by Gary Jonas
Table of Contents
Title Page
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
About the Author
UNDEAD AGENT
by Gary Jonas
CHAPTER ONE
“How can you stay in business if you don’t even have an office?” Doris Tanner asked.
I sighed, and glared at my phone. I had Doris on speaker while I walked home from the gym. My back was sore from working out with Kelly, and I just wanted to take a nice hot bath, and soak the aches and pains away. Kelly and Esther were still at the gym. Esther enjoyed watching Kelly toss me around, and sometimes she’d make herself visible to Kelly so she could clap her ghost hands at a fine take-down. Kelly wasn’t ready to stop, but I had enough bruises for one day, so she volunteered to help some MMA fighters with their workouts. They were going to regret it.
“Like I told you the last three times you called, I’m not in business right now. As such, I don’t need an office.”
“So I have to hire you sight unseen? Even with your glowing recommendations, that doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me. I like to meet the people I hire so I can take their measure. You’d be amazed at how many people try to run scams on old women like me.”
The wind kicked in as I turned a corner. I was renting an Airbnb in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, and while the temperature was in the low seventies, the wind made it feel colder.
“Was there something about ‘I’m not in business’ that you didn’t understand?” I asked.
“Just the part about you not being in business. I’m very well-connected, Mr. Shade, so you’re going to work for me whether you want to or not.”
I laughed. “Good luck with that,” I said. “Bye-bye now.” And I hung up.
“I said you’re going to work for me,” Doris said.
I stared at my phone. The screen was dark. I hit the button on the side and the time lit up, but there wasn’t a call connected.
“Did you hear me?” Doris asked.
The voice definitely came from the phone.
“Nifty little trick,” I said. “Hire someone else. Bye-bye now.” This time, I powered the phone off.
“I want to hire you, Mr. Shade.”
“Witch or wizard?” I asked.
“I’m a wizard,” she said. “Retired, of course.”
“Go bother someone else, Mrs. Tanner.”
“But my son is missing, and you’re the only one who can find him.”
“I’m not the only one,” I said. “Who gave you my number?”
“I’m on the board at Dragon Gate Industries in New York. I have access to the best.”
“Have DGI find your son.”
“They tried.”
“If they couldn’t find him, why do you think I can?”
“I want to talk to you in person.”
“I’m not in New York,” I said.
A rift opened in the air, and the sound of honking horns assaulted me. The rift revealed an apartment with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Then an old woman wearing a long gray dress with a white frilly collar stepped through to the sidewalk in front of me. The rift closed up, cutting off a blaring horn in mid-cry.
The old woman had her silver hair tied back in a bun, and bifocals perched on her nose. She leaned her head back to get a better view of me. Her lips tightened, straightening some of her wrinkles.
“You’re not that attractive,” she said.
Her voice came at me in stereo—partly from her mouth, and partly from my phone.
I held up my phone. “You can cancel your spell now,” I said.
Doris blinked. “Very well.”
She looked around, and frowned. “Chicago. I haven’t been here since the seventies.”
“I can make you feel right at home,” I said, and started singing “Bad Bad Leroy Brown.”
“Stop,” she said, and waved a hand.
I kept singing. I’m no Jim Croce, but I thought my rendition wasn’t that bad. Her eyes widened because her spell had no effect on me.
“Stop,” she said, and waved her hand again.
“What’s the magic word?” I asked, and went back to the song.
She narrowed her gaze, looked at her hand as if it might be defective, then gave her head a resigned shake.
“Please stop,” she said.
I stopped singing. “And we were just getting to the good part where you got Leroy jacked up.”
“Where I did what?”
“Your name is Doris,” I said. “And I suspect that back when the song was a hit, you looked nice enough to get Leroy’s attention.”
She rolled her eyes. I was in fine form. Normally it took longer than two minutes to get someone to roll their eyes at me.
“Is there someplace we can go to sit down and talk, away from all this wind?”
“There’s a doughnut shop over on Clark,” I said, and gestured to the left. “I’ve been meaning to try it.”
“I could sure use a cup of coffee,” she said. “Let’s go.”
My bath would have to wait. One thing I’ve learned about wizards is that when they go to the trouble of opening a rift to join you, they won’t leave you alone. It was easier to just take the damn meeting and get it over with. I could tell her no after she bought me a doughnut and a cup of coffee.
We entered the shop a few minutes later, and got in line. The place had nice wooden floors, with a few tables in the center of the front room, and a large case filled with gourmet doughnuts at the back. Another room branched off to the right with more tables, and a slender hallway leading to the restrooms. There were also a few alcoves with tables pushed out from the hall.
We waited our turn, then each ordered a doughnut and coffee. I went for a standard chocolate frosted, but Doris got some fancy pastry with cream and sprinkles of coconut on top. The cashier rang us up, and Doris looked at me.
“What are you looking at me for?” I asked.
“Pay the woman,” Doris said.
“This is your meeting,” I said. “This is supposed to be your treat.”
“It’s a man’s place to pay for a woman.”
“Right,” I said, and pulled out a twenty.
“That’s not enough,” the cashier said.
“For two doughnuts and two regular coffees?” I shook my head, and glanced at the total. I pulled out a five and passed it over with the twenty.
The cashier gave me twenty-two cents back. I stared at the two dimes and two pennies. “I guess gourmet is French for expensive,” I said.
The cashier shrugged. I pulled several one dollar bills from my pocket and tossed them into the tip jar with the twenty-two cents.
Doris and I found a table in one of the small alcoves. We sat and sipped coffee.
“My son worked at the FBI for twenty-five years,” she said. “He had a good career, and while I wish he’d studied magic, he was just never very good at spells.”
Doris took a bite of her pastry and f
rowned. She set it aside, and took another drink of her coffee. “I don’t like that,” she said.
“That was a ten dollar doughnut,” I said. “You’re telling me it’s nasty?”
“It’s beneath my standards. You can have it.”
“I don’t like coconut.”
“Neither do I.”
“You ordered coconut.”
“It looked good.”
“Something tells me that if you were alone and had to pay, you wouldn’t have ordered that.”
“You are correct. May I have half of your doughnut?”
It was pointless to argue because I knew I’d lose, so I tore my doughnut in half and passed it over. She tasted it.
“Oh, this is so much better,” she said.
“And a third the price,” I said.
When she finished eating, she dabbed at her lips with a napkin, folded it up and placed it carefully on the table. She leaned her head back to look at me through the bifocals.
“Where was I?”
“Paul was an FBI agent.”
“A damn good one, too. And now he’s gone on some damn fool mission for his wife, Sarah. I want you to find him.” She pulled a picture of Paul out of her pocket and handed it to me.
I looked at the image of a man in his late forties, maybe early fifties. He wore a suit and tie, was clean shaven, and had short hair. He looked like the prototype FBI agent from central casting. I handed the picture back, but she waved me off, so I stuck it in my back pocket.
“You said DGI tried to find him and failed. What’s the story?”
“They hired freelancers who died, but here’s the pertinent—”
“Whoa,” I said. “Back up. Who died?”
“The two paranormal investigators DGI tasked with finding Paul. Their names were Sam and Charles Norden.”
“Brothers?”
“Mother and son. Sam is short for Samantha, of course. Like the witch in that old TV show, only this Sam wasn’t a witch.”
“What happened?”
“They went to New Orleans to search for Paul, and a week later, a box of bones was delivered to DGI. The skulls were intact, so they verified the remains with dental records.”
“Charming.”
“I spoke with your sister, Monica, said she thinks Paul is dead.”
My older sister Monica worked for the New York office of DGI. She had a bad habit of sending me dangerous cases.
“Did she say why she thinks Paul is dead?”
“Something about the card from the box of bones.”
Doris dug in her purse and pulled out a square card. She handed it over. The card was white, but had BACK OFF scrawled across it in red magic marker.
“I don’t know why she thinks that means Paul is dead,” Doris said.
I flipped the card over. The other side featured the “Abbey Road” album cover.
“The Beatles,” I said, and pointed to the cover. “This is why Monica thinks Paul is dead.”
Doris looked confused.
“Paul is barefoot and out of step from John, Ringo, and George,” I said. “People thought it meant he was dead.”
“What makes you think Paul is barefoot?”
“Paul McCartney,” I said. “Not your son.” I pointed to the picture. “See? No shoes. You don’t even seem to know who he is.”
“I don’t like that rock music. I listen exclusively to Classical. You can keep your little bug band.”
“Thanks, I will. You know, I used to use Paul McCartney as a litmus test for dating.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’d talk to my potential date to see where she stood, and things went from Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings? to Paul McCartney was in a band? to who’s Paul McCartney?”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“That I’m getting old.”
“I don’t care about your age or your love life.”
“And I don’t care about the job you’re trying to foist off on me, so we’re even.”
“But I need you to find Paul. If he is dead, I want his body. Or, if he suffered the same fate as the Nordens, I want his bones. He should be buried in our family plot.”
“Not my problem, Mrs. Tanner,” I said. “I can explain the whole ‘Paul is dead’ message for you, and I can even recommend a few investigators who might be willing to help. But I’m not taking any cases right now.”
“I can pay you.”
“Well, that’s a step in the right direction,” I said. “For a moment, I thought you might expect me to pay you. So far, this meeting has cost me close to thirty bucks and all I got out of it was half a doughnut and a cup of coffee.”
“I can write you a check right here, right now.” She dug in her purse again.
“I said no.”
“I don’t accept that answer. Paul went to New Orleans to interview some Marie Laveau type who claimed to be able to bring the dead back to life. Paul’s wife died five years ago, and he never got over it. He quit his job with the FBI and focused on researching how to raise the dead. He didn’t trust the necromancers, but he thought this voodoo queen could bring her back.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “That’s exactly what I told him. Sarah has been dead for five years. She’s gone, and he needs to move on. But he insisted her ghost was still here, and that Madame Rousseau could restore her body.”
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
“The voodoo queen is named Islande Rousseau.”
“Stop,” I said. “Paul said his wife’s ghost was still with him?”
“Yes.”
“Was she?”
“Was she what? Still with him?”
“Yeah.”
“How should I know? He wouldn’t let me come into the house, and he claimed she didn’t want to see me, so she never came with him when he visited me.”
“And he thought this Rousseau lady could create a body for his wife?”
“She supposedly created a body for her dead son, so Paul thought she could bring Sarah back, too, but she refused to speak to him.”
“Do you think she’s legit?” I asked.
“Not a chance. I know she has power, but I’ve never heard of anyone being able to give a body back to a ghost who’s been long dead.”
“What happened to Paul’s wife?”
“Cancer. But Sarah was cremated, so she doesn’t even have a body to go back to.”
“And he still wanted to go?”
She nodded. “Well, that’s the story about Madame Rousseau’s son, too. That he’d been burned alive, and his scorched bones were smashed to pieces when she found him. People say she managed to restore him anyway.”
All I could think about was Esther. What if Madame Rousseau could give her back her physical body?
“I changed my mind,” I said. “I’ll take the job.”
CHAPTER TWO
Late September in New Orleans was hot, but bearable. I knew better than to drive in the city because there’s nowhere to park, so instead of renting a car, I took an Uber to my hotel.
Kelly promised to come down in a few days. Two of the MMA fighters begged her to train them for an upcoming match, and she agreed. Esther told me the fighters were the cat’s pajamas, so she wanted to stay with Kelly.
I decided not to tell either of them about the possibility of getting Esther restored to life because I didn’t want to get their hopes up. Odds were good this would be a quick little trip to New Orleans and then right back to Chicago, but if there was even a small chance of getting Esther restored to life, I wanted to look into it.
In spite of a couple of paranormal investigators getting killed, I wasn’t too concerned about anything happening to me. Voodoo Queens use magic, so if Madame Rousseau tried to curse me, she’d be wasting her chicken blood.
The trick was to get a meeting with her, something I aimed to do as soon as I got my room lined up. My hotel was
called the Tres Orleans, conveniently located on Orleans Street not too far from Jackson Square. It was supposed to be haunted, but then, all hotels in the French Quarter are supposedly haunted.
When I approached the desk clerk to check in, the young woman behind the counter had black fingernails, black lipstick, short black hair, and bright blue eyes. She looked to be about seventeen.
I set down my suitcase, gave her my name, and she checked my reservation, which I’d made before leaving Chicago, of course, and she handed me a key card.
“You’re in room 1429,” she said.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked, pretending to be serious.
“Yeah, why?”
“This is the Tres Orleans, so wouldn’t that room belong to Joan of Arc?”
She stared at me blankly.
“Never mind,” I said, “that room will be fine.”
She rolled her eyes. “You think I didn’t get it. Trust me, I got it. I just didn’t think it was funny.”
“You talk to all your guests like that?” I asked, grinning.
“Only those who try to make Joan of Arc jokes. Last year, we had a girl named Joan who worked here as a maid. Called herself the Maid of Orleans, and refused to clean room 1431 because she was nineteen and claimed to have visions she’d be killed there. She also said she liked her steaks well-done. News flash. She wasn’t funny, either.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“Feel free to keep trying, though, sir. Maybe you can come up with one I haven’t heard before.”
The sir was a nice touch.
“I’ll think on it some,” I said, and glanced at her name badge. “Veronica.”
She shot me a bored thumbs-up, and opened the copy of Gothic Beauty Magazine she had on the counter.
I grabbed my suitcase, and started toward the elevator, but turned back and patted the counter to get her attention.
She looked up from the magazine. “Don’t tell me you thought of another joke already,” she said.
“No. Are you an expert on Joan of Arc?”
“Not really. Mostly, I point people to the statue over on Decatur, but I do love history. I’m just not that up on the Hundred Years War, except that it lasted like a hundred and sixteen years and change.”
“They rounded down because it sounded better,” I said.
