Chapter 13
The dead . . .
The thing about the dead—how best to put this? Annoying? Yes. Self-centered? Sure. A pain in the ass? Most definitely. But the worst thing about the dead?
They would not shut up.
If you could find yourself a genuine medium and that medium could cast a mental net and snare a human soul still hanging around life like a bad aftertaste—best to pack a lunch, because you were going to be there a long, long time. First they wanted to tell you why they hadn’t gone to the light, and it was usually something so piddly and insignificant that you’d roll your eyes as you ate the tuna fish sandwich you’d made for the trip. It never, contrary to ghost lore, was anything evil. If you were a murderer, you didn’t get to flit around the ether giggling insanely or something equally trite. If you were evil, hell scooped you up in a heartbeat. If your religion had a hell. If you were evil and atheist, too bad, a hell would still get you—it just wouldn’t necessarily be the Christian hell.
After they told you their big sob story, then came the messages. Tell my mother this. Tell my father that. Tell my girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband I love/hate them. One even demanded I tell the post office he was dead, so they could stop his mail. If they were long dead, and everyone they knew was gone as well, then they just wanted to gossip. Did they ever catch Jack the Ripper? The Beatles split up? JFK is dead? Rudolph Valentino? We won World War II? There was a World War II? Did Pet Rocks and leg warmers ever catch on? War of the Worlds was just a hoax? Damn it, I killed myself so the aliens wouldn’t get me.
It was an ordeal. The medium should have to pay a client to sit through it. It was good there were no such things as ghosts that you could see or hear or you’d be nagged by them day and night. Luckily you needed a medium and money to arrange for that irritation and eventually you could leave, slamming the door on their questions, An actor was president? The Terminator is governor? There were certain things impossible to explain to a dead soul, because you couldn’t explain them to yourself.
We stole a car. Leo’s was as dead as they came. Only an automotive medium could help that situation. Mine was lost and Griffin didn’t remember where he’d left his. Head injuries will do that . . . an hour to even days before the smack to the cranium, was gone, maybe forever. When we found a suitable car and it came to the actual stealing part, Zeke unexpectedly balked.
“Stealing is wrong.” He folded his arms in the strip club’s parking lot. The club was three blocks down from the bar. They say don’t piss where you live, but I was in a hurry. This was convenient and quick and I was all about both at the moment. “It’s a rule. Another rule.”
Great. When we could least afford it, Old Testament Zeke was back, somewhat recovered from Griffin’s disappearance. “Didn’t you steal a car to go look for Griffin?” I asked, bending down to take a closer look at the door. How you broke into a car depended on when it was made, if it had an alarm system, if getting in without the key remote meant it would lock up the steering column, and, last but not least—I reached over and opened the door—if it was locked. Yet another good deed on my part. This guy wouldn’t forget to lock his car again. The keys were in the ignition too. I liked convenient, but this wasn’t fun at all.
“Yeah, but rules don’t apply if it’s Griffin.” That was Zeke reasoning for you and I didn’t fault him for it. “When it’s not for Griffin, stealing is wrong.”
“Fair enough. But if the entire world is taken over by Cronus, there’s no telling what will happen to Griffin, and that’s why we’re stealing a car.” I would’ve gone for the good-intentions excuse, but that wasn’t the path to Hell, as they said. It was an express train if you didn’t know what you were doing. Get out your ice skates, because it was a slippery slope if ever there was one. Not to mention I’d seen Griffin literally bang his head against a tabletop at Trixsta trying to get the concept across. Zeke wasn’t ready for good intentions versus future bad outcomes. He was still working on good intentions versus immediate bad outcomes. It was a complicated theory to grasp. I wasn’t completely positive I had the hang of it yet, although it didn’t stop me from a whole lot of practice to prove that theorem.
“So don’t think of it as stealing to save the world. Think of it as stealing to save me.” Griffin was already climbing into the back to lie flat with knees up to make sure all of him fit. It was pain-pill time from the looks of it. I was still stiff and sore, but Griffin didn’t look like someone had taken just one baseball bat to his face and head, but rather two or three.
Zeke didn’t seem completely convinced, but he got into the passenger seat. “I’ll have to think about it.” He had a bottle of water with him, which was unusual for him. He preferred his drinks to jack him up on sugar and caffeine—as if he needed more jacking up. He held the bottle over his shoulder to Griffin. He’d need it to wash down his pills. I’d seen Zeke walk into the bar wearing two different shoes before, but his guns were always immaculately clean, and he always had what Griffin needed.
Leo was the same. He never forgot my birthday; he never let me down. My brother had never remembered my birthday and stood me up more times than he turned up, but he never let me down either—not when it truly mattered. Love was love. It came in too many forms to count. . . . Sometimes it was a bushel of apples celebrating that first trick and sometimes it was as simple as a bottle of water.
“Thinking about it, that’s a good idea,” I replied as I adjusted the seat, humming, tuning the radio, and checking the mirror to make sure my hair wasn’t an advertisement for electroshock. “You should think about lying too. It’s a good way to make sure Griffin can’t ever fool you that way again.”
Swiveling in the seat, Zeke glared into the back. “Lying is wrong.”
I grinned at Griffin’s plaintive. “Are you trying to kill me? Jesus, when I bought my car, he threatened to cut out the salesman’s tongue for lying.”
“Did he?” I asked, curious, as I zipped the car out of the parking lot. I didn’t mean “Did he” as in did he actually say that. I meant “did he” as in did he go ahead and cut out the man’s tongue. With Zeke, there really was no predicting how that had ended up.
“He settled for washing the guy’s mouth out with a urinal cake. It was not a pretty sight.” I heard the rattle of a pill bottle and the slosh of water. “Zeke, you are not washing out my mouth with any kind of soap, you understand?”
“I understand.” Zeke faced forward again, his voice placid. “I’m not putting anything in your mouth for a long time. Very long. Months. And vice versa.” He whispered an aside to me. “Is that an appropriate punishment?” Zeke didn’t often ask. He almost always knew exactly what punishment should be doled out . . . in his mind. Unfortunately, he hadn’t reached the fifty-fifty mark on being correct yet, but Griffin was different. If ever he was tempted to let someone off with a warning, it would be Griffin, but, in this case, Griffin needed more than a warning, considerably more. He had to learn.
“Perfectly.” I tossed a phone book onto his lap. “Stick by your guns on it too. If anything will teach Griffin or any man a lesson, no sex is it. Now look up mediums for me. There’re enough of them in Vegas—one has to be the real deal.”
We drove past address after address. I didn’t have to stop the car and check them out face-to-face. I was human, but I had enough of a tiny speck of trickster left in me to detect the genuine article—they pinged on my shield the same as telepaths and empaths. I drove past their places of business. Hovels of business. Séance/meth labs of business. Sometimes three combined into one. As we moved from one to another, Zeke had turned the tables on Griffin. I’d told him in the hospital it was his time to be the student, and I wasn’t wrong. Zeke was taking him to school and educating him old style.