Dead To Me

by Anton Strout

  Quimbley wanted more intel, and that meant I would have to do my own surveillance work. I was looking forward to that in the same enthusiastic way I might look forward to a debilitating kick to the crotch. I didn’t mind offering up my services to the Department as far as my psychic abilities were concerned, but the type of work Shadower teams did was far too invasive for my liking.

  “I’m not really comfortable with the idea of spying on someone, sir.”

  “Well, then,” he said, reaching into one of his drawers and pulling out a pad with Fraternal Order of Goodness written across the top in Gothic-looking script. “What better way to get acquainted with surveillance work than with diving in both feet first! That’s a good lad.”

  He wrote on it briefly, tore off the sheet, and held it out to me.

  “Here,” he said. “Give this to whoever’s on duty in the supply room. I’ve made a list of surveillance equipment you’re going to need. Get some rest tonight, though. You look horrible. I want you out there skulking and stalking like the best of them tomorrow night, understand?”

  I stood there, staring at the paper in his hand, but I didn’t reach for it.

  The Inspectre sighed and stroked his mustache with his free hand. “I appreciate your concern over being a Peeping Tom, Simon, my boy. I truly do. But blast it, man, buck up! That’s an order.”

  I took the paper from him and turned toward the door.

  “That’s my boy!” he said, sounding like a dad at a father-son picnic. “Now go be lascivious!”

  * * * *

  As high-tech as the spy gear in the black aluminum case was, the weight of it was almost more than I could contend with. Combined with the rest of the workload I brought home with me, it made an inconspicuous entrance into my apartment impossible.

  Not that it would have mattered. When I opened the door, Irene was waiting expectantly on the couch and rose to greet me.

  “Any luck?” she asked and the hope in her eyes just about killed me.

  “The wheels of government-sponsored paranormal investigation turn slow,” I said, paraphrasing something I had heard Dave Davidson say.

  Her face fell. “Well, how was your day anyway? Did you do anything exciting?”

  I was reluctant to bring up my dinner “date” with the enemy so I simply shook my head. “Nothing special.”

  “Well, I do hope you and Mr. Christos have better luck in the future,” she said. She sat back on the couch, but she was still visibly upset.

  “I’m sorry, Irene,” I said, sitting on the couch next to her and throwing the aluminum case on the floor, “but on the plus side, I have this.”

  The weight of the case had shaken the floorboards when it hit.

  “What in God’s name is in that?” she said, eyeing it suspiciously.

  “Technically, it’s part of your case,” I said. I flicked it open. The contents were a collection of gismos and gadgets that James Bond would have been in awe of. “I’ve got a little reconnaissance that needs doing.”

  “Oh my,” she said. “I hope it’s nothing too dangerous.”

  I slipped on my gloves. I picked up a pair of electronic eyes, fished out the instructions, and started reading up on how to calibrate them.

  “Let’s hope not,” I said. “I signed on with the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, not the Department of Life-Threatening Affairs.”

  She smiled.

  “Does it have to do with anyone I know?” she asked. “Or anyone I would know if I could remember anyone I know?”

  She was trying to make light of the situation, but her body flickered in and out for a second, showing her frustration.

  “No one I can discuss yet,” I said, avoiding any talk of Jane for reasons both personal and professional.

  “Well, what can you talk about then?” she snapped, and I looked up at her, taken aback. “Sorry.”

  I thought for a moment of something safer to talk about while I fiddled with the light sensitivity on the eyes. How the hell was anyone supposed to figure these things out even with the instructions?

  “Do you know anything about a wooden fish?” I asked. It seemed harmless enough to bring up something that I knew had been her property.

  “A wooden fish?” she said, laughing. “No, I think I’d remember that.”

  “Does the name ‘the Westmore’ mean anything to you?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Sounds like a hotel or an apartment complex. Did I die there?”

  “I can’t really tell you,” I said, “but off the record? No. Not there.”

  Nothing I mentioned was triggering any memories of her past.

  “Speaking of apartment complexes,” she said, “I do believe you had a call from your building manager. He was going on about you falling behind on your maintenance…”

  “Crap,” I said. I selected a parabolic mike from the case and futzed about, trying to open the satellite-dish-shaped cone around it.

  “I take it that’s a bad thing?”

  “Yes, it’s bad,” I said. “Unfortunately, working for the forces of Good isn’t quite as profitable as…um…my old profession.”

  “Is there anything you can do?” she asked.

  The concern in her voice was touching. I looked down at all the equipment spread out before me.

  “Yeah,” I said with resolution, “I can probably take care of it tomorrow during the day. I’ll have to call in sick, though.”

  “Are you not feeling well?” Irene asked.

  “Outside of being ashamed for falling behind on my maintenance fees?” I said. “No, I feel fine.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I need to play a psychometric round of The Price Is Right,” I said and threw the equipment back into the case. By tomorrow night, I was sure I would have figured out how to use it…

  16

  I turned in early for the long day I suddenly had before me. Irene was still sleeping in my guest room when I quietly left the apartment. I felt bad blowing off work, but not bad enough to actually get off the train with my file box and head back south to the city. I was desperate for the cash, and besides, spying on Jane would require darkness so I had to wait until nightfall anyway.

  In the meantime, I hoped to reunite one of the promising purchases cluttering up my apartment with its original owner. Kevin Matthews had been the name I had gotten off the Intellivision game system reading at the night market, and a Google search had led me to believe that he had most likely grown up to be a Kevin Matthews who managed a bookstore at the mall in White Plains—so that was my first stop. The four other items I had brought with me were good finds that I could sell off to a local antiques dealer I knew up there. If I didn’t supplement my income unloading these goods, I doubted my building’s management company would accept antiques as payment.

  Twenty minutes into my trip, Connor called, and without thinking, I answered.

  I debated putting on some form of sick voice, but decided against it.

  “How ya feeling, pal?” Connor said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, opting to sound not necessarily sick but not necessarily well either. “I’m okay. I’ve been better.”

  “Well, make sure you get lots of fluids.” Why does everyone say that? You could be hit by a car or dive naked into a vat full of razorblades, but people were always suggesting that you get lots of fluids.

  “Yeah, I’ll make sure to do that,” I said. The train slowed for its next stop, and before I even thought of covering the mouthpiece, the doors bonged open and a voice came over the loudspeaker.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the conductor said with all the enthusiasm of Droopy Dog. “The station stop is Crestwood. Crestwood station. Scarsdale will be next. Scarsdale will be next. Step in and stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

  I slammed my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.

  “Ohhh,” Connor said, “I see…you’re that kind of ‘sick’ today.”

  Shit. Busted.

&nbs
p; “Don’t tell the Inspectre, okay?” I pleaded.

  “I don’t know, kid.” Connor sounded dead serious. “You’ve already got a mountain of paperwork sitting here in your in-box. Then there are the open investigations you’ve yet to do any follow-up on. I really don’t think it’s fair to the rest of us in Other Division.”

  “How about if I promise to…” I couldn’t come up with anything that might appease him. Connor outranked me. I couldn’t bribe him by offering to do most of his tasks or reports that he needed to file. I also doubted he would take me being his coffee boy as payment for his silence.

  “Don’t sweat it, kid,” he said with a laugh. “I’m just busting your chops. Everybody sneaks out every now and then. I’ll talk to you when you get back to the office. And kid…?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Next time, be a little faster on the mute button, will ya?”

  After hanging up, I settled back and tried to enjoy the rest of the ride as the fall foliage whooshed past at breakneck speed. The foliage thinned as we pulled into the White Plains station, and I grabbed the legal-sized filing box I’d brought and got off.

  A short cab ride through the White Plains business district of shiny modern buildings—tiny compared to the steel canyons of Manhattan—and I was at the Westchester Mall. I had never been there before, and my first thought was Who the hell carpets a mall? I made my way to the nearest directory, found the B. Dalton Bookseller, and headed off to it.

  The scent of plastic, books, and fresh carpeting washed over me as I entered the store. After asking to see the manager, a matronly looking clerk named Yolanda showed me to their back room. It was stacked to the ceiling with boxes, and a lanky gentleman was unpacking one of them onto a sleek metal library cart. He would never win World’s Hunkiest Librarian—midthirties, possibly older, with stringy brown hair that made him look all Six Degrees of Ichabod Crane.

  “Kevin?” she said. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”

  “Thanks, Yolanda. I’ll be with you in a second,” he said, his face still buried in the contents of the box. “As you can see by the state of our store room, the holiday rush is upon us.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking up at the towering cartons. “Who knew the holidays could look so…dangerous.”

  “Please,” he said with a gesture toward a small table with several chairs around it, “have a seat.” He sat down, but looked distracted by the amount of work teetering behind him. “I assume you’re here about the holiday help.”

  He pulled a yellow legal pad and a stack of blank applications from a nearby shelf, handing one to me. “You’ll need to fill one of these out.”

  I placed my file box on the table and sat down opposite him. “No, I don’t, Kev,” I said, pushing the application back toward him.

  “I’m sorry…do I know you?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  There was the tiniest hint of nervousness in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. “Well, if you’re not here for the job, what are you here for?” He gave a quick look toward my box.

  “Don’t worry,” I said as reassuringly as I could, “it’s nothing bad. I promise.”

  “Oh God,” he said, with sudden revelation on his face. “Are you an author? Look, we have buyers at our home office who handle all that. I can give you their phone numbers but you have to go through the proper channels. We do very little direct buying of self-published work on the store level…”

  “I’m not selling anything,” I said, reassuring him. I was already losing patience. I still had the antiques dealer to see and I really didn’t have time for Kevin’s guessing game.

  I went for the direct approach. I pulled the lid off the box and lifted out the Intellevision unit.

  “This, I believe,” I said, handing it to him, “is yours.”

  I reached back into the file box and began laying out game box after game box before him—twenty in all. There was a little water damage to some of the boxes from the puddle in the alley where I had helped Connor with the ghost, but other than that, they looked okay.

  “My God….” Kevin whispered and tears formed at the corners of his eyes, slowly rolling down his face. He ran his fingers over the individual boxes, pausing his thumb over tiny colored tabs that had been added to the upper-right-hand corners of each.

  “What are those?” I said.

  I always tried to maintain my emotional detachment when reuniting owners with their lost property, but I had to admit, I always loved seeing their reactions. They often cried, or had to do their damndest not to. The thing was that if an item had a strong enough emotional fingerprint on it that I could identify its past owner, it probably meant that the item was extremely important in the owner’s life.

  “I…” he started, and stopped. The words wouldn’t come. Finally he grabbed hold of another one of the boxes. The words Shark! Shark! ran down the side of it, and he hugged the game to his body. “I’m sorry. I’m a little overwhelmed is all.” He pointed to one of the tabs. “My friends—we were geeky as hell back then—and we used to color code the games by their genre. Sports games were green, for grass. Red was for fighting games, because, well, you know…blood and guts. Puzzle games were purple.”

  “Why purple?”

  He shrugged and smiled. “We couldn’t really think of a good color that stood for puzzles, really, so we went for alliteration. Purple Puzzles. See?”

  I nodded and checked my watch. I could make the next train upstate if I was out of here in the next five minutes.

  “How on earth did you get your hands on these? And how did you find me?” he asked, drying his eyes on his sleeve. “I thought this stuff was gone forever. I know it must seem foolish that I’m crying over something like this, but there are a lot of memories packed in here.”

  “If you look on the bottom of the console, it has your name and old address on it,” I said.

  It was a lie, really. I had gone ahead and faked the signature because it seemed a much more plausible explanation than trying to convince him that I had tracked him down through a psychometric vision of his childhood. I hoped he assumed one of his parents had done it.

  He picked up the machine, flipped it over, and looked at the signature. “Huh!” Let’s wrap it up, Kev. Honestly, I wasn’t insensitive to what he was going through. I loved giving someone that sense of connection to their past, but if I was to be straight with myself, my real motivation was the possibility of a cash reward. I checked my watch again. Four minutes left to get out of here and catch the next train up to see the antiques dealer in Poughkeepsie. It was time to close the deal. There were two approaches that usually worked. One was a simple “How much you willing to pay?” gambit, but I thought the subtle approach would catch Kevin hook, line, and sinker. He was weepy enough, for sure.

  Step one. “I should probably be going,” I said with the most sincere and sheepish look I could muster. “I just thought this stuff might be important to you.”

  “Wait,” he said, getting up. “Please…let me give you something for your trouble.”

  Step two. Look surprised.

  Step three. Refuse once. “No, that’s okay,” I continued. “Really.”

  “No, please. I insist.”

  Almost everyone says that. “I insist.”

  Step four. I reluctantly agreed, like I was doing him a favor by taking his money. “Well,” I said with a kind smile. “If it will make you feel better…”

  I walked out of the store with Kevin’s gratitude and a check for just over three hundred dollars. He insisted I not take a dime less. It was amazing how high a price tag people put on healing their emotional scars. I sold memories. I sold a certain amount of healing and hope, too. It didn’t mean that I didn’t feel dirty about it sometimes.

  17

  When I got home from the sales trip, it was after dark, but not too late. I had been successful to the tune of two months’ maintenance. I found Irene asleep in the guest room as I had left he
r earlier this morning and I didn’t dare disturb her. Connor had talked about how her spirit might slowly start to degrade and turn into something like the one from the alley, but I figured the less I forced her to interact, the less energy she expended—and that might slow the degradation. I caught a few hours’ sleep before waking up and sneaking the surveillance equipment I had calibrated the other night out of the apartment while Irene slept on, and I headed for Jane’s address, which Connor had e-mailed to me.

  Hours later, as I prowled the rooftops and set up a parabolic mike directly across from Jane’s Chelsea apartment, I felt skeevy and voyeuristic. The Inspectre had assured me it was a necessary evil in the fight against, well, evil. But as I settled into an evening of spying on her, I found myself…liking it. Spying on Jane gave me a much better understanding of the woman. By the dull glow of my laptop’s screen, I worked on my report for the Department, detailing every move that she made. Jane was a much more cheerful person when she was home alone, and I guessed that it was due to being free and clear of her responsibilities to the evil Mr. Faisal Bane. Well, not quite free and clear. Throughout the night, she bristled as she fielded several calls from her boss regarding his scheduling needs. I was impressed that the parabolic mike picked up his voice on the phone. The confused expressions that flitted across her face as she spoke on the phone made it clear that she didn’t understand half of what her powerful boss was up to. Not that she was dumb, but I doubted she truly grasped the evil extent of what she had gotten herself into.

  She didn’t question any of his demands. As the S.D.L. had probably made clear to her, certain things—highly evil things, I had no doubt—were on a “need to know” basis. I bet the less you knew at the Sectarian Defense League, the longer your lifespan was.

  It wasn’t until nine that she made an outgoing call of her own. Take-out. When she asked for her sweet and sour sauce on the side, the same as I did, I smiled. Thirty minutes later her food arrived (she was a heavy tipper, I noted), but before she had a chance to put it down, her cell phone went off yet again. This time, as I positioned the mike, I caught her cursing under her breath.