by Pandora Pine
DEAD RECKONING
By
Pandora Pine
Dead Reckoning
Copyright © Pandora Pine 2018
All Rights Reserved
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, events, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental.
First Digital Edition: February 2018
For Deb:
Work doesn’t feel like work when I get to sit next to you. I cannot thank you enough for your support and your stories.
PROLOGUE
Tennyson
November…
It was just another day at West Side Magick. Psychic Tennyson Grimm was preparing for his next reading with a client. His 2pm appointment was with a young lady who wanted to reconnect with her husband who had tragically died in a car accident six months ago.
Tennyson had been chatting on and off with his client’s husband, a young man named Martin, and got the idea from him that this reading was more about getting Martin’s blessing on the wife moving on with his best friend than it was about saying goodbye to the husband she’d buried too soon. That was sometimes the way of things. Not all readings were filled with tears and weepy “I miss yous,” like you saw on episodes of Long Island Medium.
If only they’d give a medium a realistic television show. Tennyson would love to show viewers the real side of what his job was like. There were clients demanding to know why they’d been written out of their father’s will. Others wanting to know where Grandma Tilly had hidden her diamonds, and more who wanted to continue the family drama beyond the grave. Now that would be must see TV!
Ten sighed. There weren’t going to be television producers knocking down his door any time soon. To be honest, that was okay with him. He loved his life in the Witch City. After growing up in the very religious town of Union Chapel, Kansas, population 588, he loved his new adopted hometown of Salem, Massachusetts.
He’d escaped to New England after high school, the ink still wet on his diploma. His parents had disowned him after Tennyson confessed that he was gay and psychic. His choices of where to spread his wings had been between New Orleans and Salem. Since gay marriage had been legal in Massachusetts as of 2004, he’d caught a bus to Boston only hours after graduation and had never looked back.
Life had settled down for Tennyson and he’d quickly established himself as a working medium with his own set of clients through word of mouth and the internet. His big break had come a few months back when he’d gotten a phone call from Carson Craig, the West Side Psychic.
Carson and his brother, Cole, were the sons of Bertha Craig, the founder of West Side Magick. Bertha had passed away from breast cancer nearly two years ago and it had been her dying wish that her sons keep her legacy alive. The problem was that neither of her sons had shown any signs they’d inherited her gifts, until one night nearly a year ago when Carson had his first vision, a vision of love, in this very shop.
That vision had sent Carson on a crusade to find Truman, the man destined to die according to that first vision. They’d fallen in love along the way and now were happily married. As it turned out, Cole Craig had also started developing his own psychic powers around that same time. The brothers decided they needed a teacher and mentor to help them learn how to use and harness their new-found abilities. That’s where Tennyson had come in.
Now, nearly eight months after meeting the Craig brothers, Tennyson was a permanent member of the staff at West Side Magick and more like the third Craig brother than best friend to Cole and Carson.
“I’ll see you next Tuesday, just like always, Mrs. Salazar,” Carson was saying to a tiny Dominican woman as he escorted her out of the reading room.
Tennyson couldn’t help smiling at the two of them. Luisa Salazar was Carson’s best customer. She came in for a reading with him every Tuesday and referred all of her friends to the shop for their psychic needs. Some of those referrals had spilled over to him when Carson’s calendar was too booked to handle them all.
“There’s my Tennyson,” Luisa chirped from near the cash register. She waved before heading off toward the candle section of the store.
“She’s a peach.” Carson grinned.
Nodding, Tennyson followed Luisa’s progress through the aisles. Mrs. Salazar had been a huge support to Carson during the time he’d spent in the hospital last year. She’d organized meal deliveries to Truman’s house and even helped run the store and book appointments while Carson recovered from his injury.
“What time is your next reading?” Carson asked.
Turning to answer the question, Tennyson spotted a young man standing at the end of the counter that featured various healing stones and crystal balls. Ten took a step forward to greet the young spirit who looked nervous. “Hi, I’m Tennyson.”
The young man chewed his lower lip and looked back and forth between Carson and Tennyson. Surprise registered in his eyes.
Ten held a hand up to Carson, signaling him, as he took another step forward. The man, boy actually, looked to be about seventeen years old. He was wearing light-colored jeans and a white sleeveless, half-tank with the logo of a grunge band printed on the front. His blue eyes popped with perfectly applied liner and mascara. “What’s your name?”
The young man took a step forward and set a hand on Tennyson’s shoulder.
The psychic jolted as if he were being electrocuted. He thought he heard Carson shout his name, but that sound was drowned out by a flash of images assaulting his brain. It reminded him of a movie on super fast-forward where the pictures were moving so fast that your brain could only process a few at a time.
Tennyson couldn’t keep up with the flow of information coming at him. He tried to pull back from the man’s touch and found he couldn’t move at all. He tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t bring air into or out of his lungs. Panicking, he realized that if he couldn’t break this connection it could kill him.
The last image he saw before the world went black was of a young man’s naked body in a frozen field.
1
Tennyson
May…
When Tennyson cracked open a gritty eyeball at half past three in the morning, there was a young man sitting on the edge of his bed. It was nothing new for him as he’d been getting nighttime visitations since he’d hit puberty. What was new for him was that this spirit was a repeat visitor.
Usually, he met with a spirit once and was able to respond to their unique situation. He passed on messages to their family members or was able to help the soul cross over to the other side. This spirit was different though. After several visits with the young man, Ten was still unable to figure out just what the spirit needed from him.
“Hey there,” Tennyson said gently, not wanting to startle the still nameless young phantom.
The young man nodded in acknowledgment.
Sitting up slowly, Tennyson made note of how the young man was dressed; torn jeans, sleeveless half-tank with the same grunge band’s logo emblazoned on it. The shirt was also stained with something, but in the low light it was hard to tell just what the stain was. It also appeared that he was wearing eyeliner, just like before.
Each of the other times this spirit had visited Tennyson, he’d been dressed in the same outfit and was wearing makeup, but as time had gone on, his image had started to change. The jeans had become torn, the shirt stained, the eyeliner streaked down his face.
The problem with this spirit was that he h
adn’t yet gotten the hang of how to communicate from the other side. Tennyson called it dead speak. This had caused a lot of frustration on both of their parts. Each time they’d met, the young ghost would get so confounded by his own inability to speak to Tennyson that he’d vanish. Each time he left, Tennyson would never know if that would be the last time he’d see the troubled young man.
Ten and the young spirit had met several more times at West Side Magick. Thankfully, none of the subsequent meetings had been as dramatic as their first encounter. This was the first time the man had visited Tennyson at home.
When Tennyson had met the young man for the first time back in November, his sixth sense had been sent into overload with the amount of information the spirit had been trying to convey. He’d ended up passing out as a result. Carson had managed to catch his limp body just before it had hit the floor of the shop, saving him from a nasty fall.
When Tennyson came back around from his swoon, the young man was gone, as were most of the images that the ghost had force-fed into his mind. The one image that had stayed with him was that of a dead body in a frozen field. Ten didn’t know if the body belonged to the young man sitting on his bed or to someone else.
He offered a smile in the semi-darkness of his bedroom. “I want to help you. I’m just not sure how.”
The spirit nodded, reaching a hand forward.
Tennyson felt himself tense up. He knew it was the wrong way to respond to the flighty ghost, but it was pure instinct after what had happened the first time the ghost touched him.
Placing a hand over his heart, the spirit reached out again, this time with his index finger held out.
The gesture reminded Ten of E.T. when the extraterrestrial wanted to go home. He mimicked the gesture, meeting the man halfway. When their fingertips touched, there was no surge of images this time. There was only one image. Tennyson burst out laughing. Justin Timberlake had his dick in a box.
He looked up at the spirit who wore a mischievous grin as well. When Tennyson focused again, the picture had shifted to another image of JT. This time the singer was on stage with Janet Jackson during the infamous Super Bowl halftime show when Janet had her “wardrobe malfunction.”
“Justin Timberlake?” Tennyson said out loud.
The ghost nodded and pointed to himself with his other hand.
“Justin?” Tennyson thought he understood now. “Your name is Justin.”
The spirit nodded, looking pleased with Tennyson.
“Can you show me another picture to help me figure out your last name?” As the words left the psychic’s mouth, Ten saw an image of a volleyball with a smiling handprint on it in what looked like blood. He didn’t recognize it at first.
A memory tickled somewhere in the back of his mind. He was sure that if he got up and grabbed his phone and Googled “volleyball with bloody handprint,” he was sure the answer would pop right up.
“Wilson!” Tom Hanks’ voice echoed in his brain. The scene from the movie Castaway immediately came to his mind. “Justin Wilson?”
Nodding, the young man held his right hand out to shake with Tennyson.
Not hesitating for a second, Tennyson shook Justin’s hand. He could feel relief and a touch of pride wash through him. “Now that I have your name, how can I help you, Justin?”
The lights in the bedroom flashed on, momentarily blinding Tennyson. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he looked up to see Justin standing in the middle of his bedroom. The young man was a wreck. Both eyes were blackened, the left one was so swollen, it was nearly shut. Blood flowed from a gash in his throat to coat his concert tee and his torn jeans. The blood pooled on the floor, spreading out toward his bed and the door to the hallway.
“Someone murdered you?” Tennyson whispered.
Justin nodded. Stepping through the puddle of his own blood, he walked to Tennyson and set a hand on his shoulder.
A vision of a Wheel of Fortune puzzle popped into his mind with the letters being quickly turned over one by one before a contestant solved the puzzle. “You want me to solve your murder?”
The spirit nodded again and vanished. The bedroom light winked out, plunging Ten into darkness again. The only light in the room came from the red digits on his alarm clock which now read 4:03am.
His hand scrabbled over the bedside table for the lamp switch. When he flipped it, the blood was gone, as if it had never been there in the first place. Which of course, it hadn’t been.
In all of his years of seeing spirits and being able to talk to the dead, Tennyson had never before been asked by a ghost to help solve their own murder. It was a good thing he knew just the man for the job.
If only he and the man for the job were speaking to each other.
2
Ronan
Cold Case Detective Ronan O’Mara was at the end of his rope. He knew the Tyler case backward and forward. He knew it in his sleep. He could recite it line by line, but had a feeling none of his colleagues would want to sit in the front row and listen to the recitation.
All of the leads had been followed up on again. All of the witnesses that were still alive after twenty years had been re-interviewed. All of the physical evidence that was available had been swabbed for DNA and fibers and sent off to the lab in hopes that something new would be found that would help identify a suspect.
All of those things had led Ronan right back to where he started, which unfortunately, was where the Boston Police Department had ended the investigation of Rebecca Tyler’s grisly murder back in the summer of 1997.
Rebecca’s long-time boyfriend, Ralph Scott, had been the BPD’s best suspect, but he had an iron-clad alibi for the night of the murder. He was working on a fishing boat that was ten miles off the Massachusetts coast. The fishing vessel’s GPS confirmed his location.
Working cold cases was not for the faint of heart. After shooting a suspect in the line of duty nearly a year ago, Ronan had been demoted to the cold case unit. He’d been wallowing in the squad room with no luck solving cases and had been in fear that his job was on the line until he’d teamed up with local psychic Tennyson Grimm to solve a long cold missing child case.
After that one success, his career in the cold case unit took off. Over the last two months, he’d been able to solve four other cases, without the help of Tennyson and his sixth sense.
A friend of his, Truman Wesley, had once told him that being sent to the cold unit wasn’t a demotion. There weren’t many cops who had the patience or perseverance to see these cases through. Truman knew he had what it took to make it in this unit, but Ronan wasn’t always so sure.
The Tyler investigation was a case in point of Truman’s observation. Ronan knew he was dead in the water here. All he had to do was ask for Tennyson’s help and he’d be back in the game. He knew the psychic would be here in an hour, bringing his sunny disposition and a pocketful of anxiety-busting crystals.
The psychic would chit-chat with the spirit of Rebecca Tyler and before you could say Witch City Medium, they’d all know who’d killed the young elementary school teacher on the last day of school back in ’97.
He’d had his phone in his hand half a dozen times in the last hour alone to call for Tennyson’s help, but hadn’t known how to ask. Ronan and Tennyson hadn’t spoken to each other in fifteen days, twelve hours, thirteen minutes and seven…eight…nine seconds. But, it’s not like Ronan was counting.
Their fledgling relationship had hit a few bumps in the road since they’d met each other back in January. Chief among those bumps were Ronan’s initial skepticism over Tennyson’s sixth sense, pepperoni versus mushroom, which Golden Girl was the sauciest, and Ronan’s increasing outbursts of temper. The last of which was responsible for the silent treatment on Tennyson’s part.
Ronan didn’t need to be a psychic to know he’d deeply wounded his sensitive boyfriend with his careless words and by storming out in the middle of their discussion on whether or not Ronan needed to see a therapist. Sitting here alone at
his desk with his phone in his hand, knowing down to the precise second how long he and Ten hadn’t spoken, the answer seemed obvious. He needed to see a therapist. Probably.
Solving the Michael Frye case had been what had restored Ronan’s faith in himself as a detective. Unfortunately, it also dug up a long-buried secret about his ex-husband. Ronan had been struggling over his newly-minted divorce from Josh Gatlin when Tennyson Grimm walked into his life. He’d been just about ready to commit himself to the quirky, but sweet-as-pie psychic when Josh’s secret came out during the course of the investigation, rocking Ronan’s world.
The secret had also rocked Tennyson’s world and their world as a couple, which Ronan was having a hard time admitting to himself. This was the reason he needed to call the phone number on the therapist’s card Tennyson gave him two weeks ago.
Vowing to do right by Tennyson and himself, Ronan picked up the phone and typed in his password. He was in the middle of typing in a sappy yet serious message to his equally stubborn boyfriend when a commotion in the squad room pulled his attention from his phone.
“Ronan!” someone yelled in a breathless voice from down the hall. “RONAN!” the voice yelled again.
Heads of other detectives swiveled toward him. Ronan stood up and straightened his tie. He recognized the voice now and wanted to look his best when the man yelling his name got to his desk. “Here, Tennyson.” Ronan stuck up his hand so the frantic-sounding psychic would be able to locate him more easily. Although with the high-pitch of his voice, Ronan would think Ten could find him as easily with echolocation, just like a bat.
“Jesus, Christ, Ronan, you have to help me!” Tennyson sprinted the rest of the way to his desk.
As Tennyson ran, Ronan could see that his lover looked as panicked as he sounded. It wasn’t like Tennyson to be ruffled by much of anything. It also wasn’t like Ten to just show up here in the middle of Boston Police Headquarters without calling or texting, which chilled him to the bone. “Is something wrong with Truman? Carson? The babies?”
