Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

she was wearing her monk robes. She had three or four cards with her name and title ready, as well as her driver’s license, which proved she was the person on the other cards. This was a first for her, but desperate times…

“Hello, I’m the venerable Amitabha Audrey Walker Rinpoche, head of the Three Jewels Buddhist Center.” Click, click, click went the cards on the desk. “I am Mr. Fresh’s spiritual guide. Our faith requires that I be present with the body at all times to help usher his spirit through bardo, from life to death. I need to be with Mr. Fresh.”

The nurse looked skeptically over her reading glasses. Luckily, she wasn’t the nurse to whom Rivera had presented Audrey as a sketch artist, but she’d been at the desk for a while. She’d seen them all come and go, their strange displays of sorrow and joy, but she was used to dealing with people who were often at the most stressful point in their lives, and they didn’t always react rationally when things got rough.

“He said the girl in the slutty schoolgirl outfit was his priest.”

Audrey knew she had some wiggle room here, because what most Americans knew about Buddhism came from a forty-year-old television show, the star of which had accidently hanged himself while having a wank in a hotel wardrobe, so it was unlikely she’d be caught stretching the truth on doctrine.

“She is, but hers is a different discipline. To those who practice our faith, outward appearance is an illusion, a distraction from the true nature of our dharma.” Wait, let that sink in. No one knows what dharma is. Wait. Wait. This will work.

“He did have her down as his next of kin.”

“All people of our faith are considered family.” No, that sounded culty. She wanted to sound nice, not culty.

“And you need to be with the body how long?”

“Until the soul has passed. Usually less than a day.”

“Could you step in here, please?” The nurse went to the part of the desk that was behind the glass partition and waited for Audrey to pick up her IDs and come through the doors.

“Look, Ms. Walker, we are going to have to send Mr. Fresh’s body down to the morgue in a few minutes. Whether they let you stay with him will be up to them. You can stay with him until they come to get him, and I can vouch for you with the orderly who takes him down, but once you get down there, you’re going to have to tell them why you’re there and see if they let you stay with him.”

“What if I told them I was with the police? You saw we were with Inspector Rivera.”

The nurse’s glasses slipped down again. “You’re a Buddhist priest and a policeman?”

“Undercover. And, technically, I’m a nun.”

“I would watch that show,” said the nurse. “I wouldn’t believe it, but I would watch it.”

“Pardon?”

“Go stay with Mr. Fresh. But stay with him. No wandering around doing detective work while you’re tending to his soul.” The nurse wondered why people never figured out that once you got your way, you could stop lying. It almost made her want to back up and revoke the permission she’d just given.

“Thank you,” said Audrey. “Blessings.”

Thirty minutes later Audrey was standing in a hallway by the gurney on which Minty Fresh’s body lay when his eyes popped open.

“Hi,” she said.

She hit send on her phone, sending the message she’d typed in: HE’S ALIVE.

His eyes went wide and darted around, as if he were trying to remember how to speak.

“You were dead a little under an hour,” she said. “Think of it like a nap, really. Charlie told me you’d be back.” Audrey watched as the confusion seemed to settle in Minty’s eyes. This process was all new to her, too, but she had been present when the Squirrel People came to life after they received a human soul; they were always disoriented and seemed to have to remind themselves of the confines of reality, because for them, reality had just been put in a jar and shaken vigorously. For some it would settle; for others, it never seemed to.

“You’re probably cold. They cut your pants off of you, and I don’t know what happened to your shirt. I brought you these.” She held up a pair of green scrubs she’d plucked from a bin as the orderly had rolled Minty Fresh’s body though the basement hallway. “I have your coat and your shoes, too. Shelf under the gurney. There’s blood on one shoe. Sorry.”

Minty’s eyes stopped darting. It seemed as if whatever part of him had been searching for reality had finally found it.

“They cut off my motherfucking custom-made leather pants?”

“Look at you, all alive and stuff,” she said. She thought she should have said something more profound, something from the heart sutra, “Form does not differ from the void, and void does not differ from form,” perhaps, but instead she said, “Who needs pants? You’re alive.”

“Spoken like someone who is alive and has pants.”

She threw him the scrubs. “I’ll turn my back and watch the hall.”

The big man sat up, turned sideways on the gurney, and began to worm his way into the scrubs.

“You presided at the death of a lot of people when you were a nun, right?”

“I guided one hundred and fifty-three souls through bardo. ”

“So how was my death?”

“Pretty good. A solid seven. Well above average.”

“Did everyone cry?”

“Well, most of the crying was done when they were still trying to save you. Lily was a mess. I wasn’t in the room when you actually died, but it wasn’t long before Charlie told us you were coming back, so everyone cheered up. I think Lily said ‘yippee’ as she was leaving.”

“Why isn’t Charlie here? He told you, I’m guessing, where we went?”

“Yes, but your cousin Lemon took Sophie.”

“Shit.”

“The ghost on the bridge told Lily that Lemon has Sophie at Fort Point, under the bridge.”

“Dressed,” he said. The scrubs were extra large but not extra tall, so they fit him in the hips and shoulders. The pants, however hit him just below the knee and the shirt in the middle of his waist. He looked like a cross between a well-kept castaway and a very large Moroccan houseboy.

“Anyone hurt?”

“No. He just came to their apartment and took her. Jane and Cassie couldn’t do anything to stop him.”

“And the old Russian lady, she okay?”

“She’ll recover, they’re saying.”

“And you, my cousin mess with you when he had you? Hurt you?”

“No. In fact, he stopped the Morrigan from hurting me.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, why didn’t he hurt you? Why didn’t the old lady die? Why would he take Sophie? She’s just a little girl, now, right? If he’s such a badass, how is it you’re all alive?”

“Maybe he just wants a new order, like he said.”

“Don’t care what he wants,” said Minty Fresh. “I want to know what he can do. How’d he get in Asher’s building through all that security?”

“They didn’t say. Everything’s always locked there.”

“Then Lemon got a way of getting around that ain’t a ’49 Buick. You got a car?”

“In the parking garage.”

“Lead on,” said the Mint One. He hopped as he pulled on his black trainers, then grabbed his leather car coat from under the gurney. “We’re going to Fort Point.”

Audrey sent a text to Charlie as they walked: ON OUR WAY TO FORT PT.

Fort Point?” said Rivera. “Charlie, I don’t know if I can get us in there. It’s a national park. Since 9/11 it’s been under Homeland Security. There are guards there with M4 rifles; even the park rangers are armed. After what we pulled at the Fort Mason tunnel, there’s no way the department is going to back me up if they call in to verify me.” They were in Rivera’s Ford, just passing Fort Mason and the Marina Safeway on their way to Fort Point.