Well, I don’t mind telling you that it was a damfool way to die, but at the time it didn’t seem like such a bad idea as all that; it wasn’t until he found ourselves standing shamefaced before those pearly gates that it really came home to us what a stupid thing it was to do.

“Well,” said Charley, and that about summed it up. We all stood around feeling uncomfortable and not quite sure what to do with our hands. We’d have put them in our pockets only we didn’t seem to have any.

“Sorry,” said Adrian, since he’d had the brainstorm that ushered us into the Great Hereafter. “Now what?”

“Dunno,” I said. “Shouldn’t there be a fellah around here directing traffic?”

There was a kind of a kiosk set up a little to the side of the gates and we drifted that way for lack of anything more concrete to do. It had a picture of a bearded sort of a guy on it, a young swarthy fellah with a great forked beard and a thousand yard stare. We looked at it for a while and smoked a couple of cigarettes and you’d have thought it was waiting for us to say something, the picture I mean, the way it watched us.

“Huh.” Everly flicked her butt at the picture but it never made it. “What do you want to do now?”

And that was kind of a stumper.