Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job

“Okay, Ray, I’ll come in for a couple of hours, but I have to be at the restaurant by five, so be back or I’m closing up early.”

“Thanks, Lily.”

Charlie sincerely hoped that Ray wasn’t a serial killer, despite all the indications to the contrary. He would never have found this woman without Ray’s police contacts, and what would he do in the future if he needed to find someone and Ray was in jail? Then again, Ray’s experience as a cop could account for his never leaving any evidence. But why, then, would he continue to pursue the Filipino women over the Internet if he was just looking to kill people? Maybe that’s what he did when he went to the Philippines to visit his paramours. Maybe he killed desperate Filipinas. Maybe Ray was a tourist serial killer. Deal with it later, Charlie thought. For now, there’s a soul vessel to retrieve.

Charlie got out of the cab outside of the Fontana, an apartment building just a block up from Ghirardelli Square, the waterfront chocolate factory turned tourist mall. The Fontana was a great, curved, concrete-and-glass building that commanded views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, and that had drawn the disdain of San Franciscans since it had been built in the 1960s. It wasn’t that it was an ugly building, although no one would argue that it wasn’t, but with the Victorian and Edwardian structures all around it, it looked very much like a giant air conditioner from outer space attacking a nineteenth-century neighborhood. However, the views from the apartments were exquisite, there was a doorman, underground parking, and a pool on the roof, so if you could handle the stigma of residing in an architectural pariah, it was a great place to live.

The address Ray had given him for Madison was on the twenty-second floor, and so, presumably, was her soul vessel. Charlie wasn’t sure of the exact range of his unnoticeability (he refused to think of it as invisibility, because it wasn’t), but he hoped that it reached twenty-two floors. He was going to have to get past the doorman and into an elevator, and posing as an estate buyer wasn’t going to work.

Ah, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If he got caught, he’d just have to find another way in. He waited by the door until a young woman in business attire went in, then followed her into the lobby. The doorman didn’t even look at him.

Ray saw Charlie get out of the cab and told his own driver to stop a block away, where he hopped out, threw the driver a five and told him to keep the change, then dug in his pocket for the rest of the fare while the driver pounded on the wheel impatiently and cursed under his breath in Urdu.

“Sorry, it’s been a while since I took a cab,” Ray said. Ray had a car, a nice little Toyota, but the only parking place he could find was eight blocks away from his apartment in the parking lot of a hotel managed by a friend of his, and when you got a parking place in San Francisco, you kept it, so Ray mostly used public transportation and only drove the car on his days off to keep the battery charged. He’d jumped in a taxi outside Charlie’s shop and shouted, “Follow that cab!” thus completely terrifying the Japanese family in the back.

“Sorry,” Ray said. “ Konichiwa. It’s been a while since I took a cab.” Then he jumped back out and caught a cab that didn’t have a fare.

He sneaked quickly up the street, going from light post, to newspaper machine, to ad kiosk, ducking behind each, staying in his stealth-crouch, and achieving nothing whatsoever except to look like a complete loon to the kid standing at the bus stop across the street. He reached the underground parking entrance of the Fontana just as Charlie was making for the door. Ray crouched behind the key-card pillar.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to do if Charlie went for the building. Fortunately, he’d memorized Madison McKerny’s phone number, and he could warn her that Charlie was coming. In the cab on the way down here he’d remembered where he’d seen her name: on the register at his health club. Madison McKerny was one of the midmorning fuck puppets from the gym, and as Ray suspected, Charlie was stalking her.

He watched Charlie fall in behind a young woman in business dress who was heading up the walk into the Fontana, then Charlie was gone. Just gone.

Ray came out onto the sidewalk to get a better angle. The woman was still there, she’d gone only a couple of steps, but he couldn’t see Charlie. There were no bushes, no walls, the whole damn lobby was glass, where the hell had he gone? Ray was sure he hadn’t looked away, he didn’t even think he had blinked, and he would have seen any sudden move Charlie might have made.

Reverting to the Beta Male’s tendency to blame himself, Ray wondered if maybe he’d had some kind of petit mal seizure that had made him black out for a second. Whether he did or not, he had to warn Madison McKerny. He reached to his belt and felt the empty cell-phone clip, then remembered putting his phone under the register when he’d gotten to work that morning.

Charlie found the right apartment and rang the bell. If he could get Madison McKerny to come out into the hallway, he could slip in behind her and look through her apartment for her soul vessel. Just down the hall there was a table with an artificial flower arrangement. He’d tipped it over, hoping she was compulsive or curious enough to come out of her apartment to get a closer look. If she wasn’t home, well, he’d have to break in. Odds were that with a doorman downstairs, she didn’t have an alarm system. But what if she could see him? Sometimes they could, the clients. Not often, but it happened, and—

She opened the door.

Charlie was stunned. She was stunning. Charlie stopped breathing and stared at her breasts.

It wasn’t that she was a young and gorgeous brunette, with perfect hair and perfect skin. Nor was it that she was wearing a thin, white silk robe that just barely concealed her swimsuit-model figure. Nor was it because she had disproportionately large but alert breasts that were straining against the robe and peeking out of the plunging neckline as she leaned out the door, although that would have been enough to render the hapless Beta breathless under any circumstances. It was that her breasts were glowing red, right through the silk robe, glowing right out of the décolletage like twin rising suns, pulsating like the lightbulb boobies of a kitschy Hawaiian hula girl lamp. Madison McKerny’s soul was residing in her breast implants.

“I’ve got to get my hands on those,” Charlie said, forgetting that he wasn’t exactly alone and he wasn’t exactly thinking to himself.

Then Madison McKerny noticed that Charlie was there and the screaming started.

Ray threw the door open so hard that the little bell went flying off its holder and tinkled across the floor.

“Oh, jeez,” Ray said. “You won’t believe it. I can’t believe it myself.”

Lily looked at Ray over her half-frame reading glasses and set down the French cookbook she’d been looking at. She didn’t really need reading glasses, but looking over the top of them conveyed instant condescension and disdain, a look that she felt flattered her.

“I have something I need to tell you, too,” Lily said.

“No,” Ray said, looking around to make sure there were no customers in the store. “What I have to tell you is really important.”

“Okay,” Lily said. “Mine’s not that important to me. You go first.”

“Okay.” Ray took a deep breath and launched. “I think Charlie may be a serial killer with ninja powers.”