Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

Written by Laird Long

  Illustrated by Mike Rooth

  Dugan Growser was the last guy I wanted to see in my office, since I'd been haunting him at home for the last month. Sure, it was a crummy office in a crummy section of town, but even it had its standards.

  "You gotta find somethin' for me, McCaffrey!" the greasy-haired, skinny little runt squealed, shoving the door right through me and dropping into a chair, as uninvited as demonic possession. He dug a hairy little hand into the box of cigars I keep on my battered desk, scarfed a mittful, knowing full well I had no use for them anymore.

  I cursed him like I'd been cursing him every night for the last thirty. And the effect was the usual—zip. "What's gone missing, Growser—your will to live maybe, I hope?"

  "My soul!" he bleated, not altogether correcting me. He shoved his three-fingered hand through his black hair and shuddered, his pointy face swimming in sweat. "You gotta find my soul, McCaffrey!"

  "Have you tried jazz?" I said, floating over my desk.

  He didn't look amused. "No, no! I don't mean I lost it or nuthin'. I mean someone stole it!"

  "How would a guy like you even know it was missing?" I asked, watching him rattle like teeth in a hockey player, enjoying myself.

  Growser grinned a crooked grin, regaining some of his scummy composure. "Okay, okay, we've had our differences, sure, McCaffrey. But—"

  "Differences!?" I shrieked (something I'd been doing a lot of lately; seemed to come with the ghostly territory). "You killed me, remember? Turned me into the only dick in this town with a clear conscience—literally!"

  Growser planted one of my cigars in his kisser. "That was an accident, McCaffrey. No hard feelin's. How was I s'posed to know the slugs I pumped in Fish Manson were gonna chew through him an' eat into you?"

  "You blast away with a .44, in the middle of a crowded street, and you don't think maybe there's going to be some collateral damage! Even you're not that dumb, Growser."

  He shrugged his bony shoulders, wiped his pointed nose with a yellowed digit. "What can I say? The opportunity just sorta came up. I couldn't let it pass. Anyway, that's yesterday's news. You gonna help me or not?"

  "Not!" I shrieked.

  Growser set fire to the stogie, puffed on it, as calm and deadly now as an oil slick. "How'd you like it if I ratted you out to the Feds—told 'em you're turnin' down cases?"

  I clenched my fists, my fingers doubling back on themselves. The reason I was still around, in spirit at least, still working cases, was because I had a tax bill outstanding at the time of my untimely demise. The IRS wanted what was coming, no excuses accepted. They had worked a deal with both sides, so that back taxes, interest, and penalties were considered unfinished business. Just as surely as you can't take it with you, you also can't take off owing Uncle Sam. The reason I was haunting Growser? Well, that's what ghosts do. Haunting your murderer is an obligation of being a ghost.

  "Okay, Growser," I gritted, "when did you first notice that your soul was missing?"

  He spat on the floor. "Yesterday mornin'. I woke up same time as usual, but I had this real, kinda, empty feelin' inside. I just wasn't myself, you know—no life or nuthin'." He made a face at the cigar. "Take this Cuban, for instance—it's got no taste to me. And food? Fuggidaboutit! I go to Mama's Kitchen in Harlem, I can't taste nuthin'."

  I floated down to look him in the eye. "You sure your soul didn't just pack up and leave on its own, like your ex-wives? Like maybe it went looking for better accommodations? Or maybe . . . it got while the getting was good?"

  "Like I'm gonna keel over any minute—that what you mean?" Growser asked, licking his thin lips, eyeing my encouraging smile. "Like the Big Man upstairs put out a hit on Growser, and his body just ain't took the message yet? Yeah, sure, I thought about that. But the thing's been missin' for more'n twenty-four hours now, and I'm still kickin'."

  "That is an awfully long time for a soul to be missing, even in this town," I mused.

  "Yeah. Anyway, I come here 'cause I figure a guy like you's got connections—you know, on the other side. And, face it, you need the bread, and I got the dough."

  He had me there. I wanted that IRS bill squared. There had to be more to death than hanging around here. "Okay," I said. "I'll scout around, see what I can dig up."

  "Good." Growser jumped to his feet, threw down the cigar with a look of disgust, and crushed it out with his heel. "You find whoever stole my soul, McCaffrey, 'cause no one steals nuthin' from Dugan Growser!" he barked, punching the air with a bony finger, like he was issuing a warning to the underworld, both above and below ground.

  * * *

  There'd been plenty of cases of gung ho angels, fallen and otherwise, snatching souls before their rightful owners had truly given up the ghost, I was well aware. Not to mention flesh-and-blood Christ crusaders, devil worshippers, and Board-decertified voodoo/witch doctors trying to save or subvert souls while the flesh was still willing but the spirit weak. So, the logical starting point in my investigation was Hyram Kruk, biggest middleman in the entire East Coast soul chain. If anyone had their ear to the ground in the soul racket, it was him.

  He was a squat, surly sonuvagun who had run a string of discount pawnshops during his days of living and breathing. He'd been killed when the stolen gun he'd pointed at an unarmed burglar had accidentally blown up in his hand, killing him and the burglar. And it'd turned out that the first-time burglar had only been trying to get his hocked plumbing tools back so he could take a job, get his family off welfare. It was quite the moral conundrum for the boys upstairs and down. And the convoluted terminus, coupled with his equally checkered past, had left Kruk in limbo longer than a calypso band conductor, two years and counting.

  But while the higher and lower powers that be were debating Kruk's fate for all eternity, they'd at least agreed to put the guy's skills to good use, making him head receiver/shipper for the largest soul storage facility on the northeastern seaboard. Kruk bagged 'em, tagged 'em, and stacked 'em, before eventually shipping them on their way. And he wasn't above doing a little fencing on the side, both to stay sharp and to score brownie points with the boys in the great beyond, on either side of the divide.

  I vacated my office straight through the roof of the three-story greystone. I would've liked to keep up the trajectory—heavenward—but I was bound by forces even more powerful than the Big Guy in the sky. So I banked, flew due west, across the Hudson, thankful for the lack of sensitivity in my see-through nostrils.

  "How's business, soul man?" I greeted Kruk, as I slipped into his warehouse beneath the most populated cemetery on the Jersey shore.

  "Eh, it's got its ups and downs," he responded, ziplocking a baggie, flinging it onto a shelf. "What'd you want now?"

  "Just passing through," I cracked, casually browsing around for anyone I knew.

  "Yeah, and me, I'm the Ghost of Christmas Past," he responded, in Hebrew. He always could see right through me.

  "Well . . . I was kind of wondering if you'd seen Dugan Growser's soul around—say, in the last twenty-four hours or so?"

  "That bum finally get plugged?"

  "No such luck," I replied, liking his analogy nonetheless. "He's still in the upright and cocky position, but he claims his soul's been stolen. Thought you might know something about it?"

  Kruk gave me a ghastly grin and waited.

  "You set up any deals lately? Maybe some brimstone-breather couldn't wait to get his mitts on a fresh one?"

  Kruk waited some more.

  I stared at his shadowy form, then smiled. "I'm not bribing you, Kruk. I've got no money to call my own, and you've got about as much use for money as a rich man has for the eye of a needle."

  Kruk's shoulders drooped. "Oh, yeah. Old habits die hard, eh?" He pulled an imaginary pipe out of the corner of his mouth. "Nah, just like everyone else, I ain't seen Growser's soul. I woulda remembered that one—probably need a pair of oven mitts just to handle it. But I do got some information might interest you."
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  We both waited some more.

  "Damn!" Kruk grunted eventually. "Okay, so I hear on the ghostvine that some phony souls been turnin' up at some of the West Coast warehouses."

  "Huh?"

  "Yeah. Nuthin' here yet, but a guy in California tells me they've had a coupla cases of soul doping already."

  "Soul doping?"

  "Yeah. Someone switching the dirt on their dirty, rotten soul onto a nice, clean one—you know, trying to hitch a ride to the stars, instead of getting the shaft. They caught a politician and a trial lawyer already."

  "How's that possible? I mean, where's the dirt going? And how are they making the switch? You're not selling salvation on the side again, are you, Kruk?"

  He gave me a dirty look. "C'mon, I wouldn't pull that kinda stuff! I don't know from nuthin' about transplanting souls. Besides, my case is in arbitration right now—you think I'd jeopardize that?" He shook his head. "That's part of how they spotted it. Found a dirty soul that wasn't supposed to be, running loose with the body still alive. It effed up their paperwork somethin' fierce."

  Then it hit me. "You mean someone's dealing in souls topside, without a spiritual connection? A flesh-and-blood for-real person?"

  "That's the way I peg it, yeah. Someone's figured out how to catch souls without a license. And he's cutting deals with the damned, to try 'n make their final journey a whole lot more uplifting, if you know what I mean." Kruk's thick, bloodless lips framed a melancholy smile. "I wish I'd've lived long enough to see a scam like that."

  * * *

  I went back to my office, did some thinking on the case. If soul doping was the angle, then why would anyone in their right mind pinch Dugan Growser's charred essence? That thing was a ticket to Hell just waiting to be punched.

  I couldn't figure it—till Growser incarnate blew into my office with a gobful of profanity and a clip n' paste note in his mitt. 'One hundred large, in small, for the return of your soul', the note read.

  It was a stiff price for a badly damaged piece of merchandise, and Growser was more than unwilling to pay it. "I don't pay nobody no ransoms!" he spat.

  "You want to find out who stole your soul, don't you?" I argued, glad I didn't have the senses left to smell the reek of the rat, taste his spittle.

  "Yeah, sure! But—"

  I held up a hand, halting him. Then I eased the little man's indignation by promising to get both his soul and his hundred grand back, and finger the soulnapper. I wasn't going to do it just for Growser, either—he could take a hike in a cow pasture minus the soles on his shoes, for all I cared—but for mankind, as well. There were bigger issues at stake here than just one wiseguy's scabby soul. A living being with the ability to snatch souls and switch sins could really do some damage, maybe even tilt the precarious balance between good and evil in the wrong direction.

  I didn't bother explaining any of that to Growser, though. I didn't fully understand all of the implications myself. I just promised the hood revenge, and he agreed that was worth paying for.

  * * *

  The phone call came later that night: 'Put the money in a garbage bag, leave the bag next to the bench under the clock tower in Hill Street Park, two a.m.' Whoever it was must've known that Growser trusted banks like they trusted him, because my client grudgingly admitted that he could exhume a hundred grand from the pickle jars he had growing in his backyard, have it bagged by two.

  By midnight, I was making with the leaves of a big, old oak tree that looked down on the bench in question, and Growser was performing what to him was true sacrilege—stuffing gelt into a garbage bag. Nevertheless, he slipped into the park at the appointed hour, looking as casual as a straitjacket, glancing around like he'd never seen nightfall before.

  He drifted over to the lighted clock tower and reluctantly deposited his garbage next to the bench, after a couple of false starts. Then he was just dumb enough to stare up my tree, trying to spot me. I did a bad hoot-owl imitation to get rid of him, make his actions look less suspicious, wishing I was a bat out of Hell and he a throbbing vein in the neck.

  Eventually, he sidled away, casting wistful glances back over his shoulder at the lonely bag of cash. And ten minutes after Growser'd made his tearful departure, a man in a hooded jacket rode up on a bike, grabbed the garbage bag, and rode away.

  I was flying the friendly skies, so I had no trouble keeping up with the bicycling bagman. He pedaled his ass all over town, twisting his head around every now and then to make sure he wasn't being followed. He finally biked it on down to the waterfront, skidded to a stop in front of a small, abandoned-looking warehouse. He parked his two-wheeler up against the graffiti-stained wall of the building, then buzzed a series of buzzes on an intercom next to a red, metal door. The door responded, and he went inside.

  I followed him through the brick wall, face-first, and wasn't altogether surprised to see that the warehouse was anything but abandoned. In fact, the place was crammed full of enough electronic equipment to stock every Radio Shack east of the Rockies, with a couple of geeks' basements left over. And there were enough bubbling test tubes, boiling beakers, and steaming flasks to create a thousand Mr. Hydes.

  The hooded bagman carefully made his way through the flashing lights and gurgling liquids and humming machines, as I hung ten in the rafters. He knocked a series of knocks on the steel door of a small office pushed into one corner of the building. The door opened, and he disappeared from view again.

  I waited, not wanting to reveal myself in the closed confines of the office. And eventually the garbageman came back out of the office, less his garbage. I watched him leave the warehouse, then watched the office door again; I wasn't interested in flunkies, I wanted the heart and soul of the operation. And I soon found him, when the steel door reopened and Dr. Francesco Franks shuffled out, clutching that morning's trash.

  I recognized the not-so-good doctor from his numerous appearances on TV, and in the tabloids. He'd been a world-renowned neurosurgeon at the Good Samaritan Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital, before going gynecological on a couple of female patients and getting the unceremonious heave-ho. His syndicated self-help/game show, Cranium Cases, had quickly followed him down the tubes.

  I descended from the heavens, as Franks placed the bag of cabbage on a workbench. "On call tonight, eh, Doc?" I said from a shadowy corner of the building.

  He spun around, his Einsteinian hair a split second behind. "Who are you!?" he yelled, pushing back a pair of black-rimmed glasses on his cowcatcher nose. The lenses in the vintage frames were thick enough to grace the Palomar Observatory.

  "I'm your worst nightmare," I replied sardonically, my back up against and partially embedded in the brick wall. "Is all the loot there?"

  Franks shook his enormous braincase, the wrinkles on his mug Etch-a-Sketching into an expression of anger. "No!" he fumed. "There's only twenty thousand dollars here!"

  That figured.

  Franks forgot his money troubles long enough to jerk a snub-nose .38 out of his lab coat. "Now, who are you?" he demanded.

  "Bain McCaffrey," I responded in a quavery voice, acting scared. The longer Dr. Franks thought I was the real deal, the longer he'd believe I could actually do him some physical harm, and vice versa. "The guy Dugan Growser hired to give him some soul satisfaction."

  "Like hell you will!" Franks hollered, blasting away.

  Hot lead smashed into the wall behind me, sending stone shrapnel rocketing in all directions. Franks emptied his gun into the wall, then charged me. Either he didn't believe in ghosts, or the dim lighting and his appalling eyesight had worked in my favor, because the wayward genius hit the bricks headfirst and hard, little realizing that I was as solid as a salesman's word. He staggered backwards, slammed up against a workbench, windmilled his arms, knocking test tubes and beakers and Bunsen burners flying and crashing and bursting into flame, setting his lab ablaze.

  Then he slowly slumped to the floor, life leaking out of a fissure in his forehead, explosions
flaring up behind him. I zipped to his side. "How'd you get Growser's soul?" I yelled.

  He looked up at me, through me, orange flames flashing in his shattered Coke-bottle lenses. "It was all a mistake!" he gasped. "They took the wrong soul!"

  "You wanted a clean one, right? For soul doping! But-but you thought you'd cash in anyway—with some ransom money!?"

  Franks nodded, blood sluicing down his ancient, grey face. "I needed more money . . . to fund my experiments . . . to perfect my soul-searing device . . . make the transplantation undetectable. You see, I wanted to . . ."

  He didn't get the chance to fully explain himself, not in his lifetime, anyway. I left his corpse and frantically scoured the lab, desperately trying to save some souls any way I could. You can't destroy a soul, but it can get banged up or lost. But the leaping flames and billowing smoke made identification impossible. I couldn't find Growser's soul, or anybody else's, as they scattered all over the place, drifting out through walls, the floor and ceiling.