“The umbrella,” Charlie said, looking for the evidence. Then he spotted it, almost down at the next corner, lying in the gutter, still glowing red, pulsating like failing neon. “There! See!” But people were gathered around the dead man in a wide semicircle, their hands to their mouths, and no one was paying any attention to the frightened thin man spouting nonsense behind them.
He threaded his way through the crowd toward the umbrella, determined now to confirm his conviction, too far in shock to be afraid. When he was only ten feet away from it he looked up the street to make sure another bus wasn’t coming before he ventured off the curb. He looked back just as a delicate, tar-black hand snaked out of the storm drain and snatched the compact umbrella off the street.
Charlie backed away, looking around to see if anyone had seen what he had seen, but no one had. No one even made eye contact. A policeman trotted by and Charlie grabbed his sleeve as he passed, but when the cop spun around and his eyes went wide with confusion, then what appeared to be real terror, Charlie let him go. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I can see you’ve got work to do—sorry.”
The cop shuddered and pushed through the crowd of onlookers toward the battered body of William Creek.
Charlie started running, across Columbus and up Vallejo, until his breath and heartbeat in his ears drowned all the sounds of the street. When he was a block away from his shop a great shadow moved over him, like a low-flying aircraft or a huge bird, and with it Charlie felt a chill vibrate up his back. He lowered his head, pumped his arms, and rounded the corner of Mason just as the cable car was passing, full of smiling tourists who looked right through him. He glanced up, just for a second, and he thought he saw something above, disappearing over the roof of the six-story Victorian across the street, then he bolted through the front door of his shop.
“Hey, boss,” Lily said. She was sixteen, pale, and a little bottom heavy—her grown-woman form still in flux between baby fat and baby bearing. Today her hair happened to be lavender: fifties-housewife helmet hair in Easter-basket cellophane pastel.
Charlie was bent over, leaning against a case full of curios by the door, sucking in deep raspy gulps of secondhand store mustiness. “I—think—I—just—killed—a—guy,” he gasped.
“Excellent,” Lily said, ignoring equally his message and his demeanor. “We’re going to need change for the register.”
“With a bus,” Charlie said.
“Ray called in,” she said. Ray Macy was Charlie’s other employee, a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor with an unhealthy lack of boundaries between the Internet and reality. “He’s flying to Manila to meet the love of his life. A Ms. LoveYouLongTime. Ray’s convinced that they are soul mates.”
“There was something in the sewer,” Charlie said.
Lily examined a chip in her black nail polish. “So I cut school to cover. I’ve been doing that since you’ve been, uh, gone. I’m going to need a note.”
Charlie stood up and made his way to the counter. “Lily, did you hear what I said?”
He grabbed her by the shoulders, but she spun out of his grasp. “Ouch! Fuck. Back off, Asher, you sado freak, that’s a new tattoo.” She punched him in the arm, hard, and backed away, rubbing her own shoulder. “I heard, you. Cease your trippin’, s’il vous plaît.” Lately, since discovering Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal in a stack of used books in the back room, Lily had been peppering her speech with French phrases. “French better expresses the profound noirness of my existence,” she had said.
Charlie put both hands on the counter to keep them from shaking, then spoke slowly and deliberately, like he was speaking to someone for whom English was a second language: “Lily, I’m having kind of a bad month, and I appreciate that you are throwing away your education so you can come here and alienate customers for me, but if you don’t sit down and show me a little fucking human decency, then I’m going to have to let you go.”
Lily sat down on the chrome-and-vinyl diner stool behind the register and pulled her long lavender bangs out of her eyes. “So you want me to pay close attention to your confession to murder? Take notes, maybe get an old cassette recorder off the shelf and get everything down on tape? You’re saying that by trying to ignore your obvious distress, which I would have to later recall to the police, so I can be personally responsible for sending you to the gas chamber, that I’m being inconsiderate?”
Charlie shuddered. “Jeez, Lily.” He was continually surprised at the speed and accuracy of her creepiness. She was like some creepiness child prodigy. But on the bright side, her extreme darkness made him realize that he probably wasn’t going to go to the gas chamber.
“It wasn’t that kind of killing. There was something following me, and—”
“Silence!” Lily put her hand up, “I’d rather not show my employee spirit by committing every detail of your heinous crime to my photographic memory to be recalled in court later. I’ll just say that I saw you but you seemed normal for someone without a clue.”
“You don’t have a photographic memory.”
“I do, too, and it’s a curse. I can never forget the futility of—”
“You forgot to take out the trash at least eight times last month.”
“I didn’t forget.”
Charlie took a deep breath, the familiarity of arguing with Lily was actually calming him down. “Okay then, without looking, what color shirt are you wearing?” He raised an eyebrow like he had her there.
Lily smiled and for a second he could see that she was just a kid, kind of cute and goofy under the fierce makeup and attitude. “Black.”
“Lucky guess.”
“You know I only own black.” She grinned. “Glad you didn’t ask hair color, I just changed this morning.”
“That’s not good for you, you know. That dye has toxins.”
Lily lifted the lavender wig to reveal her close-cut maroon locks underneath, then dropped it again. “I’m all natural.” She stood and patted the bar stool. “Sit, Asher. Confess. Bore me.”
Lily leaned back against the counter, and tilted her head to look attentive, but with her dark eye makeup and lavender hair it came off more like a marionette with a broken string. Charlie came around the counter and sat on the stool. “I was just in line behind this William Creek guy, and I saw his umbrella glowing…”
And Charlie went through the whole story to her, the umbrella, the bus, the hand from the storm sewer, the bolt for home with the giant dark shadow above the rooftops, and when he was finished, Lily asked, “So how do you know his name?”
“Huh?” Charlie said. Of all of the horrible, fantastic things she might have asked about, why that?
“How do you know the guy’s name?” Lily repeated. “You barely spoke to the guy before he bit it. You see it on his receipt or something?”
“No, I…” He didn’t have any idea how he knew the man’s name, but suddenly there was a picture in his head of it written out in big, block letters. He leapt off the stool. “I gotta go, Lily.”
He ran through the door into the stockroom and up the steps.
“I still need a note for school,” Lily shouted from below, but Charlie was dashing through the kitchen, past a large Russian woman who was bouncing his baby daughter in her arms, and into the bedroom, where he snatched up the notepad he kept on his nightstand by the phone.
There, in his own blocky handwriting, was written the name William Creek and, under it, the number 12. He sat down hard on the bed, holding the notepad like it was a vial of explosives.
Behind him came the heavy steps of Mrs. Korjev as she followed him into the bedroom. “Mr. Asher, what is wrong? You run by like burning bear.”
And Charlie, because he was a Beta Male, and there had evolved over millions of years a standard Beta response to things inexplicable, said, “Someone is fucking with me.”