by J. R. Rain
So the Cap solved the problem in his usual devious way; he switched everybody around. Ayon and I were forcibly partnered together and so were the two swinging dicks; the idea being that since we robbery-homicide detectives couldn’t act like adults, we’d all be separated like kids into boys’ and girls’ sides of the room for our own good.
It worked. Perkins finally transferred out, and a new guy came in, Oscar Talkington. Technically, I’m the boss of the other three, since I’ve already passed the Sergeant’s exam, but I’m still waiting for my shield. That’s why I don’t want anything to screw my promotion up―like an IAD investigation into last night. I mean, I guess it makes no sense why a dead person would still be ambitious for stuff like that, but, hey, I gotta be me, dead or not.
And what I’ve seen so far of the spirit world doesn’t make the alternative look very exciting. One of the first things I asked Lorna was about sex; like, if you could do it after you’re dead. She blew a lot of smoke at me and said, “That’s all I ever do.” At least I think that’s what she said―and I’m not entirely sure she understood the question properly. Maybe she thought I meant watching TV. Because as far as I can tell, that’s all she ever does, even when it’s not on.
When I asked her what the sex was like, she just shrugged. That good, huh? Just like life then, pretty much.
So screw being dead; I have a case to solve. My own murder, in fact. The case files for the past year give me everything―and nothing. A short list of arrestees or unwilling informants who might have grudges against me, an even shorter list of clearances with convictions. But they’re all behind bars right now, except for one old geezer who shot his wife but got to stay home with an ankle bracelet because of prison overcrowding and healthcare costs. I pull up the listings from DOC, Department of Corrections, on my computer screen to see who’s been released on parole or furloughed lately who might have a reason to bump me off. That’s a much longer list.
But I can’t think why any of them would want me to come back to life afterwards.
Maybe my thinking is all screwed up here, I decide. Maybe it’s not the same case but two completely unconnected ones. First case: whoever shot and killed me. And why. My murderer.
Second: whoever―or whatever―kept me from dying. And why. My resurrectionist…
Finding the first person, however, might give me the answer to the second. So I put the bullet in an envelope and stick it in the interdepartmental mail sort to be picked up and driven over to Ballistics, which is basically a single college professor plus his three assistants in the basement of the city PD headquarters building downtown at Center Plaza. Then I pull it out again. No, there’s every chance the shooter was a brother-officer; if so, the evidence could easily be tampered with or stolen. The Center’s only eight long blocks away. I’ll deliver it myself by hand. Then I’ll get something to eat. In spite of―or maybe because of―how I just spent my day, I’m hungry enough to eat a whore through a park bench, as the Cap is fond of saying. Crude but funny. Anyway, I’m a hungry ghost.
I phone Ayon first.
“How about drinks and dinner at Billard’s?” Billard’s being a cop bar two blocks from the Center.
It occurs to me again on the way over to wonder just where the hell Ayon was last night. Because she’s my partner―and so she should have had my back…
She just laughs when I ask her this, once we’ve been seated at one of the booths in the back and ordered our buffalo wings, nachos, and beer. Maybe a cop bar wasn’t such a great idea; the night is still young, half the cops coming off End of Watch are either stalling on going home to their lucky spouses or have recently been kicked out of the house by their lucky spouses, and most of the department of either gender likes to hit on Ayon. And okay, maybe on me, too. So there’s been a constant parade of off-duty shields going back and forth past our booth, either making small talk or trying to get us to slide over so they can join us.
I haven’t done many smart things in my life, but not sleeping with a fellow-police officer is up there near the top.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just the living who are leering at us―it’s also the dead. There’s a hell of a lot of them haunting this place, plenty of dead cops, too. A couple even look kind of familiar to me from my rookie days. Actually, I’m starting to see a lot more of the other side everywhere I go now; the sight was almost overwhelming on the drive over, or at least would have been if I didn’t have other things on my mind. The skeletons of the old city buildings lurk everywhere in my vision now, superimposed over the real ones. The existing ones, I should say. Now I’m catching glimpses of an underground city, a kind of ghostly Venice beneath the city streets. And of course, dead people walking around everywhere. So I’m noticing more of the ghost world―but at the same time, it kind of bothers me less, if that makes any sense. I guess I’m getting used to it. But maybe that isn’t a good thing. Maybe it just means I’m just getting deader.
“Well, whaddya think?” Ayon says in answer to my “Where the hell were you last night?”, while slurping noisily on her Amstel Lite. “I was home alone. In bed. With the cast of Toy Story, okay?” By this she means her colorful collection of vibrators, dildos, and other gadgets, the kind of crap any female police officer inevitably gets year after year from her ‘Secret Santa’ or gag-gift birthday parties. I stick mine in the bottom of my desk drawer; Ayon takes hers home and road-tests them. Writes them up on Amazon. On the rare occasions that she’s manless, I mean.
I can’t exactly ask her if she’s got a witness.
“We weren’t working a shift. How come―don’t you remember? Oh, right, they told me you blacked out.” She shows me her pearly-white teeth. I know Ayon. More to the point, I know when someone’s lying to me about something. Not the fact that we were both off-duty last night, though; that would be too easy to check. Something else is going on with her. “But you’re all checked out now, right, Rich? How you feeling now?”
“Like death warmed over.” Which wasn’t true. I was cold as hell.
“You look like shit,” she says helpfully. “We need a spa day, girl. You’re chewing your nails again.”
It’s easy for Ayon. She’s not a beautiful woman, not even a pretty one, really. She’s just hot; black-haired, black-eyed, mouth always flapping, always laughing, cute little figure stuffed into too-tight jeans. I dress by the book; regulation pantsuits, dark jacket, slacks, boots, and so on. She comes into work looking like a slutty tramp half the time but gets away with it because she used to work on the undercover squad. And because she’s, like, instantly desirable to any man.
Like I said, we hated each other at first. But after a few weeks stuck with each other on the job, I had two big surprises with Malena Ayon. The first was that’s she’s really sharp, really shrewd, always thinking a step ahead and coming up with imaginative ideas that would never have occurred to me in a million years. The other thing is that she’s totally loyal. I’ll give you an example. A little over a year ago, Devon and I were going through some tough times financially. I was helping him pay off the last of his student loans, the salary freeze had just kicked in for me, there were rolling furloughs in the department, and he was having trouble finding full-time work.
So one day, Malena puts something on the desk in front of me. “What’s this?” I say. It’s a friggin’ blank check, signed, dated, and everything, from her personal account. She just laughs at the look on my face.
“Don’t get too excited,” she says. “There’s not much in there, so you can’t just fly off to the Caymans. But I know you guys are going through some shit, so if you ever need any emergency cash, just fill in the amount, okay?” And she punches me in the arm. She wouldn’t take it back, so later I quietly tore it up and shredded it. But still. The whole incident forced me to realize that there wasn’t a single other person in the world I could have gone to for a quick loan―most especially my mom―so it really meant a lot. You can see why Ayon made my A-list.
Which is why it ups
ets me so much that she’s lying to me now.
t’s no use asking her what about. I’d just get the stoney face; you can’t win arguments with Malena Ayon. And she’s too clever to be played. So I drop the subject and tell her about Devon. We’re over, pretty much, I say, though I don’t mention the deal-breaker. Me being dead. Enough people know my little secret already, and Ayon is a chatterbox. Maybe I’ll have to tell her someday, but not right now. Not right here in front of everybody, anyway.
But the problem is, I realize after she and I finish our beers and our wings and she has to rush off because she “has a thing”, that there are quite a few people in the bar who already know. All the dead ones, I mean. Like the one who’s sitting in Ayon’s spot now staring at me with big bug eyes.
I’ve seen a few really spooky-looking ghostly corpses in the last twenty-four hours or so, but this one takes the prize. He’s big and beefy and looks like a flayed porcelain pig; half the skin on his face is missing, peeled off and exposing eyeballs big as hardboiled eggs and a whole skull-full of crooked grinning teeth with a big fat burning cigar clenched between them. He’s dressed in a too-tight three-piece suit like a lawyer and his thinning hair looks greasy and vaporous. When he opens his mouth, his voice sounds like a recording of a bullhorn on an old 78 rpm wax disk.
“So just what the hell are you anyway, girlie?” he says, smoke curling out of his mouth. “Is you in or is you out?”
Now, see, normally ghosts are pretty shy―or at least they have been so far. In other words, they might stare a lot and hang around and generally get on your nerves, but they never speak to you first. I had to practically wrestle Lorna to get any straight answers out of her. So naturally I’m pretty surprised when this gruesome-looking apparition opens its mouth and starts chatting me up like we’re old buddies. Because his tone isn’t hostile, it’s curious and sort of amused. Even fatherly.
I take out my cell and put it to my ear. The crowd in the bar is thinning out because it’s a weeknight, but I don’t need any more notoriety.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s happened to me. It’s like I’m stuck halfway.”
The big ghost-pig regards me quizzically, then nods. “Never seen it myself, but I’ve heard of a few cases like you. Name’s Bull McGuiness. I was in Robbery-Homicide downtown for thirty years until I got my face chewed off by a rabid goddamn Doberman on a fuckin’ golf course. Who did this to you?” Bull, I knew, was a nickname for a dick, a detective, back in the old days. From the way this guy looks and sounds, I figure he’s probably been dead since the 1940s.
“I don’t know. I can’t remember what happened.”
“Right. That happens a lot. Nobody likes those golden memories of how they got their ticket punched. So what’s your play?”
I have to think about this for a minute, a sure sign that I’m not myself. I keep letting myself get so distracted by the being-dead-thing that it’s seriously interfering with my competency to conduct an investigation. Or to think ahead. For example, I’ve totally been overlooking the fact that I can’t possibly keep my shield and use department resources on this forever while I look for my killer―or killers. Sure, Cappy appears to be on my side for now, mostly because he doesn’t want anything rocking the boat at the stationhouse, but realistically, how long can that go on? The first time I have a mandatory department physical or something, I’ll be exposed, and Quirk won’t wait around to go down with me. Besides, I have no idea how indiscreet he is in bed with his hookers; “Hey, baby, I’ve got a real live zombie working for me. Wanna come down sometime and see?” might be his idea of pillow talk, for all I know.
So I need to get my ass moving. The dead may have all the time in the world, but I don’t.
“Crime scene,” I say. It should be free of surveillance by now. From my fellow-cops, anyway.
“Good thinking, toots. Mind if I tag along?”
I shrug as I climb out of the booth. “No, I guess not. But why the hell would you want to?” I’m wondering if the gross old guy is some kind of ghoul. If there are even half as many creeps, monsters, and low-lifes in the land of the dead as there are in the land of the living, then I’m in big trouble. The bartender overhears my last sentence and gives me a strange look―I’ve already stuck my cell in my pocket and look like I’m talking into thin air.
“Because I’m bored shitless, whaddya think?” says McGuinness, following me out of the back room. “Wait’ll you’re in my shoes.” That thought makes me shudder.
The warehouse I was found inside is south of the business district near the old railroad yards just off First Avenue. The building is vacant; a big “For Lease or Sale” banner is draped over the side that faces the street. I’d already checked the police logs from last night; there had been an anonymous call around midnight tipping them off where to find my body. Someone with a heavy foreign accent using a “burner”, a stolen cell phone. There had been no mention that I was a cop, which was why Dispatch hadn’t sent out a Ten-Thirteen, or officer in trouble call. The big question in my mind, aside from why my murderer had called it in at all, was what the hell I was doing there in the first place on a night off…
“So?” says McGuiness, still trailing along behind me after I park in the back lot and walk toward the big brick building. Yeah, he’d driven along behind me. The world’s creepiest back seat driver. Anyway, the asphalt is cracked and pitted and has drifts of garbage collecting against the chain-link fence. “What the hell would have brought you to a God-forsaken dump like this in the middle of the night? Call from somebody you knew? A fellow-cop or an informant, right?”
I shrug. “Or a friend.”
“Oh yeah? You got any friends?” And then when I sullenly shake my head, “Thought not. Cops don’t, not unless they’re on the take. But you’re virgin, I bet―Dickless Tracys like you are always too scared of goin’ to the slammer to take payola. Am I right?” And he cackles when I ignore this last. I’m beginning to be really sorry I ever met him. Or it. Or whatever it is you call a ghost.
There’s still some yellow crime tape draped around the fence gate, but the first responder had snapped the padlock chain with a bolt-cutter to get in, and it hasn’t been fixed yet. “Killer had a key,” says my uninvited companion.
“Yeah, yeah. Unless they did the cutting.”
“You’d have noticed coming in.”
“Maybe. Maybe I came in the front or from the alley side, the way I got out. Maybe they met me at the door.”
“Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” he says sarcastically.
Something’s wrong with this picture. Right away I spot a dim flickering light from inside reflecting through the sooty grey windows. Has somebody lit a fire in there? Why would anybody be crazy enough to do that? My corpse was in there, but it’s―I’m―out here now. It’s not like there’s any evidence left in there to destroy. Or is there?
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” mutters McGuiness. Neither do I. But I feel powerless to stop myself from crossing the inner driveway and taking a look anyway. It sounds weird, but I’m feeling something…almost a compulsion to open the steel door next to the loading bay and go inside. Normally, I’d pull out my Glock, but not this time. I’m in too much of a hurry. Instead, I put my hand on the handle―it’s unlocked.
“Hey, girlie” I hear from behind me, but I’m not listening. I turn the handle and push the door open.
My chalk outline is still there on the floor, surrounded now by a ring of flickering candles inside Gerber baby-food jars. The light from these is what I must have seen from outside through the window. The candles stink―angelica root is the sweetest of the aromas I make out―but the smoke is thickly acrid and animal. It burns inside my nostrils, so that all I can smell now is human sweat and feces and something else. Gasoline.
All of which has an instant and powerful effect on me; I feel like I’m having a heart attack―even though I no longer have a beating heart. My pulse throbs in my temples and ears, floating dark s
pots dance in my vision, and I have to fight to keep my eyeballs from rolling up in my head.
“Girlie, girlie…” but I can no longer see Bull McGuiness or the otherworld at all, really. It’s as if I’m trapped inside a roaring tunnel. I turn slowly and walk back out through the open door, faintly aware of a black horseshoe nailed to each of the three walls and, hanging above the doorway, the bone-white long skull of a horse.
Oh, and one more thing. Not that it matters much, but the floor of the warehouse behind me, all but my chalk outline, is now covered in red-black blood…
But I’m already out of there. Minus the glowing green I’ve grown used to seeing everywhere, the night is dark behind the warehouse, lit only by the full moon. Now the glow of the city―the crime-lights, the moving reflections of car’s headlights, the banks of lit office windows in the skyscrapers downtown―are reduced to the same faint ghostliness as the land of the dead. It’s as if I’m all alone in my own dark tunnel world and with no will of my own, no control over my own actions.
I get back in my car. I start driving. It’s like I’m asleep at the wheel, but my every response is fluid, automatic. I’ve turned into a robot with built-in GPS and Google self-driving software. But where am I going? I have no idea. It doesn’t even occur to me to stop, to try to call for help. I turned my cell to vibrate-only in Billards, because I didn’t want it ringing in the middle of my ghost-whispering; now it buzzes in my pocket. But I’m helpless to answer it. Or to do anything but keep driving, like in a dream.
