Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job

What if the caller had just borrowed the phone? What if he stormed in screaming and threatening, and there was just some confused kid behind the counter? But then he looked in the door, and there, standing behind the counter, all alone, was an extraordinarily tall black man dressed completely in mint green, and at that point Charlie lost his mind.

“You killed her,” Charlie screamed as he stormed by the racks of CDs toward the man in mint. He drew the sword as he ran, or tried to, hoping to bring it out in a single fluid movement from the cane sheath and across the throat of Rachel’s killer. But the sword-cane had been in the back of Charlie’s shop for a long time, and except for three times when Lily’s friend Abby tried to leave with it (once trying to buy it, when Charlie refused to sell it to her, then twice trying to steal it), the sword hadn’t been drawn in years. The little brass stud that you pushed to release the blade had stuck, so when Charlie delivered the deathblow, he swung the entire cane, which was heavier—and slower—than the sword would have been. The man in mint green—quick for his size—ducked, and Charlie took out an entire row of Judy Garland CDs, lost his balance, bounced off the counter, spun around, and again tried for the single draw-and-cut move that he had seen so many times in samurai movies, and had practiced so many times in his head on the way here. This time the sword came free of the scabbard and slashed a deadly arch three feet in front of the man in mint, completely decapitating a life-sized cutout of Barbra Streisand.

“That is un-unfucking called for!” thundered the tall man.

As Charlie recovered his balance for a backhand slash, he saw something large and dark coming down over him and recognized it at the last instant, as the antique cash register slammed down on his head. There was a flash, a ding, and everything got dark and gooey.

When Charlie came to, he was tied to a chair in the back room of the record store, which looked remarkably like the back room of his own store, except all the stacked boxes were full of records and CDs instead of all variety of used jetsam. The tall black man was standing over him, and Charlie thought at first that he might be turning to mist or smoke, but then he realized it was just that his vision was going wavy, and then pain lit up the inside of his head like a strobe light.

“Ouch.”

“How’s your neck?” asked the tall man. “Does your neck feel broken? Can you feel your feet?”

“Go ahead, kill me, you fucking coward,” said Charlie, bucking around in the chair, trying to lunge at his captor and feeling a little like the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail after his arms and legs had been hacked off. If this guy took one step closer, Charlie could head-butt him in the nads, he was sure of it.

The tall man stomped on Charlie’s toes, a size-eighteen glove-leather loafer driven by two hundred and seventy pounds of death and used-record dealer.

“Ouch!” Charlie hopped his chair in a little circle of pain. “Goddammit! Ouch!”

“So you do have feeling in your feet?”

“Get it over with. Go ahead.” Charlie stretched his neck as if offering his throat to be cut—his strategy was to lure his captor into range, then sever the tall man’s femoral artery with his teeth, then gloat as the blood coursed all over his mint-green slacks onto the floor. Charlie would laugh long and sinister as he watched the life drain out of the evil bastard, then he would hop his chair out to the street and onto the streetcar at Market, transfer to the number forty-one bus at Van Ness, hop off at Columbus, and hop the two blocks home, where someone would untie him. He had a plan—and a bus pass with four more days left on it—so this son of a bitch had picked the wrong guy to fuck with.

“I have no intention of killing you, Charlie,” said the tall man, keeping a safe distance. “I’m sorry I had to hit you with the register. You didn’t really leave me any options.”

“You could have tasted the fatal sting of my blade!” Charlie glanced around for his sword-cane, just in case the guy had left it within reach.

“Yeah, sure, there was that one, but I thought I’d go with the one without the stains and the funeral.”

Charlie strained against his bonds, which he realized now were plastic shopping bags. “You’re messing with Death, you know? I am Death.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You do?”

“Sure.” The tall man spun another wooden chair around and sat on it reversed, facing Charlie. His knees were up at the level of his elbows and he looked like a great green tree frog, crouched to pounce on an insect. Charlie noticed for the first time that he had golden eyes, stark and striking in contrast to his dark skin. “So am I,” said the evil mint-green frog guy.

“You? You’re Death?”

“ A Death, not THE Death. I don’t think there is a THE Death. Not anymore, anyway.”

Charlie couldn’t grasp it, so he struggled and wobbled until the tall man had to reach out and steady him to keep him from toppling over.

“You killed Rachel.”

“I did not.”

“I saw you there.”

“Yes, you did. That’s a problem. Will you please stop thrashing around?” He shook Charlie’s chair. “But I wasn’t instrumental in Rachel’s death. That’s not what we do, not anymore, anyway. Didn’t you even look at the book?”

“What book? You said something about a book on the phone.”

“ The Great Big Book of Death . I sent it to your shop. I told a woman at the counter that I was sending it, and I got delivery confirmation, so I know it got there.”

“What woman—Lily? She’s not a woman, she’s a kid.”

“No, this was a woman about your age, with New Wave hair.”

“Jane? No. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t get any book.”

“Oh, shit. That explains why they’ve been showing up. You didn’t even know.”

“Who? What? They?”

Mint Green Death sighed heavily. “I guess we’re going to be here awhile. I’m going to make some coffee. Do you want some?”

“Sure, try to lull me into a false sense of security, then spring.”

“You’re tied the fuck up, motherfucker, I don’t need to lull you into shit. You’ve been fucking with the fabric of human existence and someone needed to shut your ass down.”

“Oh, sure, go black on me. Play the ethnic card.”

Mint Green climbed to his feet and headed toward the door to the shop. “You want cream?”

“And two sugars, please,” Charlie said.

This is really cool, why are you giving it back?” said Abby Normal. Abby was Lily’s best friend, and they were sitting on the floor in the back room of Asher’s Secondhand, looking through The Great Big Book of Death . Abby’s real name was Alison, but she would no longer tolerate the ignominy of what she called her “daylight-slave name.” Everyone had been much more responsive to calling her by her chosen name than they had been to Lily’s, Darquewillow Elventhing, which you always had to spell for people.

“Turns out it’s Asher, not me,” Lily said. “He’ll be really pissed if he finds out I took it. And he’s Death now, I guess, so I could get in trouble.”

“Are you going to tell him you had the book?” Abby scratched the silver spider stud in her eyebrow; it was a fresh piercing and still healing and she couldn’t stop messing with it. Abby, like Lily, was dressed all in black, boots to hair, the difference being that she had a black-widow’s red hourglass on the front of her black T-shirt and she was thinner and more waiflike in her affected creepiness.

“No. I’ll just say it got misfiled. That happens a lot here.”