The Dead Detective

by J. R. Rain

  I decide that now might be an excellent time to exit the premises. I start crawling across the muddy front lawn, so deafened that I only become aware of Tamara as she tries to haul me to my feet. I look up to see her silently mouthing something at me. It looks like she’s screaming.

  “Your jacket!” She’s trying to tell me something. My what? She must be talking about my rain slicker, I realize after a moment. “It’s on fire!” That last bit I sort of hear. Once I slip it off, I see she’s way exaggerating. I mean, the thick black rubber is smoking—it hisses and steams as the raindrops hit it―but it’s not really on fire. However, it is half-melted and scalded and pitted like the surface of the moon; there’s no doubt that it shielded me from most of the flames, just as the Kevlar did from the full force of the shockwave. I feel scorched all over, but only my hands and cheeks seem seriously reddened. Trembling, I go back and retrieve the shotgun from the mud before handing Tamara my cell phone.

  “You need to call it in. I can’t hear yet. Call 911. Sorry if I’m yelling.”

  She mouths something else at me.

  “What?”

  “Shouldn’t we try to save him?” she screams, and I shake my head.

  “There’s nothing we can do. He’s not dead―well he’s not any dead-er, anyway. He’ll come out when he’s ready.”

  We wait for the Emergency Response vehicles in the car. After the inferno inside the house, it actually feels good to be soaking wet, even if Tamara keeps trying to towel me off and mess around with my hair.

  “Wow, I can’t believe how great you look after being blown up, Rishya,” are the first words of hers I can actually hear. “I mean, basically my hair looks like it’s been set on fire when I get up every morning.” The next thing I hear is sirens. Lots of them, getting louder as they come closer. By now, a few of the neighbors have shown up to huddle under umbrellas on the sidewalk and stare at the sight of the house going up in flames.

  When the first of the ERV’s arrive, a fire-truck and a big ambulance, I get out and go to meet them. Just about that time, what’s left of Sergeant Burchhalter staggers out of the collapsing building, and someone starts screaming.

  ust because you’re a supernatural being doesn’t mean you’ve got superpowers or anything. Believe me, I should know. Burchhalter only manages to take a few tottering steps out into the front yard before he collapses. So maybe I’m wrong, I decide; maybe fire will kill a mulo, after all. Or maybe the poor bastard’s just collapsed from heat exhaustion. Or drunkenness.

  I get to him just after the medics do. His skin and most of his body fat has burned off; what’s left, along with his suit, has been charbroiled and fused to the bone like burned chicken in a roaster oven. Which is more or less what he smells like, along with gasoline. He’s missing both hands and half an arm, along with one side of his head. His jaw is loose. His eyeballs are completely melted in their sockets. His body smolders and smokes and spits in the rain; one of the medics has to go a ways off to puke.

  While he does, a couple of uniformed patrolmen arrive, along with three more fire trucks, and I flash my tin at them.

  “What happened here, ma’am?”

  “This is the home of Sergeant Burchhalter, Vice,” I tell them.

  “I’m smelling some kind of propellant,” says the second medic.

  “Shit! We’ll have to get the arson investigator in on this one,” says a patrol.

  “Yeah, I could smell the fuel from outside before it went up. It was definitely prepped. He set it off himself.” I’m getting my story out now, before anybody can decide to treat it as a wrongful death.

  The puking medic returns, and they make the VSA―Vital Signs Absent―call before strapping Burchhalter’s body to a gurney. Then the five of us steer it over to the driveway as the firemen start hosing down the second story.

  “I’ll give you guys and the arson squad a full statement at the stationhouse,” I tell the uniforms and then get back in the car. In the passenger seat. I am now totally soaked from head to foot and leaking all over the seat and the floor like a drowned rat. “You drive,” I say to Tamara.

  “Huh? Where are we going?”

  “Following the ambulance to the hospital. Stay right behind it―don’t let any vehicles get between you and it. Here, turn on the police flasher.” I have to show her how to mount the flashing red gumball on the dash and turn it on. “The outside siren has three settings—wail, yelp, and hi-lo. Just leave it on hi-lo.”

  “Why are you following them?” Tamara asks as she turns the Toyota around in the street.

  “You’ll see.”

  It happens at about the third major intersection we come to, when the ERV is temporarily brought to a halt behind stalled traffic. Suddenly, one of the rear doors opens, and Burchhalter’s charred hulk falls out into the road. Somehow, lacking both hands, he manages to get to his feet again and his head turns wildly from side to side, as if he’s trying to peer around him. Tamara shrieks in horror at the sight.

  I open my door and get out. “Sergeant! Over here!” I yell over the whooping of the ERV’s siren. Bright arcing stripes of red and blue and yellow are bouncing off every surface―the wet road, the idling impatient cars around us, their drivers’ faces open-mouthed in mute horror―from my flasher and the ambulance’s light bars. Does Burchhalter recognize me? I can’t tell. He takes a few steps in my direction, though, and I grab his arm and pull him into my car. Bits of him are crunching and flaking off into my hands; I just know he’s going to leave a giant fucking mess in my back seat.

  The traffic moves. The ERV pulls ahead a few yards, then stops. The puking medic’s face peeks briefly through the open door. “Turn right!” I scream at Tamara, who’s been watching all this in a sort of trance. “Keep going―the white Hyundai’s letting you through. Turn right here, and put it to the metal.”

  After a couple of miles, I tell her to slow down and turn off the flasher and horn.

  “Awww, do I have to? That was really fun. I think rabbis should get police sirens, too.” The chick’s a good sport, but I can see she’s still glancing nervously at the fried corpse in the back seat. “Sorry I screamed when I saw you,” she tells it.

  “Sergeant,” I say very gently at the same time. “I warned you setting yourself on fire wouldn’t work. But maybe there’s a way to fix some of the damage. I’ve got a doctor friend we can see. He might be able to fix your jaw, maybe do some skin transplants.”

  I’m kidding myself. The dude is still smoldering; bits of him keep coming off all over the back seat, and his residual body heat is probably melting the vinyl under him―I can pretty much kiss any resale value this car ever had goodbye forever. What’s more, he stinks. The sickening chemical smell of burned fuel mixed with charbroiled human flesh is so staggeringly sickening that Tamara and I have had to roll down all the windows. So rain is whipping in as we drive.

  Burchhalter slowly shakes his head in reply. And, groaning, tries to move his dangling jaw. Something about the mute gesture gets to me. I mean, sure he almost blew me up back there, but the son of a bitch is in pain. And filled with fear. Half-crazy out of his mind with it, just like I’ve been these past two weeks. I don’t care about that or how dirty a cop he is or was―I’ve got to do something to palliate his suffering. That much of med school still remains with me, at least.

  Or maybe it’s just that, whatever else has happened to me, I’m still a woman. With at least half a heart.

  “Tamara, we need to get him to the hospital stat, so I guess you can turn the flasher back on. I’ll phone Harper.”

  “Squee!” says Tamara.

  Harper doesn’t sound very happy to see me when he returns my call fifteen minutes later. By then we’re doing ninety on the freeway and are halfway to Beth El. “Jesus Christ, Richelle―what now?” he snaps. “I’m in the middle of an astrocytoma craniotomy.” Obviously, my glamor is starting to wear thin.

  “Sorry. I have an emergency patient for you just like me and Howell―the gu
y I brought in earlier. Only this poor guy’s completely covered in six degree burns. He tried to kill himself with gasoline and a match.”

  “Six degrees? And he’s… ambulatory?” I can tell Harper’s hooked. It’s really rare for people to survive four. “All right, bring him in, then―just tell admissions it’s a private patient of mine. Can you wrap him in a blanket or something?”

  “I’ll do my best.” I keep a second red plaid stadium blanket in the trunk, but it looks like a train ran over it, so we get a lot of curious and horrified looks inside the hospital. Tamara scored a wheelchair outside the main entrance doors, so we’re at least able to hide most of Burchhalter by getting him to slump forward in it as I push with the blanket covering his head and most of his torso. However, he has no hands, so Tamara has to keep pulling it back up over him whenever it slips off.

  Once we’ve got him up the elevator and safely through the ward and into his office, Harper takes one look at what remains of Burchhalter and says, “Holy Christ!” Somewhere in the ward, some poor shmoe is having his or her skull put back together by a surgical intern while his surgeon just stands there staring helplessly at this. Under the lights, it looks way worse than it did outside. Finally the three of us get our act together enough to help the vice sergeant up onto an examination table.

  “I really don’t know where to begin,” Harper tells me in a low tone while he puts on his mask and fresh gloves. “I mean, I’m grateful you thought to bring him here, but I… tell you what, I’m not even going to bother getting this on video. Nobody would believe it. They’d just assume it was a fake computer graphic or something.”

  He’s actually trembling. It was like he took this giant suspension of disbelief in accepting my condition for what it is since he pretty much was still in love with me, but after seeing another creature just like me―and now this… thing―he’s seriously freaking. Because of the Dawn of the Dead vibe he’s getting. You know; an army of rotting corpses coming out of the ground or whatever. He probably wants to rush off home to make sure his wife and kid are okay―and not stuck in their own apocalyptic George Romero movie. Harper is finally reacting to all this like an ordinary human being, not some dispassionate surgeon on Mount Olympus.

  It’s also occurred to him―and to me, if not to Tamara―that the three of us mulos are basically unkillable, no matter what happens to us. Given enough time, I could very well end up looking a lot like Burchhalter, missing bits of myself and all hideous and falling to pieces from constant wear and tear, if not from fire.

  In other words, the disgusting thing on his exam table could be a sneak preview of me someday. Which is probably quenching a lot of his lust. It certainly isn’t doing much for mine.

  However, his professional instincts swiftly reassert themselves, and after a half-minute or so, he returns to Burchhalter and treats him like he would any other patient after strapping on his fiber-optic headlight, examining him from head to toe while murmuring questions and making reassuring sounds and delicately probing with his fingers. “Does this hurt? Any feeling left here? Can you move your pelvis laterally?” and so on. “Do you still have vision?” he asks when he gets to the vice sergeant’s empty eye sockets. Burchhalter nods, though pretty half-heartedly, and Harper just shakes his head, lost in the medical wonder of it all.

  “How can he possibly see anything with no eyeballs or optic nerves?”

  “The same way as me―he sees the shades. The spirit world, the other side of the dark river; whatever you want to call it.”

  My cell’s been buzzing in my pocket pretty much nonstop for the last hour. Now I take it out and have a look; Cap Quirk’s phoned me twice earlier; this is his third try, and I figure I better answer it. I step outside into the hall, even though Harper’s going to need me to act as his nurse.

  “Where the fuck are you?” my boss snarls in my ear. “I got a lieutenant from the Central dick squad bugging me about you and Ayon every fifteen minutes, so I step out my office door, and presto! you’ve already vanished. Is this some new magic trick of yours? Or should I can Ayon’s ass back down to traffic for covering for you?”

  “I had a lead, and I followed it.”

  “Where? Back to that fucking Gypsy cop’s bed? Now I got him putting in a request to have you babysit him tomorrow.” Obviously, the gossip about us hooking up is already department property. Either Ayon snitched me out, or the Gypsy King’s been bragging. Most likely, both.

  “No. The name you sent me turned out to be correct.”

  “No shit.” Now the Cap actually sounds impressed. “Hold on, that was the fire everybody’s pissing themselves about? I should’ve known it was you. The whole department’s apeshit over Burch takin’ a hike; nobody knows what’s going on.”

  “Well, I do,” I said. “But for obvious reasons, I can’t bring the sergeant in and book him.”

  “Okay, I don’t want to know any more of this.”

  “Maybe not, but we still need to talk. I’ll come in after I’m done burying the body. There’s a lot I can’t tell you over the phone. But that epidemic thing you were worried about? It could happen.”

  He groans and then says I know where to find him. When I return to the exam room, Rabbi Tamara is playing nurse behind a surgical mask, making little whooping noises and bulging her eyes at what she’s been forced to see close up, while Harper sews Burchhalter’s jaw back on. She’s really a pretty amazing person. They both are, actually. For a moment, I just stand there and actually feel lucky.

  “You can start with the splinting on his legs, Richelle,” Harper says when he spots me. “Use the PVC piping in the cabinet. That one, bottom shelf. I’m worried about further contracture. Don’t bother with trying to remove clothing from the dermis―everything seems pretty well fused together.”

  Burchalter groans.

  “Are you going to bother with a full ROM check?” I ask him.

  “I don’t see the point. Not in his condition. He’s as about as flexed now as he’ll ever be. Medication and normal healing promotion techniques, even grafts, aren’t going to cause any skin cell regeneration. Your wound hasn’t shown any evidence of healing, has it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, as I see it, all I can do today is optimize his mobility and communication. And, of course, degree of comfort. I’m thinking about bypassing the burn creams and collagen and just doing some silicone injections.”

  “What about a pressure suit?”

  “We might be able to construct something. Obviously, he needs to be clothed in something before you can even wheel him out of here.” After he’s finished with the jaw, he tries to get Burchhalter to move it up and down. The sergeant utters a few croaking noises but without lips or a tongue, it’s pretty hard to make out whatever it is he’s trying to say.

  “I can’t do anything about the hands. Sorry.” Harper looks at his watch. “Listen, Richelle, I need to go now. I’ve got to check on the op I abandoned, then I have a consult with a senator’s wife with a glia in five, which, shit, I’m already late for. If you can hang around here for a few more hours, I’d like to do a full workup for my notes. In the meantime, I’ll mark this room as quarantined.”

  “Get me…out…of here,” Burchhalter says as soon as Harper’s gone. His voice is tinny and faint and very far away.

  “I think you’re safer here than anywhere else right now,” I tell him.

  “You can understand him?” says Tamara in surprise. When I say sure, she tells me that to her it sounds like he’s just saying, “Ho ho ho.”

  “No…now…” says the sergeant, trying to get up. He’s in a panic. Then I see why. He’s caught sight of his own shade reflected in one of the surgical mirrors and is freaking out. “Kill…me…now…”

  “Okay, okay; chillax. Let me finish splinting you up, at least. Then we’ll find something for you to wear, right?” I feel like a saleswoman on one of those reality TV shows like Bridezillas.

  It’s sort of like playing dolls. With a cadav
er. In the end, we dress him up in some surgical scrubs we find in a locker, and Tamara slips out and steals a hospital gown from somewhere. Which makes me feel kind of guilty―like I’m leading a person of the cloth into some bad habits, and soon she’ll be robbing banks with me Thelma and Louisa-style, or something. With the blanket draped over Burchhalter’s head and upper torso like a shawl, it looks like we’re pushing a frail and wizened, though still big-boned, old man in a wheelchair down the hall. Once downstairs, on our way to the main entrance, we pass a large waiting room with a number of ceiling-mounted flat panel TVs tuned into CNN; Devon’s face suddenly flashes across them all, and I come to a dead stop. “High school teacher files divorce suit claiming his wife is a zombie!” reads the headline on the screens. The anchorman is smirking; it’s obviously a novelty story on a slow news day.

  “What’s the matter?” says Tamara.

  “That’s my husband, Devon. He’s just outed me nationally.” Though I guess this will be playing in airports and lobbies all over the world, too. So maybe internationally.

  Luckily, they don’t have a photo of me, but I guess it’s only a matter of time until they get one.

  nce we’re outside the hospital building, I try to explain to Sergeant Burchalter that I can’t kill him. Nobody can, except maybe Gana Kali; it just isn’t possible. All I can do is stuff his pockets with salt and bury him deep in the ground somewhere. First, I think of doing it in my own back yard where it will be easiest, but then I decide Lorna would probably be jealous. Ghosts are as bad as cats, they’re so damned territorial. So then I think of the park where we just excavated the dead dog―at least that grave is already pre-dug. But when I suggest it as a final resting place, he just shakes his head. “Home…” he says.