A Dirty Job

10 DEATH TAKES A WALK

Mornings, Charlie walked. At six, after an early breakfast, he would turn the care of Sophie over to Mrs. Korjev or Mrs. Ling (whoever’s turn it was) for the workday and walk—stroll really, pacing out the city with the sword-cane, which had become part of his daily regalia, wearing soft, black-leather walking shoes and an expensive, secondhand suit that had been retailored at his cleaner’s in Chinatown. Although he pretended to have a purpose, Charlie walked to give himself time to think, to try on the size of being Death, and to look at all the people out and about in the morning. He wondered if the girl at the flower stand, from whom he often bought a carnation for his lapel, had a soul, or would give hers up while he watched her die. He watched the guy in North Beach make cappuccinos with faces and fern leaves drawn in the foam, and wondered if a guy like that could actually function without a soul, or was his soul collecting dust in Charlie’s back room? There were a lot of people to see, and a lot of thinking to be done.

Being out among the people of the city, when they were just starting to move, greeting the day, making ready, he started to feel not just the responsibility of his new role, but the power, and finally, the specialness. It didn’t matter that he had no idea what he was doing, or that he might have lost the love of his life for it to happen; he had been chosen. And realizing that, one day as he walked down California Street, down Nob Hill into the financial district, where he’d always felt inferior and out of touch with the world, as the brokers and bankers quickstepped around him, barking into their cell phones to Hong Kong or London or New York and never making eye contact, he started to not so much stroll, as strut. That day Charlie Asher climbed onto the California Street cable car for the first time since he was a kid, and hung off the bar, out over the street, holding out the sword-cane as if charging, with Hondas and Mercedes zooming along the street beside him, passing under his armpit just inches away. He got off at the end of the line, bought a Wall Street Journal from a machine, then walked to the nearest storm drain, spread out the Journal to protect his trousers against oil stains, then got down on his hands and knees and screamed into the drain grate, “I have been chosen, so don’t fuck with me!” When he stood up again, a dozen people were standing there, waiting for the light to change. Looking at him.

“Had to be done,” Charlie said, not apologizing, just explaining.

The bankers and the brokers, the executive assistants and the human-resource people and the woman on her way to serve up clam chowder in a sourdough bowl at the Boudin Bakery, all nodded, not sure exactly why, except that they worked in the financial district, and they all understood being fucked with, and in their souls if not in their minds, they knew that Charlie had been yelling in the right direction. He folded his paper, tucked it under his arm, then turned and crossed the street with them when the light changed.

Sometimes Charlie walked whole blocks when he thought only of Rachel, and would become so engrossed in the memory of her eyes, her smile, her touch, that he ran straight into people. Other times people would bump into him, and not even lift his wallet or say “excuse me,” which might be a matter of course in New York, but in San Francisco meant that he was close to a soul vessel that needed to be retrieved. He found one, a bronze fireplace poker, set out by the curb with the trash on Russian Hill. Another time, he spotted a glowing vase displayed in the bay window of a Victorian in North Beach. He screwed up his courage and knocked on the door, and when a young woman answered, and came out on the porch to look for her visitor, and was bewildered because she didn’t see anyone there, Charlie slipped past her, grabbed the vase, and was out the side door before she came back in, his heart pounding like a war drum, adrenaline sizzling through his veins like a hormonal tilt-a-whirl. As he headed back to the shop that particular morning, he realized, with no little sense of irony, that until he became Death, he’d never felt so alive.

Every morning, Charlie tried to walk in a different direction. On Mondays he liked to go up into Chinatown just after dawn, when all the deliveries were being made—crates of produce, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, melons, and a dozen varieties of cabbage, tended by Latinos in the Central Valley and consumed by Chinese in Chinatown, having passed through Anglo hands just long enough to extract the nourishing money. On Mondays the fishing companies delivered their fresh catches—usually strong Italian men whose families had been in the business for five generations, handing off their catch to inscrutable Chinese merchants whose ancestors had bought fish from the Italians off horse-drawn wagons a hundred years before. All sorts of live and recently live fish were moved across the sidewalk: snapper and halibut and mackerel, sea bass and ling cod and yellowtail, clawless Pacific lobster, Dungeness crab, ghastly monkfish, with their long saberlike teeth and a single spine that jutted from their head, bracing a luminous lure they used to draw in prey, so deep in the ocean that the sun never shone. Charlie was fascinated by the creatures from the very deep sea, the big-eyed squid, cuttlefish, the blind sharks that located prey with electromagnetic impulses—creatures who never saw light. They made him think of what might be facing him from the Underworld, because even as he fell into a rhythm of finding names at his bedside, and soul vessels in all manner of places, and the appearance of the ravens and the shades subsided, he could feel them under the street whenever he passed a storm sewer. Sometimes he could hear them whispering to one another, hushing quickly in the rare moments when the street went quiet.

To walk through Chinatown at dawn was to become part of a dangerous dance, because there were no back doors or alleys for loading, and all the wares went across the sidewalk, and although Charlie had enjoyed neither danger nor dancing up till now, he enjoyed playing dance partner to the thousand tiny Chinese grandmothers in black slippers or jelly-colored plastic shoes who scampered from merchant to merchant, squeezing and smelling and thumping, looking for the freshest and the best for their families, twanging orders and questions to the merchants in Mandarin, all the while just a second or a slip away from being run over by sides of beef, great racks of fresh duck, or hand trucks stacked high with crates of live turtles. Charlie was yet to retrieve a soul vessel on one of his Chinatown walks, but he stayed ready, because the swirl of time and motion forecast that one foggy morning someone’s granny was going to get knocked out of her moo shoes.

One Monday, just for sport, Charlie grabbed an eggplant that a spectacularly wizened granny was going for, but instead of twisting it out of his hand with some mystic kung fu move as he expected, she looked him in the eye and shook her head—just a jog, barely perceptible really—it might have been a tic, but it was the most eloquent of gestures. Charlie read it as saying: O White Devil, you do not want to purloin that purple fruit, for I have four thousand years of ancestors and civilization on you; my grandparents built the railroads and dug the silver mines, and my parents survived the earthquake, the fire, and a society that outlawed even being Chinese; I am mother to a dozen, grandmother to a hundred, and great-grandmother to a legion; I have birthed babies and washed the dead; I am history and suffering and wisdom; I am a Buddha and a dragon; so get your fucking hand off my eggplant before you lose it.

And Charlie let go.

And she grinned, just a little. Three teeth.

And he wondered if it ever did fall to him to retrieve the soul vessel of one of these crones of Chronos, if he’d even be able to lift it. And he grinned back.

And asked for her phone number, which he gave to Ray. “She seemed nice,” Charlie told him. “Mature.”

Sometimes Charlie’s walks took him through Japantown, where he passed the most enigmatic shop in the city, Invisible Shoe Repair. He really intended to stop in one day, but he was still coming to terms with giant ravens, adversaries from the Underworld, and being a Merchant of Death, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for invisible shoes, let alone invisible shoes that needed repair! He often tried to look past the Japanese characters into the shop window as he passed, but saw nothing, which, of course, didn’t mean a thing. He just wasn’t ready. But there was a pet shop in Japantown (House of Pleasant Fish and Gerbil), where he had originally gone to buy Sophie’s fish, and where he returned to replace the TV attorneys with six TV detectives, who also simultaneously took the big Ambien a week later. Charlie had been distraught to find his baby daughter drooling away in front of a bowl floating more dead detectives than a film noir festival, and after flushing all six at once and having to use the plunger to dislodge Magnum and Mannix, he vowed that next time he would find more resilient pals for his little girl. He was coming out of House of PF&G one afternoon, with a Habitrail pod containing a pair of sturdy hamsters, when he ran into Lily, who was making her way to a coffeehouse up on Van Ness, where she was planning to meet her friend Abby for some latte-fueled speed brooding.

“Hey, Lily, how are you doing?” Charlie was trying to appear matter-of-fact, but he found that the awkwardness between him and Lily over the last few months was not mitigated by her seeing him on the street carrying a plastic box full of rodents.

“Nice gerbils,” Lily said. She wore a Catholic schoolgirl’s plaid skirt over black tights and Doc Martens, with a tight black PVC bustier that was squishing pale Lily-bits out the top, like a can of biscuit dough that’s been smacked on the edge of the counter. The hair color du jour was fuchsia, over violet eye shadow, which matched her violet, elbow-length lace gloves. She looked up and down the street and, when she didn’t see anyone she knew, fell into step next to Charlie.

“They’re not gerbils, they’re hamsters,” Charlie said.

“Asher, do you have something you’ve been keeping from me?” She tilted her head a little, but didn’t look at him when she asked, just kept her eyes forward, scanning the street for someone who might recognize her walking next to Charlie, thus forcing her to commit seppuku.

“Jeez, Lily, these are for Sophie!” Charlie said. “Her fish died, so I’m bringing her some new pets. Besides, that whole gerbil thing is an urban myth—”

“I meant that you’re Death,” Lily said.

Charlie nearly dropped his hamsters. “Huh?”

“It’s so wrong—” Lily continued, walking on after Charlie had stopped in his tracks, so now he had to scurry to catch up to her. “Just so wrong, that you would be chosen. Of all of life’s many disappointments, I’d have to say that this is the crowning disappointment.”

“You’re sixteen,” Charlie said, still stumbling a little at the matter-of-fact way she was discussing this.

“Oh, throw that in my face, Asher. I’m only sixteen for two more months, then what? In the blink of an eye my beauty becomes but a feast for worms, and I, a forgotten sigh in a sea of nothingness.”

“Your birthday is in two months? Well, we’ll have to get you a nice cake,” Charlie said.

“Don’t change the subject, Asher. I know all about you, and your Death persona.”

Charlie stopped again and turned to look at her. This time, she stopped as well. “Lily, I know I’ve been acting a little strangely since Rachel died, and I’m sorry you got in trouble at school because of me, but it’s just been trying to deal with it all, with the baby, with the business. The stress of it all has—”

“I have The Great Big Book of Death,” Lily said. She steadied Charlie’s hamsters when he lost his grip. “I know about the soul vessels, about the dark forces rising if you fuck up, all that stuff—all of it. I’ve known longer than you have, I think.”

Charlie didn’t know what to say. He was feeling panic and relief at the same time—panic because Lily knew, but relief because at least someone knew, and believed it, and had actually seen the book. The book!

“Lily, do you still have the book?”

“It’s in the store. I hid it in the back of the glass cabinet where you keep the valuable stuff that no one will ever buy.”

“No one ever looks in that cabinet.”

“No kidding? I thought if you ever found it, I’d say it had always been there.”

“I have to go.” He turned and started walking the other direction, but then realized that they had already been heading toward his neighborhood and turned around again. “Where are you going?”

“To get some coffee.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

“You will not.” Lily looked around again, wary that someone might see them.

“But, Lily, I’m Death. That should at least have given me some level of cool.”

“Yeah, you’d think, but it turns out that you have managed to suck the cool out of being Death.”

“Wow, that’s harsh.”

“Welcome to my world, Asher.”

“You can’t tell anyone about this, you know that?”

“Like anyone cares what you do with your gerbils.”

“Hamsters! That’s not—”

“Chill, Asher.” Lily giggled. “I know what you mean. I’m not going to tell anyone—except Abby knows—but she doesn’t care. She says she’s met some guy who’s her dark lord. She’s in that stage where she thinks a dick is some kind of mystical magic wand.”

Charlie adjusted his hamster box uncomfortably. “Girls go through a stage like that?” Why was he just hearing about this now? Even the hamsters looked uncomfortable.

Lily turned on a heel and started up the street. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”

Charlie stood there, watching her go, balancing the hamsters and his completely useless sword-cane while trying to dig his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He needed to see that book, and he needed to see it sooner than the hour it would take him to get home. “Lily, wait!” he called. “I’m calling a cab, I’ll give you a ride.”

She waved him off without looking and kept walking. As he was waiting for the cab company to answer, he heard it, the voice, and he realized that he was standing right over a storm drain. It had been over a month since he’d heard them, and he thought maybe they’d gone. “We’ll have her, too, Meat. She’s ours now.”

He felt the fear rise in his throat like bile. He snapped the phone shut and ran after Lily, cane rattling and hamsters bouncing as he went. “Lily, wait! Wait!”

She spun around quickly and her fuchsia wig only did the quarter turn instead of the half, so her face was covered with hair when she said, “One of those ice-cream cakes from Thirty-one Flavors, okay? After that, despair and nothingness.”

“We’ll put that on the cake,” Charlie said.

11 THE GIRLS CAN GET A LITTLE DARK AT TIMES

The Great Big Book of Death, as it turned out, wasn’t that big, and certainly wasn’t that comprehensive. Charlie read through it a dozen times, took notes, made copies, ran searches trying to find some reference to any of the stuff covered, but all of the material in the twenty-eight lavishly illustrated pages boiled down to this:

1. Congratulations, you have been chosen to act as Death. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. It is your duty to retrieve soul vessels from the dead and dying and see them on to their next body. If you fail, Darkness will cover the world and Chaos will reign.

2. Some time ago, the Luminatus, or the Great Death, who kept balance between light and darkness, ceased to be. Since then, Forces of Darkness have been trying to rise from below. You are all that stands between them and destruction of the collective soul of humanity.

3. In order to hold off the Forces of Darkness, you will need a number two pencil and a calendar, preferably one without pictures of kitties on it.

4. Names and numbers will come to you. The number is how many days you have to retrieve the soul vessel. You will know the vessels by their crimson glow.

5. Don’t tell anyone what you do, or dark forces, etc. etc. etc.

6. People may not see you when you are performing your Death duties, so be careful crossing the street. You are not immortal.

7. Do not seek others. Do not waver in your duties or the Forces of Darkness will destroy all that you care about.

8. You do not cause death, you do not prevent death, you are a servant of Destiny, not its agent. Get over yourself.

9. Do not, under any circumstances, let a soul vessel fall into the hands of those from below—because that would be bad.

A few months passed before Charlie worked the shop again alone with Lily. She asked him, “Well, did you get a number two pencil?”

“No, I got a number one pencil.”

“You rogue! Asher, hello, Forces of Darkness—”

“If the world without this Luminatus is so precariously balanced that my buying a pencil with one-grade-harder lead is going to cast us all into the abyss, then maybe it’s time.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Lily chanted like she was trying to bring a spooked horse under control. “It’s one thing for me to be all nihilistic and stuff, for me it’s a fashion statement, I have the outfits for it. You can’t be all horny for the grave wearing your stupid Savile Row suits.”

Charlie was proud of her for recognizing that he was wearing one of his expensive secondhand Savile Rows. She was learning the trade in spite of herself.

“I’m tired of being afraid,” he said. “I’ve dealt with the Forces of Darkness or whatever, Lily, and you know what, we’re one and one.”

“Should you be telling me this? I mean, the book said—”

“I think I’m different than what the book says, Lily. The book says that I don’t cause death, but there have been two now that have died more or less because of my actions.”

“And I repeat, should you be telling me this? As you have pointed out many times, I am a kid, and wildly irresponsible. It’s wildly irresponsible, right? I’m never listening that closely.”

“You’re the only one who knows,” Charlie said. “And you’re seventeen now, not a kid, you’re a young woman now.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Asher. If you keep talking like that I’ll get another piercing, take X until I’m dehydrated like a mummy, talk on my cell phone until the battery is dead, then find some skinny, pale guy and suck him until he cries.”

“So, it will be like a Friday?” Charlie said.

“What I do with my weekends is my own business.”

“I know!”

“Well, then shut up!”

“I’m tired of being afraid, Lily!”

“Well, then stop being afraid, Charlie!”

They both looked away, embarrassed. Lily pretended to shuffle through the day’s receipts while Charlie pretended to be looking for something in what he called his walking satchel and Jane called his man purse.

“Sorry,” Lily said, without looking up from the receipts.

“S’okay,” Charlie said. “Me, too.”

Still not looking up, Lily said, “But really, should you be telling me any of this?”

“Probably not,” Charlie said. “It’s sort of a big burden to carry. Sort of—”

“A dirty job?” Lily looked up now and grinned.

“Yeah,” Charlie smiled, relieved. “I won’t bring it up again.”

“That’s okay. It’s kind of cool.”

“Really?” Charlie couldn’t remember anyone ever referring to him as cool. He was touched.

“Not you. The whole Death thing.”

“Yeah, right,” Charlie said. Yes! Still batting a thousand on the zero-cool quotient. “But you’re right, it’s not safe. No more talk about my, uh, avocation.”

“And I’ll never call you Charlie again,” Lily said. “Ever.”

“That would be fine,” Charlie said. “We’ll act like this never happened. Excellent. Good talk. Resume your thinly veiled contempt.”

“Fuck off, Asher.”

“Atta girl.”

They were waiting for him the next morning when he took his walk. He expected it, and he wasn’t disappointed. He’d stopped in the shop to pick up an Italian suit he’d just taken in, as well as a cigar lighter that had languished in a curio case in the back for two years, which he stuffed in his satchel with the glowing porcelain bear that was the soul vessel of someone who had passed long ago. Then he stepped outside and stood just above the opening of the storm drain—waved at the tourists on the cable car as it clanked by.

“Good morning,” he said cheerily. Anyone watching him might have thought he was greeting the day, since there was no one around.

“We’ll peck out her eyes like ripe plums,” hissed a female voice out of the drain. “Bring us up, Meat. Bring us up so we can lap your blood from the gaping wound we tear in your chest.”

“And crunch your bones in our jaws like candy,” added a different voice, also female.

“Yeah,” agreed the first voice, “like candy.”

“Yeah,” said a third.

Charlie felt his entire body go to gooseflesh, but he shook it off and tried to keep his voice steady.

“Well, today would be a good day for it,” Charlie said. “I’m well rested from sleeping in my comfy bed with the down comforter. Not like I spent the night in a sewer or anything.”

“Bastard!” A hissing female chorus.

“Well, talk to you on the next block.”

Strolled up the block into Chinatown, pacing out the sidewalk jauntily with his sword-cane, the suit inside a light garment bag thrown over his shoulder. He tried whistling, but thought that might be a little too cliché. They were already under the next corner when he got there.

“I’m going to suck the baby’s soul out through her soft spot while you watch, Meat.”

“Oh, nice!” Charlie said, gritting his teeth and trying not to sound as horrified as he was. “She’s starting to crawl around pretty well now, so don’t miss breakfast that day, because if she has her little rubber spoon, she’ll probably kick your ass.”

There was a screech of anger from the sewers and a harsh, hissing chatter. “He can’t say that? Can he say that? Does he know who we are?”

“Taking a left at the next block. See you there.”

There was a young Chinese man dressed in hip-hop wear who looked at Charlie and took a quick step to the side so as not to catch whatever kind of crazy this well-dressed Lo pak[1] was carrying. Charlie tapped his ear and said, “Sorry, wireless headset.”

The hip-hop guy nodded curtly, like he knew that, and despite appearances to the contrary, he had not been trippin’, but had, in fact, been chillin’ like a mo-fuckin’ villain, so step the fuck off, wigga. He crossed against the light, limping slightly under the weight of the subtext.

Charlie entered Golden Dragon Cleaners and the man at the counter, Mr. Hu, whom Charlie had known since he was eight, greeted him with an expansive and warm twitch of the left eyebrow, which was his usual greeting, and a good indicator to Charlie that the old man was still alive. A cigarette streamed at the end of a long black holder clinched in Hu’s dentures.

“Good morning, Mr. Hu,” Charlie said. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Suit?” said Mr. Hu, looking at the suit Charlie had slung over his shoulder.

“Yes, just the one today,” Charlie said. Charlie brought all of his finer merchandise to Golden Dragon to be cleaned, and he’d been giving them a lot of business the last few months, with all the estate clothes he’d been taking in. He also had them do his alterations, and Mr. Hu was considered to be the best three-fingered tailor on the West Coast, and perhaps, the world. Three Fingered Hu, he was known as in Chinatown, although to be fair, he was actually possessed of eight fingers, and was only missing the two smaller fingers from his right hand.

“Tailor?” Hu asked.

“No, thank you,” Charlie said. “This one’s for resale, not for me.”

Hu snatched the suit out of Charlie’s hand, tagged it, then called, “One suit for the White Devil!” in Mandarin, and one of his granddaughters came speeding out of the back, grabbed the suit, and was gone through the curtain before Charlie could see her face. “One suit for the White Devil,” she repeated for someone in the back.

“Wednesday,” said Three Fingered Hu. He handed Charlie the ticket.

“There’s something else,” Charlie said.

“Okay, Tuesday,” said Hu, “but no discount.”

“No, Mr. Hu, I know it’s been a long time since I needed it, but I wonder if you still have your other business?”

Mr. Hu closed one eye and looked at Charlie for a full minute before he replied. When he did, he said, “Come,” then disappeared behind the curtain leaving a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Charlie followed him into the back, through a noisy, steaming hell of cleaning fluids, mangle irons, and a dozen scurrying employees to a tiny plywood-walled office in the back, where Hu closed the door and locked them in as they did their business, something they’d first done over twenty years ago.

The first time Three Fingered Hu had led Charlie Asher through the stygian back room of Golden Dragon Cleaners, the ten-year-old Beta Male was sure that he was going to be kidnapped and sold into dry-cleaning slavery, butchered and turned into dim sum, or forced to smoke opium and fight fifty kung fu fighters at once while still in his pj’s (Charlie had a very tenuous grasp of his neighbors’ culture at age ten), but despite his fear, he was driven by a passion that had been embedded in his very genes millions of years ago: a quest for fire. Yes, it was a crafty Beta Male who first discovered fire, and true, it was almost immediately taken away from him by an Alpha Male. (Alphas missed out on the discovery of fire, but because they did not understand about grabbing the hot, orangey end of the stick, they are credited with inventing the third-degree burn.) Still, the original spark burns bright in every Beta’s veins. When Alpha boys have long since moved on to girls and sports, Betas will still be pursuing pyrotechnics well into adolescence and sometimes beyond. Alpha Males may lead the armies of the world, but it’s the Betas who actually get the shit blowed up.

And what better testimonial for a purveyor of fireworks than to be missing critical digits? Three Fingered Hu. When Hu opened his thick, trifold case across the desk, revealing his wares, young Charlie felt he had passed through the fires of hell to arrive, at last, in paradise, and he gladly handed over his wad of crumpled, sweaty dollar bills. And even as long silver ashes from Hu’s cigarette fell over the fuses like deadly snow, Charlie picked his pleasure. He was so excited he nearly peed himself.

The death-dealing Charlie who walked out of Golden Dragon Cleaners that morning with a compact paper parcel tucked under his arm felt a similar excitement, for as much as it was against his nature, he was rushing, once again, into the breech. He headed to the storm sewer grate and, waving the glowing porcelain bear from his satchel at the street, shouted, “I’m going over one block and up four, bitches. Join me?”

“The White Devil has finally gone around the bend,” said Three Fingered Hu’s eleventh grandchild, Cindy Lou Hu, who stood at the counter next to her venerated and digitally challenged ancestor.

“His money not crazy,” said Three.

Charlie had noticed the alley on one of his walks to the financial district. It lay between Montgomery and Kearney Streets and had all the things a good alley should have: fire escapes, Dumpsters, various steel doors tagged with graffiti, a rat, two seagulls, assorted filth, a guy passed out under some cardboard, and a half-dozen “No Parking” signs, three with bullet holes. It was the Platonic ideal of an alley, but what distinguished it from other alleys in the area was that it had two openings into the storm-drain system, spaced not fifty yards apart, one on the street end and one in the middle, concealed between two Dumpsters. Having recently developed an eye for storm drains, Charlie couldn’t help but notice.

He chose the drain that was hidden from the street, crouched down about four feet away, and opened the parcel from Three Fingered Hu. He removed eight M-80s and trimmed the two-inch-long waterproof fuses to about a half inch with a pair of nail clippers he kept on his key chain. (An M-80 is a very large firecracker, purported to have the explosive power of a quarter of a stick of dynamite. Rural children use them to blow up mailboxes or school plumbing, but in the city they have largely been replaced by the 9 mm Glock pistol as the preferred instrument of mischievous fun.)

“Kids!” Charlie called into the drain. “You with me? Sorry I didn’t get your names.” He drew the sword from his cane, set it by his knee, then dug the porcelain bear out of his satchel and sat it by his other knee. “There you go,” he called.

There was a vicious hiss from the drain, and even as he thought it was completely dark, it got even darker. He could see silver disk shapes moving in the blackness, like coins tumbling through a dark ocean, but these were paired up—eyes.

“Give it, Meat. Give it,” whispered a female voice.

“Come and get it,” Charlie said, trying to fight down the greatest case of the willies he’d ever felt. It was like dry ice was being applied to his spine and it was all he could do not to shiver.

The shadow in the drain started to leak out across the pavement, just an inch or so, but he could see it, like the light had changed. But it hadn’t. The shadow took the shape of a female hand and moved another six inches toward the glowing bear. That’s when Charlie grabbed the sword and snapped it down on the shadow. It didn’t hit pavement, but connected with something softer, and there was a deafening screech.

“You piece of shit!” screamed the voice—now in anger, not pain. “You worthless little—you—”

“Quick and the dead, ladies,” Charlie said. “Quick and the dead. C’mon, give it another shot.”

A second hand-shaped shadow snaked out of the drain on the left, then another on the right. Charlie pushed the bear away from the drain as he pulled the cigar lighter from his pocket. He lit the short fuses of four of the M-80s and tossed them into the drain, even as the shadows were reaching out.

“What was that?”

“What did he throw?”

“Move, I can’t—”

Charlie put his fingers in his ears. The M-80s exploded and Charlie grinned. He sheathed the sword in the cane, gathered up his stuff, and sprinted for the other drain. Inside an enclosed space the noise would be punishing, brutal even. He kept grinning.

He could hear a chorus of screaming and cursing, in half a dozen dead languages, some of them running over others, like someone was spinning the dial on a shortwave radio that spanned both time and space. He dropped to his knees and listened at the drain, careful to stay an arm’s length away. He could hear them coming, tracking him under the street. He hoped he was right that they couldn’t come out, but even if they did, he had the sword, and the sunlight was his turf. He lit four more M-80s, these with longer fuses, and tossed them one by one into the drain.

“Who’s New Meat now?” he said.

“What? What did he say?” said a sewer voice.

“I can’t hear shit.”

Charlie waved the porcelain bear in front of the drain. “You want this?” He tossed in another M-80.

“You like that, do you?” Charlie shouted, throwing in the third firecracker. “That’ll teach you to use your beak on my arm, you fucking harpies!”

“Mr. Asher,” came a voice from behind him.

Charlie looked around to see Alphonse Rivera, the police inspector, standing over him.

“Oh, hi,” Charlie said, then realizing that he was holding a lit M-80, he said, “Excuse me a second.” He tossed the firecracker in the drain. At that moment they all started going off.

Rivera had retreated a few steps and had his hand in his jacket, presumably on his gun. Charlie put the porcelain bear in his satchel and climbed to his feet. He could hear the voices shrieking at him, cursing.

“You fucking loser,” screeched one of the dark ones. “I’ll weave a basket of your guts and carry your severed head in it.”

“Yeah,” said another voice. “A basket.”

“I think you threatened that already,” said a third.

“I did not,” said the first.

“Shut the fuck up!” Charlie yelled at the drain, then he looked at Rivera, who had drawn his weapon and was holding it at his side.

“So,” Rivera said, “problems with, uh, someone in the drain?”

Charlie grinned. “You can’t hear that, can you?” The cursing was ongoing, but now in some language that sounded as if it required a lot of mucus to speak properly, Gaelic or German or something.

“I can hear a distinct ringing in my ears, Mr. Asher, from the report of your distinctly illegal fireworks, but beyond that, nothing, no.”

“Rats,” Charlie said, unconsciously raising an eyebrow in a so are you gonna buy that load of horseshit? way. “Hate the rats.”

“Uh-huh,” Rivera said flatly. “The rats, they used their beak on your arm and evidently you feel that they have a secret desire for cheap animal curios?”

“So that you heard?” Charlie asked.

“Yep.”

“That’s gotta make you wonder, then, huh?”

“Yep,” said the cop. “Nice suit, though. Armani?”

“Canali, actually,” Charlie said. “But thanks.”

“Not what I’d pick for bombing storm drains, but to each his own.” Rivera hadn’t moved. He was standing just off the curb, about ten feet away from Charlie, his weapon still at his side. A jogger ran by them and used the opportunity to quicken his pace. Charlie and Rivera both nodded politely as he passed.

“So,” Charlie said, “you’re a professional, where would you go with this?”

Rivera shrugged. “Not on any prescriptions you might have taken too many of, are you?”

“I wish,” Charlie said.

“Up all night drinking, thrown out by the wife, out of your mind with remorse?”

“My wife passed away.”

“I’m sorry. How long?”

“Going on a year now.”

“Well, that’s not going to work,” said Rivera. “Do you have any history of mental illness?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you do now. Congratulations, Mr. Asher. You can use that next time.”

“Do I have to do the perp walk?” Charlie asked, thinking about how he’d explain this to child services. Poor Sophie, her dad an ex con and Death, school was going to be tough. “This jacket is tailored, I don’t think I can get it over my head for the perp walk. Am I going to jail?”

“Not with me, you’re not. You think this would be any easier for me to explain? I’m an inspector, I don’t arrest guys for throwing firecrackers and yelling into storm drains.”

“Then why do you have your weapon drawn?”

“Makes me feel more secure.”

“I can see that,” Charlie said. “I probably appeared a little unstable.”

“Ya think?”

“So where’s that leave us?”

“That the rest of your stash?” Rivera nodded toward the paper bag of firecrackers under Charlie’s arm.

Charlie nodded.

“How about you toss that down the storm drain and we’ll call it a day.”

“No way. I have no idea what they’ll do if they get their hands on fireworks.”

Now it was Rivera’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “The rats?”

Charlie threw the bag in the storm sewer. He could hear whispering from below, but tried not to show Rivera that he was listening.

Rivera holstered his weapon and shot his lapels. “So, do you take suits like that into your shop very often?” he asked.

“More now than I used to. I’ve been doing a lot of estate work,” Charlie said.

“You still have my card, give me a call if you get a forty long, anything Italian, medium-to lightweight wool, oh, or raw silk, too.”

“Yeah, silk’s perfect for our weather. Sure, I’ll be happy to save you something. By the way, Inspector, how did you happen to be in a back alley, off a side street, in the middle of a Tuesday morning?”

“I don’t have to tell you that,” said Rivera with a smile.

“You don’t?”

“No. You have a nice day, Mr. Asher.”

“You, too,” said Charlie. So now he was being followed both above and below the street? Why else would a homicide detective be here? Neither the Great Big Book nor Minty Fresh had said a word about the cops. How were you supposed to keep this whole death-dealing thing a secret when a cop was watching you? His elation at having taken the battle to the enemy, something that was deeply against his nature, evaporated. He wasn’t sure why, but something was telling him that he had just fucked up.

Below the street the Morrigan looked at one another in amazement.

“He doesn’t know,” said Macha, examining her claws, which shone like brushed stainless steel in the dim light coming from above. Her body was beginning to show the gunmetal-blue relief of feathers, and her eyes were no longer just silver disks, but now had the full awareness of a predatory bird’s. She had once flown over the battlefields of the North, landing on those soldiers who were dying of their wounds, pecking out their souls in her bird form of a hooded crow. The Celts had called the severed heads of their enemies Macha’s Acorn Crop, but they had no idea that she cared nothing for their tributes or their tribes, only for their blood and their souls. It had been a thousand years since she had seen her woman claws like this.

“I still can’t hear,” said her sister Nemain, who groomed the blue-black feather shapes on her own body, hissing with the pleasure as she ran the dagger points over her breasts. She was showing fangs as well, which dented her delicate jet lips. It had been her lot to drip venom on those she would mark for death. There was no fiercer warrior than one who had been touched by the venom of Nemain, for with nothing to lose, he took the field without fear, in a frenzy that gave him the strength of ten, and dragged others to their doom with him.

Babd raked her rediscovered claws across the side of the culvert, cutting deep gouges into the concrete. “I love these. I forgot I even had these. I’ll bet we can go Above. Want to go Above? I feel like I could go Above. Tonight we can go Above. We could tear his legs off and watch him drag himself around in his own blood, that would be fun.” Babd was the screamer—her shriek on the battlefield said to send armies into retreat—ranks of soldiers a hundred deep would die of fright. She was all that was fierce, furious, and not particularly bright.

“The Meat doesn’t know,” repeated Macha. “Why would we give away our advantage in an early attack.”

“Because it would be fun,” said Babd. “Above? Fun? I know, instead of a basket, you can weave a hat from his entrails.”

Nemain slung some venom off her claws and it hissed in a steaming line across the concrete. “We should tell Orcus. He’ll have a plan.”

“About the hat?” asked Babd. “You have to tell him it was my idea. He loves hats.”

“We have to tell him that New Meat doesn’t know.”

The three moved like smoke down the pipes toward the great ship, to share the news that their newest enemy, among other things, did not know what he was, or what he had wrought on the world.

12 THE BAY CITY BOOK OF THE DEAD

Charlie named the hamsters Parmesan and Romano (or Parm and Romy, for short) because when the time came for thinking up names, he just happened to be reading the label on a jar of Alfredo sauce. That was all the thought that went into it and that was enough. In fact, Charlie thought he might have even gone overboard, considering that when he returned home the day of the great firecracker/sewer debacle, he found his daughter gleefully pounding away on the tray of her high chair with a stiff hamster.

Romano was the poundee, Charlie could tell because he’d put a dot of nail polish between his little ears so he could tell it apart from its companion, Parmesan, who was equally stiff inside the plastic Habitrail box. In the bottom of the exercise wheel, actually. Dead at the wheel.

“Mrs. Ling!” Charlie called. He pried the expired rodent from his darling daughter’s little hand and dropped it in the cage.

“Is Vladlena, Mr. Asher,” came a giant voice from the bathroom. There was a flush and Mrs. Korjev emerged from the bathroom pulling at the clasps of her overalls. “I’m sorry, I am having to crap like bear. Sophie was safe in chair.”

“She was playing with a dead hamster, Mrs. Korjev.”

Mrs. Korjev looked at the two hamsters in the plastic Habitrail box—gave it a little tap, shook it back and forth. “They sleep.”

“They are not sleeping, they’re dead.”

“They are fine when I go in bathroom. Playing, running on wheel, having laugh.”

“They were not having a laugh. They were dead. Sophie had one in her hand.” Charlie looked more closely at the rodent that Sophie had been tenderizing. Its head looked extremely wet. “In her mouth. She had it in her mouth.” He grabbed a paper towel from the roll on the counter and started wiping out the inside of Sophie’s mouth. She made a la-la-la sound as she tried to eat the towel, which she thought was part of the game.

“Where is Mrs. Ling, anyway?”

“She have to go pick up prescription, so I watch Sophie for short time. And tiny bears are happy when I go in bathroom.”

“Hamsters, Mrs. Korjev, not bears. How long were you in there?”

“Maybe five minute. I am thinking I am now having a strain in my poop chute, so hard I am pushing.”

“Aiiiiieeeee,” came the cry from the doorway as Mrs. Ling returned, and scampered to Sophie. “Is past time for nap,” Mrs. Ling snapped at Mrs. Korjev.

“I’ve got her now,” Charlie said. “One of you stay with her while I get rid of the H-A-M-S-T-E-R-S.”

“He mean the tiny bears,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“I get rid, Mr. Asher,” said Mrs. Ling. “No problem. What happen them?”

“Sleeping,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“Ladies, go. Please. I’ll see one of you in the morning.”

“Is my turn,” said Mrs. Korjev sadly. “Am I banish? Is no Sophie for Vladlena, yes?”

“No. Uh, yes. It’s fine, Mrs. Korjev. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Mrs. Ling was shaking the Habitrail cage. They certainly were sound little sleepers, these hamsters. She liked ham. “I take care,” she said. She tucked the cage under her arm and backed toward the door, waving. “Bye-bye, Sophie. Bye-bye.”

“Bye-bye, bubeleh,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“Bye-bye,” Sophie said, with a baby wave.

“When did you learn bye-bye?” Charlie said to his daughter. “I can’t leave you for a second.”

But he did leave her the very next day, to find replacements for the hamsters. He took the cargo van to the pet store this time. Whatever courage or hubris he’d rallied in order to attack the sewer harpies had melted away, and he didn’t even want to go near a storm drain. At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each about as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney-shaped dish that had its own little island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: “You think we’re slow? Look at that guy.” To shore up the snail’s morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

After he grilled the clerk for fifteen minutes on the vitality of the turtles, and was assured that they could probably survive a nuclear attack as long as there were some bugs left to eat, Charlie wrote a check and started tearing up over his turtles.

“Are you okay, Mr. Asher?” asked the pet-shop guy.

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It’s just that this is the last entry in the register.”

“And your bank didn’t give you a new one?”

“No, I have a new one, but this is the last one that my wife wrote in. Now that this one is used up, I’ll never see her handwriting in the check register again.”

“I’m sorry,” said the pet-shop guy, who, until that moment, had thought the rough patch that day was going to be consoling a guy over a couple of dead hamsters.

“It’s not your problem,” Charlie said. “I’ll just take my turtles and go.”

And he did, squeezing the check register in his hand as he drove. She was slipping away, every day a little more.

A week ago Jane had come down to borrow some honey and found the plum jelly that Rachel liked in the back of the refrigerator, covered in green fuzz.

“Little brother, this has got to go,” Jane said, making a face.

“No. It was Rachel’s.”

“I know, kid, and she’s not coming back for it. What else do you—oh my God!” She dove away from the fridge. “What was that?”

“Lasagna. Rachel made it.”

“This has been in here for over a year?”

“I couldn’t make myself throw it out.”

“Look, I’m coming over Saturday and cleaning out this apartment. I’m going to get rid of all the stuff of Rachel’s that you don’t want.”

“I want it all.”

Jane paused while moving the green-and-purple lasagna to the trash bin, pan and all. “No you don’t, Charlie. This kind of stuff doesn’t help you remember Rachel, it just hurts you. You need to focus on Sophie and the rest of both of your lives. You’re a young guy, you can’t give up. We all loved Rachel, but you have to think about moving on, maybe going out.”

“I’m not ready. And you can’t come over this Saturday, that’s my day in the shop.”

“I know,” Jane said. “It’s better if you’re not here.”

“But you can’t be trusted, Jane,” Charlie said, as if that was as obvious as the fact that Jane was irritating. “You’ll throw out all the pieces of Rachel, and you’ll steal my clothes.” Jane had been swiping Charlie’s suits pretty regularly since he’d started dressing more upscale. She was wearing a tailored, double-breasted jacket that he’d just gotten back from Three Fingered Hu a few days ago. Charlie hadn’t even worn it yet. “Why are you still wearing suits, anyway? Isn’t your new girlfriend a yoga instructor? Shouldn’t you be wearing those baggy pants made out of hemp and tofu fibers like she does? You look like David Bowie, Jane. There, I’ve said it. I’m sorry, but it had to be said.”

Jane put her arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. “You are so sweet. Bowie is the only man I’ve ever found attractive. Let me clean out your apartment. I’ll watch Sophie that day—give the widows a day to do battle down at the Everything for a Dollar Store.”

“Okay, but just clothes and stuff, no pictures. And just put it in the basement in boxes, no throwing anything away.”

“Even food items? Chuck, the lasagna, I mean—”

“Okay, food items can go. But don’t let Sophie know what you’re doing. And leave Rachel’s perfume, and her hairbrush. I want Sophie to know what her mother smelled like.”

That night, when he finished at the shop, he went down to the basement to the little gated storage area for his apartment and visited the boxes of all of the things that Jane had packed up. When that didn’t work, he opened them and said good-bye to every single item—pieces of Rachel. Seemed like he was always saying good-bye to pieces of Rachel.

On his way home from the pet shop he had stopped at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books because it, too, was a piece of Rachel and he needed a touchstone, but also because he needed to research what he was doing. He’d scoured the Internet for information on death, and while he’d found that there were a lot of people who wanted to dress like death, get naked with the dead, look at pictures of the naked and the dead, or sell pills to give erections to the dead, there just wasn’t anything on how to go about being dead, or Death. No one had ever heard of Death Merchants or sewer harpies or anything of the sort. He left the store with a two-foot-high stack of books on Death and Dying, figuring, as a Beta Male typically does, that before he tried to take the battle to the enemy again, he’d better find out something about what he was dealing with.

That evening he settled in on the couch next to his baby daughter and read while the new turtles, Bruiser and Jeep (so named in hope of instilling durability in them), ate freeze-dried bugs and watched CSI Safari-land on cable.

“Well, honey, according to this Kübler-Ross lady, the five stages of death are anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Well, we went through all of those stages when we lost Mommy, didn’t we?”

“Mama,” Sophie said.

The first time she had said “Mama” had brought Charlie to tears. He had been looking over her little shoulder at a picture of Rachel. The second time she said it, it was less emotional. She was in her high chair at the breakfast bar and was talking to the toaster.

“That’s not Mommy, Soph, that’s the toaster.”

“Mama,” Sophie insisted, reaching out for the toaster.

“You’re just trying to fuck with me, aren’t you?” Charlie said.

“Mama,” Sophie said to the fridge.

“Swell,” Charlie said.

He read on, realizing that Dr. Kübler-Ross had been exactly right. Every morning when he woke up to find another name and number in the day planner at his bedside, he went through the entire five-step process before he finished breakfast. But now that the steps had a name—he started to recognize the stages as experienced by the family members of his clients. That’s how he referred to the people whose souls he retrieved: clients.

Then he read a book, called The Last Sack, about how to kill yourself with a plastic bag, but it must not have been a very effective book, because he saw on the back cover that there had been two sequels. He imagined the fan mail:

Dear Last Sack Author:

I was almost dead, but then my sack got all steamed up and I couldn’t see the TV, so I poked an eyehole. I hope to try again with your next book.

The book really didn’t help Charlie much, except to instill in him a new paranoia about plastic bags.

Over the next few months he read: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, from which he learned how to pull someone’s brain out through his nostril with a buttonhook, which he was sure would come in handy someday; a dozen books on dealing with death, grief, burial rituals, and myths of the Underworld, from which he learned that there had been personifications of Death since the dawn of time, and none of them looked like him; and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, from which he learned that bardo, the transition between this life and the next, was forty-nine days long, and that during the process you would be met by about thirty thousand demons, all of which were described in intricate detail, none of which looked like the sewer harpies, and all of which you were supposed to ignore and not be afraid of because they weren’t real because they were of the material world.

“Strange,” Charlie said to Sophie, “how all of these books talk about how the material world isn’t significant, yet I have to retrieve people’s souls, which are attached to material objects. It would appear that death, if nothing else, is ironic, don’t you think?”

“No,” Sophie said.

At eighteen months Sophie answered all questions either “No,” “Cookie,” or “like Bear”—the last Charlie attributed to leaving his daughter too often in the care of Mrs. Korjev. After the turtles, two more hamsters, a hermit crab, an iguana, and two widemouthed frogs passed on to the great wok in the sky (or, more accurately, on the third floor), Charlie finally acquiesced and brought home a three-inch-long Madagascar hissing cockroach that he named Bear, just so his daughter wouldn’t go through life talking total nonsense.

“Like Bear,” Sophie said.

“She’s talking about the bug,” Charlie said, one night when Jane stopped by.

“She’s not talking about the bug,” Jane said. “What kind of father buys a cockroach for a little girl anyway? That’s disgusting.”

“Nothing’s supposed to be able to kill them. They’ve been around for like a hundred million years. It was that or a white shark, and they’re supposed to be hard to keep.”

“Why don’t you give up, Charlie? Just let her get by with stuffed animals.”

“A little kid should have a pet. Especially a little kid growing up in the city.”

“We grew up in the city and we didn’t have any pets.”

“I know, and look how we turned out,” Charlie said, gesturing back and forth between the two of them, one who dealt in death and had a giant cockroach named Bear, and the other who was on her third yoga-instructor girlfriend in six months and was wearing his newest Harris tweed suit.

“We turned out great, or at least one of us did,” Jane said, gesturing to the splendor of her suit, like she was a game-show model giving the big prize package on Let’s Get Androgynous, “You have got to gain some weight. This is tailored way too tight in the butt,” she said, lapsing once again into self-obsession. “Am I camel-toeing?”

“I am not looking, not looking, not looking,” Charlie chanted.

“She wouldn’t need pets if she ever saw the outside of this apartment,” Jane said, pulling down on the crotch of her trousers to counteract the dreaded dromedary-digit effect. “Take her to the zoo, Charlie. Let her see something besides this apartment. Take her out.”

“I will, tomorrow. I’ll take her out and show her the city,” Charlie said. And he would have, too, except he woke to find the name Madeline Alby written on his day planner, and next to her name, the number one.

Oh yeah, and the cockroach was dead.

I will take you out,” Charlie said as he put Sophie in her high chair for breakfast. “I will, honey. I promise. Can you believe that they’d only give me one day?”

“No,” Sophie said. “Juice,” she added, because she was in her chair and this was juice time.

“I’m sorry about Bear, honey,” Charlie said, brushing her hair this way, then that, then giving up. “He was a good bug, but he is no more. Mrs. Ling will bury him. That window box of hers must be getting pretty crowded.” He didn’t remember there being a window box in Mrs. Ling’s window, but who was he to question?

Charlie threw open the phone book and, mercifully, found an M. Alby with an address on Telegraph Hill—not ten minutes’ walk away. No client had ever been this close, and with almost six months without a peep or a shade from the sewer harpies, he was starting to feel like he had this whole Death Merchant thing under control. He’d even placed most of the soul vessels that he’d collected. The short notice felt bad. Really bad.

The house was an Italianate Victorian on the hill just below the Coit Tower, the great granite column built in honor of the San Francisco firemen who had lost their lives in the line of duty. Although it’s said to have been designed with a fire-hose nozzle in mind, almost no one who sees the tower can resist the urge to comment on its resemblance to a giant penis. Madeline Alby’s house, a flat-roofed white rectangle with ornate scrolling trim and a crowning cornice of carved cherubs, looked like a wedding cake balanced on the tower’s scrotum.

So as Charlie trudged up the nut sack of San Francisco, he wondered exactly how he was going to get inside the house. Usually he had time, he could wait and follow someone in, or construct some kind of ruse to gain entrance, but this time he had only one day to get inside, find the soul vessel, and get out. He hoped that Madeline Alby had already died. He really didn’t like being around sick people. When he saw the car parked out front with the small green hospice sticker, his hopes for a dead client were smashed like a cupcake with a sledgehammer.

He walked up the front porch steps at the left of the house and waited by the door. Could he open it himself? Would people be able to see it, or did his special “unnoticeability” extend to objects he moved as well? He didn’t think so. But then the door opened and a woman about Charlie’s age stepped out onto the porch. “I’m just having a smoke,” she called back into the house, and before she could close the door behind her, Charlie slipped inside.

The front door opened into a foyer; to his right Charlie saw what had originally been the parlor. There was a stairway in front of him, and another door beyond that that he guessed led to the kitchen. He could hear voices in the parlor and peeked around the corner to see four elderly women sitting on two couches that faced each other. They were in dresses and hats, and they might have just come from church, but Charlie guessed they had come to see their friend off.

“You’d think she’d give up the smoking, with her mother upstairs dying of cancer,” said one of the ladies, wearing a gray skirt and jacket with matching hat, and a large enameled pin in the shape of a Holstein cow.

“Well, she always was a hardheaded girl,” said another, wearing a dress that looked as if it had been made from the same floral material as the couch. “You know she used to meet with my son Jimmy up in Pioneer Park when they were little.”

“She said she was going to marry him,” said another woman, who looked like a sister of the first.

The ladies laughed, whimsy and sadness mixed in their tones.

“Well, I don’t know what she was thinking, he’s as flighty as can be,” said Mom.

“Yeah, and brain damaged,” added the sister.

“Well, yes, he is now.”

“Since the car ran over him,” said Sis.

“Didn’t he run right in front of a car?” asked one of the ladies who had been silent until now.

“No, he ran right into it,” said Mom. “He was on the drugs then.” She sighed. “I always said I had one of each—a boy, a girl, and a Jimmy.”

They all nodded. This was not the first time this group had done this, Charlie guessed. They were the type that bought sympathy cards in bulk, and every time they heard an ambulance go by they made a note to pick up their black dress from the cleaner’s.

“You know Maddy looked bad,” said the lady in gray.

“Well, she’s dying, sweetheart, that’s what happens.”

“I guess.” Another sigh.

The tinkle of ice in glasses.

They were all nursing neat little cocktails. Charlie guessed they’d been mixed by the younger woman who was outside smoking. He looked around the room for something that was glowing red. There was an oak rolltop desk in the corner that he’d like to get a look in, but that would have to wait until later. He ducked out of the doorway and into the kitchen, where two men in their late thirties, maybe early forties, were sitting at an oak table, playing Scrabble.

“Is Jenny coming back? It’s her turn.”

“She might have gone up to see Mom with one of the ladies. The hospice nurse is letting them go up one at a time.”

“I just wish it was over. I can’t stand this waiting. I have a family I need to get back to. I’m about to crawl out of my fucking skin.”

The older of the two reached across the table and set two tiny blue pills by his brother’s tiles.

“These help.”

“What are they?”

“Time-released morphine.”

“Really?” The younger brother looked alarmed.

“You hardly even feel them, they just sort of take the edge off. Jenny’s been taking them for two weeks.”

“That’s why you guys are taking this so well and I’m a wreck? You guys are stoned on Mom’s pain medication?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t take drugs. Those are drugs. You don’t take drugs.”

The older brother sat back in his chair. “Pain medication, Bill. What are you feeling?”

“No, I’m not taking Mom’s pain meds.”

“Suit yourself.”

“What if she needs them?”

“There’s enough morphine in that room to bring down a Kodiak bear, and if she needs more, then hospice will bring more.”

Charlie wanted to shake the younger brother and yell, Take the drugs, you idiot. Maybe it was the benefit of experience. Having now seen this situation happen again and again, families on deathwatch, out of their minds with grief and exhaustion, friends moving in and out of the house like ghosts, saying good-bye or just covering some sort of base so they could say they had been there, so perhaps they wouldn’t have to die alone themselves. Why was none of this in the books of the dead? Why didn’t the instructions tell him about all the pain and confusion he was going to see?

“I’m going to go find Jenny,” said the older brother, “see if she wants to get something to eat. We can finish the game later if you want.”

“That’s okay, I was losing anyway.” The younger brother gathered up the tiles and put the board away. “I’m going to go upstairs and see if I can catch a nap, tonight’s my night watching Mom.”

The older brother walked out and Charlie watched the younger brother drop the blue pills into his shirt pocket and leave the kitchen, leaving the Death Dealer to ransack the pantry and the cabinets looking for the soul vessel. But he felt before he even started that it wouldn’t be there. He was going to have to go upstairs.

He really, really hated being around sick people.

Madeline Alby was propped up and tucked into bed with a down comforter up around her neck. She was so slight that her body barely showed under the covers. Charlie guessed that she might weigh seventy or eighty pounds max. Her face was drawn and he could see the outlines of her eye sockets and her jawbone jutting through her skin, which had gone yellow. Charlie guessed liver cancer. One of her friends from downstairs was sitting at her bedside, the hospice-care worker, a big woman in scrubs, sat in a chair across the room, reading. A small dog, a Yorkshire terrier, Charlie thought, was snuggled up between Madeline’s shoulder and her neck, sleeping.

When Charlie stepped into the room, Madeline said, “Hey there, kid.”

He froze in his steps. She was looking right at him—crystal-blue eyes, and a smile. Had the floor squeaked? Had he bumped something?

“What are you doing there, kid?” She giggled.

“Who do you see, Maddy?” asked the friend. She followed Madeline’s gaze but looked right through Charlie.

“A kid over there.”

“Okay, Maddy. Do you want some water?” The friend reached for a child’s sippy cup with a built-in straw from the nightstand.

“No. Tell that kid to come in here, though. Come in here, kid.” Madeline worked her arms out of the covers and started moving her hands in sewing motions, like she was embroidering a tapestry in the air before her.

“Well, I’d better go,” said the friend. “Let you get some rest.” The friend glanced at the hospice woman, who looked over her reading glasses and smiled with her eyes. The only expert in the house, giving permission.

The friend stood and kissed Madeline Alby on the forehead. Madeline stopped sewing for a second, closed her eyes, and leaned into the kiss, like a young girl. Her friend squeezed her hand and said, “Good-bye, Maddy.”

Charlie stepped aside and let the woman pass. He watched her shoulders heave with a sob as she went through the door.

“Hey, kid,” Madeline said. “Come over here and sit down.” She paused in her sewing long enough to look Charlie in the eye, which freaked him out more than a little. He glanced at the hospice worker, who glanced up from her book, then went back to reading. Charlie pointed to himself.

“Yeah, you,” Madeline said.

Charlie was going into a panic. She could see him, but the hospice nurse could not, or so it seemed.

An alarm beeped on the nurse’s watch and Madeline picked up the little dog and held it to her ear. “Hello? Hi, how are you?” She looked up at Charlie. “It’s my oldest daughter.” The little dog looked at Charlie, too, with a distinct “save me” look in its eyes.

“Time for some medicine, Madeline,” the nurse said.

“Can’t you see I’m on the phone, Sally,” Madeline said. “Hang on a second.”

“Okay, I’ll wait,” the nurse said. She picked up a brown bottle with an eyedropper in it, filled the dropper, and checked the dosage and held.

“Bye. Love you, too,” Madeline said. She held the tiny dog out to Charlie. “Hang that up, would you?” The nurse snatched the dog out of the air and set it down on the bed next to Madeline.

“Open up, Madeline,” the nurse said. Madeline opened wide and the nurse squirted the eyedropper into the old woman’s mouth.

“Mmm, strawberry,” Madeline said.

“That’s right, strawberry. Would you like to wash it down with some water?” The nurse held the sippy cup.

“No. Cheese. I’d like some cheese.”

“I can get you some cheese,” said the nurse.

“Cheddar cheese.”

“Cheddar it is,” said the nurse. “I’ll be right back.” She tucked the covers around Madeline and left the room.

The old woman looked at Charlie again. “Can you talk, now that she’s gone?”

Charlie shrugged and looked in every direction, his hand over his mouth, like someone looking for an emergency spot to spit out a mouthful of bad seafood.

“Don’t mime, honey,” Madeline said. “No one likes a mime.”

Charlie sighed heavily, what was there to lose now? She could see him. “Hello, Madeline. I’m Charlie.”

“I always liked the name Charlie,” Madeline said. “How come Sally can’t see you?”

“Only you can see me right now,” Charlie said.

“Because I’m dying?”

“I think so.”

“Okay. You’re a nice-looking kid, you know that?”

“Thanks. You’re not bad yourself.”

“I’m scared, Charlie. It doesn’t hurt. I used to be afraid that it would hurt, but now I’m afraid of what happens next.”

Charlie sat down on the chair next to the bed. “I think that’s why I’m here, Madeline, you don’t need to be afraid.”

“I drank a lot of brandy, Charlie. That’s why this happened.”

“Maddy—can I call you Maddy?”

“Sure, kid, we’re friends.”

“Yes, we are. Maddy, this was always going to happen. You didn’t do anything to cause it.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Maddy, do you have something for me?”

“Like a present?”

“Like a present you would give to yourself. Something I can keep for you and give you back later, when it will be a surprise.”

“My pincushion,” Madeline said. “I’d like you to have that. It was my grandmother’s.”

“I’d be honored to keep that for you, Maddy. Where can I find it?”

“In my sewing box, on the top shelf of that closet.” She pointed to an old-style single closet across the room. “Oh, excuse me, phone.”

Madeline talked to her oldest daughter on the edge of the comforter while Charlie got the sewing box from the top shelf of the closet. It was made of wicker and he could see the red glow of the soul vessel inside. He removed a pincushion fashioned from red velvet wrapped with bands of real silver and held it up for Madeline to see. She smiled and gave him the thumbs-up, just as the nurse returned with a small plate of cheese and crackers.

“It’s my oldest daughter,” Madeline explained to the nurse, holding the edge of the comforter to her chest so her daughter didn’t hear. “Oh my, is that cheese?”

The nurse nodded. “And crackers.”

“I’ll call you back, honey, Sally has brought cheese and I don’t want to be rude.” She hung up the sheet and allowed Sally to feed her bites of cheese and crackers.

“I believe this is the best cheese I’ve ever tasted,” Madeline said.

Charlie could tell from the expression on her face that it was, indeed, the best cheese she had ever tasted. Every ounce of her being was going into tasting those slivers of cheddar, and she let loose little moans of pleasure as she chewed.

“You want some cheese, Charlie?” Madeline asked, spraying cracker shrapnel all over the nurse, who turned to look at the corner where Charlie was standing with the pincushion tucked safely in his jacket pocket.

“Oh, you can’t see him, Sally,” Madeline said, tapping the nurse on the hand. “But he’s a handsome rascal. A little skinny, though.” Then, to Sally, but overly loud to be sure that Charlie could hear: “He could use some fucking cheese.” Then she laughed, spraying more crackers on the nurse, who was laughing, too, and trying not to dump the plate.

“What did she say?” came a voice from the hall. Then the two sons and the daughter entered, chagrined at first at what they had heard, but then laughing with the nurse and their mother. “I said that cheese is good,” Madeline said.

“Yeah, Mom, it is,” said the daughter.

Charlie stood there in the corner, watching them eat cheese, and laughing, thinking, This should have been in the book. He watched them help her with her bedpan, and give her drinks of water, and wipe her face with a damp cloth—watched her bite at the cloth the way Sophie did when he washed her face. The eldest daughter, who Charlie realized had been dead for some time, called three more times, once on the dog and twice on the pillow. Around lunchtime Madeline was tired, and she went to sleep, and about a half hour into her nap she started panting, then stopped, then didn’t breathe for a full minute, then took a deep breath, then didn’t.

And Charlie slipped out the door with her soul in his pocket.

13 CRY HAVOC, AND LET SLIP THE GOGS OF WAR!

Watching Madeline Alby die had shaken Charlie. It wasn’t her death so much, it was the life he’d seen in her minutes before she passed. He thought: If you have to stare Death in the eye to be able to take the life out of your moments, then who better to do it than the man who shaves Death’s face?

“Cheese wasn’t in the book,” Charlie said to Sophie as he walked her out of the shop in her new runner’s stroller—which looked like someone had crossbred a carbon-fiber bicycle and a baby carriage and ended up with a vehicle you could use to take a day trip to Thunderdome—but it was strong, easy to push, and kept Sophie safely wrapped in an aluminum frame. Because of the cheese, he didn’t make her wear her helmet. He wanted her to be able to look around, see the world around her, and be in it. It was watching Madeline Alby eat cheese with every ounce of her being, like it was the first and best time, that made him realize that he had never really tasted cheese, or crackers, or life. And he didn’t want his daughter to live that way. He’d moved her into her own room the night before, the bedroom that Rachel had decorated for her with clouds painted on the ceiling and a happy balloon carrying a happy bunch of animal friends across the sky in its basket. He hadn’t slept well, and had gotten up five times during the night to check on her, only to find her sleeping peacefully, but he could lose a little sleep if Sophie could go through life without his fears and limitations. He wanted her to experience all the glorious cheese of life.

They strolled through North Beach. He stopped and bought a coffee for himself and some apple juice for Sophie. They shared a giant peanut-butter cookie, and a crowd of pigeons followed them down the sidewalk feasting on the river of crumbs that flowed from Sophie’s stroller. The World Cup soccer championships was playing on televisions in bars and cafés, and people spilled out onto the sidewalks and out into the street, watching the game, cheering, jeering, hugging, swearing, and generally acting out waves of elation and dejection in the company of new companions who were visiting this Italian-American neighborhood from all around the world. Sophie cheered with the soccer fans and shrieked with joy because they were happy. When the crowd was disappointed—a kick blocked, a play foiled—Sophie was distressed, and would look to her daddy to fix it and make everyone happy again. And Daddy did, because a few seconds later, they were all cheering again. A tall German man taught Sophie to sing “Goooooooooooooooooooooal!” the way the announcer did, practicing with her until she got the full five-second sustain, and she was still practicing three blocks away, when Charlie had to shrug at confused onlookers as if to say, The kid’s a soccer fan, what can you do?

As naptime approached, Charlie looped through the neighborhood and headed up through Washington Square Park, where people were reading and lounging in the shade, a guy played guitar and sang Dylan songs for change, two white Rasta boys kicked a Hacky Sack around, and people were generally settling in for a pleasant and windless summer day. Charlie spied a black kitten sneaking out of a hedge near busy Columbus Avenue, stalking a wild McMuffin wrapper, it appeared, and he pointed it out to Sophie.

“Look, Sophie, kitty.” Charlie felt bad about the demise of Bear, the cockroach. Maybe this afternoon he’d go to the pet shop and get a new friend for Sophie.

Sophie screamed with glee and pointed to the little cat.

“Can you say ‘kitty’?” Charlie said.

Sophie pointed, and gave a drooly grin.

“Would you like a kitty? Can you say ‘kitty,’ Sophie?”

Sophie pointed to the cat. “Kitty,” she said.

The little cat dropped on the spot, dead.

Fresh Music,” Minty Fresh answered the phone, his voice a bass sax sketch of cool jazz.

“What the fuck is this? You didn’t say anything about this? The book didn’t say anything about this? What the fuck is going on?”

“You’ll be wanting the library or a church,” Minty said. “This is a record store, we don’t answer general questions.”

“This is Charlie Asher. What the fuck did you do? What have you done to my little girl?”

Minty frowned and ran his hand over his scalp. He’d forgotten to shave this morning. He should have known something was going to go wrong. “Charlie, you can’t call me. I told you that. I’m sorry if something has happened to your little girl, but I promise you that I—”

“She pointed at a kitten and said ‘kitty’ and it fell over, stone dead.”

“Well, that is an unfortunate coincidence, Charlie, but kittens do have a pretty high mortality rate.”

“Yeah, well, then she pointed to an old guy feeding the pigeons and said ‘kitty’ and he dropped over dead, too.”

Minty Fresh was glad that there was no one in the store right then to see the look on his face, because he was sure that the full impact of the willies dancing up and down his spine was blowing his appearance of unflappable chill. “That child has a speech disorder, Charlie. You should have her looked at.”

“A speech disorder! A speech disorder! A cute lisp is a speech disorder. My daughter kills people with the word kitty. I had to keep my hand over her mouth all the way home. There’s probably video somewhere. People thought I was one of those people who beats their kid in department stores.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It’s the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.”

“Can we stay on point, Fresh, please? What do you know about this? What have you figured out in all your years as a Death Merchant?”

Minty Fresh sat down on the stool behind the counter and stared into the eyes of the cardboard cutout of Cher, hoping to find answers there. But the bitch was holding out. “Charlie, I got nothin’. The kid was in the room when you saw me, and you saw what it did to you. Who knows what it did to her. I told you I thought you were in a different league than the rest of us, well, maybe the kid is something else, too. I’ve never heard of a Death Merchant who could just ‘kitty’ someone to death, or cause anyone to die outside of normal, mortal means. Have you tried having her use other words? Like puppy?”

“Yeah, I was going to do that, but I thought it might fuck up property values if everyone in my neighborhood suddenly fell over dead! No, I didn’t try any other words. I don’t even want to make her eat her green beans for fear she’ll kitty me.”

“I’m sure you have some kind of immunity.”

“The Great Big Book says that we’re not immune to death ourselves. I’d say the next time a kitten comes on the Discovery Channel my sister could be picking out caskets.”

“I’m sorry, Charlie, I don’t know what to tell you. I’ll check out my library at home, but it sounds like the kid is a lot closer than we are to how all the legends portray Death. Things tend to balance, however, maybe there’s some positive side to this, uh, disorder she has. In the meantime, maybe you should head over to Berkeley, see if you can find anything at the library there. It’s a repository library—every book that’s printed goes there.”

“Haven’t you tried that?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t looking for something specific like this. Look, just be careful going over. Don’t take the BART tunnel.”

“You think the sewer harpies are in the BART tunnels?” Charlie asked.

“Sewer harpies? What’s that?”

“It’s what I call them,” Charlie said.

“Oh. I don’t know. It’s underground, and I’ve been on a train when the power goes out. I don’t think you want to risk it. It feels like their territory. Speaking of that, from my end they’ve been conspicuously silent for the last six months or so. Not a peep.”

“Yeah, the same here,” Charlie said. “But I suppose this phone call might change that.”

“Yeah, it probably will. But with your daughter’s condition, we might be in a whole new game, too. You watch your ass, Charlie Asher.”

“You, too, Minty.”

“Mr. Fresh.”

“I meant Mr. Fresh.”

“Good-bye, Charlie.”

In his cabin on the great ship, Orcus picked his teeth with the splintered femur of an infant. Babd combed his black mane with her claws as the bullheaded death pondered what the Morrigan had seen from the drain on Columbus Avenue: Charlie and Sophie in the park.

“It is time,” said Nemain. “Haven’t we waited long enough?” She clacked her claws like castanets, flinging drops of venom on the walls and floor.

“Would you be careful,” Macha said. “That shit stains. I just put new carpet in here.”

Nemain stuck out a black tongue. “Washerwoman,” she said.

“Whore,” Macha replied.

“I don’t like this,” Orcus said. “This child disturbs me.”

“Nemain is right. Look how strong we’ve become,” Babd said, stroking the webbing that was growing back between the spikes on Orcus’s shoulders—it looked as if he had fans mounted there, like some ornate samurai armor. “Let us go. The child’s sacrifice might give you your full wings back.”

“You think you can?”

“We can, once it’s dark,” said Macha. “We’re stronger than we’ve been in a thousand years.”

“Just one of you go, and go in stealth,” said Orcus. “Hers is a very old talent, even in this new body. If she masters it, our chance may have passed for another thousand years. Kill the child and bring its corpse to me. Don’t let her see you until you strike.”

“And her father? Kill him?”

“You’re not that strong. But if he wakes to find his child gone, then maybe his grief will destroy him.”

“You don’t have any idea what you’re doing, do you?” said Nemain.

“You stay here tonight,” said Orcus.

“Dammit,” said Nemain, slinging steaming venom across the wall. “Oh, pardon me for questioning the exalted one. Hey, head of the bull, I wonder what comes out of the other end?”

“Ha,” said Babd. “Ha. Good one.”

“And what kind of brain do you find under the feathers?” said Orcus.

“Oh! He got you, Nemain. Think about how bad he got you when I’m killing the child tonight.”

“I was talking to you,” Orcus said. “Macha goes.”

She came in through the roof, tearing up the bubble skylight over the fourth floor and dropping into the hallway. She moved as silent as a shadow down the hall to the stairs, then appeared to float down, her feet barely touching the steps. On the second floor she paused at the door and examined the locks. There were two strong dead bolts in addition to the one in the main plate. She looked up and saw a stained-glass transom, latched with a tiny brass latch. A claw slipped quickly through the gap, and with a twist of the wrist the brass lock popped off and clattered on the hardwood floor inside. She slithered up and through the transom and flattened herself against the floor inside, waiting like a pool of shadow.

She could smell the child, hear the gentle snoring coming from across the apartment. She moved to the middle of the great room, and paused. New Meat was there, too, she could sense him, sleeping in the room across from the child. If he interfered she’d tear his head from his body and take it back to the ship as proof to Orcus that he should never underestimate her. She was tempted to take him anyway, but not until she had the child.

A night-light in the child’s room sent a soft pink band of light across the living room. Macha waved a taloned hand and the light went out. She trilled a small purr of self-satisfaction. There had been a time when she could extinguish a human life in the same way, and maybe that time was coming again.

She slid into the child’s room and paused. By the moonlight streaming through the window she could see that the child lay curled on her side in her crib, hugging a plush rabbit. But she couldn’t see into the corners of the room—the shadows so dark and liquid that even her night-creature eyes couldn’t penetrate them. She moved to the crib and leaned over it. The child was sleeping with her mouth wide open. Macha decided to drive a single claw through the roof of her mouth into her brain. It would be silent, leave plenty of blood for the father to find, and she could carry the child’s corpse that way, hooked on her claw like a fish for the market. She reached down slowly and leaned into the crib so she’d have maximum leverage for the plunge. The moonlight sparkled off the three-inch talon and she drew back, and she was distracted for an instant by its pretty shininess when the jaws locked down on her arm.

“Motherfu—” she screeched as she was whipped around and slammed against the wall. Another set of jaws clamped onto her ankle. She twisted herself into a half-dozen forms, which did nothing to free her, and she was tossed around like a rag doll into the dresser, the crib, the wall again. She raked at her attacker with her claws, found purchase, then felt as if her claws were being ripped out by the root, so she let go. She could see nothing, just felt wild, disorienting movement, then impact. She kicked hard at whatever had her ankle and it released her, but the attacker on her arm whipped her through the window and against the security bars outside. She heard glass hitting the street below, pushed with all her might, shape-shifting at a furious rate until she was through the bars and falling to the pavement.

Ouch. Fuck!” came the shout from out on the street, a female voice. “Ouch.”

Charlie flipped on the light to see Sophie sitting up in her crib holding her bunny and laughing. The window behind her had been shattered, and the glass was gone. Every piece of furniture except the crib had been overturned and there were basketball-sized holes in the plaster of two walls, the wooden lath behind it splintered as well. All over the floor there were black feathers, and what looked like blood, but even as Charlie watched, the feathers started to evaporate into smoke.

“Goggy, Daddy,” Sophie said. “Goggy.” Then she giggled.

Sophie slept the rest of the night in Daddy’s bed while Daddy sat up in a chair next to her, watching the locked door, his sword-cane at his side. There was no window in Charlie’s bedroom, so the door was the only way in or out. When Sophie awoke just after dawn, Charlie changed her, bathed her, and dressed her for the day. Then he called Jane to make her breakfast while he cleaned up the glass and plaster in Sophie’s room and went downstairs to find some plywood to nail over the broken window.

He hated that he couldn’t call the police, couldn’t call someone, but if this is what one phone call to another Death Merchant was going to cause, he couldn’t risk it. And what would the police say anyway, about black feathers and blood that dissolved to smoke as you watched?

“Someone threw a brick through Sophie’s window last night,” he told Jane.

“Wow, on the second floor, too. I thought you were crazy when you put security bars all the way up the building, but I guess not so much, now. You should replace the window with that glass with the wire running through it, just to be safe.”

“I will,” Charlie said. Safe? He had no idea what had happened in Sophie’s room, but the fact that she was safe amid all the destruction scared the hell out of him. He’d replace the window, but the kid was sleeping in his room from now until she was thirty and married to a huge guy with ninja skills.

When Charlie returned from the basement with the sheet of plywood and hammer and nails, he found Jane sitting at the breakfast counter, smoking a cigarette.

“Jane, I thought you quit.”

“Yeah, I did. A month ago. Found this one in my purse.”

“Why are you smoking in my house?”

“I went into Sophie’s room to get her bunny for her.”

“Yeah? Where’s Sophie? There might still be some glass on the floor in there, you didn’t—”

“Yeah, she’s in there. And you’re not funny, Asher. Your thing with the pets has gone completely overboard. I’m going to have to do three yoga classes, get a massage, and smoke a joint the size of a thermos bottle to take the adrenaline edge off. They scared me so bad I peed myself a little.”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Jane?”

“Funny,” she said, smirking. “That’s really funny. I’m talking about the goggies, Daddy.”

Charlie shrugged at his sister as if to say, Could you be any more incoherent or incomprehensible? — a gesture he had perfected over thirty-two years, then ran to Sophie’s room and threw the door open.

There, on either side of his darling daughter, were the two biggest, blackest dogs he had ever seen. Sophie was sitting, leaning against one, while hitting the other in the head with her stuffed bunny. Charlie took a step toward rescuing Sophie when one of the dogs leapt across the room and knocked Charlie to the floor, pinning him there. The other put itself between Charlie and the baby.

“Sophie, Daddy’s coming to get you, don’t be afraid.” Charlie tried to squirm out from under the dog, but it just lowered its head and growled at him. It didn’t budge. Charlie figured that it could take the better part of one of his legs and some of his torso off in one bite. The thing’s head was bigger than the Bengal tigers’ at the San Francisco zoo.

“Jane, help me. Get this thing off of me.”

The big dog looked up, keeping its paws on Charlie’s shoulders.

Jane swiveled on her bar stool and took a deep drag on her cigarette. “No, I don’t think so, little brother. You’re on your own after springing this on me.”

“I didn’t. I’ve never seen these things before. No one’s ever seen these things before.”

“You know, we dykes have very high dog tolerance, but that doesn’t give you the right to do this. Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Jane said, gathering up her purse and keys from the breakfast bar. “You enjoy your little canine pals. I’m going to go call in freaked out to work.”

“Jane, wait.”

But she was gone. He heard the front door slam.

The big dog didn’t seem to be interested in eating Charlie, just holding him there. Every time he tried to slither out from under it, the thing growled and pushed harder.

“Down. Heel. Off.” Charlie tried commands he’d heard dog trainers shout on TV. “Fetch. Roll over. Get the fuck off me, you beast.” (He ad-libbed that last one.)

The animal barked in Charlie’s left ear, so loud that he lost hearing and there was just a ringing on that side. In his other ear he heard a little-girl giggle from across the room. “Sophie, honey, it’s okay.”

“Goggie, Daddy,” Sophie said. “Goggie.” She stumbled over and looked down at Charlie. The big dog licked her face, nearly knocking her over. (At eighteen months, Sophie moved like a small drunk most of the time.) “Goggie,” Sophie said again. She grabbed the giant hound by its ear and dragged it off Charlie. Or more accurately, it let her lead it by the ear off of him. Charlie leapt to his feet and started to reach for Sophie, but the other hound jumped in front of him and growled. The thing’s head came up to Charlie’s chest, even with its feet flat on the ground.

He figured the hounds must weigh four or five hundred pounds apiece. They were easily twice the size of the biggest dog he’d seen before, a Newfoundland that he’d seen swimming in the Aquatic Park down by the Maritime museum. They had the short fur of a Doberman, the broad shoulders and chest of a rottweiler, but the wide square head and upturned ears of a Great Dane. They were so black that they appeared to actually absorb light, and Charlie had only ever seen one type of creature that did that: the ravens from the Underworld. It was clear that wherever these hounds had come from, it wasn’t from around here. But it was also clear that they were not here to hurt Sophie. She wouldn’t even make a good meal for animals this size, and they certainly could have snapped her in two long before now if they’d meant her harm.

The damage in Sophie’s room the night before might have been caused by the hounds, but they had not been the aggressors. Something had come here to hurt her, and they had protected her, even as they were now. Charlie didn’t care why, he was just grateful that they were on his side. Where they’d been when he first rushed into the room after the window broke, he didn’t know, but it appeared that now that they were here, they were not going to go away.

“Okay, I’m not going to hurt her,” Charlie said. The dog relaxed and backed off a few steps. “She’s going to need to go potty,” Charlie said, feeling a little stupid. He just noticed that they were both wearing wide silver collars, which, strangely, disturbed him more than their size. After the stretching it had gotten over the last year and a half, his Beta Male imagination fit easily around two giant hounds showing up in his little girl’s bedroom, but the idea that someone had put collars on them was throwing him.

There was a knock at the front door and Charlie backed out of the room. “Honey, Daddy will be right back.”

14 BARKING MAD

Charlie opened the door and Lily breezed by. “Jane said you have two huge black dogs up here. I need to see.”

“Lily, wait,” Charlie called, but she was across the living room and into Sophie’s room before he could stop her. There was a low growl and she came backing out.

“Oh my fucking God, dude,” she said around a huge grin. “They are so cool. Where did you get them?”

“I didn’t get them anywhere. They were just here.”

Charlie joined Lily just outside the door to Sophie’s room. She turned and grabbed his arm. “Are they, like, instruments of your death dealing or something?”

“Lily, I thought we agreed that we wouldn’t talk about that.”

And they had. In fact, Lily had been great about it. Since she’d first found out about him being a Death Merchant, she’d hardly brought it up at all. She’d also gone on to graduate from high school without getting a major criminal record and enroll in the Culinary Institute, the upside of which was that she actually wore her white chef ’s coat, checked pants, and rubber clogs to work, which tended to soften her makeup and hair, which remained severe, dark, and a little scary.

Sophie giggled and rolled over against one of the hounds. They had been licking her and she was covered with hellish dog spit. Her hair was plastered into a dozen unlikely spikes, making her appear a little like a wide-eyed Animé character.

Sophie saw Lily in the doorway and waved. “Goggie, ’Ily. Goggie,” she said.

“Hi, Sophie. Yes, those are nice doggies,” Lily said, then to Charlie: “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know what to do. They won’t let me near her.”

“That’s good, then. They’re here to protect her.”

Charlie nodded. “I think they are. Something happened last night. You know how the Great Big Book talks about the others? I think one of them came after her last night, and these guys showed up.”

“I’m impressed. I’d think you’d be more freaked out.”

Charlie didn’t want to tell her that he was worn out from freaking out the day before about his little girl killing an old man with the word kitty. Lily already knew too much, and it was obvious now that whatever lay below was dangerous. “I guess I should be, but they aren’t here to hurt her. I need to go check the library in Berkeley, see if there’s anything about them there. I need to get Sophie away from them.”

Lily laughed. “Yeah, that’s going to happen. Look, I have work and school today, but I’ll go do your research for you tomorrow. In the meantime you can try to make friends with them.”

“I don’t want to make friends with them.”

Lily looked at the hounds, one of whom Sophie was pounding on with her little fists as she laughed gleefully, then looked back at Charlie. “Yes, you do.”

“Yeah, I guess I do,” Charlie said. “Have you ever seen a dog that size before?”

“There are no dogs that size.”

“What do you call those, then?”

“Those aren’t dogs, Asher, those are hellhounds.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know that because before I started learning about herbs and reductions and stuff, I spent my free time reading about the dark side, and those guys come up from time to time.”

“If we know that, then what are you going to do research on?”

“I’m going to try to find out what sent them.” She patted his shoulder. “I have to go open the shop. You go make nice with the goggies.”

“What do I feed them?”

“Purina Hellhound Chow.”

“They make that?”

“What do you think?”

“’Kay,” Charlie said.

It took a couple of hours, but after Sophie started smelling like diaper surprise, one of the giant dogs nosed her toward Charlie as if to say, Clean her up and bring her back. Charlie could feel them watching him as he changed his daughter, grateful that disposable diapers didn’t require pins. If he’d accidentally poked Sophie with a pin, he was sure one of the hellhounds would have bitten his head off. They watched him carefully as he moved her to the breakfast bar, and sat on either side of her high chair as he gave her breakfast.

As an experiment, he made an extra piece of toast and tossed it to one of the hounds. It snapped it out of the air and licked its chops once, eyes now locked on Charlie and the loaf of bread. So Charlie toasted four more slices and the hounds alternately snapped each out of the air so swiftly that Charlie wasn’t sure he didn’t see some sort of vapor from the pressure of their jaws clamping down.

“So, you’re hellish beasts from another dimension, and you like toast. Okay.”

Then, as Charlie started to toast four more slices, he stopped, feeling stupid. “You don’t really care if it’s toasted, do you?” He flipped a slice of bread to the closest of the dogs, who snapped it out of the air. “Okay, that will speed things up.” Charlie fed them the remainder of the loaf of bread. He spread a few slices with a thick coat of peanut butter, which did nothing whatsoever, then a half dozen more he spread with lemon dishwasher gel, which appeared to have no ill effect except that it made them burp neat, aquamarine-colored bubbles.

“Go walk, Daddy,” Sophie said.

“No walk today, sweetie. I think we’ll just stay right here in the apartment and try to figure out our new pals.”

Charlie got Sophie out of her chair, wiped the jelly off her face and out of her hair, then sat down with her on the couch to read to her from the Chronicle’s classified ads, which was where he plied a large part of his business, other than the Death stuff. But no sooner had he settled into a rhythm than one of the hellhounds came over, took his arm in its mouth, and dragged him into his bedroom, even as he protested, swore, and smacked it in the head with a brass table lamp. The big dog let him go, then stood staring at Charlie’s date book like it had been sprayed with beef gravy.

“What?” Charlie said, but then he saw. Somehow, in all the excitement, he hadn’t noticed a new name in the book. “Look, the number is thirty. I have a whole month to find this one. Leave me alone.” Charlie also noticed in passing that engraved on the hellhound’s great silver collar was the name ALVIN.

“Alvin? That’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard.”

Charlie went back to the couch, and the dog dragged him back into the bedroom, this time by the foot. As they went through the door Charlie reached for his sword-cane. When Alvin dropped him Charlie leapt to his feet and drew the blade. The big dog rolled over on his back and whimpered. His companion appeared at the door, panting. (Mohammed was the hound’s name, according to the plate on the collar.) Charlie considered his options. He had always felt the sword-cane a pretty formidable weapon, had even been willing to take on the sewer harpies with it, but it occurred to him that these animals had obviously wiped the floor with one of those other creatures of darkness and had no problem sitting down and eating a loaf of soapy toast a couple of hours later. In short, he was out of his league. They wanted him to go retrieve the soul vessel, he would retrieve the soul vessel. But he wasn’t leaving his darling daughter alone with them. “Alvin is still a stupid name,” he said, sheathing the sword.

When Mrs. Korjev arrived, Charlie had put Sophie down for her nap, and a dark pile of hellhounds was napping by her crib—snoring great clouds of lemony-fresh dog breath into the air. It was probably part of Charlie’s rising rascal nature, but he let Mrs. Korjev enter Sophie’s room with only the warning that the little girl had a couple of new pets. He suppressed a snicker as the great Cossack grandmother backed out of the room swearing in Russian.

“Is giant dogs in there.”

“Yes, there are.”

“But not like normal giant dog. They are like extra-giant, black animal, they are—”

“Like bear?” Charlie suggested.

“No, I wasn’t going to say ‘bear,’ Mr. Smart-Alec. Not like bear. Like volf, only bigger, stronger—”

“Like bear?” Charlie ventured.

“You make your mother ashamed when you are mean, Charlie Asher.”

“Not like bear?” Charlie asked.

“Is not important now. I am just surprised. Vladlena is old woman with weak heart, but you go have good laugh and I will sit with Sophie and huge dogs.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Korjev, their names are Alvin and Mohammed. It’s on their collars.”

“You have food for them?”

“There are some steaks in the freezer. Just give each one of them a couple and stand back.”

“How they like steaks done?”

“I think frozen will be fine, they eat like—”

Mrs. Korjev raised a finger in warning; it lined it up with a large mole on the side of her nose and looked as if she was sighting down a weapon.

“—like horses. They eat like horses,” Charlie said.

Mrs. Ling did not take her introduction to Alvin and Mohammed with quite the composure of her Russian neighbor. “Aiiiiieeeeeeeeee! Giant shiksas shitting,” exclaimed Mrs. Ling as she ran down the hall after Charlie. “Come back! Shiksas shitting!”

Indeed, Charlie returned to the apartment to find great steaming baguettes of poo strewn about the living room. Alvin and Mohammed were flanking the door to Sophie’s room like massive Chinese foo dogs at the temple gates, looking not so fierce as shamefaced and contrite.

“Bad dogs,” Charlie said. “Scaring Mrs. Ling. Bad dogs.” He considered for a moment trying to rub their noses in their offense, but short of bringing in a backhoe and chaining them to it, he wasn’t sure that he could make that happen. “I mean it, you guys,” he added, in an especially stern voice.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ling,” Charlie said to the diminutive matron. “These are Alvin and Mohammed. I should have been more specific when I said I’d gotten new pets for Sophie.” Actually, he had been vague on purpose, hoping for some sort of hysterical reaction. Not that he really wanted to frighten the old lady, it’s just that Beta Males are seldom ever in a position to frighten anyone physically, so when they get the opportunity, they sometimes lose their sense of judgment.

“Is okay,” said Mrs. Ling, staring at the hellhounds. She seemed distracted, mainly because she was. Having recovered from the initial shock, she was doing the math in her head—a rapid-fire abacus clicking off the weight and volume of each pony-sized canine, and dividing him into chops, steaks, ribs, and packages of stew meat.

“You’ll be all right, then?” Charlie asked.

“You not be late, okay?” said Mrs. Ling. “I want to go to Sears and look at chest freezer today. You have power saw I can borrow.”

“Power saw? Well, no, but I’m sure Ray has one he can lend you. I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Charlie said. “But let me clean this up first.” He headed to the basement in hopes of finding the coal shovel that his father had once kept there.

As they parted ways that day, both Charlie and Mrs. Ling were counting on Sophie’s history of high pet mortality to quickly solve their respective poop and soup problems. Such, however, was not to be the case.

When several weeks passed with no ill effects on the hellhounds, Charlie accepted the possibility that these might, indeed, be the only pets that could survive Sophie’s attention. He was tempted, many times, to call Minty Fresh and ask his advice, but since his last call might have caused the hellhounds to appear in the first place, he resisted the urge.

Lily’s research trips yielded little more:

“They talk about them all through time,” Lily said, calling from the Berkeley library on her cell phone. “Mostly it’s about how they like to chase blues singers, and evidently there’s a German robot soccer team called the Hellhounds, but I don’t think that’s relevant. The thing that comes up again and again, in a dozen cultures, is that they guard the passage between the living and the dead.”

“Well, that makes sense,” Charlie said. “I guess. It doesn’t say where that passage is, does it? What BART station?”

“No, Asher, it doesn’t. But I found this book by a nun who had been excommunicated in the 1890s, isn’t that cool? This library is amazing. They have like nine million books.”

“Yes, that’s great, Lily, what did the ex-nun say?”

“She had found all the references for hellhounds, and the thing they all seemed to agree on was they serve directly the ruler of the Underworld.”

“She was Catholic and she called it the Underworld?”

“Well, they threw her out of the Church for writing this book, but yeah, that’s what she said.”

“She didn’t have a number we could call in case they got lost.”

“I’m over here on my day off, Asher, trying to do you a favor. Are you going to keep being a smart-ass about it?”

“No, I’m sorry, Lily. Go on.”

“That’s it. It’s not like there’s a care-and-feeding guide. Mostly, the research implies that having hellhounds around is a bad thing.”

“What’s the title of this book, The Complete Guide to the Fucking Obvious?”

“You’re paying me for this, you know? Time and travel.”

“Sorry. Yes. So I should try to get rid of them.”

“They eat people, Asher. Who’s riding the duh train now?”

So, with that, Charlie decided that he needed to take an active role in ridding himself of the monstrous canines.

Since the only thing about the hellhounds that he could be sure of was that they would go anywhere he took Sophie, he brought them along on their trip to the San Francisco Zoo, and left them locked in the van with the engine running and a shop-vac hose run from the exhaust pipe through the vent window. After what he considered to be an extraordinarily successful tour of the zoo, in which not a single animal shuffled off the mortal coil under the delighted eye of his daughter, Charlie returned to the van to find two very stoned, but otherwise unharmed hellhounds who were burping a burnt plastic vapor after having eaten his seat covers.

Various experiments revealed that Alvin and Mohammed were not only immune to most poisons, but they rather liked the taste of bug spray and consequently licked all the paint off the baseboards in Charlie’s apartment in the week following the exterminator’s quarterly service.

As time wore on, Charlie tried to measure the danger of having the giant canines around against the damage that would be done to Sophie’s psyche from witnessing their demise, as she was obviously becoming attached to them, so he backed off the more direct attacks on them and stopped throwing Snausages in front of the number 90 crosstown express bus. (This decision was also made easy when the city of San Francisco threatened to sue Charlie if his dogs wrecked another bus.)

Direct attacks, in fact, were difficult for Charlie (as the only true Beta Male martial art was based entirely on the kindness of strangers), so he turned on the hellhounds the awesome power of the Beta Male kung fu of passive aggression.

He started conservatively, taking them for a ride over to the East Bay in the van, luring them onto the Oakland mudflats with a rack of beef ribs, then driving away quickly, only to find them waiting in the apartment when he returned, having covered the entire living room with a patina of drying mud. He then tried an even more indirect approach: crating up the hounds and air-freighting them to Korea in the hope they would find themselves in an entrée, only to find that they actually made it back to the shop before he had time to sweep the dog hair out of his apartment.

He thought that perhaps he might use their own natural instincts to chase them away, after he read on the Internet that the essence of cougar urine was sometimes sprinkled on shrubs and flowers to keep dogs from urinating on them. After a fairly exhaustive search through the phone book, he finally found the number of an outdoorsman’s supply store in South San Francisco that was a certified mountain-lion whizz dealer.

“Sure, we carry cougar urine,” the guy said. He sounded like he was wearing a buckskin jacket and had a big beard, but Charlie might have just been projecting.

“And that’s supposed to keep dogs away?” Charlie asked.

“Works like a charm. Dogs, deer, and rabbits. How much do you need?”

“I don’t know, maybe ten gallons.”

There was a pause, and Charlie was sure he could hear the guy picking flecks of elk meat out of his beard. “We sell it in one-, two-, and five-ounce bottles.”

“Well, that’s not going to do it,” Charlie said. “Can’t you get me like a large economy size—preferably from a cougar that’s been fed nothing but dog for a couple of months? I assume that this is domesticated cougar pee, right? I mean you don’t go out in the wild and collect it yourself.”

“No, sir, I believe they get it from zoos.”

“The wild stuff is probably better, huh?” Charlie asked. “If you can get it, I mean? I don’t mean you personally. I wasn’t implying that you were out in the wild following a mountain lion around with a measuring cup. I meant a professional—hello?” The bearded buckskin-sounding guy had hung up.

So Charlie sent Ray over to South San Francisco in the van to buy up all the cougar whizz they had, but in the end it achieved nothing other than making the whole second floor of Charlie’s building smell like a cat box.

When it appeared that even the most passive-aggressive attempts would not work, Charlie resorted to the ultimate Beta Male attack, which was to tolerate Alvin and Mohammed’s presence, but to resent the hell out of them and drop snide remarks whenever he had the chance.

Feeding the hellhounds was like shoveling coal into two ravenous steam engines—Charlie started having fifty pounds of dog food delivered every two days to keep up with them, which they, in turn, converted to massive torpedoes of poo that they dropped in the streets and alleys around Asher’s Secondhand like they were staging their own doggie blitzkrieg on the neighborhood.

The upside of their presence was that Charlie went for months on end without hearing a peep from the storm drains or seeing an ominous raven shadow on a wall when he was retrieving a soul vessel. And to that end, the death dealing, the hounds served their purpose as well, for whenever a new name appeared in his date book, the hounds would drag Charlie to the calendar every morning until he returned with the soul object, so he went two years without missing or being late for a retrieval. The big dogs, of course, accompanied Charlie and Sophie on their walks, which had resumed once Charlie was sure that Sophie had her “special” language skill under control. The hounds, while certainly the largest dogs that anyone had ever seen, were not so large as to be unbelievable, and everywhere they went, Charlie was asked what breed they were. Tired of trying to explain, he would simply say, “They’re hellhounds,” and when asked where he got them, he would reply, “They just showed up in my daughter’s room one night and wouldn’t go away,” after which people not only thought him a liar, but an ass as well. So he modified his response to “They’re Irish hellhounds,” which for some reason, people accepted immediately (except for one Irish football fan in a North Beach restaurant who said, “I’m Irish and those things aren’t bloody Irish.” To which Charlie replied, “Black Irish.” The football fan nodded as if he knew that all along and added to the waitress, “Can I get another fookin’ pint o’ here before I dry up and blow away, lass?”)

In a way, Charlie started to enjoy the notoriety of being the guy with the cute little girl and the two giant dogs. When you have to maintain a secret identity, you can’t help but relish a little public attention. And Charlie did, until the day he and Sophie were stopped on a side street on Russian Hill by a bearded man in a long cotton caftan and a woven hat. Sophie was old enough by then to do a lot of her own walking, although Charlie kept a piggyback kid sling with him so he could carry her when she got tired (but more often he would just balance her while she rode on the back of Alvin or Mohammed).

The bearded man passed a little too closely to Sophie and Mohammed growled and imposed himself between the man and the child.

“Mohammed, get back here,” Charlie said. It turned out the hellhounds could be trained, especially if you only told them to do things they were going to do anyway. (“Eat, Alvin. Good boy. Poop now. Excellent.”)

“Why do you call this dog Mohammed?” asked the bearded man.

“Because that’s his name.”

“You should not have called this dog Mohammed.”

“I didn’t call the dog Mohammed,” Charlie said. “His name was Mohammed when I got him. It was on his collar.”

“It is blasphemy to call a dog Mohammed.”

“I tried calling him something else, but he doesn’t listen. Watch. Steve, bite this man’s leg? See, nothing. Spot, bite off this man’s leg. Nothing. I might as well be speaking Farsi. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Well, I have named my dog Jesus. How do you feel about that?”

“Well, then I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’d lost your dog.”

“I have not lost my dog.”

“Really? I saw these flyers all over town with ‘Have You Found Jesus?’ on them. It must be another dog named Jesus. Was there a reward? A reward helps, you know.” Charlie noted that more and more lately, he had a hard time resisting the urge to fuck with people, especially when they insisted upon behaving like idiots.

“I do not have a dog named Jesus and that doesn’t bother you because you are a godless infidel.”

“No, really, you can not name your dog anything you want and it won’t bother me. But, yes, I am a godless infidel. At least that’s how I voted in the last election.” Charlie grinned at him.

“Death to the infidel! Death to the infidel!” said the bearded man in response to Charlie’s irresistible charm. He danced around shaking his fist in the Death Merchant’s face, which scared Sophie so that she covered her eyes and started to cry.

“Stop that, you’re scaring my daughter.”

“Death to the infidel! Death to the infidel!”

Mohammed and Alvin quickly got bored watching the dance and sat down to wait for someone to tell them to eat the guy in the nightshirt.

“I mean it,” Charlie said. “You need to stop.” He looked around, feeling embarrassed, but there was no one else on the street.

“Death to the infidel. Death to the infidel,” chanted the beard.

“Have you seen the size of these dogs, Mohammed?”

“Death to—hey, how did you know my name was Mohammed? Doesn’t matter. Never mind. Death to the infidel. Death to the—”

“Wow, you certainly are brave,” Charlie said, “but she’s a little girl and you’re scaring her and you really need to stop that now.”

“Death to the infidel! Death to the infidel!”

“Kitty!” Sophie said, uncovering her eyes and pointing at the man.

“Oh, honey,” Charlie said. “I thought we weren’t going to do that.”

Charlie slung Sophie up on his shoulders and walked on, leading the hellhounds away from the bearded dead man who lay in a peaceful heap on the sidewalk. He had stuffed the man’s little woven hat in his pocket. It was glowing a dull red. Strangely, the bearded man’s name wouldn’t appear in Charlie’s date book until the next day.

“See, a sense of humor is important,” Charlie said, making a goofy face over his shoulder at his daughter.

“Silly Daddy,” Sophie said.

Later, Charlie felt bad about his daughter using the “kitty” word as a weapon, and he felt that a decent father would try to give some sort of meaning to the experience—teach some sort of lesson, so he sat Sophie down with a pair of stuffed bears, some tiny cups of invisible tea, a plate of imaginary cookies, and two giant hounds from hell, and had his first, heart-to-heart, father-daughter talk.

“Honey, you understand why Daddy told you not to ever do that again, right? Why people can’t know that you can do that?”

“We’re different than other people?” Sophie said.

“That’s right, honey, because we’re different than other people,” he said to the smartest, prettiest little girl in the world. “And you know why that is, right?”

“Because we’re Chinese and the White Devils can’t be trusted?”

“No, not because we’re Chinese.”

“Because we are Russian, and in our hearts are much sorrow?”

“No, there is not much sorrow in our hearts.”

“Because we are strong, like bear?”

“Yes, sweetie, that’s it. We’re different because we’re strong, like bear.”

“I knew it. More tea, Daddy?”

“Yes, I’d love some more tea, Sophie.”

So,” said the Emperor, “I see you have experienced the multifarious ways in which a man’s life is enriched by the company of a good brace of hounds.”

Charlie was sitting on the back step of the shop, pulling whole frozen chickens from a crate and tossing them to Alvin and Mohammed one at a time. Each chicken was snapped out of the air with so much force that the Emperor, and Bummer and Lazarus, who were crouched across the alley suspiciously eyeing the hellhounds, flinched as if a pistol was being fired nearby.

“Multifarious enrichment,” Charlie said, tossing another chicken. “That is exactly how I’d describe it.”

“There is no better, nor more loyal, friend than a good hound,” said the Emperor.

Charlie paused, having pulled not a chicken from the box, but a portable electric mixer. “A friend indeed,” he said, “a friend indeed.” Mohammed snapped down the mixer without even chewing—two feet of cord hung from the side of his mouth.

“That doesn’t hurt him?” said the Emperor.

“Roughage,” Charlie explained, throwing a frozen chicken chaser to Mohammed, who gulped it down with the rest of the mixer cord. “They’re not really my dogs. They belong to Sophie.”

“A child needs a pet,” said the Emperor. “A companion to grow up with—although these fellows seem to have done most of their growing.”

Charlie nodded, tossing the alternator from an eighty-three Buick into Alvin’s eager jaws. There was a clanking and the dog belched, but his tail thumped against the Dumpster asking for more. “Well, they have been her constant companions,” Charlie said. “At least now we have them trained so they’ll just guard whatever building she’s in. For a while they wouldn’t leave her side. Bath time was a challenge.”

The Emperor said, “I believe it was the poet Billy Collins who wrote, ‘No one here likes a wet dog.’”

“Yes, and he probably never had to get a squirming toddler and two four-hundred-pound dogs out of a bubble bath, either.”

“But they’ve mellowed, you say?”

“They had to. Sophie started school. The teacher frowned on giant dogs in class.” Charlie flipped an answering machine to Alvin, who crunched it up like a dog biscuit, shards of dog-spit-covered plastic raining down from his jaws.

“So what did you do?”

“It took us a few days, and a lot of explaining, but I trained them to just sit outside the front door of the school.”

“And the faculty relented?”

“Well, I spray-paint them with that granite-texture spray paint every morning, then tell them to sit absolutely still on either side of the door. No one seems to notice them.”

“And they obey? All day?”

“Well, it’s just a half day right now, she’s only in kindergarten. And you have to promise them a cookie.”

“There’s always a price to be paid.” The Emperor pulled a frozen chicken out of the box. “May I?”

“Please.” Charlie waved him on.

The Emperor tossed the chicken to Mohammed, who chomped it down in a single bite.

“My, that is satisfying,” said the Emperor.

“That’s nothing,” Charlie said. “If you feed them mini—propane cylinders they burp fire.”

15 THE CALL OF BOOTY

Fuck puppets,” Ray said out of nowhere.

He was on the stair-climbing machine next to Charlie and they were both sweating and staring at a row of six, perfectly tuned female bottoms aimed at them from the machines in front of them.

“What was that?” Charlie said.

“Fuck puppets,” Ray said. “That’s what they are.”

Ray had talked Charlie into coming to his health club with him under the pretense of getting him into the flow of being single. Actually, because Ray was an ex-cop, watched people more closely than really was healthy, had too much time on his hands, and didn’t get out much himself, the real reason he asked Charlie to come work out with him was so he could get to know him outside of the shop. He’d noticed a strange pattern that had developed since Rachel’s death, of Charlie showing up with people’s property shortly after their obituary appeared in the paper. Because Charlie kept to himself socially and was secretive about what he did when he was out of the shop, not to mention all the little animals that ended up dead in Charlie’s apartment, Ray suspected that he might be a serial killer. Ray decided to try to get close to his boss and find out for sure.

“Keep your voice down, Ray,” Charlie said. “Jeez.” Since Ray couldn’t turn his head, he was talking right at the women’s butts.

“They can’t hear me; look, every single one has on a headset.” He was right, every one of them was talking on a cell phone. “You and I are invisible to them.”

Having actually been invisible to people, or nearly so, Charlie did a double take. It was midmorning and the gym was full of lean spandex-clad women in their twenties with disproportionately large breasts, perfect skin, and expensive hair, who seemed to have the ability to look right through him the way that everyone did when he was in pursuit of a soul vessel. In fact, when he and Ray had first come into the gym, Charlie had actually looked around for some object, pulsing red, thinking that he might have missed a name on his date book that morning.

“After I was shot I dated a physical therapist that worked here for a while,” Ray said. “She called them that: fuck puppets. Every one of them has an apartment that some older executive guy is paying for—just like he paid for the health-club membership and the fake tits. They spend their days getting facials and manicures, and their nights under some suit out of his suit.”

Charlie was wildly uncomfortable with Ray’s litany, talking about these women who were only a couple of feet away. Like any Beta Male, he would have been wildly uncomfortable in the presence of so many beautiful women anyway, but this made it worse.

“So like they’re like trophy wives?” Charlie said.

“Nuh-uh, like wannabe trophy wives. They don’t get the guy, the house, whatever. They just exist to be his perfect piece of ass.”

“Fuck puppets?” Charlie said.

“Fuck puppets,” said Ray. “But forget them, they’re not why you’re here.”

Ray was right, of course. They weren’t why Charlie was there. Five years had passed since Rachel’s death, and everyone had been telling him he needed to get back in the game, but that’s not why he agreed to accompany the ex-cop to the gym. Because Charlie spent too much time on his own, especially since Sophie had started school, and because he’d been hiding a secret identity and avocation, he’d started to suspect that everyone might have one. And since Ray kept to himself, talked a lot about people in the neighborhood who had died, and because he really didn’t seem to have a social life beyond the Filipino women he contacted online, Charlie suspected Ray might be a serial killer. Charlie thought he’d try to get closer to Ray and find out.

“So they’re like mistresses?” Charlie said. “Like in Europe?”

“I suppose,” Ray said. “But did you ever get the impression that mistresses worked this hard to look good? I think fuck puppet is more accurate, because when they get too old to hold the attention of their guy, they’ve got nothing more going. They’ll be done, like marionettes with no one at the strings.”

“Jeez, Ray, that’s harsh.” Maybe Ray is stalking one of these women, Charlie thought.

Ray shrugged.

Charlie looked up and down the line of perfect derrieres, then felt the weight of his years alone or in the company of a child and two giant dogs, and said, “I want a fuck puppet.”

Aha! thought Ray. He’s picking a victim. “Me, too,” he said. “But guys like us don’t get fuck puppets, Charlie. We just get ignored by them.”

Aha! Charlie thought. The bitter sociopath comes out. “So that’s why you brought me here, so I could show I was out of shape in front of gorgeous women who wouldn’t notice?”

“No, the fuck puppets are fun to look at, but there’s some normal women who come here, too.” Who won’t talk to me either, Ray thought.

“Who won’t talk to you either,” Charlie said. Because they can tell that you are a psychokiller.

“We’ll see in the juice bar after our workout,” Ray said. Where I’ll sit at an angle so I can watch you pick your victim.

You sick fuck, they thought.

Charlie awoke to find not one, but three new names in his date book, and the last one, a Madison McKerny, had only three days for him to retrieve her soul vessel. Charlie kept a stack of newspapers in the house and, typically, would go back for a month looking for an obituary of his new client. More often, if the hellhounds would give him some peace, he would simply wait for the name to appear in the obituary section, then go find the soul vessel when it was easy to get into the house, with mourners or posing as an estate buyer. But this time he had only three days, and Madison McKerny hadn’t appeared in the obituaries, so that meant she was probably still alive, and he couldn’t find her in the phone book either, so he was going to need to get moving quickly. Mrs. Ling and Mrs. Korjev liked to do their marketing on Saturdays, so he called his sister, Jane, and asked her to come watch Sophie.

“I want a baby brother,” Sophie announced to her Auntie Jane.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry, you can’t have a baby brother, because that would mean that Daddy had sex, and that’s never going to happen again.”

“Jane, don’t talk to her that way,” Charlie said. He was making sandwiches for them and wondering why he always got stuck making the sandwiches. To Sophie, he said, “Honey, why don’t you go in your room and play with Alvin and Mohammed, Daddy needs to talk with Auntie Jane.”

“Okay,” Sophie said, skipping off to her room.

“And don’t change clothes again, those are fine,” Charlie said. “That’s the fourth outfit she’s had on today,” he said to Jane. “She changes clothes like you change girlfriends.”

“Ouch. Be gentle, Chuck, I’m sensitive and I can still kick your ass.”

Charlie spanked some mayonnaise onto a whole wheat slice to show he was serious. “Jane, I’m not sure it’s healthy for her to have all these different aunties around. She’s already had a hard time losing her mother, and now you’ve moved away—I just don’t think she should keep getting attached to these women only to have them yanked out of her life. She needs a consistent female influence.”

“First, I have not moved away, I’ve moved across town, and I see her every bit as often as when I lived in the building. Second, it’s not like I’m promiscuous, I’m just shitty at relationships. Third, Cassie and I have been together for three months, and we’re doing fine so far, which is why I’ve moved out. And fourth, Sophie did not lose her mother, she never had her mother, she had you, and if you’re going to be a decent human being, you need to get laid.”

“That’s what I mean, you can’t talk like that in front of Sophie.”

“Charlie, it’s true! Even Sophie can see it. She doesn’t even know what it is and she can tell that you’re not getting any.”

Charlie stopped constructing sandwiches and came over to the counter. “It’s not sex, Jane. It’s human contact. I was getting my hair cut the other day and the hairdresser’s breast rubbed against my shoulder and I almost came. Then I almost cried.”

“Sounds like sex to me, little brother. Have you been with anyone since Rachel died?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“That’s wrong. Rachel wouldn’t want that for you. You have to know that. I mean she took pity on you and hooked up with you, and that couldn’t have been easy for her, knowing she could do so much better.”

“Took pity on me?”

“That’s what I’m saying. She was a sweet woman, and you’re much more pitiful now than you were then. You had more hair then, and you didn’t have a kid and two dogs the size of Volvos. Hell, there’s probably some order of nuns that would do you now, just as a holy act of mercy. Or penance.”

“Stop it, Jane.”

“The Sisters of Perpetual Nookiless Suffering.”

“I’m not that bad,” Charlie said.

“The Holy Order of Saint Bonny of the BJ, patron saint of Web porn and incurable wankers.”

“Okay, Jane, I’m sorry I said that about you changing girlfriends. I was out of line.”

Jane leaned back on her bar stool and crossed her arms, looking satisfied but skeptical. “But the problem remains.”

“I’m fine. I have Sophie and I have the business, I don’t need a girlfriend.”

“A girlfriend? A girlfriend is too ambitious for you. You just need someone to have sex with.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Yes, I do,” Charlie said, defeated. “But I have to go. Are you okay to watch Sophie?”

“Sure, I’m going to take her to my place. I have an obnoxious neighbor up the street that I’d like to introduce to the puppies. Will they poop on command?”

“They will if Sophie tells them.”

“Perfect. We’ll see you tonight. Promise me you’ll ask someone out. Or at least look for someone to ask out.”

“I promise.”

“Good. Did you get that new blue pinstripe tailored yet?”

“Stay out of my closet.”

“Don’t you need to get going?”

Ray figured that it had probably started when Charlie murdered all those little animals he brought home for his daughter. Maybe buying the big black dogs was a cry for help—pets that someone would really notice being gone. According to the movies, they all started out that way—with the little animals, then before long they moved up to hitchhikers, hookers, and pretty soon they were mummifying a whole flock of counselors at some remote summer camp and posing the crusty remains around a card table in their mountain lair. The mountain lair didn’t fit the profile for Charlie, since he had allergies, but that might just be an indication of his diabolical genius. (Ray had been a street cop, so it hadn’t really been necessary for him to study criminal profiling, and his theories tended toward the colorful, a side effect of his Beta Male imagination and large DVD collection.)

But Charlie had asked Ray to use his contacts on the force and at the DMV a half-dozen times to locate people, all of whom ended up dead a few weeks later. But not murders. And while a lot of items belonging to the recently deceased had turned up in the shop in the last few years (Ray had found antitheft numbers etched on a dozen items and called them in to a friend on the force who identified the owners), none of them had been murdered either. There were a few accidents, but mostly it was natural causes. Either Charlie was devious to an extraordinary degree, or Ray was out of his mind, a possibility that he didn’t discount completely, if for no other reason than he had three ex-wives who would testify to it. Thus, he’d devised the workout ruse to draw Charlie out. Then again, Charlie had always treated him really well, and if it turned out he didn’t have a mountain lair full of mummified camp counselors, Ray knew he’d feel bad about tricking him.

What if there was nothing wrong with Charlie except that he needed to get laid?

Ray was chatting with Eduardo, his new girlfriend at DesperateFilipina.com, when Charlie came down the back steps.

“Ray, I need you to find someone for me.”

“Hang on a second, I have to sign off. Charlie, check out my new squeeze.” Ray pulled up a photo on the screen of a heavily made-up but attractive Asian woman.

“She’s pretty, Ray. I can’t give you any time off right now to go to the Philippines, though. Not until we hire someone to take Lily’s shifts.” Charlie leaned into the screen. “Dude, her name is Eduardo.”

“I know. It’s a Filipino thing, like Edwina.”

“She has a five-o’clock shadow.”

“You’re just being a racist. Some races have more facial hair than others. I don’t care about that, I just want someone who is honest and caring and attractive.”

“She has an Adam’s apple.”

Ray squinted at the screen, then quickly clicked off the monitor and spun around on the stool. “So who do you need me to find?”

“It’s okay, Ray,” Charlie said. “An Adam’s apple doesn’t preclude someone from being honest, caring, and attractive, it just makes it less likely.”

“Right. It was just bad lighting, I think. Anyway, who do you need to find?”

“All I have is the name Madison McKerny. I know he or she lives in the city, but that’s all I know.”

“It’s a she.”

“Pardon me?”

“Madison, it’s a stripper’s name.”

Charlie shook his head. “You know this woman?”

“I don’t know her, although the name seems familiar. But Madison is a new-generation stripper name. Like Reagan and Morgan.”

“Lost me, Ray.”

“I’ve spent some time in strip joints, Charlie. I’m not proud of it, but it’s sort of what you do when you’re a cop. And you pick up on the pattern of stripper names.”

“Didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, and there’s sort of a progression going back to the fifties: Bubbles, Boom Boom, and Blaze begat Bambi, Candy, and Jewel, who begat Sunshine, Brandy, and Cinnamon, who begat Amber, Brittany, and Brie, who begat Reagan, Morgan, and Madison. Madison is a stripper name.”

“Ray, you weren’t even alive in the fifties.”

“No, I wasn’t alive during the forties either, but I know about World War Two and big-band music. I’m into history.”

“Right. So, I need to look for a stripper? Doesn’t help. I don’t even know where to start.”

“I’ll go through the DMV and the tax records. If she’s in town we’ll have an address on her by this afternoon. Why do you need to find her?”

There was a pause while Charlie pretended to find a smudge on the glass of the counter display case, wiped it away, then said, “Uh, it’s an estate thing. One of the estates we got recently had some items that were left to her.”

“Shouldn’t the executor of the estate take care of that, or his lawyer?”

“It’s minutiae, not named in the will. The executor asked me to handle it. There’s fifty bucks in it for you.”

Ray grinned. “That’s okay, I was going to help anyway, but if she turns out to be a stripper I get to go with you, okay?”

“Deal,” Charlie said.

Three hours later Ray gave the address to Charlie and watched as his boss bolted out of the shop and grabbed a cab. Why a cab? Why not take the van? Ray wanted to follow, needed to follow, but he had to find someone to cover the store. He should have anticipated this, but he’d been distracted.

Ray had been distracted since talking to Charlie, not just by the search for Madison McKerny, but also because he was trying to figure out how to work “Do you have a penis?” casually into the conversation with his sweetheart, Eduardo. After a couple of teasing e-mails, he could stand it no longer and had just typed out, Eduardo, not that it makes any difference, but I’m thinking of sending you some sexy lingerie as a friendship present, and I wondered if I should make any special accommodations for the panties.

Then he waited. And waited. And granted that it was five in the morning in Manila, he was second-guessing himself. Had he been too vague, or had he not been vague enough? And now he had to go. He knew where Charlie was going, but he had to get there before anything happened. He dialed Lily’s cell phone, hoping that she wouldn’t be working at her other job and would do him a favor.

“Speak, ingrate,” Lily answered.

“How did you know it was me?” Ray asked.

“Ray?”

“Yeah, how did you know it was me?”

“I didn’t,” Lily said. “What do you want?”

“Can you come cover the store for me for a couple of hours?” Then, as he heard her take a deep breath that he was pretty sure would be propellant for verbal abuse, he added, “There’s fifty bucks extra in it for you.” Ray heard her exhale. Yes! After graduating from the Culinary Institute, Lily had gotten a job as a sous chef at a bistro in North Beach, but she didn’t make enough to move out of her mother’s apartment yet, so she let Charlie talk her into keeping a couple of shifts at Asher’s Secondhand, at least until he could find a replacement.

“Okay, Ray, I’ll come in for a couple of hours, but I have to be at the restaurant by five, so be back or I’m closing up early.”

“Thanks, Lily.”

Charlie sincerely hoped that Ray wasn’t a serial killer, despite all the indications to the contrary. He would never have found this woman without Ray’s police contacts, and what would he do in the future if he needed to find someone and Ray was in jail? Then again, Ray’s experience as a cop could account for his never leaving any evidence. But why, then, would he continue to pursue the Filipino women over the Internet if he was just looking to kill people? Maybe that’s what he did when he went to the Philippines to visit his paramours. Maybe he killed desperate Filipinas. Maybe Ray was a tourist serial killer. Deal with it later, Charlie thought. For now, there’s a soul vessel to retrieve.

Charlie got out of the cab outside of the Fontana, an apartment building just a block up from Ghirardelli Square, the waterfront chocolate factory turned tourist mall. The Fontana was a great, curved, concrete-and-glass building that commanded views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, and that had drawn the disdain of San Franciscans since it had been built in the 1960s. It wasn’t that it was an ugly building, although no one would argue that it wasn’t, but with the Victorian and Edwardian structures all around it, it looked very much like a giant air conditioner from outer space attacking a nineteenth-century neighborhood. However, the views from the apartments were exquisite, there was a doorman, underground parking, and a pool on the roof, so if you could handle the stigma of residing in an architectural pariah, it was a great place to live.

The address Ray had given him for Madison was on the twenty-second floor, and so, presumably, was her soul vessel. Charlie wasn’t sure of the exact range of his unnoticeability (he refused to think of it as invisibility, because it wasn’t), but he hoped that it reached twenty-two floors. He was going to have to get past the doorman and into an elevator, and posing as an estate buyer wasn’t going to work.

Ah, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If he got caught, he’d just have to find another way in. He waited by the door until a young woman in business attire went in, then followed her into the lobby. The doorman didn’t even look at him.

Ray saw Charlie get out of the cab and told his own driver to stop a block away, where he hopped out, threw the driver a five and told him to keep the change, then dug in his pocket for the rest of the fare while the driver pounded on the wheel impatiently and cursed under his breath in Urdu.

“Sorry, it’s been a while since I took a cab,” Ray said. Ray had a car, a nice little Toyota, but the only parking place he could find was eight blocks away from his apartment in the parking lot of a hotel managed by a friend of his, and when you got a parking place in San Francisco, you kept it, so Ray mostly used public transportation and only drove the car on his days off to keep the battery charged. He’d jumped in a taxi outside Charlie’s shop and shouted, “Follow that cab!” thus completely terrifying the Japanese family in the back.

“Sorry,” Ray said. “Konichiwa. It’s been a while since I took a cab.” Then he jumped back out and caught a cab that didn’t have a fare.

He sneaked quickly up the street, going from light post, to newspaper machine, to ad kiosk, ducking behind each, staying in his stealth-crouch, and achieving nothing whatsoever except to look like a complete loon to the kid standing at the bus stop across the street. He reached the underground parking entrance of the Fontana just as Charlie was making for the door. Ray crouched behind the key-card pillar.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to do if Charlie went for the building. Fortunately, he’d memorized Madison McKerny’s phone number, and he could warn her that Charlie was coming. In the cab on the way down here he’d remembered where he’d seen her name: on the register at his health club. Madison McKerny was one of the midmorning fuck puppets from the gym, and as Ray suspected, Charlie was stalking her.

He watched Charlie fall in behind a young woman in business dress who was heading up the walk into the Fontana, then Charlie was gone. Just gone.

Ray came out onto the sidewalk to get a better angle. The woman was still there, she’d gone only a couple of steps, but he couldn’t see Charlie. There were no bushes, no walls, the whole damn lobby was glass, where the hell had he gone? Ray was sure he hadn’t looked away, he didn’t even think he had blinked, and he would have seen any sudden move Charlie might have made.

Reverting to the Beta Male’s tendency to blame himself, Ray wondered if maybe he’d had some kind of petit mal seizure that had made him black out for a second. Whether he did or not, he had to warn Madison McKerny. He reached to his belt and felt the empty cell-phone clip, then remembered putting his phone under the register when he’d gotten to work that morning.

Charlie found the right apartment and rang the bell. If he could get Madison McKerny to come out into the hallway, he could slip in behind her and look through her apartment for her soul vessel. Just down the hall there was a table with an artificial flower arrangement. He’d tipped it over, hoping she was compulsive or curious enough to come out of her apartment to get a closer look. If she wasn’t home, well, he’d have to break in. Odds were that with a doorman downstairs, she didn’t have an alarm system. But what if she could see him? Sometimes they could, the clients. Not often, but it happened, and—

She opened the door.

Charlie was stunned. She was stunning. Charlie stopped breathing and stared at her breasts.

It wasn’t that she was a young and gorgeous brunette, with perfect hair and perfect skin. Nor was it that she was wearing a thin, white silk robe that just barely concealed her swimsuit-model figure. Nor was it because she had disproportionately large but alert breasts that were straining against the robe and peeking out of the plunging neckline as she leaned out the door, although that would have been enough to render the hapless Beta breathless under any circumstances. It was that her breasts were glowing red, right through the silk robe, glowing right out of the décolletage like twin rising suns, pulsating like the lightbulb boobies of a kitschy Hawaiian hula girl lamp. Madison McKerny’s soul was residing in her breast implants.

“I’ve got to get my hands on those,” Charlie said, forgetting that he wasn’t exactly alone and he wasn’t exactly thinking to himself.

Then Madison McKerny noticed that Charlie was there and the screaming started.

16 THE CALL OF BOOTY II: REQUIEM FOR A FUCK PUPPET

Ray threw the door open so hard that the little bell went flying off its holder and tinkled across the floor.

“Oh, jeez,” Ray said. “You won’t believe it. I can’t believe it myself.”

Lily looked at Ray over her half-frame reading glasses and set down the French cookbook she’d been looking at. She didn’t really need reading glasses, but looking over the top of them conveyed instant condescension and disdain, a look that she felt flattered her.

“I have something I need to tell you, too,” Lily said.

“No,” Ray said, looking around to make sure there were no customers in the store. “What I have to tell you is really important.”

“Okay,” Lily said. “Mine’s not that important to me. You go first.”

“Okay.” Ray took a deep breath and launched. “I think Charlie may be a serial killer with ninja powers.”

“Wow, that is good,” Lily said. “Okay, my turn. A Miss Me-So-Horny called for you. She wanted you to know that she’s packing eight inches of luscious man-meat.” Lily held up Ray’s cell phone, which he’d left under the register.

“Oh my God, not again!” Ray cradled his head in his hands and fell against the counter.

“She said she was eager to share it with you.” Lily examined her nails. “So, Asher’s a ninja, huh?”

Ray looked up. “Yes, and he’s stalking a fuck puppet from my gym.”

“Think you’re living a rich enough fantasy life, Ray?”

“Shut up, Lily, this is a disaster. My job and my apartment depend on Charlie, not to mention that he has a kid, and the new light of my life is a guy.”

“No, she’s not.” Lily wondered about herself, giving in so early—she didn’t enjoy torturing Ray the way she used to.

“Huh? What?”

“I’m just fuckin’ with you, Ray. She didn’t call. I read all of your e-mail and IMs.”

“That stuff is private.”

“Which is why you have it all here on the store’s computer?”

“I spend a lot of time here, with the time difference…”

“And speaking of privacy, what’s the deal with Asher being a ninja and a serial killer? I mean, both? At the same time?”

Ray moved in close, and talked into his collar, as if revealing a huge conspiracy. “I’ve been watching him. Charlie’s been taking in a lot of stuff from dead people. It’s gone on for years. But he’s always having to take off on a moment’s notice, having me cover his shifts, and he never explains where he’s going, except soon after that happens, one of the dead people’s things shows up in the shop. So today I followed him, and he was after a woman who goes to my gym, who we might have seen the other day.”

Lily stepped back, crossed her arms, and looked disgusted with Ray, which was fairly easy, since she’d had years of practice. “Ray, did it occur to you that Asher handles estates, and that we’ve been doing much better business since he started doing more estates—that the quality of the merchandise is much higher? Probably because he gets there early?”

“I know, but that’s not it. You’re not around as much now, Lily. I was a cop, I notice these things. For one thing, did you know that there was a homicide detective keeping track of Charlie? That’s right. Gave me his card, told me to call if anything unusual happened.”

“No, Ray, you didn’t.”

“Charlie disappeared, Lily. I was watching him, and he just blinked out of existence, right before my eyes. And last I saw him he was going into the fuck puppet’s building.”

Lily wanted to grab the stapler off the counter and rapidly drive about a hundred staples into Ray’s shiny forehead. “You ungrateful fucktard! You called the cops on Asher? The guy who has given you a job and a place to live for what, ten years?”

“I didn’t call the black-and-whites, just this Inspector Rivera. I know him from when I was on the force. He’ll keep it on the down low.”

“Go get your checkbook and your car,” Lily barked. “We’re going to bail him out.”

“He probably hasn’t even been processed yet,” Ray said.

“Ray, you pathetic toss-beast. Go. I’ll close up the store and wait for you out front.”

“Lily, you can’t talk to me that way. I don’t have to put up with it.”

Because he couldn’t turn his head, Ray wasn’t able to avoid the first two staples Lily put in his forehead, but by then he had decided it was best to go get his checkbook and his car, and backed away.

“What’s a fuck puppet, anyway?” Lily shouted after him, somewhat surprised at the violent intensity of her loyalty to Charlie.

The policewoman fingerprinted Charlie nine times before she looked up at Inspector Alphonse Rivera and said, “This motherfucker got no fingerprints.”

Rivera took Charlie’s hand and turned it palm up, and looked at his fingers. “I can see the ridges, right there. He’s got completely normal fingerprints.”

“Well, you do it, then,” said the woman. “’Cause alls I got on the card is smooth.”

“Fine, then,” Rivera said. “Come with me.”

He led Charlie over to a wall that had a big ruler painted on it and told him to face a camera.

“How’s my hair?” Charlie said.

“Don’t smile.”

Charlie frowned.

“Don’t make a face. Just look straight ahead and—your hair is fine, though now you’ve got ink on your forehead. This is not that hard, Mr. Asher, criminals do this all the time.”

“I’m not a criminal,” Charlie said.

“You broke into a security building and harassed a young woman, that makes you a criminal.”

“I didn’t break into anything and I didn’t harass anyone.”

“We’ll see. Ms. McKerny said you threatened her life. She’s definitely going to press charges, and if you ask me, you’re both lucky I showed up when I did.”

Charlie wondered about that. The fuck puppet had started screaming and backed into her apartment, and he had followed her, trying to explain, trying to figure out how this was going to work, and at the same time paying way too much attention to her breasts.

“I didn’t threaten her.”

“You said she was going to die. Today.”

Well, they had him there. Charlie had, in all the confusion and screaming, mentioned that he had to get hold of her breasts because she was going to die today. In retrospect, he felt he probably should have kept that information to himself.

Rivera led him upstairs and into a small room with a table and two chairs. Just like on TV, Charlie looked for a one-way mirror but was disappointed to see only concrete-block walls painted in easy-clean moss-green enamel. Rivera had him sit, but then went to the door.

“I’m going to leave you here for a few minutes, until Miss McKerny comes down to file charges. It’s more hospitable here than the holding cell. You want something to drink?”

Charlie shook his head. “Should I call an attorney?”

“It’s up to you, Mr. Asher. That’s certainly your right, but I can’t advise you one way or another. I’ll be back in five. You can make your call then if you’d like.”

Rivera left the room and Charlie saw the inspector’s partner, a gruff, bald-headed bull of a guy named Cavuto, standing outside the door waiting for him. That guy actually scared Charlie. Not as much as the prospect of having to retrieve Madison McKerny’s breast implants, or what would happen if he didn’t, but still scary.

Cut him loose,” Cavuto said.

“What, cut him loose? I just got him processed, the McKerny woman—”

“Is dead. Boyfriend shot her, then, when our guys responded to the shots-fired call, did himself.”

“What?”

“Boyfriend was married, McKerny wanted more security and was going to tell the wife. He flipped out.”

“You know all that already?”

“Her neighbor told the uniforms as soon as they arrived. Come on, it’s our case. We need to roll. Cut this guy loose. Ray Macy and some Goth-chef chick are waiting for him downstairs.”

“Ray Macy is the one who called me, he thought Asher was going to kill her.”

“I know. Right crime, wrong guy. Let’s go.”

“We still have him on the concealed-weapon charge.”

“A cane with a sword in it? What, you want to go before a judge and tell him that you arrested this guy on suspicion of being a serial killer but he plea-bargained it down to being a huge fucking nerd?”

“Okay, I’ll cut him loose, but I’m telling you, Nick, this guy told McKerny that she was going to die today. There’s some weird shit going on here.”

“And we don’t have enough weird shit to deal with already?”

“Good point,” Rivera said.

Madison McKerny looked beautiful in her beige silk dress, her hair and makeup perfect, as usual, her diamond-stud earrings and a platinum-diamond solitaire necklace complemented the silver handles of her walnut-burl casket. For someone who wasn’t breathing, she was breathtaking, especially for Charlie, who was the only one who could see her hooters pulsing red in the casket.

Charlie hadn’t been to a lot of funerals, but Madison McKerny’s seemed nice, and fairly well attended for someone who had been only twenty-six. It turned out that Madison had grown up in Mill Valley, just outside San Francisco, so a lot of people had known her. Evidently, except for her family, most of them had lost touch and seemed somewhat surprised that she had been gunned down by her married boyfriend who had kept her in an expensive apartment in the city.

“Not like you vote ‘most likely’ for that in the yearbook,” Charlie said, trying to make conversation with one of her classmates, a guy he’d ended up standing next to at the urinals in the men’s room.

“How did you know Madison?” said the guy, a condescending tone in his voice. He looked like he’d been voted “most likely to piss everyone off by being rich and having nice hair.”

“Oh, me? Friend of the groom,” Charlie said. He zipped up and headed to the sink before hair guy could think of something to say.

Charlie was surprised to see a few people at the funeral whom he knew, and each time he walked away from one, he’d run into another.

First Inspector Rivera, who lied. “Had to come. It’s our case. I’ve gotten to know the family a little.”

Then Ray, who lied. “She went to my gym. I just thought I should pay my respects.”

Then Rivera’s partner, Cavuto, who didn’t lie. “I still think you’re kinky, and that goes for your ex-cop friend, too.”

And Lily, who was also honest. “I wanted to see a dead fuck puppet.”

“Who’s running the store?” Charlie asked.

“Closed. Death in the family. You know Ray called the cops on you, right?”

They hadn’t had a chance to talk since Charlie had been released. “I should’ve figured,” Charlie said.

“He said he saw you go into the dead chick’s building and just disappear. He thinks you have ninja powers. That part of the thing?” She bounced her eyebrows—a Groucho Marx conspiracy bounce—made less effective by the fact that her eyebrows were pencil thin and drawn on in magenta.

“Yeah, it’s kind of part of the thing. Ray doesn’t suspect about the thing, does he?”

“No, I covered for you. But he still thinks you might be a serial killer.”

“I thought he might be a serial killer.”

Lily shuddered. “God, you guys need to get laid.”

“True, but right now I’m here to do a thing regarding the thing.”

“You still haven’t gotten her thing thing?”

“I can’t even figure out how to get it. Her thing is still in the thing.” He nodded to the casket.

“You’re fucked,” Lily said.

“We have to go sit now,” Charlie said. He led her into the chapel, where the service was beginning.

Behind him Nick Cavuto, who had been standing three feet away with his back to Charlie, made a beeline for his partner and said, “Can we just shoot Asher and find cause later? I’m sure the fucker’s done something to deserve it.”

Charlie didn’t know what he was going to do, how he was going to retrieve the soul implants, but he really thought something would occur to him. Some supernatural ability would manifest itself at the last minute. He thought that all through the ceremony. He thought that when they closed the casket, during the funeral procession to the cemetery, and all through the graveside ceremony. He began to lose hope as the mourners dispersed and the casket was lowered, and by the time the ground crew started throwing dirt down the hole with a backhoe, he’d pretty much given up on having an idea.

There was grave robbing, but that really wasn’t an idea, was it? And even with his years of experience in the death-dealing business, Charlie didn’t think he was up for breaking into a cemetery, spending all night digging up a casket, then cutting the implants out of a dead woman’s body. It wasn’t the same as swiping a vase off the mantel. Why couldn’t Madison McKerny’s soul be in a vase on the mantel?

“Didn’t get the thing, then,” said a voice beside him.

Charlie turned to see Inspector Rivera standing not a foot away. He hadn’t even seen him since they’d left the funeral home.

“What thing?”

“Yeah, what thing?” Rivera said. “They didn’t bury her with those diamonds you saw, you know that, right?”

“That would have been a shame,” Charlie said.

“Sisters got them,” Rivera said. “You know, Charlie, most people don’t stay to watch them actually cover the box.”

“Really?” Charlie said. “I was just curious. See if they used shovels or what. How about you?”

“Me? I’m watching you. You ever get over that thing with the storm sewers?”

“Oh, that? I just needed a little adjustment in my medication.” It was an expression that Charlie had picked up from Jane. She wasn’t actually on medication, but the excuse seemed to work for her.

“Well, you keep an eye on that, Charlie. And I’ll keep an eye on you. Adios.” Rivera walked off.

“Adios, Inspector,” Charlie said. “Hey, by the way, nice suit.”

“Thanks, I bought it from your store,” Rivera said without turning around.

When was he in my store? Charlie thought.

For the next couple of weeks Charlie felt as if someone had dialed his nervous system up past the recommended voltage and he was nearly vibrating with anxiety. He thought that perhaps he should call Minty Fresh, warn him of his failure to retrieve Madison McKerney’s soul vessel, but if the sewer harpies weren’t rising because of that, maybe the contact with another Death Merchant would put them over the top. Instead he kept Sophie home and made sure that she was never out of sight of the hellhounds. In fact, he kept the hellhounds locked in her room most of the time; otherwise they kept dragging him to his day planner, which had no new names. Only the overdue Madison McKerny and the two women—Esther Johnson and Irena Posokovanovich—who had appeared on the same day, but still had some time left before expiration—or whatever you called it.

So he started his walks again, listening as he passed storm drains and manhole covers, but the darkness didn’t appear to be rising.

Charlie felt naked walking the street without his sword-cane, which Rivera had kept, so he set out to replace it, and in the process found two more Death Merchants in the city. He found the first at a used-book store in the Mission, Book ’em Danno. Well, it wasn’t really a bookstore anymore—it still had a couple of tall cases of books, but the rest of the store was a bricolage of bric-a-brac, from plumbing fittings to football helmets. Charlie understood completely how it happened. You started with a bookstore, then you made a single innocent trade, a set of bookends for a first edition maybe, then another, you picked up a grab-all box at a yard sale to get one item—pretty soon you had a whole section of unmatched crutches and obsolete radio tubes, and couldn’t for the life of you remember how you’d acquired a bear trap, yet there it was, next to the lime-green tutu and the Armadrillo penis pump: secondhand out of hand. In the back of the store, by the counter, stood a bookcase in which every volume was pulsing with a dull red light.

Charlie tripped over a spittoon and caught himself on an elk-antler coatrack.

“You okay?” asked the proprietor, looking up from the book he was reading. He was maybe sixty, skin spotted from too much sun, but he hadn’t seen any in a while and he’d gone pasty. He had long, thinning gray hair and wore oversized bifocals that gave him the look of an educated turtle.

“No, I’m fine,” Charlie said, ripping his gaze off the soul-vessel books.

“I know it’s a little cluttered in here,” the turtle guy said. “I’ve been meaning to clear it out, but then, I’ve been meaning to clear it out for thirty years and I haven’t managed it yet.”

“It’s okay, I like your store,” Charlie said. “Great selection.”

The owner looked at Charlie’s expensive suit and shoes and squinted. It was clear he recognized the worth of the clothes and was qualifying Charlie as a rich collector or antiques hunter. “You looking for anything special?” he asked.

“Sword-cane,” Charlie said. “Doesn’t have to be antique.” He wanted to buy this guy a coffee and share stories of snatching soul objects, of confronting the Underworlders, of being a Death Merchant. This guy was a kindred spirit, and from the size of his collection of soul objects, all of them books, he’d been doing this longer than Minty Fresh.

Turtle guy shook his head. “Haven’t seen one for years. If you want to give me a card, I’ll put out feelers for you.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “I’ll keep looking. That’s part of the fun.” He started backing down the aisle, but he couldn’t leave without saying something else, getting some kind of information. “Hey, how is it, doing business in this neighborhood?”

“Better now than it used to be,” said the guy. “The gangs have settled down some, this part of the Mission has turned into the edgy, artsy-fartsy neighborhood. That’s been good for business. You from the City?”

“Born and raised,” Charlie said. “Just haven’t been to this neighborhood much. You haven’t had any weird stuff on the street last couple of weeks, then?”

The turtle guy looked fully at Charlie now, even took off his giant glasses. “Except for the thumper sound systems going by, quiet as a mouse. What’s your name?”

“Charlie. Charlie Asher. I live over in the North Beach—Chinatown area.”

“I’m Anton, Charlie. Anton Dubois. Nice meeting you.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “I have to go now.”

“Charlie. There’s a pawnshop off Fillmore Street. Fulton and Fillmore, I think. The owner carries a lot of edged weapons. She might have your cane.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “You watch yourself, Anton. Okay?”

“Always do,” said Anton Dubois, and he looked back to his book.

Charlie left the store feeling even more anxious, but not quite as alone as he had five minutes before. The next day, he found a new sword-cane at the pawnshop in the Fillmore, and he also found a case of cutlery and kitchen utensils that pulsated with red light. The owner was younger than Anton Dubois, late thirties maybe, and wore a.38 revolver in a shoulder holster, which shocked Charlie less than the fact that she was a woman. He’d envisioned all the Death Merchants as being men, but of course there was no reason to think that. She wore jeans and a plain chambray shirt, but was dripping with mismatched jewelry that Charlie guessed was a self-indulgence she justified for being “in the business” the same way he justified his expensive suits. She was pretty in a lady-cop sort of way, with a nice smile, and Charlie found himself wondering if he should maybe ask her out, then heard an audible pop in his head as that bubble of self-destructive stupidity exploded. Sure, dinner and a movie, and release the Forces of Darkness on the world. Great first date. Everyone was right, he really needed to get laid.

He bought the sword-cane for cash, without quibbling, and left the store without engaging the owner in conversation, but he took a business card from the holder on the counter as he left. Her name was Carrie Lang. It was all he could do to not warn her, tell her to be careful of what might be coming from below, but he realized that every second he was there, he was probably increasing the danger to all of them.

Watch yourself, Carrie, he whispered to himself as he walked away.

That evening he decided to take action to ease some of the tension in his life. Or at least it was decided for him when Jane and her girlfriend Cassandra showed up at the apartment and offered to watch Sophie.

“Go, find a woman,” Jane said. “I got the kid.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Charlie said. “I was gone all day, I haven’t spent any quality time with my daughter.”

Jane and Cassandra—an athletic, attractive redhead in her midthirties, who Charlie promised himself he would have asked out if she hadn’t been living with his sister—pushed him out the door, slammed it in his face, and locked it.

“Don’t come home until you’ve gotten some,” Jane shouted over the transom.

“Does that work for you?” Charlie shouted back. “Just go find someone to do you, like a scavenger hunt?”

“Here’s five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars works for anyone.” A wad of bills came flying over the transom, followed by his cane, a sport coat, and his wallet.

“This is my money, isn’t it?” Charlie shouted.

“It’s you that needs to get laid,” Jane shouted back. “Go. Don’t come back until you’ve done the dance of the beast with two backs.”

“I could just lie.”

“No, you can’t,” Cassie said. She had a sweet voice, like you’d want her to tell you a bedtime story. “The desperation will still show in your eyes. And I mean that in a nice way, Charlie.”

“Sure, how else could I take it?”

“Bye, Daddy,” Sophie said from the other side of the door. “Have fun.”

“Jane!”

“Relax, she just came in. Go.”

So Charlie, thrown out of his own home, by his own sister, said good-bye to the daughter he adored and went out to find a total stranger with whom to be intimate.

Just a massage,” Charlie said.

“Okay,” said the girl as she arranged oils and lotions on a shelf. She was Asian, but Charlie couldn’t tell from where in Asia, maybe Thailand. She was petite and had black hair that hung down past her waist. She wore a red silk kimono with a chrysanthemum design. She never looked him in the eye.

“Really, I’m just tense. I don’t want anything but a completely ethical and hygienic massage, just like it says on the sign.” Charlie stood at the end of a narrow cubicle, fully dressed, with a massage table on one side of him and the masseuse and her shelf of oils on the other.

“Okay,” said the girl.

Charlie just looked at her, unsure of what to do next.

“Clothes off,” said the girl. She placed a clean white towel on the massage table near Charlie, nodded to it, then turned her back. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Charlie said, feeling now that he was here, he needed to go through with it. He’d paid the woman at the door fifty dollars for the massage, after which she made him sign a release that stated that all he was getting was a massage, that tipping was encouraged, but did not imply any services beyond a massage, and that if he thought that he was getting anything but a massage he was going to be one disappointed White Devil. She made him initial each of the six languages it was printed in, then she winked, a long slow wink, exaggerated by very long false eyelashes, and performed the internationally accepted blow-job mime, with round mouth and rhythmic tongue pushing out the cheek. “Lotus Flower make you bery relax, Mr. Macy.”

Charlie had signed Ray’s name, not so much as a small revenge for calling the cops on him, but because he thought the management might recognize Ray’s name and give him a discount.

He kept his boxers on and climbed on the table, but Lotus Flower slipped them off him as deftly as a magician pulling a scarf from his sleeve. She draped a towel over his bottom and dropped her kimono. Charlie saw it fall and glanced back to see a tiny, seminaked woman rubbing oil on her palms to warm it. He looked away and slammed his forehead into the table several times even as he felt his erection struggling for freedom beneath him.

“My sister made me come here,” he said. “I didn’t want to come.”

“Okay,” she said.

She rubbed the oil into his shoulders. It smelled of almonds and sandalwood. There must have been menthol or lavender or something in it, because he felt it tingle on his skin. Every place she touched hurt. Like he’d dug a ditch to Ecuador the day before, or pulled a barge across the Bay with a rope. It was like she had special sensory powers, she could find the exact spot where he carried his pain, then touch it, release it. He moaned, just a little.

“Bery tense,” she said, working her fingers up his spine.

“I haven’t slept well in two weeks,” he said.

“That nice.” She reached across to work his rib cage and he felt her small breasts press against his back. He stopped breathing for a second and she giggled.

“Bery tense,” she said.

“I had this thing happen at work. Well, not at work, but I’m afraid I did something that could put everyone I know in danger, and I can’t make myself do what needs to be done to fix it. People could die.”

“That nice,” said Lotus Flower, kneading his biceps.

“You don’t speak English, do you?”

“Oh. Little. No worries. You want happy ending?”

Charlie smiled. “Can you just keep rubbing?”

“No happy ending? Okay. Twenty dollar, fifteen minute.”

So Charlie paid her, and talked to her, and she rubbed his back, and he paid her again, and he told her all the things that he couldn’t share with other people: all the worries, all the fears, all the regrets. He told her of how he missed Rachel, yet how sometimes he would forget what she looked like and would run to the dresser in the middle of the night to look at her photo. He paid her for two hours in advance and dozed off, feeling her hands on his skin, and he dreamed of Rachel and sex, and when he woke up Lotus Flower was massaging his temples and tears were running into his ears. He told her it was the menthol in the oil, but it was the lonely coming up in him, like the pain in his back that he hadn’t known he’d had until it was touched.

She massaged his chest, reaching over his head and letting her breasts rub against his face as she worked, and when he rose again under the towel, she asked, “You want happy ending now?”

“Nah,” he said. “Happy endings are so Hollywood.” Then he caught her wrists, sat up, kissed the back of her hands, and thanked her. He tipped her a hundred dollars. She smiled, put on her kimono, and left the cubicle.

Charlie dressed and left the Happy Relax Good Time Oriental Massage Parlor, which he had walked by a thousand times during his life, always wondering what was behind the red door with brown paper taped over the window. Now he knew: the pathetic puddle of lonely frustration that was Charlie Asher, for whom there would be no happy ending.

He made his way up to Broadway and headed up the hill into North Beach. He was only a few blocks from home when he sensed someone behind him. He turned, but all he saw was a guy a couple of blocks back buying a newspaper from a machine. He walked another half block and could see the activity on the street up ahead: tourists out walking, waiting for tables in Italian restaurants, barkers trying to lure tourists into strip clubs, sailors barhopping, hipsters smoking outside of City Lights bookstore, looking cool and literary before the next poetry slam, which would go off in a bar across the street.

“Hey, soldier,” a voice at his side. A woman’s voice, soft and sexy. Charlie turned and looked down the alley he was passing. He could see a woman in the shadows, leaning against the wall. She was wearing an iridescent body stocking or something and a mercury light at the other end of the alley was drawing a silver outline of her figure. The hair rose on his neck, but he felt something twinge in his loins as well. This was his neighborhood, and the hookers had been calling to him since he was twelve, but this was the first time he’d ever stopped and paid more attention than a wave and a smile.

“Hey,” Charlie said. He felt dizzy—drunk or stoned—maybe all the toxins had broken loose from the long massage, but he had to lean on his cane to steady himself.

She stepped away from the wall and the light silhouetted her, highlighting outlandish curves. Charlie realized he was grinding his teeth and his right kneecap began to bounce. This was not the street-worn body of a junkie—a dancer maybe, a goddess.

“Sometimes,” she said, hissing the last s, “a rough fuck down a dark alley is the best medicine for a weary warrior.”

Charlie looked around: the party a block ahead, the guy reading his newspaper under the streetlamp two blocks back. No one down the alley waiting to ambush him.

“How much?” he asked. He couldn’t even remember what sex felt like, but all he could think about right now was release—a rough fuck down a dark alley with this…this goddess. He couldn’t see her face, just the line of a cheekbone, but that was exquisite.

“The pleasure of your company,” she said.

“Why me?” Charlie said, he couldn’t help himself—it was his Beta nature.

“Come find out,” she said. She cupped her breasts, fell back against the wall, and propped one heel up on the bricks. “Come.”

He walked into the alley and leaned the cane on the wall, then took her uplifted knee in one hand, a breast in the other, and pulled her against him for a kiss. She felt like she was wearing velvet, her mouth was warm and tasted base, gamy, like venison or liver. He didn’t even feel her undo his jeans, just a strong hand on his erection.

“Ah, strong meat,” she hissed.

“Thanks, I’ve been going to the gym.”

She bit his neck, hard, and he squeezed her breast and thrust against her hand. She threw her uplifted leg around his back and pulled him hard against her. He felt something sharp, painful digging into his scrotum and he tried to pull away. She pulled him tighter with her leg. She was incredibly strong.

“New Meat,” she said. “Don’t fight me or I’ll tear them off.”

Charlie felt the claw on his balls and the breath caught in his throat. Her face was an inch from his now, and he looked for her eyes, but could see only an obsidian blackness reflecting the highlights from the streetlight.

She held her free hand in front of his face and he watched as claws began to grow out of her fingertips, reflecting the streetlight like brushed chrome, until they were three inches long. She poised them over his eyes and he reached for his sword-cane against the wall. She knocked it away, and the claws were at his face again.

“Oh no, Meat. Not this time.” She hooked a claw into his nostril. “Shall I drive it into your brain? That would be quickest, but I don’t want quick. I’ve waited so long for this.”

She released the pressure on his balls, and to his horror, he realized that he was still hard. She started rubbing his erection, pushing the claw deeper into his nose to hold him steady. “I know, I know—when you come, I’ll put it in your ear and yank. I’ve taken off a half a man’s head that way. You’ll like it. You’re lucky, if Nemain had been sent you’d be dead already.”

“Bitch,” Charlie managed to say.

She was stroking him harder and he was cursing his body for betraying him this way. He tried to pull away and her leg wrapped behind him crushed the breath out of him. “No, you come, then I’ll kill you.”

She pulled the claw from his nose and put it next to his ear. “Don’t make me leave unsatisfied, Meat,” she said, but in that instant her claw caught the side of his scalp and he hit her as hard as he could in the ribs with both of his fists.

“You fuckface!” she shrieked. She let her leg fall; yanked him aside by his penis, and reared back for a full slash of her claws to his head. Charlie tried to raise his forearm to take the blow, but then there was an explosion and a piece of her shoulder splattered on the wall, spinning her around.

Charlie felt her release his penis, and he threw himself across the alley. She rebounded off the wall with both claws aimed at his face. There was another explosion and she was knocked back again. This time she came up facing the street, and before she could brace to leap, two more shots hit her in the chest and she screeched, the sound like a thousand angry ravens set afire.

Five more quick shots and she was danced backward by the impacts; even as she went she was changing, her arms getting wider, her shoulders smoothing. Two more shots, and the next screech wasn’t even remotely human, but that of a huge raven. She rose into the night sky trailing feathers and spattering a liquid that might have been blood, except that it was black.

Charlie climbed to his feet and staggered out of the alley to where Inspector Alphonse Rivera was still in shooting stance, holding a 9 mm Beretta aimed at the dark sky.

“Do I even want to know what the fuck that was?” Rivera said.

“Probably not,” Charlie said.

“Tie your coat around your waist,” said the cop.

Charlie looked down and saw that the front of his jeans had been shredded as if by razors.

“Thanks,” Charlie said.

“You know,” Rivera said, “this could have all been avoided if you’d just taken the happy ending like everybody else.”

17 WAS IT GOOD FOR YOU?

The next morning, Jane’s girlfriend Cassie heard someone in the hall and opened the door. Charlie stood there, covered in blood, black goo, and smelling of sandalwood and almond oil; he had a cut over his ear, blood crusted in his nose, the front of his pants were in shreds, and there were tiny black feathers stuck to him everywhere.

“Why, Charlie,” she said, somewhat surprised, “it appears that I underestimated you. When you decide to get your freak on, you do not mess around.”

“Shower,” Charlie said.

“Daddy!” Sophie called from her bedroom. She came running out with arms thrown wide, followed by two giant dogs and a lesbian aunt in Brooks Brothers. Halfway across the living room she saw her father, turned, and went squealing out of the room in terror.

Jane pulled up by the couch and stared. “Jesus, Chuck, what’d you do, try to fuck a leopard?”

“Something like that,” Charlie said. He stumbled by her and went through his bedroom to the master bath.

Jane looked at Cassandra, who was trying to keep her smile from breaking into laughter. “You wanted him to get out more.”

“You tell him about Mom?” Jane said.

“Thought that news should come from you,” said Cassandra.

Well, guns suck, I can tell you that,” said Babd, the most recent of the three death divas to make an appearance Above. “Sure, they look great from down here, but up close—noisy, impersonal—give me a battle-ax or a cudgel any day.”

“I like to cudgel,” said Macha, who had her claws up inside Madison McKerny’s severed head and was working the mouth like a hand puppet.

“It’s your own fault,” scolded Nemain. She had one of Madison McKerny’s silicone implants—bits of fuck-puppet gore still clinging to it—and was pressing it to Babd’s wounds to heal them. Even as the black flesh regenerated, the red glow in the implant dimmed. “We’re wasting the power in these. And after waiting years to get another soul?”

Babd sighed. “I suppose in retrospect the hand job wasn’t such a great idea.”

“I suppose the hand job wasn’t such a great idea,” mocked Macha’s hand puppet.

“I did that on the battlefields of the North, what, ten thousand times?” said Babd. “A final wank for the dying warrior—just seemed like the least I could do. I’m especially good at it, you know. It takes a powerful touch to keep a soldier hard when his guts are running between his fingers.”

“She is good at it,” said Orcus. “I’ll vouch for that.” He leaned back on his throne to display three feet of black, bull death-wood to show his enthusiasm.

“Not now, I just did my lipstick,” puppeted Macha with the head, making its eyes bug out with her claws so it appeared that the dead girl was impressed by Orcus’s prodigious unit.

They all snickered. She’d had Orcus and her Morrigan sisters giggling all morning with her puppet show, putting the implants on a shelf and working the head above them. “Of course they’re real, he really paid for them, didn’t he?”

They’d been giddy since pulling the soul vessels out of the fuck puppet’s grave, that victory even overshadowing Babd’s failure to kill the Death Merchant. But as the light ebbed out of the implants, their mood darkened. Nemain threw the useless implant against the bulkhead of the ship and it exploded and spattered the room with clear goo.

“What a waste,” she growled. “We will take the Above, and I will eat his liver while he watches.”

“What is it with you and eating livers?” Babd said. “I hate liver.”

“Patience, Princesses,” said Orcus as he weighed the remaining implant in his talon. “We were a thousand years coming to this place, for this battle, a few more to gather our force will but make the victory sweeter.” He snatched the head away from Macha and took a bite out of it as if it were a crisp, ripe plum. “You really could have passed on the hand job, though,” he said, spraying bits of brain at Babd.

I’ve got us on a flight to Phoenix at two,” Jane said. “We connect there to a commuter and we’re in Sedona by suppertime.”

Charlie had just come out of the shower and wore only a pair of fresh jeans. He was drying his hair with a beige towel, leaving red streaks on it from his still-bleeding scalp. He sat down on the bed.

“Wait, wait, wait. How long has she known?”

“They diagnosed her six months ago. It had already spread from her colon to her other organs.”

“And she waited until now to tell us.”

“She didn’t tell us. A guy named Buddy called. Evidently they’ve been living together. He said she didn’t want us to worry. He broke down on the phone.”

“Mom’s living with a guy?” Charlie was staring at the red stripes on the towel. He’d been up all night, trying to explain to Inspector Rivera what had happened in the alley, without actually telling him anything. He was bleeding, battered, exhausted, and his mother was dying. “I can’t believe her. She flipped when Rachel moved in before we were married.”

“Yeah, well, you can yell at her for being a hypocrite when you see her tonight.”

“I can’t go, Jane. I have the store, and Sophie—she’s too little for something like this.”

“I called Ray and Lily, they’ve got the shop covered. Cassandra will watch Sophie overnight and the Communist-bloc ladies can watch her until Cassie gets home from work.”

“Cassie’s not coming with you?”

“Charlie, Mom still refers to me as her tomboy.”

“Oh yeah, sorry.” Charlie sighed. He was nostalgic for the days when Jane was the freak in the family and he was the normal one. “You going to try to reconcile that with her?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really have a plan. I don’t even know if she’s lucid. I’ve been on autopilot since I heard. I was waiting for you to get home so I could fall apart.”

Charlie stood up, went to his sister, and put his arms around her. “You did great. I’m back, I got it from here. What do you need?”

She hugged him back, then pushed back with tears in her eyes. “I need to go home and pack. I’ll come by at noon with a cab to get you, okay?”

“I’ll be ready.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe Mom is living with a guy.”

“A guy named Buddy,” Jane said.

“The slut,” Charlie said.

Jane laughed, which is all that Charlie wanted right then.

Lois Asher was sleeping when Charlie and Jane arrived at her home in Sedona. A potbellied sunburned man wearing Bermuda shorts and a safari shirt let them in: Buddy. He sat at the kitchen table with Charlie and Jane, and professed his love for their mother, told them about his own life as an aircraft mechanic in Illinois before he retired, then recited a play-by-play of what they had done since Lois had been diagnosed. She’d gone through three courses of chemotherapy, then, sick and hairless, she had given in. Charlie and Jane looked at each other, feeling guilty that they hadn’t been there to help.

“She didn’t want to bother you two,” Buddy said. “She’s been acting like dying was something she could do in her spare time, between hair appointments.”

Charlie snapped to attention. That was the kind of thing he’d thought to himself several times when he was retrieving a soul vessel and had seen people who were so far in denial about what was happening to them that they were still buying five-year calendars.

“Women, what are you gonna do with ’em,” Buddy said, winking at Jane.

Charlie suddenly felt a great wave of affection for this sunburned little bald guy who his mother was shacked up with.

“We want to thank you for being here for her, Buddy.”

“Yeah.” Jane nodded, still looking a little dazed.

“Well, I’m here for the whole shebang, and then some, if you need me.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “We will.” And they would, because it was immediately evident to Charlie that Buddy was going to hang on himself only as long as he felt he was needed.

“Buddy,” said a soft female voice from behind Charlie. He turned to see a big, thirtyish woman in scrubs: another hospice worker—another of the amazing women that Charlie had seen in the homes of the dying, helping to deliver them into the next world with as much comfort and dignity and even joy as they could gather—benevolent Valkyries, midwives of the final light, they were—and as Charlie watched them at work, he saw that rather than become detached from, or callous to their job, they became involved with every patient and every family. They were present. He’d seen them grieve with a hundred different families, taking part in an intensity of emotion that most people would feel only a few times in their lives. Watching them over the years had made Charlie feel more reverent toward his task of being a Death Merchant. It might be a curse on him, but ultimately, it wasn’t about him, it was about serving, and the transcendence in serving, and the hospice workers had taught him that.

The woman’s name tag read GRACE. Charlie smiled.

“Buddy,” she said. “She’s awake and she’s asking for you.”

Charlie stood. “Grace, I’m Charlie, Lois’s son. This is my sister, Jane.”

“Oh, she talks about you two all the time.”

“She does?” said Jane, a tad surprised.

“Oh yes. She tells me you were quite the tomboy,” Grace said. “And you—” she said to Charlie. “You used to be nice but then something happened.”

“I learned to talk,” Charlie said.

“That’s when I stopped liking him,” Jane said.

Lois Asher was propped in a nest of pillows, wearing a perfectly coiffed gray wig tied back in the style she had always worn her real hair, a silver squash-blossom necklace and matching earrings and rings, a mauve silk nightgown that blended so well with the Southwestern decor of the bedroom that it looked as if Lois might be trying to disappear into her surroundings. And she did, except the space she’d made for herself in the world was a little bigger than she now required. There was a gap between the wig and her scalp, her nightgown hung almost empty, and her rings jangled on her fingers like bangles. It was clear to Charlie that she hadn’t actually been sleeping when they’d arrived, but had sent Buddy out with the excuse to give Grace time to dress and arrange her for presentation to her children.

Charlie noticed that the squash-blossom necklace was glowing dull red against Lois’s nightgown and he felt a long, sad sigh rise in his chest. He hugged his mother and could feel the bones in her back and shoulders, as delicate and fragile as a bird’s. Jane tried to fight down a sob as soon as she saw her mother, but managed only to produce what sounded like a painful snort. She fell to her knees at her mother’s bedside.

Charlie knew it was perhaps the stupidest question one could ask the dying, yet he asked: “How are you doing, Mom?”

She patted his hand. “I could use an old-fashioned. Buddy won’t let me have any alcohol, since I can’t keep it down. You met Buddy?”

“He seems like a nice man,” Jane said.

“Oh, he is. He’s been good to me. We’re just friends, you know.”

Charlie looked across the bed at Jane, who raised her eyebrows.

“It’s okay, we know you guys are living together,” Charlie said.

“Living together? Me? What do you take me for?”

“Never mind, Mom.”

His mother waved off the thought as if she was shooing a fly. “And how is that little Jewish girl of yours, Charlie?”

“Sophie? She’s doing great, Mom.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“What’s not it?”

“It wasn’t Sophie, it was something else. Pretty girl—too good for you, really.”

“You’re thinking of Rachel, Mom. She passed on five years ago, remember?”

“Well, you can’t blame her, can you? You were such a sweet little boy, then I don’t know what happened to you. Do you remember?”

“Yeah, Mom, I was sweet.”

Lois looked at her daughter. “And what about you, Jane, have you found yourself a nice man? I hate the idea of you being alone.”

“Still looking for Mr. Right,” Jane said, giving Charlie the “we’ve got to get away and have an emergency meeting” head toss that she had practiced around their mother since she was eight.

“Mom, Jane and I will be right back. We can call Sophie and talk to her then, okay?”

“Who’s Sophie?” Lois asked.

“She’s your granddaughter, Mom. You remember, beautiful little Sophie?”

“Don’t be silly, Charles, I’m not old enough to be a grandmother.”

Outside the bedroom Jane fumbled around and in her purse and produced a pack of cigarettes, but couldn’t figure out whether to smoke one or not. “Holy Motown Jesus with Pips, what the fuck is going on in there?”

“She’s got a lot of morphine in her, Jane. Did you smell that acrid smell? That’s her sweat glands trying to take the poisons out of her body that her kidneys and liver would normally filter. Her organs are starting to shut down, it means that there’s a lot of toxins going to her brain.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve read about it. Look, she never lived in reality completely, you know that? She hated the shop and hated Dad’s work, even though it supported her. She hated his collecting, even though she was just as bad. And the thing with Buddy not living here—she’s trying to reconcile who she’s always thought she was with who she really is.”

“Is that why I still want to punch her lights out?” Jane said. “That’s wrong, isn’t it?”

“Well, I suppose—”

“I’m a horrible person. My mother is dying of cancer and I want to punch her lights out.”

Charlie put his arm around his sister’s shoulder and started walking her toward the front door so she could go outside and smoke. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said. “You’re doing the same thing, trying to reconcile all the moms that Mom ever was—the one you wanted, the one she was when you needed her and she was there, the one she was when she didn’t understand. Most of us don’t live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we’re a whole bunch of selves. When someone dies, they all integrate into the soul—the essence of who we are, beyond the different faces we wear throughout our lives. You’re just hating the selves you’ve always hated, and loving the ones you’ve always loved. It’s bound to mess you up.”

Jane stopped and stepped back from him. “Then how come it’s not messing you up?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because of what I went through with Rachel.”

“So you think that when someone dies suddenly like that, that this face-reconciliation thing happens?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a conscious process. Maybe more for you than for Mom, you know what I mean? You feel like you have to put things right before she’s gone, and it’s frustrating.”

“So what happens if she doesn’t integrate all that before she dies. What happens if I don’t?”

“I think you get another chance.”

“Really? Like reincarnation? What about Jesus and stuff?”

“I think that there’s a lot of stuff that’s not in the book. In any of the books.”

“Where’s this coming from? I never got the impression you were spiritual. You wouldn’t even go to yoga with me.”

“I wouldn’t go to yoga with you because I’m not bendy, not because I’m not spiritual.”

They’d gotten to the door, and when Charlie pulled it open it made the same sound a refrigerator door makes. When they stepped out onto the front porch he realized why, as a wave of hundred-and-ten-degree heat hit them.

“Jeez, did you accidentally open the door to hell?” Jane said. “I don’t need to smoke this badly. Get inside, get inside, get inside.” She shoved him inside and closed the door. “That’s heinous. Why would someone live in this climate?”

“I’m confused,” Charlie said. “Did you start smoking again or not?”

“I didn’t really,” Jane said. “I just have one when I’m really stressed out. It’s like thumbing your nose at Death. Haven’t you ever felt like doing that?”

“You have no idea,” Charlie said.

With Charlie and Jane there, they sent the hospice nurse home at night and watched Lois in four-hour shifts. Charlie gave his mother her medication, wiped her mouth, fed her what little she would take in, but by now she was mostly having sips of water or apple juice, and he listened as she lamented losing her looks and her things, as she remembered being a great beauty, the belle of the ball at parties before he was born, an object of desire, which clearly she loved more than being a wife or a mother or any of the dozen other faces she had worn in her life. Sometimes she would actually turn her attention to her son…

“I loved you as a little boy. I would take you to cafés in North Beach and everyone would just dote on you. You were so sweet. Beautiful. Both of us were.”

“I know.”

“Remember when we dumped all of the cereal out of the boxes so you could get the prize out? A little submarine, I think? Do you remember?”

“I remember, Mom.”

“We were close then.”

“Yeah, we were.”

Charlie would take her hand then and let her remember great times that they had never really had. The time had long passed for correcting facts and changing impressions.

When she exhausted herself he let her sleep, and read by a flashlight sitting in the chair at her bedside. He was there, in the middle of the night, reading a crime novel, when the door opened and a slight man of about fifty crept into the room, stopped by the door, and looked around. He wore sneakers and black jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt—but for the oversized wire-frame glasses, he was just short a hand grenade and a survival knife from looking like someone on a commando mission.

“Just be quiet,” Charlie said softly. “She’s sleeping.”

The little man jumped straight up about two feet and came down in a crouch. He was breathing hard and Charlie was afraid he might faint if he didn’t relax.

“It’s okay. It’s in the top drawer of that dresser over there—it’s a squash-blossom necklace. Take it.”

The little man ducked behind the door, then peeked around the edge. “You can see me?”

“Yes.” Charlie put his book down and got up from the chair, and went to the dresser.

“Oh, this is bad. This is really, really bad.”

“It’s not that bad,” Charlie said.

The little man shook his head violently. “No, it’s really bad. Look away. Look over there. I’m not here. I’m not here. You can’t see me.”

“Here it is,” Charlie said. He took the squash-blossom necklace from its velvet case in the drawer and held it up.

“What is?”

“What you’re looking for.”

“How did you know?”

“Because I do what you do. I’m a Death Merchant.”

“A what?”

Then Charlie remembered that Minty Fresh said he had coined the term, so maybe only the Death Merchants in San Francisco knew it. “I collect soul vessels.”

“No, you don’t. You can’t see me. You can’t see me. Sleep. Sleep.” The little man was waving his hands up and down in the air like he was drawing a curtain of deception before him, or possibly clearing spiderwebs out of the room.

“These are not the droids you seek,” Charlie said, grinning.

“What?”

“You don’t have Jedi powers, you git. Just take the necklace.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come with me,” Charlie said. “It’s time for my sister to watch her anyway.” He led the little guy out of his mother’s room into the living room. They stood by the front window, looking at the sun coming up and casting shadows of the broken teeth of the red rock mountains around them. “What’s your name?”

“Vern. Vern Glover.”

“I’m Charlie. Nice to meet you. How long does she have, Vern?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long on your calendar. How many days were left?”

“How do you know about that?”

“I told you. I do what you do. I can see you. I can see that necklace glowing red. I know what you are.”

“But you can’t. The Great Big Book says that horrible Forces of Darkness will rise if I talk to you.”

“See this cut over my ear, Vern?”

Vern nodded.

“Forces of Darkness. Fuck ’em. Fuck the Forces of Darkness, Vern. How long does my mother have?”

“It’s your mother? I’m sorry, Charlie. She has two more days.”

“Okay,” Charlie said, nodding. “Then we’d better go get a doughnut.”

“Pardon?”

“Doughnut! Doughnut! You like doughnuts, don’t you?”

“Yes, but why?”

“Because the continuance of human existence as we know it depends on us having doughnuts together.”

“Really?” Vern’s eyes went wide.

“No, not really. I’m just fucking with you.” Charlie put his arm around Vern’s shoulder. “But let’s go get one anyway. I’ll wake my sister for her watch.”

Charlie called home from his mobile phone to check on Sophie. Then, satisfied she was safe, he returned to the booth at Dunkin’ Donuts, where Vern and a cruller were waiting for him. Vern had taken off his stocking cap and had a wild mop of silver gray hair over large, aviator-frame glasses that made him look like a tan and wiry mad scientist.

“So like she was really hot?”

“Vern, you wouldn’t believe. I’m telling you, body of a goddess. Covered with really fine feathers, soft as down.” Charlie innately recognized another Beta Male like he recognized another Death Merchant, so he nearly stumbled over himself to tell the story of his adventure with the sexy sewer harpy, knowing he had a sympathetic audience.

“But she was going to put her claw through your brain, right?”

“Yeah, she said she was, but you know something, I think there was some chemistry there.”

“You don’t think it was just that she had your crank in her hand at the time, because that can cloud a guy’s judgment.”

“Yeah, there’s that, but still, you have to think, of all the Death Merchants in all of the cities on the planet, she chose me to share the death wank. I think she had a thing for me.”

“Well, you’re in the City of Two Bridges,” said Vern, brushing a little maple glaze from the corner of his mouth. “That’s where it’s supposed to happen.”

“Where what’s supposed to happen?” Charlie had really enjoyed being the senior Death Merchant, acting as the elder statesman to Vern, who had been called to recruit souls only six months ago. Now he was thrown.

“In The Great Big Book of Death, it says that we can’t talk about what we do, or try to find each other, or the Forces of Darkness will rise up in the City of Two Bridges and there will be a horrible battle and the Underworld will rise and cover the land if we lose. You guys have two bridges in San Francisco, right?”

Charlie tried to hide his surprise. Vern had obviously gotten a different version of the Great Big Book than they got in San Francisco. “Well, two main ones, yes. Sorry, it’s been a long time since I read the book. Remind me why the City of Two Bridges is so important?”

Vern gave Charlie the big “duh” look. “Because that is where the new Luminatus, the Great Death, will take power.”

“Oh yeah, of course, the Luminatus.” Charlie thumped himself in the side of the head. He had no idea what Vern was talking about.

“You think that they won’t need us anymore, after the Great Death takes power?” Vern asked. “I mean, will there be layoffs? Because the Big Book makes it sound like the Luminatus rising is a good thing, but I’ve been making a ton of money since I got this gig.”

Yeah, that’s going to be our problem, layoffs, Charlie thought. “I think we’ll be fine. Like the book says, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.”

“Right, right, right. So this cop that shot the sexy-goddess babe, he didn’t do anything?”

“No, not nothing. First he put me in the back of his cop car and tried to get me to tell him what had been going on when he showed up, and what had been going on for these last few years he’s been checking on me.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him that it was as much a mystery to me as it was to him.”

“And he believed that?”

“No. He didn’t. But he did believe it when I told him that if I told him more it would get worse, so we came up with a story that justified his firing his weapon. A guy with a gun taking a shot at me, then at him—descriptions, everything. Then when he was sure we had it straight, he took me to the station and I wrote out my statement.”

“That’s it, he let you go.”

“No, then he told me stories about his career, and the weird stuff he’s encountered, and why because of that, he was going to let me go. The guy is a complete nut job. He believes in vampires and demons and giant owls—he said that he once handled a call for a polar-bear attack in Santa Barbara.”

“Wow,” said Vern. “You lucked out.”

“I called him before we left the city. He’s going to check on my building until I get home, make sure my daughter is okay.” Charlie hadn’t told Vern about the hellhounds.

“You must be worried sick about her,” Vern said. “I have a kid, she’s a junior in high school, lives with my ex-wife in Phoenix.”

“Yeah, so you know,” Charlie said. “So, Vern, you’ve never seen any of these dark creatures? Never heard voices coming out of the storm drains? Nothing like that?”

“Nope. Not like you’re talking about. We don’t have storm drains in Sedona. We have a desert with rivers through it.”

“Right, but have you ever missed getting a soul vessel?”

“Yeah, at first, when I got the Great Big Book, I thought it was a joke. I skipped three or four of them.”

“And nothing happened?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. I’d wake up early, and look up at the mountain above my house, and there’d be a shadow there, looked like a big oil slick.”

“So?”

“So, it would be on the wrong side of the mountain. It would be on the same side as the sun. And during the course of the day, it moved down the mountain. Oh, if you didn’t look at it, watch it, you’d look right by it, but it was coming down into the city, hour by hour. I drove out to where I saw it going, and waited for it.”

“And?”

“You could hear crows calling. I waited until it got a half a block from me, moving so slow you could barely see it, but it got louder and louder, like a huge flock of crows. Scared the bejesus out of me. I went home, looked up the name I’d written down during the night, and they lived in the neighborhood I’d been in. The shadow was coming out of the mountain for the soul vessel.”

“Did it get it?”

“I guess. I didn’t.”

“And nothing happened?”

“Oh yeah, something happened. The next time the shadow moved faster, like a cloud blowing over. And I followed it, and sure enough, it was heading right for a woman’s house whose name was on my calendar. That’s when I realized that the Great Big Book wasn’t bullshitting.”

“But the shadow thing, it never came for you?”

“Third time,” Vern said.

“There was a third time?”

“Oh yeah, like you didn’t think this was all a load of crap when it first started happening to you?”

“Okay, good point,” Charlie said. “Sorry. Go on.”

“So, the third time, the shadow comes down off a mountain on the other side of town, at night, during a full moon, and this time, you can see the crows flying in it. Not like really see them, but like shadows of them. Some people noticed it that time. I got in my car again, took my dog, Scottie, with me. I already knew where the thing was going. I pulled up a couple of doors down from the guy’s house—to warn him, you know. I didn’t realize yet what the book was saying about us not being seen, otherwise I would have just gone for the soul vessel. Anyway, I’m at the door, and the shadow is coming across the street, all the edges shaped like crows, and Scottie starts barking like mad, and runs at it. Brave little guy. Anyway, as soon as the shadow touches him he yelps and drops over dead. Meantime, a woman comes to the door, and I look in and see a statue, like a fake Remington bronze on the table in the foyer behind her, and it’s glowing red, like red-hot. And I blow by her and grab it. And the shadow evaporates. Just like that, it’s gone. That’s the last time I was late getting a soul vessel.”

“Sorry about your dog,” Charlie said. “What did you tell the woman?”

“That’s the funny thing, I didn’t tell her anything. She was talking to her husband in the next room, and he wasn’t answering her, and she runs back to see what happened to him. Didn’t even look at me. Turns out the guy was having a heart attack. I took the statue, went and picked up Scottie’s body, and left.”

“That had to be tough.”

“I thought I was Death for a while, you know, special. Because the guy croaked with me there, but it was just coincidence.”

“Yeah, that happened to me, too,” Charlie said. But he was still disturbed by the whole “great battle” revelation. “Vern, would you mind if I took a look at your Great Big Book?”

“I don’t think so, Charlie. In fact, I think we’d better say goodbye. I mean, if the Great Big Book is right, and I don’t have any reason to believe it’s not, then we shouldn’t even be talking.”

“But it’s a different version than I have.”

“You don’t think there’s a reason for that?” Vern said. His eyes magnified in his big glasses made him look like a madman for a second.

“Okay, then,” Charlie said. “But e-mail me, okay? That shouldn’t hurt.”

Vern looked in his coffee cup like he was thinking, as if by telling the story of the shadow that came down out of the mountains, he’d frightened himself. Finally he looked up and smiled. “You know, I’d like that. I could use some pointers, and if something weird starts to happen, we’ll stop.”

“Deal,” Charlie said. He drove Vern back to his car, which was parked around the block from his mother’s house, and they said good-bye.

Jane met Charlie at the door. “Where have you been? I need the car to go get her floss.”

“I brought doughnuts,” Charlie said, holding up the box, maybe a little too proud.

“Well, that’s not the same, is it?”

“As floss?”

“Dental floss. Can you believe it? Charlie, if I’m still flossing on my deathbed, you have my permission to garrote me with it. No, I’m leaving you instructions to garrote me with it.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “So other than that, she’s okay?”

Jane was digging in her purse, had found her cigarettes and was looking for her lighter. “Like gum disease is the big danger at this point. Goddammit! Did they take my lighter at the airport?”

“You still don’t smoke, Jane,” Charlie said.

She looked up. “So what’s your point?”

“Nothing.” He handed her the keys to the rental car. “Can you grab me some toothpaste while you’re out?”

She gave up searching for the lighter and threw the cigarettes back into her purse. “What is it with this family and the compulsive dental hygiene?”

“I forgot to bring any.”

“Okay.” Jane braced the keys in her hand, ready to go in the ignition, and tucked her purse under her arm like a football. She dropped into a crouch and pulled down her mirrored, wraparound sunglasses that, with her short platinum blond hair and Charlie’s black pinstripe suit, made her look a little like a cyborg assassin from the future getting ready to dash out into the poisonous atmosphere of planet Duran Duran. “It’s fucking hot out there, isn’t it?”

Charlie nodded and held up the doughnut box again. “The glazed have suffered.”

“Oh,” Jane said, lifting her glasses again. “Cassandra called. After you called this morning she noticed your date book on the nightstand. Well actually, she said that Alvin and Mohammed dragged her in there and pushed it at her. She wondered if you needed it.”

“What about Sophie, is she okay?”

“No, she’s been abducted by aliens, but I wanted you to digest the bad news about forgetting your date book first.”

“You know, that right there is why Mom is ashamed of you,” Charlie said.

Jane laughed. “Guess what? She’s not.”

“She’s not?”

“No, this morning. She told me that she always knew who I was, always knew what I was, and that she has always loved me, just the way I am.”

“Did you card her? There’s an impostor in our mom’s bed.”

“Shut up, it was nice. Important.”

“She was probably just saying that because she’s dying.”

“She did say that she wished I wouldn’t wear men’s suits all the time.”

“She’s not alone on that one,” Charlie said.

Jane fell back into assault mode. “I’m off on the floss mission. Call Cassandra.”

“Done,” Charlie said.

“And Buddy needs a doughnut.” Jane threw open the door and ran out into the heat screaming like a berserker charging the enemy.

Charlie closed the door behind her so as not to let the air-conditioning out, and watched through the glass as his sister ran across the zero-scaped yard like she was on fire. He looked beyond her to the red rock mesa rising out of the desert. There seemed to be a deep crevasse in it that he hadn’t seen there before. He looked again, and saw that it wasn’t a crevasse at all, just a long, sharp shadow.

Then he ran out into the driveway and looked at the position of the sun, then at the shadow. It was on the wrong side of the mesa. There couldn’t be a shadow on this side—the sun was also on this side. He shaded his eyes and watched the shadow until he thought his brains were cooking in the sun. It was moving, slowly, but moving, and not the way a shadow moves. It was moving with purpose, against the sun, toward his mother’s house.

“My date book,” he said to himself. “Oh, shit.”

18 YO MOMMA SO DEAD THAT…

On her last day, Lois Asher rallied. After not having even been able to get up to go to the breakfast table, or into the living room to sit and watch TV for three weeks, got up and danced with Buddy to an old Ink Spots song. She was playful and full of laughter, she teased her children and hugged them, she ate a chocolate-marshmallow sundae, and she brushed and flossed afterward. She put on her favorite silver jewelry and wore it to the dinner table, and when she couldn’t find her squash-blossom necklace she shrugged it off like it was a minor thing—she must have misplaced it. Oh, well.

Charlie knew what was happening because he had seen it before, and Buddy and Jane knew because Grace, the hospice nurse, explained it to them. “It happens again and again. I’ve seen people come out of a coma and sing their favorite songs, and all I can tell you is to enjoy it. People see the light come back into eyes that have been dull for months, and they start to place hope on it. It’s not a sign of getting well, it’s an opportunity to say good-bye. It’s a gift.”

Charlie had also learned by observing that it really helped everyone to let go if they were at least mildly medicated, so he and Jane took some antianxiety pills that Jane’s therapist had prescribed and Buddy washed down a time-released morphine pill with some scotch. Medication and forgiveness can make for joyous moments with the dying—it’s like they get to return to childhood—and because nothing in the future matters, because you don’t have to train them for life, teach lessons, forge applicable and practical memories, all the joy can be wicked from those last moments and stored in the heart. It was the best and closest time Charlie had ever had with his mother and his sister, and Buddy, in the sharing, became family as well.

Lois Asher went to bed at nine and died at midnight.

I can’t stay for the funeral,” Charlie said to his sister the next morning.

“What do you mean you can’t stay for the funeral?”

Charlie looked out the window at the giant ice pick of a shadow that had made its way down the mountain toward his mother’s house. Charlie could see it churning at the edges, like flocks of birds or swarming insects. The point was less than a half mile away.

“I have something I have to do at home, Jane. I mean, I forgot to do it and I really, really can’t stay.”

“Don’t be mysterious. What the hell do you need to do that you can’t attend your own mother’s funeral?”

Charlie was pressing his Beta Male imagination to the breaking point to come up with something credible on the spot. Then a light went on. “The other night, when you sent me out to get laid?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, it was an adventure, to be sure, but when I went to get my scalp sewed up, I also had a test. I talked to the doctor today, and I have to go get treatment. Right now.”

“You moron, I didn’t send you out to have unsafe sex. What were you thinking?”

“It was safe sex.” Right, sure, he thought, he almost scoffed at himself. “It’s the wounds they’re worried about. But if I get on these drugs right away, there’s a good chance that I’ll be okay.”

“They’re putting you on the cocktail? As a preventative?”

Sure, that’s it, the cocktail! Charlie thought. He nodded gravely.

“Okay, then, go.” Jane turned and hid her face.

“Maybe I can get back in time for the funeral,” Charlie said. Could he? He had to retrieve two overdue soul vessels in less than a week, and hope that no new names had appeared in his date book.

“We’ll do it a week from today,” Jane said, turning back around, tears blinked away. “You go home, get treated, come back. Buddy and I will handle the arrangements.”

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. He put his arms around his sister.

“Don’t you die on me, too, you fucker,” Jane said.

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Bring back that charcoal Armani of yours for me to wear to the funeral, and Cassie’s strappy black pumps, okay?”

“You? In strappy black pumps?”

“It’s what Mom would have wanted,” Jane said.

When Charlie landed in San Francisco there were four frantic messages on his cell phone from Cassandra. She had always seemed so calm, composed—a stable counterpoint to his sister’s flights of fancy. She sounded a wreck on the phone.

“Charlie, she’s got him trapped and they’re going to eat him and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to call the cops. Call me when you land.”

Charlie did call, all the way into the city in the shuttle van he called, but kept getting transferred to voice messaging. When he got out of the van in front of his store he heard a hiss coming out of the storm drain at the corner.

“I missed finishing with you, lover,” came the voice.

“No time,” Charlie said, hopping over the curb and running into the store.

“You never called,” purred the Morrigan.

Ray was behind the counter mousing through Asian cuties when Charlie came storming through.

“You’d better get upstairs,” Ray said. “They’re freaking out up there.”

“No kidding,” Charlie said as he passed. He took the stairs two at a time.

He was fumbling his key into the lock when Cassandra threw the door open and pulled him into his apartment.

“She won’t let him go. I’m afraid they’re going to eat him.”

“Who, what? That’s what you said on my voice mail. Where is Sophie?”

Cassandra dragged him to Sophie’s room, where he was met in the doorway by a growling Mohammed.

“Daddy!” Sophie shrieked. She ran across the room and leapt into his arms. She gave him a big hug and a sloppy kiss that left a chocolate Sophie-print on his cheek. “Down,” she said. “Down, down.” Charlie put her down and she ran back into her room, but Mohammed prevented Charlie from entering, pushed his nose into Charlie’s shirt, leaving a giant dog-nose print in chocolate. Evidently there had been a chocolate orgy going on in his absence.

“His mother is supposed to pick him up at one,” Cassandra said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Charlie strained to see around the hellhound and saw Sophie standing with her hand on Alvin’s collar while he menaced a little boy who was crouched in the corner. The little boy was a little wide-eyed, but otherwise unhurt, and he didn’t seem that frightened. In fact, he was hugging a box of Crunchy Cheese Newts, and was eating one, then feeding the next one to Alvin, who was dripping hellish dog drool onto the kid’s shoes in anticipation of the next newt.

“I love him,” Sophie said. She went to the little boy and kissed him on the cheek, leaving a chocolate smear. Not the first. It appeared that this little guy had been suffering Sophie’s affections for quite some time, for he was covered with chocolaty goodness and orange Cheese-Newt dust. “I want to keep him.”

The little boy grinned.

“He came over for a playdate. I guess you scheduled it before you left,” Cassandra said. “I thought it would be okay. I tried to get him out of there, but the dogs won’t let me by. What are we going to tell his mother?”

“I want to keep him,” Sophie said. Big kiss.

“His name is Matthew,” Cassie said.

“I know his name. He goes to Sophie’s school.”

Charlie started into the room. Mohammed blocked the doorway.

“Matty, are you all right?” Charlie said.

“Uh-huh,” said the chocolate-, cheese-, and dog-drool-sodden kid.

“I want him to stay, Dad,” Sophie said. “Alvin and Mohammed want him to stay, too.”

Charlie thought that perhaps he had not been strict enough in setting limits for his daughter. Maybe after losing her mother, he just hadn’t had the heart to say no to her, and now she was taking hostages.

“Honey, Matty has to get cleaned up. His mommy is coming to get him so he can go be traumatized in his own house.”

“No! He’s mine.”

“Honey, tell Mohammed to let me in. If we don’t get Matty cleaned up, he won’t be able to come back.”

“He can sleep in your room,” Sophie said. “I’ll take care of him.”

“No, young lady, you tell Mohammed to get—”

“I have to pee,” Matthew said. He climbed to his feet and skipped by Alvin, who followed him, then under Mohammed and past Charlie and Cassandra to the bathroom. “Hi,” he said as he went by. He closed the door and they could hear the sound of tinkle. Alvin and Mohammed bullied their way through the doorway and waited outside the bathroom.

Sophie sat down hard, her feet splayed out, her lower lip pushed out like the cowcatcher on a steam engine. Her shoulders started heaving before he could hear the sob—like she was saving up breath—then the wailing and the tears. Charlie went to her and picked her up.

“I–I—I–I, he—he—he—he—”

“It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.”

“But I love him.”

“I know you do, honey. It’ll be okay. He’ll go to his house and you can still love him.”

“Noooooooooooooooooooooo—”

She buried her face in his jacket, and as much as his heart was breaking for his daughter, he was also thinking about how much Three Fingered Wu was going to ding him for getting the chocolate stain out of his jacket.

“They just let him go pee,” Cassandra said, staring at the hellhounds. “Just like that. I thought they were going to eat him. They wouldn’t let me near him.”

“It’s okay,” Charlie said. “You didn’t know.”

“Know what?”

“They love the Crunchy Cheese Newts.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Sorry. Look, Cassie, can you clean up Sophie and Matty and take care of this? I have some stuff in my date book I have to take care of right away.”

“Sure, but—”

“Sophie will be fine. Won’t you, honey?”

Sophie nodded sadly and wiped her eyes on his coat. “I missed you, Daddy.”

“I missed you, too, sweetie. I’ll be home tonight.”

He kissed her, got his date book from the bedroom, and ran around the apartment collecting his keys, cane, hat, and man purse. “Thanks, Cassie. You have no idea how grateful I am.”

“Sorry about your mother, Charlie,” Cassandra said as he passed.

“Yeah, thanks,” Charlie said, quickly checking the edge of the sword in his cane as he went by.

“Charlie, your life is out of control,” Cassandra said, now slipping back into the unflappable persona that they were all used to.

“Okay, I’ll need to borrow your strappy black pumps, too,” Charlie said as he headed out the door.

“I think I’ve made my point,” Cassie called after him.

Ray stopped Charlie at the bottom of the stairs. “You got a minute, boss?”

“Not really, Ray. I’m in a hurry.”

“Well, I just wanted to apologize.”

“For what?”

“Well, it seems silly now, but I kind of suspected you of being a serial killer.”

Charlie nodded as if he were considering the grave consequences of Ray’s confession, when, in fact, he was trying to remember if there was any gas in the van. “Well, Ray, I accept your apology, and I’m sorry I ever gave you that impression.”

“I think all those years on the force made me suspicious, but Inspector Rivera stopped by and set me straight.”

“He did, did he? What exactly did he say?”

“He said that you had been checking some stuff out for him, getting into places he couldn’t get without a warrant and so forth, stuff that you’d both get in a lot of trouble for if anyone found out, but was helping to put the bad guys away. He said that’s why you’re so secretive.”

“Yes,” Charlie said solemnly, “I have been fighting crime in my spare time, Ray. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you.”

“I understand,” Ray said, backing away from the stairway. “Again, I’m sorry. I feel like a traitor.”

“It’s okay, Ray. But I really have to go. You know, fighting the Forces of Darkness and all.” Charlie held his cane out as if it were a sword and he was charging into action, which, bizarrely, it was and he was.

Charlie had six days to retrieve three soul vessels if he was going to get caught up before he returned to Arizona for his mother’s funeral. Two, the names that had appeared in his date book the same day as Madison McKerny were seriously overdue. The last had appeared in the book only a couple of days ago, when he was in Arizona—yet it was in his own handwriting. He’d always thought that he had been doing some kind of sleep writing, but now, this was a whole new twist. He promised himself he would freak out about it as soon as he had some time.

Meanwhile, with the near-death hand job and the dead-mom thing, he hadn’t even done the preliminary research on the first of the two, Esther Johnson and Irena Posokovanovich, and both were now past their pickup date—one by three days. What if the sewer harpies had already gotten there? As strong as they’d become already, he didn’t even want to think about what they could do if they got hold of another soul. He considered calling Rivera to watch his back when he went to the house, but what would he say he was doing? The sharp-faced cop knew there was something supernatural going on, and he’d taken Charlie’s word that he was one of the good guys (not a hard sell when he’d seen the sewer harpy driving a three-inch claw up his nostril only to survive nine rounds of 9 mm in the torso and still fly away).

Charlie was driving with no destination, heading into Pacific Heights just because the traffic was lighter in that direction. He pulled over to the curb and called information.

“I need a number and address for an Esther Johnson.”

“There’s no Esther Johnson, sir, but I have three E. Johnsons.”

“Can you give me the addresses?”

She gave him the two who had addresses. A recording offered to dial the number for him for an additional charge of fifty cents.

“Yeah, how much to drive me there?” Charlie asked the computer voice. Then he hung up and dialed the E. Johnson with no address.

“Hi, could I speak with Esther Johnson,” Charlie said cheerfully.

“There’s no Esther Johnson here,” said a man’s voice. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

“Wait. Was there an Esther Johnson there, until maybe three days ago?” Charlie asked. “I saw the E. Johnson in the phone book.”

“That’s me,” said the man, “I’m Ed Johnson.”

“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Johnson.” Charlie disconnected and dialed the next E. Johnson.

“Hello,” a woman’s voice.

“Hi, could I speak to Esther Johnson, please?”

A deep breath. “Who is calling?”

Charlie used a ruse that had worked a dozen times before. “This is Charlie Asher, of Asher’s Secondhand. We’ve taken in some merchandise that has Esther Johnson’s name on it and we wanted to make sure it’s not stolen.”

“Well, Mr. Asher, I’m sorry to tell you that my aunt passed away three days ago.”

“Bingo!” Charlie said.

“Pardon?”

“Sorry,” Charlie said. “My associate is playing a scratch-off lotto ticket here in the shop, and he’s just won ten thousand dollars.”

“Mr. Asher, this isn’t really a good time. Is this merchandise you have valuable?”

“No, just some old clothes.”

“Another time, then?” The woman sounded not so much bereaved as harried. “If you don’t mind.”

“No, I’m sorry for your loss,” Charlie said. He disconnected, checked the address, and headed up toward Golden Gate Park and the Haight.

The Haight: mecca for the Free Love movement of the sixties, where the Beat Generation begat the Flower Children, where kids from all over the country had come to tune in, turn on, and drop out—and had kept coming, even as the neighborhood went through alternating waves of renewal and decline. Now, as Charlie drove down Haight Street, amid the head shops, vegetarian restaurants, hippie boutiques, music stores, and coffeehouses, he saw hippies that ranged in age from fifteen to seventy. Grizzled oldsters panhandling or passing out pamphlets, and young, white-Rastafarian dreadlocked teenagers in flowing skirts or hemp drawstring trousers, with shining piercings and vacant pot-blissed stares. He passed brown-toothed crackheads barking at cars as they passed, a spiky holdover here and there from the punk movement, old guys in berets and wayfarers who might have stepped out of a jazz club in 1953. It wasn’t so much like the hands of time had stood still here, more like they’d been thrown in the air in exasperation, the clock declaring, “Whatever! I’m outta here.”

Esther Johnson’s house was just a couple of blocks off Haight, and Charlie was lucky enough to find parking in a twenty-minute green zone nearby. (If the time came that he ever got to talk to someone in charge, he was going to make a case for special parking privileges for Death Merchants, for while it was nice that no one could see him when he was retrieving a soul vessel, some cool Death plates or “black” parking zones would be even better.)

The house was a small bungalow, unusual for this neighborhood, where most everything was three stories tall and painted in whatever color would contrast most with the house next to it. Charlie had taught Sophie her colors here, using grand Victorians as color swatches.

“Orange, Daddy. Orange.”

“Yes, honey, the man barfed up orange. Look at that house, Sophie, it’s purple.”

The block did have its share of transients, so he knew the doors of the Johnson house would be locked. Ring the bell and try to sneak through, or wait? He really couldn’t afford to wait—the sewer harpies had hissed at him from a grate as he approached the house. He rang the bell, then quickstepped to the side.

A pretty, dark-haired woman of about thirty, wearing jeans and a peasant blouse, opened the door, looked around, and said, “Hello, can I help you?”

Charlie nearly fell through a window. He looked behind his back, then back at the woman. No, she was looking right at him.

“Yes, you rang the bell?”

“Oh, me? Yes,” Charlie said. “I’m, uh—you meant me, right?”

The woman stepped back into the house. “What can I do for you?” she said, a bit stern now.

“Oh, sorry—Charlie Asher—I own a secondhand store over in North Beach, I just talked to you on the phone, I think.”

“Yes. But I told you that it wasn’t important.”

“Right, right, right. You did, but I was in the neighborhood, and I thought, well, I’d just drop by.”

“I got the impression you were calling from your shop. You got all the way across town in five minutes?”

“Oh, right, well, the van is like a mobile shop to me.”

“So the person who won the lotto is with you?”

“Right, no, he quit. I had to kick him out of the van. New money, you know? All full of himself. Will probably buy a big rock of cocaine and a half-dozen hookers and he’ll be broke by the weekend. Good riddance, I say.”

The woman backed another step into the house and pulled the door partway shut. “Well, if you have the clothes with you, I suppose I can take a look at them.”

“Clothes?” Charlie couldn’t believe she could see him. He was completely screwed now. He’d never get the soul vessel and then—well, he didn’t want to think of what would happen then.

“The clothes you said you thought might belong to my aunt. I could look at them.”

“Oh, I don’t have those with me.”

Now she had the door closed to the point where he could see just one blue eye, the embroidery around the neckline of her blouse, the button on her jeans, and two toes. (She was barefoot.) “Maybe you’d better check another time. I’m trying to get my aunt’s things together, and I’m doing it all by myself, so it’s a little hectic. She was in this house for forty-two years. I’m overwhelmed.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Charlie said, thinking, What the hell am I talking about? “I do this all the time, uh, Ms.—”

“Mrs., actually. Mrs. Elizabeth Sarkoff.”

“Well, Mrs. Sarkoff, I do this sort of thing a lot, and sometimes it can get overwhelming going through the possessions of a loved one, especially if they’ve been in one place for a long time like your aunt. It helps to have someone who doesn’t have an emotional attachment to help sort things out. Plus, I have a pretty good eye for what’s valuable and what’s not.”

Charlie wanted to give himself a high five for coming up with that on the spur of the moment.

“And do you charge for this service?”

“No, no, no, but I may make an offer to buy items you’d like to get rid of, or you can place them in my shop on consignment if you’d prefer.”

Elizabeth Sarkoff sighed heavily and hung her head. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to take advantage.”

“It would be my pleasure,” he said.

Mrs. Sarkoff swung the door wide. “Thank God you showed up, Mr. Asher. I just spent an hour trying to figure out which set of elephant salt-and-pepper shakers to keep and which to throw away. She has ten pairs! Ten! Please come in.”

Charlie sauntered through the door feeling very proud of himself. Six hours later, when he was waist deep in porcelain-cow figurines, and he still hadn’t located the soul vessel, he lost all sense of accomplishment.

“So she had a special connection to Holsteins?” Charlie called to Mrs. Sarkoff, who was in the next room, inside a walk-in closet, sorting through yet another huge pile of collectible crap.

“No, I don’t think so. Lived her whole life here in the City. I’m not sure if she ever saw a cow outside of those talking ones that sell cheese on TV.”

“Swell,” Charlie said. He’d been through every inch of the house except the closet where Elizabeth Sarkoff was working and he hadn’t found the soul vessel. He’d peeked into the closet a couple of times, taking a fast inventory of the contents, and didn’t see anything glowing red. He was starting to suspect that either he was too late, and the Underworlders had gotten the soul vessel, or it had been buried with Esther Johnson.

He was heading down toward the basement again when his cell phone rang.

“Charlie Asher’s phone,” Charlie said.

“Charlie, it’s Cassie. Sophie wants to know if you’re going to come home in time to tell her a story and tuck her in. I gave her dinner and her bath.”

Charlie ran up the stairs and looked out the front windows. It had gotten dark and he hadn’t even noticed. “Crap, Cassie, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was so late. I’m with an estate client. Tell her I’ll be home to tuck her in.”

“Okay, I will,” Cassandra said, sounding exhausted. “And, Charlie, you can clean up the bathroom floor. You’ve got to do something about those dogs getting in the tub with her. There are drifts of Mr. Bubble suds all over your apartment.”

“They do enjoy their bath.”

“That’s cute, Charlie. If I didn’t love your sister I’d hire someone to break your legs.”

“My mom just died, Cassie.”

“You’re playing the dead-mom card? Now? Charlie Asher, you—”

“Gotta go,” Charlie said. “Be home soon.” Charlie pushed the disconnect button four times, then one more time, just to be sure. Cassandra had been such a sweet woman, only days ago. What happened to people?

Charlie bounded into the bedroom. “Mrs. Sarkoff?”

“Yes, still in here,” came a voice from the closet.

“I’m going to have to be going. My daughter needs me.”

“I hope everything is all right.”

“Yes, not an emergency, I’ve just been gone for a couple of days. Look, if you need any more help—”

“No, I wouldn’t think of it. Why don’t you give me a few days to sort things out and I’ll bring some items by your shop.”

“I don’t mind, really.” Charlie felt silly yelling to someone who was in a closet.

“No, I’ll be in touch, I promise.”

Charlie couldn’t think of any way of pressing the situation right now, and he needed to get home.

“Okay, then. I’ll be going.”

“Thank you, Mr. Asher. You’ve been a lifesaver.”

“You’re welcome. Bye.” Charlie let himself out and the front door locked behind him with a click. He could hear stirring below the street—the rustling of feathers, the distant calls of ravens—as he made his way back to where he had parked his van. And when he got there, of course, it had been towed.

When she heard the front door lock, Audrey went to the back of the closet and moved the big cardboard wardrobe box aside to reveal an elderly woman who was sitting calmly in a folding lawn chair, knitting.

“He’s gone, Esther. You can come out now.”

“Well, help me up, dear, I think I’m stuck like this,” Esther said.

“I’m sorry,” Audrey said. “I had no idea he’d stay that long.”

“I don’t understand why you let him in in the first place,” Esther said, creaky but on her feet now.

“So he could satisfy his curiosity. See for himself.”

“And where did you get that Elizabeth Sarkoff name?”

“My second-grade teacher. It was the first thing I could think of.”

“Well, I guess you fooled him. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“He’ll be back. You know that, right?” Audrey said.

“I hope not too soon,” Esther said. “I really need to visit the powder room.”

Where is it, lover?” hissed the Morrigan from the grate on Haight Street, near where Charlie was trying to flag down a cab. “You’re slipping, Meat,” said the hellish chorus.

Charlie looked around to see if anyone else had heard, but passersby seemed very intent on their own conversations, or if alone, were staring intently at a point only twelve feet in front of them on the sidewalk, both strategies to avoid eye contact with the panhandlers and crazy people who lined the sidewalk. Not even the crazy people seemed to notice.

“Fuck off,” Charlie said, in a furious whisper at the curb. “Fucking harpies.”

“Oh, lover, this teasing is so delicious. The little one’s blood will be so delicious!”

The young homeless guy sitting just down the curb looked up at Charlie. “Dude, get the clinic to up your lithium and they’ll go away. It worked for me.”

Charlie nodded and gave the guy a dollar. “Thanks, I’ll look into that.”

He’d have to call Jane in Arizona in the morning and find out how far the shadow had moved down the mesa, if it had moved. Why would what he did or didn’t do in San Francisco affect what was happening in Sedona? All this time he’d been trying to convince himself that it wasn’t about him, and now it appeared that it very much was about him. The Luminatus will rise in the City of Two Bridges, Vern had said. What kind of dependable prophecy can you get from a guy named Vern, anyway? (Come on down to Vern’s Discount Prophecy—The Nostradamus with the Low-Price Promise.) It was absurd. He had to keep going forward, doing his part, and doing his best to collect the soul vessels that came to him. And if he didn’t, well, the Forces of Darkness would rise and rule over the world. So what. Bring it on, sewer hoes! Big deal.

But his inner Beta Male, the gene that had kept his kind alive for three million years, spoke up: Forces of Darkness ruling the world? Okay, that would be bad, it said.

She so loved the smell of Pine-Sol,” said the third woman that day to claim to have been Charlie’s mother’s best friend. The funeral hadn’t been so bad, but now there was a potluck in the clubhouse of a nearby gated senior community where Buddy had lived before he moved in with Charlie’s mom. The couple had returned there often to play cards and socialize with Buddy’s old crew.

“Did you get some sloppy joe?” asked best friend number three. Despite the hundred-degree heat, she wore a pink sweatsuit emblazoned with rhinestone poodles and carried a nervous little black poodle under her arm everywhere she went. The dog licked her potato salad while she was distracted by talking to Charlie. “I don’t know if your mother ever ate sloppy joe. Only thing I ever saw her take in was an old-fashioned. She did enjoy her cocktails.”

“Yes, she did,” Charlie said. “And I think I’m going to go enjoy one myself, right now.”

Charlie had flown into Sedona that morning after spending the night in San Francisco trying to find the two overdue soul vessels. Although he couldn’t find a burial notice for Esther Johnson, the pretty brunette woman at her house had told him that she had been interred the day after he’d first gone to the house in the Haight, and he assumed that the soul vessel had been, once again, buried with her. (Was the brunette’s name Elizabeth? Of course it was Elizabeth, he was fooling himself to even pretend to forget. Beta Males do not forget the names of pretty women. Charlie could remember the name of the centerfold of the first Playboy he’d ever swiped from the shelves in his dad’s shop. He even remembered that her turnoffs were bad breath, mean people, and genocide, and resolved that he would never have, be, or commit any of those things, just in case he ran into her sometime when she was casually sunning her breasts on the hood of a car.) There was no trace of the other woman, Irena Posokovanovich, who was supposed to have died days ago. No notice, no records at hospitals, no one living in her house. It was as if she’d evaporated, and taken her soul vessel with her. He had a couple more weeks to get to the third name in his date book, but he wasn’t sure what he was going to have to deal with to get to it. Darkness was rising.

Someone beside him said, “Small talk doesn’t really get any smaller than when you’ve lost a loved one, huh?”

Charlie turned toward the voice, surprised to see Vern Glover, diminutive Death Merchant, munching some coleslaw and ranch beans.

“Thanks for coming,” Charlie said automatically.

Vern waved off the thanks with his plastic fork. “You saw the shadow?”

Charlie nodded. When he’d gotten to his mother’s house this morning, the shadow of the mesa had reached his mother’s front yard, and the calls of the carrion birds that churned in its edges were deafening. “You didn’t tell me that no one else could see it. I called my sister from San Francisco to check the progress, but she didn’t see anything.”

“Sorry, they can’t see it—at least as far as I’ve ever been able to tell they can’t. It was gone for five days. It came back this morning.”

“When I came back?”

“I guess. Did we cause this? Doughnuts and coffee and it’s the end of the world?”

“I missed two souls back home,” Charlie said, smiling at a gentleman in burgundy golf wear who held his hand to his heart in sympathy as he passed them.

“Missed? Did the—what did you call them—the sewer harpies get them?”

“Could be,” Charlie said. “But whatever is happening, it seems to be following me.”

“Sorry,” Vern said. “I’m glad we talked, though. I don’t feel so alone.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said.

“And sorry about your mother,” Vern added quickly. “You okay?”

“Hasn’t even hit me yet,” Charlie said. “I guess I’m an orphan.”

“I’ll make sure and check out whoever gets her necklace,” Vern said. “I’ll be careful with it.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “You think we have any control over who gets the soul next? I mean really. The Great Big Book says it will move on as it should.”

“I guess,” Vern said. “Every time I’ve sold one the glow has gone out right away. If it wasn’t the right person, that wouldn’t happen, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Charlie said. “So there is some order to this.”

“You’re the expert,” Vern said—then he dropped his fork. “Who is that? She’s so hot.”

“That’s my sister,” Charlie said. Jane was coming across the room toward them. She was wearing Charlie’s charcoal double-breasted Armani and the strappy black pumps; her platinum hair was lacquered into thirties finger waves, which flowed out from under a small black hat with a veil that covered her face down to her lips, which shone like red Ferraris. To Charlie, she looked, as usual, like the cross between a robot assassin and a Dr. Seuss character, but if he tried to squint past the fact that she was his sister, and a lesbian, and his sister, then he could possibly see how the hair, lips, and sheer linear altitude of her might strike someone as hot. Especially someone like Vern, who would require climbing equipment and oxygen to scale a woman Jane’s height.

“Vern, I’d like you to meet my incredibly hot sister, Jane. Jane, this is Vern.”

“Hi, Vern.” Jane took Vern’s hand and the Death Merchant winced at her grip.

“Sorry for your loss,” Vern said.

“Thanks,” Jane said. “Did you know our mother?”

“Vern knew her very well,” Charlie said. “In fact, it was one of Mom’s dying wishes that you let Vern buy you a doughnut. Wasn’t it, Vern?”

Vern nodded so hard that Charlie thought he could hear vertebrae cracking.

“Her dying wish,” Vern said.

Jane didn’t move, or say anything. Because her eyes were covered, Charlie couldn’t see her expression, but he guessed that she might be trying to burn holes in his aorta with her laser-beam vision.

“You know, Vern, that would be lovely, but could I take a rain check? We just buried my mother and I have some things to go over with my brother.”

“That’s fine,” Vern said. “And it doesn’t have to be a doughnut, if you’re watching your figure. You know, a salad, coffee, anything.”

“Sure,” Jane said. “Since it’s what Mom wanted. I’ll give you a call. Charlie told you I’m a lesbian, though, right?”

“Oh my God,” Vern said. He almost doubled over with excitement before he remembered that he was at a postfuneral potluck and he was openly imagining a ménage à trois with the deceased’s daughter. “Sorry,” he squealed.

“See you, Vern,” Charlie said as his sister hustled him toward the kitchen cubicle of the clubhouse. “I’ll e-mail you about that other thing.”

As soon as they rounded the corner into the kitchen Jane punched Charlie in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him.

“What were you thinking?” Jane hissed. She flipped back her veil so he could see just how pissed off she was, just in case the punch in the breadbasket hadn’t conveyed the message.

Charlie was gasping and laughing at the same time. “It’s what Mom would have wanted.”

“My mom just died, Charlie.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “But you have no idea what you’ve just done for that guy in there.”

“Really?” Jane raised an eyebrow.

“He will remember this day always,” Charlie said. “That guy will never again have a sexual fantasy in which you do not walk through, probably wearing borrowed shoes.”

“And you don’t find that creepy?”

“Well, yes, you’re my sister, but it’s a seminal moment for Vern.”

Jane nodded. “You’re a pretty good guy, Charlie, looking out for a tiny stranger like that.”

“Yeah, well, you know—”

“For an ass bag!” Jane said as she sank a fist into Charlie’s solar plexus.

Strangely, as he gasped for breath, Charlie felt that wherever his mother was right now, she was pleased with him.

Bye, Mom, he thought.