Battle of the Network Zombies (12 page)

“How do you know?” Wendy peered over my shoulder.

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know it’s the same one he showed you?”

I turned the envelope over in my hand. “I guess I don’t, but that’s beside the point. This time clearly they followed through on the threat.” I tossed the thing on the desk and collapsed into the side chair, defeated and glaring at the pile of Johnny. “Well. That’s the end of the fucking show. Guess I’ll have to get a job at Jack in the Box with the blue balls crowd.”

Cameron puffed out his chest. “It’s no secret Johnny’d received death threats, why else would we be doing a hunt for a bodyguard?” He pressed the toe of his platforms into the ash leaving a gray print. “Anyway. I’m outta here. This just stopped looking like a paying gig and I don’t do camera time without serious bones, let alone none.” Cameron stomped out of the room.

The cameraman, a bald zombie with a face full of scruff dark enough it could double for a bad shoe polish job, tossed his equipment off his shoulder onto the bed, where it clanked and ruffled the brocade duvet. He snarled and flipped us all off before storming out, his big fists balled up at the ends of his stiffened arms like hams.

A few moments later, a chorus of shouts rose in the mansion followed by the rumble of footfalls as the predominantly zombie crew flooded out into the drive. The four of us crowded into the window to watch the production crew abandon ship like the undead rats they were. They kicked over garbage cans and porta-pottys, flooding the grass with chemical bile. The entire lawn cleared out in a spray of mud and grass clumps, brown tracks criss-crossing the once lush green like crappy argyle. From the far side of the manor a familiar Civic hybrid zipped through the gravel and followed the train of mutineers.

I was about to say, “Isn’t that your car?” But when I turned to look at Wendy, her face, screwed up tighter than a baby’s first taste of lemon, gave me my answer.

“Motherfucker!” she screamed, fists pumping at her side.

“We could call the police, maybe?” I asked, trying to offer some solution. I hated to see Wendy so upset, especially when I was dealing with some pretty heavy shit myself, like the end of a clothes-buying era. It was kind of rude, if you ask me.

Her head lolled back on her shoulders. “Don’t bother. That’d be like calling a retard stupid. Redundant.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked me square in the eyes. “Times are tough for other people besides you, Amanda. I stole that shit off one of my meals a month ago.”

“Ooh. Sorry. You really shouldn’t take those kinds of risks though. I’m not sure you could handle a night in jail, with our diet of homeless vagrants, drug addicts and criminals, it’d be like a bulimic hanging out in the refrigerator.”

She threw her head back, tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth. “Yes, please. Tell me how to live, Ms. ‘I Just Got My Car Repoed and Can’t Keep A Man.’”

“Cold.” I could feel my lips pursing.

“Shut up, you two!” Mama backed away from the window. “Don’t you rotters know this is the end of us?”

I thought about the implications of the production closing down and had a little montage moment.

A foreclosure notice hung on the condo door, rolling out a sleeping bag next to Abuelita, Marithé carrying a box of her personal things (a pen case and an iPod) from the defunct offices of Feral Inc. and then the horrific finishing blow, my mother waiting with open arms as I carried my suitcases up to her little house in Magnolia.

Dear God
.

I could feel my knees giving out. And then I glanced from the abandoned camera to the body, a plan congealing in my undeniably gorgeous head like a Waldorf salad of brilliance—actually I don’t care for that simile—let’s just say…with the intricate and deranged beauty of a Hieronymus Bosch painting and call it good. ’Cause it was.

“Like hell it is.” I grinned at Mama Montserrat. “I say we keep on filming.”

“What?” The trio stared back at me blankly.

“Yeah! We just change up the format. Go with this.” I jabbed a thumb in the direction of the steaming pile of Birch. “Make it a mystery reality show rather than the competition we had planned. Lord knows we have plenty of suspects.”

“Who?” Wendy asked. “Those girls probably never met Johnny before
American Minions
. There’s no motive.”

“Oh, come on. I knew him for three days and I would have shanked him if I could have. But, since you’re probably right, we can script it a little bit, if we have to, no one needs to know any different.”

“And who’s our star?” Mama asked, but her wheels were already turning. She saw the kind of potential I did.

“Me, of course.” I gave them my signature starlet pose.
⁵⁴

“I’m not sure you can be a sympathetic lead, Amanda,” Wendy said.

I spun on Wendy. “Seriously? You’re thinking you might be a better option? You haven’t even had any screen time.”

“Maybe Tanesha would make a better detective.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Tanesha hummed.

I shook off Wendy’s comments. “We don’t have time to argue about this. I’ve been reading lots of mysteries lately and what we have here is a classic locked-door murder. There’s bound to be clues all over this shithole.”

“She’s right.” Wendy finally came in for some backup.

“Well, sure, you’d be behind your client.”

“Client?” Tanesha asked, swiveling around to glare at Wendy. “That bitch is her friend. I kicked her bony ass out of a club once.”

Wendy scowled and Mama Montserrat’s eye’s scrunched up in hatred. She shook her charm bracelet of dried animal parts at her, mumbling something vaguely threatening.

“All I’m saying is,” Wendy continued, blowing off what was clearly a curse. “It’s just like that Robert Altman movie where they gathered every British actor who’d ever done work in a period flick and shoved them in a spooky mansion.”

“
Gosford Park
?” I offered.

“Exactly! And then the host is mysteriously murdered.”

“Didn’t see it.” Tanesha yawned.

“Besides,” I said. “It can’t be like that movie. Too boring. Plus, we’re short one Kristin Scott Thomas.”

I fully expected to be corrected and told that
I
was the Kristin Scott Thomas.

Instead I got…

“You’re kind of like Maggie Smith, if that helps.” Wendy was scanning her iPhone again, unconscious of the sharpness of her barb. My jaw was tightening like I’d been cut open with a rusty can lid instead of Scott’s aggressive dew clawing, tetanus making a home of hatred in my dead veins. I glanced at the fine beads of leather repair gel holding the strip of skin back into place. The top had begun to curl away, revealing a divot of gore gone green with mold.

Damn humidity.

But that’s beside the point!

Maggie Smith!
Why don’t I have any other friends? Nice ones.

The blonde looked up, grinning. “I mean because of your dry wit, of course.”

Bitch
.

“Get the camera.” I stabbed a thumb in the direction of the bed.

Wendy blinked.

“We’re going to film this gonzo style. On the fly. None of us can afford to have this show go tits up, can we?” My eyes darted to Mama Montserrat.

“She’s right. We’ve got to do something,” Mama said.

“So grab the camera and we’ll reshoot this whole thing, like we were just finding the body. And this time…” I pointed at each of the women and the drag queen in a dramatic show of deliberation. “With feeling.”

The trio, sufficiently enthusiastic about my brilliant scheme, rushed into the hall to take their places.

I lagged.

It might help things if I knew what the hell I was doing.

Monday
8:00–9:00
P.M.
Ghost Hunter Hunting

After three reasonably threatening voicemails went unanswered—and figuring Scott was still mad over our little fight—I conned an East Indian cabbie named Raj into picking me up and driving me past Smitty’s Diner, an all-night shithole Scott frequented for comfort food. I met the taxi in the neighborhood outside the manor, pretending to be a resident of a particularly disheveled Victorian, the landlord of which owes me a favor for cleaning up his squatter infestation, thank you.

I’m not a fan of cabs. They’re often older model domestics, for one. And with old cars, or used cars in general, there’s always a chance you’ll run into the ghost of a heart attack victim or, God forbid, the non-corporeal result of a fatality crash—particularly bitter entities and to be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, limo services were a bit out of my reach, these days.

Scooting in next to a pair of sour purple apparitions, I kept my face forward, intentionally avoiding their scrutiny.

“Smitty’s Diner by Safeco,” I said, and settled back into the seat.

Raj grumbled, set the meter and pulled away, grabbing for his phone all in one fluid movement. The next moment, a mixed stream of Indian and English spat from his mouth at someone named Baljeet, who wasn’t taking any shit.

“You listen to me, mister high-and-mighty, I get all the girls I want, don’t need to go to school or making anything real of my life, Raj. I make the rules around here and if you want to keep dragging your sorry butt around Seattle in one of my cabs—yes, you heard me, my cabs—you’ll pick up my things from the Vindaloo Mart. I’m not joking here brother. Not joking.”

Raj sighed, cheeks flushed from the verbal beating. Our eyes met in the rearview mirror and I could have sworn his narrowed, as though he’d just lumped me in with bitches like his sister. I had to bite my tongue from correcting him. We all know I’m a bitch of a different sort, entirely.

“Do you need me to tell you what to get again?”

“No.”

“Well, just don’t forget our mother’s incontinence pads, or do you want to clean up her poop again? Is that it, you like to clean it up?”

“No.” His answer was as clipped as you’d expect, full of that adolescent hurt that echoes its way through an adult psyche.

“Hmm. And turmeric. I’m out. Get the one in the bag not in the jar no matter what Mitesh tries to sell you.”

“Fine.” Raj’s knuckles were white; his hands kneading at the loose steering wheel cover viciously. He reached for the knob on the radio.

“Don’t think of turning off the radio. This isn’t your last call you know?”

I couldn’t bring myself to look in the rearview mirror again, which was just as well, because the ghosts were shifting around a bit to chat about me like a couple of schoolgirls.

“She’s a harsh looking one,” one of the ghosts said. His tone was haughty, the words measured.

“Dark and disturbeded, be my guess,” said the other in a grumbly stutter.

“Why do you suppose she’s going down to the tracks at this hour?”

“Prolly lookin’ to meet up wit’ a man.”

I kept my focus on the window, clouding with a fresh drizzle that pooled in dots and drew lines in the wind as straight as mattress ticking. The houses gave way to aging strip malls hawking Vietnamese noodles, dry cleaning and Super Mega Hot Nails, Low Low Price for Fill. I considered my own nails, thick and sharp as talons. The French manicure covered up the monstrousness, but only from a distance.

“She looks lonely.”

“I agree completely.”

Bastards.

“Doesn’t have the propinquity for relationships. She’s too hard.”

“Too cold.”

“Frigid. Probably take a can of bacon grease to loosen her up.”

My head spun at that, glowering at the ghost nearest me, then the other. “Am not,” I hissed. Though really…I was guilty on most of those counts, but I’d be damned if they were going to talk shit.

Raj glanced back over the seat, not skipping a beat in his chastisement of his sister. He nodded and opened his eyes wide under the folds of a sagging turban. I shook my head.

“Just talking to myself,” I said.

Raj went back to his argument.

“I knew it.” The ghost furthest crossed his arms, a burly man in a pinstriped suit with round glasses and hair greased tight to his obviously lumpy skull. “I could smell dead meat the second we pulled up to that joint.”

The other nodded a face as round as a pie-hole, lips smashed up into his nose like he’d stumbled on a garbage scow. “Definitely. Dead meat,” he repeated and scooted closer to his friend, his aura fading into a calm blue—ridicule, apparently, is like ghost Xanax.

“So what
are
you doing out at this hour?” Lumpy leaned around Pie-hole to judge me more directly.

“That’d be none of your damn business, spook,” I whispered, glancing at Raj, who either hadn’t heard or was too busy arguing to care. “Can’t you two hang out on the roof or something?”

“It’s raining.” Pie-hole pointed at the streaks on the window, sheepishly.

“Besides,” Lumpy added. “We don’t get to talk to zombies everyday.”

I sighed.

Raj turned at the intersection between Safeco and the new hotel I can never remember the name of. Smitty’s appeared on the right, a spot of chrome growing out of a wet parking lot like a prosthetic.

“Pull up slowly.”

“Ooh! Surveillance!” Pie-hole’s head jutted in next to mine. Lumpy’s took up the opposite side.

“What are we looking for?”

I’d been confident in Scott’s predictability and sure enough, his tussled mop of blond hair marked his favorite spot behind an otherwise sweaty window. Probably nibbling on a tall stack with butter pecan syrup, sausage patty on the side. I didn’t have to think twice to know he was wearing his favorite pair of jeans, worn nearly threadbare on the back pocket and the left knee.

I loved those jeans. And the way he filled them out.

The cabbie slowed to a crawl and Scott’s preternatural senses must have kicked in. He swiped a clean streak from the window and peered out, forcing me to duck down onto the filthy felt seats; I didn’t need him seeing me before I had a chance to ditch Raj and his spectral passengers. Lumpy and Pie-hole ducked too, purely for effect.

“See! She is on a man-hunt.”

“Yeah. But you meant the other kind.”

“Wait. What kind are we talking about?”

I’d almost gotten out of the cab just to get away from the yammering and then remembered I didn’t have a dime. Raj would be plenty pissed when I stiffed him.
⁵⁵
It’s situations like these where a dysfunctional moral compass really comes in handy.

“Keep driving.” I punched the passenger seat. “I need smokes.”

The cabbie grunted and pulled us away from Scott’s line of sight. He stood in the window, goggling his hands to see out into the dark. I straightened, pointing a finger in the direction of an all-night convenience store. “There. The Stoppe and Shoppe. Pull in.”

“There are very bad men hanging around this area,” Raj warned.

“That’s true,” Pie-hole agreed.

“Drunks and rapists.” Lumpy raised an eyebrow, to show he was serious, I presumed.

“Sexual perverts,” Pie-hole said. “And Salvation Army nuns.”

That last one was kind of scary, I had to admit. Though did they even exist anymore?

“You must be very careful inside.” Raj reached for the meter.

“No no no.” I reached for his hand. “You wait for me here. I’ve got another errand to run after this.”

For a moment, I thought he’d argue. He did take another look at the ticking numbers, settling in at $26, before picking up his cell and yelling at Baljeet again. Maybe that’d be enough of a distraction. I slipped out of the car and stepped into the convenience store making a point of not looking back.

“See you in a minute,” Pie-hole called after.

“Not if I can help it,” I mumbled.

“Oh, buddy. She’s tryin’ to stiff the old man,” he told Lumpy. “She’ll have to fake her own death to get away from him.”

“She’s already dead, dumbass.”

I figured I’d let them work it out.

The Stoppe and Shoppe was worn to near ruin, linoleum curled up in spots and chipped away entirely in others. Where it was still smooth, sooty scuffmarks tagged it like talentless graffiti. A bank of refrigerator cases, dark except for one that flickered like a strobe light, lined the back wall, making the rows of shelves stand out like atolls of cleanliness amidst the smudged décor. Most of the shelves were empty except for off-brand potato chips, generic mouthwash and, oddly enough, a thoroughly stocked toilet paper display. The homeless apparently weren’t willing to skimp on anal cleanliness.

I saw the clerk’s feet first. Dingy white socks propped up on the counter next to an open container of pepperoni sticks so desiccated they resembled twigs. He was reading a car magazine with a girl on the cover massaging the hood of some sports car like it was a muscled chest.

“Hey,” I said, opting not to prod his gross foot to get his attention.

He swung his feet down and stood up lazily, his greasy hair hung in strips. His eyes were bruised and his nose taped, the victim of a beating or a sloppy surgeon. More likely a robbery. “Yeah?”

“Um. Do you have a back door?”

“What?”

“A back door?”

He twisted his head quizzically. I’m not sure why I expected him to be anything other than an idiot. Maybe I figured the black eyes were earned. Like he was a smartass or something. Sadly nothing like that, just dim.

“I need to get away from that guy out there.” I pointed at the cab. “He’s been following me. Stopping and flicking his tongue between his fingers.”

He made a peace sign with his fingers and lifted them to his face. “Like this—” he began.

“You don’t have to.” I waved my hands hopefully.

The clerk flicked his tongue in the webbing.

“Really?” I shook my head. “Listen, fucktard. Is there a back door?”

He pointed to a hallway even darker than the rest of the store. I looked out the front door. Lumpy stood on the cab hood, a mischievous smile at play on his shadow lips. Pie-hole sat in the passenger seat facing Raj, his mouth working pretty fast for a ghost no human could hear.

What are you up to?
I thought.

Then, Raj bolted out of his side and charged the door, screaming in that same unintelligible way. Fucking ghosts were learning new tricks every damn day. It seems like just yesterday, Mr. Kim walked away from my Volvo, like he’d never been chained to it in the first place.

Now they can be informants? It’s like there’s no fucking rules.

I darted down the hallway, slamming myself into the door, somehow expecting it to just pop open easy as ten dollar hooker, but luck wasn’t playing fair. Never did.

The door was locked. I bounced off it and spun around as Raj reached out for me, fists pumping with anger.

I hissed and ratcheted my jaw open fully, snapping at the air in front of him. I lurched forward, doing my best impression of a shambling mistake. My nails were dragging the walls as I went for him. Raj opened his mouth and let out an honest-to-God “ieeee” before clutching at his chest, twitching a bit and then dropping to the floor in a heap. I closed my mouth with a snap and a second later—as luck would have it—the clerk was hovering over the body.

“What happened?” The kid knelt beside Raj and dug through the layers of clothes to feel for a pulse.

“He had a heart attack, I think.” My jaw still ached from the threat of chowing down on some Indian food. I, of course, had no intention of eating Raj. First off, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but they tend to wear a lot of clothes around these parts. Sure, it’s cold compared to Mumbai or wherever, but really…parkas? Two, he’d taken at least fifteen radio calls since he picked me up, including a heated argument with Baljeet, whoever that was, over spices or some shit—I wasn’t really listening, though he made it clear after he clicked off that she was “full of spite and cruelty.” Plus I was kind of full, so I’d have to purge at some point. Try and explain regurgitating a partially digested corpse—they don’t flush well—I know, I’ve tried.

Finally—Hello—Witness!

“Well he’s dead, now.” The kid pulled back his hand like he’d accidentally touched a fresh turd. He even stared at his fingers, a look of actual horror in his eyes.

An odd feeling took hold of me. Something not unfamiliar, but latent, missed.

It was envy.

I opted not to disrupt his epiphany and instead said, “Wow. Life really is fragile.”

The kid nodded, still examining the body.

“Okay, then. I gotta go.” I rushed for the front door.

“But wait. What about the—”

“Bye!”

“—police?”

Pie-hole and Lumpy sat on the front bumper of the idling cab applauding. What’s the sound of two spectral hands clapping? You guessed it. Nothing.

“I’m afraid you two are going to need to get a new driver. Sorry.”

I sallied off down the sidewalk toward Smitty’s; behind me I could hear the two ghosts commiserating.

“Must have been all the ghee.”

“I’ve heard lentils are actually dried roundworms.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I hope that guy turns off the car, or we really will be here all night.”

A thought stopped me in my tracks.

I parked the cab in the alley behind Smitty’s, tucked it right in between a Dumpster overflowing with flattened cardboard and a drunk passed out in a puddle of his own sick. Oh yeah, I’m awesome at parallel parking. I didn’t even clip the fucker’s feet. Pie-hole and Lumpy were suitably impressed.

“Nice job.”

“Thanks.”

“Could you turn off the radio before you go? Baljeet will be calling every ten minutes, screaming about Raj’s laziness.” Lumpy paused. “Of course, he just got a whole lot lazier.”

I reached for the knob and found it had been snapped off, probably by Baljeet, herself. As if on cue, the squelch of the radio kicked in again.

“Raj, you soppy pile of baboon shit, where are you? Raaaj!”

“Sorry.” I shrugged.

The two ghosts looked at each other, Pie-hole through the nearly opaque hands that covered his face.