A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) (9 page)

“Then you’re not one of us?”

He tried to think of what “us” might be? Irish? Low blood pressure? Nymphomaniac? Why did he even think that? “Us? What do you mean, ‘us’?”

She backed away a step. “No. You don’t just take the weak and the sick, do you? You take anyone.”

“Take? What do you mean, ‘take’?”

“You don’t even know, do you?”

“Know what?” Charlie was getting very nervous. As a Beta Male, he found it difficult enough to function under the attention of a beautiful woman, but she was just plain spooky. “Wait. Can you see this thing glowing?” He held out the cigarette case.

“No glow. It just felt like it belonged here,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Charlie Asher. This is Asher’s.”

“Well, Charlie, you seem like a nice guy, and I don’t know exactly what you are, and it doesn’t seem like you know. You don’t, do you?”

“I’ve been going through some changes,” Charlie said, wondering why he felt compelled to share this at all.

The redhead nodded, as if confirming something to herself. “Okay. I know what it’s like to, uh, to find yourself thrown into a situation where forces beyond your control are changing you into someone, something you don’t have an owner’s manual for. I understand what it is to not know. But someone, somewhere, does know. Someone can tell you what’s going on.”

“What are you talking about?” But he knew what she was talking about. What he didn’t know was how she could possibly know.

“You make people die, don’t you, Charlie?” She said it like she had worked up the courage to tell him that he had some spinach in his teeth. More of a service to him than an accusation.

“How do you—?” How did she—

“Because it’s what I do. Not like you, but it’s what I do. Find them, Charlie. Backtrack and find whoever was there when your world changed.”

Charlie looked at her, then at the cigarette case, then at the redhead again, who was no longer smiling, but was stepping backward toward the door. Trying to stay in touch with normal, he focused on the cigarette case and said, “I suppose I can do an appraisal—”

He heard the bell over the door jingle, and when he looked up she was gone.

He didn’t see her moving by the windows on either side of the door; she was just gone. He ran to the front of the store and out the door onto the sidewalk. The
Mason Street
cable car was just topping the hill up by
California Street
and he could hear the bell, there was a thin fog coming up from the Bay that threw colorful halos around the neon signs of the other businesses, but there was no striking redhead on the street. He went to the corner and looked down Vallejo, but again no redhead, just the Emperor, sitting against the building with his dogs.

“Good evening, Charlie.”

“Your Majesty, did you see a redhead go by here just now?”

“Oh yes. Spoke to her. I’m not sure you have a chance there, Charlie, I believe she’s spoken for. And she did warn me to stay away from you.”

“Why? Did she say why?”

“She said that you were Death.”

“I am?” Charlie said. “Am I?” His breath caught in his throat as the day played back in his head. “What if I am?”

“You know, son,” the Emperor said, “I am not an expert in dealing with the fairer sex, but you might want to save that bit of information until the third date or so, after they’ve gotten to know you a little.”

W
hile Charlie’s Beta Male imagination may have often turned him toward timidity and even paranoia, when it came to accepting the unacceptable it served him like Kevlar toilet paper—bulletproof, if a tad disagreeable in application. The inability to believe the unbelievable would not be his downfall. Charlie Asher would never be a bug splattered on the smoky windscreen of dull imagination.

He knew that all the things that had happened to him in the last day were outside of the limits of possibility for most people, and since his only corroborating witness was a man who believed himself to be the Emperor of San Francisco, Charlie knew he would never be able to convince anyone that he had been pursued and attacked by giant foulmouthed ravens and then declared the tour guide to the undiscovered country by a sultry oracle in
fuck-me pumps
.

Not even Jane would give him that kind of quarter. Only one person would have, could have, and for the ten-thousandth time he felt Rachel’s absence collapsing in his chest like a miniature black hole. Thus, Sophie became his co-conspirator.

The tiny kid, dressed in Elmo overalls and baby Doc Martens (courtesy of Aunt Jane), was propped up in her car seat on the breakfast bar next to the goldfish bowl. (Charlie had bought her six big goldfish about the time she’d started to notice moving objects. A girl needs pets. He’d named them after TV lawyers. Currently Matlock was tracking Perry Mason, trying to eat a long strand of fish doo that was trailing out of Perry’s poop chute.)

Sophie was starting to show some of her mother’s dark hair, and if Charlie saw it right, the same expression of bemused affection toward him (plus a drool slick).

“So I am Death,” Charlie said as he tried to construct a tuna-fish sandwich. “Daddy is Death, sweetie.” He checked the toast, not trusting the pop-up mechanism because the toaster people sometimes just liked to fuck with you.

“Death,” Charlie said as the can opener slipped and he barked his bandaged hand on the counter. “Dammit!”

Sophie gurgled and let loose a happy baby burble, which Charlie took to mean
Do tell, Daddy? Please go on, pray tell
.

“I can’t even leave the house for fear of someone dropping dead at my feet. I’m Death, honey. Sure, you laugh now, but you’ll never get into a good preschool with a father who puts people down for their dirt nap.”

Sophie blew a spit bubble of sympathy. Charlie popped the toast up manually. It was a little rare, but if he pushed it down again it would burn, unless he watched it every second and popped it up manually again. So now he’d probably be infected with some rare and debilitating undercooked toast pathogen. Mad toast disease!
Fucking toaster people
.

“This is the toast of Death, young lady.” He showed her the toast. “Death’s toast.”

He put the toast on the counter and went back to attacking the tuna can.

“Maybe she was speaking figuratively? I mean, maybe the redhead just meant that I was, you know, deadly boring.” Of course that didn’t really explain all the other weird stuff that had been happening. “You think?” he asked Sophie.

He looked for an answer and the kid was wearing that Rachelesque smart-ass grin (minus teeth). She was enjoying his torment, and strangely enough, he felt better knowing that.

The can opener slipped again, spurting tuna juice on his shirt and sending his toast scooting to the floor, and now there was fuzz on it. Fuzz on his toast! Fuzz on the toast of Death. What the hell good was it to be the Lord of the Underworld if there was fuzz on your underdone toast. “Fuck!”

He snatched the toast from the floor and sent it sailing by Sophie into the living room. The baby followed it with her eyes, then looked back at her father with a delighted squeal, as if saying,
Do it again, Daddy. Do it again!

Charlie picked her up out of the car seat and held her tight, smelling her sour-sweet baby smell, his tears squeezing out onto her overalls. He could do this if Rachel was here, but he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, without her.

He just wouldn’t go out. That was the solution. The only way to keep the people of San Francisco safe was to stay in his apartment. So for the next four days he stayed in the apartment with Sophie, sending Mrs. Ling from upstairs out for groceries. (And he was accumulating a fairly large collection of vegetables for which he had no name nor any idea of how to prepare, as Mrs. Ling, regardless of what he put on the list, always did her shopping in the markets of Chinatown.) And after two days, when a new name appeared on the message pad next to his bed, Charlie responded by hiding the message pad under the phone book in a kitchen drawer.

It was on day five that he saw the shadow of a raven against the roof entrance of the building across the street. At first he wasn’t sure whether it was a giant raven, or just a normal-sized raven projecting a shadow, but when he realized that it was noon and any normal shadow would be cast straight down, the tiny raven of denial vanished in a wisp. He pulled the blinds on that side of the apartment and sat in the locked bedroom with Sophie, a box of Pampers, a basket of produce, a six-pack each of baby formula and orange soda, and hid out until the phone rang.

“What do you think you’re doing?” said a very deep man’s voice on the other end of the line. “Are you insane?”

Charlie was taken aback; from the caller ID, he’d expected a wrong number. “I’m eating this thing I think is either a melon or a squash.” He looked at the green thing, which tasted like a melon but looked more like a squash, with spikes. (Mrs. Ling had called it “shut-up-and-eat-it-good-for-you.”)

The man said, “You’re screwing up. You have a job to do. Do what the book says or everything that means anything to you will be taken away. I mean it.”

“What book? Who is this?” Charlie asked. He thought the voice sounded familiar, and it immediately sent him into alarm mode for some reason.

“I can’t tell you that, I’m sorry,” said the man. “I really am.”

“I’ve got caller ID, you nit. I know where you’re calling from.”

“Oops,” said the man.

“You should have thought of that. What kind of ominous power of darkness do you think you are if you don’t even block caller ID?”

The little readout on the phone said
Fresh Music
and a number. Charlie called the number back but no one answered. He ran to the kitchen, dug the phone book out of the drawer, and looked up Fresh Music. It was a record store off upper Market in the Castro district.

The phone rang again and he grabbed the handset off the counter so violently he nearly chipped a tooth in answering.

“You merciless bastard!” Charlie screamed into the phone. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been going through, you heartless monster!”

“Well, fuck you, Asher!” Lily said. “Just because I’m a kid doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings.” And she hung up.

Charlie called back.

“Asher’s Secondhand,” Lily answered, “family-owned by bourgeoisie douche waffles for over thirty years.”

“Lily, I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else. What did you call about?”

“Moi?”
Lily said.
“Je me fous de ta gueule, espèce de gaufre de douche.”

“Lily, stop speaking French. I said I was sorry.”

“There’s a cop down here to see you,” she said.

C
harlie had Sophie strapped to his chest like a terrorist baby bomb when he came down the back steps. She had just gotten to the point where she could hold up her head, so he had strapped her in face-out so she could look around. The way her arms and legs waved around as Charlie walked, she looked as if she was skydiving and using a skinny nerd as a parachute.

The cop stood at the counter opposite Lily, looking like a cognac ad in an Italian-cut double-breasted suit in indigo raw silk with a buff linen shirt and yellow tie. He was about fifty, Hispanic, lean, with sharp facial features and the aspect of a predatory bird. His hair was combed straight back and the gray streaks at the temples made it appear that he was moving toward you even when he stood still.

“Inspector Alphonse Rivera,” the cop said, extending his hand. “Thanks for coming down. The young lady said you were working last Monday night.”

Monday. The day he’d battled the ravens back in the alley, the day the pale redhead had come into the store.

“You don’t have to tell him anything, Asher,” Lily said, obviously renewing her loyalty in spite of his douche wafflosity.

“Thanks, Lily, why don’t you take a break and go see how things are going in the abyss.”

She grumbled, then got something out of the drawer under the register, presumably her cigarettes, and retreated out the back door.

“Why isn’t that kid in school?” Rivera asked.

“She’s special,” Charlie said. “You know, homeschooled.”

“That what makes her so cheerful?”

“She’s studying the Existentialists this month. Asked for a study day last week to kill an Arab on the beach.”

Rivera smiled and Charlie relaxed a little. He produced a photograph from his breast pocket and held it out to Charlie. Sophie made as if to grab it. The photograph was of an older gentleman in his Sunday best standing on the steps of a church. Charlie recognized the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, which was just a few blocks away on
Washington Square
.

“Did you see this man Monday night? He was wearing a charcoal overcoat and a hat that night.”

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t,” Charlie said. And he hadn’t. “I was here in the store until about ten. We had a few customers, but not this fellow.”

“Are you sure? His name is James O’Malley. He isn’t well. Cancer. His wife said he went out for a walk about dusk Monday night and he never came back.”