The Undertaker

by William Brown

  The Undertaker

  William Brown

  When Pete Talbott found himself at the wrong end of Gino Parini's .45 reading his own obituary, it was a mystery he couldn't leave well enough alone. Someone with a penchant for sharp scalpels and embalming tables is planting bodies under other people's names. From the cornfields of Ohio to the slums of Chicago, a bloody kitchen in a Back Bay townhouse, New York's Washington Square, and the nation's Capitol itself, the hunt is on. Talbott is a lowly computer wonk who spends his days solving software glitches, not running from County sheriffs, mafia hit men, the FBI, and an army of Chicago cops. But if he doesn't stop them, he and his quirky new girlfriend, Sandy Kasmarek, will be next on the Undertaker's list.

  The Undertaker

  Copyright 2011 by William F. Brown

  All rights reserved.

  THE UNDERTAKER

  a novel by

  William F. Brown

  First and foremost to my wife Fern, for all her love, support, and time spent proofing and reviewing. But I'd also like to thank our friends Andi Kunio, Judy Williamson, and Julie Horewitch for their diligent editing and proofing on this and my other books over the years — proofing is pain best shared with others.

  THE UNDERTAKER

  PROLOGUE

  We decided to put it all down on paper

  in case they came after us again.

  I know exactly what Louie must have gone through that night. Exactly. He would have woken slowly, blinking, looking up into a bank of harsh, white lights set in the ceiling high above him. White. Everything in the room was white: the ceiling, the walls, even the floor tile. So waking up, the bright lights would have hurt his eyes, the back of his head would have throbbed in pain, and he was cold — a teeth-chattering, shivering cold.

  As his eyes slowly cleared and the fog inside his brain cleared, he realized he was lying on his back, staring up into a bank of bright, white fluorescent lights set in an acoustical tile ceiling. Slowly, painfully, he raised his head and looked around the room. There were no windows, nothing but those gleaming, white tile walls, a set of tall glass-front cabinets set against the wall behind him, and an odd-looking aluminum table to his right and one to his left, leaving him even more confused. He looked down at himself, at the fat, pale-white mound of his own chest and stomach, and realized he was stark naked. No wonder he was so damned cold. He was laying buck-ass naked on some kind of strange, cold, aluminum table. He tried to get up and roll onto his side, but he couldn't move. Something was holding him down. That was when he would have felt the thick, leather straps – one across his upper chest, one across his lower abdomen, and one across his knees – and the smaller straps with heavy buckles that held his wrists and legs down. He could kick and strain and yank on his arms until he wore himself out, but there was no give in those thick leather straps and heavy buckles.

  His eyes darted around the room. Everything looked immaculately clean. The tall, glass-front cabinets and cases behind him held a curious array of sharp knives, rubber tubes, and clamps, all neatly arranged on clean white towels. And there was that strange, sticky sweet odor. He sniffed the cool air of the room and swore there was a soapy, antiseptic smell to the place with the faintest hint of something else lurking just beneath? What was it? Flowers?

  “Ah, Louis, you are finally awake,” a friendly voice called to him from the far end of the room. “How nice of you to join us. Virgil gave you a pretty good rap on the back of the head and I was beginning to wonder.” That was when he would have recognized the voice and realized where he must be. And that was when the real panic would have set in. He would have bucked and kicked and struggled even harder against those damned leather straps, to no avail.

  The other man finally walked into his field of vision and stared down at him. He was tall, well built, and very distinguished in an expensive, dark-blue suit with a blue and gold silk tie and white shirt. He held his arms across his chest and looked down, studying him like a doctor making his rounds. However, this was no doctor. He looked down and smiled as he watched the fat man strain, pulling and pushing against the thick leather straps until he finally fell back on the table, exhausted and shivering in a pool of his own sweat.

  “You've been a very bad boy, Louis. You've been talking to Jimmy's people in New Jersey again, haven't you?”

  “Ralph, what do you think you're…? You can't do this.”

  “Sure I can, Louis. I can do anything I want to you, because you're already dead. Remember?” he stated quietly, confidently. “Now tell me where they are. We've torn your office apart. We've torn your house apart. Where are they?” He stared down at the fat man, but he could see there was no answer coming. Finally, he shrugged. “Have it your way, Louis,” he said as he turned away. He took off his suit coat and carefully hung it on a brass hook on the wall, pulling out a white cotton smock from a drawer in one of the cabinets. It was the kind with a high neck in front and the opening in back. The fat man watched as he pulled it on and carefully tied the drawstrings around his waist. Then the man stepped over to one of the glass-front cabinets, opened a door, and reached inside. When he turned back and looked down at the fat man, he was slipping his hands into a pair of thin, latex gloves. He pulled them on and let the wrist bands snap in place with a loud, dramatic flourish.

  “There. All set,” he smiled again as he reached back into the cabinet. This time his hand came out with a stainless-steel scalpel. He held it up and let the edge of the razor-sharp blade catch the light.

  “What?” the fat man blustered. “You think you're going to torture it out of me?”

  “No, Louis, I think I'm going to kill you,” he answered with a thin, cruel smile. “I'm going to start opening a vein here and an artery there until you slowly bleed to death.”

  “You're crazy!” The fat man starred up at him, heart pounding.

  “Oh, no, Louis, quite the opposite.” he said as he stepped over to the table and held the blade in front of the fat man's face. “I'm the sanest man you've ever met. More importantly, I've done this before, many times before. I assure you, when the blood starts to run out of you, you will talk. And the more it flows, all sticky, warm, and wet, the faster you're going to talk. That's when you're going to tell me where they are, Louis, because there are no secrets down here, not then, not at the end, at the very end.”

  He bent over and lightly touched the fat man at the base of his neck with a fingernail. The fat man jumped. He began to breathe heavily and sweat began to pour off him again.

  “That's the carotid artery and the jugular vein in there, Louis. Nick those babies and it'll be all over in a couple of minutes.”

  The fat man couldn't take his eyes off the sharp edge of the scalpel as it came closer and closer to his neck, and he began to shake.

  “Personally though, I prefer the iliac. That's down here near your hip and groin.” The man droned on, his voice calm, as if he was discussing the weather or a favorite golf club. He stood up and let his eyes slowly scan the white, flabby body from head to toe. “That is, if I can find it. You are a mess, Louis, an absolute mess. Look at you – all fat and so out of shape. Now where are they!” he suddenly screamed and lashed out with the scalpel. The blade flashed in a big arc and sliced lightly across the fat man's gut, cutting deep enough to draw blood.

  That did it! The fat man's head shot up. He saw the blood and the cut. His face turned deep red. He felt the panic rise in his throat as a sharp, angry pain exploded in his chest. “Ahhhh…!” he groaned as the pain pounded and sucked the life out of him. Then, there was nothing. His head dropped back on the metal table with a loud “Clang!” His eyes grew round and his body went limp against the leather straps, and he was dead.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Boston: w
here California meets Jersey…

  I knew I was in trouble when Gino Parini shoved that .45 automatic in my face and made me read my own obituary. I'm not talking about something vague or California-cosmic, like the San Andreas Fault will turn Nevada into beachfront property, or those McDonald's French fries will seal my arteries shut, or second-hand smoke will give me lung cancer. I'm talking about my own honest-to-God black-and-white obituary ripped from page thirty-two of that morning's Columbus, Ohio newspaper:

  TALBOTT, PETER EMERSON, age 33, of Columbus, died Sunday at Varner Clinic following a tragic automobile accident. President and founder of Center Financial Advisors of Columbus. Formerly of Los Angeles, a 1999 graduate of UCLA and a lieutenant, US Army Transportation Corps...

  That was me. I was Talbott, Peter Emerson, 33 years old, and formerly from Los Angeles. I had graduated from UCLA and I had been a lieutenant in the Army. Coincidence? I didn't think so. There was only one of me and I didn't die in the Varner Clinic or anywhere else last Sunday. I was an aeronautical software engineer and I had never been to Columbus or heard of Center Financial Advisors much less been its President. Still, when you're looking into a set of hard, dark eyes and a .45 automatic, it's hard to argue the fine points.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

  That day began normally enough. For the past two months, I had been settling into a new job as a systems designer and software engineer with Symbiotic Software in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was one of a hundred programming shops in those big, mirror-glass office buildings that dot the Route 128 Beltway around Boston. You know the kind: no hard walls, no doors, just dozens of low, pastel-colored cubicles filled with a mixed bag of grungy 20-somethings in every size, shape, color, orientation, and gender. My cubicle was like all the others, except for the cheap plastic nameplate that said “Peter E. Talbott, Senior Systems Engineer” hanging at the entrance. Inside, the wall behind my chair featured a framed poster of Eric Clapton, signed by The Man himself, ripped-off from a LA record store back in my younger and much crazier days. On the wall across from my desk hung a beautiful Air Mexico travel poster: a color shot of a beach at sunset near San Jose down on the Baja, with a thin, solitary young woman in a bikini walking away down the sand. That was where Terri and I were supposed to go that last fall, but she got sick and we never made it. Other than the simple 8” x 10” photograph of her sitting on my desk smiling up at me, the Baja beach poster was easily my most prized possession.

  It was already 5:30 PM. Headset on, I stared at my big, flat-screen computer, pounding away at the keyboard, dressed in my treasured, but badly faded, Rolling Stones 1995 Voodoo Lounge World Tour T-shirt, blue jeans, and a worn-out pair of Nikes. Like the shoes, I was a tad older and more scuffed than the rest of the hired help, so clothes helped me fit in during those first awkward weeks after I moved there from LA. Anyway, I had just finished a crash project and was slowly coming back down as I listened to the last tracks of a two CD set of Clapton's Greatest Hits. When I really get into a problem, the building could go up in flames, and I'd never notice unless my monitor went blank.

  I leaned back in my chair, eyes closed, playing air guitar riffs along with “Tears in Heaven,” when a cold hand lifted one of the ear pieces and whispered in my ear. “Earth to Petey, you are going to have the sub-routines done by tomorrow, aren't you?”

  “You said “tomorrow”, as in “close-of-business tomorrow,” not “tomorrow-tomorrow,” or “tomorrow morning”, or “today-tomorrow,” I answered.

  “I know, but I've got a problem and “tomorrow” just became first thing tomorrow.”

  Looking over my shoulder was Doug Chesterton in his “harried boss” costume: a wrinkled white shirt, a cheap necktie with soup stains, and a pocket full of pens. It read MIT all the way – smart as hell, but dumb as a rock.

  “Douglas,” I smiled. “Having anticipated that you'd be a completely disorganized and unreasonable asshole...”

  “And your brother-in-law, your boss, and the magnanimous owner of the company.”

  “They're done. I e-mailed them to you twenty minutes ago.”

  “That's why I brought you here, big guy,” he said as he gave me a big bear hug and planted a disgustingly loud, wet kiss in my right ear, tongue and all. “You're like a bloodhound when you get the scent, Petey, you're fucking relentless.”

  “Relentless with a wet ear, you moron.”

  Doug leaned in over my shoulder and looked at the screen. “Then what the hell are you still working on? Wait a minute. That's the Anderson job I gave Julie, isn't it?”

  “Don't get pissed at her; it was my idea. She had some meetings at school with her kids, so I said I'd help her out.”

  Doug laid his hand on my shoulder. “I'm not pissed. I'm glad. I know it's been hell for you since Terri died, but you moved here to get a fresh start and Julie is drop-dead gorgeous. She's divorced and she's exactly what you need.”

  “Julie? Oh, come on, I'm just helping her out, I wouldn't…”

  “No, you probably wouldn't, but she would. Trust me. The faithful widower? Half the secretarial pool wants to take you home and mother you, and the other half wants to have your baby. They think you're a saint.”

  I looked over at Terri's smiling photo. I knew he was right, but that wasn't what I wanted or what I needed. He saw me look, too.

  “She's gone, Pete. It's been a year now and it's time you moved on. She was my sister and I loved her as much as you did, but that's what she'd tell you, too.”

  “I know, Doug, I know.” The truth was, Terri did tell me that, almost every day at the end and almost every day since. That was where Doug and all the others had it wrong. I wasn't alone. I still had all my memories of Terri, and my life was full, so full I didn't have anything left to give to anyone else. Someday, maybe, but not then.”

  “Look, I didn't come out here to bug you,” Doug said. “But accounting keeps gnawing on me about your social security number. The IRS still has your account blocked.”

  “I've called them three times. They keep mumbling something about a “numeric anomaly.”

  “It's no anomaly. They've got you mixed up with somebody else with the same name and they think you're dead. So, if you want to see a paycheck anytime soon, get the damned thing fixed.”

  I shrugged and put it on my list of things to do. Maybe it was number fifty-nine, but it was there. Besides, Doug was right. He was boss. More importantly, he saved my life.

  I was born in Los Angeles — a child of the Golden West, raised on a steady diet of hard rock, fast cars, Pacific beaches, and the trend-du-jour. After UCLA, I went to work at Dynamic Data in Pasadena. It was Terri who introduced me to her MIT techno-nerd brother. We both bounced around Pasadena, going from one hot software shop to another, doing what we both loved and what we were good at. I was smart, but Doug was always smarter. He sold his old Porsche and moved to Boston with his three mangy cats, sinking every dime he could beg or borrow into his own start-up software company, which he named Symbiotic Software. The title was just vague enough to let him take on all sorts of work. However, trading the beaches and sun of Tinseltown for a long, gray winter of snow and ice in New England wasn't my idea of fun, so I stayed in LA. Shows what we knew. Doug's little company found a niche and he never looked back.

  Back then, LA was the “land of milk and honey,” where the growth curve only pointed to “UP” and “MORE UP.” Like the white rabbit told Gracie Slick though, “one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.” Gracie had no idea how small. Outsourcing was a new word to us “left coasters.” Layoffs and downsizing were something for the Midwest autoworkers and the steelworkers in Pittsburgh with the beer guts and lunch pails to worry about. This time however, it was us smart guys with the white shirts and the glasses of Napa chardonnay who found ourselves on the chopping block. Yep, ask not for whom the HR manager tolls, he tolls for me and for thee.

  I became a WOOWCP-WFP as we Southern Californians called ourselves — or at
least the ones who still had a sense of humor. That's a White-Out-of-Work-Computer-Programmer-With-Few-Prospects. The big aeronautical engineering firm in Glendale that I was then doing software design for was spinning off people faster than an Oklahoma tornado. Half of the parking lot was empty and the signs on the executive parking spaces had hastily painted-over names or no names at all. We'd been downsized and out-sourced to India and Pakistan and most of my friends were now calling themselves house-husbands, shoe clerks, the Orange County Militia, or alcoholics. My defense mechanism had always been a cynical black humor, but even that gets real old, real quick. So does the weekly humiliation of the unemployment line, a McJob that wasn't worth going to, or sharing my afternoons with Oprah. When Doug phoned me from Boston and offered me the job, I packed the Bronco, did a reverse Horace Greeley, and headed east. Why not? Terri had died of cancer the year before and there was nothing holding me in California anymore. All I had left were my memories of her, but I soon discovered they were surprisingly portable. I could take her with me anywhere I went, and she never complained, not once.

  Terri and I met at a Bruce Springsteen Concert in Oakland when we were young and Bruce's liver was a lot older. She was a reporter for an on-line weekly e-paper and rock blog in Mendocino, a stringer actually, all bright-eyed and serious, hoping to catch the big break with an in-depth retrospective piece on the inner meaning of Springsteen's lyrics. Me? I had cut class for the week and hitched my way up the coast from LA, hoping to catch the music and some fun with the tailgaters and groupies in the parking lot. Don't ask me why, but for some strange reason we stuck. The unity of opposites? Who knows, but we had eight incredible years together and a lot of good times, right to the bitter end. When it came, I was left with a lot of pain and a gaping hole where someone else should be — a hole I thought could never be filled. Fortunately, I had all those good memories of her too. Memories. Without my memories of Terri, I would never have made it. They were the parts of her I could tuck away in the back corner of my mind and pull out whenever things got really bad, when the hurting parts of me ripped loose and started to fly away. Those were the times I needed something firm to hold onto until I could pull myself back together. That was why they could kill me if they wanted to, but I refused to let them hi-jack my memories of Terri. They were too precious. I owed them everything.