“Yeah, he was one of the last. But I thought that was just because his soul wasn’t retrieved by one of you guys, like all the others.”
“Can you call him?”
“Of course I can’t call him. He calls through magic or something, there’s no number. But I’m the only who can hear him. That’s what I’m saying, Asher. I have to stay at the Crisis Center. That’s my special thing.”
“I’ve got to go call Audrey. I left my phone upstairs.”
“You massive wuss. Are you missing the fact that I am the only person who can speak to the dead, Asher?”
“Right, just you and the Emperor,” Charlie said. “Be right back.” He ran through the back room and up the stairs.
“It’s a big fucking deal!” she shouted after him, then settled into her well-practiced pout. Fuckstick, she thought. “Fuckstick!” she called after him, knowing he wouldn’t hear it, but saying it because it needed to be said.
“Lily!” called a voice from the stairwell.
Sophie ran, stumbled, hopped, tumbled, down the stairs the way she did, then climbed up on the bar stool next to Lily.
“I needs me my gin and juice,” she said.
“No gin,” said Lily.
“Just juice, then,” Sophie said.
Lily slid her Starbucks over to the kid, who took a sip, made a face, then slid it back.
“Where’s Daddy—I mean Mike?”
“You just missed him.”
More noise on the stairs, deliberate, heavy steps, lots of them, a tired horse descending.
Sophie leaned over and whispered wetly, “I’m not ’sposed to call my dad Daddy in front of anyone because it would be weird.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want it to be weird,” Lily said.
Mrs. Korjev came out of the back room, eclipsing Mrs. Ling, who was right behind her, but identifiable by the squeak of the little cart she always rolled her groceries in, despite having to fold and unfold it to get it up and down stairs, and up curbs, and on and off buses, or trains, about a thousand times every trip.
Lily greeted each of the grandmothers and they returned her greetings with the same distaste and distrust they had paid her since she was sixteen and had first come to work for Charlie Asher.
“Lily,” each of them had said in turn, slowly, as a greeting, just short of spitting in three languages after.
“We take Sophie to buy vegetable,” said Mrs. Korjev.
“Maybe snack,” said Mrs. Ling, defiantly, for no apparent reason.
“Both of you?” Lily asked.
Mrs. Ling stormed forward in teeny-tiny steps, stopping twice to uncatch her cart from the edge of the bar, but stormed right up in Lily’s face, well, in Lily’s general bosom area, but she was looking at her face. “You think we not know how to take care Sophie? We take care Sophie since baby. We know what good for her. Not Mike.”
“What is manny?” said Mrs. Korjev. “Is not real. Is imaginary. He is drug fiend. I see on Oprah.”
“Dlug fiend!” said Mrs. Ling. Then she said something in Cantonese, most of which Lily didn’t get except for “white devil,” which she’d learned a long time ago because it was how Mrs. Ling referred to anyone who wasn’t Chinese.
“Maybe you ladies should wait for Mike to come back. He shouldn’t be long.”
“We go,” said Mrs. Ling. “We go, four block to market on Stockton Street, four block home. Two hour, tops. You tell. We go.”
The two matrons herded Sophie through the back room and out the steel door into the ally, and Lily let them because, really, it was only four blocks, and it was the middle of the afternoon, so there was no danger from the Morrigan, and because she was a little afraid of both of them. “Bye, Lily,” Sophie called as the door closed behind them.
Lily’s phone buzzed. It was M. She contemplated sending it to voice mail for a half a second, then remembered that he hadn’t yet found out about her specialness.
“Speak,” she said.
“Lily, where are you?”
“I’m at the restaur— at Asher’s.”
“You okay?”
“I’m mysterious.”
“Good. Look, Asher said he’s sending his daughter out of town with his sister. I want you to see if you can go with them.”
“No. I have a job. I can’t—”
“Dammit, Lily. Would you—” She could hear the exhale, his effort to calm his voice. “I need to know you’re safe.”
“Chill, M. I’m fine. It’s broad daylight.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s not the Morrigan. We’re talkin’ ’bout a whole different level of badass. This motherfucker can go anywhere, any time of day. You hear me, girl? You need to get gone, right now, and stay gone until this shit is over or everything is over. I need that from you.”
She slid off the bar stool, ran around the bar, into the back room, and opened the steel door into the alley. No one was out there.
“Uh, M, I’m going to have to call you back.”
23
Strange Attractors
Audrey was missing her Charlies. Big Charlie, because he was her companion, her lover, her best friend, and Wiggly Charlie because
in the absence of Big Charlie, he was good for a laugh, better company than a dog, and a little more self-maintaining. Sort of like a talkative cat who wasn’t a jerk, but could still be entertained by a piece of string.
Charlie had been in his new apartment in his old building for only a day and a half, and she was already trying to think of ways to alter their living arrangement so they could be together, yet both attend to their responsibilities. Her first instinct was to have Charlie and Sophie move into the Buddhist Center. After all, she carried Sophie’s mother’s soul; the kid would get over the fact that she wasn’t Jewish soon enough. But Charlie didn’t think it would be fair to Jane and Cassie, who had really thrown themselves into raising Sophie as their own, plus the fact that Charlie, who inhabited Mike Sullivan’s body, did not look like the Charlie the world knew as Sophie’s father and who the world thought to be dead. The simplest solution, although not the easiest for Audrey, would be for her to leave her position at the Buddhist Center and move into Charlie’s building with him and Sophie, which would make her, what? Was her clinging to her title as the venerable Amitabha Audrey Walker Rinpoche, of the Three Jewels Buddhist Center, a regression in consciousness? Was she clinging to a self that had no meaning. Was she, in fact, a hypocrite for not letting go of ego, of desire, of attachment, as she prescribed in her teaching?
The bright side was that it might all be moot if the imbalance that seemed to be wobbling through the greater Bay Area destroyed the world of light as they knew it, and they would all be cast together into a dark pandemonium of destruction and disorder. So she had that going for her. She decided that she would call Charlie to celebrate their liberation into doom, but as she was scrolling through her contacts looking for Mike Sullivan’s phone number, one of the center’s landlines rang. She pocketed her cell and picked up a handset in the kitchen. MIKE SULLIVAN showed on the screen.
“Hi, Charlie. I was just going to call you. You really need to change the name on your phone.”
“Audrey, the bridge, I think they’re on the bridge.”
“You may have to be more specific, sweetie.”
“Lily talked to Mike Sullivan, the dead one. His soul, or his ghost, whatever, is on the Golden Gate Bridge. He says there are thousands of other ghosts there.”
Audrey wasn’t sure how to react, wasn’t sure that she should really question Lily talking on a ghost phone, considering everyone’s history. “So if that’s true—”
“That could be where all the missing souls went. Lily said Mike Sullivan’s name was on the Emperor’s list. What if all those souls, going back hundreds of years, are on the bridge?”
“I
suppose it makes as much sense as someone’s soul trapped in an ashtray or a ceramic frog, and we’ve seen that.”
“Or a CD,” Charlie said. His wife, Rachel’s, soul had moved into a CD when she died shortly after Sophie was born, then moved out of it into Audrey. He’d seen it happen.
“What do we do?” Audrey asked.
“I don’t know, that’s why I called you.”
There was a skittering noise in the next room, then the sound of something falling over, maybe a wastebasket. Wiggly Charlie, she thought. “Wait a second, Charlie. I heard something. Wiggly Charlie has been missing, it might be him. Hang on, while I check.”
“Sure.”
As she came out of the kitchen into the dining room she saw one of the Squirrel People on the other side of the room and something grabbed her ankle. As she tried to steady herself, something caught her other ankle and she fell forward, losing the handset as she went.
“Audrey?” Charlie’s voice over the phone.
“No, I’m okay,” she said. “Tripped. Just a second—”
Audrey twisted her head and saw one of the Squirrel People with a duck’s face and especially nimble paws pick up the handset and click it off. Then they were on her, all over her, the sound of duct tape ripping, tension around her ankles, tiny claws raking her, pulling her hands behind her back.
Mrs. Korjev led them up Stockton Street and into Chinatown, clearing the way through the crush of shoppers like a blocking-back, Sophie right behind her, and Mrs. Ling bringing up the rear, the wheels on her cart squeaking like distressed mice. At Jackson Street, Mrs. Korjev moved toward a luscious display of pears at the corner market, whose trays of fruit and vegetables ran along the sidewalk and around the corner for another quarter block on either side. Mrs. Ling went in low, did a quick hand-sweep that threw a competing grandmother off balance, and snagged the perfect pear before her opponent could do anything about it. Doing tai chi every morning in Washington Square Park to Motown songs with a hundred other oldsters might seem a waste of time at first glance, but when those slow, repetitive moves were cranked up to marketing intensity, only the grandma with the strongest kung fu would emerge with the perfect pear. Eat dragon dung, loser. Mrs. Ling dropped the pear into her cart and moved on to some bok choy of superior crispness.
Meanwhile Mrs. Korjev was quarrying carrots from a display, holding up one after another for Sophie’s consideration.
“No,” said Sophie.
“This one?”
“No, not big enough.”
The market owner stood at his scale, watching the systematic destruction of his carefully arranged carrot display with muted alarm, one eye twitching slightly.
“You want broccoli?” asked Mrs. Korjev.
“Is there orange broccoli?” Sophie asked.
“Green broccoli is good for you, make you strong, like bear.”
“But it’s not vegan.”
“We put on Cheez Whiz, make vegan for you.”
“Okay, broccoli,” said Sophie.
Sophie moved behind Mrs. Korjev, skipped around the corner, and yipped like a trod-upon Chihuahua.
“Hey, Shy Dookie.”
Instead of finding a new crowd of shoppers, Sophie stepped into a cleared space, a bubble of quiet, and in it stood the man in yellow.
“That’s not my name,” said Sophie.
“That’s my name for you,” said Lemon.
“Eat shit and die!” Sophie shouted.
Mrs. Korjev came around the corner like a mother bear, spotted Lemon, put her hand on Sophie’s shoulder.
“Sophie, is not nice to say. What you say to gentleman?”
“Pleeeeeease,” Sophie said, grinning at Lemon, unafraid.
“Know something, Shy Dookie, you ain’t the Big D no more. You ain’t shit.”
“You better be careful,” Sophie said.
Perplexed, Mrs. Korjev started to pull Sophie away. “You are nasty man,” she said to Lemon. “She is little girl, she not know better. You—you should know better.”
“Yeah?” said Lemon. He held out his hand to Mrs. Korjev, fingers spread, then closed it in front of her, like a starfish closing over a mollusk. Mrs. Korjev gasped, and collapsed on the spot. Sophie screamed, leaned on the fallen matron’s shoulder, and screamed some more. The crowd closed around them, their cell phones beeping for 911.
Sophie looked up to see the man in yellow strolling away. She made the same hand-closing gesture at him that he had just made to Mrs. Korjev. He looked back and said, “You got nothin’, Shy Dookie.” Despite the commotion and her own screaming, Sophie heard him as if his lips were pressed against her ear.
Rivera loaded shotgun shells into a riot gun, one by one, at the counter of his store. The shades were pulled down, the sign turned to CLOSED. He hadn’t opened the store, or even cleaned up since Cavuto had been killed here. There were still books shredded by gunfire and a bloodstain on the floor.
He had collected two soul vessels on his calendar, easy finds, and they were tucked safely into the trunk of the brown, unmarked Ford parked out front. The plan was to pick up Baptiste and his soul vessels, then ride shotgun, literally, as they went to Minty Fresh’s store, then Carrie Lang’s place, and picked up their inventory. They’d take them all to a vault storage facility that people used for storing fine art and furs in the Hayes Valley, near City Hall. Ultimately, Baptiste would photograph each item, and his wife would post them to sell on the Internet. They would retrieve them for shipping as they sold—those details were not really worked out—the key was to get all the soul vessels they controlled out of reach of the Morrigan and this mysterious man in the yellow Buick. Once the souls were secured, and Charlie Asher got his daughter out of town, they’d move on the Morrigan.
Rivera pushed the last shell into the shotgun, then slipped on a knife-resistant vest that he had borrowed from the county jail, feeling a little silly. He had two bullet-resistant vests of his own, but they weren’t going up against assailants with guns. His Beretta 9-mm was in a shoulder holster, and the smaller Glock on his ankle. As he put on a sport coat, one he’d had tailored especially for hiding tactical gear, his phone buzzed. Baptiste.
“Are you ready?” Rivera said by way of greeting.
“Hello,” said Baptiste. “Yes, I am ready, Inspector, I have all of the soul vessels, even the one stolen from the hospice the day you were there.”
“You found it? How?”
“Well, that is why I am calling. It—well—it is speaking French and walking around.”
Rivera, armed and armored for battle, his plan arranged to the minute, and steeled by anger and the desire to avenge his friend, felt unprepared for this conversation.
“I don’t think I follow,” said Rivera. “It’s, what, one of those talking dolls?”
“In a manner of speaking. I think she is what Audrey referred to at the meeting as a Squirrel Person. I can see her soul glowing in her chest, and it is Helen, she remembers me, but, well, she is knee-high and has the head of a cat. And hands”—whispering in the background—“the hands of a raccoon.”
“And you think it’s your Helen?”
“That’s what she says.”
“Well, you can’t sell her on the Internet.”
“No, that would be wrong. We are friends.”
“How did you find her?”
“She came to me, when we were leaving the meeting at the Buddhist Center. She forced her way into my car.”
“How did she force anything if she’s not even knee-high?”
“She is very insistent.”
“Audrey will know what to do. We’ll take Helen back to the Buddhist Center after we leave Carrie Lang’s pawnshop.”
“She doesn’t want to go there. She says they are all mad. She says we must help the cheese monster.”
“The cheese monster?”
“Yes, that is what she says. I think. Her French is—she is working on her French. The monster who wants cheese, she says.”
“Did you call Audrey?”
“No, I called you.”
“Well, find a way to get Helen to the car. Put her in a box or something. Even with another stop, we should be able to get the souls in storage before dark. I’ll call Audrey.”
“Very well, but she heard what you said and she says she will not get into a box.”
“Do your best,” said Rivera. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He disconnected then called the Buddhist Center. Voice mail. He couldn’t really have a uniform unit run by the Buddhist Center to check on her. He was pretty sure there wasn’t even a radio code for “cheese monster in distress.” If they ran out of daylight, then the Helen creature could just stay with Baptiste. Or Minty Fresh. Or Charlie Asher. Just not him. He was not going to go into mortal combat tomorrow worrying about a cat-headed lady talking in French about a cheese monster.
You gave us life, but you gave us no voices!” He waved his spork menacingly, only inches from her face.
Audrey lay on the floor in the parlor, her feet and hands duct-taped, surrounded by Squirrel People, many of whom she didn’t recognize except for the miniature hospital scrubs they wore. There were more than she had made, many more. Over a hundred.
“What’s the matter with you, Bob? If you needed supplies, all you had to do was ask.”
“Ha!” said Bob. “Don’t call me Bob. That is my slave name. I now remember my name from before, when I was a man. I am Theeb the Wise!”
“Theeb! Theeb! Theeb!” the People chanted.
“Hey, you guys can talk,” Audrey said. She felt she really should have been more frightened, but being menaced with a spork by a fourteen-inch-tall megalomaniac in a beefeater’s uniform seemed too absurd to be frightening. Especially when she had collected and sewn his parts together herself. “What did you do?”
“We have collected our bodies from markets across the city, parts from Chinatown, from animals who died in the road, from trash bins. We have taken these unwanted parts, and we have made new People. We have stolen the souls from the Death Merchants and with the Book of the Dead we have given them voices.”