A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper 1)

Twenty seconds later the nurse with the snake tattoo arrived, followed in another thirty seconds by a resuscitation team with a crash cart.

There was nothing they could do.

Chapter 2

2

A FINE EDGE

There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality - there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

So Charlie was barely even aware of his own shrieks in Rachel's hospital room, of being sedated, of the filmy electric hysteria that netted everything he did for that first day. After that, it was a memory out of a sleepwalk, scenes filmed from a zombie's eye socket, as he ambled undead through explanations, accusations, preparations, and ceremony.

"It's called a cerebral thromboembolism," the doctor had said. "A blood clot forms in the legs or pelvis during labor, then moves to the brain, cutting off the blood supply. It's very rare, but it happens. There was nothing we could do. Even if the crash team had been able to revive her, she'd have had massive brain damage. There was no pain. She probably just felt sleepy and passed. "

Charlie whispered to keep from screaming, "The man in mint green! He did something to her. He injected her with something. He was there and he knew that she was dying. I saw him when I brought her CD back. "

They showed him the security tapes - the nurse, the doctor, the hospital's administrators and lawyers - they all watched the black-and-white images of him leaving Rachel's room, of the empty hallway, of his returning to her room. No tall black man dressed in mint green. They didn't even find the CD.

Sleep deprivation, they said. Hallucination brought on by exhaustion. Trauma. They gave him drugs to sleep, drugs for anxiety, drugs for depression, and they sent him home with his baby daughter.

Charlie's older sister, Jane, held baby Sophie as they spoke over Rachel and buried her on the second day. He didn't remember picking out a casket or making arrangements. It was more of the somnambulant dream: his in-laws moving to and fro in black, like tottering specters, spouting the inadequate clich??s of condolence: We're so sorry. She was so young. What a tragedy. If there's anything we can do. . .

Rachel's father and mother held him, their heads pressed together in the apex of a tripod. The slate floor in the funeral-home foyer spotted with their tears. Every time Charlie felt the shoulders of the older man heave with a sob, he felt his own heart break again. Saul took Charlie's face in his hands and said, "You can't imagine, because I can't imagine. " But Charlie could imagine, because he was a Beta Male, and imagination was his curse; and he could imagine because he had lost Rachel and now he had a daughter, that tiny stranger sleeping in his sister's arms. He could imagine the man in mint green taking her.

Charlie looked at the tear-spotted floor and said, "That's why most funeral homes are carpeted. Someone could slip. "

"Poor boy," said Rachel's mother. "We'll sit shivah with you, of course. "

Charlie made his way across the room to his sister, Jane, who wore a man's double-breasted suit in charcoal pinstripe gabardine, that along with her severe eighties pop-star hairstyle and the infant in the pink blanket that she held, made her appear not so much androgynous as confused. Charlie thought the suit actually looked better on her than it did on him, but she should have asked him for permission to wear it nonetheless.

"I can't do this," he said. He let himself fall forward until the receded peninsula of dark hair touched her gelled Flock of Seagulls platinum flip. It seemed like the best posture for sharing grief, this forehead lean, and it reminded him of standing drunkenly at a urinal and falling forward until his head hit the wall. Despair.

"You're doing fine," Jane said. "Nobody's good at this. "

"What the fuck's a shivah?"

"I think it's that Hindu god with all the arms. "

"That can't be right. The Goldsteins are going to sit on it with me. "

"Didn't Rachel teach you anything about being Jewish?"

"I wasn't paying attention. I thought we had time. "

Jane adjusted baby Sophie into a half-back, one-armed carry and put her free hand on the back of Charlie's neck. "You'll be okay, kid. "

Seven," said Mrs. Goldstein. "Shivah means 'seven. ' We used to sit for seven days, grieving for the dead, praying. That's Orthodox, now most people just sit for three. "

They sat shivah in Charlie and Rachel's apartment that overlooked the cable-car line at the corner of Mason and Vallejo Streets. The building was a four-story brick Edwardian (architecturally, not quite the grand courtesan couture of the Victorians, but enough tarty trim and trash to toss off a sailor down a side street) built after the earthquake and fire of 1906 had leveled the whole area of what was now North Beach, Russian Hill, and Chinatown. Charlie and Jane had inherited the building, along with the thrift shop that occupied the ground floor, when their father died four years before. Charlie got the business, the large, double apartment they'd grown up in, and the upkeep on the old building, while Jane got half the rental income and one of the apartments on the top floor with a Bay Bridge view.

At the instruction of Mrs. Goldstein, all the mirrors in the house were draped with black fabric and a large candle was placed on the coffee table in the center of the living room. They were supposed to sit on low benches or cushions, neither of which Charlie had in the house, so, for the first time since Rachel's death, he went downstairs into the thrift shop looking for something they could use. The back stairs descended from a pantry behind the kitchen into the stockroom, where Charlie kept his office among boxes of merchandise waiting to be sorted, priced, and placed in the store.

The shop was dark except for the light that filtered in the front window from the streetlights out on Mason Street. Charlie stood there at the foot of the stairs, his hand on the light switch, just staring. Amid the shelves of knickknacks and books, the piles of old radios, the racks of clothes, all of them dark, just lumpy shapes in the dark, he could see objects glowing a dull red, nearly pulsing, like beating hearts. A sweater in the racks, a porcelain figure of a frog in a curio case, out by the front window an old Coca-Cola tray, a pair of shoes - all glowing red.

Charlie flipped the switch, fluorescent tubes fired to life across the ceiling, flickering at first, and the shop lit up. The red glow disappeared. "Okaaaaaaay," he said to himself, calmly, like everything was just fine now. He flipped off the lights. Glowing red stuff. On the counter, close to where he stood, there was a brass business-card holder cast in the shape of a whooping crane, glowing dull red. He took a second to study it, just to make sure there wasn't some red light source from outside refracting around the room and making him uneasy for no reason. He stepped into the dark shop, took a closer look, got an angle on the brass cranes. Nope, the brass was definitely pulsing red. He turned and ran back up the steps as fast as he could.

He nearly ran over Jane, who stood in the kitchen, rocking Sophie gently in her arms, talking baby talk under her breath.