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.”
“I want details, Asher.”
“Lily, a gentleman doesn’t share the details of his amorous encounters.”
Lily crossed her arms and assumed a pose of disgusted incredulity, an eloquent pose, because before she said it, Charlie knew what was coming: “Bullshit. That cop shot pieces off her, but you’re worried about protecting her honor?”
Charlie smiled wistfully. “You know, we shared a moment—”
“Oh my God, you complete man-whore!”
“Lily, you can’t possibly be hurt by my—by my response to your generous—and let me say right here—extraordinarily tempting offer. Gee whiz.”
“It’s because I’m too perky, isn’t it? Not dark enough for you? You being Mr. Death and all.”
“Lily, the shadow in Sedona was coming for me. When I left town, it went away. The sewer harpy came for me. The other Death Merchant said that I was different. They never had deaths happen as a result of their presence like I have.”
“Did you just say ‘gee whiz’ to me? What am I, nine? I am a woman—”
“I think I might be the Luminatus, Lily.”
Lily shut up.
She raised her eyebrows. As if “no.”
Charlie nodded. As if “yes.”
“The Big Death?”
“With a capital D,” Charlie said.
“Well, you’re totally not qualified for that,” Lily said.
“Thanks, I feel better now.”
Being two hundred feet under the sea always made Minty uneasy, especially if he’d been drinking sake and listening to jazz all night, which he had. He was in the last car on the last train out of Oakland, and he had the car to himself, like his own private submarine, cruising under the Bay with the echo of a tenor sax in his ear like sonar, and a half-dozen sake-sodden spicy tuna rolls sitting in his stomach like depth charges.
He’d spent his evening at Sato’s on the Embarcadero, Japanese restaurant and jazz club. Sushi and jazz, strange bedfellows, shacked up by opportunity and oppression. It began in the Fillmore district, which had been a Japanese neighborhood before World War II. When the Japanese were shipped off to internment camps, and their homes and belongings sold off, the blacks, who came to the city to work in the shipyards building battleships and destroyers, moved into the vacant buildings. Jazz came close behind.
For years, the Fillmore was the center of the San Francisco jazz scene, and Bop City on Post Street the premier jazz club. When the war ended and the Japanese returned, many a late night might find Japanese kids standing under the windows of Bop City, listening to the likes of Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, or Charles Mingus, listening to art happen and dissipate into the San Francisco nights. Sato was one of those kids.