A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) (31 page)

“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.

W
hen 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.”

W
here 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.

S
he 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?”