Secondhand Souls (12 page)

“Have you seen these?” Audrey said. The flyer was one of the ones Sophie had shown them. “They’re all over North Beach.”

“Sophie and Mrs. Korjev just came through,” Charlie said.

“Are you okay?” Audrey said. She unzipped one end of the cat carrier and handed in the little paper espresso cup. “Two sugars.”

“I’m okay,” said Charlie. “But Lily wants us to kill a guy and take his body.”

Audrey sat down on the bar stool next to Lily and sipped a frosty brown thing through a straw while she considered the proposition.

“Won’t work,” said the nun.

Lily nearly aspirated skinny latte. “Why not? M said that you needed someone who was healthy, male, and whose body would be fresh and not too broken up.”

“It’s why she blackmailed us into coming here,” Charlie said.

“Stop saying that,” Lily said. “I wouldn’t have told Sophie about you and you know it. It was only a symbolic threat.”

“We would have come without the threat.”

Audrey said, “Does this man you’re going to kill know what you’re going to do?”

“I’m not going to actively kill him. He’s going to kill himself. But no.”

“For the ritual of Chöd to work the subject has to
willingly
give up his body to be occupied.”

“Seriously? I not only have to talk a guy into jumping off a bridge, but I have to talk him into just giving me his body? He’s not going to go for that.”

“Maybe if you wear something low-cut,” Charlie said.

“I will crush you and your little cat box, Asher.”

“Let’s calm down and work through this,” said Audrey.

“Yeah, Lily,” said Charlie. “Audrey is badass. Buddhist monks invented kung fu, you know.”

“Not my sect,” said Audrey. “We mostly chant and beg.”

“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” Charlie said.

“Fine,” said Lily. “Audrey, is there anything in your tradition about a Ghost Thief?”

“No, why?”

“Well, because evidently there’s a whole choir of ghosts on the Golden Gate Bridge farting a message of doom if we don’t find the Ghost Thief. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be a condition of getting my guy to give up the goods.”

“That’s new,” said Charlie.

12

Portable Darkness and the Booty Nun

I
n a turnout on Interstate 80, about forty miles east of Reno, the hellhounds had killed a Subaru and were rolling in its remains as two horrified kayakers looked on. Alvin had the last shreds of plastic from a red kayak hanging out of his jaws as he squirmed in the still-smoking bits of the engine, while Mohammed was biting at his reflection in the hatchback window, trying to pop the final intact window like a soap bubble, which he did with great growling glee, before crunching down a mouthful of rubber gasket and safety glass.

Something popped and hissed under Alvin’s back and in an instant the four-hundred-pound canine was on his feet barking at the stream of steam, each bark like a rifle report in the ears of the kayakers. The hound reared up in a prancing fashion, and came down repeatedly on the offending steam thing with his front paws until it ceased and desisted. He celebrated by settling down with the engine between his forelegs to chew off the remaining hoses and wires. Mohammed made to join him, but was distracted by a stream of green antifreeze which he stopped to lap up off the asphalt.

“Uh, I think—” said one of the kayakers, a fit man of twenty-five in an earth-toned array of tactical outdoor clothing, who had heard of dogs being poisoned by antifreeze.

“I don’t think it will bother them,” said the other, who had been driving when Alvin’s jaws first latched on to the bumper, causing him to skid into this turnout and scaring him badly.

“Your insurance will cover this, right?” said the first.

“We should probably film it. Do you have your phone?”

“In the car.”

“Damn.”

They were both adrenaline junkies and had been on their way to run some level-five rapids on the Salmon River in Idaho, but now they were reconsidering, since the kayaks were the first things the hellhounds had eaten after bringing down the Subaru. They were both a little in shock and had already run a couple hundred yards into the desert before realizing the enormous hounds weren’t in the least bit interested in them, then skulking back to watch the destruction of their car and possessions.

“You ever seen a dog like that before?” asked one.

“I don’t think anyone has seen
anything
like that.”

The hounds were long-legged, with the squared head of a mastiff and the pointed ears of a Great Dane; heavily muscled, with great barrel chests and rippling shoulders and haunches. They were so black that they appeared to absorb light—their slick coats neither shone nor rippled with their movement—sometimes they appeared simply to be violent swaths of starless night sky.

“I was doing seventy when they hit us,” said the driver.

Interstate 80 was a main artery across the northern part of the U.S., but today the traffic was sparse and they were far enough off the road that someone would have to be looking for them to actually notice what was going on.

The driver was about to suggest that they hike up to the interstate to flag down some help, when a creamy yellow land yacht, a 1950 Buick Roadmaster fastback with a white top, a sun visor, and blacked-out windows, pulled off the highway and cruised by, just beyond the dead Subaru. The great hounds stopped what they were doing and jumped to their feet, their ears peaked, their backs bristling. They growled in unison like choral bulldozers.

The passenger-side window whirred down and a black man wearing a yellow suit and homburg hat leaned over and addressed the kayakers as he rolled by.

“Y’all all right?”

They nodded, the driver gesturing to the opera of destruction playing out before them, as if to say,
“What the fuck?”

“Them goggies ain’t shit,” said the yellow fellow. “I’ll have them off you in a slim jiffy.”

With that, great clouds of fire burst out the twin tailpipes of the Buick and it lowered its stance like a crouching leopard before bolting out of the turnout. The hellhounds dropped what they were chewing and took off after it, their front claws digging furrows in the asphalt as they came up to speed, their staccato barking trailing away like fading machine guns in a distant dogfight. In less than a minute, they were out of sight.

“I have my wallet,” said the Subaru’s owner, feeling he might have had enough adrenaline for a bit. “I say we catch a ride back to Reno. Get a room.”

“Video poker,” said the other. “And drinks,” he said. “With umbrellas.”

I
n a previous incarnation, he had been torn apart by jackals—black jackals—so overall, the fellow in yellow had developed a healthy distaste for the company of canines, which was why he was leading them away from San Francisco.

“You ladies doing all right back there?” he asked as he gunned the Roadmaster out of the turnout and back onto Highway 80. The big V-8 rumbled and the four chrome ports down each side of the hood blinked as if startled out of a nap, then opened to draw more air into the infernal engine. The tail of the Buick dipped and the grinning chrome mouth of the grille gulped desert air like a whale shark sucking down krill. Far below the crusty strata, long-dead dinosaurs wept for the liquid remains of their brethren consumed by the creamy, jaundiced leviathan.

“Was that them?” came a female voice from inside the trunk behind the bloodred leather backseat.

“That sounded like them,” another female voice.

“Y’all can take a peek, you need to be sure,” said the man in yellow. “Trunk ain’t locked.”

“You should go faster,” said a third voice.

“They sound close,” said the first. “Are they close?”

“They won’t catch us,” said the yellow fellow. “Them goggies ain’t shit.”

“I hate those things. They’re so barky.” said the second voice.

“So bitey,” said another.

“Well, they loves y’all,” said the yellow fellow. “That’s why y’all are along.”

“Can they bite through this metal? because I don’t think I’m ready for the
above
?”

“No, not in the light. Not yet.”

“Macha, remember that time they almost tore you apart?”

“I’ma slow up a bit, ladies, so they stay close.”

A chorus of “No!” and “Oh, fuck no!” erupted from behind the seat.

Just yards behind, the hellhounds heard the voices, answered with enraged howls, and quickened their pace. The Buick jerked with impact, something hitting the rear, tearing metal, once, then again. The ladies in the dark screeched. The driver checked his side mirror and, finding it overflowing with angry dog face, slammed the accelerator to the floor, because while “them goggies might not be shit,” he did not particularly want to be proven wrong by being reduced to yellow specks in great piles of hellhound poo dropped across the Nevada desert.

“I want to make Salt Lake before they know what happened,” said the driver.

“What’s at Salt Lake?” asked one of the trunk voices.

“They’s a portal there that these motherfuckers don’t know about.”

“To the Underworld? We just got out of the Underworld.”

The yellow fellow chuckled. “Relax, ladies. We gonna dump these goggies in Salt Lake, keep ’em out of my business in San Francisco. I’ll have y’all back in some less portable darkness lickity-split, then y’all can freshen up.”

“What about the child?” asked one of the voices.

“We cross that bridge when we get to it,” said the yellow fellow.

“She’s worse than the hounds.”

“Nemain!”

“Well, she
is.
”

“You know, it’s not so bad in here,” said Babd, changing the subject.

“Plenty of room. And it’s not damp.”

“And it’s warm.”

“You want,” said the driver, “y’all can stay there when we get back to the city. I get you some curtains and cushions and whatnot.”

He smiled to himself. Through many centuries and many incarnations, he had learned one universal truth:
bitches love them some cushions
.

They sped on, and after the two unfortunate bites, stayed just far enough ahead of Alvin and Mohammed so that from a distance, the hellhounds might appear to be particularly animated clouds of black smoke emitted from the tailpipes. They were creatures of fire and force, pursuing a yellow Buick with a creamy-white top through the desert. Like many supernatural creatures, they winked in and out of the visible spectrum as they moved, so when a highway patrolman outside of Elko, Nevada, looked up from his radar readout, first he blinked, then he was tempted to radio up the road to his colleague and say, “Hey, did you just see two pony-sized black dogs, doing seventy, pursuing a giant slice of lemon meringue pie?” Then he thought,
No, perhaps I’ll keep that to myself.

A
bout that same time, five hundred miles west, in the Mission District of San Francisco, a Buddhist nun and little crocodile-wizard guy were working out the finer points of a murder.

“Is it really murder,” said Audrey, “if he is going to jump anyway?”

“I’m pretty sure it is,” said Charlie. “I think the Buddha said that one should never injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm. If we know he’s going to jump and we don’t stop him, I think we’re going against whatever sutra that is.”

“First, that is not a sutra, that’s Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, from
I, Robot
, and second, we’re not just allowing him to harm himself, we’re trying to get him to do it on a schedule.”

“I didn’t know Isaac Asimov was a Buddhist,” said Charlie. “Buddhist robots. Ha!”

“Asimov wasn’t. But the robots thing is close. I mean, you”— she was about to say,
You are kind of a Buddhist robot,
but instead she said, “You know those terra-cotta warriors they found in China, buried since the second century B.C.? Those were kind of supposed to be Buddhist robots. The Emperor Qin Shi Huang was going to have a priest use the
p’howa of forceful projection
I used on the Squirrel People to put soldiers’ souls in the terra-cotta soldiers, making himself an indestructible army. It might have worked if they’d filled them with meat.”

“You said that Buddhism didn’t come to China until the fifth century.” Charlie had always had a difficult time understanding Buddhism.

“It was always there, they just didn’t call it Buddhism. Buddha was just a guy who pointed out some fairly obvious things, so we call it Buddhism. Otherwise we’d just have to call it everything.”

“Sometimes I think you’re just making up Buddhism as you go along.”

“Exactly.” Audrey grinned. Charlie grinned back and Audrey shuddered. She would not miss all those teeth grinning at her. She had been under pressure when she’d put his body together, but given the opportunity to build her perfect man again, she would definitely go with fewer teeth.

“Maybe this Sullivan guy is in someone’s calendar,” Charlie said. “If Minty can find his name on one of the Death Merchants’ calendars, then we’ll know his death is inevitable. In a way, we’ll be saving him, or his body, at least?”

“He still has to offer his body as a vessel for your soul. He must do it willingly or the Chöd ritual won’t work. I’m not sure it will work, anyway, Charlie. I’ve never done it. I don’t know if anyone has ever done it.”

“Well, Lily’s going to ask him. If he says yes, we’re good to go.”

“Would you believe Lily if she told you that she needed your permission to move a new soul into your body, and in order to do that, you had to jump off a bridge at a certain time?”

“I would. Lily is very trustworthy. She worked for me for six years and never stole anything. Except the
Great Big
Book of Death.
” Charlie scratched under his long, lower jaw, wishing he had a beard, even a chin, to stroke thoughtfully. “Okay, that caused problems, but otherwise . . . Yes, good point. But he told her a ghost talked him into this and she believed him, so he kind of owes her.”

“Really?” She raised a questioning eyebrow.

“You’re right, we should go talk to him.”

“Charlie, you know I adore you, but I’m not sure that the finer essence of your being will shine through to a stranger, in a first meeting, and we
are
asking this guy to believe something that sounds, if not impossible, certainly preposterous.”

“I know. That’s the beauty of it. I’m like the preposterous poster child.”

“I’ll go see him.”

“Fine. Maybe just brush your hair to the side so it’s soft, nonintimidating,” Charlie suggested.

“What’s wrong with my hair?”

“Nothing. So you studied robots in the monastery? Who would have thought.”

B
ecause her discipline stressed living in the moment, and not obsessing on the past or the future, Audrey found herself more than somewhat off balance when Mike Sullivan answered his door.

“Hi, Audrey,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Mike.” Dark, short hair; light eyes, green, maybe hazel, kind.

He was younger than she expected, even though Lily had told her that he was in his early to midthirties, and he was better-looking than she’d expected, even though Lily had also mentioned that he was not unpleasant to look upon. What surprised her most was that he was so healthy and alive, because in the past, everyone she had prepared for
bardo,
the transition between life and death, had been sick and dying, and most often old. Mike Sullivan did not look like a man who was dying.

She shook his hand and let him lead her into his second-story apartment, which took up the middle floor of a Victorian in the Richmond District, adjacent to Golden Gate Park. She felt prickly and self-conscious as she sat on the couch and watched him move around the apartment, playing host, getting them tea, relaxed, barefoot, in old jeans and a T-shirt. Despite her training to stay focused on the moment, she glimpsed into the future, and she realized that if everything went as it was supposed to, in a few days she’d be shagging this guy. She blushed; she could feel the heat rise in her cheeks, and she realized he must see it.

“You’re not what I expected,” Mike Sullivan said. “The director of a Buddhist center—although I don’t know what I expected.”

“That’s okay,” said Audrey; she touched her hair, which she’d spun into a bun behind her head, so that wasn’t what he meant. “There aren’t many women in my sect, even in the East. I’m privileged to have my position.”