A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper 1)

Lily shut up.

She raised her eyebrows. As if "no. "

Charlie nodded. As if "yes. "

"The Big Death?"

"With a capital D," Charlie said.

"Well, you're totally not qualified for that," Lily said.

"Thanks, I feel better now. "

MINTY FRESH

Being two hundred feet under the sea always made Minty uneasy, especially if he'd been drinking sake and listening to jazz all night, which he had. He was in the last car on the last train out of Oakland, and he had the car to himself, like his own private submarine, cruising under the Bay with the echo of a tenor sax in his ear like sonar, and a half-dozen sake-sodden spicy tuna rolls sitting in his stomach like depth charges.

He'd spent his evening at Sato's on the Embarcadero, Japanese restaurant and jazz club. Sushi and jazz, strange bedfellows, shacked up by opportunity and oppression. It began in the Fillmore district, which had been a Japanese neighborhood before World War II. When the Japanese were shipped off to internment camps, and their homes and belongings sold off, the blacks, who came to the city to work in the shipyards building battleships and destroyers, moved into the vacant buildings. Jazz came close behind.

For years, the Fillmore was the center of the San Francisco jazz scene, and Bop City on Post Street the premier jazz club. When the war ended and the Japanese returned, many a late night might find Japanese kids standing under the windows of Bop City, listening to the likes of Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, o

r Charles Mingus, listening to art happen and dissipate into the San Francisco nights. Sato was one of those kids.

It wasn't just historical happenstance - Sato had explained to Minty, late one night after the music had ended and the sake was making him wax eloquent - it was philosophical alignment: jazz was a Zen art, dig? Controlled spontaneity. Like sumi-e ink painting, like haiku, like archery, like kendo fencing - jazz wasn't something you planned, it was something you did. You practiced, you played your scales, you learned your chops, then you brought all your knowledge, your conditioning, to the moment. "And in jazz, every moment is a crisis," Sato quoted Wynton Marsalis, "and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis. " Like the swordsman, the archer, the poet, and the painter - it's all right there - no future, no past, just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens.

And Minty, taken by the need to escape his life as Death, had taken the train to Oakland to find a moment he could hide in, without the regret of the past or the anxiety of the future, just a pure right now resting in the bell of a tenor sax. But the sake, too much future looming ahead, and too much water overhead had brought on the blues, the moment melted, and Minty was uneasy. Things were going badly. He'd been unable to retrieve his last two soul vessels - a first in his career - and he was starting to see, or hear, the effects. Voices out of the storm sewers - louder and more numerous than ever - taunting him. Things moving in the shadows, on the periphery of his vision, shuffling, scuffling dark things that disappeared when you looked right at them.

He'd even sold three discs off the soul-vessels rack to the same person, another first. He hadn't noticed it was the same woman right away, but when things started to go wrong, the faces played back and he realized. She'd been a monk the first time, a Buddhist monk of some kind, wearing gold-and-maroon robes, her hair very short, as if her head had been shaved and was growing out. What he remembered was that her eyes were a crystal blue, unusual in someone with such dark hair and skin. And there was a smile deep in those eyes that made him feel as if a soul had found its rightful place, a good home at a higher level. The next time he'd seen her was six months later and she was in jeans and leather jacket, her hair sort of out of control. She'd taken a CD from the "One Per Customer" rack, a Sarah McLachlan, which is what he'd have chosen for her if asked, and he barely noticed the crystal-blue eyes other than to think that he'd seen that smile before. Then, last week, it was her again, with hair down around her shoulders, wearing a long skirt and a belted muslin poet's shirt - like an escapee from a Renaissance fair, not unusual for the Haight, but not quite common in the Castro - still, he thought nothing of it, until she had paid him and glanced over the top of her sunglasses to count the cash out of her wallet. The blue eyes again, electric and not quite smiling this time. He didn't know what to do. He had no proof she was the monk, the chick in the leather jacket, but he knew it was her. He brought all his skills to bear on the situation, and essentially, he folded.

"So you like Mozart?" he asked her.

"It's for a friend" was all she said.

He rationalized not confronting her by that simple statement. A soul vessel was supposed to find its rightful owner, right? It didn't say he had to sell it directly to them. That had been a week ago, and since then the voices, the scuffling noises in the shadows, the general creepiness, had been nearly constant. Minty Fresh had spent most of his adult life alone, but never before had he felt the loneliness so profoundly. A dozen times in the last few weeks he'd been tempted to call one of the other Death Merchants under the pretense of warning them about his screwup, but mainly just to talk to someone who had a clue about what his life was like.

He stretched his long legs out over three train seats and into the aisle, then closed his eyes and laid his head back against the window, feeling the rhythm of the rattling train coming through the cool glass against his shaved scalp. Oh no, that wasn't going to work. Too much sake and something akin to bed spins. He jerked his head forward and opened his eyes, then noticed through the doors that the train had gone dark two cars up. He sat upright and watched as the lights went out in the next car - no, that's not what happened. Darkness moved through the car like a flowing gas, taking the energy out of the lights as it went.

"Oh, shit," Minty said to the empty car.

He couldn't even stand up inside the train, but stand up he did, staying slumped a little, his head against the ceiling, but facing the flowing darkness.

The door at the end of the car opened and someone stepped through. A woman. Well, not exactly a woman. What looked like the shadow of a woman.

"Hey, lover," it said. A low voice, smoky.

He'd heard this voice before, or a voice like it.

The darkness flowed around the two floor lights at the far end of the car, leaving the woman illuminated in outline only, a gunmetal reflection against pure blackness. Since he was first tapped as a Death Merchant, Minty had never remembered feeling afraid, but he was afraid now.

"I'm not your lover," Minty said, his voice as smooth and steady as a bass sax, not giving up a note of fear. A crisis in every moment, he thought.

"Once you've had black, you never go back," she said, taking a step toward him, her blue-black outline the only thing visible in any direction now.

He knew there was a door a few feet behind him that was held shut with powerful hydraulics, and that led to a dark tunnel two hundred feet under the Bay, lined with a deadly electric rail - but for some reason, that sounded like a really friendly place to be right now.

"I've had black," said Minty.

"No, you haven't, lover. You've had shades of brown, dark cocoa and coffee maybe, but I promise you, you've never had black. Because once you do, you never ever come back. "