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“Good. Where’s the nun with our drinks?”
The nun with the drinks came through the door fifteen minutes later, a cardboard tray in one hand, a lost dog flyer wedged between the cups.
“Have you seen these?” Audrey said. The flyer was one of the ones Sophie had shown them. “They’re all over North Beach.”
“Sophie and Mrs. Korjev just came through,” Charlie said.
“Are you okay?” Audrey said. She unzipped one end of the cat carrier and handed in the little paper espresso cup. “Two sugars.”
“I’m okay,” said Charlie. “But Lily wants us to kill a guy and take his body.”
Audrey sat down on the bar stool next to Lily and sipped a frosty brown thing through a straw while she considered the proposition.
“Won’t work,” said the nun.
Lily nearly aspirated skinny latte. “Why not? M said that you needed someone who was healthy, male, and whose body would be fresh and not too broken up.”
“It’s why she blackmailed us into coming here,” Charlie said.
“Stop saying that,” Lily said. “I wouldn’t have told Sophie about you and you know it. It was only a symbolic threat.”
“We would have come without the threat.”
Audrey said, “Does this man you’re going to kill know what you’re going to do?”
“I’m not going to actively kill him. He’s going to kill himself. But no.”
“For the ritual of Chöd to work the subject has to willingly give up his body to be occupied.”
“Seriously? I not only have to talk a guy into jumping off a bridge, but I have to talk him into just giving me his body? He’s not going to go for that.”
“Maybe if you wear something low-cut,” Charlie said.
“I will crush you and your little cat box, Asher.”
“Let’s calm down and work through this,” said Audrey.
“Yeah, Lily,” said Charlie. “Audrey is badass. Buddhist monks invented kung fu, you know.”
“Not my sect,” said Audrey. “We mostly chant and beg.”
“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” Charlie said.
“Fine,” said Lily. “Audrey, is there anything in your tradition about a Ghost Thief?”
“No, why?”
“Well, because evidently there’s a whole choir of ghosts on the Golden Gate Bridge farting a message of doom if we don’t find the Ghost Thief. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be a condition of getting my guy to give up the goods.”
“That’s new,” said Charlie.
12
Portable Darkness and the Booty Nun
In a turnout on Interstate 80, about forty miles east of Reno, the hellhounds had killed a Subaru and were rolling in its remains as two horrified kayakers looked on. Alvin had the last shreds of plastic from a red kayak hanging out of his jaws as he squirmed in the still-smoking bits of the engine, while Mohammed was biting at his reflection in the hatchback window, trying to pop the final intact window like a soap bubble, which he did with great growling glee, before crunching down a mouthful of rubber gasket and safety glass.
Something popped and hissed under Alvin’s back and in an instant the four-hundred-pound canine was on his feet barking at the stream of steam, each bark like a rifle report in the ears of the kayakers. The hound reared up in a prancing fashion, and came down repeatedly on the offending steam thing with his front paws until it ceased and desisted. He celebrated by settling down with the engine between his forelegs to chew off the remaining hoses and wires. Mohammed made to join him, but was distracted by a stream of green antifreeze which he stopped to lap up off the asphalt.
