Secondhand Souls

10. Remembrance of Things Past

She was so slight that her body made barely a rise in the sheets, like a wave on a calm pond from a phantom wind—her face might have been a skeletal mask laid upon the pillow for presentation, her long white hair brushed out to one side the way she liked it.

“You are trying to disappear,” Baptiste sang from the doorway, “but I see you.” He wheeled his mop bucket into her room.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Baptiste,” Helen said, her voice little more than a whisper.

“Bonjour, Madame Helen,” said Baptiste. “Comment allez-vous?”

“Pas trés bien. Je suis fatiguée, monsieur.”

“I won’t be long, then you can rest. Can I bring you anything, chère?”

“No, thank you. Thank you for speaking French with me, no one does that anymore. I spent my semester abroad in Paris, you know?”

She told him this every day he worked, and every day he replied, “Ah, the City of Light. So many delights. What, I wonder, is your favorite?”

And here, her answer often changed. “I loved walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg in the autumn, when the wind was blowing a little, and chestnuts would drop out of the trees and sometimes hit one of the old men who sat on the benches reading. Plop, right on the head.” She laughed, then coughed. “Now I’m the old one.”

“Nonsense, chère.” He was not so young himself, and by the end of his workday, gray stubble would show on his dark cheeks as if they had been dusted with ash.

“You want some oxygen?”

“Non, merci,” she said.

He was not authorized to put the cannula in her nose and turn on the oxygen, but he had done it before when she was in discomfort, and he did a lot of things he was not authorized to do. He rolled his bucket to the corner, dipped his mop in the water, then leaned on the ringer until it was nearly dry. When he wiped the mop out into the corner, the room filled with the smell of the lemon disinfectant, but above it he could still detect the acid smell of her organs shutting down. Helen had been in hospice for six months, longer than most of the patients. He had become attached to her and he was sad her time was coming to an end. Speaking French to her was a kindness he didn’t get to grant to most of the patients, although he made an effort to try to do something actively kind for each one of them, every day, even if it was only asking after a grandchild, changing the channel on the television, or singing a soft song to them as they slept.

They all would pass, and he would grieve for each one, even if he was only the man who mopped the floors, gathered the laundry, emptied the bins. He would say hello to each one every day, if they were conscious or not, and say good-bye each evening as well, so if they died in the night, good-bye would not go unsaid. But Helen concerned him more than the others. Her name had not appeared in his date book and he did not see the object around her glowing red. From her symptoms, he could tell he had only days to retrieve her soul vessel, and he did not want to go to her house, as he sometimes did. He did not want to see the life she had left, which was grand and full and opulent; he knew because she had told him, and he did not want to see what she was leaving because it would make him more sad.

He mopped from the wall to her bedside, then ran the mop under her bed and up onto some very nice Italian shoes. On the other side of the bed stood a sharp, well-dressed Latin man who was looking around the room with some urgency—trying to look around Baptiste, not at him.

“Who are you?” Baptiste asked, and the man in the nice suit leapt back as if he’d encountered an electric fence at Helen’s bedside.

“Santa Maria!” he said. Then he looked back quickly, as if something might be following. Finally, he looked at Baptiste. “You can see me?”

Baptiste smiled. “I can, but Madame Helen cannot.”

“I’m blind,” said Helen.

“What are you, some kind of ninny? Say hello to Madame,” said Baptiste.

Charlie paced across the parlor of the Three Jewel Buddhist Center, the claws on his duck feet snagging occasionally on the Persian rug, at which Audrey tried not to cringe. She was not attached to material things, but it was a nice rug.

“I’m telling you, Audrey, they’re squirrelly,” Charlie said.

“Really? Squirrelly? Who would have thought?”

“No, I don’t mean it that way. Well, yes that way, but what I’m saying is that the Squirrel People are going loopy, not exactly dirt-eating loonies, although there is a little of that. Okay, fine, they’ve turned into dirt-eating loonies. There, I’ve said it.”

“So they won’t help us find the Death Merchants or the missing soul vessels?”

“I went to ask them, but they…” Charlie considered for moment whether he wanted to say exactly what he had seen, and if he knew, in fact, what he had seen. “Look, they’re my friends, but the Squirrel People are loopy.”

“We prefer People of the Squirrel,” said Bob, the beefeater-bobcat guy, who stepped out from behind a wastebasket in the butler’s pantry and strode into the parlor using his spork as a walking stick. “Or just, the People.”

“You shouldn’t lurk, Bob, it’s not polite,” said Audrey.

“Your hair looks nice,” said Bob.

Audrey had not put any product in her hair and had just brushed it up and over, so it fell softly to her left shoulder. It did look nice, Charlie thought, and he wanted to punch Bob for having said so before him.

“He’s just trying to distract you,” Charlie said.

“I heard you two talking,” said Bob. “So we checked the places where we found the souls before, the Death Merchants.”

“And?” Audrey said.

“When were you spying on us?” Charlie asked.

“They’re all gone,” Bob said, ignoring Charlie’s question. “All of the Death Merchants that we took soul vessels from were killed by the Morrigan except Charlie and the tall Minty One. I don’t know if there are others.”

“When were you going to tell us?” Audrey asked.

“Now?” Bob ventured.

“So the Squirrel People are still going out in the city?” Charlie asked. “Using the sewers?”

“Mostly,” Bob said.

“What about the Death Merchants’ date books?” Audrey asked. “The soul vessels?”

Bob shrugged.

Charlie said, “So, if they’re like me, their books kept getting names—”

“They aren’t like you,” Bob said. “Their souls moved on. You’re a monstrosity with a human soul.”

Audrey cringed but pushed on: “Have your people seen any new Death Merchants?” The Squirrel People could see the glow of soul objects, as could she, and she’d never really questioned why, but it had been a useful talent when she was misguidedly having them steal souls from the Death Merchants’ shops.

“We haven’t looked,” said Bob. “I only had them look in the places we’d been before because I heard you two talking.”

“No soul vessels lying around either?” Charlie asked.

“Nope,” said the bobcat.

“If all those souls have gone uncollected—”

“Plus the ones in your and Rivera’s books,” Audrey said. She looked to Bob. “Could the People of the Squirrel help Charlie find the soul vessels in his book, at least?”

“We need new outfits,” said Bob.

“Pardon?” Audrey said.

“You only made us one set of clothes each. They’re wearing out.” He presented the elbow of his red coat, revealing a hole there.

Audrey said, “I suppose I could patch—”

“I’d like leather armor,” said Bob. “Like a samurai. Like a shogun.”

“But strictly speaking, you don’t even need clothes,” Audrey said.

“Strictly speaking, no one does,” said Bob.

“Your clothes take a lot of time to make, Bob. They’re miniature theatrical costumes. The stitching is actually more difficult than regular clothes because they’re smaller. I don’t think I can—”

“Fine,” said Bob. “The People do not need you.” He walked back into the butler’s pantry.

“She buys the groceries,” Charlie called after him.

“We can find food.”

“Clothes are merely adornments of ego, anyway,” Audrey said.

Bob stopped, walked back, stood in the doorway, and dropped his spork. He undid the brass buttons of hs long red coat and pulled it open, revealing crisscrossed strands of muscle running over bone—some of the ham-colored fibers had crept up his neck and were starting to form the beginnings of cheeks on the bobcat skull that was his face. The high beefeater collar had hidden the progress.

“Adornment of ego?” Bob said.

“Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “Well have a look at this.” He started to untie his robe and Audrey held her hand out to stop him.

“I’ll make new clothes,” she said.

“For all of us,” Bob said.

“For all of you,” Audrey said.

“And extras. So we can change.”

“Fine,” said Audrey. “I’ll get started tonight.”

“Good,” said Charlie. “Because if we don’t get this done, the dark could rise again, and you know what comes then…”

“About that,” said Bob. He buttoned his jacket, picked up his spork, and turned to walk away. “You may want to get yourself a spork or something.”

“What?” Charlie scampered into the butler’s pantry after Bob, but he was gone. Charlie returned into the parlor. “There’s a vent in there behind the wastebasket—drops right into the space under the house.”

“You’re not a monstrosity, Charlie,” Audrey said.

“It’s okay,” he said, waving the thought away with a raptor’s talon. “But I can’t collect souls like this, and I don’t trust the Squirrel People.”

“I have an idea, but it might be a little, uh, humbling.”

“We just got owned by a guy who carries a spork.”

“Good point. Also, because you’re officially still a Death Merchant, at least your date book is still active, I’m hoping that you’ll still be invisible when you’re collecting a soul vessel.”

“Not invisible; people just don’t see you. If you call their attention to you, they can.”

“You didn’t have to be naked for that to work, did you?”

“No.”

“Good, because—”

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

“You know about the cat carrier?”

“No, I was thinking of something else.”

You can see me?” Rivera asked the guy with the mop. After actually collecting several soul vessels from the names on his list, he was starting to gain some confidence as a Death Merchant. He’d even managed to enter the houses of two of his “clients” unnoticed, passing right by people who didn’t realize he was there. All his years as a cop had conditioned him to take special care in entering a residence, so to ease his mind he had started to think of the names in his date book as warrants, which also expired if not served. The fresh names had worked, the older ones, not so much, but this name had only appeared in his book this very morning. Now he was busted while standing over this poor woman’s hospice bed like some kind of ghoul. There was only one proper way to deal with this: badge the shit out of the mop guy.

“Inspector Alphonse Rivera,” he said, flipping open his badge wallet to flash the seven-pointed gold star. “SFPD homicide.”

“Uh-huh,” said the mop guy, much less impressed than Rivera had hoped. “I am Jean-Pierre Baptiste. Are you lookin’ for something, Inspector?” He was black, about sixty, and spoke with a musical Caribbean accent—from a French-speaking island, Rivera guessed.

“I’m working a case, and I’m looking for a book that I was told I might find here.” All the soul vessels he had found had been books, which had been convenient, since he owned a bookstore, but then, it appeared that the universe preferred specialty retailing.

“This book you’re looking for, you think it might be glowing red?”

Rivera felt an electric shiver run from his heels to the crown of his head, only a little less paralyzing than when the banshee had shocked him with the stun gun.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rivera said, not even convincing himself. He’d interviewed witnesses who lied so badly that he was embarrassed for them and had to look away to keep from wincing. Usually, after a few minutes, they would realize they weren’t pulling it off and would just cave in and tell the truth. Now he knew how they felt.

“Let us step out into the hallway,” Baptiste said, “so Madame Helen can get some rest.” To Helen he said, “À bientôt, madame, I will stop in before I go home.”

“Monsieur Baptiste,” said Helen, gesturing for him to come closer.

“I am here, madame,” he whispered.

“Don’t let that man alone in here with me. I think he’s Mexican. I think he’s after my Proust.”

“I will keep it safe, madame. But I don’t know where it is.”

“I had Nurse Anne wrap it in a towel and put it in the bottom drawer. Don’t look now, but check once you get rid of him.”

“I will, madame.” Baptiste looked to the little white dresser. There was one in each room, where patients’ personal things were kept. “I will.”

He left his mop bucket in the room and joined Rivera in the hall, then signaled for the policeman to follow him outside. He told the nurse at the desk that he was going on break and led Rivera outside to a spot by a covered bus stop. The hospice was in the outer Sunset, where San Francisco met the sea, and even though it was a sunny day, a cold wind swirled in the streets.

“You heard her?” Baptiste asked.

Rivera nodded.

“Don’t think badly of Helen. She has also asked me to keep the darkie nurses out of her room. A long time ago, when she was a little girl, someone planted a small seed of fear in her, and now, when all of her fears are bubbling up, this is one she has yet to let go, but she has not lived her life this way.”

“Then she doesn’t know you’re—”

“I speak French with her,” said Baptiste with a shrug—c’est la vie. “Now, for you, Inspector, how did you know it was a book?”

“How did you know I was looking for something?”

“How many people that you meet are surprised when you can see them, Inspector?”

“I’m asking the questions here,” said Rivera, feeling stupid for having said it. He remembered Charlie Asher having a similar reaction once when Rivera had spotted him up on a roof about to brain a Russian grandmother with a cinder block. Charlie had known then that Rivera was going to be a Death Merchant, long before the Big Book showed up in the mail.

“Oh, I understand. I work in a hospice. There is always a vessel close here, so much of the time I have to whistle or sing while I am working or people will run into me.”

Rivera decided to drop the pretense. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already gone against the Great Big Book of Death’s warning about contact with other Death Merchants before this.

“You are one of us and you work in a hospice? Seems kind of easy. Lazy.”

“Me? You are a homicide detective and I am the lazy one?”

“I’ve never collected a vessel from one of my cases.”

“Seems like a waste of coincidence. Maybe you are just not very good at finding things. The Big Book says it is very bad to miss a soul vessel. Very bad indeed.”

“I could be better at it,” said Rivera. “I didn’t pick it up right away. I only started a little more than a year ago.”

“Me, too,” said Baptiste. “The book came in the mail a year ago and my wife opened it. I thought it was a joke until people started running into me at work and I began to see the soul vessels’ red glow. I have never met another person who does this.”

“There are a lot of us. I don’t know how many, exactly.”

“But you have met others?”

“Yes. A couple. Many in the city were killed a year ago. All of them shopkeepers. I think you and I must be their replacements.”

“Killed? What do you mean they were killed?”

And because to keep the secret would have been unfair to the point of endangering him, Rivera told Baptiste about the darkness rising, about the Morrigan, about the Underworld somehow expanding itself into the sewer system of San Francisco, about the battle under the city, and of how Charlie Asher had sacrificed himself to put things back in order. Baptiste, already well adjusted to this soul-selling world, actually seemed pleased to have some dimension put on the responsibility that had been dropped on him from his mailbox.

“You said these Death Merchants were all shopkeepers? You and I are not shopkeepers.”

“I have a bookshop on Russian Hill. That’s how I knew that the soul vessel would be a book. Probably, anyway. If you don’t have a shop, then how—”

“My wife sells them on the Internet.”

“You sell souls on the Internet?”

“It’s not always the Internet. Some Saturdays she will take them to the swap meet at the Cow Palace parking lot and sell them off a blanket. People pay a lot of money for the silliest things. We may be able to buy a house soon.”

“How do you know the right person gets the soul?”

“How do you know in your bookshop?”

Actually, Rivera didn’t know. While he had several soul vessels in his shop, he had yet to sell one. But when he did, there was no way to verify the right person was getting it. According to the Big Book, each soul would find its right person. He shook his head and they both looked into the gutter. Rivera had a million questions for the orderly, and he guessed that Baptiste felt the same toward him, but there was a feeling of wrongness to it, like somehow they were cheating on a test.

Finally, Baptiste said, “How long? For Helen?”

“Three days,” Rivera said. “But you know, the number isn’t always how long they have to live, only how long we have to collect the soul vessel. So probably less. I’m sorry.”

“Why do you suppose I did not get her name in my calendar?”

“I don’t know,” Rivera said.

“I should probably get the Proust book for you, then.”

“I would let you collect it, but I’m afraid I may have already set things out of order by falling behind on my calendar.”

“I understand,” Baptiste said. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Rivera waited, closed his eyes, and just felt the chill wind biting through his light, worsted wool suit. In a few minutes Baptiste came back out of the front door, moving quite a bit more quickly than he had gone in.

“It’s gone,” he said.

“Did you check all the drawers?”

“I checked and I asked the shift nurse, who said that Helen had her check on it this morning. It was there then, she said.”

“Did Helen see anything?” Rivera asked.

Baptiste just looked at him.

“Sorry. Did she hear anything?”

“Rats. She complained of the sound of rats scurrying in the room. She rang for the nurse after we came out here.”

“Rats?”

“Her hearing is very good.”

They just looked at each other and there was a lull between gusts of wind when the leaves that were skittering around in the street slid to a stop. A woman’s voice whispered, “Meeeeeeeeat.” A woman’s voice that seemed to be coming from under an Audi wagon parked on the curb across the street. They both looked and did a slow, synchronized deep knee bend until they could see under the car, where there appeared to be nothing but leaves and a candy wrapper.

“Did you hear that?” Baptiste asked.

“Did you?” asked Rivera.

“No,” said Baptiste.

“Me either,” said Rivera.

11. Crocodile Tears

Lily let herself into the empty storefront that had once been Asher’s Secondhand and later the location of Pizazz, the pizza and jazz place she and M had opened. The sight of the sign, leaning in the corner, and the idea that she’d let the Mint One talk her into that name made her want to start cutting herself again, something she’d indulged briefly when she was fifteen but had quickly stopped because it hurt. The space filled the entire ground floor of a four-story building at the corner of Mason and Vallejo streets, where the North Beach, Chinatown, and Russian Hill neighborhoods met like slices of an international pie.

All the booths and tables were gone, as well as most of the restaurant equipment. Only the oak bar and a great, brick, wood-burning pizza oven remained. There was still a storeroom with a staircase that led up to Charlie Asher’s old apartment (now Jane and Cassie’s), but now it contained only a walk-in refrigerator and a few bar stools and chairs instead of the collection of knickknacks that had filled it when it had been Charlie’s store.

Lily dragged some stools out to the bar and sat down to wait in the diffused daylight from the papered-over windows. This would be weird, but she found she was excited at the idea of seeing Charlie again, even if he was a wretched little carrion creature now.

Soon there was the silhouette at the door of a woman who apparently had a crescent-moon-shaped head and Lily hurried to the door to let her in. Oh yeah, this was going to be weird.

Audrey, wearing yoga pants, a sweater, and sneakers, stood on the sidewalk holding a cat carrier shaped like a Quonset hut. It was made from heavy nylon embroidered in blue and orange swirls, heavy mesh halfway down on either end.

“Hi,” Lily said, stepping out of the way so Audrey could come in. They’d met once before the debacle, when Lily had been the one with the postmodern hair. “Where’s Asher?”

Audrey lifted the cat carrier.

“Well dump that little fucker out,” Lily said. “Let’s have a look at him.” Charlie had described his new body on the phone but she wanted to see him for herself.

“Hi, Lily,” came a voice from inside the luggage.

“Asher!” Lily bent down and tried to look into the cat carrier, but beyond something dark reflecting two points of light—eyes, she guessed—she could see nothing.

Audrey swung the cat carrier away from Lily. “He’d prefer you didn’t see him this way.”

“Oh, hell no,” Lily said. “I agreed to meet you here where all my PTSD began, I get to look at the little monster.”

Lily tried again to squint into the cat carrier. Audrey swung it around the other way.

Charlie said, “Audrey, if you keep swinging this thing around, I’m going to be sick.”

“Please,” Audrey said to Lily. “He’s really sensitive about his looks.”

Audrey put the cat carrier on the bar and sat down at one of the stools. Lily sat and squinted through the carrier’s mesh, trying to see something. Still just points of light.

“Asher, is it really you?”

“It’s me now.”

“I feel like I’m talking to a tiny priest in a tiny confessional. But you can only hear my tiny sins.” She affected her bowed-head-of-deep-contrition look, which was new to her, so she wasn’t confident in it. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned: I once drank the last of the milk and put the empty carton back in the fridge. I drew pubes on my Barbies and posed them in a threesome with a Ninja Turtle. I sometimes wish that dicks were mint flavored. I won’t say what made me think of it. I never wished that you were dead, Asher, but when I worked here, I sometimes wished that you would fall down the stairs and land in a cake. I don’t know how the cake gets there, it’s just a fantasy.”

“I don’t think any of those things are sins,” Charlie said.

“What do you know? You’re not a priest.”

“Although he is wearing a beautiful wizard’s robe,” said Audrey.

Lily gave Audrey what she considered her, withering, silence, worm! look.

“How about I run out and grab us some beverages?” Audrey said. “Give you two a chance to catch up.”

“Skinny latte, please,” Lily said, flashing her, I am cute so all my prior bitchiness must be forgiven smile. “Here, my treat.” She took a bill from her purse and handed it to Audrey, who, having spent years as a monk begging for her daily meal, accepted it without protest.

“I’ll get your usual, Charlie,” Audrey said, and she was out the door.

As soon as the door closed Lily said, “Asher, you fucker!” She slapped the top of the cat carrier. It took the hit and sprang back.

“Ouch!” said Charlie. “Hey!”

“How could you do that to me? You fucker! You fucker!” Lily was crying now, as if she’d been saving it all for when Audrey was no longer in the room, which she had. “I thought you were dead! You let me think you were dead! You fucker!”

“Stop saying that,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry.”

She smacked the top of the cat carrier again.

“Ouch!”

“I would never do that to you, Asher, you fucker. Never! How could you do that? I thought we were friends, well, not friends, but something. You fucker!”

“I’m right here. Stop crying.”

“I’m crying because you’re right here, you fucker. I finished crying because you weren’t here a long time ago.”

“I thought it would be easier—I couldn’t keep running the shop, being Sophie’s daddy, being Charlie Asher like this. I thought it would be easier. I’m a freak.”

“You’ve always been a freak, Asher. That’s your best quality.”

“That’s not true, I was always nice to you, at least when you weren’t being stubborn and moody.”

“Which is like, never.”

“Is that why you called the Buddhist Center and blackmailed me into meeting you? Because you’re angry?”

“Yes, I’m angry, but that’s not why. M told me you were in trouble, so I thought I might be able to help.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out between you and Minty Fresh.”

Lily cringed at the sound of M’s full name. “What could I do? You guys and the whole death-dealing thing… And he knows so much, and I don’t know anything, and he was always giving me stuff and forgiving me when I was a bitch—acting like he respected my opinion.”

“Maybe he does respect your opinion.”

“That’s what I’m saying. How do you win a relationship like that?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to win a relationship, Lily.”

“What do you know? You’re hiding in a cat box.”

“This isn’t a cat box.”

There was a commotion from the back room, a door opening at the second-floor landing, then footfalls on the stairs.

“Is voices. Hello,” said Mrs. Korjev. The stout Russian grandmother came down the backroom stairs, followed by Sophie Asher. Sophie, her dark hair in pigtails with clips that resembled gummy bears, was dressed in layers of pastels that would have looked perfectly fine on taffy or ice cream. The soles of her pink sneakers lit up with every step.

Lily leaned over the bar so they could see her. “Hey.”

“Lily!” Sophie scampered into the abandoned restaurant and jumped into Lily arms. “We miss you and your pizza.”

“I miss you, too, kiddo.”

“Lily, the goggies are lost. We’re going to put up posters.”

Sophie ran back to Mrs. Korjev, who handed her a letter-size printed sheet from a stack she was carrying. Sophie plopped the poster on the bar in front of Lily, then climbed onto the bar stool next to her. “See?” Sophie said. “There’s a reward.”

Mrs. Korjev pulled a staple gun from her shopping bag and held it. “Is reward for Mr. Chin at butcher shop, too, if he give Vladlena trouble about boning chicken again. Is lost-dog-poster staple on his front-head.”

“Forehead,” Sophie corrected the Cossack matron.

“If shoe fit,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“So you’re doing your shopping, too,” Lily said. “Multitasking.”

“Chinatown have best vegetables, even for white devils,” Sophie said, with only a slight Cantonese accent, a remnant of Mrs. Ling’s shopping tutelage. “Auntie Jane used to take me to Whole Foods on her day off, but she says she has to take too much vitamin X to keep from killing everyone there, so now we get our veggies in Chinatown.”

“Let’s see here.” Lily pulled the poster over. At the top there was a picture, printed in black and white, of Sophie perhaps a year or two younger, with the hellhounds. Sophie was in the tub, her head above a sea of bubbles, crowned with shampoo horns. Alvin and Mohammed flanked the claw-foot tub like guardians at the entrance to a bubbly tomb, making them look completely unreal to scale, which is kind of how they looked in real life.

“We blacked out my eyes with this square for my privacy,” said Sophie.

“Good idea,” said Lily. “You didn’t have any other pictures of them?”

“Nope,” Sophie said.

The poster read:

LOST

2 Irish Hellhounds.

Very black, like bear.

Huge, like bear.

Answer to Alvin and Mohammed.

Like to eat everything. Like bear!

REWARD!

“Did you write the text, Mrs. Korjev?” Lily asked.

“I put in two bears and the Irish part,” said Sophie. “Daddy said that no one would believe you if you called them hellhounds, but if you said Irish hellhounds everyone thought they’d heard of them.”

A scratching noise came from the cat carrier on the bar and Sophie seemed to notice it for the first time. “Hey, what’s that? Do you have a—”

Lily clamped her hand over Sophie’s mouth. “No. I don’t. There’s nothing in there. Nothing. Do you understand?”

Lily’s hand still on her mouth, Sophie nodded. Lily tentatively pulled her hand away.

“I wasn’t going to say it,” Sophie said.

“I know,” said Lily. “I’m just taking the empty carrier to a friend. There’s some food in there that shifted.”

“Okay,” said Sophie.

“We need to go, lapochka,” said Mrs. Korjev. The Russian matron had come around the corner of the bar like a great, bosomy whirlwind when Lily grabbed Sophie and still held her staple gun at the ready. Lily was relatively sure that she had been only seconds from having her own forehead stapled.

“Okay, you two,” Lily said. She carefully lifted Sophie off the bar stool and set her on the floor, then crouched in front of her. “I hope you find the goggies.”

Sophie gave Lily a hug. “Come see us. Bring special-special pizza.”

“I will,” Lily said. “Bye, Sophie. Bye, Mrs. Korjev.”

“Bye,” Sophie said, leading Mrs. Korjev out the metal door that led into the alley. Mrs. Korjev looked back at Lily, siting down the mole on the side of her nose, letting Lily know that she had her eye on her.

As soon as the door closed behind them, a heartbreaking wail rose from the cat carrier.

“You okay, Asher?”

“I miss her so much. She’s gotten so big.”

“Sorry.” Lily patted the top of the cat carrier.

“What’s special-special pizza?”

“It’s a flaming-dome pizza with mac and cheese inside. I created it for Sophie to celebrate her becoming a vegetarian.”

“She’s a vegetarian? She didn’t even like vegetables last year.”

“It’s okay. She’s only a vegetarian because it was a thing with the other girls. Jane convinced her you could still be a vegetarian if you only eat animals that eat vegetables, too.”

“So anything but what?”

“I don’t know, lion, bear, crocodile—”

“Jane is ruining my daughter. I have got to come home. I’m missing everything.”

“But you are coming back, right?” said, Lily trying to cheer him up.

“Probably not. We’ll never find the right body.”

“No, that’s the good news. That’s why I’m blackmailing you—I mean, why I called. I think I have the body for you.”

“Lily, I have to be there almost at the moment of death. You can’t just grab a body out of the fridge.”

“Are you implying that I keep bodies in my fridge?”

“It’s just an expression.”

“That’s not an expression, Asher.”

“Okay, sorry. No, I don’t think you have a human body in your fridge.”

“Douche.” She pouted. She’d forgotten how much fun it was to pout in front of Asher. If only she could see the distress on his little face.

“I said I’m sorry,” he said. “Go on.”

“It’s a guy I met on the crisis line. He’s about your age, pretty nice-looking, if you like that type, doesn’t seem to have any family, no wife or girlfriend, and he’s got balls the size of toaster ovens.”

“Trust me, Lily, enormous genitals are not as fun as they sound.”

“It’s just a figure of speech. He’s a painter on the Golden Gate Bridge, so he’s up on high steel, hundreds of feet above the water, every working day.”

“And how do you know he’s going to die? Did Minty find him in his date book?”

“No, M doesn’t know anything about this, the guy told me, himself. He wanted me to talk him out of jumping off the bridge.”

“That’s horrible. Is he depressed?”

“No. He says he’s not jumping to get away from anything, he’s jumping to get to something.”

“But don’t you have a moral obligation to talk him out of jumping?”

“It’s a gray area.”

“How can that be a gray area? You work on a suicide hotline. You can’t just say, ‘Okay, have at it.’ ”

“I have before.” She chewed a nail.

“Lily!”

“Shut up, they made a good case. Besides, nobody that I told to jump ever actually jumped.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “We’ll have to ask Audrey. She’s the one who knows the rituals and stuff.”

“Do you want to see your daughter again or not?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then shut the fuck up and let me kill this guy for you.”

“Let’s talk to Audrey.”

“But if she says go, it’s a go, right?”

“Sure, I suppose.

“Good. Where’s the nun with our drinks?”

The nun with the drinks came through the door fifteen minutes later, a cardboard tray in one hand, a lost dog flyer wedged between the cups.

“Have you seen these?” Audrey said. The flyer was one of the ones Sophie had shown them. “They’re all over North Beach.”

“Sophie and Mrs. Korjev just came through,” Charlie said.

“Are you okay?” Audrey said. She unzipped one end of the cat carrier and handed in the little paper espresso cup. “Two sugars.”

“I’m okay,” said Charlie. “But Lily wants us to kill a guy and take his body.”

Audrey sat down on the bar stool next to Lily and sipped a frosty brown thing through a straw while she considered the proposition.

“Won’t work,” said the nun.

Lily nearly aspirated skinny latte. “Why not? M said that you needed someone who was healthy, male, and whose body would be fresh and not too broken up.”

“It’s why she blackmailed us into coming here,” Charlie said.

“Stop saying that,” Lily said. “I wouldn’t have told Sophie about you and you know it. It was only a symbolic threat.”

“We would have come without the threat.”

Audrey said, “Does this man you’re going to kill know what you’re going to do?”

“I’m not going to actively kill him. He’s going to kill himself. But no.”

“For the ritual of Chöd to work the subject has to willingly give up his body to be occupied.”

“Seriously? I not only have to talk a guy into jumping off a bridge, but I have to talk him into just giving me his body? He’s not going to go for that.”

“Maybe if you wear something low-cut,” Charlie said.

“I will crush you and your little cat box, Asher.”

“Let’s calm down and work through this,” said Audrey.

“Yeah, Lily,” said Charlie. “Audrey is badass. Buddhist monks invented kung fu, you know.”

“Not my sect,” said Audrey. “We mostly chant and beg.”

“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” Charlie said.

“Fine,” said Lily. “Audrey, is there anything in your tradition about a Ghost Thief?”

“No, why?”

“Well, because evidently there’s a whole choir of ghosts on the Golden Gate Bridge farting a message of doom if we don’t find the Ghost Thief. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be a condition of getting my guy to give up the goods.”

“That’s new,” said Charlie.

12. Portable Darkness and the Booty Nun

In a turnout on Interstate 80, about forty miles east of Reno, the hellhounds had killed a Subaru and were rolling in its remains as two horrified kayakers looked on. Alvin had the last shreds of plastic from a red kayak hanging out of his jaws as he squirmed in the still-smoking bits of the engine, while Mohammed was biting at his reflection in the hatchback window, trying to pop the final intact window like a soap bubble, which he did with great growling glee, before crunching down a mouthful of rubber gasket and safety glass.

Something popped and hissed under Alvin’s back and in an instant the four-hundred-pound canine was on his feet barking at the stream of steam, each bark like a rifle report in the ears of the kayakers. The hound reared up in a prancing fashion, and came down repeatedly on the offending steam thing with his front paws until it ceased and desisted. He celebrated by settling down with the engine between his forelegs to chew off the remaining hoses and wires. Mohammed made to join him, but was distracted by a stream of green antifreeze which he stopped to lap up off the asphalt.

“Uh, I think—” said one of the kayakers, a fit man of twenty-five in an earth-toned array of tactical outdoor clothing, who had heard of dogs being poisoned by antifreeze.

“I don’t think it will bother them,” said the other, who had been driving when Alvin’s jaws first latched on to the bumper, causing him to skid into this turnout and scaring him badly.

“Your insurance will cover this, right?” said the first.

“We should probably film it. Do you have your phone?”

“In the car.”

“Damn.”

They were both adrenaline junkies and had been on their way to run some level-five rapids on the Salmon River in Idaho, but now they were reconsidering, since the kayaks were the first things the hellhounds had eaten after bringing down the Subaru. They were both a little in shock and had already run a couple hundred yards into the desert before realizing the enormous hounds weren’t in the least bit interested in them, then skulking back to watch the destruction of their car and possessions.

“You ever seen a dog like that before?” asked one.

“I don’t think anyone has seen anything like that.”

The hounds were long-legged, with the squared head of a mastiff and the pointed ears of a Great Dane; heavily muscled, with great barrel chests and rippling shoulders and haunches. They were so black that they appeared to absorb light—their slick coats neither shone nor rippled with their movement—sometimes they appeared simply to be violent swaths of starless night sky.

“I was doing seventy when they hit us,” said the driver.

Interstate 80 was a main artery across the northern part of the U.S., but today the traffic was sparse and they were far enough off the road that someone would have to be looking for them to actually notice what was going on.

The driver was about to suggest that they hike up to the interstate to flag down some help, when a creamy yellow land yacht, a 1950 Buick Roadmaster fastback with a white top, a sun visor, and blacked-out windows, pulled off the highway and cruised by, just beyond the dead Subaru. The great hounds stopped what they were doing and jumped to their feet, their ears peaked, their backs bristling. They growled in unison like choral bulldozers.

The passenger-side window whirred down and a black man wearing a yellow suit and homburg hat leaned over and addressed the kayakers as he rolled by.

“Y’all all right?”

They nodded, the driver gesturing to the opera of destruction playing out before them, as if to say, “What the fuck?”

“Them goggies ain’t shit,” said the yellow fellow. “I’ll have them off you in a slim jiffy.”

With that, great clouds of fire burst out the twin tailpipes of the Buick and it lowered its stance like a crouching leopard before bolting out of the turnout. The hellhounds dropped what they were chewing and took off after it, their front claws digging furrows in the asphalt as they came up to speed, their staccato barking trailing away like fading machine guns in a distant dogfight. In less than a minute, they were out of sight.

“I have my wallet,” said the Subaru’s owner, feeling he might have had enough adrenaline for a bit. “I say we catch a ride back to Reno. Get a room.”

“Video poker,” said the other. “And drinks,” he said. “With umbrellas.”

In a previous incarnation, he had been torn apart by jackals—black jackals—so overall, the fellow in yellow had developed a healthy distaste for the company of canines, which was why he was leading them away from San Francisco.

“You ladies doing all right back there?” he asked as he gunned the Roadmaster out of the turnout and back onto Highway 80. The big V-8 rumbled and the four chrome ports down each side of the hood blinked as if startled out of a nap, then opened to draw more air into the infernal engine. The tail of the Buick dipped and the grinning chrome mouth of the grille gulped desert air like a whale shark sucking down krill. Far below the crusty strata, long-dead dinosaurs wept for the liquid remains of their brethren consumed by the creamy, jaundiced leviathan.

“Was that them?” came a female voice from inside the trunk behind the bloodred leather backseat.

“That sounded like them,” another female voice.

“Y’all can take a peek, you need to be sure,” said the man in yellow. “Trunk ain’t locked.”

“You should go faster,” said a third voice.

“They sound close,” said the first. “Are they close?”

“They won’t catch us,” said the yellow fellow. “Them goggies ain’t shit.”

“I hate those things. They’re so barky.” said the second voice.

“So bitey,” said another.

“Well, they loves y’all,” said the yellow fellow. “That’s why y’all are along.”

“Can they bite through this metal? because I don’t think I’m ready for the above?”

“No, not in the light. Not yet.”

“Macha, remember that time they almost tore you apart?”

“I’ma slow up a bit, ladies, so they stay close.”

A chorus of “No!” and “Oh, fuck no!” erupted from behind the seat.

Just yards behind, the hellhounds heard the voices, answered with enraged howls, and quickened their pace. The Buick jerked with impact, something hitting the rear, tearing metal, once, then again. The ladies in the dark screeched. The driver checked his side mirror and, finding it overflowing with angry dog face, slammed the accelerator to the floor, because while “them goggies might not be shit,” he did not particularly want to be proven wrong by being reduced to yellow specks in great piles of hellhound poo dropped across the Nevada desert.

“I want to make Salt Lake before they know what happened,” said the driver.

“What’s at Salt Lake?” asked one of the trunk voices.

“They’s a portal there that these motherfuckers don’t know about.”

“To the Underworld? We just got out of the Underworld.”

The yellow fellow chuckled. “Relax, ladies. We gonna dump these goggies in Salt Lake, keep ’em out of my business in San Francisco. I’ll have y’all back in some less portable darkness lickity-split, then y’all can freshen up.”

“What about the child?” asked one of the voices.

“We cross that bridge when we get to it,” said the yellow fellow.

“She’s worse than the hounds.”

“Nemain!”

“Well, she is.”

“You know, it’s not so bad in here,” said Babd, changing the subject.

“Plenty of room. And it’s not damp.”

“And it’s warm.”

“You want,” said the driver, “y’all can stay there when we get back to the city. I get you some curtains and cushions and whatnot.”

He smiled to himself. Through many centuries and many incarnations, he had learned one universal truth: bitches love them some cushions.

They sped on, and after the two unfortunate bites, stayed just far enough ahead of Alvin and Mohammed so that from a distance, the hellhounds might appear to be particularly animated clouds of black smoke emitted from the tailpipes. They were creatures of fire and force, pursuing a yellow Buick with a creamy-white top through the desert. Like many supernatural creatures, they winked in and out of the visible spectrum as they moved, so when a highway patrolman outside of Elko, Nevada, looked up from his radar readout, first he blinked, then he was tempted to radio up the road to his colleague and say, “Hey, did you just see two pony-sized black dogs, doing seventy, pursuing a giant slice of lemon meringue pie?” Then he thought, No, perhaps I’ll keep that to myself.

About that same time, five hundred miles west, in the Mission District of San Francisco, a Buddhist nun and little crocodile-wizard guy were working out the finer points of a murder.

“Is it really murder,” said Audrey, “if he is going to jump anyway?”

“I’m pretty sure it is,” said Charlie. “I think the Buddha said that one should never injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm. If we know he’s going to jump and we don’t stop him, I think we’re going against whatever sutra that is.”

“First, that is not a sutra, that’s Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, from I, Robot, and second, we’re not just allowing him to harm himself, we’re trying to get him to do it on a schedule.”

“I didn’t know Isaac Asimov was a Buddhist,” said Charlie. “Buddhist robots. Ha!”

“Asimov wasn’t. But the robots thing is close. I mean, you”— she was about to say, You are kind of a Buddhist robot, but instead she said, “You know those terra-cotta warriors they found in China, buried since the second century B.C.? Those were kind of supposed to be Buddhist robots. The Emperor Qin Shi Huang was going to have a priest use the p’howa of forceful projection I used on the Squirrel People to put soldiers’ souls in the terra-cotta soldiers, making himself an indestructible army. It might have worked if they’d filled them with meat.”

“You said that Buddhism didn’t come to China until the fifth century.” Charlie had always had a difficult time understanding Buddhism.

“It was always there, they just didn’t call it Buddhism. Buddha was just a guy who pointed out some fairly obvious things, so we call it Buddhism. Otherwise we’d just have to call it everything.”

“Sometimes I think you’re just making up Buddhism as you go along.”

“Exactly.” Audrey grinned. Charlie grinned back and Audrey shuddered. She would not miss all those teeth grinning at her. She had been under pressure when she’d put his body together, but given the opportunity to build her perfect man again, she would definitely go with fewer teeth.

“Maybe this Sullivan guy is in someone’s calendar,” Charlie said. “If Minty can find his name on one of the Death Merchants’ calendars, then we’ll know his death is inevitable. In a way, we’ll be saving him, or his body, at least?”

“He still has to offer his body as a vessel for your soul. He must do it willingly or the Chöd ritual won’t work. I’m not sure it will work, anyway, Charlie. I’ve never done it. I don’t know if anyone has ever done it.”

“Well, Lily’s going to ask him. If he says yes, we’re good to go.”

“Would you believe Lily if she told you that she needed your permission to move a new soul into your body, and in order to do that, you had to jump off a bridge at a certain time?”

“I would. Lily is very trustworthy. She worked for me for six years and never stole anything. Except the Great Big Book of Death.” Charlie scratched under his long, lower jaw, wishing he had a beard, even a chin, to stroke thoughtfully. “Okay, that caused problems, but otherwise… Yes, good point. But he told her a ghost talked him into this and she believed him, so he kind of owes her.”

“Really?” She raised a questioning eyebrow.

“You’re right, we should go talk to him.”

“Charlie, you know I adore you, but I’m not sure that the finer essence of your being will shine through to a stranger, in a first meeting, and we are asking this guy to believe something that sounds, if not impossible, certainly preposterous.”

“I know. That’s the beauty of it. I’m like the preposterous poster child.”

“I’ll go see him.”

“Fine. Maybe just brush your hair to the side so it’s soft, nonintimidating,” Charlie suggested.

“What’s wrong with my hair?”

“Nothing. So you studied robots in the monastery? Who would have thought.”

Because her discipline stressed living in the moment, and not obsessing on the past or the future, Audrey found herself more than somewhat off balance when Mike Sullivan answered his door.

“Hi, Audrey,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Mike.” Dark, short hair; light eyes, green, maybe hazel, kind.

He was younger than she expected, even though Lily had told her that he was in his early to midthirties, and he was better-looking than she’d expected, even though Lily had also mentioned that he was not unpleasant to look upon. What surprised her most was that he was so healthy and alive, because in the past, everyone she had prepared for bardo, the transition between life and death, had been sick and dying, and most often old. Mike Sullivan did not look like a man who was dying.

She shook his hand and let him lead her into his second-story apartment, which took up the middle floor of a Victorian in the Richmond District, adjacent to Golden Gate Park. She felt prickly and self-conscious as she sat on the couch and watched him move around the apartment, playing host, getting them tea, relaxed, barefoot, in old jeans and a T-shirt. Despite her training to stay focused on the moment, she glimpsed into the future, and she realized that if everything went as it was supposed to, in a few days she’d be shagging this guy. She blushed; she could feel the heat rise in her cheeks, and she realized he must see it.

“You’re not what I expected,” Mike Sullivan said. “The director of a Buddhist center—although I don’t know what I expected.”

“That’s okay,” said Audrey; she touched her hair, which she’d spun into a bun behind her head, so that wasn’t what he meant. “There aren’t many women in my sect, even in the East. I’m privileged to have my position.”

Mike sat down on the edge of a recliner across the coffee table from her and leaned forward. “From what Lily tells me, you’re one of a kind.”

Audrey felt herself blush again and suddenly, and for no reason she could think, thought of poor Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice, and then remembered how she also felt that Lizzie, nay, all of the Bennet women, in fact, all of the characters in P&P could have benefited from a good roundhouse kick to the head, and how, if she kept blushing, she should ask this guy to deliver one to her. (Despite what she had told Charlie, she did know a little kung fu, which she had learned in college, at San Francisco State, not in a monastery in Tibet. Namaste.)

“Mike, you should know, I’ve never done this before. I have transferred conciousnesses from people to, uh, other entities, many times, actually, but not anything like this. I don’t even know if Chöd works. I mean, I’ve read scrolls written about people in the mountains who gave their bodies up for an enlightened being, but I’ve never seen it.”

“I figured,” said Mike. He smiled.

“So if you’re going to do this, you should go into it prepared for your life to simply end, as all our lives will end. Part of you will endure either way, but you shouldn’t do this just to offer up your body.”

“I know,” said Mike. “I know all that. I’ve always known that. I’m not doing this for your friend.”

“You need to be sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“And you understand that if it works, someone else will be walking around in your body. If someone you know sees him on the street, they’ll think it’s you. Your friends, your family.”

“I don’t have any family, and no close friends.”

Audrey paused. She wasn’t sure how to react to that. Well, she wanted to ask why not, but that seemed a bit cruel, considering why she was here.

“Audrey, I’ll be honest, I have never really connected with anyone. I mean, I’ve had girlfriends, even serious ones, but they’ve always left, and I’ve always let them. I’m not sad, or heartbroken, I just go to work the next day and try to do my job. Another girl comes along, and then we’re off to the races until the race ends again. Same with friends. I get along with people, I like listening to them, I play in a softball league with some cool guys, but if they all went away tomorrow I’d be fine. My folks are dead, my brother and I have been out of touch for years, all the rest of my extended family is all over the country and we don’t see one another. Not bad blood, just blood. I guess I only realized after these people, these ghosts, came to me on the bridge, but I’ve been like a ghost for a long time. It sounds like this friend of yours can put better use to this body than I ever have. He’s welcome to it.”

Audrey was breathless. He was so calm about it, so sure. This was the place you tried to get people to in bardo, to accept their death as part of their life, as a door through which all must pass, will pass, and have passed. He was standing calmly in the doorway, unafraid. It was the sexiest thing she’d ever encountered, and if it weren’t for Charlie, she would have wrestled him to the couch and screwed his brains out right then. No. From desire comes suffering. And besides, she could jump him after he was dead. Her Buddhist practice had suffered somewhat, she realized, since coming back to the States.

“Mike, have you thought about something less violent? Carbon monoxide? Pills?” Was she actually planning a murder with the victim?

“No, it has to be the bridge. That’s where I’m going. I mean, that’s why I’m going. Concepción, did Lily tell you about her?”

“Yes, but I don’t know about any Ghost Thief. I’ve never even heard the term before.”

Mike nodded, looked into his teacup, which he held loosely by the edge between his knees. “I figured. But they need me.”

“For what?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugged, smiled. “If your Charlie said he needed you, would you ask him what for?”

Oh yes, she was going to do him until he begged her to stop. He’d be lucky if he could walk straight when she was done with him.

She cleared her throat, fidgeted. “I guess not,” she said demurely.

She really did need to get laid more than once every twelve years. This must be what it’s like for locusts. Long periods of dormancy followed by crazy tantric bug-fucks. Maybe not.

She cleared her throat again, hoping it would clear her restless mind as well. “Well, we’ll have to be there, when you… when you…”

“Jump?” he offered.

“Really, do you have to jump? Maybe you can crawl up in a cubbyhole with a bottle of sleeping pills? You don’t have to jump, do you?”

“I think I do. Believe me, that part sort of gives me the willies. I mean, if you’re up on the bridge five days a week for ten years, there’s not five minutes that pass that it doesn’t occur to you that you are just one mistake from plummeting to your death.”

“That’s it!” she said.

“That’s what?”

“That’s why you’re who you are. That’s why you can do this, why we’ll be able to do this. Probably. You’ve lived every day of your life preparing for your death.”

“Not really preparing.”

“But you’re not afraid when you’re up there, right?”

“No. Well, I was a little bugged out when the ghosts first showed up.”

“But you’re aware, always.”

“You kind of have to be.”

“We can do this, Mike.” She put her tea down and reached out for his hands. He put his tea down and took her hands across the table.

“I’m sure we can do this; we just have to coordinate everything.”

“One thing…”

“Yes?”

“Can you pull me out of my body before I hit the water? I kind of don’t want to be there.”

“I think that’s going to be on you—the timing of your part of the ritual.”

“Great. I’m in. Now what?”

“Well, there’s your life to close up. Charlie’s going to have to sort of take over for you, at least for a while. Because even though you jump off the bridge, and you die, to everyone else it will appear that you survived.”

“So, what? You want me to close my credit cards, stuff like that? Get my affairs in order?”

“I guess just do things to make it easier for Charlie to move from your life to his.”

“And now his soul is trapped in some kind of jar? A vessel? Lily wasn’t clear.”

“Sure, let’s say vessel. Some kind of vessel.”

“Poor guy. And he has a little girl. You know, I wouldn’t believe any of this if the ghosts hadn’t appeared to me. I mean, Concepción was the one who told me to call Lily. A ghost! Who would have believed that?”

“I know,” said Audrey. “I’ve trained for this kind of thing for most of my adult life and it wigs me out a little.”

“I love her,” said Mike. “I’ve never been in love, but I love her.”

“Yes,” said Audrey, patting his hand.

“The ghost.”

“Right, I know,” said Audrey. “Let’s make lists. Lists will help. Let’s start with ten things to keep you from getting too broken when you fall hundreds of feet into the bay.”

So, I guess we’re going to kill this guy, she thought. Then she said, “How does Thursday look for you?”

13. The Shadow of a Thousand Birds

Minty Fresh had felt dread rising like acid in his throat since Rivera first showed up in his shop with the story of the banshee, but never had it been more immediate than when he walked into the pawnshop in the Fillmore to find Ray Macy standing behind a glass case full of watches and jewelry. Ray had worked with Lily at Charlie Asher’s secondhand store. Lily had described the fortyish, balding ex-cop as her nemesis, her natural enemy, and a fucktard of astounding density. Minty tried to dismiss Ray as just more of the saturated humanity that lived under the wide spray of Lily’s contempt sprinkler, except that the ex-cop had become openly hostile when Lily and Minty Fresh closed Charlie’s store to open their pizza and jazz joint. Shortly afterward, Ray moved out of Charlie’s building and Fresh thought he’d seen the last of him. But no, here he was, guarding the gate, so to speak, to the only living Death Merchant Fresh knew besides Charlie and Rivera. It was cool. He was cool.

“Mr. Fresh,” said Ray. He was a beta male, so open confrontation wasn’t really his game. Passive aggression being the beta weapon of choice.

“Ray,” said Minty Fresh. “Good to see you landed on your feet.”

Ray turned behind the counter a bit so Minty Fresh could see he was wearing a revolver on his hip, the gesture made overly obvious by Ray’s inability to turn his head. A bullet to the neck had ended his career as a cop and doctors had fused his vertebrae. Ray Macy looked at life head-on, whether he wanted to or not.

“Did you just turn so I could see you had a gun?” asked Minty Fresh, amused.

“No,” said Ray, turning back quickly.

Ray must have been a horrible, horrible cop, Minty thought. He said, “I need to talk to Carrie Lang. This is her shop, I’m told.”

“She’s not available,” said Ray.

“I’m right here,” a woman called from the back room. “I’ll be right out.”

“She must have just come in,” Ray explained.

A blond woman in her midthirties came out of the back room.

“Whoa,” she said, when she spotted the big man. She stopped and backed up a step. “You’re a tall drink of water.”

“Honey,” said Ray, “this is Minty Fresh. Remember, I told you about him. Him and Lily.”

Minty considered the “honey” and gave Carrie Lang a second look: she was short, but weren’t they all? She wore an awful lot of silver Indian jewelry layered over denim and chambray, but she had a sweet smile, a nice shape, and there was a spark of intelligence in her eyes that really should have put Ray out of the running for her attention. It’s a lonely business, Fresh thought.

“Ms. Lang.” Minty offered his hand over the counter. “A pleasure.” As he took her hand he looked at Ray and nodded approval, giving the non-cop props for achieving out of his league.

“Mr. Fresh,” said Carrie Lang. “I’ve been by your store in the Castro. I always mean to stop in. What can I do for you?”

“I wonder if there’s someplace we can speak in private.”

“We’re pretty busy,” said Ray through gritted teeth.

“It’s about that special part of your business,” Minty said. “I, too, deal with very special secondhand items.”

Carrie Lang’s perky smile wilted. “Mr. Fresh, I don’t discuss the details of my business.”

“Under normal circumstances, neither do I, as the Big Book instructs, but these are really special circumstances.”

Ray turned to Carrie. “Big Book?” She patted his arm.

“I have an office in the back,” said Carrie. She turned and walked back through the doorway through which she’d come. “Watch your head.”

“Always do.”

Ray Macy audibly growled as Minty Fresh stepped behind the counter and ducked to go through the door.

Ray blurted, “You know Lily did me once in the back room at Asher’s.”

Minty Fresh stood to his full height and looked back over his shoulder at Ray. Carrie Lang popped back through the door, walked under Minty’s armpit, and glared at Ray.

“That is not news to me, Ray,” said Minty. But he’d bet it was news to Carrie Lang. “Miss Severo and I have parted ways. She is far too young.”

Carrie Lang held up her index finger to Ray, marking a place in the conversation where they would return at a later time—for fucking sure. Ray understood completely, and had he been able to nod, he would have, but instead he assumed the expression of someone who had just accidentally plunged an ice pick into his junk and is trying to hide the effect. Carrie exited under the big man’s armpit. “My office,” she said, leading him across the stockroom.

Her office was utilitarian, small, with all metal desk, chairs, and filing cabinets. Minty Fresh sat in a guest chair across from her. His knees touched her desk and the chair was backed flush against the door.

Lang sat, sighed. “Mr. Fresh, you know the last time we started

talking—”

“That’s why I’m here, Ms. Lang. All those secondhand dealers who were killed a year ago, ten of them, I think. They were all like us.”

She nodded. So she knew? What she didn’t know was that she’d been saved by the Squirrel People, who had knocked her out, duct-taped her up, and thrown her in a dumpster until the danger passed. They’d come in the dark and she’d never even seen them. Fresh knew.

“I don’t think they’ve been replaced. We—myself and a couple of other Death Merchants—think that the soul vessels they should have collected are still out there somewhere.”

She shrugged. “The Big Book says that stuff just gets taken care of. We don’t need to worry about what other—what did you call them, Death Merchants—are doing with their soul vessel?”

“I know, but apparently, they’re not taken care of. Look, have you noticed an increase in the number of names, or any strange circumstances? More important, have you seen any weird shit when you’re out and about?”

“You mean like giant ravens or voices coming out of the sewers.”

Minty Fresh tried to push back in his chair, but there wasn’t room to do it and he bumped his head on the steel door. “Yes.”

“No. I did before, last year. But it’s been quiet since. The soul vessels are about the same. I bring them in, they go out.”

“Good. That’s good. And Ray, he doesn’t know?”

“I think he suspects I’m a serial killer, but he’s clueless about the other thing.”

“You know Charlie Asher was one of us?”

“Yes. That’s how I met Ray. I went to Asher’s shop after the Latino cop told me what had happened and picked up the soul vessels that had been taken from me. The cop said it was over.”

“Rivera didn’t know. He was just being a cop. He’s one of us, now.”

“So maybe the others have been replaced, too.”

“No way to tell. We only knew about you because Charlie Asher went in your store once and saw the soul vessels. We don’t know what rules are still in effect. That’s what we’re trying to find out. I won’t contact you again unless it’s an emergency, just in case our contact is bringing up the forces of darkness like before. You can always reach me at my store if anything strange happens.” He threw a business card on her desk. “My mobile’s there. Anytime. Even if it’s just to fuck with Ray.”

She laughed. Her eyes had been getting wider and her expression more frightened as he had spoken, but now she smiled. She picked up his card. “Okay.”

“Just one more favor, then I’m in the wind.”

“Sure.”

“I need to look at your book. Your calendar.”

“We allowed to do that?”

“Who knows?”

“Okay.” She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a leather date book, and slid it across the desk to him. “There’s only one uncollected. Just appeared today.”

“I’m looking for a specific name. Mike Sullivan. Sound familiar? Within the last six weeks or so?” They’d figured out long ago that Death Merchants had the forty-nine days of bardo, the transition from life to death, to collect the soul vessel; sometimes they got it before the subject died, sometimes after.

“Nope,” she said.

He opened the book to the current date and she saw another entry on the page. “Two, I guess,” she said. “That last one wasn’t there this morning.”

Minty saw the newest name on her calendar and the number of days she had to retrieve the soul vessel: one.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“What? What? What?” She stood and leaned over, trying to get a better look at the new entry.

“I know this guy. He’s a cop.”

Sundown. Rivera was sneaking into a house when his phone buzzed in his jacket pocket and he checked it: Minty Fresh. He hit mute and soldiered on, walking into a bedroom where a portly man in pajamas was holding a pillow over the face of a thin person propped up in a hospital bed.

“Just a little bit more,” said the man. He looked to the clock on the nightstand as if timing himself.

After being restrained for twenty-five years by warrants, or at least knock and announce, Rivera was still getting used to sneaking into a house under the cloak of kinda-sorta invisibility. He kept reminding himself that he was not here as a cop. But then the guy looked over at him.

“Holy—!” The fat guy leapt back, threw the pillow in the air, and grabbed his chest. The woman’s head in the hospital bed lolled to the side. She was dead.

“You can see me?” said Rivera.

“Well, yeah.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news, then.”

“Worse than you walked in on me smothering my mother?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Who are you?”

Rivera badged him. “Inspector Alphonse Rivera, SFPD Homicide.”

The guy was backed against a dresser, trying to catch his breath, still holding his chest. He looked quickly to the dead woman, then back to Rivera. “Well, this is awkward.”

“You think?” said Rivera.

“It’s not what you think. She asked for it.”

“Okay,” said Rivera. He noticed a crystal perfume bottle on the dresser behind the fat guy, glowing a dull red.

“No, she really asked for it. She’s been sick. She’s my mother.” He looked at the dead woman again. “Was my mother. I have a videotape of her asking me to do this. We even discussed show tunes I could sing to cover the noise of her struggles.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rivera. “Decided to skip the singing, then?”

“Forgot. How did you get here so fast? You guys are a lot better at this than cops on TV. It usually takes like forty minutes to find the killer on TV.”

“Yeah, that’s not real,” said Rivera.

“So, do I need a lawyer? Are you going to take me in?”

“That depends,” said Rivera. He looked at the names in his case notebook that he’d copied out of his calendar. “Is that Wanda DeFazio?”

“Yes. Yes, it is,” said the fat guy, breathless once again.

Rivera nodded, referred back to the notebook again. “You wouldn’t be Donald DeFazio, would you?”

“Donny,” said Donny.

Rivera nodded again. He’d wondered what was going on when he had the two names appear on his calendar with the same surname. He figured it might be a car accident, husband and wife thing. He’d wanted to call Minty Fresh to ask him about it, but then, no…

“Donny, give me that perfume bottle behind you on the dresser.”

Donny DeFazio did what he was told, handed the crystal bottle to Rivera, who slipped it in his jacket pocket.

“You live here, Donny?”

“I have been. I had to move in six months ago to take care of my mother.”

Rivera nodded. Noncommittal cop nod. “So your possessions, they all here in the house?”

“Yes, why? Are you going to seize my stuff when you take me in? Freeze my accounts?”

Rivera shook his head at his notebook, flipped it shut, put it into his inside jacket pocket. “Nah, you’re good to go, Donny. I’m going to have a look around, though. Which is your room?”

“Down the hall.” Donny moved away from the dresser. “Wait, don’t I need to get a lawyer? Don’t you want to see the video? She was in pain. She asked me to do it?”

“I know. You feel bad about it?”

“Well, of course. I feel horrible about it. It’s the hardest thing I ever had to do.” He started gasping again.

“Well then, I’m sorry for your loss.” He pointed. “Just down the hall this way?”

Donny nodded, then grabbed his chest again, and either from relief or stress, stiffened, twitched, and slid down the front of the dresser to a splay-legged sitting position on the floor. He twitched for a few seconds, then slumped forward.

“And there we go,” said Rivera. He looked around, just in case Donny’s soul vessel might be sitting out like his mother’s, but nothing else was glowing. He backed out of the room and headed down the hall.

His phone buzzed again. There was also a text that had come in during the DeFazio deaths. Pick the fuck up, it said.

Rivera hit talk. “You said we weren’t supposed to talk unless it was an emergency.”

“Where’s your partner?” asked Minty Fresh.

“He’s watching my store while I’m out on a collection. I didn’t hear from you on the Lily girl, so he’s filling in until I find someone.”

“Where are you, not near him?”

“No. In Noe Valley. Looking for a vessel. I found another Death Merchant, and there’s more—”

“Yeah, we’ll get to that. Y’all might want to sit down, Inspector.”

Nick Cavuto was reading a Raymond Chandler short story called “Red Wind” behind the counter when the banshee stepped out of the stacks.

“AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

Cavuto dropped the paperback as he slid off the stool into a crouch, drew a ridiculously large revolver from his shoulder holster, and leveled it at the banshee. One motion.

“I will drop you, raggedy,” he said.

“I come to save your life, you great dolt, and you cast aspersions on me frock?”

Cavuto kept the gun trained on her and looked around it. “Save my life, huh?”

“You need to get out of here before dark, lad. There’s a nasty bit of business heading your way. They’re not strong enough to move in the daylight yet, but they’ll be here soon.”

“Raven women coming to take my soul?” Cavuto lowered the gun to his side. “Stay there.”

“They can’t kill a man for his soul, don’t know why, just the way of things, otherwise you’d all be rotting in the fields. But they will kill you for the sport.” She moved toward him, gestured that she was moving wide of the counter, toward the front door. “Let’s go, love, have a ride in your lovely carriage. I’ll hang me head out the window when I scream.” She smiled, black lips and bluish teeth—batted her sooty eyelashes.

Cavuto glanced over his shoulder and out the window. The streetlights were on and the little stripe of sky he could see was dying pink.

“There’ll be no screaming.”

“Aye, lad, let’s go, then.” She made a motion as if shooing errant chickens toward the door, the long tatters of her sleeves making trails like smoke.

There was a rumble from behind the shop and they both looked to the single window at the back of the store, high and narrow, four steel bars across it. As they watched, the window, lit yellow from the light in the alley, went black.

“Back door locked, then?” asked the banshee.

Cavuto nodded, not looking away from the window.

“Spendid. We’re off, then. Come along. Go swiftly and stay long, I always say.”

The rear window cracked and the shadow of a thousand birds oozed in between the cracks and down the back wall, spreading, form and light exchanging as it moved, like oily lace woven into the shapes of flying things. The shadow slid down onto the hardwood floor, splashed in waves over the shelves as it approached them. At one narrow, central shelf where Rivera displayed recently acquired books—soul vessels—the shadow coalesced, covered the whole shelf like a shroud.

The banshee could see the five souls, glowing dull red, and one by one, as the shadow enveloped them, they started to fade.

“Mad dash, love. Mad dash,” she said.

“You go,” said Cavuto. He trained the.44 Magnum on a spot at the middle of a dark shelf, fifteen feet away.

As the last soul vessel went dark, the shadow throbbed, gained dimension, split into three distinct masses that then undulated, changed, formed into three female figures, human to a degree, shimmering with fine, blue-black feathers; talons sprouted from the tips of their fingers, long and hooked like marlin spikes, the silver color of stars.

“Gun,” said one, her voice like gravel swishing in a pan. “I hate guns.”

“Well, lad, you’ve shat the bed now,” said the banshee.

14. Perchance to Dream

It was a Wednesday night in San Francisco, and despite the fog having laid a soft blanket over the city and the foghorn singing its sad and low lullaby, no one slept well.

RIVERA

Inspector Alphonse Rivera was electrified by the shock and grief of finding Nick Cavuto dead in his bookstore. There were four units and an ambulance on the scene by the time Rivera got there. The EMTs were working on the big man on the floor—compressions on his chest, squeezing the bag to breathe for him, slamming syringes of adrenaline, and hitting him with defibrillator paddles. As soon as they got a heartbeat they would move him, they said.

There was blood, but not a tremendous amount, on Cavuto’s cutaway shirt.

Rivera could still smell the gunpowder in the air, as well as the more smoky aroma of burning peat. Cavuto’s big stainless-steel revolver lay on the floor by him.

“How long?” he asked the first officer he saw with a notebook who wasn’t interviewing someone. Nguyen on his nameplate. Rivera going into autopilot, not allowing what was happening a few feet behind him to become part of his reality.

“They’ve been working about ten minutes—since I’ve been on scene.”

“Gunshot wound?”

“Probably not,” the cop said. He cringed. “EMT said it looks more like a stab wound. Thin blade. Ice pick maybe.”

“Witnesses?”

“People all over on the street, drinkers, diners, people walking their dogs, you know this neighborhood. No one saw shit yet, still looking. ‘Shots fired’ call came from the nail place next door.” The officer looked at his notes. “Seven-oh-two. First unit on scene a minute later. Found him like this.”

Rivera checked his watch: 7:15.

Rivera looked around. The shelf where he had displayed the soul vessels was sprayed with a fine, oily fuzz, like black down, and even as Rivera watched, it was evaporating into vapor. He’d seen it before, a year ago, on the bricks in the alley where he’d pumped nine 9-mm rounds into one of the Morrigan to rescue Charlie Asher.

“We’re moving him!” barked one of the EMTs.

“He’s back?” Rivera asked.

The EMT whipped his head. “No, I’m calling an audible. We can get him to St. Francis in five. He needs a surgeon. Wound may have hit the heart.”

The other EMTs had already lifted Cavuto onto a gurney. Uniform cops were clearing the way to the ambulance.

“We’ll work on him until we can’t,” said the EMT over his shoulder as he went out the door.

“Tell them to check for venom,” Rivera said.

The EMT raised his eyebrows.

“Just do it.”

The EMT nodded and was out the door.

“People next door said they heard six shots, quick,” said Officer Nguyen. “Very, very loud.”

Rivera walked to the display shelf. The books, the five soul vessel books, were still there, lying on the floor, but they no longer glowed. Two rounds had hit the books on the top shelf, tearing cantaloupe-sized holes through the books, leaving shredded paper in the cavity like it had been nested by hamsters. He looked to the back of the store. Two more portals of shredded paper where the rounds had hit the books on the back wall.

Nguyen moved to his side as the last of the black feathers vaporized.

“What the fuck is that stuff? It was all over the place when I got here.”

“No idea,” said Rivera. Then, still on emotional autopilot, crime-scene robot on the scene, he said, “All the shots were Cavuto’s.” He pointed to the four impact points with his pen. He saw Nguyen’s eyes go wide at the craters in the books before him.

“He used SWAT loads,” Rivera explained. Cavuto loaded the.44 with very-high-speed, prefrangilized bullets — a copper jacket filled with lead beads encased in resin, half the weight of a normal.44 round, thus the high speed, but when they hit they expanded explosively, doing enormous damage to flesh, or in this case, paper. Used by law enforcement because they didn’t ricochet, and would not go through walls or car doors to hurt innocents. Essentially, they blew up on the first thing they hit, and Cavuto had hit what he was aiming at, thus the spray of hellish down.

Nyguen ran his own pen around the edge of one of the craters in the books, careful not to actually touch it. “So these rounds went through someone before they hit here?”

“Something,” Rivera said. “If it had been someone, there’d be a pile of ground meat here to identify and clean up.”

“Fuck,” said Nguyen.

“Yeah,” said Rivera. “I’m headed to St. Francis. Tell the watch commander, would you?”

Rivera did not hurry because he knew there was no reason to hurry. They wouldn’t be bringing Nick Cavuto back to the land of the living. They continued to work on the big cop for forty-five minutes after Rivera arrived at the hospital without getting so much as a blip of a heartbeat. They pronounced him dead a little after 8 P.M.

A captain from Personal Crimes debriefed Rivera at the hospital, after which two commanders took turns telling him to go home and stay away from the case, which he finally did when they threated to suspend him if he didn’t.

At home, he texted Minty Fresh about Cavuto’s death, then ate something, but he didn’t remember what, turned on the TV and sat in front of it, but he couldn’t have said what was on, then went to bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling, his Glock.40 cal in his hand, until 6 A.M., when he finally fell into a fitful, jerky sleep, with dreams full of the sound of frantic birds scratching at windows.

MINTY FRESH

Minty Fresh lay awake mentally arranging jazz albums by artist and recording date, cross-referencing who played what on which record, listening in his mind’s ear to the signature riff of each artist as he came to mind. It was a rich, complex, demanding exercise, but it kept him from thinking about the dead cop, the dark rising, and the task he would have to perform tomorrow. It kept him from reaching that place that he hit so, so often in his life, the mind-bending, sob-inducing limit where he said to himself, I just cannot endure any more motherfucking death. No more!

Order. Put everything in order. Serve order. That was the why and what of it. Order.

In his head, he flipped albums, looked at liner notes, grainy photographs taken in smoky clubs, listened to notes played by men long dead, and he put them in order. ’Round Midnight, he drifted off.

MIKE SULLIVAN

Mike couldn’t remember being this excited to go to sleep since Christmas Eve when he was a kid: the excitement, the anticipation, the replaying, over and over, of how it would be, knowing that no matter how you imagined it, you’d be surprised. This was just like that, but instead of waking up to find that Santa had brought him a new bike, or a fire truck with an extending ladder (he loved that fire truck), he was going to get up in the morning and throw himself off a bridge and die.

He knew he should feel sad about it, in fact, he even felt a little guilty for not feeling sad, but he didn’t feel sad. He’d miss his apartment, and some of his friends, but not that much, really. Not compared to what it might be like. And there was the Christmas-morning part: he was going to die, but he was not going to end. There was something else out there, more exciting and unknown than even a bike under the Christmas tree, and somehow there was an inevitability to all of it. He didn’t feel like this was a choice he was making, but more like a choice that had been made long ago and he was just fulfilling it—like riding on a train, waiting for your station, you don’t decide at each station to stay or go, you get to your station and you get off. He was coming to his station.

He ran the Sanskrit chant through his head, which wasn’t hard. It was only a few words, Audrey had written them out phonetically for him, and since he’d first learned them and repeated them, they had rung in his head constantly. With the chant sounding in the background, he checked and rechecked the arrangements he’d made for Charlie Asher to take over his life, going so far as to label certain shirts that he thought looked good on him, certain background details he shared with the guys at work, listing each of their social network profiles so if Charlie ever ran into them, he might recognize them from their pictures.

He liked that someone was getting his stuff, even his body, as if he was giving someone who was really hungry half of his sandwich, after deciding he might have to throw it away. It was all so exciting. Charlie had called him, and in his strange, scratchy little voice, thanked him for what he was going to lose. Ha! Lose? “You’re welcome, but no, not lose,” he’d said. “A gift,” he said, and, “Thank you.”

Concepción! Concepción! Concepción! Concepción! My Conchita! My love! He had never felt like this and it was glorious. He ached for her, his soul sang electric with the thought of her, and tomorrow he would be with her.

He didn’t remember falling asleep and he didn’t care that he did, because in the morning he would get up, go to the bridge, then jump off and die.

LILY

Lily lived in the Sunset District, where San Francisco was open to the sea, so even when the rest of the city was warm and sunny, the fog rolled in over Ocean Beach and the Great Highway to settle between the rows of postwar tract homes. Lily liked the fog, and didn’t even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, windswept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff’s dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to bring light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor’s garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry.

“Look, I just need it for a few hours,” she told the ambulance guy.

“They have to stay with the ambulance, miss,” the stupid guy had said. “We can’t lend them out.”

“Look, nurse, I’m trying to save lives over here. I swear, I’ll have it back to you in like three, four hours max.”

“Still can’t do it. Even if we could, these aren’t the consumer models like they hang on the wall at the airport. We’re trained to use these.”

“Quoi?” she had said, in perfect fucking French. They just hung defibrillators on the wall at the airport? Those things cost like five thousand dollars. (Which she hadn’t known when she said she’d take care of getting one.) And they just hang them there for anyone to use? She needed to travel more.

A quick search on her phone revealed that they hung them on the wall at City Hall, as well as at the airport, and she was only a few blocks from there. But she hadn’t really been sure she wanted to try to get on the bus or the BART while making off with a stolen defibrillator, so she had called her friend Abby, who had a car.

“Abs, we’re getting the band back together,” Lily’d said.

“I have to work at four,” Abby said.

“It’s an emergency. Like an hour, max. Can you pick me up at the corner of Polk and Pine?”

“Okay, but I’m going to be dressed for work.”

Twenty minutes later, Abby showed up in her beater Prius and Lily jumped in. “What are you wearing?” was the first thing Lily said.

“For work,” Abby said. She was wearing a khaki skirt, black tights, a crisp white blouse and flats. If not for her hair, which was still short and dyed a deep maroon, Lily wouldn’t have recognized her.

“Retail?” Lily asked.

Abby nodded. “I’m a failure. What are you wearing?”

Lily was in black jeans, ankle boots, and a red SF Fire Department T-shirt, which she had thought might help her with the ambulance guys. “Me, too,” she said.

The two failed Goth girls shared a high-five and hugged it out for their shame, then Lily said, “Head up Van Ness and pull in in front of City Hall.”

“I can’t park there. There’s a bus stop.”

“You’re not parking. It’s an emergency.”

Lily outlined the plan on the way: “I need to steal a defibrillator.”

“Okay, I’ll drive,” said Abby.

“No, you have to come in with me.”

“Why? They aren’t heavy. Are they heavy?”

“No, but I haven’t done this before.”

Abby pulled the Prius up onto the sidewalk in front of City Hall and they both jumped out.

“My friend is having a heart attack. My friend is having a heart attack,” Lily chanted as she led Abby up the steps, and continued chanting it as they ran up the hall.

“My friend is having a heart attack, make way.”

When people looked, Abby said, “Hey, fuck off, I’m having a heart attack.”

Finally they spotted a bright red plastic box inside a larger, clear plastic box near a fire extinguisher.

“You want this, too?” Abby said, her hand on the fire extinguisher handle.

“No, just this.”

Lily pulled open the plastic box and pulled out the defibrillator, which was about the size of a small laptop computer. There was a readout and a single yellow button. Then the box started talking.

“Place pads on patient’s chest,” said the box.

Unfortunately, Lily and Abby had attracted enough attention on their way to the defibrillator that a group of about a dozen people had gathered around them to either help the skinny girl or watch her twitch.

“Place pads on patient’s chest,” said the box.

Lily popped open a little door on the defibrillator and two vinyl pads about the size of coasters, stuck together, fell out, trailing wires behind them.

“What do we do?” Abby said.

“Place pads on patient’s chest,” said the box.

Lily held the box between her legs, separated the two pads, then tore open Abby’s blouse and slammed the pads on her boobs.

“You bitch!” said Abby. She grabbed the front of Lily’s shirt and made to tear it open, but instead just stretched it out and spun Lily halfway around.

“Heart rhythm normal. Do not shock,” said the box.

“What’s going on here?” came a voice from down the hall.

It was a heavyset, coplike guy, in that he had a gun and a uniform, but he didn’t look like he ever had to do any difficult cop stuff.

Abby took off running the way they had come. Lily grabbed the defibrillator just as it was about to be yanked out of her hand and followed.

“Heart attack! Heart attack!” Abby yelled ahead. “Out of the way, I’m having a fucking heart attack.”

“She is,” said Lily, holding up the defibrillator as she ran. “Slow down, Abs, you’re pulling out the wires.”

Abby jumped into the Prius. Lily bundled the defibrillator into her friend’s lap, then jumped in the Prius’s back door behind her. “Go! Go! Go!”

And with all the roaring fury of a golf cart escaping the back nine, they sped into the traffic on Van Ness and were immediately stuck behind a bus, which, it turned out, didn’t matter, because no one was chasing them.

“Do not shock. Heart rhythm normal,” the box said.

“You got electro-stickum on my best bra,” Abby said. “I have to change before work, now.”

“They look good on you, though—like a sexy torture robot.”

“Yeah?” Abby was trying to look at her chest while driving. “See if there’s extras in the little box.”

So that had happened, and Lily had called M and told his voice mail, “No problem on the defibrillator, I’ll have it for you,” but then doubt started rising as evening came on, and by midnight she really, really wanted to be asleep, not thinking about killing a guy, but the stupid foghorn. What, ships didn’t have radar and stuff, they still had to use nineteenth-century technology to keep from crashing into rocks?

She went to her bedroom window, threw up the sash, and stuck her head out as the foghorn sounded.

“Really?” she shouted.

Again the horn.

“Seriously!”

“How ’bout you be quiet,” said Mr. Lee, the old Chinese guy who lived in the apartment below her and was hanging out the window smoking.

“Sorry,” she said, and slunk back to bed.

AUDREY AND CHARLIE

Since meeting with Mike, Audrey had spent three days fasting, chanting, and meditating, preparing herself to perform the ritual of Chöd, trying to achieve the mental state necessary, without, of course, thinking about achieving the mental state necessary, which is sort of the tricky part of Buddhism.

Late Wednesday night found her sitting in the lotus position on a wide, padded stool at the end of the bed while Charlie paced frantically around her, nervous about his big moment. She had not slept and would not sleep, having achieved the state of waking trance that she would need to maintain through the ritual, but Charlie’s toenails, snickt, snickt, snickting on the carpet threated to pull her out of her trance.

Calmly, evenly, quietly, she said, “Charlie. Please.”

“I can’t sleep. I’ve tried. All the things that could go wrong. What if it doesn’t work and Sophie never has her daddy? You could have done all of this for nothing. Mike might back out, and who could blame him. I’m sure there’s a way I could screw this up. And you know if there’s a way to, I will. And not only that—”

“Please,” she said, not a note of alarm or anger, every breath with purpose.

“I just can’t sleep, there’s the—” and he was off again. Snickt, snickt, snickt.

Audrey, her face a model of the beautiful and compassionate Buddha, stood on the cushioned stool, ever so slowly—Venus rising from the sea on the half shell—and let her silk saffron robe slip off her until she stood there naked.

“Hey,” Charlie said. “Wow. What, are you—”

Charlie, all of his vital energies and most of his fluids having been inspired to swiftly migrate to his enormous dong, was spun around as the member unfurled from his waist until it achieved its full appreciation, then he plopped over on his side unconscious on the rug, where he remained, snoring, until dawn.

Audrey slowly lowered herself back into the lotus position and continued her meditation through the night.

THE MORRIGAN

They had once been death goddesses of the Celts, the three, and had reigned over the battlefields of the North for a thousand years, plucking souls from the dead and dying, and driving warriors on with fury and terror, switching from their raven and crow forms to the silky, razor-clawed harpy-women as whim and wind suited them. Now they were patchwork shadows, licking their wounds in a closed train tunnel under Fort Mason Great Meadow, unable even to hold three-dimensional form, distinguishable from the oil stains left by the tractors and other heavy equipment stored in the tunnel only in that they were moving.

“Did guns get worse?” asked Nemain, the venomous one, trying to hold on her left arm, which was attached by only a thread of pitch. “I was shot when I was above before, and I don’t remember it being this bad.” She tried to will herself to hold form, but melted back a flat shadow. She looked to the man in yellow, who sat in the seat of the skip-loader, leaning on one elbow.

“And it wasn’t the same one who shot you before?” asked the Yellow Fellow.

“Different. Bigger. Bigger gun. But I stung him in the heart before he shot my arm.”

“We’re going to need more souls to heal,” said Macha, who had reverted to the shadow of her bird form, a hooded crow. The cold, fog-diffused moonlight in the tunnel shone through ragged holes in her wings and breasts. “The five that were in the bookstore were barely enough for us to take form. Now…”

“I want to take the head of the banshee,” said Babd, the third of the sisters, who leaned on the wheel of a skip-loader for balance, her left leg gone from the shin down. She had wielded the terrifying screech that drove warriors to suicidal frenzy on the battlefield, so the more gentle screamer, the banshee, had always been especially annoying to her. “But I can’t do it with only one leg. We need souls.”

“Ladies, ladies, relax. I will bring you what you need,” he said. And he would. He hadn’t anticipated the setback of a heavily armed policeman who had been forewarned by a banshee when he sent them into the soul-seller’s store. They hadn’t been strong enough for that, and now they weren’t even strong enough to go above and hold a useful form, or, if necessary, face the Luminatus and her hellhounds. He wasn’t exactly sure he wanted them to be. They had torn his predecessor, Orcus, to pieces. It was a dilemma he needed to ponder. He would bring them what they needed to heal, but only what they needed.

“For now y’all can lick your wounds in the trunk of the Buick. I’ll be back in a butterfly wink.”

He limped off down the tunnel alongside the heavy equipment, limped not because he was injured, but as a matter of style.

When he was gone, Babd said, “How long is that? Is that more than a week?”

“He’s being colorful,” said Nemain. “He’s very colorful.”

“If I want any color out of him, I’ll open one of his veins,” said Macha.

“Ooo, I like that,” said Babd. “I’m going to say that to the banshee.”

“Not the same,” said Macha, shaking her shadowy head.

“Yeah,” said Nemain. “No blood.”

“Butterflies,” said Babd. “Yuck.” She shuddered so that even in her shadow form her feathers bristled with revulsion.

15. Thursday at the Bridge

Thursday was similar to any other workday for Mike Sullivan, in that he got up, got dressed, and drove to the bridge. But this Thursday was a little different in that he wouldn’t be driving back. He was awakened by the knock on his door, and when he opened it, a thin woman with severe blond hair dropped a gear bag at his feet.

“What are you, about a forty, forty long?” she said instead of hello.

“Huh?” said Mike.

“Jacket size.”

“Yeah, a forty.”

“Yeah; me, too,” she said. “Thirty-eight actually, but I like shoulder pads. I have to have the waist taken in a little, too.”

“Okay,” said Mike.

“I’m Jane. I’m going to be your new sister.”

Mike shook her hand. “You wanna come in?”

“No, gotta go. I’m on the catch team. There’s motocross leathers in there. Not really leather, though, some kind of bulletproof fabric. They were my brother’s. Should fit you. If they’re snug, that’s good, they’ll hold your bones in place.”

Mike was suddenly wide-awake. It was the “hold your bones in place” line that did the trick.

“There’s plates over the spine, elbows, forearms, knees. All should fit under your coveralls without showing. I also threw in a kayaker’s

helmet—”

“No,” said Mike.

“Look, I’m just trying to keep you from getting too mashed up.”

“I’m not wearing a helmet.”

“You wear a hard hat on the bridge, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but.”

“Fine, wear that.”

“I will.”

“Okay, there’s also a five-pound paper bag of sand in the satchel. You want to throw that in right before you jump. I mean, right before you jump. You’re basically going to jump into the hole that the bag makes in the surface of the water.”

“How do I get a five-pound bag out onto the bridge unnoticed?”

“Do you ever bring your lunch?”

“Well yeah, but—”

“You aren’t going to need your lunch today. Take the sand instead. If everything goes right, you’ll just knock yourself out and drown.”

“You’re kind of being mean to me, considering…” He realized then that she hadn’t looked him in the eye once since she’d shown up. Now she did.

“I’m just trying to get through this, okay, Mike? I can’t get my head around what you’re doing for us, and it’s easier if I think of you as some random insane guy.”

“Sure, I get that.”

“Sorry. I’m sometimes overly stern with the mentally ill. I’ll work on that.”

“Uh, thanks?”

She held her arms out stiffly, offering a hug above the gear bag at their feet. Mike leaned over and shared an awkward, only-collar-bones-touching-back-patting hug with her.

“Okay. Good talk,” Jane said, pushing away. “You have the number.”

“Yes,” Mike said.

“So, unless something different happens with the weather, I’ll see you at nine?”

“Nine,” Mike said.

“Thanks,” she said. “Really.” Then she quickstepped away down the hallway like she was trying to get through a haunted graveyard as fast as possible without actually running.

They had rented a twenty-four-foot Boston Whaler from the marina by the ballpark. Rivera was to have been their pilot, but they’d agreed to call him off when they got news of Cavuto’s murder. Jane stood at the center console, steering. Minty Fresh stood to her side, holding the stainless rail on the console, towering over her. On the deck behind Jane, Audrey sat in the lotus position, apparently in some kind of trance, although she could move and react when they needed her to. Her head bobbed as the boat bounced over a light chop in the bay. Charlie, in his wizard robe and a dog’s life jacket that had come with the boat, was at the stern, wedged between the bait box and a large waterproof suitcase that Minty Fresh had brought on board.

“So, a green wet suit?” said Jane. “Bold choice.”

“I wanted it in a sea foam,” said the Mint One, who was already wearing his fins. “But the guy who was making it could only get neoprene in forest green.”

“Very froggy,” said Charlie, shouting to be heard over the big twin Mercury outboards.

“You need to consider your glass house,” said Minty.

“But hey, webbed feet,” Charlie said, wiggling his duck feet before him. “Nice, right?”

Jane glanced back. “I can’t even look at you like that. It’s just like Mom used to say, you’re a freak of nature.”

“Mom said that?” Charlie thought he was pouting, but since he had no lower lip to protrude, it looked more like his jaw was flapping in the breeze.

“Well, she did one time—she was repeating what I had just said when she asked me to drive you to school one day. Still.”

“Not for much longer,” said Minty Fresh, letting them both off the hook of family history.

“Shhhh,” shushed Jane. “We’re harshing Audrey’s chi or something.”

Jane throttled down the outboards a little as they rounded Alcatraz and the current coming in the Golden Gate kicked the waves up.

“Where’d you learn to drive a boat?” Minty Fresh asked.

“Our dad used to take us fishing,” shouted Charlie. “Jane always got to drive the boat.”

“Shhhh,” shushed Audrey, who evidently was not as deep in trance as they thought.

“Sorry,” said Charlie.

“Uh-oh,” said Jane as she steered toward the north tower of the bridge. “That’s not good.”

A finger of fog was streaming in through the Golden Gate; from their position, it appeared to be above the water, but below the deck of the bridge.

Minty Fresh lifted his sunglasses to get a better look. “You can see to steer, right?”

“So far,” said Jane. “But I don’t know if we’ll be able to see the bottom of the bridge from under it. It might be a whiteout by the time we get there.” She checked her watch.

Five minutes later, when they were a half mile out, the fingerling of fog had taken on the aspect of a snowy knife blade, inserting itself between the bridge towers and the water just below the roadway.

“We won’t be able to see the bottom of the bridge,” said Jane, digging in her rain-jacket pocket for her phone. “I’m calling it off.”

Lily was supposed to be at work at nine, and she had actually been headed that way, but after dropping off the defibrillator at Charlie’s store for his sister, and learning that the big gay cop, Cavuto, had been killed, she started to shake, and as her bus approached her stop near the Crisis Center offices she realized she just couldn’t do it. She got off the bus and flagged down a taxi.

“Take me to the Golden Gate Bridge,” she said.

“You want me to take you to the visitor center, or to the bridge. Because if I take you to the bridge, I’m going to have to go to Marin to turn around and pay the toll to come back and it’s going to cost you.”

“Sure, the visitor center,” she said, not really thinking it through.

She got out of the cab at the visitor center and paid, then started running up the trail for the bridge. She hadn’t even gotten to the tollbooths before she was out of breath and had to slow to a walk. She checked the time on her phone: 8:55. Five minutes. She started to jog in the wobbly, ankle-breaking way that drunk girls do, although she wasn’t drunk, just really out of shape.

He was going to jump off from the steel structure under the road, about two hundred feet south of the north tower. She looked up. She wasn’t even to the south tower. She’d never make it. And if she did, what was she going to do? You couldn’t even get to where he was going to be from the walkway; at least she didn’t know how to get there.

But there was fog coming in under the bridge, like a plank or something. He wouldn’t jump in the fog. That was one of the plans, she was sure of it.

She scrolled up his number and pressed dial. This was her thing, this was what she did. This was what made her special. She would get the bridge painter off the bridge.

“Hi, Lily,” Mike said.

“Mike, you can’t do this. Not today.”

“I have to, Lily. But I wouldn’t be here if not for you.”

She made an exasperated growling noise.

“Are you okay?” Mike asked. “You sound like you’re choking. Are you crying.”

“No, I’m running.” She was crying. “I’m right above you on the walkway.” She was, kind of, above him, and she was on the walkway, she just wasn’t right above him on the walkway, by about a quarter of a mile.

“That’s very sweet of you,” Mike said. “But really, I’ll be fine. I don’t know, I feel like I’m done here.”

“You’re totally not done. You paint the bridge I’m looking at it. I can see a spot you missed right here. There’s rust.”

“This is what’s supposed to be, Lily. She needs me. They need me.”

She held the phone to her chest until the urge to scream that he was a fucking lunatic passed, then, very calmly she said, “Just come up, Mike. This is a bad idea. There’s fog. You can go back down if your mind is set on it, but for now, please just come up here. Hang out with me for a little bit. I’m waiting.”

“Are you using the ‘promise of sex’ thing on me, Lily?”

“No, that’s not what this is. That’s a different thing completely. This is—”

“Well, that would be lovely, and under other circumstances, I’d jump at the opportunity.”

“Really?” He did not just say that. Did he really say that?

“I mean, I’m flattered, but Concepción is waiting for me, and she has my heart.”

“Mike, did you just call that ghost your boo?”

“Good-bye, Lily. Thank you. I have to go, I have another call.”

Her phone beeped as he disconnected. She stopped walking and just looked at it.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she screeched.

A father who was walking his two elementary school kids across the bridge took their heads and steered them away from the foulmouthed girl with too much eye makeup. He glared over his shoulder at her.

“Oh, lick my love-luge, Dockers, I’m trying to save a fucking life here.”

She couldn’t see the screen of her phone through the blur of her tears. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and looked again: nine o’clock.

Hi, Jane,” Mike said into the phone. He stood on a beam under the roadway, facing the city, one arm wrapped around a crossbeam. He’d already slipped out of his safety harness, leaving the lines attached to the bridge. At his feet, the bag of sand. The chant Audrey had taught him was repeating in his mind, over, and over, and over, as constant as the ocean.

“Mike, it’s not a go,” said Jane. “We can’t even see you.”

Mike looked down on the strip of fog that was streaming not more than twenty feet below him. Incredibly dense, but wispy and soft-looking on top. Looking out, the bay was clear all the way to Berkeley, the fog only coming in from the ocean side, the strip of vapor like the fog bank testing the temperature of the bay before coming through the Gate. He’d seen it before, he’d seen it all.

“It’s clear all around you, though, right?” Mike said.

“Yes, but not above us. It’s not safe.”

Concepción materialized before him, about ten feet away, smiling, her arms out.

Mike laughed. “Good-bye, Jane. Take care of my body.” Eyes forward, knees a little bent, hands in a fist, he thought. He crouched, put his phone on the beam, then stood and faced Concepción, holding the bag of sand before him.

“Come to me,” she said. “Come to me, my sweet Nikolasha.”

The Sanskrit chant circling in his head, Mike dropped the bag of sand and stepped out into space.

The man in yellow could just hear them saying—after the Morrigan killed the cop and took the soul vessels from the bookstore, completely wasting them—he could just hear them saying, “They’re creatures of darkness, it’s not like they’re just going to waltz right in in broad daylight and take the souls.”

Everybody likes a surprise, he thought.

So, just a little after nine in the morning, when a pasty guy in big glasses flipped the “Open” sign on the front door at Fresh Music, the man in yellow waltzed right in, in broad daylight, to take the souls.

It was a nice store, stained glass in the front windows true to the Edwardian architecture of the building, poster-sized black-and-white photos of jazz, soul, and rock greats. Iconic album covers in frames over the racks of used vinyl: Bitches Brew, Lush Life, Sticky Fingers, Abbey Road, Born to Run. The yellow fellow strolled by the racks, flipping an album here, there, looking for that beautiful red glow that the ladies loved so.

The store was laid out in a barbell shape; he paced the whole front, then paused at the counter before going to the back. The guy behind the counter was about thirty, wearing a too-small plaid cotton short-sleeve, the bottom buttons unbuttoned, the shirt flaring over too-tight, too-short, gold polyester dress slacks, his hair a tangled mushroom shape, his beard more the function of not shaving than grooming—that shit was growing down his neck. The yellow fellow looked over the counter at the guy’s shoes: like something out of a Dorthea Lange Depression work-camp photo, toes all bent up and nasty.

“Can I help you,” said Neck Beard, a little indignant, the yellow fellow in his personal space.

“What’s your name?”

“Evan,” said Evan.

“Evan, this everything?” Yellow stirred the air with a long finger to include the whole store. “This your whole inventory?”

“There are a few things in the back room, mostly duplicates, some estate stuff I’m supposed to unpack and file. Nothing good.”

“Uh-huh,” said Yellow, noticing the locked glass case on the wall behind the counter was conspicuously half empty. “What you got in there?”

Evan looked over his shoulder dismissively, shrugged. “Some rare pressings, first editions. Usually these three shelves on the right are what the owner calls his ‘special collection’: just crap, mixed-up genres, vinyl, 78s, 45s, like a Fleetwood Mac CD, a beat-up wax Edison cylinder, worthless—not anything anybody’d want, no need to lock them up.”

“But he do? He lock them up, keep watch on them like they solid gold, right?”

“Yeah,” said Evan, just weary of it all. “I don’t understand it, unless he’s keeping them ironically, because they are worthless, so he’s kind of making a statement by pretending they have value.”

“So where, ironically, do you think he put them?”

Shrug. “Who cares?”

Yellow’s hand shot out and struck Evan’s throat like a viper, catching his windpipe between his thumb and fingers, pinching it. Evan made a cat-yakking-up-a-hairball noise, but could not move.

“Son, I’ma tell you something ain’t nobody else in the world can tell you: you got no soul. And I’ma tell your future, too: you ain’t never gonna get a soul, you keep makin’ people’s shit small.”

Evan’s eyes started to roll back in his head and the big man shook him like dust mop until he came back to the room. “You ain’t shit, Evan, and you ain’t never gonna be shit until you show some passion for something. Y’all got to love something. Y’all got to hate something. Y’all got to want something. Pissing on other people’s passion ’cause you trying to be cool just make you a coward—a little bitch.” Shake. Rattle. Roll.

“You don’t love nothin’, Evan. You’re no use to me. You’re no use to anyone. In fact, I’ma choke you out. Say good-bye to the world, Evan.”

“Wait!” Evan gasped.

“Wait, what? Ain’t no thing. I’ma choke you out ironically, Evan, so you be too cool for school. Cool as a motherfuckin’ corpse, Evan.” He let a little air through.

“I love something! I do love something.”

“You do?”

“My cat, Cisco.”

“Cisco? After the outlaw?”

“After the networking company.”

“Yeah, I’m sho-nuff gonna choke this motherfucker out!” Yellow said to the ceiling, just an amen short of preaching.

“There won’t be anyone to take care of him. The people in my building will take him to the shelter and they’ll put him down.”

Yellow loosened his grip. “Evan, did you just say something that wasn’t about you?”

Evan nodded as best he could.

“Where is the shit was in that case?”

“With Fresh. It was gone this morning when I got here.”

“Tell you what, Evan, I’ma give you a gift—a gift of passion. You got a passion for finding the shit was in that case.”

Yellow let him go. Evan fell back against the glass case, gasping. The man in yellow reached in his vest, pulled out a business card, and threw it on the counter. “That shit turn up, you call that number.”

Evan nodded.

“And that’s all you know about this encounter, Evan. You got a passion for finding that shit and calling that number. You didn’t see nobody, you didn’t hear nobody, you don’t even know how you got that card.”

Evan nodded.

“And shave your motherfucking neck.” Yellow pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his choking hand as he left the shop. “That shit is nasty.”

The bell over the door rang and Evan looked up, surprised that no one was there. No one had been in all morning. Just as well, he could feel a sore throat coming on.

It’s done,” Audrey said. She opened her eyes and looked around.

“What’s done?” said Jane, she looked up from her phone just in time to see a dark shape plummeting out of the fog bank above them. Two things hit the water with explosive impact only about fifteen feet from the boat—Pow! Pow! — a water spout shot up and dispersed over and around them.

“Holy fuck!” Jane said, staring at the water.

“Audrey, can you hand me that,” Minty Fresh said, pointing to the big, gray suitcase at the stern. His diving mask was on his head. He hit a button on his watch.

“Holy fuck!” Jane said.

Audrey stood, grabbed the handle, and swung it over to the big man, who stepped past the console and set it in the bow.

“What’s in there?” Audrey asked.

“Soul vessels,” said the Mint One. “After Cavuto, I wanted them with me.”

“Holy fuck!” Jane said, still staring at the settling spot where Mike had hit the water.

“Jane!” said Minty Fresh. She shook off the amazement and looked at him. “We need to get into the water.”

Jane shook her head. “Too much current, someone has to drive the boat.” She wore a wet suit under a yellow Gore-tex rain jacket, which she had refused to take off because she wasn’t happy about her butt.

Minty looked to Audrey, who shook her head.

“Fine, fold down that swim platform, Audrey,” said Minty. He moved to the rear of the console—his fins now in the space where Audrey had been sitting—sat on the gunwale, then pulled down his mask, put his snorkel in, and flipped over backward into the water. He took one breath on the surface and dove, his fins standing straight up out of the water like the flukes of a sounding whale. Sirens began to sound on the bridge.

“There’s enough foam in those motorcycle leathers to bring him to the surface,” Jane said. “Isn’t there?”

Audrey shrugged… who knows?

Jane maneuvered the boat to keep it near the point of impact. Without a word, Audrey reached over the stern of the boat and folded down an aluminum and teak swimming platform that formed a little dock at water level next to the big Mercury outboards. Jane pulled a backpack with the defibrillator in it out from under the console and handed it back to Audrey.

They watched the water fizz where Mike had gone in, looking for any sign of movement. A shadow rose in the deep green water and heads broke the surface. A geyser of seawater sprayed into the air as Minty Fresh cleared his snorkel. He looked around, located the boat, then hooked Mike under the chin in the crook of his arm, and started kicking for the boat.

“Backboard,” said Audrey. She was still in her nun robes, yellow and maroon silk, now beginning to whip in the cold wind.

There was an orange plastic backboard lashed to the rail on the console. Jane slipped the knot and handed one end of the board back to Audrey, who caught it by one of the many handles. The two of them lowered it over the side and waited. Minty Fresh swam Mike’s limp body up to the backboard, then pushed him onto it as Jane and Audrey held it steady. The big man cinched a nylon strap around Mike’s chest, then another around his feet, then kicked back to the swim platform, which he launched himself up and around into a sitting position. He allowed himself one breath, pulled his fins off and threw them into the boat, then was on his feet, reaching over the side to grab the backboard.

“Just pull his head up, we’ll slide him up out of the water,” said Audrey.

They did, sliding the board up, then turning it so it would fit in the open part of the boat behind the console. Audrey and Minty Fresh immediately fell to their knees over Mike.

“Jane,” called the Mint One, tossing his head to point. The boat, in neutral, had drifted and was dangerously close to the south tower pier, which loomed above them.

“Holy fuck!” Jane said. She dove for the console, threw the throttle forward and powered away from the massive concrete monolith.

“Easy,” said Minty.

Audrey flipped the strap off the backboard, unzipped the front of Mike’s coveralls, then his leathers. Mercifully, he wasn’t wearing anything under the leathers. The defibrillator started making a high-pitched whine as the capacitor charged.

“Place pads on patient’s chest,” said the defibrillator. “Charging.”

Minty Fresh handed Audrey the pads, which she separated and stuck on Mike’s chest.

“Please stand clear. Do not touch patient.”

Audrey pulled back her hands, the defibrillator fired, Mike’s body convulsed, relaxed, then he started coughing.

“What? What?” said Jane.

“He’s back,” Minty said. Audrey fell forward across the body and let loose a soul-shaking sob.

Audrey felt a hand on her head, pushed back, looked at the guy on the backboard.

“Charlie?”

“Hey, baby,” he said. She lost herself again, sobbing into his chest.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” said Charlie. “I can’t move my other arm.”

“Your shoulder is dislocated,” said Minty Fresh. “Just try to lie still.” He nodded toward Audrey. “She says the ritual will heal a lot of the damage. Don’t ask me how. We’ll hand you over to the Coast Guard rescue boat like we planned. They’ll take you to the hospital.”

“Coast Guard closing,” Jane said. She turned at the console and looked down on Charlie. “Hey, little brother, welcome back. You’re all growed up.”

“Hey, Jane.” He grinned at her, then looked up, trying to see past his feet. “What about him?”

In the stern of the boat was Charlie’s former crocodile-guy body, his wizard robe saturated with seawater, his little duck feet twitching as if he was being electrocuted.

16. A Brand-New Day

Charlie was actually grateful that they made him stay in the hospital over the weekend while doctors evaluated his injuries, mostly, it seemed, because they wouldn’t believe he wasn’t hurt worse than he was. It gave him a chance to get used to being someone else.

“Mr. Sullivan,” said a Dr. Banerjee, scrolling through the chart on a tablet computer, “We analyzed the full-body CAT scan, which we often do in the case of fall this severe, and it appears that you have no broken bones.”

“That’s great, isn’t it?” said Charlie, spraying a little spit. He was still getting used to how Mike’s mouth worked compared to the crocodile guy. It was like driving a different car for the first time after not driving for a long time, but human-sized stuff was coming back to him quickly.

“It is. It’s amazing, really, considering. You’re very, very lucky.”

“I think if I was very lucky, I’d have remembered to check the buckle on my safety harness.”

“So this was an accident?”

“Absolutely,” Charlie said. He’d already talked to a psychiatrist, a social worker, and two people from the Bridge Authority, as well as a couple of guys from the painting crew whom he’d pretended to know.

“We don’t see any organ damage from impact, and beyond the bruising, which is fading, and your dislocated shoulder, which should be fine after a week or so in a sling, it’s only your mental condition that concerns me. There’s no physical evidence of damage to your brain, although you did sustain a concussion, but the memory loss concerns us.”

“It’s just certain things,” said Charlie. “Like I can name every street in the north end of the city, in both directions, but I couldn’t tell you the address of my apartment if you gave me two numbers and a letter to start.”

The doctor nodded, ticked something on the tablet, scrolled back. “I’ve also looked at your medical history, and it seems pretty clear going back, ten years. Hernia operation, that’s it.”

“That’s it,” said Charlie.

“So you haven’t had a major accident in the last year or two? Motorcycle?”

“No, not that I remember. I think I’d remember a motorcycle accident. Or, knowing how to ride a motorcycle. Do I know how to ride a motorcycle?”

“I don’t know, I just wondered. We had to cut motocross pants off of you. The CAT scan showed evidence of a pretty major accident within the last two years. Both hips broken, five cracked vertebrae, cracked ribs, all healed nicely, but recently.”

Charlie shook his head. They’d had him in a neck brace at first, but after the CAT scan they’d taken it off. “I think I’d remember something like that.”

He caught movement, looked up to see Audrey peeking in the door. “Is it okay?” she said to the doctor.

“Well, hello, sir or madame,” said Charlie. “Please come in.”

“I’ll leave you two,” said the doctor, bowing out.

“That’s not funny,” said Audrey.

“What? You changed your hair.”

“I’ve given up the swoop.”

“Who does he think you are?”

“Your girlfriend.”

“My girlfriend or Mike’s girlfriend?”

“Obviously Mike’s girlfriend.”

“And yet you were living with me. Floozy!”

She leaned over, grabbed his hand, laughing, and started to kiss him, then stopped herself and stepped back. “Weird,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s me. I feel like me. Kind of.”

“Might take a little while,” she said.

What it took was two more days, when she picked him up at the hospital. When he got in the passenger seat of her Honda, as he was reaching for his seat belt, she threw her arms around him and kissed him, hard and long, lots of tongue, not coming up until both of them were breathing hard, then she pushed him away and reached for her own seat belt.

“There,” she said.

“Wow,” he said.

“We’re going to be fine,” she said.

“Weird, though, huh?”

“Absolutely.” She put the car in gear and drove them across town the to Buddhist Center.

There was an empty apartment in his building—well, Jane’s building, now—and Jane was having it cleaned and painted for him to move into, but they still had to figure out how they were going to tell Sophie before they went there.

“It’s a lot for a little kid to take,” said Charlie, when they got home. He sat at the oak table in the kitchen drinking coffee. “I don’t want to traumatize her.”

Audrey fussed with the coffeemaker at the counter. “Charlie, she’s seen the Squirrel People, she’s Death —the Big Death. She holds dominion over the Underworld. You’re not going to shock her.”

“I know. That’s got to be really hard. And we don’t even know if she still is Death.”

“I think you should just go over there and have Auntie Jane explain. Sophie will know it’s you. You sound like you already. You move like you. You just, you know, just don’t look like you.”

“Speaking of which, how’s he doing?”

Charlie’s former body, the wizard-crocodile guy, sat on the floor in front of the dishwasher, rocking from side to side with the rhythm of the motor. Audrey had brought him home from the boat in a sack and had been caring for him while Charlie was in the hospital.

“He’s good. He’s doing really good. I mean, he’s, well, you’ll see. Charlie, come meet a new friend!”

“Really?” Charlie said.

The croc guy made a delighted growly noise as he climbed to his feet and scampered across the kitchen, his head and torso sort of wiggling back and forth as he moved, his lower jaw flapping, leaving a drop of drool on every downstroke, his long dong skittering on the tile between his feet as he moved. He stopped in front of Charlie and made an excited and juicy growling sound.

“Charlie, this is big Charlie,” Audrey said, presenting big Charlie with a bow.

Big Charlie looked at her. “You named him Charlie?”

“What was I supposed to do? He was Charlie for a year. I’ve talked to him for countless hours as Charlie, so when I see him, I think Charlie. You’re not the only one going through a transition here. Anyway, I’ve decided on another name for him.”

“Which is?”

“Wiggly Charlie.”

The croc guy jumped up and down, clicked his talons as if clapping, excited drooly breaths.

“See, he likes it.”

“He is pretty wiggly.”

As if on cue, Wiggly Charlie resumed jumping, his torso, head, and jaw wiggling as if connected by loose springs.

Charlie felt bad for the little guy, then he felt bad for Audrey. “Was I this goofy when I first, you know, when I first moved into that body?”

“No, you were much more coordinated. There was kind of more there. Less drooly.”

“Really? I mean, look at him.” Charlie looked at Wiggly Charlie, then at Audrey. “All that time, you weren’t—you weren’t creeped out by me?”

She sat down in the chair across from him, moved his coffee cup, took his hand. “To be honest, I was always captivated by your enormous unit.”

“Really?”

She nodded, eyes down, humble and sincere.

“Are you fucking with me?”

She nodded, eyes down, humble and sincere.

She laughed. Wiggly Charlie made his breathy, excited noise.

“Come here,” Charlie said, bending down. “We need to fix you.”

Charlie untied Wiggly Charlie’s wizard robe, then wound his dong around his waist and cinched his robe shut under it, so now instead of a creepy little patchwork creature dragging around a completely disproportionately sized sex organ, he just looked like he needed to spend a little more time at a creepy little patchwork creature gym to work off his roll.

“There you go,” Charlie said, sitting up to admire his work. “Better?”

Wiggly Charlie frisked and drooled, clicked his talons together in applause.

“Are you hungry?” Charlie asked. “Do you want something to eat?”

More jumping, frisking, and drooling. Audrey sat back in her chair with Charlie’s coffee in hand and watched this very strange bonding.

“Let’s get you something to eat,” Charlie said. He got up and led Wiggly Charlie over to the big stainless-steel refrigerator.

“I’m making him some shoes,” said Audrey. “The toenails on the tile and carpet drive me nuts.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because my annoyance at toenail noise seemed kind of trivial compared to the fact that I’d trapped you in that,” she said. Then to Wiggly Charlie, “No offense.”

Charlie scanned the shelves. “Do you want a cheese stick?” He held up an individually wrapped mozzarella cheese stick.

Wiggly Charlie jumped, reached up. Charlie gave him the cheese stick. He immediately clamped down on it, working it with noisy, wet smacks of his jaws, the cheese stick sort of becoming very distressed, but more of it hanging out either side of his mouth than in it.

Charlie crouched down. “Look at me. Look at me.”

Wiggly Charlie stopped chomping and looked at him.

“Do your tongue like this? See, like this.”

Wiggly Charlie did his tongue the way Charlie was doing it, rolling it. Charlie remembered having to learn to eat with teeth that were made only to tear, not to chew. In the hospital, he’d had to consciously get used to having molars again, not to swallow chunks of food.

“Good,” said Charlie. “Now do this with your tongue while you’re chewing.”

Wiggly Charlie did, and the cheese stick slowly disappeared into his mouth.

“Good! Next time we’ll take the wrapper off.” Charlie said. “You want another cheese stick?” He grabbed another cheese stick from the shelf.

“Want a cheez,” said Wiggly Charlie, very wet, very scratchy, but very distinct.

Charlie looked at Audrey. “He talks.” His voice broke.

She nodded, smiling into the coffee cup.

“Want a cheez,” said Wiggly Charlie.

Charlie, who was alive in another man’s body, who had lost the mother of his child and the love of his life, who had found and sold human souls, been present at hundreds of deaths, who had died and been resurrected, twice, closed the refrigerator and slid down the door as he unwrapped the mozzarella, then began to weep. Wiggly Charlie, whatever the hell he was, was alive, and Charlie wept for the joy of it—that spark of life.

“I know, we can call him W.C. for short,” said Audrey, acting as if she didn’t notice that the man she loved, evidently, was sitting on the floor, sobbing—giving him that measure of pretend privacy.

“A cheez,” said Wiggly Charlie, bouncing on his ducky feet.

Charlie gave him the mozzarella stick, then looked up at Audrey, tears in his eyes. “Let’s go see my daughter.”

“I’ll get my keys,” Audrey said.

“Need a cheez,” said Wiggly Charlie.

It took them ten minutes to get to North Beach from the Buddhist Center in the Mission District and twenty minutes to find parking.

“I’ll get you a permit and you’ll be able to park in the alley where I used to park my van,” said Charlie.

“That will be great when I visit,” said Audrey.

“Wait, what? Wait.”

They were at the front entrance, next to the storefront. Charlie had buzzed and they were waiting, since Charlie no longer had a key.

“I can’t live here, Charlie. I have to be at the Three Jewels Center. It’s my job.”

“You can go there for meetings and classes,” he said. “I thought you’d live here with Sophie and me.”

“I have to be there for the Squirrel People.”

Charlie threw his arms around her and pulled her close. “No. I’m never letting you out of my sight.”

Audrey patted his back for him to let her loose, but he pulled her tighter to him.

“Are you guys going to do it?” came Jane’s voice over the speaker.

Charlie let Audrey loose and looked around. There was a domed security camera in the doorway that hadn’t been there when he had lived here. He looked directly into it. “No, can you buzz us in?”

“I guess technically it’s not necrophilia,” Jane said.

“Please,” he said.

The door buzzed and they went in and up the stairs. Jane stood in the doorway of what had once been Charlie’s apartment, wearing Cal Berkeley sweatpants and a Stanford sweatshirt. “Come on in.”

“Is Sophie here?” Charlie whispered.

“School,” said Jane.

“Cassie?”

“The yoga center is mad at her for borrowing their backboard without asking, so they’re making her stay extra to scrub out all the old chakras.”

“Yeah, that’s not a thing,” said Audrey.

“Whatever,” said Jane. “She’s going to run by school and walk Sophie home, so we’ve got an hour or so to kill.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“I’m in banking. We have ATMs that do almost everything.”

“Aren’t you in real estate loans?”

“I am, but I’m pretty high up, so I don’t really do anything. Sign papers and go to meetings. I have an assistant who does the work. They don’t even miss me. I’m golfing with important clients right now, I think.”

“You golf?”

“Nope. You want to go through your old suits? I’ve had a lot of them tailored for me, but there’s some I didn’t get to yet. They should fit you—you look about the same size as former Charlie. You’re going to need something for the cop’s funeral and this Mike guy doesn’t seem like a suit guy.”

“He owned one,” said Audrey. “It’s pretty ratty.”

“Wait,” said Charlie. “How do you know what clothes he owns?”

“Because I went to his apartment to get the clothes you’re wearing now.”

Charlie suddenly became aware of the clothes he had on, felt the front of the oxford-cloth shirt, looked at the jeans, the shoes, some sort of sporty black leather walking shoe. “I’m wearing dead man’s clothes?”

Jane looked at Audrey with a “What are you gonna do?” shrug. She headed into the master bedroom, waving for them to follow.

“You seem very—I guess, very okay with this,” Charlie said.

Jane spun on him at the closet door. “I know! How are you doing? Are you feeling comfortable? Is it weird?” She looked over Charlie’s shoulder. “Is it weird for you? Have you guys—”

“She just brought me home from the hospital this morning,” Charlie said.

“So?”

“He’s our Charlie,” said Audrey.

Jane punched him in the arm. “Freak.”

She went to the closet and picked a subtle, dark gray plaid wool suit, handed it to him, then took Audrey out into the great room to wait for him to emerge. The suit felt very familiar, yet not. Watching Mike’s expression change in the mirror when he moved was strange, like he was remotely working a robot, but he was getting used it. He wasn’t comparing it to old, human Charlie, so much, as little, crocodile Charlie, so the differences, for the most part, were positive. He straightened the lapels and presented himself to the judges, who were seated on the couch.

“Turn around,” Jane said.

“Very nice,” Audrey said.

“A little snug in the shoulders and arms.” Jane rose, pulled at the shoulders, brushed at some imaginary lint. “That’s how guys are wearing their suits now, though. I think you’re good to go. Do you have shoes?” Jane looked at Audrey, who nodded. “Sweet. You guys want something to drink?” She headed to the kitchen.

“I like my tea like I like my men,” Audrey said.

Jane looked at her quizzically.

“Weak and green,” Charlie said. “You know, that line was a lot funnier the first time I heard it, when I actually hadn’t spent a year being weak and green.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Audrey. “Sorry. Jane, do have you any wine?”

Jane scoffed. “I have red, I have white, I have pink, I have green.” She looked at Charlie. “Get over it, Chuck, you’re not green anymore.”

“Red, please.”

Before Charlie could ask for anything to drink, there was the ratcheting sound of a key in the lock and the door opened, flying back on its hinges. In marched Sophie, pink backpack dragging behind her, followed by Cassie, carrying two bags of groceries. Sophie slung her backpack up on the breakfast bar and jumped up onto the stool.

“I need a snack up in this bitch or I’m going to plotz,” said the darling little brunette with the heartbreak blue eyes.

Jane looked past Sophie to Charlie and cringed, then to Cassie, who was trying to land two bags of groceries on a counter with only one bag’s worth of space. “Cassandra, what kind of filth are you teaching this child?”

Cassie finally let one bag of groceries slide into the sink and looked over. “Oh.” She combed her red curls with her fingers. “Hi.” Then she recognized Audrey, having only really seen her once, and her eyes went wide. “Oh, hi!” She looked at Charlie, really more checking him out than looking at him, as if she might be sizing him up to figure out a fair price for him. “So…”

Sophie looked over her shoulder quickly, then to Cassie, and whispered, “Who is that guy wearing Auntie Jane’s suit?” Her whisper skills were still developing and were decidedly wetter than required.

“Family meeting,” said Jane. “In the kitchen. Family meeting.” She crouched down so she was behind the breakfast-bar pass-through. “Family meeting.” Her hand shot up and grabbed a handful of Cassie’s sweater, pulling her down.

Sophie spun on her stool, her eye on Audrey. “Hey, I remember you. You’re that shiksa that came here with Daddy.” She squinted at Charlie suspiciously.

“Yes,” said Audrey. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“Family meeting!” said Jane and Cassie as they stood, each taking one of Sophie’s arms and dragging the child over the breakfast bar into the kitchen and out of sight in the depths below.

Furious whispers, some of them damp, Jane peeked up, ducked, more whispers.

Audrey patted Charlie’s arm. He’d stood when Sophie had come in and looked on the verge of either crying or being sick to his stomach.

Frantic whispers, a pause, then a little kid voice: “Are you fucking with me?!”

“Jane!” Charlie barked.

Jane stood, “You taught her that one.” Back down.

Cassie stood, nodded confirmation, ducked.

Charlie looked at Audrey for help. “It is kind of your catchphrase,” she said.

Jane popped up, then Cassie. Sophie came around the breakfast bar as if the great room had been mined, stepping carefully but keeping her eyes on Charlie.

Charlie crouched down. “Hey, Soph,” he said.

She approached him, looked him in the eye, looked into his eyes, looked around, like she might spot the driver in there. He had felt less foreign even when he was the croc guy. “It’s me, honey,” he said. “It’s Daddy.”

Sophie looked to Audrey, who nodded. “It your daddy, Sophie. He just got a new body because the old one was broken.”

Charlie put his arms out. She stood there, three feet away, just looking at him. He let his arms fall to his knees.

“Go ahead, honey, ask me anything. Ask me something that only Daddy would know.”

“That won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“You could be tricking me. I’m a kid, we’re easy to trick. It’s a proven fact.”

“Just try.”

She rolled her eyes, thinking. “What word are we never allowed to say? I mean, you can say it for the question, but I can never say it.”

“You mean the K-word?”

She didn’t move. “You could have just guessed that.”

“It’s okay, honey. I know this is strange.”

More eye rolling, foot shuffling, then her eyes lit up when the question occurred to her. “When we went to Tony’s to get pizza, how did we eat it?”

“Like bear.”

“Daddy!” She jumped into his arms.

There were hugs and kisses and no few tears, which appeared to be contagious and went on for a few minutes until Jane started making gagging noises. “God, I hate this movie!” She blew her nose on a paper towel.

Sophie pushed back from Charlie’s embrace. “Daddy, the goggies!”

“I know, honey, Auntie Jane told me. It’s one of the reasons I had to come back.”

“Are you going to find them? We have to find them.”

“We’ll find them,” Charlie said.

“Let’s go get ice cream, and look for them,” said Sophie. “Can we go get ice cream?” Sophie looked to the kitchen, to Jane, who froze like a pistol had been pointed at her. Sophie looked back at Charlie. “Who is the boss of me now?”

“Family meeting,” Charlie said.

Sophie ran back to the kitchen. Cassie and Jane ducked down.

“Out here, please,” Charlie said.

They all came out of the kitchen, heads down, and shuffled out into the great room. Charlie sat in one of the leather club chairs, Cassie and Jane sat with Audrey on the couch. Sophie crawled into the chair with Charlie and he looked up, helpless.

“Do not start crying, Chuck!” said Jane. “Do not!”

Audrey looked down, veiled her eyes with her hand.

“You either, booty nun.” Jane elbowed Audrey.

“Are you a nun?” asked Sophie.

“Different kind,” said Jane.

“Flying?”

“Yes,” said Jane.

“Sweet,” said Sophie.

“Sophie has nun issues,” Jane explained to Audrey.

“Flying?” asked Charlie.

“It’s a show on TV Land,” Cassie said.

“Right,” Charlie said. “So, can I take my daughter out for ice cream?”

“That would be great,” Jane said, “except everybody in the neighborhood knows Sophie, and knows that Cassie and I are raising her. All of a sudden she shows up with a strange man—”

“Wearing Auntie Jane’s suit,” added Sophie.

“It’s my suit,” Charlie said.

Jane said, “Maybe we can say we brought you in so she would have a male influence on her, like Big Brothers of America or something.”

Cassie said, “Or, we could say that we are thinking of having a kid of our own and we’re auditioning you as a sperm donor. See how you are with kids first.”

“That seems kind of dubious,” Charlie said. “Not that easy to explain casually on the street.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Cassie. “I’ve got it, you’re Uncle Mike from Seattle. Rachel’s estranged brother. And you’re staying with us because you can’t hold a job due to your drug problem and some run-ins with the law.”

“Yeah, so we’ve let you work as our manny, until you get on your feet,” Jane said.

“Except that money keeps disappearing from our purses,” Cassie said.

“And local dogs have started to go missing,” Jane said.

“So we made Sophie show us where you touched her on a My Little Pony,” said Cassie.

“On my horn,” said Sophie.

“She’s an alicorn,” Jane explained.

“A unicorn, a Pegasus, and a princess at the same time,” Sophie clarified.

“Of course,” said Charlie, thinking they were enjoying this family meeting way, way too much. To Jane he said, “You have broken my daughter.”

“Everybody thought you were fine,” said Jane, completely ignoring him.

“But then,” said Cassie, “I went to your apartment to borrow a cup of sugar, and you weren’t there, but the door was open, so I went in—”

“And discovered the secret room full of your mummified victims,” said Jane.

“We have one of those at the Buddhist Center,” Audrey said cheerfully. “Under the porch.”

“Audrey, please stop helping,” Charlie said.

“What? It’s nice to be included.”

Cassie hugged Audrey and kissed her on the cheek, which Charlie found both disturbing and slightly arousing at the same time.

“So, if anyone asks, that’s the story,” said Jane.

“It’ll be great!” said Cassie.

“Sure, good.” Charlie stood and held his hand out to his daughter. “Come on, Soph, let’s go get ice cream.”

They walked a few blocks through North Beach, down Grant Avenue past Café Trieste, where Francis Ford Coppola supposedly wrote the script for The Godfather; past Savoy Tivoli, the bright yellow-and-maroon-painted bar and café with booths open to the street, where Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti dined; past North Beach Pizza, two galleries, two leather boutiques, and a lingerie store, then up Union Street, headed toward Coit Tower, to a gelato place that had been there as long as Charlie could remember, and whose seating consisted of one teak garden bench outside and one against the wall inside across from the counter. They ordered scoops in sugar cones and took their cones to the bench outside.

“Your Nana used to love this place,” Charlie said.

“Jewish Nana or dead Nana?”

“Dead Nana.”

“Your mom, right?”

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt when you think about your dead mother?” A serious question coming from a small child with a corona of bubble-gum gelato around her mouth.

“A little, maybe, but a good hurt. I wish I would have paid better attention when I was little.”

“Yeah; me, too,” said Sophie, who had never known her mother as anything but pictures and stories. She sighed, licked her gelato, painting a dot of pink on her nose. “We’re not going to be able to tell Jewish Nana about you being back, huh?”

“No, probably not.”

“She’d plotz, huh?”

“I don’t know what that means, punkin.”

“You couldn’t find a Jewish body?”

“Been spending a lot of time with Jewish Nana, then?”

“It feels like it.”

“Oh, I know, honey.”

She patted his arm in solidarity.

“After this, we need to find the goggies, Daddy.”

17. Come Lay My Body Down

For the next two days Charlie tried to get used to the idea of living his life as someone else. He walked around the neighborhood, running errands and adjusting to being outdoors again, among people and traffic and sunshine. He went to the courthouse and applied to change Mike Sullivan’s name to Charles Michael Sullivan, so he’d have a quick explanation for why everyone in his life would be calling him Charlie. He accepted sympathy about his accident from the people at Mike’s bank, and made sure everyone he encountered knew that he was suffering from mild amnesia and asked them to be understanding if he seemed a bit sketchy on the basic details of his life. Mercifully, most of the people who he encountered seemed to think Mike Sullivan was a pretty decent guy, although no one seemed to know him very well, which worked out great for Charlie.

“This amnesia thing is great,” he said to Audrey as she sat bent over a sewing machine, making one of dozens of costumes for the Squirrel People. “You just say, ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t remember your name, I fell off the Golden Gate Bridge and hit my head and I’m having a few memory issues.’ Everyone’s so nice about it.”

“They’re probably envious they can’t use the same excuse,” said Audrey. “This is ridiculous!” She snapped the needle up out of the fabric and snipped the thread. “I can’t make all the Squirrel People ornate costumes. This list Bob gave me is impossible. I made their original costumes from fabric scraps I’d collected over months. This would be a full-time job, even if all I was doing was collecting material, let alone making a unique costume for each of them.”

“Maybe I can help,” said Charlie.

“That’s sweet of you to offer, but you have plenty to do already. I’m just going to get a couple of bolts of cotton in different colors and make them basic outfits from it, with drawstring trousers, like hospital scrubs. They can cinch them up to fit.”

“Sounds good,” said Charlie. “You can use Wiggly Charlie for the pattern.”

Charlie had gotten used to Wiggly Charlie following him around the big house that comprised the Buddhist Center, the little monster imitating his movements. When Charlie went to the bathroom, W.C. followed him and peed in a plastic mixing bowl that Charlie had used for the same purpose when he had been a little monster. When Charlie sat down to practice Mike Sullivan’s signature, W.C. sat on his mixed nut can, using a stack of books as a little desk, and practiced his penmanship as well, which consisted mostly of tearing stationery and licking the pen, then putting inky tongue prints on the paper. Charlie hung some of the more interesting ones on the fridge.

Wiggly Charlie was learning skills, but didn’t seem to be getting any more vocabulary, picking up only the odd word here and there and working them into some syntax around the phrase “need a cheez.” He also alternated between making an excited, happy noise and a disappointed sigh sound, which he only seemed to make when a cheez was not forthcoming or when Charlie left the house and did not take him. Charlie felt for the little guy, having been imprisoned in that improbable body himself, but W.C. seemed strangely untroubled.

“Maybe life is just easier if you’re a little goofy,” Charlie said to Audrey. He gestured as he said it, a bit of a game-show-spokes-model-presenting-a-dishwasher flourish. W.C. made exactly the same gesture, perhaps half a second behind Charlie. Audrey shuddered a little at the sight of it.

“I’m not sure how he’s even, uh, alive,” said Audrey. “Not that I understand the mechanics of any of the Squirrel People, but the engine is their consciousness, their soul. W.C.’s soul—you—left the building and found a new place to live.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said, rubbing his brow. W.C. mirrored the gesture. “There’s something in there.”

Audrey nodded, a little creeped out by the synchronized mime. “I think maybe when you left that body, there was a shadow or an echo of you left in there.”

“Nah, I’d feel part of me missing, wouldn’t I?”

She shrugged. “Just don’t get too attached to him, Charlie. We don’t know how long he will last. He might be like the ladies I used the p’howa of undying on.”

“Boobies,” said Wiggly Charlie, who hopped and made his excited noise.

“See,” said Charlie. “He’s his own man.”

“Really? What were you thinking about just then?”

“I’m going to go grab something to eat,” Charlie said. “Can I bring you anything?”

“Need a cheez,” said W.C.

Meanwhile Charlie got used to the peculiarities of Mike Sullivan’s body. Mike had been meticulous and incredibly considerate to write down all of his bank account numbers, his passwords, even the context of the contacts in his phone, but he didn’t explain what the dark spot on his left calf was: it could have been where he’d been poked with a pencil as a child, or it could be a deadly melanoma, but in Charlie Asher’s beta-male imagination, it was probably the latter. Despite a dubious medical history, there were qualities of Mike Sullivan’s body that were new to Charlie, and delighted him, among them a much more solid hairline than Charlie Asher had been blessed with, and, of course, arms…

“Look, I’ve got guns.” He flexed his biceps for Audrey. “I’ve never had guns before. Do you think they’re good for anything, or are they, you know, like breasts, just for looking at and touching.” He presented an arm for her to squeeze.

“Breasts are for breast-feeding babies, you doof.”

“Sure, there’s that, too, I guess.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll need them to paint the bridge. That’s probably how Mike got them.”

Charlie sat down, a little stunned.

“I can’t paint the bridge. I can’t. I have to collect souls, I have to reopen the shop. I have my own stuff to do.”

“But that’s Mike Sullivan’s job.”

“I’ll claim that the fall damaged me, so I can’t do it.”

“But it’s obvious you’re good as new,” Audrey said.

“I’ll say I’m mentally unable to do it. The amnesia excuse has worked great so far.”

“So you’ll tell them you can’t remember what color to paint?” She tried very hard not to laugh, but failed.

“You, young lady, are not too old to be spanked,” said Charlie, using his stern dad voice, tickling her and trying to pull her over his knee as she squirmed and giggled.

Which was only one of the many, many cues that had sent them into a raucous session of sweet monkey love. In fact, once they had breached the wall of tentative awkwardness his first day home, if it hadn’t been for Audrey’s duties at the Buddhist Center, and Charlie’s need to establish his new life as Charles Michael Sullivan, they might never have gotten out of bed except to slide naked down the stairs to the refrigerator. But when the last attendee for the last meditation session left in the early evening, the crazy new-love sex fest began, and went on until they collapsed into exhaustion or laughter or exhausted laughter.

“Wow,” Charlie said, late that first night, lying next to her, catching his breath; a sheen of sweat on both of them, golden under the candlelight.

“Yeah,” said Audrey. She ran a fingernail between his abdominal muscles. “Yeah.”

“Is this better?” he said, rolling on his side to face her, look in her eyes. “Better than the first time, when we were together?”

“Charlie, this is wonderful, but we only had one night. It was wonderful then and it’s wonderful now. I knew I loved you then. I love you now.”

“Me, too,” he said. He touched her jaw, smiled. “But is this body, you know, am I better now?”

“It doesn’t really matter what I say, I’m not going to stop you from being jealous of yourself, am I?”

“I’m sorry. I guess, yeah. I just feel so lucky to be here, with you, to not be, you know, like before.”

“I loved you then, too,” she said. “But this is nicer. It’s okay to say that, right?”

“I guess. But some part of me will always just be a little reptilian monster following his penis around.”

“I know that’s how I always think of you,” she said.

Again, the tickling, and they were off again.

On their second night together they learned just how close Charlie was to W.C. They were making love, slow and sweet and without the slightest worry of getting anywhere, just being there, when there came a scratching at the door. For a second their eyes went wide, then the scratching began again, then stopped, and having been brought back to the world outside themselves, they finished, and Audrey got up and padded naked over to the bedroom door.

“Oh no!” she said, when she opened the door.

Charlie looked over to see Wiggly Charlie lying on the floor, as if he’d been leaning against the door and had rolled in when she opened it. He just lay there, a motionless lump.

“Is he…” Charlie sat up. “Is he dead?”

Audrey knelt, reached out, and gently touched W.C. on his wizard robe. He lolled to the side.

“Oh no. That’s not right,” Charlie said.

Then Audrey lit up, looked back at Charlie over her shoulder with a smile. “No, look, it’s okay. He just has an erection.”

She picked up Wiggly Charlie by his enormous erect willy and turned to show Charlie. The little unconscious monster jostled limply like a puppet on a stick. “He’ll be fine.” She bounced W.C. on the end of his stick.

“Wow, you were right about the echo. It’s like we have some kind of psychic connection.”

“Right, this used to happen to you, remember?” Audrey said, swinging W.C. by his dong to make her point. “As soon as it goes down he’ll be back.”

“Which is never going to happen if you keep yanking him around by it.”

“Oh. Good point. Sorry.” She carried Wiggly Charlie back to the doorway and carefully set him outside in the hall—rolled him on his side and patted his little shoulder. “You rest, little guy.”

She palmed the door closed, then turned, leaned on the door, and looked at Charlie. “I’m glad he’s okay.”

Charlie lay back on the bed, looked at the ceiling. She joined him and found a spot between his chest and shoulder that seemed to have been built to lay her head upon.

“He was eating some out-of-date cat food this morning,” she said. “I hope you don’t have any ill effects from it.”

They lay quietly for a moment, considering the situation, pretending they didn’t hear Charlie’s stomach growl. There was the noise of something stirring in the hall and she smiled and kissed his chest. “See?” she said. “He’s fine.”

“Before, when I was—you know—when I had Wiggly Charlie’s body, did you ever pick me up like that? I mean, it seemed like a pretty automatic response for you…”

She nuzzled into his chest. “You mean, pick you up and swing you around by your huge unit? Spray furniture polish on your wizard robe and dust under the bed with you? Like that?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Of course not.”

“Was that why my clothes always smelled like lemon?”

“Don’t be silly. You couldn’t smell things in that body. Hey, what should I wear to the funeral tomorrow? I don’t think my monk robes are appropriate, but it’s been so long since I’ve worn a dress.”

“Wait a minute. I used to wake up under the bed wondering how I got there.”

“Shh, shh, shh, quiet time. Rest. Rest. Sleep.” She gently stroked his penis like she was petting a kitten.

There was a thump in the hallway like someone had dropped a bag of dicks.

Which Little Pony is appropriate for a funeral?” Jane asked, flipping through Sophie’s closet.

“I don’t think any,” said Charlie. “It’s a wake, Jane.”

“Smurf? Little Mermaid? This big red dog, I forget his name?”

“Doesn’t she just have a normal little dress?”

“Why are you taking her to a funeral anyway? She’s just a little kid. Despite her being the big D, she doesn’t really get death. After you, uh, died, it was pretty awful trying to explain.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her that when you die, fluffy monkeys take you shoe shopping with a black card.”

“That’s horrible.”

“And very hetero,” said Cassie from the other room.

“No, it’s not. I see what you’re saying, Chuck, but Sophie didn’t even know Cavuto.”

“We’re not going for Cavuto. We’re going for Inspector Rivera. He saved my life. Sophie wouldn’t even have a daddy if it weren’t for him, so we’re going. Funerals are for the living.”

“Fine. What’s Audrey wearing?”

“A black dress.”

“Well, I can’t go now, that’s what I was going to wear.”

“No, you weren’t. I saw my charcoal Armani hanging on the doorknob in your room.”

“Okay, I wasn’t, but Cassie was, so she can’t go, so I can’t go.”

“Gray dress,” Cassie called from the other room.

“Not helping,” Jane shouted. To her brother, under her breath, she said, “Can you believe we marched for the right to marry, for that?”

“You didn’t march,” Cassie called.

“How did you hear that?” Jane said. “Do you have this room bugged?”

“Jane, please, can we find something?” Charlie said. “Audrey’s waiting downstairs.”

Before Jane could dig back into the closet, Sophie marched into the room, past them, pushed her toy box over to the closet, climbed on it, pulled out a blue dress, jumped down, went over to the bed, where she laid out the dress, then crossed her arms and looked at them.

Charlie and Jane slunk out of the room to give the child the privacy she seemed to require.

“It’s my Armani,” Jane said. “You were dead.”

“You swiped it when I still lived here. What tie are you wearing?”

“No tie. Cream satin camisole.”

“Nice.” He put his arm around her, side hug, then hip-bumped her into the couch.

Cavuto’s wake was held in the grand ballroom at the Elks Lodge, which took up the third floor of a large building just off Union Square. The enormous room was paneled in dark mahogany, with tall cathedral windows that looked out over the square. There were perhaps five hundred people in the room when Charlie and his family arrived: Audrey on his arm, Jane and Cassie following, each taking one of Sophie’s hands between them. Most in attendance were San Francisco cops, all in dress uniform, but there were also police and firemen from a dozen different departments, and more polished buttons than a royal wedding procession.

Charlie immediately spotted Minty Fresh across the room, towering above the crowd, and near him, Lily, in a black lace and brocade Victorian dress with a plunging neckline and bustle, and a black-feathered hat with a veil. Charlie escorted Audrey in their direction, and as they cleared the crowd, saw Fresh was talking to Inspector Alphonse Rivera.

There were introductions all around, condolences, and when Rivera shook Charlie’s hand he grasped it with both hands and held it for a second. “Charlie, you have no idea how happy I am to know you’re here,” Rivera said, looking directly into the eyes of a stranger he’d never even seen before.

But Charlie did know, and he believed him, because in the face of a death, overwhelming, irresistible death, what moves you is life, and Charlie being here, even in the body of this stranger, was the thing that would touch this strong, collected cop the most. “Wouldn’t be here at all if not for you, Inspector,” he said.

Rivera still held his hand. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help pull you out of the bay. I—”

“You needed to be somewhere else,” Charlie said. He could see Rivera was still a little stunned, as could happen to you, mercifully, after the death of someone close. The grief or remorse might come over him later, like a rogue wave, but right now he was functioning, doing his duty, carrying on. There’d be no sloppy songs with his fellow officers for this one, no raucous, funny stories, of which he’d have had hundreds. He was part of the fraternity, but he stood out from every other cop in the room, in the city, in the world, because he knew who, what, had killed Nick Cavuto. “I’m going to get them, Charlie.”

“Absolutely,” Charlie said.

Minty Fresh leaned down, said, “We’re going to meet tomorrow. Everyone. We just need to pick a time and place.”

“The Buddhist Center,” Audrey said. “Noon?”

Minty Fresh looked to each of them for a nod.

Charlie looked around for Jane, Cassie, and Sophie, and saw they were already in a reception line that ran four deep halfway around the great room and was moving, slowly, by a thin, middle-aged, balding fellow in an immaculately tailored suit.

“Brian,” Rivera said. “Brian Cavuto. Nick Cavuto’s husband.”

“I didn’t even know he was married,” Charlie said.

“Neither did I,” said Rivera.

“We should pay our respects,” Minty Fresh said, directing Audrey and Lily to go before them to the line with a slight bow.

As Lily went by, Charlie whispered, “Nice bustle.”

“I liked you better when you were in the cat box,” she said.

Brian took Rivera’s hand and held it in both of his the way Rivera had held Charlie’s only moments before, gripping and shaking his hand with the rhythm of his words as he spoke. He had that lean, stringy strength of a marathon runner. Cavuto used to say guys like that wanted to be the last one everyone ate if they went down in a plane crash in the mountains.

“Inspector Rivera, I’m so glad you came.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Rivera said, because that’s what you say. “Nick meant a lot to me.”

“You were his best friend,” Brian said. “Nick talked about you constantly.”

Rivera couldn’t keep up any pretense. This guy had been Nick’s husband. He’d know bullshit even if he didn’t call bullshit.

“Evidently I didn’t even know him at all.”

“You knew him,” Brian said, patting Rivera’s hand. “He was a huge lunch whore.” Brian smiled and released Rivera’s hand.

“Okay, maybe I did know him.”

“That was one of his favorite things. He would tell me at least twice a week, while we were eating dinner, like I’d never heard it before.” Brian then did an uncannily accurate impression of Nick Cavuto: “ ‘Fucking Rivera says I’m huge lunch whore.’ That’s what he always called you, ‘fucking Rivera.’ ”

“Well,” said Rivera, pinching the bridge of his nose for a second, waiting for the power of speech to return. After a quarter of a minute or so, in which Brian waited patiently, not touching Rivera’s arm, which might have caused the detective to break up in front of four hundred cops, not offering comfort, just waiting, politely looking at his shoes, until Rivera said, “he was a huge lunch whore.”

Brian laughed.

Rivera laughed and said, “You’ve done this before.”

“Inspector, I’m gay, I’m fifty, and I’ve lived in the Castro for thirty-two years. I buried half a generation of friends and lovers before the cocktail. Yes, I’ve done this before. Not like this, though.”

“You can call me Alphonse,” Rivera said.

“I’ll call you ‘Inspector.’ Nick liked that. He was proud of being an inspector, a detective, a working cop.”

“He wouldn’t even take the tests to move up,” Rivera said.

“He was where he wanted to be, and for that we can both take comfort.”

“I’m going to get them.”

“I know,” Brian said.

Rivera nodded and moved on. He walked by his partner’s open casket but could only bring himself to look at Cavuto’s tie, and smile, because someone, probably Brian, had put just the slightest smear of mustard there.

Across the room, Sophie waited with Auntie Cassie for her daddy and Audrey to get through the line, and for Auntie Jane to return from the bar. Among all the cops, the mayor, city councilmen, firemen, EMTs, nurses, prosecutors, jailors, and friends, was the occasional junkie, or hooker, or ex-gangster, most of them standing off to themselves, or trying to, not feeling as if they fit in, but feeling like they needed to be there, because as much as Nick Cavuto had been a rough, profane, bull of a cop, he had also been a kind, fair man, and in the course of his long career had touched a lot of people’s lives. Standing out from those, though, were three man-nuns from the order of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group who did their service and performance for the community with good humor and, of course, in drag.

The three were all in Kabuki-style whiteface makeup with three different styles of habits. The one closest to Sophie wore a wimple with wings.

“Are you a nun?” Sophie asked.

“Why yes, darling, we all are,” said the sister.

“The nuns at my school are mean.”

“I’m a different kind of nun.”

“Flying?”

“No, but thanks for asking.” The sister primped his wings.

“A booty nun?”

“I don’t know what that is, honey, but I like where you’re going with it. No, we’re more like—like fairies.”

“Fairies?” She grinned in a kid-rictus and pointed to a vacant spot in her lower gum. “You bitches still owe me some money for this.”

“Oh my. We’ll see about that. Sister has to go do good deeds now, honey.” The nun led her sisters a few feet to the right, where they turned their attention to others in need of mercy.

“Who was that?” asked Cassie.

“Just a fairy.”

“Honey, we don’t use that term, it’s not nice.”

“Like Magical Negro?”

“Auntie Jane really has ruined you. Come, let’s go blame her.”

Lily finished in the reception line first and headed for Cassie and Sophie. As she passed the Sisters, one of them looked at her corset-elevated cleavage and tsked-tsked her as she passed.

“Really, doll, the devil’s pillows at a funeral?”

“Only dress I had that was clean,” Lily said. Which was not entirely true, but even she knew it was ill-advised to throw down with drag nuns at a funeral, and she felt very mature for the lie.

“Well, they’re stunning,” said a second nun. “If you got it, flaunt it, I guess—”

“God loves hussies, too,” said the third. “Bless you, child.”

The funeral was held at St. Mary’s Cathedral of San Francisco, which has the distinction of being the only church in the world designed after a washing-machine agitator. There was a wide courtyard that led out onto Geary Boulevard, the main east-west surface artery of San Francisco, and today it was filled a block wide and a half a block deep with policemen from a score of departments all over the state, in dress blues, standing in ranks, saluting their fallen brother in arms.

The cathedral was full, not just the main sanctuary, with its soaring concrete ceiling broken with strips of stained glass, but all the pews that reached back into grotto-like overhangs. The doors on all sides of the main nave were propped open and hundreds of people stood in the outer lobbies, which had highly polished floors and glass walls that looked out on the courtyards and the streets.

If the outside of St. Mary’s resembled a washing machine, the interior was a minimalist starship, with the round dais and altar at the head of the nave, and a pipe organ built into a platform that rose and cantilevered over the mourners on the side, like the control center of the great vessel.

Rivera and the other pallbearers stood to the side of the casket, along with an honor guard with rifles and a corps of eight with bagpipes and drums. He stood at ease, hands in white gloves folded in front, as first the bishop, then two priests, then the mayor, the chief of police, the district attorney, a senator, two congressmen, and the lieutenant governor spoke of Nick Cavuto’s courage, dedication, and service to the city for twenty-six years. The entire time, Rivera tried not to smile, not because he wasn’t grief-stricken or nearly shaking with a desire for revenge, not because he didn’t feel the profound space that his friend had left vacant, but because he could hear Cavuto cracking wise through the entire ceremony, calling bullshit on everything the politicians and clerics said: “You know why those guys with the bagpipes have daggers on their belts, right? So they can stab themselves in the fucking legs to take their minds off the music.”

He could hear him like his friend was standing next to him:“You know why they play bagpipes at a funeral? It’s to rush the soul to heaven because he’s the only one who can leave early. Tell me if my ears start to bleed, this is a new shirt.”

Thousands were watching, and Rivera knew that he, the fallen’s partner, dare not smile, and he knew that Cavuto would be laughing at him, razzing him, daring him to laugh.

And when they had all spoken, the great organ had played, the final prayer given, the bagpipes started to play, to signal them to move the casket, but instead the crowd parted and a solitary figure came up the aisle, female, thin, dressed head to toe in beaded lace, a veiled pillar of femininity and grace, moving as if floating above the floor. And no one moved. The pipes whined to silence. She turned, faced the mourners, and began to sing.

Without a microphone or amplifier, her voice filled the cathedral, the lobbies, the courtyards and the streets. She sang the notes of heartbreak and loss, of grief unassuaged and glory unrewarded. She sang to the heartstrings of all who could hear—tears streamed and eyes clouded until the sunlight through the stained glass looked like stars. She sang “Danny Boy” and “The Minstrel Boy,” in a Celtic dialect, because even though Cavuto had been Italian, all cops are Irish in death. She sang a dirge in an ancient language that no one recognized except that the notes resonated with that part in each of them that could feel the passing of a soul—a part they had never touched before. And when she finished, she was gone. No one saw her leave, but somehow, everyone was left with a bittersweet sadness, satisfied that they had said good-bye. Their vision was cleared of tears.

As he helped lift Cavuto’s casket, to take it out to the hearse under the salute of five thousand cops, Rivera smelled the faint odor of burning peat and at last allowed himself to smile.

18. Strategy

They met at the Three Jewel Buddhist Center the day after the funeral: Charlie, Audrey, Minty Fresh, Lily, Rivera. Minty Fresh had called Carrie Lang, the pawnbroker, and Jean-Pierre Baptiste, the Death Merchant from the hospice. Charlie had found the Emperor and his men in the utility closet behind the pizza place in North Beach, and strangely enough, had no problem convincing the old man that he was, indeed, Charlie Asher in a different body, and saw to it that he and the men made it to the meeting. The Emperor entered carrying the map bag containing the heavy journal Rivera had given him.

Audrey was accustomed to leading meetings at the Buddhist Center, and they usually held them in what had been the parlor in the grand old house, with attendees sitting on the floor, but for this one she decided that they should all sit on chairs. She and Charlie set them up in a circle. Introductions were made all around, with as little biography as possible, because they could have filled the entire day with the reasons each of them was there.

“Well,” said Minty Fresh. “I think Audrey ought to start, because it seems like once again we are dealing with metaphysical shit that she’s spent a lot more time thinking about than the rest of us.”

“Oh, that’s just a load of moo-poo and you know it, Mr. Fresh. You all are much more experienced than I am.”

“Uh-huh,” said Fresh. “You did a ritual that moved Charlie’s consciousness out of a monster you made from deli meat into that dude over there, who you more or less talked into jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge so you could do it. Anyone else feel like they got more experience with spooky-ass supernatural shit than that? Show of hands.”

No one raised his hand. Carrie Lang and Baptiste, who knew nothing of the Squirrel People, looked dumbfounded, even for people whose work involved collecting human souls. Wiggly Charlie had been locked in the butler’s pantry with the last two mozzarella sticks and a tennis ball he’d taken a liking to, largely to avoid a lengthy and somewhat irrelevant explanation of how he came to be, but also to keep Bummer from eating him. The stalwart Boston terrier had growled and scratched at the pantry door until the Emperor was forced to exile him and Lazarus to the porch.

“I’ll start,” said Lily, and when Minty Fresh started to object that he had just made a perfect explanation of why Audrey should run things, Lily glared him into silence.

“Proceed,” said the big man.

Lily said, “Seems to me, we need to figure out what is happening, why it’s happening, and what we need to do about it, agreed?”

Everyone nodded except Baptiste, who said, “I don’t even know why I am here. I do my part and everything works out as it should, just like it says in the Big Book.”

“Speaking of which,” said Carrie Lang, who was wearing a casual business suit instead of her usual denim and Indian jewelry ensemble. “I’m guessing that there’s a reason that we’re totally ignoring the instructions in the Big Book not to have contact with each other.

She looked at Minty Fresh.

“We think that the rules have been changing,” said the Mint One.

“Right,” said Lily, taking back the floor. “Did each of you bring your copy of the Great Big Book of Death?”

Rivera, Carrie Lang, and Baptiste all nodded. Minty Fresh said, “Rivera has mine now.”

“Good,” Lily said. “Do they all say ‘revised edition’ on the cover?”

Everyone nodded.

“And none of you has ever been out of possession of the book since you received it?”

No all around.

“Yet it’s changed, right? M, you knew the text backward and forward, and it changed?”

“Yes.”

“All of them did,” Lily said. “Spontaneously.” She looked at Audrey. “What’s up with that?”

“No idea,” said Audrey. “All this was going on when I met Minty Fresh and Charlie in their shops, when I was looking for soul vessels. I thought they were somehow trapping the souls. I didn’t know they passed on to the next person through the object.”

Lily looked at Minty Fresh. “See, she doesn’t know anything about it.” To the group she said, “We know that the book set down rules to keep the Underworlders or whatever from rising, which everyone broke, causing the shit storm last time, bringing up the Morrigan and that thing with the wings, that Asher saw them tear apart.”

Rivera said, “If we try to figure out why it’s happening, we won’t get anywhere. We need to figure out what is happening. And I can tell you, I haven’t seen the Morrigan, but I’ve heard them.”

Baptiste nodded.

“And they killed Cavuto,” Rivera went on. “There’s no doubt in my mind. I’ve seen that feathery goo that passes for their flesh, and we’ve all seen what their venom does.” He nodded to Charlie.

“That hand job in the alley was completely against my will,” Charlie said.

“He means killing you,” said Minty Fresh.

“Exactly,” said Lily. “How did the Big Book change? It assumes that you’ve already broken the rules.” She snatched Rivera’s copy off his lap and paged through it. She read, “So you fucked up— It says, A new order will be established. In the meantime, try not to get killed or let your world be overwhelmed by darkness forever.”

“That’s really not that helpful,” said Charlie. “I think we need pushpins and red string. You’re supposed to put all the stuff you know on a bulletin board with pushpins, then connect them with red string. It’s a must for figuring things out.” He looked at Rivera, who was a cop and would know about such things.

Lily looked at the others. “Clearly Asher is still an idiot, so at least we have that on our side.”

“Hey!”

“A new order,” Lily said. “That’s you.” She pointed to Baptiste. “He’s selling souls on the Internet, at swap meets, that’s new. Rivera is new, too. He didn’t collect any souls for a year, and Asher’s calendar was active as well, yet bad stuff only just started happening. Before the big battle, that kind of screwup would have brought up a world of trouble. It’s new.”

“Plus the banshee,” Rivera said. “She warned me of a new, elegant Death. Something more insidious than what came before.”

“I thought she was one of them,” said Minty Fresh.

“That was her at Cavuto’s funeral yesterday, singing,” Rivera said. “That wasn’t enemy action. You felt it.”

Everyone who had been there, which was everyone but Carrie Lang, had felt it.

“Comfort and consolation,” said the Emperor. “I felt it.”

“And I think she was there the night Cavuto was killed, but not to hurt him. To warn him. It’s what she does. She’s a good guy.”

“What about the other thing she warned of, the ‘elegant Death’?”

“He’s here,” said Minty Fresh.

Everybody looked to the big man, the same look: You’re telling us this now?

“I wasn’t sure. I saw a car in my neighborhood, early the day we pulled Charlie from the bay. A 1950 Buick Roadmaster fastback. Can’t be a dozen of them in that condition left in the world. It’s why I brought the soul vessels with us on the boat, besides what happened to Cavuto. In fact, y’all need to carry all the soul vessels you have, old and new, with you at all times to keep them safe.”

“Can’t they just kill people and take their souls, like the cop?” asked Carrie Lang. She looked quickly to Rivera. “Sorry, I mean the policeman. Your partner.”

“That’s just it,” said Minty Fresh. ”They didn’t get his soul. He came up in your calendar just before they attacked him. I saw it when I was at your shop.” He looked to Rivera. “Show them.”

Rivera reached into a leather briefcase beside his chair and pulled out a very large, short-barreled, stainless-steel revolver. He held it up so everyone could see. “Brian, Cavuto’s husband, asked me to come by their house yesterday after the services. He said Nick wanted me to have it.”

“I thought they’d gotten it,” said Carrie Lang. “That I wouldn’t be able to retrieve it at all.”

“What? What?” Lily said.

To everyone in the room except her and the Emperor, the revolver was glowing a dull red. Charlie leaned over and whispered to Lily. “It was Nick Cavuto’s soul vessel.”

“Oh!” Lily said. “You said he shot the Morrigan with a revolver. Shouldn’t it be in evidence or something.”

“This is a different one,” said Rivera. He handed the big revolver to Carrie Lang, who tucked it into her oversized purse.

“He had two of those?” Lily looked to Minty Fresh, who shrugged. He had two enormous Desert Eagle.50-caliber automatics he’d carried during the last debacle. “Okay, so it’s not a penis-size thing,” Lily said.

“Some evil shit out there, Darque,” Minty said. A smile.

“Wait,” Charlie said. “Back up. How do you know that this Buick is this ‘elegant Death’ the banshee warned about?”

“Teeth marks,” said Minty Fresh.

“Huh?” said Charlie, and a chorus of various “huhs” and “whats” sounded around the room.

“You have any idea how much steel they put in the bumper of a 1950 Buick?” Minty asked. “In the bodywork?”

“A lot?” ventured Charlie, not seeing where this was going.

“A shitload. That car is as heavy as any two modern cars, and in the back of it, through the bumper and up onto the rear of the body, were two bite marks. Clear as day.” He held his hands apart as if he were holding an imaginary volley ball. “About this big. Through the metal. Through the motherfucking bumper. Y’all ever seen a creature could do something like that?”

There was a pause. Thinking.

“The goggies,” said Charlie.

“Hellhounds,” Lily said at the same time.

“That’s right, motherfuckin’ hellhounds. Whatever was driving that Buick got hellhounds on his tail.”

Charlie said, “And they disappeared, about the time—”

“That the Morrigan showed up,” said Rivera.

Lily said, “And the hellhounds showed up in the first place to protect Sophie from the Morrigan.”

“Where is Sophie?” asked Minty Fresh. “She’s kicked their ass before, she can—”

“She’s seven,” said Charlie.

“She’s the Luminatus,” said Lily. “She’s the Big Death.”

“Maybe,” said Charlie. “Maybe not. Does anyone have pushpins in their car? I just think I could get a better handle on all of this if we had pushpins and some red string.”

“Maybe not?” said Minty Fresh. “Did you say maybe not?”

Charlie rubbed his forehead as if he was thinking, when he was actually just stalling for time. Mike Sullivan had less forehead and more hair than Charlie was used to, so he found that the forehead rubbing wasn’t really working.

“Maybe not?” Minty Fresh repeated. “Sophie is maybe motherfucking not the Luminatus—the only thing that kept the whole damn city from being destroyed last time? Maybe not?”

“We think she might not have her powers anymore,” Charlie said.

“You think maybe you ought to find out?” asked Minty Fresh.

“Probably,” said Charlie.

“A few months ago, Bummer lost the hellhound powers she bestowed upon him,” said the Emperor, being helpful. “It was a relief, really. He had such a penchant for biting the tires off of Volvos. I don’t know why. He still enjoys barking at them.”

“Excuse me?” said Jean-Pierre Baptiste. “Could someone tell me what all of you are talking about, please?”

“Us,” said Carrie Lang. “Tell us.”

And so they did, running through the whole history of what had happened before, glossing over the bits about Audrey and the Squirrel People as if that was just a minor thing that had passed, not mentioning that they had been the ones who had saved Carrie Lang from the Morrigan by duct taping her up and hiding her in a dumpster, as she was still a bit traumatized by the event, focusing more on how Sophie had basically vaporized the Morrigan with a wave of her hand.

When they were finished, Carrie Lang said, “Whoa. A little kid?”

“She’s in the advanced reading group,” said Charlie.

Carrie Lang said, “So now you think there could be a thousand souls unretrieved?”

“Maybe more,” said Rivera. “I’ve gone back to the early names on my calendar. I haven’t found one soul vessel from those.”

“Plus all those on my calendar,” said Charlie. “While I was—uh—unable to retrieve them.”

“The Big Book revised edition still says that it would be really bad if they ended up with the powers of darkness,” Lily said, tapping the page in Rivera’s copy of the Big Book. “There’s no way to know how many souls have been missed.”

“I have a list,” said the Emperor, and they all turned to him. He pulled the journal from his map bag and held it up. “Here.”

Lily handed the Big Book back to Rivera and crossed the circle to get the Emperor’s journal. They all watched as she leafed through it, hundreds of pages of names in two, single-spaced columns per page, printed in the meticulous hand lettering of an engineer. “You have nice handwriting,” she said. She flipped back and forth. “You have dates next to them. These aren’t just for the last year.”

“I was given the dates along with the names.”

“Some of these go back to the 1700s.”

“Yes,” said the Emperor.

“Who gave you the names, Your Grace?” Charlie asked.

“I got many from the library. And public records. Inspector Rivera was very helpful with that. But some were given to me by the dead themselves. While I slept. The older ones. When I awoke, I would know all the names and the dates next to them.”

Lily closed the journal with a finger in it to hold her place. “So, basically, I’m the only one here who doesn’t have a superpower. Even the crazy homeless guy has a special power, but not me?”

“That’s not true, Lily,” Charlie said. “The Emperor may be fabricating all of this.”

“A distinct possibility,” said the Emperor.

Lily looked around the circle. “I need each of your date books. Cough ’em up.” She collected the date books from the five Death Merchants then slung her messenger bag over her shoulder. “Audrey, I need a place to work and I need your Wi-Fi password.”

“What are you doing, Darque?” Minty Fresh asked.

“I’m going to check the names in all of your date books against the Emperor’s list. Then I’m going to check as many of the names with the old dates with what I can find on the Web. If they match, we have a list of the unaccounted for.”

“There’s a table in the kitchen where you can spread out,” said Audrey, standing. “And an outlet where you can plug in your laptop.”

As Lily followed Audrey out of the parlor she grumbled, “I feel like the accountant for the Justice League. If someone finds a magical cat or an enchanted stapler or something, I’m calling dibs, you got it?” She looked around the circle as everybody nodded. “Good, give me half an hour.”

While Audrey was out of the room, Minty said to Charlie, “So when do you have to go back to painting the bridge?”

“I don’t. They offered me a disability settlement. Post-traumatic stress. I can take the settlement or they’ll train me for a job that’s not on the bridge. The gardens or the tourist center.”

“Take the settlement, and the time off,” said Fresh. “Get your shop up and running again. You saved the city, gave your life, really. THE MAN can help you out for a while.”

“I know,” said Charlie, fidgeting in his chair. “But whenever I used to hear that expression I always thought I was THE MAN.”

“No, you’re A man,” said Audrey, returning to the room. “Kind of…”

Minty Fresh laughed and high-fived Audrey. “I always liked you,” he said.

There came a scratching at the door to the butler’s pantry, just behind where Charlie was sitting. He tapped the door lightly with his palm. “Settle,” he whispered, in a way that made no one at all look away from him. “New puppy,” he explained.

The scratching became more frantic. He reached back and opened the door just a crack.

“Need a cheez,” came a little voice at about shin level.

“Play with your ball. We’re out of cheese.”

“Need a cheez,” said the voice again.

Charlie closed the door, grinned at everyone, embarrassed, as the scratching resumed. “Maybe if you show him your boobs,” he said to Audrey.

Now, Charlie pretty much had everyone’s attention.

“No,” Audrey said, crossing her arms.

“Excuse me,” Charlie said. He got up, moved his chair, then got down on his knees and opened the door again.

“Need a cheez,” said the voice.

Charlie opened the door a couple of inches, reached in, grabbed something, and threw it. “Go play.” They could all hear the distinct sound of a tennis ball bouncing off surfaces and something scurrying after it, then nothing.

“There,” Charlie said, getting back in his seat. “He’ll be fine.”

“I have a basset hound,” said Carrie Lang. “Showing him my boobs doesn’t really have much of an effect on him.”

“Hmm,” Audrey said. “Go figure.” She moved to the center of the floor. “Okay, here’s what I’ve been thinking, about this new order.” She paused a moment, seeing if they would let her out of further explanations about her dog-training methods. Everyone appeared to be letting it go and she felt loving kindness toward all of them.

“The universe seeks balance, order. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, right?” Audrey was suddenly grateful that Lily was out of the room. She was feeling somewhat vulnerable to sarcasm as she waded into this concept. Everyone waited.

“So, for every dark, there is a light, the wheels turn, the planets spin, the machine seeks and finds order. But the universe also oscillates, pulses, expands and contracts—and, I’ve lost all of you, haven’t I?”

“Pretty much,” said Charlie. Now that it was out there, everyone agreed.

“Okay, let me come at it this way, The Book of Living and Dying, what you call The Tibetan Book of the Dead, talks about hundreds of demons and monsters that one will encounter on the journey from life to death and beyond. It describes them in detail, but warns not to be afraid, because they are all illusions, manifestations of human consciousness.”

“Like the Morrigan…”

“But, they aren’t an illusion,” said Charlie. “They are very real and deadly.”

“They become real,” Audrey said. “The Big Book warns not to let souls fall into the hands of those from the Underworld, but at one time, they weren’t in the Underworld, were they? Human souls empower them. They were part of someone’s living religion. So was that bullheaded thing, so was, or is, this elegant Death entity in the Buick, so are you guys, you Death Merchants. The Big Book is revised because things change, the rules change, and I don’t think this whole system of moving souls from one life to the next has always been that way. Every supernatural entity is a projection of human consciousness, going back for, well, who knows how long? And any change is going to be countered, always has been.”

She looked around the room. “Nobody?”

“We need to figure out what to do,” said Rivera.

“I don’t think you can solve a problem if you don’t know what it is, Inspector,” said Audrey. “I think that the order the universe found, for a time, anyway, was this ridiculously complex system of souls transferring through objects. Maybe there was a wobble a thousand years ago, and this is the universe trying to correct that, but now there’s another wobble. Maybe when Sophie was born, somehow as the Luminatus, there had to be a balance, so that horned death thing rose, and the hellhounds came to protect Sophie, and the Morrigan appeared to balance that. The whole conflict changed things, and for the last year it’s been seeking a new order. Subtle, like Mr. Baptiste being able to sell souls over the Internet instead of having a shop.”

Charlie said, “But if Sophie was on the light side, and has lost her powers, and this new Death has come, with the Morrigan, doesn’t that mean that everything is out of balance again?”

“Yes,” said Audrey. “It means we’re in a wobble. And there’s way too much on the dark side of the wobble. Something has to balance it out.”

“Some good guys?” said Charlie.

“Not necessarily,” said Audrey. “There’s order and disorder, we may not perceive whatever is balancing the dark as good. I’m just saying there has to be something to balance the dark, and if it’s not Sophie, there’s something else, some other being or force—”

“So,” Charlie said, “you’re saying that every god, throughout history, every supernatural being ever, is a manifestation of the power of the human soul?”

Audrey shrugged.

“The Ghost Thief,” Lily said from the doorway. Everyone looked up at her. “Mike Sullivan said that the ghost on the bridge told him we had to find the Ghost Thief.”

“Which is what?” said Rivera, starting to show some impatience now.

Lily held up the Emperor’s journal. “This is not a list of everyone who has died in the Bay Area, but it is a list of a lot of people who have died, most I confirmed. And so are all of your calendars. But none of the names on the Emperor’s list are in any of your calendars, except those in Charlie and Rivera’s calendars, and only Charlie’s from the last year.”

“Which means?”

“It means that if your soul object was retrieved, your name isn’t on the Emperor’s list. And after all those Death Merchants were murdered, the list got a lot longer fast. It means that there are a shit ton of unretrieved souls—souls out of order—floating around or taken by another entity. If what Audrey says actually applies, if they gain their power from human souls, there’s something very big and very scary that’s been taking these souls. I think that’s what Mike’s ghost girl was calling the Ghost Thief.”

“You know this for a fact,” said Charlie.

“No, Asher, I don’t know anything for a fact, I’m just putting it together from what we know and what Audrey is saying. I’m saying there’s a big hole in the system right now and I’m calling that hole the Ghost Thief. Could be good, could be bad.”

“So, there,” said Rivera. “What do we do?”

Lily looked to Audrey, “All yours.”

Audrey said, “I think you need to carry on, collecting soul vessels, getting them to new people, keep as many as you can out of the hands of the Underworlders. The cycle of living and dying is the order the universe is seeking.” She paused, scanned faces, got nothing. “I think.”

“Maybe it’s better to do it Mr. Baptiste’s way,” said Minty Fresh. “Not have them in our shops. Put them somewhere out of the way, a vault or something. Sell them remotely over the Internet.”

“My wife and I can sell them,” said Baptiste. “We would just need a photo of each vessel.”

“We could move them all to a vault somewhere,” said Minty Fresh. “Only go there to get the ones you will ship.”

Rivera said, “That might keep the soul vessels out of their hands, but it does ignore the more immediate problem, which is when they come for the souls, they kill us. Does no one else find that a problem?”

“Yeah,” said Minty Fresh. “That’s why I’m suggesting we hide the objects, then we hide. Stay out of our shops. Just go out to retrieve the new vessels. What do you want to do about it?”

“Go after them,” said Rivera. “Sure, we try to figure out who this Ghost Thief is, and I’ll use what resources I can to help, but the Morrigan require a little more direct action. We know they can be hurt by weapons, and they only get stronger as they accumulate human souls, so the sooner we go after them, the better chance we have of stopping them.”

He looked at Charlie. “You need to figure out if your little girl still has her powers, because if she doesn’t, her history with them is probably all that’s protecting her, and without her hellhounds, that’s about it. So even if we can’t kill them, we can at least weaken them, slow them down.”

Minty Fresh rubbed his shaved head, as if polishing an idea in there, then looked at Charlie. “How did you find them last time?”

“Bummer found them,” Charlie said. “I sort of wandered around in the sewers with the Squirrel People until we ran into Bummer. He led us to them.”

“They’re definitely going to be out of the light,” Lily said.

“We heard one, the Inspector and I, in a sewer in the Sunset,” said Baptiste.

“That’s my neighborhood,” said Lily. “I’m officially pro-fuck-up-the-sewer-harpies’-shit. Now you just have to find them.”

The Emperor held up a hand. “I know where they are.”

“Okay, well, that was easy,” said Lily. “You don’t know where the thousands of souls listed in your book are, do you?”

The old man shook his head dolefully. “I’m sorry.”

Baptiste thought it was perhaps the strangest meeting he had ever attended, and even when it was over, and they were all leaving, he looked to Minty Fresh and said, “Mr. Fresh, can you tell me please, what happened just now?”

“You know in a horror movie, when the scientist comes in and explains that there’s a zombie virus or there are vampires in the city?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what this was, but instead of a scientist, we had a crazy old man who thinks he’s the Emperor of San Francisco.”

“Oh, I see,” said Baptiste, who really didn’t see.

He stood on the porch of the big Victorian, gathering his thoughts, searching in his messenger bag for his car keys as the others made their way to the street.

“Pssst!”

A noise at his feet, no, below his feet. It was coming from beside the stairs.

“Monsieur Baptiste!” An urgent, small whisper.

Baptiste went to the rail and looked over. Below, on the walk, stood a creature about fourteen inches tall with a rotund little body, small hands that looked like those of a raccoon, and the head of a calico cat, wearing what looked like miniature pink hospital scrubs and doll shoes.

“Monsieur Baptiste, comment allez-vous?” it said in perfect French.

“Not so good,” said Baptiste.