Ghosts of Christmas Past

by Corrina Lawson

  Cassandra navigated the wreckage inside the burned-out dry cleaners with ease, surprisingly nimbly. But then, she welded metal and climbed ladders for a living. What were downed timbers and scattered shingles to her?

  At the far back, a door hung half off its hinges, revealing stone steps to what Lucy presumed was a basement. Cassandra slipped past the door without hesitation and knocked on a shiny steel door at the bottom of the stairs. Lucy looked around, but the shadows in the basement prevented her from seeing much.

  Locks clicked, the steel door opened and the room was flooded with fluorescent light. “C’mon in, babe,” said an older woman with her head covered by a do-rag. Lucy looked closer and tagged the host as Indian, maybe midforties, maybe younger.

  As Lucy walked inside, she smelled pie. Pumpkin spice pie. Perfect for the holidays. Her mouth watered and her stomach rumbled.

  Their host laughed. “Can’t wait, can you?”

  Cassandra rubbed her stomach and her gaze darted around the room. “No way, not for your food, Rickey. Hey, is Salvatore here?”

  “Are you kidding? He came in here last night, headed to the bar in the foulest mood I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few. He fell asleep slumped over a table. A couple of the regulars helped him to the back and he’s sleeping it off in the cot room. You two have a fight?”

  “Looks like we did, though he forgot to tell me about it,” Cassandra said through gritted teeth.

  Rickey laughed. “Sounds like, whatever it was, he got the raw end of the deal. Sit down, have pie. He’s not going anywhere, and you might as well have some before you deal with him.”

  Cassandra practically fell into the first available chair in the “restaurant”. She rubbed her temples and took deep breaths. “He’s alive,” Cassandra breathed. “And now I’m gonna kill him.”

  “I’ll bring you our special, calming tea blend along with the pie,” Rickey said.

  Lucy nudged Cassandra’s shoulder. Invisible or not, she was not leaving this place without tasting that wonderful-smelling pie. And she was coming back with Al. He loved pie.

  Cassandra cleared her throat. “Rickey, make that two slices of pie. I’m, um, really hungry.”

  “Sure, honey.”

  “Thanks,” Lucy whispered.

  “Thank me by making Salvatore get his ass out here,” Cassandra muttered.

  “Okay.”

  Lucy glanced around the room as she left. The concrete walls were draped with handmade quilts and framed cross-stitch designs honoring not only Christmas but Kwanzaa and something Lucy guessed was from the Hindu religion. Handmade snowflakes filled the walls between them.

  The mismatched furniture was scrubbed and polished; the smell of pea soup and waffles mingled with the pie scent wafting from the back area near the kitchen.

  This place was awesome.

  And, somehow, it reminded her of Al making chili for her. Hand cooked, hand served and with love since Rickey probably wasn’t making much money from it. She hoped Rickey’s food tasted better than Al’s chili, though.

  Dammit, Al should be here. He would love Rickey and her place. His loss.

  Lucy leaned over to Cassandra. “Which way to the cots?”

  Cassandra sat up straighter and put her hand over her mouth, to cover that she was speaking to thin air, Lucy guessed. “Through the kitchen, to the left, straight back.”

  “Gotcha. Stay put.”

  The smells were only more enticing in the kitchen. The pie was out of reach, but she swiped a warm biscuit from a tray cooling on the edge of a table. Once, people would’ve been able to see the food in her hand, though not her. The biscuit would have appeared to float midair. But she could munch in peace now, because her telepathic order to not be seen would cover it.

  So much better.

  Beyond the kitchen, the corridors were a maze. Left, Lucy remembered, and turned at the first corner. Light receded and she worried about accidentally bumping into someone or something. She stopped, concentrated, and a small light appeared in her hand. She was learning how to control that too.

  With enough light to avoid obstacles, she followed the sound of snoring, skipped past empty mop buckets and found herself in a room full of people slumbering on cots.

  No decorations here, just bare basement walls.

  Salvatore was sitting upright on a cot on the far end, just under a grimy basement window that light tried but mostly failed to penetrate.

  He rubbed his eyes, sighed and looked up. “Dammit, I should never have had that last whiskey,” he muttered. “Cassandra is going to kill me.”

  Lucy walked over and loomed over him. “Do you have any idea how worried Cassandra’s been about you?”

  Salvatore shot to his feet. “Who said that? Aw crap, now I’m hallucinating. I thought that only happened when you were drunk, not during the hangover.”

  Rickey poked her head in the doorway. “Your woman’s here, Italian. Better come make your apologies. She looks wrung out. You scared her.”

  Salvatore nodded and rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah sure.”

  Lucy thought about becoming visible so she could start asking Salvatore questions about the thumb drive, what had sent him on a bender and what the hell he had on Schneider, but he’d probably open up better to Cassandra alone.

  “Man up,” Salvatore muttered to himself and started toward the doorway. “And make damn sure we get the hell out of this fucking city.”

  Behind them, the grimy basement window shattered, and a metal canister rolled on the floor.

  Grenade!

  Lucy dove for Salvatore, knocking them both to the floor. She pulled a cot over them just as the grenade exploded.

  A burst of light and a roar of sound filled the room. Her ears popped. Sight ceased. She put her hand over her chest to make sure she was still breathing and at least felt her heart beating.

  Was this what everyone experienced when she let loose her light bursts?

  Salvatore pushed her off him and she let him. He groped around and she had to knock his hand off her knee. As sight came back, she could see his mouth was moving.

  Could he see her or not? She concentrated and shifted back to visibility. He didn’t need to be further freaked out and someone could easily stumble into her in the middle of a panic.

  The room was a tangle of groaning people strewn about, but all of them were still moving. That meant the grenade wasn’t an explosive meant to kill them, but to scare and disable. It’d done that, for sure.

  Salvatore headed straight for the door, his mouth open in a yell that she couldn’t hear. But the panic on his face was evident, and he knocked over a mop bucket on the way back to the restaurant.

  Lucy banged her ear with the flat of her hand as she ran and followed Salvatore. Everything was still silence, even when she knew there must be noise from people scrambling or screaming.

  For the first time in a long time, fear crept in. Sweat poured down her back. Who had attacked? Was her hearing loss permanent?

  She wanted Al. She wanted him to start kicking ass and taking names and stop whoever was outside.

  The kitchen was deserted. Everyone was crowded into the dining room and the outer hallway. Rickey was at the head of the group, gesturing with a dishrag. Noir guessed she was trying to get everyone to calm down until they knew what was going on.

  Lucy peered around for Cassandra. A blur passed her as Cassandra threw herself into Salvatore’s pudgy arms.

  Tears ran down their faces as they hugged. Cassandra was saying something; so was Salvatore. Even without sound, it was still beautiful.

  Cassandra tapped her lover’s shoulder and he let her go. Her mouth moved but Lucy still had no idea what was being said. She shook her head and knocked her ear with the palm of her hand.

  Salvatore grabbed a pad from his jacket pocket and wro
te Flashbang grenade on it. He showed it to both of them and added Temporary hearing loss and We have to get out of here.

  Lucy took a depth breath, grabbed the pencil and wrote: Who? Why?

  SWAT outside, Cassandra wrote. Using a megaphone. They’re yelling to surrender. Assholes.

  “Why?” Lucy asked again, though she didn’t hear her own word. SWAT? If there were cops out there, Al wasn’t with them. He’d never toss a grenade at civilians.

  Salvatore pointed to himself. They wanted him. Had Schneider sent them and, if so, how had his boss found out Salvatore was here?

  Cassandra wrote: They can’t get through the door. Rickey locked ’em out.

  Lucy shook her head. “Only for now,” she said. This time, she thought she heard a whisper of a noise. Maybe her hearing was coming back.

  If this was a SWAT team, they’d get in eventually. That steel door wouldn’t hold up to serious firepower. She remembered that Al had refused to call in the SWAT team as backup when they confronted Jack and Jill. Al said the SWAT team was corrupt and followed the orders of people who bribed them.

  SWAT couldn’t be trusted. First priority: Get Salvatore and Cassandra the hell out of here.

  “Stay with me,” she pointed to herself, hoping that her words made sense. “They’re not getting Salvatore or you.”

  SWAT weren’t the only ones with flashbangs at their disposal. If they stepped inside this room, her alter ego would light them up.

  Chapter Seven

  Breaking into Johns’ Fiesta presented Al with somewhat of a problem. Life was easier, he mused, when he could just use a slim jim on a locked vehicle. Instead, he had to go to his car and dig out his secret weapon, a master lock that somehow had managed to fall under the seat and was buried under empty coffee cups.

  He probably should clean his car out.

  “Captain, why do you drive this piece of crap?” Alvarez asked.

  “Because no one wants to steal it. And when something goes wrong, I don’t need a degree in electronics to fix it.” He pocketed the master lock fob and slammed his door shut. The old Chevy rocked. He should replace the shocks.

  He walked back over to the victim’s Fiesta and pressed the fob inside his coat pocket. The Fiesta chirped and the locks disengaged.

  “You’ve got a master lock,” Alvarez said.

  “Yep,” Al said.

  “Where you’d get it?” she asked.

  “From a Ford engineer. We went to school together.” His friend had cut and run from Charlton and into the suburbs. But, occasionally, he slipped Al something that could give him an edge. Like the master-code control and a lesson in how the new Fords tracked mileage.

  “We should wait on the crime scene people to process the car,” she said.

  “Time was when a detective could investigate all by himself. We could sit here a long, long time waiting for our crime scene techs. They’ve got their hands full in the museum. I’m not even sure the city’s tow trucks are working right now or if we have the budget to pay for a private tow to the police impound lot.”

  Still, he put on plastic gloves before he sat behind the driver’s seat and pulled up the dashboard displays. The car ran on battery only, which meant it tracked trips. He punched up the GPS and…bingo. Last location.

  Time for a field trip.

  He locked up the Fiesta and walked back over to his car.

  “Get in, Alvarez,” he said. “I might need backup.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Wherever the stiff was before he came to the museum. Hopefully, that’s where our victim met our murder suspect.”

  “Captain, respectfully, that GPS is leading us to a street full of burned-out stores.” Alvarez opened the passenger door. She didn’t get in. Maybe she didn’t like his car.

  She wrinkled her nose. She definitely didn’t like his car. Noir never complained.

  “How would you know about the neighborhood?” he asked.

  “I have cousins who live nearby.”

  “Well hell, we’ll stop by and say hi on our way back,” he drawled. “Look, rookie, you want into investigation and real police work instead of being dicked around at your precinct? Then follow orders and get in my car.”

  Alvarez got in the car, using her hat to push aside the empty Chinese food containers left over from a stakeout. “How long have these been here?”

  “Who knows?” In reality, they were only from last night. But it was more fun to mess with Alvarez.

  Alvarez used a cloth from inside her pocket to wipe down the passenger seat before she sat down. “What do we do when we get there, Captain?”

  “Depends. For all we know, our victim and the suspect pulled up next to each other and talked through the car windows, and not much we can find out from that. Still, someone in the neighborhood might have seen them. You have to turn over a lot of rocks to find the right one.”

  “Yes, Captain.” She looked in vain for the shoulder belt, only realizing at the last minute that his old beater had only a lap belt for the front seat.

  She opened her mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it.

  “You have a comment, Officer?”

  “This car is shit,” she said.

  “Drivable shit.” Al pulled out into traffic, reminded that Noir had told him to get shoulder belts installed too. He wished she was with him, rather than Alvarez. She had a knack for getting to the heart of the problem. As soon as he followed this lead to its end, he’d call her.

  “But that’s not the real reason you were reluctant to come, Officer. Spit it out.”

  “I heard Captain Fixit was a hero,” Alvarez muttered.

  “And I’m not what you expected, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Heroes are the ones who show up and do the job, not the ones who drive the neatest cars or have the best appearance.” Noir knew that. She’d seen right through him the first day. “You could be a hero, Alvarez.”

  “Me?”

  “All being a hero takes in the Double C is giving a damn and hoping that what you’re doing makes a difference.”

  She snorted.

  He should ease off Alvarez, since part of the reason he was cranky is that it wasn’t Noir in the car next to him.

  “Besides, we’re not having fun yet,” he said.

  Al heard the police sirens a block from their destination. He hoped at first the local cops were here for something else, like a domestic or a trespassing complaint.

  But he saw the SWAT team vans and knew they had to be after his suspect too. This was getting more messed up by the minute. Someone at city hall must have called in a favor and sent Petit and his goons to this neighborhood, maybe searching for Salvatore Giamatti.

  “This is my damned case, asshole,” Al muttered as he parked his car sideways, next to Petit’s unmarked car.

  “Sir, is it smart to interfere with a SWAT operation?” Alvarez asked.

  “It’s never smart to interfere with my investigations.” Al popped the trunk, grabbed his shotgun and checked to make sure it was properly loaded. A sharp pain shot through his forearm, a remnant of the injuries from his first case with Noir. He flexed his fingers, remembering he’d forgotten his physical therapy exercises.

  “If you think you can back me up, then come with me, Alvarez. Otherwise, wait in the car. This is gonna get messy.”

  Alvarez fell into step behind him. “So are we having fun yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  He strode past the vans and the patrol cars with lights flashing. A uniform stepped up to stop them but Al flashed his gold shield, waved the shotgun and kept on going. He needed to get to Petit right now, before this became a fiasco.

  “You are running an illegal operation. Open the door and come out with your hands up,” blared a megaphone held by Pet
it, head of SWAT.

  The five-man SWAT team Petit commanded wore riot gear: rifles, helmets, and one had a grenade launcher. They’d surrounded what looked like a burned-out dry cleaners. Since it didn’t have a second floor, Al guessed they were after someone in the basement.

  “You’d think the flashbang would have scared them out, Lieutenant,” one of the team said. “I expected those squatters to run right into our arms.”

  “A flashbang? You used a flashbang in an enclosed space full of people?” Al pushed past the team to confront Petit. A flashbang. Which could start fires. Idiots. “Why the hell would you do that, Petit?”

  “We have a solid tip that an illegal and dangerous business, potentially drug manufacturing, is operating in the basement area below these stores.” Petit lowered the megaphone. “Get out of my operation, Fixit.”

  “You tossed a grenade into a potential drug-manufacturing business that could contain flammables? Are you insane?”

  Petit raised the shield on his riot helmet, his face in a scowl. As far as Al had ever been able to tell, that was Petit’s permanent expression. They’d clashed many times. Usually Al had to back off because Petit had superior firepower.

  Not today.

  “I gave them warning,” Petit said.

  “Knowing you, I doubt that,” Al said.

  “Get the hell out of my operation and go back to playing with stiffs, Lieutenant James. Whatever business is being run down there, we have every right to shut it down.”

  “So now we use SWAT for enforcing zoning laws?” Al asked.

  Someone snickered behind Al, and he hoped it was a SWAT team member because that meant not everyone was on Petit’s side.

  Al lowered his voice. “Why are you really here? Who are you after? Who did your city hall masters sic you on?”

  “I’m arresting those inside, whether you like it or not, whether I have to burn them out or not.” Petit stepped closer until their chests were nearly bumping.

  “I’m ordering you to stand down,” Al said.

  “You don’t have the authority.”

  “Remember? I’m Captain Fixit now, Lieutenant. One last chance. Stand. Down. That’s an order.”