Dead To Me

by Anton Strout

  I slipped on one of my gloves. I had no idea if I would get a reading from the clipboard but I grabbed it and handed it over. The Inspectre casually slipped the manifest page onto it and slowly began to creep the whole thing behind his back.

  Faisal paused from sneering at David Davidson and cocked his head in our direction. He tsked-tsked us. “I’ll be taking that back, thank you.”

  “What?” the Inspectre said with feigned ignorance. “Oh…this? Yes, of course you will…”

  He pulled the manifest free of the clipboard and held it out to the head Sectarian. Faisal raised one of his thick, black eyebrows. “It’s good to see such obedience.” He turned to me. “You could learn a thing or two from him, lapdog.”

  “I’ve learned plenty,” I said, feeling totally ineffectual. “And I’ll learn what you did to Irene, too.”

  “Perhaps,” he said with a smile, “but if you could only prove it…or anything for that matter.”

  Davidson stepped in at this moment. “You don’t have to say anything more, Mr. Bane. We’re leaving.”

  “No,” Faisal said almost cheerfully as he narrowed in on me. “I don’t mind. Tell me, Mr. Canderous, you seem quite taken by Ms. Blatt, don’t you? Every time I run into you, I seem to be subjected to one of your little fits of misguided bravado over her.”

  I felt embarrassed and angry at the same time, my face turning bright red. I did care for Irene, but I didn’t want all of it coming out right here in front of my own Department—especially in front of Connor. I didn’t even want to think of what the Inspectre would make of my involvement in all this.

  “Your obsession with Irene,” Faisal continued, “seems to be clouding your judgment, I suspect, and corollary to that, it causes you to meddle in my affairs far too often. Maybe what I have to say now will make you back off my people once and for all.”

  “Are you going to threaten to kill me?” I said.

  “Yes, you’d like me to say something like that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Here in a room full of witnesses. No such luck, I’m afraid, but I want to give you something to think about.” His eyes fell to the manifest and he tapped his finger at the page. “You’re terribly concerned about this wooden fish. So intent on getting it back. Did you ever give a thought for a single second that maybe the fish wasn’t Irene Blatt’s in the first place?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I made a sudden lunge for the manifest but he easily avoided me and held it out of reach.

  “The day you accosted one of my fellow Sectarians in Ms. Blatt’s apartment…did you take a good look at her place? Anything strike you odd? Single woman…living all alone in a veritable paradise of antiquities…?”

  I recalled her apartment, trashed as it was. Her tastes and collecting habits were so similar to things I had or would love to own. It was one of the first things that had intrigued me about her. I lived in the same type of antique-freaque way, and maybe I needed to start looking at our similarities for clues instead. Maybe she was more like me than I thought.

  “She’s a psychic?”

  Faisal scrunched his face at me, looking like one of those Chinese dogs with all the wrinkles. “What?! No, you nitwit!”

  “Then I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why she owned all that stuff. Maybe she had a rich family or something.”

  Part of hunting down who Irene Blatt truly was had fallen to me, and the truth was I hadn’t been able to come up with much on her in the real world. Over the past week, it had fallen farther down the list of priorities, especially with Tamara’s death and Jane’s appearance in my life.

  “Irene had a bit of a habit,” he said. “A real pro with the sticky fingers. A little something that you can see she turned into quite a profitable career.”

  “She’s no thief,” I said defensively. There was only one ex-thief around here, and that was me. I moved for Faisal, but the Inspectre held me back.

  “Wasn’t she?” Faisal said. He folded the manifest and slipped it in his pocket. “Then answer me this: What was she doing freelancing for a filthy cultist like me then? I suppose the fact that she whored out her skills in high-class, high-stakes thievery to us was just a coincidence. And when she got a little greedy over one of my commissions and decided to hold out for more money…”

  “Hold on,” Davidson interjected. “Hold on for a second. Are you implying you had someone murdered? The Mayor’s Office does not condone that sort of conflict resolution…”

  “Just giving Mr. Canderous here some hypothetical food for thought,” Faisal said. “Of course we would have never harmed her.”

  As he turned away from Davidson, Faisal winked at me and I snapped. I couldn’t help myself. I dove forward, intent on killing him if I could just, God willing, wrap my hands around his neck. He was begging for the eternal dirt nap, and I was more than happy to be the one to give it to him.

  The Inspectre had me by the arm and was trying to pull me back, but I didn’t take notice until I felt a second set of arms wrap around my waist. Connor had joined our little circle of friends.

  “Don’t,” he whispered in my ear as I struggled to break free. “That’s what he wants, kid. Davidson will be witness to it, report it back to Town Hall, and they’ll shut us down faster than you’d believe.”

  “We’re just going to let him walk out of here?” I asked.

  Inspectre Quimbley nodded.

  Davidson cleared his throat and I turned my attention to find him looking sternly at me. “Mr. Canderous, I really think us leaving here is the least of your concerns right now. I’ve got several bones I could start picking with your Department if you’d like. I understand that Mr. Bane here was kidnapped from his place of work, rolled into a carpet no less, and I highly suspect that you had something to do with that. Frankly, I hate to think what charges he might bring against the D.E.A. should you not let us walk out that door right now.”

  Connor and the Inspectre let go of me. I turned silently, feeling utterly helpless. Any heroism I had felt earlier was squashed now, and my ego had practically shriveled up, crawled under a rock, and died. I stood mute.

  “Fine,” I said, making an unexpected dive for Faisal now that no one was holding on to me. “Go, but not before I give our friend here a hug good-bye!”

  Faisal didn’t have a chance to react. I pulled my gloves off as I went and then did something I had never done before—I grabbed Faisal’s face in both hands and tapped directly into him. I concentrated on my raw emotions the way Connor had taught me to, and flipped into a psychometric vision with one thought on my mind. Irene.

  The room around me fell away. An image resolved in my mind’s eye—Faisal in his office talking to Irene, only in this vision she was alive. In life, she was more radiant than I had ever seen her. She was quoting him a price, a price Faisal would have to pay if she was going to steal the wooden fish for him. Faisal knew it was in a private collection on the Upper West Side, its owner unaware of its value to the Sectarians, but he desperately needed it. I tried to guide Faisal’s thoughts in the vision, but they wouldn’t tell me why he wanted it so badly.

  Time slipped forward in the vision and this time Faisal was on the phone with Irene and they were yelling at each other. Irene had stolen the artifact as asked, but kept repeating over and over into the phone that she’d never sell it to Faisal, now that she knew what he was planning on doing with it. All I had to do was wait long enough and I was sure I’d hear the specifics of what Faisal had been planning…

  Except I was suddenly torn out of the vision and back into the real world with the sickening sensation of having the wind knocked out of me. I was doubled over kneeling on the floor, clutching my stomach. Faisal stood over me, his fist still clenched from the blow.

  “Stay,” he panted, “out.”

  His face looked as drained as I felt, except he was able to stand, while all I could do was flounder on the floor, flopping like a fish. Forcing myself into another person’s mind was a violation l
ike no other and it tore at my nerves as if I had run into an electric fence. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to repeat. It had weakened me more than psychometry usually did. Maybe tapping into another living creature used up more energy, on top of the pronounced unpleasantness of it all? I didn’t know. I started fishing in my pocket for my Life Savers. Faisal and Davidson turned away.

  “We’ll be in touch,” Davidson said as they started for the door.

  “I say, so shall we,” the Inspectre said, stopping them in their tracks by the door. “It’s awfully brave of you to intimidate my young initiate here, old boy, but you’ll find me a different story. Rest assured, I will get to the bottom of all this.”

  Faisal glanced back as he reached for the handle. “The only thing you’re bound to reach the bottom of is a bag of chips, old man…or the East River.”

  As soon as he and Davidson walked out, the divisional managers scrambled out of their chairs and followed, leaving just Connor, the Inspectre, and me. Connor helped me up in the immediate and heavy silence that hung in the air as the door closed. None of us dared looked at the other.

  “Well, that was certainly different,” I said.

  “You look like hell, kid,” Connor said.

  “Good. I feel like hell.”

  “Hope it was worth it. Did you get anything?”

  “Most of what he said about Irene was true,” I said. “She was a thief, like a freelancer to them, but she wasn’t holding out for more money. She refused to help him when she found out what the Sectarians were going to use the wooden fish for.”

  “And what were they planning?” the Inspectre asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. That’s when Faisal went all Cassius Clay on me.”

  “Well, that’s a start,” the Inspectre said encouragingly. “That’s more than we knew before. And we do have an avenue or two more to explore…”

  Connor and the Inspectre exchanged that look again. I was too wiped to say anything more. Connor took the empty clipboard and slid it in his satchel.

  “I could use a stiff drink after that,” Connor continued as he ran his hand through the white streak in his hair. “Shall we?”

  “Hrooom!” the Inspectre blasted as he headed for the door. “That may indeed be the best idea I’ve heard all night, boys. Tonight the drinks are on Other Division.”

  33

  Eccentric Circles was the ancient dive that catered to a clientele of the mysterious and the strange. Naturally, it was a departmental favorite. As usual, the place was packed with secretive folk who wanted little in the way of small talk or questions, but it was a safe bet that just about all of its patrons dabbled in something arcane, otherworldly, or just plain fucked up. We fit in perfectly.

  The first few drinks helped rebuild my sugar depletion, but the trade-off was that I was slowly getting drunk. Three rounds into it, I started feeling bad. There was a growing mountain of things I should be dealing with and I was sick of not dealing with things—it had gotten Tamara killed. Also, I had essentially abandoned Jane right after she had helped me bring in Faisal, and now she was somewhere out there alone in the city, unsure of her own fate. Irene had yet to manifest again, and I didn’t know if she’d be hostile or not when she did. I attempted to leave at one point to check my messages, but the Inspectre stopped me and confided that our drinking and bonding were every bit departmental job functions as time in the office was. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but after my third pint I was willing to give it a shot. Other Division was buying, and after the downward spiral my day had taken, I found it a meager but welcome reward. Three cheers for job-sanctioned drinking!

  Connor returned from the bar, pushing his way through the buzzing crowd. He was carrying several pints, which he slammed down on the table. Having matched the Inspectre and me drink for drink, he was in a jovial mood.

  “Sorry it took so long,” he said. “Some of the guys from Greater and Lesser Arcana were up at the bar and pulled me into the old argument.”

  “What argument?” I asked, grabbing one of the glasses.

  “Historically,” Connor said, “drinking is a common pastime among agents. There’s a lot of stress on everyone and the biggest in-Department pissing contest is over who suffers the most. Those guys always think that they’re the ones.”

  “They could be right,” the Inspectre said. “They do carry the additional burden of answering to Thaddeus Wesker.”

  I liked hearing the Inspectre be a little cheeky, and knowing Director Wesker as I did, I thought the old man made a pretty convincing argument.

  “I don’t think they do,” Connor said. “Shadower has the largest group of heavy drinkers. I think their world of infiltration, subterfuge, and constant surveillance might take the prize.”

  I stared at my pint as the foam slowly settled, and I felt the weight of the past day pressing down on me.

  “You okay, kid?” Connor asked.

  “None of today happened the way I imagined,” I said with a sigh. I took a sip, relishing the oaty thickness of the brew.

  “Anything particular?” Connor asked.

  I sipped at the dark pint again, having no recollection of what I had ordered but happy with it nonetheless. “Everything! The entire evening. The whole epic struggle between good and evil. We’ve dead-ended on tracking down Cyrus even.”

  The Inspectre laughed as he took a swig. His mustache was covered with foam as he pulled the pint glass away. “Not quite the theatrics you were expecting, eh?”

  “I guess not,” I said with a shrug. My moment of triumph had turned into two separate games, one that ended in a stalemate during the questioning of Faisal Bane and the second of departmental politics that generated so much red tape that I was sure I could patch the Titanic with it.

  Connor shook his head at me, and started speaking with that lecturing attitude he had been taking all too frequently lately. “You can keep your ideology when it comes to the battle between good and evil, kid. The somewhat romantic notion of the clear-cut struggle doesn’t exist. None of the fight has ever been black-and-white, or if it has, I sure as hell ain’t ever seen it.”

  He put his pint down, leaned across the table, and gave me a serious look that was undercut by the amount he had been drinking.

  “There’s more to be seen in the shades of gray,” he added.

  “Then how the hell do we fight it if we can’t make heads or tails of where the line is?” I asked.

  The Inspectre looked at me with a mixture of kindness and inebriation. “My boy, you are talking about evil as a concept. You can’t fight a concept!”

  I slammed my glass down on the table a bit too hard, and its contents sloshed onto my hand. “But I expected something to come out of tonight! Conflict, fighting, something, anything!”

  “Evil is damned peculiar that way,” the Inspectre said. He picked up a napkin and wiped the foam from his mustache with it. “It takes many forms, as you might well expect, but evil is at its most devious—at its worst, actually—when it makes us lazy, when we cease to take action against it. Evil is slow, crafty, and even slothful at times.”

  “You speak of it like it’s a person, not an idea,” I said.

  The Inspectre leaned closer. “Isn’t it like a person? What makes up the essence of a person but the totality of their actions, Simon? Every person has the chance at any moment to choose their own path, their actions coming down to simple good or bad intent. Conceptually, evil itself is not half as frightening as the actions of those who follow its path.”

  “That’s comforting,” I muttered.

  Connor grabbed my arm across the table. “Don’t discount what the Inspectre has to say, kid. It has a lot of bearing on what you’re going through. If what Faisal said is true—that Irene was a freelancing thief for the Sectarians in life—that part of her is gone now. Those actions are dead and the evil gone on with them. It’s not a part of who she is anymore, and you have to judge her soul based on the person you’ve come to know
.”

  It was a blow to find out that someone I held affection for—my dark-haired beauty gone wild—was in league with the Sectarians. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to believe it even though I had seen it. Had my powers failed me, distorted what I was seeing? The woman I knew was not an agent of Darkness.

  In truth, I was no better than her, was I? I had once been a criminal in the not so far away past, yet I had always felt that at my core I remained a good person. That was long behind me anyway. I had given up those actions, my petty crimes, and turned away from that path.

  It made my relationship to Jane seem even more important than ever. She was choosing the right path now, and I wanted to be there for her.

  “Fat lot of good all this talk does us,” I said. “The only lead we had—the manifest on that wooden fish and who it was going to—is back in Bane’s hands. We had it in our possession, and thanks to Davidson, we lost it again.”

  “Yes,” the Inspectre said. “About that…”

  “We kinda brought you here to get you away from the Department so you could recharge a bit, kid,” Connor said. He rummaged around in his satchel and pulled out the clipboard from the interrogation. “Remember this?”

  He tossed it across the table and it slid to rest in front of me. I looked at the empty clipboard.

  “Yep,” I said. “Looks great without the manifest on it, too.”

  Connor pulled a notebook and a pen from his satchel and slid them over to me.

  “I don’t know how it looks with the manifest on it,” he said. “You tell me.”

  “Stop tormenting me, all right?” I said. “Just let me drink in peace.”

  “I’m not tormenting you,” Connor said. “I’m telling you to read the clipboard…psychometrically.”

  It was a brilliant idea on his part, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it. “With my luck, I’ll probably get stuck in a mental documentary on the exciting world of clipboard making.”

  “Just try,” Connor said.

  I avoided the pen and paper for now. I didn’t want it conflicting with anything I might get off the clipboard. I laid my hands on it like it was a Ouija board and envisioned the Inspectre as I had seen him before, placing the copy of the manifest on it. I flipped into the vision and threw my concentration into that exact moment, freeze framing my mind like pressing a pause button. I could actually make out the words on the form. A delivery address.