Lazarus, normally tolerant of all noncookie creatures great and small, growled at the squirrel, who appeared to have the feet of a chicken sticking out from under her skirt, which—you know—was weird.
With the growl, Bummer squirmed awake and emerged from the woolen bedchamber like Grendel from his lair. He immediately erupted into an apoplectic barking fit, as if to say, You guys, in case you didn’t notice, there’s a squirrel in a ball gown going through the trash over there and you’re just sitting here like a couple of concrete library lions! The message thus barked, off he went, a furry squirrel-seeking missile, bent on single-minded annihilation of all things rodent.
“Bummer,” called the Emperor. “Wait.”
Too late. The squirrel had tried to take off up the side of the brick building, but snagged her skirt on a gutter and fell back to the alley, just as Bummer was hitting full stride. Then the squirrel snatched up a small board from a broken pallet and swung it at his pursuer, who leapt just in time to miss taking a nail in one of his bug eyes.
Growling ensued.
The Emperor noticed at that point that the squirrel’s hands were reptilian in nature, the fingernails painted a pleasant pink to match her gown.
“You don’t see that every day,” the Emperor said. Lazarus barked in agreement.
The squirrel dropped the board and took off toward the street, moving nicely on her chicken feet, her skirt held up in her lizard hands. Bummer had recovered from the initial shock of a weapon-wielding squirrel (something he had encountered before only in doggie nightmares brought on by the late-night gift of chorizo pizza from a charitable Domino’s guy) and took off after the squirrel, followed closely by the Emperor and Lazarus.
“No, Bummer,” the Emperor called. “She’s not a normal squirrel.”
Lazarus, because he did not know how to say “well, duh,” stopped in his tracks and looked at the Emperor.
The squirrel rocketed out of the alley and took a quick turn down the gutter, falling now to all fours as she went.
Just as he reached the corner, the Emperor saw the trail of the tiny pink dress disappear down a storm sewer, followed closely by the intrepid Bummer. The Emperor could hear the terrier’s bark echoing out of the grate, fading as Bummer pursued his prey into the darkness.
Nick Cavuto sat down across from Rivera with a plate of buffalo stew roughly the size of a garbage-can lid. They were having lunch at Tommy’s Joynt, an old-school eatery on Van Ness that served home-style food like meat loaf, roasted turkey and stuffing, and buffalo stew every day of the year, and featured San Francisco sports teams on the TV over the bar whenever anyone was playing.
“What?” said the big cop, when he saw his partner roll his eyes. “Fucking what?”
“Buffalo almost went extinct once,” Rivera said. “You have ancestors on the Great Plains?”
“Special law enforcement portions—protecting and serving and stuff requires protein.”
“A whole bison?”
“Do I criticize your hobbies?”
Rivera looked at his half a turkey sandwich and cup of bean soup, then at Cavuto’s stew, then at his runt of a sandwich, then at his partner’s colossus of a stew. “My lunch is embarrassed,” he said.
“Serves you right. Revenge for the Italian suits. I love going to every call with people thinking I’m the victim.”
“You could buy a steamer, or I could have my guy find you some nice clothes.”
“Your guy the serial-killing thrift-store owner? No thanks.”
“He’s not a serial killer. He’s got some weird shit going on, but he’s not a killer.”
“Just what we need, more weird shit. What was he really doing when you had that shots-fired report?”
“Just like it said, I was going by and a guy tried to rob him at gunpoint. I drew my weapon and told the perp to halt, he drew down on me, and I fired.”
“Your ass. You never fired eleven shots in your life you didn’t hit the ten X ring with nine of them. The fuck happened?”
Rivera looked down the long table, made sure the three guys sitting down at the other end were engaged in the game showing on the TV over the bar. “I hit her with every shot.”
“Her? Perp was a woman?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Cavuto dropped his spoon. “Partner? Don’t tell me you shot the redhead? I thought that was over.”
“No. This was a new thing—like—Nick, you know me, I’m not going to fire unless it’s justified.”
“Just say what happened. I got your back.”
“It was like this bird woman or something. All black. I mean fucking black as tar. Had claws that looked like—I don’t know, like three-inch-long silver ice picks or something. My shots took chunks out of her—feathers and black goo and shit everywhere. She took nine in the torso and flew away.”
“Flew?”
Rivera sipped his coffee, eyeing his partner’s reaction over the edge of the cup. They had been through some extraordinary things working together, but if the situation had been reversed, he wasn’t sure he’d believe this story either. “Yeah, flew.”
Cavuto nodded. “Okay, I can see why you wouldn’t put that in the report.”
“Yeah.”
“So this bird woman,” Cavuto said, like that was settled, he totally believed it, now what? “She was robbing the Asher guy from the thrift shop?”
“Giving him a hand job.”
Cavuto nodded, picked up his spoon, and took a huge bite of stew and rice, still nodding as he chewed. He looked as if he were going to say something, then quickly took another bite, as if to stop himself. He appeared to be distracted by the game on television, and finished his lunch without another word.
Rivera ate his soup and sandwich in silence as well.
As they were leaving, Cavuto grabbed two toothpicks from the dispenser by the register and gave one to Rivera as they walked out into a beautiful San Francisco day.
“So you were following Asher?”
“I’ve been trying to keep an eye on him. Just in case.”
“And you shot her nine times for giving the guy a hand job,” Cavuto finally asked.
“I guess,” Rivera said.
“You know, Alphonse, that right there is why I don’t hang out with you socially. Your values are fucked up.”
“She wasn’t human, Nick.”
“Still. A hand job? Deadly force? I don’t know—”
“It wasn’t deadly force. I didn’t kill her.”
“Nine to the chest?”
“I saw her—it—last night. On my street. Watching me from a storm sewer.”
“Ever think to ask Asher how he happened to know the flying bulletproof bird woman in the first place?”
“Yeah, I did, but I can’t tell you what he said. It’s too weird.”
Cavuto threw his arms in the air. “Well, sweet Tidy Bowl Jesus skipping on the blue toilet water, we wouldn’t want it to get fucking weird, would we?”
They were on their second cup of coffee and Charlie had told Lily about not getting the two soul vessels, about the encounter with the sewer harpy, about the shadow coming out of the mountains in Sedona and the other version of The Great Big Book of Death, and his suspicions that there was a frightening problem with his little girl, the symptoms of which were two giant dogs and an ability to kill with the word kitty. To Charlie’s thinking, Lily was reacting to the wrong story.
“You hooked up with a demon from the Underworld and I’m not good enough for you?”
“It’s not a competition, Lily. Can we not talk about that? I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I’m worried about other stuff.”