The Daredevil Corpse (The Departed Book 2)

by Sean Arthur Cox

  “Sixty-five?” I say sheepishly. It’s a fairly standard speed limit across the country. Sure, the actual limit was probably lower because it’s a speed trap, but at least it makes it sound like I was trying to do the right thing.

  “Spot on, missy,” he says. “Spot dang on.”

  “So… was I speeding?” I ask.

  “No, you was fine on that account,” he says. “But your tail light’s busted.”

  Ho. Ly. Shit. What kind of massive trouser weasel pulls a person over for a busted tail light during the day? “What?” I ask, genuinely surprised. “Really?”

  “Take a look,” he says. I suspect had I been a guy, I would not have been allowed out of the vehicle, but being a woman on the smaller side, I must be less intimidating. Unless of course, he’s just getting ready to frisk me. I climb out of the car as respectfully as I can, just like Houston taught me. Hands through the window, open the door, step out slowly with no sudden moves, hands in view at all times. I think my caution caught his attention because he now seems a little more on edge, his hand a little closer to his gun.

  “Look here,” he says and points to my light.

  Busted, as he said. Or more accurately, shot out a week ago when the murder couple tried to gun us down in Virginia. How did I not notice that? Was I too focused on the big damage, the window, to notice the small problems?

  “Oh no!” I say. “How did this happen?”

  “Doesn’t matter how it happened,” he says as he begins writing in his little ticket book. “What matters is you get it fixed and you get this fine paid.”

  He tears the ticket out with a smug sort of finality and presses it hard into my hand. “Thanks, officer,” I say and move back toward the driver’s seat.

  “Hold on, missy,” he says. “You seem to be in a bit of a hurry.”

  “No,” I say. “Well yes, but I won’t be speeding if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  He follows me to the door. “If I were to search this car, I wouldn’t find anything you wouldn’t want me to find, would I?”

  “No,” I lie. Texas may be lenient on handguns in cars or purses, but Officer Seventies Stache probably wouldn’t care for the sniper rifle in the hatch, the vials of poison in my pocket, or the dead man in the back seat.

  “No drugs? No guns?”

  “Of course I have a gun,” I say. “This is Texas.”

  “Oh?” he says and almost laughs. “And what sort of gun is a little lady like you packing?”

  I nod toward the glove compartment and let him take out Queen Mary I. “It’s a Colt Detective .38 Special,” I say. “My dad and I used to watch a lot of old black and white crime noir movies when I was a kid. I always wanted to be the hard-boiled gumshoe, kicking in doors and cracking in bad guy’s skulls, so he bought me this when I graduated high school.”

  “It’s a pretty powerful piece for such a little lady,” he says.

  “You know how boys get these days,” I say. “Wouldn’t you want your daughter armed for bear?”

  He laughs openly now. Good. One step closer to freedom. “I can see your old man is a fellow of good sense.”

  “I think so,” I say.

  “What’s with the old man? That him there?” he asks, tapping the glass where Dan Germany’s dead body rests. “Hey, old man. You okay?”

  “No, that’s my granddad,” I say, scrambling for an answer. “He hasn’t been feeling well, so I’m taking him to Amarillo to get him checked out.”

  “Is that so?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say, hoping it doesn’t sound like a question.

  He stands there for a moment, weighing some decision that I hope results in him letting me go free. “You know, he hasn’t moved since I pulled you over.”

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. “Yeah, he sleeps a lot. Says he’s been having headaches and dizzy spells. That’s why we’re going to Amarillo. I hear there’s a specialist up there that can take a look at him.”

  The officer taps again on the window, and of course, Dan Germany does nothing. That tends to be the habit of dead people.

  “Roll down the window,” he says. “I wanna see something.”

  “Do we have to?” I ask. “I would hate to wake him. He’s not well.”

  “Do as I say, darlin’, and no funny moves,” he says, and I’m suddenly painfully aware he hasn’t given me my pistol back.

  I roll the window down slowly, hoping to avoid having Dan Germany’s head suddenly flop loosely down like some kind of dead fish.

  “Sir,” says the police officer, who gives Dan Germany a little nudge. “Sir?”

  Another nudge. Nothing. A light shake. Nothing. Then he reaches and an overpowering sense of horror sinks in as he goes for Old Dan Germany’s neck and leaves his fingers there, pressed against the Adam’s apple.

  “This man has no pulse,” he says. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to put your hands against the vehicle and spread your legs.”

  Chapter 23

  JAIME

  MY SORDID PAST GIVES ME A RIDE

  I hadn’t burned this long since I couldn’t remember when, so long I had forgotten that I was inhabiting a heroin addict. When the warm comfort of nothingness began to sink in, for a moment I was almost happy to be truly dead at last. Then I realized I was still conscious and thinking, something I shouldn’t have been able to do if I were truly taken by oblivion. Perhaps, I wondered, I was finally free to enjoy the comforting solace of paradise? Slowly, the memories seeped back into me. The drugs, the torture. I wasn’t dead. Just numb.

  In the distance, I heard talking, felt someone’s hand pressing at my throat, and while I wasn’t up for a full-on protest, I did manage to bat weakly at the hand like some old cat making token gestures at play.

  “Stop it,” I said, but the words tangled on my lazy tongue and came out a bit more like “suhhbuhh.” Close enough. It was too relaxing where I was to care about something as trivial as talking.

  The hand withdrew so I must have been articulate enough for the hand to understand what I wanted. I retreated back into myself and ignored the chatter, content to savor this sweet, beautiful rest.

  When the euphoria faded, I found myself sitting in the back of a car. I didn’t know where I was except to say that we were in the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere. It was night, and the sky was the sort of deep blue blanket flecked with a thousand diamonds that I hadn’t really seen since before the Industrial Revolution. I’m always amazed at how beautiful a star-filled sky can be. Between the silence of the car and the vast expanse of heaven overhead, I almost forgot that I was just tortured for two days.

  Almost. I realized the car drove quietly, smoothly. Neither of those were words I would use to describe the car Dan and I bought. That beast was loud and shaky. This was not Dan Germany’s car. It was too nice, too new, too quiet. Too suburban. I spotted a soccer ball on the floor, and in the rear window, I could make out the silhouette of those family decals. Daddy, mommy, some kids, a dog. It was her. Monkey woman.

  Fear petrified me, which was good because otherwise I would have screamed. I could work with frozen. Frozen looked dead. If she thought me dead, she wouldn’t watch to see if I made a break for it.

  I took a moment to evaluate my situation. I was in the middle of nowhere going at least sixty-five. If I jumped out of a moving vehicle at this speed, I’d be beaten pretty badly and it wouldn’t take any effort on her part to wrangle me back into the car. She’d be fine, but I’d have blown my advantage and made it harder to escape later. I could play dead and hope she discarded me someplace. I had died, and dead bodies needed disposing of. But I was dressed. My wounds were healed. She would have noticed that. She must have known something was up. Maybe she didn’t know I would come back from the dead. Maybe she was just selling me to science. Still bad, but at least they might listen when the time came to plead my case.

  “How are you doing back there?” a woman called from the front.

  Damn
. She knew. Of course she knew. I swatted a hand away earlier. Damn, damn, damn. I fumbled for the door, but it wouldn’t open no matter how many times I undid the lock.

  “Child locks,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere, but I need you to calm down.”

  “Like hell I will, devil woman!” I shouted and began kicking at the window.

  “Stop it! I’ve replaced too many windows already. You’re safe. Relax!”

  “What do you want from me?” I asked. “Why is everyone after me?”

  “Why?” she asked. “There’s a ten-thousand-dollar bounty out on you for whoever kills you.”

  “That’s it? Ten grand? You tortured me for two days! You could have just killed me!”

  The car pulled over and the woman in the front turned around to chew me out like some child asking if we were there yet. I took a swing before she had a chance to speak. The seat belt didn’t give me a full range of motion, so my punch fell short, missing entirely. Then I saw her face.

  “It’s you!” I shouted. “I should have known! You tried to kill me half a dozen times last year! You chased me clear across Philadelphia! You kidnapped me out of my hotel room, and you tortured me for two days! Why won’t you just leave me alone, Monkey Woman?”

  “What?” she said. “Monkey Woman? I’m not the Monkey Woman!”

  “A likely story,” I said and tried to look imposing, no easy feat while visibly struggling to take off a seat belt.

  “Look,” she said. “Yes, I tried to kill you a few times last year. Yes, I chased you across Philadelphia, but I did not kidnap you, I did not torture you, and I certainly did not try to kill you. Not this time at least. I’ve been trying to protect Dan Germany.”

  “Well, he doesn’t need protecting,” I said.

  “And I would have known that if you would ever return my phone calls!” she shouted. “Why the hell am I paying that bill if you never take my calls?”

  “What?”

  “The phone,” she said. “The cell phone I sent you with the business cards. The one I gave you in case someone wanted me to kill someone and I didn’t think they deserved killing. A contract came my way for Dan Germany. I didn’t think he should die. I tried to call you to get you some work, but you didn’t answer that phone I bought you. You never answer that phone I gave you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That phone. Yeah, I lost the charger for it and the replacement I bought didn’t work. I mean, it’s a cell phone charger. Why won’t it fit my cell phone?’

  “There are different kinds,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Different phones need different chargers. Didn’t you think to bring the phone in and have someone find the right charger for you?”

  I didn’t answer. It felt like a loaded question.

  “When I called Dan Germany in his apartment and told him to get under the bed, it’s because there was a sniper watching. That was me who warned you. The electrician who broke into your place? He was a bomber. I chased him off. The fake cop and the werewolf who had a shootout? I got them to turn their guns on each other. They were both coming for you. When I chased you across the whole damn city, I was trying to get close enough to warn you, maybe help get you to safety. Hell, it was me and Dan Germany who rescued you from the Monkey Lady.”

  Monkey Woman might have been able to take credit for all of that. It was all in the news. All of it except the phone call. I never told anyone, not even Dan.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Oh, I tracked your cellphone using GPS and phone towers.”

  “I knew it!” I said. “The government can track me like that. TheRealTruth.org was right.”

  “The real what was what?”

  “It’s an Internet site,” I said. “It tells about all the secrets the government is up to that they don’t want us to know, like how they’re tracking the movements and phone calls and emails of everyone in the country.”

  It was too dark to tell, but I suspected the assassin was giving me a patronizing look.

  “There are over three hundred million people in the US,” she said. “The amount of data generated by tracking even one person’s movements and communications for one day would take forever to analyze. Do you know how many texts your average teenager sends in a day? A lot. You would need a population a lot bigger than the population of the United States in order to track the entire population of the United States. Are you trying to tell me that one billion people can keep a secret that big from the other six billion of us? And where are they meeting? It’s absurd. Not happening. It’s a logistical impossibility.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I feel stupid.”

  “Forget about it,” she said, pulling out my cell phone. “Here. You can call your friend if you need confirmation, but Dan and I have been looking over your dead body for a week now.”

  “A week?” That seemed way too long for the wounds I had taken. Some cuts. Some burns. The testicles had to grow back, but that was all fleshy bits. That shouldn’t have taken a week.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We kind of had to cut off your feet to get you out of those chains, and that took forever to regrow.”

  “I know forever,” I said. “A week isn’t forever.”

  “Anyway,” she said. “You’re probably hungry. Grub up. There’s a bag of tacos and a mountain dew back there if you want it.”

  She didn’t have to tell me twice. I dove into the bag and devoured three before she was even back on the interstate.

  “And thanks,” she said. “I know you can’t control it, but you waking up when you did? If you had resurrected one minute later, I’d be in jail right now.”

  “Serendipity,” I said with a shrug and dug into another taco.

  “Either way, thanks,” she said. “Rest. You have a big day tomorrow.”

  “The stunt?” I asked.

  “The stunt.”

  I nodded, finished my taco and leaned back, basking in the stars. If things went as planned tomorrow, I would be dead for longer than a week. I wanted to take this memory, the tranquility of the stars, into the fire with me. I drifted off and dreamt of snow and wolves and that moment of peace before I died, there in the dark with a sky just like this one overhead.

  I woke still in the back seat, but the scenery had changed. Instead of resting in the middle of the desert, I now found myself in a very specific part of the desert. The Grand Canyon stretched before me in a way so expansive, so indescribably vast, that I wondered any part of the earth could possibly exist which did not touch it.

  Out the other window, there was a ramp, much bigger than I had imagined, and a helicopter resting nearby, waiting for me to jump it. Dan Germany and another tech moved from item to item inspecting each piece of equipment. Afterward, Dan took a video camera and checked everything again, then hopped on a laptop. He didn’t strike me as the laptop type. Good for him. In the distance, I could see crowds beginning to form.

  The Marquis rapped hard on my window, startling me.

  “Rise and shine,” he said. “You look so much worse in the morning than you used to. There was a time when you were as radiant as the rising sun. Now look at what’s become of you. You look like an old man.”

  “I am an old man,” I said.

  “A tragic fate for such a lovely young woman.”

  “So, what’s the agenda for today?” I asked

  “Your new friend, Olivia I believe is her name, will help you with wardrobe. Crowds will gather. TGN will set up their cameras. You will give a stirring speech about second chances or what have you. Dan Germany has prepared something, but you may wish to give it some polish. He is no Oscar Wilde. Then you will strap the bomb to your chest, race your chariot down yon ramp and soar over the helicopter, escape the handcuffs that hold you to the steering wheel, leap from the vehicle before it crashes to the canyon floor, use your wingsuit to fly through the flaming rings, collecting the key necessary to unlock the bomb strapped to your chest, land at the base of the canyon, and use the code you find there to dis
able the explosives, to the applause of Dan Germany’s adoring public, and all within three minutes or the bomb explodes, killing your horribly.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound over the top at all.” There wasn’t a mop big enough to clean up all that sarcasm.

  “Just remember to die somewhere in all of that, and I am confident things will resolve themselves exactly as planned.”

  “With a stunt that convoluted, I’m pretty sure I can forget to die somewhere in there and still manage to get myself killed.”

  “Excellent,” the Marquis said. “Now out of the car. It’s time to get in costume. Your public awaits.”

  I climbed from the vehicle and was surprised to hear an eruption of cheering. I kept forgetting that I was a famous person, or at least a semi-famous person. All these people paid good money to see me die, I thought. Dan must really have a following.

  Olivia rushed me into a small room where a strange suit hung on a hanger. It was black and flappy with flames on the arms and legs, and someone had stitched extra fabric between the sleeves. On a separate hanger on the other side of the room was a harness with a large hunk of explosives and wiring strapped to the chest area. Fun.

  “This is all really necessary?” I asked. “A bomb’s going to keep me dead for a pretty long time.”

  “Apparently, it’s to make sure you die,” Olivia said and pulled the wingsuit off the hanger. “Like no autopsy possible die. Too much heroin in your system, Dan said. They don’t want to lose the insurance payment.”

  I nodded.

  “Does this feel scammy to you the way it feels like a scam to me?” she asked.

  “An old friend of mine is involved,” I said. “Of course it’s a scam. But to me, it sounds like twenty grand for two weeks work, another twenty grand for four deaths, ten grand for two days of torture, and seven grand for the seven days I spent dead. And that’s just to this point. I’m dying at least once more before the day is out and who knows how long that will take to come back from. It sounds like a scam to you, but to me it sounds like at least two years’ pay at my old job.”