The Professional Corpse (The Departed Book 1)

by Sean Arthur Cox

  “This is Ambrose Wentworth IV.”

  “Marquis? It’s me.”

  “Everyone I know is a ‘me.’ Kindly be more specific.”

  “Right now, Bill, but I was Jaime a few days ago when you dragged me into this mess, and Genevieve when we met in Paris back in-”

  “Yes, I recall now. What is the issue?”

  I took a deep breath to steady my thoughts. It was nice to have lungs that would let me do that. It would be nicer still once I got back into a young body, one that knew what lung capacity ought to be.

  “The problem is I feel fantastic.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  “No,” I said, emphasizing the point. “I feel completely healthy.”

  “Oh,” he said, then again. “Oh. Yes, I could see how that would be a problem.”

  “I need to get out of here undetected. Any ideas?”

  “What is your situation?”

  “Security at the door, probably paparazzi, plus usual hospital stuff I imagine. I can’t exactly leave the bed to find out.”

  “I believe I know someone who can help.”

  “Anything you need me to do?” I asked.

  “Just keep calm and don’t draw any attention to your health.”

  “I can do that,” I said. “Also, could you tell Bill I don’t think Hanson is our man. He seemed genuinely surprised to find his daughter here.”

  “I will be sure to pass on your message,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and before I hung up, “Oh, one more thing. Our assassin, the balding guy? He isn’t working alone. He may have been tailing Bill, but it was a young brunette girl that shoved me down the stairs and poisoned me last night.”

  There was a moment of silence, then the Marquis said, “Good to know. If she comes back, just knock something over. You’re feeling well enough that it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Hey, Marquis?”

  “Yes?”

  “How long before your guy gets here? I know hospitals are all about recovering, but I don’t want to get caught here feeling better.”

  “A few hours,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be cut open like a lab rat. It’s already happened to me once in the last hundred years, back in the forties. That’s enough for a good long while.”

  “I understand it’s unpleasant when that happens,” he said, “but don’t be such a child about it. It will be terrible, but you will survive it. Humans instinctively fear harm because it leads to death. That isn’t a problem for you, so there is no need to fear.”

  “Well what is a legitimate fear, in your estimation?”

  “Me personally? I fear being powerless. Without the ability to assert his will on the world, a man is nothing, and I refuse to be nothing.”

  “I have a legitimate fear,” I said. “Not torture, and not being powerless. If nothing else, I can outlive anyone who oppresses me.”

  “And what could an immortal possibly be afraid of?” he asked with no small portion of condescension.

  “Eternity,” I said, and shuddered in my bed.

  “That’s not a curse,” he said. “That’s a blessing. You’re just too pessimistic and uncreative to treat it as such.”

  “You say that because you haven’t really noticed it yet,” I said, “and even if you had, you could do something about it. Yes, you’re over two centuries old, but you can’t imagine more than a thousand years, I’m guessing. Not really. You can acknowledge the time, but you can’t understand it. I’ve been around over ten thousand years, and I’m beginning to have a pretty clear picture of eternity. I will almost certainly live forever and that terrifies me.”

  “What’s so frightening about that?”

  “Forever,” I said. “Not a century. Not a millennium. Forever. One day, mankind will be extinct except for me. All life on earth will cease to be except for me alone, suffocating on thick, unbreathable air because there are no more plants to make oxygen. Not a single living thing except me. Maybe it will be a Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear war that kills everyone off. Maybe a plague. Maybe time. But it will happen eventually, and I’ll have to watch it happen. I’ll have to live with the nothing that remains.

  “And then one day, the sun will become a red giant and swallow the earth and here I will be, charred to a crisp in its corona. Then I will resurrect and promptly char again and again, flaring back up like a trick candle in the heart of a star until the universe ends, and after that? Who knows? Maybe I’ll still be here. Maybe I’m the one destined to turn off the light at the end of it all.

  “You can live a really long time if you choose, Marquis. But you can also die if it ever becomes too much. You aren’t immortal like me. You’re just living an extended life, one whose constancy keeps me sane in an ever-changing world. But one day, even you will die. And humanity. And then plants and animals. And then it’s just me, my thoughts, and the endless stream of death until the end of time. That’s what scares me.”

  “What are you, some kind of nihilist?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Nihilists believe in nothing. I don’t believe in anything. There’s a difference.”

  “Oh, and what’s that?”

  “Nihilists believe nothing is real. We come from nothing, we return to nothing, and everything in between is relative. Morality, truth, belief? These are meaningless concepts.”

  “That sounds like you to me,” he said.

  “The bit about the middle, I agree,” I said. “The part about returning to nothing? Not so much. After so long, it’s hard to put faith in anything, even nothingness. In every society I see goodness triumph over evil and vice versa with coin toss predictability. I have seen countless One True Gods replaced by new One True Gods. But the difference is how can I believe I will one day return to nothing when that’s the one thing I’ve learned I cannot do?”

  I sighed as deeply as this old body and older soul could.

  “I would love to believe in something,” I said. “I just can’t anymore.”

  The Marquis said nothing, and I suspected for the first time in all the years we had known each other, he had truly listened to what I had to say.

  “I’ll see if I can’t hurry my associate along,” he said and then hung up the phone.

  Once again, it was just me and my thoughts. I looked at the cars outside to remind myself that it wasn’t time yet. For now, there was still life in the world. Somewhere out there, some of those lives were working to get me free.

  Now all I had to do was wait. I hated waiting.

  Chapter 9

  OLIVIA

  DETERMINED NOT TO FAIL

  I have the financial networks running constantly throughout the day, waiting for news to break of poor Mister Thompson, who shuffled off this mortal coil at the hospital following a nasty little tumble that was complicated by old age. It does not come in the first hour, and I worry that my Mister Johnson will not pay if news of Thompson’s death comes outside the prescribed hours of ten to two. How can so much time possibly pass without the hospital staff realizing he died? The monitors would keep repeating echoing the heartbeat and breathing, but someone should notice he’s gotten cold. Unless...

  I practically kick myself when I realize the error of my ways. I glitched the monitors to keep a pulse and breathing pattern going whether there was one or not. It bought me time to escape and made sure Thompson would be dead long enough that there would be no saving him once they finally discover the malfunction. With all machines pinging normal, no one will discover the body until someone thinks to physically examine my victim. No, not my victim. My target. Victims are wronged, but targets have it coming. Surely, the thermometer will have to eventually tell them he has passed, or at least rouse their suspicions when his core temperature drops to the low sixties while his pulse keeps up a steady fifty-five beats per minute.

  But hours pass and there’s still no news of the ex-
Mister Thompson. Short of criminal negligence, I can fathom no possible way the doctors have not noticed how cold the body has become, and yet the news and the financial websites make not one peep about his passing. Equally strange, there’s no scrolling update about doctors charging in at the last moment to save him. And yet they must have, or else he would be pronounced dead by now. He cannot possibly have survived that much succinylcholine on his own. Not even a ventilator could keep him breathing with that much in him. There must have been some medical intervention, an intervention no one seems to be talking about. Does he have press agents working frantically behind the scenes to crush whatever rumors may be circulating?

  I sit in my dim hotel room on pins and needles all afternoon, anxiously tabbing through blog after blog, first hoping someone will finally pronounce Bill Thompson dead once and for all, then when the market bells close and the only thing down is corn futures, I tab from blog to blog hoping old Bill survives the night. I clean Prince Charlie at least a dozen times while waiting for news. Killing a man between ten and two seems like such a simple request. I’ll never get another gig if I can’t accomplish so direct an assassination.

  When my phone rings, I want nothing more than to curl under my covers and hide. But I answer. I have no reason not to, and Houston knows it.

  “How are you? Have a good dinner?” I ask, trying to keep the conversation as light and non-business related as possible for as long as possible.

  “There are enormous time zone differences between your office and Thailand. I haven’t had dinner yet today. But you knew that. You’re stalling.”

  “What? Me? Why would I do that?”

  “Because it is well past time and the paperwork still hasn’t been filed.”

  “It’s a very tricky printer,” I say. Is it printers we blame things on now? And is the printer his death or the media finding out about it?

  “Then find a new printer,” he says, his voice harder than I have ever heard it before. “You will file it no later than midday tomorrow. Use a typewriter if you have to, but get the job done. It isn’t just your career on the line.”

  It’s his turn to hang up on me. I don’t even get a chance to ask how his business went, but knowing Houston, it went swimmingly. How could it not? He is a professional among professionals, practically a legend, and I’m the new kid working the dish room. I want to protest, to say it’s not my fault. I shoved an old man down forty flights of stairs. I pumped so much muscle relaxant into him that even machines shouldn’t be able to keep his lungs going, and I made it virtually impossible for anyone to notice until well after he was good and dead. The man has more lives than Rasputin, and that’s just the times I could get close to him. That’s not counting the attempts thwarted by dumb luck. The poisoned coffee. The initial plan to get him drunk and drown him in a small lake he was known to drive by every single Monday for years, that for some inexplicable reason, he did not pass. The man must have a platoon of guardian angels looking out for him.

  I want to tell Houston that even Castro would be dead by now. I want to shout all of this at him, to make him see that none of this is my fault, that my plans were exceptional, only undermined by the strangest, most unforeseeable whims of fate. But I don’t. If I call him back to tell him any of this, he’ll only tell me that a good plan leaves no room for fate.

  I resolve myself. At ten a.m. sharp, Bill Thompson will die, no more escapes. I will not walk away until I have confirmed his death personally. It will be clean, it will be decisive. There will be no doubt he has died once and for all, and if everything goes according to plan, no one will think it anything more than a tragic happenstance. I will finish the job. I may have been a disappointment, even an embarrassment to my profession with my earlier clumsy attempts, but I will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of those failures and kill this man. I will make Houston proud.

  I sit down at my desk and make my Plan A. Then I pick apart every flaw, hone it, and sharpen it like a razor. And just in case it goes to hell, I refine Plan B. Then Plan C and Plan D.

  It’s two a.m. and I’m still at my desk, surrounded by the crusts of a cheese sandwich and a stale cup of coffee. My wits have dulled from overuse. My vision blurs as I slump to the desk asleep, drooling on a half-finished Plan Q.

  Chapter 10

  JAMIE

  CRUSHED UPON THE FLOOR

  “We’re hoping to get you into radiology in a little bit for some x-rays. There looked to be some swelling that we need to check on. The good news is your vitals have been really stable except for that fever you slept through last night, but after an accident like yours, it’s to be expected.” The nurse smiled, all bubbles and sunshine. “However, it has gone down, you’re awake and responsive, and like I said, those vitals are very promising. I’m not going to say you’re out of the woods, Mister Thompson. Not by a long shot. You still have years of therapy ahead of you. But I will say, it looks like you’ve at least found a well-traveled road that will get you out of the woods safely.”

  I groaned in understanding, careful not to let slip how out of the woods I was. Of course, I was so far out of the woods, I was right back in them. If they scanned me, I was in big trouble. They would marvel at my progress, release me from the hospital, at least on paper they would, and then someone would whisk me away to a research facility. It had happened to me before. I did not look forward to it happening again.

  I tried to ease my nerves with a little TV. The nurse had been kind enough to put it on the financial news. She didn’t ask. She just assumed that because I was a big powerful businessman, it was what I would want to watch. It happened to be true, but how did she know Bill wasn’t a Days of Our Lives guy?

  I scanned the ticker at the bottom and saw that according to reports my condition was still critical. Yeah, yeah, tell me something I don’t know. As if the TV had read my mind, in the middle of their talking head, Crossfire, “let’s get four people to just speculate wildly about the news of the day” show, word broke that apparently, I, or rather Bill, had filed paperwork to take Thompson’s public just a few weeks before my tragic fall.

  The talk immediately jumped to the timing of the news. Was this the reason Thompson had taken his sabbatical, to meet with the SEC about the filing? Table talk said probably, though one speculated Thompson had taken the time to plan for how he would spend all that money. How would the accident affect this? The paperwork should still go through, but they debated whether the stock would be a buy, buy, buy or a wait-and-see. It was an even split. Half felt that the company was so successful currently that buying initially would pay off because even if something happened to Bill and the company tanked, the initial demand for the stock would turn a quick profit for early investors with time enough to sell before the bottom dropped out. The other half felt that attitude was irresponsible. The paperwork still had a few weeks or months of SEC review before anything came of it, and a lot could happen in a few months, especially with the company’s president potentially at death’s door because, “let’s be realistic. Not a lot of old people do well after a fall like that, and from there it all depends on what direction the new leadership decides to take, whoever that new leader is.”

  They then began discussing who the new head of Thompson’s might be and how the company had managed to keep the filing secret for so long.

  I was confused right along with them. Weeks? That didn’t seem right. Surely if something had been filed for weeks, it would have been in the news already. Plus, Bill had said not long ago that he had absolutely no interest in going public. Something didn’t jive.

  I glanced at the clock on the ticker scrolling beneath these talking heads ranting about the best way to profit off Bill’s death when he wasn’t even dead yet. The clock read nine thirty-seven. My senses had itched all morning, flickering at every piece of new stimuli that might be the Marquis’s friend. Earlier I was anxious for him to get me out of here. Now, I was desperate. I had no idea how I would do it on my own.

  A ta
ller fellow with dark hair and glasses stepped in wearing pale green scrubs. I didn’t know if scrub color had any indication what they did around the hospital, but I sure hoped he wasn’t my radiologist.

  “How are those bones feeling?” asked the man. “Up to moving?”

  Damn, damn, damn. I grunted a noncommittal noise that I hoped said, “No, leave me alone, I’m watching my stories.”

  He moved to my monitors and hooked them up to the bed for easy pushing. “Yeah, I believe it,” he said, clearly misinterpreting my groans. “We’re going to get you all taken care of.”

  I wondered if perhaps someone had told him he was working with a particularly tall child today. He certainly smiled enough and made silly faces. I expected any moment now, he would ask if he could give me a sticker or maybe draw a smiley face on one of my many casts. He continued to strap all the assorted beep makers and medical thing-doers to the adjustable bed, and he disabled the brakes on the wheels. This was it. I would get caught. I would be probed and experimented on. Again.

  Panic overtook me as old memories long buried flashed through my mind. The feeling of the scalpel cutting into me, dissecting me alive. The smoky stench of antiseptics and death burning into my nostrils. The dispassionate nod after every scream, followed by the endless scribbles in the doctor’s notebooks. And that was only the most recent time a medical professional discovered my curse. I flailed, perhaps more than someone in my presumed condition should, but he would find out I had no broken bones to examine anyway.

  “If you don’t settle down, we’ll have to sedate you.”

  Not that it mattered. Shaking wildly would throw off the x-ray clarity, concealing the lack of fractures, but it would also strongly imply that I was a man with no fractures to look at. At least with the sedative, I might not feel it when they started to cut me open in yet another futile attempt to find out what makes me keep ticking. I resisted.