The Daredevil Corpse (The Departed Book 2)

by Sean Arthur Cox

  The

  Daredevil

  Corpse

  Sean Arthur Cox

  First draft written in 2014 for NaNoWriMo.

  This pretty, typo-free reduced version: Copyright © 2018 Sean Arthur Cox

  All rights reserved.

  Cover designed by LV Book Design www.lvbookdesign.com

  ISBN: 172485951X

  ISBN-13: 978-1724859518

  DEDICATION

  To A.I., (not the robot brains or movie), because your brother and sister had the last two books dedicated to them, so this one’s for you.

  Lazarus, Inc

  443.648.DEAD

  I dare you to fly

  I dare you to sail

  I dare you to run as if the Devil’s on your tail

  I dare you to go

  I dare you to stay

  I dare you to try and have it any other way

  I dare you to hear

  I dare you to see

  I dare you to live as if you have no memory

  I dare you to be

  Chapter 1

  JAIME

  ONE SHOT AT A LEGACY

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, to steal a phrase from Jane Austen, that an investor in possession of a good fortune must be in want of some proof that he is not about to be swindled. For some this means spreadsheets, facts and figures, profit projections, and market shares. Actors have auditions and cold reads. For pastry chefs, they may need to provide a delicious cake. Magicians, no doubt, must pull quarters from ears and name impossible to guess cards before they can book gigs at wherever it is magicians perform these days. I understand this as a matter of smart business practice. However, some proof is easier to provide than others.

  Which is why on this particular morning, as the dawn’s early light first began to peek above the horizon, I found myself standing in an abandoned warehouse, light from the broken window cascading in visible bands against the dust filling the air, staring down the most emaciated old man I’d seen in several decades.

  “Do it already,” I said, and pressed my forehead harder against the barrel of the pistol the Marquis had provided to me at no obvious cost for just such situations. It would no doubt leave a silly little mark when my client pulled the pistol away, except that ideally, a dimple on my forehead would be the least noticeable thing about me if he would just screw his courage to the sticking place and do it. When you tell a person that you can't be killed—or more accurately, that you can't stay dead—they don't want to take your word for it, but they are just as afraid to get proof.

  For a while I had toyed with the idea of using poisons, or hanging, or drowning to prove my unique skill set. They caused less physical trauma, and I recovered a whole lot faster. Minutes instead of hours or even days.

  “But those lack panache, Jaime” the Marquis had told me time and again. “They lack showmanship. There's no spark to challenge the impossible. A man can easily feign death by asphyxiation. They say a ball tucked beneath the armpit can hide a pulse at the wrist, and from there one needs only hold his breath long enough. A hole clean through the head, however, the undeniable splatter of brain, blood, and bone on the wall, that is proof beyond reproach.”

  He wasn't wrong, of course. Didn’t stop me from trying to argue my way out of it anyway.

  What about the mess?

  I would get paid enough, he’d say. I could clean a little blood.

  Wouldn't the neighbors hear?

  Find a vacant building or stand in a river. Private and self-cleaning.

  What about the wait? It took a while to come back from physical trauma such as that.

  “That,” he had said, “is the best part. The anxious creeping terror as they helplessly sit, seconds turning into minutes and hours, fearing you won't rise to triumph over death, knowing their fingerprints are on the weapon. It is delightful.”

  “You're a sadist,” I told him.

  “You're thinking of a different marquis.”

  The words still rang in my ear, even all this time later. As usual, he was right. The first time we used a gun as a convincer, I was too busy being dead to really appreciate it, but modern videography had given me a chance to see it in action. Call me a bad person, but I did get a little enjoyment from watching them squirm. In my defense, I knew how it would turn out, so I knew they weren’t in any real danger. It was just a funny story to tell after the fact, right? We’d all laugh about it later.

  I gave a sideways glance at the hidden camera and returned my gaze to the old man, his skin stretched and cracked over his towering skeleton, not unlike a long dead animal lying on the side of the road if you made it stand up, put on a denim jacket, and regret all of its life decisions up to this point.

  “Come on,” I said to the man. “You're the adrenaline junkie. Let's see some of that gung-ho gusto that made you so famous.”

  His chapped hands quivered so violently that I wondered, even with the gun jammed against my skull, if he might somehow miss. I locked my eyes onto his and grabbed his wrist to steady the shot. The last thing I wanted was for the bullet to go wild. I might survive, and that would be no good for anyone.

  “Do it, ol-”

  The world disappeared into blackness and the searing pain I had long since come to associate with being dead. The sensation of fire charring my flesh and boiling my blood overwhelmed my soul. It burned like Hell.

  What happened next, I learned from replaying my world's bloodiest Candid Camera footage. My client, has-been ’80s daredevil Dan “Danger Man” Germany, pulled the trigger then recoiled in horror as the wall of the vacant tenement building became Ed Gein's personal Jackson Pollack painting. He dropped the gun and tried to run, but the Marquis wouldn't let him. He told Dan to sit and wait, and if he didn't, he would turn over the footage I'd secretly made to the police. Instead of being remembered as a hero to millions, he would be the washed-out geezer who shot a poor, crazy woman in the head.

  Dan Germany asked if it was a setup, felt like he'd been duped or framed. He paced, cried, tried to shoot himself, but we wisely only loaded a single round. The Marquis made him sit and wait. He tried to get him to eat a sandwich, but the old stunt man was having none of it.

  An hour later, Dan still expected the police to arrive any minute to take him away. What he no longer expected—if ever he did—was for me to sit up, gasping for air and rubbing away dried blood, shaking off the last remnants of a headache and the blistering sensation of burning that dying gave me.

  “What..? But how...? You were...” Dan stammered, but nary a comprehensible thought was anywhere to be found.

  “Ten grand a week, up front, live or die,” I said, ignoring his babbling. Reaching into my pocket, I produced a hardpack of Camels, a Zippo I got from PFC Cohen when I helped him and his friends liberate Dachau back in World War II, and a business card for Lazarus Inc. The card I gave to Dan. Then, sitting casually against the wall, I struck up the lighter and put the tip of my cigarette to flame. I didn't care too much for smoking or any sort of addiction for that matter, but the effect, I had decided, was pretty cool right after rising from the dead. Besides, it wasn’t like the habit would kill me. I pulled a slow, dramatic drag of hot smoke into my lungs, prolonging Danger Man's awe before speaking again. “If I die, it's five grand per death and a thousand dollars per day I'm dead. And that's any length of time for that day. If I’m dead between one second to twenty-three hours fifty-nine minutes, it’s a grand. Twenty-four hours zero minutes to forty-seven fifty-nine is two days, got me?”

  He nodded incoherently, which I didn’t realize was a thing people could do until that very moment.

  “Torture's a
nother five grand a day. Someone takes a baseball bat to my knees before sealing the deal, ties me to a chair and goes to town with a car battery, takes pliers to my teeth and fingernails. Whatever. That's five grand. Is this something you expect, and if so, is it something you can afford?”

  He glanced to the Marquis, who nodded, then returned his awestruck gaze back to me. “Yes,” he said. “I mean, yeah, I can pay it, but I don't think torture will be an issue.”

  “Whoever's out to get you isn't the sadistic type, then?”

  “No,” he said. “It's me. No one's trying to kill me but me.”

  I popped a quizzical eyebrow. “Care to elaborate?”

  He let his glance drift down to the trash-covered floor, then his body followed. I had known he was old, at least by normal people standards, but there on the floor in this abandoned slum, he looked ancient. His boney body, once tall and well maintained, now looked frail and wasted. Papery skin hung from him, and in his shoulders, I recognized the weight of decades spent without purpose. He gave me the look all smokers know, and I obliged, giving him the rest of my cigarette. I wasn't going to finish it anyway. He pulled flame and gray smoke into his lungs, the cigarette's embers glowing bright in the unlit room, and like an aging dragon who had lost his fire, let the smoke drift weakly from his nostrils.

  “I used to have a breakfast cereal. Did you know that?”

  I vaguely recalled such a thing but nodded just to be safe.

  “Stunties, they called 'em.” His gaze drifted back several years, and with it a tiny spark of lost life returned to his features. “Man, I was on lunch boxes. I was on t-shirts. Cartoons.”

  He began humming a tune I didn't recognize.

  “'Danger Man! Daredevil Extraordinaire!

  Fighting crime most everywhere!'”

  A laugh, small and full of longing. “What are you, thirty? You probably watched it when you were a kid, or maybe your brothers.”

  I never saw it, and certainly not when I was a kid. Farming was the height of technology in those days. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear, though, so I simply smiled and nodded.

  “I once jumped my motorcycle across the Twin Towers, back before... you know.”

  Another nod.

  “Do you know what I do now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Last week, I cut the ribbon at a grocery store in Wichita Falls. For this, they gave me five hundred bucks plus hotel and gas money. I had to haggle for the gas money and provide receipts.”

  “That's when I directed my friend here to you,” said the Marquis, startling me. I didn't usually associate him with honest, heartfelt moments, so his sudden intrusion into our conversation caught me quite by surprise.

  “How kind of you,” I said.

  He gave me a wordless smile, and yet, as inscrutable as he was, I had known him long enough to read his poker face as easily as a Vegas billboard. He owned that grocery store. Not directly, certainly, but through subsidiaries and stocks. He probably recommended Danger Man for the job and put the idea into the store manager's mind that he could pocket any money he didn't spend from his grand opening gala budget.

  “I told him you could no doubt help with his legacy,” the Marquis said.

  “Your legacy?” I asked.

  “I want to be remembered as the guy who did something spectacular, not the guy who used to be spectacular.”

  I pursed my lips and nodded, putting the pieces together. “But you don't have the body to be spectacular. Not anymore.”

  “Not safely,” he said. “I want to be remembered, but I don't want to die either. This guy says you can't die. I can see that. He also says you're a master of disguise. You can look like literally anyone.”

  “He does, does he?” The Marquis may have gotten me started with this business of dying for people, so it was only natural he would provide me with word of mouth advertising, but it made me anxious every time I discovered someone else knew my secrets. I had had too many people do terrible things to me, made me do terrible things to others, because they knew more than I would have liked them to know.

  “One last, big stunt,” Dan said. “That's all I want.”

  “Which I'll be performing, I assume, in the very likely case that things go south.”

  “That's the long and short of it,” he said.

  “So, things go poorly. You're dead, legally. What's your plan for that?”

  “Well,” he said and cast a sideways look at the Marquis, “Ambrose said... I mean, I was under the impression that you could... you know... I mean, it seems impossible, but then so does recovering from a bullet to the head, you know?”

  “Damn your bones, Marquis,” I said and he scowled almost imperceptibly. Ambrose had his own secrets, not the least of which was that his name wasn't Ambrose. I had been keeping him alive for longer than these past hundred and fifty years. But he had pretenses to keep up. An established identity with a birth certificate from the seventies. Certainly nothing tying him to a certain aristocrat believed—inaccurately, I might add—to have died in the French Revolution. But if he insisted on spilling my secrets all over, I could certainly drop hints about his.

  “Whatever are you damning me for?” he asked, nonplussed. He was, if nothing else, a master of keeping his cool under pressure. “Would you like to go back to that squalid little hole you called an apartment? I was under the impression you liked having gainful employment that left a little spending money in your pocket after the bills are paid.”

  With a huff, I turned from the Marquis. “In that case, if you need a new identity when this is all over, it's twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Twenty thousand?” Dan gasped, and his eyes began swimming in his head like two lost, frightened little fish.

  “That's not just papers,” I said. “That's a whole identity. Our mutual friend here isn't bad with computers, or at least he knows people who know a thing or two. Either way, you're looking at birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, an online presence if anyone goes goodling you.”

  “The term is 'Googling,'” the Marquis said.

  “Not to mention a brand-new body for a brand new you. It's a deal. It's a steal. It's the sale of the century.”

  He pondered for a moment, pinching at his pale, pencil thin lips. “I'm in,” he said after a long breath.

  “Good,” I said and gave his hand a vigorous shake. “Now, if you don't mind me asking, how do you intend to pay? You said yourself, you're earning peanuts opening grocery stores, and you practically died right here when I told you how much it would cost to establish a new life. I bet if I were to ask you to show me a bank statement, you'd be close to overdrawn. Our friend here isn't in the habit of wasting time when it comes to money, so I'm deeply curious. How can you afford my services?”

  “Ah! That's the thing!” Dan said, full of hesitant excitement like a light bulb flashing on behind a veil. “I sell tickets, make it a huge spectacle. We pull this off, you get paid out of the proceeds.”

  “And if I die?”

  “I mean, we’d still have the take at the door, so to speak. That’d get collected up front. Plus, I have a million-dollar life insurance policy. I'm sure I can scrape enough money from that payout to cover expenses. Ambrose says he can handle the paperwork sorting out my beneficiary so it all looks clean as a whistle.”

  “So,” I said, speaking more to the Marquis than Dan Germany. “No money up front. No money in his bank account. I'm working on spec in the hopes that this crazy plan works? That people will pay good money to watch an old man kill himself? That his insurance claim won't be denied or his will won't be held up in probate for years on end? I trust you're acting as a guarantor on this transaction?”

  The Marquis nods. “I personally swear to cover all of his debts to you if it appears he will be unable to.”

  “I don’t like that ‘if it appears’ talk. Sounds like you’re writing yourself a good faith loophole. Good faith doesn’t keep the lights on.”
<
br />   “Very well,” the Marquis said, and he gave me a look that may have been pride at catching his wording. “I personally swear that you will be paid what you are owed, from the profits of his venture if possible, or from my own finances if he is unable.”

  “How selfless of you.” I considered his words for a moment. I didn’t trust him in the smallest iota. However, I also liked having money, and the Marquis was good for it. With a shrug and a smile, I offered Dan my hand again. “Looks like you'll be getting your last hurrah after all.”

  His face lit up like a kid on Christmas, and he took my hand, giving it a spirited shake.

  “Now tell me,” I asked. “What did you have in mind for this stunt of yours?”

  Chapter 2

  OLIVIA

  JUST LET YOUR BYGONE HEROES DIE

  Children scuttle about, running back and forth between the playground and the soda machines. Moms do their best to keep track of socks and spilled French fries. Some people might think it’s a strange place to plot a murder, but it's perfect, really. The only people who dine in at fast food restaurants in the middle of a weekday are people with kids and people with burger fetishes, both of which are too involved in their own affairs to listen to a word me and Mister Smith have to say to each other.

  “Miss Jones?” a surprisingly squeaky tenor says from behind me.

  I turn around and see a medium sized man with smoothed back hair and a mustache so thin it must have been drawn on. He barely fills his ash-gray suit. When the mob says they want to meet about some murder business, you expect some well-dressed guy with a thick Marlon Brando accent surrounded by Golden Gloves gorillas in people suits. You don't expect this particular Mister Smith. He was more John Waters than Mario Puzzo.

  “Mister Smith.” I offer him a chair and a large order of seasoned curly fries, which he declines. I'm a little relieved. I love these curly fries, and I'd hate to think I bought two orders and would only get to keep one. Shrugging, I pull back the offered pouch, and a few more spicy fries, still hot from the heat lamp, disappear into my mouth.