Death Warmed Over

by Kevin J. Anderson

  I didn’t think so at all, but maybe Sheyenne needed to say that just to make the regrets glide down easier, like a $300 bottle of wine. Maybe I’d be smart to do the same thing, but it was damned hard to see that beautiful woman in my office every single day and never be able to touch her....

  CHAPTER 15

  Lunchtime. I’ve never been, nor do I intend to become, one of those disgusting ambulatory corpses with a sweet tooth for brains. Even though I don’t need to eat as often as before—undead metabolism is all out of whack—lunch isn’t something a man should give up. I liked to do things out of habit just to pretend that my life was normal.

  The big sign in the front window of Ghoul’s Diner, my favorite lunch counter, said in bright orange letters: YES, WE SERVE HUMANS! The diner was a warm and cheery place, crowded with unnaturals who liked to sit in the booths or take a stool up at the counter with elbows propped on the speckled Formica.

  At the grill in back stood a sweaty grayish creature who looked decidedly unwell. Albert Gould, the proprietor, had skin with the sheen and consistency of sliced ham left too long in the sun. I had talked with him face-to-face a few times. Albert could be an unsettling fellow for anyone with a queasy stomach. Cockroaches scuttled around in his spiky hair, and thin whitish things dripped in and out of his nostrils as he inhaled and exhaled. At first I thought they were boogers; then I realized they were maggots.

  Albert concocted variations of the daily special, catering to different types of clientele. Zombie special, vampire special, werewolf special, human special (although the humans who dared to eat there rarely became repeat customers). He served platters of sliced, discolored mystery meat, sometimes on a bun with all the condiments, other times spread out on a blue plate pooled in gelatinous gravy made from a mucus roux.

  The smells inside Ghoul’s Diner were rich and ripe. Conversation buzzed among the booths; a cash register rang up sales. From the back, a gush of steam and spray of water rose from where a reptile-skinned dishwasher blasted globs of food off the plates, then stacked them back on the shelves.

  Esther, the diner’s lone waitress—a harpy who never provided good service, but always received excellent tips because the customers were afraid to annoy her—chatted with two necromancers in a corner booth. She seemed to have no interest in her other customers.

  I took a seat at the counter beside a bespectacled hunchback who was poring over stock listings in the newspaper. The folded front page had a headline story, ELVIS FOUND!

  I’d heard the story on the radio: A zombie came back to life, insisting he was Elvis Presley. Over the years, there had been many Elvis sightings, people who claimed the King had never died. This one was different, because the guy was unquestionably dead, and he had submitted flesh scrapings for DNA testing to verify his identity.

  “Can I borrow the front section?” I asked.

  The hunchback shrugged, a languorous rolling movement that made me a bit seasick. “Help yourself.”

  I turned to page two, found a story about the previous night’s art auction, in which the Ricketts zombie puppies painting sold to a private collector for two hundred thousand dollars. Sheyenne had received the call that morning while I was at the Hope & Salvation mission; she calculated that Chambeaux & Deyer’s one-third commission would be enough to pay off my outstanding funeral expenses and also provide ample operating cash for the business.

  Below the story, a quarter-page ad gushed about the imminent release of JLPN’s new Fresh Loam product line, posting a toll-free number for a full range of free samples.

  Seeing me at the counter, Albert shuffled around the kitchen wall and stepped up to me, swaying on his feet. I could smell the aroma around him, but I wasn’t one to complain.

  “What’s the lunch special today, Albert?” I asked.

  “Lunch special,” was all he slurred.

  “Different from yesterday’s?”

  “Lunch special.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll have that—the zombie special. And a cup of black coffee.”

  Next to me, without a word, the hunchback turned the page of his newspaper and studied the classified ads.

  Albert shuffled off without acknowledging me, but I knew my order had lodged somewhere in what was left of his brain. He returned a few minutes later with a mug of coffee that sloshed on the counter when he set it down. Ghouls weren’t known for their social graces or their dexterity. Neither were zombies, but I was glad to be on the high-functioning end of the spectrum. I lifted the cup and took a sip of coffee. It tasted flat and bitter at the same time; maybe it was me, maybe it was the coffee.

  Now that Sheyenne had compiled my old cases, I took the time to ponder them while I waited for the food, mulling over what person, event, or bit of data might be connected to my own murder.

  Back at the corner booth with the necromancers, Esther the waitress let out a howl of laughter loud enough that two werewolves at another table perked up before returning to their conversation. I glanced over, and one of the bald, sallow wizards looked at me. He could move one eye independently of the other, but when I met his gaze and didn’t flinch, the eyeball drifted back to the harpy waitress.

  The necromancers’ guild didn’t like me either. About five years ago, an ambitious rabbi had brought a clay golem to life by placing an Amulet of Animation (where do they get these names?) on the golem’s chest. When a necromancer stole the amulet—thereby rendering the golem lifeless—the rabbi hired me to get it back. Pure detective work.

  Robin, meanwhile, got on her legal high horse over the crime and as soon as I identified the perpetrator, she demanded that the DA file murder charges against the necromancer, because by stealing the Amulet of Animation, he had robbed the golem of life. The rabbi added his two cents to the case, insisting that the Amulet itself was an extremely valuable object, and he wanted grand theft added to the charges against the necromancer.

  It seemed an open-and-shut case. Everything was going fine until I succeeded in stealing back the Amulet. (Definitely not an evening I would like to repeat; necromancers are abysmal housekeepers.) I retrieved the Amulet, and Robin presented the evidence to Judge Gemma Hawkins, who took one look at the mystical artifact and determined that it was mere cheap costume jewelry made of plastic and tin with gold paint. Worth about ten bucks. Grand theft charges dismissed.

  Also, once the Amulet of Animation was restored to the golem’s chest, he came back to life again, good as new. So the judge dropped the murder charge as well: no victim.

  But Robin refused to let the case go—Justice had to be served. She submitted a succession of post-trial motions. She filed a suit on behalf of the golem for personal injury and negligent infliction of emotional distress, which the judge dismissed because she could not rule that the golem was a “person.” Next, Robin demanded monetary damages to reimburse the rabbi for the lost value of the golem’s services during the days when he was no longer animated. In exasperation, Judge Hawkins relented; she reprimanded the necromancer and made him pay a small fine, which Robin then appealed for a higher amount.

  I had the easy part. All I did was break into a necromancer’s lair in the middle of the night and steal a sacred object....

  My blue plate special arrived. Sliced grayish meat swimming in an unappetizing sauce that had already congealed enough to form scabs. When Albert set down the plate, one of the maggots dropped out of his nose and into the gravy.

  Not what I had ordered. “I think you gave me the ghoul special, Albert.”

  He looked down, focused on the food. “Sorry.” He took it away.

  Next to me, the hunchback was reading the sports scores.

  “How did Notre Dame do?” I asked.

  He slowly turned and looked at me through his round spectacles. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard that joke?”

  “Sorry, I’m a detective, not a comedian.”

  When Albert brought back the correct plate, I concentrated on my lunch, cutting a chunk of meat an
d popping it into my mouth, chewing as I considered the cases again. Somehow I couldn’t believe that the rabbi or even the necromancer had any motive to shoot me. One down. Only about ninety-nine more cases to go through.

  I finished my lunch in a hurry, paid the tab at the cash register, and returned to the counter to leave a two-dollar tip for Esther, even though she hadn’t spoken a word to me. Maybe that was why I did leave her a tip.

  I left the diner and headed out into the streets. I had work to do that afternoon.

  CHAPTER 16

  That afternoon I turned my attention to investigating Miranda Jekyll’s case, revisiting my previous surveillance of her husband back when I was a living, breathing private eye. I had no doubt the man was scum, but so were a lot of people. It isn’t always illegal. I had to catch him at something else.

  The corporate president and CEO hadn’t left his offices in two days, except to be transported in his black limo back and forth from the factory and the Jekyll mansion in a high-rent, guarded area outside the Unnatural Quarter. Earlier in the case, I had shadowed Jekyll for weeks to catch him going out on his extracurricular expeditions. (He was a singularly uninteresting man.)

  This time, I wanted to get my ducks in a row before I started shooting.

  Robin was preoccupied in her office writing a brief, so I told Sheyenne where I was going, then borrowed the keys to Robin’s car.

  Since I live and work in the Quarter, where most of my clients are, I rarely need to drive. However, the municipal dump is on the outskirts of the city, so I drove.

  Even though I’m a zombie, my driver’s license remains valid—a landmark case that Robin herself had pushed through the court system. However, I’d been required to reapply and take another driving test shortly after returning from the grave. I memorized the traffic rules and passed the written part of the test, but no one should have to go through an actual driving examination more than once. Parallel parking had always been a challenge for me, even when I was alive.

  The Department of Motor Vehicles driving-test administrator was a rotund balding man who perspired profusely and seemed very uncomfortable to have to sit in the front seat with an undead applicant. He rolled down both windows and breathed as if he were either aroused or hyperventilating.

  I performed my hand signals by the book, drove properly on one-way streets, executed a perfect Y-turn, and, with a generous amount of open curb, managed to parallel park. I left more than the preferred gap between the tires and the curb, but the DMV test administrator called it good enough and marked on his clipboard. If he failed me, he knew I would just reapply, and he was anxious for the test to be over. I got my renewed license.

  Robin owned a rusted-out Ford Maverick two-tone (three tones, if you count the rust as a separate color). The original paint job was a brilliant lime green that had faded to a color more akin to snot. The engine puttered and snickered, but the muffler wasn’t too loud, and at least the car ran. Sheyenne decided to dub the Maverick the “Pro Bono Mobile.”

  I drove out of town. The landfill’s euphemistic name—the Metropolitan Pre-Used Resource Depository, according to the sign—was a reflection of some deluded city councilman’s idea of beautifying an eyesore without actually changing anything but the name. Sanitation trucks from all over the city, both the Unnatural Quarter and the natural populated areas, poured their refuse here until high mounds of bagged garbage, loose litter, discarded furniture, and cast-off machinery formed an exotic artificial mountain range. Foul-smelling organic stuff belched and burbled as it rotted. Dried paper and cardboard whispered around in updraft circles as if stirred by a witch’s broom.

  For some mysterious, and therefore suspicious, reason, Harvey Jekyll had come out here late at night, alone and secretive, and I’d followed him. He must have delivered something that he didn’t want a sanitation engineer, or even his own henchmen, to know about. And that made it very interesting to me . . . although shady company dealings would not necessarily help Miranda Jekyll get a good divorce settlement.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to find out what he’d been doing. Since I had no particular desire to wade through the mounds of piled garbage, I went to the man who might have some idea what Jekyll was up to.

  The dump manager lived in his own single-wide house trailer parked in the foothills of the ever-changing debris landscape. The trailer had plywood for windows, sheet metal for an awning, and two old and bent folding lawn chairs so that he could sit outside and watch the rot.

  After parking in the dirt clearing in front of the trailer, I climbed out of the Maverick and slammed the creaky car door. Three large flakes of rust broke off the driver’s side door and fell to the ground; rust was basically the only thing holding Robin’s car together. I knew what Sheyenne would have said: If Robin didn’t do so much work for free, Chambeaux & Deyer would be able to afford a decent company car. Maybe our cut from the Ricketts art auction would be enough to upgrade.

  I called out, “Hey, Mel, you in there?” I heard movement inside the trailer, and the door swung wide open with a bang because one of the hinges was loose and the air-piston door stop had broken off.

  A hulking zombie—one of the putrefying kind—stepped onto the front step, swayed, caught his balance, then got his other foot on solid ground. “Dan Chambeaux! How are you, bud?”

  “Just great, Mel.” I don’t know how he could be so cheery with his body falling apart like that. “How’s life treating you?”

  “Just as good the second time around as it was the first. Let’s see where karma takes me this time.”

  I’ve mentioned Mel before: He was one of my very first cases, when his family hired me to find him, but then decided they didn’t want him back after all. Mrs. Saldana had helped Mel get his job as landfill manager, and he loved the work. I had stopped by to see him often over the years.

  Sometimes on my visits he’d invite me inside, and we would sit, holding highball glasses filled with ginger ale—not because Mel couldn’t afford real booze, but because in life he’d been a recovering alcoholic. Even though dead, he didn’t want to fall off the wagon, just on general principles. On a bowed shelf above his sofa, sandwiched between two wooden bookends, was an array of old used paperbacks, self-help books that he read with great interest.

  Now that I’d also come back from the grave, Mel and I had more in common. Seeing me, he reached out and pumped my hand. I cringed at his strength. “Careful, Mel! Don’t do any damage—it’s hard to fix.”

  “Sorry, bud. I just like to have visitors. We zombies gotta stick together. We’re blood brothers—or we would be, if anything was still pumping.”

  “I guess we’re embalming-fluid brothers.” He grinned at that. “I’ve got a few questions to ask you about a case. Maybe you could help me?”

  “Feel free to ask anything, bud,” Mel said. “You already helped me out so much. It’s what friends do for each other.”

  Before I could inquire about Harvey Jekyll, I heard a loud rustling from the garbage embankment. Bloated black plastic bags were nudged aside, and I saw a huge rodent with bright beady eyes tunneling its way out of the pile like a gigantic mole—a rat the size of a German shepherd.

  “Holy crap, Mel! What is that thing?”

  Mel whistled to the emerging rat and slapped the thighs of his stained pants. “Here, boy! Come on.” He was grinning. “That one’s Spot, I think. Or it could be Fido. The third one’s Rover. I haven’t named the other ones yet.”

  “Other ones? How many are there?”

  “It’s a dump, bud. There’s bound to be rats. And it’s a big dump, so why wouldn’t we expect big rats?”

  The gargantuan rat waddled forward, enormously fat, no doubt because of all the garbage available to eat. Mel patted the brown bristly fur on its head, scratched behind the pink ears. The rat turned to regard me, snuffling, its whiskers twitching.

  Two other enormous rodents followed the first out of the trash tunnel. Mel laughed and patted all three. “No, no trea
ts for you today.”

  I didn’t think monstrous mutated rats were an aftereffect of the Big Uneasy, but I couldn’t be sure. “This is . . . unsettling, Mel. Why do they grow so big?” I had never much liked rats.

  “Oh, probably because of the toxic waste dumped out there. I try to bury it deep, but sometimes the containers leak.” He shrugged. “And then what are you going to do?”

  I sensed there was more to the story, but wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. Mel lowered his voice, kneeling down so that he could keep scratching the three giant rats that jostled around him for attention like eager puppies. “Every private citizen who comes here pays a dumping fee. I get all sorts of people and all sorts of trash. You never know what you’ll find. Manna from heaven, or just garbage from the city.”

  The big zombie picked up a broken pipe from the ground, cocked back his arm, and flung it twirling out into the mounds of garbage. “Fetch!”

  The three huge rats bounded after the pipe, scampering up the piled trash bags.

  He took a seat in one of the wobbly lawn chairs in front of his trailer. “This is a place where people dispose of things, whatever they want to hide. Including bodies. And if somebody slips me an extra ‘discretionary fee,’ then I’ll make sure no one ever finds whatever they want to get rid of.”

  I took a seat in the other bent folding chair. “I’m trying to track down something that was delivered here a little while before I was killed. Do you know Harvey Jekyll? Big corporate exec who runs Jekyll Lifestyle Products and Necroceuticals.”

  “Oh, yeah!” Mel beamed, showing crooked brown teeth. “A big shot from the factory in the city. He’s been here. An uptight fellow, doesn’t seem to like being around zombies. Now that I think of it . . .” Mel scratched his head a little too vigorously and a clump of dark hair came off on his fingernail. “I can’t picture him being comfortable around anyone.”

  “So you’ve seen him come out here?”

  “Sure, bud. It’s just business . . . but none of my business, if you know what I mean.”