Secondhand Souls (14 page)

“Raven women coming to take my soul?” Cavuto lowered the gun to his side. “Stay there.”

“They can’t kill a man for his soul, don’t know why, just the way of things, otherwise you’d all be rotting in the fields. But they will kill you for the sport.” She moved toward him, gestured that she was moving wide of the counter, toward the front door. “Let’s go, love, have a ride in your lovely carriage. I’ll hang me head out the window when I scream.” She smiled, black lips and bluish teeth—batted her sooty eyelashes.

Cavuto glanced over his shoulder and out the window. The streetlights were on and the little stripe of sky he could see was dying pink.

“There’ll be no screaming.”

“Aye, lad, let’s go, then.” She made a motion as if shooing errant chickens toward the door, the long tatters of her sleeves making trails like smoke.

There was a rumble from behind the shop and they both looked to the single window at the back of the store, high and narrow, four steel bars across it. As they watched, the window, lit yellow from the light in the alley, went black.

“Back door locked, then?” asked the banshee.

Cavuto nodded, not looking away from the window.

“Spendid. We’re off, then. Come along. Go swiftly and stay long, I always say.”

The rear window cracked and the shadow of a thousand birds oozed in between the cracks and down the back wall, spreading, form and light exchanging as it moved, like oily lace woven into the shapes of flying things. The shadow slid down onto the hardwood floor, splashed in waves over the shelves as it approached them. At one narrow, central shelf where Rivera displayed recently acquired books—soul vessels—the shadow coalesced, covered the whole shelf like a shroud.

The banshee could see the five souls, glowing dull red, and one by one, as the shadow enveloped them, they started to fade.

“Mad dash, love. Mad dash,” she said.

“You go,” said Cavuto. He trained the .44 Magnum on a spot at the middle of a dark shelf, fifteen feet away.

As the last soul vessel went dark, the shadow throbbed, gained dimension, split into three distinct masses that then undulated, changed, formed into three female figures, human to a degree, shimmering with fine, blue-black feathers; talons sprouted from the tips of their fingers, long and hooked like marlin spikes, the silver color of stars.

“Gun,” said one, her voice like gravel swishing in a pan. “I hate guns.”

“Well, lad, you’ve shat the bed now,” said the banshee.

14

Perchance to Dream

I
t was a Wednesday night in San Francisco, and despite the fog having laid a soft blanket over the city and the foghorn singing its sad and low lullaby, no one slept well.

RIVERA

Inspector Alphonse Rivera was electrified by the shock and grief of finding Nick Cavuto dead in his bookstore. There were four units and an ambulance on the scene by the time Rivera got there. The EMTs were working on the big man on the floor—compressions on his chest, squeezing the bag to breathe for him, slamming syringes of adrenaline, and hitting him with defibrillator paddles. As soon as they got a heartbeat they would move him, they said.

There was blood, but not a tremendous amount, on Cavuto’s cutaway shirt.

Rivera could still smell the gunpowder in the air, as well as the more smoky aroma of burning peat. Cavuto’s big stainless-steel revolver lay on the floor by him.

“How long?” he asked the first officer he saw with a notebook who wasn’t interviewing someone. Nguyen on his nameplate. Rivera going into autopilot, not allowing what was happening a few feet behind him to become part of his reality.

“They’ve been working about ten minutes—since I’ve been on scene.”

“Gunshot wound?”

“Probably not,” the cop said. He cringed. “EMT said it looks more like a stab wound. Thin blade. Ice pick maybe.”

“Witnesses?”

“People all over on the street, drinkers, diners, people walking their dogs, you know this neighborhood. No one saw shit yet, still looking. ‘Shots fired’ call came from the nail place next door.” The officer looked at his notes. “Seven-oh-two. First unit on scene a minute later. Found him like this.”

Rivera checked his watch: 7:15.

Rivera looked around. The shelf where he had displayed the soul vessels was sprayed with a fine, oily fuzz, like black down, and even as Rivera watched, it was evaporating into vapor. He’d seen it before, a year ago, on the bricks in the alley where he’d pumped nine 9-mm rounds into one of the Morrigan to rescue Charlie Asher.

“We’re moving him!” barked one of the EMTs.

“He’s back?” Rivera asked.

The EMT whipped his head. “No, I’m calling an audible. We can get him to St. Francis in five. He needs a surgeon. Wound may have hit the heart.”

The other EMTs had already lifted Cavuto onto a gurney. Uniform cops were clearing the way to the ambulance.

“We’ll work on him until we can’t,” said the EMT over his shoulder as he went out the door.

“Tell them to check for venom,” Rivera said.

The EMT raised his eyebrows.

“Just do it.”

The EMT nodded and was out the door.

“People next door said they heard six shots, quick,” said Officer Nguyen. “Very, very loud.”

Rivera walked to the display shelf. The books, the five soul vessel books, were still there, lying on the floor, but they no longer glowed. Two rounds had hit the books on the top shelf, tearing cantaloupe-sized holes through the books, leaving shredded paper in the cavity like it had been nested by hamsters. He looked to the back of the store. Two more portals of shredded paper where the rounds had hit the books on the back wall.

Nguyen moved to his side as the last of the black feathers vaporized.

“What the fuck is that stuff? It was all over the place when I got here.”

“No idea,” said Rivera. Then, still on emotional autopilot, crime-scene robot on the scene, he said, “All the shots were Cavuto’s.” He pointed to the four impact points with his pen. He saw Nguyen’s eyes go wide at the craters in the books before him.

“He used SWAT loads,” Rivera explained. Cavuto loaded the .44 with very-high-speed, prefrangilized bullets—a copper jacket filled with lead beads encased in resin, half the weight of a normal .44 round, thus the high speed, but when they hit they expanded explosively, doing enormous damage to flesh, or in this case, paper. Used by law enforcement because they didn’t ricochet, and would not go through walls or car doors to hurt innocents. Essentially, they blew up on the first thing they hit, and Cavuto had hit what he was aiming at, thus the spray of hellish down.

Nyguen ran his own pen around the edge of one of the craters in the books, careful not to actually touch it. “So these rounds went through someone before they hit here?”

“Some
thing
,” Rivera said. “If it had been some
one
, there’d be a pile of ground meat here to identify and clean up.”

“Fuck,” said Nguyen.

“Yeah,” said Rivera. “I’m headed to St. Francis. Tell the watch commander, would you?”

Rivera did not hurry because he knew there was no reason to hurry. They wouldn’t be bringing Nick Cavuto back to the land of the living. They continued to work on the big cop for forty-five minutes after Rivera arrived at the hospital without getting so much as a blip of a heartbeat. They pronounced him dead a little after 8
P.M.

A captain from Personal Crimes debriefed Rivera at the hospital, after which two commanders took turns telling him to go home and stay away from the case, which he finally did when they threated to suspend him if he didn’t.

At home, he texted Minty Fresh about Cavuto’s death, then ate something, but he didn’t remember what, turned on the TV and sat in front of it, but he couldn’t have said what was on, then went to bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling, his Glock .40 cal in his hand, until 6
A.M.
, when he finally fell into a fitful, jerky sleep, with dreams full of the sound of frantic birds scratching at windows.

MINTY FRESH

Minty Fresh lay awake mentally arranging jazz albums by artist and recording date, cross-referencing who played what on which record, listening in his mind’s ear to the signature riff of each artist as he came to mind. It was a rich, complex, demanding exercise, but it kept him from thinking about the dead cop, the dark rising, and the task he would have to perform tomorrow. It kept him from reaching that place that he hit so, so often in his life, the mind-bending, sob-inducing limit where he said to himself,
I just cannot endure any more motherfucking death. No more!

Order. Put everything in order. Serve order. That was the
why
and
what
of it. Order.

In his head, he flipped albums, looked at liner notes, grainy photographs taken in smoky clubs, listened to notes played by men long dead, and he put them in order. ’Round Midnight, he drifted off.

MIKE SULLIVAN

Mike couldn’t remember being this excited to go to sleep since Christmas Eve when he was a kid: the excitement, the anticipation, the replaying, over and over, of how it would be, knowing that no matter how you imagined it, you’d be surprised. This was just like that, but instead of waking up to find that Santa had brought him a new bike, or a fire truck with an extending ladder (he loved that fire truck), he was going to get up in the morning and throw himself off a bridge and die.

He knew he should feel sad about it, in fact, he even felt a little guilty for not feeling sad, but he didn’t feel sad. He’d miss his apartment, and some of his friends, but not that much, really. Not compared to what it might be like. And there was the Christmas-morning part: he was going to die, but he was not going to end. There was something else out there, more exciting and unknown than even a bike under the Christmas tree, and somehow there was an inevitability to all of it. He didn’t feel like this was a choice he was making, but more like a choice that had been made long ago and he was just fulfilling it—like riding on a train, waiting for your station, you don’t decide at each station to stay or go, you get to your station and you get off. He was coming to his station.

He ran the Sanskrit chant through his head, which wasn’t hard. It was only a few words, Audrey had written them out phonetically for him, and since he’d first learned them and repeated them, they had rung in his head constantly. With the chant sounding in the background, he checked and rechecked the arrangements he’d made for Charlie Asher to take over his life, going so far as to label certain shirts that he thought looked good on him, certain background details he shared with the guys at work, listing each of their social network profiles so if Charlie ever ran into them, he might recognize them from their pictures.

He liked that someone was getting his stuff, even his body, as if he was giving someone who was really hungry half of his sandwich, after deciding he might have to throw it away. It was all so exciting. Charlie had called him, and in his strange, scratchy little voice, thanked him for what he was going to lose. Ha! Lose? “You’re welcome, but no, not lose,” he’d said. “A gift,” he said, and, “Thank
you
.”

Concepción! Concepción! Concepción! Concepción! My Conchita!
My love!
He had never felt like this and it was glorious. He ached for her, his soul sang electric with the thought of her, and tomorrow he would be with her.

He didn’t remember falling asleep and he didn’t care that he did, because in the morning he would get up, go to the bridge, then jump off and die.

LILY

Lily lived in the Sunset District, where San Francisco was open to the sea, so even when the rest of the city was warm and sunny, the fog rolled in over Ocean Beach and the Great Highway to settle between the rows of postwar tract homes. Lily liked the fog, and didn’t even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, windswept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff’s dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to bring light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor’s garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry.

“Look, I just need it for a few hours,” she told the ambulance guy.

“They have to stay with the ambulance, miss,” the stupid guy had said. “We can’t lend them out.”

“Look,
nurse
, I’m trying to save lives over here. I swear, I’ll have it back to you in like three, four hours max.”

“Still can’t do it. Even if we could, these aren’t the consumer models like they hang on the wall at the airport. We’re trained to use these.”

“
Quoi?”
she had said, in perfect fucking French. They just hung defibrillators on the wall at the airport? Those things cost like five thousand dollars. (Which she hadn’t known when she said she’d take care of getting one.) And they just hang them there for anyone to use? She needed to travel more.

A quick search on her phone revealed that they hung them on the wall at City Hall, as well as at the airport, and she was only a few blocks from there. But she hadn’t really been sure she wanted to try to get on the bus or the BART while making off with a stolen defibrillator, so she had called her friend Abby, who had a car.

“Abs, we’re getting the band back together,” Lily’d said.

“I have to work at four,” Abby said.

“It’s an emergency. Like an hour, max. Can you pick me up at the corner of Polk and Pine?”

“Okay, but I’m going to be dressed for work.”

Twenty minutes later, Abby showed up in her beater Prius and Lily jumped in. “What are you wearing?” was the first thing Lily said.

“For work,” Abby said. She was wearing a khaki skirt, black tights, a crisp white blouse and flats. If not for her hair, which was still short and dyed a deep maroon, Lily wouldn’t have recognized her.

“Retail?” Lily asked.

Abby nodded. “I’m a failure. What are
you
wearing?”

Lily was in black jeans, ankle boots, and a red SF Fire Department T-shirt, which she had thought might help her with the ambulance guys. “Me, too,” she said.

The two failed Goth girls shared a high-five and hugged it out for their shame, then Lily said, “Head up Van Ness and pull in in front of City Hall.”

“I can’t park there. There’s a bus stop.”

“You’re not parking. It’s an emergency.”

Lily outlined the plan on the way: “I need to steal a defibrillator.”

“Okay, I’ll drive,” said Abby.

“No, you have to come in with me.”

“Why? They aren’t heavy. Are they heavy?”

“No, but I haven’t done this before.”

Abby pulled the Prius up onto the sidewalk in front of City Hall and they both jumped out.

“My friend is having a heart attack. My friend is having a heart attack,” Lily chanted as she led Abby up the steps, and continued chanting it as they ran up the hall.

“My friend is having a heart attack, make way.”

When people looked, Abby said, “Hey, fuck off, I’m having a heart attack.”

Finally they spotted a bright red plastic box inside a larger, clear plastic box near a fire extinguisher.

“You want this, too?” Abby said, her hand on the fire extinguisher handle.

“No, just this.”

Lily pulled open the plastic box and pulled out the defibrillator, which was about the size of a small laptop computer. There was a readout and a single yellow button. Then the box started talking.

“Place pads on patient’s chest,” said the box.

Unfortunately, Lily and Abby had attracted enough attention on their way to the defibrillator that a group of about a dozen people had gathered around them to either help the skinny girl or watch her twitch.

“Place pads on patient’s chest,” said the box.

Lily popped open a little door on the defibrillator and two vinyl pads about the size of coasters, stuck together, fell out, trailing wires behind them.

“What do we do?” Abby said.

“Place pads on patient’s chest,” said the box.

Lily held the box between her legs, separated the two pads, then tore open Abby’s blouse and slammed the pads on her boobs.