Dead Man's Hand

by Richard Levesque

  “Bascom and I are square,” I said. “And besides, he has bad memories associated with that case. If I show up at his shop, it’s not likely to make him feel all cuddly.”

  “Will you try?”

  She had the dignity not to go into a pout, not to lean forward and let her cleavage do the talking. She was asking me honestly, one person to another. Even so, I shook my head.

  “I don’t see much point,” I said.

  Her expression turned grim. With those dark red, sharp nails of hers, she reached up to finger the silver chain around her neck. The crucifix popped out of her blouse. “Not even to return a favor?” she asked.

  I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “I won’t be able to get him to do it for nothing. A discount may be the best I can swing.”

  A smile spread across her face, and she dropped the crucifix against her chest. “Anything would help.”

  I hesitated a moment, then said, “And I want a cut.”

  “A cut? I told you there wasn’t going to be any money in this. Whatever program Rincon was hacking for Yancy, I’m giving straight to Clancy.”

  I shook my head. “Not without figuring an angle for yourself first. You profit from the information that thing gives you,” I said with a nod to the hand in the bag, “and I get a cut. Just a little. But a cut.”

  “How will you know what I get from the hand?”

  “I’ll have to trust you.”

  She nodded, raised an eyebrow, and extended her hand. “Two percent?”

  “Five,” I said, reaching out to shake on it.

  “Done. Can you get me Bascom by tomorrow?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Good. I don’t know how long this thing will stay viable.”

  She stood up to put it back in the refrigerator. Then, our dealings done, she offered to drive me back to my office building, but I insisted she call me a cab instead. We shook hands one more time at her door before saying goodnight.

  It was closing in on one in the morning by the time I got downstairs. Most nights, I’d have just been getting started, but tonight I was beat—maybe from the lingering effect of the attack in the Mirage, the drinks I’d consumed, or just dealing with Pixel and the sight of the dead man’s hand in the baggie. I couldn’t have said for sure what had gotten to me, just that I was done in and wanted to get myself home and behind a locked door. On top of all that, I noticed a sleek black van parked in front of the building across the street from Pixel’s complex, and in the moonlight I could see the ForeveRest logo on its door. The funeral home was doing an intake, and for some reason, it gave me goose bumps up my forearms and across my chest. The cab couldn’t get there soon enough.

  Three

  The whole thing with Bascom Quibble was a washout. I got to his factory at about two in the afternoon after spending the morning chasing down information on the phone for the legitimate cases I was running. The place was big and gray, tin siding on the walls, and no sign at the street. Bascom had a nice, neat little storefront in a different part of town with a waiting room, upholstered chairs, coffee and tissues for the bereaved. That’s where he made his money with a cute secretary to work the sympathy and credit card angle. But the real work was done here, where it just wouldn’t do to have the families of the legitimately departed actually get a hint at the process that could bring their loved one back for just a little while.

  I thumped on the plain metal door three times and waited, pulling at my collar and wondering when the heat was going to let up. When I was about to lose patience and knock again, the door clicked open, and a skinny little guy with glasses and a blood-smeared lab coat stood looking at me. I didn’t recognize him.

  “Bascom here?” I asked, flipping him one of my business cards.

  He stepped aside by way of answering and shut the door once I was inside. The place was big with fluorescent fixtures hanging down that made the darkness above them look like it went on forever. From hidden speakers came the flowing sounds of violins and other instruments—Bach, I think—all aimed at keeping things serene in the zombie factory. And in front of me were clear plastic tanks with cadavers floating naked in a yellow fluid, their hair billowing around their heads in a perverse approximation of gracefulness. Bascom’s helper led the way through the array of tanks and toward an unfinished sheetrock wall halfway across the warehouse. It had several doors, all unpainted, that opened into rooms where I assumed different stages of the process were carried out. Beside one door labeled “Extraction” was a gurney with a still dripping corpse on it, a middle-aged man with an autopsy incision reaching from neck to groin. It was repulsive, undignified, and I reminded myself that I needed to write a Will if only to keep myself from assembling yo-yos for Quibble Toys in whatever brief version of an afterlife I was destined to enjoy.

  Beside the extraction room—where Bascom removed the corpses’ teeth and wired their jaws shut to keep them from harming anyone living—was a door marked “Processing” which the assistant knocked on and then opened without waiting for a response from within. I followed him inside to find Bascom Quibble standing over another corpse. He was tall and thin with a pointy goatee that made his angular face look positively geometrical. Small eyes blinked at me from behind yellow safety goggles. He held a nasty looking syringe with a bright blue liquid in it and appeared ready to pop the needle into the corpse’s neck. His expression shifted from distasteful to worried when he recognized me, and I knew he had immediately assumed my presence meant legal trouble of one kind or another.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nice to see you, too, Bascom.”

  He jerked his head toward the door, and his assistant exited, shutting us in. The body on the table between Bascom and me was a woman, maybe in her sixties. He’d shaved her head after doing the routine with her teeth, and I was glad he’d covered her with a sheet. Still, I wasn’t pleased being in here with her, knowing she’d soon be up and in one of the holding cells I knew were at the back of the factory next to the loading dock.

  “I have a little job for you,” I told him.

  “Then you should go to the store and put in your order like anyone else.”

  “This one requires a bit of discretion.”

  “Which means it’s illegal. I’ve had enough trouble with the law lately. You should know that.”

  I’d been expecting him not to be enthusiastic about my proposition, so I went on undaunted. “The discretion I’m talking about isn’t exactly a question of legal or illegal. It’s more dealing with a different kind of authority.”

  He stared me at me for a second or two, trying to unpack that one. “The Grommets,” he said with a nod. “Even worse. Get out, Ace. Please.”

  He bent over the corpse, moving the big needle in place above the neck.

  “It’s not a whole re-animation my client is after. Just a partial. And it’ll impress the hell out of Clancy. Be good for you to have him in your corner.”

  “And equally bad to have Yancy know I helped his brother. No way.”

  He popped the syringe into the flesh and pushed down on the plunger. The skin swelled around the puncture point and started turning blue. The color faded after a few seconds, but the big lump lingered after Bascom withdrew the needle.

  “I’m getting a five percent cut on this,” I said. “I don’t know of how much, but it’s likely big. I’ll split it with you.”

  I watched the corpse for signs of life rather than trying to read Bascom’s face for his reaction to my offer. When he said, “Answer’s still no,” I didn’t even look up.

  “60/40?” I countered.

  “Not for 90/10. Not for all of it. Now get out. I’ve got work to do.”

  Without warning, the corpse jolted to life. The woman’s eyes popped open and veins stood out on her forehead. I hadn’t seen the restraints underneath the sheet but was damn glad they were there now as she bucked against them. She let out a pitiful, impotent grunt that would have been a snarl if h
er jaw hadn’t been wired shut, and she turned her head toward Bascom, clearly confused about why she wasn’t able to bite into his hand. Her rage only increased, and I had to wonder about the strength of the restraints.

  From a tray behind him, Bascom took another syringe, this one loaded with a milky liquid, and came around to the side of the table. He lifted the sheet to expose the zombie’s hand writhing against one of the thick leather straps that held her. As casually as he might have petted a faithful dog, Bascom rubbed at the wrist just above the strap and then plunged the needle into the flesh. In seconds, the syringe was emptied and the newly awoken zombie attained a blissful look on her face.

  Bascom looked up, a satisfied expression on his face. He turned to me, one eyebrow raised. It was his way of silently showing me not only that he didn’t need any kind of cut from any kind of deal that a person like me could swing, but also that he was surprised to find me still standing there. That eyebrow was tough to argue with, so I dropped my card onto the sheet covering the zombie’s legs and let myself out.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon looking through my list of contacts and trying to figure the next best thing. The wisest approach, I realized, would have been to find a diplomatic way of telling Pixel to pound sand, but my vocabulary isn’t that big, so I needed to find another way. It wasn’t just that I felt I owed Pixel after she’d saved me in the Mirage, and it certainly wasn’t that I needed the pocket change she’d throw my way if the hand actually yielded something. No, I’d decided that I kind of liked having Pixel in my corner. If she needed me to do this for her, then I was going to try my hardest.

  By seven, the sun was edging down and the moon was edging up. Between the other work I’d needed to do and the time I’d taken to cram in a ham and cheese, I’d gone through all of my contacts and come up with no one who could do the kind of quality job Pixel needed for the dead man’s hand. Her only choices were to go with someone less qualified to do the work or to come up with some serious money that would either get Bascom to change his mind or act as an icebreaker for reputable re-animators I wasn’t yet acquainted with. I was about to call her with the news, but my phone jumped to life first. The caller ID read “Quibble, Bascom,” and I found my interest in the case revived.

  “Stubble,” I said when I picked up the phone.

  “That job you told me about today, Ace?”

  I smiled. He sounded desperate. I like that in a partner. “Yes.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  My smile widened. “You don’t even know what it is yet.”

  “There’s a condition.” And with that my smile faded. “I need a favor from you first. A big one.”

  I was all the way to frown at this point. Quid pro quo had become my whole modus operandi lately. Getting physical with the werewolf the night before had started an unpleasant domino effect, and I was starting to feel like the final one was going to fall right on my head with a thump.

  There was an easy way out, and I could have taken it without hearing another word from Bascom—just call Pixel and tell her I was done, tell her to sic the dog on me if she had it in her but that there was just no way I could get that hand moving with the resources I had. And like an idiot I did no such thing, just kept the phone right up against my ear and said, “What’s the favor?”

  “Do you know Drea Wexler?”

  I’d never met the woman, but her name was on the list of re-animators I’d been poring over for the last few hours. I decided to play dumb.

  “No. Should I?”

  “She’s in my profession,” he said a bit coldly.

  I knew the type he was talking about. Where Bascom’s corpses were all legitimately acquired, accurately labeled and carefully tracked with expiration dates and quality control guarantees, the stock used by re-animators like Drea Wexler could come from anywhere and be shipped anywhere when she was done with them. And while Bascom’s creations were relatively safe for the people that had to handle them, the creatures that came out of Wexler’s lab couldn’t be counted on for anything but ferocity, and the drugs used to sedate them had nowhere near the controlling power of the milky fluid I’d seen Bascom inject into the zombie this afternoon. The word was that if you really wanted revenge on someone, you wouldn’t just kill them; you’d kill them and take the body to someone like Drea Wexler and hope the resulting monstrosity ended up as a crash test dummy or the quarry in a canned hunt outside the city limits.

  “What happened? She moving in on your territory? Catch her re-animating a hamster?”

  I imagined Bascom gritting his teeth, trying not to yell into the phone. That he was actually restraining himself, not chewing me out and not hanging up, told me that he wasn’t entirely in the power position he made himself out to occupy. Had that been the case, he wouldn’t have needed to put up with my jabs.

  “Listen,” he finally said after several seconds, and when he spoke, the words were measured, deliberate, as though he had to force himself to speak, thinking about his words one at a time. “She’s had a shipment go astray. Anything could have happened. We need this contained before anyone gets hurt. Before she ends up liable for anything.”

  I thought I’d throw him another question while I processed what he’d said. “And what’s it to you? It’s not your zombies on the loose.”

  “It’s bad for the profession. We have a hard enough time dealing with regulations and restrictions and zoning. If one of Drea’s products hurts somebody…turns somebody, you can imagine the outcome.”

  “I see your point.”

  My guess was that Bascom and other high-end re-animators had kept a steady flow of political contributions going over the years to keep the city’s power structure from involving itself in the zombie trade. That might all be gone with a disaster and some bad press behind it.

  “And you want me to do what? Run legal interference for her? What makes you think she hasn’t already got a lawyer?”

  “Because she told me she hasn’t. She called me as soon as the shipment went missing.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that. “She called you,” I repeated, “not somebody else. Not the police.”

  “We…” he began.

  “Have a past,” I finished for him. In the silence that followed, I added, “Some pillow talk you must have had.”

  “Shut up, Ace!” he hissed. “We need some help here, all right?”

  “So it’s still we? You still together?”

  “No, but…she still means something to me, all right?”

  “You’re getting me all misty here, Bascom.”

  “Damn it, Ace!” he yelled. “Will you just…” He took a breath to calm down. “Do it and I’ll take care of whatever you were after today.”

  “I’m still listening.”

  “This isn’t just about keeping Drea out of court, Ace. We need somebody to actually find her shipment.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “That’s way out of my league. I don’t know the first thing about wrangling zombies.”

  “You don’t need to wrangle them. Just find them.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I’m not going near those things.”

  I smiled at that in spite of myself. His reluctance told me more about the quality of his ex-girlfriend’s product and also about Bascom himself. Deep down, the zombie maker was a bit of a coward. The thing was, though, that in a situation like this, anybody would have been, including me.

  “The same goes for me, Bascom. Have your girlfriend call the police. There’s a special squad for undead disturbances, you know.”

  “Things are bad enough without getting the police involved,” he said. “She’s already had the Grommets sniffing around her place. For all we know, they’ve got something to do with this. If we bring in the police…Drea’s bound to get caught in the crossfire.”

  I was only half-listening now, trying to figure out what the Grommets had to do with all of this. “What did she say about the Grommets?” I asked.

 
He hesitated a moment, probably trying to process the risks versus rewards of telling me any more. The math must have worked out in my favor, because he took a breath and said, “She did some work for Neat Pete. Then some of Yancy’s boys came around asking questions.”

  “What kind of questions.”

  “Like where she got her supply, where it shipped to, the chances of re-animating just part of a corpse.”

  “She tell ‘em anything?”

  “She says she didn’t.”

  “And you don’t quite believe her.”

  “I don’t know what to believe any more. I just need some help here. I’ll do whatever it was you wanted…and more. Name your price.”

  “To be determined,” I said.

  During the last exchange, my mind had been racing. It stuck me as likely that Neat Pete had sold Drea Wexler a one-handed corpse in the last couple of days. And somehow Yancy Grommet had gotten wind of it, maybe even wanted to re-animate the remaining hand to pull the same kind of muscle memory hack that Pixel was planning. All of that was inconsequential to me. What I didn’t like was the fact that all of this would end up back on Pixel. There was a good chance that if things went badly, she’d end up in the stable of one or the other Grommet.

  My smarter side told me to let it go. Pixel had gotten herself into this, and if the price was heavy, that was on her. At best, Pixel was just a resource for me, an occasional partner whom I’d never had reason to mistrust. At worst, she was a little conniver who’d jumped at a chance to ensnare me into her little game when she’d seen that werewolf come at me. Either way, I’d be none the worse leaving her to the Grommets. But then my less smart side chimed in, and I thought about that plain pine table in her apartment. Pixel wasn’t a player, not this kind anyway. She’d just wanted to help her father out of a jam, and inexperience had put her right in the middle of an even bigger one.