Secret Dead Men (27 page)

"Good show, Susannah," Brad said. "Wouldn't you say, sweetheart?"

Alison didn't say anything. She took a step back. Her heel dug into my outstretched hand. I shrieked, but it came out as a series of gurgles.

By way of pure reflex, Brad spun around and shot me in the shoulder.

"Owww shit," I said, and rolled over. To be perfectly honest, my hand hurt a lot more than the bullet wound. I managed to spit out the words, "
It's Del."
As if it would matter to Brad.

"Christ," he said. "Don't you know when to play dead?"

I would have shot a pithy remark back at him, but I was too busy trying to line my eyes up with Ray Loogan's. He was a dead man, of course. But luckily for me, he'd chosen to expire with his eyelids rolled up in his head.

"Looks like I'll have to teach you." Brad took careful aim at my head and squeezed the trigger.

Or should I say, took careful aim at my ex-head. Because as the bullet was flying through the air, my soul was flinging across the space of the room, right into Ray's body. I was getting better and better at this. I jerked up my head in time to see Leah Farrell's head do a J.F.K.

And I'll be damned if Ray's body didn't hurt a hundred time's worse than Leah's abused corpse. I didn't know where to register pain first. I turned my new head to the left, experimentally, and saw Susannah staring at me in mute horror.

"Hi sweetie," I said.

That
broke her stunned silence. She screamed and slid down to the floor, and started to crawl backwards until she bumped into Alison.

Brad, once again, spun around to face me. "You ... !"

I realized I had to do some fast talking. I was running out of bodies. And at the rate at which Brad was blowing their heads off...

"Hold it, tough guy," I said. "I have something important to say. To Agent Fieldman."

"I doubt it," Fieldman said, from within Alison's robot body.

"This exercise in revenge isn't going to solve anything. You're treating the symptom, not the disease. This is an entirely wasted effort." It must have seemed too funny to watch a dead guy wax philosophical about the uses of revenge.

"Ah," Fieldman said. "This is where I'm supposed to have an epiphany about violence begetting violence? Spare me the philosophy, Collective. This store isn't buying. The 'exercise' you see before you is going to solve everything. I've been trying to explain this to your tiny mind, but will you listen? No. This is much, much bigger than you or I, or anybody in this world."

"Okay, Buddha. Maybe everything you're saying is true. If it is, fine. You want some kind of higher justice served? Bully for you. But it still doesn't address my earlier point: What are we going to do about the killer?"

"We have the killer. Killers, to be precise."

"No, not this pathetic errand boy, or the dizzy wench. I mean
the
real killer." I looked at Brad. The face of the killer, accusing the victim.

"What?" he asked.

"You don't see it, do you Brad?
You
killed your wife, and yourself!"

"Shut up," he said.

"It was you. You hired these two pathetic people to do it."

"I did not!"

"Perhaps not the personality known as Brad Larsen," I said. "But the name on the dotted line was John Paul Bafoures. And you were, in fact, John Paul Bafoures."

I could see a dim bulb lighting in Brad's mind. "No..." he said weakly, but he was finally getting it.

Alison's face wrinkled up in confusion. "What are you saying ...
he
hired them?"

"Sorry, Fieldman. I suppose you would have had no way of knowing, looking at the situation from the outside. But Brad and Paul are one and the same. A split personality--do they still use that term in your dimension? Brad wanted out of his professional rackets, and decided to bury the murderous side of him. Only problem, the murderous side resented it. So he decided to cash in everybody's chips, all at once."

"You..." Fieldman said. It sure looked weird coming out of Alison's mouth. "All this ... for nothing!"

I saw the fire die in Alison's eyes, and something invisible pound in Brad's body, flinging him back against the wall. Alison took two wobbly steps backwards, found her back against the wall, then slid down. She started to cry. At last, the real Alison Larsen, the woman I knew as Amy Langtree, finally regained control of her artificial body. Had she been watching the whole time? I had no way of knowing. She simply lowered her head into her folded arms and sobbed.

Brad, on the other hand, was on the floor convulsing. Clearly, the Ghost of Fieldman had jumped in there, and there was some kind of battle royale going on in that skull. I probably shouldn't have waited this long to play my trump card, but hell, hindsight is 20/20. And to be honest, I had no idea Fieldman would be this upset. To think that would have meant believing his crazy stories and schemes. And now--after seeing how this damned thing was turning out--maybe I was. Maybe this case was bigger than all of us.

Finally, a victor emerged. Brad stopped shaking. He rolled over on his side, then scrambled to his feet. He paused to straighten out his police uniform and looked at me. "I owe you an apology, Collective," he said, smirking. "Brad Larsen is under arrest."

I was about to accept Fieldman's apology when I saw Susannah pick the cop's revolver from the floor and shove it in his face.

"Cool your tool, fool," she said.

As if on cue, a siren screamed outside.

"Talk about timing," I said.

Fieldman nodded. "Yes. Brad had arranged for that. He figured the FBI was here at the beginning, might as well call them in at the end. I can't believe how clouded my judgement has been."

"Hello!" Susannah yelled. "Can't you see I have a fucking gun to your head?"

"Sorry," Fieldman said.

I was growing tired of the interruptions. Part of me wished I had shown up after Brad had deep-sixed both of them. "Lady, listen to me," I said from Ray's bleeding body. "Do you still think can control this situation? After all you've seen tonight?"

Susannah didn't bother to give me a rational answer. Instead, she whipped the pistol around and fired, screaming, "AND YOU!"

The shot was amazing. It planted directly beneath my right eye, dug a few inches into my skull, then exploded back and out. All in all, a much more professional shot than the one she'd delivered to my other head mere hours ago. Talk about a learning curve.

When my vision dimmed and my head flopped to the left, I started to worry. This was beyond my bag of resurrection tricks. If someone were to poke out Ray Loogan's remaining eye, I'd be screwed, blued and tattooed. And as much as I've complained before about all the miserable places my soul had been shuttled to, this was by far the King Daddy shit-pick of the year.

I could still see, though, out of my remaining eye. Susannah had the gun back on Fieldman. Why didn't he use the distraction to disarm her?

"The law is coming for you," Fieldman said.

"Don't worry," she said. "I'll explain everything to them. How you killed all of these nasty people. How you tried to kill me."

"They won't believe you, Ms. Lewalski."

"No, but they
will
believe Susannah Winston. She has powerful friends. She has a powerful father. She can explain her way out of anything."

Feds kicked in the front door; footsteps thundered up the hallway. My old buddy--Special Agent in Charge Dean Nevins--whipped out his pistol, doing the best Dirty Harry impression he could muster. "Drop your weapon!"

"Oh, can she?" Fieldman whispered, looking directly into her eyes.

"
Explain this
."

Susannah's trigger finger twitched, enough to fire the gun. At first, I'd thought she'd flinched, but then it became clear what had happened. God, that clever, stupid bastard. His face--which looked like Brad's, but used to belong to a Philadelphia police officer--exploded in a blur of wet crimson, and his body flipped back to the ground. I wonder what kind of gizmo he'd used to do
that.
The look on Susannah's face was priceless. Absolute and complete horror.

One might say what happened next speaks volumes about the self-control of Dean Nevins--after all, any other agent would have immediately started pumping lead into the psycho bitch. But Nevins didn't do that. He calmly and sternly repeated himself. "
Drop your weapon now, woman!"

Susannah turned to face him, gun still in her hand. Ooh, bad form, girl.

"Drop it!" Nevins squawked. His entire body seemed to tense.

"God, NO!
He
did this--"

"I said DROP IT!"

"Yes, yes, of course..." Susannah bent down to put the gun on the floor.

"That's it."

Susannah complied, even offering a weak, vulnerable smile.

"Now just step away from the body...."

I couldn't believe it. Despite Fieldman's last-minute efforts to the contrary, it looked as if Susannah Winston was going to explain her way out of this one, too. Her whole life had been lying her way into bigger and better social circles--shit desert town to gun moll, gun moll to high-society mistress, high-society mistress to ... what? Directrix of the FBI?

Thankfully, it wasn't to be. A thirst for justice runs in the Larsen family.

From behind, Alison slid her hand across Nevins' beefy forearm. For a brief second, he looked confused: Why was this attractive woman touching his arm? A sudden manifestation of gratitude for saving her life?

Of course, a second was all that Alison Larsen, robot, simulacrum, android, whatever--needed. She found Nevins' trigger finger and managed to squeeze off three shots before he could stop her. Susannah's chest and face exploded in near-tandem. She choked and flung her hands to her throat, then stumbled and collapsed back to the floor.

Nevins wrestled the gun away and threw Alison to the ground. He stared at the bodies on the floor, then at Alison. He lowered his gun and closed his eyes tightly.

I let a sigh escape my dead lips, and then I involuntarily passed out.

* * * *

I heard movement, then decided it was okay to opened my one working eye again.

Alison had scrambled up from the floor and ran to Brad's side. She was ignoring Susannah, who was lying nearby and choking on her own blood. Alison grabbed her husband's hand, crying. "Brad, please ... please don't go now ...
not now
." She took his face in her hands, rubbed his forehead, passed her thumbs over his eyes.

And then the crying stopped. Alison sniffled, then cleared her throat.

"Sorry it has to end this way, Larsen," she whispered. But it wasn't Alison talking anymore.

Brad's corpse didn't make a sound, but something inside must have.

"No," Alison/Fieldman said. "You've done enough for now. It's time for you to rest." Another pause. "Shhh. See you on the flip side."

Alison walked over to me and forced open my eyelids. "Your investigation's officially over."

I didn't reply. I knew it was Fieldman talking, and I knew it would be useless to resist. For the first time, I was ready to accept that my investigation
was
over.

She was the last thing I saw before my own, borrowed, dead eye fluttered shut.

Twenty-Seven

Four and a Half Dead Bodies

The next time they opened I was staring at Special Agent Dean Nevins. My long lost friend in the Bureau. After spending a month with the ghost of his former flunky, I was almost happy to see him. Nevins forced my eyelid up with a fat thumb.

"Hello, dead guy," he asked, deadpan. "And what happened to you?"

I decided it was time to work the magic just one more time.

"The usual," I said. I watched his face turn white and his eyes bulge--very, very wide--and then I jumped into his body.

* * * *

Practice must make perfect, I guess. Nevins' knees didn't even buckle. I stood up and started barking orders, just like Nevins would have done himself.
Get these bodies tagged and I.D.'d. Where are the print guys? Come on, fellas--are we running an investigation, or a three-ring circus here?
At that moment, the phone rang. One of the other agents answered it. He seemed to listen for a long time, then turned to me.

"Boss? It's a Mr. Gard. He's asking for Susannah Winston or Paul After?"

"I'll take the call," I said. "Hello, Gard? Hi. Special Agent Nevins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. How are you doing tonight?"

"What's going on there?"

"Well, there are a bunch of dead bodies scattered all over the living room floor of your parents' house. Including your mistress, Susannah Winston, nee Lana Lewalski, a hooker from Las Vegas wanted for murder. Pinned to your parents' couch is her ex-boyfriend, cheap hood Ray Loogan, also wanted for murder. Then across the room is Leah Farrell, yet another piece of Vegas scum. She had her throat shot open. Lastly, there's a guy who's face has been blasted beyond all recognition. Frankly, we don't know who he is. Quite possibly, he's a rogue FBI agent we've been looking for."

"Who?" Gard asked. "What ... what are you talking about? I ...
I don't know these people!
"

"Yeah, well that's the funny thing, Gard," I said. "Right after I got here, I ran into the P.I. you hired. He wanted me to pass on a message to you."

"Wh-Wh-What?"

"He said if you ever bounce a check on him again, he'll feed you your own spleen. Have a nice day." I hung up.

Next order of business: rescuing the souls I'd left behind in Leah's body. I figured they were probably flung out into the space of the room when Leah's head went up like a melon with a roman candle inside. I checked pieces of furniture, the shag rugs, nature paintings, dopey white plastic World Class Father & Mother statuettes, lamps but nothing. Not a glimmer of life.

Fieldman must have taken them with him in the Cyborg Alison body. Or perhaps they'd all made it to the Great Beyond. For all of their sakes--even that pain-in-the-ass Harlan, even cranky Kevin Kennedy--I hoped that was the case.

There was a final piece of business to take care of, though. I approached a young-looking agent holding a clipboard. Most likely, Fieldman's replacement on Nevins' team. "Call the cleaners in here. I want this house razed to the ground."