The Eighth Day

by Joseph John

  The Eighth Day

  Joseph John

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Published by Obsidian Dawn

  Copyright © 2015 by Joseph John

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this short story or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information, contact Joseph John at joseph@josephjohnfiction.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For more information about special discount for bulk purchases, please contact the author at the email address above.

  First Obsidian Dawn softcover edition March 2016.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015915706

  ISBN 978-0692529041

  www.josephjohnfiction.com

  For Stephanie

  When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

  Autobiography of Mark Twain

  The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

  The Premature Burial, Edgar Allen Poe

  Lord, what fools these mortals be!

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

  Part I

  New York City, 2041

  Chapter One

  They’re watching you.”

  At the sound of the words, Shawn Jaffe jerked his head up from his breakfast to find a man standing across the restaurant table from him.

  The stranger’s bedraggled appearance clashed with the hardwood floors and impressionist decor of the Café del Mar, and sweat gleamed on his face beneath the subdued lights of the restaurant’s chandeliers. His hair was plastered to his forehead in disheveled tangles, and his eyes were rimmed with red and framed by dark circles. He looked like a man at the gallows with a noose around his neck, waiting for the floor to drop away beneath his feet.

  The man leaned forward and placed his palms on the digital tabletop, where a haphazard scattering of apps displayed the latest headlines, Wall Street projections, and videos of pundits debating current events.

  Shawn leaned back in counterbalance. He looked down at the man’s splayed fingers, black crescents of dirt beneath the nails.

  “They’re watching you,” he said again, louder this time, the words hissing between clenched teeth. The conversation at nearby tables stuttered, and contemptuous looks flitted in their direction. The man glanced over his shoulder, then back at Shawn. When next he spoke, his voice was little more than a whisper.

  “Nothing you know is real.”

  Shawn didn’t know if he should ignore him and hope he’d wander off or call for a manager, a waiter—anyone—to intercede. He glanced down at his breakfast, a plate of toast and eggs that leaked yolk in an obscene, yellow smear.

  “Please.”

  Shawn looked up at him, at his rumpled and stained white button-down shirt, at the shadow of stubble that darkened his jaw, at the inextricable nature of the situation.

  “I’m sorry,” Shawn said, not knowing what else he could say.

  “Your name isn’t Shawn Jaffe. You aren’t from Ohio, and you’re not an investment broker. Come with me, and I’ll explain everything.”

  Shawn straightened in his seat, eyes wide and mouth agape. “What? How did you—?”

  The man glanced over his shoulder again and gasped as if punched in the gut. “Oh God. No. It’s them. They’re here.”

  He turned and stumbled away, careening off a table opposite Shawn’s, and the flatware skidded across its surface in an angry clatter. A pair of suits seated at the table glared at him. One of them wrenched a red napkin from his lap and threw it on the table. The stranger paid them no mind as he regained his footing and fled across the restaurant.

  Shawn scanned the room. Another man—impeccably dressed in a dark suit and tie, hair slicked back—stood just inside the entrance to the restaurant. He held the door open with an outstretched hand and watched the flight of the stranger who’d given Shawn his bizarre warning.

  Dark suit’s gaze flickered sideways toward Shawn for the briefest of moments. Then he turned and left, and the door closed behind him.

  The stranger didn’t look back. He wove through the tables in a blind panic until he reached the rear of the restaurant, threw himself through a pair of swinging doors, and disappeared.

  Trepidation knotted itself into a tight ball in Shawn’s gut. Around him, the restaurant buzzed with nervous energy.

  A woman’s voice rose above the others. “What the hell was that about?” she asked, and someone else called out, “Whatever he ordered, I don’t want it,” inspiring a round of nervous laughter.

  He had figured the stranger was crazy, and maybe he was, but he also knew Shawn’s name, where he was from, his job. And dark suit was proof the man’s paranoia amounted to more than delusions. He had to know what the stranger meant by his cryptic warning.

  Shawn stood and hurried after the stranger. As he did, a wave of silence washed over the restaurant once more as the people seated around him realized the morning’s drama had not yet reached its conclusion. Shawn set his jaw, his strides long and purposeful. He burst through the swinging doors in the rear of the restaurant and found himself in the kitchen.

  Shawn surveyed the room, looking for the stranger. Rows of silver-gray ovens, stoves, countertops, and cabinets stretched its length. A troupe of chefs, each wearing a white apron and toque blanche, stood as still as figures in a photograph. They held spoons and spatulas that dripped with the morning’s cuisine.

  They all stared at the stranger, who lay on his back next to an overturned metal serving cart, a small dark hole in the breast pocket of his shirt. He stared through the ceiling, unblinking and unseeing forevermore as the answers he’d promised bled out onto the floor in a thick pool of red.

  Behind Shawn, the doors creaked as they swung back and forth, as if he’d stepped into a saloon in the Old West, and one of the chefs was going to swagger forward, spit a stream of tobacco onto the floor, and say in a drawl, “We don’t take kindly to strangers ’round here.” Instead, they simply stared, alternating their attention between the dead man in their midst and Shawn, their eyes wide and mouths agape.

  Shawn scanned the room, stunned by how death had come and gone so swiftly, swooping through with grace and violence, like a tornado that levels one house while leaving its neighbors standing and then disperses into a mild breeze. It had left no evidence of having ever been. No evidence, that is, other than the man dead and bleeding on the floor.

  Then one of the chefs spoke. He was a tall and gangly man with a drooping black mustache and bags beneath his eyes. “He shot him,” he said.

  “Who shot him?” Shawn’s gaze flickered across the faces of the men standing before him.

  The chef raised his arm and extended a bony finger, not toward one of his comrades but toward a door at the rear of the kitchen, the words FIRE EXIT stenciled in red block letters across it.

  Shawn forged ahead, shouldering his way through the phalanx of chefs. He felt a hand on his arm, and at first he thought t
hat hand meant to stop him, but it was a meaningless gesture without weight that fell away as he passed. He stepped over the body, around the overturned cart, and broke into a stumbling run.

  Behind him, the chefs came to life. Panicked cries rose and jumbled together in a tangle of confusion. Shawn didn’t look back, and he didn’t slow as he slammed into the fire exit’s crash bar, throwing the door open and stumbling out into a narrow alley. A congestion of sounds clogged the air—the hum of traffic, the blare of horns, the murmur of a million voices caught in the daily grind.

  At the far end of the alley, a dark-haired man was getting into the passenger seat of a black sedan. Like the well-dressed man in the restaurant, he wore a dark suit.

  “Stop!” Shawn cried, a solitary, flat syllable that echoed down the alley.

  The man froze, half in and half out of the sedan. He looked back at Shawn.

  Shawn stopped breathing. He stood anesthetized, as if his feet had melded with the asphalt beneath them, his arms hanging at his sides. He could only stare at the dark suit staring back at him as he remembered the man lying dead in the kitchen. He shivered in spite of the warmth of the sun that bled into the summer morning. He waited for the drawing of the gun, the squeeze of the trigger, the explosion of pain and darkness that would follow.

  But the man turned away without a word. He dropped the rest of the way into the passenger seat, pulling the door shut and disappearing behind the tinted glass. The car sped away with a squeal of tires, lost to the traffic and buildings of the city.

  The Café del Mar, with its overpriced fare and darkened atmosphere, was considered one of the finest restaurants in Manhattan. In 1896, a family of Spanish immigrants had opened it in a two-story brick building on Forty-Sixth Street. The first story consisted of the original kitchen, updated with extravagant top-of-the-line equipment, and a dining area with hardwood floors and chandeliers that hung from a vaulted ceiling. The second story, once used as living quarters, now served as a bar and nightclub.

  A crowd of curious looky-loos had gathered outside the Café del Mar, tempered by the police officers between them and the restaurant. The bordering sidewalk and street glowed a dim yellow with diagonal black lines, cordoning the building off from the city like an infectious sore. Red and white lights whirled on police cars, and cameramen and reporters emerged from news vans and pushed their way through the crowd to capture the day’s headline.

  Contrasting with the hum of excitement outside, solemnity hushed the interior of the restaurant, like a church before service. Several groups of patrons remained at their tables, waiting for the investigators to finish with their questions. Some sat wringing their hands and mopping at sweaty brows, as if they themselves had committed murder. Others glowered, their expressions clearly stating they were important people with important things to do. Here, too, sat the chefs of the Café del Mar, aprons stained with egg spatter, grease, and flakes of dried batter, eyes glazed by the memory of death that danced in their heads. One still held a crusty spatula, clutching it in his hands like a condemned man might clutch a crucifix.

  Shawn sat at the same table where he’d eaten breakfast, sipping coffee no longer even warm. He stared out the window, seeing nothing, his thoughts a blur of questions uninterrupted by a single answer.

  A polite cough jerked him from his ruminations. Shawn wrenched his gaze from the window and turned to a man dressed in a dark-brown suit and tie. Streaks of gray had invaded his once black hair, and his deeply lined face had about the same consistency as sandpaper.

  “May I have a seat?” he asked, and his voice was sandpaper as well. He slid into the chair on the opposite side of the table before Shawn could respond. “Name’s Detective Sam Harrington.”

  “Shawn Jaffe.”

  “How’re you holding up?”

  He tried on a smile, but it didn’t fit. “Okay, I guess.”

  An app for the New York Times was open on the digital tabletop, and the detective gestured toward it with a nod of his chin. “The classifieds, huh?”

  Shawn frowned at it. “I guess. I don’t remember.”

  Harrington produced a notepad and ballpoint pen from a pocket inside his jacket. Shawn raised his eyebrows. Talk about old school. He’d thought ink and paper had gone the way of the polar bear.

  The detective opened the pad with a flick of his wrist and thumbed the plunger on the pen. “Looking for anything in particular?” he asked. An innocent enough question under other circumstances, but to Shawn it sounded like an accusation.

  “Not me,” Shawn said. He tapped the screen, and the app disappeared. “It was open when I got here.”

  The detective studied his face for a moment, then shrugged. “I’m told the victim spoke with you before he was killed. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  Shawn remembered the stranger’s warning. They’re watching you. But who were “they,” and who could he trust? The police? Aloud, he said, “Not at all. Fire away.”

  “Got an ID on you?”

  “Sure.” Shawn brought up his driver’s license on his smartphone. “Ready?” he asked, expecting to transfer the information through a wireless sync.

  But instead of pulling out his own smartphone, Harrington said, “I’m an analog kind of guy. There’s something cathartic about putting pen to paper.” He gave an apologetic shrug and held out his hand. “Do you mind?”

  Shawn handed his smartphone to the detective, who held it up and squinted at it.

  “Ohio, huh?”

  “I moved here a couple weeks ago.”

  The detective nodded as he copied down the information from the license and handed it back to Shawn.

  “What brings you to the city?”

  “Work. I work at Lark Morton. It’s an investment firm.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m a stockbroker.”

  “Got an address?”

  “Sure.”

  After copying down both Shawn’s work and home address, Harrington began thumbing through his notepad, scanning each page, occasionally flipping back to reference something he’d written previously, then flipping forward again. It seemed terribly inefficient, and Shawn wondered why the detective didn’t use a digital tablet like everyone else. He returned his gaze to the window. Outside, the crowd and the cameras all jostled for position like they were at a rock concert or a movie premiere, not a murder scene.

  At last, Harrington looked up from his notepad. “Did you know the victim?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Did he know you?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t recognize him. I thought he was, you know, crazy. But he knew my name, where I’m from, where I work. It freaked me out.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Shawn hesitated. He considered lying, making something up, but Harrington was with the police. He was one of the good guys. Still, the stranger’s words echoed in his mind. Nothing you know is real. But if Shawn was going to figure out what the hell was going on, he had to start somewhere, and he had to trust someone. “‘They’re watching you,’” he said.

  A slight frown pulled at the corners of the detective’s mouth. “They’re watching you?”

  “Yeah. They’re watching you. Then he said my name wasn’t Shawn Jaffe, I wasn’t from Ohio, and I wasn’t an investment broker. And he wanted me to come with him. Said he’d explain everything.”

  “Come with him where?”

  “Hell if I know. I didn’t ask. Like I said, I thought he was crazy.”

  “Hm.” Harrington leaned back, his head cocked slightly to one side. “So what’d you say that made him run away like his hair was on fire?” he asked, and Shawn sensed the subtext, like something with teeth lurking just beneath the surface.

  “I didn’t say anything. He looked over his shoulder and was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s them,’ and took off.”

  Harrington’s face remained impassive. He stared at Shawn with the patience of a Roman statue.
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  “That’s when I saw the guy standing at the entrance.”

  “What guy?”

  “I don’t know, some guy in a suit. He watched the other guy—the one who’d warned me—run off, then he looked at me and just turned and left.”

  Shawn continued his tale, telling Harrington how he’d followed the stranger into the kitchen and found him dead, and then chased after the shooter.

  “I went outside, and he was way down at the end of the alley, standing next to a four-door Cadillac or Ford or something. Big black car. I yelled at him to stop.”

  “Probably not the best move.”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He looked at me for a second, then got in the car, and it drove off.”

  “Think you could describe him?” Harrington asked.

  “He was pretty far away, and I only saw him for a second. But he was wearing a suit. A dark suit. And a tie, I think.”

  “Like the man at the entrance?”

  “Yeah, kind of like that.”

  “How about the license plate?”

  Shawn shook his head. “I was too far away.”

  Harrington’s frown deepened. “Okay. Let’s go back to what the victim said to you.”

  “‘They’re watching you’?”

  “And the bit about how you’re not Shawn Jaffe and all that. What’d he mean?”

  “I don’t know. I told you, I thought he was crazy.”

  “Think hard, Mr. Jaffe. Any recent conversations, encounters, arguments, anything that might’ve happened that seemed out of the ordinary?”

  “No. Like I said, I only moved here a couple of weeks ago.” His head throbbed, and Shawn rubbed his temples. He needed caffeine, but his coffee had grown toilet water cold and tasted about the same. “I didn’t know him. Maybe he was crazy.”