“Now,” she said, “you’ve made them pay.”
I wilted. Why hadn’t I seen it sooner? Someone had been in my motel room when I was shot. Someone I trusted. I’d turned my back on her, which I never would’ve done with the Guidos or the Ivans, and she popped me behind the ear with a.38. Probably my own damn gun. Then she coolly watched me bleed to death before calling the cops.
Just like she was doing now.
I kneeled next to the bloodstain, trying to hold my light inside, but it spilled everywhere. The yellow light filled the motel room, blinding me.
I fell forward onto the same spot where I’d died once before. Right at her feet. But all I could see was light.
The Insider by Mike Wiecek
It was nice to have my office back.
Not strictly an office, mind you, and not strictly mine. In our profession, nobody would dream of paying for a hundred square feet behind pebbled glass. But the Tasty-Time Coffeehouse had not long ago been completely overrun by the New Unemployed. You know who I mean-laid-off bankers, mostly-hogging the chairs, frowning at their laptops, stretching a single caramel mint latte straight through lunch. The Tasty-Time’s manager tried switching off the Wi-Fi, but it wasn’t until he bolted plates over every power outlet that the freeloaders finally got the idea.
Today even the best table in the house was open, up front by a plate glass window. I steered my client over-we’d arrived at the same time-and got two stale donuts and coffee.
“Ernest Eppleworth,” he said. He didn’t look much like an Ernest, with his movie-star jaw and short, fashionably graying hair. “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Clark.”
Ernest ran a little hedge fund, and he knew a guy whose sister had a friend I’d helped out last year. It wasn’t much of a case-the ghost had already been fading away, and the friend held on to his marriage-but everyone seemed happy at the end. A recommendation apparently traveled along, as they do.
Anyway, I was glad for the business.
“So how can I help you?” I asked.
“Well.” Ernest hesitated. “The thing is… I’m making too much money.”
“Ah.” An obvious solution presented itself, but-“Why don’t you tell me about that?”
“Since November, we’ve earned a 13,000 percent return.”
“Holy-” I choked on my donut. “A little over half a year-you’ve been doubling your money every month?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Short-term forex trading.”
“No way.” And I meant it.
See, I used to be a banker myself. Lehman Brothers, maybe you heard of them. After my own layoff, I drifted into private security. Crime is just about the only growth industry going nowadays. The ghost specialization thing-all that came later.
But anyway, that’s how I knew my way around the markets. Day-trading foreign exchange?-most folks would do better piling up their money and putting a match to it. Ernest wasn’t telling the whole story.
“Well,” I said. “What currencies?”
“A range. Nairas, lately, and good action in hryvnias, kyats, and Qatari riyals.”
“There’s a market in this stuff?” Nairas were Nigerian, and I was pretty sure hryvnias were Belorussian or Ukrainian or something, but I’d never heard of kyats.
“We get better leverage in the unregulated venues.” He noticed my skepticism and added, “It’s fully documented. We use a London-based clearinghouse, report every trade, pay our taxes. Entirely above-board.”
I started to get a glimmer of the problem. “So you’re just very good traders, is that it? Never wrong-footed by the market, ice-cool under pressure, all that?”
Ernest had the grace to look embarrassed. “More or less.”
“Someone’s feeding you trades.” I didn’t make it a question.
“No.”
“No?”
“Not someone,” he said. “Something.”
CONSIDERING how much sheer energy and intellect has gone into analyzing the markets, it’s surprising that no one saw the correlation decades before. Hemlines, sunspots, AFC vs. NFC in the Super Bowl-every other conceivable, spurious relationship has been studied to death. But only recently did someone notice that market volatility marched neatly in step with parapsychological phenomena.
In other words, the more ghosts showing up, the wackier the Dow.
Ouija boards and seances? Had their peak in the late 1920s and early ’30s, and you know what was happening then. The Age of Aquarius? Maybe it was all the dope those kids were smoking, but paranormal visitations skyrocketed right when the economy tanked in the early 1970s. Which led directly to all that New Age out-of-body crap and the first Reagan recession-and by the time the bubble economy crashed, everyone and their dog seemed to have a personal angel.
Potted history, to be sure, but now that we’re in the Great Depression Two, the ectoplasm’s been flying like mud. Basically, economic distress translates into a lot of unhappy deaths, with hauntings following right behind.
“I don’t know who he is,” said Ernest. “I’ve never seen… one before.”
“What’s he look like?”
“You know-like a ghost.” Ernest frowned impatiently. “His shirt’s all torn up, blood everywhere on his head and chest, and he kind of shimmers, and you can see outlines of the furniture behind him.”
“So he didn’t die in his sleep.”
Here’s how it works-or the best current understanding, maybe not worth much. Most people, they die, and they go somewhere else straightaway. Nobody knows what’s beyond that long tunnel with the warm light at the end of it. But sometimes, if someone is really upset, if they feel they have vital, unfinished business-basically, if they’re incredibly resentful about being dead-they can hang around for a while, pestering the living.
It’s almost always revenge, of course. Once in a blue moon some star-crossed Romeo can’t believe he died before his beloved, and he comes back, blubbering and fading in and out, until Juliet gets fed up and tells him to just get going, already. But usually shades are angry, vindictive losers who are happy to take a rain check on heaven if they can get just one more chance to screw with their enemies still on earth.
I’d never heard of a ghost who stayed behind simply to help out.
“Why you?” I asked.
“I have no idea.” Ernest hesitated. “And, well, I haven’t tried to press, you know? I mean, the guy’s making me a fortune, no reason to rock the applecart.”
Nice. The hedge fund mentality in a nutshell, if anyone still doesn’t understand why Wall Street cratered the world economy recently. But we could let that go for now.
“He appears in my office,” said Ernest. “Always late at night, when I’m the only one there.”
“How often?”
“Every week or two at first. Then more frequently. This week on Monday and Thursday.”
“And he-”
“Gives me a recommendation. This or that currency, up or down, for the first thing the next morning.”
Forex, especially in the bizarro currencies Ernest had mentioned, was more than volatile. It would be like putting your entire stack on red or black, every time. And with leverage-he could probably multiply his bets by ten or twenty, on margin, with a cooperative broker-he was gambling the car, the mortgage, and the girlfriend, too.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How does he communicate the details?”
“He must have died with a pen in his hand.” Ernest shrugged. “He writes on his shirttail and shows it to me.”
That’s another of the rules: the ghost shows up with whatever he happened to be wearing or holding at the instant of death. For most people, of course, that means a hospital johnny and the nurse-call button. Or if you have a massive heart attack shoveling snow, you get to keep your parka and the shovel.
Ernest’s ghost was apparently killed in the office.
“How long does he stay?”