Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)

“He used SWAT loads,” Rivera explained. Cavuto loaded the .44 with very-­high-speed, prefrangilized bullets—a copper jacket filled with lead beads encased in resin, half the weight of a normal .44 round, thus the high speed, but when they hit they expanded explosively, doing enormous damage to flesh, or in this case, paper. Used by law enforcement because they didn’t ricochet, and would not go through walls or car doors to hurt innocents. Essentially, they blew up on the first thing they hit, and Cavuto had hit what he was aiming at, thus the spray of hellish down.

Nyguen ran his own pen around the edge of one of the craters in the books, careful not to actually touch it. “So these rounds went through someone before they hit here?”

“Something,” Rivera said. “If it had been someone, there’d be a pile of ground meat here to identify and clean up.”

“Fuck,” said Nguyen.

“Yeah,” said Rivera. “I’m headed to St. Francis. Tell the watch commander, would you?”

Rivera did not hurry because he knew there was no reason to hurry. They wouldn’t be bringing Nick Cavuto back to the land of the living. They continued to work on the big cop for forty-­five minutes after Rivera arrived at the hospital without getting so much as a blip of a heartbeat. They pronounced him dead a little after 8 P.M.

A captain from Personal Crimes debriefed Rivera at the hospital, after which two commanders took turns telling him to go home and stay away from the case, which he finally did when they threated to suspend him if he didn’t.

At home, he texted Minty Fresh about Cavuto’s death, then ate something, but he didn’t remember what, turned on the TV and sat in front of it, but he couldn’t have said what was on, then went to bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling, his Glock .40 cal in his hand, until 6 A.M., when he finally fell into a fitful, jerky sleep, with dreams full of the sound of frantic birds scratching at windows.

MINTY FRESH

Minty Fresh lay awake mentally arranging jazz albums by artist and recording date, cross-­referencing who played what on which record, listening in his mind’s ear to the signature riff of each artist as he came to mind. It was a rich, complex, demanding exercise, but it kept him from thinking about the dead cop, the dark rising, and the task he would have to perform tomorrow. It kept him from reaching that place that he hit so, so often in his life, the mind-­bending, sob-­inducing limit where he said to himself, I just cannot endure any more motherfucking death. No more!

Order. Put everything in order. Serve order. That was the why and what of it. Order.

In his head, he flipped albums, looked at liner notes, grainy photographs taken in smoky clubs, listened to notes played by men long dead, and he put them in order. ’Round Midnight, he drifted off.

MIKE SULLIVAN

Mike couldn’t remember being this excited to go to sleep since Christmas Eve when he was a kid: the excitement, the anticipation, the replaying, over and over, of how it would be, knowing that no matter how you imagined it, you’d be surprised. This was just like that, but instead of waking up to find that Santa had brought him a new bike, or a fire truck with an extending ladder (he loved that fire truck), he was going to get up in the morning and throw himself off a bridge and die.

He knew he should feel sad about it, in fact, he even felt a little guilty for not feeling sad, but he didn’t feel sad. He’d miss his apartment, and some of his friends, but not that much, really. Not compared to what it might be like. And there was the Christmas-­morning part: he was going to die, but he was not going to end. There was something else out there, more exciting and unknown than even a bike under the Christmas tree, and somehow there was an inevitability to all of it. He didn’t feel like this was a choice he was making, but more like a choice that had been made long ago and he was just fulfilling it—­like riding on a train, waiting for your station, you don’t decide at each station to stay or go, you get to your station and you get off. He was coming to his station.

He ran the Sanskrit chant through his head, which wasn’t hard. It was only a few words, Audrey had written them out phonetically for him, and since he’d first learned them and repeated them, they had rung in his head constantly. With the chant sounding in the background, he checked and rechecked the arrangements he’d made for Charlie Asher to take over his life, going so far as to label certain shirts that he thought looked good on him, certain background details he shared with the guys at work, listing each of their social network profiles so if Charlie ever ran into them, he might recognize them from their pictures.

He liked that someone was getting his stuff, even his body, as if he was giving someone who was really hungry half of his sandwich, after deciding he might have to throw it away. It was all so exciting. Charlie had called him, and in his strange, scratchy little voice, thanked him for what he was going to lose. Ha! Lose? “You’re welcome, but no, not lose,” he’d said. “A gift,” he said, and, “Thank you.”

Concepción! Concepción! Concepción! Concepción! My Conchita! My love! He had never felt like this and it was glorious. He ached for her, his soul sang electric with the thought of her, and tomorrow he would be with her.

He didn’t remember falling asleep and he didn’t care that he did, because in the morning he would get up, go to the bridge, then jump off and die.

LILY

Lily lived in the Sunset District, where San Francisco was open to the sea, so even when the rest of the city was warm and sunny, the fog rolled in over Ocean Beach and the Great Highway to settle between the rows of postwar tract homes. Lily liked the fog, and didn’t even mind the cold wind. She reckoned that Ocean Beach, the dunes there, and the Sunset were the closest San Francisco was going to come to the foreboding, windswept moors of England, where she had aspired to suffer romance and heartache when she was a kid. The foghorn, however, rather than a lonesome lament that conjured images of Heathcliff’s dark figure, waiting with clenched jaw on the moor for her to brin

g light and warmth into his life, sounded like a distressed moose tied up in her neighbor’s garage, having his nut sack singed with jumper cables at a precise interval calculated to keep her from falling asleep. Which, in turn, made her think of what complete douche bags ­people could be when all you wanted to do was borrow a defibrillator. Then she was awake and angry.

“Look, I just need it for a few hours,” she told the ambulance guy.

“They have to stay with the ambulance, miss,” the stupid guy had said. “We can’t lend them out.”

“Look, nurse, I’m trying to save lives over here. I swear, I’ll have it back to you in like three, four hours max.”

“Still can’t do it. Even if we could, these aren’t the consumer models like they hang on the wall at the airport. We’re trained to use these.”

“Quoi?” she had said, in perfect fucking French. They just hung defibrillators on the wall at the airport? Those things cost like five thousand dollars. (Which she hadn’t known when she said she’d take care of getting one.) And they just hang them there for anyone to use? She needed to travel more.

A quick search on her phone revealed that they hung them on the wall at City Hall, as well as at the airport, and she was only a few blocks from there. But she hadn’t really been sure she wanted to try to get on the bus or the BART while making off with a stolen defibrillator, so she had called her friend Abby, who had a car.

“Abs, we’re getting the band back together,” Lily’d said.

“I have to work at four,” Abby said.