“Good. That’s good. And Ray, he doesn’t know?”
“I think he suspects I’m a serial killer, but he’s clueless about the other thing.”
“You know Charlie Asher was one of us?”
“Yes. That’s how I met Ray. I went to Asher’s shop after the Latino cop told me what had happened and picked up the soul vessels that had been taken from me. The cop said it was over.”
“Rivera didn’t know. He was just being a cop. He’s one of us, now.”
“So maybe the others have been replaced, too.”
“No way to tell. We only knew about you because Charlie Asher went in your store once and saw the soul vessels. We don’t know what rules are still in effect. That’s what we’re trying to find out. I won’t contact you again unless it’s an emergency, just in case our contact is bringing up the forces of darkness like before. You can always reach me at my store if anything strange happens.” He threw a business card on her desk. “My mobile’s there. Anytime. Even if it’s just to fuck with Ray.”
She laughed. Her eyes had been getting wider and her expression more frightened as he had spoken, but now she smiled. She picked up his card. “Okay.”
“Just one more favor, then I’m in the wind.”
“Sure.”
“I need to look at your book. Your calendar.”
“We allowed to do that?”
“Who knows?”
“Okay.” She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a leather date book, and slid it across the desk to him. “There’s only one uncollected. Just appeared today.”
“I’m looking for a specific name. Mike Sullivan. Sound familiar? Within the last six weeks or so?” They’d figured out long ago that Death Merchants had the forty-nine days of bardo, the transition from life to death, to collect the soul vessel; sometimes they got it before the subject died, sometimes after.
“Nope,” she said.
He opened the book to the current date and she saw another entry on the page. “Two, I guess,” she said. “That last one wasn’t there this morning.”
Minty saw the newest name on her calendar and the number of days she had to retrieve the soul vessel: one.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“What? What? What?” She stood and leaned over, trying to get a better look at the new entry.
“I know this guy. He’s a cop.”
Sundown. Rivera was sneaking into a house when his phone buzzed in his jacket pocket and he che
cked it: Minty Fresh. He hit mute and soldiered on, walking into a bedroom where a portly man in pajamas was holding a pillow over the face of a thin person propped up in a hospital bed.
“Just a little bit more,” said the man. He looked to the clock on the nightstand as if timing himself.
After being restrained for twenty-five years by warrants, or at least knock and announce, Rivera was still getting used to sneaking into a house under the cloak of kinda-sorta invisibility. He kept reminding himself that he was not here as a cop. But then the guy looked over at him.
“Holy—!” The fat guy leapt back, threw the pillow in the air, and grabbed his chest. The woman’s head in the hospital bed lolled to the side. She was dead.
“You can see me?” said Rivera.
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news, then.”
“Worse than you walked in on me smothering my mother?”