“Why?”

“I have to follow her, find out who she is.” Ray began to gather his stuff—phone, keys, baseball cap.

“Yeah, that’s healthy, Ray.”

“Tell Charlie I—don’t tell Charlie.”

“Okay. So is it okay if I switch the computer from the UGLY Web site?”

“What are you talking about?”

Lily stepped back from the screen and pointed to the letters as she read, “Ukrainian Girls Loving You—U-G-L-Y, ugly.” Lily smiled, a perky, self-satisfied smile, like that kid who won the spelling bee in third grade. Didn’t you hate that kid?

Ray couldn’t believe it. They weren’t even being subtle about it anymore. “Can’t talk,” he said. “Gotta go.” He ran out the door and headed up Mason Street after the lovely and compassionate Audrey.

Rivera had driven up to the Cliff House Restaurant overlooking Seal Rocks and forced Charlie to buy him a drink while they watched the surfers down on the beach. Rivera was not a morbid man, but he knew that if he came here enough times, eventually he’d see a surfer get hit by a white shark. In fact, he sorely hoped that it would happen, because otherwise, the world made no sense, there was no justice, and life was just a tangled ball of chaos. Thousands of seals in the water and on the rocks—the mainstay of the white shark diet—hundreds of surfers in the water, dressed like seals, well, it just needed to happen for all to be right with the world.

“I never believed you, Mr. Asher, when you said that you were Death, but since I couldn’t explain whatever that thing was in the alley with you, didn’t want to explain, in fact, I let it slide.”

“And I appreciate that,” said Charlie, showing a little discomfort at drinking a glass of wine with handcuffs on. His face was candy-apple red from having been burned by the pepper spray. “Is this normal procedure for interrogations?”

“No,” Rivera said. “Normally the City is supposed to pay, but I’ll have the judge take the drinks off your sentence.”

“Great. Thanks,” Charlie said. “And you can call me Charlie.”

“Okay, and you can call me Inspector Rivera. Now, braining the old lady with the cinder block—just exactly what were you thinking?”

“Do I need a lawyer?”

“Of course not, you’re fine, this bar is full of witnesses.” Rivera had once been a by-the-book kind of cop. That was before the demons, the giant owls, the bankruptcy, the polar bears, the vampires, the divorce, and the saber-clawed woman-thing that turned into a bird. Now, not so much.

“In that case, I was thinking that no one could see me,” Charlie said.

“Because you were invisible?”

“Not really. Just sort of not noticeable.”

“Well, I’ll give you that, but I don’t think that’s any reason to crush a grandmother’s skull.”

“You have no proof of that,” Charlie said.

“Of course I do,” Rivera said, holding up his glass to signal to the waitress that he needed another Glenfiddich on the rocks. “I saw pictures of her grandchildren, she showed me when I went in the house.”

“No, I mean you have no proof that I was going to crush her skull.”

“I see,” said Rivera, who did not see at all. “How did you know Mrs. Posokovanovich?”

“I didn’t. Her name just showed up in my date book, like I showed you.”

“Yes, you did. Yes, you did. But that doesn’t really give you a license to kill her, now does it?”

“That’s the point, she was supposed to be dead three weeks ago. There was even a death notice in the paper. I was just trying to make sure it was accurate.”

“So in lieu of having the Chronicle print a correction, you thought you’d bash in granny’s brains.”

“Well, it was that or have my daughter say ‘kitty’ at her, and I refuse to exploit my child in that way.”

“Well, I admire your taking the high ground on that one, Charlie,” Rivera said, thinking, Who do I have to shoot to get a drink around here? “But let’s just say that for one millisecond I believe you, and the old lady was supposed to die, but didn’t, and that because of it you were shot with a crossbow and that thing I shot in the alley appeared—let’s just say I believe all that, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“You need to be careful,” Charlie said. “You may be turning into one of us.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s how it happened to me. When my wife passed away, in the hospital, I saw the guy that came to collect her soul vessel, and wham, I was a Death Merchant. You saw me today, when no one else could, and you saw the sewer harpy, that night in the alley. Most of the time, I’m the only one who can see them.”

Rivera really, really wanted to turn this guy over to a psychiatrist at the hospital and never see him again, but the problem was, he had seen the woman-thing, that night and another time on his own street, and he had seen reports of weird stuff happening in the City over the last two weeks. And not just normal San Francisco weird stuff, but really weird stuff, like a flock of ravens attacking a tourist in Coit Tower, and a guy who slammed his car through a storefront in Chinatown, saying that he had swerved to miss a dragon, and people all over the Mission saying that they’d seen an iguana dressed like a musketeer going through their garbage, tiny sword and all.

“I can prove it,” Charlie said. “Just take me to the music store in the Castro.”

Rivera looked at the sad, naked ice cubes in his glass and said, “Anyone ever tell you that it’s hard to follow your train of thought, Charlie?”

“You need to talk to Minty Fresh.”

“Of course, that clears things up. I’ll have a word with Krispy Kreme while I’m there.”

“He’s also a Death Merchant. He can tell you that what I’m telling you is true and you can let me go.”

“Get up.” Rivera stood.

“I’m not finished with my wine.”

“Leave the money for the drinks and get up, please.” Rivera hooked his finger in Charlie’s handcuffs and pulled him up. “We’re going to the Castro.”

“I don’t think I can work my cane with these things on,” Charlie said.

Rivera sighed and looked down on the surfers. He thought he saw something large moving in a wave behind one surfer, but as his heart leapt at the prospect, a sea lion poked his whiskered face out of the curl and Rivera’s spirits sank again. He threw Charlie the handcuff keys.

“Meet me in the car, I have to take a leak.”

“I could escape.”

“You do that, Charlie—after you pay.”

22

RECONSIDERING A CAREER IN SECONDHAND RETAIL

Anton Dubois, the owner of Book ’em Danno in the Mission, had been a Death Merchant longer than anyone else in San Francisco. Of course he hadn’t called himself a Death Merchant at first, but when that Minty Fresh fellow who opened the record store in the Castro coined the term, he could never think of himself as anything else. He was sixty-five years old and not in the best health, having never used his body for much more than to carry his head around, which is where he lived most of the time. He had, however, in his years of reading, acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the science and mythology of death. So, on that Tuesday evening, just after sundown, when the windows of his store went black, as if all the light had been sucked suddenly out of the universe, and the three female figures moved toward him through the store, as he sat under his little reading light at the counter in the back, like a tiny yellow island in the vast pitch of space, he was the first man in fifteen hundred years to know exactly what—who—they were.

“Morrigan,” Anton said, with no particular note of fear in his voice. He set his book down, but didn’t bother to mark the page. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his flannel shirt, then put them back on so as not to miss any detail. Just now they were only blue-black highlights moving among the deep shadows in the store, but he could see them. They stopped when he spoke. One of them hissed—not the hiss of a cat, a long, steady tone—more like the hiss of air escaping the rubber raft that is all that lies between you and a dark sea full of sharks, the hiss of your life leaking out at the seams.