Jane smiled to herself. This guy had something—a brooch, a coin, a book—something that he thought was worth some money, maybe something he’d found in his grandmother’s closet. She’d seen it a dozen times. They acted like they’ve found the lost city of Eldorado—they’d come in with it tucked in their coats, or wrapped in a thousand layers of tissue paper and tape. (The more tape, generally, the more worthless the item would turn out to be—there was an equation there somewhere.) Nine times out of ten it was crap. She’d watched her father try to finesse their ego and gently lower the owners into disappointment, convince them that the sentimental value made it priceless, and that he, a lowly secondhand-store owner, couldn’t presume to put a value on it. Charlie, on the other hand, would just tell them that he didn’t know about brooches, or coins, or whatever they had and let someone else bear the bad news.
“Okay, I’ll tell him,” Jane said from her cover behind the coats.
With that, the tall man was away, taking great praying-mantis strides up the street and out of view. Jane shrugged, went back and turned on the lights, then proceeded to search for cushions among the piles.
It was a big store, taking up nearly the whole bottom floor of the building, and not particularly well organized, as each system that Charlie adopted seemed to collapse after a few weeks under its own weight, and the result was not so much a patchwork of organizational systems, but a garden of mismatched piles. Lily, the maroon-haired Goth girl who worked for Charlie three afternoons a week, said that the fact that they ever found anything at all was proof of the chaos theory at work, then she would walk away muttering and go out in the alley to smoke clove cigarettes and stare into the Abyss. (Although Charlie noted that the Abyss looked an awful lot like a Dumpster.)
It took Jane ten minutes to navigate the aisles and find three cushions that looked wide enough and thick enough that they might work for sitting shivah, and when she returned to Charlie’s apartment she found her brother curled into the fetal position around baby Sophie, asleep on the kitchen floor. The other mourners had completely forgotten about him.
“Hey, doofus.” She nudged his shoulder with her toe and he rolled onto his back, the baby still in his arms. “These okay?”
“Did you see anything glowing?”
Jane dropped the stack of cushions on the floor. “What?”
“Glowing red. Did you see things in the shop glowing, like pulsating red?”
“No. Did you?”
“Kind of.”
“Give ’em up.”
“What?”
“The drugs. Hand them over. They’re obviously much better than you led me to believe.”
“But you said they were just antianxiety.”
“Give up the drugs. I’ll watch the kid while you shivah.”
“You can’t watch my daughter if you’re on drugs.”
“Fine. Surrender the crumb snatcher and go sit.”
Charlie handed the baby up to Jane. “You have to keep Mom out of the way, too.”
“Oh no, not without drugs.”
“They’re in the medicine cabinet in the master bath. Bottom shelf.”
He was sitting on the floor now, rubbing his forehead as if to stretch the skin out over his pain. She kneed him in the shoulder.
“Hey, kid, I’m sorry, you know that, right? Goes without saying, right?”
“Yeah.” A weak smile.
She held the baby up by her face, then looked down in adoration, Mother of Jesus style. “What do you think? I should get one of these, huh?”
“You can borrow mine whenever you need to.”
“Nah, I should get my own. I already feel bad about borrowing your wife.”
“Jane!”
“Kidding! Jeez. You’re such a wuss sometimes. Go sit shivah. Go. Go. Go.”
Charlie gathered the cushions and went to the living room to grieve with his in-laws, nervous because the only prayer he knew was “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” and he wasn’t sure that was going to cut it for three full days.
Jane forgot to mention the tall guy from the shop.
3
BENEATH THE NUMBER FORTY-ONE BUS
It was two weeks before Charlie left the apartment and walked down to the auto-teller on Columbus Avenue where he first killed a guy. His weapon of choice was the number forty-one bus, on its way from the Trans Bay station, by the Bay Bridge, to the Presidio, by the Golden Gate Bridge. If you’re going to get hit by a bus in San Francisco, you want to go with the forty-one, because you can pretty much figure on there being a nice bridge view.
Charlie hadn’t really counted on killing a guy that morning. He had hoped to get some twenties for the register at the thrift store, check his balance, and maybe pick up some yellow mustard at the deli. (Charlie was not a brown mustard kind of guy. Brown mustard was the condiment equivalent of skydiving—it was okay for race-car drivers and serial killers, but for Charlie, a fine line of French’s yellow was all the spice that life required.) After the funeral, friends and relatives had left a mountain of cold cuts in Charlie’s fridge, which was all he’d eaten for the past two weeks, but now he was down to ham, dark rye, and premixed Enfamil formula, none of which was tolerable without yellow mustard. He’d secured the yellow squeeze bottle and felt safer now with it in his jacket pocket, but when the bus hit the guy, mustard completely slipped Charlie’s mind.
It was a warm day in October, the light had gone autumn soft over the city, the summer fog had ceased its relentless crawl out of the Bay each morning, and there was just enough breeze that the few sailboats that dotted the Bay looked like they might have been posing for an Impressionist painter. In the split second that Charlie’s victim realized that he was being run over, he might not have been happy about the event, but he couldn’t have picked a nicer day for it.
The guy’s name was William Creek. He was thirty-two and worked as a market analyst in the financial district, where he had been headed that morning when he decided to stop at the auto-teller. He was wearing a light wool suit and running shoes, his work shoes were tucked into a leather satchel under his arm. The handle of a compact umbrella protruded from the side pocket of the satchel, and it was this that caught Charlie’s attention, for while the handle of the umbrella appeared to be made of faux walnut burl, it was glowing a dull red as if it had been heated in a forge.
Charlie stood in the ATM line trying not to notice, trying to appear uninterested, but he couldn’t help but stare. It was glowing, for fuck’s sake, didn’t anyone see it?
William Creek glanced over his shoulder as he slid his card into the machine, saw Charlie looking at him, then tried to will his suit coat to expand into great manta-ray wings to block Charlie’s view as he keyed in his PIN number. Creek snatched his card and the expectorated cash from the machine, turned, and headed away quickly toward the corner.
Charlie couldn’t stand it any longer. The umbrella handle had begun to pulsate red, like a beating heart. As Creek reached the curb, Charlie said, “Excuse me. Excuse me, sir!”
When Creek turned, Charlie said, “Your umbrella—”
At that point, the number forty-one bus was coming through the intersection at Columbus and Vallejo at about thirty-five miles per hour, angling toward the curb for its next stop. Creek looked down at the satchel under his arm where Charlie was pointing, and the heel of his running shoe caught the slight rise of the curb. He started to lose his balance, the sort of thing we all might do on any given day while walking through the city, trip on a crack in the sidewalk and take a couple of quick steps to regain equilibrium, but William Creek took only one step. Back. Off the curb.
You can’t really sugarcoat it at this point, can you? The number forty-one bus creamed him. He flew a good fifty feet through the air before he hit the back window of a SAAB like a great gabardine sack of meat, then bounced back to the pavement and commenced to ooze fluids. His belongings—the satchel, the umbrella, a gold tie bar, a Tag Heuer watch—skittered on down the street, ricocheting off tires, shoes, manhole covers, some coming to rest nearly a block away.