“Boudreau killed Lucy to get to me. Came pretty fucking close, too. I can’t bring her back, I can’t change a goddamn thing. So what the hell am I getting out of this? The fuck am I supposed to do?”
“Kill Boudreau. For real this time. Jesus, Eric. Pull your head out of your ass. You think he’s gonna stop just because you left town this time?” He looks at Tabitha for support. She shrugs.
“Got any brilliant insights on how?” I show him my bandaged hand. Point to the bruises on my face. “I’ve been getting my ass handed to me since I got back in town. I’m pretty fucking tired of it.”
“Can’t win if you don’t play,” Alex says.
“Can’t lose, either. You know what happens if I leave? Griffin’s screwed. He’s hiding behind my ass hoping Boudreau’ll come after me instead of him. Well, fuck him. Best thing I can do is leave.”
“No,” Tabitha says. “You can’t keep running. Not forever. I mean, I get it. If you have to go, go. But Alex is right. This isn’t going to stop just because you’re not here.”
Alex’s phone interrupts him before he can say anything else. He looks at it, glares at me, flips it open.
“Hey,” he says, listens for a bit. “Okay. Yeah, he’s right here. You want to talk— Oh. Okay.” Listens some more. “I’ll see if he wants to. Yeah, he’s being kind of an asshole. See you in a bit.” He hangs up.
“I’ll take a wild guess and say that’s Vivian and Ellis has woken up.”
“Yes on one. No on two. He’s still out. She’s been there all night. Wants me to pick her up. Asked if you’d come along.”
He sees my hesitation. Rolls his eyes. “Fine, at least say goodbye to her this time. Then, hell, I’ll drop you at the fucking airport, or something.”
Say goodbye. I owe her that much. Kind of missed that the last time. Another thing I owe Griffin. I hope when Boudreau eats him he makes it hurt.
“Okay.”
“Are you coming back?” Tabitha says.
Half an hour ago I’d have said no, but now. “I don’t know.”
“Fair enough,” she says. She steps over from the door, kisses me on the cheek. “I hope I see you again some time.”
“Me too,” I say. “Thanks. I mean for the other night, not, you know.”
“Selling you out?”
“Yeah, that. You might want to make yourself scarce for a bit. I doubt Griffin’s going to try anything with you. There’s no profit in it, but still.”
“I have his money and I gave him what he wanted. I think I’ll be fine.”
I nod. She gets it better than most people would. I turn to Alex. “You’re gonna have to drive. My car’s stuck in the afterlife.”
Chapter 21
“You gonna fire her?” I ask.
Alex shakes his head. “No. She didn’t know who you were. She didn’t know anything about this. How about you?”
“I’m not her boss.”
“You know what I mean. What are you going to do about her?”
I don’t know. No, I know and I just don’t want to say it. I need to leave. They can call me a coward but I’m a target and anyone standing around me is in the blast radius. If Boudreau doesn’t kill me, Griffin’s sure as hell going to try.
“Nothing,” I say. “She didn’t do anything wrong. This is all Griffin.”
Griffin. There’s something about him that’s been bugging me since last night, but I can’t put my finger on it. What was it that he said in the ambulance? Something isn’t clicking. He’d said, “Now that Boudreau knows you’re in town.” There’s something there, but my mind slides off it as we hit a pothole and my head throbs some more.
I manage to pull myself more or less together by the time we get to Harbor-UCLA. The headache’s dulled to a low throb. A couple pieces of gum and my mouth doesn’t taste like a possum took a shit in it.
I’m still hungover, but not so hungover to not notice that shit is really, really wrong when we step into the hospital.
“What?” Alex says, as I freeze at the doorway. I put up a hand to shut him up, close my eyes. Extend my senses.
“There’s nobody dead,” I say.
“They’re having a good day?”
“My kind of dead, smartass. There aren’t any anywhere in or around the hospital. This place should be crawling with them.”
“The fuck would scare ghosts away?”
I can think of a couple things, but only one of them makes any sense. “Boudreau. He’s got to be somewhere in the building, but I can’t sense him.” A thought hits me. “Where’s Vivian?”
“Fourth floor. ICU.”
We run to the elevators, almost knocking over a security guard as we pass. Get there as the lights go off. Emergency lighting kicks in, flickers, dies.
“Stairs?” Alex sees them first, grabs my sleeve, yanks me down a short hallway. Get to the fourth floor and my chest is in agony. I don’t recommend running up stairs with fucked up ribs. Hit the door, step into chaos.
The ICU looks like it’s been hit with a tornado. Equipment is toppled, gurneys on their sides. Through the glass walls of the rooms I can see doctors and nurses doing CPR on flatlining patients.
An orderly runs by with a defibrillator that suddenly starts emitting an electronic shriek. I yank Alex back into the stairwell and slam the door just as the defibrillator explodes. It goes off like a flash-bang, a loud pop. Then screaming.
The orderly’s thrashing around with pieces of plastic embedded in his face and chest, blood running into his scrubs. I push past him looking for Vivian.
“Did she say what room?”
Alex is leaning by the orderly looking like he doesn’t know what to do. Pull out chunks of glass and plastic? Apply pressure? Where? I grab Alex, haul him up. “What room?”
“But the guy—”
“Screw the guy. What room?”
“Uh, 412. Around the corner.”
I head down the hall, dodging gurneys, nurses, exploding fluorescent tubes raining glass from the ceiling. Turn the corner.
Room 412 is worse than the rest of the floor. The entire glass wall facing the hallway is gone. Pieces of tempered glass cover the floor like gravel. Somebody threw a nurse through it.
“Vivian?”
“Here,” she says next to me, sliding into view as she drops the spell hiding her.
“What happened?”
She doesn’t have to answer. Ellis steps out of the room, IV and catheter lines trailing behind him. Wild eyed, unfocused. There’s a pulse of light that I’m not sure anyone else can see and then there they are. Swirling around him are all the hospitals ghosts I should have been sensing since I walked in. And at the center of it I see Boudreau’s face flickering over Ellis’. Back and forth and back again.
I can sense the ghosts now, but I’m still not getting a read on Boudreau. Not like I can’t see him standing right there, but why can’t I feel him?
I don’t have time to think about it. He sees Vivian and I, raises his hands. I can feel energy collecting around us. I yank a fire extinguisher off the wall, throw it at his head before he can get a spell off. The blow glances off his head, knocks him down.
I grab Vivian and pull her around the corner. Alex is halfway down the hall, helping somebody to their feet. He sees us. Doesn’t need us to tell him what to do.
“I’m going to eat your fucking soul, you sonofabitch,” Boudreau screams down the hallway. The voice is a weird synthesis of his and Ellis’. He’s shuffling after us, slow and unwieldy. As possessions go Ellis probably wasn’t the best choice.
We hit the exit door right after Alex, take two steps down and the door blows off its hinges. It’s not heavy, but it’s moving fast. It slams into me and Vivian, throwing us ass over teakettle down the stairs. I feel a crack in my chest. That rib’s never going to heal.
I feel like a cat in a dryer. Tumble down the cement steps. Alex barely manages to jump out of the way. We hit the landing on the next floor down, Vivian half on top of me, the door
beneath us.
Alex hangs over the side of the railing, trying to pull himself up. As he scrambles for purchase Boudreau steps through the doorway, grabs him by the wrist, twists.
What Boudreau lacks in speed he makes up for in strength. The snap of bone echoes in the stairwell. Alex screams as Boudreau hoists him up, yanks him back onto the stairs.
I push Vivian off of me so I can draw the Browning. I focus all the gun’s hatred into that shot, pull the trigger. But Vivian grabs my arm and the shot goes high. Instead of blowing his head off it tears into Boudreau’s shoulder. It’s a lot worse than any 9mm should do. Blood erupts from the wound, the shoulder a ragged mess of meat and shattered bone. He almost drops Alex, staggers.
Is that worry on his face?
“What are you doing?” Vivian says.
“Killing him. The fuck does it look like?”
“But he—”
“Wants to kill us, yes.”
It occurs to me that she can’t see what I see. She doesn’t see Boudreau, or all the swirling, screaming ghosts that surround him like a swarm of bees.
She just sees some old man in a hospital gown that she’s been treating for years when he comes in off the street looking for something to ease his pain.
“That’s not Ellis. Trust me on this, okay? Please?”
I readjust my aim and Boudreau grabs Alex off the floor with his good arm and I don’t dare take the shot.
“You want him?” Boudreau says. Blood is pouring out of the shredded wound in his shoulder, the arm hanging limp. “I’ll trade. Him for you. I’ll even give you some time to think about it.”
The ghosts swarming around Ellis’ body spin faster, spiral tighter. I can see Boudreau’s face over Ellis’ pinch, recede into a point. I can’t let him get away. But I don’t want to hit Alex. I take the shot, anyway.
A blast of light and sound bursts outward from Boudreau as I pull the trigger filling the room with bright light. When it clears Alex is gone, a bullethole the size of a dinner plate in the wall where he was standing. But Ellis is still there. Or his body is. He lies motionless on the steps. An empty, broken old man.
Vivian yells, pulls herself to her feet, runs up the stairs. “Where is he? Where’d Alex go?”
I limp up after her, holstering the Browning. My ears are still ringing from the gunshots, but I think the overall chaos in the hospital has stopped.
“Boudreau’s got him,” I say. “I don’t know where.”
She leans down to check on Ellis while I look at the bullet hole. There’s no blood, thank god. If I’d hit Alex on top of the rest of this clusterfuck—
I don’t finish the rest of the thought. “How’s Ellis?”
Vivian looks up at me shakes her head. “He’s gone.”
“Probably been gone for a while,” I say. I reach under him, hoist him up over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. My chest screams at me and I almost fall over from the pain.
Boudreau probably moved in as he was dying and kept things working in his body long enough to not trip off any monitors. Would I have sensed him if he was hiding in Ellis’ body? I don’t know.
“We need to get him out of here,” I say. “Go downstairs, get a gurney. I’ll meet you there. I need to ask Ellis some questions.”
“He’s dead.”
“Never stopped me before.”
—
“Do you have a garage?” I say.
“A carport in my building,” Vivian says. “Why?”
“That won’t work. I need somewhere we won’t be disturbed. This could take a while.”
We’re heading north in an ambulance. I fried the radio and GPS when I stole it. We’ll be fine for a while.
Ellis’ body is strapped into a gurney in the back. Vivian slapped some gauze bandages over the gunshot wound so he wouldn’t leak all over the place. Couldn’t find a body bag.
“Alex has a garage. We can go to his place. He’s got a place in Hancock Park. Will that work?”
“Yeah, that’ll do fine.” Hancock Park’s old money, big houses. Wilshire Country Club shit. “I need to hit a hardware store first.”
“I know one on Robertson,” she says. “We can hit it on our way. What do you need?”
Been a while since I’ve done this. I’m not sure I remember all of it. “Hammer. Iron nails. Pliers. Dropcloth. Hacksaw would be good. Duct tape. Definitely duct tape. Maybe some rope. Couple 2x4s.” I’m missing something. “Oh, and razor wire.”
She stares at me, horrified. I can feel the gulf between us widening.
“I’m remembering something you said to me last night,” she says. “About not knowing the kind of shit you deal with.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re right. And I don’t want to.”
—
I find everything but the razor wire. The kind gentlemen at the store directs me to a fencing and lumber place up the street where I’m able to grab a spool. I shouldn’t need much. Ellis isn’t that big a guy.
“Jesus, this place is huge,” I say as we pull into Alex’s driveway. Spanish style with terra cotta roof tiles and a jacaranda tree in the yard.
“He got it a few years ago before the market went to hell,” Vivian says. “I—”
“What?”
“I was going to move in next month. Now—”
“Hey. We’ll get him back.”
Before we drag Ellis’ body out of the back of the ambulance I pull out a can of Krylon I picked up from the hardware store and spray paint “NOTHING TO SEE HERE” on all four sides of the car, casting a don’t-see-me spell as I make each pass. Vivian helps me wheel the gurney into the garage. I flick on the overhead fluorescents, close the door behind us.
I’ve heard you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their garage. What I can see from this one is that Alex is a neat freak. The cement floor is spotless. What few tools he has are put away in drawers or hanging from pegboards. A few cardboard boxes are stacked neatly in overhead racks. Most importantly, there’s plenty of room.
“What can I do?” Vivian says.
I pull out the 2x4s, the hammer, nails and rope. Pull on a pair of painter’s coveralls. “Not much at the moment. I have to get this frame set up. Ropes attached. Sling them over the rack up there. Might need your help nailing Ellis up.”
“Come again?”
I lay the beams one on top of the other in a crude cross. “We’re crucifying him,” I say. “Sort of.” I stop when I notice her horrified look. “And then we’re going to get him to answer some questions.”
“Crucifying him?” She shakes her head. “Jesus, Eric. What kind of sick shit is this? Why don’t you just talk to his ghost?”
I throw the hammer and nails down. “You know what, I’m getting fucking tired of this. I can’t ask his ghost because he didn’t leave one. Ellis has either moved on or Boudreau grabbed him before he could. Either way, there’s no ghost for me to talk to. This is what we’ve got. So either shut up and help me or stay out of my way.”
I know she’s not squeamish. You don’t make it through med school having a problem with corpses. So what gives?
“I’m sorry. This is just really far removed from what I do and—” Vivian swallows hard. “I’m worried about Alex. All right?”
She’s been holding it together, but the veneer is starting to crack. “We’ll find him,” I say.
“Okay. I’ll lay down the drop cloth and get Ellis off the gurney.”
With her help it doesn’t take long to get the old man’s ravaged body onto the cross. Positioned upside down, one foot crossed behind the other, hands behind his back nailed and duct taped to the wood. Vivian helps me hold the nails in place as I get them through his wrists.
“Tell me you didn’t try this spell when we were dating,” Vivian says.
I laugh. It’s dry and hollow. “No,” I say. “This is old magic. Learned it in New York. Had some help from an old Algonquin spirit. Michabo? I think? Looks like a big rabbit. Kind of like Har
vey.”
“You know, people like us, we hear stories about these things. I know they exist. I know they’re out there. But this still sounds crazy.”
“Yeah,” I say. I finish wrapping a layer of duct tape around Ellis’ left wrist. “I know. I thought so, too. Even with the shit I do. There’s so much more out there I didn’t know about.”
I tape a couple of quarters to his eyes. Rigor’s beginning to set in and it takes some work to pry his mouth open. There’s a cracking sound as we pry his jaws apart. Vivian’s a professional the whole time. I don’t know why I thought she might not be. She’s a doctor for fuck’s sake. She knows dead bodies better than I do. I’ve never given her enough credit.
By the time we’ve hoisted Ellis up to the rafters he’s a fairly decent approximation of The Hanged Man. A half naked homeless guy with burns and scrapes, face swelling purple from pooling blood. A cut-rate Christ thrown together by mad monks.
I take a second, hang my head and give him a moment of silence. It’s not a prayer. What the hell would I pray to? I’ve met gods. They’re nothing special. But I want to give him this one last moment of respect before I turn him into a freak show.
I slide an oil pan under his body, slice a couple wide gashes into his chest to thread the razor wire through. I say a spell of binding as I unspool it around his torso, through the cuts, over his shoulders. Dark blood, dead and beginning to fester, drips into the oil pan. I slice his throat to drain him faster.
Vivian stands at the other end of the garage, watching me, arms wrapped tight around herself. I make a slice in my arm with the straight razor. With the wards Alex has on his home, I’ve left the ghosts outside. Good thing. Though they won’t come in without an intentional summoning, any that are just hanging around would be drooling all over me and I don’t need the distraction.
I drip the blood from my arm onto my fingertip, smear it on Ellis’ forehead, above his eyes, around his lips. Draw a charm on his chest.
“I hate this bit.” I say.
“All that and this is the part you hate?” Vivian says.
I flip her the bird, get on my knees, bring in a big gulp of air and clamp my mouth over his. I fill his lungs with air. Gag on the taste of bad teeth, rotting blood and bile. I pull away, force my stomach to stop doing handstands, spit as much of the stink out as I can. I step back, bind all the different pieces of the spell together, snap my fingers.
Dead Things Page 18