A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) by Christopher Moore Read Free Book Online

LoveYouLongTime?”
    “That was not her name. Did Lily tell you that? That kid has problems.”
    “Yeah, well, kids,” Charlie said, suddenly noticing a matronly woman in tweed who was browsing the curio shelves at the front of the store. She was carrying a porcelain frog that was glowing dull red.
    Ray clicked on one of the pictures, which opened a profile. “Look at this one, boss. It says she’s into sculling .” He spun on his stool again and bounced his eyebrows at Charlie.
    Charlie pulled his attention from the woman with the glowing frog and looked at the screen.
    “That’s rowing, Ray.”
    “No it’s not. Look, it says she was a coxswain in college.” Again with the eyebrow bounce, he offered a high five.
    “Also rowing,” Charlie said, leaving the ex-cop hanging. “The person at the back of the boat who yells at the rowers is called the coxswain.”
    “Really?” Ray said, disappointed. He’d been married three times, and been left by all three wives because of an inability to develop normal adult social skills. Ray reacted to the world as a cop, and while many women found that attractive initially, they expected him eventually to leave the attitude, along with his service weapon, in the coat closet when he arrived home. He didn’t. When Ray had first come to work at Asher’s Secondhand, it had taken two months for Charlie to get him to stop ordering customers to “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” Ray spent a lot of time being disappointed in himself and humanity in general.
    “But, dude, rowing!” Charlie said, trying to make it all better. He liked the ex-cop in spite of his awkwardness. Ray was basically a good guy, kindhearted and loyal, hardworking and punctual, but most important, Ray was losing his hair faster than Charlie.
    Ray sighed. “Maybe I should search for another Web site. What’s a word that means that your standards are lower than the desperate?”
    Charlie read down the page a little. “This woman has a master’s degree in English lit from Cambridge, Ray. And look at her. She’s gorgeous. And nineteen. Why is she desperate?”
    “Hey, wait a minute. A master’s degree at nineteen, this girl is too smart for me.”
    “No she’s not. She’s lying.”
    Ray spun on the stool as if Charlie had poked him in the ear with a pencil. “No!”
    “Ray, look at her. She looks like one of those Asian models for Sour Apple Flavored Calamari Treats.”
    “They have that?”
    Charlie pointed to the left side of the front window. “Ray, let me introduce you to Chinatown. Chinatown, this is Ray. Ray, Chinatown.”
    Ray smiled, embarrassed. There was a store two blocks up that sold nothing but dried shark parts, the windows full of pictures of beautiful Chinese women holding shark spleens and eyeballs like they’d just received an Academy Award. “Well, the last woman I met through here did have a few errors and omissions in her profile.”
    “Like?” Charlie was watching the woman in tweed with the glowing frog, who was approaching the counter.
    “Well, she said that she was twenty-three, five feet tall, a hundred five pounds, so I thought, ‘Okay, I can have fun with a petite woman.’ Turns out it was a hundred and five kilos .”
    “So, not what you expected?” Charlie said. He smiled at the approaching woman, feeling panic rise. She was going to buy the frog!
    “Five foot—two-thirty. She was built like a mailbox. I might have gotten past that, but she wasn’t even twenty-three, she was sixty-three. One of her grandsons tried to sell her to me.”
    “Ma’am, I’m sorry, you can’t buy that,” Charlie said to the woman.
    “You hear the expression all the time,” Ray went on, “but you hardly ever meet anyone really trying to sell his own grandmother.”
    “Why not?” the woman asked.
    “Fifty bucks,” Ray said.
    “That’s outrageous,” the woman said. “It’s marked ten.”
    “No, it’s fifty for the grandmother Ray is dating,” Charlie