Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar by Tad Williams Page B

could do, but judging by their noises of rapture, that was plenty. Then I asked them if they knew anything about a revenant named Smyler, and told them what I knew of his history—at least, through his first two deaths.
    “Don’t think so, dear,” Betty said after some consideration. “There was a fellow they used to call The Smiler, but that was years ago in England and he was a tall, tall fellow. Lovely teeth, too. Dead since Queen Victoria’s day, everyone said, but he had a set of pearlies you could read by on a dark night. Still, he’d done his victims with arsenic, hadn’t he?”
    “Cyanide, dear.”
    “Right you are, our Doris. Cyanide. It wouldn’t be him, would it?”
    I said I didn’t think so.
    “Then there was Moaning Sally, but she was a girl, wasn’t she? She stabbed her lover and some of his family with one of those bayonets. Quite a lot of stabbing, altogether. They said she killed herself in her prison cell, then came back and hung about the street near St. Chad’s in Birmingham, but that’s all part of that awful ring road now, isn’t it, Doris?”
    “The Queensway. Dreadful thing.”
    “So it probably wouldn’t be her, not all the way over here in America. Wait, you said it was a fella you were looking for, didn’t you?”
    I could see they weren’t going to be able to help me much with Smyler himself, so I tried a more general question. “But how would something like that happen at all? Have you ever heard of somebody dying once, then coming back, then being exorcised or whatever you’d call it . . . ?”
    “Watch your language, dear,” said Doris primly. “We’ve got feelings, you know.”
    “Well, let’s just say ‘dispatched’ a second time and then coming back
again
. Have you ever heard of anything like that? How could that happen?”
    “To be honest, love, I’ve never heard of anything like it. Have you, Betty?”
    “No, dear. And I feel terrible after you bought us these lovely pastilles, and we’ve had such a nice visit. But no. I’m afraid you’ll have to find somebody a bit more qualified to answer that. Have you tried the Broken Boy yet?”
    I hadn’t, and I didn’t really want to, but I was beginning to think I might not have a choice. That’s the problem with ghosts. Sometimes they’re a lot of help, sometimes worse than useless, but it always takes a long time to find out, because most of them like to talk and they all tend to be a bit loopy.
    I thanked the ladies and walked out past other customers and the waitresses, none of whom had come anywhere near me during my entire visit, not even to see if I wanted to order something. Clearly, the Sollyhulls had already begun to freak out the regulars, and I wondered how long it would be until the paranormal fanboys were onto this place as well. I had a worried feeling the sisters might be developing a taste for notoriety.

    One of the many problems with visiting the Broken Boy was that, unlike the sisters, he didn’t give out information in return for a cheap box of hard candy. In fact, last time I heard, he was charging two thousand dollars a session, and my bank account was pretty much tapped out. Heaven doesn’t pay us a whole lot. Then again, we don’t have to put anything aside for retirement.
    These are the jokes, people. If you came to laugh, you might as well start now.
    Anyway, if I wanted to visit the Broken Boy I needed to raise some cash, and I didn’t have much in the way of options. I’d been thinking about putting my Matador in long-term storage and trying to scrape up the money somehow to buy that ’69 Super Sport from Orban, but since I didn’t play the lottery I had trouble imagining a scenario where that could happen without the sudden appearance of Santa Claus. Now I was beginning to think I might have to sell the Matador outright. I loved that car and had spent several years finding parts and getting it refurbished, not to mention putting up with endless shit from Sam and Monica