Secondhand Souls

by Christopher Moore

  “He would never say that.”

  “She never met him.”

  “Fine. Now look sadder and get your mom to take you to work. You’re our only contact with the ghosts on the bridge. You need to be on the crisis line. And we need her out of here so I can tell the others. I’ll call your cell when I know more.”

  “Okay, I’m going to hug you now, Asher.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not a real hug, it’s theater. I’m faking it.”

  “Right. Me, too,” said Charlie.

  Lily and her mother had only been gone seconds when Charlie’s phone buzzed: Jane. He answered.

  “He took Sophie,” Cassie said. “He just came in the door and took her. We couldn’t do anything. We tried.”

  An electric chill surged through his body. “Who?”

  “The black guy in yellow—­the one she talked about hurting Mrs. Korjev.”

  “Where’s Jane?”

  “She’s right here. He did something to her. She ran at him and he just put out his hand and she dropped. She’s coming to, woozy, but she seems okay.”

  “You called the police?”

  “Yes, they’re on their way. I’m still on the other phone with 911.”

  Charlie heard her talking to someone, describing the man in yellow.

  “Was he driving? On foot?”

  “I don’t know, Charlie. I couldn’t move. He just looked at me and I couldn’t move. Sophie kept yelling for him to put her down. Called him Dookie Face. She wasn’t screaming, afraid screaming. She was yelling, angry yelling. I’m so sorry. We should have been gone by now.”

  “Tell the police everything,” Charlie said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Ten minutes, maybe.”

  Rivera and Audrey stood behind him, waiting for instructions, having read the situation from his end of the conversation. “We have to go,” he said to Rivera. “Audrey, can you stay with Minty Fresh’s body? Don’t leave him for even a second. You have to be there when he comes back.” He held out her car keys.

  “What?” Audrey asked, taking the car keys by reflex.

  “He’s coming back, I don’t know when, but stay with him. Tell them whatever you have to. I would do it, but I have to go.”

  “Go,” she said, “Go, go, go.” She kissed him and pushed him toward the door. She pushed Rivera after Charlie. “Call me when you know anything.”

  “You, too,” said Rivera. “And if they give you any trouble—­”

  “Go. I’ve got this. Go.”

  Rivera ran after Charlie.

  Crisis Center, this is Lily. What’s your name?” Her screen showed the call was coming from one of the hardwired lines on the bridge. Her heart leapt.

  “Lily, it’s Mike.”

  “Holy fuck, do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  And once again, everyone in the call center turned to look at her.

  “I mean, hello, Mike, how can I help? This call may be recorded,” she said, letting him know why she was being formal, “but only my side, so you should feel safe to say whatever you’d like.”

  “Okay,” said Mike. “I thought you should know. There’s someone here, at the bridge, and all the ghosts are riled up. It’s like a storm here. Not that you could see, but here in my world.”

  “I was going to tell you that I think we found that thief you were looking for.” Lily was trying to figure out how her side of the conversation might sound on the recording. Incoherent was fine. She could claim she was responding to someone who was suffering from delusions. “So, it looks like the suspect is a large African American man who is dressed all in yellow. I see. And his name is Lemon Fresh, maybe, possibly Yama?”

  “I don’t know about that last part, but he’s here, and he has a little girl with him. He’s why everyone is riled up.”

  “On the bridge?”

  “No, not on the bridge, he’s right under the bridge. In Fort Point.”

  “Fort Point,” Lily repeated. “I see. Shall I send someone to you?”

  “If you think they can help,” said Mike.

  “Well, they’ll certainly try. Can you hold on a minute while I contact those ­people to help you?”

  “Sure,” said Mike. “Lily, I can’t find Concepción, either. It’s like she’s lost in this storm.”

  “Let me see what I can do, Mike.”

  Lily pushed the hold button, looked around the center. Mercifully, Sage wasn’t working tonight, but a ­couple of the other counselors were glancing her way every few seconds. Leonidas was standing in the doorway of his office, his finger to the earpiece of a wireless headset. The fucker was listening in on her live. Fine, he’d only hear her side and think her terminal was out of order. Pretending to scroll through contact numbers on her screen, she pulled her phone out of her purse and texted Charlie Asher: HE’S AT FORT POINT. UNDER THE BRIDGE.

  She looked over her shoulder. Leonidas was frowning. He would have expected to hear her call to emergency ser­vices, even if he couldn’t hear Mike’s end of the conversation. She clicked off the hold button.

  “Hi Mike, I’m back. Sorry about that, something seems to be wrong with my terminal. I texted the bridge authority and they are on their way to you. I’ll stay on the line with you until they reach you.”

  “I know you’re covering, Lily. You need to know, I think I’m starting to get the point of all the stories the ghosts have been telling me, but I need to find Concepción. She just evaporated, right in front of me.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be back any minute, Mike. I just had a similar experience and I know how distressing that can be, but just stay calm and—­”

  The line clicked. The screen showed disconnected. She had the ­ability to call back each of the hard lines on the bridge and she hit the button.

  “Hello?” A male voice, but different. She could hear wind, traffic, not the ghostly static that she heard when Mike called.

  “Mike?”

  “No, this is Jeremy. Who is this?”

  “This is the Crisis Center for the bridge.”

  “Well, you guys should have blankets up here or something. It’s really cold. I thought it was supposed to be warm in California.”

  “Well, you’re standing over the mouth of a bay, at night, in the winter, you fucktard, of course it’s cold.” She disconnected. When she looked back, Leonidas was heading for her desk.

  Her phone buzzed with a return message from Asher: HE HAS SOPHIE.

  Fuck! The little girl Mike mentioned.

  She stood up, turned to Leonidas, did a traffic-­cop signal for him to stop right where he was. “Get the fuck back in your office. This is my thing, and I need to be here. It’s not my fault that this terminal isn’t working right, but you didn’t hear the other side of the conversation. If that guy calls back and I’m not here, someone is going to die, so get back in your office and chew my ass or fire me at the end of shift, but right now I need to be here.”

  Leonidas, paused, seemed to be thinking, then said, “End of shift.” He turned and headed back to his office.

  Lily texted Charlie: MIKE SAW SOPHIE WITH LEMON AT FORT POINT.

  * Coyote Blue.

  27

  Fort Point

  Audrey dug her wallet out of her purse as she approached the nurses’ desk. For the first time since she’d returned from Asia, she wished

  she was wearing her monk robes. She had three or four cards with her name and title ready, as well as her driver’s license, which proved she was the person on the other cards. This was a first for her, but desperate times . . .

  “Hello, I’m the venerable Amitabha Audrey Walker Rinpoche, head of the Three Jewels Buddhist Center.” Click, click, click went the cards on the desk. “I am Mr. Fresh’s spiritual guide. Our faith requires that I be present with the body at all
times to help usher his spirit through bardo, from life to death. I need to be with Mr. Fresh.”

  The nurse looked skeptically over her reading glasses. Luckily, she wasn’t the nurse to whom Rivera had presented Audrey as a sketch artist, but she’d been at the desk for a while. She’d seen them all come and go, their strange displays of sorrow and joy, but she was used to dealing with ­people who were often at the most stressful point in their lives, and they didn’t always react rationally when things got rough.

  “He said the girl in the slutty schoolgirl outfit was his priest.”

  Audrey knew she had some wiggle room here, because what most Americans knew about Buddhism came from a forty-­year-­old television show, the star of which had accidently hanged himself while having a wank in a hotel wardrobe, so it was unlikely she’d be caught stretching the truth on doctrine.

  “She is, but hers is a different discipline. To those who practice our faith, outward appearance is an illusion, a distraction from the true nature of our dharma.” Wait, let that sink in. No one knows what dharma is. Wait. Wait. This will work.

  “He did have her down as his next of kin.”

  “All ­people of our faith are considered family.” No, that sounded culty. She wanted to sound nice, not culty.

  “And you need to be with the body how long?”

  “Until the soul has passed. Usually less than a day.”

  “Could you step in here, please?” The nurse went to the part of the desk that was behind the glass partition and waited for Audrey to pick up her IDs and come through the doors.

  “Look, Ms. Walker, we are going to have to send Mr. Fresh’s body down to the morgue in a few minutes. Whether they let you stay with him will be up to them. You can stay with him until they come to get him, and I can vouch for you with the orderly who takes him down, but once you get down there, you’re going to have to tell them why you’re there and see if they let you stay with him.”

  “What if I told them I was with the police? You saw we were with Inspector Rivera.”

  The nurse’s glasses slipped down again. “You’re a Buddhist priest and a policeman?”

  “Undercover. And, technically, I’m a nun.”

  “I would watch that show,” said the nurse. “I wouldn’t believe it, but I would watch it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Go stay with Mr. Fresh. But stay with him. No wandering around doing detective work while you’re tending to his soul.” The nurse wondered why ­people never figured out that once you got your way, you could stop lying. It almost made her want to back up and revoke the permission she’d just given.

  “Thank you,” said Audrey. “Blessings.”

  Thirty minutes later Audrey was standing in a hallway by the gurney on which Minty Fresh’s body lay when his eyes popped open.

  “Hi,” she said.

  She hit send on her phone, sending the message she’d typed in: HE’S ALIVE.

  His eyes went wide and darted around, as if he were trying to remember how to speak.

  “You were dead a little under an hour,” she said. “Think of it like a nap, really. Charlie told me you’d be back.” Audrey watched as the confusion seemed to settle in Minty’s eyes. This process was all new to her, too, but she had been present when the Squirrel ­People came to life after they received a human soul; they were always disoriented and seemed to have to remind themselves of the confines of reality, because for them, reality had just been put in a jar and shaken vigorously. For some it would settle; for others, it never seemed to.

  “You’re probably cold. They cut your pants off of you, and I don’t know what happened to your shirt. I brought you these.” She held up a pair of green scrubs she’d plucked from a bin as the orderly had rolled Minty Fresh’s body though the basement hallway. “I have your coat and your shoes, too. Shelf under the gurney. There’s blood on one shoe. Sorry.”

  Minty’s eyes stopped darting. It seemed as if whatever part of him had been searching for reality had finally found it.

  “They cut off my motherfucking custom-­made leather pants?”

  “Look at you, all alive and stuff,” she said. She thought she should have said something more profound, something from the heart sutra, “Form does not differ from the void, and void does not differ from form,” perhaps, but instead she said, “Who needs pants? You’re alive.”

  “Spoken like someone who is alive and has pants.”

  She threw him the scrubs. “I’ll turn my back and watch the hall.”

  The big man sat up, turned sideways on the gurney, and began to worm his way into the scrubs.

  “You presided at the death of a lot of ­people when you were a nun, right?”

  “I guided one hundred and fifty-­three souls through bardo.”

  “So how was my death?”

  “Pretty good. A solid seven. Well above average.”

  “Did everyone cry?”

  “Well, most of the crying was done when they were still trying to save you. Lily was a mess. I wasn’t in the room when you actually died, but it wasn’t long before Charlie told us you were coming back, so everyone cheered up. I think Lily said ‘yippee’ as she was leaving.”

  “Why isn’t Charlie here? He told you, I’m guessing, where we went?”

  “Yes, but your cousin Lemon took Sophie.”

  “Shit.”

  “The ghost on the bridge told Lily that Lemon has Sophie at Fort Point, under the bridge.”

  “Dressed,” he said. The scrubs were extra large but not extra tall, so they fit him in the hips and shoulders. The pants, however hit him just below the knee and the shirt in the middle of his waist. He looked like a cross between a well-­kept castaway and a very large Moroccan houseboy.

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “No. He just came to their apartment and took her. Jane and Cassie couldn’t do anything to stop him.”

  “And the old Russian lady, she okay?”

  “She’ll recover, they’re saying.”

  “And you, my cousin mess with you when he had you? Hurt you?”

  “No. In fact, he stopped the Morrigan from hurting me.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, why didn’t he hurt you? Why didn’t the old lady die? Why would he take Sophie? She’s just a little girl, now, right? If he’s such a badass, how is it you’re all alive?”

  “Maybe he just wants a new order, like he said.”

  “Don’t care what he wants,” said Minty Fresh. “I want to know what he can do. How’d he get in Asher’s building through all that security?”

  “They didn’t say. Everything’s always locked there.”

  “Then Lemon got a way of getting around that ain’t a ’49 Buick. You got a car?”

  “In the parking garage.”

  “Lead on,” said the Mint One. He hopped as he pulled on his black trainers, then grabbed his leather car coat from under the gurney. “We’re going to Fort Point.”

  Audrey sent a text to Charlie as they walked: ON OUR WAY TO FORT PT.

  Fort Point?” said Rivera. “Charlie, I don’t know if I can get us in there. It’s a national park. Since 9/11 it’s been under Homeland Security. There are guards there with M4 rifles; even the park rangers are armed. After what we pulled at the Fort Mason tunnel, there’s no way the department is going to back me up if they call in to verify me.” They were in Rivera’s Ford, just passing Fort Mason and the Marina Safeway on their way to Fort Point.

  Charlie said, “It’s okay, they’ll let me in.”

  “Why would they let you in?”

  Charlie pulled Mike Sullivan’s bridge authority ID and held it up. “Because I’m an employee. They need me to find another job in the park that gets me off the bridge, so even if they call in, someone will vouch. Ev
eryone knows Mike Sullivan’s story. I’ll say I wanted to check it out when there were no tourists.”

  “They’ll never let us in with our weapons,” said Rivera.

  “Anubis said weapons won’t do us any good. They won’t touch him.”

  “Well, I’m not sure what good we can do here, then.”

  “We have to be here. He has my daughter. She’s just a little kid.”

  “Actually, she’s probably not.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘she’s probably not’?”

  “Why would this thing—­this deity, go back and kidnap a little kid? What use is a random little kid to him? We would have taken a break if he hadn’t taken her.”

  “I never thought about that. You think he still thinks she’s the Luminatus?”

  “He knows more about this stuff than I do, and he took her.”

  “She is in the advanced reading group.”

  “Well, there you go,” said Rivera.

  Charlie’s phone buzzed. Message from Audrey. HE’S ALIVE.

  Rivera pulled into the tourist parking area, which was still a good half mile from the fort. The remainder of the road had heavy vehicle barriers that rose out of the concrete to limit traffic to pedestrians and bicycles; however, currently, the barriers were down. Rivera killed the lights and drove to the parking lot adjacent to the fort. He stopped the car at the far edge of the parking lot and turned off the engine. There were a few vehicles near the fort, but they looked official, light trucks and SUVs with national park insignias.

  Fort Point was a Civil War–era fortress with four-­foot-­thick brick and concrete walls, and gun ports designed for a battery of cannons to defend the entire entrance to the San Francisco Bay. Even though the fort had lost its strategic value by the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge had been designed specifically so the fort would be preserved as an example of military architecture. The entrance from the city side of the bridge was a great, structural steel arch that went directly over the top of the fort, ­rather than the more practical straight pylons that could have been built if the fort had been removed.

  As they climbed out of the car, Charlie’s phone buzzed again. Audrey’s message: ON OUR WAY TO FORT PT.