Dead and Kicking (2 page)

The coffee shop where my supposed
meet-cute was to take place, was just a couple blocks over from the old
refurbished firehall that houses both me and my shop. There’s a little park across the street with
a clear view of the coffee shop’s door.
I figured that it would be a good place to park myself, grande latte in hand, to scope out the clientele. According to Gran, I was looking for a young
Cary Grant, if Cary Grant was Asian. I
wasn’t really sure what that was either, but I wasn’t going to complain about
taking an hour’s peace and quiet to people watch on a sunny, autumn day. At least I would have lived up to the spirit,
if not the letter, of my promise to Gran to give her idea a try. I probably should have gone for the venti though, because there wasn’t much left of my grande to ‘accidentally’ spill on Mr. Asian Cary Grant.

I had just about decided to call it a
day when Mr. No-Show showed up. He
really did look like an Asian Cary Grant; prominent cheekbones, high forehead,
strong chin. I had to give Gran credit, she knew a hottie when she
saw one. He was casually dressed in
Dockers and a black v-neck t-shirt that was tight
enough to show that he must make some effort at the gym. He definitely had appeal. Just my luck he was also dead.

I quickly put my head down, suddenly
finding my empty coffee cup very interesting, but I knew it was too late. He’d spotted me. Or maybe he was already being drawn to me
since I’m basically like a ghost magnet.
When I looked up from my cup, he had disappeared from across the street
and was standing beside me.

“You see me? You can see me? Oh my God!
You gotta help me.” The ghost made a grab for my arm, as if he wanted to pull me up
from the bench, but his translucent fingers passed right though me. He looked momentarily stunned at his
predicament. “Please, I need your
help.” He pleaded with me with his eyes.

The park was pretty busy with people
coming and going, so I pulled out my cell phone and put it to my ear. It’s one of the tricks of the trade when
you’re a medium. The last thing you want
is to look like some sort of crazy person talking to thin air. I looked up at him and put on my most sympathetic face.

“Listen to me. You’re dead. Go to the light,” I said. I got up from the bench and threw my empty
cup into the trash, ignoring the pleading spirit. What?
I said I sent them on their way, not hold their hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’. I’m not
their grief counsellor. If there’s one
thing I’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that you have to be pretty
blunt when it comes to the dead. Just
cut to the chase. Otherwise you’ll end
up getting sucked into the vortex of their self-pity. Telling it like it is usually works;
unfortunately not this time.

“Please, you gotta
help me. I can’t go yet. There’s something I have to do first.” He looked at me, his desperation mirrored in
his eyes. I hate it when they look at me
like that. It’s like looking at a
puppy. It gets me every time.

“Alright,
alright.
What do you want me to do? Get a
message to someone? Feed your cat?”

Dead Guy smiled. Wow, he could really turn on the charm. Too bad he was dead; that smile could have
taken him places.

“Hurry! This
way.”

He evaporated only to reappear back
across the street. I reluctantly
followed, his spectral body blinking in and out of sight a few yards in front
of me, like some sort of weird follow the bouncing ball sing along.

I found Dead Guy’s body just around
the corner from the coffee shop in the back lane. It looked like he had been dumped there and
the killer didn’t try all that hard to hide the body. I really hate looking at dead bodies. You’d think I would be used to it by now, but
it doesn’t get any easier. I never
would have guessed the bloody, swollen bag of bones on the ground beside the
dumpster could be my Asian Cary Grant. He
had really taken a beating. I turned to
look at the spirit beside me. “Do you
remember your name?”

“My name? Of course I know my own
name. I’m Bryce. Bryce Chow.”

“Do you have any idea who would do
this to you?”

“I…”
A look of consternation passed over his handsome features. “I…I don’t
know. I can’t remember.”

No surprise there, but it was worth a
shot. Generally, the memories of the
recently departed are like Swiss cheese.
They can usually remember their name, address and what they ate for
breakfast, but the minutes leading up to their death? Gone like a prom queen’s virginity in the
back of a Chevy. Looking at what had
once been Bryce Chow, I guess it’s a mercy.

“I really can’t remember. Why can’t I remember?” Bryce moaned.

“It’s just the way it is. Listen Bryce, you’ve got to focus. Why did you need me to come here? What is it that you still have to do?”

“I…the stick. The
memory stick. They didn’t find
it.” He clutched at his ghostly head as
if he could yank the memories out. “Why
can’t I remember who
they
are?”

“I don’t know. I’ll do what I can to help you find out. Where do I find this memory stick?”

“It’s in my shoe, my left shoe.”

“Crap! I don’t want to touch
you.” I made a face of disgust. “Didn’t you ever watch TV? I’ll leave fingerprints or trace evidence or
something.”

“Come on girl, you’ve got to help
me.”

A quick look around the back lane
revealed that the only security camera in range appeared to be broken. Luckily, the shoe in question wasn’t as dirty
as the other and I was able to grasp it with my hands in the sleeves of my
sweater. The heel swiveled open with a
little persuasion and inside I found a USB memory stick. I pocketed the stick, closed the secret
compartment back up and then got the hell out of there.

At the entrance to the lane I stopped
and pulled out my cell phone.

“What are you doing?” Bryce’s
incorporeal self was beginning to become more translucent. I was surprised he lasted as long as he
did. As I said, manifesting as a ghost
requires energy. Usually the newbies
don’t have much juice and their appearances are fleeting at best.

“I have to call the cops. If I don’t, and someone saw me enter the
alley, they’ll wonder why I didn’t call it in.
Trust me. It’s the right thing to
do.”

Trust me
…Famous last
words. Why is it that the right thing to
do isn’t necessarily the best thing?
After waiting twenty minutes for a squad car to show up, the uniforms
had left me to cool my heels on the same park bench I had occupied before. This wasn’t my first rodeo or even my second
for that matter, when it came to finding a dead body. I knew they would keep me waiting for the
detectives assigned to the case to arrive.
This time though, there seemed to be some confusion because the first
suits that showed up just waited around for another car to arrive. The four men had a little confab then the
first two, looking a little disgruntled, hopped back in their car and took
off. The whole scene smacked of office
politics. Somebody had pulled some
strings to get the second pair of detectives assigned to the case. What had Bryce gotten himself
into? I’d have asked him, but he had
long since dissipated.

The second set of detectives looked
less than pleased to be called in. They
both looked a little bleary eyed, like they had just woken up, but since it was
now after three in the afternoon, that didn’t seem likely, unless they were on
the night shift or something. The pair
made an odd couple. One was a short,
slim, mixed race-African American with warm mocha skin and short
dreadlocks. His sharp, charcoal grey
suit complete with tie seemed completely antithetical to the dreads. The second of the pair towered over his
partner. He had to be at least six foot
four and had the well-proportioned build of someone who works out and not just
to build upper body bulk for show. He was also wearing a shirt and tie, but had gone for a more casual look,
wearing a black leather jacket instead of a suit, and Dockers that hugged his ass nicely. His short,
light brown hair had that tousled, just got out of bed look that made you want to run your fingers through it.

“You’re staring at Nash and
licking your lips.”

“Bryce!” His voice in my ear
practically startled me right off the bench.
“I was not.”

“You were too.”

He materialized on the bench beside
me. I cast a furtive look over to the uniform supposedly babysitting me, but he didn’t
appear to have noticed my outburst. “I was not…..hey, wait a minute. Whose ass? You know that guy?”

“Of course I do. Everyone does.”

“Well, obviously not everyone. I don’t know him or his partner.”

“The partner is Dev, Devlin
Mayes. How can you be part of the
Cimmerian and not know Nash and Dev?”

“The Cimmerian! I’m not a criminal. I don’t associate with them.” The Cimmerian was the collective name for the
darker side of the supernatural community, a community that for the most part,
remained in the closet. Taken from Greek
mythology it meant dwellers of the dark and gloom. That Bryce knew the name for the local
criminal underworld, spoke volumes as to why he ended up beaten into a bloody
pulp. “How were you associated to
them?” I looked at him
suspiciously. “You weren’t a Cutter were
you?”

“A vamp-wannabe? No way, I try to steer clear of bloodsuckers.”

Vampires made up the majority of the
Cimmerian society and had a hierarchical power structure. Cutters, basically humans that longed to be
vampires were the lowest in the pecking order, the lackeys and sycophants of
the true vampires. They took their name
from their unnatural habit of sucking each other’s blood. Since they didn’t have fangs, they used razor
blades to slice their skin.
Occasionally, a Cutter who ingratiated himself to a particularly
powerful vampire, a ‘Vlad’, would be granted the right to be turned, which of
course gave all the other Cutters hope of immortality and brought more of the
Goth freaks to the service of the vampires.

“If you steer clear of vampires how
do you even know about the Cimmerian then?”

“I said I
tried
to steer clear of them, but I do work for them or at least I
did. I was a computer security
consultant for the Magister.”

Salvador Arroyo, the Magister. Based on the company he kept, it really came
as no surprise that Bryce ended up a bloody smudge in a back lane. The Kingpin of the underworld, Salvador
Arroyo was the most powerful Vlad in Riverton and as the Magister for the Cimmerian
it made him the leader of the entire supernatural community. Arroyo owned a multinational corporation and
had his fingers in a lot of pies, mostly those that involved sex, drugs and
alcohol. Gambling was another of his
cornerstone industries. It wasn’t much
of a stretch of the imagination to figure he might own a few corrupt cops as
well.

“And how do Detective Nash and his
partner come into play?” I asked Bryce, but he had disappeared again.

I looked over to the mouth of the
alley only to see Nash and his partner staring at me. Just great, they probably saw me talking to
myself. I made a show of getting up from
the bench and gathering up my things.
When I turned around, Detective Nash was standing beside me. I looked up into his eyes and, this is going
to sound totally cliché and corny, but time stood still. Seriously. It was like everything ceased to exist except
his startling green eyes. My heart
thumped in my chest. For a moment, he had
a look of complete shock on his face and then he inhaled and a frown replaced
the shock and time started to move again.
I let out the breath I didn’t know I had been holding.

“Detective Nash.” I held out my hand for him to shake. “Harry Russo.
Nice to meet you, well, I mean it’s not nice under the circumstances
but…” Damn, I was totally babbling. “I…can
I go now? I gave my statement to the
officer and I really have nothing more to add.”

“You’re Harry Russo?” Detective Nash shook my hand and held onto
it. “Harry? Really?”

“Yes, that’s me. It’s a nickname.” I tried to pull my hand back but it was held
fast. “Could I, um, have my hand back?”

“Your hand?” He looked at me in confusion then looked down to see our hands
still clasped together. “Of course.
Sorry. It was the name. You’re not what I expected.”

He released my hand and I pulled it
back and held it protectively against my chest.
My whole hand tingled from his touch.

“No problem. I get that all the time. Kind of goes with the territory when you’re a
girl named Harry.”

“Yes, I guess it does.” He gestured to his partner. “This is Detective Mayes. We just have a few questions for you.”

“Yes of course. But I really don’t know what I could add to
the statement I already made.”

“It won’t take long. Would you like to sit down?”

“No thanks. I’ve been warming that bench for almost two
hours now. I’d really just like to get
back to work. They’ll be wondering what
happened to me.”

“Yes, I see. So you didn’t call them to let them know you
were being detained?”

“No.
The officer said I shouldn’t make any calls.”

“Then who were you talking to just
now?”

“Talking to? I wasn’t talking to anyone.”

“But we just saw you talking to
someone a minute ago.”

“Oh that.” I smiled self-consciously. “I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was just making some notes on my
phone. Gotta love voice recognition.” I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and
gave it a little shake. “Can’t live without it these days.”

“Right. May I see?” He held his hand out for my phone which I
reluctantly gave him. He pressed a key
and the screen lock came on.

“Oh, you just…” I swiped my finger
over the screen and then punched in the lock code. The home screen flashed on with a picture of
me and my two roommates posing like
Charlie’s
Angels
.

He selected the call log and saw that
there were no incoming or outgoing calls in the last two hours then thumbed the
button to take him back to the home screen.

“And these two others are?” He gestured to the picture.

“Those are my roommates, Holly and
Tess. We’re posing like
Charlie’s Angels
. You know…like….” I struck a pose, fake finger gun held up in
front of me.

“Uh-huh. So, how did you know the deceased?”

“I didn’t. I mean I don’t.”

“And why were you in the alley?”

Luckily, I had prepared myself for
that question. “I was going to look in
the recycling for boxes I could reuse.”
It was something I did quite often, although never here at the coffee
shop.

“So start from the beginning and tell
us everything you saw.”

“Do I really need to go over
everything again?”

“Yes.”

I sat back down on the bench. This was going to take a while; might as well
get comfortable.