A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper 1)

"What?" Jane said. "I know you have some big cushions down in the shop somewhere. "

"I can't," Charlie said. "I'm on drugs. " He backed against the refrigerator, like he was holding it hostage.

"I'll go get them. Here, hold the baby. "

"I can't, I'm on drugs. I'm hallucinating. "

Jane cradled the baby in the crook of her right arm and put a free arm around her younger brother. "Charlie, you are on antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, not acid. Look around this apartment, there's not a person here that's not on something. " Charlie looked through the kitchen pass-through: women in black, most of them middle-aged or older, shaking their heads, men looking stoic, standing around the perimeter of the living room, each holding a stout tumbler of liquor and staring into space.

"See, they're all fucked up. "

"What about Mom?" Charlie nodded to their mother, who stood out among the other gray-haired women in black because she was draped in silver Navaho jewelry and was so darkly tanned that she appeared to be melting into her old-fashioned when she took a sip.

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"Especially Mom," Jane said. "I'll go look for something to sit shivah on. I don't know why you can't just use the couches. Now take your daughter. "

"I can't. I can't be trusted with her. "

"Take her, bitch!" Jane barked in Charlie's ear - sort of a whisper bark. It had long ago been determined who was the Alpha Male between them and it was not Charlie. She handed off the baby and cut to the stairs.

"Jane," Charlie called after her. "Look around before you turn on the lights. See if you see anything weird, okay?"

"Right. Weird. "

She left him standing there in the kitchen, studying his daughter, thinking that her head might be a little oblong, but despite that, she looked a little like Rachel. "Your mommy loved Aunt Jane," he said. "They used to gang up on me in Risk - and Monopoly - and arguments - and cooking. " He slid down the fridge door, sat splayed-legged on the floor, and buried his face in Sophie's blanket.

In the dark, Jane barked her shin on a wooden box full of old telephones. "Well, this is just stupid," she said to herself, and flipped on the lights. Nothing weird. Then, because Charlie was many things, but one of them was not crazy, she turned off the lights again, just to be sure that she hadn't missed something. "Right. Weird. "

There was nothing weird about the store except that she was standing there in the dark rubbing her shin. But then, right before she turned on the light again, she saw someone peering in the front window, making a cup around his eyes to see through the reflection of the streetlights. A homeless guy or drunken tourist, she thought. She moved through the dark shop, between columns of comic books stacked on the floor, to a spot behind a rack of jackets where she could get a clear view of the window, which was filled with cheap cameras, vases, belt buckles, and all manner of objects that Charlie had judged worthy of interest, but obviously not worthy of a smash-and-grab.

The guy looked tall, and not homeless, nicely dressed, but all in a single light color, she thought it might be yellow, but it was hard to tell under the streetlights. Could be light green.

"We're closed," Jane said, loud enough to be heard through the glass.

The man outside peered around the shop, but couldn't spot her. He stepped back from the window and she could see that he was, indeed, tall. Very tall. The streetlight caught the line of his cheek as he turned. He was also very thin and very black.

"I was looking for the owner," the tall man said. "I have something I need to show him. "

"There's been a death in the family," Jane said. "We'll be closed for the week. Can you come back in a week?"

The tall man nodded, looking up and down the street as he did. He rocked on one foot like he was about to bolt, but kept stopping himself, like a sprinter straining against the starting blocks. Jane didn't move. There were always people out on the street, and it wasn't even late yet, but this guy was too anxious for the situation. "Look, if you need to get something appraised - "

"No," he cut her off. "No. Just tell him she's, no - tell him to look for a package in the mail. I'm not sure when. "

Jane smiled to herself. This guy had something - a brooch, a coin, a book - something that he thought was worth some money, maybe something he'd found in his grandmother's closet. She'd seen it a dozen times. They acted like they've found the lost city of Eldorado - they'd come in with it tucked in their coats, or wrapped in a thousand layers of tissue paper and tape. (The more tape, generally, the more worthless the item would turn out to be - there was an equation there somewhere. ) Nine times out of ten it was crap. She'd watched her father try to finesse their ego and gently lower the owners into disappointment, convince them that the sentimental value made it priceless, and that he, a lowly secondhand-store owner, couldn't presume to put a value on it. Charlie, on the other hand, would just tell them that he didn't know about brooches, or coins, or whatever they had and let someone else bear the bad news.

"Okay, I'll tell him," Jane said from her cover behind the coats.

With that, the tall man was away, taking great praying-mantis strides up the street and out of view. Jane shrugged, went back and turned on the lights, then proceeded to search for cushions among the piles.

It was a big store, taking up nearly the whole bottom floor of the building, and not particularly well organized, as each system that Charlie adopted seemed to collapse after a few weeks under its own weight, and the result was not so much a patchwork of organizational systems, but a garden of mismatched piles. Lily, the maroon-haired Goth girl who worked for Charlie three afternoons a week, said that the fact that they ever found anything at all was proof of the chaos theory at work, then she would walk away muttering and go out in the alley to smoke clove cigarettes and stare into the Abyss. (Although Charlie noted that the Abyss looked an awful lot like a Dumpster. )

It took Jane ten minutes to navigate the aisles and find three cushions that looked wide enough and thick enough that they might work for sitting shivah, and when she returned to Charlie's apartment she found her brother curled into the fetal position around baby Sophie, asleep on the kitchen floor. The other mourners had completely forgotten about him.

"Hey, doofus. " She nudged his shoulder with her toe and he rolled onto his back, the baby still in his arms. "These okay?"

"Did you see anything glowing?"