Godfellas

  GODFELLAS, OR, VIC TAKES A ROOM AT THE MAGELLAN

  An original short story by Rachel Caine

  I suppose you might say I died happy. Couple bottles of gin, a hooker who looked exactly like Julia Roberts, and one cigarette too many. See, I was laying there in the afterglow, lighting up, not paying any attention, when the door opened and Jimmy Cassoli came in with his two ugly cousins and put a couple of .375 hollow points through my forehead.

  Didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would – big noise, big flash of light, and then it was all over but the crying. That was the hooker crying, ‘cause she had to get the hell out of the room without her best pair of fuck-me shoes. Jimmy Cassoli must have known her or something because he didn’t pop her on the way out, or maybe he was just more interested in making sure I wasn’t going to get up and follow her.

  While they were going through my wallet for the green and grabbing up my working gun – I really hated that, I loved that .45 – I realized I wasn’t actually laying there looking up at them anymore. I was standing next to them, but it was like I wasn’t standing there, because they didn’t see me. I took a swing at Cassoli, who was yucking it up how I’d pissed the bed, but it didn’t connect. I kept trying, though; nobody screws with Vic Donato like that without paying for it.

  Except maybe Jimmy Cassoli, who slapped his cousins on the back and took them down the stairs, out for an evening of lasagna and big-man bragging. I was left standing there, fists ready and nobody to slam them into except that poor bastard on the bed, who I then realized might really be me.

  I had to sit down. See, that guy on the bed that looked like me wasn’t dead yet. Going, you know, but not gone. Blood kept pumping, lungs kept filling, eyes kept staring straight up. Die, I kept thinking, like I was the hitter, not the hittee. Only the guy on the bed didn’t die, not then. Not that quick. Took another fifteen minutes for the cops to show up, guns drawn, take a look at him -- me -- laid out bleeding into the bed, and call for an ambo.

  So for the next twenty minutes or so firemen, cops, paramedics, goddamn Boy Scout trooped around my fucked-up near corpse like ants around a picnic. Hell, I was the biggest tourist attraction since Father Carmine Ozowski hung himself from the sprinkler head while wearing a black leather teddy. Speaking of priests, one of the cops – Billy Torreti, we’d been altar boys together – came up with one, dragged his drunk holy ass out of some other shithole room, I guess, ‘cause I remember Billy propping the Father up while he made the sign of the cross and gave me unction. At which point, I started shaking all over and leaking brains out of the great big hole in the back of my head.

  I felt it, that exact second when the guy on the bed ceased to be me and started being a decomposing pile of meat. I felt it, but nothing happened. I didn’t zip off to heaven, or hell, or into the light with my dead friends.

  Nothing.

  Happened. Not to me.

  Eventually, the room got sorted out. Coroner carted out my smoking corpse, trailing cops and crying hookers like a Saint Paddy’s day parade. I was already forgotten by everybody except the maid, who was going to have to wipe soot off the walls and put in a new air freshener. Badda bing, badda boom. Game over.

  I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do. Hanging around staring at the bloody mattress sounded sick, but for the first time in my life I had no place to go. Nobody to see. Nobody to do.

  Then this guy walked into the room. Just a guy, on the skinny side, medium everything. He didn’t look like much of nothing, but unlike all the other mopes, he wasn’t looking at the bed. He was looking straight at me, giving me big puppy eyes, and I was feeling just a little bit pissed off, so I snarled, "What the hell you looking at, pinhead?"

  "I don’t know, Vic. What am I looking at?" He had a medium voice, too. Some kind of Midwest accent. He sounded mild and a little bit cocky, which pissed me off more.

  I was about to tell him to fuck off when I noticed the wings. I’m talking real wings, sort of like a fan of white light, so bright it should have set the dingy peeling paint on fire. Apart from the wings, he still looked like the kind who ordered vanilla at 31 Flavors, which was crazy, right? How could he be an angel? Angels were sexy babes in sheer robes and little fluffy wings, like Victoria’s Secret models

  I checked behind me. No wings.

  "Not yet," the angel said, like he was listening to my head. "First, you have a few things to take care of."

  Great. I couldn’t even go to hell without owing some asshole a favor. All of a sudden I felt tired, really tired, tired of everything. My life had been one piece of bullshit piled on top of another. A giant mountain of crap, and I'd been the king of the dungheap. Big Vic Donato.

  So what the hell? Might as well screw up my afterlife, too.

  "Shoot," I said. He winced and looked at the bed. "You know what I mean."

  I had some debts to work out. Of course. Which meant I had some time to serve, a cross between juvie detention and a Federal pen.

  My sentence was two more years stuck inside the fucking Magellan.

  Which just goes to prove, the more things change …

  Two years later, on the last day of detention (say hallelujah), I sat on a plastic avocado-green couch in the Magellan’s lobby and stared at the desk clerk, who was reading a thick paperback. He was new, I noticed. I kept an eye out for that sort of thing around here.

  "Hey," I said. The desk clerk glanced up at me, waved vaguely, and went back to moving his lips. "Hey! Buddy!"

  "Yeah?" He didn’t even look up this time.

  "You ought to get a better job. This one’s bad for your health." If he was an innocent asshole working the night shift, a little intimidation could save his life. Of course, if he was a genuine innocent asshole, he couldn’t have heard me ask the question, ‘cause, of course, I was dead, and therefore that would be kinda hard.

  He finally looked up from his book.

  "Look," he said. "It’s your last day, right? Give it a rest. We can call this one a draw, you know, in honor of your big day and all."

  "My ass."

  "Shit. Well, whatever you want," he shrugged. "Just figured you’d want to get to that sunny afterlife sooner instead of later."

  "I will," I said, and spread my arms out over the back of the couch. Genuine antique, that couch. Nobody had so much as wiped it off since 1969. I figured the lobby carpet for shag, too, but who could tell under all the grime. "Soon as we’re done. How’s life on the wrong side of the tracks?"

  He shrugged again and opened his book like he might just go back to it. "It’s okay. Tell the truth, that singing Hosannah In The Highest, that ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?"

  "Like sleeping with your sister." He grinned, so I clarified it. "No, I mean your sister. Man, she was good."

  No more grin. He put the book away. "You don’t want to mess with me, you stupid fuck. You really don’t."

  "Yeah, and you’d be who, exactly?"

  "Nobody you want to mess with." I might not have been a big thinker, but I could see that this little conversation was going nowhere. It was time to quit talking.

  I sized him up. Nothing special about this punk except for two nose rings and one in his lip like a pull-tab. Of course, looks weren’t everything.

  Take me, for instance. I wasn’t much to write home about, either.

  We dick-measured for a while without saying anything.

  "I can see we’re going to need to get this part out of the way," he said. "This is the door to Hell. I guard the door to Hell. So I think you’d better walk out and go cry on Saint Pete’s shoulder or whoever’s God’s doorman this week, and save your ass, ‘cause otherwise I’m going to fry it like the Colonel’s chicken, baby."

  I gave him the universal Italian goodwill gesture.
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  "You’re kind of a stupid fucker, aren’t you?" he asked, with a certain degree of admiration. I sighed.

  "Okay, that’s it. I’m gonna come over there and play pop your weasel." He looked confused. I gave him the short version. "You want a piece of me, go right ahead. I ain’t leaving."

  He smiled like he had a double-barreled shotgun aimed at me under the counter, only I had the feeling what he had in store for me was nowhere near as warm and fuzzy as that. "Duuuude," he said – he had that half-dead surfer look – "Thanks. As a matter of fact, I am so hungry."

  And then he Turned. Not a pretty sight. Some of these scumbags, they look nearly human – at least as nearly human as they ever did. He wasn’t that pretty. Tumors, tentacles and a big drool problem.

  And teeth. They always had teeth.

  "Nice outfit," I said. "Your mommy get it for you?"

  "Your soul is mine," he hissed, and sort of oozed through the counter. Christ in a can, you’d think word would get around or something, that trick was older than Methusulah, David Fucking Copperfield could do it. I shrugged and metabolized a nice big silver cross. Very B-movie. I seriously missed having the heavy artillery, like a chrome .45 or a nice handful of Uzi, but more than just the times had changed. Besides, an Uzi would have just given this pencil dick a bad case of acne.

  He laughed and kept on coming. "Hey, douche brain, what makes you think I’m scared of your little cross?"

  "Nothing," I said, and flipped it in the air, grabbed the long end, and threw it end-over-end. Somewhere between us, it turned red hot and developed a nice sharp point on it.

  Oooh, that had to hurt. Plus, it ruined his loud Hawaiian shirt.

  I figured he wanted to give me one last curse, but the cross was eating into him in a big way, and he was just plain too pissed to bother.

  We got down to the serious dancing.

  Messy. Very, very messy. When it was over, the Magellan was knee-deep in discorporated Demon, and I was having a bitch of a time scraping dried ectoplasm off my plaid jacket. Not that it mattered. I was about to trade in my sports coat for something nice and heavenly, in a 36 Long.

  "Nice job, Vic," said my supervisor, who was either some unpronounceable Angelic name or Ed, depending who you asked. He looked pretty comfy today, mostly human except for the big gaudy wings behind him. I used to ask him, why the wings? I’d never got that part. I mean, wasn’t like we used ‘em or anything. Typical angel, he’d never given me a straight-out answer, either.

  Ed, who’d floated in through the front doors sometime while I was kicking the shit out of Surfer Demon, came in and levitated about three inches over a pool of bubbling slime. "You know, we really must discuss some ways to make this less – messy."

  "You want the fucking place redecorated, hire Martha Stewart," I said. "I’m in the extermination business. Actually, I guess I just graduated out of the extermination business. Yippee." One of the dirty fluorescent lights was flickering overhead, it was giving me a headache. I took a pair of shades out of my pocket and slid them on.

  "You know, you don’t really need those."

  "Go play with your harp, Ed."

  Ed looked like I’d farted at God’s dinner table. "I wish you’d – "

  "Act more like an Angel. Yeah, we’ve been all over that. Well, excuse me, but the Big Guy picked me, he knew what the fuck he was getting into. He’s all-knowing, right? So I got nothing to apologize for." I kicked a still-wiggling tentacle out of my way. "That’s why you hired me on, buddy. Because I ain’t neat."

  "Actually, I recruited you because you had something we lack," he said softly. "Passion. So few souls die with such a sense of life and the importance of it. When you ascended – "

  "—got whacked – "

  "—you kept that passion. Most souls come to us at peace. Not you."

  "No shit," I said. "I got my head blown off by a hollow point out of a .357, that really fucks up your best day. Look, can we skip the catechism and get right to the part where you bless me and get me the hell out of here?"

  I was not in the mood for Ed’s crap. I’d just smoked a Demon, probably the equivalent of a made guy in the Opposition, and as far as I was concerned it was just about Miller Time. I had done two years of hard time knocking down the bad guys, and it was time to get my reward.

  I didn’t like that look from Ed. That kind look. It gave me the creeps.

  "Vic," he said gently. "I’m afraid we’re not quite finished yet."

  "Maybe you’re not, but I am. Unless you want this rathole torched."

  Hey, believe me, I was all in favor of splashing a little gas and holding a barbecue, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t the Angelic Way. Preserve, protect, you know. The only fair game was the kind with horns, hooves and too many teeth.

  "We can’t do that." Ed looked pained.

  "So you tell me."

  "There are living people here."

  As if she wanted to prove his point, a dazed, stoned, half-dead hooker wandered down the stairs and across the lobby in search of the Coke machine. For her the twitching piles of ex-Demon didn’t exist. Neither did I. Neither did Ed. We wouldn’t unless we dropped another level and put on skin, which all things considered was not in my plans. Not that I don’t like it, it’s just I got used to doing without it, you know?

  The hooker tripped over a seam in the threadbare carpet. She could have been anywhere from thirteen to seventeen, but not around the eyes. She’d skipped all those years of braces and training bras and shy little kisses in the school halls; she’d hold up pretty good another couple of years and die with a needle in her arm, or a knife in her chest, or maybe just freeze her ass to death in an alley somewhere. Ed watched her with that quiet tender look he gets. I’d seen him give that same damn look to a five-year-old raped and strangled in a crackhouse. It was all just a matter of degree to him.

  I didn’t bother to get out of the hooker’s way as she walked through me. She shivered a little, crossed thin arms across her chest, and hurried on, head down. Probably thought it was just the shakes from coming down off her latest skin-pop.

  In the old days, she would have been walking furniture to me, something you could buy and sell and lie down on to get comfortable. Maybe that’s why I didn’t put on skin anymore. I didn’t like remembering.

  "Why me?" I asked. I was watching the kid walk away now, staring her thousand-mile stare. "You never told me, why’d I end up here instead of there?"

  I wasn’t talking about the hooker, and Ed knew it. He raised eyebrows and gave me his calm look.

  "Remember the priest giving you last rites and absolving you of your sins?" he asked. "We meant that."

  "So Ted Bundy gets last rites and he earns a pair of wings, too. Great fucking system."

  Ed’s smile was a slice of mystery and ham. "Not all truths are true for all."

  Which demonstrates why I tried not to ask too many questions.

  "Translate this," I said, and shot him the finger. "Can we go now?"

  "Not quite yet." Ed got that tender look again, only this time it was for my benefit. "Just a bit more."

  "Yeah, how many more?" Truth was, I was tired, and I was pissed, because Ed could have at least hinted around that the last day was going to be busy. And plus, I’d just wasted my best trick.

  "Just two more," he said, almost apologetically. I gave him a bug-eyed glare. "But I’m sure they won’t cause you any trouble."

  Not much, they wouldn’t. Thing is, the whole reason I was here wearing the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval instead of sizzling my dick downstairs was that (1) I’d gotten absolved and I actually had been sorry, and (2) the Opposition (that was what Ed called them, the Opposition) were kicking angelic ass. When somebody like me came up eligible, well, it was like being an NFL first-round draft pick. Mopes like me were few and far between.

  But that wasn’t the case Down Under. Nearly everybody down there, including the punk kids, could kick the crap out of most anybody Up There. Which made
my job just a little bit difficult.

  No backup.

  "Two more," I said. "Two more Demons. That doesn’t include my buddy here?"

  Ed glanced down at the slime on the floor, which had started out human, gone bad, and then gone worse, and mutely shook his head. I hadn’t killed the little prick – in fact, we couldn’t kill each other, it was part of the rules of the game – but I’d hurt him bad. It would take him about, oh, two or three thousand years to pull himself together again, by which time, hopefully, the whole ball game might be tidily wrapped up. Of course, that could just as easily have been me bubbling in little puddles down there. Angels, Demons, there wasn’t much difference when you got right down to it, except they went more for the chains, leather and horns look instead of the wings. Basically, Demons had better fashion sense. And they got the chicks.