by C. L. Bevill
“Oh.”
“But the phone is a secret,” Peony said.
“You had cancer right?” Tavie asked.
Peony blinked and glanced down at herself. “How did you—?”
“Looks like you still have an IV? Chemotherapy? Lost your hair, your eyebrows, too,” Tavie said. “That port in your chest was for the chemicals.”
“I had leukemia,” Peony said slowly. “The worst kind. It took three months from diagnosis to death. When I died, I was talking to my BFF on the phone because she was graduating from Berkley. She was letting me listen to the graduation. I should have been there, you know? I figure I brought the phone with me like someone brought the Sultana with them. Plus, it was on when I crossed over.”
It was difficult to find compassion when Tavie kept running into people with sad stories about the way they had died. There was disease, accidents, and worse. It hardly seemed fair. Still a kernel of sympathy pressed against the large red organ in the middle of her chest and made it ache.
“I’m sorry,” Tavie said. “It isn’t fair.”
“It could be worse,” Peony said. “There’s a girl down the street who’s in four pieces. She has to pick herself up every time she wants to take a walk. Factory accident, I think. How do you cover that up?”
“I need to use the phone,” Tavie said.
“I don’t have a phone,” Peony said, as if she had simply given it away.
“You can let me use the phone and I’ll keep the information to myself,” Tavie said politely. The kernel of sympathy went flying away as soon as Peony lied to her. “Or you can refuse and I’ll tell everyone in Deadsville that you have a working phone. Even worse, I’ll make sure they know it’s a smart phone.”
Peony’s outraged expression was very nearly priceless.
“And I’ll start with the traders like Hungry Hippo Herman. They’re dying for a phone like that. They’d make a killing.” Tavie shook her head. “I’ve got to stop making those kinds of puns. That’s getting old.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Peony said.
“You’d be begging me to put you in jail,” Tavie said. “People would mob you in the worst way. You’d have to give it away.”
“Not my phone,” Peony protested.
“Okay, your choice,” Tavie said and turned to leave. “Common, Pudd. We’ve got lots of people to talk with.”
“Wait,” Peony said. She turned and reached under a pillow on a pallet on the floor. She brought it up. It was a Samsung Galaxy. “You’re not going to keep it?”
“Let me use it right now and when I need it,” Tavie said, “and I won’t keep it. It shouldn’t be an issue. I won’t tell anyone about it. I won’t sell you down the river.”
“Haha,” Peony said.
“What about the battery?” Tavie thought about the phone. She had to stick her smart phone on a charger at least once a day. More if she was playing games with it or looking at Facebook.
Peony made a face. “Haven’t you heard? Some things get brought over are like, unlimited. People who have a pack of cigarettes, for example. They can smoke and smoke and smoke, provided they have a lighter, and the pack never goes empty.”
Motormouth nodded. “I know a guy who has a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. It don’t matter how many he eats or gives away. Believe me, he’s got lots of friends.”
“How does someone die with a bag of Hershey’s Kisses?” Tavie wondered.
Motormouth shrugged.
Peony held the Samsung out. Tavie took it and nearly sighed. She pushed the power button and swiped a finger across the screen. The background was a Hello Kitty face with a bejeweled ribbon.
“You can use this all you want and it doesn’t go dead?” Tavie asked. She wished she could keep it, however she was certain that Peony wouldn’t trade it for all the rain in Spain and a golden ticket to Old Navy.
Peony rolled her eyes. “I told you. It’s unlimited. Unless I dropped it or something, I guess I could still break it. Can I pet your dog?”
“Sure. His name is Pudd.” Tavie’s eyes roamed over the screen. Apps were present like the Internet browser and maps. There was even a Facebook icon. The little menu at the top showed two bars on the signal strength and that it was 89% of battery capacity. But the time and date were blurred out. “This doesn’t show the time or the date.”
“Never did after I died,” Peony said, kneeling by Pudd. She let the dog sniff her fingers in the proper manner. Pudd acquiesced and allowed the girl to scratch his chin and behind his ears. “You know watches don’t work here.”
Tavie thought about the watch in one of her pockets. She’d won it in a game of horse on her first, well, day, or whatever it had been. It didn’t work. She hadn’t thought about it, but once she thought about it, she realized deadies tended to avoid references to hours and days. They simply didn’t know how much time had passed and was passing.
“So how does it get a signal?” Tavie asked.
“Ask God,” Peony said. “He’s in charge of all of that.”
“Or someone else,” Motormouth interjected.
Tavie connected to the Internet and smiled. Google was Peony’s homepage. She typed in Darren’s name. Darren Tucker, M.D. and she got a few hits. There were a few Darren Tuckers around. The cover Darren had worn had a Nixon pin on it, but he had died while he was in his eighties. It took her about ten minutes but she found his obituary. It was glowing, filled with praise. He had been married and had three children. He had ten grandchildren and one great grandchild. He had formed a society for emergency medicine physicians. He had been a member of the Masonic Lodge. He had several community awards. He had been a great guy, very nearly a saint according to the obit.
Then Tavie looked at Minh Thanh. His obituary was equally informative, but perhaps not as glowing. He had lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had been a member of several legal organizations. He’d had a wife and six children. He had three grandchildren. He had originally come from Viet Nam. He’d moved to New Mexico in the 1940s. He had been the first Vietnamese-American attorney in the county. Another great guy.
But both accounts were obituaries. The dead were supposed to be wonderful because saying something bad about the dead was a no-no.
And wait a minute. Tavie went back to the doctor. He had been from Santa Fe, New Mexico with offices in Rio Rancho, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas.
She took a moment to look at Mapquest.com. Santa Fe wasn’t all that far from Albuquerque. That was interesting. Rio Rancho was on the edge of Albuquerque, and Albuquerque was well, Albuquerque.
What were the odds of that happening? Two men “dying” in Deadsville of something unknown, with Latin words carved onto their backs, were both from New Mexico.
Coincidences did happen, Tavie knew, but in her line of work, there were usually few and far between.
Chapter 12
The death of one dog is the life of another dog. – Manx Proverb
~
“Not my circus, not my monkeys.” – Octavia Stone
~
“What happens if you make a call?” Tavie asked Peony. “Like a call to your mother?”
Tavie was still very much stuck on the issue of the two murdered (or maybe not murdered) men and tried to clear her mind by asking an unrelated question. Plainly someone had wanted revenge on them. It was her experience that it was a matter of time before she narrowed down who had wanted payback in the worst way. The biggest issue she had, of course, was in determining where the originating issue had occurred. Had it been in the living world or in Deadsville? It seemed more logical that it had happened in Deadsville, because there was no rhyme or reason to the deadies who ended up in Deadsville. They came from all parts of the world— there was a man she’d met from Pitcairn Island and who was descended from Fletcher Christian. There was also a woman from Tristan da Cunha and a pair of twins from Greenland. In addition, deadies came from odd times. There had been the flapper from the 1920s and Enoch was from the 1960s. The odds would be tremendo
usly against the correct set of people ending up with each other in this warped assemblage of randomivity.
“Try it,” Peony said, referring to the cell phone.
“It’s messed up,” Motormouth said.
Tavie glanced at the phone in her hand. Her mother’s phone number was on the forefront of her head. It hadn’t changed for more than a decade and Tavie remembered every digit. It would be nice to talk to her mother, if only for a moment, maybe just to hear her voice.
But…
There was always a but. The but was the huge, honking, white elephant sitting in the corner, pretending to be invisible. It seemed like that would be torture for both of them. Tavie had a sudden image of her mother in church, staring at a stained glass window, wondering if Tavie had suffered, if she would ever get past the agonizing wellspring of grief that threatened to overwhelm her when she thought of her dead daughter.
Tavie swallowed back the reciprocal pain she felt at her mother’s sorrow. If Tavie’s mother was in church, she wouldn’t be answering the phone.
“What happens?” Tavie asked, looking longingly at the tiny blue telephone icon on the menu.
“Most of the time nothing,” Peony said. “But every once in a while, it connects.” She shrugged. “If they answer, they hear you for a word or two, then they can’t hear you or they say something like ‘there’s too much static.’ It’s like someone cuts us off on purpose because we found a loophole.”
“You can’t have a real conversation,” Motormouth said. “I called my dad once. He knew it was me. He heard me say, ‘Dad, it’s me.’ He said he forgave me. It was kinda nice. He stopped crying about me when he was alone.”
Tavie stared at the cell phone. Reluctantly she handed it back to Peony. “Better keep that to yourself. I guess you know what happens if someone wants something like that.”
“That’s why we kept it a secret.” Sarcasm dripped from Peony’s voice.
“You think the other two are going to keep that a secret for long?” If there was one thing that cops knew, it was how to be a decent judge of character. Motormouth might keep it to himself because Peony was his ever-after girlfriend. But Misters Bullet Holes and Slit Throat didn’t have the same motivation. It was only a matter of time.
“If they keep wanting to use it, they will,” Peony said fiercely.
“I may need it again,” Tavie said.
Peony shrugged. Tavie could tell by the look on the young woman’s face that she thought she was being hosed. Tavie reached into her pocket and retrieved the small maneki-neko statue. “Here,” she said and handed it to Peony. “It’s supposed to be good luck. Consider it payment for the use of the phone.”
Peony brightened up. “I love these.”
Tavie glanced at Motormouth, shooting him a meaningful look. “Remember what we talked about.”
“I won’t forget.”
“Neither will I,” Tavie swore and she walked away from the house that once had been a steamboat that had sunk in the Mississippi River. She whistled sharply and Pudd came charging after her, only stopping to mark a nearby wall constructed of termite damaged 2x4s.
Tavie walked for a while in the general direction of where she believed the Deadsville Jail to be. However, nothing much looked familiar. Had she missed a turn? Maybe she should stop and ask for direction. But people were starting to give her that look. Tavie knew the look. They knew who the law was and they knew what the law meant. Even people who were completely innocent of wrongdoing slowed down automatically when they saw a patrol car. It wasn’t all that different when they saw an officer walking down the street. Or in this case, the Deadsville sheriff.
It was readily apparent Deadies spread out when they saw Tavie coming and she knew she wasn’t going to get to play horse for fun for a while. Pudd was the secondary attraction. It was harshly obvious that some of the people hadn’t seen a pet since they had died and they desperately wanted a little puppy fix. Pudd got tired of hands reaching out for him and shied away.
After a few blocks, all but the diehards faded away. She looked back and gave the remaining two a hard stare and they slowed to a grinding halt, simply watching her and the dog walk away.
Tavie looked forward and quickly touted up turns and landmarks in her head for the walk back to the jail. Deadsville desperately needed a bus or a taxi, and hadn’t someone said something about something like that? It wasn’t regular and it didn’t always have fuel or something. Maybe a bicycle cabbie?
When Pudd yipped once sharply, she glanced back and saw a man just behind her close enough to reach out and touch her shoulder. Inadvertently, she stepped to the side and spun around, reaching inside her jacket. She was used to pretending that nothing ever startled her. That was something cops frequently did. Attitude was 99% of curing most problems and it went a long way to getting past most situations. But this man had disconcerted her badly. He hadn’t been there and then he was there, in the time that it had taken her to turn her head forward and then back. He could have taken her down if that had been his intent. Instead, he studied her in a way that made her skin crawl.
Tavie kept her face as neutral as she could and she looked him over in turn, trying to take his measure. Was he a perpetrator or was he an ally? Was he bad guy with the switch blade tucked into the elastic of his sock or was he the Good Samaritan ready to do the cop a solid?
A tall man with burnished brown skin, he would have been noticeable anywhere. His long hair was the color of a crow’s wing, complete with silvery blue highlights glinting from the streams of the nearby ecto lights. His eyes were endless pools of pitch black. It was a starless night in the deepest shadow in a place where the sun never thought to shine.
Tavie made herself look away from his disturbing eyes. His clothing was white and loose, like a cotton shirt and a skirt that seemed oddly old fashioned and yet appropriate for him. One long fingered hand held a golden rod decorated with blue stones. The end of the rod had three braids of blue and red beads attached with a single chain. He twitched it and then rested the rod in the crook of his arm, as he came to a complete halt only a few feet from her.
Tavie didn’t have to look up at many people but she looked up at this man. That blue black hair was long and bracketed his narrow face. If anything the sharp angular lines and hooked nose reminded her of a jackal she had once seen in a zoo. Egyptian wolf, something inside her said.
Something else said to her, Dangerous.
“Help you, slick?” she said. Pluck and mettle were the fruit of hope or a way to give oneself more rope for the noose, depending on the defining moments. She’d take pluck and mettle over cowardice and ineffectiveness every time.
The man’s eyes glittered in the gloaming. At first she thought his eyes were catching the light of the bluish lanterns but she realized the eyes were simply gleaming with a luminosity all their own.
“I just wanted you to know that Thana isn’t the only game in town,” he said, and his voice contained the chill of death. The shiver that immediately coursed down Tavie’s back couldn’t be helped.
“What do you know about Thana?” Tavie asked.
“I know she didn’t tell you everything,” he said. His voice made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Her instincts were telling her to run and to run fast, but Tavie didn’t think she had a chance with this…man, if she did that. Look…and…see. Not a man. Not friendly. Lethal. Treacherous.
“So you’re going to tell me?”
“We’re in the land of the dead. Deadsville is only what the humans call it.” He smiled at her, a wealth of white teeth that would have made any predator jealous. “Do you not think that there are gods of the dead here as well as the humans? That there is one who is more powerful than the rest? The lord of the gods of the dead?”
“Thana is a god of the dead?”
“You don’t know your mythology, law woman,” he said.
“What’s your name?” she asked carefully.
“The people of my country
called me Anapa. The Greeks called me by another name. Anubis.”
Tavie carefully looked around, all the while keeping Anapa in her line of sight. She cautiously took a step backward while Pudd growled lowly behind her. “Anubis,” she said. “I’ve heard that one before. I don’t know much about the ancient Egyptians, but I believe Anubis was…”
“The god of the dead,” Anapa finished, not letting that eerie smile go from his face. “The protector of the dead. The guardian of the scales. It was I who embalmed Osiris and it is I who weighs hearts against Ma’at, the goddess of truth and justice. The heart that is heavier than the feather of Ma’at is devoured by Ammit.”
“Must have missed that class in mythology,” Tavie said.
“The humans of the latest millennia are sadly lacking,” Anapa decreed and at last the smile faded away. “Ammit is a demon, a soul eater, who stays close to the scales of justice. It is she who carries out the justice of the gods.”
“So you bring them in, and judge them. Ammit carries out the dirty work, is that about right?”
Anapa nodded his head. “And Thana is just another god of death, albeit the one temporarily in charge.”
“But the one who got to me first, who gave me a gift, made a trade with me,” Tavie said.
“Again, lacking in your education, human. Thana is another name for Thanatos, the Greek god, a demon personification of death, the child of darkness and night.”
“And the guy in the top hat, Baron Samedi, is another god of death?” Tavie almost giggled. She bit her lip because she didn’t want to come across as insulting. “You’ve got all kinds of gods wandering around here. For all different cultures, is that right?”
“Gods are what men have made of the higher beings because they needed them to be gods,” Anapa said. “Gods are who humans turn to in the dead of night when they fear the noises that occur just outside the light of their fires. The gods of the dead are in Deadsville because that is where we belong.”
“Is it just the three of you?”
“How many cultures have there been?” Anapa waved his golden rod and the beads made a tinkling noise as they knocked against each other. “How many stories have been told in order to explain away the mysteries of what happens next?”
