Larry! Larry!
I spun round, the words loud in my ear, but still there was no one else in the room. Just a voice, calling my name. For a moment I almost remembered something horrid, then it was gone before I could hold on to it. I scowled, pacing up and down the room to help me think. I was dead, I’d been murdered. So, start with the usual suspects. Who had reason to want me dead? Serious reasons; I had my share of enemies, but that was just the price of doing business. No one murders anyone over business.
No; start with my ex-wife, Donna Tramen. She had reasons to hate me. I fell in love with a client, Margaret Boniface, and left my wife for her. The affair didn’t work out, but Maggie and I remained friends. In fact, we worked so well together I made her a partner in my business. My wife hadn’t talked to me since I moved out, except through her lawyer, but if she was going to kill me, she would have done it long ago. And the amount of money the divorce judge awarded her gave her a lot of good reasons for wanting me alive. As long as the cheques kept coming.
Next up: angry or disappointed clients, where the case hadn’t worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. There were any number of organizations in and out of the Nightside that I’d stolen secrets or personnel from. But none of them would take such things personally. Today’s target might be tomorrow’s client, so everyone stayed polite. I never got involved in the kinds of cases where passions were likely to be raised. No one’s ever made movies about the kind of work I do.
I kept feeling I already knew the answer, but it remained stubbornly out of reach. Perhaps because… I didn’t want to remember. I shuddered suddenly, and it wasn’t from the cold. I picked up the phone beside the bed, and called my partner. Maggie picked up on the second ring, as though she’d been waiting for a call.
“Maggie, this is Larry. Listen, you’re not going to believe what’s happened…”
“Larry, you’ve been missing for three days! Where are you?”
Three days… A trail could get real cold in three days…
“I’m at the old safe house on Blaiston Street. I think you’d better come and get me.”
“What the hell are you doing there? I didn’t know we still had that place on the books.”
“Just come and get me. I’m in trouble.”
Her voice changed immediately. “What kind of trouble, Larry?”
“Let’s just say… I think I’m going to need some of your old expertise, Mama Bones.”
“Don’t use that name on an open line! It’s been a long time since I was a mover and shaker on the voodoo scene, and hopefully most people have forgotten Margaret Boniface was ever involved. I’m clean now. One day at a time, sweet Jesus.”
“You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. I need what you used to know. Get here as fast as you can. And, Maggie, don’t tell anyone where you’re going. We can’t trust anyone but each other.”
She laughed briefly. “Business as usual, in the Nightside.”
–
I did a lot more pacing and thinking in the half hour it took Maggie to reach Blaiston Street, but I was no wiser at the end of it. My memories stopped abruptly three days ago, with no warning of what was to come. I kept watch on and off through the slats of the window shutters, and was finally rewarded with the sight of Maggie pulling up to the curb in her cherry-red Jaguar. Protective spells sparked briefly around the car as she got out and looked up at my window. Tall and slender, an ice-cool blonde with a buzz cut and a heavy scarlet mouth. She dressed like a diva and walked like a princess, and carried a silver-plated magnum derringer in her purse, next to her aboriginal pointing bone. She had a sharp, incisive mind, and given a few more years experience and the right contacts, she’d be ten times the operative I was. I never told her that, of course. I didn’t want her getting overconfident.
She rapped out our special knock on the door, the one that said yes she had checked, and no, no one had followed her. I let her in, and she checked the room out professionally before turning to kiss my cheek. And then she stopped, and looked at me.
“Larry… you look half dead.”
I smiled briefly. “You don’t know the half of it.”
I gave her the bad news, and she took it as well as could be expected. She insisted on checking my lack of a pulse or heartbeat for herself, then stepped back from me and hugged herself tightly. I don’t think she liked the way my cold flesh felt. I tried to make light of what had happened, complaining that my life must have been really dull if neither Heaven nor Hell were interested in claiming me, but neither of us was fooled. In the end, we sat side by side on the bed, and discussed what we should do next in calm, professional voices.
“You’ve no memory at all of being killed?” Maggie said finally.
“No. I’m dead, but not yet departed. Murdered, but still walking around. Which puts me very much in your old territory, oh mistress of the mystic arts.”
“Oh please! So I used to know a little voodoo… Practically everyone in my family does. Where we come from, it’s no big thing. And I was never involved in anything like this…”
“Can you help me, or not?”
She scowled. “All right. Let me run a few diagnostics on you.”
“Are we going to have to send out for a chicken?”
“Be quiet, heathen.”
She ran through a series of chants in Old French, lit up some incense, then took off all her clothes and danced around the room for a while. I’d probably have enjoyed it if I hadn’t been dead. The room grew darker, and there was a sense of unseen eyes watching. Shadows moved slowly across the walls, deep disturbing shapes, though there was nothing in the room to cast them. And then Maggie stopped dancing, and stood facing me, breathing hard, sweat running down her bare body.
“Did you feel anything then?” she said.
“No. Was I supposed to?”
Maggie shrugged briefly and put her clothes back on in a businesslike way. The shadows and the sense of being watched were gone.
“You’ve been dead for three days,” said Maggie. “Someone killed you, then held your spirit in your dead body. There’s a rider spell attached, to give you the appearance of normality, but inside you’re already rotting. Hence the maggots.”
“Can you undo the spell?” I said.
“Larry, you’re dead. The dead can be made to walk, but no one can bring them all the way back, not even in the Nightside. Whatever we decide to do, your story’s over, Larry.”
I thought about that for a while. I always thought I would have achieved more, before the end. All the things I meant to do, and kept putting off, because I was young and imagined I had all the time in the world. Larry Oblivion, who always dreamed of something better, but never had the guts to go after it. One ex-wife, one ex-lover, no kids, no legacy. No point and no purpose.
“When all else fails,” I said finally, “there’s always revenge. I need to find out who killed me and why, while I still can. While there’s still enough of me left to savor it.”
“Any ideas who it might have been?” said Maggie. “Anyone new you might have upset recently?”
I thought hard. “Prometheus Inc. weren’t at all happy over my handling of their poltergeist saboteur. Count Entropy didn’t like what I found out about his son, even though he paid me to dig it up. Big Max always said he’d put me in the ground someday…”
“Max,” Maggie said immediately. “Has to be Max. You’ve been rivals for years, hurt his business and made him look a fool, more than once. He must have decided to put an end to the competition.”
“Why would he want to keep me around after killing me?”
“To gloat! He hated your guts, Larry; it has to be him!”
I thought about it. I’d rubbed Max’s nose in it before, and all he ever did was talk. Maybe… he’d got tired of talking.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go see the big man and ask him a few pointed questions.”