A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper 1)

Ray sighed. "Maybe I should search for another Web site. What's a word that means that your standards are lower than the desperate?"

Charlie read down the page a little. "This woman has a master's degree in English lit from Cambridge, Ray. And look at her. She's gorgeous. And nineteen. Why is she desperate?"

"Hey, wait a minute. A master's degree at nineteen, this girl is too smart for me. "

"No she's not. She's lying. "

Ray spun on the stool as if Charlie had poked him in the ear with a pencil. "No!"

"Ray, look at her. She looks like one of those Asian models for Sour Apple Flavored Calamari Treats. "

"They have that?"

Charlie pointed to the left side of the front window. "Ray, let me introduce you to Chinatown. Chinatown, this is Ray. Ray, Chinatown. "

Ray smiled, embarrassed. There was a store two blocks up that sold nothing but dried shark parts, the windows full of pictures of beautiful Chinese women holding shark spleens and eyeballs like they'd just received an Academy Award. "Well, the last woman I met through here did have a few errors and omissions in her profile. "

"Like?" Charlie was watching the woman in tweed with the glowing frog, who was approaching the counter.

"Well, she said that she was twenty-three, five feet tall, a hundred five pounds, so I thought, 'Okay, I can have fun with a petite woman. ' Turns out it was a hundred and five kilos. "

"So, not what you expected?" Charlie said. He smiled at the approaching woman, feeling panic rise. She was going to buy the frog!

"Five foot - two-thirty. She was built like a mailbox. I might have gotten past that, but she wasn't even twenty-three, she was sixty-three. One of her grandsons tried to sell her to me. "

"Ma'am, I'm sorry, you can't buy that," Charlie said to the woman.

"You hear the expression all the time," Ray went on, "but you hardly ever meet anyone really trying to sell his own grandmother. "

"Why not?" the woman asked.

"Fifty bucks," Ray said.

"That's outrageous," the woman said. "It's marked ten. "

"No, it's fifty for the grandmother Ray is dating," Charlie said. "The frog is not for sale, ma'am, I'm sorry. It's defective. "

"Then why do you have it on the shelf? Why is it marked for sale? I don't see any defect. "

Evidently she couldn't see that the goofy porcelain frog was not only glowing in her hands, it had started to pulsate. Charlie reached across the counter and snatched it away from her.

"It's radioactive, ma'am. I'm sorry. You can't buy it. "

"I wasn't dating her," Ray said. "I just flew to the Philippines to meet her. "

"It is not radioactive," the woman said. "You're just trying to jack up the price. Fine, I'll give you twenty for it. "

"No, ma'am, public safety," Charlie said, trying to look concerned, holding the frog to his chest as if shielding her from its dangerous energy. "And it's clearly ridiculous. You'll note that this frog is playing a banjo with only two strings. A travesty, really. Why don't you let my colleague show you something in a cymbal-playing monkey. Ray, could you show this young woman something in a monkey, please. " Charlie hoped that the "young woman" would win him points.

The woman backed away from the counter, holding her purse before her like a shield. "I'm not sure I want to buy anything from you wack jobs. "

"Hey!" Ray protested, as if to say that there was only one wack job on duty and he wasn't it.

Then she did it, she quickstepped to a rack of shoes and picked up a pair of size-twelve, red Converse All Stars. They, too, were glowing. "I want these. "

"No. " Charlie tossed the frog over his shoulder to Ray, who fumbled it and almost dropped it. "Those aren't for sale either. "

The tweed woman backed away toward the door, holding the sneakers behind her. Charlie stalked her down the aisle, taking the occasional grab at the All Stars. "Give them. "