A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) (7 page)

But Charlie did. “Do you have any children, Mr. Mainheart?”

“Two sons. They came back for the funeral, then they went home to their own families. They offer to do whatever they can, but…”

“They can’t,” Charlie finished for him. “No one can.”

Now the old man looked up at him, his face as bereft and barren as a mummified basset hound. “I just want to die.”

“Don’t say that,” Charlie said, because that’s what you say. “That feeling will pass.” Which he said because everyone had been saying it to him. As far as he knew, he was just slinging bullshit clichés.

“She was—” Mainheart’s voice caught on the edge of a sob. A strong man, at once overcome by his grief and embarrassed that he was showing it.

“I know,” Charlie said, thinking about how Rachel still occupied that place in his heart, and when he turned in the kitchen to say something to her, and she wasn’t there, it took his breath.

“She was—”

“I know,” Charlie interrupted, trying to give the old man a pass, because he knew what Mainheart was feeling.
She was meaning and order and light, and now that she’s gone, chaos falls like a dark leaden cloud
.

“She was so phenomenally stupid.”

“What?” Charlie looked up so quickly he heard a vertebra pop in his neck. Hadn’t seen that coming.

“The dumb broad ate silica gel,” Mainheart said, irritated as well as agonized.

“What?” Charlie was shaking his head, as if trying to rattle something loose.

“Silica gel.”

“What?”

“Silica gel! Silica gel! Silica gel, you idiot!”

Charlie felt as if he should shout the name of some arcane stuff back at him:
Well, symethicone! Symethicone! Symethicone, you butt-nugget!
Instead he said, “The stuff fake breasts are made of? She ate that?” The image of a well-dressed older woman macking on a goopish spoonful of artificial boob spooge was running across the lobes of his brain like a stuttering nightmare.

Mainheart pushed himself to his feet on the vanity. “No, the little packets of stuff they pack in with electronic equipment and cameras.”

“The
‘Do Not Eat’
stuff?”

“Exactly.”

“But it says right on the packet—she ate that?”

“Yes. The furrier put packets of it in with her furs when he installed that cabinet.” Mainheart pointed.

Charlie turned, and behind the large closet door where they had entered was a lighted glass cabinet—inside hung a dozen or so fur coats. The cabinet probably had its own air-conditioning unit to control the humidity, but that wasn’t what Charlie was noticing. Even under the recessed fluorescent light inside the cabinet, one of the coats was clearly glowing red and pulsating. He turned back to Mainheart slowly, trying not to overreact, not sure, in fact, what would constitute an overreaction in this case, so he tried to sound calm, but not willing to take any shit.

“Mr. Mainheart, I appreciate your loss, but is there something more going on here than you’ve told me?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I mean,” Charlie said, “why, of all the used-clothing dealers in the Bay Area, did you decide to call me? There are people who are much more qualified to deal with a collection of this size and quality.” Charlie stormed over to the fur cabinet and pulled open the door. It made a
floof-tha
sound that the seal on a refrigerator door makes when opened. He grabbed the glowing jacket—fox fur, it appeared to be. “Or was it this? Did the call have something to do with this?” Charlie brandished the jacket like he was holding a murder weapon before the accused.
In short,
he thought about adding,
are you fucking with me?

“You were the first used-clothing dealer in the phone book.”

Charlie let the jacket drop. “Asher’s Secondhand?”

“Starts with an
A,
” Mainheart said, slowly, carefully—obviously resisting the urge to call Charlie an idiot again.

“So it has nothing to do with this jacket?”

“Well, it has something to do with that jacket. I’d like you to take it away with all the rest of it.”

“Oh,” Charlie said, trying to recover. “Mr. Mainheart, I appreciate the call, and this is certainly a beautiful collection, amazing, really, but I’m not equipped to take on this kind of inventory. And I’ll be honest with you, even though my father would be spinning in his grave for telling you this, there is probably a million dollars’ worth of clothes in this closet. Maybe more. And given the time and space to resell it, it’s probably worth a quarter of that. I just don’t have that kind of money.”

“We can work something out,” Mainheart said. “Just to get it out of the house—”

“I could take some of it on consignment, I suppose—”

“Five hundred dollars.”

“What?”

“Give me five hundred dollars and get it out of here by tomorrow and it’s yours.”

Charlie started to object, but he could feel what felt like the ghost of his father rising up to bonk him on the head with a spittoon if he didn’t stop himself.
We provide a valuable service, son. We are like an orphanage to art and artifact, because we are willing to handle the unwanted, we give them value
.

“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Mainheart, I feel as if I’d be taking advantage of your grief.”

Oh for Christ’s sake, you fucking loser, you are no son of mine. I have no son
. Was that the ghost of Charlie’s father, rattling chains in his head? Why, then, did it have the voice and vocabulary of Lily? Can a conscience be greedy?

“You would be doing me a favor, Mr. Asher. A huge favor. If you don’t take it, my next call is to the Goodwill. I promised Emily that if something ever happened to her that I wouldn’t just give her things away. Please.”

And there was so much pain in the old man’s voice that Charlie had to look away. Charlie felt for the old man because he
did
understand. He couldn’t do anything to help, couldn’t say,
It will get better,
like everyone kept saying to him. It wasn’t getting better. Different, but not better. And this fellow had fifty more years in which to pack his hopes, or in his case, his history.

“Let me think about it. Check into storage. If I can handle it, I’ll call you tomorrow, would that be all right?”

“I’d be grateful,” Mainheart said.

Then, for no reason that he could think of, Charlie said, “May I take this jacket with me? As an example of the quality of the collection, in case I have to divide it among other dealers.”

“That would be fine. Let me show you out.”

As they passed into the rotunda, a shadow passed across the leaded-glass windows, three stories up. A large shadow. Charlie paused on the steps and waited for the old man to react, but he just tottered on down the staircase, leaning heavily on the railing as he went. When Mainheart reached the door he turned to Charlie, extending his hand. “I’m sorry about that, uh, outburst upstairs. I haven’t been myself since—”

As the old man began to open the door a figure dropped outside, casting the silhouette of a bird as tall as a man through the glass.

“No!” Charlie dove forward, knocking the old man aside and slamming the door on the great bird’s head, the heavy black beak stabbing through and snapping like hedge clippers, rattling an umbrella stand and scattering its contents across the marble floor. Charlie’s face was only inches from the bird’s eye, and he shoved the door with his shoulder, trying to keep the beak from snapping off one of his hands. The bird’s claws raked against the glass, cracking one of the thick beveled panels as the animal thrashed to free itself.

Charlie threw his hip against the doorjamb then slid down it, dropped the fox jacket, and snatched one of the umbrellas from the floor. He stabbed up into the bird’s neck feathers, but lost his purchase on the doorjamb—one of the black talons snaked through the opening and raked across his forearm, cutting through his jacket, his shirtsleeve, and into the flesh. Charlie shoved the umbrella with all he had, driving the bird’s head back through the opening.

The raven let out a screech and took flight, its wings making a great whooshing noise as it went. Charlie lay on his back, out of breath, staring at the leaded-glass panels, as if any moment the shadow of the giant raven would come back, then he looked to Michael Mainheart, who lay crumpled on his side like a stringless marionette. Beside his head lay a cane with an ivory handle that had been carved into the shape of a polar bear that had fallen from the umbrella stand. The cane was glowing red. The old man was not breathing.

“Well that’s fucked up,” Charlie said.

I
n the alley behind Asher’s Secondhand, the Emperor of San Francisco hand-fed olive focaccia to the troops and tried to keep dog snot from fouling his breakfast.

“Patience, Bummer,” the Emperor said to the Boston terrier, who was leaping at the day-old wheel of flat bread like a furry Super Ball, while Lazarus, the solemn golden retriever, stood by, waiting for his share. Bummer snorted an impatient reply (thus the dog snot). He’d worked up a furious appetite because breakfast was running late today. The Emperor had slept on a bench by the Maritime Museum, and during the night his arthritic knee had snaked out of his wool overcoat into the damp cold, making the walk to North Beach and the Italian bakery that gave them free day-old a slow and painful ordeal.

The Emperor groaned and sat down on an empty milk crate. He was a great rolling bear of a man, his shoulders broad but a little broken from carrying the weight of the city. A white tangle of hair and beard wreathed his face like a storm cloud. As far as he could remember, he and the troops had patrolled the city streets forever, but upon further consideration, it might have just been since Wednesday. He wasn’t entirely sure.

The Emperor decided to make a proclamation to the troops about the importance of compassion in the face of the rising tide of heinous fuckery and political weaselocity in the nearby kingdom of the United States. (He found his audience was most attentive to his proclamations when the meat-laced focaccia were still nuzzled in the larder of his overcoat pockets, and presently a pepperoni and Parmesan reposed fragrant in the woolly depths, so the royal hounds were rapt.) But just as he cleared his throat to begin, a cargo van came screeching around the corner, went up on two wheels as it plowed through a row of garbage cans, and slid to a stop not fifty feet away. The driver’s-side door flew open and a thin man in a suit leapt out, carrying a cane and a woman’s fur coat, and made a beeline for the back door of Asher’s. But before he got two steps the man fell to the concrete as if hit from behind, then rolled on his back and began flailing at the air with the cane and the coat. The Emperor, who knew most everyone, recognized Charlie Asher.

Bummer erupted into a fit of yapping, but the more levelheaded Lazarus growled once and took off toward Charlie.

“Lazarus!” the Emperor shouted, but the retriever charged on, followed now by his bug-eyed brother in arms.

Charlie was back on his feet and swinging the cane as if he was fencing with some phantom, using the coat like a shield. Living on the street, the Emperor had seen a lot of people battling with unseen demons, but Charlie Asher was apparently scoring some hits. The cane was making a thwacking noise against what appeared to be thin air—but no, there was something there, a shadow of some sort?

The Emperor climbed to his feet and limped into the fray, but before he got two steps Lazarus had leapt and appeared to be attacking Charlie, but he soared over the shopkeeper and snapped at a spot above his head—then hung there, his jaws sunk into the substantial neck of thin air.

Charlie took advantage of the distraction, stepped back, and swung the cane above the levitating golden retriever. There was a smack, and Lazarus let go, but now Bummer launched himself at the invisible foe. He missed whatever was there, and ended up performing a doggy swish shot into a garbage can.

Charlie made for the steel door of Asher’s again, but found it locked, and as he reached for his keys, something caught him from behind.

“Let go, fuckface,” the shade screeched.

The fur coat Charlie was holding appeared to be swept out of his hand and was pulled straight up, over the four-story building and out of sight.

Charlie turned and held the cane at ready, but whatever had been there seemed to be gone now.

“Aren’t you just supposed to sit above the door and
nevermore
and be poetic and stuff?!” he shouted at the sky. Then, for good measure, added, “You evil fuck!”

Lazarus barked, then whined. A sharp and metallic yapping rose from Bummer’s garbage can.

“Well, you don’t see that every day,” said the Emperor as he limped up to Charlie.

“You could see that?”

“Well, no, not really. Merely a shadow, but I could see that something was there. There
was
something there, wasn’t there, Charlie?”

Charlie nodded, trying to catch his breath. “It will be back. It followed me across the city.” He dug into his pocket for his keys. “You guys should duck into the store with me, Your Majesty.” Of course Charlie knew the Emperor. Every San Franciscan knew the Emperor.

The Emperor smiled. “That’s very kind of you, but we will be perfectly safe. For now I need to free my charge from his galvanized prison.” The big man tipped the garbage can and Bummer emerged snorting and tossing his head as if ready to tear the ass out of any man or beast foolhardy enough to cross him (and he would have, as long as they were knee-high or shorter).