by H. T. Night
Chapter Two
I was sitting with Detective Hammer inside a donut shop on Glendale Avenue. Hammer seemed right at home in a donut shop, and I told him as much.
“Very funny, asshole,” he said.
Hammer and I had been working missing cases together for the past few years, ever since I got into the business and had made finding missing children my specialty. Hammer was a lead detective at the LAPD Missing Persons Unit, and he was damned good at what he did. I happened to have a knack for it, too, and we made a good team.
We had also become friends, which is a rarity in the private business. Mostly, cops looked at us private dicks as irritants. Not to mention, I rarely, if ever, went out of my way to make friends, which was partly due to extreme shyness, and partly due to my desire to just be left the hell alone. The fewer the people who knew me, the fewer the people who could remind me about what a fuck-up I was.
Anyway, Detective Hammer and I were sitting in the far corner booth, which gave the detective a good view of the glass door, and the donut case behind me.
“How come I never get to watch the door?” I asked.
“Because you’re not a real cop,” he said.
“How do I know you’re really watching?” I asked. “And not just planning your next donut?”
“Because I’m a highly trained detective in the LAPD. I can do both,” he said. “So far, the coast is clear, and I’m thinking I’ll have a maple bar next.”
And he did just that. A moment later, he returned with said donut and a chocolate milk.
I said, “When you’re done with that, there’s cubes of sugar over there that you can snack on.”
“Maybe,” he said, and I wasn’t entirely sure he was joking. “So which case are you working on?”
I told him about it, although I left out the part about Veronica being a vampire slayer. Which was probably for the best, since I wouldn’t have been able to say it with a straight face, anyway.
Hammer nodded and took a bite of his donut. “The runaway who’s been living with the old couple.”
I nodded.
“We put this case on the back burner,” he said. “We’ve got more important things to do than look for a runaway who ran away again.”
“Or so it seems.”
“She’ll turn up alive and well, trust me. Probably out on some party boat in Havasu. She’ll come back to the old folks when she’s partied out.” He finished his donut and sucked on his fingers. “Anyway, to put the old lady’s mind at ease, I told her to go see you, since you’ve got nothing better to do.”
“That, and I happen to be the best.”
“Maybe, maybe not. There’s a guy here in town who gives you a run for your money. An old guy. Looks a little like Elvis.”
“Lucky bastard.”
“Tell me about it. Anyway, he’s pretty good, too. Maybe better than you.”
“That’s one thing I don’t mind being second best at. Maybe he and I could touch bases sometime.”
“Sure,” said Hammer. “I’ll give you his number. Then you and Elvis can solve crimes together—call yourselves Starsky and Hubba-Hubba.”
“When you’re done clowning around,” I said, “maybe we can think about finding a missing girl. And I don’t give a shit if you think she’s just another runaway. Even so, runaways find themselves in more shit than anyone. She needs help, no matter.”
“Fine. Quit busting my balls.”
“Did you do any work on this case?”
“Enough to know that it looks like she skipped town.”
“What else do you know?”
“That’s it. I told grandma to put together as much information as possible on the girl and to give it to you.”
“She did.”
“Then you now have twice as much info as we’ve got.”
We were quiet. As Hammer was about to bite into his maple bar, his bristly mustache sort of quivered in anticipation.
“When you eat,” I said, “Your cop mustache quivers like a randy mouse.”
“Does it do it in a sexy way or a creepy way?”
“A disgusting way.”
“Probably why my old lady never sleeps with me.” He wiped his mouth. “Did Gladys mention, um, anything else to you?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Something, you know, odd?”
“Maybe.”
He said, “You ask me, she’s off her rocker.”
“Maybe.”
“You got anything else to say other than maybe? And if you say maybe again, I’m going to go ape shit on you.”
I grinned. “She might have mentioned something about the girl being into some weird goth shit.”
“No, it wasn’t weird goth shit,” said Hammer. “And might have and maybe is the same fucking word, asshole.”
I grinned again.
“What did she tell you?” I asked.
“That the girl was some sort of a vampire slasher.”
“Slayer,” I said. “Vampire slayer.”
“Thank you for clearing that fucking up,” said Hammer. “Now I can rest well tonight knowing I have it fucking straight.”
“So what does your gut say about this case,” I said. In this business, instincts were everything, and we often asked this question to each other.
Hammer, for the first time in quite a while, looked legitimately perplexed; his mustache even sagged a little. “I’ll admit, it’s weird enough that it’s worth looking into, which is why I sent the old lady your way.”
“That, and because I’m the best.”
He ignored me and went on, ticking points off on his fingers as he spoke, “So, this girl Veronica shows up at the old lady’s door one day, bleeding and hurt, but won’t tell Gladys where she’s from or how old she is, and warns the old lady not to call the cops or she’s gone. The old folks are so desperate for excitement in their pathetic lives that they happily take on this degenerate.”
“Way to look on the bright side,” I said.
“There ain’t no bright side to what I do,” he said.
“I do it, too,” I said.
“But not as good.”
“Go on.”
He said, “So they take this girl in, treat her as if she’s their own for a few years. Meanwhile she disappears every now and then to hunt werewolves.”
“Vampires.”
“Whatever. Look, someone here is clearly nuts.”
“Nuts or not, we have a missing girl, who’s most likely a minor.”
“I still say she’s a runaway. A runaway of a runaway is low priority for a prestigious law enforcement agency like the LAPD.”
“But not for me.”
“Do I really need to answer that?” he said. “Anyway, since you get paid to do this shit, you’re the lucky bastard who gets to look into it further.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky me.”
Also available at your favorite ebookseller:
The Body Departed
A Ghost Story
by
J.R. Rain
(read on for a sample)
1.
I stepped through the wall and into my daughter’s bedroom.
She was sleeping contentedly on her side. It was before dawn and the building was quiet. The curtains were open and the sky was black beyond. If there were any stars, they were lost to the L.A. smog. The curtains were covered with ponies, as was most of the room. A plastic pony light switch, a pony bed lamp, pony wallpaper and bedspread. Someday she would outgrow her obsession with ponies, although I secretly hoped not.
A girl and her pony. It’s a beautiful thing.
I stepped closer to my sleeping daughter, and as I did so she shifted slightly towards me. She mewed like a newborn kitten. Crimson light from her alarm clock splashed over her delicate features, highlighting a slightly upturned nose and impossibly big eyes. Sometimes when she slept her closed eyelids fluttered and danced. But not tonight. Tonight she was sleeping deeply, no doubt dreaming of sugar and spice and e
verything nice.
Or of Barbies and boys and everything in-between.
I wondered if she ever dreamed of me. I’m sure she did at times. Were those dreams good or bad? Did she ever wake up sad and missing her father?
Do you want her to wake up sad? I asked myself.
No, I thought. I wanted her to wake up rested, restored and full of peace.
I stepped away from the far wall and glided over to the small chair in the corner of her room. We had made the chair together one weekend, a father/daughter project for the Girl’s Scouts. To her credit, she did most of the work.
I sat in it now, lowering my weightless body into it, mimicking the act of sitting. Unsurprisingly, the chair didn’t creak.
As I sat, my daughter rolled over in her sleep, facing me. Her aura, usually blue and streaked with red flames, often reacted to my presence, as it did now. The red flames crackled and gravitated toward me like a pulsating static ball, sensing me like I sensed it.
As I continued to sit, the lapping red flames grew in intensity, snapping and licking the air like solar flares on the surface of the sun. My daughter’s aura always reacted this way to me. But only in sleep. Somehow her subconscious recognized, or perhaps it was her soul. Or both. And from this sub-conscious state, she would sometimes speak to me, as she did now.
“Hi, daddy.”
“Hi, baby,” I said.
“Mommy said you got hurt real bad.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Mommy said that a bad man hurt you and you got killed.”
“Mommy’s right, but I don’t want you thinking about that right now, okay?”
“Okay,” she said sleepily. “Am I dreaming, daddy?”
“Yes, baby.”
We were quiet and she shifted subtly, lifting her face toward me, her eyes still closed in sleep. There was a sound from outside her window, a light tapping. I ignored it, but it came again and again, and then with more consistency. I looked over my shoulder and saw that it was raining. I looked back at my daughter and thought of the rain, remembering how it felt on my skin, on my face. Or, rather, I was trying to remember. Lately, such memories of the flesh were getting harder and harder to recall.
“It’s raining, daddy,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you live in the rain?”
“No.”
“Where do you live, daddy?”
“I live here, with you.”
“But you’re dead.”
I said nothing. I hated to be reminded of this, even by my daughter.
“Why don’t you go to heaven, daddy?”
I thought about that. I think about that a lot, actually. I said, “Daddy still has work to do.”
“What kind of work?”
“Good work.”
“I miss you,” she said. “I miss you so much. I think about you every day. I’m always crying. People at school say I’m a crybaby.”
“You’re not a crybaby,” I said. “You’re just sad.” My heart broke all over again. “It’s time to go back to sleep, angel.”
“Okay, daddy.”
“I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you, too, daddy.”
I drifted up from the small wooden chair and moved across the room the way I do—silently and easily—and at the far wall I looked back at her. Her aura had subsided, although some of it still flared here and there. For her to relax—to truly relax—I needed to leave her room entirely.
And so I did. Through the wall.
To hell with doors.
2.
I was standing behind him, reading the newspaper from over his shoulder, as I did every morning.
His name was Jerrold and he was close to sixty and close to retirement. He lived alone and seemed mostly happy. He was addicted to internet poker, but, as far as I could tell, that was his only vice.
Thank God.
He turned the paper casually, snapping it taught, then reached for his steaming mug of coffee, heavy with sugar and cream, and took a long sip. I could smell the coffee. Or at least a hint of it, just like I could smell a hint of his aftershave and hair gel. My senses were weak at best.
As he set the mug down, some of the coffee sloshed over the rim and onto the back of his hand. He yelped and shook his hand. I could see that it had immediately reddened.
Pain.
I hadn’t known pain in quite a long time. My last memory of it was when I had been working at a friend’s house, cutting carpet, and nearly severed my arm off.
I looked down at my translucent arm now. Although nearly imperceptible, the scar was still there—or at least the ghostly hint of it.
Still cursing under his breath, Jerrold turned back to his paper. So did I. He scanned the major headlines, and I scanned them along with him. After all, he was my hands in this situation.
He read through some local Los Angeles news, mostly political stuff that would have bored me to tears had I tears to be bored with. I glanced over at his coffee while he read, trying to remember what it tasted like. I think I remembered.
I think.
Hot, roasted, bitter and sweet. I knew the words, but I was having a hard time recalling the actual flavor. That scared me.
Jerrold turned the page. As he did so, something immediately caught my eye; luckily, it caught his eye, too.
A piano teacher had been murdered at St. Luke’s, a converted monastery that was now being used as a Catholic church and school. Lucy Randolph was eighty-six years old and just three days shy from celebrating her sixtieth anniversary with her husband.
I had known Mrs. Randolph. In fact, she had been my own music teacher back when I was a student at St. Luke’s. She had been kind to a fault, a source of inspiration and joy to her students, and especially to me.
And now, according to the report, someone had strangled her, leaving her for dead on the very piano she had taught from. Perhaps the very same piano I had been taught from.
Damn.
Jerrold clucked his tongue and shook his head and moved on to the next page, but I had seen enough. I stepped away,
“You’re still young, Jerrold,” I said to him. “Lose fifteen pounds and find someone special—and ditch the gambling.”
As I spoke, the small hairs on the back of his neck stood up and and his aura shifted towards me. He shivered unconsciously and turned the page.
I left his apartment.
3.
We were in Pauline’s apartment.
She was drinking an apple martini and I wasn’t, which was a damn shame. At the moment, I was sitting in an old wingback chair and she was on the couch, one bare foot up on a hand-painted coffee table which could have doubled for a modern piece of abstract art.
“If you ever need any extra money,” I said, “you could always sell your coffee table on eBay.”
“It’s not for sale,” she said. “Ever.”
“What if you were homeless and living on the streets and needed money?”
“Then I would be homeless and living on the streets with the world’s most bitchen hand-painted coffee table.”
Her name was Pauline and she was a world-famous medium. She could hear me, see me and sometimes even touch me. Hell, she could even read my thoughts, which was a bit disconcerting for me. She was a full-figured woman, with perhaps the most beautiful face I had ever seen. She often wore her long brown hair haphazardly, a look that would surely have your average California girl running back to the bathroom mirror. Pauline was not your average California girl. She wasn’t your average girl by any definition, spending as much of her time in the world of the dead as in the world of the living. Luckily, she just so happened to live in the very building I was presently haunting.
“Yeah, lucky me,” said Pauline, picking up on my thoughts.
She did her readings out of a small office near downtown Los Angeles, usually working with just one or two clients a day. Some of her sessions lasted longer than others and tonight she was home later than usual, hitti
ng the booze hard, as she often did. I wouldn’t call her a drunk, but she was damn close to being one.
“I’m not a drunk,” Pauline said absently, reading my thoughts again. “I can stop any time I want. The booze just helps me...release.”
“Release?” I asked.
“Yeah, to forget. To unwind. To uneverything.”
“You should probably not drink so much,” I said.
She regarded me over her martini glass. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her face gleamed with a fine film of sweat. She wasn’t as attractive when she was drunk.
“Thanks,” she said sarcastically. “And do you even remember what it’s like being drunk?”
I thought about that. “A little. And that was below the belt.”
“Do you even have a belt?”
I looked down at my slightly glowing ethereal body. Hell, even my clothing glowed, which was the same clothing I had been wearing on the night I was murdered two years ago: a white tee shirt and long red basketball shorts, my usual sleeping garb. I was barefoot and I suspected my hair was a mess, since I had been shot to death in my sleep. Dotting my body were the various bloody holes where the bullets had long ago entered my living flesh.
“No belt,” I said. “Then again, no shoes, either.”
She laughed, which caused some of her martini to slosh over the rim. She cursed and licked her fingers like a true alcoholic.
“Oh, shut up,” she said.
“Waste not, want not,” I said.
She glared at me some more as she took a long pull on her drink. When she set it down, she missed the center of the cork coaster by about three inches. Now part of the glass sat askew on the edge of the coaster, and the whole thing looked like it might tip over. She didn’t notice or care.
Pauline worked with spirits all day. Early on, she had tried her best to ignore my presence. But I knew she could see me, and so I pursued her relentlessly until she finally acknowledged my existence.
“And now I can’t get rid of you,” she said.
“You love me,” I said. “Admit it.”
