Secondhand Souls Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t get close to him.”
    “You should have had him call me himself.”
    “He didn’t have a phone.”
    “What kind of loser goes out without a phone?”
    “I know,” said Mike. “I was thinking the same thing.”
    “Well, couldn’t be helped,” said Lily. “You’re going to lose some. I’ve been doing this awhile, and even with your best moves, some are going in the drink.”
    “Thanks,” said Mike.
    “You sound nice,” said Lily. “Single?”
    “Uh, kind of.”
    “Me, too. Straight?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Look, I have your number. Okay if I call you?”
    Mike was still shaking from Geoff’s dive. “Sure.”
    “I’ll text you mine. Call anytime.”
    “Okay,” Mike said.
    “But the blow-job thing is not automatic, Mike. That’s strictly a crisis-line thing.”
    “Of course,” Mike said.
    “But not out of the question,” said Lily.
    “Okay. What do you do if the caller is a woman?”
    “I commiserate. I can go from zero to co-miserable at the speed of dark.”
    “Okay.”
    “I know things, Mike. Many things. Terrible, dark, disturbing things.”
    “I should probably report in or something.”
    “Okay, call me, bye,” said Lily.
    “Bye,” he said.
    Mike put his phone back in the pouch then made his way to the top of the tower, hooked his safety lines on the high cables, then sat down, took off his hard hat, and ran his fingers through his hair, as if he might comb some of the strangeness out of the morning that way. He looked up at the giant aircraft warning light, sitting in its orange-painted steel cage twelve feet above his head, at the very top of the bridge, and behind it the sky began to darken as his vision started to tunnel down. He had just about fainted when out of the side of the light tower a woman’s torso appeared—as solid as if a window had opened and she had peeked out, except there was no window. She was jutting right out of the metal, like a ship’s figurehead, a woman in a white lace dress, her dark hair tied back, some kind of white flower pinned in her hair above her ear.
    “Alone at last,” she said. A dazzling smile. “We’re going to need your help.”
    Mike stood and backed up against the rail, trying not to scream. His breath came in a whimper.

 
    4
    Tribulations of the Mint One
    N estled between the Castro and the Haight, just off the corner of Noe and Market Streets, lay Fresh Music. Behind the counter stood the owner, seven feet, two-hundred and seventy-five pounds of lean heartache, the eponymous Mister Fresh. Minty Fresh. He wore moss-green linen slacks and a white dress shirt, the sleeves flipped back on his forearms. His scalp was shaved and shone like polished walnut; his eyes were golden; his cool, which had always been there before, was missing.
    Minty held Coltrane’s My Favorite Things album cover by its edges and looked into Trane’s face for a clue to the whereabouts of his cool. Behind him the vinyl disc was spinning on a machined aluminum turntable that looked like a Mars lander and weighed as much as a supermodel. He had hoped that the notes might bring him into the moment, out of a future or a past, anxiety or regret, but Gershwin’s “Summertime” was skating up next on the disc and he just didn’t think he could take the future-past it would evoke.
    He had wept into her voice mail.
    Did Trane look up from the album cover, lower his soprano sax, and say, “That is some pathetic shit, you know that right?” He might as well have.
    He put the album cover down in the polycarbonate “now playing” stand and was stepping back to lift the tone arm when he saw the profile of a sharp-featured Hispanic man moving by the front window. Inspector Rivera. Not a thing, Rivera coming to the shop. It was cool. The last time he’d spoken to Rivera, the Underworld had manifested itself in the city in the form of horrible creatures, and chaos had nearly overcome the known world, but that was in the past, not a thing, now.
    He willed a