Lovely Death

by Brandon Meyers

  He was no longer in the Cougar. In fact, he was inside of a building, lying horizontally on a floor that was as hard and cold as concrete.

  Voices swam around his head, their urgency trying desperately to be heard. The words were muddled. Then came a shot of pain from his guts, a sharp stab that forced his eyes wide and caused him to call out.

  The surrounding glare faded; the shimmering light dulled to a soft glow. A solitary naked bulb illuminated the bare walls of a bathroom. A looming white monolith beside Nick’s head proved to be a toilet.

  His hands were shaking, or rather, they were being shaken.

  “—orry. So sorry. Jesus Christ, what’d I do. Help me, he’s dying!”

  Nick knew that voice. Layla hovered over his fallen form, just where he’d left her in the dead mystic’s house. The outline of her shoulders glowed in the dim light, giving her the appearance of some kind of angel. Among his reality of pain and shadow, it was a welcome beauty. He knew neither how it had happened nor how it was possible, but he was back among the land of the living.

  He tried to respond, to tell her everything was going to be alright, but a spear of fire dug into his stomach as soon as he attempted to speak. He winced and took a sharp breath. That hurt too.

  “Layla,” he managed. “It’s—o—”

  “Please, do something!”

  She shook his hands, looked back over her shoulder frantically.

  Nick’s vision cleared a little and he could see the swarthy form of Monique standing in the threshold. She was watching him intently, studying him with her left hand raised and pointed in his direction. Her lips were moving rapidly as she whispered to herself, some kind of mantra. And then she stopped. Monique lowered her hand and took a step forward.

  “It is done,” she said. “He has succeeded.”

  With that, she took another step closer. And Nick saw that she was not alone. Mama Bindu stood right beside her. It was an unexpected sight, but not a frightening one. She offered an approving nod to Nick and then faded into empty air. Monique grunted as she leaned down and plucked something from his pants pocket. Neither he nor Layla made any motion to try and stop her, at least not until she stood up and backed away.

  Confusion struck Layla’s face. “What? What are you doing, lady? He’s fucking dying here! Please do something!”

  Monique nodded as she hurried away. “I am, girl. I’m calling the police.”

  Nick tried to bolt upright when he heard her say it, but the fiery knot would not let him.

  “Sit down,” Layla commanded. “Help will be here soon. I’m so sorry, Nick. I—I shot you. I didn’t think it through. She said it would help, that it was the only way.”

  It took a considerable amount of effort for Nick to nod his head.

  “It worked?”

  Again, he nodded. He closed his eyes, suddenly growing nauseous. Consciousness was slipping away from him but there was one last thing he needed to tell her.

  “You—shot me,” he said. “The police.”

  “Ohgod, the police,” she said. “How the hell am I going to explain this?”

  “Gang—bangers,” he said through rising bile. “Get us out. Hide—gun.”

  And then for what felt like the hundredth time that day, Nick’s body forfeited the battle against pain and abuse, and retreated to unconsciousness.

  Thirty

  Back in Spokane, things had settled down concerning a cute, young bartender who had abruptly gone missing. Everyone had been relieved when they heard the news that she’d turned up a few days later, unhurt, halfway across the country. And when she returned home two weeks after that, her local friends and family were stunned to learn that the rumors were true, that she was accompanied by a somewhat infamous celebrity.

  Layla had stayed by Nick’s side for two full days after she had willingly gunned him down in the South Side of Chicago. As far as the police were concerned, the two of them had been on the losing side of an altercation with a nameless gang member. In such a rough neighborhood, there were no witnesses to the crime. There never were.

  She’d followed the ambulance to the hospital in the Cougar, where Nick spent the next two days progressing from the Emergency Room to Intensive Care, and then into general recovery. The hollow point bullet had done no lasting organ damage and had been within a half inch of exiting Nick’s back on its own. Within a week, he was back on his feet again for a few minutes at a time.

  The hospital was in no rush to discharge him. He was only half joking when he noted that his insurance was, after all, pretty damn excellent. It didn’t take long for the paparazzi to catch wind of the killer director’s surfacing in the Windy City, but the hospital security did a bang up job of keeping the buzzards at bay. Not that they were clawing to get at him, anyway. It wasn’t as if he was Tom freaking Cruise.

  Layla spent most days at the hospital, helping the nurses whip Nick’s ass back into shape. They didn’t go easy on him. But they didn’t need to. Nick was glowing with determination. Despite his injury, he looked the best that he ever had to Layla, a new man almost. She stayed as late as visiting hours would allow, leaving at night to stay at a boutique hotel room he’d rented for her just across Division Street in the Wicker Park neighborhood. Nick’s body mended during the time they spent together. And so did his heart.

  Nick had aged, physically. By his best guess, his body had lost five solid years, maybe even ten. There were new, sharp lines at the corners of his eyes and around his lips. And his hair, once jet black, was now evenly salt-and-pepper. He also healed a little slower. When Layla brought it up, he just shrugged. If that was the steepest price he had to pay just to survive his encounter with the soul eater, he would have done it again in a heartbeat.

  After a couple weeks, Nick was fully discharged. He had decided to make his way back to Los Angeles, where his manager and agent both assured him he would be readily welcomed. The studio had not pulled any funny business in response to his unannounced walkabout, as they were still quite pleased with the amount of press he continued to inadvertently drum up leading into the release of Return to the Grindstone. As if killing his deranged, stalker ex wasn’t enough, he’d managed to go out and get shot in a real gangland crime. As such, his slithering agent had finally done him a solid and convinced the studio to keep the original film title.

  Layla drove them back to Spokane. He did a lot of uncomfortable shifting in the passenger seat, but never once did he complain. They didn’t spend much time in Layla’s hometown. When it was time to move along, Nick didn’t ask Layla to accompany him home. And neither did she ask to. She just pulled the keys from her newly recovered purse—next to the dead cell phone with about a thousand text messages on it—and climbed into the Cougar’s driver seat. Nick slid into the passenger side with a content little smile on his face.

  He slept most of the way to Seattle. But the GPS unit directed Layla without a problem.

  When they reached their destination, she shook his shoulder to wake him.

  Nick lifted his groggy head, blinked a few times, and looked around.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  Nick nodded. The bittersweet end was near. There was only one last thing left to do.

  “You need help?”

  Nick shook his head. “Nah, I got this.” He gave Layla’s resting hand a squeeze and stepped gingerly out of the car.

  Crisp air bit his cheeks and he dug his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket.

  He was surrounded by emerald green grass and low hanging tree branches. The iron gate of the cemetery was visible in the distance, and the road just beyond that.

  The graveyard was very full. He passed at least a dozen folks on his way to Laura’s headstone. With the exception of a few more potted lilies, it looked just as it had when he’d left it last. The sod still looked fresh and disjointed. But there was something different. There was a peace about the grave marker, or at least an absence of the chilling unrest Nick had experienced during
his first visit.

  “I won’t make this long, Laura. I came to say thank you. And I’m sorry. But mostly thank you. I know you didn’t have to do what you did back in that shoe shop, but it saved my life. And—”

  Wetness filled the corners of his eyes and Nick blinked it back.

  “I know there’s nothing left of you, that he got all of it. He used you up like burning gasoline. And I’m really, really sorry for that. We both fucked up here, girl, but in the end, it was my fault. You weren’t the monster in all of this. I was. And even though I know there isn’t anything left of you to hear it, I—it just needed to be said. I’m sorry.”

  Nick stared at the soft soil, watched the wet grass as it just sat there, soaking in his words. He wiped at his eyes and looked around.

  The woman at the grave nearest his back was watching him curiously. She was in her eighties, barefoot, and a long incision scar poked out the top of her dirty white dress. She smiled and waved.

  Nick waved back and saw another man standing at the other end of Laura’s grave. This guy was young, probably just out of his teens and handsome. He wore a black and white suit and his eyes were full of life. Which was fairly ironic for a dead man. He smiled at Nick and said hello.

  Nick took a deep breath and looked down at his hands. He was still getting used to this. It didn’t happen much, but being in a graveyard certainly made it more noticeable. The population density of ghosts was, after all, much higher in a place like that.

  It was an aftereffect of his travels, his ability to not only see, but to communicate with spectral remainders. Not like the wandering souls whom he had encountered in the land of the dead, but rather ghosts of those trapped behind in the world of the living. He did not know if it would be with him the rest of his life, but he had made peace with the fact that it might. After all, it could have been worse. All the shades he had encountered thus far had been almost friendly. Like Delilah back in Deadwood. Nick opened the palm of his right hand to see the physical reminder of that particularly helpful spirit. The shape of a skeleton key had been branded into the skin just above his wrist. It must have happened when the axe was broken, and somehow stayed with him when he crossed back over. However it had come about, it made him feel safer knowing that the key was still with him.

  The actual skeleton key was back in the Cougar, dangling from the necklace around Layla’s neck, where Nick had affixed it back in the hospital.

  He let his hands drift to the front pockets of his jeans. He sighed in relief when he found them to be empty. The bullet had disappeared. It had left his person completely the night he had faced Goddard, but it still made him uneasy to think about. And checking his pockets was an easy reassurance.

  “Got to go now, Laura. Lot of lost time to make up for.” Nick gave an imaginary tip of the hat toward the headstone. “Goodbye.”

  “Leaving so soon, pal?” the young man’s ghost called after him.

  Nick offered a slight wave without turning around. He passed the same dozen or so lingering ghosts he’d passed on the way in and kept his gaze fixed on the ground. He’d found that they paid him little mind if he didn’t acknowledge their existence. And right now, he didn’t feel like making any new friends. Those lonely old souls had a knack for chattering a guy’s ear off.

  Nick reached the Cougar again, paused with his hand on the passenger door. He leaned down and looked in the open window. Layla grinned back at him from the passenger seat. She tipped her head toward the steering wheel.

  “Well, this thing isn’t gonna drive itself, is it?” she asked.

  He chuckled. “No. I suppose it isn’t.” He rounded the nose of the vehicle, opened the door, and took a seat.

  Nick turned the key. He couldn’t fight the smile that took over his face when the rumbling 351-cubic-inch Cleveland motor sparked to life.

  “Where to, Miss Daisy?”

  “Home, James.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Nick put the car into gear, straightened his back in the seat to relieve the pressure on his wound, and found the gas pedal. He guided them back down the dirt hill to the entrance of the cemetery.

  “You mind?” Layla asked as she reached for the radio dial. “It’s been dead silent in here for the past few hours while I let you get your beauty sleep.”

  Nick gave an obliging wave.

  She hit the power button on the satellite receiver and for a brief moment there was music. It was some B-side track from Journey. But after only a few notes it was drowned out by soft static.

  “Huh? I didn’t think you had this problem with satellite…”

  The static cleared a little and the sound of The Turtles pushed through the speakers. It was not loud by any means, but the music was audible. First came the guitar, followed by the simple, redundant snare drum.

  “Weird,” Layla said. “I thought we had this thing set to the 70’s.”

  “No, wait,” Nick said, staying her hand. He leaned back in the seat, shook his head in mild disbelief. Already, the song had begun to fade. Whatever cosmic radio transmitter it was being broadcast from was running out of power.

  “Let it play,” he said.

  And play it did.

  Epilogue (I)

  Two months had passed since the death, and revival, of Nick Aragon.

  It was the official premiere day for Return to the Grindstone, and despite the fact that it was in the horror genre, the film was expected to crush a handful of box office records. This was in no small part helped by the passing of recent events surrounding the director. Not to say that the film itself wasn’t anticipated, but let’s face it, nothing ever sold quite so well as controversy.

  Since that frightening night Layla pulled the trigger in the late Mama Bindu’s home, Officer Wayne Marczyk of the Chicago Police Department was on the road to recovery. He would never again walk without the aid of a cane, and he was permanently blinded in his left eye, but an anonymous donation made by a sympathetic citizen had made him wealthy enough that he would never need to work another day in his life, if he invested his newfound money wisely. Officer Marczyk possessed no recollection of the night of his accident, though several witnesses swore they saw a lanky bald man with sunken eyes at the scene, driving away in an early model, black Monte Carlo.

  The man was never found.

  Epilogue (II)

  It was an unusually cool day in the city of New Orleans. Winter was still at least a month away and the overcast sky had blocked the sun from giving any additional warmth to the streets below.

  It was mid-morning in the French Quarter and the cleaning people were still excavating the glass bottles and plastic cups from the bar festivities of the previous evening. The narrow streets were empty save for a few tourists without hangovers walking around in search of breakfast. They would not have much luck. While New York City was known as the city that never slept, New Orleans should have been equally famous as being the city that slept until three in the afternoon.

  And as far as Marty Pike was concerned, that was A-OK. He loved making his deliveries to the Quarter in the morning. It meant not having to fight traffic in the teeny tiny streets, or struggling to find a place to park his beefy UPS truck at a curb. Today was no exception. The residential deliveries were pretty light for some reason, which was fine. He was ahead of schedule, but it wasn’t a big deal. If he started on the riverfront, it was probable that on the main drag of Decatur, he would find most of his commercial deliveries to have their doors open.

  Marty decided to start on the north end. He dropped a couple small packages at a bar on Frenchmen Street, followed by a big, heavy bastard only half a block away.

  When he got to Esplanade, Marty stopped the truck in front of a shoe shop he’d never noticed before. He checked his electronic clipboard, pulled a tiny box from the bottom shelf in the back, and hopped out the doorless side of the vehicle. As he stood there on the stoop, examining the shipping details, a little black bubble on his device notified him that this pack
age required a signature. It was a damn small box and Marty furrowed his brow. The thing was no bigger than three decks of playing cards stack on top of one another. That would just about have to be the smallest pair of shoes known to man.

  He shook his head, double-checked the address above the wrought iron security door.

  He could not help but shiver. A sudden breeze drifted down the street and brought a chill to the light working sweat that hung to his arms and legs.

  The place looked closed. The shutters were drawn and when you got right up close to look at them, it was gross to see the amount of dust and grime that had gathered on their slats. When it came time to get a new pair of Air Jordans, he would damn sure not be coming here.

  Marty tried the door knob. To his surprise, it turned easily. He went inside.

  The place was filthy. Mismatched shoes adorned the lopsided shelves on the walls. The drop-off counter was covered in a layer of caked dust, and the only light in the entire place limped insufficiently outward from the rear of the store.

  “What the fuck?” he whispered to himself. And then he turned up the volume.

  “Uh, hello?”

  A phlegmy cough emanated from behind the dirty counter. Marty dared a step forward, where he saw the crooked, hunched form of an old man sitting at a table. He did not look like he should be alive. In this light, his sallow skin was the color of a banana and giant black spots covered more than half the surface of his face and hands. His face was sunken. Not just tired, Marty thought. The skin looked like it could literally fall from the old man’s skull to land on the table in front of him. And he might not have even noticed it.

  “The hell are you?” rasped the old man. There was a bottle of overturned fluid seeping out on the table. The old bald bastard was daubing a paper towel at it with a gnarled, arthritic hand that shook like an egg beater.