Ghosts & Echoes

by Lyn Benedict

  Ross pulled her to her feet. “Got any ID?”

  “In the truck.” She gestured. “My friend all right?” She moved toward Wright, and away from Bayside. Maybe they’d be lucky and get hauled in, get bailed out, before the mall even recognized their loss.

  Ross said, “Stay where you are.”

  Sylvie slowed but kept moving, talking all the while. “Hey, I just want to check. He’s a little squirrelly, got hit by lightning recently—what if he had a relapse? I mean, that would suck, right? And your department can’t take too many publicity hits.”

  While the thought distracted Ross—how did one have a relapse from a lightning stroke?—Sylvie dropped to a crouch beside Wright and the other patrolman. He looked over at her, and her stomach plummeted. Her luck had just run out. His name tag read F. SUAREZ; the mismatched eyes—one brown, one blue-green—argued that he was Rafael Suarez’s close kin, and no friend to her.

  “Shadows,” he said. His lips curled; he scowled; he reached for his cuffs.

  She dodged his grasp, fighting the urge to move in and strike, to unsnap his gun from his holster and demand they leave her be. Wright chose that moment to wake, groaning, obviously startled and disoriented. He crab-scuttled back on heels and hands, fell off the curb and into the street, before stopping.

  “Vagrancy, Shadows. An unlicensed weapon—”

  Oh. There was her gun. Where Wright had been lying. She wondered if Suarez had moved it, or if the burglars had considered taking it as part of their haul. She might get it printed. Then Suarez scooped it into his sweaty palm, and that idea fled.

  “I have a license,” she said.

  “You’re a liar,” he said.

  “And a concealed-carry permit,” she continued, as if there had been no interruption. “In the truck.”

  “Oh, is that your truck? Parking violation,” he said and, despite his partner’s bewildered glance, turned her about and cuffed her.

  “What’s going on—?” Ross asked.

  “She got Rafi killed,” Suarez answered, and Sylvie flinched as his grip bit into bone for a moment.

  Ross made no response, but he didn’t need to make one. A fraternity in blue indeed; loyal to their own.

  Sylvie ducked when Suarez shoved her into the backseat of the cruiser, saving herself a knock to the head. The vertigo that resulted from her sudden movement made her wish she’d just taken the lump. It wouldn’t have been too bad. Their harassment followed predictable lines—concussions were out of bounds. She leaned back against the cruiser seat, squirming as she imagined she felt guilt and desperation bleeding out of the stuffing.

  Outside, Ross tugged Wright to his feet, shaking his head at whatever it was Wright was saying.

  Wright fell in beside her, his face a tight knot of frustration and anger. His shoulder pressed hard on hers, and he struggled to right himself, awkward with his hands cuffed behind him. His shoulders shook, long tremors in his body that told her he felt as crappy as she did.

  “Take it they didn’t believe you were a cop,” she said.

  “Not real trusting, no. It’s the company I’m keeping. Should I be worried? You got a record, Sylvie?”

  “I’ve got a reputation.” Sylvie kicked moodily at the driver’s seatback before her.

  He slipped down beside her, hunching inward with a grimace.

  “They hit you?” Sylvie asked. If the Suarezes had expanded their harassment to her acquaintances, all bets were off.

  “Just sore and really confused.” He sighed, twitched, tried to rub his cheek on his shoulder.

  “Welcome to Miami,” she said. Lowering her voice, she added, “And the Magicus Mundi. You got off lightly. Just arrested.” She gave one last kick to the front seat, and Ross slapped the glass.

  “Hey, play nice, kiddies,” Ross said, climbing into the passenger’s seat. “And Shadows? Felipe doesn’t like you already. Try not to piss him off further. He might slam on the brakes.”

  Wright said, “He slams on the brakes for anything but a kid in the street, and I got your badge.”

  Ross sighed, scratched at his grey-black stubble, and said, “Look, just keep her from kicking the seat.”

  Suarez climbed in; the cruiser rocked as he settled himself.

  Sylvie started to snark about men who loved their donuts, but Wright leaned closer, and said, “What happened? I thought waking up in the gutter was just an expression.” He shifted, twitched; metal chinked behind his back. If his hands had been free, Sylvie bet he’d be crossing his arms defensively.

  “Spell of some kind,” Sylvie said, keeping her voice low. “The people coming toward us? The light? They were carrying a talisman of some kind. I was looking at their faces, for all the good that did me. That light was . . .” She shivered a moment. She’d been afraid of light before—balefire, the lightning of battling gods—but she’d never been repulsed down to her core by light. Until now. She swallowed back the memory. “You see anything different? What they were carrying? I got an idea. Don’t like it much, but could stand to have it confirmed.”

  His face, tight with stress, quivered. He sank down in the seat. “I didn’t see anything.”

  The cruiser pulled away from the curb, toward the interstate and the downtown jail.

  “C’mon, Wright. Nothing? You saw enough of the light to fall prey to it—” She felt her voice go sharp. He’d been doing so well; she hadn’t expected him to get a last-minute case of wishful blindness.

  “Nothing,” he snapped. “Nothing at all. Don’t you get it? The last thing I remember? I was sitting in your truck, wishin’ you’d turn on the AC.” He turned his back on her, determinedly staring out the window as if he were just an ordinary tourist, leaving Sylvie to wonder if memory loss was a side effect of the sleep spell that had whammied him—it wouldn’t be the first time she recovered faster, better, differently from those around her—or if for those forty minutes or so, Wright’s “ghost” had been running the show.

  5

  Echoes & Leftovers

  MMM. JAIL AIR, SYLVIE THOUGHT. THE STINK OF BLEACH AND DESPERATION, old coffee, alcohol, and chemical-laced sweat. She sat, cuffed to the long bench on the edge of the main squad room, with Wright a sullen presence at her side. At least, this early in the morning, near the end of night shift, before day shift, there weren’t a lot of people waiting processing. Gave her space to think about Wright and his memory gap.

  Fugue states were rare but far more common than ghosts, and Wright had enough trauma to suggest a fractured psyche: Dead and back again wasn’t all roses. On the other hand, Wright had died in Chicago, where the Magicus Mundi was everywhere, snatching at everything like greedy children freed from the need to be mannerly.

  A dead man brought back to life on an ordinary day, suffering mental gaps, she’d write him off as delusional or damaged. A dead man brought back to life while gods were roaming around and magic was reshaping reality? Chicago made possession a possibility.

  But a ghost, given abrupt freedom of a body, should have betrayed itself somehow.

  Beside her, Wright slumped, an unstrung puppet, all uncomfortable angles and quiet misery.

  She’d thought herself in circles, gotten no closer to a solution to Wright’s problem. Frustrated, she leaned back and thumped her head against the wall, regretting it when her hair stuck. “I hate this place.”

  “Then maybe you should have gotten a permit,” Wright said. He leaped into conversation as if he’d been desperate for an opening. “Christ, Sylvie, what kind of PI doesn’t even register her gun?”

  From the wary expression on his face, he had come up with an answer of his own—the kind of PI who might need to walk away from used guns and dead bodies.

  “I have a concealed-carry permit,” she said.

  He raised his brows, double-barreled skepticism, followed by a speaking eye sweep of their surroundings. An utterly nonverbal yeah right.

  She licked her lip. He hadn’t been anywhere near that expressive during the
time they were roaming around the parking lot, checking for burglars.

  “They ignore it or lose it,” Sylvie said.

  “It’s a conspiracy? The Man out to get you? I hear that a lot.”

  Sylvie sighed, pitched her voice to the most annoying whine possible. “Yup. But it’s different this time, Officer. . . .” At his expression, she said, “What? You never played the game at all? Losing info? Just long enough to make a difference?”

  “I’m a beat cop,” Wright said. “I risk my neck for a general pop that spit on me if I give ’em a chance. I do my job, I do it well, and I don’t play games.”

  “Don’t you?” She stood, tried to stand, and was yanked to an awkward crouch by the cuffs. It did nothing for her mood. “Thing is, I’m used to my clients lying to me, Wright, but it still burns me every single time.”

  “I haven’t—”

  “Lying by omission is still a lie,” she said. “You have blackouts? Fugue states? You think the ghost is walking around in your skin, and you didn’t think to mention that?”

  The receptionist, a heavyset cop with a permanently etched scowl on his face, said, “Hey, Shadows, keep your freak show quiet!”

  The rasp in her throat pointed out, if the cop’s reprimand hadn’t, that she’d been one step away from shouting. Sylvie sucked in a breath, brought her temper back under control, and dropped into the seat.

  Wright didn’t make it easy. The moment she sat, he said, “I told you I was possessed. I thought that kinda thing came with the label.”

  “That’s it?” she said. “That’s all you’re going to say. You just expected me to know?”

  He nodded once, jerkily.

  The bad temper washed out of her; he looked so . . . broken. A tough guy barely hanging on.

  He scrubbed his free hand over his mouth, his eyes, as if he could wipe away things he had seen or said. As if the whole problem could be erased. Then his shoulders went back, stiff and strong. “So, you going to tell me what happened? I mean, what . . . it did when it had control?”

  Sylvie studied the juncture of cuff and bench, a spot worn slick in the terrazzo. She wasn’t sure she had an answer to his question—two questions in one, really. The covert one was a plea for assurance that there was a ghost at all.

  Setting aside her default paranoia, Sylvie wasn’t convinced that there had been anything more at play than the sleep spell messing with a man already fighting his own mind.

  “Did it try to hurt—”

  “You were helpful,” Sylvie said. “You were useful. A little mouthy, a little logy, not all that different.”

  Wright’s mouth twisted, rejecting what should have been good news. Sylvie reminded herself that cops had their own instincts, and he was reading between what she had and hadn’t said. His voice deepened to a growl, an angry pitch she hadn’t thought he could reach. “I recognize that look. You’re going to dump me and my problem on someone else.”

  Sylvie bit back her first, second, third retorts, before saying, temperately, “I just don’t think it’s my kind of problem.” A police station was not the place to have this talk. This discussion should be happening in the privacy of her office, not under the bloodshot eyes of an overworked cop. But Wright was as pushy as the best cops tended to be.

  He swallowed hard, his throat working, his chest rising rapidly beneath his thin T-shirt. “I thought you were supposed to help me. Thought you were supposed to believe all this shit.”

  Sylvie scooched over on the bench to put her mouth close to his ear. “What ‘shit’ is that? Wright, all I’ve seen so far is a man with a blackout. And that’s explicable by lots of things: drug abuse”—she held up her hand to forestall his instant protest—“psychological trauma, organic trauma, just plain exhaustion. Just because there are monsters doesn’t mean that every shadow is cast by one. You have a high-stress job in a high-stress city that just had big problems. You have money problems. You’re having trouble in your marriage. And you died. You’re the poster boy for stress-related disorders.”

  “I dreamed you. Isn’t that proof enough?” He picked fitfully at the fraying denim on his knee. She addressed herself to the high blade of his cheekbone, the bronze stubble blurring his tight-held jaw.

  “Tell me what type of possessing ghost would be so helpful? Possession isn’t a good thing, Wright—”

  She ignored his dry Tell me about it and bulled on. “Possession means taking over someone else, trammeling their will beneath your own, claiming their flesh. Not the mark of a good guy. Not the mark of a nice guy. Yet your supposed ghost helped out. Do you see why I’m having doubts?” It sounded good. Believable. Solid. Everything she said had been true. Facts. Logic. The PI’s best friends.

  Yet she couldn’t quite shake the tiniest doubt in herself. The idea that Wright’s ghost might be a very real threat.

  “You don’t want to take the case, fine. Don’t lie about it,” he shot back, and he was hissing in her face now, red-flushed, a vein pulling tight in his neck. “If you don’t believe me, tell me why Cedo Nulli makes you flinch.”

  “You’re mangling the Latin,” she said.

  The intake cop growled another warning.

  Wright leaned back, let bleach-scented air drift between them; the red heat faded from his skin before he said, “I’m not leaving. You don’t believe? Just wait. You’ll get your fuckin’ proof. I’ll be your sidekick if I gotta. But I’m sticking around.”

  “You could help your cause,” Sylvie said. Her voice was sharp, torn between guilty relief that he wasn’t going to let her push him away, anger for the same cause. “You got someone else in your head, and you know nothing about them? Not even a name? C’mon, Wright, you want me to believe you? Give me something. Give me a name.”

  Wright’s eyelids fell closed, shutting off that fever-bright gaze. The last of the hectic flush faded, leaving him ashen. His brow knotted. Behind his eyelids, movement, searching his own mind. She found herself holding her breath.

  “It’s . . .” His hands fisted, his jaw tightened, and he gritted the words out. “I don’t think it knows. It’s all broken glass; edges and bits and pieces. Like those toys, kaleidoscopes, and you turn ’em and you turn ’em and it’s pretty and shiny but it never makes sense. It’s like there’s a piece missing.” He went back to picking at his jeans.

  She didn’t say anything. She might be a bitch, but she didn’t kick a man when he was down. Unless he deserved it.

  “I’m still sticking to you like glue,” he muttered.

  She licked her lips, hated to give him false hope, but ghost or not, his distress was real. “I’ll get someone to take a closer look, do a proper diagnosis. I can help you that much.”

  A rude laugh interrupted their talk; Felipe Suarez loomed over them. His partner, three steps ahead, holding two cups of coffee, paused on his way toward the exit. “Shadows, you don’t help people. You fuck ’em over. I’d run back to your wife, Chicago, if I were you. Or you’ll end up on a slab.”

  “Felipe, man, c’mon,” his partner urged, and silence fell in their wake.

  Wright cleared his throat. “So, why exactly are they out to get you?”

  “Rafi . . . Rafael Suarez was an employee of mine, as well as related to a good chunk of the force.”

  “Was?”

  Yeah, trust a cop to home right in on the point.

  “He died. We tangled with some would-be sorcerers, and he got killed.” It cost her something still to winnow Rafi to cold fact and report his death in a level tone.

  “They blame you,” Wright said. “ ’Cause grief makes people crazy. I get that. So our arresting officer?”

  “First cousin, Felipe Suarez,” Sylvie said. “And if it hadn’t been him, it could have been one of Rafi’s brothers, his uncle, his sister, or his father. They’re a big family, and they bleed blue. So, they lose my permits and give me the runaround. We’ll sit, they’ll yell at me, maybe fine me. Depends on how bad their day went.”

  “Light
ner!” A big-voiced man in a rumpled suit poked his head into the hall, saw her cuffed, and sighed. He scrubbed at his face, stubble dark along his jaw, eyes weary. The very picture of a tired man about to go off shift and finding that he had one last unwelcome task to complete.

  He disconnected her from the seat, the jangle of hand-cuffs, and pointed her down the hall. “You know the way.”

  She wiggled her fingers bye-bye at Wright and let Detective Adelio Suarez lead her into one of the interrogation rooms.

  THE ROOM WAS A FLUORESCENT HELL: CHEAP LINOLEUM, CHEAP paint, cheap video camera aimed squarely at the table bolted to the floor, all of it reflecting the flicker-shine of the false light. A rectangular window high up, filled with wire-mesh glass, showed a sky going blue and bright outside.

  Here we go again, she thought, stiffening her spine. It was hard: With all the other Suarezes, she felt equal portions irritation and patience. With Adelio Suarez—she just felt guilt. Rafael had been his son, and when Rafi had come to work for her, she’d told Adelio she’d keep him safe. He’d been pleased. One child out of the line of fire.

  He stabbed his thumb at the chair. “Sit.”

  Disobedience ran deep in her soul, but she dropped into the wooden chair, heard it screek against the faded turquoise linoleum as she shifted her weight. The sooner she shut up, the sooner she’d be out of here. He paced behind her; then, just when she was preparing to start the game by asking for a phone call, he said, “Wait here,” and left the room. A total change of pattern. It made her wary.

  Adelio came back with a file folder, and her gun, which he set on the table before her. It drew her eyes like a magnet; she missed his first words, lost in the itch to reclaim what was hers.

  “. . . even with your testimony and Ms. Figueroa-Smith’s, we’ve had no luck finding the cultists that killed my son. We’ve got a set of probable names, but the suspects themselves are gone. All of them vanish on the same night, except for one of them, who disappeared some days earlier—a college student named Mira Castellan. She vanished from the UM campus, and funny thing is, Shadows, campus security recalls seeing your truck on that day. You’re no student.” He flipped through the folder, showed Sylvie a picture of the woman. Sylvie felt her upper lip curl, restrained any other response. Murderess.