“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 vegetar
ian 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 Da
ne; 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.