Desperate Souls (9 page)

Now
this
is fucked up,
Jake thought, sitting in the interview room.
Who the hell wants to talk to me so bad that they kept me here an extra forty minutes already?

He got his answer when the door opened and a figure from his past entered: Gary Brown from Narcotics, his former partner in SNAP. Jake hadn’t seen him since Sheryl’s funeral.

Now this is a coincidence. Maybe there’s something to all this psychic hooey.

“Hey, Jake,” Gary said, closing the interview room door.

Jake looked his former partner up and down. The detective wore fashionable Italian slacks, a button-down shirt, and a designer tie. He also appeared to have aged ten years in the span of one. “Looks like you’re moving up in the world, Gary.”

Gary sat down. “Eh. It’s good to be a detective, but I’m still in Narcotics. It’s a real shit hole down there, partner. I’d rather be where you’re sitting.”

Jake looked around the interview room. “Really?”

“Working for myself? Hell, yeah.”

I thought you were working for yourself.
Rumors had Gary and his partner, Frank Beck, working overtime for any drug lord looking for muscle. “What, and forego your pension?”

“Maybe you’re right. I just get restless doing the same thing year in and year out. Hey, did you hear I’m working with your
other
ex-partner?”

He’s feeling me out.
“Edgar? No, I hadn’t heard. He’s a good man.”

“Yeah, how about that? Two of your former colleagues pitching for the same team. It’s a small world. You should see the number who’s working with him now. Latin chick, real fine.”

Now Jake had to play along, even if Gary knew better. “What are you guys working together on?”

“Task force on these Machete Murders, only now they have us on Black Magic, too. No telling if anything will come of it. But that’s why I’m here now: gangbangers try to shoot up a citizen; the call goes out to the Task Force to decide whether or not to investigate. I’m on call, and when I saw your name, I just had to see what was doing. Weird, thinking of you as a civilian, pal. You’re still one of us at heart, always will be.”

What, a dirty cop?
Jake had witnessed Gary and Frank in action. They always knew who worked for whom on the street, and they always had their hands out. Jake had managed to steer clear of their operations, but once he’d joined Homicide and started using coke himself, he found himself resorting to their tactics to pay for his habit. In a way, Gary had been his mentor. “I don’t think I can give you much assistance.” Jake repeated the story he had told Geoghegan and the civilian typist.

Chuckling, Gary shook his head. “Come on. Who do you think you’re shitting? I’m onto you, brother. No way in hell Jake Helman is going to get chased by gangbangers from one borough to the next and not know why.”

Jake’s gaze drifted to the two-way mirror opposite him.

“There’s nobody there, and the recorder’s off. It’s just you and me in here, breaking bread.”

“Like I told Geoghegan—”

“Theodore? The man doesn’t know shit. And that’s what his opinion is worth. I know what time of day it is without looking at my watch. You know that. Do me a solid on this, and I’ll remember it.”

Jake interlaced his fingers. “I got nothing to share with you, cousin.”

Gary leaned closer, his eyes intense and jittery. “I need to deliver these cocksuckers.”

Wired,
Jake thought. “Sorry. I don’t know anything about these machete killings.”

“Your client hired you to find her grandson, right? What gang does the kid run with? That’s a good place to start.”

Jake maintained his innocent expression. “I don’t know that he is with a gang. His grandmother just suspects he’s slinging. He could be getting laid for all I know.”

Gary relaxed his features from his mouth up. His jaw remained coke tight. “You’ll call me if you hear anything about this?”

“Sure.”

He reached into his pocket and tossed a card onto the table. “We could work this thing together on the side, just like old times. There could be something extra in it for each one of us.”

“I’m not interested in collaring perps anymore. Those days are behind me.”

Drumming his fingers on the table, Gary said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

As Gary exited the interview room, Geoghegan walked in.

“Am I good to go?” Jake said.

“I’m afraid not.” The detective gestured to someone Jake could not see, and then a balding man in a crisp suit entered, briefcase in hand.

FBI,
Jake guessed.

“When someone attempts to ram One PP, it raises eyebrows outside the department,” Geoghegan said in a mock sympathetic tone. “Allow me to introduce Agent Riley from Homeland Security.”

Fuck me,
Jake thought.

“I’ll try not to keep you too late, Mr. Helman,” Riley said as he set his briefcase on the table and sat down.

“That’s a relief,” Jake said in a deadpan voice.

“The district attorney is sending an ADA over to take a statement, too,” Geoghegan said. Stepping outside the interview room, he closed the door.

When they finally released him, Jake pretended to be afraid to go home because the gangbangers might still be out there, waiting for him. For all he knew, they really were. But he had another reason for coaxing a ride to his office in the backseat of the RPM, and as the squad car pulled out of Park Row, he stared at the reporters gathered outside. Camera strobes and video lights spotlighted the wreckage of his former car. He’d managed to keep his picture out of the paper, which was always a good thing.

As the car drove uptown, the uniformed driver oblivious to what had occurred, Jake catalogued the night’s incidents. His would-be assassin’s soul had risen from his body. Did that mean it had been trapped inside the cadaver? He experienced a sick feeling of déjà vu, and yet this latest brush with the impossible seemed entirely different from those he had endured in the Tower and completely unrelated.

When the PO dropped him off on Twenty-third Street and drove away, Jake cast his eyes upward at the imposing, self-illuminated structure that haunted his dreams. Unlocking the front glass door, he entered the lit lobby, unlocked the alarm box on the wall with a key, punched in his code, and locked the door from the inside. Bypassing the stairs this time, he took the elevator to the fourth floor. With his footsteps echoing in the hallway, he glanced over his shoulder as he approached his office door, spooked for the first time since he had moved in.

I’m all alone,
he thought.
Except maybe for Laurel on the first floor.
But he considered the storefront a separate building.

Flicking on the overhead light in his office, he closed and locked the door. He entered the kitchenette, removed a Diet Coke from the miniature refrigerator, and entered his office. He popped the tab on the can, sipped the soda, then set the can down on his desk and stepped over to the immense safe in the far corner. The iron cube was two and a half feet by two and a half feet. Too large and heavy to move without a hydraulic lift, it came with the office and remained a permanent fixture. Jake had hired three different locksmiths to install three combination locks, with none of them knowing the other combinations.

Crouching on one knee, he dialed the combinations and twisted the heavy brass levers. The safe door swung open with a metallic groan, and Jake gazed inside at the safe’s contents. On a shelf that divided the safe’s height in half, a DVD-R in a jewel case lay upon a laptop, which rested beside a file folder. Jake removed the jewel case and the laptop, then closed the safe door but left it unlocked. Then he sat behind his desk and affixed a fully charged battery pack to the laptop. Ignoring the flat-screen monitor on his desk, he inserted the DVD-R into the laptop.

He did not have a wireless router for the laptop or an Internet hookup. The compact computer existed solely for the DVD-R. Jake made sure that no one could ever hack into this isolated system. He needed to ensure that the DVD-R’s contents were known only to him. When the disc loaded, he downloaded the program and waited.

Afterlife,
he thought.

An animated globe rotated into view on the monitor. A DNA strand enveloped it. Then gleaming gold text filled the screen: Tower International—Building Better Life. Jake hadn’t seen these images since the week he spent working as Nicholas Tower’s director of security at the Tower. He had been too frightened to view the contents of the download again. When the animated introduction ended, a main page appeared. The table of contents was so long that it more resembled an index found in the back of a research book. Jake went straight to the search engine and typed in a single word:
zombie.

A moment later, a section of the dense file opened, one of several hundred reports Tower had commissioned on the supernatural during his quest for immortality. The names of four researchers appeared at the top of the report: Dr. Donna Bidel, Ramera Evans, Professor Blake Carlton, and Javier Soueza. Jake copied the names down on a notepad, then scrolled through the 112-page document, including photos, illustrations, a glossary, and a bibliography. Sipping his Diet Coke for an infusion of caffeine, he returned to the beginning of the section and read it straight through to the end.

Zombies, or reanimated human corpses, exist in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief system of vodou, which depicts living people enslaved by powerful sorcerers. The word
zombie
entered English usage sometime in 1871. The beliefs that zombies eat human flesh and that they can be destroyed only by destroying their brains are cinematic devices created by George A. Romero and his co-screenwriter, John Russo, in the 1968 film
Night of the Living Dead
and have no basis in true vodou. A more accurate portrayal of zombies appeared decades earlier in the 1932 film
White Zombie,
which starred Bela Lugosi as “Murder” Legendre, a mill owner with an undead labor force.

Jake scanned a glossary of terms related to the research data.

Bokor:
a vodou sorcerer or sorceress who revives a dead person as an enslaved zonbi.