Dead to Me

11

Since I wasn’t used to having guests in my loft, I spent the rest of my night staring at my ceiling, tossing, turning, and wondering if Irene was also lying awake off in my guest room. Exhaustion eventually washed over me, though, and before I knew it, I awoke to the shrill cry of the alarm going off. I crept to the open door of the guest room, where I could make out the curled-up shape of Irene. I wasn’t sure what the cosmic rules were concerning the sleeping habits of ghosts, but Irene was resting peacefully on top of the sheets, hovering over them slightly. I didn’t have the heart to wake her before I left. What was she going to do with herself if I did wake her anyway? Float around the office until I had figured out what exactly to do with her? She was better off hidden here in my apartment.

When I caught up with Connor over coffee at the Lovecraft, I purposefully neglected telling him that Irene had stayed at my apartment, even though the subject of Irene and her apartment were on the table.

We jumped a cab on Eleventh Street and rode uptown to Columbus Circle. Although Irene’s building was in the Seventies, we got out near Trump’s latest eyesore and walked along the tree-lined length of Central Park West until we came across her building, which was a far better architectural wonder. The Westmore looked as if it were straight out of a Tim Burton movie. Gothic-era gargoyles with their mouths agape laughed at some sinister secret.

We entered the Westmore’s red and gold lobby and were confronted with an elderly doorman whose dusty jacket looked like it had seen better days. A button was missing from the front of it, and judging by the size of his pot belly, I could imagine it had flown across the room whenever it had popped. We didn’t have a game plan for getting past him, but Connor patted me on the back.

“All yours, kid,” he said, and leaned against the wall with his arms folded.

I stepped forward to the tiny counter the man stood behind. His hand moved automatically for the house phone.

“Whose apartment may I ring for you, sir?”

“Irene Blatt, please,” I said. It killed me just saying her last name.

A look crossed the old man’s face and he lowered the phone back to its cradle. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure if Ms. Blatt is in right now.”

Since we knew that the lady of the house was dead, and I knew her spirit was holed up in my apartment, I was pretty sure that Irene wouldn’t be answering her phone.

Connor stepped up to the doorman’s desk and nudged me out of the way.

“Excuse us a moment, won’t you, Simon?” he said. I moved away from the reception area, and Connor lowered his voice to the point where I could no longer hear. Whether he used some form of mind trick or simply slipped the codger a hundred, I didn’t know, but suddenly the doorman was hurrying us into one of the mahogany-lined elevators. He pressed the button, tipped his hat, and we were on our way.

“Sorry ’bout that, kid,” Connor said. “I could already tell he was suspicious. We should be quick about this, though, just in case.”

“What the hell did you do to him down there?” I asked.

“Sorry, kid. Classified.”

I was hoping for more of a clue as to what had just transpired, but the look on his face told me it wasn’t up for discussion.

After several silent floors, he changed the subject. “The view of Central Park must be spectacular.”

“For what it probably costs to live here, the view better be,” I said.

The elevator slowed and the doors slid open with a gentle bing onto an enormous hallway that could have easily held my whole apartment. There were only three doors. One was marked STAIRS, and the other two were set on either side of the elevator. When we stepped out, Connor walked to the one on our right. I reached for the doorbell, but he grabbed me by the wrist and shook his head.

“Let me handle this, kid,” Connor said.

I pulled my arm away. I was pissed at him for taking charge again. How was I supposed to learn anything with him always taking the lead? I could have handled anyone who answered the door, dammit.

Connor put on his best game face as he prepared to greet whoever might answer. It was the one he put on to look as mundane as a door-to-door insurance salesman. He rang the bell and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said after the first minute had passed, and pushed Connor out of the way. I dropped to my knees directly in front of the door, took off my gloves, and pulled several thin metal strips from the cuff of my jacket.

I slid two of the strips into the keyhole and flexed my fingers slightly as I felt around for the tumblers. Connor gave me a look of disapproval.

“What?” I said. “Clearly no one’s home and I don’t think Irene would mind if we had a look around.”

“Did you requisition those from the supply room?” Connor asked, peeved.

“No,” I said testily. “They’re mine. Holdovers from my days as a petty thief.”

“Did they get rid of the screening process in HR?”

“Can I help it that some of my criminal skills come in handy every so often? Besides, breaking and entering in the name of Good feels a whole lot better.”

“May I remind you that it’s still breaking and entering?”

“Not if we’ve got permission from the owner!” I fired back. “And we’ve got it.”

“I’d love to see you explain it to the cops,” Connor said. “It doesn’t matter if she gave us her permission, kid, since she’s dead.”

There was no love lost between the Department of Extraordinary Affairs and the NYPD. The NYPD resented us because they had been told countless times by David Davidson at the Office of Plausible Deniability that we didn’t even exist, and yet they were still supposed to cooperate with us.

“Irene’s not totally dead,” I reminded Connor.

I continued searching for the right combination of positions within the lock, but I was rusty with the whole lock-picking thing.

“She seems pretty dead to me, kid,” he said, leaning against the wall as I worked. “We’ll probably find pictures of her husband and kids in here, too. One big happy family. One big happy family who’ll come home in the middle of our breaking and entering, and demand an explanation as to why we’re in their apartment.”

“She’s not married,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive.

“How do you know that?” Connor asked, but I met him with silence, under the pretense of being too busy working the lock. He wasn’t falling for it. “I knew it! You are interested in her.”

I tried to ignore him and threw all my concentration into picking the lock—and was rewarded when the tumblers finally clicked. I hadn’t picked a lock in forever, wasn’t even sure I’d be able to until it happened just now, but I felt a little swell of pride at the familiar sound of a door giving way.

“I’m shocked,” Connor said with mock sincerity. He stepped back to allow room for me to stand up and swing the door fully open. “Does anyone at the Department know about your little transgressive skills?”

I nodded. “I think so. I bet the F.O.G.ies have already blacklisted me because of it.”

“You’ve only been with the D.E.A. a few months,” Connor replied. He pushed his way forward, crowding me. “Wait until you’ve been working there a couple of years. Even then, the F.O.G.ies are secretive and it’s almost impossible to guess who they’ll choose.”

“Well,” I said as I motioned for Connor to follow me through the door into the darkness of the apartment, “I doubt my criminal past would pass muster at the Fraternal Order of Goodness’s membership drive.”

“They took Inspectre Quimbley, kid, so I’m not so sure about that.”

I rolled my eyes, but the effect was lost on Connor in the darkened room. The Inspectre a troublemaker? He had been my How to Distinguish an East Villager from a Satanist instructor during my initial three weeks of evening classes, and he didn’t seem the badass type despite the legends of his past honors. The Inspectre, an old-school rapscallion? I couldn’t imagine it.

“I don’t think that our befuddled Inspectre has any dark secrets to hide, Connor.”

As we moved farther into the apartment, the sounds of Connor fumbling in the dark came from off to my left somewhere, sounding not unlike a herd of elephants.

“Those old boys all have dark secrets to hide,” he said. “That’s probably half the reason F.O.G. exists, so they can have one collective burial ground for all their bad mojo.”

I shook my head, another gesture wasted in the darkness.

My arm bumped into something tall, slender, and lamp-like, and I groped around it until I found a switch. With the tiniest of clicks, a Tiffany floor lamp—much like the one sitting half unpacked back home—sprang to life, its stained glass dragonflies sparkling with color. Both of us gasped as the small pool of light lit up a section of the large room. We had expected spacious, which it was. I had expected elegant, which it was. Neither of us had expected for the place to be thoroughly and abusively trashed from floor to ceiling, which sadly, it was.

I felt like someone had sucker punched me in the stomach. The similarity to my place was so striking that it was like seeing my own apartment ransacked. Tasteful antiques littered the floor, many of them now broken or overturned. Irene’s tastes definitely ran in the same circles as mine. Seeing a broken Venini bowl, a midcentury George III card table missing a leg, countless scattered books, and a shredded seat cushion on a late-eighteenth-century Highback—it all drove the pain home.

Irene Blatt might have been struck down by a cab yesterday morning, but someone had gone just as medieval on her apartment. It would be foolish to assume that the two were not connected. “My God…”

Connor whistled, and stepped carefully through the disarray as he looked around. “I know. D.E.A.’s not going to like the overtime on this one.” We started poking through all the destruction. I was a bit confused about what I was supposed to be looking for, but when I asked Connor, he just said, “You’ll know it when you find it, kid,” so I didn’t feel too bad.

“And remember, even though we got in a little practice with your powers at the Antiques Annex, use them sparingly if you have to, got it? This clutter could probably overwhelm you psychometrically.”

I nodded, slipped my gloves back on, and started poring over the scattered books, smashed relics, and broken antiques in the living room before venturing farther back into the apartment. I slowly waded through the knee-deep clutter of books, papers, and boxes, looking for any kind of sign. Most of Irene’s possessions, although broken, gave me greater insight into the living person she had been. I found myself liking her more and more, especially when I unearthed the worn-out box cover of an old board game. Hungry Hungry Hippos. A woman after my own juvenile heart.

I couldn’t resist pushing my power into it. I took my gloves off and placed a tentative finger on the head of the yellow hippo. I tried to envision Irene as a child playing the game—or maybe I’d see that she had kids or a family that she played the game with. Either way, it might offer a clue to our case. Instead, my psychometry skipped all that and jumped straight to showing me the last person who had handled it.

In my mind’s eye, the apartment was only partly trashed, but a figure in a dark robe opened the game box warily looking for something—but what? He tore the contents of the box out, smashing the plastic tray and sending the four rainbow-colored plastic hippos flying. The bottom of the box held nothing and the figure threw the whole game against the wall in frustration before heading farther down the hall, which was where I intended to go as well.

I pulled out of the vision—slightly weary—and helped myself to more of my Life Savers before wading down the hall to the first room on my left. I could probably read half the apartment with my power, but all I’d get was mental footage of that figure trashing it. I decided to conserve my power for now and entered the room on my left.

Irene had definitely been a packrat in life. The room was filled with overturned boxes, and every last article, book, or meticulously catalogued item she had ever come across was stored in them. There were other doors farther along the back hall of the massive apartment, and I imagined more of the same behind them. Whatever manner these items had originally been organized in was now lost to reckless vandalism.

A cracked frame showed a picture of Irene against a background of Italian architecture. In it, she wore a thick cable knit turtleneck sweater. The photo, at last, confirmed for us that my ghostly friend was indeed Irene Blatt, and that this trashed mess had once been her apartment. I slipped the picture from the frame and slid it into my jacket pocket, wondering who had snapped the shot. A boyfriend or maybe just a passerby. This didn’t count as stealing, I told myself, but checked the door guiltily anyway.

I was relieved to find the next room empty, and I heard the sounds of Connor searching another room close by. I turned my focus back to my immediate surroundings. There were two closets at the far end of the room I had to check out. Simply moving was a distraction, so much so that when I finally reached the closets, I didn’t even register the fact that the dark-robed figure from my vision was hiding in there—until he sprang out at me. He pushed me down in his effort to escape, and as I fell, I winced painfully as the pointy corner of a book jabbed into my lower back.

“Connor!” I shouted. “There’s someone here!”

I floundered for several seconds in the sea of scattered books and crumpled papers. The dark-robed figure rushed nimbly across the top of the debris without sinking in before racing out of the room. I hoped Connor was having better luck navigating the apartment than I was.

Clumsily, I got back on my feet and waded as quickly as I could out into the main hall. The sound of a struggle came from the direction of the living room. As the hall opened up onto the main room, I saw Connor and his assailant grappling as the two of them toppled over onto an overturned couch. When they regained their footing, I noticed two things—one strange and one dangerous. The strange thing was a large, dark wooden fish that the intruder clutched close to his body. The dangerous thing was a heavy, curved dagger he held in his other hand. I had seen its kind before, unique in that its sharpened edge was along the inside of the weapon’s curve.

A kukri, I thought. It was the calling card for someone prepared to perform ritualistic sacrifice. That’s a cultist if I ever saw one.

“Knife!” I shouted to Connor, who looked down at the blade for the first time. He moved to pry the wooden fish from the cultist’s hand. When the figure flicked the blade at Connor, he moved back to avoid its swinging arc. The blade ripped through the fabric of his shirt. Thanks to Connor’s awkward positioning, he stumbled out of reach, but not before the backs of his knees hit the couch. His arms spun out of control with the momentum and his legs flew up in the air, toppling him over once again, but saving him from his attacker’s next swipe.

For a second, the madman lifted the blade high overhead and I thought he was going to finish Connor off, so I shouted unintelligibly. It sounded ridiculous, but it did the trick and the robed figure paused and turned from the couch. I pulled my retractable bat from inside my coat and extended it, daring him to come after me.

Instead of attacking, however, the cultist flicked his wrist, and with a barely audible click, the blade disappeared up one of his voluminous sleeves. Connor reached up from behind the couch and made a grab for him, but he kicked Connor’s hand away, turned, and dashed out the apartment door.

Connor groaned as he lifted himself slowly up from behind the couch. His free hand rubbed the back of his head. He seemed on the verge of falling over again, but he grabbed the edge of the couch and steadied himself.

“After him,” Connor said and stumbled across the room. I ran for the door and together we burst into the hallway outside the apartment…to emptiness. I looked up at the elevator indicator, but neither car was even remotely close to our floor. I caught movement in the corner of my eye, though, and turned to see the door to the stairwell slowly closing. I rushed through it and looked down into the opening between the stairs going down. Catching a glimpse of robe several floors below, I hesitated a moment to check on Connor.

“You up for it, boss?” I asked. I was worried. He was still rubbing the back of his head.

“Am I up for it? And let you have all the fun, kid?” Connor leapt past me, taking the steps four or five at a time. I followed at a slightly less breakneck pace, holding on to the railing as I went. Connor was the more experienced of us, after all, and I was more than happy to let him be the more reckless pursuer, but I didn’t want to tumble to my death in my haste. And if my mentor got to collar the son of a bitch first, more power to him.

But as the chase continued downward flight after flight, it seemed like Connor was unlikely to catch up with the fugitive. The intruder kept an almost inhuman pace all the way to the ground floor. When I finally reached the bottom and caught up with Connor outside the Westmore, the robed figure had dashed into traffic on Central Park West, causing much screeching of brakes and honking. Connor and I looked at each other, registering our mutual exhaustion, and sprinted off after the cultist as he dashed into the woods at the edge of Central Park.

The rest of the chase was a blur. Trees with their low-hanging branches, pedestrians lounging on the Great Lawn, vendors…sometimes a combination of all of these got in my way, but I refused to let up on our prey. I had no idea why the stolen wooden fish was important or why it had been taken, but it was Irene’s and I wanted it back. Forty blocks later, the chase ended when the figure jumped the security turnstile at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Empire State Building. I watched as he shoved past the tourists waiting to get in and ran off into the building. When we attempted to follow suit, however, a well-built security guard blocked our way.

“That man stole something from us!” I pleaded. “We’ve got to stop him. He’s getting away!”

A particularly nasty woman with yellow teeth thwacked me on the arm with a postcard book as she waited to get in, shouting, “There’s people on line, mister!”

“Relax, lady,” the guard said. Connor flashed his D.E.A. ID, which did count as official local government documentation, but I was still clutching my bat as I fished mine out. The guard checked them over carefully before gesturing us through the security gate one at a time.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “That guy’s not going anywhere. Damned cultists are already giving this building a bad name.”

I stood there, stopped reholstering the bat, and stared at the guard in amazement.

“Wait a second. You know he’s a cultist?”

“Sure,” the guard offered with a sour look on his face. “They’ve been stinking up the building for ’bout six months, ever since they started yammering to the Mayor’s Office about equal rights. They’re up on thirty-three, I think.”

We thanked him and walked toward the elevators. Connor shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

“I wonder if anyone has been informed back at the D.E.A.?” I asked. We stepped into the waiting elevator and I pushed 33.

“We’ll find that out when we talk to the Inspectre. Right now I want to get that goddamn fish back.”

The doors shut and I looked at Connor quizzically. “What’s so important about that fish?”

“I’m not sure,” Connor replied, “but if they wanted it bad enough to trash Irene’s place, then maybe it was worth killing over, too. Somebody wanted it awfully bad. That’s why I want it back.”

“Ah.”

I had hoped for a more concrete answer. Something like, “It’s the sacred fish of the Mondoogamor tribe,” or “It mystically cures young teens of acne,” but just wanting it back because it was stolen worked, too.

When the elevator reached the thirty-third floor and the doors opened, we braced ourselves for an attack. After all, the man we were pursuing had tried to fillet us, so it seemed wise to make sure the coast was clear. Connor stuck his head out quickly to the left, and I did the same on the right side, finding nothing.

“Clear?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Great,” he said.

“Where do you think he went? I’m not even sure what offices we’re looking for.”

Connor pointed to the directory on the wall straight across from the elevator, and from the listings, there was really only one choice.

Most of them were pretty standard, ending in “LLC” or “& Associates.” Only one of the listings truly stuck out. It was three simple letters done up in a Gothic bloodred font. The clincher, of course, was the fact that they had been laid out on the directory to look as if they were actually dripping blood.

S.D.L., they read cryptically. An arrow pointed down the hall to our left.

“Not much for subtlety, are they?” I asked.

“If they were subtle, they wouldn’t be cultists, would they?” Connor said, and started down the hall cautiously. “I suspect we’ll find out soon enough what they stand for. You might want to have your negotiating tool ready.”

I pulled my bat free and hid it under my coat once it was extended. “Should be lethal enough if it comes to it, I think.”

“Just follow my lead, kid. Don’t be overhasty to use it, all right? If things get hairy in there, I’ll give you a signal.”

“Right,” I said.

My body was cold from the accumulated sweat of the downtown chase, but it was also a reaction to my discomfort with the situation. The idea of pulling my bat in defense against a group of humans, regardless of their fanaticism, didn’t sit well with me. Beating a bookcase to death was one thing. Attacking humans was another. I tried not to overanalyze the situation, wanting to take things as they came.

The frosted glass doors at the end of the hall gave no hint as to what went on behind them, but the letters “S.D.L.”—this time over a foot high—marked the entrance. Connor crouched and pressed his ear to the door, listening carefully while I tried to center myself with several deep breaths.

“I can’t hear anything,” he said. “They must be soundproofed, or else it’s a lot quieter in there than we’re expecting.”

“Maybe we should pull ourselves together before going in,” I said, tucking my shirt in. “It’s an office building, after all.”

“Fine, Mr. Blackwell,” Connor said.

He stood up, straightened his tie, and ran his fingers through his sandy mop of white-striped hair, which did nothing to change the frantic-looking muss. I checked my grip on the bat as I smoothed down my coat for lack of a tie to straighten. Appearance is everything, Quimbley had told me in one of the early seminars. If you looked calm and composed upon entering the unknown, it went a long way toward controlling whatever situation might arise.

“You ready?” Connor asked.

I shook my head.

“We’re never ready,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I’m not going through that door, though.”

“Good,” Connor said, clapping me on the shoulder. “And remember, no caving anyone’s skull in unless I tell you to.”

I paled at his suggestion, hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

I was prepared for a lot of things when it came to cultists and the dark arts, but what we saw when Connor threw open the doors took me totally by surprise.