by E. A. Copen
I gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I don't think he was doing laundry if that's what you mean.”
“What kind of looney toon psycho does their laundry at six in the morning?” Tindall glared up at me. I raised my eyebrows at him. For a short moment, the two of us traded unblinking, unwavering stares. He lowered his eyes first, sighed and pushed himself up to walk the room as I'd done.
When he concluded there had been a fight, he went back out to his car and came in with a body bag. He unrolled it on the floor next to the body and slapped on a pair of rubber gloves, the kind you wear to wash dishes. “Well,” he said, glaring up at me. “You going to help me bag him or stand there?”
I'm not squeamish. I can't afford to be in my line of work. Cleveland’s murder rate was one of the highest in the country while I was stationed there and I had seen my fair share of dead bodies, most of them in worse shape than our dead werewolf. I'd never had to haul one out of a building in a laundry cart and shove it in the trunk of a Cadillac, though. The process made me feel dirty, guilty. Whoever this guy was, I felt like he deserved more dignity than Tindall and I gave him. If it had been later in the morning when I found him, Tindall informed me that he would have called his partner, Morris Quincy, and had him bring his truck, but he was sure Quincy wouldn't even come to the phone before nine. I found myself wondering what I was getting into, working in a place where coroners and CSI didn't come out to murder scenes and where ranking detectives could sleep in at their leisure without consequence. Maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew.
I turned away from the trunk of the Cadillac. “So, how does this work exactly if there's no CSI?”
Tindall gave me a dismissive gesture. “I'll call a team down from Eden but they won't get here until later. We'll have to keep the scene secure until then. I'll put someone on it. As for the body, going to have to take him to the clinic and get Doc Ramis on it right off.” He tried to close the trunk and quickly realized that the body bag wasn't all the way in. He had to stop to adjust it before trying again. “You can follow me over after our backup gets down here.”
I looked down at my watch. Five after seven. I was supposed to have my laundry in the dryer and be out for my morning run by now. If I took too much longer, my son would wake up and wonder where his breakfast was. I definitely needed to stop by my place to update him on the situation and change into more weather appropriate clothes. Once the sun got up above the horizon, I was going to regret the sweats and oversized t-shirt I'd picked out for the morning routine.
“Can I meet you there in an hour or so?” I asked with a sigh. “My kid's going to be up in a few.”
Tindall scowled at me again. “Your superiors made it very clear that I was to let you take the lead when it came to this kind of thing.”
“Come on, Tindall. You're an old pro. You don't need a federal agent to hold your hand through an autopsy. This ought to be a walk in the park for you. I promise. I'll be downtown by eight thirty.”
“I'm filing a complaint with your superiors,” he informed me.
“You do that and see how far that goes.”
I walked the laundry back to my car, tossed it into my backseat and then sat behind the wheel, trying to ignore the way my hands shook. I'd seen death plenty of times before. Seems like there's always someone or something somewhere wanting to kill someone else. We are the only sentient beings in the universe actively seeking to make ourselves go extinct. An old teacher of mine told me once that it gets easier to deal with death the more times you see it, that you eventually become numb to it. If that was true, I hadn't reached that point yet. Every dead body I'd ever seen was burned into my memory like a bad stain on good carpet. While I could deal with it so long as I eventually nabbed the bad guys, I had a hard time not bringing my job home. Every time I left a scene, I had to stop and collect myself before going home to pretend like the life I lived had some degree of normalcy. I'd seen a therapist once. He recommended yoga. Making a human pretzel out of myself wasn’t going to make all the stress headaches go away.
I reached over and pulled a bottle of ibuprofen out of my glove box, downing three of them without anything to drink. Then, I pulled back out onto the sun-baked and sand-beaten road that cut through the reservation.
Most of the permanent buildings on the Paint Rock Reservation were single-wide trailers with hodgepodge additions thrown onto one side or another. Broken chain length fences outlined some of them while the property boundaries of others were marked with nothing more than a couple of big stones. Two skinny dogs raced alongside my car when I passed the post office, but quickly gave up the chase.
My house was one of the few buildings that hadn't started its life out as a mobile home. A more creative real estate agent might have called it a log cabin, since the outside sort of resembled that. In reality, it was mostly plywood, chipboard and drywall with some paint thrown on. Whenever the wind kicked up really good, the whole house leaned and groaned. When my son, Hunter, and I arrived, we found the gutters in a pile beside the house and I still hadn't gotten around to getting them up. I wasn't in a hurry to do it, either, since Texas was smack dab in the middle of a ten-year drought. There were three or four trailers within sight of my place, so I had neighbors. I hadn't introduced myself yet. Today wasn't looking promising for that, either.
Hunter was already sitting in front of the television with a bowl of cereal when I came in. The pale light of morning cartoons illuminated his blank face as he chewed. I sighed, grunted and hauled in the laundry. “Don't get up or anything, Hunter.”
“Wouldn't have to drag the laundry everywhere if we'd stayed in Ohio,” he grumbled. “This place sucks. The air conditioning doesn't even work.”
I went over to the tiny unit in the window and put my hand over one of the vents. The air trickling through it was maybe five degrees cooler than outside. “Seems fine to me.”
Hunter picked up the remote and flipped through some channels, lingering on an exercise program featuring a muscular guy with an Australian accent and his two petite assistants in their skin tight leotards. He took a bite of his cereal before switching the channel over to The New Adventures of Scooby Doo. “Better?”
“What? I didn't say anything.”
He stuck his tongue out at me. “I saw your face.” I went back into the kitchen and started moving some dishes around in the sink. “How come you didn't get the laundry done?” he asked with a mouthful of cereal.
“Don't talk with your mouth full. And I couldn't. Place was closed.”
“I thought you said it was a twenty-four hour laundromat?”
I shrugged in answer.
“You smell like death. Someone died?” He paused, waiting for an answer.
I scribbled down a list of rules. Don't touch the stove. Don't open the windows. Check the caller ID before answering the phone. Don't give anyone your real name. I still wasn't comfortable with the idea of leaving him home alone while I worked, but I didn't have much of a choice. Even back in Ohio, he'd given every sitter I hired a run for their money. Hunter insisted that he was old enough to look after himself, but I wasn't sure. He was only eleven for Christ's sake. Leaving him alone was more harrowing than dealing with a dead werewolf.
“Mom?” I looked up to see him standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his skinny, white chest. “Are you going to go to work?”
I swallowed and looked down at the dishes instead of directly at him. “You know I don't have a choice. These people need the law as much as everyone else.”
“Why couldn't we stay in Ohio?”
Finally, I looked up and met his eyes with a stern glare. “You know why, Hunter.”
“Is it because of that fight I got into at school? Because, like I told you, Chad started it.”
That made my heart sink into my toes. I went to my son and hugged him. “Hunter, this has nothing to do with you. It's...” I stumbled. How do you explain to an eleven-year-old boy that doing the right thing got me blacklisted from e
very major police force in the country? I'd had to pull quite a few strings to keep from getting fired altogether. After what I did, not even L.A. wanted me and that was saying something. L.A. was desperate for agents. “It's complicated, kiddo. We got dealt a crap hand but we're going to play it out. I promise things will get better.”
“That's what you said in Chicago and Philadelphia, too. And Cleveland.” I patted him on the back and he sighed. “I guess there's no further down to go once you hit rock bottom, huh?”
I gave him a playful shove back toward the TV. “Go watch your cartoons.”
I finished my list of rules, jotted down some emergency phone numbers, and checked the locks on the windows one more time. Then I went and kissed my boy on the top of the head and told him I was going to work. “Take care of the place while I'm gone. And I'm going to call to check in randomly. But don't feel the need to wait on me. Call me if you need anything.”
Hunter gave me a shove out of the way so he could see the TV. “Uh-huh. Yeah. See you later, mom.” Kids these days.
I grabbed my keys, checked the window locks and the emergency numbers one more time and then left to meet a detective about a werewolf autopsy.
Chapter Two
My car could put Frankenstein's monster to shame. It was a sixty-eight Firebird, but it had parts in it from every major car on the road because it was constantly breaking down. The body was black and the doors were red. The bumper was a dented strip of silver and the clutch was a bit touchy. While I could probably afford something better, there was a certain appeal in saying I drove a classic car, even if it looked like it'd been through a war zone.
I could only change radio stations if I busted out a screwdriver and pulled some wires out of the dash but I never bothered. The AM station it was stuck on was static in all the other places I lived but on the reservation, it was an oldies station that played mostly seventies and eighties rock, which suited the car. “Stayin' Alive” by the Bee Gees played that morning as I pulled into the gravel lot next to a building that could have served as a backdrop in a John Wayne western. It had that perfect, flat front with pretty white columns and hitching posts out front. Maybe the building was old enough to be authentic but now it bore the scars of modern remodeling. The doors were the pressure sensitive, automatic kind instead of the swinging saloon doors that might have fit better. A big red neon cross glowed against the dawn, the only bit of neon in the whole town.
There were two other vehicles on the lot: Tindall's Cadillac and a class A motorhome that took up the majority of the parking lot. I parked and got out to look at the motor home with a whistle. There were some trailers on the reservation that weren't as nice as that thing. Still, it had seen some road. An inch of dirt was caked to the side, though someone had painstakingly wiped down the back end to make sure the bumper stickers, of which there were plenty, were still visible.
Inside, I stopped by the receptionist window, which was empty. Tindall was sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a magazine. He spoke to me without looking up. “Body's in the back. Doc's waiting on you.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“Listen, Black. Where you come from, maybe they got fancy, well-equipped law enforcement teams that handle this sort of thing but Paint Rock is a backwater God-forsaken place. Don't ask me how this place attracted talent like Doctor Eugene Ramis. The guy's probably foremost in the field of weird dead things, even if he isn’t a certified through the state. Still, he’s the closest thing we’ve got. That’s how it is here. We work with what we’ve got. But if something goes wrong, it’s my ass in the fire, since I am employed by the state.”
“So,” I started, “what you're telling me is that you need someone to pass the blame to if he screws up?”
“Bingo.” Finally, he looked up from his magazine. “And, since you technically outrank me, you get to deal with that nut today.” I tried to object but Tindall jerked his chin in the direction of the door down the hall. “Get on down there before the place starts to stink even more than it already does, will you? I've got other things to do today.”
I clamped my jaw firmly shut and started down the hall. The elevator music faded the further I went, shifting into a different rhythm. By the time I reached the end of the hall, I realized the door was vibrating to the familiar beat of Michael Jackson's “Thriller”. Despite myself, I was smiling when I opened the door. The smile quickly faded when I realized that Doctor Ramis wasn't the only one waiting for me on the other side.
Three corpses, not counting the werewolf we'd brought in, stood in the middle of a small, temporary stage, dressed in the tattered remains of dust and dirt sodden suits and prom dresses from what could have been another century. They weren't behaving much like corpses, though. Every single one of them was up and walking around. More accurately, they were dancing.
The doctor, a stick of a white guy with an honest to God afro and thick glasses, sat in his white lab coat, tapping the beat out on his CD player with a drumstick and mouthing the words to the song. The song reached the chorus, and he got up, tapping on the wall, and acted as if he was going to join them. When he saw me, he did a cartoon style double take, then dropped his drumstick and shrieked.
The corpses behind him immediately stopped moving around and stood there blankly staring ahead with dead, glassy eyes. The doctor adjusted his glasses and composed himself before clearing his throat and shutting off the music. “You scared the bejeezus out of me!”
I raised an eyebrow and forgot to be disturbed by dancing zombies for a moment. “You're in here, dancing with a bunch of actual zombies and I scared you?”
He turned and waved a hand across the room. “Dormite,” he commanded. His zombies shambled off to lean their foreheads against the wall and he went to draw a curtain over them.
He was walking a fine line with the existing law, keeping zombies. There wasn't a law against it, I supposed, except for all the old abuse of a corpse laws. Whether zombies qualified as corpses, though, was a matter still being decided in the courts. In fact, almost everything regarding zombies was still being argued in the courts. Unlike vampires, werewolves and most varieties of the fae, they weren't yet afforded any rights at all. I could have double tapped each one of them and walked away clean.
“Isn't it a little redundant?” I asked, crossing my arms. “Teaching a bunch of zombies to dance to that particular song?”
He gave me a deer in the headlights look. “Why?”
“Never mind.”
“Sorry I'm not ready. There's this show coming up, and it has us all in a bother. I've got less than a month to get them ready. If we win...” He stopped bumbling around with the gurney that held the body bag to smile to himself. “Think of the difference we can make, the attention they can draw to their own cause.”
“Dancing zombie activists,” I muttered. “What'll they think of next?”
“Make light if you want but it won't change the fact that their rights are still limited. They might be undead but they're capable of doing a lot of things and deserve the same rights as every other supernatural out there. If it's legal for vampires to buy blood, then why can't we legalize tissue donation for zombies?” He put on a pair of latex gloves and held another pair out to me. “I know what you're thinking. Why dance? Well, they can't very well speak. They'd been too long without a proper feeding for the language center of the brain to be salvaged. The poor idiot that had them kept them in a cage and used them for target practice. Target practice.” He shook his head. “You have no idea how far they've come.”
I cleared my throat, eager to redirect him to my purpose so I could get out of there. “Eugene? Doctor Ramis?”
“Doctor Ramis was my father,” he said with a snort. “And I hate my first name. Doc will do.” I started to introduce myself but he cut me off. “You're Judah Black with BSI. Tindall told me to expect you.”
“You do a lot of autopsies out here, Doc?”
“Not really. I mean, I did a few in medical sc
hool. You have to in order to get your license. Here, I do maybe one or two a year, mostly exsanguination. You know, vampire kills? They get a little overzealous sometimes.”
I wasn't sure I would call drinking a person's blood to the point of death overzealousness. The casual attitude with which Doc approached death was more than a little unsettling and it made me wonder how many crimes had slipped by without ever making it to the state authorities.
He pulled and tugged at the body bag until it was free of the body, then tossed it to the floor. “This is going to be a fun one. The change makes their organs go all screwy until they balance out on the other side. Going to have to do some digging.” He started poking at the body. My stomach twisted. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied and tried to ignore the cold sweat I'd broken into. “Do you recognize him?”
Doc took the corpse's chin in his hand and turned his head stiffly from one side to the other. “Nope. Of course, being half changed, making a positive ID is going to be hard. He won't even have the same prints.” He went to a filing cabinet on the other side of the room and pulled out a digital camera, a small produce scale, a tool belt full of sharp things and a zippered pouch that was labeled “phlebotomy kit”. He tossed the last item to me, then retrieved a pen and paper that he also passed to me. “I'll do the fun part. You take the notes. That is, unless you want to help?”
I swallowed the bile that had decided to creep up my throat. “No. I'm good with notes.”
Doc shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said before he walked over to press the button on his CD player and flipped through a few songs before he found one he liked. I don't know what was more unnerving, standing by while he cut open a dead werewolf or the fact that he was doing it while listening to Olivia Newton-John.