Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel)

by Shrum, Kory M.

  Dazzled, I pinched my eyes shut. “I’m under too much stress. Maybe you are a psychological device that keeps my mind from completely ripping itself in half?”

  “If you take your pain medication, your judgment will be impaired.”

  “Ah, so you’re like a voice of reason?” I bounced the two pain pills in my hand. “Does this mean I’m not having a psychotic episode? My judgment is irrelevant if I am crazy.”

  “You must make an important decision soon. If you take those, you may make the wrong decision.”

  “Ok, you seem judgment-oriented. That’s progress,” I said. “Insanity couldn’t care less about judgment, right? Besides have you ever tried to sleep with a neck wound before? Dr. York told me Eve’s knife scratched my spinal column. Think about that for a second.”

  He watched me with quiet amusement, like I might be a puppy tumbling all over my big floppy ears.

  “And have you considered that my decision-making abilities will amount to squat if I don’t take this pill and get some sleep?” I added.

  He lifted an object from my desk and turned it in his hands. It was a snow globe that Ally sent me from London last winter while vacationing with her older brother. Gabriel kept turning it over and righting it as if he’d never seen one.

  “You can’t see the city,” he said.

  “You’re supposed to look at the snow not the city.”

  “But it is not snow,” he replied.

  “It’s not a city either.” I had to set the pills down again. If I held them for too long they’d start melting in my hand and leave that disgusting taste in my mouth on the way down.

  He dropped the globe to the floor and it rolled across the carpet, stopping when it hit the leg of the desk. Tidiness meant nothing to this guy.

  What the hell was I going to do with him? He acted as if he’d follow me forever. Just picture me at the grocery store, pretending not to notice a man with black wings fondling and dropping produce just like that damned snow globe.

  “You know the problem with insanity? I can’t tell anyone I’m am crazy. Maybe I could work through this if I could talk to someone—but no. That’s just not an option, is it? So you know what I’m left with? You. I can only talk to you. And the fact that I’m willing to talk to you, the hallucination in question, is just proof that I’m crazy.”

  “She sees that which is unseen. She will understand.”

  “Rachel? And she was locked up!”

  “Not Rachel,” he replied and blinked those big cat-eyes of his.

  The only person I knew who ‘sees that which is unseen’ was Gloria. I didn’t even know how to begin that conversation.

  “Back to our little game of ‘What the Fuck Are You?” I said. “If I touched you would I feel anything?”

  He was out of his chair and across the room so quick I missed it in a blink. I gasped, face to face with a red tie. It had changed color again.

  “What are you doing?” I choked.

  He touched my cheek and my breath caught in my throat. His hand hovered for a moment, and then it moved right through me. I felt the strangest sensation, a warm tickle from head to toe, like each hair and nerve stood on its end. Then he returned his hand to his pocket, leaving my heart palpitating strangely. But he didn’t move away. He waited.

  “Why are you still standing here?” I asked and tried to breathe my heart into a more comfortable rhythm.

  “You want to touch me,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “Touch me.”

  My hand was half-raised to his face before I realized what I was doing. I jerked back, alarmed, but before I could fully retract my hand, he caught it. It was a tangible hand as any I’d ever touched, and equally as real as the chest he placed it against. He guided my fingertips under the soft satin-silk of his suit jacket’s lapel. But his chest was still, silent. No heartbeat.

  “So—” I stammered. “Am I imagining what your hand feels like or do you really have a hand?”

  My pulse had become a raging, monstrous thing in my ears. The swollen size of my heart made it difficult to get any air down my throat.

  “I am more real than this life you live.” His tie turned dark blue, the color of midnight. The look in his eyes made me shiver. They weren’t green. They matched the tie, and the longer I stared into those dark pools the more I felt I was falling forward into water. Not just any water, nighttime waters, fathoms-deep, water which held the reflection of the still, starry sky above, a perfect replication of the heavens.

  I bit my lip for focus, letting it go only once I’d tasted blood. “I’m so totally fucked.”

  And he moved through me to the windows on the other side of my bed. His hands sought his pockets. His wings stretched then folded against his back until they disappeared completely. He’d become just a man with long dark hair staring out my windows. A strange man in my bedroom.

  “When you’re upset your heart beats much faster,” he said. He turned toward me and as he did, his tie changed to the red shade I saw before.

  “Quit doing that thing with the tie, please. It’s making me nauseous.”

  “It alarms me when you are upset,” he said, quietly. The seriousness of his tight-set mouth made me believe him.

  “It alarms me that I’m having conversations with a winged guy that no one can see, that a guy I’ve trusted with my life for the last seven years might have conspired to kill me, and that I was this close to having my head chopped off. On top of all of that, I might have to go to jail and be somebody’s bitch.”

  “Explain trust,” he said. Gabriel was looking out the windows again, which were orange now with the sunlight closest to the earth. Long shadows of each tangible object lay stretched along the world as if to make the most of themselves before their moment was gone. He was very beautiful in this light. The whole scene, his back to me, edges of his body soft from all the light pushing past him, was like a dream.

  “I’m not the one to ask about trust,” I answered. “I’m terrible at it. What little trust I have is easily broken.” I sighed. “And it shouldn’t be.”

  “How can it be broken if it is not tangible?”

  I fell backwards onto the bed with tears in my eyes. “Because it’s so fucking fragile.”

  “Fragile,” he said, as if he liked the sound of the word against his teeth.

  I placed one pillow under my head and squished the other against my chest. I curled into a ball and let the exhaustion settle into my bones. “You may not be able to touch or see trust, but you sure feel it when it’s gone.”

  “For all your questions, you never asked why I am here,” he said.

  I nuzzled into my pillows. “Because I know why you are here.”

  My thoughts went to Rachel sitting in her dark living room with bloody fingerprints on her face and a circle of smeared blood drying on the carpet around her.

  “You are stronger than that,” he whispered as if he plucked these thoughts right out of my mind. I felt the soft press of a hand on my forehead. It was comforting, something Ally would do.

  “Are you a good angel or a bad one?” I asked.

  “I am here to serve you,” he said, his fingertips touching my cheek. “And I am determined not to fail.”

  I wasn’t sure when I fell asleep. One minute I was listening to the soft caress of Gabriel’s voice and the next I was jarred awake by the sound of something hitting my bedroom window. I came to a sitting position in one fluid movement.

  Gabriel was gone and I had mixed feelings about that.

  I listened hard for the sound that had woken me, thinking it might be him—or God help me, some other psychological development—but I didn’t hear the noise again.

  Then I saw it. Across the room, one of my bedroom windows was partially open. I thought I had left all the windows closed, but this one was open just a crack.

  As I crossed the room I realized something was wedged into the corner of the sill. I opened the window enough to retrieve the small folded paper. It was a b
usiness card for Jade Palace, the tiny Chinese food joint off of 22nd avenue. On the back of the card, scrawled in black ink, was a message.

  House bugged. Meet me off the trail.

  It didn’t have a name but I didn’t need one. I’d spent the last seven years reading this crappy handwriting.

  I crossed to the other side of the bedroom so I could see the street. A black car was parked near the house but I couldn’t see who was in the vehicle from here. More cops or perhaps even Garrison himself—was I really considering sneaking out to meet my fugitive handler? If it meant some freaking answers, hell yes.

  The creak of someone coming up the stairs made my heart leap.

  It was just Ally who appeared in the doorway. “You’re awake. How do you feel?”

  “I feel groggy,” I said. I gave Ally my note from Brinkley. “I think I might want to take a walk to wake up. Do you want to come with me?”

  Ally read the card. “Sure. Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich.”

  “Yeah, a PB and J, please.”

  I dug a green and a yellow sneaker out of the basket in my closet. Of course, it didn’t have a match so it was paired with a pink and white one. “And bring the bug spray so we don’t get beat up.”

  Ally’s eyes widened.

  “I mean eaten up. Man see how loopy, I am?” Clearly I was not made for secret missions.

  Covered in bug spray, PB and J in my hand, we exited out the back door. Ally had Winston on a leash but he wasn’t acting very interested in taking a walk. I kept an eye out for Gabriel, waiting for him to pop up at any time.

  My backyard was lined with trees, and as I pushed past them, it was only a few feet until the dirt trail began. It didn’t begin behind my house, but simply continued around the entire suburb in a two-mile loop, cutting near the road at one point. I opened my mouth but Ally shook her head. It wasn’t until we’d been walking almost five minutes that she finally spoke.

  “There are zero ways this can go wrong,” she said, sarcastically.

  I followed her lead and kept my voice low too. “I just want answers.”

  “And hopefully that’s all we get,” she added, her sash lightly slapping her legs as she walked.

  Garrison had gotten to me. What if Brinkley did mean me harm? What if he was tired of working with me, of my attitude or something else?

  I turned over my shoulder again but I still didn’t see Gabriel, only the damp stretch of a narrow trail and the surrounding woods that pressed in on us. “If you really thought we might get attacked, why did you bring him?” I asked her, pointing at Winston whose belly dragged along the trail. He wouldn’t so much as bark at an attacker.

  “He needs more exercise,” she replied. Her breath sped up from the walking. Mine too. Winston was practically wheezing.

  “Yeah, but we can’t exactly run away dragging forty pounds of pug behind us,” I argued.

  “We’ll have to carry him then,” she replied. “Wait, shhhhh.”

  Ally’s hand flew up and stopped me in my tracks. She moved closer to the edge of the trees and peered into the spaces between their trunks. “Do you see it?”

  Yes. I saw them.

  The dark outlines of man-shaped bodies shifted through the trees. And not just one man, which I took as a very bad sign.

  “Can you make out their faces?” I whispered.

  “Not Brinkley,” she answered. “There’s at least two of them.”

  “Three,” I said, doing a headcount of moving shadows myself.

  Ally picked Winston up off the ground and positioned him in her arms. I took that to mean we were going to run for it. Shit. I would’ve laced my sneakers better if I’d known we’d have to run. Too late now.

  “Ready when you are,” she whispered.

  I took off, leaving Ally in the dust. I wasn’t really worried because Ally could outrun me any day, carrying forty pounds of pug or not. Not just because she is inches taller than me with a longer stride, but between the two of us, she was certainly healthier. She went to the gym. She ate vegetables. The only exercise I got was from death-replacing and sex. The only vegetables I ever ate were potato chips, French fries and the occasional spinach dip.

  Ally passed me on the trail just like I knew she would, velvet black pug ears flopping in the wind. But Ally passing me wasn’t the problem. The problem was the person coming up behind me. Someones actually—sounding like a herd of rhinoceroses tearing down trees as they thrashed through the woods after us.

  “Faster!” I yelled after Ally. No point in playing it cool now.

  She increased her pace but I had a hard time catching up. Again I made one last furtive search for Gabriel. Nada. Protect and serve, my ass.

  “Gotcha!” I heard someone say just before a pair of large hands emerged from the trees and snatched Ally by the back of her red coat.

  When she disappeared into the trees, I froze on the trail, stunned. I was about to run into the trees after her but it was too late. Before I could cry out for help, or even call her name, a hand clasped hard over my mouth and I was pulled kicking into the surrounding darkness.

  Chapter 9

  I fought hard. Not just for Ally and Winston, but for me. I did not want to be that girl on the six o’clock news: body of a young woman found dead in Greenbrook woods today, wounds from extensive head trauma—or decapitation, or whatever my attackers decided to do to my brain to keep me dead dead. I managed a couple of decent shots: an elbow strike to the sternum, a hard bite to the forearm and couple of kicks to the shins—all of which elicited swears from my attacker.

  “Fuck this Brinkley. Wrangle your own wild cat.” I was dropped like a hot iron and hit the dirt with my knees. My attacker was very tall and very blond. The kind of pale that made me think he was from somewhere frigid and altogether unaccustomed to sunlight: Sweden or Finland maybe. Just a shade shy of albino. No accent though, so maybe it was more like Canada or just pasty genetics.

  “Language,” a familiar voice said, a voice I’d know anywhere. “There are ladies present.”

  “She isn’t behaving like a lady.”

  I pushed off the ground and turned toward the voice but didn’t see the face covered in shadow. The pale man stepped away from me, cradling his forearm where I had bitten him. The man bringing Ally and Winston into our circle was also a stranger.

  “This one isn’t a lady either,” the second man said in a cocky accent. He was from somewhere east—Philadelphia or Boston.

  He stood 5’10 or so with hair the same color as mine. He was probably a couple of years older than me with sharp features: a pointy jaw, hooked nose, jutting cheek bones, and pit marks from acne. He had a lean body, no fat and was dressed in black from head to toe, cotton T-shirt to leather boots. I couldn’t tell his eye color in the shadow of the trees, but his brow was dark and bushy.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “I’m fine,” she mumbled, but I could tell by the blush of her cheeks she was not happy.

  Brinkley stepped from the shadow of a tree into the light. Relief washed over me. He was alive. Brinkley was alive. I hadn’t realized how worried I was about him until that moment. But my relief was quickly replaced with confusion.

  “How are you, Sullivan. Are you okay?” Brinkley asked. Concern. Actual concern. My mouth dropped open. When Brinkley saw my shocked expression his lips twitched to one side. “You’re fine.”

  “How old is she?” Boston asked.

  “Old enough,” Brinkley said.

  “No,” he began. “It’s just—”

  “It’s the regeneration,” Brinkley told him.

  “She doesn’t age?” Swede asked.

  Brinkley was visibly annoyed. “I needed you to come outside, because your house is bugged. I cleared it but I may have missed one in the kitchen. It is safer to talk out here.”

  “You disappeared on me,” I said. The anger and fear rose to replace the confusion. “If you’d have answered my call to begin with, I wouldn’t be in t
his mess.”

  Brinkley flicked his gaze toward his companions. “Patrol the area. Make sure we are clear.”

  The men hesitated. Then Boston spoke. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  I didn’t like the way Boston said “boss.” It seemed much more sinister than it should have.

  Brinkley watched the men go while Ally patiently stood with the pug at her feet. She might have been able to wait all day for answers, but not me. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I didn’t disappear on you,” he began.

  “It sure—” I started, feeling the heat of my anger on my face as I pulled myself up to standing.

  “Shut up,” Brinkley said, before I could really get going. “For once.”

  I closed my mouth and watched Brinkley run a hand through his thick hair. “My superior called me in after I dropped you off and held me all night for questioning. I wasn’t released until just before Eve’s replacement. Conveniently.”

  “Why would they do that?” Ally asked.

  “To make me look guilty and to leave me without an alibi.” Brinkley punctuated his words with little jabs of his index finger.

  “You could have at least checked on me!” I watched the trees move around us until all the hairs on my skin stood on end. This dark little patch of woods, completely out of sight of the trail and houses beyond was creepy to begin with, but as the sunlight faded around us and the sound of crickets and bugs rose to an overbearing cacophony. It was more than creepy.

  “You’re tough, Jesse.” Brinkley grabbed my shoulders and forced me to look at him. “But if they arrest me, we’ll never be able to prove the truth.”

  “Why do I even have to prove my innocence?” I demanded. I deflected his show of concern. “I was the one who almost got my head cut off.”

  Brinkley shuffled in place. I knew this dance. He did this dance when Rachel got sick.

  “Just say it,” I demanded. “What the hell is going on?”

  “The man in the hotel room with you was one of our own men. Another agent from FBRD. Replacement agents are dying,” he said.