Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel)

by Shrum, Kory M.

  Fifteen minutes later, Jacob, a tall, thin guy in his late twenties, turned up with a greasy sack in one hand and two cartons of cigarettes in the other. His sandy hair was slicked to his head, big eyes vacant, sunken cheeks and thin lips just made him look more gaunt and angular. He froze. If he was psychic, he looked completely surprised to see us.

  “Did I miss your appointment?” he asked.

  “We didn’t have an appointment,” Cindy said. “We just need to talk.”

  The food sack hit the card table with a fat thump. He pulled out a huge burger wrapped in plastic. He scattered the fries all over the brown sack after he flattened it with a hand. With his food spread out in front of him, he finally took a seat.

  “Do you know a woman named Judy Ludlow, or a man named Brad Cestrum?” she asked.

  “I remember you,” he said. “You asked me this on the phone.”

  “What kind of services do you offer?” I asked, hoping that if I showed interest—even flattery—he might be more willing to impress us with his knowledge.

  He gave me a grease smudged price sheet. I could get a palm reading for $10 and a tarot reading for $25.

  Cindy repeated the names. “Do you remember meeting them for a sign off?”

  “No. I don’t know anyone by those names.” His eyes flicked to mine as he shoved a handful of ketchup covered fries into his mouth. He stared for a moment too long. “I have a feeling that you’ve got romance troubles.”

  “Really?” I asked. Was it written on my face or something?

  Cindy tried to get his attention again, holding up her paperwork. “Can you verify this isn’t your signature?”

  Jacob ignored her, his eyes wide and dark. “All you’ve ever wanted was to be loved. So it scares you.”

  “Hey,” Cindy snapped. “Answer my question.”

  “It’s one thing to be adored,” Jacob said. “It’s another to love someone back. He adores you, but you love someone else, don’t you?”

  “Wait—” I said. “You saw all that on my face?”

  Cindy slapped the paperwork down in front of him and put her whole body between us, stretching over the table and everything. “Have you ever seen this?”

  Having broken the eye contact between us, Jacob was forced finally give Cindy his attention. “That’s not my signature.”

  “Can you verify that?” Cindy said. “Do you have something you’ve signed that we can compare it to?”

  Without those creepy black eyes burning through mine, it was easier to regain myself control. Logic prevailed. He was a scam. So what if all I’ve ever wanted was to be loved? So did everyone. I probably smelled like Lane because we were just together and I didn’t look happy, so there was probably trouble. A drunk hobo could guess as much.

  Jacob pulled off a dusty drape covering from a piece of neglected furniture in the corner. Dust billowed up into the air. He pulled a fat folder from the cabinet.

  “Here,” he said. He lined up all three sheets side-by-side, two white sheets and a carbon copy, each signed by him. He even took a pen from his desk and signed again on the file folder itself so we could see all four signatures in a row. Cindy put her paperwork beside the sheets.

  We leaned close, our eyes measuring every curve and shift of his signature. I broke the silence first. “They’re different.”

  “So you don’t serve as an A.M.P. on death replacements at all?” Cindy asked.

  “Death-reading is not my area of expertise,” he said with a wink.

  Cindy straightened. “Do you realize someone has been going around signing your name? Do you even take proper steps to prevent identity theft? Do you know I could have been killed today under the false assumption that you, as an A.M.P., verified all these replacements?”

  “How I run my business ain’t none of your business.”

  “It does when people are trying to kill me!” Cindy yelled.

  Both Cindy and I turned toward the clicking beads of the moving curtain to find Jacob’s mom in the doorway.

  “Get out of my house.” She repeated herself when we didn’t move fast enough. “Do you have a hearing problem? I said get out of my house.”

  “Obviously we’ve misunderstood each other,” Cindy said, her voice cooling.

  “I didn’t misunderstand nothing,” she said. She reached up and gave her blond ponytail a tug as if to say she were serious about hauling our butts out. I already figured that. I didn’t need any displays of dominance to get the point. “I’ve been watching the news, knew I recognized you. You’re trying to say my boy is responsible for that accident. You’re saying he’s going around trying to get people killed.”

  “Let’s start over.” Cindy assumed the voice of a lion tamer. “I’m Cindy. This is J—”

  “Get the hell out of my house.” She moved toward us. “Someone turns out to be special and you just want to persecute them. Well, my boy ain’t gonna be your sacrificial lamb.”

  “Wait a minute.” I wasn’t even going to point out the complete illogical mentality behind her reasoning. She knew she was talking to one of those persecuted victims, right?

  Jacob who had been beside me the whole time, slipped a card into my open hand. “In case you need help making your decision,” he said in a whisper.

  His mother edged closer. Cindy and I maneuvered around the other side of the table, away from the pair, moving back through the beaded curtain. Just before we crossed the threshold something caught my eye—a picture hanging on the wall beside the door frame.

  In the picture, four people and a baby stood smiling: Jacob, his momma, a woman I didn’t know, and someone else. Beside the mystery woman was Eve who held a baby. BAM! Here was my evidence. If I gave Garrison this picture, then he might believe our story about Eve’s fake signatures even if she won’t confess.

  “Yes! I got it,” I squealed, snatching the picture off the wall and showed it to Cindy. “This is all we need!”

  Jacob’s momma charged, I mean charged like a bull with a spear in its butt. “I told you to get the hell out of my house!”

  I pushed Cindy over as I scrambled for the door. She got me back in the doorway, when she shoved me through the screen out onto the lawn. I hit the ground on both knees.

  The same time that my knees connected with the dirt and stray gravel migrating from the driveway, an explosion rocked the house. I bent down low and covered my head, inhaling the wet scent of earth.

  “What in the Lord’s name?” Jacob’s mom said and stopped chasing us. Through the unhinged screen door and around the woman’s thick calves, I saw a large spray of water pouring into the hallway. The toilet seat landed in the hallway too, just outside the bathroom, propped up at an angle against one wall.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask,” Cindy said and yanked me up out of the yard and pushed me toward her car.

  We were out of the driveway and into the street before Momma Mayhem made it down the stairs, cursing us for destroying her house.

  Cindy didn’t stop speeding until we were blocks away. “Holy shit!”

  “Do you affect water pressure or something?”

  Cindy bit her lip and for a minute it made me think of Ally. “—or something.”

  “And you couldn’t tell me that sooner?” I asked, my voice still an octave too high. “Oh my god, I’ve been freaking out about spontaneous combustion and you explode toilets!”

  Chapter 21

  “We should talk about it,” I pressed.

  “No,” Cindy insisted.

  “You explode toliets! I explode electronics,” I argued for the tenth time. “That’s not fucking normal.”

  “Nothing is wrong with me,” Cindy shouted. What little remained of her composure was lost. Her face was bright red and her hands shook in little fists by her side. “If you say another word about it I’m leaving.”

  And that was that. I didn’t want her to leave so I kept my mouth shut. But damn, it was hard. I felt better, knowing I wasn�
��t the only one, but I needed to process.

  We managed five whole minutes of silence, sprawled in defeat across my living room furniture, before she spoke again. Cindy pointed at the picture in my lap. “I can’t believe you stole that.”

  “Eve might not tell the truth ever,” I said, examining the picture more closely. “If I can show this to Garrison along with the falsified signatures, then he might believe I’m the victim.”

  “Jacob might not have known she was forging his signature,” Cindy said. “He looked surprised to see his name on our D.R.s.”

  “Or he could’ve been acting,” I said. “You saw the way he totally tried to scam me.”

  I started to shake from my crashing adrenaline. My eyes wandered over the picture again, searching the happy foursome for clues, staring particularly at happy Eve holding a baby.

  My eyes were fixed but my mind wandered. Eve’s death wasn’t a real death. I died for nothing. Worse, there was still the possibility I’d have to pay the fine and go to jail. I tried to breathe against the panic.

  “Someone is still baiting agents,” I said. “I’m betting on mystery dude from the hotel room, Brad Cestrum. We could use your replacement to bait him, see how he likes it.”

  Cindy frowned. “It’s too risky.”

  “You’re right.” That still left us in the dark as to how to find Brad Cestrum. It’s clear he was still working to polish off the Nashville zombies, but then why hadn’t he come back for me? Was that Gabriel’s doing? Brinkley’s?

  “Do you have any way of getting a hold of that agent who’s supposed to be working your case?” Cindy asked.

  “Garrison?” I asked.

  “We should give him a call,” she said. “She can’t chase him out of the house.”

  I turned the picture over so I wouldn’t have to look at their grinning faces. “Mrs. Mayhem doesn’t seem like the sort of woman to let a federal agent hold her back.”

  I called Garrison and he turned up with another fat folder in hand.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the bulging brown flaps. “Not my warrant I hope.”

  “We are in the process of acquiring that,” he said, deadpan.

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I forced a laugh anyway, but I was pretty sure it just sounded nervous and awkward. I tried to offer the picture of Eve that I stole but he waved me away.

  “I brought my own,” he said. He unfolded the envelope flap and removed several large 8x10 photographs. He spread them side-by-side on my coffee table.

  “Do you recognize him?” he asked, pointing to a middle-aged, bald man on the table.

  “No,” I said. I didn’t like his blunt, irritated tone.

  He turned to Cindy. “You?”

  She leaned over the coffee table, peering closely. “No.”

  “This is Brad Cestrum,” he said, turning back to me.

  I pointed to a different photograph. “That’s the man Eve introduced as Brad.”

  The photograph I pointed to was much less clear, an unfocused security cam photo rather than a staged portrait. The fuzzy photo was a black and white photograph of Eve and fake-Brad. In this picture, fake-Brad was checking out of some kind of store.

  “This is the real Brad Cestrum,” he said, again. He pointed at the middle-aged, bald man I’d never seen.

  “But look at him,” I said, trying to draw Garrison’s eye back to fake-Brad’s picture. “Doesn’t he look familiar?”

  He spoke as if he hadn’t heard me. “We took it off a convenience store security camera.”

  Cindy handed me the picture I’d swiped from Jacob’s place and nudged me. I offered it to Garrison again, hoping he wouldn’t disregard me a second time. He took it and assessed with a thorough eye while I explained how we got it.

  “You took this from Jacob Willis’s house, 507 Kenney Street?”

  “Eve fabricated her paperwork using her cousin Jacob’s signature,” I explained. “I have a couple of the signature sheets that prove his signatures don’t match and that he knows Eve.”

  “We were chased out of the house,” Cindy said. “She only took that by accident.”

  He didn’t look interested in arresting me for a minor theft.

  I looked at Garrison’s photographs. This whole situation was bizarre and surreal. A cop in my living room, showing me black and white photographs of someone who’d tried to kill me. Did this really happen to people?

  “So the man in the hotel room isn’t named Brad Cestrum?” I asked. “So who could he be?”

  I couldn’t make it any more obvious unless I told Garrison what Brinkley had told me, but that meant admitting that I’d seen Brinkley.

  It was Cindy’s turn to shuffle through the photographs. “My God, that’s him.”

  Apparently Garrison and I didn’t look nearly interested enough.

  “Him,” Cindy said. She poked the picture several times. “The priest I told you about.”

  Garrison snatched the second, slightly better photo of fake-Brad from my hands as if I weren’t worthy of touching it anymore. He handed it to Cindy. “You’ve seen this man as a priest?”

  “A few days ago he tried to get me to leave the church with him.”

  “He’s a priest,” I said, elated. “She just identified him, so you can go pick him up, right?” I would’ve felt so much better if this fake-Brad wasn’t lurking around. And at this rate, Garrison was going to have to look this guy in the face before making the FBRD connection.

  “Are you certain?” he asked Cindy.

  “Yes,” we both said in unison.

  “I interviewed all the listed priests and clergy members last week. I didn’t come across him.” He gathered the photographs together.

  “Maybe he’s visiting from a different church,” Cindy said, standing up because he did. “They do that.”

  He tucked everything under his arms and hustled toward the door. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Wait,” I touched his arm hoping to stop him. It worked but it was immediately apparent he did not like to be touched. I released him. “Sorry. But look, so it turns out Eve’s paperwork was fake. You can’t really punish me for that, can you? How was I supposed to know?”

  “Quit sneaking around,” he said. “Or you’ll run into something worse than an irate mother.”

  “But I’m trying to get out of trouble here. I swear to you I didn’t do anything!”

  Garrison leaned real close, almost as if he would kiss me. But then at the last moment, he turned his head and whispered directly into my ear. “If you are so concerned with proving your innocence, I’d watch what you say over breakfast.”

  It took a moment for me to process this.

  What did I say over breakfast? Everything.

  I’d told Lane everything.

  “Get the hell out of the house. Now,” Gloria yelled, and Gloria never yelled.

  I either moved the phone away from my ear or risked losing an ear drum. “What? Why?”

  I took another bite of the sandwich I made after Cindy left. I’d been standing in my kitchen trying to figure out what I could do—if anything—in the event that the police really did have my confession to killing Eddie on tape. Call a lawyer, maybe? Make arrangements for Winston?

  “You have company coming,” Gloria said. “You need to get out of the house before they arrive.”

  “I just want to finish my sandwich. Is that okay?”

  “Move, move, move!” Gloria barked like a drill sergeant. “You’ve only got minutes.”

  “Is this a long trip? Do I need to pack?”

  “Forget your clothes! You can’t let them catch you! You have somewhere else to be.”

  My skin shivered when she said this. “You found her.”

  “But that won’t mean anything if you don’t get out of that house!” Gloria kept screaming.

  I dropped the sandwich and grabbed my keys.

  “Leave your car,” Gloria said. “I’ll meet you where you met Br
inkley last. And leave the dog!”

  With this final warning she disconnected the line. The place I met Brinkley? She must’ve meant the trail behind my house. I heard sirens in the distance and I about shit myself. Those sirens might not have had anything to do with me, it could’ve been a fire for all I knew, but it was motivation enough to drop the keys and run for the backdoor.

  I was almost out the kitchen door when I saw Winston lying in a heap of wrinkles by his food dish. Dinner wasn’t for another two hours but he was very patient when it came to food. The sirens grew louder and I knew I should be running, but I just couldn’t leave him.

  “Gloria’s going to kill me,” I said, scooping his chubby butt up. I ran out the back door, cut through the yard and hit the trail at full speed.

  It wasn’t easy running with forty pounds of pug pressed against my chest. Winston didn’t appreciate it either, all his huffing and wheezing told me so. I apologized to him a million times explaining that I just couldn’t rely on the FBRD or the local police to feed him. They would’ve taken him for evidence.

  We had to stick together, for better or worse.

  I travelled much farther down the trail than Ally and I had before I saw Gloria’s car. My legs and lungs were on fire and my biceps threatened to give out on the pug, but we made it.

  I had to balance Winston in one shaky arm while I opened the back door and put him in the car. I fell into the front seat panting. “God, I need to work out more. Lift weights or something.”

  “I knew you were going to bring that damn thing,” she said, throwing the car in reverse and speeding away before I even had the door shut.

  “I couldn’t just leave him!” I whined. “He’s my baby.”

  “Well who’s going to take care of him while you’re off saving the world?” she asked with raised eyebrows.

  I gave her a pouty lip.

  “Honey, you don’t want to leave your baby in my care,” she said. “I disappear into my head for days at a time. I might come out to find that he’s died of starvation or pissed on my floor.”

  I chewed my lip nervously. “Maybe Lane will watch him. We’re dating now. I think.”