Chapter Thirty

Cyrus, that is to say, Joe Anderson, was on the phone with one of his neighbors in Minnesota.

“Sam! It’s Joe, how ya been?” Joe said.

Nubbins watched him calmly from the other side of the room. There were only a few pieces of undamaged furniture left in the room, and Nubbins had claimed the comfortable chair for himself.

“Joe!” Sam said, “Wow, weird timing that you called.”

Joe felt an icicle push into his heart, but tried to maintain a jovial tone of voice.

“Oh yeah? Is my house burning down as we speak?” Joe asked.

“No, nothing like that. I have some bad news for you though,” Sam said.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Joe asked. He felt his stomach crawling up his throat, and had to fight a strong urge to start pacing about the room.

“Well, I hate to have to tell you, but Judy passed away last night from a heart attack,” Sam said.

“What?! Oh my god!” Joe said.

“Yeah. She’d been bringing the garbage out, and collapsed. Steve across the way saw her, and called 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late,” Sam said.

“Oh no!” Joe said. So the little bastard really had killed her. He had been hoping the little demon was bluffing.

“Yeah. There’s going to be a memorial service for her next Saturday,” Sam said. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

“It’s OK, Sam. I guess I’ll be seeing you later this week,” Joe said. Nubbins sat up in his chair and watched Cyrus with a bit more interest.

“See you Joe,” Sam said, and hung up the phone.

“See you later this week?” Nubbins asked. “You’re going up there?”

“Yes, I’m going up to my friend’s funeral,” Joe said. He called Grace, and told her he needed her to cancel the coming weekend’s revival appearance for him. She objected until he told her about the funeral for a friend.

“What the hell is going on over there, Cyrus,” Grace asked him.

“Grace, I promise I’ll tell you all about it another time,” Cyrus said. “By the way, cancel payment on the check to Judy. Donate the money to your favorite charity instead.”

He hung up the phone.


The next morning Cyrus was on a flight back to Minnesota. He’d bought two seats on the plane, ostensibly for a bit of space, but actually because he didn’t want Nubbins sitting in his lap.

Nubbins was unusually still during the flight. There was something deeply unsettling to the demon about being thousands of feet in the air.

They landed in Minneapolis, and took a cab to Cyrus’s – Joe Anderson’s – house. Once he had opened up his house and turned the heat up a bit (he kept the thermostat at a cool forty five degrees, since he wasn’t there) he stopped by to visit his neighbor Sam.

The street in front of the house was icy, but Sam had done a great job of keeping Cyrus’s sidewalk and driveway clear. It actually looked like someone was living there. Cyrus decided he was going to have to pay him more for helping out.

He and Sam visited for a little bit, and talked about nothing much of importance in the way that people who’ve lost a friend will do when they’re trying to avoid talking about their friend who just died. While they talked, Nubbins slid around on the ice out on the street. Many people think demons would hate the cold, given the usual climate they have to live in, but the fact is a trip to somewhere snowy is a universal daydream among demons. If he hadn’t needed to keep such a close eye on the Reverend, Nubbins probably would have stuck around up in Minnesota for a while longer after killing Judy.

But, instead he had to get back to the Reverend. He’d catch hell if anyone in Hell found out about how he’d had to kill Judy. Not, you understand, that they’d have a problem with her death. The problem was that Cyrus had gotten awfully close to redeeming himself. Preventing such a thing from happening was the whole reason Nubbins was here, and Cyrus shouldn’t have gotten that close to saving himself.

So he kept a close eye on Cyrus as he, Nubbins, tried to enjoy the cold weather.

After a while, Cyrus, Joe, wrapped up his conversation with Sam and walked back to his own house.


“Well what the fuck happened to him?” Scroat said in the hallway outside the room Cyrus had been staying in while in Coalgate, Oklahoma.

Several hotel employees were hauling away the wreckage from the fight Ares and Nubbins had had the night before. The cleaning crew was waiting outside to get in and take care of the wood splinters and broken glass, as well as to replenish the towels and strip the sheets.

Hep thought about it for a minute.

“I know where he probably went,” Hep said, and paused. “He probably went up to Minnesota.”

Scroat and Sarah both gave him a blank look.

“For the funeral?” Hep said. “You know? For his friend? The one Nubbins killed?”

“Oh. Right,” Scroat said. “Well, I guess we can all go home then, right?”

Sarah and Hep both gave Scroat the kind of look usually reserved only for those who are being willfully and maliciously stupid.

In Scroat’s case, he was honestly that stupid, with no malicious intent.

“No, Scroat. We’re all going up to Minnesota now,” Hep said. “You know, to keep trying to help him out.”

“Yeah. You know, we haven’t been doing a real great job of that,” Scroat said. “We might want to consider giving up and finding some other impossible challenge.”

Sarah kicked him, hard, in the left shin.

“Ow! Fucking Fuck! OK, we’ll go up. Just throwing an alternate idea out there. Keep your pants on,” Scroat said. “I hope Killer likes the cold.”

They all stood silently in the hallway for a moment as a couple of scrawny guys hustled by them carrying replacement furniture for the room Cyrus had been in.

“Anyone know where he lives?” Sarah asked.

No one answered, and they turned and walked back down to the lobby of the hotel. Sarah spotted a woman sitting on one of the couches, and said “Hey, isn’t that his secretary?”

Sarah, Hep and Scroat walked over to the woman.

Hep said, “Excuse me, do you work with Reverend Milton?”

Grace looked at the three of them, and hesitantly said, “Yes.”

Waves of relief flowed through Hep. He had no idea how they would have found the bastard up in Minnesota. He knew Cyrus lived under an alias up there, but he didn’t actually know what the alias was.

“Can you tell us how to find him in Minnesota?” Hep asked.

She blinked twice, and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And Reverend Milton is a very private man.”

Hep and Scroat looked at each other, and Scroat said, “Do we look like the fucking holy rollers that go to hear him preach?”

Grace looked at the three of them again, and said, “Well, no.”

Hep said, “We really need to catch up with him. Could you help us at least figure out how to find him?”

Grace was quiet for a moment, then dug a pen and note pad out of her purse. She wrote something down, handed it to Hep, and said, “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Hep said, and walked away. Scroat and Sarah followed him.

“So? What did she give us?” Scroat asked Hep.

“A name and the number for directory assistance,” Hep said. The left the hotel and went out to the bikes again.

“Let’s head to a bank and get some quarters,” Hep said.

“What for?” Scroat asked.

“Someone has to make a whole shitload of calls to directory assistance. And then call a whole bunch of guys named Joe Anderson,” Hep said.

They rode to the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City, and left their bikes in the long-term storage lot. They went into the airport then, after Sarah put Killer into his shiny new travel cage.

In the airport, Hep set about getting the three of them (and the bird) tickets on the next available flight to Minnesota. While he was doing that, Sarah and Scroat went to call directory assistance and try to track down ‘Joe Anderson.’

There were fifty six listings for Joe Anderson in Minneapolis alone. Sarah and Scroat really hoped he didn’t live in St. Paul, or one of the outlying cities.

After about twenty minutes, Hep came over to the bank of phones Sarah and Scroat were at. He handed each of them a ticket.

“Any luck?” Hep asked them.

“In a manner of speaking,” Sarah said, and showed him the huge list of phone numbers they had to go through.

“Well, good thing we’ve got four hours until our flight,” Hep said. “Let’s get to the terminal and start calling from there.”

They made it through security with relatively few problems. One of the security doofuses tried to take Killer out of his cage while Sarah was otherwise distracted, and got the hell bitten out of his hand.

Sarah looked at him and said, “Do you always stick your hand in the face of small, cornered animals? You should have just asked me to take him out.”

Once they had made it to their gate, they split the quarters and headed for the payphones to try and find the right Joe Anderson.


The temperature in his house had just become comfortable enough for Joe to take his jacket off. Nubbins had found Joe’s liquor cabinet almost immediately. He was three quarters of the way through a bottle of Jack Daniels when Joe noticed.

“Hey, stay out of the expensive stuff, would you?” he said to the little demon.

“Fuck you, I’m going to drink whatever I want,” Nubbins said.

Joe had been about to say something when the phone rang. He was a little curious who would be calling him, but figured it was probably Grace.

He picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

“Is this Joe Anderson?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

Joe sighed. How had a telemarketer found him when he’d only been home a couple of hours?

“Yes,” he said.

“Joe, this is Scroat. Do you know who I am?” said the voice.

“Oh, yeah! Uh, how’d you find me?” Joe asked.

“I have my fucking ways, dickhead,” Scroat said. “Most of them involve calling twenty other Joe Andersons until I find you because you couldn’t be enough of a fucking gentleman to fucking call us and fucking tell us you were fucking going to fucking Minnesota, you fucker.”

“Um. Sorry about that. I was distraught,” Joe said.

“No, you were a dickhead,” Scroat said. “But enough of that. Where the fuck are you, and how the fuck are we going to get there from the Minneapolis airport?”

“Yeah, uh, here goes,” Joe said. He gave them directions to his house, and asked when he could expect them. Then he hung up the phone, and wondered how he was going to explain Hep, Scroat, Sarah and Killer to his neighbors.