The guy's name was William Creek. He was thirty-two and worked as a market analyst in the financial district, where he had been headed that morning when he decided to stop at the auto-teller. He was wearing a light wool suit and running shoes, his work shoes were tucked into a leather satchel under his arm. The handle of a compact umbrella protruded from the side pocket of the satchel, and it was this that caught Charlie's attention, for while the handle of the umbrella appeared to be made of faux walnut burl, it was glowing a dull red as if it had been heated in a forge.
Charlie stood in the ATM line trying not to notice, trying to appear uninterested, but he couldn't help but stare. It was glowing, for fuck's sake, didn't anyone see it?
William Creek glanced over his shoulder as he slid his card into the machine, saw Charlie looking at him, then tried to will his suit coat to expand into great manta-ray wings to block Charlie's view as he keyed in his PIN number. Creek snatched his card and the expectorated cash from the machine, turned, and headed away quickly toward the corner.
Charlie couldn't stand it any longer. The umbrella handle had begun to pulsate red, like a beating heart. As Creek reached the curb, Charlie said, "Excuse me. Excuse me, sir!"
When Creek turned, Charlie said, "Your umbrella - "
At that point, the number forty-one bus was coming through the intersection at Columbus and Vallejo at about thirty-five miles per hour, angling toward the curb for its next stop. Creek looked down at the satchel under his arm where Charlie was pointing, and the heel of his running shoe caught the slight rise of the curb. He started to lose his balance, the sort of thing we all might do on any given day while walking through the city, trip on a crack in the sidewalk and take a couple of quick steps to regain equilibrium, but William Creek took only one step. Back. Off the curb.
You can't really sugarcoat it at this point, can you? The number forty-one bus creamed him. He flew a good fifty feet through the air before he hit the back window of a SAAB like a great gabardine sack of meat, then bounced back to the pavement and commenced to ooze fluids. His belongings - the satchel, the umbrella, a gold tie bar, a Tag Heuer watch - skittered on down the street, ricocheting off tires, shoes, manhole covers, some coming to rest nearly a block away.
Charlie stood at the curb trying to breathe. He could hear a tooting sound, like someone was blowing a toy train whistle - it was all he could hear, then someone ran into him and he realized it was the sound of his own rhythmic whimpering. The guy - the guy with the umbrella - had just been wiped out of the world. People rushed, crowded around, a dozen were barking into cell phones, the bus driver nearly flattened Charlie as he rushed down the sidewalk toward the carnage. Charlie staggered after him.
"I was just going to ask him - "
No one looked at Charlie. It had taken all of his will, as well as a pep talk from his sister, to leave the apartment, and now this?
"I was just going to tell him that his umbrella was on fire," Charlie said, as if he was explaining to his accusers. But no one accused him, really. They ran by him, some headed toward the body, some away from it - they batted him around and looked back, baffled, like they'd collided with a rough air current or a ghost instead of a man.
"The umbrella," Charlie said, looking for the evidence. Then he spotted it, almost down at the next corner, lying in the gutter, still glowing red, pulsating like failing neon. "There! See!" But people were gathered around the dead man in a wide semicircle, their hands to their mouths, and no one was paying any attention to the frightened thin man spouting nonsense behind them.
He threaded his way through the crowd toward the umbrella, determined now to confirm his conviction, too far in shock to be afraid. When he was only ten feet away from it he looked up the street to make sure another bus wasn't coming before he ventured off the curb. He looked back just as a delicate, tar-black hand snaked out of the storm drain and snatched the compact umbrella off the street.
Charlie backed away, looking around to see if anyone had seen what he had seen, but no one had. No one even made eye contact. A policeman trotted by and Charlie grabbed his sleeve as he passed, but when the cop spun around and his eyes went wide with confusion, then what appeared to be real terror, Charlie let him go. "Sorry," he said. "Sorry. I can see you've got work to do - sorry. "
The cop shuddered and pushed through the crowd of onlookers toward the battered body of William Creek.
Charlie started running, across Columbus and up Vallejo, until his breath and heartbeat in his ears drowned all the sounds of the street. When he was a block away from his shop a great shadow moved over him, like a low-flying aircraft or a huge bird, and with it Charlie felt a chill vibrate up his back. He lowered his head, pumped his arms, and rounded the corner of Mason just as the cable car was passing, full of smiling tourists who looked right through him. He glanced up, just for a second, and he thought he saw something above, disappearing over the roof of the six-story Victorian across the street, then he bolted through the front door of his shop.
"Hey, boss," Lily said. She was sixteen, pale, and a little bottom heavy - her grown-woman form still in flux between baby fat and baby bearing. Today her hair happened to be lavender: fifties-housewife helmet hair in Easter-basket cellophane pastel.
Charlie was bent over, leaning against a case full of curios by the door, sucking in deep raspy gulps of secondhand store mustiness. "I - think - I - just - killed - a - guy," he gasped.
"Excellent," Lily said, ignoring equally his message and his demeanor. "We're going to need change for the register. "
"With a bus," Charlie said.
"Ray called in," she said. Ray Macy was Charlie's other employee, a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor with an unhealthy lack of boundaries between the Internet and reality. "He's flying to Manila to meet the love of his life. A Ms. LoveYouLongTime. Ray's convinced that they are soul mates. "
"There was something in the sewer," Charlie said.
Lily examined a chip in her black nail polish. "So I cut school to cover. I've been doing that since you've been, uh, gone. I'm going to need a note. "
Charlie stood up and made his way to the counter. "Lily, did you hear what I sa
id?"
He grabbed her by the shoulders, but she spun out of his grasp. "Ouch! Fuck. Back off, Asher, you sado freak, that's a new tattoo. " She punched him in the arm, hard, and backed away, rubbing her own shoulder. "I heard, you. Cease your trippin', s'il vous plaît. " Lately, since discovering Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal in a stack of used books in the back room, Lily had been peppering her speech with French phrases. "French better expresses the profound noirness of my existence," she had said.
Charlie put both hands on the counter to keep them from shaking, then spoke slowly and deliberately, like he was speaking to someone for whom English was a second language: "Lily, I'm having kind of a bad month, and I appreciate that you are throwing away your education so you can come here and alienate customers for me, but if you don't sit down and show me a little fucking human decency, then I'm going to have to let you go. "
Lily sat down on the chrome-and-vinyl diner stool behind the register and pulled her long lavender bangs out of her eyes. "So you want me to pay close attention to your confession to murder? Take notes, maybe get an old cassette recorder off the shelf and get everything down on tape? You're saying that by trying to ignore your obvious distress, which I would have to later recall to the police, so I can be personally responsible for sending you to the gas chamber, that I'm being inconsiderate?"
Charlie shuddered. "Jeez, Lily. " He was continually surprised at the speed and accuracy of her creepiness. She was like some creepiness child prodigy. But on the bright side, her extreme darkness made him realize that he probably wasn't going to go to the gas chamber.
"It wasn't that kind of killing. There was something following me, and - "