Half-Resurrection Blues

by Daniel José Older

  And wait.

  And check back around the corner. The street is empty. I curse. Walk halfway down it, curse again. Storm back out. And wait.

  The sky grows dark.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  It’s been going on every night for the past three or four weeks.” Mrs. Overbrook squints up at me like I might have something to do with it. I don’t.

  “Just bumping or other noises too?”

  “No, singing, clapping. Tambourines.” Her hands wave small circles. “All kinds of things.”

  “I see.”

  “Are you going to file a report, Detective?”

  “Sure. Any recent deaths in the family, ma’am?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Deaths. Have you lost any family members recently?”

  “Come.” She takes my cool gray hand in her warm little brown one and walks crookedly beside me into the next room. I’m still getting back into the swing of things, tidying up these sad little crinkles in the life-and-death continuum. Sasha hasn’t shown up for more than a week. Sarco’s shadow waits for me around every corner. And my wound itches every time I think too hard about either of them. Mrs. Overbrook hobbles along through the forest of old newspapers and random knickknacks cluttered to the low ceiling. It’s too hot in here. Outside the window, the sun does glorious things to the Manhattan skyline. “Pretty, right?”

  “Beautiful,” I say. Then I realize she’s not talking about the view, which she’s probably more than used to at this point; she’s talking about a small shrine set up in a wooden bookcase beside the window. Four adorable little kids smile out of a framed picture in the middle. Around it, Mrs. Overbrook has stapled some squiggly marker drawings and a short thank-you letter written in careful, looping script. A fake gold necklace hangs off one shelf, and a tiny ballerina music box sits on the bottom.

  “They died in a fire, down south.”

  “How long ago?”

  “It’ll be two years in June. Their stupid cow of a mother was smoking in bed. She lived, her drunk-ass son-of-a-bitch husband lived, and all my little angels passed away.” She looks for a second like she might break down crying, but then she gathers herself and smiles up at me. “I’ll never understand why the Lord does what he does. Nothin’ to do but accept it. But it pains my heart, Detective. It really does.”

  “I cannot even imagine.”

  “It’s them, isn’t it—been pestering my sleep so?”

  “I think so, yes, Mrs. Overbrook.”

  “Thought so.” She looks at me with that penetrating gaze of the old and wise, squinting through two solid inches of glass that magnifies her eyes into giant, wandering splotches. “You’re not like other cops I’ve met.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. Do you want me to deal with your situation?”

  She considers for a moment, staring thoughtfully at the shrine. “No.”

  Our eyes meet again, and I feel an infinity of understanding pass between us, one so deep I don’t even completely grasp it. So I nod. “Okay, Mrs. Overbrook.”

  “I think it’s rather comforting. I just wanted someone to come take a look. Someone who would know what to do.”

  I’m a little startled by how much her words mean to me. “Glad I could help.”

  Unfounded. That’s what I’ll scrawl on my paperwork for this one. I’ve already half written it in my head as I step out of the pee-stained elevator and walk through the lobby. The investigating officer has determined that there was no supernatural activity in the apartment in question. Further review is unnecessary. I’ve written those words so many times now, I can’t even count. You’d be amazed how many folks get attached to their ghosts.

  Elton Ellis, the tactless miniature messenger ghost, is waiting for me outside Mrs. Overbrook’s public housing project.

  “Yes?”

  “The Council has a message for you.”

  “Why didn’t they just blast it to me the way they usually do?”

  “The system is down.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Something happened. A glitch or something, and they can’t get through. Or not every time anyway. So they send me.”

  “How convenient for you.”

  “Well . . . in a way.”

  “Out with it.”

  Elton Ellis clears his throat, then says: “The crack house off Fulton Street.”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “The crack house off Fulton Street. That’s the whole message?”

  “Word for word. What’dyou think it means?”

  “Guess I’ll go there and find out.”

  “Maybe there’s something there they want you to see.”

  I glare down at the little ghost. “Is that what you overheard somewhere, or are you being speculative?”

  “Maybe I heard one of the chairmen saying that to one of the soulcatchers.”

  “Maybe you heard something else too?”

  Elton Ellis shrugs. “Maybe.”

  I fish through my pockets for a little toy or candy for him, but I’m all out. Figures. I tell him to wait right there and fast-walk it to the bodega across the street and back.

  “Here,” I say, handing him a fistful of assorted penny candies.

  He eyes them hungrily. “That oughta shut it down.”

  “Who said that—Botus?”

  “Maybe.”

  I throw him a sharp look so he knows he’s not getting any more candy out of me.

  “Okay, yeah. Botus. He thinks the case’s a waste of time and a useless runaround and wants you back dealing with other things.”

  “But I am dealing with other . . . Oh, never mind. Anything else?”

  “Agent Washington wants you to meet him at the Burgundy when you’re done. Where you going?”

  * * *

  There’s actually a couple of crack houses off Fulton Street, but I’m pretty sure I know which one they mean. It’s a big brick building with a long history of unfortunate fires, ODs, kidnappings . . . I’m sure Victor’s seen his share of living hell at this spot. Spiritually, the place is a disaster. So much ruined life attracts the ruinous dead too, and I have to shoulder through a crowd of muttering shadows just to get to the front door. They’re dripping with regret, bitterness, all the sloppy leftovers of a life poorly lived, and I want nothing to do with it.

  “Shmash’ema,” one of them moans as I hurry past. “Shmash’ema, ohhh da li.” The old tattered spirit’s thrown himself in my path and I don’t want to touch him.

  “The fuck out my way.”

  “Shmaaaa-aaa!” he gurgles. “Car . . . los!” Ugh. I hate it when they know your name. There’s no reason for that.

  “Move!”

  He slithers and writhes, an almost formless mass of wayward hair and tentacular slabs of fat, and finally gets in a position that I can easily step over, which I do.

  “Shmlaaaaa Carlo-os!”

  I walk into the dim building, step past a few sleeping-or-dead bodies in the front foyer, and eye the shadows for Sarco. But he’s not here. He’s nowhere. I’ve stared into how many shadows these past weeks? Scanned how many empty streets? It seems never-ending. I keep waiting for the shivering dread to pass, for my old reckless self to come back, unsullied by fear. But it won’t. Far as my mind is concerned, Sarco waits around every corner. He slides along alleyways, slinking out when I’ve turned my back and vanishing again when I spin, blade drawn, to confront him. I can’t go on like this, chasing my own shadow.

  I march up a flight of rickety stairs, brush past a guy in his underpants, drooling, all scratchy beard and flimsy, tracked-up arms, and find another room full of human desecration. I knock my cane a few times on the wood-paneled floor. “Anybody seen a tall, pale dude with long, nasty black hair?”

  A few guys look up at me and then look back down. One nods his head toward the back of the room, and I gingerly step over a few huddled clumps to an empty spot of floor. Balled-up rubber gloves and b
lood stained bandages lay scattered around like someone just turned over a hospital garbage can. Then I realize that whole part of the floor is a shade darker than the rest.

  Blood.

  “What happened?” I ask no one in particular.

  “Dweezo crapped out,” a grizzly old man offers. I recognize him—Delton Jennings: one of the regular homeless guys who make their night rounds through the city.

  “Dweezo?”

  “The guy you lookin’ for.”

  “Was he a Muppet?”

  “Naw, man, that was just what they called him. I dunno.”

  “All right, how’d it play out?”

  “Nah, he was just all fucked-up-looking when he showed up this morning. Blood kept trickling out his eye and shit.”

  “His eye?”

  “That’s what I said! And then he started coughing. He was up here and he started coughing and then he threw up and it was bright red, yo, and then, well . . . that.” He nods at the sizable stain stretched across the wood floor.

  “EMS just left a few minutes ago.”

  “You know where they took him?”

  “Woodhull, I think. It was all kinda rush-rush.”

  I thank Delton and work my way back downstairs and out the door. The same phantom nastiness tries to get in my way again, cooing his horrible song, but I step past before he can really become a nuisance.

  “Shmloooo,” the thing gurgles as I walk away. “Carlossss . . .”

  * * *

  Woodhull looks more like a prison than a hospital. The hulking cement monstrosity sits at the geographical moment where Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Bed-Stuy converge. Three massive towers jut out from an aggressively plain block of nondescript windows. One concrete ramp loops around into a parking lot and another peels off from the street into an awning-covered driveway, where ambulances idle outside the ER doors. A series of grumpy-looking surgeons, security guards, and EMTs share cigarettes and horror stories on the curb directly in front of a NO SMOKING sign.

  I wait, blending with the passing bums and street riffraff, until an ambulance crew rolls up and unloads a screaming bearded guy who appears to be velcroed to the stretcher. A couple cops jump out, looking exhausted. “Fuck ya mothas!” the guy yells. “Fuck all ya fuckin’ fuck mothas. Twice!” Perfect. “I will”—he bangs his head against the stretcher—“fucking kill you all!”

  Hospital cops are running everywhere, looking for restraints, trying to appear competent. It’s a mess. I slip in on the current of that chaos, veer off down any old hallway and find an elevator. The morgue is all bright lights and bland colors. We have a guy down there, Mortimer, who lets us pretty much roam free when we need to. I don’t know if he knows what all is going on, or if he just takes whatever handout the Council has for him and forgets what he sees. Either way, he nods his jowly old head as I strut past and mumbles: “Row seven, bin A.”

  I walk down the aisles, peering at the numbers like I’m using the damn Dewey decimal system for the dead. The little silver doors seems to go on forever, and I try not to think about dozens of bodies decaying around me, many unclaimed, unnamed. Death is one thing. The moment of the release of the soul, all that: fine. But the physical body after the fact? Get it away from me. That smell of rot, that festering, bubbling transition into mold and then dust? Hell no. Good night. I don’t like dead bodies.

  But apparently there’s one I have to see, so I put my hand on the cold steel handle and roll out bin A in the seventh column. It’s Sarco, all right. His mouth hangs open in that particular dead-guy way, rotten teeth jutting out in all kinds of unseemly directions. Ugh. And he’s naked, his pale skin even paler now and lacking in all the stretch and shine of life.

  “Bled to death.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I jump backward, reaching for my blade, before I realize it’s only Mortimer. The guy should really know better than to sneak up on a man in a morgue. Surely there’s some protocol about that.

  “Odd case really.”

  “Oh?” I say when I recover my composure.

  “The EMTs were so used to bringing him in for some bullshit OD or another night of binge drinking, I think it caught ’em off guard that something was actually wrong with him.”

  “That and he was bleeding out his eyes.”

  “Well . . . yeah, that too.”

  “Anything else?”

  Mortimer digs in his lab coat pockets, retrieves a flask, and tugs on it brazenly, making loud guzzling noises. When he’s done, he wipes his mouth, smacks his lips a few times, and says: “Nope.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  They’re what?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “But, Riley . . .” I let out a sigh that’s full of my dull hatred for the Council. Then I give up trying to finish the sentence, because Riley already knows what I was gonna say. “Fuck.”

  “Word.”

  We’re in the Burgundy Bar. I’m trying not to think about Dro not being here with us. I’m trying not to think about Sasha too. I had been getting good at that; she’s vanished as predicted, after all. But Sasha keeps creeping back into my thoughts.

  “I’m so . . . ugh!” I don’t even give a fuck about all the surly drunks that’re making faces my way right now. Least of my damn concerns. That crazy guy in the corner? I’ll be that. I am that. I’m done pretending shit. “Riley. The fuck we gonna do?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “You need to consider the possibility that the dude done died and that’s what it is.”

  “But I . . .”

  “I know you don’t like it. But that’s what you looking at right now.”

  “I said, I wouldn’t believe he was dead till I saw a body.”

  “And?”

  “And I saw the body and I still don’t believe he’s dead.”

  “Well, the Council does. And they say there’s no record of him becoming a ghost or nothin’.”

  “Like they never miss a spirit.”

  “Right. Well, regardless. Case closed.”

  “But no.” I down another shot. “No. We keep going.”

  Riley does too. “Carlos, it doesn’t bother you that the homey checked out in damn near the same way your boy from New Year’s did?”

  “It does. It does. Of course it does.”

  “Well, what does that tell you?”

  “That some sinister shit is at play.”

  “No! Well, yes, but besides that . . .”

  I put my head on the bar and then lift it up again. “Indeed. Quiñones, dos más por favor.”

  “It tells you there’s someone else workin’ things. Pullin’ strings. A third party.”

  “Fuck. Well, that’s not case closed then. It’s case wide the fuck open.”

  “Right, but the Sarco chapter of the case is closed. Anyway,” Riley says languidly. The alcohol seethes through his words now. He pauses, squints up his face like he’s trying to remember what he was about to say.

  “Anyway?” I drink my shot; he drinks his.

  We both let out that satisfied, holy shit aaaah! noise, and then Riley goes: “Oh yeah, anyway, the Council wants to tell you about how they’re shuttin’ down your big case in person.”

  I bust out laughing. Not really sure why. “When?”

  “You were sposta be there about fifteen minutes ago.”

  I stop laughing. “What?”

  Now Riley’s cracking up. “They said ASAP about forty-five minutes back, so . . . I figure that means about twenty minutes later. So, yeah.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The little guy. Erfin. Orifice. Orifice Eddie.”

  “Elton Ellis.”

  “Right.”

  “Why didn’t they just . . . ?”

  “The system’s fucking down.”

  I let out another exasperated sigh. “In so many more ways than one.”

  There’s a somber pause, and then we both break out laughing again.

  * * *
>
  Botus seems unpleasantly victorious today. He doesn’t simmer in the shadows with the rest of the committee like at the last hearing. “Agent Delacruz,” he says, sliding forward so the bright overhead lights shine right through him and throw drastic shadows down his face. “How wonderful that you have recovered so well.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “We really quite enjoyed your report, although we were dismayed to see how much trouble you went through and, of course, that you proceeded into the realm of the dead without first obtaining permission for said activity from the Council.”

  Assery! My mind bumbles through the big clunky words I have to say to justify said activity, but I’m still a little tipsy, so I know they’re not going to come out right. “The situation,” I say, very slowly, “was sufficiently urgent . . . as to require . . .”

  “Of course,” Botus says with a pay-no-mind swipe of his hand. “We’re just glad you made it out okay.” This is when I realize something must indeed be very wrong. I’ve never heard of him being this magnanimous. “What’s . . . ? How shall I put it? Ironic? What’s ironic, Carlos, is all that trouble you went through and still were not able to fully thwart the conspirator Sarco.”

  “Hm, ironic, right.” Trying not to roll my eyes.

  “Fortunately, he was found dead, as you know, yesterday afternoon. Perhaps even brought low as a result of some of the damage you inflicted on him during the foray into the Underworld?” I want to stab Botus. But I won’t, partially because my aim would be a little off right now and I don’t think I’ll have more than one shot. He’s going somewhere with all this, enjoying it thoroughly too. “So we are going to close the case, but only partially.”

  “Partially?”

  “Well, of course, ngks are still there, infesting several buildings around the rogue entity Esther.” Besides calling Esther a rogue entity, this is the first thing Botus has said that I agree with, possibly ever. “And many tantalizing, unanswered questions remain: Who was this character? Where did he obtain the spiritual technology to do what he almost did? What is the nature of his alliance with the ngks? How exactly did he finally meet his end?”