A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) (27 page)

T
he 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.

W
ell, 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.

L
ois 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.

L
ois 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?”