Charlie threw open the phone book and, mercifully, found an M. Alby with an address on Telegraph Hill—not ten minutes’ walk away. No client had ever been this close, and with almost six months without a peep or a shade from the sewer harpies, he was starting to feel like he had this whole Death Merchant thing under control. He’d even placed most of the soul vessels that he’d collected. The short notice felt bad. Really bad.

The house was an Italianate Victorian on the hill just below the Coit Tower, the great granite column built in honor of the San Francisco firemen who had lost their lives in the line of duty. Although it’s said to have been designed with a fire-hose nozzle in mind, almost no one who sees the tower can resist the urge to comment on its resemblance to a giant penis. Madeline Alby’s house, a flat-roofed white rectangle with ornate scrolling trim and a crowning cornice of carved cherubs, looked like a wedding cake balanced on the tower’s scrotum.

So as Charlie trudged up the nut sack of San Francisco, he wondered exactly how he was going to get inside the house. Usually he had time, he could wait and follow someone in, or construct some kind of ruse to gain entrance, but this time he had only one day to get inside, find the soul vessel, and get out. He hoped that Madeline Alby had already died. He really didn’t like being around sick people. When he saw the car parked out front with the small green hospice sticker, his hopes for a dead client were smashed like a cupcake with a sledgehammer.

He walked up the front porch steps at the left of the house and waited by the door. Could he open it himself? Would people be able to see it, or did his special “unnoticeability” extend to objects he moved as well? He didn’t think so. But then the door opened and a woman about Charlie’s age stepped out onto the porch. “I’m just having a smoke,” she called back into the house, and before she could close the door behind her, Charlie slipped inside.

The front door opened into a foyer; to his right Charlie saw what had originally been the parlor. There was a stairway in front of him, and another door beyond that that he guessed led to the kitchen. He could hear voices in the parlor and peeked around the corner to see four elderly women sitting on two couches that faced each other. They were in dresses and hats, and they might have just come from church, but Charlie guessed they had come to see their friend off.

“You’d think she’d give up the smoking, with her mother upstairs dying of cancer,” said one of the ladies, wearing a gray skirt and jacket with matching hat, and a large enameled pin in the shape of a Holstein cow.

“Well, she always was a hardheaded girl,” said another, wearing a dress that looked as if it had been made from the same floral material as the couch. “You know she used to meet with my son Jimmy up in Pioneer Park when they were little.”

“She said she was going to marry him,” said another woman, who looked like a sister of the first.

The ladies laughed, whimsy and sadness mixed in their tones.

“Well, I don’t know what she was thinking, he’s as flighty as can be,” said Mom.

“Yeah, and brain damaged,” added the sister.

“Well, yes, he is now.”

“Since the car ran over him,” said Sis.

“Didn’t he run right in front of a car?” asked one of the ladies who had been silent until now.

“No, he ran right into it,” said Mom. “He was on the drugs then.” She sighed. “I always said I had one of each—a boy, a girl, and a Jimmy.”

They all nodded. This was not the first time this group had done this, Charlie guessed. They were the type that bought sympathy cards in bulk, and every time they heard an ambulance go by they made a note to pick up their black dress from the cleaner’s.

“You know Maddy looked bad,” said the lady in gray.

“Well, she’s dying, sweetheart, that’s what happens.”

“I guess.” Another sigh.

The tinkle of ice in glasses.

They were all nursing neat little cocktails. Charlie guessed they’d been mixed by the younger woman who was outside smoking. He looked around the room for something that was glowing red. There was an oak rolltop desk in the corner that he’d like to get a look in, but that would have to wait until later. He ducked out of the doorway and into the kitchen, where two men in their late thirties, maybe early forties, were sitting at an oak table, playing Scrabble.

“Is Jenny coming back? It’s her turn.”

“She might have gone up to see Mom with one of the ladies. The hospice nurse is letting them go up one at a time.”

“I just wish it was over. I can’t stand this waiting. I have a family I need to get back to. I’m about to crawl out of my fucking skin.”

The older of the two reached across the table and set two tiny blue pills by his brother’s tiles.

“These help.”

“What are they?”

“Time-released morphine.”

“Really?” The younger brother looked alarmed.

“You hardly even feel them, they just sort of take the edge off. Jenny’s been taking them for two weeks.”

“That’s why you guys are taking this so well and I’m a wreck? You guys are stoned on Mom’s pain medication?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t take drugs. Those are drugs. You don’t take drugs.”

The older brother sat back in his chair. “Pain medication, Bill. What are you feeling?”

“No, I’m not taking Mom’s pain meds.”

“Suit yourself.”

“What if she needs them?”

“There’s enough morphine in that room to bring down a Kodiak bear, and if she needs more, then hospice will bring more.”

Charlie wanted to shake the younger brother and yell, Take the drugs, you idiot. Maybe it was the benefit of experience. Having now seen this situation happen again and again, families on deathwatch, out of their minds with grief and exhaustion, friends moving in and out of the house like ghosts, saying good-bye or just covering some sort of base so they could say they had been there, so perhaps they wouldn’t have to die alone themselves. Why was none of this in the books of the dead? Why didn’t the instructions tell him about all the pain and confusion he was going to see?

“I’m going to go find Jenny,” said the older brother, “see if she wants to get something to eat. We can finish the game later if you want.”

“That’s okay, I was losing anyway.” The younger brother gathered up the tiles and put the board away. “I’m going to go upstairs and see if I can catch a nap, tonight’s my night watching Mom.”

The older brother walked out and Charlie watched the younger brother drop the blue pills into his shirt pocket and leave the kitchen, leaving the Death Dealer to ransack the pantry and the cabinets looking for the soul vessel. But he felt before he even started that it wouldn’t be there. He was going to have to go upstairs.

He really, really hated being around sick people.

Madeline Alby was propped up and tucked into bed with a down comforter up around her neck. She was so slight that her body barely showed under the covers. Charlie guessed that she might weigh seventy or eighty pounds max. Her face was drawn and he could see the outlines of her eye sockets and her jawbone jutting through her skin, which had gone yellow. Charlie guessed liver cancer. One of her friends from downstairs was sitting at her bedside, the hospice-care worker, a big woman in scrubs, sat in a chair across the room, reading. A small dog, a Yorkshire terrier, Charlie thought, was snuggled up between Madeline’s shoulder and her neck, sleeping.

When Charlie stepped into the room, Madeline said, “Hey there, kid.”

He froze in his steps. She was looking right at him—crystal-blue eyes, and a smile. Had the floor squeaked? Had he bumped something?

“What are you doing there, kid?” She giggled.

“Who do you see, Maddy?” asked the friend. She followed Madeline’s gaze but looked right through Charlie.