The Girl On Victoria Road: A Tim Reaper Novel

by Sean Cummings

  What’s this? Is Tim Reaper going soft? Not really, I just think it’s wrong that I’m likely the old lady’s only company these days since her no-good children live across the country and her husband has been dead going on twenty years now.

  I threw on a pair of cargo pants and grabbed a clean sweatshirt as I headed to the bathroom. After liberally applying roll-on to my armpits, I pulled at the bags under my eyes with two fingers and stuck out my tongue as I looked in the mirror. The face staring back at me looked like it had been dragged behind a truck for five city blocks. My host’s blonde hair hung limply over my ears, and my eyes were bloodshot to the point where you couldn’t make out the whites anymore. Four days’ worth of stubble on my chin gave me a wino’s complexion; my teeth felt like they had fur growing on them.

  “Classy, Reaper,” I grumbled. “You’re a bag of shit, did you know that?”

  I could have hopped in the shower, but there was an urgency to Spark’s voice that told me to haul ass over to the crime scene. I brushed my teeth, scrubbed my face the best I could and splashed enough water into my hair to run a comb through it. Then I grabbed a bottle of Visine from the medicine cabinet and emptied its contents into both eyes.

  “Fresh as a daisy,” I said quietly as I eyeballed my shoulder holsters hanging next to my trench coat. I didn’t have a license to carry a concealed weapon, and I was heading to a crime scene that was swimming with cops. Detectives who’d probably want to know how the name RICHTER managed to make its way onto the wall of a child’s bedroom not to mention the irony of it being my host’s last name as well.

  Whatever. I never go anywhere unarmed. Bad guys try to kill me far too often, thank you very much.

  In minutes, I was cruising across the MacDonald Bridge and heading to North End Dartmouth. I’d grabbed a couple of coffees from a convenience store and a fresh pack of smokes. Like all convenience store coffee, the black liquid in my paper cup tasted like concentrated roofing tar, but it had enough of a kick to it that I got a sharp jolt just in time to stop at the toll booth on the Dartmouth end of the bridge. A morbidly obese man wearing a powder blue uniform shirt with the badge of the Metro Bridge Commission on each shoulder took one look at me and grimaced as I handed him a five-dollar bill.

  “You look like shit, Mister,” he said, handing me five bucks worth of bridge tokens.

  I deposited a token into the toll and gave him a quick once-over. “You should probably mark November 21st on your calendar. I think it’s going to be a bad day for you.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said, startled.

  “Nothing,” I yapped. “I look like shit, remember?”

  The barrier swung up, and I tromped on the gas pedal, leaving the toll booth guy in a haze of blue smoke. I lit a cigarette as I drove up Nantucket and then swung left on Victoria Road. I didn’t have to go very far because no sooner had I turned out of the intersection when my eyes were blinded by flashing blue lights that lit up the darkness about a block and a half in front of me. I managed to pull the Tempo in behind a florist’s van, and I hopped out, coffees in hand and a cigarette dangling out of the corner of my mouth. I padded over to a uniformed officer monitoring the police line and took a sip of my coffee.

  “Go home, sir. The area is cordoned off,” he said.

  “I kind of figured that when I saw the yellow tape. I’m looking for Detective Sergeant Carol Sparks. She’s expecting me.” I held up the coffee and gave it a little shake for effect.

  He threw me a skeptical look as he reached for his radio handset. “Marie, it’s Steve. I got some guy here who wants to see Sparks. She around?”

  The radio hissed, and a woman’s voice thick with an eastern shore accent spilled through the speaker. “I’ll get her, stand by.”

  I drew in a deep haul of smoke as I eyeballed the officer. He looked to be in his early thirties and good shape. I glanced at his nametag and said, “Officer Carter, huh? Have you been inside the crime scene?”

  He nodded, and I noticed some of the colour had drained from his face. “I was first on the scene. A right bloody mess in there. And that poor little girl. She’ll be damaged goods for the rest of her life.”

  “You got kids, Carter?” I asked as I glimpsed into his future. I saw an EKG along with an ultrasound of an enlarged heart. A small flash into the future again and I saw him lying in a hospital bed completely flat lined.

  “Yeah, I got a little boy,” he said with a note of pride in his voice. “He’s three. My wife’s expecting, and she’s due in about two months.”

  I looked at him the same way a doctor looks at you when he or she is about to drop a terminal cancer diagnosis on your sorry ass. “Carter. When I meet some folks for the first time, I get a bad feeling, and I can sometimes see people’s futures.”

  He snorted. Loudly. “Pfffft … did Sparks hire a psychic? Are you a psychic or something? That’s all bullshit.”

  I nodded sharply as I saw Sparks heading down the darkened front path. She threw me a small wave and then lifted the yellow police tape. “The last name’s Richter,” I said, taking on a tone of ominous dread. “It’s your heart. See your doctor today. You have been warned.”

  Maybe it was the tone of my voice or the empty look in my half-drunken eyes that got the officer’s attention, but he gulped. Audibly.

  “I-I will,” he stammered. “Go on ahead, sir.”

  I took another haul on my cigarette. “Sir, huh? Not bad … I kind of like the sounds of that. See you around, Carter. Maybe.”

  If you’re new to my story or you hadn’t figured it out by now, I’m a grim reaper. Or I used to be until I did a very bad thing about a hundred years ago, again, Google “Spanish Flu Epidemic”. And again, again, that was me. I’m death incarnate; I’m just wearing human skin. Why am I not out claiming souls? Simple … I got kicked out of my order and for the past century, I’ve been wearing other people’s bodies and I’ve done everything from fighting fascists during the Spanish Civil War to slapping on hockey skates and laying a beat down on all comers for a Stanley Cup winning team back in the 1970’s.

  I’d just given Constable Carter a huge head’s up. With a little luck, he’d see his doctor ASAP, get his ticker fixed and then he’d owe me a solid. For the time being, I was going to have to work with Detective Sergeant Carol Sparks again, and I hoped for both our sakes the reason she’d called me to the house would turn out to be something as simple as a murdered mother whose only child is really great at Stephen Hawking-level physics and nothing more.

  Sparks stood with her arms folded across her chest. She’s tall and athletic. She’s tough as nails; she has to be given that she’s an African-Canadian on a still overwhelmingly white police service. She was wearing a Baltimore Orioles ball cap, a leather jacket with deep enough pockets for the assortment of small hand weapons that she’d taken to collecting in the days and weeks since our showdown with the megalomaniacal angel known as Jael. Basically, she’s got the contents of Batman’s utility belt in her pockets.

  “Good to see you’re not staggering up the walk,” she said with no shortage of snark in her voice. “This is a bizarre crime scene, Reaper. I don’t know what any of it means.”

  I flicked my cigarette butt on the concrete and stubbed it with the heel of my shoe. I handed Sparks her coffee and said, “Where is the girl? I can look at the groovy math formula on her walls and ceilings until the cows come home, but that kid knows my name, and I need to find out why since I’ve never met the child.”

  “What about her mother? You might know her.”

  “And you make this grand assumption because of an assumption based on what?” I asked.

  Sparks looked at her tablet and swiped the screen a couple of times. “Because she was a prostitute and you’ve got a soft spot for ladies of the evening.”

  I felt a twinge of anger tie itself into a knot deep in the pit of my stomach. “Yeah, well we all know how that ended last time.”

  Sparks showed me the dead wom
an’s picture along with her rap sheet. She had black hair and dark circles under a pair of eyes that looked like they’d seen too much, too often, for too long. Her name was Lori Simms, and the name didn’t ring a bell.

  “Well,” Sparks said impatiently. “Do you know her?”

  I shook my head. “Never seen her before. I never forget a face because I know every face that ever was and ever will be. Try carrying that load inside your bean all day long.”

  “Shit … then we’re going to have to talk to the girl,” Sparks said, sounding a little deflated. “And she’s not talking to anyone.”

  I snorted as I turned on my heels in the direction of the house. “Yeah … we’ll see about that.”

  Sparks and I slipped on a pair of disposable booties and together headed into the house; a slightly dilapidated one and a half story with a stone foundation. Faded wood siding that had last seen a paint job sometime during the Johnson administration gave the exterior a flophouse appearance. When we stepped through the front door, I gave my head a hard shake because the exterior of the house had nothing on the interior.

  There had been recent renovations. In front of me was a short hallway with new laminate flooring. A fresh coat of paint had been applied to both walls and into the kitchen as I could still see the masking tape edged along the ceiling. The house smelled of the usual chemical soup off-gassing that accompanies any home improvement project.

  And blood.

  Ceramic tile spread across the kitchen floor in the shape of a daisy; it actually looked pretty elaborate, and I wondered if Lori Simms had done it herself. Maybe the poor woman had a knack for interior design and was working her way through school by working the streets.

  The living room walls were also freshly painted and were adorned with tasteful prints showing pastoral scenes from the English countryside. A leather sofa and love seat faced an enormous fifty-two-inch flat screen TV that had been professionally installed on the wall as if it were a part of the dead woman’s collection of art. If anything, the entire main floor appeared to be work-in-progress and if Lori Simms had lived long enough to get the exterior of the home as stylish as the interior, the house would have been a textbook example of a gentrified character home.

  Of course, they might as well just bulldoze the place now because nobody wants to buy a home where there’s been a murder. You know, unless they’re creepy people who get their kicks out of that kind of thing. It’s all a big joke, however, until you wake up screaming at two in the morning because evil always leaves an imprint. It seeps into the walls and through the floorboards. That’s dark intent, and it comes from the twisted minds of fucked up evil bad guys who are soulless serial killing pricks. They’re an anomaly and one of my hobbies is that I like to remove their stain from the face of the earth.

  I hadn’t whacked any serial killing sons of bitches in months, and I’ll admit it, part of me wished the guy who ended Lori Simms’s life was one of them. If he were, then he’d meet a pissed off grim reaper in human skin who likes to go full spirit of vengeance cosplay on his pathetic excuse for a life. (The spirit of vengeance, by the way, is real. Like my former boss Ezekiel, she too is one never to be fucked with. Her name is Cassiel. If she were to show up on the scene, I’d be the first one heading for the hills.)

  “I’ve been to a lot of crime scenes over the years, Sparks,” I said taking on a grim tone. “But I’ve not been to one where the smell of blood was everywhere. And there’s something else.”

  “What’s that,” she said as we stepped into the master bedroom of the small house.

  “This place is alive with the dark residue of what fucking happened here, Jesus!”

  The walls of the master bedroom were splashed with blood; as if someone had deliberately thrown buckets of crimson paint everywhere. Lori Simms was lying on the floor next to the bed. She was nude, and her torso resembled hamburger because I couldn’t make out the dead woman’s skin through all the stab wounds, there had to be hundreds of them. One badly sliced arm covered her face as if in her dying moments, she was trying to block the killer from treating her face the way that he’d treated the rest of her body.

  “Jesus wasn’t there for Lori Simms, Reaper,” Sparks muttered. “If God is real, what kind of deity would allow this to happen and in front of a little girl.”

  I grunted in agreement. “You’re not wrong there. The Man with the Big White Beard is a prick nine times out of ten because he allows shit like this to happen every damned day.”

  “Are you going to get in trouble for saying that?” she whispered in my ear.

  “Probably. But then I’m already on the heavenly shit list so what else is new?”

  A crime scene photographer began snapping pictures of the dead woman, and I looked around the room for anything the killer might have left behind because I wasn’t getting any mental image of who’d done this to the girl’s mother. All I could feel was the killer’s imprint; aside from the blood, the walls were dripping with evil intent and that got me thinking the murderer wasn’t entirely human. What I saw next confirmed it.

  We stepped into the little girl’s bedroom and just as I’d seen in the pictures Sparks had texted me, the walls around a child’s bed complete with stuffed animals were plastered with mathematical formula from floor to ceiling. An assortment of felt markers lay scattered on the carpet. I pulled the cap off one and tried to draw on my hand, but there was nothing.

  “Dry as a bone,” I said as I stood up and ran my hand along the complicated strings of numbers, integers and about a hundred other mathematical symbols I’d never even heard of.

  “I think the girl is a prodigy of some kind,” said Sparks. “You know … one of those gifted children.”

  I cocked an eyebrow and stepped back to the doorway so that I could take in the sheer scale of what I was looking at. “Or cursed,” I said warily. “Assuming the girl wrote all this stuff.”

  “She did,” said Sparks as she pointed to the one wall where the mathematical formula had been replaced by the word RICHTER hundreds and hundreds of times. “Her hands and arms are covered with black ink. Also, the only thing she’s said to us so far is your last name. We think she wrote all this after her mother had been killed. Maybe she was catatonic or something but whatever the reason, she knows who you are.”

  “And that’s a huge problem because people might be thinking I killed her mother,” I pointed out. “Which I didn’t. And I have alibis I can pull out of my butt at the drop of a coin, so I’d better not be walking out of this place in handcuffs, Sparks.”

  She shook her head. “Not if I have anything to do with it. She’s in a spare bedroom right now, and a social worker is on the way. I want you to talk to her— see if she will open up about what happened. And I want to know how she knows your name.”

  “Does the kid have a name?” I asked as we exited the girl’s bedroom and headed down the hall that was bustling with forensics personnel.

  “Charlotte,” said Sparks. “I need you to get into her head like you did with Kelly Jameson a few months back. Just don’t do any rewiring.”

  I pointed to my chest and thrust out my lower lip. “Who me? I love kids, Sparks. You know that.”

  I headed down the hallway past a uniformed officer who was standing outside an open door. He took one look at me and held up a hand. “You can’t go in there.”

  I cocked an eyebrow and pointed to Sparks who was standing next to me. “Me or her.”

  “You.”

  “It’s alright, he’s with me,” said Sparks,

  The officer stepped aside, and I poked my head in the door. The little girl sat in the middle of the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. She was dressed in a Wonder Woman nighty that was spotted with black ink. She’d wrapped her ink-covered, twig-like arms around her legs and rocked herself gently. Her auburn hair hung limply over her face, but I could make out that she had freckles on the bridge of her nose.

  I stepped into the small bedroom, and she gazed
up at me with a pair of blue eyes so clear that I stopped in my tracks to look in them. It wasn’t entirely the smartest thing I’d done since I arrived at the crime scene. In less time than it takes for a person to blink, a jolt of pain shot through my head; like a migraine armed with an ice pick whose sole purpose was to stab at my mind with the efficiency of a laser drill.

  I shut my eyes tight and drove a free hand onto the door frame to keep myself from stumbling as Sparks grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “Reaper … you come to my crime scene drunk!” Sparks hissed. “You’re useless to me right now.”

  I dug my fingers into the door frame and grated my teeth together as I pushed the pain aside. “If I was drunk, I sure as hell just sobered up.”

  “What are you on about?”

  I took a tentative step forward and then knelt in front of the little girl. She stopped rocking and gazed up at me.

  “You are Richter, but Richter isn’t you,” the little girl said clear as a bell. If she’d been traumatized by the death of her mother, her voice wasn’t showing it. “You are nameless.”

  Sparks knelt beside me. “Nameless? What’s she talking about?”

  I stood up and shut the door to the bedroom in the young officer’s face. I leaned against it and folded my arms across my chest as I regarded the little girl. “She means that I don’t have a name which is technically true. Death-dealers don’t have names. We just are and that’s pretty much it.”

  “That sounds confusing,” said Sparks.

  I shook my head. “Not really. Grim Reapers are lousy conversationalists anyway. I mean, who wants to talk about death and dying all day long? It’s boring.”

  “She knows about you,” Sparks conceded. “That’s pretty interesting.”

  The little girl stood up and said, “She is in the room in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  I regarded the little girl with a healthy dose of suspicion. She sure as hell didn’t appear to be catatonic the way that Sparks had described in her text back at my flat. Was it an act? She looked like an eight-year-old but looks are always deceiving when it comes to life and death. It was clear that she hadn’t killed her mother; she’d have been covered in blood. I needed more information and decided to see if she’d let me into her head.