Death Warmed Over

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Some of the unnaturals glared after them, as if sniffing blood.

  “Are they really gone?” Sheldon had tears in his eyes. “Thank you, Mr. Chambeaux! Thank you, madam, and you . . .” He nodded toward the sow, who grunted amiably.

  “They won’t bother you again,” Mavis said. “Or if they do, they’ll catch a stomach bug they won’t soon forget.”

  I picked up Priscilla’s discarded sign and brought it to Sheldon. “Keep this as a souvenir.” The vampire was beaming with a smile so wide that I could see the full extent of his very small fangs.

  “Would you like to come over for dinner, Mr. Chambeaux? Fondue again? Maybe some games?”

  “Not right now. Thank you, Sheldon.” I took my hat back. “I have to keep my other clients happy as well.”

  The skittish vampire looked crestfallen, then turned to Mavis and Alma. “Perhaps you ladies?”

  “I love fondue!” Mavis said. Alma snuffled, sounding delighted. Sheldon opened his front door and ushered the sow and witch inside.

  CHAPTER 29

  Now that the Wannovich sisters and Sheldon Fennerman were all satisfied, we’d wrapped up two cases. Cause for celebration.

  But I still hadn’t solved my own murder, or Sheyenne’s.

  I’d made her a promise on her deathbed that I would find out who poisoned her. Every time I looked at her ghost, that pale image of the vibrant young woman who meant so much to me, I remembered the pain and suffering she’d endured as the deadly toxin destroyed her liver and kidneys, made her sink into a shadow of herself, and then death.

  That was one case I didn’t intend to file in the “Unsolved” drawer.

  Sheyenne already had copies of her medical report and autopsy, and as a former med student, she was quite interested in the cause of her own demise. Amanita phalloides, the deadliest toadstool in existence. She read up on the toxicology, studied the symptoms, treatment, and prognosis. Back in the office, she was studying the file again.

  “I didn’t have a chance, Beaux. Whoever slipped me that poison wanted me dead, but she didn’t care that I would spend days dying. She knew I wouldn’t be able to prove who did it.”

  “She?” I asked.

  “Ivory. If it was up to me, I’d have you deliver her a special toadstool quiche from me. Just to get even.”

  “I don’t think poison works the same on vampires,” I said. “And we need proof before we do anything so rash. Fortunately, thanks to Mavis Wannovich, I’ve got another lead.” I smiled, drawing out the suspense. “She gave me the address of a potion supply shop, the best source for toadstool poison in the city. I’m going to have a chat with the proprietor, see if we can find out who purchased the toxin that killed you. Want to go along? The cases don’t solve themselves.”

  I swear I saw a vivid flush of life come back to her cheeks. “Absolutely. I’ll consider it a date.”

  “You’re such a romantic.”

  Grandma Wong’s Herbal Warehouse, Potion Ingredients, Botanica, Hoodoo Supply, and Other Exotic Items was a dingy hole-in-the-wall shop filled with more clashing odors than Brondon Morris’s sample case. Bunches of dried herbs dangled from the rafters, along with shriveled body parts, both human and animal. Large glass containers held hemlock, deadly nightshade, delicate white flowers of jimsonweed, clumps of graveyard moss. Humanoid mandrake roots were submerged in an oily transparent liquid, twitching as if bored.

  Small jars were labeled Eyes of Newt; it looked like caviar. Dark vials in a refrigerated bargain bin were marked Special Today, Virgin’s Blood. Incense smoldered in two small pots, filling the shop with a pungent reek, but a stronger smell of burning weeds came from behind the counter.

  The only person inside the shop was definitely not a grandma, and not a Wong, either. The clerk was a young, well-tanned human with a mop of shaggy straw-colored hair, blue eyes, and a vapid smile. His nametag said Jimmy. In an ashtray on the glass countertop smoldered a joint the size of an index finger. Not only did Jimmy sell exotic magical herbs, apparently he wasn’t averse to sampling them either.

  He grinned as we entered—me walking, Sheyenne gliding—but made no effort to rise from his chair. “Mellow day, friends.” He drew a long, slow inhalation through his nostrils. “Got everything you need, you know, whatever . . . a revenge spell or a love charm. Even some excellent seasonings if you’re, like, a gourmet cook.”

  “We’re interested in toadstools—poisonous ones,” I said. “I understand you’re the best supplier in town.”

  Jimmy didn’t exactly recoil (he was far too mellow for that), but he did react with a molasses sort of alarm. “You mean, like death caps?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Nasty stuff, very negative, friend.” He picked up his joint and savored a slow toke, then exhaled as he centered himself and calmed his thoughts. He saw me eyeing him, then made a good-natured invitation. “Have a hit yourself, if you want.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Oh, this is more than just pure weed. Plenty of special additives in the supply cases here, and I’ve experimented with a little of everything. Some real magical mystery tours! One even let me see with my eyes shut for a week. Made it really hard to sleep.” He held up the smoldering joint. “But this recipe . . . awesome mix! All in the name of continuing education.”

  Sheyenne sounded impatient. “Can we get back to the poisonous toadstools?”

  “Yeah, we sell that stuff here. How much do you need?”

  “I’m more interested in who else purchased it . . . say, around two months ago.”

  “Toadstools are a popular item, sells better than nightshade or hemlock,” Jimmy said. “Lots of negativity in the world, like I said. Customers of all types—warlocks, necromancers, amateur alchemists, even a few bartenders. And I remember these two witch sisters who bought some . . . one of them turned into a pig, I think.”

  “I know about them,” I said. “They’re the ones who recommended your shop. Can you tell us specifically who else bought the death cap?”

  “We’re trying to solve a murder,” Sheyenne added. “It’s very important.”

  Jimmy got that slow-motion shocked look again. “Murder?” He drew another drag from the joint and exhaled. “I have records. Like, you know, a ledger right here.” He moved some papers from the top of the display case and pulled out a three-ring binder. “Death cap toadstools are a controlled substance. I have to keep the supplies behind the counter and write down who buys it, but . . . uh, I only get around to tallying it up once a month or so.”

  My pulse would have started pounding, if my heart were still beating. This could be the clue we needed. Excited, Sheyenne drifted closer.

  Jimmy opened the binder and flipped through pages and pages, lists of ingredients, customers, dates. He found the toadstool page, but instead of the names, numbers, and columns as on the other pages, we saw only a scrawled, barely legible note: My hand looks funny.

  Jimmy gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Sorry, man, that was a day I tried a new recipe. Must have lost track . . .”

  Sheyenne looked disappointed, and I was afraid she might go into a poltergeist flurry, creating an herbal storm inside the shop. “You better hope you don’t get audited.”

  The comment distressed Jimmy enough that he had to take another hit to calm himself. He extended the joint to me. “Sure you don’t want any, friend?”

  Sheyenne and I left.

  She was quiet as we walked along the street, each wrapped in our own thoughts. By now it was long after dark. “It’ll be okay, Spooky. Even dead ends are progress in a way,” I said. “Narrowing down possibilities.”

  “It’s not a total loss,” Sheyenne said. “At least I got to spend time with you.”

  I pulled the phone from my jacket pocket. “I’m going to call Robin and let her know where we are, see if she’s heard anything.” I dialed the number, and Sheyenne drifted ahead, preoccupied.

  A dark sedan drove up the empty street, pulling alongside me. The car paused
as the passenger window rolled down. Probably some lost tourist asking for directions.

  In my ear, I heard Robin answer the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hi, just wanted to let you know—”

  I saw the barrel of the pistol extend from the open window, then the bright muzzle flash.

  They say you don’t hear the one that hits you, but I certainly heard this shot—and five more in rapid succession. The bullets slammed into my chest like a half-dozen linebackers, spinning me around. I tucked my head and tried to roll; my phone went flying.

  Sheyenne screamed. “Beaux!”

  The dark sedan roared off, tires squealing on the shadowy street.

  I sprawled on the sidewalk, broken and tattered, like a rag doll owned by a psychopathic child. Then Sheyenne was hovering over me, yelling for help. It seemed like an odd reversal from when I’d hovered over her hospital bed during her last days.

  I groaned. I hadn’t felt this bad since I’d been killed.

  CHAPTER 30

  After the shooter fled, Sheyenne had the presence of mind to grab my phone from where it had skittered down the sidewalk. She shouted to Robin, explained what had happened, then rushed back to me. “Help is on the way!” She was terrified and distraught; being unable to touch me made the situation much worse for her. “I’ll stay with you—Robin’s coming. We’re going to get you fixed up.”

  I lifted a hand, wanting to brush my fingers through her beautiful hair, but that wasn’t going to happen. “I’m fine.” (I’m not good at telling bald-faced lies.) “Did you see who did this? The license plate? The make of the car?”

  Sheyenne was crestfallen. “Sorry, I was more worried about you.”

  I levered myself onto my elbows. “The good news is, we must’ve stepped on somebody’s toes, or they wouldn’t have bothered to gun me down. That means we’re getting close to something.”

  Unfortunately, in the past few days I’d been digging into a lot of old cases, making phone calls, asking questions. Who knew which one had pushed the shooter’s buttons? He, or she, might be my original killer, or Sheyenne’s . . . or it could be a different person entirely.

  The Straight Edgers might be infuriated because of the restraining order I delivered or the protective spell we placed over Sheldon Fennerman. I’d been in Basilisk asking questions, and if Ivory was involved in poisoning Sheyenne, she might have gotten nervous, especially after we went into Grandma Wong’s shop. Or, I’d followed Brondon Morris and Harvey Jekyll to their secret meeting in the warehouse. For that matter, the heirs of Alvin Ricketts could have been vindictive now that he’d sold his zombie puppies painting for a large amount at auction.

  Sure, I had more enemies than I could shake a stake at, but I had a gut feeling that Jekyll was involved—a conclusion I drew partly from circumstantial evidence and partly because I just plain didn’t like the guy. Even if it turned out he had nothing to do with my murder, I still wouldn’t have minded seeing him screwed in his divorce.

  I slowly sat up on the sidewalk. Sheyenne fussed over me and uttered a string of frustrated curses because she couldn’t lend me a hand and help me to my feet. By myself, I managed to stand up again.

  I looked at the bullet holes that had torn through my sport jacket. “Son of a bitch, this was my only good jacket.” A private investigator doesn’t require many jackets, but I need at least one without bullet holes.

  The six slugs had passed cleanly through my chest. Fortunately, they’d missed my spine, which I really needed in order to keep myself upright. I poked my fingers into the large holes across my torso—it was like Frankenstein’s game of connect-the-dots. Every bit of damage to my body was tough to repair, and I had vowed never to become one of those shamblers who fall apart with each jostle or hiccup.

  I heard a puttering muffler and recognized the sound of the Pro Bono Mobile. Sheyenne reappeared down the street in the headlights of the oncoming car. She flitted and bobbed like a will-o’-the-wisp, guiding Robin to where I was standing, then she yanked open the passenger door for me so I could collapse inside onto the musty fabric seats.

  “Dan, I heard the gunshots on the phone,” Robin cried. “Sheyenne said—”

  “Just get me to the sawbones, and we’ll see how bad the damage really is.”

  In the month since crawling out of the grave, I hadn’t had any occasion to visit the Patchup Parlor of Miss Lujean Eccles, but thanks to word on the street, every zombie knows where to go for an emergency bodily repair.

  Miss Eccles operated her business out of an old Victorian home. A large dead oak tree stood out front, from which dangled a tire swing for the human and inhuman children in the neighborhood. Sheyenne’s ghost had drifted ahead, passing through the Patchup Parlor’s front door to alert Miss Eccles we were coming. Robin helped me out of the car, slung my right arm over her shoulder, and supported me as I stumbled up the tulip-lined path.

  I had a hard time getting my legs to move right, and I felt clumsy and stupid—worse, I was acting like a shambler, and that made me both embarrassed and horrified. Wasn’t death hard enough already? “I’m just disoriented, that’s all,” I said. “I’ll get better.”

  “Yes, you will,” Robin said. “Or else.”

  Miss Eccles clucked her tongue as she looked me over. “Oh, my, my!” She was a sweet, plump woman in her late fifties, with gray-brown hair piled in a beehive hairdo that looked like an ancient obelisk. “You look much the worse for wear!”

  Robin hurried me into the front room, where I slumped onto an old Victorian flower-print sofa. “Can you treat him?” Sheyenne asked. “Somebody shot him because of me.”

  “We don’t know why I was shot,” I said. “Not tonight, and not the first time either.”

  I ran the ideas over and over in my mind. We’d asked questions of the clerk at Grandma Wong’s, but he hadn’t given us any names of toadstool customers. And how could anyone have had time to set up the shooting? Jimmy the stoner clerk was the only one who knew we’d asked the questions, and I’d been gunned down less than fifteen minutes after that. Unless Jimmy did it himself . . . but I doubted he was in any condition to shoot straight. My hand looks funny.

  Though he gave us no names, Jimmy had mentioned that bartenders sometimes purchased the death cap extract, but the only bartenders I knew were Francine at the Goblin Tavern—she certainly had no beef with me—and Fletcher at Basilisk.

  Fletcher Knowles.

  Less than two months before my death, I had butted heads with him about his black-market blood sales. The nightclub manager had an ongoing feud with my previous client Harry Talbot—maybe I’d gotten in the cross fire somehow.

  Sheyenne had worked at Basilisk, and she’d been poisoned with the toadstool extract.

  And Fletcher was the one who had found my body not far from the nightclub.

  When I came back from the dead, after reading the ballistics and autopsy results, I had pressed Fletcher about antique Civil War–era guns, specifically a .32 caliber revolver. He rolled his eyes, stroked his blond goatee, and insisted he used only garlic spray and holy water to keep patrons in line....

  Now, while Miss Eccles pulled off my ruined sport jacket, Robin worked to unbutton my shirt and expose my chest. Hovering nearby, Sheyenne winced to see the wounds. The bullet holes looked nasty, dark craters in my puckered skin, now leaking embalming fluid. Bruno was going to have to top me off sooner than my regular appointment.

  Robin had tears running down her face, but she didn’t say a word.

  “What’s the prognosis?” Sheyenne asked. “If I weren’t a ghost, I’d try to fix the damage myself.” Her voice hitched at the end.

  “Oh, my, my—I won’t pretend this isn’t going to be a challenge, but I’ve seen worse,” Miss Eccles said. “Don’t worry. There’ve been great advances in restorative mending. When I’m done you’ll barely even see the marks.”

  Before the Big Uneasy, Lujean Eccles had owned and operated a taxidermy shop. Examples of her best work covered the
parlor walls—a stuffed raccoon, a moose head, a leaping rainbow trout, and, for some reason, a rooster. I think taxidermy was still her first love, but she filled a greater need by offering pseudo-medical services for the undead.

  She switched on two Tiffany lamps beside the sofa and bent close to my wounds. “Lean forward, please.” She studied the exit holes in my back. “We can use some wire and plastic braces to repair your ribs. The slugs missed your vertebrae, fortunately. I could have replaced part of your spine with a dowel or a broomstick if I needed to, but you wouldn’t have had much flexibility.”

  “Are any of the bullets still in me?” I asked.

  “No, through and through. Six neat holes in front, six in back—it’s all very clean.”

  “What’s the internal damage, though?” Sheyenne asked.

  “Mostly soft tissue, it looks like,” Miss Eccles said. “I’ll use a bit of packing material, tight little stitches here and there. I’ll reconnect what needs connecting, and you’ll be as good as . . . as you were. I’ve even got some scab-salve that really minimizes the marks.”

  I looked up at Sheyenne, thinking like a PI again. “We need to retrieve at least one of the bullets so we can run ballistics. See if it’s the same gun that shot me the first time around.”

  “I’m on it,” she said. “After I make sure you’re all right.”

  Robin added, “We’ll get even later.” Her expression was hard and determined, much like Sheyenne’s. “And we will get even.”

  Miss Eccles puffed out her rounded cheeks and blew out a tired-sounding breath. She lifted her head and raised her voice. “Oh, Wendy! Wendy, come in here, would you? Bring my kit. We’ll need some of that biofill mixture, the heavy-gauge sutures, and the fine flesh-colored finishing thread.”

  From the dim doorway that led into the back rooms, I saw a waifish yet hideous figure, a distorted female form. She hesitated to come out into the bright light, but Miss Eccles clucked her tongue again. “No need to be shy, dear—these are friends. We haven’t got all night. Can’t you see this man needs our help?”