Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)
“You bitch!” said Abby. She grabbed the front of Lily’s shirt and made to tear it open, but instead just stretched it out and spun Lily halfway around.
“Heart rhythm normal. Do not shock,” said the box.
“What’s going on here?” came a voice from down the hall.
It was a heavyset, coplike guy, in that he had a gun and a uniform, but he didn’t look like he ever had to do any difficult cop stuff.
Abby took off running the way they had come. Lily grabbed the defibrillator just as it was about to be yanked out of her hand and followed.
“Heart attack! Heart attack!” Abby yelled ahead. “Out of the way, I’m having a fucking heart attack.”
“She is,” said Lily, holding up the defibrillator as she ran. “Slow down, Abs, you’re pulling out the wires.”
Abby jumped into the Prius. Lily bundled the defibrillator into her friend’s lap, then jumped in the Prius’s back door behind her. “Go! Go! Go!”
And with all the roaring fury of a golf cart escaping the back nine, they sped into the traffic on Van Ness and were immediately stuck behind a bus, which, it turned out, didn’t matter, because no one was chasing them.
“Do not shock. Heart rhythm normal,” the box said.
“You got electro-stickum on my best bra,” Abby said. “I have to change before work, now.”
“They look good on you, though—like a sexy torture robot.”
“Yeah?” Abby was trying to look at her chest while driving. “See if there’s extras in the little box.”
So that had happened, and Lily had called M and told his voice mail, “No problem on the defibrillator, I’ll have it for you,” but then doubt started rising as evening came on, and by midnight she really, really wanted to be asleep, not thinking about killing a guy, but the stupid foghorn. What, ships didn’t have radar and stuff, they still had to use nineteenth-century technology to keep from crashing into rocks?
She went to her bedroom window, threw up the sash, and stuck her head out as the foghorn sounded.
“Really?” she shouted.
Again the horn.
“Seriously!”
“How ’bout you be quiet,” said Mr. Lee, the old Chinese guy who lived in the apartment below her and was hanging out the window smoking.
“Sorry,” she said, and slunk back to bed.
AUDREY AND CHARLIE
Since meeting with Mike, Audrey had spent three days fasting, chanting, and meditating, preparing herself to perform the ritual of Chöd, trying to achieve the mental state necessary, without, of course, thinking about achieving the mental state necessary, which is sort of the tricky part of Buddhism.
Late Wednesday night found her sitting in the lotus position on a wide, padded stool at the end of the bed while Charlie paced frantically around her, nervous about his big moment. She had not slept and would not sleep, having achieved the state of waking trance that she would need to maintain through the ritual, but Charlie’s toenails, snickt, snickt, snickting on the carpet threated to pull her out of her trance.
Calmly, evenly, quietly, she said, “Charlie. Please.”
“I can’t sleep. I’ve tried. All the things that could go wrong. What if it doesn’t work and Sophie never has her daddy? You could have done all of this for nothing. Mike might back out, and who could blame him. I’m sure there’s a wa
y I could screw this up. And you know if there’s a way to, I will. And not only that—”
“Please,” she said, not a note of alarm or anger, every breath with purpose.
“I just can’t sleep, there’s the—” and he was off again. Snickt, snickt, snickt.
Audrey, her face a model of the beautiful and compassionate Buddha, stood on the cushioned stool, ever so slowly—Venus rising from the sea on the half shell—and let her silk saffron robe slip off her until she stood there naked.
“Hey,” Charlie said. “Wow. What, are you—”