What happened next was kind of awkward.
The pretty blonde threw herself at my chest and started bawling. “H-He was going to kill me just like he killed those two other girls!” she blubbered.
I placed both hands firmly on the girl’s shoulders and gave her a slight push. She dropped to her knees and sobbed as I pulled out my wallet and slipped her a twenty-dollar bill.
“Maybe, you know, uh… call a cab or something, okay?” I said as I stuffed the note into her clenched fist.
She gazed up at me, wide-eyed. “But the police will want to talk to you – you’re not leaving are you? I don’t want to wait here all by myself. Please, just stay with me … please?”
Well crap.
See, this is why women bug the hell out of me. I mean, I’d just killed the living shit out of the guy who’d planned on gutting her and now she wanted me to baby-sit until the cops showed up. I glanced over my shoulder to where my pickup was parked, just around the corner from the warehouse. If I was going to hang around, I’d definitely wind up being hauled in for questioning about precisely how I was able to locate Danny-boy. Then there was the issue of why the back of his head was splashed all over the passenger seat, and with my luck, I’d probably wind up being charged with manslaughter. I pursed my lips tightly and looked down at Kelly who’d managed to get the tape off her legs. I decided I needed Sparks if the cops were going to be involved and she fucking hated me.
“I want my money back,” I said flatly, holding out my hand.
She blinked a couple of times and handed me back my twenty bucks.
“Here,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“You okay to walk?” I asked, as I crawled out of the van.
She sniffled back a big gob of snot as she started rifling through her purse. “Yeah – are you going to hang here with me while I call the police?”
“Looks that way,” I said, handing her a business card. “Here’s the number for the homicide division. Ask for Detective Sergeant Sparks. When she answers, tell her Tim Reaper told you to call and that I’ve solved her cat abuse problem.”
The girl nodded slowly and gave me one of those looks that told me exactly what she was thinking.
“Yeah-yeah,” I groaned, as I slipped a cigarette between my lips. “My name really is Tim Reaper … just make the call.”
3
Detective Sergeant Carol Sparks showed up within twenty minutes of the girl’s call. She hopped out of her Crown Victoria and fired a glare my way that could melt the rivets out of an iron girder.
“Evening, Carol,” I said with a slight nod.
“Reaper,” she replied in a cool voice, as she strode over to the back of Danny-boy’s cargo van. “That the girl?”
“Yup,” I said, matching her tone. “She’s a basket case right now, but there’s barely a scratch on her.”
Kelly Jameson was squatting in front of the garbage bin sucking back a cigarette. I’d taken pity and draped my trench coat over her, seeing as how her clothes were torn and she was almost half-naked. She stared blankly at the pavement as Sparks swung open the rear door of the van.
“It smells like shit in here,” she said, waving her hand in front of her nose.
“Cat’s aren’t exactly my biggest fans,” I said. “That’s definitely the guy you’ve been looking for, though. Do I have to wait for you to pay me, because I’m running low on cash these days.”
Sparks snorted. “You get paid when I decide to fucking pay you. And by the way, I’ve just got a corpse with his head blown off instead of a killer who should have had a trial and gone to prison for what he did.”
I snorted right back. “Why? So the guy could rot away in a cell on the taxpayer’s dime? I’m far more cost-effective. So, you know … pay up.”
She closed the back door and sauntered over to Kelly Jameson who was stubbing out her cigarette on the damp pavement. “You enjoy shooting people way too much to draw any kind of income from it, so suck it up. Times are tough all over so if you want to picket the city auditor, see if you can get me a raise because I’ve been working outside of a contract for the past two years.”
Carol Sparks sort of had a hate-on for me. It’s a complicated relationship to describe. She’s probably still pissed off at me after she made the mistake of trying to rough me up last year when she took me in for questioning about the death of a nurse who’d been whacking terminally ill patients on the intensive care ward at the Camp Hill Hospital. (Okay, yeah … I shot the nurse, but she had killed twelve people in a three year period, so what the hell, right?) Normally I kept my ability to know the time and date of someone’s death to myself, but Sparks called bullshit when I tried to explain that criminal law didn’t exactly apply to death spirits. The good detective challenged me to prove I was what I claimed to be so I grabbed her by the wrist and gave her a cold, hard stare straight into her eyes. What she saw that day changed her life forever because it was knowledge no human being should ever possess. I had given Sparks a brief glimpse into her demise, and she learned she’d be shot to death during a routine stop at a convenience store on the way home from work on New Year’s Eve, eight years from now. Since then, she’d bounced back and forth between believing what she saw in my icy blue eyes that day a year ago was real, or that I’d pulled some kind of Vegas-style hypnosis trick on her.
I didn’t particularly like cops, but I had a healthy respect for Carol Sparks because she’d seen boatloads of trouble in her thirty-two years. A product of East Preston, she’d grown up surrounded by a deeply religious family in a black community that took great strides to insulate itself from a white province where racism was alive and well. Seriously, some of the rural folks literally act, walk and talk like they fell headfirst out of the back of a turnip truck. Tall and slender with the grace of an Olympic hurdler, Sparks beat the odds and at twenty-one, she became the youngest African-Canadian ever hired by the Halifax City Police. By twenty-five, she’d been assigned to do undercover work and she single-handedly exposed a human trafficking ring that was smuggling Thai women into the country via shipping containers in Cape Breton. At thirty, she was assigned to the Homicide Division and solved four cold cases in one year through sheer determination and toughness. That got her promoted to Detective Sergeant, and last year she personally put up the bounty for a kiddie-diddler who was the head honcho of a local pedophile ring. In short, Carol Sparks was a force of nature and while I didn’t exactly understand her motivations, she’s the best cop I’d ever seen.
She knelt down and reached for Kelly’s hand as the young girl stared at the cargo van. “We need to get you to the hospital and we have to inform your family you’re safe,” she said with a hint of tenderness in her voice.
The traumatized girl blinked and stared at me with a look of stone cold terror in her eyes. “How did he know to find me? How could he have known the exact location of … he shot him! He blew his frigging head off right in front of me!”
Sparks grimaced and then somehow managed to force a weak smile. “That’s not really important right now, Kelly. What matters is that you’re safe and that sick bastard won’t ever harm another woman.”
I put a gloved hand on Sparks’ shoulder. “Um … we probably should talk about … you know?”
Sparks swept my hand off her blazer, and then spun around and gave me a hard shove. “Don’t ever touch me, Reaper,” she growled.
I stepped back and motioned for her to calm down as I craned my neck over her shoulder and fired a glance at the girl I’d just saved. “Just sit tight for a second or two, kid. The detective and me are going to have a wee chat, okay?”
The girl skittered a few feet further away from me and then looked back at Sparks who threw her a sympathetic smile. She sniffed back another gob of snot as I gestured for Sparks to follow me until we were out of earshot.
“What is it?” said Sparks in a voice that could freeze boiling water in five seconds flat.
“I can fix it so the kid over there doesn
’t remember a thing about me and Detective Sergeant Carol Sparks gets to be the hero.”
The detective blinked. “Precisely how?”
“Well you can’t exactly haul me in for questioning again, Sparks. Nobody is going to believe yours truly just happened to know the precise location of your serial killer. Hell, it wouldn’t exactly be a public relations coup for you guys either … how long have you been looking for this guy?”
“Four months,” she said, cocking her eyebrow. “What are you proposing to do?”
I waved my fingers in the air like a magician. “I’ll just help her select what to remember.”
Sparks pursed her lips and turned to look back at Kelly Jameson. I could almost hear her teeth grinding as she glanced at her watch and then back to the girl. “This better not be anything like what—“
“Not even close,” I interrupted. “And I’m glad to see you’re keeping an open mind. Listen, the kid’s grey matter is in a fragile state. I can impart a little bit of me into her subconscious and then I can do a bit of rewiring.”
“I don’t like it,” said Sparks as her eyes narrowed. “But I don’t see how I have a choice. They’ll haul you in for questioning again and I need that headache like I need another ex-husband.”
I grunted as I headed back to the traumatized girl. “Fair enough – this won’t take more than a minute.”
A few drops of rain tapped the back of my neck and I smiled to myself as a shiver ran across my shoulders. Since the day I crossed over into the human world, I found myself amazed by the tiniest sensations. I gulped back a big mouthful of air as I knelt before the girl, tilting her head back so she could look into my eyes.
“Kelly, I want you to pay close attention,” I said softly. “Just take four or five deep breaths as I examine your eyes … try to relax, now.”
She tilted her chin up as I gazed into her eyes. “Oh my God.” She gasped.
I looked deep into her mind and a torrent of emotion poured over me. It spilled out; flooding my mind with sensations of terror, lust, hatred and hopelessness, they were all there. An amalgam of concentrated feelings that existed in all humanity, experiences I’d only recently discovered began pushing forward in shimmering waves of energy. I was deep inside now, and all around me were faces of people she’d met. I looked upon her memories of home, a warm bed, dinner on the table and a smiling middle aged woman, each one flashed by me as twinkling vignettes. A thousand miniscule threads of conversation filled my ears and I had to blot them out; I was searching for something: a dark place that existed in everyone’s mind. The inky black shadow containing a stone-cold vault of horror and pain filled with all of the bad people and places that happened to the girl in her young life. In seconds, I’d found it: a solitary figure with a menacing grin on its face and claw-like hands dripping a heart wrenching mix of tears and torment onto its feet.
I approached the figure with my own mixture of menace and loathing. I reached out and latched onto its face as I drew on the ancient power that dwelled within me. A taker of lives I’d been since the very beginning, since before the very first breath and the very first thought that ever was. I pressed my palms against its cold flesh as I raised my power against her memories. Like a sponge, I drew upon those primal images, sucking up the poison that had been every terror she’d experienced since she was abducted. I scoured her thoughts and her memory, erasing every horror-filled breath she’d experienced until the figure dissolved in my hands like melting snow. I drew a deep breath and broke my gaze from the girl’s eyes. She’d sleep now, a long and fitful sleep and when she’d awaken, there would be nothing but a gap in time where any memory of Tim Reaper might have been found.
I stepped back from the girl and rubbed my temples. “It’s done – take her home.”
Sparks gave me a worried look. “You’d better be right because I’m going to call this in.”
“Her mind will heal in time,” I said, exhaling. “She’ll be in la-la land for a day or so, but she won’t remember anything.”
“It’s my ass if she does – got it?”
I spun around and threw Sparks a wiseass grin. “Why Carol, you have one of the classic asses of our time. If you didn’t hate me so much, I’d probably try to seduce you.”
She snorted. “Don’t look at my ass – as a matter of fact, don’t even look at me. You creep the hell out of me, did you know that?”
“I creep most women out – it’s another little talent of mine. Sorry about the mess in the van, but the guy did have it coming.”
Sparks threw me a grudging nod. “We all have it coming, Reaper. You should know that.”
4
I lived in a small flat overlooking the narrows in the Halifax Harbour where in 1917, the largest accidental, non-nuclear explosion in human history occurred. The Halifax Explosion killed more than two thousand people and flattened the city. For those of my kind, it was just another in an ongoing series of human contrived calamities that had been going on for thousands of years, so we did what we always did; we claimed souls.
It’s important to remember death spirits didn’t cause wars, pestilence or any number of plagues that can destroy life, as we know it. Shit, as they say, happens. Extinction events such as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs happen. Climate change happens, whether man-made or not; it’s just how it goes sometimes, and when death comes to all things, Reapers are there doing what they do best. On the subject of Reapers, I carry a certain amount of notoriety among those in my order for unleashing a flu pandemic that wiped out nearly five percent of humanity. I wasn’t on someone’s payroll when I did it, I was just a death spirit who arrived to claim a man infected with a nasty-ass super virus and it seemed reasonable at the time to see what it could do. I decided instead of taking him when he was lying in bed hacking his lungs out it might be interesting to let him linger on until someone came to check on him. What I hadn’t taken into consideration was a poor sap that came calling to check on my charge becoming infected himself. Obviously, the dominoes started falling shortly after and the rest was history.
Okay, so it wasn’t my brightest moment.
Bear in mind, though, my actions were nothing compared to what human beings caused in wars they started, so let’s just call it even: Humans sucked for killing each other off and I sucked for helping them along.
Why did I live in Halifax and not some glamorous place like New York or London? The rent was cheap, the stroll was about four blocks from my place, and I liked to watch the ships go underneath the MacKay Bridge-it relaxed me. I worked as a bounty hunter of sorts, and in truth, I liked to think of myself as a guy who did odd jobs for money. I’m halfway between gumshoe and mercenary, and it paid the bills, not that my lifestyle was anything extravagant. I didn’t work for government agencies to take down supernatural threats; there are lots of human beings with special skills to deal with that kind of crap. Me? I dabbled in stuff they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, so it’s fair to say some of my employers were on the shady side.
And sometimes not.
I stared hard at the envelope on the floor below my mail slot. It was a standard business sized piece of stationary except for the words ‘Archdiocese of Halifax’ embossed in gold ink on the top left corner. I clenched my jaw, deciding whether or not to open it. What the hell did the Catholic Church want from a guy like me? I didn’t go to church, I wasn’t exactly on good terms with the Supreme Being and I’d probably burst into flames if I ever set foot on church-owned property.
I reached for the envelope and stopped, my fingers inches away from it. “I just freaking know I’m going to regret this,” I said, as I swiped it off the doormat.
I threw off my trench coat and hung it up on the back of the door when I noticed the red light on my phone was blinking, so I picked it up to check my voice mail.
“Hello, Mister Waxman, or rather, Mister Reaper, isn’t it?” asked a voice thick with an eastern shore accent. “Your landlord said Thomas Waxman lived in your
flat – but we know otherwise, don’t we? My name is Father Butler and it was I who dropped the envelope in your mail slot early this afternoon. When you’ve opened it and had a chance to absorb the contents, I’d like to meet with you tomorrow morning at the Halifax Citadel main gate. I’ll look for you at Eight-thirty sharp, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have at that time.”
The phone beeped again, so I placed it in its cradle and plopped down on my easy chair. I stared at the envelope and then glanced back at the phone for half a second.
Absorb the contents?
I slid my knife out from its sheath and ran the razor sharp blade across the top of the envelope. I looked inside and blinked hard for a long moment: it was a single white feather and on it, a smattering of what looked liked dried blood.
“Father Butler, huh?” I grunted, as I pulled the feather out of the envelope. It was maybe four inches long from shaft to tip and the unstained portions were as white as freshly fallen snow. I got up out of my chair and padded down the narrow hall to my office, feather in hand. I flipped the light switch and went over to my roll top desk to do a little amateur CSI work because my gut told me the feather in my hand didn’t come from a chicken. Or a goose. Or an eagle.
I had a sneaking suspicion the blood didn’t either, so instead of grabbing my luminal test kit, I snatched my relic and stared at it for a long moment. More than eighty years had passed since I’d used the ancient finger bone I’d swiped from an Italian monastery for a summoning and I half wondered if the big guy would even show up.
No – not God; Ezekiel, the Angel of Death and Transformation. He’s the guy who gave all Reapers their marching orders on behalf of you-know-who, and he’s someone not to be fucked with. He’s also the only angel I’d ever met in my life since angels generally avoided death-dealers. It was a crap shoot as to whether he’d show up, so I gave a small shrug and clutched the bone in my right hand as I dropped to one knee and prepared to speak the Word that would summon him.
Immortal Remains: A Tim Reaper Novel Page 3