by Rob Rosen
I nodded. Made sense. As much as anything did. Then again, none of it made sense, not really. And, I wondered, what part did we actually play? According to Didi, Chaz and Paula had been arrested, but what did we do to make that happen? I mean, sure, I was glad they were arrested, but how, why, and had we uncovered anything to make it happen? Had everything we did, everything we’d been through, been mere fun and games—minus, for much of it, the fun?
“Doesn’t feel right,” I said to them.
“What doesn’t?” asked Bruce.
Only, I didn’t know. It was just a feeling. I’d say it was an unease, but it was pretty impossible to feel uneasy in Arby’s. “Too simple,” I replied.
Max chuckled. “You sure about that? I mean, from where we were standing—or, you know, floating—none of that seemed simple.”
He was right, of course. I should’ve been happy. I got to see my mom again. My killer was arrested. I even made new friends, was responsible for a new relationship, and Bruce got to say goodbye to his brother. I even got to cross something off my bucket list, namely that whole drag schtick. Then again, do you still have a bucket list when you already kicked it? The bucket, I mean. So I forced a smile on my face. Or maybe it had been there since we’d been back. Arby’s had a way of doing that to you. “Thank you for your help,” I told them.
Bruce patted my back. “I got to see my brother again.” He laughed. “Or maybe make that sister. Either way, thanks.” His smile, however, quivered, if however briefly. “Though Eve did seem to be struggling, right? I mean since my death.” He stared up and squinted into the endless white. “Selfish of me to leave her.” He stared back our way. “I should have done better. On Earth, I mean.” He also tried to sigh and also miserably failed. “Think she’ll be okay?”
I nodded. I did think that. Eve didn’t seem the type to accept failure. “She’ll be back on her Manolo’s in no time.”
His head was moving up and down. “She tried to get me off the steroids.”
“See,” said Max.
“And failed,” said Bruce, head still moving but without much conviction as he pointed into the abyss.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, uh, oh,” said Max.
Bruce’s head stopped rising and falling. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to rain on your parade, Nord. I mean, the whole point of this was to find your killer. FYI, your killer is in jail!”
“Yep,” I said. “Woohoo!”
I said it. I didn’t feel it. Like my mom had noted, it wasn’t going to bring me back. Bittersweet, as a rule, is usually mostly bitter and not nearly sweet enough. And still there was the fact that I and they were all quite poofless.
* * * *
Life continued as before—or, that is to say, after-life. I didn’t feel sad or rueful. I was glad to have Max, Bruce, Anna Nicole Smith, when she deigned us with her presence. I tried not to think about what I’d left behind, focusing instead on the good memories, of meeting Voltan and Clark and Eve, happy times with mom or at work, which were also happy times—when I wasn’t, of course, getting shot to death.
Max and I explored our new world, met people, heard their stories, shared ours. In life, you live for new experiences. In death, you live, for lack of a better word, in the recounting of them. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. Arby’s had a unique way of bringing that home.
Days went by like this. For all we knew, it could have been weeks, months. There was no sleep, no wake, no clocks, no sun, no moon, no way to tell. You simply were, even though, technically, you were not. It was blissful limbo without the need to crane your back beneath a shaky bamboo pole.
“You think he’s in prison now?” I asked Max. “You think she is, too?”
He pulled me in tight. I rejoiced in the pulling. It never got old. I wondered if never would last forever. I tried not to wonder about what if it didn’t. “We could go back and find out,” he offered.
I shook my head. “No,” I told him. “I don’t think it’d do any good.”
“Life is for the living, huh?”
I shrugged. “I’m happy here with you. Why rock the boat?”
He stroked my back, my ass, my hole. Fuck the boat when he could rock my world. Still, the boat was there, floating along some unseen horizon. “Nice try, Nord.”
“What?” I asked, locking eyes with him, another something that never got old. Not ever. So much beautiful blue in a world of almost pure white.
“You know what.”
I did know. I’d known ever since we’d been back. Like I said, I tried not to think about it. I didn’t mention that I failed in that regard. I mean, people were fascinating, but people were boring, too. And in those boring moments, it was impossible not to wonder what was happening back in my world. Even more impossible to not wonder what happened to Chaz, to Paula. And, fine, to wonder if the police had the right people in custody. I mean, if they were the reason why I was supposed to go poof, then why didn’t I? Then again, maybe that elusive poof was simply some sort of egg timer going off on God’s toaster oven. Lord only knew. Literally. Because none of us certainly did.
“It doesn’t matter,” I lied, glancing off to my side to see if lightning would strike me deader.
His finger went around and around my hole. “You don’t think Chaz did it, that Paula helped or at least knew what was going on?”
“Yep, I do think that, actually.” And, actually, that is what I’d thought.
“But?” he said with a grin. “And, by the way, you do have a rather fetching butt.”
I smacked his. “Ditto.” I rested my head on his chest. “Just before I died, Max, there was a flash of color, out of the corner of my eye, something vivid, something I maybe had seen before.”
“You never mentioned it,” he said.
I nodded into his broad expanse. “It didn’t mean anything, didn’t point to anything. Maybe I was shot, my head whipped around, my eyes caught on a light or a blur of something on the wall or even on my computer screen. It wasn’t a face, wasn’t something I could pin to someone else. I saw it. I didn’t recognize it. It was probably nothing.”
“But maybe something? Or enough of something to make you question the outcome of all this?”
Again, I nodded. “But so what? I mean, I still think Chaz did it. All evidence points to him. And what could a flash of color prove, anyway?”
We stood there. Or floated there. Or did whatever it was we did there because, like I said, lord only knew. Eventually, Max said, “You said, ‘something I maybe had seen before.’”
“Uh huh. It looked familiar.”
“Or,” he said, “maybe it wasn’t something you’d seen before; maybe it was something you saw since.”
I pushed away from him. Our eyes again locked. “Oh my God!” I shouted, suddenly looking upwards, just in case. “Um, sorry,” I apologized into the ether, then looked back at Max. “That’s why I didn’t say anything before because it didn’t mean anything before. But that’s what’s been nagging at me since we’ve been back. Why, Max? Why is it nagging at me now?”
“Where did you see it again, Nord?” he asked. “Or did you see it again?”
“I…” I said, “I don’t know. I mean, it’d been a flash. I was shot. I died. It happened so quickly, too quickly. Or thankfully too quickly, but still. Maybe everyone sees it just before they die. Maybe it’s just the final pinprick of life being snuffed out.”
He shook his head. “Nope. Not me. I was alive. I was dead. No flash of color that I can remember.”
“Damn.”
“What color?” he then asked. “Was it just one? A bunch? Two?”
I could still see it. I could see everything. I had no body, or at least nothing you could rightly call a body, but memories, yeah, those I still had. They say you can’t take it with you, but those you could. Again, thankfully.
I tried to recall it again as we stood and/or floated and/or did whatever it was we were doing, but it was all so flee
ting. One second, I was sitting at my desk, then a bang, then a flash of color, then Max and Arby’s.
“Red,” I saw. “Maybe orange. Maybe green. I think.” I played it over and over again. I hadn’t tried to do that all that much before. Dying was a bitch; why relive the moment, so to speak? I held his hands in mine. I nodded. “Red, for sure. Orange, too. The green might have been a square of some sort. In my memory, it looks blocky.” I squeezed his hands. “It was all too fast, Max. All I know is that I saw something that wasn’t what I normally saw. Then again, I wasn’t normally shot to death at work, so maybe it was nothing worth noting to begin with.”
“But you don’t believe that, do you, Nord? If it was nothing, it wouldn’t be bothering you now.”
I shook my head. “Again, what does it matter? Chaz and Paula are presumably in prison. They were bad people. You met them, to a degree. They certainly had it coming. Karma is a bitch served cold.”
He grinned. “You’re mixing your metaphors.”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Chaz is an azz,” he said. “Paula locked you in a basement. They did bad things, maybe planned on doing worse ones, but if they didn’t kill you…”
Yeah, I got it. Then they didn’t deserve to be in prison. At least not for my death. “But, again, what can we do about it now? Even when we were back there in the real world, nothing we tried to do had an impact. The police arrested Chaz and Paula after having no contact with us. In other words, that would’ve happened even if we hadn’t been there.”
“We found Didi,” he said with a shake of his head. “You showed Didi the document, or at least Clark did. Chaz and Paula were arrested right after that, according to Didi. Maybe you had something to do with that, either directly or tangentially.”
I started to reply. I stopped. That was the sequence of events, but were they related? And, again, what if they were? Everything still pointed to Chaz. Heck, it looked like he tried to kill Didi and Glenn, too. Had it not been for us, they would both probably be dead right now, maybe even at Arby’s with us. So in that, we had an impact. I supposed that was something. A big something, in fact.
“The flash of colors,” I said, “do they mean anything to you?”
He pursed his lips and stared off into the distance, seemingly in thought, then looked back my way. “Nada, Nord. Sorry. But red and orange and a maybe a block of green isn’t much to go on.”
I nodded. He was right, of course. It was nothing, even though it could have been everything. And so, “Bruce!” I hollered into the void.
Bruce was never very far away. It would have been too easy for us all to be separated, and so we all stayed together, or at least in relatively close proximity to one another. “Howdy,” he said moments later as he walked in from behind me.
“Howdy?”
He shrugged. “Trying it on for size. Does it fit?”
He was naked. He was hot. In life, I bet everything fit; why should death be any different? And, so, “Howdy,” I replied, to which I added, “Thinking back to when we were looking for my killer, can you recall seeing anything with a splash of red and orange and perhaps a block of green?”
Like Max before him, Bruce squinted into the abyss, seemingly in thought, before turning back to us and replying, “Yep, I reckon I did.”
Max pointed Bruce’s way. “You’ve been chatting with a cowboy, right?”
“Cowboys, yep. Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, in fact. Talk about your unresolved issues.”
I slapped Bruce’s brawny chest. It made no sound, but it got his attention. “Where did you see it?” I asked, rather on the loud side. “Where?! Where?!” The loud side grew even louder.
He looked at me as if I’d gone crazy. Right about then, I think I truly had. “Didi’s head,” he replied.
“Didi’s hea….” And that’s when it hit me. I had seen those colors since I died. They didn’t look familiar to me in life; they looked familiar to me in death. As in my own. “Her scarf! That Hermes scarf!”
“Fuck,” said Max.
“Fuck,” agreed I.
“Fuck what?” asked Bruce. “What are we fucking?”
I shook my head. “We are not fucking; we were fucked.”
Bruce scratched his chin. “Lost me.”
“Didi,” I told him. “Didi killed me and framed her husband and her husband’s mistress. The mugging, the red blotch on her forehead, it’d all been faked. All of it.”
He seemed to think about it before nodding my way. “Yep, you’re fucked then, alright.” But then he threw in a smile. “Unless we go back and make things right.” He moved in closer. “You sure you’re right, though?”
I turned to Max. “We showed her the document just before the arrest. She must’ve been able to tie it all in for the police, what she saw on Clark’s phone, the money shuffling, her attempted murder, which Voltan and Clark and Eve could somewhat attest to, then Glenn’s attempted murder, which my mom could somewhat attest to, plus my murder, which needed no attesting to, and which Chaz could easily have accomplished, and had a reason to pull off. I mean, it’s all circumstantial, but it sure is a boat-load of circumstantial.” I’d believed her. I’d believed all of it. But all I believed were the words coming from a really good actress, and one that could also have easily planted my blood on her husband’s coat.
Max nodded. “And how much you want to bet that Didi gets everything if Chaz gets arrested? Divorces are messy things, and maybe they had a pre-nup, but if Chaz goes to jail, she gets it all, no fuss, no muss. And if her husband’s mistress is also implicated, then sweet revenge, icing on the cake.”
I grimaced. I pointed to where my bloody bullet hole had been. “Fuss and muss, Max. No cake. No icing.”
He held my hand, patted my shoulder. “Somehow, she must’ve found out you had the document on your work computer, and she saw her chance.”
I knew how that happened. “Didi told us that Chaz uses the same password for everything. She must’ve been able to access the company’s servers, maybe my computer directly, remotely. She must’ve seen that I had the document. Maybe she even changed the data on it, also remotely. Maybe that’s why there were no bells and whistles going off two years ago. And if she was logged in as her husband, it would look like he changed everything around.”
“So now what?” asked Bruce. “How can we prove any of it? Even if all that is true, Didi, as you just said, would have logged in as Chaz, so if we could somehow show the police what we think really happened, we still can’t pin it on her. Someone killed you. Someone theoretically tried to kill her. Someone theoretically tried to kill Glenn. Meaning, someone tried to kill all the suspects, save for her husband, the guy moving money around, the same amount on the document that was on your computer when you were killed. The same guy cheating on his wife with a mistress who is obviously cashing in somehow. Everything pointed to Chaz for us; the same is obviously true for the police. Chaz had motive. Chaz had access. Didi made sure everything pointed back to him. End of story.”
End of me, he should have added.
I was suddenly sad. I was equal parts mad. Even Arby’s couldn’t cure me. What was a spirit to do? Would our poltergeist tricks work at the police station? Would any of it be admissible in court, anyway? And then I was smiling. Because, yes, that did indeed give me an idea.
* * * *
“They’re back,” Voltan groaned, not because we were indeed back but because Clark was pounding his ass at the time, and Voltan’s ass was small and Clark’s cock was not, and so groaning seemed highly appropriate. Plus, we were back, and us being back was probably not a good sign, at least for them, and so groaning was probably doubly appropriate.
Clark pulled out and tried to cover himself. “Good luck with that,” I said, seeing as they were in the living room at the time, and a throw pillow simply wasn’t up for the covering task.
As for the three of us, we were hovering over them as Voltan stared our way. “If this is a soci
al visit, may I suggest you call ahead next time?”
And again, good luck with that.
I swooped inside him. “How long have we been gone?” I asked.
“Not long enough,” he harrumphed as I pushed him to the side. “FYI, I missed you but did not miss this.” This clearly being us sharing his body. Two peas, one pod, as it were. “But just over three months. Why?”
Three months? Seemed like weeks. Guess time does fly when you’re, well, sort of dead, I suppose. “Chaz didn’t kill me.”
“Um, yeah he did. That’s why he’s in jail. Because he killed you. Said so on the news, so it must be true.”
“Pretty sure he didn’t,” I replied.
“Pretty sure?”
I shrugged. It was more an internal thing. Like his internals, but still. “We think Didi set it all up, that she killed me so that he’d be put away and she’d get it all: the house, the business, his money.”
“Yep,” he said, “she seems to have gotten all that.”
“See.”
“See what? The cops arrested Chaz. The evidence pointed to Chaz. I’m pretty sure we all thought he did it, anyway. What changed? And how did it change from wherever it was you were before you were suddenly somewhere around my kidneys?”
And so I told him.
“See,” I said, yet again.
He paused. “Um.” He paused again. “A scarf? A scarf is what you’re going on?”
“And a hunch. A feeling in my proverbial gut.”
“But you’re in my gut right now.”
“Which is why I said proverbial. In any case, she had motive, she had opportunity, she knew how to access the company’s servers, and he was cheating on her and he was rich, so this was a perfect way to get everything she wanted. Heck, even the mistress was arrested.”
“Was,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Was,” he replied. “As in she was arrested and she was in jail, but now she’s not.”