Dead Man's Hand (4 page)

Three

The whole thing with Bascom Quibble was a
washout. I got to his factory at about two in the afternoon after
spending the morning chasing down information on the phone for the
legitimate cases I was running. The place was big and gray, tin
siding on the walls, and no sign at the street. Bascom had a nice,
neat little storefront in a different part of town with a waiting
room, upholstered chairs, coffee and tissues for the bereaved.
That’s where he made his money with a cute secretary to work the
sympathy and credit card angle. But the real work was done here,
where it just wouldn’t do to have the families of the legitimately
departed actually get a hint at the process that could bring their
loved one back for just a little while.

I thumped on the plain metal door three
times and waited, pulling at my collar and wondering when the heat
was going to let up. When I was about to lose patience and knock
again, the door clicked open, and a skinny little guy with glasses
and a blood-smeared lab coat stood looking at me. I didn’t
recognize him.

“
Bascom here?” I asked,
flipping him one of my business cards.

He stepped aside by way of answering and
shut the door once I was inside. The place was big with fluorescent
fixtures hanging down that made the darkness above them look like
it went on forever. From hidden speakers came the flowing sounds of
violins and other instruments—Bach, I think—all aimed at keeping
things serene in the zombie factory. And in front of me were clear
plastic tanks with cadavers floating naked in a yellow fluid, their
hair billowing around their heads in a perverse approximation of
gracefulness. Bascom’s helper led the way through the array of
tanks and toward an unfinished sheetrock wall halfway across the
warehouse. It had several doors, all unpainted, that opened into
rooms where I assumed different stages of the process were carried
out. Beside one door labeled “Extraction” was a gurney with a still
dripping corpse on it, a middle-aged man with an autopsy incision
reaching from neck to groin. It was repulsive, undignified, and I
reminded myself that I needed to write a Will if only to keep
myself from assembling yo-yos for Quibble Toys in whatever brief
version of an afterlife I was destined to enjoy.

Beside the extraction room—where Bascom
removed the corpses’ teeth and wired their jaws shut to keep them
from harming anyone living—was a door marked “Processing” which the
assistant knocked on and then opened without waiting for a response
from within. I followed him inside to find Bascom Quibble standing
over another corpse. He was tall and thin with a pointy goatee that
made his angular face look positively geometrical. Small eyes
blinked at me from behind yellow safety goggles. He held a nasty
looking syringe with a bright blue liquid in it and appeared ready
to pop the needle into the corpse’s neck. His expression shifted
from distasteful to worried when he recognized me, and I knew he
had immediately assumed my presence meant legal trouble of one kind
or another.

“
What’s wrong?” he
said.

“
Nice to see you, too,
Bascom.”

He jerked his head toward the door, and his
assistant exited, shutting us in. The body on the table between
Bascom and me was a woman, maybe in her sixties. He’d shaved her
head after doing the routine with her teeth, and I was glad he’d
covered her with a sheet. Still, I wasn’t pleased being in here
with her, knowing she’d soon be up and in one of the holding cells
I knew were at the back of the factory next to the loading
dock.

“
I have a little job for
you,” I told him.

“
Then you should go to the
store and put in your order like anyone else.”

“
This one requires a bit of
discretion.”

“
Which means it’s illegal.
I’ve had enough trouble with the law lately. You should know
that.”

I’d been expecting him not to be
enthusiastic about my proposition, so I went on undaunted. “The
discretion I’m talking about isn’t exactly a question of legal or
illegal. It’s more dealing with a different kind of authority.”

He stared me at me for a second or two,
trying to unpack that one. “The Grommets,” he said with a nod.
“Even worse. Get out, Ace. Please.”

He bent over the corpse, moving the big
needle in place above the neck.

“
It’s not a whole
re-animation my client is after. Just a partial. And it’ll impress
the hell out of Clancy. Be good for you to have him in your
corner.”

“
And equally bad to have
Yancy know I helped his brother. No way.”

He popped the syringe into the flesh and
pushed down on the plunger. The skin swelled around the puncture
point and started turning blue. The color faded after a few
seconds, but the big lump lingered after Bascom withdrew the
needle.

“
I’m getting a five percent
cut on this,” I said. “I don’t know of how much, but it’s likely
big. I’ll split it with you.”

I watched the corpse for signs of life
rather than trying to read Bascom’s face for his reaction to my
offer. When he said, “Answer’s still no,” I didn’t even look
up.

“
60/40?” I
countered.

“
Not for 90/10. Not for all
of it. Now get out. I’ve got work to do.”

Without warning, the corpse jolted to life.
The woman’s eyes popped open and veins stood out on her forehead. I
hadn’t seen the restraints underneath the sheet but was damn glad
they were there now as she bucked against them. She let out a
pitiful, impotent grunt that would have been a snarl if her jaw
hadn’t been wired shut, and she turned her head toward Bascom,
clearly confused about why she wasn’t able to bite into his hand.
Her rage only increased, and I had to wonder about the strength of
the restraints.

From a tray behind him, Bascom took another
syringe, this one loaded with a milky liquid, and came around to
the side of the table. He lifted the sheet to expose the zombie’s
hand writhing against one of the thick leather straps that held
her. As casually as he might have petted a faithful dog, Bascom
rubbed at the wrist just above the strap and then plunged the
needle into the flesh. In seconds, the syringe was emptied and the
newly awoken zombie attained a blissful look on her face.

Bascom looked up, a satisfied expression on
his face. He turned to me, one eyebrow raised. It was his way of
silently showing me not only that he didn’t need any kind of cut
from any kind of deal that a person like me could swing, but also
that he was surprised to find me still standing there. That eyebrow
was tough to argue with, so I dropped my card onto the sheet
covering the zombie’s legs and let myself out.

I spent the rest of the afternoon looking
through my list of contacts and trying to figure the next best
thing. The wisest approach, I realized, would have been to find a
diplomatic way of telling Pixel to pound sand, but my vocabulary
isn’t that big, so I needed to find another way. It wasn’t just
that I felt I owed Pixel after she’d saved me in the Mirage, and it
certainly wasn’t that I needed the pocket change she’d throw my way
if the hand actually yielded something. No, I’d decided that I kind
of liked having Pixel in my corner. If she needed me to do this for
her, then I was going to try my hardest.

By seven, the sun was edging down and the
moon was edging up. Between the other work I’d needed to do and the
time I’d taken to cram in a ham and cheese, I’d gone through all of
my contacts and come up with no one who could do the kind of
quality job Pixel needed for the dead man’s hand. Her only choices
were to go with someone less qualified to do the work or to come up
with some serious money that would either get Bascom to change his
mind or act as an icebreaker for reputable re-animators I wasn’t
yet acquainted with. I was about to call her with the news, but my
phone jumped to life first. The caller ID read “Quibble, Bascom,”
and I found my interest in the case revived.

“
Stubble,” I said when I
picked up the phone.

“
That job you told me about
today, Ace?”

I smiled. He sounded desperate. I like that
in a partner. “Yes.”

“
I’ll do it.”

My smile widened. “You don’t even know what
it is yet.”

“
There’s a condition.” And
with that my smile faded. “I need a favor from you first. A big
one.”

I was all the way to frown
at this point.
Quid pro quo
had become my whole
modus
operandi
lately. Getting physical with the
werewolf the night before had started an unpleasant domino effect,
and I was starting to feel like the final one was going to fall
right on my head with a thump.

There was an easy way out, and I could have
taken it without hearing another word from Bascom—just call Pixel
and tell her I was done, tell her to sic the dog on me if she had
it in her but that there was just no way I could get that hand
moving with the resources I had. And like an idiot I did no such
thing, just kept the phone right up against my ear and said,
“What’s the favor?”

“
Do you know Drea
Wexler?”

I’d never met the woman, but her name was on
the list of re-animators I’d been poring over for the last few
hours. I decided to play dumb.

“
No. Should I?”

“
She’s in my profession,”
he said a bit coldly.

I knew the type he was talking about. Where
Bascom’s corpses were all legitimately acquired, accurately labeled
and carefully tracked with expiration dates and quality control
guarantees, the stock used by re-animators like Drea Wexler could
come from anywhere and be shipped anywhere when she was done with
them. And while Bascom’s creations were relatively safe for the
people that had to handle them, the creatures that came out of
Wexler’s lab couldn’t be counted on for anything but ferocity, and
the drugs used to sedate them had nowhere near the controlling
power of the milky fluid I’d seen Bascom inject into the zombie
this afternoon. The word was that if you really wanted revenge on
someone, you wouldn’t just kill them; you’d kill them and take the
body to someone like Drea Wexler and hope the resulting monstrosity
ended up as a crash test dummy or the quarry in a canned hunt
outside the city limits.

“
What happened? She moving
in on your territory? Catch her re-animating a hamster?”

I imagined Bascom gritting his teeth, trying
not to yell into the phone. That he was actually restraining
himself, not chewing me out and not hanging up, told me that he
wasn’t entirely in the power position he made himself out to
occupy. Had that been the case, he wouldn’t have needed to put up
with my jabs.

“
Listen,” he finally said
after several seconds, and when he spoke, the words were measured,
deliberate, as though he had to force himself to speak, thinking
about his words one at a time. “She’s had a shipment go astray.
Anything could have happened. We need this contained before anyone
gets hurt. Before she ends up liable for anything.”

I thought I’d throw him another question
while I processed what he’d said. “And what’s it to you? It’s not
your zombies on the loose.”

“
It’s bad for the
profession. We have a hard enough time dealing with regulations and
restrictions and zoning. If one of Drea’s products hurts
somebody…
turns
somebody, you can imagine the outcome.”

“
I see your
point.”

My guess was that Bascom and other high-end
re-animators had kept a steady flow of political contributions
going over the years to keep the city’s power structure from
involving itself in the zombie trade. That might all be gone with a
disaster and some bad press behind it.

“
And you want me to do
what? Run legal interference for her? What makes you think she
hasn’t already got a lawyer?”

“
Because she told me she
hasn’t. She called me as soon as the shipment went
missing.”

I raised an eyebrow at
that. “She called
you,
” I repeated, “not somebody else. Not the police.”

“
We…” he began.

“
Have a past,” I finished
for him. In the silence that followed, I added, “Some pillow talk
you must have had.”

“
Shut up, Ace!” he hissed.
“We need some help here, all right?”

“
So it’s still
we
? You still
together?”

“
No, but…she still means
something to me, all right?”

“
You’re getting me all
misty here, Bascom.”

“
Damn it, Ace!” he yelled.
“Will you just…” He took a breath to calm down. “Do it and I’ll
take care of whatever you were after today.”

“
I’m still
listening.”

“
This isn’t just about
keeping Drea out of court, Ace. We need somebody to actually find
her shipment.”

“
No, no, no,” I said.
“That’s way out of my league. I don’t know the first thing about
wrangling zombies.”

“
You don’t need to wrangle
them. Just find them.”

“
Why don’t you?”

“
I’m not going near those
things.”

I smiled at that in spite of myself. His
reluctance told me more about the quality of his ex-girlfriend’s
product and also about Bascom himself. Deep down, the zombie maker
was a bit of a coward. The thing was, though, that in a situation
like this, anybody would have been, including me.