by Rich Leder
Greenburg turned to the voice, saw the hellish figure striding toward him holding a hunting knife, and froze, eyes wide. Greenburg wasn’t a fan of zombie films, though he had seen previews and posters from time to time and had even watched an episode or two of The Walking Dead, so he knew, like most everyone else, what a zombie looked like. But the zombie concept had always struck him as scientifically improbable if not impossible, which is why he wasn’t a fan of the genre. Anyway, this was no Hollywood production, this was flesh and blood or something coming toward in him real time—a true-life (true-death?) zombie in Greenburg’s very own backyard. The smell of the thing alone was horrifying. In his head, Greenburg screamed for help, but his throat was constricted with confusion and shock and fear, and so he made no noise at all.
Martin knocked the wire-bristle broom out of Greenburg’s hand and the straw hat off his head and gripped him by the throat. By instinct, Greenburg put his hands on the zombie’s thick and filthy arm.
“I’m an undead deputy of the LAPD,” Martin said. “It has come to my attention through back-channel communications that you’re calling your lawyer tomorrow to sue a certain detective who you think has your seventy-five thousand cash dollars. Is that correct?”
Greenburg couldn’t make a sound because the zombie was choking off his airway. He thought he might die of strangulation in the next minute or two.
“I told said certain detective that I would persuade you otherwise regarding your lawsuit, but I’ve changed my mind. Turns out I’m overcome with the desire to open your chest, remove your heart, cook it on your gas grill, and eat it for lunch with a cold beer—fast food for zombies. I didn’t catch your answer about the lawsuit. Yes or no? I don’t hear anything.”
And then the unmistakable racking sound of a shotgun loading a shell into the chamber filled the patio.
“I bet you heard that, motherfucker,” Ramona said.
The zombie turned to her. “You I wasn’t expecting.”
“Let go of my man, or I’ll blow your damn zombie head off your damn zombie body,” Ramona said, racking the second shell into the chamber.
Martin released Greenburg and said, “That’s the only way to kill a zombie.”
“No shit, Sherlock. I watch TV. Now drop the damn knife and get down on your damn knees or I’ll blow your damn dick off. Pretty sure that ain’t no damn fun for a zombie neither,” Ramona said, aiming the gun at his groin.
Martin dropped the knife and got down on his knees, facing Ramona and Greenburg, who moved away from the zombie and stood beside his woman, ten feet in front of Martin. Greenburg’s throat hurt, but Ramona pointing Sawed-Off Sally at the undead deputy’s face helped him forget about the pain.
“Shuler sent him to keep us from going after the money,” Greenburg said. “He made up a story about me calling a lawyer and sent the zombie to do his dirty work.”
“We way past lawyers now, DG,” Ramona said.
“I know it, RC,” Greenburg said.
“You’re not calling your lawyer?” Martin said.
“We going to war,” Ramona said. “Get my man’s money, his cars, and his dog.”
“Shuler doesn’t have the money,” Martin said.
“Yes, he does,” Greenburg said. “I pawned my wife’s Mercedes for seventy-five thousand and paid Miller so his paranormal partner, a woman named Jenny, would breathe on my dead dog and bring him back to life, which she did, except it turned out badly, so I told Miller I wanted my money back. Miller told me Shuler took it from him. Shuler has the cash. He lied to you about the lawyer and the money.”
“He lied to me?” Martin said.
“You lost your damn zombie mind?” Ramona said. “He a cop and a comedian.”
“Of course he lied to you,” Greenburg said. “Twice.”
“Fool me once, shame on you,” Martin said.
“Shame on Shuler,” Greenburg said, and a plan took shape in his gin-soaked head.
“Fool me twice, shame on me,” Martin said.
“Shame on the motherfucking zombie,” Ramona said. “I say we kill his ass right now.”
“I just cleaned the pool,” Greenburg said with something else in mind.
Ramona glanced at him out of the sides of her eyes. “What you thinking, DG?”
“I’m thinking this is about my dog, RC,” Greenburg said. “I’m thinking he knows what it is?”
“What you know about DG’s dead dog, zombie?” Ramona said.
“It’s a jigsaw puzzle with a million pieces,” Martin said.
“You best put them together or your face going to be a damn jigsaw puzzle,” Ramona said.
Martin told them about Mike Miller turning him into a zombie, about Shuler deputizing him after someone murdered Greenburg’s dog, about stalking Mike Miller, about Miller’s brother, Danny, telling him (thinking he was Mike) about the seventy-five grand and the dead goldfish swimming in the bowl, about branding Miller with a cattle iron, about Shuler telling Miller he wanted to be part of the Sunday night, Jenny the Gypsy Show, featuring the dead dog resurrection, about the meeting with Shuler in The Japanese Garden, where the detective sent him to get Greenburg out of the game or else lose the money and his badge, not to mention he’d have to stop stalking Mike Miller.
“That the most fucked up thing I heard since yesterday,” Ramona said.
“What time’s the show?” Greenburg said.
“Midnight,” Martin said.
“We got to crash that party,” Ramona said.
“We’ve got to find it first,” Greenburg said.
“Hair dude took your dog. Wherever he at, your cars and your cash going to be there too,” Ramona said.
“I don’t know where Dan Miller is,” Greenburg said.
“I do,” Martin said, taking off his badge and tossing it to the dentist. “When I was branding his brother, I asked him how it felt. He said it was almost as bad as Dan moving into his garage. I’ve been to the house. If you don’t blow my dick off and you give me five minutes alone with Mike Miller, I’ll take you there and get your money and shove your dog down Shuler’s throat.”
“How do we know we can trust you?” Greenburg said, looking at the tin toy badge.
“I’m a zombie,” Martin said. “You can’t trust me.”
THE BUSINESS OF LIFE AND DEATH IS ABOUT TO CHANGE
“Look at Moby Dick,” Omar said to Harvey, “wearing his funeral suit to the circus.”
“If I don’t get my money back, he’ll go straight in the casket,” Harvey said. “We won’t even have to straighten his tie.”
“Don’t call me Moby Dick,” Mike said. He had chosen a black suit with a navy blue shirt and a black and blue paisley tie. It was the suit he’d planned to wear to the Wasserman and Waddell New Partner Party in his last lifetime one week ago.
Harvey and Omar were standing at Mike’s front door. It was five minutes to midnight. The temperature was one ten. The Weather Channel had said Los Angeles was now Hell on Earth. They’d done a half-hour special segment by that name to demonstrate how dangerous the LA heat had become, to emphasize the fact folks and their pets should stay in their houses to be safe. Not my house, Mike thought as he stepped aside and let the dwarf and the giant into his foyer.
After leaving Jenny’s crooked cottage, he’d spent the afternoon wrestling with a feeling he’d been unable to pin to the mat: lust—an irreconcilable thumping in his chest. He wanted to have sex with the voodoo queen; he couldn’t deny it. But he also missed Marcy and his daughters and longed for them to come home. Longing was the feeling under the feeling he was feeling.
But the feeling under the feeling he was feeling wasn’t stopping him from spending the night with Jenny Stone. No, the feeling he was feeling under the feeling he was feeling under the feeling he was feeling that was stopping him was horror.
He was horrified at the picture now and forever engrained on the inside of his eyeballs—the image of crossing swords with his brother. It made him physically il
l—weak and nauseous, though not so sick he couldn’t also feel hunger.
To think things through before the midnight show, he’d stopped at Cupid’s on Lindley Avenue in Northridge, not far from Jenny’s house, for a quick hot dog. Instead, he had eaten two with mustard, onions, and chili (Everything), two with mustard, onions, and relish (Triangle), five small bags of chips, and three large sodas. He had just said, “Large soda,” so he didn’t even know what he’d drunk, just that they were large.
As he’d pulled into his driveway, the Cupid’s sugar and fat bliss wore off entirely, replaced by a single thought: Linda.
To Mike’s knowledge, no other dead human being had ever been brought back to life with the same consequences as Linda. Jesus didn’t walk around Palestine hoping to get his bookkeeping job back after he’d been risen. Some people said they saw him, and so he was risen, and so Christianity started, and so…big deal, Mike thought. His mother was burning like the Cuyahoga River—baking sardine-jalapeno pies and threatening him with frying pans and busting his balls to get out of his house and get on with it.
Palestine had Jesus and Paul the Apostle. So what? Mike thought. He had Linda and Paul the Pervert.
He found Linda locked in Bethany’s bedroom. She wouldn’t open the door. “I’m getting pretty for my party, fairy boy,” she’d said. “Don’t talk to me till midnight.”
Danny had left a note on the kitchen table: at the track—back later.
So Mike took a shower and watched TV and wondered if anyone else in America was having a week like he was having.
And then it was five minutes to midnight, and he shut and locked his front door and followed the dwarf and the giant to the living room.
Located directly behind the foyer, the large living room stretched across the back of the California ranch. A wide hallway bisected the house, separating the living room from the foyer so that you had to cross the hallway to enter the living room, even though the whole house was basically an open floor plan. Turn left and the hallway led to the bedrooms. Turn right and it led to the kitchen at the back of the house, which was connected to the dining room at the front of the house.
Once in the living room, the far right wall was a double doorway into the kitchen; the far left wall was a stone fireplace. Leather sofas and maple coffee tables and upholstered armchairs and a flat-screen TV and various lamps and bookshelves and framed family photographs were arranged to look like a Pottery Barn showroom.
During one of the renovations, Marcy and Mike had replaced the entire back wall of the living room with French doors that opened to the patio and the pool so that guests—Harvey and Omar, for instance—could stand in the foyer and look straight through the house to the backyard.
Chachi’s body was laid out on the coffee table in the middle of the room. Shuler was seated on the sofa that faced the foyer, on the cushion closest to the kitchen. Harvey and Omar took the sofa facing the French doors, opposite Shuler, so that the coffee table with the dead dog was between them.
Danny stood in front of the fireplace. He wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black Nike cross trainers. His hair was behind his ears. The gash on his forehead had been cleaned. He’d put a bandage on it. Spots of blood had leaked through the bandage.
Mike followed the dwarf and the giant into the room and stood opposite Danny, in front of the armchairs closer to the kitchen, so that everyone formed a square around the poodle on the table.
“Thank you for coming tonight. What you’re about to see will make you the hottest comedian in the business,” Danny said, looking at Shuler first and then at Harvey, “and will make you one of the richest men in America.”
“I don’t want to say your life depends on it,” Harvey said to Danny, “but your life depends on it.”
Shuler smiled and wrote the exchange in his pocket pad.
“Then without further ado, please welcome Jenny Stone,” Danny said, dimming the lights and gesturing at the double doors to the kitchen.
Jenny came through the darkened doorway into the light of the living room and stopped so everyone could see her. Her hair was even more auburn and her eyes were greener still, and she had changed into a full-length, sequined red gown slit high on her hip and cut low around her tits, which were spectacular in any light.
Harvey, Omar, and Shuler fell silent—an occurrence as rare, Mike imagined, as the alignment of Mercury, Saturn, and Venus over the Pyramids of Giza, a once every twenty-eight centuries or so event he’d learned about while helping Julia study her astronomy, before she and her mother and her sister fled to Paramus…oh, how he missed them. The point being whatever the dwarf and the giant and the comedian cop were expecting Jenny Stone to be, they weren’t expecting her to be anything like this.
And neither was he. Holy Mother of God, Mike thought, his jaw dropped open. She’s not a voodoo queen. She’s Jessica Rabbit.
The gown glittered as she walked like a runway model around Shuler’s couch, in front of the French doors to the fireplace, where she stood beside Danny.
“What you’re about to see now,” Danny said, “is nothing short of a miracle. The dog is dead; there can be no doubt of that. Mike…”
Mike picked up the iron fireplace poker he had earlier in the evening leaned against the armchair beside him, took a step forward, and poked Chachi with it—once, twice, three times. The poodle was deceased. Mike stepped back and leaned the poker back against the armchair. He hated dead bodies, even dead dog bodies, so this part of the show was torture for him. But Danny was directing, so he had to do it.
“I hate this fucking dog,” Omar said.
“Be that as it may,” Danny said to Omar and to the group, “it is time to forgive old grievances, wipe clean the slate, and blaze a new trail. The angles are infinite. The upside is without limit. The business of life and death is about to change in our financial favor.”
He nodded at Jenny, and she moved to the coffee table. As she bent down to the dog, Mike looked at her tits spilling out of her dress and momentarily forgot what the hell was happening here in his living room. And then he remembered, and the chaos coalesced, and he found himself even more confused, astounded, and afraid than he’d been before he’d looked at Jenny’s tits spilling out of her dress.
Jenny looked into the poodle’s face, frozen in the ferocious snarl with which he’d drowned. She made a sad little sigh and gently blew on the snarl. Then her lips turned ever so slightly up at the corners, and she stood, looked at Shuler and Harvey and Omar, and walked out of the living room and into the darkness of the kitchen.
“Now what?” Shuler said.
“Now we wait in wonder,” Danny said.
“I’m wondering where my money is,” Harvey said.
“I’m wondering how deep I can shove that poker up Danny’s ass,” Omar said.
“I’m wondering how long will it take,” Shuler said.
“I’m wondering why you don’t see the comedic tension,” Mike said to Shuler, remembering their meeting in the funeral home. “What kind of crap comedian are you?”
“White whale spouting,” Harvey said to Omar.
“And me without my harpoon,” Omar said.
“Don’t call me a white whale,” Mike said to Harvey.
“Be quiet, be patient, and ponder your fabulous futures,” Danny said.
Harvey and Omar and Shuler all took an impatient breath and looked at the dog on the coffee table. One minute went by, and then another minute. A clock on the mantel clicked off one hundred twenty seconds of silence. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick…
And then Harvey sang softly, “Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling, From glen to glen, and down the mountain side…”
Omar reached out, grabbed the poker, and stood as if he’d had enough and was ready to hurt someone—or everyone.
“The summer’s gone,” Harvey sang, “and all the flowers are dying…”
Shuler stood, pulled his gun, and pointed it at Omar.
Harvey pulle
d his gun, pointed it at Shuler, and kept singing, “’Tis you, ’tis you must go and I must…”
Bark, bark. Bark, bark.
The room was instantly suspended in space and time—except for Chachi, who stood on the table, wagging his tail like the happiest poodle in the pound.
“Oh my God,” Harvey said, astounded and horrified in the same breath. And then he stood on his couch cushion and said it again. “Oh my God…”
“Hilarious,” Shuler said, but his voice was void of all hilarity and instead was filled with amazement and terror.
“I hate this fucking dog,” Omar said with a touch of fear in his voice, and he took a step away from Chachi and held the poker out to defend himself.
Mike had seen it before, with his mother and with this very same dog, but breathing life into death had the same effect on him all over again: a sense of deep and debilitating dread, as if something was very wrong with the universe.
“And now, gentlemen,” Danny said, “I’m pleased to present my mother, the late Linda Miller. Mom…”
Danny gestured behind Harvey and Omar toward the hallway, and Linda appeared, looking, Mike thought, like Elsa Lanchester in Boris Karloff’s Bride of Frankenstein, hair frozen in a frightening black beehive with white streaks highlighting the sides, dark lips, wild eyes, wearing a white, toga-like gown, a woman of the netherworld. Mike had seen her alive again since Friday, and he was stunned and terrified as if for the first time.
Harvey spun around on the couch to see her, Omar turned too, and Shuler looked up and away from the poodle. All of them gasped out loud.
Bark, bark. Bark, bark.
And then the French doors exploded into the living room, a smashing, crashing tidal wave of wood and glass and Greenburg and Ramona and Judd Martin.
YOU OWE ME ONE, FAIRY BOY
The dentist, his woman, and the zombie were armed to the teeth. Greenburg was packing Sawed-Off Sally, Ramona had her Civil War sword, and Martin held his snubnose in one hand and his nine-inch hunting knife in the other. Before the dust settled and all in the same blazing-blinding moment…