Deader Still

by Anton Strout

  I expected the Inspectre to try to reason with me, to quell my nerves or tell me to stop acting like such a child, possibly even a no-nonsense chiding.

  “Well,” he said. He put down his towel and grinned. “There’s rash and then there’s rash, isn’t there?”

  I cocked my head. “I don’t think I follow you, sir.”

  “Well,” he said, “there are distinctions in the details, aren’t there? There is stupid rash and there is noble rash. Both can make you dead, I suppose, but one at least stands a chance of causing great heroics, yes? For instance, and this is all hypothetical, mind you . . . If I were in a position where I had a chance to take down something as dangerous as a vampire before the local government could even get through all the red tape, some might think it incredibly foolish of me to act upon that.”

  I nodded. “Connor’s always telling me to keep an even head about things,” I said, “to not let my emotions get in the way, and to think clearly. But now I’ve got to worry about putting him in harm’s way as well.”

  “Yes, well, Connor’s right in one sense when he talks about absolute clearheadedness. That is what works for Connor.” He poured himself a glass of water and began drinking. He leaned over, drawing conspiratorially close.

  “You and I are men of action, Simon. So are the rest of the F.O.G.gies. Most people don’t understand that. Most people never will. Sometimes all we have to go with are our emotions. That may be the one thing that gives us an edge, the one thing that saves us all in the battle between good and evil, especially in the face of bureaucracy.”

  I swallowed hard. I felt the pressure of failing coming on once again. I had vampires to deal with. The Inspectre clapped me on the back.

  “Don’t worry yourself about it too much,” he said cheerfully. “If you die, at least you’ll die spectacularly. That’s the mark of a true hero.” He clapped me on the back. “Same time tomorrow?”

  I nodded, thinking, And the day after and the day after . . . until I either become the most expert vampire slayer since Buffy or die trying.

  8

  I cleaned myself up after my training session and headed back down to the main floor. With the graveyard shift arriving, the offices were dead and of course Supply was closed, so after making a quick copy of the form I’d had Jane sign, I slid it under their door. Then I headed back out through the movie theater and into the coffee shop up front. With its bare brick walls, classic movie posters, and big, comfy, secondhand chairs, I thought it would be the perfect place to brood. I had seen many a dark literary writer gravitate to this place with their laptops, and once I had my coffee, I navigated through a sea of them until I found an unoccupied large purple chair to curl up in. I set my coffee down on a table in the center of a few other chairs, one of them occupied by Godfrey Candella. He was furiously writing away in one of his notebooks.

  “You know, a laptop would be faster,” I said.

  Godfrey looked up from his writing.

  “Excuse me?” he said, somewhat distracted.

  “A laptop,” I repeated. I gestured toward his pen and notebook. “It would be faster.”

  “Ah,” he said, and his face lit up, “but would it be as reliable?” He held up his notebook like he was displaying it on QVC. “The Moleskine notebook is a near-legendary form of record keeping, used by great minds for well over two centuries. Hemingway, Picasso, even Van Gogh . . .”

  “My apologies,” I said, cutting off his little nerdgasm on the history of notebooks. I raised my coffee mug in salute. He did the same and we drank in silence for a moment, but it didn’t last long. Godfrey started flipping back through his notebook until he found whatever he was looking for.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a few follow-up questions about what happened earlier today?” he asked. “The incident involving the Oubliette? I just wanted to clarify a few things.”

  I sighed. Maybe helping Godfrey clarify his historical documents would help me with my own, or at the very least provide some form of distraction. Besides, I liked Godfrey, despite the quiet loneliness that radiated from him—or maybe because of it. I knew a thing or two about loneliness.

  “Go ahead,” I said, settling back in my chair. “Shoot.”

  “Great. Thanks.” Godfrey smiled and looked down at his notes. “So, earlier the Inspectre mentioned something about the Oubliette and you . . . ? Unfortunately, Director Wesker yelled about it so much at the time, I kind of missed what exactly happened.”

  “It’s a wonder we ever get anything done around here with Wesker shouting,” I said. I couldn’t shake the image of his hand resting against Jane’s lower back. I tried to push it out of my mind by telling Godfrey Candella all the details I could remember about the incident at the Javits Center. It seemed to help. When I finished, I was no longer thinking about Jane and Wesker together, but instead about being swallowed up by a sea of rats and then being knee-deep in rat goo. Believe it or not, the nostalgia of being knee-deep in rat goo was a mental step-up.

  Godfrey wrote frantically to keep up, and about a minute after I stopped speaking, he finally looked up. He pulled the pen out of his hand and flexed his fingers.

  “So,” he said, “you think it was sabotage?”

  I nodded.

  “If you had to make a guess,” he continued, “who do you think tried to kill you?”

  He said it so earnestly, I laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and then thought about it. “Well, I’ve only been here half a year, so I haven’t had a ton of time to make that many enemies, I hope.” I thought for a moment. “I’d say the Sectarians, for a start. But their leader is locked up in jail.”

  “The Sectarians,” he said. Godfrey’s eyes rolled up into his head as if he were a computer accessing some archived file. “Oh, right. That whole pincushioning their leader to the wall of the Met thing . . .”

  Yeah,” I said, “that.” I couldn’t help but have a little bitterness in my tone.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Godfrey said. He looked genuinely concerned that he might have somehow offended me. He worried the notebook back and forth in his hands.

  I shook my head.

  “I just thought things would be different; that’s all,” I said.

  “Different how?” he asked, looking enrapt.

  “I don’t want to trouble you with any of this,” I said, starting to stand.

  “No, please,” he said. He wasn’t moving and his eyes were eager like a starving man coveting someone’s sandwich.

  I sat back down.

  “After that night at the museum,” I said, “when you caught me just outside on the steps almost immediately after it went down . . .”

  Godfrey nodded. He tapped the side of his temple. “I remember.”

  I was sure the Computer Who Wore Horn-Rims did. I continued.

  “I was on cloud nine . . . cloud ten, even. Everyone was patting me on the back, congratulating me. I had been in hog heaven with all that attention, plus with Jane on my arm. The Fraternal Order had just taken me in . . .”

  I couldn’t put words to it.

  “You’re lamenting your success,” Godfrey offered.

  “That’s exactly it,” I exclaimed, almost physically relieved to hear him say it.

  “I hear that a lot, actually,” he said.

  “Really?”

  Godfrey nodded. “A lot of agents bring it up when they’re recounting stuff for the Gauntlet. Let me guess. Right now you’re experiencing a bout of depression, especially after the day you’ve had . . .”

  “Yes,” I said. It was invigorating to get this kind of validation. “I spent three months after the whole Met incident doing the paperwork on it. Three months. And then I have days where I almost die on an hourly basis and everything goes wrong around here. Then I have to file a twenty-page form to get a new cell phone from Supply. With all these swings between the mundane and the fantastical, I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  Godfrey gave me a kind smile.
“You do realize you work for the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, don’t you? Try not to confuse things. It’s the affairs that are extraordinary, not us. We still have to be ordinary in the face of it. Sure, some of us might do extraordinary things, but we can’t live our lives at that heightened level.”

  I did feel better having heard it, but it still nagged at me. “It feels so crazy and thankless.”

  “Welcome to civil service,” Godfrey said, and he laughed. “Good deeds are supposed to be their own reward, are they not?”

  I nodded and started to laugh as well, hearing the Inspectre’s words echoed. “Yeah, well, a little reward every now and then wouldn’t hurt. Do you know what I came up with when they finally forced me to do my own performance appraisal? I wrote ‘Didn’t die.’ ”

  Godfrey laughed harder, the two of us now cackling like witches around a cauldron. A few of the norms who hung out in the Lovecraft Café gave us the evil eye, but I didn’t care. Something pleasant in me had bubbled up to the surface, and I embraced it.

  Godfrey reached into a messenger bag sitting on the floor next to his chair and pulled out a stack of paper. “This is mine,” he said. “Forty-three pages so far, and still counting . . .”

  I raised my mug to him once again.

  “You, sir, have given me a sense of perspective,” I said, the laughter starting to calm. “Not to mention the best laugh I’ve had all day.”

  He clinked his mug against mine.

  I was somewhat exhausted from my day, but at least my mind was in better spirits. Too bad I was about to spoil it by heading home to deal with the fallout from my tiff with Jane earlier this afternoon.

  9

  A calm washed over me as I embraced the nighttime quiet of the SoHo streets. By the time I clambered into the wrought-iron cage of my building’s elevator, I was practically asleep. I was also full of regret, remembering how I had conducted myself at the bookstore with Jane earlier. Now all I wanted was a chance to apologize, if Jane was even going to stop by now.

  When the elevator hit my floor, I slid the accordion doors open and stumbled down the hall, barely awake. My apartment door wasn’t locked, but with my brain shutting down for the day, I didn’t think much of it. I was expecting Jane, after all, and besides, if I had afforded myself any luxury in this world, it was that I lived in a pretty nice and secure building. But I’d been wrong before. I woke right the hell up when a fist shot out from behind my door and popped me in the jaw. The hook of the swing made the left side of my head smack hard against the solid oak of the door itself.

  Part of my special training from the D.E.A. kicked in as one of the lessons I’d learned in the first session came to me. He who turns and runs away, lives to live another day. I wasn’t about to get ambushed in my own apartment, and since the punch had spun me to face my door and potential freedom, I gladly started off in that direction . . . until an arm snaked around my neck from behind and dragged me back into the apartment. My legs were sprawled out in front of me as I was pulled backward toward the couch in the center of the room. Whoever was attacking me was strong as hell. There was no way I was going to overpower him from this position.

  I waited for him to stop dragging me. My training was more than just how to fight; it was how to fight dirty if need be. I vividly remembered the unfortunate day when our instructor had said, “When you’re not sure what you’re dealing with—be it humanoid, lycanthropic, or other—go for the breadbasket.” I did just that. I put all my weight on my right leg and threw the rest of it into the heel of my left foot, raising it high and hard into my attacker’s crotch. My attacker let out a grunt but didn’t release the hold around my neck. Just then, it dawned on me with rising horror just what type of creature could withstand a kick to the groin. I was being sleeperholded by a woman.

  Jane couldn’t be that pissed, could she?

  “I apologize,” I croaked out, but it was lost in the commotion.

  “Apology accepted,” a woman who was most definitely not Jane said from right behind my ear. Panic set in, but before I was able to free myself, the weight of my body was used against me and I was thrown down onto my couch. Luckily I landed in an upright position, almost perfectly sitting, but before I could get up my attacker straddled me and pushed me back against the leather. I caught a flash of steel in the darkness and felt a cold blade against my neck. Just like that, the fight went out of me.

  The figure leaned forward, crossing into a stream of moonlight coming in through the ceiling-high bay windows that covered one whole wall of my living room. The woman’s hair was dark red and shoulder length, cut so she sported Bettie Page bangs. Her eyes showed a hint of devilish delight in manhandling—womanhandling—me. Her lips were pressed thin as she slid the knife against my throat, but there was something familiar about her.

  Recognition hit me.

  “Liza Saria?” I said.

  “It’s Mina now, remember? Took you long enough, Sherlock,” she said. “Miss the old crew?” She relaxed a little, then put her left hand—the one not brandishing a knife—on my forehead, stroking my hair back hard.

  This was worse than I thought, actually.

  “Long time, no want to see,” I said, afraid to speak too loud for fear of moving my throat against the blade. “And no, I don’t miss the old crew. That was back when I was a cocky young con artist hell bent on fucking my life up. Can’t say I really miss that, ‘Mina.’ Still have the unhealthy obsession with the victimhood of Dracula’s paramour, I see.”

  “You didn’t miss me?” Mina said, pouting her lips. “Not even a little?”

  I shook my head carefully under the blade. “Sorry. I’m not terribly proud of myself or the people I used to associate with back in the day. How the hell did you find me?”

  “If you didn’t want to be found,” she said, loving every minute of controlling me, “maybe you shouldn’t have left the name Canderous on the mailbox downstairs.”

  I looked over at my open door, and now I could see where part of the doorjamb had been torn away. She had flat-out broken her way in. I really needed to talk to the co-op board about beefing up security around here.

  “So you were just wandering by and happened to see it?”

  Mina laughed. “What the hell do you care, Candy?” she asked. “Isn’t it enough that I found you?”

  I winced at the nickname. “Can we not call me that? I know you coined it and all . . .”

  Mina laughed again. “Despite all the terrible illegal shit you’ve done—the crimes, the thefts, conning people out of their money—it’s the nickname that bothers you most?”

  Illegal though it all had been, Mina and the rest of the crew never had an idea that I had any special powers that made it all possible. They had simply assumed I was a crack thief with a good eye. The paranormal didn’t figure into their world.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I said, giving up on the name and trying to be logical with her. “There’s a reason I haven’t kept in contact, you know. Some ties should remain broken.”

  Mina gave me a firm pat like I was her dog. Worse, she was messing up my hair.

  “Why did you leave all of us?” she said, her eyes full of crazy. “We were like family. Things were just getting interesting when you ran out on us.”

  “Is that how you see it?” I asked. It was hard not to laugh in her face. “I ran out on all of you? Mina, I barely escaped getting arrested when you switched to robbing museums. And that last one, well . . . I read about the debacle you went through, barely pulling it off.”

  Mina laughed. The blade pressed harder against me.

  “But we did pull it off, and that’s the important thing,” she said, writhing around on top of me. There was nothing sexy about it to me, but she seemed pleased. “God, don’t you remember the rush from those days?”

  “I know the museum eventually got The Scream back again . . .”

  “But they won’t have it for long.” Mina’s laughter turned into a schoolgirl giggle. D
espite the knife at my throat, it dawned on me what she had come here for. I was getting angry and my body was cramped from our position on the couch.

  “I’m not going to help you steal The Scream again, Mina,” I shouted.

  “I need your lock-picking skills,” she pleaded, letting the knife fall from my neck. “It’s just me this time; none of the old crew.”

  I relaxed, but only by the tiniest margin. With crazy, there’s never much room for relaxation.

  “You know you want to,” she said, and she jumped off me, walking like a cat in the dark, heading straight for my galley kitchen. She tucked the knife into her belt and started rooting through my refrigerator. “The Scream is on loan to the Museum of Modern Art. It’s closed right now, so it looks like I’ll have to check it out tomorrow night before it closes. Then you and I will hit it the following night. Three days. That’s all I’m asking for.”