by DM Sinclair
Hitler had dissed his Float Beer shirt.
Well, that’s it then. His mind was made up. Hitler was the deciding factor. Somebody on the plane had made a remark about his shirt too, but somehow it hurt more coming from someone evil.
Ryan didn’t regret his decision to leave his body. Not at all. This new existence would just take some getting used to. But he knew now, for a fact, that he needed to find a way to change his shirt. Or he would be hearing for all eternity what he had just heard from Hitler.
He thought if he jumped, slid, and rolled he could probably be at the bottom before it got completely dark.
ELEVEN
Even before the Blackout, Lowell Mahaffey had hated police stations. The feeling always started as soon as he got within a block of a station and started to see the flow of police cruisers like ant scouts swarming to and from their hill. He’d freeze up in fear that every black-and-white that passed him was going to suddenly veer onto the sidewalk and block his path. He worried that SWAT cops might materialize out of mailboxes and sewer grates to encircle him. He felt that way even when he hadn’t done anything obviously illegal, which was usually.
Not always, but usually.
Piled on top of that anxiety were whole other big, fat, supernatural reasons for avoiding the police station. And he was feeling that tension now as he turned down Rogers Street and the office of the Cambridge Police Department drifted into view ahead.
It was still two blocks away, and already the ghosts were filling the street between him and it. He flicked on his headlights as the car plunged into them.
The popular theory before the Blackout had been that ghosts were the spirits of dead people with unfinished business. Vengeances, vendettas, injustices, and so forth. And while the theory may have been correct in spirit, it ignored one crucial fact: everybody who dies has unfinished business. Every single person. The occasional 107-year-old on their deathbed might think they’ve led a full life and done everything they wanted to do and closed off every dangling subplot. But there’s always something left undone. Like maybe they forgot to clean out the pan under the fridge before they kicked off. It’s still unfinished business, albeit unfinished business that doesn’t seem worth hanging around eternally for. Many others, though, find themselves stuck with full-on vengeance quests: murder victims wanting to implicate their killer, parking ticket victims wanting to implicate their meter maids, and so forth. That’s a lot of ghosts looking for justice. And many of them, once the Blackout afforded them the opportunity, turned to the police. Six years later, the police were still struggling to deal with them. They had barely even begun to make a dent in the case load. Hence the human soul pea soup that now made Lowell almost rear-end a parked U-haul.
He couldn’t begin to guess the number of ghosts. Tens of thousands, maybe. They swarmed the place, as they did virtually every police station and public services building in Boston, and likely in every other city on Earth. They were a constant billowing cloud around the station, pressing in from all sides down every artery. Almost all sense of individual ghosts was lost. They were just fog filled with voices.
But unlike actual fog, the ghosts were not held at bay by the windshield of the car. You didn’t get to drive through them in a fog-free bubble. Lowell’s wobbling little 1990-something Cavalier, which was well past its prime and the primes of cars half its age, wasn’t good at keeping even actual fog out. So it stood little chance against such a relentless press of spiritual smog. The car filled up with the stuff as he pushed down Rogers St., and he felt the chill electricity of hundreds of ghosts passing through him. Too many foreign emotions to process and too many voices to single out any one.
He had planned to try parking in one of the spots reserved for police cruisers along the Bent Street side of the building. Technically he could be assured of being towed away for parking there. But tow truck drivers didn’t like coming down here any more than he did, so he was prepared to risk it. But the density of the human cloud proved too much for him to drive through even before he got within a block of the station. So he cut left down 5th street, aiming for the parking structure on Cambridge Center where visitors to the station were supposed to park. Walking back to the station through ghost vapor chilled him nearly as much as the parking fee.
“Lowell, not that it’s not good seeing you, but get out.”
Lowell hadn’t even made it halfway across the office, and already Detective Blair was yelling at him. But Lowell had expected that Blair would stop him in the lobby well before he even got into the elevator, so he had surpassed his own modest expectations.
Lowell was always disappointed by the office of the Criminal Investigation Unit. Bad movies had conditioned him to expect, even want, a police station to be a bustling hive. Sweaty detectives with rolled-up sleeves barking into phones. Arrested prostitutes and handcuffed bikers spitting threats at each other. The Chief in his adjacent office demanding that some loose cannon turn in his badge. Instead, the place looked like the sales department of a moderately successful insurance company.
Blair seemed to have second thoughts about kicking him out. “Wait, first tell me how you got in here. Then get out.”
“It’s no big deal,” Lowell said. “The Desk Sergeant knows me.”
“He knows you because I told him not to let you in here. He has a picture of you taped to his desk.”
“See? He knows me.”
Blair sat down and rubbed his temples. “You still got a working card, don’t you?”
“Come on. Do you think they’d let me keep a working security card?” They had, in fact. By mistake. And it had continued working even despite him having dropped it in the toilet twice.
“Give it to me.” Blair held out his hand and motioned with his fingers.
Lowell sat across from him and glanced around the office. It was quiet and nearly unpopulated. Two other detectives at their desks paid him no attention, but that was it. The place was, compared to the ghost-infested nightmare he had come through in the street and the lobby, an absolute oasis. “This is nice, Blair. I never seen it like this! How’d you get all the ghosts out?”
Blair sighed and pointed up to the corner of the office. A white hemisphere about the size of half a softball was affixed to the wall near the ceiling. Its perimeter was dotted with dark circles and a red LED glowed softly at its apex. Lowell checked the other corners and, sure enough, each corner had an identical device.
“Ghost Wall?” he asked, genuinely surprised. The devices, which generated some kind of electrical field he didn’t understand that somehow prevented ghosts from passing through, were generally considered an expensive luxury that billionaires installed on their yachts. “Is that in the department budget?”
“It’s why we don’t have a coffee machine anymore. Now give me the card, Lowell, and get out of here.”
“I need cases. As many as you’ve got.”
Blair sighed again. “I told you on the phone. I’m not giving you any more cases.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m tired of people coming back to the department complaining that we sent them to a con man.”
“It never used to bother you.”
Blair flinched and glanced around at the other detectives, too far away to be listening. He lowered his voice. “That wasn’t a con. That was a non-traditional avenue of investigation. And it was helping people. Remember when you used to help people?”
“So if you’re not going to give me a case, pay the rent on my office.”
“Why would I do that? It has nothing to do with me.”
“Somebody has to. And the way things are going, it’s not going to be me.”
Blair cocked an eyebrow. "It's that bad?"
Lowell caught a softening of his expression. Blair had always been a softy, not really the hard-boiled detective he tried to project. Okay, so, pity is the play of the day, Lowell thought. I can do pity. He looked down and shifted in his chair, trying to appear humiliated. He kn
ew if he hit the right notes, Blair would fold like he had done so many times before. But Lowell realized partway through his performance that he actually was kind of humiliated. Things were tough. The more people learned about ghosts, the harder it was for him to convince them they needed him. He was a specialist in doing things people could easily do themselves, and the market for those was small and shrinking. He had been forced to sell most of his office furniture. The bowling dad case wasn’t nearly enough to turn the corner. But he was adamantly opposed to displaying actual humility, especially since he was so much better at feigning it.
“It’s worse than that, Blair, I need cases. Big ones. You gotta have something.”
“What am I supposed to give you?”
“I don’t know, something easy.”
“If it’s easy, they don’t bring it to the police. We are here specifically to handle stuff that is hard.” Blair was sounding annoyed now. The pity play hadn’t worked. “There’s a bazillion ghosts downstairs. Go ask them. Gotta be a case for you down there somewhere.”
Lowell shivered. “I can’t find a case for me in that pea soup. Come on, Blair. You owe me.” Lowell hadn’t planned on dropping the “you owe me” bomb so early in the conversation, and so casually. But there it was. It had slipped out. And the hardening of Blair’s face made Lowell instantly regret it.
“No, Lowell. I owed you.”
“You wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for me.”
“I’ve repaid that debt fifty times already. It’s paid.”
Pity had failed. Guilt had failed. Blair was proving to be made of harder stuff than Lowell had ever suspected. Lowell sat back in his chair and tried to look angry, which was hard because he was angry and it was messing up his performance.
Blair shook his head, whether from annoyance or pity Lowell couldn’t decide. “Have you ever thought about finding another line of work?”
“This is the only thing I’ve ever been good at.”
“But you’re not good at it.”
“Well then this is the only thing I’ve ever been able to pretend to be good at.”
Blair checked to make sure nobody was listening. “You know I appreciate all you did for me. But the fact is, Lowell, you’re not much good to me anymore. I’m sorry. I got nothing for you.”
Lowell stepped out of the elevator and into the chill, electrically-charged ghost fog of the lobby. He was so consumed with his frustration and annoyance at Blair that he hardly noticed the countless souls passing through him as he trudged across the lobby. Or the thousands of insistent voices pleading with him that they needed his help, that their problem was more important than all these other people’s. There were so many voices it became a white noise as thick as the soul fog.
He couldn’t see more than a foot or so through the thronging, grasping mist, so he aimed himself generally towards where he thought the door was and hoped for the best. A couple of times he passed sweating, befuddled-looking cops with clipboards. Probably rookies being hazed with the unenviable task of trying to take statements from fifty thousand ghosts a day. It was impossible and everybody knew it, but they had to put on a show of serving and protecting.
The silhouette of the information desk loomed up out of the seething, grasping cloud and Lowell realized he had aimed too far to the right. He adjusted his course, squinting through a hundred semi-translucent faces to see if he could spot daylight anywhere.
What he spotted, instead, was a surprisingly solid form, a dark mass like a rock that the river of ghosts flowed around. An actual living person, he thought. The only one here other than Lowell and the few pitiable cops. Whoever it was, they were standing at the information desk and as he passed he discerned a woman’s voice.
“I don’t know where he is,” she was saying. “That’s why I need to talk to someone.”
Lowell couldn’t make out what the desk minder’s reply was, but he had heard all he needed to hear. It was a gamble, to be sure. There was no guarantee it would be easy. But she was alive, she was missing someone, and he needed cases. Badly.
He doubled-back and pushed through the glowing mass towards her, fishing around in his raincoat pockets in the vain hope that he might come across a stray business card.
TWELVE
Ryan couldn’t judge the reaction on Trudy’s face, given that she lacked one. He found it impossible to tell if he she had heard him at all. He tried to watch for body language but his gaze kept drifting back to the ragged stump of her neck, which displayed little if any emotion. She just sat behind her desk, doing nothing at all. Headlessly.
“Trudy,” he tried again, “I need to talk to Roger about the guarantee.”
He thought he saw her shoulders swivel towards him slightly, a degree or two, and then swivel back. He didn’t know what that meant.
He decided to try asking one last time, and if it failed he was going to go find a living employee, preferably one with a head. “Trudy, I need an appointment with…”
He stopped mid-sentence, because his very next word was walking across the foyer.
“Roger!” Ryan called out, dashing around Trudy’s desk to catch up to him.
Roger didn’t stop but turned to him irritably.
Ryan fully expected Roger not to recognize him. He assumed that Roger saw ten clients like him every day, and that he wouldn’t have made much of an impression. So he expected that he would be forced to re-introduce himself. He did not expect Roger to even remember his name. And he certainly did not expect Roger to look astonished at the sight of him, immediately lose his grip on the paper coffee cup in his hand, and drop said cup onto the carpet, splattering his socks with coffee foam. But that is what happened. Twice, because he was carrying two of them.
“Sorry,” Ryan said, jumping back to avoid the coffee spill that couldn’t stain him if it wanted to. “I don’t know if you remember me, I’m…”
“Mr. Matney,” Roger said immediately. He was staring at Ryan with what looked like a mixture of shock and bewilderment. Ryan couldn’t explain either one.
“That’s right,” Ryan said, surprised. “I wanted to talk to you about the guarantee.”
“The guarantee?” Roger didn’t seem to recognize it as an English word. He looked, as the old expression would have gone, like he had seen a ghost.
“The guarantee? Getting my body back?” He only wanted it temporarily. Long enough to change his shirt. And then he’d be asking for another rushed appointment to get back out again and get on with whatever-it-was-he-was-going-to-do-forever. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to mention that. Not yet.
Roger took a long time to respond. He seemed to be waging a war with his composure. Finally he won it, and that funeral-director calm emerged mildly triumphant. “Of course. The guarantee. Come in, please!”
He led Ryan down the short hall to his office, his legs twisting around each other even more quickly than they usually did, and stood aside to let Ryan enter first.
“You said the guarantee is ten days, right?” Ryan asked.
“Ten days is the time during which the procedure may be safely reversed, yes.”
“Yeah, I need to do that.”
Roger circled around his desk and sat down. Ryan could have sworn Roger still looked a little nervous. He seemed to be thinking about something else entirely. “Ah, I see. May I ask why? Are you unhappy with the service? Is there a problem?”
“No, everything worked fine. I just…” Ryan sighed and sucked up his humiliation. He felt like he was asking for extra-strength hemorrhoid cream at the pharmacy counter. Just tell him. “I need to change my shirt. And then we can re-do everything and take me out again. That’s it.”
Roger cocked his head, like what Ryan had said was pushing it off balance. “You want back in your body. And then out again.”
“Just long enough to change my shirt. Otherwise I’m totally happy. Totally. It’s just the shirt. The shirt is kind of… well, it’s ruining everything.”
“Well, th
at is certainly…” Roger looked disdainfully at Ryan’s shirt. “…understandable.”
Ryan folded his arms over the Float Beer logo.
Roger stared at him for too long. Ryan started to get uncomfortable.
Finally Roger just broadened his smile and leaned forward to his laptop keyboard. “Alright then. You’re a decisive man who knows what he wants. Or at least, a decisive man who knows he doesn’t want anymore what he wanted a few days ago. Let’s make you an appointment.”
Roger clicked his mouse a few times and typed an M. He clicked through a few pages before finding what he was looking for. “There we are. You do understand you will have to pay for the procedure again. It’s really rather expensive.”
“That’s fine.”
“And there will be an extra cancellation fee if you change your mind again.”
“That’s okay.”
Roger clenched his jaw. “Excellent. Let me just…” He clicked a few more times. And then he stopped. He stared at the screen. For a few seconds he didn’t click. “Oh dear,” he said.
“What is it?”
He was silent for several more seconds. Ryan could see his eyes scanning the screen as he read something. Finally he turned to Ryan and folded his hands on the desk. “I’m afraid we have a bit of a difficult situation,” he said in a sympathetic voice that Ryan imagined he had once reserved for widows with bad credit.
“I paid the full fee,” Ryan said quickly. “I’m sure it cleared.”
“Indeed it did. That is not the problem. Do you recall when you first applied for the procedure you were required to fill out several legal forms. Releases, declarations, that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, I did them all. I got them in early.”
“Yes. But you see, the problem is that you failed to report your condition. A rather significant condition, I’m sure you’ll agree, with an obvious impact on procedures such as those offered by this Clinic. And that, I’m afraid, is a violation of the Terms of Service.”