Charlie turned off Market Street and just around the corner on Noe Street he saw it: Fresh Music, the sign done in blocky, Craftsman-style stained glass, and he felt the hair at the back of his neck bristle and an urgency in his bladder. His body had gone into fight-or-flight mode, and for the second time in a week, he was going against his Beta Male nature and choosing to fight. Well, so be it, he thought. So be it. He would confront his tormentor and lay him low, as soon as he found a parking place—which he didn’t.
He circled the block, cutting between cafés and bars, both of which were in abundance in the Castro. He drove up and down the side streets, lined with rows of immaculately kept (exorbitantly priced) Victorians and found no quarter for his trusty steed. After a half hour of orbiting the neighborhood, he headed back uptown and found a spot in a parking garage in the Fillmore, then took the antique streetcar back down Market Street to the Castro. A cute little green, Italian-made antique streetcar, with oak benches, brass railings, and mahogany window frames—a charming brass bell and a top speed of about twenty miles per hour: this is how Charlie Asher charged into battle. He tried to imagine a horde of Huns hanging off the sides, waving wicked blades and firing arrows as they passed the murals in the Mission district, perhaps Viking raiders, shields fastened to the sides of the car, a great drum pounding as they rowed in to pillage the antique shops, the leather bars, the sushi bars, the leather sushi bars (don’t ask), and the art galleries, in the Castro. And here, even Charlie’s formidable imagination failed him. He got off the car at Castro and Market and walked back a block to Fresh Music, then paused outside the shop, wondering what in the hell he was going to do now.
What if the caller had just borrowed the phone? What if he stormed in screaming and threatening, and there was just some confused kid behind the counter? But then he looked in the door, and there, standing behind the counter, all alone, was an extraordinarily tall black man dressed completely in mint green, and at that point Charlie lost his mind.
“You killed her,” Charlie screamed as he stormed by the racks of CDs toward the man in mint. He drew the sword as he ran, or tried to, hoping to bring it out in a single fluid movement from the cane sheath and across the throat of Rachel’s killer. But the sword-cane had been in the back of Charlie’s shop for a long time, and except for three times when Lily’s friend Abby tried to leave with it (once trying to buy it, when Charlie refused to sell it to her, then twice trying to steal it), the sword hadn’t been drawn in years. The little brass stud that you pushed to release the blade had stuck, so when Charlie delivered the deathblow, he swung the entire cane, which was heavier—and slower—than the sword would have been. The man in mint green—quick for his size—ducked, and Charlie took out an entire row of Judy Garland CDs, lost his balance, bounced off the counter, spun around, and again tried for the single draw-and-cut move that he had seen so many times in samurai movies, and had practiced so many times in his head on the way here. This time the sword came free of the scabbard and slashed a deadly arch three feet in front of the man in mint, completely decapitating a life-sized cutout of Barbra Streisand.
“That is un-unfucking called for!” thundered the tall man.
As Charlie recovered his balance for a backhand slash, he saw something large and dark coming down over him and recognized it at the last instant, as the antique cash register slammed down on his head. There was a flash, a ding, and everything got dark and gooey.
When Charlie came to, he was tied to a chair in the back room of the record store, which looked remarkably like the back room of his own store, except all the stacked boxes were full of records and CDs instead of all variety of used jetsam. The tall black man was standing over him, and Charlie thought at first that he might be turning to mist or smoke, but then he realized it was just that his vision was going wavy, and then pain lit up the inside of his head like a strobe light.
“Ouch.”
“How’s your neck?” asked the tall man. “Does your neck feel broken? Can you feel your feet?”
“Go ahead, kill me, you fucking coward,” said Charlie, bucking around in the chair, trying to lunge at his captor and feeling a little like the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail after his arms and legs had been hacked off. If this guy took one step closer, Charlie could head-butt him in the nads, he was sure of it.
The tall man stomped on Charlie’s toes, a size-eighteen glove-leather loafer driven by two hundred and seventy pounds of death and used-record dealer.
“Ouch!” Charlie hopped his chair in a little circle of pain. “Goddammit! Ouch!”
“So you do have feeling in your feet?”
“Get it over with. Go ahead.” Charlie stretched his neck as if offering his throat to be cut—his strategy was to lure his captor into range, then sever the tall man’s femoral artery with his teeth, then gloat as the blood coursed all over his mint-green slacks onto the floor. Charlie would laugh long and sinister as he watched the life drain out of the evil bastard, then he would hop his chair out to the street and onto the streetcar at Market, transfer to the number forty-one bus at Van Ness, hop off at Columbus, and hop the two blocks home, where someone would untie him. He had a plan—and a bus pass with four more days left on it—so this son of a bitch had picked the wrong guy to fuck with.
“I have no intention of killing you, Charlie,” said the tall man, keeping a safe distance. “I’m sorry I had to hit you with the register. You didn’t really leave me any options.”
“You could have tasted the fatal sting of my blade!” Charlie glanced around for his sword-cane, just in case the guy had left it within reach.
“Yeah, sure, there was that one, but I thought I’d go with the one without the stains and the funeral.”
Charlie strained against his bonds, which he realized now were plastic shopping bags. “You’re messing with Death, you know? I am Death.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You do?”
“Sure.” The tall man spun another wooden chair around and sat on it reversed, facing Charlie. His knees were up at the level of his elbows and he looked like a great green tree frog, crouched to pounce on an insect. Charlie noticed for the first time that he had golden eyes, stark and striking in contrast to his dark skin. “So am I,” said the evil mint-green frog guy.
“You? You’re Death?”
“A Death, not THE Death. I don’t think there is a THE Death. Not anymore, anyway.”
Charlie couldn’t grasp it, so he struggled and wobbled until the tall man had to reach out and steady him to keep him from toppling over.
“You killed Rachel.”
“I did not.”
“I saw you there.”
“Yes, you did. That’s a problem. Will you please stop thrashing around?” He shook Charlie’s chair. “But I wasn’t instrumental in Rachel’s death. That’s not what we do, not anymore, anyway. Didn’t you even look at the book?”
“What book? You said something about a book on the phone.”
“The Great Big Book of Death. I sent it to your shop. I told a woman at the counter that I was sending it, and I got delivery confirmation, so I know it got there.”
“What woman—Lily? She’s not a woman, she’s a kid.”
“No, this was a woman about your age, with New Wave hair.”
“Jane? No. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t get any book.”