Deadsville

by C. L. Bevill

  The teenager nodded. “You can make trades. You have to agree to it.” She motioned at the three men. “There are always ways around it.” She paused and grimaced. “You know, they’re not…dead. Not truly dead. They’ll come back after a while. And they’ll be pissed off.”

  Tavie thought of the woman in the muumuu with the hand sliced off. She had seen the muumuu later and the hand had returned, as good as new. “Maybe we should get the hell out of Dodge, then,” she suggested.

  “Too late,” the teenager said regretfully. Other deadies crowded into the alley and stared at both Tavie and the three idiots on the ground. There were several of them from the welcoming committee including Maximillian and Sternstein.

  “What the friggin’ flippin’ flop?” Sternstein said.

  Tavie wondered if the reaper would be coming for her. Her intentions had been leaning on the side of honorable. (Shooting someone in the head because he had a big mouth couldn’t really be called honorable, but hey, she hadn’t really done it.) She looked into the gathering crowd and didn’t see anyone with a scythe or even with glowing red eyes. She did see a few people she had met before and there was Nica, moving around to the side so that he could better see what was happening.

  “She shot them,” the teenager said, pointing at Tavie.

  Tavie rolled her eyes. Save a teenager. Teenager has a big mouth. Teenager should keep the mouth shut. That’s karma.

  “But they were going to hurt me,” the teenager added, as if she could read Tavie’s mind, “and her, too. See, that one’s got a knife.” She pointed again. Mr. Slit Throat still had the knife in his hand.

  Maximillian walked over to the men on the ground and stared at them. Then he lifted his eyes toward Tavie. “You’ve got a gun,” he said.

  Tavie pulled her jacket back and showed him the badge. Her chin lifted up. She didn’t need to explain herself to anyone, well, except to one individual, and He wasn’t around yet. She wasn’t about to show these people the Glock. There wasn’t a point.

  Sternstein joined Maximillian, as did a few other people who Tavie had seen from the welcoming committee. She supposed they were part of the elders that the first bluish woman had mentioned, but Tavie hadn’t thought to ask. She’d been overwhelmed. Hey, she told herself, adjusting to being dead is tough. She would dare anyone to try it and see.

  Sternstein said, “Is that true?”

  Tavie took a moment to realize that he was speaking to her. “That I shot them or that they were going to hurt the girl or me?”

  “Both.”

  “I did shoot them.” Tavie took a breath. “And I shot them because they represented a threat to my being. I interrupted them when they said they would hurt the girl over and over again until she voluntarily gave them her bracelet.” She would have added, “I did what I thought was the right thing,” but it didn’t seem appropriate. If the girl was correct, the bozos would wake up after a while and be as good as new. Or as good as dead, whatever the case was. If that was true, and Tavie had every reason to suspect it was, then she hadn’t killed them. However, she knew that knowledge hadn’t been with her when she had pulled the trigger four times.

  As a police officer, Tavie had been trained to put a perpetrator down for the count. There was no “shoulder” shot to disarm or fancy trick shot through a hand. The rule was to aim for center of mass and disable the bad guy. Ideally the BG shouldn’t be able to shoot at you, get up, or harm anyone else. If the three men had managed to get the upper hand on Tavie, they probably would have tried the same tactics on her that they had been going to employ on the teenager. In fact, they had probably used it on other people.

  Maximillian shook his head. “Take ‘em to jail,” he said. A group of people pushed into the alley. Tavie braced herself but they headed for the three men on the ground, coursing around her like water around a rock in the middle of a gushing river. They took the arms and legs of the lifeless men and carried them away. Heads lolled and bounced. The crowd observed in silence.

  “Am I going to jail, too?” Tavie asked. “Or maybe the Grim Reaper will be by later for an up close encounter that I won’t ever forget?”

  “I don’t know about the reapers,” Maximillian said. “Not jail, though. Self-defense is a reasonable justification here. It’s not like you shot them all a half dozen times, stopped to reload and did it again.”

  “I did threaten that, but why waste bullets,” Tavie said. “Although the one with the big mouth deserved a little extra something special.”

  Maximillian chuckled. She remembered he had a tantō knife tucked away somewhere and he had cut off multiple hands and ankles. He was a man wearing a suit and he had an unusual knife. He probably hadn’t died with that knife. So he had traded for it or perhaps he had employed a method consistent with the three ninnies.

  Sternstein appeared at Tavie’s side. “They’re taking them to our ‘jail.’ It’s built from stones and has bars. They’ll be in there until we can decide they’ve learned their lesson. If we’re lucky a reaper will come and solve the problem for us.”

  “The reapers,” Tavie began and trailed off. She didn’t know exactly how to pose the question. But Sternstein understood her dilemma.

  “We don’t think they judge us personally,” he said. “We think that there are so many of us that it takes God or whomever is doing the nasty business, a while to figure out who goes where and what happens to us. Some of the folks here believe that we can make a difference here. Some folks believe that their family and friends on the living side are the ones who make the difference. If they pray for us, then we’ll go where we need to go.”

  “So what we are here, what we do here, makes a difference?” Tavie asked.

  “Maybe,” Sternstein said. “Helluva answer. Maybe.”

  “You get people in here that take that as tacit permission to do what they want because it’s too late to make a difference?”

  Sternstein waved in the direction of the ground, indicating the three men she had shot. “Exactly. Most people aren’t bad people. Most.”

  Tavie had learned that as a police officer, although she couldn’t help judging the rest. It was almost an ingrained habit for people to lie to police officers. When she had done a tour in traffic enforcement, she had learned that it was a hard and fast rule to lie to a police officer who was about to give you a ticket for a moving violation. She had heard everything from “I’ve got diarrhea,” to “My mother has fallen and can’t get up,” to “I think my penis just broke in half and I need to go to the E.R.” It all tended to make a police officer cynical.

  “Why is she here?” asked a female voice. Tavie turned to see a medium sized woman wearing a gray suit and skirt. Her hair was neatly bobbed and she stared at Tavie intently with her equally gray eyes. If her hair hadn’t been chestnut brown, she would have been going for a theme. She was even wearing three-inch heeled, gray pumps. Her cause of death appeared to be poisoning. Underneath what the three men had called a “cover”, she had mottled skin and vomit stains down her white blouse.

  “This is Lillian,” Sternstein said as he motioned at the woman in gray. “She’s as tight-assed in death as she was in life.”

  “Bite me, bee-yotch,” Lillian said to Sternstein. “You,” she said to Tavie, “how did you die? You don’t look particularly mangled. Actually, you look remarkably unscathed for a new deadie.”

  “I haven’t got a clue,” Tavie said, but that wasn’t exactly true. There had been an early morning call. There hadn’t been any units around where they were supposed to be. There had been someone there who had been stabbed. First on the scene.

  Then someone else had been there.

  That was a clue. Tavie shouldn’t have been the first one there. Someone had called it in. Someone had looked at the roster and seen Tavie’s name next on the list. This had been another victim. Someone had killed others in the same manner.

  Tavie frowned. Thinking about it made her head hurt. Furthermore, it made her chest ach
e. Somewhere her parents were crying. Somewhere her mentor Charlie was drinking a shot of Angels Envy Bourbon in her honor and saying, “I’ll find out what happened, kiddo. I swear.” Sparkplug was hiding his head in Puddles A. Lott’s flank and whining piteously. One of her brothers was thinking that the world was a horrid, wretched place.

  Lillian expelled air. “God, I wish I had a cigarette.”

  “Guess they go quickly around here,” Tavie said.

  “Yes and no,” Lillian said. “People don’t want to give them up. I stopped smoking a week before I died, which in retrospect, was a big mistake.”

  Tavie looked over her shoulder at the crowd at the opening of the alley. Nica was gone. She looked back at Lillian. They wanted something from her. She could feel it. This was the world she lived in now and nothing was going to get her back to the living. One day her parents would stop crying. Charlie would unravel a mystery. The dogs would be getting Milk Bones from her landlady. Her brother would find something else to give him hope. They would move on. So, too, should she.

  “You were poisoned,” she said to Lillian. “Your husband or one of your employees, I’d bet.” She looked at Maximillian. “Stroke. You were much older than you present here, but that’s okay. I would make myself look twenty if I had the choice.” Her gaze settled on Sternstein. “You died…pretty damn quickly. You didn’t feel a thing. That sure jerked you off that plane into this one.” Tavie could see that he had overdosed on pills, a suicide. However that meant that earlier Sternstein had lied to her about his manner of death. Perhaps he had some secrets of his own and she would save them like a prize out of a Cracker Jack box.

  Lillian glowered at Tavie. “My personal assistant thought she’d get a promotion if she took me out. She didn’t think an autopsy would show arsenic, since— ” her voice went high pitched as she obviously imitated a younger, flightier female “—‘Like, that’s something they used in the olden days.’”

  “She go to jail?”

  “Life without possibility of parole,” Lillian said. “All that premeditation, you know. The stupid twat. She shouldn’t have done Google searches what poisons work best on her private computer and then didn’t clear the history. Dumbass.”

  “How did you find out what happened to her?”

  “People pass through here and eventually you find one that was in your universe, from your time, or lived through your time,” Lillian said carefully. “You find out things.”

  “How do I know things?” Tavie asked.

  “That’s a very good question,” Sternstein said. He gave her a good long look. “How’s about you come see the jail?”

  “The inside or the outside?” Tavie asked promptly.

  “We won’t lock you up,” Sternstein said and laughed. “You’re a cop. We have other cops here but mostly they didn’t die with their weapons. Also they wouldn’t have tried to save Coco there.” He indicated the teenager with the tennis bracelet.

  “Coco,” she repeated. “Your mama like Chanel or something?”

  Coco shrugged. “My mother liked the perfume. It’s a good thing she didn’t like Obsession or White Shoulders.”

  “Okay,” Tavie said, “show me the jail.”

  * * *

  The Deadsville Sheriff’s Department was one of the bigger buildings that Tavie had seen in the town. It was constructed of a patchwork of stones and brick. Tavie couldn’t quite see how stones and bricks had come through with someone who had died, but then there were a lot of ways a person could die. It had a nice wooden door that someone had spent a lot of time on. Someone else had painted “DEADSVILLE JAIL” over the door in red. It looked as if it had been spray-painted.

  Tavie paused by the door while the elders got their act together. There was a bunch of them and it was a motley crew of deadies. Sternstein took the lead while Maximillian and Lillian followed up. There were a few others who appeared staid and conventional in suits and dresses appropriate for Sunday services. Coco even followed along, looking at Tavie as if the older woman was a saint.

  “Not bad, huh?” Sternstein asked. One day Tavie was going to have to ask him or someone else his actual name.

  Tavie looked around. The stones and bricks were solidly cemented by a mortar that looked like it could survive World War III or perhaps a prom night in the barrio. Sternstein knocked and someone unlatched the door from the inside.

  “Dang,” the man said from inside. “Did you have to send three deadies at once? What happened to them? Did you know that it looks like bullet wounds and that one is saying you have a shooter? An actual shooter.”

  The door opened and a redheaded young man with a cloud of freckles peered out. He didn’t look like he was older than twenty-two years old. He wore a police uniform out of the 1950s and spectacles that Buddy Holly would have been happy with. The patch on his shoulder said Reeves County, Texas. His cover showed the man as he would have looked decades before. Underneath, Tavie could see that his shirt was shredded and inundated with blood. He’d been stabbed about fifty time, give or take a dozen.

  “Holy pumpernickel bread with sesame seeds on top,” he said as he caught sight of Tavie. He sighed gustily. “Now that’s a dame.”

  ​Chapter 5

  Death is a black camel that kneels at every door. – Turkish Proverb

  ~

  “Dead is dead in Deadsville.”– Common saying in Deadsville

  ~

  “And she can shoot, too,” Sternstein said. The sheriff’s deputy’s name was Enoch, no last name was given. No name tag was evident on the uniform to give it away.

  Enoch placed his hand over his heart as if he was going to pledge allegiance to the flag. His big brown, puppy dog eyes didn’t leave Tavie’s figure. “I am in love, darlin’,” he declared.

  Maximillian motioned at the door. “Let’s do a tour.”

  They did a tour. The group included the elders, Enoch, and Tavie. Everyone else remained outside of the Deadsville Jail AKA the Deadsville Sheriff’s Department. Inside there wasn’t much to tour. A main office with two mismatched desks possessed a frizzy haired blonde secretary named Fritzi and an old iron pot-bellied stove. There was also an area for processing, a smaller office for the sheriff with another mismatched desk and chair, and a small wing with the actual jail cells.

  “We have eight,” Enoch said proudly. Four of them were occupied. Mr. Holey Head, Mr. Slit Throat, and Mr. Bullet Holes all had their own teensy weensy cells. Each cell was hardly larger than each man. They could stand or they could sit on the floor. Mr. Holey Head was sitting and glaring between the bars at Tavie while he muttered foul invectives that got progressively repetitive and involved doing things with relatives or animals that weren’t legal in forty-nine states. Mr. Bullet Holes was still unconscious and sat braced against the back wall, his head lolling across his chest. One of his clunky boots stuck half out of the cell. Mr. Slit Throat sat upright and was hypothetically awake, but his eyes were crossed and obviously he hadn’t recovered yet. He blinked and his eyes uncrossed.

  The thought that Tavie had shot all of these men, and yet here they were, halfway back to being what they were, was profoundly disturbing.

  The fourth person in the cells was a tall blonde woman wearing a black vinyl cat suit and matching stiletto heeled boots. All of the men in the room immediately looked at the point where the zipper ended at the apex of her breasts. Tavie appreciated the fine surgical techniques that had clearly gone into the making of her large and well-formed bomambas, but that was about it.

  More importantly, Tavie could also see underneath her cover. The woman in cat suit had been killed execution style with one efficient shot to the back of the head. She had barely even bled before she’d died.

  “Enoch,” the cat suit said to the redheaded man from Reeves County, “I’m bored beyond belief. Please let me out. I promise to come back in an hour. An hour and a half tops.”

  “Now Mistress Nightshade, you know I cain’t be doin’ that,” Enoch said regretfull
y. “The elders said you had to give up the razor blade before you go anywhere.”

  Mistress Nightshade pouted. “How can anyone expect a helpless woman to give up her only protection?”

  Tavie couldn’t argue with that, except that a woman like Mistress Nightshade probably had unlimited means of self-protection. She was about as helpless as a barracuda.

  “Besides you cut that fella’s testicles off…twice,” Enoch said. “You said something about using ‘em for earrings.” He tsk-tsked.

  “He wasn’t using them,” Mistress Nightshade said. “And they came back.” She shook her head sadly. “I wouldn’t have done it a third time.” She glanced at Tavie. “He was a righteous jerk. If only I had my whips and chains. A man like that won’t have a lot of energy when he’s got something the size of a cucumber stuck up his—”

  Maximillian said quickly, “We’ve heard it before, Nightshade. This is—” he turned to Tavie and grimaced— “I don’t think we caught your name, Officer.”

  “Octavia Stone,” she supplied. “Formerly of the Phoenix Police Department.”

  “Ah, Phoenix,” Mistress Nightshade said wistfully, “I had a sub there once. He would do things on command. Never had a better sub until he ran off to Guatemala with his legal secretary. Wonder what happened to him.”

  “But you’re not just an officer,” Maximillian said to Tavie, half a question.

  “I’m an officer for the Violet Crimes Unit,” Tavie said. “A detective. Well, I was. Now I’m dead.”

  “A problem we all seem to share,” Nightshade added cheerfully. “Are they putting you in charge of the Deadsville Sheriff’s Department? I’m bi, you know. Law enforcement officers are usually the type who enjoy a good domination. I can make your butt the most delightful shade of pink. I guarantee you would love it.”

  “While that’s wonderful information,” Sternstein interrupted, “it’s not always something you have to share with everyone, Nightshade.”