comes up again and again, in a dozen cultures, is that they guard the passage between the living and the dead."
"Well, that makes sense," Charlie said. "I guess. It doesn't say where that passage is, does it? What BART station?"
"No, Asher, it doesn't. But I found this book by a nun who had been excommunicated in the 1890s, isn't that cool? This library is amazing. They have like nine million books."
"Yes, that's great, Lily, what did the ex-nun say?"
"She had found all the references for hellhounds, and the thing they all seemed to agree on was they serve directly the ruler of the Underworld."
"She was Catholic and she called it the Underworld?"
"Well, they threw her out of the Church for writing this book, but yeah, that's what she said."
"She didn't have a number we could call in case they got lost."
"I'm over here on my day off, Asher, trying to do you a favor. Are you going to keep being a smart-ass about it?"
"No, I'm sorry, Lily. Go on."
"That's it. It's not like there's a care-and-feeding guide. Mostly, the research implies that having hellhounds around is a bad thing."
"What's the title of this book, The Complete Guide to the Fucking Obvious?"
"You're paying me for this, you know? Time and travel."
"Sorry. Yes. So I should try to get rid of them."
"They eat people, Asher. Who's riding the duh train now?"
So, with that, Charlie decided that he needed to take an active role in ridding himself of the monstrous canines.
Since the only thing about the hellhounds that he could be sure of was that they would go anywhere he took Sophie, he brought them along on their trip to the San Francisco Zoo, and left them locked in the van with the engine running and a shop-vac hose run from the exhaust pipe through the vent window. After what he considered to be an extraordinarily successful tour of the zoo, in which not a single animal shuffled off the mortal coil under the delighted eye of his daughter, Charlie returned to the van to find two very stoned, but otherwise unharmed hellhounds who were burping a burnt plastic vapor after having eaten his seat covers.
Various experiments revealed that Alvin and Mohammed were not only immune to most poisons, but they rather liked the taste of bug spray and consequently licked all the paint off the baseboards in Charlie's apartment in the week following the exterminator's quarterly service.
As time wore on, Charlie tried to measure the danger of having the giant canines around against the damage that would be done to Sophie's psyche from witnessing their demise, as she was obviously becoming attached to them, so he backed off the more direct attacks on them and stopped throwing Snausages in front of the number 90 crosstown express bus. (This decision was also made easy when the city of San Francisco threatened to sue Charlie if his dogs wrecked another bus.)
Direct attacks, in fact, were difficult for Charlie (as the only true Beta Male martial art was based entirely on the kindness of strangers), so he turned on the hellhounds the awesome power of the Beta Male kung fu of passive aggression.
He started conservatively, taking them for a ride over to the East Bay in the van, luring them onto the Oakland mudflats with a rack of beef ribs, then driving away quickly, only to find them waiting in the apartment when he returned, having covered the entire living room with a patina of drying mud. He then tried an even more indirect approach: crating up the hounds and air-freighting them to Korea in the hope they would find themselves in an entr茅e, only to find that they actually made it back to the shop before he had time to sweep the dog hair out of his apartment.
He thought that perhaps he might use their own natural instincts to chase them away, after he read on the Internet that the essence of cougar urine was sometimes sprinkled on shrubs and flowers to keep dogs from urinating on them. After a fairly exhaustive search through the phone book, he finally found the number of an outdoorsman's supply store in South San Francisco that was a certified mountain-lion whizz dealer.
"Sure, we carry cougar urine," the guy said. He sounded like he was wearing a buckskin jacket and had a big beard, but Charlie might have just been projecting.
"And that's supposed to keep dogs away?" Charlie asked.
"Works like a charm. Dogs, deer, and rabbits. How much do