by Alexie Aaron
“Did she also tell you that she put a flea in my ear about how I was raising him?”
“No.”
“She did right, and I’m trying to do right,” Patrick said. “But I just want you to know. Do you still want to have dinner with me?”
“Yes. I do,” Sabine said.
Mia stared out the door of the command center. “He’s landed a date,” she said and turned around and sat down next to Mason.
“I’m sure he’ll be a gentleman,” Mason assured her.
“I was actually worried about your brother,” Mia said. “My cousin is… to put it kindly, drifty and has very powerful protectors.”
“We’re talking one date,” Mason said.
“You didn’t feel the spark?” Mia asked Mason.
“No, but I did sense Patrick’s got the glad eye for Sabine and was going to throttle me if I didn’t leave.”
“I felt Sabine was coming alive. She was never outgoing, but she has been enjoying a half-life after her husband Brian died.”
“So this is who you named your son after. Tell me about him?” Mason asked.
“I met Brian while my aunt and I were looking for Sabine. She’d been kidnapped by this collector when she was bilocating. I’ll get into that later. Anyway, we were OOBing when something brilliant came towards us. Things in the astral plane are usually muted, but the sun had caught Brian’s sword. His OOBing persona was one of a knight, like you’d see in the fictional world of King Arthur. He asked us if he could be of service, and through him, we found out how Sabine had been taken. Long story short, he helped us to rescue her, which was very dangerous as all of us would be away a long time from our bodies…”
“Like Inky.”
“Not that long, but yes, like Inky. Our bodies could take the abuse of a long OOB, but Brian Norwood was wheelchair bound with a disease that was slowly killing him. He was as different physically from his OOBing persona as it could get, but the mightiness of his soul was the same. It wasn’t the brilliance of Brian’s sword that Bev and I saw; it was Brian’s caliber. Sabine met him in his normal form, and the two fell in love and married. They had three daughters through artificial insemination, and Brian lived to see them as tots before the disease took him. Sabine begged him to stay earthbound, but he was ready to move on. Besides, he knew that was no kind of life for Sabine.”
“She sounds like a very compassionate woman. To marry a cripple.”
“They did have many adventures with the aid of bilocation, Mason.”
“So Brian was named for a brave man of caliber.”
“Three men of caliber. Brian Stephen Cid Martin.”
“Do you think a name directs a person’s actions?” Mason asked.
“I think if you explain why a person was given the names, then yes I do.”
“How about you?”
“In my case, my mother wrote a name down absentmindedly, so I didn’t have direction.”
“But you don’t carry a chip on your shoulder, girly-girl.”
“Oh it’s there, faded a bit, but I do have a very large chip. And baggage enough to fill a military transport plane. But I found someone willing to help me with it, and love me because of it.”
“He’s pretty smart for a goof.”
“I love the goof, and there is more to him than you can see,” Mia said lovingly.
“So that Mike fella doesn’t stand a chance?” Mason asked.
Mia turned around and looked at him.
“I have eyes,” Mason said. “Don’t worry, I know how to keep my mouth shut.”
“I like that about you,” Mia said. “Now let’s go through the footage of The Eighty-eight.”
“Mind telling me what we’re looking for?”
“More of a who. I have a bad feeling about someone I ran into there. I’ll show you when it happened. If we get a good enough picture, perhaps Jake can run him to see if he’s a danger to Dash or to PEEPs.”
Barb carefully guided her grad students as they methodically removed the dirt around the front of the bar. A trench was dug a few feet from the building and then the dirt removed level by level. The header of the front door was visible.
Murphy stared as inch by inch the door and shuttered windows were exposed.
Fergus appeared next to Murphy. “I remembered the door being green,” he said.
“The ground could have turned it brown,” Murphy said distracted.
“We could move through that,” Fergus said. “You want to try with me?”
Murphy looked at Fergus and didn’t sense that the ghost was trying to trick him. “Yes, it would be better if we went together.”
Fergus led the way to the door and slowly moved through it. Murphy followed him and found himself inside of McNally’s. It was dark in there. Murphy used his power to manifest a green light. He floated over and through mangled tables and the skeletal remains of patrons of McNally’s. Most of them were piled at the front of the large front room. There was a lot of damage in this room of the bar, but the mahogany and brass u-shaped bar was still intact. At the far end, he found his father’s skeletal remains. Kevin’s spine was bisected by a fallen ceiling beam. His top half rested on the bar top. Even now, the surface held its shine. Kevin’s gold tooth reflected in the wood.
Murphy was careful not to disturb his father’s remains. He was filled with complex emotions: the joy of finding out his father hadn’t abandoned his family as his mother had thought, along with the sadness that his father had died so young.
Fergus pointed to the silver flask that rested with the bottom half of Kevin’s bones.
“Your father never went anywhere without that. Do you see him anywhere?” Fergus asked.
Murphy shook his head. “Maybe he moved on.”
“Too bad, I think he’d get a kick out of all the newfangled machines up there on the surface.”
Murphy stepped back and took a good look around. He got the feeling that most of the patrons of the front room had died instantly as the bar was pulled into the ground and was buried. There was some movement in the mass of table and bones. Whoever’s soul had not moved on was just now waking. He would steer a course around the pile so they didn’t take most of his energy.
Murphy remembered the one-story bar having back rooms and a basement. He moved through the closed door into a dark hallway. He stopped and retreated into the main room again. He couldn’t manifest enough light even for a ghost to make his way. He felt the parasitical pull of something trying to feed off of him. Murphy moved quickly out of the bar.
Burt was the first to see Murphy. He had been filming a segment with Mike and Sabine. He was surprised to see uneasiness painted on the features of the normally laidback ghost. “Are you alright?” Burt asked.
“Give me a moment,” Murphy answered as he drew power from the nature around them.
“I looked around the main room of the bar. There are bones and broken tables and chairs piled up against the front of the place. Inside, the building seems mostly intact. A few ceiling beams have fallen. My father’s remains are folded in half at the end of the bar. He has a gold tooth here,” Murphy said, smiling and pointing to an incisor. “I didn’t go any further. My power and my light were rapidly being eaten away from whatever lies beyond that door.”
“That would explain the unease in my stomach,” Mike said. “To paraphrase, ‘by the quaking of my tum, something wicked this way comes.’”
In this case it was Mia. Jake had alerted her to the activity at the excavation site. “What’s going on?” Mia asked, concerned by the anxiety rolling off Murphy in tidal waves.
Sabine filled in, “Murphy was able to enter the bar and found his father’s remains. What was his name?” Sabine asked.
“Whose name?” Murphy asked.
“Your dad’s.”
“Kevin, Kevin Murphy,” Murphy said.
“Who be callin’ me? Is it God?” a voice called out.
Mia turned around and yelled, “I’m looking for Kev
in Murphy!”
“Well, you found him,” said a handsome young man as he moved out of McNally’s with Fergus following him. He looked at the pretty woman, ripe with child, with another beauty standing beside her. Behind them stood a man with a familiar face, looked a bit like his Grandpa Callen. “Where am I? I don’t remember this being here,” Kevin said, looking around him.
Mia stared at the ghost claiming to be Kevin Murphy. He was wearing dress pants and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had on a cap set back at a jaunty angle. His blue eyes sparkled with mischief and his dark hair was thick, shaggy and long. He had a gold tooth that sparkled in the lost light that surrounded him.
“Who’s your man over there? Is he your husband?” Kevin asked, still bothered by not being able to put a name to a face – something he took pride in.
“No. Do you know where you are?” Mia asked.
“Chicago.”
Murphy moved around Mia and Sabine. “My name is Stephen Murphy, son of Catherine.”
“Impossible, that would make you…” Kevin stopped a moment and started to put two and two together.
“I’m your son. And you’ve been dead these many years.”
“Impossible,” he argued. “I was just enjoying a round with Fergus, and I was buyin’ when… when?” Kevin dropped his head, and as he did, he took in the transparent nature of his shoes. He lifted one foot at a time, setting it down, noticing it had no effect on dusty ground. He turned back expecting to see the bar’s welcoming door but only saw the front of it jutting out of the earth like a rodent.
Nietzsche who was annoyed by all the PEEPs trampling the excavation walked over. “What’s going on here?”
“Murphy’s dad just walked out of that building,” Sabine said.
Nietzsche looked at Murphy and then at Kevin and back again. “There is a resemblance.”
Kevin moved closer to Nietzsche, fascinated. “I heard about folks like you, but this be the first time, I be seeing one.”
“An archeologist” Nietzsche asked.
“No, I think he means a Native American,” Murphy said, being careful to use the words for injun Mia had taught him.
Kevin looked at Murphy and asked, “How long have I been gone?”
“It’s 2016,” Mia said. “You do the math.”
“Now I figure you’re lying, because if this is my son, then he’d be… dead… too,” Kevin’s voice trailed off.
Barb, annoyed by the defection of her O.I. from the trench and the mass of PEEPs standing on her site, called over, “Mia, what’s going on?”
“Kevin Murphy has just figured out that not only is he dead, but his son is too,” she said.
“God help me. You mean there is more than one Murphy here?” Barb asked. “Who’s this other fella?”
Kevin turned around and stared at the misty man behind him and asked, “Fergus, is that you?”
“Aye, Kevin, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“We’re dead.”
“Aye, we are,” Fergus sympathized.
Kevin took off his cap and itched his head. He then pulled out a silver flask and opened it up and drank from it.
“Ghosts can’t drink,” Sabine whispered to Mia.
“This one can. But I imagine that’s part of him, like Murphy’s axe and Fergus’s knife in his boot.”
Cid walked over to Mason and watched the reunion by way of the cameras. He took out his ear plugs that he wore to keep the machinery of the dig from driving him nuts and listened in on the conversation. He looked at Mason and said, “Look at Mike’s face.”
“He looks a bit horrified. I thought he was a professional. Surely a few ghosts don’t bother him.”
“No, but a couple of Murphys do,” Cid said.
“Good thing Ted’s not here,” Mason said.
“Why?”
“Well, before you got here, the elder Murphy assumed that Stephen was Mia’s husband.”
“I’d like to think my friend has gotten over any jealousies that involve Mia and Murphy.”
“Jealousy is a like a campfire. It looks like it’s gone out, but with some stirring, it comes back again and again. The trick is to never assume it’s gone and fan the flames.”
“How are you so wise for a kid?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s in the Callen blood.”
There was a knock on the side of the truck.
Cid opened up the door to see Patrick Callen standing there. “Can I have a private word with me brother?”
Cid turned around. “Patrick is here. I’ll take the com,” Cid offered. “Take as long as you need.”
Patrick drew Mason away from the site. “I remember that guy has super hearing,” he said to explain the brisk walk they were taking. “Now tell me, why do you want to know about fencing valuable antiques?”
Mason explained that it was a request from Mia.
“Mia?”
“Yes, she has this deputy sheriff who is working on a missing ghost case, and he thinks that whomever took the guard ghost out of commission, is going to burgle and try to move the priceless antiques stored in the attic of the ghost’s domain.”
Patrick looked panicked. “Did she tell the copper my name?”
“No. The Callen involvement is on the down low.”
“Talk English. What’s a down low?”
“I mean, she’s not telling the deputy where the information is coming from. Ask her yourself. I’m just the go-between. She asked for our help. I said I’d try. Now, if you’ll excuse me, one of us has a job to get back to.”
Patrick stood there a moment.
“By the way, Patrick, there is a new Callen in town,” Mason called over his shoulder.
“What the feck are you talking about?” Patrick asked, jogging to catch up with his brother.
“Kevin Murphy walked out of McNally’s, bold as brass.”
“Kevin Murphy?”
“He’s Stephen’s da, and Kevin’s ma’s a Callen. And before you get all excited, there’s a ghost claiming to be an O’Connor who is sticking to Kevin like glue. Claims the O’Connors and Callens have been friends since the old days.”
“That’s not true. Didn’t our pa tell us to beware of O’Connors? They were back stabbers.”
“I was too young to remember Dad, let alone his advice,” Mason reminded Patrick.
Patrick flexed his hands.
“What are you going to do?”
“First, I’m going to give Mia the information she needs, then I’m going to sit down with Stephen, and tell him all I know about the O’Connors. He’s family, he should know.”
Mason smiled. He liked it when Patrick’s family pride rose to the surface. The last time was when he had been beaten nearly to death by a ghost and was saved by PEEPs. Patrick was determined to even the score and not be beholden to PEEPs. His actions nudged open a door that resulted in Mason becoming friends with Ira and, because of this, getting a college education. This time, Patrick would be helping PEEPs out before that O’Connor did something to hurt their friends and family.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Tauni Cerise exited the taxi in front of The Eighty-eight. Tony was setting out his velvet rope and walked over to see what the attractive black woman wanted.
“Excuse me, but the bar’s not open for another hour,” he said.
Tauni looked up at the burly Italian and held up the clothing bag. “I need to get this to Mrs. Martin. I think the cab dropped me off at the wrong spot.”
“Mrs. Martin?”
“Mia?”
“Oh, Mia! Please come on in,” Tony said. He gently took the heavy hang up bag from the woman and escorted her into the bar. “Can I get you a cold drink while you wait?” he asked.
Tauni smiled. “I wouldn’t mind a beer.” She walked over and sat at the bar.
“One beer coming up. Anything in particular?” he asked. Tony was delighted by Tauni.
“I don’t know, what’s good?”
�
�I imagine everything. I like Sam Adams.”
“Then I’ll have one, thank you.”
“You have a familiar accent.”
“I’m from Long Island.”
“Me too!” Tony exclaimed. “Massapequa, you?” he asked, handing her a bottle and a tall icy glass.
“Hempstead, but I haven’t been back in years.”
“I went back for my cousin’s wedding a year ago. The place has changed.”
“What brought you to Chicago?”
“Football. I was drafted and never made it out of the practice team, but I fell in love with the city. Excuse me a moment.” Tony went in search of Dash.
Tauni enjoyed her beer and scouted out the place from her perch on the bar stool. She surveyed the long club and tried to picture it at night with a full complement of guests. It would be a tight space to move around in. She was glad her waitress days were behind her.
Tony came back. “Mia says she’ll be here in five.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Tauni, what do you do for fun?”
“Chase three toddlers around the house.”
“You have kids! I love kids.”
“They aren’t mine. I help Sabine out. I’m a practicing nurse, but right now, I’m a live-in nanny and nurse for Leta, Maisha and Nura.”
“Three girls! How darling.”
“They are a handful, but I enjoy the challenge,” Tauni said. “Are you married? Do you have kids?” she asked.
“No and no.” Tony blushed. “Never found anyone that could understand why I prefer to guard the door instead of sitting at a desk.”
“Why do you?”
“My little brother Carmine came out of the closet when I was in college. I wasn’t there for him. He was a victim of a hate crime. He was only sixteen when he died. I kept thinking if I had been there, I could have prevented it from happening.”
“But, Tony, you couldn’t be with him 24/7,” Tauni said.
“I could have made sure he got home from the prom. He and his partner were ambushed. They never caught the beasts that did this. So, jump forward a decade, and I run into Dash. I was working as a bodyguard for a local celebrity at the time. I heard Dash had problems starting this place up. I looked at it as an opportunity to honor my brother by keeping the patrons of this place safe.”
