The Vengeful Dead

by J N Duncan

  That life still ebbed and flowed in his veins. In quiet moments, if Nick turned his senses inward and he focused upon that energy that fueled his continuing existence in this world, he could catch fleeting moments of Jackie, taste her soul as it were. She reminded him of good coffee: strong, dark, and complicated, with hints of many wonderful flavors hidden within if you paid close enough attention to notice. He wanted to continue savoring that drink.

  Nick finished his coffee and glanced at his watch. Jackie had been in her room for ten minutes. He did not want her waking up by herself. He made his way down the labyrinth of tile hallways, sidestepping the occasional ghost he found wandering the halls. Hospitals were horrible places if you could see the dead. They were everywhere, lingering in rooms and halls and parking garages. One could counsel the dead for endless days and never see the end of them, and by now Nick had spent enough time in hospitals over the years to avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

  At the third floor nurses’ station, Nick walked up to the counter and leaned on it, smiling down at the nurse seated at the computer. “Pardon me, ma’am. I’m looking for Jackie Rutledge’s room. I believe she was just brought up a short time ago.”

  Her hard, worker’s gaze melted away when she caught his eye. “Are you a family member, sir?”

  “Someday, perhaps,” he said, throwing in a bit of drawl. “We haven’t got that far yet.”

  She gave him a knowing smile. “Ah, I see. Well, I wish you the best, sir. Let me see.” She shuffled through a few charts. “Here we go. She’s in three twenty-four. Down the hall there and on your left.”

  “Much appreciated, ma’am. Thank you.”

  Her cheeks began to redden. “Any time, sir. Let us know if she needs anything.”

  He found Jackie mumbling softly in her sleep, white gauze creating a cap on her head. An IV ran down to her arm, dripping clear fluid into her veins. Nick pulled one of the chairs over from the opposite wall and seated himself beside her. Jackie’s head turned back and forth, the murmuring growing more intense. He couldn’t make out what she was saying but the tone did not sound pleasant.

  Gently, Nick reached up and placed his hand over hers. “Shhhh,” he whispered. “It’s all fine, Jackie. You’re safe here. Shhhh.”

  Her hand involuntarily grasped his and her body settled itself. She remained quiet for some time after that, but Nick kept his hand on hers, until at some point he began to drift himself.

  She woke him abruptly by squeezing his hand. “Broken,” she said in a raspy voice. “I’m not broken. I’m not. I’m not broken.”

  “Jackie,” Nick said, leaning in close. “Jackie, it’s Nick. You’re safe in the hospital.”

  “What?” Her eyes blinked rapidly. “Hospital? Nick?” Her eyes finally focused on him. “Nick. What happened?”

  Her voice held the drunken, groggy remnants of anesthetic and painkillers. “Morgan shot you,” Nick replied. “Grazed your skull.”

  Jackie closed her eyes. “God, my head hurts. I shot him, Nick. Did he make it?”

  “No. Morgan is dead.”

  The eyes squeezed even tighter. “Fuck. I’m so screwed. I had no choice.”

  “I know. They’ll see that.”

  “Shit.” A moan escaped her lips, but then she opened her eyes to look at him. “The ghost. What about Rosa?”

  “She was gone by the time I got there.”

  “Is she really gone?”

  “Wish I knew. If that was the last guy, then maybe,” he said.

  “Oh.” Her eyes closed and Jackie was silent for a while. Nick said nothing, but kept a hold of her hand. “What time is it?”

  “It’s been about two and a half hours since the incident.”

  “Any news?”

  “Nobody’s called me,” he said. “I talked to Shelby about thirty minutes after getting here and she just told me the place was crawling with FBI and CPD. She wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Am I? OK, I mean.”

  “Looked a lot worse than it was. You know how scalp wounds bleed, but you’ll have a nice scar to show for it.”

  “As if my hair didn’t already look like shit. Lovely.”

  “Least of your worries now, Jackie. You’ll have people in here asking questions soon.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She turned away, looking out the window at the rain running down the window. “I killed a fricking cop.” She let out a long, slow sigh. “I knew Morgan. We weren’t friends, but I knew him. He was a good guy. He has a daughter.”

  “I’m sorry, Jackie. This kind of thing is never easy.”

  “They’ll all say I should’ve waited, but how could I?” Her rough voice was cracking. “He just blew away the guy in the doorway without hesitation. Was anyone else in the house? Did my foolishness save someone at least?”

  “There was another body in the kitchen,” he said, wishing like hell he had something good to say to her. There was no decent way to spin this story.

  Jackie nodded and was silent. Then her head turned back to him. “Wait. How? Wasn’t Morgan dead in the doorway?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know.” Nick envisioned the scene again, Morgan and the first victim in the entry and Jackie lying on the floor in the dining room. She was the only one with a clear view of the second victim. “He must have staggered around the corner and shot the guy and fallen back into the entry.”

  Jackie gave him a blank look for a second. “I guess. Last thing I remember was Morgan slamming my head into the floor, and . . . that’s it.”

  “Maybe you pulled him back into the entry after that. Your memory is likely a little skewed after what happened. Blows to the head will do that.”

  “I guess,” she said and sagged back into her pillow. “I really could use something to drink.”

  There was a pitcher and plastic cups on the bedside table. “Here let me get you some water.” He poured out half a cup and held the cup up to her lips.

  “I’m not an invalid, you know,” she said, the hint of a smile on her lips. “But thanks.”

  “Hungry at all?”

  “God no. My stomach feels like hell. I bet the coffee here is horrid too.”

  “I’ll bring you a latte later.”

  “Thank you.” She closed her eyes once more. “That’d be great.”

  “Get some rest, Jackie. You need it.” She nodded but did not open her eyes. “You want me to hang around for when the others start rolling in?”

  Her voice was a murmur now. “That could be hours. You don’t need to do that.”

  “Sooner than that, I think.” He stood up and gave her hand a squeeze. “I’ll be around. Get some more sleep, and I’ll give you warning when they start to arrive.”

  She made an agreeable sound but was already fading out. Nick looked down on her for several minutes, watching her sleep, the slow rise and fall of her stomach, the bandaged head that made her look far more frail than she was. When he was sure she was out, Nick turned around and left.

  Chapter 22

  McManus sat in the dining room of Javier Johnson, cousin of Manuel “Steel-Toe” Juarez, his head propped on his hand. The evidence crew had finally left with their plastic bags and collected items detailing what they figured had happened. They had it wrong, however. They took the convenient answer.

  He couldn’t exactly knock Pernetti for accepting it. The guy was a decent agent, but he didn’t want to accept the unlikeliest of scenarios. They had stopped the bad guy in a less-than-ideal manner, but when it was all said and done, they had stopped him and that was all that mattered. All they needed was a confirming report from Jackie and they could file it away: Agent Rutledge tracks down rogue cop and kills him after two victims are killed and he fires his weapon at her. Justified response. Unfortunate. End of story.

  Only the more he had looked at it, the less likely it seemed the scenario played out that way. The others either didn’t see it or had collectively decided not to look at the evidence. Protect your own. The Chic
ago PD didn’t like it either. One of their own had gone astray and was gunned down by the FBI. That never went down well no matter how you played it. But even they had glossed over what seemed plainly possible to McManus.

  Detective Morgan had not shot the second victim.

  The first shot fired had been victim number one. He clearly remembered hearing that first distinct pop and turning to see Jackie sprinting across the lawns in the next block. Who would have thought those short, slender legs could move a body so fast? He had started after her when he saw Morgan. Then another gunshot followed by three in rapid succession as she charged him. That was when she had been nearly killed. They had blood evidence from the yard for that. Jackie had then barreled into Morgan, taking him down in the entry of the house. McManus just reached the house’s yard when two more shots went off.

  Three seconds. It couldn’t have been any more than that before he got to the front door. Morgan and Johnson were dead in the entry and Jackie lay unconscious in the dining room. In the initial chaos of dealing with Jackie, he hadn’t even considered what had happened. By the time he got a moment to breathe and had come back in from securing the area, the rest of the crew had arrived and Pernetti had taken over. Nobody had asked the disturbing question: Why was Jackie the only one in sight of the second victim?

  Ballistics would tell a clearer story. If she had fired more than three shots, people might then begin to wonder. Her gun, though, had been on the floor, lying between her and Morgan. There may or may not be prints from Morgan on her weapon, but that wouldn’t be conclusive. He knew how they would write it up. Morgan had grabbed her gun and shot the second victim before collapsing himself. Perhaps he had shoved her into the dining room where she collapsed. Any number of potential scenarios could tell the story, but the facts didn’t really add up. How did a guy, shot twice in the chest, stagger around the corner into the living room and get off two perfectly aimed shots? It had been mere seconds, so Morgan, even if alive, was at the end of his rope and not in any shape to get off any kind of clean shot, much less two bull’s-eyes.

  So, however improbable, Jackie had or most likely had shot the second victim. Why would she do such a thing? It made no sense.

  McManus got up and walked back to the front door, playing through the scenario in his head. He ignored the television crews on the street who turned their cameras in his direction. There would be plenty of time for questions. He would play out the events over and over again for many. The Bureau of Professional Standards guys would be all over them, going over the events until he was sick of them. Jackie would have it ten times worse. Poor Jack. Helping on a case to get back in the swing of things and she winds up killing a cop. No telling how long she would be on leave for this one.

  “What the hell happened, Jack?” McManus said, trying to put himself in Morgan’s shoes, being shot in the doorway, bleeding out, shoving Jackie into the dining room, putting two rounds into a guy in the next room and then stumbling back to collapse in the entry. While physically possible, McManus could not wrap his brain around the second victim. If you’re in your dying moments, you aren’t moving around blowing people away with pinpoint accuracy. But trying things from Jackie’s point of view made even less sense. Tackling Morgan, staggering into the dining room after he’s died, likely light-headed and woozy as hell from the head wound, and then shooting an unarmed guy in the next room.

  It made the scene look like Jackie had taken out Morgan’s last victim for him. Unless, by some miraculous turn of events, the second victim was actually the first and Morgan happened to run into the first coming out of the house. That didn’t explain the screen door though.

  McManus sighed and thrust his hands into his pockets. This was getting him nowhere. He needed to speak with Jack before the Standards guys came down on her.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed up the hospital and got routed to Jackie’s room. After four rings a male voice answered.

  “Agent Rutledge’s room.”

  “Mr. Anderson? This is Agent McManus.”

  “How are things over there?” he asked.

  “Winding down here. Is Jack available to talk? How is she?”

  “Groggy but all right. She’s got company at the moment. Something you needed to ask her?”

  “Lots of things, actually,” he said.

  “You and a dozen other people,” came Nick’s agitated reply.

  “Yeah, I figured. This is going to be one big cluster fuck. Tell her to call me as soon as she can. I really need to chat with her about what happened.”

  “I’ll do that, Agent McManus. Oh, hold on,” he said and there was a moment of muffled conversation. “Call her tonight. She insists she will be home in a few hours.”

  “Will she?”

  “Unless they chain her to the bed.”

  McManus laughed. “Yeah, all right. I’ll try her around nine or so. Thanks, and wish her luck for me.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  He shoved the phone back in his pocket and headed back outside. There was little for him to do at the scene now, and he needed to figure out what the hell to put in the incident report on this. For now, at least, he would keep his absurd notions to himself. Things were enough of a mess already without throwing suspicions toward Jackie, and it would look bad for her if they had different accounts of the events.

  Stepping down onto the front walk, McManus recognized a familiar figure standing on the sidewalk beyond the scene tape. Belgerman had decided to come and see for himself, and given the beckoning shrug of his head, he had been waiting for McManus to come out. So much for syncing their stories together.

  Chapter 23

  Jackie prayed it was time for another Percocet. Her head felt like a sculptor was going at it with a hammer and chisel. Nick stood at the window, staring out through his reflection. Laurel sat weightless on the end of her bed, legs dangling through the footboard. Shelby had contacted her after leaving the scene, and the hospital was a place she had been to before, so she could travel directly. Her presence had helped alleviate the stress of two hours of endless questioning, made worse by Belgerman.

  He had come by twenty minutes after she woke up. After assuring himself of her health, the first words out his mouth about the case had been simple and direct. “Jackie, you need to consider yourself gagged when it comes to anything supernatural involving this case. Don’t even hint at anything odd.”

  Not that she had any desire to do so, but her involvement in the case was entirely supernatural. “And what was I doing on this case then?”

  “Investigative backup. Research. Background on potential suspects. You were looking into the rogue cop angle after Morgan went on leave after the second murders. Spin it however you like, Jackie, but leave the ghost out of it. I know it will be difficult, but you will manage it.”

  Nick, who was sitting against the windowsill, arms crossed over his chest, sounded more curious than angry about the news. “If they look into us, they may start to wonder.”

  “Don’t worry about that, but I need you on board with this, Mr. Anderson. If you’re asked, you were investigating a prescription drug ring, involving illegal Oxycontin prescriptions. Your client is confidential and shall remain so.”

  “This is a bit unusual, John,” he said.

  “I know, but we can’t afford the supernatural angle to get public on this one. It’s already a mess with a cop getting killed.”

  “So, I’m on leave again I take it?” Jackie asked.

  “Until this gets investigated, yes. The case, as far as everyone is concerned, is over. The killer was stopped.”

  Nick unfolded his arms and hooked his hands in his pants pockets. “We don’t know that Rosa is done. We still don’t know everyone she was after.”

  “We’ll keep looking for Vasquez, but as far as this case is concerned, once these loose ends are tied up, we’re done.”

  Two hours later, Jackie felt nowhere close to being done. More than anything, she felt done in. The c
ops had been first, a grim-looking female detective with her hair pulled up into a tight little knot on the back of her head and an even tighter frown. She spoke in a rock-hard staccato voice, but Jackie couldn’t muster the energy to be annoyed. Drugs and the mild concussion made the world beyond the confines of her body inconsequential. Pernetti had followed, but was mercifully brief, realizing quickly that she was in no state for prolonged questioning. Denny had stopped by more to see how she was doing, followed by the doctor checking up on her, then someone from Professional Standards, who only took a brief statement of events and stated they would need to speak with her as soon as she was able.

  In between, Jackie dozed in and out of consciousness, full of hazy dreams smelling of blood and Morgan’s grinning, bloodstained teeth. When she came out of the last dream to the touch of the nurse looking to take her blood pressure, Jackie felt the overwhelming desire to get out.

  She reached for the water on her bedside table, but it was empty. Nick, stoically patient in the corner chair, got up to fill her cup. After taking a couple of sips and waiting for the nurse to leave, she said to him, “I’m ready to go home.”

  “They want to keep you overnight for observation,” he said, but his tone was perfunctory.

  “I need to get out of here, Nick. I hate the sterility and the smell.”

  He nodded with a knowing half-smile. “All right. I’ll make the arrangements.”

  “Thank you.” Jackie sagged back against the pillows. Once again, Nick was there to help out. Quiet and subtle as a mouse, he had stepped up his presence in her life. Even when she had not really asked or wanted him to be around, he had wormed his way in, refusing her complaints in that ever-steady, unruffled voice. And obviously, she didn’t mind that much or she would have fought him more. The fact was, having him around outweighed how nervous he could make her feel.

  Shelby walked in with a duffle-shaped suitcase slung over a shoulder. It took Jackie a moment of sluggish awareness to realize it was hers. “Hey. That’s my duffle. How did you get that?”