Sort of Dead

by Rob Rosen

  “And you?” asked Clark.

  Voltan grinned all Woody Harrelson like, except on a much smaller scale. “It has its perks,” he replied with a well-placed wink. Gravitas, it seemed, had flown out the window. Ironically, if I wanted to, I could now do the same.

  The poke repoked. Each one made me a bit weaker, but I fought to stay. Bruce was now on Voltan’s other side, staring at the screen as the document slowly scrolled ever downward. He put his finger on our conduit’s back, rolling over the vertebrae as if it were a mouse.

  We reached the end—of our short ropes, that is. Meaning, we were suddenly back in Arby’s.

  “Holy cow!” shouted Bruce, shaking his massive willy, which swung like a pendulum—of a grandfather clock. Or maybe make that great-grandfather. “That was so cool! Like I was alive again!”

  I nodded. The feeling was tangible. Sort of dead. Sort of alive. “Thanks,” I told him. “And if you don’t mind me asking—”

  “Heart attack,” he said. “Steroids.” He flexed his biceps. Or tried to. “People joked that I had a body to die for. Guess it was no joke.” He’d stopped smiling. We’d stopped smiling. As light as I felt, this death shit was heavy stuff. “Still,” he said, “that was fun!”

  I liked Bruce. We would’ve been friends back in the real world. That is, if he ever left the gym. Still, my smile remained flatlined. “Someone killed me over that document, Bruce.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah,” he added. “My bad.”

  “So,” said Max, clearly remembering the purpose of all this as he rolled his hands in front of him, “did you find anything out?”

  Bruce snapped his fingers. Again, and as always, or tried to. It was weird to watch him do it and to then not hear anything. We all stared at his fingers, waiting for something that was never to come. “Um, I think so.”

  My eyes went wide. Yeah, that I could do. No sort of about it. I couldn’t exhale sharply. My heart rate couldn’t spike to hummingbird levels. Sweat couldn’t suddenly drip from my forehead. But my eyes, yep, they could go all saucer-like. “You think so?”

  He nodded. “Well, I mean, I don’t know the purpose of that document you made, or what the end-use of it was, but I could see a discrepancy in that the numbers didn’t add up.”

  “Which numbers?” Max asked.

  “The final numbers,” said Bruce. “They were inflated. So, if you shared those values, someone might have been made to look better than they were. Or someone’s project. Because, best I could tell, the numbers should have been much lower.”

  Max looked my way. “What was the project, Nord? Was it someone else’s project or yours? Did you accidentally inflate your own numbers or someone else’s?”

  I racked my brain. I tried to picture myself creating that document, but I was drawing a blank. It was simply too long ago. “It was a financial document for sure, something related to a project. More than likely, a campaign. I didn’t usually create documents like that. If I crunched those numbers, it had to be as a favor for someone else, something tangential to what I was working on at the time. I could do simple stuff like that if need be.”

  “So, if you made a mistake,” said Bruce, “it’s not all that surprising. It wasn’t your job to create documents like that. And it was a simple mistake, something easy to overlook, especially if you weren’t used to the sort of work, didn’t do it all that often.”

  “Something that inevitably cost me my life,” I added.

  Max and Bruce hung their heads. Mine was already there. It was a seemingly innocuous file. It was more than two year’s old, probably hadn’t seen the light of day since close to when it was created. I couldn’t for the life of me—bad choice of words—figure out why it sent a bullet through my back.

  Max patted said back. “Remind me again, how many people work at your firm, Nord?”

  “Thirty-six,” I replied.

  His head went up and down. “And of those, how many actually would’ve needed numbers like those?”

  My head aped his head. “If I’m guessing correctly that the results were needed for a marketing campaign, that would mean we’re talking about either an account manager or someone in the financial department, or perhaps someone on the executive team. Someone who needed the values to show to a client, or to create a budget for the campaign, or to use the values toward the company’s overall financial picture.”

  “And how many people is that?” asked Bruce.

  I held up my hands. I counted on my fingers. My fingers that still looked like my fingers, felt like my fingers, but which clearly were no longer my fingers. Heavy shit, yet again. “Three account managers, two finance people, three execs. So eight. Eight people who might’ve needed those numbers.”

  Max smiled. “But that document was created two years ago. How many of those eight still work at your company?”

  My grin had finally returned. Eight had been a daunting number. But my company was on the small side. Turn-over was normal for a middling marketing firm, namely high. One of my hands went down. The other remained. Again, I counted. “The chief financial officer, the CEO, and two of the account managers. So, four. Four people who worked with me two years ago, who might have needed numbers like the ones in that file.” My grin rose higher. “But only three were at work when…”

  Again, Max patted my back. “Which three?”

  “The CFO, the CEO, and one of the account managers. They all worked with me two years ago, they all work with me today, and they all might have asked me to create a document like that, would have needed those values for either a marketing campaign or for the company’s budget.” My smile at last fully returned. “That’s doable, right? I mean, at least we can go see if any of them are acting suspicious, right?”

  Max nodded and grabbed my hand. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait!” shouted Bruce. “I mean, uh, take me with you.”

  I looked at him. I looked at Max. I looked back at Bruce and then down. Then down even lower. And, um, down even lower still. I wondered how, in life, Bruce had enough blood to operate his other appendages. “Isn’t it more fun here?” I asked. “In Arby’s?”

  “Arby’s?”

  I grinned. “Long story.” Even though it wasn’t. “Plus, you don’t know us from Adam.” I wondered if he was still in Arby’s. Talk about your unfinished business.

  He sighed. That is to say, he went through the motions. It was almost just as weird to watch someone else make the attempt. “I’ve been here five years, as best I can tell. Five years, no—”

  “Poof,” I said, making the universal poof sign with my hands.

  He nodded. “Right. Nothing.” The attempted and failed sigh repeated. “I was selfish in life. Not a bad person, but not a good one, either. Big ego. Big dick. Big deal. People react to you a certain way for long enough, you start to believe the hype. But all the hype in the world—or, um, after-world—isn’t going to make you go—”

  “Poof,” I again interrupted with.

  His nod repeated. “Right. Poof.” He looked at us and smiled. He was just as impossibly handsome as he was impossibly hung. In life, he must’ve been impossible. Still, and again, I liked him. We were kindred spirits. Literally. “Maybe,” he said, “I can turn over a new leaf.” He looked around at the endless nothing. “So to speak.” His grin rose northward. “Guess it really is never too late to try.” He held out his hand. Yep, it was impossibly large. Maybe it grew that way so he’d be able to jack-off. Nature, it seemed, was an amazing thing. Mainly because he had an amazing everything. “If you’ll let me help, that is.”

  I looked at Max. Max looked at me. “Don’t all good things travel in threes?” he asked.

  In fact, I believe that it was the opposite. All bad things travel in threes. Like celebrity deaths. Like Ed McMahon, Michael Jackson, and Farrah Fawcett all dying at the same time. I wondered if Farrah, too, was hanging around in Arby’s—Charlie’s angel now a real-life angel, minus the life part. I had a feeling Mister Jackson wen
t in the other direction from us. In any case, I didn’t argue. Instead, I took Bruce’s hand in mine. Mine was quickly engulfed. “The more the merrier, Bruce.”

  Max put his hand over ours. We were suddenly no longer in Arby’s; we were back in my office. It was late, toward the end of the day. No one was smiling. My death, it appeared, was quite the buzzkill.

  I was hovering over my desk. The carpet beneath had, it seemed, been hastily replaced, the uneven swatch apparent. My personal belongings had been removed. I’d been erased, but the wiping away made the mark of death all the more obvious.

  Bruce was floating by my side. “There, huh?”

  I nodded. “They say work can kill you, but I never took it literally.” I turned his way. “Where were, uh, you?”

  He grinned. “I was fucking this guy and had a heart attack.”

  My grin mirrored his. “Yeah, that one wins.”

  Max snapped his fingers in front of my face. Not that there was a sound made, but I got the drift. “Right, right,” I said. “Work to do.” Luckily, I was already at work. Or maybe not so luckily, all things considered. “There,” I said. “Paula. The account manager. Large accounts. The top three. Been here almost as long as the CEO.”

  She was alone at her desk. I liked Paula. She was tough but fun. We sometimes went out drinking after work. It couldn’t have been her. Could it?

  We floated over. She was on her computer.

  “Facebook,” said Bruce.

  I nodded. “Probably writing a sad commentary on my demise.”

  Max moved in closer. “She’s watching kitten and puppy videos.”

  I nodded still. “To cheer herself up because of my demise.”

  Bruce’s face was at the side of hers. “She’s smiling, so I guess the kittens and/or puppies are doing the trick.”

  My nodding continued. “Easier to laugh than to cry.” Though laughing didn’t quite seem appropriate. I mean, I’d been murdered less than ten feet away, my body barely cold. “She’s probably still in shock.” And it was then that I noticed it. “My flash-drive.” I pointed at her PC, which sat at her feet beneath the desk.

  Max turned my way. “How do you know it’s yours?” To answer his question, I pointed down, and so down he went, his body now parallel with the floor. Haunting definitely had its privileges. “Oh,” he said, his eyes locking with mine. “Nord’s, it says, the letters in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.”

  “I didn’t have a violet-colored marker, or there would’ve been an exclamation point,” I explained. “But why does she have it? It’d been locked in my drawer.” I looked back at my desk; my drawer was wide open. My drawer. My drawer which was no longer my drawer. Just like my flash-drive was no longer mine. Just like I was no longer me. But none of that explained why she had it now.

  Bruce floated to my side again. “I’d say that was suspicious.”

  I sighed. As usual, sort of. “Maybe she took it as a keepsake, to always remember me by.”

  “Or,” said Max, now also by my side, “to steal what was on there. Or erase what was on there. Or to see if you had something on there that she didn’t want others to see.”

  “But she’s my friend,” I replied, the high of Arby’s clearly worn away.

  “Was,” said Bruce. “And the dead tell no tales. Especially when their flash-drives are erased.”

  I shook my head. I looked away, toward the other side of the office. “Glenn,” I said with a point. “That’s the CFO.”

  Max stared his way. “He looks sad.”

  I nodded. “He always looks that way. His wife left him when he turned sixty.”

  “For another man?”

  I shook my head. “For another woman. A younger woman, too. By twenty years.”

  “Huh,” said Max.

  “Huh?” said I.

  He turned. “Maybe he’s a raging homophobe now. Maybe he took his aggressions out on you. It’s certainly been known to happen.”

  “But then why was that weird file left on my screen if my murder was an act of homophobia?”

  Max shrugged. “Red herring. Something to throw the police off with.”

  I floated over to Glenn’s desk. The others followed. Glenn’s desk was set off in a corner, his screen away from everyone else’s, seeing as he frequently had hush-hush stuff up on there. Only, Glenn wasn’t at his desk now, and his screen only had wallpaper on it.

  “Pat Robertson,” said Max.

  I shrugged. That I could still do. “Maybe Glenn found religion when he lost his wife.”

  “But Pat Robertson?” said Max. “He’s one of the biggest homophobes on the planet. How about Jesus? Jesus would make some nice wallpaper. Or Mary. Heck, just about anyone else in the bible, but not him.” Max was pointing at the him in question. The him in question was scowling back.

  “Hate to say it,” said Bruce, “but that also looks suspicious.”

  And I hated to hear it. Mainly because people got killed for being gay just about every day. Still, did Glenn have enough time to kill me and find a red herring and leave that red herring on my screen, then vamoose before getting caught? I mean, Glenn was sixty-one now, and not a sprightly sixty-one either.

  And so that left option number three to investigate.

  I pointed down a hallway to an office, the door to it closed. I grinned. Mainly because a closed door was no match for the three of us. Neither was the man inside. We floated there and through and in. “Chaz McGraff,” I said. “CEO.”

  “Chaz?” said Max. “That’s a real name? I thought only people who came out of Cher had that name.” He floated around the guy. “Handsome. Looks like John Hamm.”

  I shrugged. “If you say so. In any case, we called him Azz. Behind his back. As to that real thing you mentioned, he was a real one. Azz, that is.” But did that mean he was capable of murder? Were any of them? They were my coworkers. They knew me, had met my family when they came to the office to visit. Even Chaz had sent me a Christmas card every year. Sure, he sent one to the entire company, but still. In any case, one of them was capable of it. Clearly. Maybe there’s a thin line between jerk and murderer. Maybe Chaz had crossed that line. Maybe Glenn had, too. Or Paula.

  Max pointed Chaz’s way. “Guy looks upset about something.”

  Bruce nodded. “One of his employees was murdered while at work. Hard to spin that into something good. I bet it’ll be months before someone takes a job here. Something like this could even shut the place down.”

  Huh, I hadn’t thought of that. Then again, I had other things on my mind. Getting shot in the back will do that to a person. Still, that sucked. I hated Chaz, but I liked pretty much everyone else, and I certainly didn’t want them to lose their jobs.

  It was then my turn to point at Chaz. “He seems to be pressing the same key on his keyboard.” I swooped over. “Delete. He’s deleting stuff. A lot of stuff.”

  Max and Bruce also whooshed over. “Too fast,” Max said. “Too fast to see what he’s deleting.”

  Bruce put his finger near the screen. “Looks like emails.” Our newfound friend glanced my way. “I’d say that was acting suspicious.”

  Which meant that we were now three for three with the whole looking suspicious thing. Par for my fucking course.

  In any case, my ex-boss finished rapid-deleting. He sat back. Sweat had formed atop his forehead. “What are you up to?” I said in his ear. I looked over at my friends, who were floating on the other side of Chaz. “If we knew his password, we could see what he deleted.”

  “How’s that possible?” asked Bruce. “Can a ghost possess a computer?”

  I grinned. “Not a ghost so much as a big-dicked computer geek named Clark.”

  “Bigger than mine?”

  We three stared down. I’d recently been murdered and was comparing dick sizes with the sort of dead. Even in life, I never had a conversation like this, not even over brunch-mimosas with the guys. “You win again,” I said, and he grinned. “But Clark can get his up,”
I added, and the grin promptly turned frown. “In any case, if we can distract the azzhole here, I have an idea.”

  “Distract?” asked Bruce.

  Max nodded. “Boo-yeah.” He laughed. “Hey, see how well that works now.”

  I pointed at the screen. I pointed at the azzhole. “Maybe we can discuss ghost lingo a bit later, Max?”

  He nodded. He whooshed away, arriving at the light switch a second later. Bruce caught on quickly and headed for the lamp in the corner. “Concentrate, Bruce,” I said. “You’re pure energy, now. Energy can flick a switch on and off. Just concentrate. When we’re all together like this, we can feed off each other.”

  Which meant that, in about two seconds flat, we were suddenly in the middle of a rather odd lightshow, like we were at low-end disco. My ex-boss glanced around. He’d already looked tense; now he seemed both peeved and nervous, which was the perfect time for us to change his password, especially during all the commotion.

  “Judy!” he hollered. Judy was his assistant. “Judy, call the maintenance guy! He stood. He started to walk away. The strobing light effects made it hard to see where you were stepping. Meaning, he started to walk and ended up falling, landing with a thud and a string of expletives. I was laughing even as I put my plan into action, but even as I laughed, I could feel the drain, my battery fast depleting as I willed the keys on the keyboard to press down.

  I looked up as I began to fade. “Fuck you, azzhooooole….”

  We were suddenly back at Arby’s, all three of us.

  Bruce was grinning wide. “God, that felt good!” He quickly looked around, then up, then down, like he was waiting for a bolt of lightning to hit him for using you-know-who’s name in vain. When no errant bolts were forthcoming, he added, “But what was the point of all that?”

  Max’s grin also went into overdrive. “You changed the password, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “He was already logged in. It’s easy enough to do, if you know the system, which I clearly do. Or, um, did.”

  Bruce scratched his head. Or at least went through the motions. “You pissed him off and changed his password. Great. And what good will that do? He’ll get it changed back. Plus, we’re ghosts, not computer hackers, so, again, what was the point?” I paused, waiting for him to catch up. “Ah,” he eventually ahhed. “But we know a potential computer hacker.”