Secondhand Souls (7 page)

“You are the first person who could hear us. Sometimes, when someone is about to jump, they can hear us, but they do not answer, and soon they are here with us. By that time, it is too late for answers.”

“Then everyone who has ever jumped—they are all here? They, like you, they—”

“Not all of them, but most.”

Mike tried to count in his head, about one jumper a week, since the bridge was opened, nearly eighty years ago—it was many. “That’s—”

“Many,” she said. “And there are others. Not only those who jump. Many others.”

“Many,” he repeated.

“A bridge is a place between, we are souls that are between.”

“So if I can find out what happened to your count, then what, you move on?”

“One hopes,” said the ghost. “One always hopes.”

“One moment, please.” Mike spidered his way back into a matrix of beams so he was out of sight of Bernitelli, then reached in his coveralls for his smartphone, but paused. It couldn’t be this sudden: two hundred years and he simply looks something up on a search engine and resolves her mission, puts her to rest? What if her count
had
married another woman? What if he had used her, lied to her?

“Concepción, you have a modern way of speaking, do you know about the Internet?”

“Please, call me Conchita. Yes, I have heard. We hear the radios in the cars as they pass, listen to the people walking on the bridge. I think the Internet is new way people have found to be unpleasant to one an-other, no?”

“Something like that.” He typed the count’s name into a search engine, then, when it suggested he’d spelled it wrong, he hit search. In seconds, the result was back and he tried not to react as he read what the count had done, so many years ago. When she had first appeared, while he was still in shock over the sweater guy going over the rail, she had shown him pity, given him a week to prepare for her reappearance. She had warned him she was coming the second time and had only appeared to him after he was safely hooked to the bridge. She had shown him consideration. He owed her the same.

He shook his head at the phone and said, “Unfortunately, the Internet has sent me to the library to look for word of your count. It may take some time; can you come to me again, soon?”

“It takes great will to come to you like this, but I will return.”

“Thank you. Give me a couple of days. I’ll be working under the roadway for the next few days.”

“I will find you,” she said. “Until next time, thank you, Mike Sullivan.”

In an instant she was beside him. She kissed his cheek and was gone.

R
ivera was standing in the living room of a woman named Margaret Atherton, who was eleven months dead, when he realized he wasn’t invisible.

“Hold it right there, you son of a bitch, or I’ll splatter you across that wall,” said the old man, who had entered the room from the kitchen while Rivera was rifling through a side table drawer. Rivera fought instinct and did not reach for the Glock on his hip. Instead he looked over his shoulder to see a man, at least eighty years old, shaped like the letter
C,
pointing an enormous revolver at him.

“Wait! I’m a cop,” Rivera said. “I’m a policeman, Mr. Atherton.”

“What are you doing in my house?”

Rivera didn’t have an answer. People weren’t supposed to be able to see him when he was retrieving a soul vessel. That’s what it said in the book. That’s what Minty Fresh had told him. “You aren’t actually invisible, it’s just that people won’t notice you. You can slip right into their houses when they bring in the groceries, and as long as you don’t say anything to them, they won’t notice you.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Rivera had said.

“Yeah,” said the big man. “That’s the hard to believe part.”

The old man said, “If you’re a cop, let’s see a badge. And you do anything sketchy I’ll turn you into pink mist.”

When did old people start talking like that? The old fellow was slight and frail-looking, like he might just fall apart at a touch, a man of ash, yet he held the heavy revolver with the steadiness of a bronze monument.

Rivera turned and reached slowly into his jacket pocket for his badge wallet. He’d gone back to active duty two days ago, thinking that the credentials and access would help him to track down the missing soul vessels, but he hadn’t expected this—only the fifth person on his list, the first four were washouts, and already he was abusing his authority. Rivera held up the badge.

“Mr. Atherton, I’m looking into the death of your wife. I knocked and the door was open. I thought something might be wrong, so I came in to check on you.”

“In the side table drawer?” The old man squinted down the sights of the big revolver.

Silent and dark as a shadow, she stepped out of the kitchen behind Atherton and touched the stun gun to his neck.

ZZZZZT!

The old man spasmed, dropped the gun, then fell and twitched in place a bit.

“AIEEEEEEEEEEE!”
shrieked the banshee. Then, to Rivera, “Hello, love.”

Rivera fell to a crouch as he drew the Glock and leveled it at her chest. “Back,” he said. He moved to the old man and checked his pulse while keeping the Glock trained on the banshee.

“That’s no way to treat someone who just rescued you.”

“You didn’t rescue me.” Rivera moved the big Smith & Wesson away from Mr. Atherton, and shuddered. It was a .41 Magnum and would, indeed, have splattered parts of him all over the wall if the old man had shot him. “You might have killed him.”

“And he might have killed you. He’s fine. Catchin’ a bit of a nap is all. I’ve your wee box o’ lightning here if you need to give him another buzz.” The banshee clicked the stun gun and a bolt of electricity arced between the contacts.

“Put that down. Now. And back away.”

The banshee did as she was told, grinning the whole time. The old man let out a moan. Rivera knew he should call an ambulance, but wasn’t sure how to explain why he was here.

“Why are you here?” Rivera asked.

“Same as I told you, puppet, harbinger of doom. Usually death, ain’t it?”

“I read about your kind. You’re supposed to call hauntingly in the distance—‘a keening wail,’ they said. You’re not supposed to just appear out of nowhere zapping old people and screaming like a—”

“Like a what? Like a what, love? Say my name. Say my name.”

“What doom? What death? Mine? This guy?”

“Oh, no, he’ll be fine. No, the death I’m warning of is a right scary shit, innit he—a dark storm out of the Underworld, he is. You’ll be wanting a much bigger weapon than that wee thing.”

“It was big enough to stop one of your feathered sisters,” he said.

Rivera lowered the Glock. Actually, it was smaller than the fifteen-round 9-mm Beretta he’d shot the Morrigan with when he’d been on active duty before, nearly half the weight, only ten shots, but more powerful—it was a man-stopper. What did she know about the size of a man’s weapon, stupid, sooty-assed fairy anyway.

“Oh, you shot one of those bitches, and you still draw breath? Aren’t you lovely?” She batted her eyelashes at him coyly. “Still, won’t do for him what’s coming.”

“So you’re not here to warn of some general rising of forces of darkness and—”

“Oh, there’s those, love, to be sure. But it’s the one dark one you’ll be wanting to watch for—not like that winged dolt, Orcus, what came before.”

Rivera hadn’t seen it, the huge, winged Death that had killed so many of the Death Merchants. Charlie Asher had seen it torn apart by the Morrigan before they came for him.

“This one is worse?”

“Aye, this one won’t come bashing through the front door like Orcus. This one’s sneaky. Elegant.”

“Elegant? So you’re not part of the dark rising, you’re just here to warn me, I mean, us?”

“Appears so. Unsettled souls attract a bad lot. This city of yours is a whirlwind of ’em.”

“Like here, in this house?” Rivera was hoping. Maybe she could help.

“No, love, no human souls here ’cept yours and old Smokey’s there.”

Rivera looked down at Mr. Atherton—his shirt collar was smoking from where the stun gun had arced. He patted the ember out.

“So that’s why he could see me . . .” He looked to the banshee, but she was gone, leaving behind the smell of damp moss and burning peat. Somehow she’d managed to grab his stun gun as she left.

“Fuck!” said Rivera, to no one in particular.

7

Shy Dookie and Death

A
study in sadness: Sophie Asher—sitting at the picnic table by the edge of the playground, away from the other kids, denied access
to friends, laughter, and fun, condemned to watch from afar like some exile—was in a time-out.

He walked across the playground with something between a limp and a soft-shoe, as if there were brushes playing rhythm on a snare drum under his steps. He was tall, but not too tall, thin, but not too, dressed in different shades of soft yellow from shoe to hat, the latter a butter-colored homburg with a tiny red feather in the lemon-hued band. He sat down across from Sophie and swung his long legs in under the table.

Sophie saw him, but didn’t look up from coloring her ponies. He was wearing sunglasses on an overcast day, which Aunt Cassie would explain as him protecting his retinas from UV radiation and which Aunt Jane would explain as him being a douche.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to be here,” Sophie said. There was no gate into the playground, and he hadn’t come through the building, past the nuns.

“It’ll be all right,” said the yellow man. His voice was friendly and he sounded Southern. “Why so sad, peanut?” He smiled, just his lower teeth showed, one of them was gold, then he matched her pout to share her sadness.

“I’m in a T.O.,” said Sophie. She glared over her shoulder at
Sister Maria la Madonna con el Corpo de Cristo encima una Tortilla,
the Irish nun, who had stripped her of her recess and exiled her to this cold limbo by the fence. The nun returned her gaze with a stern, tight-lipped resolve—mime anger. The nun didn’t seem to see the man in yellow at all, which likely was something else she would be stern about.

“How’d you do to get yourself in such a fix, peanut?”

“I told them I had to go home to go to the bathroom and they said no.”

“You have bathrooms in the school, don’t you?” He said bathrooms with an
f
instead of a
th,
which she liked and decided that’s the way she would say it, too, from now on.

“It was number two,” she said, putting down her crayon and really looking up at him for the first time. “I don’t do number two away from home.”

“So you got shy dookie. That’s okay, I had that, too, when I was little. Shoot, bitches need to respect a person’s habits.”

“That’s what I said. But they’re all anti-Semites.”

“Y’all lost me, peanut. This a Catholic school, right?”

“Yeah, I go here because it’s by our house, but I’m a Jewess.”

“You don’t say?”

“And an orphan,” Sophie added gravely.

“Aw, that’s sad.”

“And my dogs ran away.”

He’d been shaking his head to the rhythm of the sadness of her story, but he stopped and looked up when she mentioned the goggies. She missed them. She didn’t feel safe without them, so she was acting out, that’s what Auntie Cassie would say.

The man in yellow whistled, a long, sad
oh my gracious
note. “You got shy dookie,
and
you an orphan?”

“I’m like Nemo,” Sophie said, still nodding, lots of lower lip to show her tragedy.

“You don’t say, you the captain of a submarine?”

“No, not that Nemo. The clown fish.” Her daddy had been a huge nerd and had taught her about Captain Nemo and the
Nautilus,
but she meant the real Nemo.

“Shoot, that the saddest story I ever heard, Shy Dookie.”

“That’s not my name.”

“That’s what I’m gonna call you.”

Sophie considered it for a moment. It could be her hip-hop name. Her
secret
hip-hop name. She shrugged, which meant, “Okay.”

“What’s your name?”

“You can just call me the Magical Negro,” said the man in yellow.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that word.”

“It’s okay. I’m allowed.”

“Some words hurt people and you’re not supposed to say them. I have a word I’m not supposed to say. A really bad word.”

“You do, do you? What that word?”

“I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.”

“You got a lot of secrets.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe this meeting we havin’, this be our little secret.”

“When a grown-up tells you it’s our little secret, it means they might be up to something. You should be careful.”

“You don’t never be lyin’, peanut. You don’t never be lyin’. I do need to be careful. How long it been since you seen them dogs of yours, child?”

“This morning,” she lied. It had been a week since the giant hellhounds had disappeared. “I like your hat,” she said to change the subject. “It’s nice. Daddy said you should always say nice things about a person’s hat because it was an easy way to make them feel better.”

“Why, thank you, peanut.” He ran his fingers around the brim. “You miss your daddy, don’t you?”

How did he know? That wasn’t right. He was a stranger. She nodded, pushed out her lip, went back to coloring her ponies.

“You miss your mama, too, I’ll bet.”

She had never met her mama, but she missed her.

“You think they gone because of you, peanut? ’Cause of how special you are?”

She looked up at him.

“Don’t look at me like that. I know. I’m special, too.”

“You should be careful,” Sophie said. “I need to go.”

She stood and looked toward the building. The mean nun pointed for her to sit back down, but then the bell rang and the sister waved her in.

Sophie turned back to the man in yellow, held out the page she had been coloring. “Here, you can have this.”

“Well, thank you, peanut.” He took the drawing, then untangled from the table and stood as he looked at it. “That’s very kind.”

“Their names are Death, Disease, War, and Sparkle-Darkle Glitter-tits,” Sophie said. “They’re the four little ponies of the Apocalypse.” Sophie liked saying things that shocked people, especially nuns and old people, but he wasn’t shocked.

The man in yellow nodded, folded the drawing, and slipped it into his breast pocket. He looked over his sunglasses and Sophie could see for the first time that his eyes were golden-colored. “Well, y’all take care, Shy Dookie,” he said.

“Bye,” Sophie said. She took her handful of crayons and skipped back into school. Once in the door, she looked back to the picnic table. The man in yellow was gone.

I
’m not invisible,” Rivera said into the phone.

“I never said you were invisible,” said Minty Fresh. “The
Big Book
never said you were invisible. It says ‘people
may
not see you’. Even if you are retrieving a soul vessel, people can see you if you call attention to yourself.”

“I didn’t call attention to myself. The old man walked in on me —was going to shoot me.”

“And the bitch just Tased him. You know, that banshee know how to party.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying this, Mr. Fresh, but if I hadn’t known the EMTs who arrived to take care of the old man, I’d be facing breaking and entering charges.”

“Emergency operator didn’t record your call, then?”

“I didn’t call. The old man had one of those electronic alert medallions. I just pushed the button and they dispatched.”

“Yeah, shit tend to work out like that. If our frequent phone calls don’t cause the end of the world, I’ll tell you about my
unified theory of irony
someday.”

“I’ll look forward to that. Meanwhile, that’s five out of five people from my calendar who I visited and there was no evidence of a soul vessel.”

“And out of five, even you would have found one. Even a blind squirrel—”

“They weren’t there.”

“Maybe you should try starting at the
end
of the list. Catch up on the most recent names, the people just went on your calendar. Retrieve those and work backward.”

“When? I’m officially back on duty. I have real cases to work.”

“Well, you put this off anymore, shit gonna get real up in here real quick. Let me call your attention to exhibit A, Inspector: motherfucking banshee Tasing motherfuckers in the privacy of their own home.”

“I know. I know. But, assuming I find the soul vessels, how am I going to sell them? With my caseload, I can’t open the bookstore.”

“Hire someone.”

“I can’t afford to hire someone. I’m barely keeping the doors open working there myself, and I don’t even take a salary.”

“You do what you’re supposed to do, collect the soul vessels, the money will come. It always does.”

“That more of your unified theory?”

“Experience. I’ve known a dozen Death Merchants. Everyone said the same thing: as soon as you start doing it, the money comes. You are catching up, Inspector. You’re not going to have time to work in your store at all. It’s a bookstore. There’s a multitude of bright, overeducated motherfuckers with liberal arts degrees who would be happy to come work for you, just on the outside chance someone might ask them about Milton or Postmodernism or something, just like for my record store, there’s a shitload of insufferable know-it-all hipsters who will work for next to nothing for the privilege of condescending to customers about their musical knowledge. Just run an ad and hire someone.”

“What about that spooky girl who used to work for Asher?” Rivera asked. “She knew all about our business. I mean, if it’s all right with you, I know you two—”

“I told you, it ain’t a motherfuckin’ thing, Rivera.”

“Sorry. Do you have her number?”

“I’ll call her for you.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Fresh.”

“I do not want to, I’m doing it because she won’t trust you if you try to tell her what’s going on.”

“Trust me? But I’m a cop.”

“Seriously? You did not just say that to a black man.” The Mint One disconnected.

C
risis Center. What is your name, please?”

“Kevin.”

“Hi Kevin. I’m Lily. Where are you calling from, Kevin?”

“I’m on the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m going to jump.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Nope. Not going to happen. Not on my watch.”

Now he was going to tell her his story. Lily liked to watch French movies with subtitles on her tablet while listening to
the story
. The stories were usually pretty similar, or at least it seemed that way, because they were always calling from the same chapter. The chapter where someone is thinking about jumping off a big orange bridge or walking in front of a train.

Kevin told her his story. It sounded sad. But not as sad as what poor Audrey Tautou was going through on the screen. Lily knew there would be sad French accordion music and she tried to work an earbud from her tablet under her phone headset ear so she could feel the full weight of poor Audrey’s despair . . .

Kevin paused. Lily paused her movie.

“Don’t do it,” she said. “There’s stuff to live for. Have you tried that cereal with the chocolate inside? Not
on
it, inside the actual cereal. How about pizza under a flaming dome? That shit is tasty insanity. Fuck, Kevin, you kill yourself without trying that, you’ll hate yourself even more than you do now. I’m a trained chef, Kevin. I know.”

“At least it will be over.”

“Oh, hell no, it won’t be over. You could hit the water, blow out an eardrum, shatter a bunch of vertebrae, die cold and in excruciating pain, and then, like five minutes later, you’re a squirrel in a top hat and tap shoes, fighting a pigeon with a spork over a used donut. I have seen things, Kevin, terrible, dark, disturbing things. You do not want to go there.”

“Really, a spork?”

“Yeah, Kevin, the fucking detail you want to grasp on to is the spork. That was the point of the story. Not that you’ll be a squirrel in tap shoes, fighting a pigeon over a donut? That’s a custard donut, Kevin. Custard is running out of the donut onto the pavement. There are ants on your donut, Kevin.”

“Whoa, ants?”

“Ants are still not the important part, Kevin, you douche waffle.”

“Hey, I don’t even like custard donuts.”

“Jump, Kevin. Over you go.”

“What?”

“Geronimo! Let loose a long trailing scream as you go—warn any boaters or windsurfers to look the fuck out. No sense dragging someone along with your dumb ass.”

“Hey?”

“Take the leap, Kevin. Into the maelstrom of suffering that will open for you.”

“At least it will be different.”

“Yeah, different in that it will be worse. Since when did a two-hundred foot drop into icy waves full of sharks spell hope to you, huh? You think you’re depressed now? You think you’re hopeless now? Wait until you’re reincarnated as a crazed, scurrying little creature, desperate, afraid of everything, wearing stupid outfits. I’ve seen them, Kevin. I’ll show you. You take a look at them, see what you’ll become, and if you still want to jump, I’ll drive you back there and push you off. Deal?”

“You’re lying.”

“I am. I don’t have a car. But I’ll pay your cab fare and say good-bye to you over the phone as you go. Worst-case scenario, you get to see some really creepy little animal people and two hours from now you’re in the same place you are now, and I’m giving you hot phone sex as you’re plummeting into the shark cafeteria.”

“Really?”

“Really. Your phone got a camera?”

“Yeah.”

“Send me a selfie.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah, how am going to know what you look like?”

“Okay. This shirt has a little coffee stain down the front.”

“Got it. Now head for the city side of the bridge. I’ll be there in ten.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“I’m going to borrow my boss’s. Head for the tollgates. I’ll park the car in the visitor center and walk up.”

“Can’t you stay on the line until you get here.”

“Would love to, Kevin, but I can’t tie up the crisis line. Look, I’ll call you from my cell in a second. They make us leave them in the locker room, so give me five minutes. Head for the tollbooths. I’ll call you in a bit.”

“How will I know you?”

“I’m Asian.” She wasn’t Asian, but there would be a metric fuckload of Asian girls on the bridge for him to think were her. “Ten minutes. Don’t jump, okay?”