Working Stiff tr-1

by Rachel Caine

  She wondered if he was as uncomfortable as she felt.

  Liam was standing on the steps with a suit coat on a hanger when McCallister crunched the car to a stop on the flawless white gravel, and Bryn’s door was open before she could do more than cast a look Patrick’s way. He didn’t return it. He was staring straight ahead, through the windshield, at the growing gloom and the halogen glare cast by the headlights.

  Liam gathered up the picnic basket and Mr. French’s doggy bed, put the fresh jacket on the hook in the back, and shut the passenger door once she was out of it. McCallister, without another word, took his foot off the brake and continued along the rest of the circular drive leading back to the main entrance.

  Bryn watched him go. When she turned, Liam was watching her with far too perceptive a gaze, but he merely said, “It’s getting chilly, Miss Davis. Shall we go in?”

  She let Mr. French follow up the steps; he needed the exercise anyway. He let out a whuff of recognition once they were in the door, and immediately went in search of his dog bed, which Liam had set against the wall. “I can see you’ve had quite a day,” the butler—estate administrator—said. “I’ve kept some dinner warm for you. Mr. Fideli is waiting in the Small Room. If you’d prefer to change first, there are clothes in your closet upstairs. I took the liberty of buying a few things for you.”

  Implying, of course, that what she’d brought wasn‘t suitable. She didn’t feel at all offended, because, well, he was right. She’d never bitch about someone with exquisite taste—and he almost certainly had that—buying her something new to wear that was out of her budget range. Liam wasn’t out for anything but upholding the good name of the McCallister trust. If Patrick had bought her clothes, that would have seemed … awkward.

  “Sure,” she said. “Thank you, Liam. I’ll go change first.”

  Mr. French, the traitor, stayed in his bed and watched her go upstairs alone. Funny how quickly he was adapting to the good life. Her dog, she decided, was quite the social climber. She wasn’t sure she was any different, and that made her feel a little dirty, somehow.

  The things hanging in her closet were, predictably, amazing. She picked out a pale pink silk blouse and a pair of designer jeans and dressed quickly. When she walked into the Small Room, Joe Fideli—digging into an overflowing salad bowl—looked up and said, “I feel like I should get up or something. You look good, Bryn. Ladylike.”

  “Don’t get up. You’ll make me feel worse than I already do about all this.” She got herself a plate and inspected the silver warming trays. Chicken, fish, salad, vegetables, dessert. It all looked amazing. She chose the salad and sat down with him, feeling hungrier than she expected. “What did McCallister tell you?”

  “That the protocol inhibitor from Glickman is working,” he said. When she frowned at him, he waved his fork vaguely at the room around them. “Room’s shielded. You can say what you want in here. So, you met the crazy man. What’d you think?”

  “He’s the most paranoid man I’ve ever seen not locked up.”

  “Yeah, that was my feeling, too. He knows what he’s doing, though.”

  “Yes, he does. Did my mystery guest call today?”

  “No. He said he’ll take a week to look you over, so I didn’t expect it anyway. As soon as I get your apartment buttoned up, you’re out of here, and you don’t come back. In fact, you break ties with McCallister, at least in public. I’m going to be your shadow.”

  “You don’t think our friendly supplier’s going to notice you and trace you back?”

  “I’m not on record at Pharmadene, as I told you. I’m a ghost who gets paid in cash. Besides, I think he’ll think we’re really, really close.” He held up two fingers together, then crossed them. “You know.”

  “You can’t do that. You’ve got a family.”

  “Yeah, and Kylie won’t be too damn happy about my shacking up with a good-looking woman like you, but I’ll martyr myself for the cause.” He was, she realized, kidding her. “Seriously, Kylie’s good with it. She knows the drill. This isn’t our first rodeo, and she’s met you. It’s all good.”

  “So our cover story is what, you’re sleeping with me on the side? God.” Bryn dropped her head into her hands. “If only my personal life were really this exciting.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That was also McCallister’s alibi for slipping off the chain today. I’m getting twice the reputation and none of the fun. I’m assuming that Pharmadene would also notice the sleepover.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, Pharmadene doesn’t officially know me; I’m not on any corporate records. Pat pays his contractors off book. Shouldn’t present a paper trail for our mystery guest to follow.”

  “My apartment …” Bryn bit her lip. “McCallister said you’d be making it safe.”

  “Well, safer, anyway; it’s a cinder block box, only so good I can make the place. Tonight, you sleep here; this place is as solid as you can get. I’ll go do some midnight renovations: sensors, motion detectors, upgraded doors and windows. Your neighbors might be a little pissed off about the noise, but I can do it in a couple of hours. Pat’ll sign off on the expense, no problem.”

  “Maybe I should go with you.”

  “Trust me, you shouldn’t. I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder wondering whether somebody’s creeping up behind you while I’m installing windows. Because it’s all about me, obviously.” Fideli fell silent for a moment, then said, with studied casualness, “What happened to you today?”

  “Me? Nothing. Why?”

  “Tremors.” He pointed at her hand as she picked up her water glass. Sure enough, it was shaking. She could see the ripples spreading across the surface of the liquid, and quickly put the glass down. “I know Pat can be tough to take, but people don’t usually get PTSD from a day with him.”

  McCallister was going to tell him anyway. She picked up her fork and ate a couple of leaves of lettuce drenched in heavenly balsamic dressing before she replied. “I got mugged. He beat me pretty bad. Broken nose, broken cheekbone, probably some broken ribs. It wasn’t McCallister’s fault. He was checking in for the room. I was walking the dog.”

  Fideli absorbed that in silence. “Just a random mugging.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure about that.”

  It was a new thought, and a nasty one, and she took another bite and considered it carefully, before she said, “You think someone might have set it up? How? We weren’t followed. Even I didn’t know where I was going.”

  “Pat did.”

  She almost choked on her salad, and took a quick gulp of water to wash it down. “You think he—”

  “No, no, but if he scouted this location before, or used it before, they might have made an educated guess and planted somebody on coverage at every possible stop. That would mean a big operation, big enough to scare me, and I don’t scare easy. Of course, I could just be paranoid, but that’s what they pay me to be.” He shrugged and drank about half a glass of water. “Maybe it was random. Maybe you’re just damned unlucky, Bryn.”

  She felt that way. “Why would they do that? Send someone to beat me up?”

  “I can only think of one reason,” Joe said. “Because they wanted to see if you’d heal.”

  “Oh, God. They just proved I was revived?”

  “Look, our Mystery Guest must have already guessed at it; he sent that guy to protocol you at the bar. We got to the son of a bitch before he could report in; that meant he had to try something else. This could be it. And this could still be pure speculation.” Joe finished up the last bite of his salad and pushed back from the table. “I’m going to need the keys to your apartment. Whether I’m being crazy or not, you need better security on that place. It’s a kill box.”

  “Eat first. It’s not going to get any worse before you get there.”

  “Yes, ma‘am, boss. By the way, I up-sold two premium packages today, with full floral. Should net us about ten thousand in clear profit.” He got up an
d speared a piece of chicken from the warming trays, then added rice and asparagus. “Of course, the bad news is I had to kill one of them myself. Anything to get business, I always say.”

  It was morbid, but he made her laugh, and as they sat together and ate, and Liam came in and out, and Mr. French wandered in with a pug she hadn’t seen before, life seemed … temporarily normal. Death-and-taxes normal, anyway.

  It was a good way to end the day.

  “So,” Joe said, “this is a panic button. There’s one in every room, recessed, so you can’t hit it by accident. If the electricity goes out, they light up on their own battery power so you can see them easily.” He pointed to something that looked like a simple doorbell, recessed beside the interior frame of her apartment door. “It hits up police and robo-texts me and Pat a nine-one-one with your address. I added break-resistant windows last night, with key locks and interior panic releases in case you have to get out quick. Here’s the alarm keypad. You put in the code and you arm tamper sensors on the wall under each window and on the door outside. You want to leave motion detectors on; you just press this button after you arm it. I configured it to ignore anything dog-size.”

  He was good. Bryn, looking around the apartment, couldn’t see any sign that anything had been done at all, except for the keypad next to the apartment door and the recessed button. Well, the windows might have looked a little less grimy. “Anything else?”

  “Here’s the deactivation code and secret panic code.” He passed over a sheet of paper. “Memorize and destroy; you know the drill. There’s a video surveillance monitor in the bedroom that shows you the external door and the outside walls, so if you’re worried about somebody out there, just check the feed. Got it?”

  “Got it.” She cast him a look. “Anybody else watching my monitors back at the mother ship?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Can’t avoid that. They’ll keep tabs and records. We all get used to it.”

  Or, Bryn thought, we build ourselves fortresses of solitude in the backyard and arm up with AK-47s.

  “You’re clear on how the system works?”

  “Yes.”

  “Time to get back at it, then.” He yawned wide enough to crack his jaw. Bryn winced at the noise; it sounded painful. “Don’t worry; I’ll stay awake. Couple of pots of coffee will fix me right up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Part of the job. Sleepless nights just come with the territory.” He dropped the apartment keys back into her hand and brushed a fleck of dust from his suit lapel. “How do I look?”

  “Impressive.” He did. In the suit, Fideli looked trustworthy, calm, kind, attentive—all the things you should be as a funeral director. “I guess I’ll take my own car…. Oh, damn.” Her car was probably parked in a lot near that damn bar where she’d been so humiliatingly introduced to the concept of protocols.

  “I had it brought over,” he said. “Don’t want people thinking the boss got smashed and had to be driven home.”

  “Do you have any idea of the alcohol and drug abuse statistics among mortuary workers? It’s not like anyone would blink at my getting drunk.”

  “It scares me that you knew that and still took the job.”

  “Why? What are the self-harm statistics in your line of work?”

  He was silent, then shrugged. “Point taken.” He bowed, elegant and formal, and yet warm in ways Patrick McCallister didn’t seem he could ever be. “After you, boss.”

  * * *

  Fairview Mortuary was now hers, Bryn thought. She stood there in the elegant lobby and greeted people, signed for flowers, assigned runners to take floral arrangements to viewing rooms and out to grave sites; she checked the clothing choices of staff to make sure everything was appropriate, and despaired, because she was not ready for this. She’d studied, she’d graduated, she’d apprenticed successfully, but this … this was different.

  It wasn’t even the grief. She quickly got used to the raw emotions, and the awful, gut-ripping stories of loss; funeral directors learned how to distance themselves from that, like police officers and therapists. By the third day of what she supposed constituted her normal life, she’d hired on two more funeral directors and three assistants. Two of those assistants had lasted about half a day before leaving and never coming back, which Lucy assured her was entirely normal. “We never stop running the ads,” Lucy told her, as she helped get the death certificates filed and paged people for pickups out to residences, hospitals, and the county morgue. “Can’t keep assistants. You’re lucky if one makes it a few months, seems like. It’s even hard to keep funeral directors; I guess because they like to move around to greener pastures. We went through three last year.”

  Well, Bryn thought, I know what happened to one of them. She’d seen him, still moving weakly in his body bag, body rotted into rags. The memory came back to her in a post-traumatic rush of sight, sound, and smell, and she felt herself waver. That’s my future.

  No. No, it wasn‘t. She just had to keep telling herself that.

  It was lucky Riley Block was on the staff, because there was no one, no one, better than Riley at doing the delicate, artistic work of embalming. Bryn was astonished the first time she went down to do her own work at how meticulous and neat the prep room was kept; nothing was left out, except what Riley was currently using. Every surface gleamed. Unlike the creepy atmosphere the place had had when Freddy reigned, this felt oddly warm and comfortable, even though it had the usual chilly temperature. Riley had brought in some lovely art to put on the walls, and warm lighting in the corners, and there was a subtle scent of vanilla and jasmine in the air to cover the usual uneasy spoiled-meat tang.

  Bryn said hello and went to the locker to grab a gown and mask, which she tied on with practiced ease, and gloved up before retrieving Mrs. Jacoby from refrigeration. This one was simple enough that there was no need to waste Riley’s time, and Bryn needed the practice. She was discovering, as the days went by, that even as much education as she had left huge gaps in her practical experience.

  Riley, she discovered, wasn’t chatty when she was working, so Bryn kept her silence, too. There was something oddly Zen about the prep room; it was like a chapel, hushed and peaceful. As Bryn made her incisions and hooked the carotid out of Mrs. Jacoby’s pale, fleshy neck, she concentrated on the details. Don’t break the surface was the first rule; the dead did bleed, particularly from the carotid, and it was a mess that ruined the clear field of vision and made embalming that much tougher. If she screwed this one up, she’d have to go for the femoral.

  She didn’t screw it up.

  The mechanics of the embalming went smoothly enough, and Mrs. Jacoby had died peacefully in her sleep. It was only a matter of pumping out the blood and pumping in embalming fluid, applying the hydration cream to keep the tissues supple, and suturing the mouth.

  “You know the worst thing about this business?” Riley suddenly said. She stepped back from her table, sighed, put her hands on her hips, and stretched as if her back ached, which it probably did; Bryn’s already had a twinge, even though she’d probably done a lot less standing and leaning. “You can get used to the bodies, the smell, the mess. I’ve picked up bodies that were melted into furniture, they’d been down so long. You can get used to the grief, too.”

  Bryn nodded. She’d already experienced that; after the first few days, she’d realized that the tearful stories still moved her, but not in a deeply personal way. She’d put up a wall to muffle the vulnerability. That was manageable. She’d seen the bad (Melissa) and the sad (most of the rest), and so far, only one that was crazy, but it was all a manageable process now. A continuum.

  “You get used to thinking of them as just skin, bones, flesh, to-do lists, but every once in a while you find something that makes you realize they used to be just like you. Just like us.” Riley stared down at the man she was working on. He was a tough one, a car crash victim in his thirties. Handsome, too, though Bryn had more reason than most to subscribe to the whole beaut
y-is-skin-deep theory. “He had plane tickets in his pocket. He was supposed to be headed to Hawaii today—can you believe that? First class. He probably paid extra so he could really enjoy himself, and somewhere, right about now, they’re calling his name at the ticket counter and moving on to a standby because he hasn’t shown up.”

  Riley was right. That made it uncomfortably real. There were so many layers of reality to the world. Nothing stopped for death; nothing stopped for grief or horror or tragedy.

  As if she’d read her thoughts, Riley said, “The worst part of it is that it never stops. Death keeps coming. We get older; we get tired; we get sad and lonely because nobody understands what we do or why we do it. Police and firemen, they’re heroes. Us, we’re pariahs. And every day, there are more bodies.” She said it without any particular emotional emphasis; it was an observation, delivered calmly, but it chilled Bryn deep down.

  “Then why do you do it?” she asked.

  Riley turned and met her eyes. She didn’t smile. “Because I’m good at it,” she said. “Because it needs doing. Why do you?”

  Originally, it had been because the money was good and the job was stable, but Bryn understood what Riley was saying. There was a certain unspoken honor to this job, a certain quiet dignity. We, Bryn thought, are the great dirty secret, the reality that runs under everything else.

  And Riley was right. It was lonely.

  “Don’t mind me,” Riley said, and finally smiled. It didn’t reach her sad eyes. “I’ve been at this awhile. I get maudlin. Some people drink; some get depressed; some run around having sex with anyone with a pulse. Me, I get philosophical. It’s healthier.”

  “What do you do when you’re not, you know, here?”

  “I shower three times before I leave the building, and then I go out to dinner with friends. I watch movies and read books. I exercise. I live a normal life.” Riley cocked her head and looked at Bryn with suddenly sharp, inquisitive eyes. “Don’t you?”