"Give me a pigfoot and a bottle of beer," Glibspet told the clerk at the RediMart.
"I don't know," the clerk said. He looked doubtfully at the large glass jar Glibspet was pointing to. "No one's ever bought one of those things since I was here. I don't even know what I'm supposed to fish 'em out with." He paused. "Hell, I don't even like looking at 'em."
"And I don't like looking at you," Glibspet snapped. "Use the hot-dog tongs and put it in a drink cup."
The clerk stiffened. "Okay, mister, if that's what you want." He moved with deliberate slowness, making a production of finding a cup and rinsing the tongs. He put his arm around the huge glass jar and wrestled the screw top off. The pressure equalized with a pop. Apparently no one had ever bought a pigfoot. Why then were the jars stuck in convenience stores all across the state? Glibspet smelled a brother Unchained in the loop somewhere.
The clerk took the tongs and fished through the mass of floating pink tissue until he got a solid catch. He raised it, let it drip for a second, then plopped it into the cup. It made an ugly sloughing sound. Glibspet's mouth started to water.
"Okay now, mister, let's see some ID," the clerk said.
"Do I look like I'm under twenty-one?" Glibspet demanded.
"Rules is rules," the clerk said. "You want your beer, you show me your ID."
Glibspet had lots of ID. If pressed, he could prove that he was any of thirteen different people, all of them old enough to drink. He produced a driver's license from his pocket.
The clerk scrutinized it and him. "Yeah, I guess that's you," he said. "Here you go."
Glibspet paid and hurried out the door. He was on a mission. Craig had struck pay dirt after a day in the newspaper morgue. It wasn't hard to confirm that one Rheabeth Samuels was the owner and CEO of Celestial Technologies, and that her picture looked almost too good to be human. Glibspet gunned the Lincoln and peeled out of the parking lot. He put the cold beer between his legs, raised the cup with the pigfoot and drank down the liquid that had run off of it. Not bad. A little too fresh, perhaps.
A little work at the courthouse and tracking down her driver's license turned up a home address, which just happened to lie in the rough center of his cluster of green pins. Coincidence? He popped the top off the beer bottle with his teeth and took a long swig from it. Glibspet knew all about quantum uncertainty, but he didn't believe in coincidence. He looked at the address again. For some reason, it was a hard one to remember, but he should be almost there.
A police car passed, going the other way. The patrolman glanced at Glibspet suspiciously. Glibspet raised the hand with the bottle and waved at him. Looking surprised, the cop screeched to a halt, then fired up the lights and siren as he swung the patrol car around.
Glibspet grinned. This was always fun. He swung the Lincoln in front of a school bus and jammed on the brakes. The driver swung the wheel frantically to avoid rear-ending him, and the bus careened across the road, children screaming, horn honking. Blocked, the patrol car came to a stop again while Glibspet turned down a side street. He would be blocks away before it was all sorted out, and the cop would find out later that he'd never gotten a clear glance at the license plate. Glibspet hoped they went looking anyway. People who drove Lincoln Town Cars tended to be older, well-off men, crotchety and well-connected enough to make life hell for any officer who hassled them.
Now what was that address again?
He drove by it three times before he saw it; for some reason his mind always turned to some other problem while he was counting off the numbers. It wasn't a big house—looked like three bedrooms, nicely kept, no fence so probably no dog. Mmm. Dog. That had been a really juicy pup he'd rounded up the other night when he'd fed Craig some line and had gone back to his old digs for a few hours. Probably not a pure poodle. A cockapoo perhaps, with a little more meat on the bones than usual, and really succulent ears . . .
A horn honked impatiently behind him and brought Glibspet back to the present. He was stopped in the street about a block past his goal. He flipped the hidden toggle that dumped oil in the fuel line and hit the gas, moving on, leaving the car behind him in a cloud of noxious black smoke. This time, he didn't circle back around. The house was obviously protected, and not by Averial—he would have smelled any spent Hellawatts. Unless he greatly missed his guess, there were angels in that house, and that was out of his league. Now, if this Rheabeth Samuels really were Averial, and she had angels in her house, something completely unprecedented was going on. Something he would have to think about. Glibspet bit into the pigfoot and chewed slowly. In the meantime, he would have to try to catch up with her away from home.