Jack Kilborn & J. A. Konrath (13 page)

Regrettably, the bike pump was nowhere to be found. Neither was old caretaker guy. And I’d apparently won the loser trifecta, because Bill, the man I’d been hired to follow, was also MIA.

Some pinhead hopped into the coffin with Frankengroin, and I picked up the flashlight and made my way to the exit before the groaning began. I needed some fresh air. I also needed a hatchet and some steel wool, so I could access and scour the last half an hour from my brain.

Conveniently, the exit was a large door marked
EXIT
, which opened up to some concrete steps. I took them up, and they ended in a maintenance closet, which opened up into the mausoleum. It was an easier—and faster—entrance than the nightmare slide, but lacked the dramatic effect.

I pulled out my gun, did a quick search for old caretaker guy, scared the hell out of some grieving old man, mourning his dead wife or some similar maudlin bullshit, and then made my way through the cemetery, across the street, and into the first place that sold liquor.

Three shots and two beers later, I called the police.

T
he cop I called was a somewhat tasty little morsel named Lieutenant Jackie “Jack” Daniels. So-so face, great legs, nice rack, especially for an older broad. I knew her back in the day, when we were partners in blue, and she continued to have a crush on me almost two decades later.

“I don’t owe you shit, McGlade. And if you bother me again I’m going to send some uniforms over to trash your apartment and beat you with phone books for so long you’ll have area codes embedded in your skin.”

“Pay attention, Jackie. I’m offering you a prime bust here. As we speak, there’s a group of perverts running a train on a dead guy with gonads the size of a Thanksgiving turkey.”

“Let me guess. Is it a
Butterball
?”

“They have to be stopped. Would you want some loonies digging you up and poking your cooter after you’ve been laid to eternal rest?”

“Sex with a corpse, disgusting as it is, isn’t a crime, Harry. Didn’t you read
Bloody Mary
by JA Konrath? There was a character in there, did the same thing.”

“I listened to part of the audiobook. The author thinks he’s funny, but he’s not.”

“It’s a he? I thought a woman wrote those books.”

I tried to make my voice sound soothing, a tough trick because I had screamed myself raw.

“Jackie, partner, be a good cop and send a team over to the cemetery. You’ll get brownie points from the Captain, a little TV spotlight, and the satisfaction knowing that you got a bunch of lunatic perverts off the street.”

“What do I charge them with, McGlade? Public indecency? You want me to waste manpower on a minor misdemeanor?”

“Aggravated sexual assault. Trust me. It was aggravating.”

“Who’s going to press charges? The cadaver? You want to bring a corpse to trial? The cross examination would be riveting, I bet.”

I clenched my fist. “Dammit, Jackie! I was violated in ways you can’t even begin to understand. I’ll never be the same. My sex life might very well be ruined, and I won’t be able to ever watch basketball on TV again. And I love basketball. If you don’t arrest these assholes I’m going to go on a killing spree and when they bring me in I’ll tell them you could have stopped it just by doing your job.”

She sighed big, but I knew I’d won. “Cut the melodrama, McGlade. I’ll send a few uniforms over to check it out.”

“If you arrest a creepy old caretaker guy, call me. I’m going to impale him on his mop and make him clean all the floors in Union Station.”

“I got extra tickets to the Bulls game tomorrow. Want them?”

“You can really be a mean bitch sometimes, Jackie.”

I hung up, ordered another tequila, drank it, ordered another, drank it, then called a taxi to take me back to my condo to really start drinking.

M
y plan had been to drink so much I didn’t dream. And when I peeled my eyes open, I thought it worked. I couldn’t remember a single nocturnal image, let alone any nightmares.

Then I realized I was lying naked on the kitchen floor, straddling a head of lettuce.

“Oh hell no.”

Like any freaked-out person, I needed answers. So I searched Google, using the terms “post dramatic stress disorder sex with corpses and giant testicles” which linked me to a bunch of unhelpful porn sites. I dutifully surfed them anyway, but there were no answers there.

Then I went to eBay, and I was still the top bidder on everything. Lousy eBastards. I decided I just wouldn’t pay if I won, but then I’d get negative feedback, and negative feedback was permanent. I’m proud of my 99.4% positive score. My only bad mark came from some jerk who didn’t read the whole product description, only the header. I sold him a mint Babe Ruth baseball card for $260. The card had some tears and a few bends, but I’d stapled some mint leaves to it. Which I mentioned, in two point font, at the bottom of the listing. Some guys can’t take a joke.

Next I checked my email, where I discovered I’d won the Irish lottery, inherited eighty million dollars from an unknown relative, and was asked to shuffle funds into my bank account from the President of Rwanda. They all got my standard response: enthusiastic replies with an attachment supposedly containing my routing number. The attachment really contained an email bomb, which once opened would bombard their computers with tens of thousands of naked pictures of actress Bea Arthur. I called it the Maude Virus.

I had a bit of a hangover, my ass still hurt from where I’d fallen on my keys, and I was hungry. But the only food I had in the condo was that head of lettuce, which I wasn’t going to eat even if I were starving to death, so I changed into a slightly less dirty suit and hit the corner convenience store for an overpriced cup of joe, a dose of Advil, and a prepackaged cheese Danish.

It was a gorgeous Chicago day, the sun shining, the lakeshore breeze blowing, the pigeons singing their lovely song. I leaned against the storefront window and called my client.

“Hello?”

“Is this Maxine Drawbridge?”

“It’s Norma Cauldridge.”

I rubbed my nose. “Hi, Maxine. It’s Harry McGlade. I need more money.”

“Did you find something out, Mr. McGlade?”

“I did. And it’s ugly. Real ugly. Plus, I was gravely injured during my surveillance.” I smiled at my unintentional pun, which was actually intentional. “I’m not going near him again without more cash.”

“I’ve already paid you twelve hundred dollars.”

My nose still itched, so I scratched it. On the inside.

“I want double that. Think of it as an investment. When the lawyers see the dirt I’ve got on old Roy, you’ll take the freak for every dime he has.”

I removed my finger, noted something gray and waxy stuck to the end. I’d been picking my nose for years, and this was the strangest booger I’d ever seen.

“Who’s Roy?”

“Whatever the hell his name is.”

I took a closer look. Sniffed. It smelled familiar.

“Do you have pictures?”

“I will. Send the money to my PayPal account. My email is… oh god…”

The odor was rotten meat and formaldehyde. Somehow, while I was in the coffin, I’d gotten a hunk of dead flesh up my nose. Dead flesh covered in boogers. And a nose hair.

I leaned over and puked up the coffee, Danish, and Advil. Eighteen bucks and change, shot to hell.

“Mr. McGlade? Are you there?”

I wiped a toe through the puke, looking for the Advil. They were probably still good. Instead, I saw something that made me want to quit eating forever.

Part of a human ear.

I got closer, sure it had to be some coincidentally-shaped chunk of chewed Danish.

No, it was an ear. The upper, cartilagey part. I often nibbled women’s ears when we were fooling around. I must have got caught up in the role-playing and bitten off a hunk.

“Mr. McGlade?”

“Scratch that. I want triple.”

“That’s outrageous.”

“Lady, I went to third base with a dead guy last night, all because of your husband. Pay me, or find some other schmuck to do your dirty work.”

“You did what with a dead guy?”

“Don’t believe me? You want to talk to him?”

I held my cell phone over the ear. Then I realized I was acting a bit hysterical. Maybe I was still asleep, and this was just a dream.

I felt my backside, wondering if the pain in my ass was truly from sitting on my keys, or from something that was
still up there…

I stuck my hand inside my pants, reaching down the plumber’s crack…

It’s a dream, it has to be a dream…

A pigeon waddled over, pecked up the ear, and ran off. My fingers crept closer…

“Mr. McGlade?”

A dream, all a dream, just a harmless dream…

And then I touched the severed end of something that shouldn’t be there. Something that felt like a Pepperidge Farm County Style Breakfast Sausage Link.

“Please!” I cried out. “If there’s any decency left in this cruel world, let this be a dream!”

I
t was a dream. I woke up in bed next to an empty bottle of tequila. Blessedly, there was no head of lettuce between my legs. And the puddle of puke on my pillow didn’t contain anything resembling human flesh. I did a nose check and an ass check, and they were both free and clear.

So much for drinking away the nightmares.

I rolled out of bed, padded to the can, showered, dressed in a slightly less dirty suit than yesterday, and visited the local convenience store for a coffee, Danish, and some Advil. That should have been my tip off I’d been dreaming—paying eighteen bucks for those three items. I forked over the real-life money—twenty-six bucks—then called Mrs. Drawbridge and demanded quadruple my rate. She reluctantly agreed, and mentioned her husband was in bed, still asleep. I decided to stakeout her house and tail him. And this time, I’d be taking some sophisticated equipment.

I returned to the condo and entered my Crime Lab. It was actually an extra bedroom that I converted into a crime lab by stocking it with spy stuff and writing
Crime Lab
on the door. The modern private detective had to stay current with modern gadgetry, so I bought all of the latest high-tech stuff. Phone tappers. Listening devices. Infra red things. A remote control tank with a miniature video camera hooked up to the turret. Cell phone jammers. A set of brass knuckles with a microchip inside that played Pat Benatar when I socked somebody. All the essentials.

I popped the SanDisk memory card out of the tank and plugged it into my computer, to check the footage I’d recorded during my practice run. The video was a little choppy, but more than acceptable.

The first scene was of a dog in Grant Park, urinating.

Cut to the same dog, pooping.

Cut to another dog, pooping.

Cut to the first dog, eating the second dog’s poop.

Cut to a third dog, trying to hump the first dog, who was still munching on the poop.

Cut to the poop, which didn’t look like it warranted being eaten.

Cut to some gangbanger punk, running off with my tank.

Cut to me explaining to the cop why I fired my gun in a populated area, and then me getting arrested.