“No. This was a new thing—like—Nick, you know me, I’m not going to fire unless it’s justified.”

“Just say what happened. I got your back.”

“It was like this bird woman or something. All black. I mean fucking black as tar. Had claws that looked like—I don’t know, like three-inch-long silver ice picks or something. My shots took chunks out of her—feathers and black goo and shit everywhere. She took nine in the torso and flew away.”

“Flew?”

Rivera sipped his coffee, eyeing his partner’s reaction over the edge of the cup. They had been through some extraordinary things working together, but if the situation had been reversed, he wasn’t sure he’d believe this story either. “Yeah, flew.”

Cavuto nodded. “Okay, I can see why you wouldn’t put that in the report.”

“Yeah.”

“So this bird woman,” Cavuto said, like that was settled, he totally believed it, now what? “She was robbing the Asher guy from the thrift shop?”

“Giving him a hand job.”

Cavuto nodded, picked up his spoon, and took a huge bite of stew and rice, still nodding as he chewed. He looked as if he were going to say something, then quickly took another bite, as if to stop himself. He appeared to be distracted by the game on television, and finished his lunch without another word.

Rivera ate his soup and sandwich in silence as well.

As they were leaving, Cavuto grabbed two toothpicks from the dispenser by the register and gave one to Rivera as they walked out into a beautiful San Francisco day.

“So you were following Asher?”

“I’ve been trying to keep an eye on him. Just in case.”

“And you shot her nine times for giving the guy a hand job,” Cavuto finally asked.

“I guess,” Rivera said.

“You know, Alphonse, that right there is why I don’t hang out with you socially. Your values are fucked up.”

“She wasn’t human, Nick.”

“Still. A hand job? Deadly force? I don’t know—”

“It wasn’t deadly force. I didn’t kill her.”

“Nine to the chest?”

“I saw her—it—last night. On my street. Watching me from a storm sewer.”

“Ever think to ask Asher how he happened to know the flying bulletproof bird woman in the first place?”

“Yeah, I did, but I can’t tell you what he said. It’s too weird.”

Cavuto threw his arms in the air. “Well, sweet Tidy Bowl Jesus skipping on the blue toilet water, we wouldn’t want it to get fucking weird, would we?”

They were on their second cup of coffee and Charlie had told Lily about not getting the two soul vessels, about the encounter with the sewer harpy, about the shadow coming out of the mountains in Sedona and the other version of The Great Big Book of Death, and his suspicions that there was a frightening problem with his little girl, the symptoms of which were two giant dogs and an ability to kill with the word kitty. To Charlie’s thinking, Lily was reacting to the wrong story.

“You hooked up with a demon from the Underworld and I’m not good enough for you?”

“It’s not a competition, Lily. Can we not talk about that? I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I’m worried about other stuff.”

“I want details, Asher.”

“Lily, a gentleman doesn’t share the details of his amorous encounters.”

Lily crossed her arms and assumed a pose of disgusted incredulity, an eloquent pose, because before she said it, Charlie knew what was coming: “Bullshit. That cop shot pieces off her, but you’re worried about protecting her honor?”

Charlie smiled wistfully. “You know, we shared a moment—”

“Oh my God, you complete man-whore!”

“Lily, you can’t possibly be hurt by my—by my response to your generous—and let me say right here—extraordinarily tempting offer. Gee whiz.”

“It’s because I’m too perky, isn’t it? Not dark enough for you? You being Mr. Death and all.”

“Lily, the shadow in Sedona was coming for me. When I left town, it went away. The sewer harpy came for me. The other Death Merchant said that I was different. They never had deaths happen as a result of their presence like I have.”

“Did you just say ‘gee whiz’ to me? What am I, nine? I am a woman—”

“I think I might be the Luminatus, Lily.”

Lily shut up.

She raised her eyebrows. As if “no.”

Charlie nodded. As if “yes.”

“The Big Death?”

“With a capital D,” Charlie said.

“Well, you’re totally not qualified for that,” Lily said.

“Thanks, I feel better now.”

Being two hundred feet under the sea always made Minty uneasy, especially if he’d been drinking sake and listening to jazz all night, which he had. He was in the last car on the last train out of Oakland, and he had the car to himself, like his own private submarine, cruising under the Bay with the echo of a tenor sax in his ear like sonar, and a half-dozen sake-sodden spicy tuna rolls sitting in his stomach like depth charges.

He’d spent his evening at Sato’s on the Embarcadero, Japanese restaurant and jazz club. Sushi and jazz, strange bedfellows, shacked up by opportunity and oppression. It began in the Fillmore district, which had been a Japanese neighborhood before World War II. When the Japanese were shipped off to internment camps, and their homes and belongings sold off, the blacks, who came to the city to work in the shipyards building battleships and destroyers, moved into the vacant buildings. Jazz came close behind.

For years, the Fillmore was the center of the San Francisco jazz scene, and Bop City on Post Street the premier jazz club. When the war ended and the Japanese returned, many a late night might find Japanese kids standing under the windows of Bop City, listening to the likes of Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, or Charles Mingus, listening to art happen and dissipate into the San Francisco nights. Sato was one of those kids.

It wasn’t just historical happenstance—Sato had explained to Minty, late one night after the music had ended and the sake was making him wax eloquent—it was philosophical alignment: jazz was a Zen art, dig? Controlled spontaneity. Like sumi-e ink painting, like haiku, like archery, like kendo fencing—jazz wasn’t something you planned, it was something you did. You practiced, you played your scales, you learned your chops, then you brought all your knowledge, your conditioning, to the moment. “And in jazz, every moment is a crisis,” Sato quoted Wynton Marsalis, “and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis.” Like the swordsman, the archer, the poet, and the painter—it’s all right there—no future, no past, just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens.

And Minty, taken by the need to escape his life as Death, had taken the train to Oakland to find a moment he could hide in, without the regret of the past or the anxiety of the future, just a pure right now resting in the bell of a tenor sax. But the sake, too much future looming ahead, and too much water overhead had brought on the blues, the moment melted, and Minty was uneasy. Things were going badly. He’d been unable to retrieve his last two soul vessels—a first in his career—and he was starting to see, or hear, the effects. Voices out of the storm sewers—louder and more numerous than ever—taunting him. Things moving in the shadows, on the periphery of his vision, shuffling, scuffling dark things that disappeared when you looked right at them.

He’d even sold three discs off the soul-vessels rack to the same person, another first. He hadn’t noticed it was the same woman right away, but when things started to go wrong, the faces played back and he realized. She’d been a monk the first time, a Buddhist monk of some kind, wearing gold-and-maroon robes, her hair very short, as if her head had been shaved and was growing out. What he remembered was that her eyes were a crystal blue, unusual in someone with such dark hair and skin. And there was a smile deep in those eyes that made him feel as if a soul had found its rightful place, a good home at a higher level. The next time he’d seen her was six months later and she was in jeans and leather jacket, her hair sort of out of control. She’d taken a CD from the “One Per Customer” rack, a Sarah McLachlan, which is what he’d have chosen for her if asked, and he barely noticed the crystal-blue eyes other than to think that he’d seen that smile before. Then, last week, it was her again, with hair down around her shoulders, wearing a long skirt and a belted muslin poet’s shirt—like an escapee from a Renaissance fair, not unusual for the Haight, but not quite common in the Castro—still, he thought nothing of it, until she had paid him and glanced over the top of her sunglasses to count the cash out of her wallet. The blue eyes again, electric and not quite smiling this time. He didn’t know what to do. He had no proof she was the monk, the chick in the leather jacket, but he knew it was her. He brought all his skills to bear on the situation, and essentially, he folded.