Read A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) Online
Authors: Christopher Moore
Lily shut up.
She raised her eyebrows. As if
“no.”
Charlie nodded. As if
“yes.”
“The Big Death?”
“With a capital
D,
” Charlie said.
“Well, you’re totally not qualified for that,” Lily said.
“Thanks, I feel better now.”
MINTY FRESH
Being two hundred feet under the sea always made Minty uneasy, especially if he’d been drinking sake and listening to jazz all night, which he had. He was in the last car on the last train out of Oakland, and he had the car to himself, like his own private submarine, cruising under the Bay with the echo of a tenor sax in his ear like sonar, and a half-dozen sake-sodden spicy tuna rolls sitting in his stomach like depth charges.
He’d spent his evening at Sato’s on the Embarcadero, Japanese restaurant and jazz club. Sushi and jazz, strange bedfellows, shacked up by opportunity and oppression. It began in the Fillmore district, which had been a Japanese neighborhood before World War II. When the Japanese were shipped off to internment camps, and their homes and belongings sold off, the blacks, who came to the city to work in the shipyards building battleships and destroyers, moved into the vacant buildings. Jazz came close behind.
For years, the Fillmore was the center of the San Francisco jazz scene, and
It wasn’t just historical happenstance—Sato had explained to Minty, late one night after the music had ended and the sake was making him wax eloquent—it was philosophical alignment: jazz was a Zen art, dig? Controlled spontaneity. Like
sumi-e
ink painting, like haiku, like archery, like kendo fencing—jazz wasn’t something you planned, it was something you did. You practiced, you played your scales, you learned your chops, then you brought all your knowledge, your conditioning, to the moment. “And in jazz, every moment is a crisis,” Sato quoted Wynton Marsalis, “and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis.” Like the swordsman, the archer, the poet, and the painter—it’s all right there—no future, no past, just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens.
And Minty, taken by the need to escape his life as Death, had taken the train to Oakland to find a moment he could hide in, without the regret of the past or the anxiety of the future, just a pure
right now
resting in the bell of a tenor sax. But the sake, too much future looming ahead, and too much water overhead had brought on the blues, the moment melted, and Minty was uneasy. Things were going badly. He’d been unable to retrieve his last two soul vessels—a first in his career—and he was starting to see, or hear, the effects. Voices out of the storm sewers—louder and more numerous than ever—taunting him. Things moving in the shadows, on the periphery of his vision, shuffling, scuffling dark things that disappeared when you looked right at them.
He’d even sold three discs off the soul-vessels rack to the same person, another first. He hadn’t noticed it was the same woman right away, but when things started to go wrong, the faces played back and he realized. She’d been a monk the first time, a Buddhist monk of some kind, wearing gold-and-maroon robes, her hair very short, as if her head had been shaved and was growing out. What he remembered was that her eyes were a crystal blue, unusual in someone with such dark hair and skin. And there was a smile deep in those eyes that made him feel as if a soul had found its rightful place, a good home at a higher level. The next time he’d seen her was six months later and she was in jeans and leather jacket, her hair sort of out of control. She’d taken a CD from the “One Per Customer” rack, a Sarah McLachlan, which is what he’d have chosen for her if asked, and he barely noticed the crystal-blue eyes other than to think that he’d seen that smile before. Then, last week, it was her again, with hair down around her shoulders, wearing a long skirt and a belted muslin poet’s shirt—like an escapee from a Renaissance fair, not unusual for the Haight, but not quite common in the Castro—still, he thought nothing of it, until she had paid him and glanced over the top of her sunglasses to count the cash out of her wallet. The blue eyes again, electric and not quite smiling this time. He didn’t know what to do. He had no proof she was the monk, the chick in the leather jacket, but he knew it was her. He brought all his skills to bear on the situation, and essentially, he folded.
“So you like Mozart?” he asked her.
“It’s for a friend” was all she said.
He rationalized not confronting her by that simple statement. A soul vessel was supposed to find its rightful owner, right? It didn’t say he had to sell it
directly
to them. That had been a week ago, and since then the voices, the scuffling noises in the shadows, the general creepiness, had been nearly constant. Minty Fresh had spent most of his adult life alone, but never before had he felt the loneliness so profoundly. A dozen times in the last few weeks he’d been tempted to call one of the other Death Merchants under the pretense of warning them about his screwup, but mainly just to talk to someone who had a clue about what his life was like.
He stretched his long legs out over three train seats and into the aisle, then closed his eyes and laid his head back against the window, feeling the rhythm of the rattling train coming through the cool glass against his shaved scalp. Oh no, that wasn’t going to work. Too much sake and something akin to
bed spins
. He jerked his head forward and opened his eyes, then noticed through the doors that the train had gone dark two cars up. He sat upright and watched as the lights went out in the next car—no, that’s not what happened. Darkness moved through the car like a flowing gas, taking the energy out of the lights as it went.
“Oh, shit,” Minty said to the empty car.
He couldn’t even stand up inside the train, but stand up he did, staying slumped a little, his head against the ceiling, but facing the flowing darkness.
The door at the end of the car opened and someone stepped through. A woman. Well, not exactly a woman. What looked like the shadow of a woman.
“Hey, lover,” it said. A low voice, smoky.
He’d heard this voice before, or a voice like it.
The darkness flowed around the two floor lights at the far end of the car, leaving the woman illuminated in outline only, a gunmetal reflection against pure blackness. Since he was first tapped as a Death Merchant, Minty had never remembered feeling afraid, but he was afraid now.
“I’m not your lover,” Minty said, his voice as smooth and steady as a bass sax, not giving up a note of fear.
A crisis in every moment,
he thought.
“Once you’ve had black, you never go back,” she said, taking a step toward him, her blue-black outline the only thing visible in any direction now.
He knew there was a door a few feet behind him that was held shut with powerful hydraulics, and that led to a dark tunnel two hundred feet under the Bay, lined with a deadly electric rail—but for some reason, that sounded like a really friendly place to be right now.
“I’ve had black,” said Minty.
“No, you haven’t, lover. You’ve had shades of brown, dark cocoa and coffee maybe, but I promise you, you’ve never had black. Because once you do, you
never ever
come back.”
He watched as she moved toward him—flowed toward him—and long silver claws sprouted from her fingertips, playing in the dim glow from the safety lights, dripping something that steamed when it hit the floor. There were scurrying sounds on either side of him, things moving in the darkness, low and quick.
“Okay, good point,” Minty said.
I
t was a brutally hot night in the City, and everyone had their windows open. From the roof across the alley, the spy could see the little girl happily splashing away in a tub full of suds, the two giant hounds sitting just outside the tub licking shampoo from her hand and belching bubbles as she screeched with glee.
“Sophie, don’t feed the puppies soap, okay?” The shopkeeper’s voice from another room.
“Okay, Dad. I won’t. I’m not a kid, you know,” she said, pouring more strawberry-kiwi shampoo into her palm and holding it out for one of the dogs to lick. A cloud of fragrant bubbles burped out of the beast, through the bars of the window, and out into the still air over the alley.
The hounds were the problem, but if the spy had his timing right, he’d be able to take care of them and get to the child without interference.
In the past he’d been an assassin, a bodyguard, a kickboxer, and most recently a certified fiberglass-insulation installer—skills that could serve him well in his current mission. He had the face of a crocodile—sixty-eight spiked teeth and eyes that gleamed like black glass beads. His hands were the claws of a raptor, the wicked black nails encrusted with dried blood. He wore a black silk tuxedo, but no shoes—his feet were webbed like those of a waterbird, with claws for digging prey from the mud.
He rolled the large Persian rug to the edge of the roof and waited; then, just as he had planned, he heard, “Sweetie, I’m going to take the trash out, I’ll be right back.”
“Okay, Dad.”
Funny how the illusion of security can make us careless, the spy thought. No one would leave a young child alone in the bath unattended, but the company of two canine bodyguards wouldn’t make her unattended, would it?
He waited, and the shopkeeper emerged from the steel door downstairs carrying two trash bags. He seemed momentarily thrown off by the fact that the Dumpster, which was normally right outside the door, had been moved down the alley twenty feet or so, but shrugged, kicked the door wide, and while it hissed slowly shut on its pneumatic cylinder, he dashed for the Dumpster. That’s when the spy sent the rug off the roof. The rug unrolled as it fell the four stories. Unfurled, it hit the shopkeeper with a substantial thud and drove him to the ground.
In the bathroom, the huge dogs perked up. One let out a woof of caution.
The spy already had the first bolt in his crossbow. Now he let it fly—nylon line hissed out and the bolt hit the rug with a thump, penetrating the rug and probably the shopkeeper’s calf, effectively pinning him under the rug, perhaps even to the ground. The shopkeeper screamed. The great hounds dashed out of the bathroom.
The spy loaded another bolt, attached it to the free end of the nylon line attached to the first bolt, then fired it through another section of the rug below. The shopkeeper continued to shout, but with the heavy rug pinned over him, he couldn’t move. As the spy loaded his third bolt the hounds burst through the doorway into the alley.
The third bolt wasn’t attached to a line, but had a wicked titanium-spiked tip. The spy aimed at the pneumatic cylinder on the door, hit it, and the door slammed shut, locking the hounds in the alley. He’d practiced this a dozen times in his mind, and it was all going exactly as planned. The front doors to the shop and the apartment building had been Super Glued shut before he’d come up on the roof—no easy job getting that done without being seen.
His fourth shot put a bolt in the window frame over the hall window. The bars on the bathroom were too narrow, but he knew that the shopkeeper would have left the door to the apartment open. He attached a carabiner to the nylon line and slid silently down the line to the window ledge. He unclipped, then squeezed through the bars and dropped to the floor in the hallway.
He kept close to the hall walls, taking careful, exaggerated steps to keep his toenails from catching on the carpet. He could smell onions cooking in a nearby apartment and hear the child’s voice coming from the door down the hall, which he could see was open, if only a crack.
“Dad, I’m ready to get out! Dad, I’m ready to get out!”
He paused at the doorway, peeked into the apartment. He knew the child would scream when she saw him—his jagged teeth, the claws, his cold black eyes. He would see to it that her screams were short-lived, but nobody could remain calm in the face of his fearsomeness. Of course, the fearsome effect was somewhat reduced by the fact that he was only fourteen inches tall.
He pushed the door open, but as he stepped into the apartment something grabbed him from behind, yanking him off his feet, and in spite of his training and stealth skills, he screamed like a flaming wood duck.
S
omeone had Super Glued the key slot in the back door and Charlie had snapped his key off trying to get it open. There was some kind of arrow stuck on a string through the back of his leg and it hurt like hell—blood was filling up his shoe. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew it wasn’t good that the hellhounds were bouncing around him whimpering.
He pounded the door with both fists. “Open the goddamn door, Ray!”
Ray opened the door. “What?”
The hellhounds knocked them both down going through the door. Charlie jumped to his feet and limped after them, up the steps. Ray followed.