The dead don’t spend dollars.
I couldn’t ransom a little girl’s ghost.
Shivering, I watched the cottage.
A minute passed. Another, and another. Just as I was starting to worry, the front door banged open. Circe and Spider hurried to the Rolls. Janice hollered after them, but they ignored her.
Car doors slammed. The Rolls roared alive and fishtailed onto Hangman’s Point Drive.
Janice was understandably upset. She obviously needed to vent. She screamed at the bodyguard, nice and warm in his big coat, but he only shrugged and flicked his cigarette butt into the rain.
Janice stomped into the house and slammed the door behind her.
My teeth started chattering again. The bodyguard lit another cigarette. The crimson end flared like a target.
A few minutes later, I hit the redial button on Spider’s cell phone.
Janice’s phone rang for quite a while. I let it ring. Janice probably didn’t much like telephones anymore. I figured she needed to work up her courage before she answered, the same way you work up your courage before you stick your hand into a lion’s mouth.
I watched the house. I tried to be patient.
Finally, a familiar click.
A handset wrestled from its cradle.
A hand entering a lion’s mouth.
Janice said, “H-hello?”
“They left you all alone, didn’t they?”
“N-no. I’m not alone. I’ve got protection-”
I chuckled. “You mean the guard on the porch?”
“How do you know…how do you know where he is?”
I tossed the dead guard through the window.
“I know where he is.” I stepped over the sill and over the corpse. “Now we both know where he is.”
Janice stared down at the corpse’s broken nose. It was tilted at a piggish slant, with the bone rammed into his brainpan.
Janice didn’t move. She couldn’t move.
Until I told her to.
I pointed the K-Bar at the dead man. “Strip him,” I said. “Give me his clothes. Especially that coat.”
She did, and it didn’t take her long. It wasn’t the kind of work you wanted to linger over if you were Janice Ravenwood, if every scrap of clothing you touched coughed up a dark panorama of psychic impressions.
I changed quickly. The guy was a little bigger than me, but the fit was close enough. Apart from a little blood on the shirt, the clothes were dry. That was what mattered most.
I didn’t care about a little blood. As far as I was concerned they were my clothes now. The dead man didn’t need them. Neither did his ghost-a dark, thin shadow that cowered outside, howling in the rain.
I ignored the dead man’s screams.
The coat felt good, and warm.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“F-fine,” Janice said.
“Great. Now get a coat for yourself, or rain gear if you’ve got it. I don’t want you to get wet.”
“Where are we going?”
“Across the River Styx,” I said. “Just the two of us.”
5
The rain fell harder now, sheeting across the highway. The storm was getting worse, and it showed no sign of letting up anytime soon. No way did I want to rely on a busted-up Toyota that had been to hell and back when Janice’s new Ford Explorer was ripe for the taking.
The self-important scribbler didn’t need it now. I was doing the driving. Janice rode shotgun, though that was a laugh. She wouldn’t have touched a gun if one lay in her lap. She was that scared.
Maybe she was scared enough to tell the truth.
“I was supposed to be Circe’s ghostwriter, if you can believe that,” Janice began. “She had an offer in the high six figures from a publisher who wanted her autobiography, and she handpicked me to write it. How could I refuse? Slice up a pie like that, there was plenty left for me. My agent negotiated the deal and managed to make it a little sweeter. In fact, she bumped us over the million dollar mark. When it came to Circe Whistler, she said there was a lot more money in channeling the living than channeling the dead.”
“Celebrities sell,” I said.
“All I wanted was the money.”
“There are lots of ways to make money.”
“You’re right. If you can kill people and and cut off their heads, I’m sure the job offers just roll right in.”
“Spare me the wounded sarcasm. You’re a smart woman. I’m not much on metaphysics, but I read a chapter from one of your books. You can write.”
“You know how hard it is to sell a book?” Janice asked, and it wasn’t the kind of question that called for an answer. “It’s hard. I know. I couldn’t sell my first two. I had to publish them myself. I lost money on both of them. If it wasn’t for my gift, I would have starved.”
Her talented hands rested on her thighs, silver bracelets gathered like manacles. I knew Janice wasn’t lying about her powers. When it came to psychic impressions from physical objects, I had no doubt that she was the real deal. She had to be. One touch from her fingers and she’d known all about my knife and the things I had done with it. There was no way she could beg, borrow, or steal that information from anyone on earth, living or dead.
But with a wild talent like that, I didn’t understand how money could have been a problem for her. “Seems to me that you could have made plenty of money with your powers alone,” I said.
“Sure. But people don’t want to know the truth. Not really. They can’t take it. The truth isn’t worth a dime. It’s ugly. Pretty lies are the things that sell.”
“And you sold more than your share.”
“That’s right. Pretty lies were my stock and trade. Bring me a couple grand and your dead husband’s pipe, and I’d give you a show. I’d sit you down in a cozy little new-age parlor in front of a roaring fire, and I’d hold that pipe in my hands, and I’d close my eyes as if I were closing them for the very last time. I’d pretend to contact my spirit guide, Natasha Orlovsky, one of the Cliffside witches. Never mind that Natasha was never a witch at all, just a scared teenager who was hanged as a result of mass hysteria. Never mind that I’d never seen Natasha’s ghost, or that the Natasha I pretended to conjure up was a recycled character from a historical horror novel I sold under a pen name for a quick two grand.
“Never mind any of that. I’d close my eyes, and I’d smile, and I’d whisper a few lines of college Russian. Then I’d tell my client what she wanted to hear, whispering in soothing tones that her dear departed husband was so happy in the afterlife, so glad that his widow had remarried that nice fellow who owned the hardware store, so pleased that she’d spent that extra fifteen hundred bucks for a burial plot near a fountain because listening to those sweet little songbirds splashing around sure did make his eternal slumber a lot more comfortable.
“If that was what the old lady wanted to hear, that was what I’d tell her. And I’d hold on to her dead husband’s pipe, even though holding it was like swallowing poison. I’d think of the two grand the old lady had in her purse-the same amount of money I got for a horror novel that took four months of solid work to write. And while I thought of the old lady’s money and how fast I was going to make it mine, I could almost taste the dead man’s tobacco in my mouth, and I could almost feel that rough little lump growing inside my cheek, the one that turned into a cancer that the doctors hacked off along with a good chunk of jawbone.
“I’d feel the dead man’s hate as his wife pretended she needed something from the hardware store, when he knew she only wanted to cry on the shoulder of the cross-eyed bastard who owned the place. I’d feel all of it, just the way the dead man had felt it.
“In a finger snap, I’d live the day his wife came home with the news that the cross-eyed bastard was hiring her twenty hours a week. She hated to go to work, but she didn’t see how they could turn down the income. And she was right about that. They did need money. He couldn’t work anymore. Hell, no one wanted to go to a barber who was missing half his face.