by J. R. Rain
I stick the tweezers in the wound and work them in very, very slowly. In med school, I would have had a high-intensity lamp and magnifying glasses to do this with; in the here and now, I’m having to rely on my sense of touch and whatever I can glimpse in the dimly lit and none-too-clean mirror over the sink. The hole opens like a pair of lips; maybe I’ll be able to seal this up with superglue or something, then cover it with theatrical makeup or polymer. Inside the glistening red meat that lies beneath, I can spot shards of bone and gristle. For some reason, I don’t want to pull these out—like with bad wisdom teeth, I can somehow pretend I’m whole as long as they’re still in me. So I keep going, wincing and hissing with the sharp stabs of pain, until I spot something glinting from inside what I would guess to be my right ventricle.
The bullet that killed me.
I’ve been in the hospital as a patient a few times, especially back in the days when I was in a patrol car. I’ve had broken bones, knife cuts, a flesh wound from an Uzi, a miscarriage once, a kidney stone…I thought I knew what agony was.
Trust me, I had no idea.
The moment I work the tweezers into the lifeless heart tissue and grasp the metal jacket, then all the pain in the world shows up and smacks me all at once. I almost faint dead away standing there. I’ve only got the one shot, all or nothing, at getting it out. I give it a single yank and hear something clattering in the sink as I black out on my feet. Protect your face, is my last conscious thought; then somehow I catch myself by leaning forward into the peeling wood vanity, almost toppling into the mirror face-first.
After a few minutes, I come to again. The bullet lies glittering up at me from near the sink’s drain-hole. I take a closer look at it under the light. A 9mm para. Police issue, but full metal jacketed, not hollow point—if it had been hollow, it would have spread my heart all over my rib cage. This is the kind of cartridge you’d use for target practice, not patrol. It would have fit my Glock. I put it in an evidence baggie, then in my pocket. Any DNA or prints on it had probably been compromised by the sink, but they aren’t really what I’m interested in. I want the ballistics from it.
That might tell me whose gun it was fired from. All police department-issued firearms have their barrel striations measured and kept on file, so that any bullets fired from them have their “fingerprints.”
That done, I put on some blusher and pinch my cheeks. It’s amazing how much better I’m feeling with that thing out of me. I have a sudden fierce craving for a cup of coffee. I put on some lipstick and then smear the stick over the blood on my shirt. When Cappy’s right, he’s right; it works wonders. I even touch up my mascara a bit. Then I unlock the door and go downstairs with the man. It’s showtime.
If it was somebody in the stationhouse who’s set me up and then shot me, then they’re about to get one hell of a surprise when I show up…
ctually, showing up turns out to be the easy part. I’m really surprised—and, okay, touched—by how grim everybody in the stationhouse had been about my death. Everybody on the night shift, anyway. And how stunned and happy, pretty much, they seem to see me alive again and kicking. No one stands out as a suspect really. Unless they all are.
The worst part is all the hugging. I beg off as much as I can, pleading my broken rib. This fits in with my vengeful-gangbangers-pranking-me narrative and gives me an excuse to wince and whine a lot and not let anybody notice how cold my skin is. And for the captain to send me off to the hospital.
“Take as much time as you need,” he tells me. “See what the doctor says—take the rest of this week, say. Shoot for full workload next Monday.” Meaning, get your act together by then.
I already know what a doctor would tell me; I almost was one, once. “You’re dead, lady.” That’s what three years of med school will teach you: no pulse, no blood pressure? Yep, dead as a doornail. So I don’t need no damn hospital, except maybe for cosmetic purposes.
Instead, I head straight home. Now that the shock is wearing off, the thing I’m dreading the most is telling my husband. I mean, aside from being whatever I am—dead, half-dead, undead—forever. You know. Like for all eternity. Unless I really am some kind of zombie, like in that show The Walking Dead or something. But do zombies come with expiration dates? I guess I’ll have to Google that.
OK, my mind may be dazed and confused by what’s just happened to me, but I’m still a cop. Viewing this objectively, as I would with any other murder victim, a few really wrong things jump out at me. Aside from the being dead but still walking around aspect of the situation, I mean. Like the lack of an exit wound. And the missing time. An hour, I believe. And it seems to me I wouldn’t have died instantly from a major heart trauma. There would have been a lot of gurgling, burbling, and spraying blood around. I’ve never actually witnessed anyone being shot through the heart, only seen the aftermath, but I seem to remember reading about a few cases in med school and at the police academy. At the very least, there would have been a lot more blood around.
Of course, there was; I’d just assumed it was fruit juice. But it occurs to me for the first time that maybe I was shot somewhere else and then dumped at the warehouse. But by who?
In police work, it’s usually the most obvious suspect who turns out to be the criminal. Like the boyfriend. Or the husband.
My hubby’s name is Devon James Puckett. Hubby, half-hubby, maybe un-hubby. I don’t really know anymore. Here’s the thing. I said I’d never cheated on him, and yeah, that’s technically true. If it’s just sex we’re talking about. But if it’s commitment, then yeah, I guess I’ve always put him second. And sort of snuck around about it, making feeble excuses and a few outright lies. You know, acting real guilty, except not guilty enough to change my ways. Let him down over and over. Because I always put my work first. As he’s bitterly said several times in front of several different counselors, The Job is my real husband.
And I guess that’s true. The lure of becoming a cop was enough to get me to drop out of med school, to my mother’s eternal and bitter disappointment. In fact, I could have been a surgeon—I had most, though not all, of the necessary qualities. And the grades. Of course, if I’d been a surgeon, my marriage would have ended up on the rocks anyway, most likely. But hey, at least I would have been rich.
The thing is, women who were abused as girls usually fall into two categories: the ones who deal with it and move on, and the ones who don’t. Guess which kind I am. But see, even the ones in the first category often have a lot of marital problems later in life, and a surprising number of us end up in a uniform of one kind or another—military, police, nursing, prison, that kind of uniform. I thought a doctor’s scrubs would be enough, but I was wrong. I needed more control, needed to feel like I was preventing others from being victimized like I was.
At least that’s what a police shrink told me once. Oh shit, and I forgot to mention that as I left tonight, Cappy wanted me to see the guy again ASAP. Cap said—get this—I needed “grief counseling.” Huh, I told him; I’m not bereaved. Sure you are, he said. Think about it. So it’s written up; my first appointment is next Monday. Something tells me it won’t go well. But right now, as I park my banged-up Toyota Corolla in our driveway, I’m sort of thinking the same thing about me telling Devon that I’m, you know, dead. I’ve had to break a lot of job-related weirdness to the poor guy over the three years we’ve been together. But nothing quite like this…
I’m guessing it might be a deal-breaker.
And another thing. The detective in me knows Devon is by far the likeliest person to have murdered me. Or to have contracted it out to someone else. Cui bono, see. So a part of me is going to be judging him, weighing his every word, checking him out for tells, like him being surprised I’m still able to walk and talk. Or lying to me. Though I highly doubt Devon had anything to do with my death―for one thing, he practically pukes at the sight of my sidearm if I unholster it. Not that being a vegan and a pacifist lets him off the hook. I just can’t see him being that…wel
l, decisive, somehow. And for another, he’s way too stingy to hire a hitman. Not out of one of his own personal accounts, anyway. Mine, maybe.
It goes even worse than I expect, and I’m expecting the worst. For starters, there’s another woman in the room when I walk in the front door. It’s true she’s one of those sketchy pale green people I’ve been seeing everywhere, but she’s sitting on the couch watching TV and looking like she owns the place. Oh, what the hell; it’s time I faced facts. She’s a ghost. She’s what I would be if the 9mm parabellum had killed me—killed me all the way, I mean. Yeah, she’s dead alright.
By now, I’m getting pretty used to these dead people and ghost-trails, ghostly buildings and cars and trolleys and even a few horse-drawn wagons. And the dead underfoot all over the place. There hadn’t been any upstairs at the stationhouse, for some reason—maybe because the building had no second story in the old days—but there had been plenty on the ground floor. They kept wandering in and out of the duty-room and the break kitchen during my little Lazarus-back-from-the-dead performance for my co-workers. There had even been a little dead girl in big bow ribbons and a pinafore. They don’t float or fly or slime you or anything; they seem to just walk or drive around all day and hang out. I guess that’s what you do when you’re dead and have a lot of time on your hands. Like…eternity.
Or you hang out in somebody’s living room, like this hot ghost chick is doing now at dawn, drinking ghost Scotch, smoking unfiltered ghost cigarettes, and wearing nothing but a shimmery bathrobe and a stocking and garter set.
Devon, of course, totally doesn’t know what he’s missing. But that’s been the case where I’m concerned, too, for most of these past three years. Him not knowing—or really caring—what he’s missing. Not that I wear stocking and garter sets for him; I’m strictly the pantyhose type. But maybe it’s time for me to shake things up a little, do things a bit different now that I’m dead. Right now, in spite of the TV blaring, he’s in a lotus position on the carpet, meditating, so I take the opportunity to speak to the ghost chick, something I’ve never attempted before. Trying to talk to a ghost, I mean.
“Excuse me,” I say to her. “But could you give us a little privacy, please?”
The bimbo just stares at me and blows a lazy smoke ring. Ghosts smoke a lot, I’ve noticed. A hell of a lot. There’s a kind of ectoplasmic smog that hangs over the city. And something else, too: a kind of giant moving tapioca cloud layer higher up. I noticed this in the rearview mirror about halfway home to the suburbs.
“You can see me?” she asks. Her voice sounds faint and scratchy, like old-time radio, and she actually sounds a little surprised.
“Sure. Would you mind?”
She shrugs and gets up, exposing way more of herself than I want to see, then jiggles off to the bedroom or someplace. Through the wall. She is, without question, the politest, most obliging, and cooperative ghost I’ve encountered yet, even if she is probably lying in my bed smoking right now. As far as I can tell—hell, I’ve only been doing this for a few hours now—most of them just walk right through you without saying a word. At least, that’s been my impression so far.
“Who are you talking to, Richie Rich?” Devon asks, waking with a snap from his trance—by reciting a special concluding mantra, he once told me. Devon is a really, really beautiful guy, which is why I married him, even if he does hide most of it under a very trimmed beard. But even that is the most beautiful beard I’ve ever seen in my life. The only even halfway-bearable one, anyway.
“Cell phone.” It occurred to me back at the stationhouse that I could get away with talking to anything I see—ghosts, demons, trolls, flying fruit-bats, whatever—just by holding it to my ear. That little piece of hardware is the difference between being perceived as a normal person and getting slapped with a blue paper and sent off to a psych ward.
“Devon,” I say now in my wife voice, “we need to talk.”
“What? Now? I’ve got a planning meeting in half an hour. For open house.”
Devon is a high school teacher. Which may explain why he sounds like a high school student most of the time. He’s two years younger than me, thirty-one, has thick long brown hair, a carpet of brown hair on his chest that matches his beard, dreamy blue eyes to die for, brilliantly white teeth, and a perfect tan. Half the girls at his school are in love with him. I don’t blame them. I was once, too.
Not that he’s a bad person. Or a dumb one. He’s just…Devon. Here’s what I mean:
“Devon, honey, I have something really scary and terrible and weird to tell you, and I need all of your attention right now. And I need you to be, well…super open-minded.”
“Okay, cool,” he says. Sort of vaguely. “Open-minded. Right. You’ve met someone. Another woman?” I can’t tell whether he’s being ironic or hopeful. Most likely, however, he’s just being supportive.
“No. It’s worse than that.”
“You’ve joined a church.”
“No, Devon, I’ve had, um, kind of an accident at work. An industrial accident, I guess you could say—occupational, anyway. I got shot through the heart last night—see?” And I take off my jacket and show him the bullet wound. He just stares at it blankly. Like I’m trying to come on to him at an inappropriate time of day or something. He has very circadian rules regarding sex; like many other furry mammals, he is a strict nocturnal. “The thing is, it didn’t completely kill me. Not totally.”
Okay, now he’s really staring at me, and I don’t blame him. It’s pretty hard to process news like this, especially first thing in the morning. On a weekday. When you aren’t stoned, I mean, as he normally is most weekends and evenings. No, he’s not exactly a role model to his students.
“Come here,” I tell him. “Check out my skin temperature and see if you can find a pulse. Seriously.”
He does this, moving like a robot, still staring. “Ah, hell,” he says after he’s confirmed my heart isn’t beating. Tears well up in his eyes and start to trickle down his cheeks. My own eyes sting in response. Maybe I can still cry; hope for me yet.
As a cop, I’ve had to make more than my share of “widow calls” in the line of duty; giving citizens the bad news that their loved ones are deceased. Wives, husbands, mothers, mostly. So I know it’s generally true what they say about the stages of grief—that most people have to go through denial, negotiation, and anger first. But not my Devon. It takes him a few minutes, but he goes pretty much straight to acceptance.
And he keeps looking down at the hole in my chest. He seems hypnotized by the sight of it. “Can I put my finger in there?” he asks like a kid.
Strangely enough, this is also his idea of foreplay. Digital insertion lower down, I mean. You might think from his question that he’s a biology teacher, but you’d be wrong. Social and Gender Studies. Of course, he’s always accused me of being cold and heartless. Maybe this is just his way of wanting to confirm it.
“No.”
He bursts into a flood of tears then, but when I try to comfort him by putting my arms around him, he pulls away. “You’re really cold! It’s spooky, Rich. I don’t think being touched by you erotically is healthy for me, not unless your aura gets cleansed first. So…your deal is that you’re halfway to the other side spiritually but still stuck in this world physically?”
“Sounds about right.”
“You want me to help? You know, like, guide you on your journey to the other side?”
I have no idea what he thinks this might involve, aside from setting me on fire or sawing my head off with the hedge-trimmer, so I say no to this, too.
“I mean, holy shit…you’re really and truly dead, Richelle!” Devon moans now, collapsing onto the couch and burying his face in his hands. Once the New Agey calm is punctured, we usually get some kind of dramatics display in our tender moments. He was in the theater club in high school, because of his looks and all.
“Well, more like undead, actually.”
“Still…” My husband stops snuff
ling and looks up at me guilelessly. “I guess I should get the house now. I mean, technically, dead persons don’t have any legal right to community property anymore, right? Or to own any property, actually. Not when you stop and think about it.”
He had a point. The dumbass.
t least Kitty looks happy to see me. She was a stray I found in an alley five years ago; Kitty is the only name I could ever get her to answer to, and frankly, that’s all I dare call her. She’s all wire and nerves, a fierce little thing, black and white calico, with a bandit’s markings around her bright yellow eyes, who might eat me in my sleep if I get on her bad side. Did I say my job came first? Kitty comes first, The Job second, and Devon third.
Although after this morning, I’m pretty sure I know where I stand with Devon. Way lower on his personal list of priorities; not at number one or even number three. Somewhere in the mid-teens, I’m guessing, down there between owning this house and buying a burial plot. I get the distinct feeling he’s already written me off. He’s more attached to my cat, though, and I can tell he wants to put up a fight to keep her. The issue’s already come up in couples’ counseling a few times.
After Devon’s rushed off to work, I feed Kitty—the most expensive cat food on the planet, naturally; the kind that comes in little individual plastic mini-servings, not cans or, God forbid, bags―then I go in to talk to Lorna. That turns out to be the name of the platinum-blonde bimbo in my bed. She’s friendly enough but fading badly with the daylight, and by nine AM, she’s pretty much disappeared. And honestly? I’m not feeling so great myself. Maybe it’s all that bright sunshine from outside affecting my undead eyes, or maybe I’m just still hung over, feeling dehydrated, and faint with hunger―or deadness―but I have to take a nap before I can even get up the strength to feed myself. This worries the cat. She hates me to act sick or out of character or alter my habits in any way, so she wakes me after an hour or two by sinking her claws in and out of my hair like it’s carpeting or a thick blanket or something. When I get up, I feel as weak as…well, as a kitten.