The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams

by Richard Sanders

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  Then the tremors stopped. They just stopped. They’d lasted, I don’t know, seven seconds, eight, though it felt like they’d gone on for three days. She was quiet now, hands still on the desk, though when she lifted her head and looked at me, it was different. It was like she could actually see me now and her sight was so sharp it was burning the air.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her hands moved, rubbed the wood of the desk. “It’s raining.”

  “It’s what?”

  “It’s raining. Heavy, heavy downpour. It’s raining and people are leaving you. Two people.”

  Her voice was low but steady, like she making an intense confession.

  “Two people?”

  “You can’t see them, but you know they’re leaving. You can’t see them because you’re standing far away.”

  Jesus H.—she was trying to pull some psychic shit on me.

  “Where am I standing?”

  “You’re standing behind cement.” She was concentrating, almost squinting. It was like she was trying to read the fine print. “”You’re surrounded by cement. That’s why you can’t see them, but you know they’re leaving. It’s raining and you know they’re going away.”

  I felt a tightness in my throat, a sad tension. I remembered. I was up in Red Mountain Correctional, early in my term. It was raining hard outside. It was October 18, and I realized this was the day my wife and daughter were moving to Arizona. She’d told me—we’re leaving New York on October 18. I was standing in my cell, realizing what day it was, realizing this was the last day the three of us would officially live together. And it was raining hard, cannonball heavy. It was like the ocean was falling outside.

  I didn’t know what was going on here. I felt like I was gently drowning, like I was being hypnotized. But not by her, because she looked hypnotized too. She kept rubbing her hands on the desk, absently kneading the wood, staring not at me but at some ghost light inside me.

  I don’t know how she knew about that day. I was running all kinds of scenarios through my head, trying to explain it, but there was something here that couldn’t be explained away.

  Her hands stopped. They stopped rubbing the wood. She let go of the desk and fell back in the chair, suddenly looking very tired, the energy seeping out of her like air from an untied balloon. It was over. Her eyes returned to blind normal. Whatever had taken over her had passed. The world had come back.

  Four, five seconds went by. Nothing. Silence.

  “Are you okay?”

  She thought for a moment before answering. “Yes.”

  “Do you need anything? Water?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude on your private thoughts. I have no right to do that.”

  “It’s all right. I guess.”

  “I can’t help it, I’m sorry. I have no control over these episodes. They just…come. They just come out of nowhere. My body starts to tremble and I feel this, this pressure come over me, falling over me. It just happens.”

  I kept looking at her, waiting five more seconds. “Once it happens, what does it feel like?”

  The question seemed to throw her. She thought about it, her eyes straining as she searched for words.

  “It’s like being taken out of time,” she said, “suddenly snatched out of time and space. It’s like time and space don’t exist. It’s like living in a universe without time and space, like the Big Bang never happened, and time and space were never created.”

  She felt the desk again, as if looking for reassurance.

  “Do you ever think about the universe?” she said.

  “All the time.”

  She balled her right hand in a fist. “You know what scientists say, right? At one point, just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was smaller than a fist. Can you imagine that? The entire universe was smaller than a human fist.”

  I sat there, staring at her closed hand. Neither of us said anything. It felt like we’d been sitting in that room forever.

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  FRIDAY JUNE 15, 10:47 a.m.

  THE LAST DOOR

  Getting out of the room, getting out of the house, was like walking into the light. Yes, I mean that light. After the darkness and the psychic display, it was like a rebirth. I felt like an initiate crawling into the dawn after a night in the Delphic cave. I couldn’t believe how incredibly real everything outside looked. The sky, the flowers, the trees hiding the house from the road.

  The vintage Jag, my rental behind it, my open shoelace.

  As I walked past the Jag, I bent down to tie my shoe. By the time I stood up, I’d slipped a GPS transmitter under the rear bumper of the XKE.

  We have an 11:30.

  I parked a few blocks away, not totally persuaded that Georgiana wasn’t playing some role in the shootings. I thought about her, still wondering how she got inside my memory, still trying to recover from the experience.

  At 11:10 my phone beeped. The Jag was on the move. I called up the tracking screen, saw that the car was leaving the house and heading southeast. Georgiana could read my mind, I could read her direction—tit for tat.

  Three minutes later I caught up with the XKE. It was about 200 feet in front of me, Georgiana on the passenger’s side, Marco driving. I kept that distance as they drove into town. They passed the Hidden Lake Hotel, turned by the town’s tallest structure—a five-story office building—and turned past the glorious splendor of the corner fried chicken restaurant in the middle of downtown. A block beyond the chicken joint Marco found a parking space and pulled in. I kept going, made a quick U and found my own spot.

  A lunch crowd was starting to build on the streets, mixed in with a few early-arrival tourists. But with the overalls and the long white hair, Georgiana was easy to follow. She was wearing sunglasses, arm linked around Marco’s. They were walking back the way they’d come—around the chicken corner and down toward the office building. Hidden Lake Executive Center it was called. A generically ugly building, not even crappy in a unique and interesting way.

  Marco let her go first through the revolving door. Something odd happened as she was halfway through. She just stopped. I could see it from the street. She stopped pushing the door and just stood in that glass-walled limbo between in and out. I thought Marco might’ve spotted me, but no—he never looked back. It was more like hesitation, like she didn’t want to be going where she was going.

  Whatever it was, it lasted four seconds, then onward she went. By then I’d made it to the front of the building. I saw them through the all-glass exterior. They walked right through the lobby to the elevator bank, never looking at the directory. Wherever she was going, she’d been there before.

  I did glance at the directory when I got inside, only because it was next to the security board showing the progress of the elevators. The lights of the one they’d hopped into danced all the way to the top.

  The fifth floor, I found out a minute later, was a random collection of offices off a bland hallway. Potted plants at either end, safe paintings on the walls. Industrialized nice. I counted two doctors’ offices, two law offices, various businesses, a pair of restrooms. I could hear voices behind some of the doors, but none I could identify as Georgiana’s.

  There was a stairwell at one end. I waited inside, keeping the door open crack-wide enough to see the hall. Over the next five minutes office doors opened and closed, elevators dinged, people came and went. Busy place.

  I heard a noise below me. Someone on one of the lower floors was using the stairwell. I shut my door and waited, ready to move. No need. Whoever it was only traveled one flight of steps, but as the person was leaving the stairwell he or she sneezed, and whether it was the echo-distortion of the cement walls or whatever, for a second I thought somebody was shouting my name. Mc-SHANE. Made me realize: I’m way too tense.

  A door closed in the hallway. I peeked out, saw Georgiana and Marco coming from the other end of the corridor. Walki
ng this way, but turning their heads, glancing around like they were making sure nobody was watching. The fuck’re they up to?

  I ducked back in the stairwell and closed my door again, listening for whatever move they were going to make, the ding of the elevator maybe that would take them back down. Instead I heard a key in a lock, a door opening, Marco saying, “I’ll wait here.”

  Got it—the ladies’ room.

  A good two minutes went by. I heard the door open and shut. But only a moment later the elevator hit the floor and a woman and child got off. The kid—a boy from the sound of it—was complaining about something and his mother was telling him to keep it down. I could still make out Georgiana and Marco’s steps—they were going away from me—but they were hard to hear over the uproar. Then the mother and son went into one of the offices and all that was left was the two adult steps. They were clear enough for me to time them, follow them with my ears all the way to the end of the hallway, where they disappeared behind a closed door.

  The end of the hallway—the last door.

  I left the stairwell and walked my way down the hall. The nameplate on the last door held two simple words: Trident Manufacturing.

  It surprised me. A manufacturing company? What the hell was Georgiana Copely doing here? It struck me as an unusual destination for a blind psychic photographer.

  I moved back to the stairwell, took out my phone and went to school on Trident Manufacturing. Couple minutes of searching told me it was an umbrella title for a number of different companies. Majority owner, Monte Slater. And one of those companies—this was good—was called Trident Textiles. Textiles. A connection was beginning to grow.

  I narrowed the focus to Trident Textiles, and the more I saw, the better it got. Up came stories about Trident Textiles’ declining sales, its grim financial outlook. Then I found a motherlode of a story. Trident Textiles was involved in a $12 million lawsuit. Monte Slater and partners were the plaintiffs. The defendant? Material Witness Laboratories, owned by Wooly Cornell.

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  FRIDAY JUNE 15, 12:20 P.M.

  THE TESTING PROCESS

  “I always say,” Wooly said, “there but for the grace of God…goes Monte Slater.” He stuffed a handful of asiago cheese in his mouth. “Some people are homeless? He’s honeless. I can’t see that dumb cluck-fuck getting involved in anything like this.” He reached for more cheese.

  Genevieve went to whack his hand with her knife. She was dicing the asiago, getting ready to make a sauce for her chicken tetrazzini. “You keep eating like that, there’ll be nothing left to cook.”

  Crestfallen, he moved away from the counter. “What you saw, to my mind, it’s just this short of interesting. I just don’t think Monte Slater would be trying to kill me.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “He’s just not the type, for one. He’s the kind of person, he takes all his anger out on himself. Number two, his business tanking and all, he’s got enough troubles on his own.”

  “His troubles have anything to do with the lawsuit?”

  Wooly snorted. “The lawsuit—forget the lawsuit. It’s neither shit nor shat. I’ve been involved in many suits, both sides, and I can tell you this is nothing big. Believe me on this. I’ve got as many lawsuits going as I’ve got changes of underwear, and this is nothing.”

  “Wish you had a few more,” said Genevieve.

  “Yes, I heard your amusing little remark.”

  “What about Georgiana?” said Nickie. “Why’s she meeting with Slater?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wooly. “With his luck, maybe he needs a séance.”

  “I can’t buy it,” I said. “Two people who don’t like you—you don’t think they’re doubling up on you?”

  “I don’t know. That I don’t know.”

  He grabbed for another fistful of cheese to console himself.

  “Will you stop it!” said Genevieve. “”Get your fat ass out of my kitchen!”

  Nickie and I went with him to the living room, Wooly standing in front of Georgiana’s photo, giving it a long look.

  “I can believe her trying to off me. Her, absolutely. Not Monte.”

  “Tell me about the lawsuit,” I said, “meaningless as it is.”

  “What’s to tell? He came to me with some product, I tested it, it sucked.” He turned away from the photo. “Thing about Monte, he has no respect for the testing process. Doesn’t take it seriously. To him it’s just some unnecessary blockage, a fucking lark. But your test results, your whole reputation rests on your test results. That’s how you go out in the world. You gotta go out proclaiming the strength of your product, the dura— Wait, wait, out here, I wanna show you something.”

  He yanked us through the double Mormon Tabernacle doors and dragged us out to the weird living room set on the front lawn. The cast aluminum couch, ottoman and armchairs, the plugged-in floor lamps.

  “Now this,” he said, “look at this.” He plopped on the couch and pounded the mattresses at his sides. “This is fabric.”

  Nickie and I each took an armchair. “What is this stuff?” I said.

  “It’s the best material you’ll ever find. Or I ever found. We tested it once—it stood up to everything we threw at it. More than stood up to it. It’s the most durable fabric I ever came across.”

  “But why a living room outdoors?”

  “Oh I don’t know. It’s just something I wanted to do. I thought it would be cool.”

  “You ever use it?” said Nickie. “You ever sit out here?”

  “No, it’s just, you know, decoration. It’s just something to, I don’t know, spruce up the place.”

  Durable as the fabric might be, it wasn’t very comfortable. I got up, walked around the rest of the furniture. “Can you give me some details about the lawsuit?”

  “Details, sure. Like what?”

  “You tested Monte’s product.”

  “I tested it.”

  “It sucked.”

  “Big time.”

  “So he sued you.”

  “Well, no, not exactly. First he says to me, can I keep the results quiet? The answer is no—I can’t do shit like that. Then he offers me a bribe. Can I retest the stuff in a different way? With different results? The answer, again, is no. I can’t compromise the integrity of my quality checks. So I tell him that, no uncertain terms, and that’s when he files the suit. Claims my testing standards’re too high, they constitute unfair business practices, etc. etc.”

  “And this wouldn’t want to make him kill you?”

  “On the basis of the suit? No. It’s baseless and he knows it. You know what the most valuable thing about that lawsuit is? The paper clip it came with.”

  Nickie wasn’t getting it. “So why’s he asking for 12 million?”

  “Ah who the fuck knows?” Wooly stood up, stretched his back, circled around the couch. “Maybe he thinks I’ll settle, pay him off some just to get rid of him. You know, this is the trouble with Monte. He can’t accept that he fucked up. He still wants more. He wants more and more and more. Just like everybody fucking else these days—they all want more. They all want the old smoreeny.”

  I was standing in the middle of the setting, studying the floor lamps—the wires running across the lawn, thinking about the work that went into this lunacy—when I heard the car. Nothing unusual about traffic on the road. Two or three cars had already gone by while we were out here.

  What was unusual was hearing Nickie shout “Get down!” and me suddenly getting hit in the back by a flying tackle. A body landed on top of me as I did a face-first on the lawn and a sharp ping rang against the cast aluminum.

  This was followed by a whole blitzkrieg of noise—gunfire shattering the air, bits of dirt and grass exploding around us, more pings as bullets ricocheted off the furniture. I couldn’t breathe—all the oxygen had been burned out of the air.

  “Don’t move!” Nickie yelled, her voice vibrating through my back and into my chest.

  “I�
��m not fucking moving!” Wooly yelled back.

  I took a peek at the road, saw a green shape against the trees. The Ford Fusion, all splattered with mud now. The car was sitting in the road spitting fireflies out its window. The car was vomiting fireflies in the daylight. The driver’s face was dark, maybe from a ski mask.

  The barrage went on—four, five seconds, maybe an hour. Nickie rolled off me, pulled her Smith & Wesson and started returning fire. I looked back at Wooly. He was scrambling on all fours behind the couch. I worked the Glock out of my pants, and as bad as the noise was, it multiplied by 100 with three guns firing. There was nothing else in my head but the roar of war.

  It didn’t last long. The gunfire built to a quick pentacostal climax and then the Fusion took off. The car gave a little spin as it pulled away, its tires yelping like a dying dog.

  Genevieve ran out of the house, kitchen knife in her hand. “Wooly! Wooly!”

  “I can’t believe this!” Wooly was huffing and puffing as he hoisted himself up by the couch’s frame.

  “Tell me you’re all right, Wooly. Tell me!”

  His face was flowing with sweat and his body was shaking with shock. He could barely stand. But he could talk. “My own house! In front of my own fucking house this happens!”

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  Alex Tarkashian was squinting at his notes as if the sun reflecting off the pad was hurting his eyes. He didn’t look happy, though I don’t think it was the light that was bothering him.

  “You have nothing else to tell me? It was the same car?”

  “The same car,” said Wooly, the whole back of his shirt stuck to his wet body. “The same fucking Ford Fusion.”

  Nickie and I were standing off to the side, sipping the ice tea that Genevieve was handing out. Out on the road, Alex’s two pork-bellied cops were making a lazy examination of the crime scene.