A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) Read Free Page B

to collapse after a few weeks under its own weight, and the result was not so much a patchwork of organizational systems, but a garden of mismatched piles. Lily, the maroon-haired Goth girl who worked for Charlie three afternoons a week, said that the fact that they ever found anything at all was proof of the chaos theory at work, then she would walk away muttering and go out in the alley to smoke clove cigarettes and stare into the Abyss. (Although Charlie noted that the Abyss looked an awful lot like a Dumpster.)
    It took Jane ten minutes to navigate the aisles and find three cushions that looked wide enough and thick enough that they might work for sitting shivah, and when she returned to Charlie’s apartment she found her brother curled into the fetal position around baby Sophie, asleep on the kitchen floor. The other mourners had completely forgotten about him.
    “Hey, doofus.” She nudged his shoulder with her toe and he rolled onto his back, the baby still in his arms. “These okay?”
    “Did you see anything glowing?”
    Jane dropped the stack of cushions on the floor. “What?”
    “Glowing red. Did you see things in the shop glowing, like pulsating red?”
    “No. Did you?”
    “Kind of.”
    “Give ’em up.”
    “What?”
    “The drugs. Hand them over. They’re obviously much better than you led me to believe.”
    “But you said they were just antianxiety.”
    “Give up the drugs. I’ll watch the kid while you shivah.”
    “You can’t watch my daughter if you’re on drugs.”
    “Fine. Surrender the crumb snatcher and go sit.”
    Charlie handed the baby up to Jane. “You have to keep Mom out of the way, too.”
    “Oh no, not without drugs.”
    “They’re in the medicine cabinet in the master bath. Bottom shelf.”
    He was sitting on the floor now, rubbing his forehead as if to stretch the skin out over his pain. She kneed him in the shoulder.
    “Hey, kid, I’m sorry, you know that, right? Goes without saying, right?”
    “Yeah.” A weak smile.
    She held the baby up by her face, then looked down in adoration, Mother of Jesus style. “What do you think? I should get one of these, huh?”
    “You can borrow mine whenever you need to.”
    “Nah, I should get my own. I already feel bad about borrowing your wife.”
    “Jane!”
    “Kidding! Jeez. You’re such a wuss sometimes. Go sit shivah. Go. Go. Go.”
    Charlie gathered the cushions and went to the living room to grieve with his in-laws, nervous because the only prayer he knew was “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” and he wasn’t sure that was going to cut it for three full days.
    Jane forgot to mention the tall guy from the shop.

BENEATH THE NUMBER FORTY-ONE BUS
    I t was two weeks before Charlie left the apartment and walked down to the auto-teller on
Columbus Avenue
where he first killed a guy. His weapon of choice was the number forty-one bus, on its way from the
Trans
Bay
station, by the
Bay
Bridge
, to the Presidio, by the
Golden Gate
Bridge
. If you’re going to get hit by a bus in San Francisco, you want to go with the forty-one, because you can pretty much figure on there being a nice bridge view.
    Charlie hadn’t really counted on killing a guy that morning. He had hoped to get some twenties for the register at the thrift store, check his balance, and maybe pick up some yellow mustard at the deli. (Charlie was not a brown mustard kind of guy. Brown mustard was the condiment equivalent of skydiving—it was okay for race-car drivers and serial killers, but for Charlie, a fine line of French’s yellow was all the spice that life required.) After the funeral, friends and relatives had left a mountain of cold cuts in Charlie’s fridge, which was all he’d eaten for the past two weeks, but now he was down to ham, dark rye, and premixed Enfamil formula, none of which was tolerable without yellow mustard. He’d secured the yellow squeeze bottle and felt safer now with it in his jacket pocket, but when the bus hit the guy, mustard