A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) (29 page)

“And?”

“You could hear crows calling. I waited until it got a half a block from me, moving so slow you could barely see it, but it got louder and louder, like a huge flock of crows. Scared the bejesus out of me. I went home, looked up the name I’d written down during the night, and they lived in the neighborhood I’d been in. The shadow was coming out of the mountain for the soul vessel.”

“Did it get it?”

“I guess. I didn’t.”

“And nothing happened?”

“Oh yeah, something happened. The next time the shadow moved faster, like a cloud blowing over. And I followed it, and sure enough, it was heading right for a woman’s house whose name was on my calendar. That’s when I realized that the
Great Big Book
wasn’t bullshitting.”

“But the shadow thing, it never came for you?”

“Third time,” Vern said.

“There was a third time?”

“Oh yeah, like you didn’t think this was all a load of crap when it first started happening to you?”

“Okay, good point,” Charlie said. “Sorry. Go on.”

“So, the third time, the shadow comes down off a mountain on the other side of town, at night, during a full moon, and this time, you can see the crows flying in it. Not like really see them, but like shadows of them. Some people noticed it that time. I got in my car again, took my dog, Scottie, with me. I already knew where the thing was going. I pulled up a couple of doors down from the guy’s house—to warn him, you know. I didn’t realize yet what the book was saying about us not being seen, otherwise I would have just gone for the soul vessel. Anyway, I’m at the door, and the shadow is coming across the street, all the edges shaped like crows, and Scottie starts barking like mad, and runs at it. Brave little guy. Anyway, as soon as the shadow touches him he yelps and drops over dead. Meantime, a woman comes to the door, and I look in and see a statue, like a fake Remington bronze on the table in the foyer behind her, and it’s glowing red, like red-hot. And I blow by her and grab it. And the shadow evaporates. Just like that, it’s gone. That’s the last time I was late getting a soul vessel.”

“Sorry about your dog,” Charlie said. “What did you tell the woman?”

“That’s the funny thing, I didn’t tell her anything. She was talking to her husband in the next room, and he wasn’t answering her, and she runs back to see what happened to him. Didn’t even look at me. Turns out the guy was having a heart attack. I took the statue, went and picked up Scottie’s body, and left.”

“That had to be tough.”

“I thought I was Death for a while, you know, special. Because the guy croaked with me there, but it was just coincidence.”

“Yeah, that happened to me, too,” Charlie said. But he was still disturbed by the whole “great battle” revelation. “Vern, would you mind if I took a look at your
Great Big Book
?”

“I don’t think so, Charlie. In fact, I think we’d better say goodbye. I mean, if the
Great Big Book
is right, and I don’t have any reason to believe it’s not, then we shouldn’t even be talking.”

“But it’s a different version than I have.”

“You don’t think there’s a reason for that?” Vern said. His eyes magnified in his big glasses made him look like a madman for a second.

“Okay, then,” Charlie said. “But e-mail me, okay? That shouldn’t hurt.”

Vern looked in his coffee cup like he was thinking, as if by telling the story of the shadow that came down out of the mountains, he’d frightened himself. Finally he looked up and smiled. “You know, I’d like that. I could use some pointers, and if something weird starts to happen, we’ll stop.”

“Deal,” Charlie said. He drove Vern back to his car, which was parked around the block from his mother’s house, and they said good-bye.

J
ane met Charlie at the door. “Where have you been? I need the car to go get her floss.”

“I brought doughnuts,” Charlie said, holding up the box, maybe a little too proud.

“Well, that’s not the same, is it?”

“As floss?”

“Dental floss. Can you believe it? Charlie, if I’m still flossing on my deathbed, you have my permission to garrote me with it. No, I’m leaving you
instructions
to garrote me with it.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “So other than that, she’s okay?”

Jane was digging in her purse, had found her cigarettes and was looking for her lighter. “Like gum disease is the big danger at this point. Goddammit! Did they take my lighter at the airport?”

“You still don’t smoke, Jane,” Charlie said.

She looked up. “So what’s your point?”

“Nothing.” He handed her the keys to the rental car. “Can you grab me some toothpaste while you’re out?”

She gave up searching for the lighter and threw the cigarettes back into her purse. “What is it with this family and the compulsive dental hygiene?”

“I forgot to bring any.”

“Okay.” Jane braced the keys in her hand, ready to go in the ignition, and tucked her purse under her arm like a football. She dropped into a crouch and pulled down her mirrored, wraparound sunglasses that, with her short platinum blond hair and Charlie’s black pinstripe suit, made her look a little like a cyborg assassin from the future getting ready to dash out into the poisonous atmosphere of planet Duran Duran. “It’s fucking hot out there, isn’t it?”

Charlie nodded and held up the doughnut box again. “The glazed have suffered.”

“Oh,” Jane said, lifting her glasses again. “Cassandra called. After you called this morning she noticed your date book on the nightstand. Well actually, she said that Alvin and Mohammed dragged her in there and pushed it at her. She wondered if you needed it.”

“What about Sophie, is she okay?”

“No, she’s been abducted by aliens, but I wanted you to digest the bad news about forgetting your date book first.”

“You know, that right there is why Mom is ashamed of you,” Charlie said.

Jane laughed. “Guess what? She’s not.”

“She’s not?”

“No, this morning. She told me that she always knew who I was, always knew what I was, and that she has always loved me, just the way I am.”

“Did you card her? There’s an impostor in our mom’s bed.”

“Shut up, it was nice. Important.”

“She was probably just saying that because she’s dying.”

“She did say that she wished I wouldn’t wear men’s suits all the time.”

“She’s not alone on that one,” Charlie said.

Jane fell back into assault mode. “I’m off on the floss mission. Call Cassandra.”

“Done,” Charlie said.

“And Buddy needs a doughnut.” Jane threw open the door and ran out into the heat screaming like a berserker charging the enemy.

Charlie closed the door behind her so as not to let the air-conditioning out, and watched through the glass as his sister ran across the zero-scaped yard like she was on fire. He looked beyond her to the red rock mesa rising out of the desert. There seemed to be a deep crevasse in it that he hadn’t seen there before. He looked again, and saw that it wasn’t a crevasse at all, just a long, sharp shadow.

Then he ran out into the driveway and looked at the position of the sun, then at the shadow. It was on the wrong side of the mesa. There couldn’t be a shadow on this side—the sun was also on this side. He shaded his eyes and watched the shadow until he thought his brains were cooking in the sun. It was moving, slowly, but moving, and not the way a shadow moves. It was moving with purpose, against the sun, toward his mother’s house.

“My date book,” he said to himself. “Oh, shit.”

O
n her last day, Lois Asher rallied. After not having even been able to get up to go to the breakfast table, or into the living room to sit and watch TV for three weeks, got up and danced with Buddy to an old Ink Spots song. She was playful and full of laughter, she teased her children and hugged them, she ate a chocolate-marshmallow sundae, and she brushed and flossed afterward. She put on her favorite silver jewelry and wore it to the dinner table, and when she couldn’t find her squash-blossom necklace she shrugged it off like it was a minor thing—she must have misplaced it. Oh, well.

Charlie knew what was happening because he had seen it before, and Buddy and Jane knew because Grace, the hospice nurse, explained it to them. “It happens again and again. I’ve seen people come out of a coma and sing their favorite songs, and all I can tell you is to enjoy it. People see the light come back into eyes that have been dull for months, and they start to place hope on it. It’s not a sign of getting well, it’s an opportunity to say good-bye. It’s a gift.”

Charlie had also learned by observing that it really helped everyone to let go if they were at least mildly medicated, so he and Jane took some antianxiety pills that Jane’s therapist had prescribed and Buddy washed down a time-released morphine pill with some scotch. Medication and forgiveness can make for joyous moments with the dying—it’s like they get to return to childhood—and because nothing in the future matters, because you don’t have to train them for life, teach lessons, forge applicable and practical memories, all the joy can be wicked from those last moments and stored in the heart. It was the best and closest time Charlie had ever had with his mother and his sister, and Buddy, in the sharing, became family as well.

Lois Asher went to bed at nine and died at midnight.

I
can’t stay for the funeral,” Charlie said to his sister the next morning.

“What do you mean you can’t stay for the funeral?”

Charlie looked out the window at the giant ice pick of a shadow that had made its way down the mountain toward his mother’s house. Charlie could see it churning at the edges, like flocks of birds or swarming insects. The point was less than a half mile away.

“I have something I have to do at home, Jane. I mean, I forgot to do it and I really, really can’t stay.”

“Don’t be mysterious. What the hell do you need to do that you can’t attend your own mother’s funeral?”

Charlie was pressing his Beta Male imagination to the breaking point to come up with something credible on the spot. Then a light went on. “The other night, when you sent me out to get laid?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, it was an adventure, to be sure, but when I went to get my scalp sewed up, I also had a test. I talked to the doctor today, and I have to go get treatment. Right now.”

“You moron, I didn’t send you out to have unsafe sex. What were you thinking?”

“It
was
safe sex.”
Right, sure,
he thought, he almost scoffed at himself. “It’s the wounds they’re worried about. But if I get on these drugs right away, there’s a good chance that I’ll be okay.”

“They’re putting you on the cocktail? As a preventative?”

Sure, that’s it, the cocktail!
Charlie thought. He nodded gravely.

“Okay, then, go.” Jane turned and hid her face.

“Maybe I can get back in time for the funeral,” Charlie said. Could he? He had to retrieve two overdue soul vessels in less than a week, and hope that no new names had appeared in his date book.

“We’ll do it a week from today,” Jane said, turning back around, tears blinked away. “You go home, get treated, come back. Buddy and I will handle the arrangements.”

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. He put his arms around his sister.

“Don’t you die on me, too, you fucker,” Jane said.

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Bring back that charcoal Armani of yours for me to wear to the funeral, and Cassie’s strappy black pumps, okay?”

“You? In strappy black pumps?”

“It’s what Mom would have wanted,” Jane said.

W
hen Charlie landed in San Francisco there were four frantic messages on his cell phone from Cassandra. She had always seemed so calm, composed—a stable counterpoint to his sister’s flights of fancy. She sounded a wreck on the phone.

“Charlie, she’s got him trapped and they’re going to eat him and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to call the cops. Call me when you land.”

Charlie did call, all the way into the city in the shuttle van he called, but kept getting transferred to voice messaging. When he got out of the van in front of his store he heard a hiss coming out of the storm drain at the corner.

“I missed finishing with you, lover,” came the voice.

“No time,” Charlie said, hopping over the curb and running into the store.

“You never called,” purred the Morrigan.

Ray was behind the counter mousing through Asian cuties when Charlie came storming through.

“You’d better get upstairs,” Ray said. “They’re freaking out up there.”

“No kidding,” Charlie said as he passed. He took the stairs two at a time.

He was fumbling his key into the lock when Cassandra threw the door open and pulled him into his apartment.

“She won’t let him go. I’m afraid they’re going to eat him.”