Free A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) by Christopher Moore Page B

owner’s manual for. I understand what it is to not know. But someone, somewhere, does know. Someone can tell you what’s going on.”
    “What are you talking about?” But he knew what she was talking about. What he didn’t know was how she could possibly know.
    “You make people die, don’t you, Charlie?” She said it like she had worked up the courage to tell him that he had some spinach in his teeth. More of a service to him than an accusation.
    “How do you—?” How did she—
    “Because it’s what I do. Not like you, but it’s what I do. Find them, Charlie. Backtrack and find whoever was there when your world changed.”
    Charlie looked at her, then at the cigarette case, then at the redhead again, who was no longer smiling, but was stepping backward toward the door. Trying to stay in touch with normal, he focused on the cigarette case and said, “I suppose I can do an appraisal—”
    He heard the bell over the door jingle, and when he looked up she was gone.
    He didn’t see her moving by the windows on either side of the door; she was just gone. He ran to the front of the store and out the door onto the sidewalk. The
Mason Street
cable car was just topping the hill up by
California Street
and he could hear the bell, there was a thin fog coming up from the Bay that threw colorful halos around the neon signs of the other businesses, but there was no striking redhead on the street. He went to the corner and looked down Vallejo, but again no redhead, just the Emperor, sitting against the building with his dogs.
    “Good evening, Charlie.”
    “Your Majesty, did you see a redhead go by here just now?”
    “Oh yes. Spoke to her. I’m not sure you have a chance there, Charlie, I believe she’s spoken for. And she did warn me to stay away from you.”
    “Why? Did she say why?”
    “She said that you were Death.”
    “I am?” Charlie said. “Am I?” His breath caught in his throat as the day played back in his head. “What if I am?”
    “You know, son,” the Emperor said, “I am not an expert in dealing with the fairer sex, but you might want to save that bit of information until the third date or so, after they’ve gotten to know you a little.”

THANATOAST
    W hile Charlie’s Beta Male imagination may have often turned him toward timidity and even paranoia, when it came to accepting the unacceptable it served him like Kevlar toilet paper—bulletproof, if a tad disagreeable in application. The inability to believe the unbelievable would not be his downfall. Charlie Asher would never be a bug splattered on the smoky windscreen of dull imagination.
    He knew that all the things that had happened to him in the last day were outside of the limits of possibility for most people, and since his only corroborating witness was a man who believed himself to be the Emperor of San Francisco, Charlie knew he would never be able to convince anyone that he had been pursued and attacked by giant foulmouthed ravens and then declared the tour guide to the undiscovered country by a sultry oracle in fuck-me pumps .
    Not even Jane would give him that kind of quarter. Only one person would have, could have, and for the ten-thousandth time he felt Rachel’s absence collapsing in his chest like a miniature black hole. Thus, Sophie became his co-conspirator.
    The tiny kid, dressed in Elmo overalls and baby Doc Martens (courtesy of Aunt Jane), was propped up in her car seat on the breakfast bar next to the goldfish bowl. (Charlie had bought her six big goldfish about the time she’d started to notice moving objects. A girl needs pets. He’d named them after TV lawyers. Currently Matlock was tracking Perry Mason, trying to eat a long strand of fish doo that was trailing out of Perry’s poop chute.)
    Sophie was starting to show some of her mother’s dark hair, and if Charlie saw it right, the same expression of bemused affection toward him (plus a drool slick).
    “So I am Death,” Charlie said as he tried to