Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (102 page)

But Eddie hadn’t been talking to Amberson. The detective heard him say something to somebody, his voice low as if turned away from the phone. There was a muffled reply, then three loud pops.

“Oh shit! Eddie! Eddie!” Amberson yelled into the receiver. To his partner, “Andy, call 2284. Get this line traced. Get an ambo started. Eddie!” he yelled again. No answer.

“Got it,” Russell said calmly. “Units and medics are rolling. Anything on your end?” Amberson shook his head. “Damn. Well, let’s get out there.” Amberson looked at the admissions folder they’d gotten from McCulloh. “Damn,” he said again, “and after all our hard work.”

When the two detectives rolled up on the scene they saw the ambulance pulling away.

“Follow that,” Amberson told his partner. “Let the district guys and the Lab worry about witnesses and spent casings. If Eddie’s still alive we’ll get his statement.”

Russell followed the ambulance down Wolfe Street. He groaned when it turned right, bypassing Johns Hopkins.

“Taking him right to Shock Trauma,” he said. “Must be bad.”

Madison to Central. Central to Fayette. From Fayette straight to Shock Trauma and the best emergency care available. Russell knew the way––every detective did––and he stayed close to the wagon. He wanted to be there when Eddie was pulled out, to hear him say who shot him, hoping the name was “Santos.”

Lights flashing and siren screaming, the ambulance raced down Central. But when it turned on Fayette, it went silent and dark as its emergency system shut down. It slowed, now keeping pace with traffic rather than weaving in and out.

There could only be one reason for the sudden lack of urgency. “Damn,” Amberson’s fist hit the dash. “They lost him.”

Still, Russell followed. From Fayette Street the wagon turned on to Penn Street and from there, down the ramp that led to the Medical Examiner’s Office.

Russell parked along side the ambulance. The detectives caught up to the paramedics just as they were wheeling Eddie into the receiving area.

“He say anything?” Amberson shouted as soon as he got into the room.

“Like?” asked the medic. He was on the twelfth hour of a sixteen-hour day. He’d had two “breaks.” Once he stopped for a coffee and doughnut at a convenience store, both of which he gulped down rushing to yet another overdose call. An hour later at Hopkins he stopped briefly to call his wife and use the bathroom. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to get as excited about this dead junkie as the detective was.

“Like did he say who shot him?”

The medic shrugged. “Maybe. I wasn’t listening.” In fact, the medic had stopped listening a year ago. He’d heard a dying declaration from a gunshot victim, reported it to the police. That lead to his going to court several times, spending hours waiting in a cold, dark hallway only to be told the case was once again postponed. When he finally did get to testify, he was on the stand three hours, as a team of defense attorneys challenged his competency, questioned his hearing and subtly suggested that he’d let the victim die so that declaration could be used in court. When a “not guilty” verdict came back the medic decided that from then on, he’d be deaf to anything not directly related to treating his patient.

~

Like a baby, Eddie felt himself being cradled in someone’s arms. There was a gentle, rocking motion. Gradually, the arms became a hand, with Eddie cupped in its palm as if being weighed. He became aware of all the decisions, good or bad, he’d ever made in his life. He saw too all the decisions he’d failed to make. Every path his life could have taken was revealed to him. Some were worse than the one he had lived. Most were better.

From somewhere there was a voice. “A life mostly wasted. An effort at redemption towards the end.” A light appeared––a golden light. Eddie was drawn toward it. But he knew without the voice telling him that despite his yearning, he’d get no closer to the light than where he was now.

~

“Can you make the ID?” the attending examiner asked Amberson and Russell.

The detectives looked down at the body. There wasn’t much to see: a body ravaged by drugs, thin and dirty from too many months on the street.

“Yeah,” Russell answered. “For your records, I identify this body as one Wallace Cromwell, a.k.a. Fast Eddie.”

“And do you agree, sir?” the examiner asked Amberson. There was a slight lilt of the Caribbean in his voice.

Amberson nodded. “Well, Eddie,” he said to the corpse, “I guess you won’t be needing that treatment now. I just wish you’d held on long enough to give us Santos.”

Now would be a good time, the examiner thought. In his six months in this country, five months doing this job, he’d seen too much of this tragedy, too many wasted lives. It was time to do something about it, if these men were willing.

“I am from the Dominican Republic. My country, as you may or may not know, shares its island with Haiti. When I was in medical school, it was close enough to Haiti that, occasionally, myself and other students would slip across the border to study, shall we say, comparative medicine and religion.”

Jones smiled. “Not exactly. Rather, it may be possible to awaken a soul, as if from sleep, before it passes on. If so, one can ask what questions one needs to, before the soul is called away forever.”

Russell gave a derisive laugh. Amberson, on the other hand, asked, “And you can do this?”

“I have seen it done. An old man, called back to tell where he had hidden his wealth. A woman, dead after childbirth, summoned from the dark to say which man in the village fathered her child. In each case, the priest performed the ritual. In each case, an answer came from the corpse.”

Russell interrupted. “And there are guys in Vegas who stick their hands up dummies’s butts who can do the same thing.”

“Ventriloquism, Detective? Maybe. But the money was found where the old man’s ghost said it would be. And the child grew up in the image of his announced father.”

“Do you know the ceremony?” Amberson asked suddenly.

“This is crazy!”

At his partner’s exclamation Amberson said, “And we haven’t seen crazy before? Besides, it’s not like we got anything to lose. Unless you’ve got a better idea?”

“I can do it, Detective. I have watched the priests and studied with them. One thing about this place: it’s got everything I need, except… do you know where we can get a live chicken?”

~

Eddie drifted. Try as he might, he couldn’t move closer to the glow. Then he felt himself being pulled away. He thought he heard someone call his name. And then––something else. There was something else he had to do. The golden light got fainter, smaller. Like the dot on an old TV, it faded away.

~

“Eddie, Eddie, can you hear me?” Amberson shouted, shaking the corpse. “Come back, Eddie! Give us Santos!”

“It’s no good, partner.” Russell drew Amberson away. “It was dumb idea to begin with.”

“It should have worked,” a despondent Jones said. He looked at the bodies of the dead pigeons in the biohazard waste bin. “We should have used chickens.”

“Yeah,” Russell turned on him, “and I should maybe run us all up to Mercy for an emergency commitment. Me searching the parking garage for those birds, catching them yet. I have to be crazy.”

“The only other choice was regular or extra crispy,” Amberson said. “Come on, we’ve already wasted two hours. Let’s get some papers signed and get back to work. Mr. Jones, thanks for your effort, but let’s not mention this to anyone.”

“Agreed, detective. Now if you two will step into my office, we can get the paperwork out of the way.”

It took Jones about ten minutes to find and fill out the forms. Amberson signed them and gave them back. Jones was just putting them into a folder when an alarm sounded.

“What’s that?” Russell asked.

“The door to our vehicle bay,” Jones explained. “Someone’s coming in.”

They went out into the receiving area to see who it was. Russell was the first to notice the empty gurney where Eddie’s body had lain. “Or someone left.”

Beside him, Amberson swore quietly.

“You know,” Jones said, staring at the empty place where Fast Eddie had been, “when you use a chicken they don’t get up and leave.”

~

Eddie woke up, sort of. Light and sound rushed back in. His chest hurt. He felt the cold steel of the gurney beneath him. Not knowing where he was or how he got there, Eddie got up and walked toward the door. It opened automatically, as did the gate of the vehicle bay when Eddie crossed the electric eye. Driven by a need he didn’t understand, Fast Eddie walked out into the night.

He was confused. Memories of a warm, safe place where he was loved conflicted with other thoughts. He was talking to someone, someone who was helping him. He heard a noise. He turned. Talking, then more noise, louder this time. Pain. Eddie looked down at his chest. His shirt was open. He could see the holes the loud noise had put there. A clear liquid was seeping from them.

Eddie was still looking at the bullet wounds when he wandered into the street. There was a screeching of wheels, then Eddie was struck by steel, glass and steel again as he went up and over the car that hit him. Eddie stood up and, ignoring the curses of the driver, slowly walked away.

~

The detectives left the ME’s and walked out on to an accident scene: a late-model sedan with pedestrian damage to the hood, windshield and roof; two patrol cars blocking the street; a uniformed officer taking a statement from a distraught driver. No victim, no ambo.

“What happened?” Russell asked one of the officers standing by.

“Damnest thing,” came the reply. “Driver here says some junkie walked out in front of him. He couldn’t stop in time and the guy went up and over. Says he came down hard, then got up and walked away.”

~

Eddie wandered, his thoughts a jumble. He sensed a need, but for what? Dimly he recalled the taste of food, of strong drink. He vaguely remembered the touch of a woman and how that made him felt. Then there was the needle, the high that had made him float and forget. It had taken the place of the others, but it was still not enough, not now, not tonight.

Brightness blinded him. His wanderings had taken him out of the dark streets and alleys and now he found himself on Greene Street.

Streetlights, stoplights, neon and the glow of the not so distant Oriole Park all hit his too sensitive eyes at once. It came back––he needed the light, the golden light he’d been denied earlier. But no, that light was gone, taken from him when he was called back. Its absence left a yearning, a hole to be filled. Instinct turned Eddie to the east, towards the one man who had always given him what he needed.

~

“And say what? Eastern CID looking for a walkaway from the Medical Examiner’s; suspect’s a light-skinned black male, about five-nine and believed to be dead?”

“That would do it,” Russell said after some thought. “Look, Danny, we’re never going to find him this way. We turn right, he goes left and we miss him. We drive straight, he turns down an alley, he’s gone.”

“So we quit?”

“No, we start thinking like cops looking for a suspect. Eddie never was that bright, and I’m betting that whatever smarts he had died when he did and didn’t come back. He’s down to memory and habit. Let’s hit the Eastside, check out his haunts. See if anybody saw a zombie tonight.”

Nobody had. Russell and Amberson hit all the corners where Eddie hung out. They questioned some of the girls he saw when he had the stuff to trade for their favors. They braced the low-level dealers Eddie knew. Everywhere was the same story.