"Speaking of which, you're not supposed to be eating sugar or gluten," Arie said. "Gimme my brownie back."
Grumpa was already making his escape, but he paused at the door for one more shot. "Did you pick up my prescription, or did you forget it again?"
"If you're talking about your denture cream, it's on your dresser, and it's not a prescription. And don't go leaving your nasty teeth floating in the water glass in the bathroom again. You agreed to keep them on your nightstand if I kept my mouth shut about—"
"Blah, blah, blah. Can't hear you. Turned my hearing aid off."
"You don't have a hearing aid!" Arie shouted at his retreating back.
"Blah, blah, blah."
Arie flopped down at the table, letting her head thump against the surface. "Do you think maybe Grumpa wants to see what Heaven is like, too? I could make arrangements."
"I think it's an idea," Chandra said, leaning back in her chair and putting her feet up on the one opposite. "It's definitely an idea. And maybe he'd like it enough to stay there permanently instead of coming back like you did."
Arie sat up. "Yeah, well, I didn't have a choice."
Chandra looked at her friend fondly. She knew better than anyone else how Arie's near-death experience had affected her—even better than Arie's own parents, mostly because Evelyn Stiles refused to talk about what she still called The Incident, namely, the period of time before Christmas of the past year when Arie had been mugged in the parking lot as she left work from her part-time job at Rack's Bar. Mugged and killed. By the time she made it to the hospital, she'd bled out and was pronounced dead at 3:28 a.m.
It didn't take. At 3:47, Arie "returned" from a nearly twenty-minute journey to Heaven and back.
Chandra had been by Arie’s side for the long months of depression and confusion while Arie struggled to come to terms with having to live—well, having to live again. Arie didn’t even know then about the "gift" with which she'd returned from Over There. For her, the ability to scry meant submitting to a relentless series of intrusive visions of people's memories whenever Arie looked into their blood, a crystal ball, mirrors, or even bowls of water—but especially blood. It always started with their blood.
All of which might have been a nice thing to know before she'd hired on as a crime-scene cleanup technician for a biohazard waste removal company.
"You might not have had a choice about coming back," Chandra said, "although for the record, I'm very glad you did. But you have choices now."
Arie stared warily at her friend's enigmatic smile. "Oh really. And what might those be?"
"Well, what about checking with Connor? Just because the nursing home thinks it was suicide doesn't mean the cops do."
"Rec center," Arie said.
Chandra tipped a huh? look at her friend.
"You said 'nursing home.' The part of River Rest we're at is the rec center. You know, like all these old people go there to socialize or whatever. The center is attached to the home, I think, but—"
"Okay." Chandra raised three fingers. "Number one: who gives a poop if it's a rec center or a nursing home? Second: don't try to change the subject. Are you going to call Connor?"
"What's the third option?" Arie reached over and grabbed a brownie. Talking about Connor or her nonexistent love life—same thing, really—made Arie nervous, and when Arie was nervous, she ate. Or when she was depressed. Or bored. Or—
Chandra held the third finger aloft. The rude, inappropriate finger, Arie noted. "The third option is to stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something about it. You know, the last time this happened, those visions kept mind-raping you until you decided to look into Marissa's murder. If you want these to go away, then you're going to have to—"
Arie stood, her chair making a squealy protest against the tile. "Stop. That's ridiculous. I'm not some Nancy Drew in an ugly yellow bio suit. I mean, let's really look at what happened the last time. People died, Chandra. I almost did too. This is no game."
Chandra sighed. "Okay, calm down. But you could at least call Connor. If you're not going to do anything about it yourself, you should at least tell him so he can. He's a cop, after all."
Grumpa trudged back into the kitchen, heading straight for the brownie pan. "She can't call him. He hasn't called her in weeks. If she calls him now, she'll look like a hussy."
Hearing such an outdated, chauvinistic comment made their mouths fall open like trapdoors under a hanged man. Taking advantage of their stunned silence, Grumpa plucked up two brownies and Arie's milk before scuttling, mission accomplished, back to the living room. The young women's protests bounced heedlessly off his scrawny, hunched back.
"What was that thing about sending him to Heaven you were talking about earlier?" Chandra asked.
Arie rubbed her face as if the friction could erase her frustration. "It would depend on the jury. If we could get a jury where at least one person knew him..."
"It's so tempting," Chandra said. "But what was that bit about Connor not calling? You never told me that."
Arie cut off another hunk of brownie. After all, a thieving geriatric brownie snatcher had stolen hers. She made Chandra wait through a couple restorative bites before finally answering. "It's been two weeks." She shrugged in an effort to look blasé. "Almost three."
"Maybe he's... busy. He is a homicide detective, right? I'm guessing they might get pretty busy from time to time. And, duh, this would be the perfect excuse to call him. Not that you need one."
"Of course I don't, but..."
"But what? Two birds, one stone. Win-win."
"Maybe." Arie reached for the pan, but it was empty.
CHAPTER FOUR
Surprisingly, Arie and Grady were called out to another job the next day. Surprising because their coworkers Bruno and Rich usually hogged most of the jobs. Rich had been with Guts from the beginning. They'd gone to school together, Rich emerging from UW Madison with a teaching degree and Guts with one in business. From what Arie had been told, Rich had never even applied to any school districts. Instead, he’d gone right to work for Guts. It was a bit of a mystery.
Bruno, on the other hand, had by his own admission never graduated high school. He'd been working with BioClean for almost as long as Rich, and the two were the crew that Guts relied on most. To an extent, Arie could understand. They certainly had the most experience. However, she and Grady were both struggling to make a forty-hour week, and a bit of rivalry for assignments always existed between the teams.
For that case, both teams were called out, and once Arie heard what it actually entailed, she was glad to not get the "plum" job. Two days earlier, in Taycheeda, a small town just north of Fond du Lac, a twenty-five-year-old meth junkie had his lab—a dilapidated toolshed on his uncle's farm—raided by the sheriff's department. Apparently, seeing the police cars driving up his uncle's quarter-mile-long driveway had been sufficient warning, even for a tweaker who'd already cooked whatever brain cells he might ever have laid claim to. He ran away and hid out in a trailer park two miles down the road. Since he chose his girlfriend's trailer as his hideaway, the law didn’t take too long to catch up. Armed with an unknown number of firearms and two cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon that his girlfriend had picked up in preparation for celebrating her youngest baby's upcoming baptism, Donnie Brewer settled in. Unfortunately for Donnie, the PBR ran out several hours before the police finally lobbed in multiple canisters of tear gas, which exploded all around him.
Neither job was going to be easy, but a tear-gas-contamination scene was the lesser evil—or so Arie thought, probably because she'd never done one before. As a matter of fact, neither had Grady.
After they did the preliminary walkthrough, they both wished they never had. Just standing near the battered front door necessitated wearing a hooded bodysuit with the full-face respirator.
"Maybe we can get the owner dude to let us blow it up," Grady said, evaluating the dilapidated domicile.
"Tempting. But I don't think the insura
nce will cover that."
As Grady went to call Guts for instructions on how to go about the job, Arie began setting up the clean zone. She already knew they were going to need a large area for stacking trash. Anything fabric—anything porous, really—was simply going to be tossed. There wasn't a driveway to speak of, but a car-sized patch of dirt and dead grass was the most level. That would have to do.
Grady was back before she'd even grabbed the first of many boxes of industrial-strength trash bags. "Okay, this is going to suck," he said. "Like, really big."
"What did Guts say?"
"Kind of hard to understand him. He kept saying ka-ching! Ka-ching! Like a cash register, you know?"
"Ka-ching?"
"He's really excited."
Arie held back a sigh, which would only have fogged up her respirator mask, anyway. "So, what do we do first?"
"The usual: containment." He grabbed the roll of plastic sheeting and waggled the duct tape at her. "Doors and windows. Just leave the front door open for coming in and out. Everything else gets sealed off."
"Oh my gosh, Grady. Are you serious? It's going to get so hot in there."
Arie was already slick with sweat, soppy puddles soaking the undersides of her breasts. Given her cup size, that wasn't a new thing, by any means. She'd been battling underboob sweat since seventh grade, but the runnels of sweat trickling down her back were an added irritant.
This was going to be a long day.
A long, hot, sweaty, irritating, vision-induced-nausea-leading-to-a-wretched-migraine kind of day. Since her discovery that Bernie Reynolds had been murdered, Arie had been expecting she would have trouble with recurring visions, but wearing a full-mask respirator created an ever-present reflective surface, and they were far more relentless than she'd expected.
After several hours spent stripping the living room down to the worn mint-green shag carpet, they took a break. As soon as she started pulling off her suit, Arie's eyes promptly set themselves on fire, and her nose let loose like a hose, which unfortunately did nothing to extinguish the burning.
Flash.
I can't believe that sorry heifer thinks I would ever marry her. Look at her. Tears and snot running down her face. I'm tired of her, anyway. Yawned three times the last time we were doin' the nasty. "Making love," she says. Stupid heifer. I'm so sick of her tears and her—
"Grady!" she gasped.
He was choking too. She heard him blundering to the van. A sloshing sound told her he was splashing around in the cooler. Since her eyes were squeezed shut, she didn’t see the bottle of water he tossed her until it bounced off her chest and rolled across the scraggly grass. She scrambled after it, fumbling around until her hand closed on the plastic bottle. Wrenching the cap off, she poured water over her eyes, blinking frantically.
"Man, this is the nastiest stuff I've ever worked with," Grady said.
Considering their work involved cleaning up decomposing bodies or trash so toxic no one else dared, that was saying a lot. He sat in the open door of the van while Arie settled on the ground. The stinging gradually subsided.
"Think we'll be done by five?" Arie asked. "I'm taking Chandra to the movies for her birthday. I'm definitely going to need to shower."
"Sure, why not? Except for the carpet, which we pull next, this is the hard part. After this, we can use the HEPA vac."
"Then what?" Arie wasn't sure she wanted to know. She stood up because the grass was itchy.
Grady took her rising as a sign that break was over and stood as well. "Then we spray the room down and wipe it all up."
That sounded easy enough, but of course, it wasn't. Whoever had laid the carpet had used glue across the entire surface of the subfloor instead of just at the edges. Lots of glue. Buckets and buckets of glue. Arie and Grady had to use scrapers, and even then, the carpet only came up in strips. They had to keep their hooded suits and breathing apparatus on the whole time. Arie was wringing wet inside her Tyvek suit, her hair and clothes clinging to her body in the most irritating way.
They skipped lunch and then worked past their usual leave time because they were so close to finishing. Arie definitely didn't want to come back the next day if they could help it, and she knew Grady felt the same way.
At nearly an hour past the five o'clock deadline, Arie finally peeled her suit off. That time, she had water ready, but her eyes still felt as though she'd squeezed a fresh habanero into each one.
As she began to drag the vac over to the van, Grady stopped her. "Hold up. We gotta make sure we got it all."
"Of course we did. We sprayed and wiped twice already." Arie couldn't keep the irritability from coloring her tone. She was tired—bone tired and sick to her stomach. What the pepper spray hadn't wiped out, the visions had, and she still had to meet Chan for the movie. "Come on, Grady. We can—"
"Look, we gotta give it a sniff test. Guts said so. And if it's good, great. We won't have to come back tomorrow."
Arie sighed, but she knew he was right. She grabbed the camera to document the "after" pics they would submit to the insurance company. In such a case, proof of non-smell would have been more logical, but no such thing existed. They would have to be content with the evidence of the gut job they'd done.
Arie followed Grady into the trailer, but they hadn't gone more than three feet before they both started sneezing and hacking. Arie spun on her heel, beating her partner to the van, where they both leaned against it, moaning.
"How can it still be that bad?" Arie gasped. "How can it—"
"Guts said we might have to spray it down a whole bunch of times. I thought twice would be enough." Straightening, he wiped his eyes—and, Arie suspected, his nose—with the bottom of his sweat-drenched T-shirt. "Looks like we'll be back tomorrow."
Since her eyes and nose were already streaming, Arie hoped he wouldn't be able to tell she was crying. The wailing might have given it away, though.
Arie wanted to cancel. More than anything, she did. The problem was that treating Chandra to a movie was part of her birthday present, and not just any movie, either. Chan had always been a Star Wars geek, and they were going to the first showing of the latest in the series. Arie managed to get a shower in but didn't have time to do more than swipe a mascara wand across her lashes before flinging herself back in her car in order to get to Chandra's on time.
In fact, her friend was already waiting at the curb when Arie drove up. Chandra jumped in but paused as she fastened her seat belt while scrunching her nose at Arie's minimalistic approach to grooming. "Oh my."
"Don't ask. I had a horrible day at work."
"You scrape dead-body goop off walls for a living. Every day is a horrible day."
"Not like this." Arie rubbed her forehead, trying to tamp down the throbbing.
"Oh!" Realization lighted Chandra's face. "What did he say?"
Arie was battling the rise of bile. She took a sip from the can of Sprite she'd had the forethought to bring along. "Who? Grady?"
"Duh. No. What did Connor say? That's what's got you so upset, right? Is he being a jerk? Listen, it probably wouldn't have worked out anyway. I mean, he's a—"
"Connor? I didn't call him."
"What? We agreed you were going to—"
"I never agreed to that!" Arie's throat felt tight from trying to keep her voice as well as her stomach under control. "You decided that was a good idea. I didn't. And what do you mean, 'It probably wouldn't have worked?'"
"Well, if you aren't interested in him, what difference does it make? And if you are interested, why didn't you call him?"
"The problem isn't my interest. It's his. I'm not going to go chasing after some guy who obviously doesn't want to be with me. I'm not some desperate stalker."
"You're being ridiculous. It's not stalkerish to phone the guy, especially when—"
"And you're being obnoxious." Arie grabbed for her pop again, spilling a good quarter of it on her chest before it reached her mouth. Great. The girls were going to be sti
cky all night.
"Excuse me, Miss Thing, but if you value your brownie connection, you best tread lightly." Chandra crossed her arms and huffed back in her seat.
Arie took a deep breath. "Okay, look, I'm sorry."
Chandra flipped the palm of her hand out and pointedly stared out the car window.
Another deep breath. The pop was already gluing her boobs together. "I'm sorry," Arie said quietly. "Please, Chan. I really am. I've had a really awful day, but I shouldn't have taken it out on you. Especially tonight."
Chandra turned, contemplating her friend. "Is the old guy giving you problems again? Not the cranky one you live with—the dead one you're cleaning up."
Arie sighed. Her friend had a level of intuition that was nearly psychic itself, but by then, Arie wanted to drop the whole thing. "We had a job working with tear gas today. You have no idea how hard it is to—"
"Yeah, but that's just work. It's Bertie What's-His-Face, isn't it? The visions. Should I be driving?"
Probably. Arie faked a laugh. "What kind of birthday present would that be? And..." She paused, knowing she should just shut up, but she felt compelled to correct Chandra. "It's Bernie."
"What?"
"Bernie. Not Bertie. You said—"
"Are you going to be okay?" Chandra asked. "We could, you know, go a different night."
For the briefest of moments, Arie was tempted to take her up on the offer, but she was too tired to whip up the amount of denial she'd need to summon if she were going to ignore the disappointment in her friend's voice. She forced some pep into her tone, even though the effort made her stomach roll ominously. "Don't be silly! This will be perfect. It'll get my mind off everything."
Chandra didn't look convinced, but since Arie was pulling into the cinema's parking lot by then, she didn't argue. "Oh my gosh! Look at that line. We'll never get in."
For the first time in thirty-plus hours, Arie's smile was genuine. She pulled the receipt for the two tickets she'd already purchased online from her purse and waggled them. Chandra's squeal tightened the band currently trying to split Arie’s head in two, but it did her heart good.
Scry Me A River: Suspense with a Dash of Humor (Blood Visions Paranormal Mysteries Book 2) Page 3