by Lisa Emme
The park was pretty busy with people coming and going, so I pulled out my cell phone and put it to my ear. It’s one of the tricks of the trade when you’re a medium. The last thing you want is to look like some sort of crazy person talking to thin air. I looked up at him and put on my most sympathetic face.
“Listen to me. You’re dead. Go to the light,” I said. I got up from the bench and threw my empty cup into the trash, ignoring the pleading spirit. What? I said I sent them on their way, not hold their hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’. I’m not their grief counsellor. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that you have to be pretty blunt when it comes to the dead. Just cut to the chase. Otherwise you’ll end up getting sucked into the vortex of their self-pity. Telling it like it is usually works; unfortunately not this time.
“Please, you gotta help me. I can’t go yet. There’s something I have to do first.” He looked at me, his desperation mirrored in his eyes. I hate it when they look at me like that. It’s like looking at a puppy. It gets me every time.
“Alright, alright. What do you want me to do? Get a message to someone? Feed your cat?”
Dead Guy smiled. Wow, he could really turn on the charm. Too bad he was dead; that smile could have taken him places.
“Hurry! This way.”
He evaporated only to reappear back across the street. I reluctantly followed, his spectral body blinking in and out of sight a few yards in front of me, like some sort of weird follow the bouncing ball sing along.
I found Dead Guy’s body just around the corner from the coffee shop in the back lane. It looked like he had been dumped there and the killer didn’t try all that hard to hide the body. I really hate looking at dead bodies. You’d think I would be used to it by now, but it doesn’t get any easier. I never would have guessed the bloody, swollen bag of bones on the ground beside the dumpster could be my Asian Cary Grant. He had really taken a beating. I turned to look at the spirit beside me. “Do you remember your name?”
“My name? Of course I know my own name. I’m Bryce. Bryce Chow.”
“Do you have any idea who would do this to you?”
“I…” A look of consternation passed over his handsome features. “I…I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
No surprise there, but it was worth a shot. Generally, the memories of the recently departed are like Swiss cheese. They can usually remember their name, address and what they ate for breakfast, but the minutes leading up to their death? Gone like a prom queen’s virginity in the back of a Chevy. Looking at what had once been Bryce Chow, I guess it’s a mercy.
“I really can’t remember. Why can’t I remember?” Bryce moaned.
“It’s just the way it is. Listen Bryce, you’ve got to focus. Why did you need me to come here? What is it that you still have to do?”
“I…the stick. The memory stick. They didn’t find it.” He clutched at his ghostly head as if he could yank the memories out. “Why can’t I remember who they are?”
“I don’t know. I’ll do what I can to help you find out. Where do I find this memory stick?”
“It’s in my shoe, my left shoe.”
“Crap! I don’t want to touch you.” I made a face of disgust. “Didn’t you ever watch TV? I’ll leave fingerprints or trace evidence or something.”
“Come on girl, you’ve got to help me.”
A quick look around the back lane revealed that the only security camera in range appeared to be broken. Luckily, the shoe in question wasn’t as dirty as the other and I was able to grasp it with my hands in the sleeves of my sweater. The heel swiveled open with a little persuasion and inside I found a USB memory stick. I pocketed the stick, closed the secret compartment back up and then got the hell out of there.
At the entrance to the lane I stopped and pulled out my cell phone.
“What are you doing?” Bryce’s incorporeal self was beginning to become more translucent. I was surprised he lasted as long as he did. As I said, manifesting as a ghost requires energy. Usually the newbies don’t have much juice and their appearances are fleeting at best.
“I have to call the cops. If I don’t, and someone saw me enter the alley, they’ll wonder why I didn’t call it in. Trust me. It’s the right thing to do.”
Chapter Three
Trust me…Famous last words. Why is it that the right thing to do isn’t necessarily the best thing? After waiting twenty minutes for a squad car to show up, the uniforms had left me to cool my heels on the same park bench I had occupied before. This wasn’t my first rodeo or even my second for that matter, when it came to finding a dead body. I knew they would keep me waiting for the detectives assigned to the case to arrive. This time though, there seemed to be some confusion because the first suits that showed up just waited around for another car to arrive. The four men had a little confab then the first two, looking a little disgruntled, hopped back in their car and took off. The whole scene smacked of office politics. Somebody had pulled some strings to get the second pair of detectives assigned to the case. What had Bryce gotten himself into? I’d have asked him, but he had long since dissipated.
The second set of detectives looked less than pleased to be called in. They both looked a little bleary eyed, like they had just woken up, but since it was now after three in the afternoon, that didn’t seem likely, unless they were on the night shift or something. The pair made an odd couple. One was a short, slim, mixed race-African American with warm mocha skin and short dreadlocks. His sharp, charcoal grey suit complete with tie seemed completely antithetical to the dreads. The second of the pair towered over his partner. He had to be at least six foot four and had the well-proportioned build of someone who works out and not just to build upper body bulk for show. He was also wearing a shirt and tie, but had gone for a more casual look, wearing a black leather jacket instead of a suit, and Dockers that hugged his ass nicely. His short, light brown hair had that tousled, just got out of bed look that made you want to run your fingers through it.
“You’re staring at Nash and licking your lips.”
“Bryce!” His voice in my ear practically startled me right off the bench. “I was not.”
“You were too.”
He materialized on the bench beside me. I cast a furtive look over to the uniform supposedly babysitting me, but he didn’t appear to have noticed my outburst. “I was not…..hey, wait a minute. Whose ass? You know that guy?”
“Of course I do. Everyone does.”
“Well, obviously not everyone. I don’t know him or his partner.”
“The partner is Dev, Devlin Mayes. How can you be part of the Cimmerian and not know Nash and Dev?”
“The Cimmerian! I’m not a criminal. I don’t associate with them.” The Cimmerian was the collective name for the darker side of the supernatural community, a community that for the most part, remained in the closet. Taken from Greek mythology it meant dwellers of the dark and gloom. That Bryce knew the name for the local criminal underworld, spoke volumes as to why he ended up beaten into a bloody pulp. “How were you associated to them?” I looked at him suspiciously. “You weren’t a Cutter were you?”
“A vamp-wannabe? No way, I try to steer clear of bloodsuckers.”
Vampires made up the majority of the Cimmerian society and had a hierarchical power structure. Cutters, basically humans that longed to be vampires were the lowest in the pecking order, the lackeys and sycophants of the true vampires. They took their name from their unnatural habit of sucking each other’s blood. Since they didn’t have fangs, they used razor blades to slice their skin. Occasionally, a Cutter who ingratiated himself to a particularly powerful vampire, a ‘Vlad’, would be granted the right to be turned, which of course gave all the other Cutters hope of immortality and brought more of the Goth freaks to the service of the vampires.
“If you st
eer clear of vampires how do you even know about the Cimmerian then?”
“I said I tried to steer clear of them, but I do work for them or at least I did. I was a computer security consultant for the Magister.”
Salvador Arroyo, the Magister. Based on the company he kept, it really came as no surprise that Bryce ended up a bloody smudge in a back lane. The Kingpin of the underworld, Salvador Arroyo was the most powerful Vlad in Riverton and as the Magister for the Cimmerian it made him the leader of the entire supernatural community. Arroyo owned a multinational corporation and had his fingers in a lot of pies, mostly those that involved sex, drugs and alcohol. Gambling was another of his cornerstone industries. It wasn’t much of a stretch of the imagination to figure he might own a few corrupt cops as well.
“And how do Detective Nash and his partner come into play?” I asked Bryce, but he had disappeared again.
I looked over to the mouth of the alley only to see Nash and his partner staring at me. Just great, they probably saw me talking to myself. I made a show of getting up from the bench and gathering up my things. When I turned around, Detective Nash was standing beside me. I looked up into his eyes and, this is going to sound totally cliché and corny, but time stood still. Seriously. It was like everything ceased to exist except his startling green eyes. My heart thumped in my chest. For a moment, he had a look of complete shock on his face and then he inhaled and a frown replaced the shock and time started to move again. I let out the breath I didn’t know I had been holding.
“Detective Nash.” I held out my hand for him to shake. “Harry Russo. Nice to meet you, well, I mean it’s not nice under the circumstances but…” Damn, I was totally babbling. “I…can I go now? I gave my statement to the officer and I really have nothing more to add.”
“You’re Harry Russo?” Detective Nash shook my hand and held onto it. “Harry? Really?”
“Yes, that’s me. It’s a nickname.” I tried to pull my hand back but it was held fast. “Could I, um, have my hand back?”
“Your hand?” He looked at me in confusion then looked down to see our hands still clasped together. “Of course. Sorry. It was the name. You’re not what I expected.”
He released my hand and I pulled it back and held it protectively against my chest. My whole hand tingled from his touch.
“No problem. I get that all the time. Kind of goes with the territory when you’re a girl named Harry.”
“Yes, I guess it does.” He gestured to his partner. “This is Detective Mayes. We just have a few questions for you.”
“Yes of course. But I really don’t know what I could add to the statement I already made.”
“It won’t take long. Would you like to sit down?”
“No thanks. I’ve been warming that bench for almost two hours now. I’d really just like to get back to work. They’ll be wondering what happened to me.”
“Yes, I see. So you didn’t call them to let them know you were being detained?”
“No. The officer said I shouldn’t make any calls.”
“Then who were you talking to just now?”
“Talking to? I wasn’t talking to anyone.”
“But we just saw you talking to someone a minute ago.”
“Oh that.” I smiled self-consciously. “I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was just making some notes on my phone. Gotta love voice recognition.” I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and gave it a little shake. “Can’t live without it these days.”
“Right. May I see?” He held his hand out for my phone which I reluctantly gave him. He pressed a key and the screen lock came on.
“Oh, you just…” I swiped my finger over the screen and then punched in the lock code. The home screen flashed on with a picture of me and my two roommates posing like Charlie’s Angels.
He selected the call log and saw that there were no incoming or outgoing calls in the last two hours then thumbed the button to take him back to the home screen.
“And these two others are?” He gestured to the picture.
“Those are my roommates, Holly and Tess. We’re posing like Charlie’s Angels. You know…like….” I struck a pose, fake finger gun held up in front of me.
“Uh-huh. So, how did you know the deceased?”
“I didn’t. I mean I don’t.”
“And why were you in the alley?”
Luckily, I had prepared myself for that question. “I was going to look in the recycling for boxes I could reuse.” It was something I did quite often, although never here at the coffee shop.
“So start from the beginning and tell us everything you saw.”
“Do I really need to go over everything again?”
“Yes.”
I sat back down on the bench. This was going to take a while; might as well get comfortable.
Chapter Four
“Gran!” I dumped my purse on the kitchen island and went straight for the cupboard. “Gran?” Of course she was a no show. What a disaster her little set up turned out to be. The entire afternoon spent being grilled by the police and I still had the headache of figuring out what Bryce needed me to do for him.
My roommates, Tess and Holly, were both still at work. Tess worked at her uncle’s gym and Holly worked as a nurse at the nearby Riverton Hospital. The three of us lived above my shop on the second and third floors of the firehall. A deal with the building’s owner had allowed us to sink some money into the place, with the understanding that we would be able to buy the building from him in five more years’ time when he retired and moved back home to India. The second floor was shared space with an open concept living room and kitchen. There was also some storage, a powder room, and the laundry on this floor. We converted the third floor dormitories into three spacious bedrooms each complete with its own ensuite. The best part was the roof top greenhouse and garden. The building’s flat style roof had allowed me to create a green oasis in the city. Besides a kitchen herb and vegetable garden, I cultivated many of the plants and flowers there that ended up in customer containers for the shop.
Since I was alone and didn’t feel like making anything to eat, I grabbed a jar of peanut butter, a bottle of chocolate syrup and a spoon from the cupboard, sat down on one of the stools at the kitchen island and dug a big spoonful of peanut butter out of the jar. Next I drizzled on some chocolate sauce then stuck the whole spoonful in my mouth. Hey, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. I was seriously running low on energy reserves. Communicating with cops and ghosts will do that to you. Okay, so the cops were just really frustrating. It’s ghosts that are draining. One of the pitfalls of being a medium; ghosts have to get the energy to manifest from somewhere and a medium is like having a telephone and a battery rolled into one handy package. When I started to feel drained like this, the best thing for it was carbs followed by a protein chaser, thus the peanut butter and chocolate sauce. Not to mention it tasted damn good too.
I poured myself a big glass of milk and then pulled the memory stick out of my pocket to look at it. It was just a standard USB memory stick. What could be on it that was worth killing for? I guess there was only one way to find out. After firing up the old computer sitting in the corner of the living room, I inserted the memory stick and opened it up. There was only one file on the stick, a rather large video file. Great, it was starting to look like Bryce was killed for a sex tape.
Knowing I would probably regret it, I clicked on the icon to play the video, but instead of getting someone’s naughty home movie, a security screen popped open asking for a password.
“You need the RSA token.”
“Bryce! Quit doing that.” My heart pounded in my chest. You’d think I would be used to voices coming out of nowhere by now. “What’s an RSA token? Do you know what’s on this video?”
Bryce took form behind me, looking over my shoulder at the monitor and frowni
ng. “No, I can’t remember. I just know it’s something important, something very important and I want to trade it for Bianca, my sister.”
“Your sister? You mean she’s being held for ransom or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
It turned out Bryce’s younger sister had a bit of a gambling problem. She had dug herself into a hole so deep that even her brother couldn’t help dig her out by legitimate means. That’s why Bryce had started working for Salvador Arroyo in the first place, to work off her debt by doing some less than legal computer security.
“And now that I’m, uh, well dead, I need to get her out of debt once and for all.”
“Well without the password we don’t even know what’s on here and if it is even worth trading. How do we find the password to look at it?”
“You need to get the RSA token and use it to enter a code. I have one at my place. I must have copied the video from somewhere and used the token to protect it.”
“Can’t you just hack the password?”
“No, it’s 128-bit encryption. I can’t hack it. You just need to go to my place and get the token then we can use it to unlock the file.”
“Go to your place? Are you kidding? I’m sure the cops are all over it. I can’t just waltz in there. What if someone sees me?”
“I can get you in so you won’t be seen. There’s a fire escape around the back and the bedroom window doesn’t lock properly. The sooner you find out what’s on that video, the sooner you can get rid of me.”
Solving Bryce’s problem and sending him on his way was high on my list of things to do, even if I did have to do a little break and entering. “Okay, okay. But I need to stop for a burger on the way.”
***
The third storey window to Bryce’s apartment was unlocked, just like he said it would be. What he neglected to mention was that the fire escape ended at the living room window and that I would have to shimmy along a narrow ledge to get to the bedroom. I had grilled Bryce as much as I could about where to look for the token in his apartment before I had left because it was more than likely that he would be a no show when I needed him. You can’t really predict when or if a spirit will manifest, at least not without performing some sort of summoning ritual.