“Forty-eight dead. Twelve alive.”
“She would have passed recently. She was born in Houston but raised here in New Mexico.”
He responded faster this time. “Dead. I can show you.”
He started to pull me out of the freezer, but I held my ground with a pat on his hand. He was going to show me where he’d written the name in one of his walls. “I believe you, hon. It just makes me sad. I was hoping they were still alive. One more: Theodore James Chandler from Albuquerque.”
I had high hopes for this guy. His wife had just found the suicide note that morning. Maybe, just maybe, he was still alive.
“Not dead,” he said, and as my hopes soared, he counted on his fingers.
“So, he’s still alive? Do you know where he is?” I asked him.
“Not where. Not how,” he said, still counting down slowly on his fingers, each pudgy digit folding down one at a time. “Only if.”
I started to fish my phone out of my front pocket when he’d counted down to zero and said, “Dead.”
“Wait, what? Ted Chandler is dead? He was alive two seconds ago.”
“No, no, no. Not anymore.”
I blinked at him, waiting for an explanation.
“He probably didn’t pay his electric bill,” Rocket said, arching his brows and nodding as though issuing a caveat.
The impact of Ted’s death hit me hard. While I was busy playing detective – not that I wasn’t one, but still – poking around old receipts and p**n magazines with the pages stuck together, a man had been dying.
I texted Uncle Bob, my message somber and pensive at once:
They’re dead. All three.
Son of a bitch. Are they with you?
No. Probably crossed over already.
Uncle Bob didn’t know exactly how it all worked, but he knew enough to believe anything I said, no matter how… unusual it sounded. One day I’d tell him who – no, what – I really was. For now, he took anything I had to say as gospel.
Going to talk to some of the relatives of these victims.
Let me know what you find out.
Will do.
With a heavy sigh and a heavier heart, I turned back to the task at hand: homeless perv living in the freezer. I didn’t really know if the pages of the p**n magazines were stuck together, and I was not about to find out. I totally needed to start carrying plastic gloves, but that was all I needed, to launder gloves along with my license and car keys. I went through more fobs that way.
“Has he been here today?” I asked Rocket, trying to gauge whether there was anything in the area to identify the man. When I received no answer, I turned around.
Everyone was gone. Jessica. Strawberry. Rocket.
I walked slowly back into the kitchen, shining my light into the darkest corners, but saw nothing. I did, however, feel something. The cold hand of an attacker as it slammed roughly over my mouth.
6
My life is just like a soap opera
filmed in a psychiatric ward.
— T-SHIRT
I was pulled back against a skeletal body as a sharp piece of metal jabbed the skin at my neck. Not a knife, but something long and sharp. A screwdriver perhaps, which could do a lot of damage in the right hands. The man held it there as a warning while he got a better hold, tightening the opposite arm around my ribs just under Danger and Will Robinson, my br**sts. He pulled me close.
I wasn’t fighting terribly hard just yet. No need to cause a ruckus when I had no idea what he wanted. Maybe he just wanted me to leave, which I’d oblige willingly. Homeless people, for the most part, were harmless unless you invaded what they considered their turf. I wasn’t using that freezer space anyway. It was all his.
“You sure talk a lot when ain’t nobody else in the room,” he said, his voice full of sand and gravel.
I glanced down to assess what I could: a grimy hand, Caucasian, mid-thirties. He was much stronger than he felt because all I could feel were bones. I caught a glimpse of the end of a tool in his other hand. Definitely a screwdriver. Long bony fingers curled around it until their knuckles shone white.
I’d dropped my flashlight, but I would have been able to see the others, no matter how dark it was. I couldn’t fathom why they’d left. A mere mortal wouldn’t have sent them packing. I had to wonder what had made them turn tail. At the same moment, I realized my order to hide my emotions from Reyes must have worked. Otherwise, the second my adrenaline spiked, he would have been there. Materialized right in front of me, and after severing the spine of my attacker as he was wont to do, he would have glared at me, given me a scolding for leaving without him.
Instead, nothing. I stood there parked against a homeless guy with a rusty screwdriver at my throat, and I had to wonder how I got into these situations so often. It wasn’t like I went in search of crazy people. They just seemed to find me.
“Look,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender, “it’s yours, okay? I never liked that freezer much anyway.”
He waited a long moment, his breath raspy as his lungs filled with air. Then he leaned forward and did the strangest thing. He bit the tip of my ear. Rather hard. As though he enjoyed inflicting pain on others.
I jerked in his grip, but he only tightened it more.
“You think I’m living in this shithole because I want to?” he asked, the smell of stale cigarettes on his breath suffocating me. “This is the only place you go without that pretty boyfriend of yours.”
Dread began to fill me, and I was on the verge of summoning Reyes when the man continued, his words convincing me to suspend the summons.