"Myron—"
"Right, right. To the point."
"Just spit it out," she said.
"I'm working on it. Um, let's see. Where to start?"
"Myron, for God's sake!"
"I see ghosts," I said.
She stopped digging. I stopped, too. We looked at each other, both of us already breathing heavy, our breath fogging the night air.
"You what?" she said.
"I see ghosts."
"You see ghosts?"
"Yes."
"What do you mean, you see ghosts?"
"I mean … I see ghosts."
"You see ghosts," she said.
"I feel like we're caught in a loop here."
"What ghosts?"
"All ghosts."
"All ghosts?"
"Yes."
"Like, how many?"
"I don't know. Billions."
"What?"
"I told you, I see all of them."
"There are billions?"
"Yep. Everybody who's ever lived and died."
"Everybody…"
She trailed off, her eyes flat and unreadable. She was silent a long time, and I waited, bracing myself for the volcano to blow its top. Anger. Disbelief. Mocking laughter. I didn't know how she would react, but I expected it to be bad. She had absolutely no reason to believe me. I'd lied repeatedly to her over the last six years, so why would she think I'd suddenly start telling the truth now, especially with some crazy-ass story about seeing ghosts? I expected I would have to prove it to her somehow—which I would do, when the opportunity presented itself. Right now, I just wanted to keep her from hating me. I wanted to keep her here so she'd listen.
But when she finally answered, she surprised me.
"Okay," she said, nodding.
"Okay?"
"Yeah, I believe you."
"You do?"
She laughed. "You shouldn't be so surprised. You know, I'm not just your former partner. I'm also your friend. You should have told me this a long time ago. I would have been there for you … if you'd let me."
The hurt in her voice was unmistakable. I realized, then, I shouldn't have been surprised that she'd believed me. It wasn't just because she was the kind of person who did believe in ghosts, or at least was open to the idea just as she was open to many ideas I would have found dubious in my old life, and still did in many cases—numerology, reincarnation, healing crystals, and the like. It was because Alesha, despite her occasionally rash and impulsive behavior, was always capable of a depth of thought and feeling that few people knew she possessed, and even fewer appreciated. I was someone who should have appreciated that aspect of her personality, but I still needed reminders now and then that she was more than the gruff detective she made herself out to be. A lot more.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Yeah, well." She shrugged.
"It happened after I was shot. When I woke up from the coma."
"I kind of figured. It explains some things."
"It took me a long time to deal with it. To put myself back together."
"Tell me about it," she said.
So I did. While we dug through snow and dirt, I told her my story, or at least the part of my story she didn't know. She knew about my marital problems with Billie, but she didn't know the rest, the real story behind the shooting. I told her how hard it was to live in a world where you couldn't tell the living apart from the dead. The truth tumbled out fast and easy, as it often does when there's no reason to hold back anymore. Having something to do while I talked also helped, working the grave, my palms already sore and stinging from the constant chafing of the wooden handle. We made good progress. The hole grew deeper, foot by foot, one shovel of dirt at a time.
I told her about Mom. I told her about Elvis, the Department of Souls, and the reality behind some of the cases I'd worked on, like the Goodbye Killer. I told her how hard it was to lose Dad, this time for good. Then I did something that completely stunned me.
I cried.
No, not just cried. I sobbed. It seemed to come out of nowhere. One moment I was relaying to Alesha all the crazy shit I had to deal with on a daily basis since that morning when I'd walked into that Starbucks and met my fate with a bullet in the middle of the forehead, the next there were tears pouring down my face. I dropped the shovel and covered my face with my hands, like an embarrassed toddler. I couldn't believe I was doing this. What was wrong with me?
Alesha touched my shoulder. I tried to turn away from her, ashamed of her seeing me like this, but she pulled me against her. She hugged me tightly against her body, pressing my head against her shoulder, letting me cry it out. Her fingers felt cold threading through my hair. The sobs racking my body lasted longer than I wanted, but finally the worst of it passed.
"I'm sorry," I said. I still had my head against her shoulder. It was a good place to be.
"Don't be," she said. "Really, Myron, you don't have to apologize."
"I don't know what came over me."
"I think I do."
"You do?"
"Yeah. You're grieving."
"For Dad? Yeah, maybe a little."
"No, not that. I mean, maybe that, too. But I think it's more than that. I think, I don't know, maybe you're grieving your old life. What you lost."
She was right. I knew it immediately. In all these years, I'd never gotten to grieve my old self. I'd never given myself permission. Oh, I'd raged against the injustice of it all; I'd cursed fate, a God I didn't believe in, and anyone or anything else that could conceivably be the target of my wrath, but I'd never really mourned. That was an entirely different thing, mourning, and it required allowing yourself to submit to self-pity and despair, at least for a short time, at least as some sort of gateway to the promise of better days. To really get over a loss of any kind of magnitude, you had to feel sorry for yourself. You had to be okay with that, with that kind of indulgence. You had to treat yourself the way you would treat someone else who'd suffered in a similar way.
For some of us, maybe for a lot of us, that was hard to do.
Why now, though? I pulled back so I could look her in the eyes. In the moonlight, her pupils and irises appeared as one solid shade of black, but there was an openness there, a vulnerability that she almost never revealed to the world. We stood so close that I felt her breath on my face. I felt her body, warm even through all those layers of clothes, pressing against mine.
"How'd you get so smart?" I asked.
"Learned from the best," she said, smiling. Not even a hint of sarcasm.
"I'm glad you're here," I said.
"Me too. I still might arrest you, though."
I laughed. Then I kissed her. Like the crying, it seemed to come out of nowhere. An impulse. It wasn't a chaste kiss, either. It was a full-on-the-mouth, hands-pressed-to-either-side-of-her-face, lean-in-and-really-go-for-it kind of kiss. She didn't fight it. She kissed right back, her lips pliant, her nose cold, her hands, clutching my shoulder, digging in fiercely. We'd kissed once before, shortly after I'd left the bureau, and that time she'd been the one to initiate it. It hadn't gone anywhere, mostly because I hadn't been ready.
I still wasn't ready. I was with someone else, for God's sake, someone I loved, someone I wanted to marry. What was I doing?
This last thought finally intruded enough into the heat of the moment to get me to break off the kiss. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them, she blinked a few times, refocusing. The guilt I felt was so overwhelming I had to look away.
"Myron?" Alesha said.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"It's okay."
"I don't know what I was thinking."
"Hey, I thought it was a pretty good kiss."
"It was. I just…" I shook my head.
"I know," she said. "It's all right."
But I could tell by her voice that it wasn't all right. It wasn't even close to all right. I looked at her again, saw the hurt there, the pain, hairline fractures in the facade, b
efore she blinked away the mistiness in her eyes and gave her head a little shake, forcing a smile. We had an unspoken conversation in the silence, louder and clearer than if we'd actually put the thoughts to words. Are you still with her? Yeah, I'm still with her? You know I'm here. Yeah, I know. I wish you'd join me. I wish you'd make a different choice.
And what could I say to that? One of us had to say something, anything, to let this moment pass, and it wouldn't take much, a laugh, a joke, a comment about the weather. But neither of us wanted to be the one. In the end, someone else took that privilege.
"Well, well, well." A woman's voice pierced the stillness. "This is something you don't see every day. Two lovebirds standing in a grave. And Myron! What will Jak say?"
I knew the voice—silky smooth with a bit of a bite at the end, confident to the point of being almost regal, as if everyone was her subject but just didn't know it yet. It was rare that a voice heard first on the phone matched the image I'd constructed in my mind, but the woman who emerged from the shadows and the low-lying mist came pretty close.
I'd imagined a thin, birdlike woman with hard cheekbones and large, cold eyes, stately and graceful, dressed in fine clothes that could only be bought in specialty shops on Madison Avenue. Her blood-red cloak, a combination of suede and silk, was certainly expensive, but I doubted they sold it off the rack. She was thin and birdlike, all right, to an extreme that bordered on the unnatural, but she did not seem fragile in the slightest. Her long neck, so narrow I might have been able to throttle it with one hand, looked like a solid metal pole. Her cheekbones, casting deep shadows, shone in the moonlight like polished ivory. Her eyes and hair—so much hair, so straight and smooth as it draped down the front of her cloak—were just as dark as her skin was white. The skin seemed all the whiter because of her red lipstick, the same deep crimson as her cloak. I'd seen albinos with more color in their skin.
She also wasn't alone. Her two Guatemalan thugs were with her, wearing puffy black ski jackets over black turtlenecks, both of them pointing Rugers with suppressors at me. The one on the right had his left arm in a blue sling, the product of my handiwork. Though Gath was just about as tall as them, she was like a blade of grass next to a pair of tree stumps.
Even so, they may have been more physically imposing, and the ones pointing guns, but there was no doubt which of the three was more dangerous.
"Who the hell are you?" Alesha said.
"Victoria Gath, my dear. Now, hand over your firearm to my employee. No one will get hurt if you do as you're told. You too, Myron."
"Not a chance," Alesha said.
Gath made a tsk tsk sound. "Come now, let's not be foolish. Myron knows I'd rather not shoot him, but I have no such reluctance about shooting you. I'd rather he has some help digging the rest of the way, just for expedience's sake, but I'm sure he can handle it by himself."
Nobody moved. I saw what Alesha was thinking. Even without seeing her face, I'd known her so long I could guess what she was going to do. The angle was bad, they already had two guns pointed at us, but she was thinking of going for it.
When her hand started to move to her coat, just a fraction of an inch, I grabbed her arm.
"No," I said.
She stared at me.
"Not now," I said.
She didn't move, still staring at me as if she couldn't believe what I was asking, so I took the lead. Slowly, so as not to alarm Tweedledee and Tweedledum, I unbuttoned my coat and removed the Glock from its holster, holding it upside down by the handle. I held it out to Gath, hoping to see if she would take it from me and prove she was really alive. Instead, she gestured for the twin without the sling to take it—which he did, keeping his Ruger pointed at me, and with all the caution of a man taking something out of the mouth of a rabid dog. He tossed it far off to the right, and it vanished in the snow.
"Now you, my dear," Gath said, "and make sure you take great pains to do it slowly. We wouldn't want my friends to get nervous."
Alesha looked at me. I nodded. Grimacing, she removed her own Glock, which she'd stored in one of the big side pockets of her coat. The twin took this one and tossed it near where mine had fallen.
Off to my right, a crow alighted on a branch of the Japanese maple. Gath glanced at the bird, frowned, and returned her cold stare to the two of us.
"Now, then," she said, "as long as you two are finished with your romantic interlude, I suggest you get back to work."
"Myron," Alesha said, "who the hell is this?"
"She's the one who has Olivia," I said.
"And she won't be harmed," Gath said, "so long as you get me what I came for."
Another crow alighted on the Japanese maple, next to the first. Gath glanced at it. The two crows shifted their weight, fluttering their wings and shaking loose some of the snow stuck to the branches. I saw fear growing in Gath's eyes.
"She's watching us, isn't she?" I said.
"She doesn't know what she's doing," Gath said. "She can barely understand her powers, much less control them. Otherwise she would not dare defy me like this, knowing what is at stake for her. She was already getting dangerously close to connecting with her father, which was why I had to make sure no connection was possible … But why am I telling you this? Get to work!" When both of us stood there, she glanced at the twin with his arm in the sling. "Shoot the girl's arm."
"No!" I shouted.
I grabbed the shovel and set to work again, glaring at Alesha to do the same. She hesitated, but then sighed and got to shoveling herself. We'd dug a lot already, a few feet down at least, but I doubted we were more than halfway there. We worked at a good pace, fast enough not to draw Gath's suspicion, but I didn't want to work too fast. I needed time to think. A few pieces were starting to fall into place, but the whole picture was still a little murky.
That Gath was here, that she'd risked facing me in person, was certainly telling.
"So that's what this is all about," I said. "You were just waiting until I led you to the gold."
"Be quiet," Gath said.
"What gold?" Alesha asked.
"I said, be quiet!"
Alesha sighed. "It'd just be nice if I knew exactly why we were digging up a grave of a woman who's been dead for twenty years."
"If I'm right," I said, "Felicity Langford's corpse is wearing a very special pair of glasses, one with gold frames."
"Gold frames?"
"Yes. Painted over to hide them. If the legend is true, they have the power to take away someone's second sight."
The twin with his arm in the sling shot the dirt piled behind us, a loud whump in the stillness.
"Zzzop talking," he said.
He was probably used to dealing with people who scared a lot easier than Alesha or I. We barely even flinched, and we only afforded him a quick, disdainful glance before returning to our conversation, digging as we talked.
"Second sight?" Alesha said, who continued to amaze me with her ability to take this all in stride. "You mean, if you wear those … ?"
"Yep. Supposedly. Olivia, too."
"She can see ghosts?"
"No. At least I don't think so. But she can do a lot of other things." A third crow landed next to his friends, and I nodded to them. "Like communicate with animals—just like Felicity. She had that power, too."
"Felicity was a fool," Gath said, "thinking she could keep this powerful talisman from someone like me."
I realized something, then. I heard it in her voice, something more than anger or fear, a neediness that gave away her true desire for the gold. I'd been assuming she wanted it simply to stop others from having it, or to prevent her enemies from using it against her, but now I sensed that she actually wanted it for herself. I stopped digging and peered up at her.
"You're tormented as well, aren't you?" I said.
"What?"
"Your power. The memory thing. You can't always control it."
"I can control it completely. Don't be ridiculous."
"I
bet you're haunted by other people's memories. Ones you don't want."
"Nonsense."
"You're hoping the glasses will provide some relief."
"I'm hoping you finish digging before my patience runs out."
"You won't kill me. You're afraid of what I'll be able to do when I'm dead."
"Maybe I'll take my chances. I think I'm powerful enough to deal with you either way, whatever you become."
"Really? I don't think you're as powerful as you've made yourself out to be."
"What?"
"Otherwise, you wouldn't be here with the same two dipshits from before. You don't really have that many followers, do you?"
She shook her head. "You're making assumptions based on very little information, Myron. That's a mistake that can cost you dearly. Now, this is your final warning. Either dig in silence, or watch as your friend bleeds to death next to you."
This time, her tone left no room for doubt. Maybe these two goons were the only followers she had, but they were more than enough to give her the upper hand in the current situation. So Alesha and I did the only thing we could: we dug. We worked the ground until our clothes stuck to our bodies and our faces were caked in dirt, silent except for our labored breathing. Now and then, I heard the flutter of wings or a cawing of a crow. How many of them were there now? A half-dozen? More?
If only Olivia could make them do something. Why couldn't she? If she could get them to attack, it might give us the distraction we needed.
But they didn't attack, and I suspected that Gath was telling the truth about this one thing at least: Olivia wasn't in full control of her powers, and may not even be aware that the crows were here at all. Time passed. An hour, maybe more. I thought I detected faint streaks of daylight across the night sky. The whisper of a passing car on the nearby freeway become more frequent, the squeal of a truck's brakes, the buzz of a motorcycle's muffler. Finally, deep enough that I could no longer see over the lip of the grave, I threw my weight onto the shovel and heard the distinctive crackle of wood.
"Ah," Gath said.
Glee. That was what I heard in her voice—unmistakable glee. Reaching the object of all our efforts gave Alesha and me a new burst of energy, and it wasn't long before we'd cleared the entire lid. The color was a dark shade of wood, made to seem like mahogany or oak, but it felt more like resin to my mud-caked fingers. Gath urged us on, and we dug around the edges. We found the metal latches and undid those, but it still wouldn't open. Time, moisture, and dirt had sealed the coffin as good as glue.
The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold Page 22
