Undead Agent

by Gary Jonas

  “And how,” Esther said.

  “Emmanuel was twenty-seven when he died. So far as we know, he was burned alive. Then his bones were pulverized. His remains … cremains, really, were delivered in a shoebox left on Mama’s porch. His gris-gris bag was gone, and presumed burned up until Mama spotted Papa Simon with one exactly like it.”

  I resisted the temptation to ask if it was like Samuel L. Jackson’s wallet in Pulp Fiction. You can only get away with so many jokes when dealing with voodoo priests, priestesses, kings, and queens.

  “Did she accuse Papa Simon?” I asked.

  “No. She just noted it, and told me. This is going to come out wrong, but I think Mama was glad Emmanuel was dead. Not the way he died, of course, but he was damaging her reputation because his actions reflected on her. Mama helps people. Emmanuel hurt people.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to have a little chat with Papa Simon.”

  “That’s not a good idea. His magic is strong.”

  “I don’t care. If we’re going to get rid of Emmanuel’s ghost, we’ll have to destroy his gris-gris bag. That’s got to be what’s allowing him to remain here.”

  “You won’t be able to get it. Papa Simon wears it.”

  “Oh, I can get it,” I said. “Your grandmother said when she brought Emmanuel back that he was different.”

  “He was,” Tara said. “He was full-on dark side when he came back. Mama hoped she could save his soul, but while she won’t admit it even to herself, he can’t be redeemed. It bothers her so much because she raised him.”

  A chill ran through me and I shivered. I looked up, expecting to see an air conditioning vent, but there wasn’t one.

  “Something wrong?” Tara asked.

  “No. I just got cold all of the sudden. Must have been a draft.”

  “It’s actually a little hot in here,” Tara said. “I was going to ask the waitress if she could turn on the A.C.”

  “Doesn’t feel hot or cold to me,” Esther said. “One of the few benefits of being a ghost.”

  The chill went away, and I felt better when the food arrived.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We met Kelly back at the hotel at eight o’clock. She sat in the bar drinking a glass of red wine. She was dressed all in black, as usual, from her shirt, to her pants, to her boots. While I didn’t see any weapons on her, I knew she had knives and shuriken stashed in various places. Then again, she’d had to go through airport security, so maybe she didn’t. I considered asking, but did the introduction thing instead.

  “Kelly, this is Tara Rousseau. Tara, this is Kelly Chan.”

  They did the pleased to meet you routine.

  Esther said hello, and all the niceties were out of the way.

  I gave Kelly the key to room 1429. We rode up in the elevator. The hair was gone from the door jamb, but that wasn’t surprising since the cleaning crew would have gone in to tidy things up. That wouldn’t have taken much since I hadn’t slept there.

  Kelly dropped her suitcase off in the room. As soon as we were inside, Esther made herself visible to everyone. She sat on the bed and waited patiently.

  “So you think they tracked you?” Kelly asked.

  “I do. I left the tracker on the counter.” I checked to see if the cleaning crew took it away, but it was still where I left it. “Still here,” I said, and handed it to Kelly.

  She tossed it back on the counter. “I trust you,” she said. “It can stay there.”

  “If they’re tracking it, they might break in,” Tara said.

  Kelly smiled. “I certainly hope so.”

  “I’m in the next room,” I said.

  “Good. I trust you have a lead on where Emmanuel might be hiding.”

  “One of the cemeteries.”

  “Let’s go,” Kelly said.

  “Not at night,” Tara said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Even better,” Kelly said.

  A short Uber ride later, and a few minutes of assuring the driver that yes we did want to get out at the cemetery, and no we didn’t want to come back tomorrow for one of the ghost tour groups, and yes, we knew the cemetery wasn’t a safe place to go, and on and on. The driver gave up, and said, “Your life.”

  And at nine o’clock, we set foot in the cemetery.

  To get in, we had to climb over a brick wall because the cemetery was only open in the daytime, and even then, you’re supposed to go with a tour group unless you have special dispensation from a genealogy mission, or you have family entombed there.

  If Emmanuel was hanging out, I guess that meant Tara had family hiding there, so if a policeman happened by, that would be our story. Explaining our visitation after hours might take more creativity.

  In any case, we hopped the fence, and found ourselves in the dark cemetery. There were mausoleums and two- to three-stack family tombs, all above ground. Tara explained that the cemetery was below sea level, so burying people was a bad idea. The next rain, you’d have bodies coming up out of the ground. So they put them in these tombs. Some of them were essentially brick ovens. A family member would be placed in the slot, bricked in, and the heat of New Orleans would slowly cook them until the skin slid off, and disintegrated. A year and a day later, the skeleton could be removed and either pulverized to dust or placed in an ossuary. Then that slot was open for another family member.

  They were essentially hand-me-down graves.

  The tombs were jam-packed into the cemetery. The place took up one full city block. Some of the tombs had sets of three X’s drawn all over them. One of those tombs belonged to Marie Laveau, the infamous voodoo queen. People would scrawl XXX on the tomb, and ask for the dead voodoo queen’s help. If the wish was granted, they had to return with an offering or they’d pay the price three times over.

  So it was easy to tell which tombs held voodoo practitioners because of the graffiti. A lot of the tombs had been vandalized, too.

  We crept down the narrow aisles in search of Emmanuel’s ghost. That meant it was up to me and Esther to spot him.

  The cemetery was about half a mile from the French Quarter in a bad part of town, so we were as likely to encounter drug-addicted criminals as we were to find ghosts.

  Some of the tombs had wrought iron fences with spiked tops to keep people out.

  And amusingly, there was a pyramid that supposedly belonged to the actor Nicolas Cage, as he wanted to be entombed there like some long-forgotten pharaoh, but if I ran the place, after that second Ghost Rider movie or Drive Angry, he’d need to cough up some more cash to maintain his spot. I understand needing to earn more money, but the word no exists for a reason.

  Shadows crawled across the ground, and moonlight barely illuminated some of the lighter tombs. There were only a few palm trees inside the cemetery. Most of the space was filled with row after row of above-ground tombs. It was a city of the dead.

  Sirens sounded in the distance, but that was common here. I walked along as quietly as I could. Kelly moved like a ninja making zero sound. Tara’s feet crunched a bit on the ground, but I was impressed at her stealth, too. Esther wasn’t a problem. She floated ahead of us a bit, then drifted back.

  “It’s spooky in here,” she whispered.

  “I don’t think you have to worry about anything, Esther,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  If there were bad guys, I didn’t want to draw them out just yet. I wanted to find Emmanuel.

  Regular criminals were never going to be a problem. Kelly was here, and she’d dispatch them in less time than it takes to tell you about it.

  The living weren’t my concern.

  “We have a family tomb over that way,” Tara said, pointing.

  We moved in the direction indicated. Our eyes adjusted to the darkness so the tombs were like shadows against the darkness, and the tops had slivers of moonlight reflecting back. There was an unnatural beauty to the place.

  I drew a deep breath because something felt o
ff about the air ahead of us, but I couldn’t see anything.

  “Esther,” I said. “Can you scout ahead?”

  She nodded to me and drifted forward. She stopped and pointed to her left. She turned around.

  “Torpedoes hiding right here,” she said.

  “Shut up, bitch!” a voice said from the darkness. “Go back to your grave!”

  “I don’t reside here, you dumb palooka.”

  Kelly tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned toward her.

  “Bogies at three o’clock,” she said.

  I glanced over. Three men darted between a row of tombs. Their footsteps were audible, so they weren’t ghosts.

  “You want to take them out?” I asked.

  “To dinner and a movie?” she asked with a grin. “I’ll let them come ask me to dance.”

  I heard more footsteps, closer, but off to the left. “More at nine o’clock,” I said.

  “I hear them,” Kelly said. “We can expect some behind us, too.”

  “Where did a ghost get henchmen?” My nose wrinkled at the stench of dead bodies wafting on a warm breeze. “Oh,” I said.

  And sure enough, two ghosts slid out in front of us, and a bunch of dead people stalked toward us from all sides.

  They stopped when they were close enough to stink us to death, but not close enough to launch a flying kick at without taking a running start.

  One of the ghosts ahead was Emmanuel.

  “Jonathan Shade,” he said.

  “That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” I said.

  “Like a child with your taunts.”

  “Would you prefer a Monty Python routine? If you’ll wait a moment, I can taunt you a second time.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Tara asked.

  “Your brother,” I said.

  “He’s here?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t see him,” Tara said.

  “I don’t either,” Kelly said. “But don’t worry about that. Our problem is that after we kick the crap out of the corpses, we’ll have to go back to the hotel smelling like death.”

  “Maybe we can get through this without a fight,” I said.

  Kelly glared at me. “Don’t ruin my night, Jonathan. You promised I could have some fun.”

  “Give me a few minutes to try a different approach.”

  Kelly sighed and studied her fingernails. “Fine.”

  I took a few steps toward Emmanuel, but the ghost with him, an older black man in a nice vintage suit, darted toward me and put up a hand.

  “That’s far enough,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Grady Rousseau,” he said. “Emmanuel is my son, and Taraji is my daughter.”

  I noted the slight variation in Tara’s name, but like someone named Annette being called Ann or Annie, it wasn’t worth getting worked up about. “So you’re Madame Rousseau’s son?”

  “Indeed.”

  Tara started forward. “My father is here?”

  “Evidently. But don’t go any closer. He’s not a happy ghost.”

  “Makes sense. He was never a happy father either.”

  “Sticks and stones,” Grady said.

  “Play nice,” I said. “You need to remember that I can end you.”

  “Pretty ghost you brought along,” Emmanuel said. “Be a shame if I had to recruit her.”

  “Bank’s closed, buster,” Esther said, drifting away from him to stand on one of the tombs.

  “That goes for you, too, dipshit,” I said to Emmanuel. “Esther, you can come back here.”

  She popped away from the tomb and appeared at my side.

  “Neat trick,” Emmanuel said. “You’ll have to teach me that dance move.”

  “Dry up,” Esther said. “You’re no Oliver Twist, and Jonathan is gonna bump you off.”

  Emmanuel smiled. “I tried to hire him to save me, not kill me.”

  “You were just messing with me,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not at all. Someone is trying to kill me. Kill might be the wrong word of course, because I’m already dead, so let’s go with someone is trying to extinguish my spirit.”

  “If someone else really does want to get rid of you, they’ll have to stand in line,” I said. “I’m not here to work for you, pal. My plan is to destroy you so you can’t possess Tara again.”

  “Oh, you have no idea what’s really going on. My family is so fucked up it would take a team of psychiatrists to scratch the surface.”

  Kelly nudged me. “What is he saying?”

  “He wants to hire me.”

  “You might point out to him that raising a gang of dead people to surround us doesn’t play into his good intentions.”

  “She’s right,” I said to Emmanuel. “What do you have to say for yourself now?”

  “I didn’t raise the dead,” Emmanuel said. “He did.” And he pointed down an aisle toward someone I could not see.

  A man in a dark suit stepped around a tomb. His suit wasn’t in the best of shape. A dark stain on his chest made the tie look malformed.

  “Good evening, Emmanuel,” the man said. He turned toward me. “I don’t know you, but you’re interrupting.” There was a big hole in his forehead, as if someone had taken Maxwell’s silver hammer to his skull, but as the moonlight illuminated his face, I recognized him.

  “Paul Tanner,” I said. “Looks like you bit the big one.”

  “You know me?” he asked.

  “Your mother hired me to find you.”

  “Like that bitch cares about me.”

  “Her check cleared, so she must care a little bit,” I said.

  “My mother wouldn’t pay you to do anything.”

  “She does like to get everyone else to pay, but she really did write a check for me to find you.”

  “Mission accomplished,” he said. “It’s too bad she didn’t send you a month ago. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

  A woman walked out of the shadows to stand beside him. She had her hands on her stomach as she bent over. She looked over at me. “Please help me,” she said. “Please make the pain stop.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Sarah Tanner,” she said. “At least, I used to be. I don’t know what I am now. Please kill me.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “That seems like a rather extreme solution,” I said.

  Emmanuel drifted away from Paul. Grady moved backward, too.

  “He tortured me in life,” Sarah said. “Don’t let him torture me in death.”

  She was a ghost trapped in someone else’s body because I couldn’t see through her to the tombs. But her voice sounded like it echoed off the chambers of Valhalla. Well, the chambers of somewhere, anyway.

  “You left me when I needed you most,” Paul said to her. “I couldn’t abide by that.”

  “Dude,” I said, “if you want to do a karaoke version of Randy Vanwarmer’s ‘Just When I Needed You Most’ we can arrange that. The KJ might not have that song, though, so you might want to line up a second choice. Maybe you two can do a duet of an Ike and Tina Turner song.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Though this looks more like a Dead Man’s Party.”

  He glared at me like he couldn’t believe some clown would toss karaoke into a standoff in a dark cemetery while surrounded by corpses.

  Tara looked at me like I was crazy, too, but Kelly took it all in stride because she knew how I was. But I could tell from the way she angled herself, that she expected Paul to take a swing at his dead wife, and I knew if that happened, the fecal matter would sail into the rotary oscillator and things would get downright messy.

  The smart thing to do would be to hide among the tombs, but the grave next to me was protected by a spike-topped wrought iron fence, and the dead guys were too close for me to retreat to another section.

  Esther kept an eye on the corpses. “If they start toward you, I’ll let you know,” she said.

  That le
ft me free to talk to Paul.

  “Tell you what, dude,” I said.

  “Did you just call me dude?”

  “Would you prefer dudette?”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “I didn’t think so. Now if you’ll stop interrupting, we can negotiate a bit before the inevitable fight.”

  “Let’s just skip ahead to the fighting,” Kelly said.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Now, now, you know you love the anitici—” I said and held the silence like Frankenfurter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  Everyone stared at me.

  I wondered if I could hold the silence indefinitely.

  Paul stared at me like he didn’t know what to say or do. His dead wife remained silent, waiting.

  Esther shook her head. I’d taken her to a midnight showing of the movie a few weeks before, so she knew what I was doing.

  I looked around. Some of the corpses shifted feet. Bones rattled. One guy’s skin dripped off his arm and splatted on the ground.

  “—pation,” I finished at last.

  “You’re a dork,” Kelly said.

  “But it calmed things down a bit. Can we talk now?”

  Paul looked unsure.

  “Are you an agent or a special agent?” I asked.

  “I was a special agent. Why?”

  “Special Agent Tanner,” I said. His posture changed, and the modicum of respect eased some of the tension. I reached into my pocket and took out my cellphone. I held it up. “Your mommy wants to talk to you.”

  He cussed at me.

  His dead wife laughed.

  He clenched a fist, and turned toward her.

  Stupid idea.

  Kelly launched herself at him. She leaped up, used a tomb to ricochet around, spun and kicked the undead agent in the face before his fist could connect with his wife’s cheek.

  He staggered back.

  Kelly landed in front of him and punched him in the throat. He stumbled back again, but made a slight motion with his right hand.

  “They’re coming,” Esther said.

  The corpses advanced. A few of them were little more than skeletons.

  Emmanuel and his father dropped into the ground.

  I pushed Tara toward the fence and cupped my hands at knee-level. “I’ll boost you over.”