Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)

Minty disconnected them. “With you and Rivera, that’s a ­couple of hundred souls uncollected right there.”

“And you think it might be thousands.”

“In the Bay Area alone.”

“We’re probably fine, all those souls and nothing has happened.”

“Banshee,” said Minty, holding a long finger in the air to mark his point. “She calls herself a harbinger of doom, Asher. You know what a harbinger is?”

“I’m really hoping it’s a brand of Scotch.”

“It’s a messenger that tells you what is going to happen. With a banshee, that message is that death is coming.”

Charlie shrugged. “Big Death or little death?”

Fresh shrugged, shook his head.

“Then you need to help me find a body,” said Charlie.

“What?”

“That’s why I called. You help me find a body, then I can help you fix whatever the banshee is warning us about.”

“Like a corpse-­type body?”

“Not exactly. Someone who is going to be a corpse, but before they become a corpse.”

“Doesn’t that describe everybody?”

“I mean right before they die. Like we have to be there at the moment of death.”

“Are you asking me to help you kill someone, because no.”

“Let me get Audrey. She’ll explain.”

5

The ­People Under the Porch

Chöd,” said Audrey. The d was silent, it rhymed with “foe.”

“Chöd?” Minty Fresh repeated. He couldn’t stop looking at the surprised comma of her hair, for which he was grateful, because it kept him from looking at Charlie, which made him uncomfortable. When Audrey came in she insisted that Charlie come out of the pantry, so now they sat at an oak table in the breakfast room of the Buddhist Center, Audrey and he on chairs, Charlie sitting on his mixed nut can atop the table.

“Chöd’s the ritual I will perform to get Charlie a new body.”

When Minty had first seen her in his shop, several years ago, when she was rail thin, wore no makeup, and her shaved head was still in stubble, it would have been easy to believe she was a Buddhist nun, although he remembered at the time thinking she might be a chemotherapy patient, but now, with her drag-­queen hair and a girlish shape filling out jeans and a San Francisco Giants thermal, it was hard to make the leap. This woman had been given the secret books of the dead by a Tibetan master? How could that be? She was dating a puppet!

“She can’t use the p’howa of forceful projection ritual that she used to put souls into the Squirrel ­People,” said Charlie.

“There would be no way to know that there wasn’t another soul in someone’s body,” Audrey said.

“We don’t know what would happen, but at best you’d end up with two personalities battling,” Charlie added.

“More likely two lunatics in one body, neither functioning,” said Audrey.

“And y’all can’t just use a corpse why? Your thingy of undying?”

“P’howa,” Audrey supplied.