Secondhand Souls (4 page)

“What’s his name?” asked Lily.

“What’s your name?” Mike asked sweater guy.

“Geoff with a
G
,” said sweater.

“Geoff with a
G
,” Mike repeated into the phone.

“Tell him he doesn’t have to tell people about the
G
,” said Lily.

“She says you don’t have to tell people about the
G
,” Mike said.

“Yes I do. Yes I do. Yes I do,” said Geoff with a
G.

“The
G
is important to him,” Mike said to Lily.

“Is he cute?”

“Pardon.”

“What’s he look like? Is he cute?”

“I don’t know. He’s a guy? He’s going to jump off the bridge.”

“Describe him.”

“I don’t know. He’s about thirty, maybe. Glasses. Brown hair.”

“Is he clean?”

Mike looked. “Yeah. To the eye.”

“He sounds nice.”

“She says you sound nice,” Mike conveyed to Geoff.

“Tell him if he comes down, we can get together, chat about his problems, and I’ll give him a blow job.”

“Really?”

“The point is to get them past the crisis, Mike. Get him off the bridge.”

“Okay,” said Mike. To Geoff, he said. “So, Geoff, Lily here says that if you come down, the two of you can get together and chat about your problems.”

“I’m done talking,” said Geoff.

“Tell him the rest,” said Lily. “The second part usually closes the deal.”

“She says she’ll give you a blow job.”

“What?” said Geoff.

“I’m not saying it again,” Mike said to Lily.

“Tell him I’m beautiful.”

“Really?”

“Yes, fucktard, really. How are you not getting this?”

“Maybe I should just put you on speaker, and you can tell him.”

“Nooooooo,” wailed Geoff. He raised his free hand and swung out into space.

“She’s beautiful,” Mike said.

“Not again,” said Geoff. “No more.” He pushed off into space. No scream. Wind.

“Fuck,” Mike said. He looked, then looked away. He didn’t want to see him hit. He cringed and anticipated the sound. It came up from the water like a distant gunshot.

“Mike?” said Lily.

He caught his breath. He could feel his pulse rushing in his ears and the sound of people shouting below. A code blue came over his radio, signaling for everyone on the crew to stay secured in place until the captain of the bridge could assess the situation.

“He went over,” Mike said into the phone.

“Balls,” Lily said. “This is on you, Mike. This is not on me. If you’d given him the phone—”

“He wouldn’t take it. I couldn’t get close to him.”

“You should have had him call me himself.”

“He didn’t have a phone.”

“What kind of loser goes out without a phone?”

“I know,” said Mike. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“Well, couldn’t be helped,” said Lily. “You’re going to lose some. I’ve been doing this awhile, and even with your best moves, some are going in the drink.”

“Thanks,” said Mike.

“You sound nice,” said Lily. “Single?”

“Uh, kind of.”

“Me, too. Straight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, I have your number. Okay if I call you?”

Mike was still shaking from Geoff’s dive. “Sure.”

“I’ll text you mine. Call anytime.”

“Okay,” Mike said.

“But the blow-job thing is not automatic, Mike. That’s strictly a crisis-line thing.”

“Of course,” Mike said.

“But not out of the question,” said Lily.

“Okay. What do you do if the caller is a woman?”

“I commiserate. I can go from zero to co-miserable at the speed of dark.”

“Okay.”

“I know things, Mike. Many things. Terrible, dark, disturbing things.”

“I should probably report in or something.”

“Okay, call me, bye,” said Lily.

“Bye,” he said.

Mike put his phone back in the pouch then made his way to the top of the tower, hooked his safety lines on the high cables, then sat down, took off his hard hat, and ran his fingers through his hair, as if he might comb some of the strangeness out of the morning that way. He looked up at the giant aircraft warning light, sitting in its orange-painted steel cage twelve feet above his head, at the very top of the bridge, and behind it the sky began to darken as his vision started to tunnel down. He had just about fainted when out of the side of the light tower a woman’s torso appeared—as solid as if a window had opened and she had peeked out, except there was no window. She was jutting right out of the metal, like a ship’s figurehead, a woman in a white lace dress, her dark hair tied back, some kind of white flower pinned in her hair above her ear.

“Alone at last,” she said. A dazzling smile. “We’re going to need your help.”

Mike stood and backed up against the rail, trying not to scream. His breath came in a whimper.

4

Tribulations of the Mint One

N
estled between the Castro and the Haight, just off the corner of Noe and Market Streets, lay Fresh Music. Behind the counter stood the owner, seven feet, two-hundred and seventy-five pounds of lean heartache, the eponymous Mister Fresh. Minty Fresh. He wore moss-green linen slacks and a white dress shirt, the sleeves flipped back on his forearms. His scalp was shaved and shone like polished walnut; his eyes were golden; his cool, which had always been there before, was missing.

Minty held Coltrane’s
My Favorite Things
album cover by its edges and looked into Trane’s face for a clue to the whereabouts of his cool. Behind him the vinyl disc was spinning on a machined aluminum turntable that looked like a Mars lander and weighed as much as a supermodel. He had hoped that the notes might bring him into the moment, out of a future or a past, anxiety or regret, but Gershwin’s “Summertime” was skating up next on the disc and he just didn’t think he could take the future-past it would evoke.

He had wept into her voice mail.

Did Trane look up from the album cover, lower his soprano sax, and say,
“That is some pathetic shit, you know that right?”
He might as well have.

He put the album cover down in the polycarbonate “now playing” stand and was stepping back to lift the tone arm when he saw the profile of a sharp-featured Hispanic man moving by the front window. Inspector Rivera. Not a thing, Rivera coming to the shop. It was cool. The last time he’d spoken to Rivera, the Underworld had manifested itself in the city in the form of horrible creatures, and chaos had nearly overcome the known world, but that was in the past, not a thing, now.

He willed a chill over himself as Rivera came in. Then—

“Oh, hell no! Get your ass right back out that door.”

“Mr. Fresh,” said Rivera, with a nod. “I think I need your help.”

“I don’t do police work,” said Fresh. “I’ve been out of the security business for twenty years.”

“I’m not police anymore. I have a bookstore over on Russian Hill.”

“I don’t sell books either.”

“But you still sell soul vessels, don’t you?” Rivera nodded to a locked, bulletproof case displaying what appeared to be a random collection of records, CDs, tapes, and even a couple of old wax cylinders.

To Minty Fresh, every object in the case glowed a dull red, as if they’d been heated in a furnace, evincing the human soul housed there, but to anyone but a Death Merchant, they looked like, well, a random collection of recorded media. Rivera knew about the Death Merchants. He’d first come to the shop with Charlie Asher when the shit had gone down, when the Death Merchants around the city had been slaughtered and their stores ransacked for soul vessels by the Morrigan—“sewer harpies,” Charlie had called them. But now that Rivera was one of them, a Death Merchant, he could also see the glow. Minty had sent him the
Great Big Book of Death
himself.

Fresh said: “Y’all read the book, then, so you know you shouldn’t be here, talking to me. You know what happened last time Death Merchants started talking. Just go back to your store and keep collecting the objects when they come up in your calendar, like you been doing.”

“That’s the thing: I haven’t been collecting soul vessels at all.”

“The fuck you mean, you haven’t been collecting them at all?”

Minty Fresh made a motion with his hands of leveling, as if he were smoothing an imaginary tablecloth of calm over a counter constructed of contemporary freak-out. With concerted effort now, and lower register, he said, “Never?”

“I bought the date book, and a number two pencil,” Rivera said, trying to accentuate the positive. He smiled. In the background, Coltrane improvised a boppy, playful riff around “Summertime” ’s sweet, low-down melody. “The names and numbers showed up on the calendar, like the
Big Book
said they would? But I didn’t do anything about them.”

“You can’t just
not
do the job. Someone
has
to do it. That’s why they put it in the book, right in the beginning, right by the part about not having contact with other Death Merchants. You just ignore the
Big Book,
shit gonna get muthafuckin’ freaky up in here.”

“It already has,” said Rivera. “That’s why I’m here. A woman appeared in my shop, not exactly a human woman. A dark thing.”

“The Morrigan?” Minty could still see the Morrigan’s three-inch talons raking the wall of a dark subway car where she had confronted him. He shuddered.

“Different,” said Rivera. “This one didn’t have any bird features. She was just pale—dressed in black rags, like a shroud. I didn’t see any claws.”

“How you know she wasn’t just a raggedy woman?”

“She disappeared. Puff of smoke, while my partner watched. Locked door. And she told me. She said she was called
Bean Sidhe.
Had a really thick brogue, I can’t say it the way she did.”

“
Banshee
,” said Minty Fresh. “You pronounce it
banshee
.”

“That makes sense,” said Rivera. “She did a lot of shrieking. You’ve seen her, then?”

“Until ten seconds ago I thought the banshee was a myth, but I recognize the description. My ex—woman I know—did a lot of research on Celtic legends after that last—”

“Then you know what she’s doing here?”

“Not being a detective like you, I can only guess, but I had to guess, I’d guess she the sound the Underworld make when you throw shit in its fan.”

Rivera nodded, as if that made sense. “She
did
call herself a ‘harbinger of doom.’ ”

“That’s all I’m saying,” said Minty.

“There’s more,” said Rivera.

“Of course there is.”

So Rivera told Minty Fresh about the Emperor’s quest to record the names of the dead, of his insistence that they would be forgotten, and how in the past, the kindhearted madman had been somewhat ahead of the police on supernatural goings-on in the city. When he finished he said, “So, do you think there’s anything to it?”

Minty Fresh shrugged. “Probably. You broke the universe, Inspector, no tellin’ how bad.”

“You sound happy about that.”

“Do I? Because I don’t like that the universe is broken, I keep all my shit there.” For the moment, he did feel a little better, because as much as he had convinced himself that he was losing his grip on his cool, here was someone who was clearly worse off than he. Then he looked at Rivera, standing there easy in his Italian suit, his lines and aspect sharp as a blade, and he realized that the cop, or the ex-cop, had
not
lost his cool. The world might be unraveling around him, but Rivera was chill as a motherfucker.

“So what do I do?”

“I’d start with doing your job.”

“I’m retired—semiretired.”

“I mean picking up the soul vessels.”

“You think they’d still be there?”

“You had better hope they are.”

“How do I find them?”

“I’d start with your date book full of names, Detective Inspector—that was your title, right?”

Some of Rivera’s chill seemed to slip a bit. Rivera undid a button on his suit jacket, evidently to show that he was in action mode.

Minty smiled, a dazzling crescent moon in a night sky. “Did you just unbutton your coat so you could get to your gun?”

“Of course not, it’s just a little warm in here. I carry my gun on my hip.” Rivera brushed back his jacket to show the Glock.

“But you’re still packing, despite your retirement?”

“
Semiretirement
. Yes, I started carrying my old backup. The banshee took my stun gun. She zapped me with it.”

“So she can just appear out of nowhere and knock you out?”

“Looks that way.”

“Well, good luck with that,” said Fresh, feeling ever so much cooler.

“I’ll call you,” said Rivera. “Let you know how it goes.”

“If you feel you have to.”

Rivera turned as if to leave, then turned back. “Didn’t you have a pizza and jazz place at Charlie Asher’s building in North Beach?”

“For a while. Didn’t pencil out.”

“You were in it with that spooky girl from Asher’s shop?”

“Also didn’t pencil out.”

“Sorry,” said Rivera, and he seemed genuinely so. “That can be tough. I’m divorced.”

“No damage can’t be buffed out.” said Minty. “Girl ain’t nothin’ but tits and sass.”

Rivera nodded. “Well, good luck with that.” He turned and left the shop, once again, chill as a motherfucker.

Minty Fresh shuddered, then picked up his mobile and began to scroll through his contacts, stopping on Lily’s number, but before he could hit call to set in motion another humiliating surrender of his cool, the phone buzzed and the screen read
Three
Jewels Buddhist Center.

“Sheeiiiiiiit,” said the Mint One, slow and dreadful, pronouncing the expletive with a long, low sustain of dread.

A
n iguana in a musketeer’s costume ran under Minty Fresh’s chair and through the beaded curtain into a butler’s pantry, where Charlie Asher sat on an empty mixed nuts can.

“Nice hat,” Charlie said.

The musketeer removed his hat, holding it with perfect little hands (previously raccoon paws, Charlie guessed), and bowed grandly over it.

“You’re welcome,” Charlie said.

The musketeer scampered on through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. Charlie looked through the swinging beads at Minty Fresh, who was sitting on an inverted dining room chair, his knees up around his elbows, putting Charlie in mind of a very large, mint-green tree frog.

“You never seen that hat before?” asked Minty.

“Every day, but it makes him feel special if you notice it.”

“Ain’t you sweet.”

Charlie slid off his can and started through the beaded curtain.

Minty Fresh waved him off. “Ease on back there, Asher. I need to talk to you.”

“Why can’t you talk to me if I’m on the same side of the curtain as you?”

“Because I start looking at you, and before I know it I forget what I’m talking about, and I think maybe I should chase you away with a stick.”

“Ouch.” Charlie slunk back into the pantry and sat on his can. “What’s on your mind?”

“You called me.”

“But you showed up.”

Minty Fresh hung his head, rubbed his scalp. “I’m thinking maybe us talking isn’t the same now as it was before.”

Charlie was happy to hear it. “So you think now that Sophie is the Luminatus, everything is over, so we don’t have to worry about the rise of the Underworld?”

“No. I think that shit might already be rising. When you were collecting soul vessels, how many you think you picked up a year? On average?”

“I don’t know, a couple a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

“Yeah, me, too. So that’s about a hundred a year. And about fifty-five hundred people a year die in the city proper. So that means there must be, call it, fifty-five Death Merchants.”

“That sounds about right,” Charlie said. “I met the Death Merchant in Sedona who collected my mother’s vessel, he said about two a week, too.”

“Right,” said Minty. “So, when they all came up, when it hit the fan, we only knew a dozen Death Merchants in the city, and the Morrigan killed all but three of us. Two if we count you as dead.”

“Which I don’t,” Charlie said.

“But you don’t collect soul vessels anymore. You don’t have a shop to turn them around.”

“Okay, don’t count me.”

“And I sent your copy of the
Great Big Book of Death
to Inspector Rivera.”

“Yeah. I wonder how he’s doing.”

“He was in my shop right before you called. A banshee appeared in his bookstore and zapped him with a stun gun.”

“So, not adjusting well to retirement?”

“He hasn’t collected a single soul vessel.”

“None?”

The Mint One shook his head. “That’s at least a hundred souls not collected, not passed on to the new owner. Plus, we don’t know what happened to the souls the other dead Death Merchants were supposed to collect.”

“I always assumed that when a Death Merchant died someone took his place. Audrey says the universe just takes care of the mechanics of it. Everything seeks balance.”

“Audrey, the one who put you inside that little monster?”

Charlie waved his talons in the air as if to dismiss the point and realized that he might be helping to make it. “So you’re saying—what are you saying?”

“Rivera said the names appeared in his date book, even though he didn’t pick up the souls. What if no one has been collecting the souls of the Death Merchants who were killed? What if by defeating the Underworlders we threw things out of balance? What if the Death Merchants who were killed weren’t replaced? What if there are a
thousand
souls that haven’t been collected since the Morrigan rose? Maybe more. A lot of people were killed in the city at that time. What if some of them were Death Merchants we didn’t know about, and all of those souls haven’t been collected?”

“I used to hear them moving under the streets, calling out, if I was late collecting just
one
,” said Charlie. “When they got their hands on all the soul vessels in our shops—”

“It was a shit storm,” said Minty. “Now multiply that by ten, twenty.”

“So you think this banshee—?”

“I think the bitch is announcing coming attractions.”

“Sssssshit,” Charlie said, letting the
s
hiss out between his multitude of teeth.

“Uh-huh,” said Minty. “You know where your old date book is?”

“At my apartment, I guess. I can’t imagine Jane would have thrown it out.”

“Call her.” Minty pulled his phone from his jacket pocket.

“You’ll have to help me dial.” Charlie waved his talons before his face again. They were not suited for touch screens and buttons. He gave Minty Fresh the number. Cassie answered and they waited while she found Charlie’s date book—a three-year calendar with only one year used when he had died.

“It’s filled in for the whole year, Charlie,” said Cassie over the speaker. “The latest entry is today. How can that be?” Charlie looked up at Minty Fresh and again missed having eyebrows—if he’d had them, he’d have raised one at the tall Death Merchant.