A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper 1)

"Well, they threw her out of the Church for writing this book, but yeah, that's what she said. "

"She didn't have a number we could call in case they got lost. "

"I'm over here on my day off, Asher, trying to do you a favor. Are you going to keep being a smart-ass about it?"

"No, I'm sorry, Lily. Go on. "

"That's it. It's not like there's a care-and-feeding guide. Mostly, the research implies that having hellhounds around is a bad thing. "

"What's the title of this book, The Complete Guide to the Fucking Obvious?"

"You're paying me for this, you know? Time and travel. "

"Sorry. Yes. So I should try to get rid of them. "

"They eat people, Asher. Who's riding the duh train now?"

So, with that, Charlie decided that he needed to take an active role in ridding himself of the monstrous canines.

Since the only thing about the hellhounds that he could be sure of was that they would go anywhere he took Sophie, he brought them along on their trip to the San Francisco Zoo, and left them locked in the van with the engine running and a shop-vac hose run from the exhaust pipe through the vent window. After what he considered to be an extraordinarily successful tour of the zoo, in which not a single animal shuffled off the mortal coil under the delighted eye of his daughter, Charlie returned to the van to find two very stoned, but otherwise unharmed hellhounds who were burping a burnt plastic vapor after having eaten his seat covers.

Various experiments revealed that Alvin and Mohammed were not only immune to most poisons, but they rather liked the taste of bug spray and consequently licked all the paint off the baseboards in Charlie's apartment in the week following the exterminator's quarterly service.

As time wore on, Charlie tried to measure the danger of having the giant canines around against the damage that would be done to Sophie's psyche from witnessing their demise, as she was obviously becoming attached to them, so he backed off the more direct attacks on them and stopped throwing Snausages in front of the number 90 crosstown express bus. (This decision was also made easy when the city of San Francisco threatened to sue Charlie if his dogs wrecked another bus. )

Direct attacks, in fact, were difficult for Charlie (as the only true Beta Male martial art was based entirely on the kindness of strangers), so he turned on the hellhounds the awesome power of the Beta Male kung fu of passive aggression.

He started conservatively, taking them for a ride over to the East Bay in the van, luring them onto the Oakland mudflats with a rack of beef ribs, then driving away quickly, only to find them waiting in the apartment when he returned, having covered the entire living room with a patina of drying mud. He then tried an even more indirect approach: crating up the hounds and air-freighting them to Korea in the hope they would find themselves in an entr??e, only to find that they actually made it back to the shop before he had time to sweep the dog hair out of his apartment.

He thought that perhaps he might use their own natural instincts to chase them away, after he read on the Internet that the essence of cougar urine was sometimes sprinkled on shrubs and flowers to keep dogs from urinating on them. After a fairly exhaustive search through the phone book, he finally found the number of an outdoorsman's supply store in South San Francisco that was a certified mountain-lion whizz dealer.

"Sure, we carry cougar urine," the guy said. He sounded like he was wearing a buckskin jacket and had a big beard, but Charlie might have just been projecting.

"And that's supposed to keep dogs away?" Charlie asked.

"Works like a charm. Dogs, deer, and rabbits. How much do you need?"

"I don't know, maybe ten gallons. "

There was a pause, and Charlie was sure he could hear the guy picking flecks of elk meat out of his beard. "We sell it in one-, two-, and five-ounce bottles. "

"Well, that's not going to do it," Charlie said. "Can't you get me like a large economy size - preferably from a cougar that's been fed nothing but dog for a couple of months? I assume that this is domesticated cougar pee, right? I mean you don't go out in the wild and collect it yourself. "

"No, sir, I believe they get it from zoos. "

"The wild stuff is probably better, huh?" Charlie asked. "If you can get it, I mean? I don't mean you personally. I wasn't implying that you were out in the wild following a mountain lion around with a measuring cup. I meant a professional - hello?" The bearded buckskin-sounding guy had hung up.

So Charlie sent Ray over to South San Francisco in the van to buy up all the cougar whizz they had, but in the end it achieved nothing other than making the whole second floor of Charlie's building smell like a cat box.

When it appeared that even the most passive-aggressive attempts would not work, Charlie resorted to the ultimate Beta Male attack, which was to tolerate Alvin and Mohammed's presence, but to resent the hell out of them and drop snide remarks whenever he had the chance.

Feeding the hellhounds was like shoveling coal into two ravenous steam engines - Charlie started having fifty pounds of dog food delivered every two days to keep up with them, which they, in turn, converted to massive torpedoes of poo that they dropped in the streets and alleys around Asher's Secondhand like they were staging their own doggie blitzkrieg on the neighborhood.

The upside of their presence was that Charlie went for months on end without hearing a peep from the storm drains or seeing an ominous raven shadow on a wall when he was retrieving a soul vessel. And to that end, the death dealing, the hounds served their purpose as well, for whenever a new name appeared in his date book, the hounds would drag Charlie to the calendar every morning until he returned with the soul object, so he went two years without missing or being late for a retrieval. The big dogs, of course, accompanied Charlie and Sophie on their walks, which had resumed once Charlie was sure that Sophie had her "special" language skill under control. The hounds, while certainly the largest dogs that anyone had ever seen, were not so large as to be unbelievable, and everywhere they went, Charlie was asked what breed they were. Tired of trying to explain, he would simply say, "They're hellhounds," and when asked where he got them, he would reply, "They just showed up in my daughter's room one night and wouldn't go away," after which people not only thought him a liar, but an ass as well. So he modified his response to "They're Irish hellhounds," which for some reason, people accepted immediately (except for one Irish football fan in a North Beach restaurant who said, "I'm Irish and those things aren't bloody Irish. " To which Charlie replied, "Black Irish. " The football fan nodded as if he knew that all along and added to the waitress, "Can I get another fookin' pint o' here before I dry up and blow away, lass?")

In a way, Charlie started to enjoy the notoriety of being the guy with the cute little girl and the two giant dogs. When you have to maintain a secret identity, you can't help but relish a little public attention. And Charlie did, until the day he and Sophie were stopped on a side street on Russian Hill by a bearded man in a long cotton caftan and a woven hat. Sophie was old enough by then to do a lot of her own walking, although Charlie kept a piggyback kid sling with him so he could carry her when she got tired (but more often he would just balance her while she rode on the back of Alvin or Mohammed).

The bearded man passed a little too closely to Sophie and Mohammed growled and imposed himself between the man and the child.