Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“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.

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 Dane; 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.