Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job

“Fuck off,” Charlie said, in a furious whisper at the curb. “Fucking harpies.”

“Oh, lover, this teasing is so delicious. The little one’s blood will be so delicious!”

The young homeless guy sitting just down the curb looked up at Charlie. “Dude, get the clinic to up your lithium and they’ll go away. It worked for me.”

Charlie nodded and gave the guy a dollar. “Thanks, I’ll look into that.”

He’d have to call Jane in Arizona in the morning and find out how far the shadow had moved down the mesa, if it had moved. Why would what he did or didn’t do in San Francisco affect what was happening in Sedona? All this time he’d been trying to convince himself that it wasn’t about him, and now it appeared that it very much was about him. The Luminatus will rise in the City of Two Bridges, Vern had said. What kind of dependable prophecy can you get from a guy named Vern, anyway? ( Come on down to Vern’s Discount Prophecy—The Nostradamus with the Low-Price Promise. ) It was absurd. He had to keep going forward, doing his part, and doing his best to collect the soul vessels that came to him. And if he didn’t, well, the Forces of Darkness would rise and rule over the world. So what. Bring it on, sewer hoes! Big deal.

But his inner Beta Male, the gene that had kept his kind alive for three million years, spoke up: Forces of Darkness ruling the world? Okay, that would be bad, it said.

She so loved the smell of Pine-Sol,” said the third woman that day to claim to have been Charlie’s mother’s best friend. The funeral hadn’t been so bad, but now there was a potluck in the clubhouse of a nearby gated senior community where Buddy had lived before he moved in with Charlie’s mom. The couple had returned there often to play cards and socialize with Buddy’s old crew.

“Did you get some sloppy joe?” asked best friend number three. Despite the hundred-degree heat, she wore a pink sweatsuit emblazoned with rhinestone poodles and carried a nervous little black poodle under her arm everywhere she went. The dog licked her potato salad while she was distracted by talking to Charlie. “I don’t know if your mother ever ate sloppy joe. Only thing I ever saw her take in was an old-fashioned. She did enjoy her cocktails.”

“Yes, she did,” Charlie said. “And I think I’m going to go enjoy one myself, right now.”

Charlie had flown into Sedona that morning after spending the night in San Francisco trying to find the two overdue soul vessels. Although he couldn’t find a burial notice for Esther Johnson, the pretty brunette woman at her house had told him that she had been interred the day after he’d first gone to the house in the Haight, and he assumed that the soul vessel had been, once again, buried with her. (Was the brunette’s name Elizabeth? Of course it was Elizabeth, he was fooling himself to even pretend to forget. Beta Males do not forget the names of pretty women. Charlie could remember the name of the centerfold of the first Playboy he’d ever swiped from the shelves in his dad’s shop. He even remembered that her turnoffs were bad breath, mean people, and genocide, and resolved that he would never have, be, or commit any of those things, just in case he ran into her sometime when she was casually sunning her breasts on the hood of a car.) There was no trace of the other woman, Irena Posokovanovich, who was supposed to have died days ago. No notice, no records at hospitals, no one living in her house. It was as if she’d evaporated, and taken her soul vessel with her. He had a couple more weeks to get to the third name in his date book, but he wasn’t sure what he was going to have to deal with to get to it. Darkness was rising.

Someone beside him said, “Small talk doesn’t really get any smaller than when you’ve lost a loved one, huh?”

Charlie turned toward the voice, surprised to see Vern Glover, diminutive Death Merchant, munching some coleslaw and ranch beans.

“Thanks for coming,” Charlie said automatically.

Vern waved off the thanks with his plastic fork. “You saw the shadow?”

Charlie nodded. When he’d gotten to his mother’s house this morning, the shadow of the mesa had reached his mother’s front yard, and the calls of the carrion birds that churned in its edges were deafening. “You didn’t tell me that no one else could see it. I called my sister from San Francisco to check the progress, but she didn’t see anything.”

“Sorry, they can’t see it—at least as far as I’ve ever been able to tell they can’t. It was gone for five days. It came back this morning.”

“When I came back?”

“I guess. Did we cause this? Doughnuts and coffee and it’s the end of the world?”

“I missed two souls back home,” Charlie said, smiling at a gentleman in burgundy golf wear who held his hand to his heart in sympathy as he passed them.

“Missed? Did the—what did you call them—the sewer harpies get them?”

“Could be,” Charlie said. “But whatever is happening, it seems to be following me.”

“Sorry,” Vern said. “I’m glad we talked, though. I don’t feel so alone.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said.

“And sorry about your mother,” Vern added quickly. “You okay?”

“Hasn’t even hit me yet,” Charlie said. “I guess I’m an orphan.”

“I’ll make sure and check out whoever gets her necklace,” Vern said. “I’ll be careful with it.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “You think we have any control over who gets the soul next? I mean really. The Great Big Book says it will move on as it should.”

“I guess,” Vern said. “Every time I’ve sold one the glow has gone out right away. If it wasn’t the right person, that wouldn’t happen, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Charlie said. “So there is some order to this.”

“You’re the expert,” Vern said—then he dropped his fork. “Who is that? She’s so hot.”

“That’s my sister,” Charlie said. Jane was coming across the room toward them. She was wearing Charlie’s charcoal double-breasted Armani and the strappy black pumps; her platinum hair was lacquered into thirties finger waves, which flowed out from under a small black hat with a veil that covered her face down to her lips, which shone like red Ferraris. To Charlie, she looked, as usual, like the cross between a robot assassin and a Dr. Seuss character, but if he tried to squint past the fact that she was his sister, and a lesbian, and his sister, then he could possibly see how the hair, lips, and sheer linear altitude of her might strike someone as hot. Especially someone like Vern, who would require climbing equipment and oxygen to scale a woman Jane’s height.

“Vern, I’d like you to meet my incredibly hot sister, Jane. Jane, this is Vern.”

“Hi, Vern.” Jane took Vern’s hand and the Death Merchant winced at her grip.

“Sorry for your loss,” Vern said.

“Thanks,” Jane said. “Did you know our mother?”

“Vern knew her very well,” Charlie said. “In fact, it was one of Mom’s dying wishes that you let Vern buy you a doughnut. Wasn’t it, Vern?”

Vern nodded so hard that Charlie thought he could hear vertebrae cracking.

“Her dying wish,” Vern said.

Jane didn’t move, or say anything. Because her eyes were covered, Charlie couldn’t see her expression, but he guessed that she might be trying to burn holes in his aorta with her laser-beam vision.

“You know, Vern, that would be lovely, but could I take a rain check? We just buried my mother and I have some things to go over with my brother.”

“That’s fine,” Vern said. “And it doesn’t have to be a doughnut, if you’re watching your figure. You know, a salad, coffee, anything.”