Desperate Souls

by Gregory Lamberson

  Sitting in the bull pen on the fifth floor, Jake fed his story to a civilian typist who helped him fill out his police report.

  Good practice for my car insurance company, he thought.

  Then he cooled his heels for half an hour before Geoghegan took him into his office. The detective sat behind his desk, his back to the window, and Jake sat opposite him.

  “Enlighten me.”

  Pompous ass, Jake thought. “I’m a PI—”

  “I know who you are,” he said, making little effort to mask his contempt.

  I bet you do. You knew who I was the minute you laid eyes on me.

  “Big hero homicide cop drops two skells in a bar, then resigns the next day. Go figure.”

  “I had enough of killing,” Jake said.

  “You wanted a piece of the quiet life, eh?”

  “I want to make an honest living without dealing with any bureaucratic bullshit or departmental politics.”

  Geoghegan smiled. “The red tape was too much for you, huh?”

  “Some people like that shit, like pigs in swill. It wasn’t for me.”

  “So you think you’re better than the rest of us because you won’t eat shit?”

  Jake shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”

  “The way I hear it, you aren’t better than anybody.”

  Here it comes. “I never said I was.”

  But Geoghegan didn’t bring up the controversy that surrounded Jake’s resignation from the force. “You gonna tell me what the hell happened out there?”

  Jake took a breath before speaking. Don’t let him throw you off. “A client hired me to track down her grandson, who she thinks might be slinging over on Flatbush Avenue. I went looking for the kid but didn’t find him. I must have stumbled into the wrong neighborhood or something, because this black Escalade came out of nowhere, guns blazing. I got the hell out of there as fast as I could, but they followed me over the bridge.”

  “So you led them here?”

  “It seemed like the safest place I could reach.”

  “When you say you must have stumbled into the wrong neighborhood, did you get out of your vehicle?”

  Jake held the detective’s gaze. “Yes.”

  “How come?”

  Careful. He had to cop to getting out of the Malibu to explain its missing door. “Like I said, I was looking for the kid, but I didn’t see him. Then the Escalade came ripping around the corner and tried to mow me down. I dove into my car, and the Escalade took off my door.”

  “You fire your weapon?”

  Jake saw no point in lying. Ballistics would only screw him up. “Wouldn’t you? It was self-defense.”

  “You hit anyone?”

  “No. We were going too fast.”

  Geoghegan tore a sheet of paper from a pad and handed it to Jake with a pen. “Client’s name and the name of her grandson, with any relevant contact info.”

  Jake wrote down Carmen and Louis Rodriguez’s names, then took out his cell phone and located Carmen’s telephone number.

  Geoghegan looked at the information on the paper when Jake handed it back to him. “How do I know you didn’t just go over there looking to score some dope?”

  Jake stared at the detective. “I’m clean.”

  “I hear maybe you had a habit.”

  “That’s one story.”

  “And everyone knows how cocaine cops pay for their stash.”

  “That’s another story.”

  “Way I remember it, you were after the Cipher, and the Cipher killed your wife after you resigned. And what happened to the Cipher?” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, right—some unidentified vigilante managed to whack him without leaving any evidence. A real pro, who never had reason to strike again. We could use a guy like that now, what with all these layoffs.”

  Jake felt his jaw tightening. “My wife’s got nothing to do with what happened to me tonight.”

  “Now if the wife of a straight-up cop had been murdered and the scumbag who did it turned up dead, I’d say, ‘Good riddance’ and sleep well at night. But when I think about the Cipher buying it in his own apartment, for some reason I don’t feel so good. Something just doesn’t feel right about that.”

  Major Crimes Unit, Jake reminded himself. “Forgive me if I sound unconcerned about your feelings, but three men tried to kill me tonight, and I don’t know why.”

  The shit-eating grin on Geoghegan’s face widened. “How do you know there were three of them? PW Cassidy reports the vehicle had tinted windows.”

  Jake’s pulse quickened. Damn it! Why did I have to be such a wiseass? He’s right. “Because they pulled up beside me and lowered their windows to shoot, and I got a good look inside before they opened fire. What happened to them, anyway?”

  Geoghegan sat back in his chair. “They got away.”

  Jake actually felt relieved by the news. The last thing he wanted was to be connected to living dead hit men. “They circled the area and went back to Brooklyn.”

  “You seem to know their moves pretty well for an innocent bystander.”

  “I led those gangbangers to your doorstep. They’d have been crazy to stay in Manhattan.”

  “One could say the same thing about you, if you’re lying and they know who you are.”

  “They don’t.”

  “Good thing for you.” Geoghegan stood.

  “Am I free to go?”

  “Not just yet. Someone else wants to talk to you.”

  Now this is fucked up, Jake thought, sitting in the interview room. Who the hell wants to talk to me so bad that they kept me here an extra forty minutes already?

  He got his answer when the door opened and a figure from his past entered: Gary Brown from Narcotics, his former partner in SNAP. Jake hadn’t seen him since Sheryl’s funeral.

  Now this is a coincidence. Maybe there’s something to all this psychic hooey.

  “Hey, Jake,” Gary said, closing the interview room door.

  Jake looked his former partner up and down. The detective wore fashionable Italian slacks, a button-down shirt, and a designer tie. He also appeared to have aged ten years in the span of one. “Looks like you’re moving up in the world, Gary.”

  Gary sat down. “Eh. It’s good to be a detective, but I’m still in Narcotics. It’s a real shit hole down there, partner. I’d rather be where you’re sitting.”

  Jake looked around the interview room. “Really?”

  “Working for myself? Hell, yeah.”

  I thought you were working for yourself. Rumors had Gary and his partner, Frank Beck, working overtime for any drug lord looking for muscle. “What, and forego your pension?”

  “Maybe you’re right. I just get restless doing the same thing year in and year out. Hey, did you hear I’m working with your other ex-partner?”

  He’s feeling me out. “Edgar? No, I hadn’t heard. He’s a good man.”

  “Yeah, how about that? Two of your former colleagues pitching for the same team. It’s a small world. You should see the number who’s working with him now. Latin chick, real fine.”

  Now Jake had to play along, even if Gary knew better. “What are you guys working together on?”

  “Task force on these Machete Murders, only now they have us on Black Magic, too. No telling if anything will come of it. But that’s why I’m here now: gangbangers try to shoot up a citizen; the call goes out to the Task Force to decide whether or not to investigate. I’m on call, and when I saw your name, I just had to see what was doing. Weird, thinking of you as a civilian, pal. You’re still one of us at heart, always will be.”

  What, a dirty cop? Jake had witnessed Gary and Frank in action. They always knew who worked for whom on the street, and they always had their hands out. Jake had managed to steer clear of their operations, but once he’d joined Homicide and started using coke himself, he found himself resorting to their tactics to pay for his habit. In a way, Gary had been his mentor. “I don’t think I can give you much assistance.” Jake repeat
ed the story he had told Geoghegan and the civilian typist.

  Chuckling, Gary shook his head. “Come on. Who do you think you’re shitting? I’m onto you, brother. No way in hell Jake Helman is going to get chased by gangbangers from one borough to the next and not know why.”

  Jake’s gaze drifted to the two-way mirror opposite him.

  “There’s nobody there, and the recorder’s off. It’s just you and me in here, breaking bread.”

  “Like I told Geoghegan—”

  “Theodore? The man doesn’t know shit. And that’s what his opinion is worth. I know what time of day it is without looking at my watch. You know that. Do me a solid on this, and I’ll remember it.”

  Jake interlaced his fingers. “I got nothing to share with you, cousin.”

  Gary leaned closer, his eyes intense and jittery. “I need to deliver these cocksuckers.”

  Wired, Jake thought. “Sorry. I don’t know anything about these machete killings.”

  “Your client hired you to find her grandson, right? What gang does the kid run with? That’s a good place to start.”

  Jake maintained his innocent expression. “I don’t know that he is with a gang. His grandmother just suspects he’s slinging. He could be getting laid for all I know.”

  Gary relaxed his features from his mouth up. His jaw remained coke tight. “You’ll call me if you hear anything about this?”

  “Sure.”

  He reached into his pocket and tossed a card onto the table. “We could work this thing together on the side, just like old times. There could be something extra in it for each one of us.”

  “I’m not interested in collaring perps anymore. Those days are behind me.”

  Drumming his fingers on the table, Gary said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

  As Gary exited the interview room, Geoghegan walked in.

  “Am I good to go?” Jake said.

  “I’m afraid not.” The detective gestured to someone Jake could not see, and then a balding man in a crisp suit entered, briefcase in hand.

  FBI, Jake guessed.

  “When someone attempts to ram One PP, it raises eyebrows outside the department,” Geoghegan said in a mock sympathetic tone. “Allow me to introduce Agent Riley from Homeland Security.”

  Fuck me, Jake thought.

  “I’ll try not to keep you too late, Mr. Helman,” Riley said as he set his briefcase on the table and sat down.

  “That’s a relief,” Jake said in a deadpan voice.

  “The district attorney is sending an ADA over to take a statement, too,” Geoghegan said. Stepping outside the interview room, he closed the door.

  When they finally released him, Jake pretended to be afraid to go home because the gangbangers might still be out there, waiting for him. For all he knew, they really were. But he had another reason for coaxing a ride to his office in the backseat of the RPM, and as the squad car pulled out of Park Row, he stared at the reporters gathered outside. Camera strobes and video lights spotlighted the wreckage of his former car. He’d managed to keep his picture out of the paper, which was always a good thing.

  As the car drove uptown, the uniformed driver oblivious to what had occurred, Jake catalogued the night’s incidents. His would-be assassin’s soul had risen from his body. Did that mean it had been trapped inside the cadaver? He experienced a sick feeling of déjà vu, and yet this latest brush with the impossible seemed entirely different from those he had endured in the Tower and completely unrelated.

  When the PO dropped him off on Twenty-third Street and drove away, Jake cast his eyes upward at the imposing, self-illuminated structure that haunted his dreams. Unlocking the front glass door, he entered the lit lobby, unlocked the alarm box on the wall with a key, punched in his code, and locked the door from the inside. Bypassing the stairs this time, he took the elevator to the fourth floor. With his footsteps echoing in the hallway, he glanced over his shoulder as he approached his office door, spooked for the first time since he had moved in.

  I’m all alone, he thought. Except maybe for Laurel on the first floor. But he considered the storefront a separate building.

  Flicking on the overhead light in his office, he closed and locked the door. He entered the kitchenette, removed a Diet Coke from the miniature refrigerator, and entered his office. He popped the tab on the can, sipped the soda, then set the can down on his desk and stepped over to the immense safe in the far corner. The iron cube was two and a half feet by two and a half feet. Too large and heavy to move without a hydraulic lift, it came with the office and remained a permanent fixture. Jake had hired three different locksmiths to install three combination locks, with none of them knowing the other combinations.

  Crouching on one knee, he dialed the combinations and twisted the heavy brass levers. The safe door swung open with a metallic groan, and Jake gazed inside at the safe’s contents. On a shelf that divided the safe’s height in half, a DVD-R in a jewel case lay upon a laptop, which rested beside a file folder. Jake removed the jewel case and the laptop, then closed the safe door but left it unlocked. Then he sat behind his desk and affixed a fully charged battery pack to the laptop. Ignoring the flat-screen monitor on his desk, he inserted the DVD-R into the laptop.

  He did not have a wireless router for the laptop or an Internet hookup. The compact computer existed solely for the DVD-R. Jake made sure that no one could ever hack into this isolated system. He needed to ensure that the DVD-R’s contents were known only to him. When the disc loaded, he downloaded the program and waited.

  Afterlife, he thought.

  An animated globe rotated into view on the monitor. A DNA strand enveloped it. Then gleaming gold text filled the screen: Tower International—Building Better Life. Jake hadn’t seen these images since the week he spent working as Nicholas Tower’s director of security at the Tower. He had been too frightened to view the contents of the download again. When the animated introduction ended, a main page appeared. The table of contents was so long that it more resembled an index found in the back of a research book. Jake went straight to the search engine and typed in a single word: zombie.

  A moment later, a section of the dense file opened, one of several hundred reports Tower had commissioned on the supernatural during his quest for immortality. The names of four researchers appeared at the top of the report: Dr. Donna Bidel, Ramera Evans, Professor Blake Carlton, and Javier Soueza. Jake copied the names down on a notepad, then scrolled through the 112-page document, including photos, illustrations, a glossary, and a bibliography. Sipping his Diet Coke for an infusion of caffeine, he returned to the beginning of the section and read it straight through to the end.

  Zombies, or reanimated human corpses, exist in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief system of vodou, which depicts living people enslaved by powerful sorcerers. The word zombie entered English usage sometime in 1871. The beliefs that zombies eat human flesh and that they can be destroyed only by destroying their brains are cinematic devices created by George A. Romero and his co-screenwriter, John Russo, in the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and have no basis in true vodou. A more accurate portrayal of zombies appeared decades earlier in the 1932 film White Zombie, which starred Bela Lugosi as “Murder” Legendre, a mill owner with an undead labor force.

  Jake scanned a glossary of terms related to the research data.

  Bokor: a vodou sorcerer or sorceress who revives a dead person as an enslaved zonbi.

  Jumbie: West Indian for “ghost.”

  Nzambi: Kongo term meaning “the spirit of a dead person.”

  Nzúmbe: the Kimbundu ghost.

  Zonbi: Louisiana Creole or Haitian Creole; a person who has died and has been resurrected without the power of speech or free will.

  Zonbi astral: a human soul captured by a bokor to increase the bokor’s power.

  Jake continued reading into the night, digesting terms and dates and geographic locations related to zombies. Finally, he rubbed his eyes and uninstalled the program from the laptop’s ha
rd drive. Having processed the file’s information, he wondered if Tower had been taken for a fool by his research team. Although Jake had found the dozens of cases of modern zombies around the world interesting, nothing he read had persuaded him that the creatures existed. Still, the hair on the back of his neck had prickled at the mention of bokors capturing human souls for their own nefarious purposes.

  Soul catchers, Jake thought. The term alone sent an icy chill through his core.

  Then the lights went out.

  SEVEN

  A beam of light shot up behind Jake. It came from the high-intensity emergency flashlight that he kept plugged into the outlet behind his chair.

  Power’s out, he thought as he swiveled around and stood up. But he did not snatch the flashlight from the outlet. The blinds over the window to his right glowed from the city lights outside, and as he peeked through the slats, he saw lit windows in the buildings on either side of him. Only the power in this building had been cut.

  Three… two … one…

  The lights came on again as he expected, juiced by the emergency generator that he had recommended Eden, Inc. install in the basement. As he watched the security monitors on the far wall flare back to life, he unfastened his cell phone from his belt.

  When the phone rang in his hand, he answered it. “Jake Helman.” Scanning the security monitors, he studied each floor. No sign of intruders yet.

  “Mr. Helman, this is Central Alarm Station. What is your—?”

  “Evolution.” With his password given, he added, “I’m on-site. There’s nothing to worry about. Thank you.” He powered down the laptop.

  “Have a good night, sir.”

  “You, too.” Seizing the laptop in both hands, he ran it over to the safe, set it on its designated shelf, closed the iron door, and spun the combination dials.

  His mind raced. The power lines had been cut in the back of the building, which was where the intruders would have to break in. Even as he formulated this scenario, he saw on one monitor the black metal door in the rear of the lobby swing open and a figure lumber forward: tall, shaved head, Chinese. His eyes resembled black pits. Three men followed him. One appeared Hispanic, one African American, and one Caucasian.