A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) (13 page)

Charlie was thrown by all of it, coming as it did when he was in a panic about his daughter and had just driven across town like a madman. He was sure the gestures of respect were just some dark cover-up for a favor or a misdeed, or, as often was the case, the teenager was messing with him. So he sat down on one of the high hardwood stools near the desk and said, “Cop? Guy? ’Splain, please. And I didn’t kill anyone.”

Lily took a deep breath. “That cop that was by here the other day came back. Turns out that guy you went up to see in
Pacific
Heights
last week”—she looked at something she had written on her arm in red ink—“Michael Mainheart, killed himself. And he left a note to you. Saying that you were to take his and his wife’s clothes and sell them at the market rate. And then he wrote”—and here she again referred to her ink-stained arm—“‘What about “I just want to die” did you not understand?’” Lily looked up.

“That’s what he said after I gave him CPR the other day,” Charlie said.

“So, did you kill him? Or whatever you call it. You can tell me.” She curtsied again, which disturbed Charlie more than somewhat. He’d long ago defined his relationship with Lily as being built on a strong base of affectionate contempt, and this was throwing everything off.

“No, I did not kill him. What kind of question is that?”

“Did you kill the guy with the cigarette case?”

“No! I never even saw that guy.”

“You realize that I am your trusted minion,” Lily said, this time adding another bow.

“Lily, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing wrong at all, Mr. Asher—uh, Charles. Do you prefer Charles or Charlie?”

“You’re asking now? What else did the cop say?”

“He wanted to talk to you. I guess they found that Mainheart guy dressed in his wife’s clothing. He hadn’t been home from the hospital for an hour before he sent the nurse away, got all cross-dressed up, then took a handful of painkillers.”

Charlie nodded, thinking about how adamant Mainheart had been about having his wife’s clothes out of the house. He was using any way he could to feel close to her, and it wasn’t working. And when wearing her clothes didn’t put him closer, he’d gone after her the only way he knew how, by joining her in death. Charlie understood. If it hadn’t been for Sophie, he might have tried to join Rachel.

“Pretty kinky, huh?” Lily said.

“No!” Charlie barked. “No it’s not, Lily. It’s not like that at all. Don’t even think that. Mr. Mainheart died of grief. It might look like something else, but that’s what it was.”

“Sorry,” Lily said. “You’re the expert.”

Charlie was staring at the floor, trying to put some sense to it all, wondering if his losing the fur coat that was Mrs. Mainheart’s soul vessel meant that the couple would never be together again. Because of him.

“Oh yeah,” Lily added. “Mrs. Ling called down all freaked out and yelling all Chinesey about a black bird smashing the window—”

Charlie was off the stool and taking the stairs two at a time.

“She’s in your apartment,” Lily called after him.

T
here was an orange slick of TV attorneys floating on the top of the fishbowl when Charlie got to his apartment. The Asian powers were standing in his kitchen, Mrs. Korjev was holding Sophie tight to her chest, and the infant was virtually swimming, trying to escape the giant marshmallowy canyon of protection between the massive Cossack fun bags. Charlie snatched his daughter as she was sinking into the cleavage for the third time and held her tight.

“What happened?” he asked.

There followed a barrage of Chinese and Russian mixed with the odd English word:
bird, window, broken, black,
and
make shit on myself
.

“Stop!” Charlie held up a free hand. “Mrs. Ling, what happened?”

Mrs. Ling had recovered from the bird hitting the window and the mad dash down the steps, but she was now showing an uncharacteristic shyness, afraid that Charlie might notice the damp spot in the pocket of her frock where the recently deceased Barnaby Jones lay orangely awaiting introduction to some wonton, green onions, a pinch of five spices, and her soup pot. “Fish is fish,” she said to herself when she squirreled that rascal away. There were, after all, five more dead attorneys in the bowl, who would miss one?

“Oh, nothing,” said Mrs. Ling. “Bird break window and scare us. Not so bad now.”

Charlie looked to Mrs. Korjev. “Where?”

“On our floor. We are talking in hall. Speaking of what is best for Sophie, when
boom,
bird hits window and black ink run through window. We run here and lock door.” Both the widows had keys to Charlie’s apartment.

“I’ll have it fixed tomorrow,” Charlie said. “But that’s all. Nothing—no one came in?”

“Is third floor, Charlie. No one comes in.”

Charlie looked to the fishbowl. “What happened there?”

Mrs. Ling’s eyes went wide. “I have to go. Mah-jongg night at temple.”

“We come in, lock door,” explained Mrs. Korjev. “Fish are fine. Put Sophie in car seat like always we are doing, then go look in hallway for coast to be clear. When Mrs. Ling look back, fish are dead.”

“Not me! Is Russian who see dead fish,” said Mrs. Ling.

“It’s okay,” Charlie said. “Did you see any birds, anything dark in the apartment?”

The two women shook their heads. “Only upstairs,” Mrs. Ling said.

“Let’s go look,” Charlie said, moving Sophie to his hip and picking up his sword-cane. He led the two women to the little elevator, did a quick assessment of Mrs. Korjev’s size versus the cubic footage, and led them up the stairs. When he saw the broken bay window he felt a little weak in the knees. It wasn’t so much the window, it was what was on the roof across the street. Refracted a thousand times in the spiderwebbed safety glass was the shadow of a woman that was cast on the building. He handed the baby to Mrs. Korjev, approached the window, and knocked a hole in the glass to see better. As he did, the shadow slid down the side of the building, across the sidewalk, and into the storm drain next to where a dozen tourists had just disembarked from a cable car. None of them appeared to have seen anything. It was just past one and the sun was casting shadows nearly straight down. He looked back at the two windows.

“Did you see that?”

“You mean break window?” Mrs. Ling said, slowly approaching the window and peering through the hole Charlie had made. “Oh no.”

“What? What?”

Mrs. Ling looked back at Mrs. Korjev. “You are right. Flowers need water.”

Charlie looked through the hole in the window and saw that Mrs. Ling was referring to a window box full of dead, black geraniums.

“Safety bars on all the windows. Tomorrow,” Charlie said.

N
ot far away, as the crow flies, under Columbus Avenue, in a wide pipe junction where several storm sewers met, Orcus, the Ancient One, paced, bent over like a hunchback, the heavy spikes that jutted from his shoulders scraping the sides of the pipe, throwing off sparks and the smell of smoldering peat.

“You’re going to fuck up your spikes if you keep pacing like that,” said Babd.

She was crouched in one of the smaller pipes to the side, next to her sisters, Nemain and Macha. Except for Nemain, who was beginning to show a gunmetal relief of bird feathers over her body, they were devoid of depth; flat absences of light, absolute black even in the gloom filtering down through the storm grates—shadows, silhouettes, really—the darker ancestors of the modern mud-flap girls. Shades: delicate and female and fierce.

“Sit. Have a snack. What good to take the Above if you look like hell in the end?”

Orcus growled and spun on the Morrigan, the three. “Too long out of the air! Too long.” From the basket on his belt he hooked a human skull on one of his claws, popped it in his mouth, and crunched down on it.

The Morrigan laughed, sounding like wind through the pipes, pleased that he was enjoying their gift. They’d spent much of the day under San Francisco’s graveyards digging out the skulls (Orcus liked them decoffinated) and polishing off the dirt and detritus until they shone like bone china.

“We flew,” said Nemain. She took a moment to admire the blue-black feather shapes on her surface. “Above,” she added unnecessarily. “They are everywhere, like cherries waiting to be stolen.”

“Not stolen,” said Orcus. “You think like a crow. They are ours for the taking.”

“Oh yeah, well, where were you? I got these.” The shade held up
William
Creek
’s umbrella in one hand and the fur jacket she’d ripped away from Charlie Asher in the other. They still glowed red, but were rapidly dimming. “Because of these, I was Above. I flew.” When no one reacted, Nemain added, “Above.”

“I flew, too,” said Babd timidly. “A little.” She was a tad self-conscious that she’d manifested no feather patterns or dimension.

Orcus hung his great head. The Morrigan moved to his side and began stroking the long spikes that had once been wings. “We will all be Above, soon,” said Macha. “This new one doesn’t know what he is doing. He will make it so we can all be Above. Look how far we’ve come—and we are so close now. Two Above in such a short time. This New Meat, this ignorant one, he may be all we need.”

Orcus lifted his bull-like head and grinned, revealing a sawmill of teeth. “They will be like fruit for the picking.”

“See,” said Nemain. “Like I said. Did you know that Above you can see really far? Miles. And the wonderful smells. I never realized how damp and musty it is down here. Is there any reason that we can’t have a window?”

“Shut up!” growled Orcus.

“Jeez, bite my head off, why don’t you.”

“Don’t tease,” said the bullheaded Death. He rose and led the other Deaths, the Morrigan, down the pipe toward the financial district, to the buried Gold Rush ship where they made their home.

Do not seek death. Death will find you.

But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.

—Dag Hammarskjöld

M
ornings, 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.