After Nikki closed the door, she took me by the hand and led me down the hallway, made a few turns, then backed me up against a white stucco wall. There was a surprising amount of muscle in her spindly limbs. Then again, maybe I was still drunk.
“Think about your partner,” she said. “Everything is riding on this.”
“How about you take a moment and explain to me what the fuck is going on.”
“No.”
“No!? What do you mean, no.”
“No, as in there is no time. Do you want to save your partner or not?”
“You said he was dead.”
“Dead but not gone.”
“What in the motherloving hell does that mean?”
Nikki sighed. “I want you to think about Detective Ostrander. The sound of his voice. The look in his eyes. The way he moved his body. What he liked to eat or drink. All of this will help us locate his soul, which is clinging to his corpse somewhere in this complex.”
“If he’s dead like you say,” I said, “wouldn’t his soul be gone along with him?”
“When someone dies, it takes a while for the soul to understand. Imagine you’re in a car wreck. Do you immediately run away from the vehicle? No, you stick around to see what happens next. You wait for the police to show up. You wait for order to be restored. Only then do you abandon your vehicle. It’s the same for a human soul.”
“So if we find him, we can put his soul back in his body?”
“No,” Nikki said. “Would you climb back into a totaled car?”
“So what does it fucking matter?”
“One,” Nikki said, “you shouldn’t curse so much, it makes you sound like a cliché. Two, it will make all of the difference in the world. Especially if you want to catch the killer you call MM. Detective Ostrander cracked his pattern, and I need to know what he knows.”
The weird little chick was throwing so much at me I needed a moment to breathe. Mind you, I was still drunk. Yet, for the first time that morning, I realized I very much needed a drink.
“Trust your partner,” Nikki continued. “He’s calling out for you. If you think about him, you can lead us right to him.”
When you’re faced with the absurd, sometimes all you can do is go along with the absurd. So I leaned back against that white stucco wall and thought about my partner. Chadwick “Chuck” Ostrander. The “Chuck” was my idea. No L.A. cop would take a dude named “Chadwick” seriously. How about Chad, he suggested? Get the fuck out, I said. Chad was even worse. Hi, I’m a bad-ass detective named . . . Chad? It just wouldn’t work. So Chadwick, to his credit, became accustomed to being called “Chuck,” which—like most nicknames—started out as a joke. But, eventually, it became something warm. Something real.
“That’s good,” Nikki said. “Keep going. Imagine him standing in front of you.”
Okay, so Chuck is standing in front of me, looking at me through his horn-rimmed glasses. Another thing that made him a target in the Detective Bureau. But he didn’t care. Even when they fogged up at the most inopportune times.
“What was that?” Nikki asked.
“What was what?”
“What were you just thinking about—specifically?”
“His glasses.”
“That’s it! He left us a clue.”
“What?”
“Come on,” she said, tugging at my arm and leading me down another hallway.
We ran through this apartment complex that was clearly designed by a schizophrenic. Look for his glasses, Nikki said. That will tell us where his body is. It would be just like Chuck to leave us a bread crumb like this. But I was sad to think of Chuck, in a horribly desperate moment, pulling down his horn-rims, his vision blurring instantly, and—knowing he’d never see clearly again—tossing them somewhere for me to find later.
As we moved through the buildings, dogs barked at us and people told us to quiet the hell down. Some threatened to call the police. I told them I was the police, and they told me I was a fascist. Good morning to you, too, sweetheart.
We were on the second floor when something caught my eye. “Wait,” I said, then peered over a balcony down into this little patch of ground one floor below. A hangover vertigo washed over me, and then something else. A cold reckoning.
“What is it?”
I could barely form the words: “Chuck’s glasses.”
Only then did I truly believe my partner was dead. Whenever we’d find ourselves in one of those shoot-outs or brawls or fights to the death, Chuck would carefully remove his eyewear and tuck them in the pocket of his blazer. But you won’t be able to see, I’d say every time. And then he’d give me one of those cock-eyed smiles and say, “They cost $179.99 a pair. I can squint.”
But here was the weird thing: there were no apartment doors anywhere near Chuck’s glasses.
We were looking down into this weird little square of non-used space, enclosed by four walls, visible only from above. Which is what happens when you draw up the architectural plans for an apartment complex while you’re in a straitjacket.
“There’s no door,” I said. “How’d did they get down there?”
Nikki looked up. “The roof.”
We went up a series of stairs that left me both winded and on the verge of another epic round of vomiting. I was chilled to my marrow and sweating at the same time. Surely this was my body telling me that it was just giving up. Go ahead and drink yourself to death if you want. I’m done trying to talk to you.
My vision was blurry when we reached the top, which was above the third-floor level. Nikki tried a metal door that opened out on the roof. Locked.
“Step back,” she said, balancing herself like a crane—arms extended out, leg up—before smashing open the door with the heel of one of her prostitute boots.
“How did you do that?” I asked, stunned. “You’re what, all of 90 pounds?”
“It’s not about weight, it’s about physics. Now come help me look for your partner.”
Chuck and I called it “tough guy ballet”—fancy cop moves. Chuck wasn’t the type to leap over a hood and draw his weapon, taking down three bad guys with one bullet, and neither was I. We laughed whenever we saw that shit in a movie. But here was this kid, doing it in real life.
We scrambled across the rooftops. The morning light was soft pink through the pollution of the L.A. basin, which made Chuck’s corpse seem to glow like it was radioactive.
Yeah, my partner was up there, and he was definitely dead. MM had done a number on him. I was by no means a forensic expert, but even I could tell Chuck had put up the fight of his life. He’d very much wanted to go on living. I should have been with him. Chances are, it’d be my corpse lying right there next to Chuck’s, too. But it would have been one glorious brawl.
A quiet voice snapped me out of the numbness that had washed over me.
“When I collect him,” Nikki said, “I’m going to fall unconscious. I need you to take me somewhere quiet and safe and give me time to recover.”
“‘Collect?’”
“Like I told you, he needs order to be restored. I need to give him a refuge.”
“You’re going to take in Chuck’s soul,” I finally said.
“That’s a crude way of putting it, but essentially yes.”
“So Chuck’s going to wake up in the body of a fifteen-year-old girl dressed up like a hooker.”
Nikki was offended. “This body is nineteen years old. Do you think they’d do this to a minor?”
“No, course not.”
She kneeled on the spongy surface of the roof and closed her eyes, as if in prayer. I walked over to look down at Chuck. I probably looked like I was praying, too, but I wasn’t. I took a deep breath, and turned around just in time to see Nikki shudder and keel over.
I threw up.
So that’s how I ended up carrying the unconscious body of a fifteen-year—sorry, nineteen-year-old—girl dressed up like a hooker back down to the roundabout . . . right into a six-m
an team of Burbank PD, all of whom were pointing their service weapons at me.
“Hey,” I said. “Let me explain.”
Which started a long day of explaining. All I did for hours was explain—our case, my drinking, the girl dressed up like a hooker, the assault on the yuppie, the glasses, how I found the body. I left out the metaphysical stuff, for obvious reasons. I said that my partner had left me a message, and this girl had led me to his body. Along the way, some yuppie attacked us. He was probably high on PCP, I don’t know. Does it matter? My partner was dead. I said “my partner is dead” a lot. I told my story so much even I began to believe it. And why wouldn’t I? That’s what happened, right? Any other version would be too bizarre.
I also said, “the girl is a hero,” and that I wanted to talk to her immediately. And eventually, they let me.
They had her in interrogation room D with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a napkin stacked with a couple of sugar cookies. They were untouched.
“Hey, Nikki—how’re you feeling?” I closed the door behind me.
“Hi, Howie,” she said. “Glad to see you made it in the end.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Howie, I’ve been your partner for six years.”
“Nikki, listen . . .”
“It’s me, Howie. Your old pal Chuck.”
“Nikki, honey, enough with the—”
“Go ahead. Ask me anything.”
“I’m not asking you anything because you’re crazy. You understand that, honey, don’t you?”
But then Nikki began to tell me a series of things only Chuck would know. The things that are shared between partners and partners alone, secrets that die with those partners. She—he—reminded me of things I did for him, times I pulled his bacon out of the fire. The bullet that caught my hand instead of his face. The sinking boat I pulled him off, lugging him to shore with only one good arm and one sort-of-okay leg. Tackling him at L.A. Coliseum while automatic gunfire sprayed over our heads. The things you tend to forget or downplay when you’re hanging around a goddamned genius all the time. But funny enough, those were the very things that Chuck remembered the most.
“Jesus, Chuck. Are you, what—in there alongside Nikki?” I felt like I ought to peer into the girl’s eyes to see.
“Yeah, we all sort of share . . . like, a brain hotel, for lack of a better term. We each have our own rooms. And we take turns controlling the body.”
“The body of a teenager, Chuck. Do you even realize you’re in the body of a teenager?”
“This isn’t the first body they’ve occupied,” Nikki/Chuck said. “Some bodies just give out, some are killed. But the brain hotel can move to different hosts. There’s got to be a dozen people in here with me. It’s impressive company. Some of these detectives are legends.”
“You’re inside this ‘brain hotel’ with a bunch of dead cops.”
“Not all cops. There’s this big fat guy who’s obsessed with orchids, and some alcoholic lady named Nora, and this British guy who plays the violin and seems to know everything about everyone, and—oh, and Nikki, too. She says hello.”
“Hi,” I said, which came out like a whisper-choke.
“But that’s not even the craziest thing. You know the guy we’ve been chasing? This MM? Well, he’s been running around the country collecting souls, too. He’s got over a hundred psychopaths knocking around his skull. Can you believe that? This is why there was no real pattern. He lets a different soul take the wheel every time he kills.”
I put my face in my hands. “Please, please . . . stop it.”
“What’s wrong?”
I looked up.
“What’s wrong!? Chuck . . . if this is you . . . what the hell, man? What do you want me to do? What am I supposed to do with all of this?”
Nikki’s face twisted up into one of those Chuck Ostrander–style cock-eyed grins.
“You want to get into some trouble?”
HOUNDED
by Zoë Sharp
“Excuse me, gentlemen, is anyone sitting here?”
The men looked up from their table with the resigned irritation of travellers who thought they’d managed to get three seats together in a first class compartment without having to endure the company of a stranger.
One of them—youngish and tall, with a nose he could have used to spear pickles out of a jar—peered rather pointedly over his gold-framed spectacles at the adjacent table across the aisle. It had only a middle-aged, middle-class couple in occupation, although they’d sprawled their iPads and iPhones and papers across the surface to stake their claim.
I followed his gaze and produced a rueful smile.
“I don’t go by train very often,” I confided as I slid into the remaining seat. “But when I do I’m afraid I really can’t face backwards. Gives me motion sickness.”
“Ah,” said the man. “Have you thought of taking hyoscine hydrobromide of some kind? It’s available at any pharmacy without a prescription.”
Before I could answer that, one of the others—an older man with a bushy moustache and the upright spine of the ex-soldier—cut in with, “Or antihistamines? A little less effective, perhaps, but fewer side-effects. Hyoscine may make you drowsy, my dear.”
Instinctively, I glanced at the third man. He was small and sturdy, his hands and face tanned as much by wind as by sun. He grinned at me from under thick black eyebrows.
“Hey, no use looking to me for advice. These two guys are the physicians. The ginger tea my mom used to make whenever I got sick, that’s about all I could suggest.”
My first thought was American, but the slightly Scottish inflection on the word “about” tipped him farther north.
“Is that a Canadian accent I hear?”
The bushy eyebrows wriggled like two hairy caterpillars on his forehead, and his grin, if anything, widened.
“Good call,” he said. “Most folks over here mistake me for a Yank.”
“Ah, well, I shouldn’t let it worry you.” I returned his smile. “Some folk over here mistake me for a lady.”
He laughed out loud at that, and after a moment the two doctors allowed themselves a small twist of the lips that might have passed for amusement. The Canadian, meanwhile, leaned across the table with a weathered hand outstretched. “Henry Baskerville.”
I took his hand, not without caution, and received a robust shake that threatened to bounce my shoulder out of its socket. Still, at least there were two professionals nearby who could have put it back for me.
“Charlie Fox,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Henry.”
The beaky-nosed doctor cleared his throat, murmured, “It’s Sir Henry, actually.”
“Really? Should I curtsey?”
“Oh, not on my account, I assure you. A few months ago I was farming in Alberta province. Then my uncle, Sir Charles Baskerville, died suddenly, and now I find myself a baronet with a country estate in Devonshire.”
“I thought your last name rang a bell. There was something unusual about your uncle’s death, wasn’t there? Enough to make the national news, anyway.”
“Ah, you’re referring to the pet story of my family—the hell hound.” Sir Henry smiled again at his own pun. “I’ve heard of it ever since I was in the nursery, but I never thought of taking it seriously until now.”
The doctors’ eyes flicked toward each other. Only a tiny movement, but I caught it nonetheless.
“Sir Charles died of dyspnoea—difficulty breathing—and cardiac failure,” the beaky-nosed doctor said. “The post-mortem examination showed long-standing organic heart disease. Indeed, as his medical practitioner I had urged him to seek specialist advice about his health. But . . .” He gave a shrug.
“I’m sure you did everything you could for your patient,” I offered. “Urging him is one thing, but I don’t suppose you could exactly truss him up like a Sunday roast and deliver him to Harley Street, could you?”
He unbent enough then to introduce himself as Dr. Jame
s Mortimer. That left the older of the men, who quickly followed suit, even though recognising him was the reason I’d begged the spare seat at their table in the first place.
“Dr. John Watson.”
I manufactured a reasonable facsimile of surprise. “Of course,” I said. “I follow your blog. The exploits of Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. If even half of it is true, it makes fascinating reading.”
“If anything, I tend to play down some of the more sensational aspects of Holmes’s cases,” Watson said, looking almost sheepish.
A firm nudge against my leg beneath the table had me looking down, to find a curly-haired spaniel eyeing me dolefully. I stroked the dog’s ears, and said, “Do I take it there might be a hint of the sensational going on in Devon?”
“Indeed not,” Watson denied quickly. “Or Sherlock Holmes himself would be travelling with us.”
“Which, plainly, he is not,” Mortimer added, trying for an air of nonchalance that he failed to pull off.
“Even so, to bring along not one but two doctors, Sir Henry, you must be wary of something serious happening to you?”
“I guess it might look that way,” said the baronet. “And there have been a couple of interesting occurrences since I got to England. I don’t mind admitting I feel safer in company.”
Aware of a certain relief, I opened my mouth to ask more about that, but Watson jumped into the gap with a question about my own reason for heading down to Dartmoor.
My turn to shrug. “Oh, I’ve booked a week away in one of those little holiday cottages on the moor,” I said, still fussing the spaniel under the table as an excuse not to make eye contact. “It’s almost more a yurt than a cottage, from the pictures I’ve seen. A bit basic, but the season’s just about over, so I’m told I’ll have the whole development to myself.”
“I know the ones. They are rather remote,” Mortimer said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right out there on your own?”
“I needed a get-away-from-it-all break.” The story tripped convincingly from my tongue. “Having no Internet and no cellphone coverage sounded like a blessing rather than a curse.”
For the Sake of the Game Page 25
