by J. D. Oliva
Chris hailed an Uber and bought a ticket back to LA. When he did decide to call Mom back, he promised to come see her. He still had the place on Toughy and Caldwell when things in California got old.
After going through security at Lambert International Airport, Chris sat down in the terminal and stared at the hundreds of people shuffling by, heading to work or back home, or wherever their lives needed them. Chris still didn’t have that. He didn’t have a direction. But he knew he had to find another gym. He needed to get better at MMA, even though he had no intention of ever getting back in the cage.
Bored, Chris mindlessly shuffled his way across the terminal, settling in front of a book store. He wasn’t a big reader, but he should probably change that. He looked at wall of paperback covers. A combination of mostly newer fiction and classic books. Those seemed to be the things people bought at the airport.
Chris scanned the shelves, looking to see what they offered but not sure what he really wanted, if anything. Finally, his eyes caught the name Dashiell Hammett. Hammett was his dad’s favorite writer. There was one book on the shelf with his name embossed on the cover. There was a black bird perched and a disembodied hand filled with what looked like gold or jewels staring back at him. The Maltese Falcon. Chris raised an eyebrow and pulled out his phone.
“Siri, how do you become a private investigator?”
LXXV
Two body bags were placed on the cold steel surface of the morgue. The first hosted the body of former detective Brian Anderson. No one at the scene, not his friends or family understood what led this decorated officer to kill his husband and seven other people. It was like he went crazy one day.
The body in the second bag belonged to an unidentified African-American man with long dreadlocks and no fingerprints. The coroner's office planned to run a full DNA test to try and identify the mysterious John Doe. Maybe it could explain why Detective Anderson did these horrible things.
The coroner unzipped the first bag and found Brian Anderson. The bullet wound in his head still looked fresh. The coroner shifted over and unzipped the second bag. He expected to find the body of 6'2, 240 pound African-American. But the body in the bag looked very different. The coroner found the body of Oscar Rice, a seventy-seven-year-old heart attack victim who'd passed away earlier that morning.
He didn't notice the orderly, who matched the John Doe's exact description, pushing a gurney out of the morgue twenty minutes earlier. He certainly didn't know the orderly had suffered from a slight case of tetrodotoxin poisoning, a drug that, in some cases, had been known in to mimic near-death like appearances. The coroner also didn't notice when the orderly stole a pair of sunglasses from his desk. The coroner didn't see a lot of things that night.
The FBI would later go over hospital's security footage, searching for any sign of the John Doe's escape, but wouldn't find a thing.
It was almost as if the man just up and disappeared into the ether.
Like he was a specter.
Or a man who didn't exist.
THE END
Ethan Jericho will return in Snowblind