Secret Dead Men

by Duane Swierczynski

  Or, to be technical about it, he threw a fist into the part of my soul that equated with the human stomach. I buckled over for a moment, then tossed a fist back into the part of him equated with the human nose.

  It snapped, and spurted out the soul equivalent of blood.

  I jumped to my feet. Brad was snarling like an angry dog. “Bastard! You don’t know when you’re finished, do you?”

  “Nope,” I said, then dove through the lobby doors.

  I woke up in the real world.

  Unfortunately, in the real world I was lying on a collapsed table, soaked in Stoli vodka. Susannah and Amy/Alison were both holding one of my hands, rubbing and tapping as if to snap me out of it.

  A couple of confused-looking men in black tie—presumably, representatives of the Stoli company—stood behind them, no doubt checking the damage to their booth.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, struggling to my feet. Both women helped me up. “Very, very sorry. Susannah, will you pardon me for a moment?”

  “What’s happening, Paul?” she asked, touching my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine, fine. Just need a second to myself.” I stumbled forward and took Amy/Alison’s arm. “Follow me,” I whispered. I felt like I was in some absurd sitcom double-date scenario. Torn between two lovers.

  We walked to the back of the hall—the only clear space I could find. On the way, however, I took care of some urgent business. For the first time, I ejected a human soul out into an inanimate object in the real world.

  I sent Brad Larsen’s soul into the spinning corpse of a roasted pig mounted on a metal spit. I’m not sure what company had sponsored that.

  “Alison, there are many things I need to tell you.” I was trying like hell to sound like Brad. I figured this was no time to tell Alison her husband’s soul was stuck inside a roasted pig.

  “Brad, I’m confused. All I hear are voices…”

  “Shhh. I know.” I grabbed her and held her close to me.

  “You gotta hang on for me. I have to go and do something, then I’ll be right back to take you away from here.”

  “What do you have to do?”

  I wasn’t about to tell her the truth: I had to take my ex-client outside, kill her, then absorb her soul for later interrogation. Instead I told her, “Nothing important.”

  Alison looked like a cat trapped in a corner. “I don’t know any of these people. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Here.” I reached around to the table behind her and snatched up a tiny portion of a cheesteak, skewered on a plastic toothpick. “Have something to eat. There’s plenty of free food here.” I wondered: Did robots eat? Then I remembered her attacking her burritos with gusto on our date at Casa Tequila a couple of nights ago. God, how long ago that seemed.

  “Okay,” she said, taking the sandwich and sinking her teeth into it. I was disturbed how different she seemed now—like a compliant child. I promised myself I would sort everything out for her when this was over. I owed her that.

  I needed a moment to think about the best way to kill Susannah. This party was not the ideal place, but enough was enough. I had to do it now. Absorb her soul, get whatever info I could out of her, then head west. If I could pick up a beat on the ever-elusive Ray Loogan, great. I’d kill him, too. Either way, I was certainly going to force Brad Larsen to spill whatever beans he had left. The gig was over.

  The best way to think straight, if you’re a guy, is to take a piss. Following a few taped paper signs with black arrows, I stumbled into an ornate men’s room with too many stalls to count. I walked along a long mirror above the row of sinks. I told myself the key was to keep it simple, basic. Maybe invite her outside for a breath of fresh air, then slit her throat? No, no, too much mess. Strangulation? Always an iffy proposition. Although I was steeped up to my eyeballs in death, I had amazingly little experience with murder. This, technically, would be my first.

  I chose a urinal near the end. I started into my eyes in the steel piping. This wasn’t murder, though. Susannah Winston—or Lana Lewalski, or Lulu Lakawana, or whatever the hell her real name was—would live on in the Brain Hotel. I could give her a better life than any adulterous lawyer could. Hell, if I could find Paul’s soul, the two of them would make a happy couple.

  My self-justifications were interrupted when the stall door opened behind me. Before I could stop the stream of piss a hunk of metal was pressed to the back of my head.

  “Hello, Paul.”

  “Uh, hello,” I said. “Leah, isn’t it?”

  “Very funny. You and the slut are going to die tonight.”

  “I see.”

  “You had to fuck with your only lifeline, didn’t you? With me, you had a chance. Ray wanted to kill you both from the word go.”

  “Oddly enough, Leah, I wish you’d listened to Ray.”

  That did it. Leah threw up an arm and smashed it into my face, pinning my head against the clammy tile wall. The pistol pressed into the back of my neck.

  “Stop fucking around with me,” she hissed.

  I closed my eyes and sighed.

  Big mistake.

  Without warning, I found myself standing in the Brain Hotel lobby. The Ghost of Fieldman was standing there, holding his metal gizmos. “It is imperative you leave this situation to me, Collective.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “No raving psychotics allowed.” I stormed off toward the lobby doors and walked through them. I walked smack into a brick wall. My brick wall.

  “Do keep trying,” Fieldman said. “Try until you crack your spectral head.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “You’ve lost control,” Fieldman said. He was suddenly standing right behind me. “Stop fighting it.”

  To accent the “it,” Fieldman shoved the metal gizmo deep into my spectral body. I felt a white heat wash over me. My Brain limbs turned to jelly, and I fell to the carpet, at which point the gizmo tunneled through my chest and locked into the carpet. I tried to sit up, but it hurt so bad I didn’t try again. I could barely breathe—or at least, perform the soul-equivalent of breathing—without spasms of pain.

  The Ghost of Fieldman smiled at me, waved, then faded back into reality. As usual, without going through the lobby doors. Or saying what a goose he was.

  But this time Fieldman did something new.

  I watched, impaled to the lobby floor, as Fieldman resumed control of my body. Leah was looking down at my body on the bathroom floor, directly in front of the urinals. I must have collapsed when Fieldman yanked me back inside.

  Get up, she commanded, nudging Fieldman’s/our chest with her gun. C’mon, I didn’t hit you that hard.

  My pleasure, Fieldman said. Could you give me a hand?

  To my surprise, she did. She kept the gun trained on him the entire time, though.

  Fieldman brushed the wrinkles out of his/our suit, and adjusted the tie. I understand you and Mr. Loogan wish to kill us? Excellent. In fact, I’ll even supply you with the address where we’ll be staying this evening. The only thing I ask is that you wait a couple of hours, which will give me time to call my insurance company and put a few things in order. Then I’m all yours. Please do stop over. Shoot me in the head. Shoot Ms. Winston in the head. Shoot everyone in the head, if you please.

  You, Leah said, are still fucking with me?

  No, Fieldman said, then whipped out his fist and smashed Leah in the jaw. She stumbled back. Fieldman punched her again, then smacked the gun out of her hand and used his forearm to bulldoze her back into the stall she’d originally popped out of. I watched as her head connected with porcelain. She was out.

  I gave that up long, long ago, Ms. Farrell.

  Fieldman took a Magic Marker out of his suit pocket. He scratched out an address on a paper towel—the infamous 473 Winding Way—then balled it and gently tucked it down the front of Leah’s dress.

  He seemed to paused for a moment, then applied the marker to Leah’s forehead. On it he wrote: BRING A DATE.

&nbs
p; On the lobby screen, I watched Fieldman walk back out into the party, squeezing past hundreds of people shoveling food into their faces. No matter that they were all rich enough to sit at home and have a hundred Philly cheeseteaks delivered via limo without a second thought. The idea of hogging free food was too good to pass up.

  Fieldman walked past the roasted pig, then paused. Nuts, I thought. He was collecting Brad again. True enough, within seconds, Brad appeared back in lobby. He scowled at me, then started to laugh.

  “You’re lucky a large percentage of guests at the party don’t eat swine.”

  “I should have dumped your soul in a keg of beer,” I said.

  “Don’t go giving me any ideas, toilet-face.” Brad walked over to the lobby doors, then paused to turn. “Let me send a friend of yours back to keep you company.”

  As Brad walked through the doors, the Ghost of Fieldman materialized next to my pinned spectral body. “That was exciting!”

  He started to pace around me, looking at the gizmo lodged in my chest. “I had no idea of the machine’s adaptability. Tell me—to what extent does your soul feel the paralysis?”

  “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you how much this goddamn thing hurts if you tell me what Brad is planning.”

  “This is quite amazing,” Fieldman said, then touched the gizmo. “It was never intended to anchor a soul—only push it, like a cattle prod. Can you move your arms?”

  I responded by flipping him the bird.

  “That would be an affirmative.” Fieldman stood up. He folded his arms and looked down at me with mock pity on his face. “You know, I could tell you more than what Brad is planning to do. I could tell you what Brad is going to do. I could tell you how you’re going to die. I could tell you who’s going to be president in the year 2020.”

  “Because you exist out of time,” I said.

  “The past, the present, the future … I see all dimensions at once.”

  “So,” I said. “Did you see me dumping Brad’s ass into the roast pig?”

  Fieldman didn’t have anything to say that. That would be in the negative, I thought. “Okay, I give up. What is Brad going to do?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Collective. For you, this story is coming to a close.”

  “Then read me the last chapter.”

  “In less than twelve hours, you will undergo a profound and lasting change. You will question your immediate past, and by extension, your entire life. Everyone you know will be dead, or speeding away from you. You’ll be covered in blood. You’ll be trapped in a dead body. Your investigation will be over. Everything will be different.”

  “Couldn’t you throw in a nuclear war or something, just for kicks?”

  The Ghost of Fieldman laughed. “If you only knew.”

  I didn’t like how this was going. The fact that I had a hunk of metal shoved where my astral perception of lungs should be didn’t make me feel better, either. I decided to pick Fieldman’s warped brain to see what angle he was working. After all, Buddha or not, he started out as an ordinary—well, almost ordinary—human being. There had to be something he wanted, enlightened or not.

  “Where will you be in 12 hours?” I asked.

  “Eating a luxurious breakfast with a breathtakingly beautiful woman, lounging over the morning paper. The meal will be soft-boiled eggs, with fresh croissants and six tiny jars of the freshest fruit preserves available. It will be the finest meal I’ve ever had. And then the new phase begins, and the woman and I will proceed to save the planet Earth from imminent destruction.”

  Good Lord. Did I actually think I could reason with a person so obviously insane? There was nothing he wanted, except to take me to the nut-hatch with him. My only option was to pass the time listening to Fieldman ooze psychotic verbal diarrhea until Brad returned. What would I do then? No idea. But I figured my chances had to be better with Brad. He might be a homicidal maniac hell-bent on avenging his dead wife, but he was still a reasonable human being.

  Fieldman’s attention had turned back to the reality on the lobby screen. “You might want to watch this, Collective,” he said. “This is going to be wonderful.”

  The worst part: Fieldman was right.

  Brad, in our body, had finally spied Susannah and walked over to her. She smiled and made a tiny wave. What was Brad planning to do? Cut her open right here in the middle of the party?

  “I was wondering where you went,” Susannah said. “What am I paying you for, anyway?” But Brad didn’t say a word. He reached out and clamped his hands down on her hips. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  Brad cleared his throat. “I want to dance with you.”

  “Right now? There’s nobody else dancing.”

  “There will be. There’ll be plenty of dancing.”

  As if on cue—and come to think of it, it probably was—the freebie Big Band started to play the opening bars of “The Air That I Breathe.” Oh no, I thought. I searched the screen for a sign of Alison, but she was nowhere in sight. What the hell was Brad doing? Trying to drive his own wife nuts?

  “This next one’s a request,” said the band leader through a crackling, tinny mike. “With love, to Ray and Lana, from Brad and Alison.”

  Oh boy.

  Brad grabbed Susannah and pulled her into a bear hug. Her face practically bounced off the screen in the hotel lobby. She looked confused. Maybe she was trying to figure out why someone had spoken the names “Ray and Lana” out loud. Maybe she wondering why her bodyguard was suddenly pawing at her.

  “What are you doing, Paul?”

  Brad didn’t say a word. He forced her to rock back and forth in an awful parody of a slow dance.

  “Paul, say something.”

  “I’m remembering this beautiful song.”

  “Yeah,” she said, nervously. “It’s nice. But it doesn’t explain why you’re touching me like this.”

  “Do you remember the last time you heard this?”

  “Not really.”

  “I do, Susannah.” Brad’s hands slid up and locked onto her forearms. “Lana. Susannah. Whatever your fucking name is.”

  Susannah’s eyes went wide.

  “The last time I heard this song,” Brad continued, “I was in Woody Creek, Illinois. It had started playing on the radio, and I turned around to watch my wife blown away with a shotgun.”

  “Ohjesusgod,” Susannah whispered, stark terror blossoming in her eyes.

  “The last time I heard this song, I was beating the shit out of the guy who killed my wife, and I’d almost killed him when somebody stabbed me from behind.”

  Susannah’s head started to shake.

  “The last time I heard this inane fucking song, you took a stiletto and stabbed me in the back, and then stabbed me again in the chest, and in the arm, and in my ribs…” Brad shook her arms with every body part mentioned.

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no…”

  “And now I’m going to repay the favor, Lana.”

  Brad released her arms. Susannah was no dummy. She spun and ran away, pushing through the crowd toward the front of the Museum. Nearly everyone was staring at Brad, probably wondering what he’d done to drive that pretty young girl away. I’m glad I didn’t have to explain it to them.

  “Absolute genius,” Fieldman said. “Better than he’d described it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “She got away.”

  “Try to keep up, Collective. Brad can’t kill the woman here. He never intended to. You arriving with his wife in tow may have confused things for a moment, but we’ve recovered splendidly. Things are back on schedule. We’ve been planning this for too long to have it go awry.”

  “How long, exactly?”

  “Oh,” Fieldman said. “A little over eight months.”

  “That isn’t possible. You only died a month ago. Remember? Nevada? Flaming Datsun? Pan-Fried Fieldman?”

  “Collective, you continue to ignore the truth: I exist out of time. Once I returned to be with yo
u, it was as if I had been with you all along.”

  The Gods must have taken pity upon my poor soul and showered enlightenment down upon me, because in instant I understood what Fieldman was talking about. Memories in my own head now seemed elastic, gelatin, pliable. What had gone on for those eight months? I had no idea. They were no longer my own months. They were my Fieldman months. They were supple as a dream and painful as reality.

  “You and Brad were plotting this sicko revenge thing the whole time,” I mumbled. “Right under my nose.”

  “Sometimes even using your nose. Along with the rest of your physical body. Remember the flu you had back in February? Knocked you out? I did that. Gave us use of your body for weeks. You still believe it was a matter of coincidence the Brown Agency assigned you this case?”

  “But … why?”

  Fieldman saw that I was still confused. “Oh, Collective! To lay the trap! And it’s working. She’s walking right into it. No chance she’ll go back to her hotel apartment—not after her bodyguard—who not only has the address but a set of keys—just threatened to kill her. Nor does she have anyplace else to go … except 473 Winding Way.”

  Something clicked. “Wait. That’s…”

  “That, dear Collective is the same address I scribbled on a paper towel and stuffed between the breasts of Ms. Farrell. Do I have to explain everything to you?”

  “I think so.”

  Fieldman laughed. “Of course I have to explain it to you, because you haven’t been there yet, but you will be. 473 Winding Way is Susannah Winston’s hideaway. Richard gave her the keys in case of an emergency. That’s where she’ll run.”

  And that’s where Alison was going to run. And now, Leah Farrell. And undoubtedly, Ray Loogan. A Woody Creek reunion. I was forced to agree with Buddha. It had to admit it was brilliant, from a vengeance-is-mine point of view.

  Up on the screen: Brad trying to make his way through the crowd. Along a few of the more popular tables, nobody was budging. Standing in line for twenty minutes for a free Dixie Cup full of booze had the Philadelphia socialites returning to their baser instincts. They weren’t letting anybody through. Finally, after making his way around the long way, Brad found Alison. She had been standing in a corner, eating Jell-O from a cup with a plastic spoon. “Alison.”