byA moment after the bullet hit him in the back, tearing through muscle and shattering bone before twisting abruptly and erratically upward to lodge fatally in his heart, Elliot Holt materialized in an enormous basalt cavern—one of Hell’s sundry antechambers for the reception of souls in transit. Holt gasped and took a wavering step backward. He looked around. Where, seconds before, there had been a tangerine suede couch on which a reclining dark-eyed redhead wearing only knee-length black leather boots regarded him with an insatiable gaze, there now loomed a jagged cluster of stalagmites carved in the shape of nose-thumbing demons. The subtle scent of Le De Givenchy was gone, replaced by an overwhelming stench of ozone and sulfur fumes, and instead of the melancholy sound of Charlie Byrd’
