“Ten, maybe fifteen seconds.”
Rivera rubbed the back of his head. Must have hit it on the edge of the counter when he fell. Every joint in his body hurt. He rolled to his hands and knees and looked back to where the raggedy woman had been lying.
“Gone,” said Cavuto. He dangled his handcuffs in front of Rivera’s eyes. They were still locked. “I heard her scream again, ran in, she was gone.”
“The back door is locked,” said Rivera. “Go after her.”
“Not going to matter. She’s gone.”
“What’s with all the smoke? She start a fire?”
“Nope. Just a cloud of smoke behind the counter where I guess she was standing when she zapped you.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” said Cavuto. “You’re going to need to call someone with more experience at this than me.” He picked up the phone receiver from the floor, held it to his ear. “Yeah, did you get that order? Two double burgers, medium well, everything but tomatoes, curly fries.” He looked at Rivera. “You want anything?”
3
Something About Sophie
Sophie Asher was seven years old. She lived in San Francisco with her aunties, Jane and Cassie, on the second floor of a building that overlooked the cable-car line in North Beach. Sophie had dark hair and blue eyes, like her mother, and an overactive imagination, like her father, although both parents were gone now, which is why she was looked after by her aunties; two widows who lived in the building, Mrs. Ling and Mrs. Korjev; as well as two enormous black hellhounds, Alvin and Mohammed, that had simply appeared in her room when she was a toddler. She liked dressing up like a princess, playing with her plastic ponies, eating Crunchy Cheese Newts, and making grandiose declarations about her power over the Underworld and her dominion over Death, which was why she was currently in a time-out in her room while Auntie Jane was frantically chattering into the phone out in the great room.
From time to time, Sophie popped her head out the door and fired off another salvo of flamboyant nonsense, because she was the Luminatus, dammit, and she would have the last word.
“I am become Death, destroyer of worlds!” she shouted, her passion somewhat diffused when the pink ribbon holding her pigtail caught in the door as she ducked back into her room.
“So, that’s what we’re dealing with here,” said Jane into the phone. “She’s gotten completely out of hand.” Jane was tall, angular, and wore her short platinum hair sculpted into various unlikely permutations, from angry spikes to soft finger waves, all of which played counterpoint to the tailored men’s suits she wore when she worked at the bank, making her appear either fiercely pretty, or frightfully confused. Right now she wore a houndstooth tweed Savile Row suit she’d inherited from Charlie, waistcoat with watch chain, and a pair of eight-inch patent-leather red pumps the same shade as her bow tie. She might have been the result of a time-travel accident where Doctor Who parts were woven into the warp with those of a robot stripper.
“She’s seven,” said Charlie. “Finding out that you’re Death—it’s hard on a kid. I was thirty-three when I thought I was the Luminatus, and I’m still a little traumatized.”
“Tell him about the tooth fairy,” said Cassie, Jane’s wife. She stood barefoot by the breakfast bar in yoga pants and an oversized olive-green cotton sweater, red hair in loose, shoulder-length curls—a calm snuggle of a woman, a chamomile chaser to Jane’s vodka and sarcasm shooter.
“Shhh,” Jane shushed. Sophie didn’t know that Jane was talking to her father, thought, in fact, that he was dead. Charlie had wanted it that way.
“She doesn’t play well with others,” said Jane. “I mean, since she’s this magical thing, she has unrealistic expectations about other magic
al—uh, persons. She lost a tooth the other day—”
“Awe,” said Charlie.
“Awe,” said Bob, and the other Squirrel People in the room with him, who were gathered around the speakerphone like it was a storyteller’s campfire, made various awe-like noises.
“Yeah, well, the tooth fairy forgot to put money under Sophie’s pillow that night—”
At “tooth fairy,” Sophie popped her head out the door. “I will smack that bitch up and take her bag of quarters! I will not be fucked with!”
Jane pointed until Sophie retreated into her room and closed the door.
“See?”
“Where did she learn that? Little kids don’t talk that way.”
“Sophie does. She just started talking like that.”
“She didn’t when I was alive. Someone had to teach her.”
“Oh, so you’re fine that she all of a sudden becomes Death incarnate without so much as seeing a Sesame Street segment about it, but a little light profanity and it’s all my fault.”