“I should probably report in or something.”
“Okay, call me, bye,” said Lily.
“Bye,” he said.
Mike put his phone back in the pouch then made his way to the top of the tower, hooked his safety lines on the high cables, then sat down, took off his hard hat, and ran his fingers through his hair, as if he might comb some of the strangeness out of the morning that way. He looked up at the giant aircraft warning light, sitting in its orange-painted steel cage twelve feet above his head, at the very top of the bridge, and behind it the sky began to darken as his vision started to tunnel down. He had just about fainted when out of the side of the light tower a woman’s torso appeared—as solid as if a window had opened and she had peeked out, except there was no window. She was jutting right out of the metal, like a ship’s figurehead, a woman in a white lace dress, her dark hair tied back, some kind of white flower pinned in her hair above her ear.
“Alone at last,” she said. A dazzling smile. “We’re going to need your help.”
Mike stood and backed up against the rail, trying not to scream. His breath came in a whimper.
4
Tribulations of the Mint One
Nestled between the Castro and the Haight, just off the corner of Noe and Market Streets, lay Fresh Music. Behind the counter stood the owner, seven feet, two-hundred and seventy-five pounds of lean heartache, the eponymous Mister Fresh. Minty Fresh. He wore moss-green linen slacks and a white dress shirt, the sleeves flipped back on his forearms. His scalp was shaved and shone like polished walnut; his eyes were golden; his cool, which had always been there before, was missing.
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Minty held Coltrane’s My Favorite Things album cover by its edges and looked into Trane’s face for a clue to the whereabouts of his cool. Behind him the vinyl disc was spinning on a machined aluminum turntable that looked like a Mars lander and weighed as much as a supermodel. He had hoped that the notes might bring him into the moment, out of a future or a past, anxiety or regret, but Gershwin’s “Summertime” was skating up next on the disc and he just didn’t think he could take the future-past it would evoke.
He had wept into her voice mail.
Did Trane look up from the album cover, lower his soprano sax, and say, “That is some pathetic shit, you know that right?” He might as well have.
He put the album cover down in the polycarbonate “now playing” stand and was stepping back to lift the tone arm when he saw the profile of a sharp-featured Hispanic man moving by the front window. Inspector Rivera. Not a thing, Rivera coming to the shop. It was cool. The last time he’d spoken to Rivera, the Underworld had manifested itself in the city in the form of horrible creatures, and chaos had nearly overcome the known world, but that was in the past, not a thing, now.
He willed a chill over himself as Rivera came in. Then—
“Oh, hell no! Get your ass right back out that door.”
“Mr. Fresh,” said Rivera, with a nod. “I think I need your help.”
“I don’t do police work,” said Fresh. “I’ve been out of the security business for twenty years.”
“I’m not police anymore. I have a bookstore over on Russian Hill.”
“I don’t sell books either.”
“But you still sell soul vessels, don’t you?” Rivera nodded to a locked, bulletproof case displaying what appeared to be a random collection of records, CDs, tapes, and even a couple of old wax cylinders.
To Minty Fresh, every object in the case glowed a dull red, as if they’d been heated in a furnace, evincing the human soul housed there, but to anyone but a Death Merchant, they looked like, well, a random collection of recorded media. Rivera knew about the Death Merchants. He’d first come to the shop with Charlie Asher when the shit had gone down, when the Death Merchants around the city had been slaughtered and their stores ransacked for soul vessels by the Morrigan—“sewer harpies,” Charlie had called them. But now that Rivera was one of them, a Death Merchant, he could also see the glow. Minty had sent him the Great Big Book of Death himself.
Fresh said: “Y’all read the book, then, so you know you shouldn’t be here, talking to me. You know what happened last time Death Merchants started talking. Just go back to your store and keep collecting the objects when they come up in your calendar, like you been doing.”
“That’s the thing: I haven’t been collecting soul vessels at all.”
“The fuck you mean, you haven’t been collecting them at all?”
Minty Fresh made a motion with his hands of leveling, as if he were smoothing an imaginary tablecloth of calm over a counter constructed of contemporary freak-out. With concerted effort now, and lower register, he said, “Never?”
“I bought the date book, and a number two pencil,” Rivera said, trying to accentuate the positive. He smiled. In the background, Coltrane improvised a boppy, playful riff around “Summertime” ’s sweet, low-down melody. “The names and numbers showed up on the calendar, like the Big Book said they would? But I didn’t do anything about them.”
“You can’t just not do the job. Someone has to do it. That’s why they put it in the book, right in the beginning, right by the part about not having contact with other Death Merchants. You just ignore the Big Book, shit gonna get muthafuckin’ freaky up in here.”
“It already has,” said Rivera. “That’s why I’m here. A woman appeared in my shop, not exactly a human woman. A dark thing.”
“The Morrigan?” Minty could still see the Morrigan’s three-inch talons raking the wall of a dark subway car where she had confronted him. He shuddered.