Secret Dead Men

by Duane Swierczynski

  Brad pulled his drink to his lips and took a sharp, joyless swallow. I knew I had to snap him out of this mood. Fast.

  “Do you remember what radio station was playing?”

  “Why is that important?”

  “It’s not,” I said. “Just another detail.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “Well, this song was playing, and Alison was dancing around, and all of a sudden there was a knock at the door. This is the moment I’ve been playing over and over in my head these last couple of days. Why didn’t I think anything of that knock? After all, I was a government witness, hiding out hundreds of miles from home so that I could stay alive long enough to testify at a federal trial. Why did I think that knock was ordinary, like mail being delivered or the phone ringing?”

  I had no reply for Brad. I was about to mumble something stupid when he saved me the trouble.

  “I’ll tell you why. Because Alison and I weren’t raised that way! We didn’t have it beaten into our heads from age five that you couldn’t trust people! That you wouldn’t always have somebody around to protect you, even when they said they were going to! So, for the briefest of moments, I forgot where we were, and I thought nothing of letting Alison answer the door. I went back to a line in my text and started reading again. No, I’ll tell what I had really thought: Thank God for the door. Now I can get back to work. Can you believe it? Do you know the selfishness and arrogance it requires to produce such a thought?”

  I looked down into my glass.

  “Let me tell you—it takes a lot. I was so self-absorbed that it took a full couple of seconds for reality to kick back in, for me to realize where we both were, and what we were doing here, and by then, it was too late. Alison had opened the door. And somebody stuck a shotgun in her face.”

  Brad was filled with a combination of self-loathing and anger I’d never seen before, even in the most self-pitying bastards I’ve encountered. It was as if he wanted to nuke the Earth, then save one last bomb for himself to detonate inside his own broken heart. I could allow Brad to finish his own story here, but it took a while for me to drag it out of him, and I’d hate for anybody to wade through all his psychodrama just to glean a few basic facts. (I know I did.) I wished I could have tapped his memory of the murders and played it back in private, so Brad wouldn’t be forced to relive it. However, this was not part of the soul-collection deal.

  According to Brad, here is what happened:

  Alison opened the front door the very second Brad realized it was a mistake. The Killer pushed a shotgun into her face, and Brad remembers an awful second or two passing before anything happened. It seemed as if the Killer hadn’t planned to open the door and start shooting. Perhaps he’d wanted to bargain with Brad, or at least make him plead for his life. Perhaps he was shocked somebody had answered the door.

  Once the moment of confusion passed, however the Killer fired his gun, and Alison’s throat exploded. Brad watched her step back, her knees buckle, her body give out. He was paralyzed. “None of the images held any meaning,” he said. Fortunately his paralysis broke, because the killer cocked the gun and swung it in Brad’s direction. Through dumb luck, Brad slid from his desk chair to the ground just as a bullet sped over his head and blew out a large portion of the wall behind him. Brad charged the Killer.

  The Killer tried to reload, but was unable to. So he went for a bunt—grabbing the gun with both hands to smash it into Brad’s charging body. They collided. Brad spun back into his own desk, collapsing it, papers and textbooks flying willy-nilly around him. He landed on his back. But the Killer was thrown off his feet, too, which probably saved Brad’s life—there was no time to reload the rifle.

  Brad heaved forward again, as if he were doing a sit-up, and lunged for the Killer’s legs as he stood up again. The Killer went down, but hoisted a punch in Brad’s direction; the punch crushed nose cartilage. Brad returned the favor once (connecting with the Killer’s mouth), twice (bony forehead), and a third time (left ear) before the Killer swung the base of the rifle up into Brad’s mouth. Again, Brad staggered and fell on his back. He spat blood and jumped up instantaneously. Needless to say, Brad was angry. And when it comes down to it, the man whose blood is flooded with adrenaline is going to have the edge. The Killer was only in it for the money—otherwise, he wouldn’t have allowed Brad any kind of reprisal. Either that, or he was a shitty assassin.

  I made some preliminary Notes on the Killer: Inexperienced, yet solid. Trained in the basic areas. Young.

  Brad hoisted the Killer up by his shirt and thrust his entire weight against the nearest wall; it was a spectacular collision, to hear Brad tell it. He put his entire shoulder into it. To follow it up, he pounded the Killer’s body into walls throughout the living room, then the kitchen. Anytime the Killer tried to push back, Brad used his momentum against him, and flip him into, say, a glass-fronted cabinet, or a Formica countertop. (Which would account for all of the blood-streaked wood and glass found at the crime scene.)

  That said, I’m not sure this was the lopsided battle Brad painted it to be. Consider the facts: Brad Larsen is a college professor, and our Killer is a piece of Las Vegas muscle. Even the weakest piece of Vegas meat is still pretty damn tough. True, Brad had the adrenaline rush of watching his wife die. Still, I can’t believe Mr. College Boy turned into Muhammad Ali, wiping his kitchen up with the Killer. I have to believe the struggle was dead even, until it reached the back deck.

  The back deck is where everything fell apart. As I understand it, the Killer wound up on the ground, and was reaching for a small pistol tucked in the back of his trousers. (Probably for emergencies … and hey, this qualified.) Brad saw him reaching for it, however, and kicked the gun out of his hand quicker than you could say, “Die, you scummy bastard.”

  Gun went airborne; clattered to the wooden slats. Brad nabbed it. Quoted some poetry at the Killer.

  “It was the last thing I’d read before watching Alison die,” Brad told me. “All I could think of through each punch, jab and kick, were the words: Mark but this flea. It kept me alive.”

  Then, Brad shot the Killer in the kneecap.

  “Right then, I knew what I was going to do,” Brad told me. “I was going to take this pistol, and shoot one bodypart at a time. I was going to make this man die slowly, and screaming, in inverse proportion to the time it took Alison to die. I wanted him to reflect on what he had done, and let the lesson burn into his soul before he left this world. First, the kneecap—I’d read somewhere that rupturing the knee hurts like hell itself, but is non-fatal. Then a wrist. Then, maybe an ankle. A shoulder. The other kneecap.

  Brad never got to shooting the wrist, because behind him—out of nowhere—came a blinding pain in his back, as if God himself had decided to stick a cocktail toothpick through his entire body. Brad dropped the pistol.

  He hurled his body around, only to receive a similar shock to his upper chest, right above his heart. Is this a heart attack from the stress of it all? he’d thought. Am I being struck down before I can completely devolve into an animal?

  Not quite. Brad’s eyes managed to focus, and he realized somebody was stabbing him.

  He lifted his left arm to shield another blow, but the knife plunged right through his forearm. The blade lingered there, caught between the opposing forces of Brad attempts to dislodge it and the Wielder’s attempts to draw it back. Brad saw his attacker: a young woman, with red lips. That’s all he saw. Call her Killer Number Two.

  The knife ripped free and slid back into Brad’s left shoulder. Then out again and across his chest, bisecting his right nipple. Down, across three of his fingers.

  At this point, Brad did what any sane person would do: retreated. His legs, still fully operational, shuffled him back, out of harm’s way, until he tripped over a wooden slat that was a fraction of an inch higher than its companions and crash-landed on his ass. The knife was on him again, pushing into his stomach. Brad rolled, an
d started to crawl forward. Sharp blows hit him in the back, the fury and power intensifying with each strike. Killer Number Two was trying to nail him to the floor.

  Brad’s salvation: the wooden railing, three feet away. He crawled for it, despite repeated blows. His hand reached the middle rung, and grabbed it tight. He looked behind him and saw Killer Number One crawling on the floor, too. Crawling for the gun Brad had dropped.

  Brad reached for the top rung, wrapped his fingers around it, and was wracked with the worst pain he’d ever felt in his life. It was as if God had pushed the base of his spinal cord into a food processor. He turned his head, and saw the knife buried to the hilt in his right shoulder. Killer Number Two was walking away.

  Brad was able to turn his head once more, and saw Killer Number Two bending over to grab the gun Killer Number One was so desperate to reach. He faced forward again and coughed; felt blood dribble from his lips. He placed both hands on the top rung and somehow managed to pull himself up, resting his full bodyweight on the railing. He rolled around to face his tormentor.

  Killer Number Two had the gun. She was an attractive blonde. Full, red lips, taut face, upturned nose. That’s all he registered before…

  “Cool your tool, fool,” she said, then shot him in the chest.

  “Are you sure?” I asked Brad.

  “That’s what she said.”

  Notes on Killer Number Two: Aggressive female. Young. Very young.

  With those four words, Brad Larsen took a bullet in the head and flipped over the railing, landing in the muddy creek.

  Well, not quite in the creek. But close enough.

  His body flopped in the wet, packed mud. He waited to die, listening to Killer Number Two drag the whining, complaining body of Killer Number One back into the house. Then all was quiet. Leaves in the trees rustled, water gurgled, the occasional vehicle passed by, motor whirring off in the distance.

  Brad tried to crawl to solid ground, but the slow, forceful flow of the creek pushed him further and further downstream. In retrospect, the flowing waters probably kept him alive longer. He spent the majority of the time flailing around, hovering between consciousness and oblivion, wondering about Alison.

  It had to be a special kind of hell. I can only imagine what it would be like to lie there, cut to death, unable to breathe without pain, let alone able to stand up and go back up to the house to find out what had happened. It gave me the chills.

  In time, Brad gave up the ghost. He wandered about the site for a while, lost. He saw his dead wife in the front room of the witness protection house … but he couldn’t find her soul anywhere. He wandered by to his dead body. He cried, then wandered some more. And about 16 hours later, I arrived at his side.

  “So,” he said, lighting a Brain cigarette. “Now you know what kind of monsters you’re looking for, and what you have to do when you find them.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Put them through the exact same agony Alison and I had to live through.”

  “Not to be technical, but both of you are dead.”

  “Ah,” Brad said, smiling for the first time since we’d met. “Now you’re starting to see the picture.”

  Seven

  A New Case

  So that was the deal. No Association skinny until Brad and Alison Larsen’s killers were located, and Brad got the opportunity for a little payback.

  Reasoning with him—explaining that crushing the Association was by extension punishing his executioners—wasn’t going to ease his suffering one bit. Brad wanted me to deliver the assassins’ severed heads on a drink tray, cups of their blood in drinking glasses nearby.

  In other words, now I had a bigger workload than ever.

  Of course, if the roles were reversed, I’m sure I would demand the same thing. God knows what kind of punishment he saw inflicted upon his wife’s body by those kids. I only saw the aftershocks—blood stains on a piece of ratty carpet. Maybe that’s what made it easier to agree to this whole thing.

  I’d been running East on reflex. At the moment, it’d seemed like Las Vegas would be first place the Feds would be crawling around. But Brad insisted we head back. No doubt his killers had driven out to Illinois, done the deed, then headed back to collect the bounty. And I couldn’t disagree with his logic. It was all so damned reasonable it made me want to vomit.

  So I journeyed back west. Whoever the Association had sent to do the deed most likely lived in Vegas, and now that the bodies were stacked up, it was time to head home and collect the reward. Somewhere, I would find two killers living it up. And once I found them, it would be the beginning of the end. For the first time in years—perhaps since Robert first collected me—I felt the warm vibe of optimism.

  I drove through the night, routinely looking at my new face—Brad Larsen’s face—in the rear view mirror. I am going to find your killers, I told it. And I meant it.

  Of course, I was being an idiot.

  HENDERSON, NEVADA

  EIGHT MONTHS LATER

  “Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.”

  —TIMOTHY LEARY

  Eight

  Soul Patrol

  It was a slow night in Tom’s Holiday, a bar for the wayward souls at the Brain Hotel. Old Tom had given up 80 percent of his living space to create the joint. He was content to sleep in a small room in the back on a waterbed-style single bed with only a transistor radio and a small collection of Ian Fleming novels he’d once read. Tom’s Holiday had daily specials, a decent selection of Brain pub food, and a jukebox containing every song he’d ever heard. It stopped around 1970, but that didn’t bother any of the patrons—only Old Tom. He was forever asking me about new music, urging me to listen to the radio in the real world more often.

  “Ya got any new Beatles?” he’d ask.

  “Sorry,” I’d reply. “I don’t think they’re getting back together any time soon. Want me to listen to some Wings? They’re on tour this year.”

  “Ah, that garbage. Don’t bother. What’s Hendrix doin’?”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him the news about that one.

  Old Tom was one of my first soul collections. He’d been a chef and bartender at a number of casinos, then worked his way up to—then out of—a prime bartending gig at a crooked casino. One ill-conceived wisecrack, and that was it. Some thug made him chug a cocktail of liquid drain cleaner. I’d picked him up thinking he’d know a shitload of management detail; turns out, all he knew was how to mix a mean French martini.

  Over in the corner, a group of souls—Old Tom, Doug, and the Brain hooker, Genevieve—were watching an episode of The Bionic Woman I’d seen earlier in the week. I was lazing over a tall glass of draft Brain beer, trying to forget everything for a few moments. You spend enough time with a body of information and after a while you start to lose perspective. You start to believe the information is devoid of meaning. You forget why you’re looking at the information. You question your role as a gatherer of information. And that’s when your world really turns into a pile of shit.

  So there I was, taking a mental health break, when Brad walked in.

  “Hard at work?”

  I looked up and smiled. “Collecting my thoughts.”

  “What’s to collect? They’re all in those filing cabinets of yours, aren’t they?”

  Brad was referring to the cabinets in my office. As I’ve mentioned, all that I observed in the real world was instantly transcribed to sheets of paper. Well, not instantly—I had to want it to be recorded, but it was fairly easy, so I kept everything recorded just in case. Soon my office filled up with filing cabinets. I started putting them in other rooms on the floor, and eventually the entire 2nd floor became a massive filing system of the past six years.

  “It’s not that easy,” I explained. “The names of your killers could be printed on any one of those pages. They’re probably in file #4,759, page 312. You want to start skimming pages?”

  “It’s been what … e
ight months, best as I can tell? How far along are you?”

  “Very close. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “I’ve heard that before, in eight million variations.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You know what I want.”

  True enough, I did. And as long as I was in a truthful mood, I could admit to myself I was nowhere near catching Brad Larsen’s killers.

  Robert taught me that you can’t count too much on the souls you collect. “The sad truth is,” he told me, “90 percent of ‘em you never want to see again.”

  This was especially true now. Over the past eight months I’d collected five additional souls, which—including myself—brought the Brain Hotel total up to 13. Three of the newcomers were useless.

  Soul #9 was Mort, an accountant who’d claimed he kept books for “organized crime figures,” offered to show his books to the cops, but died of a heart attack a few days later. He was a tough collection. Had all sorts of ideas about the afterlife, being Catholic and all. Association info? Nada. “All I did was crunch the numbers,” he said. “Honest. Now you gonna explain to me why I don’t see no Saint Peter?”

  George, former aide to a corrupt Henderson councilman, was soul #10. I collected him thinking I’d learn all sorts of insider goodies about local corruption. But once inside the Brain Hotel, George refused to speak. All he did was oil-paint Revolutionary War scenes. And he couldn’t even get the historical details right—many of the British Redcoats wore Timex wristwatches. He also sang drinking songs to himself, usually loaded on a bottle of Brain gin he’d cooked up in his room. The only Association info he supplied came in the form of parody folk ballads he played on his Brain guitar: