Through the Grey, page 10
Tucker fishes the flask from his pocket and listens to it slosh—nearly empty, but not quite. He unscrews the cap, pours a tot into it, and hands it to Jen. He raises the flask in an ironic toast. “Well… here's to us.”
“Yeah,” Jen says. “Freezing to death.”
And the snow begins to fall.
4
CHEMOTHERAPY
A GREYWALKER STORY
My would-be client started off by standing in the door, his face and front sticking out of its surface like Han Solo out of carbonite. His puff of white hair looked like laundry lint arrested in its earthward-drift by something sticky on the door’s inside panel. He wasn’t quite looking at me. In fact, he was dead, which made getting information out of him a bit tricky.
I knew I didn’t want the case—whatever it was—but it’s often easier to say yes to the dead and inhuman than to say no. They can make persistent pests of themselves, turning up at odd times, knocking on the walls, and being general pains in my backside if I refuse. I’m the only PI in Seattle—possibly the only one anywhere—who can operate in their world as well as the normal one, and they all seem to know it.
“They killed me.” His voice quavered with distress and indignation. “They killed me.”
I nodded. “All right. Why don’t you take a seat, give me some details, and I’ll see what I can do for you?” I suggested, but he just continued on the same complaint.
I rolled my eyes in disgust: a repeater. Ghosts come in a lot of varieties, from the ephemeral wisps and harmless unexplained cold spots in the hall, to wraiths and revenants—conscious and alive in all but body. Repeaters have limited consciousness, looping through thoughts or events left over from their lives again and again. They’re difficult clients; not very helpful if I can’t knock them off their loop, and they never pay.
I tried another tack. “Who are you?” I demanded. “What’s your name? Who killed you?” Questing ghosts often respond to offers of help or requests for information, but not this one—he just kept blithering.
I heaved a sigh and got up to lock the door. I’d have to conduct this interview in the Grey if I were to get anything useful out of him, and I’d need assured privacy to do that. I didn’t want any casual clients to freak out if they dropped by.
Working in the Grey—the slippery overlap between the normal and the paranormal realms—is exhausting for a naturalized citizen like me, though it’s native country for ghosts and such. Most people ignore the odd flicker in the corner of the eye, but I tend to go a bit ghostly when I sink into the Grey, and I appear to be talking to or dancing with wisps of light and darkness. That can be unsettling.
I had to stick my hand into the ghost’s left arm to reach the deadbolt. A shock of cold electricity ripped up my forearm and plucked a profound chord on my ribs. I stifled the urge to gag and flicked the latch over, pulling my hand back as fast as I could. Greywalking got easier with time, but it didn’t get more pleasant.
The ghost jerked and stared down at his arm where I’d intersected it. Then the moment of volition ended and his gaze de-focused again.
I rubbed my now-aching elbow, then took a deep breath, and let go of my hold on the normal world.
The cold, unraveling feeling starts in my chest now. When all this began, there was a curtain between me and the Grey and I’d have to go through it. Now I just let go, and the Grey wells up around me, but the feeling of it starts at the knot of Grey-stuff that had been rammed into my chest way back at the beginning.
The Grey power grid snapped into view: bright, hot lines limning the dark world in neon. The ghost in front of me was just a hazy mess afloat in a blazing wire-frame world. I’d sunk a bit too far, too fast. I concentrated on it, and the world became an icy overlap of misty images on top of images—time and place stacked on each other like overlapping film projections. It was noisy with whispering and clanging that had nothing to do with anything I could see. And cold that stank, suddenly, of disinfectant over persistent mold and old death.
In this mist-world, I found myself face-to-face with a black man in his late sixties or so. He was well-dressed in a suit he’d probably bought at Nordstrom and worn often to some office job—his residual concept of himself, complete with a memory of aftershave. He was a little stooped at the shoulder, but was still a tall guy.
“Hi,” I said.
He blinked at me and looked me over as if I were the ethereal one. “They killed me…”
“So you said. How ’bout you come all the way in and sit down, and you can tell me why I should give a damn.”
He didn’t move. “You’re certainly rude enough for the job, young woman.”
At least he’d gotten off his loop, though the tenor of the comment could have been nicer. I took half a step back before trudging across the misty floor to sit down in the gleaming shape of my desk chair. “I’m the only game in town. So get to it, or go away.”
In the Grey overlap of the room’s past and present, ghosts of long-gone furniture stood among the shadows of the current stuff, some sticking out of the living fog of the walls, and no more substantial than my potential client. He finally came in and seated himself in one of the missing chairs—a Scandinavian memory from some late-80s incarnation of my office space. But then he stopped. At that speed, it was a miracle he’d gotten to me at all. I had to lean over the desk and poke him—literally—to get his attention again.
“They killed—”
“Yes,” I interrupted, nodding. “OK. What’s your name?”
“Francis de Fayette Parker.”
“And you believe you were murdered?”
“My family killed me like a dog in the pound.”
You can’t count on ghosts to tell the truth, or even to know what it is. Death doesn’t impart wisdom. Or common sense. “Who in particular?” I asked. “Which of your dearly beloved did the dirty deed?”
“They killed me.”
I sighed. “And what do you expect me to do about it?”
“Stop it!”
I leaned forward and braced my arms on the unseen surface of my desk. I was tired already. “Bit late, Mr. Parker. You’re dead.”
He glared through me. “They killed me! They killed me! Stop it!”
Damn, damn, damn. Looping again. I was tempted to hit him, but it’s not easy to smack someone who’s only sort of there. I get lucky, sometimes, but it’s not a sure thing, and touching ghosts isn’t pleasant. The dead press into me as much as I into them, and they bring along whatever emotional and physical turmoil they’re still carrying around. And the dead part is just nasty.
Attempting to be both alive and dead at the same time is life- and sanity-threatening. This wouldn’t be a problem if every even-remotely conscious dead and undead thing west of the Cascades didn’t drift in and play hob with my life whenever the fancy took them. Plenty of live ones have a go, too.
I watched Francis Parker chant for a moment. He was a wreck, for a ghost: short trigger radius, short loop, low energy. He seemed to have retained his intelligence, but only by some on-again-off-again act of will. Must have been hell—like being a paralysis victim who retained a fine mind, but could only blink to express it.
That decided me.
“Parker!” I yelled at him. “Frank!”
He went on.
I braced myself and snatched at his wrist.
It felt as if he’d punched me in the gut. He flooded into me on a rip curl of chill, sucking my breath out, and cracking me open. Gasping, airless, burning from the inside, ice-sheeted skin, crumble-boned in toxin-wracked flesh.
His eyes flared into incandescence and glared into me, breaking the loop. My body resonated with his voice. Poison! It burned into us, through the age, and the illness, and the exhaustion.
I tore myself loose like leaving skin behind on a hot stove. I swallowed convulsively and caught my breath as I kept my distance.
Parker stared at me, his eyes as bright and alive as if he still wore flesh. Then the dulling started.
I couldn’t just let him go. “When did you die?” I demanded. “I’ll find out what happened, but give me a place to start.”
“Feb’wa…” The left corner of his mouth turned up as he slipped into a seam in the mist.
I ripped my way out of the Grey and slumped at my desk, shivering and uneasy. There was something more than usually strange about Frank Parker.
I headed up the hill to the County Records Office to dig up Parker’s death certificate. I finally found him in February about two years earlier. He’d died at seventy-two, of complications related to cancer and his chemotherapy. This didn’t look like a murder, but the corpse was convinced. Maybe he’d believed his pain pills or chemo were meant to kill him. I’d have to poke around, if I was going to get him off my back. I took notes for follow-up, then made a phone call.
Detective Solis answered his own phone. His Colombian accent puts the emphasis on the second syllable: “Sol-EES.”
“Hey, it’s Harper Blaine. Can you answer a question for me?”
“Maybe.” The noises in the background sounded like the Criminal Investigations office in the black-glass Justice Center a few blocks away. I imagined he was hunching the old phone into his shoulder as he transcribed from one of his scribbled notepads, a frown creasing his round, pock-marked face.
“First, was there ever any kind of homicide investigation into the death of a man named Francis de Fayette Parker in February about two years ago?”
He paused before replying, “None I see here.”
“And what would be required to open one?”
“On a two-year-old non-suspicious death? Strong evidence. Maybe a confession, medical report, some physical evidence. Otherwise, we’re too busy here.”
“What about an autopsy?”
“You have a suspicious report?”
“Nope. Death was while under doctor’s care. No autopsy.”
“Then you need an exhumation—if you got a body. If you got ashes, you’re probably out of luck. But you need evidence to convince the M.E. to issue the exhumation order.”
“That’s nicely circular.”
“Eh. Nine times outta ten on a cold homicide, the perpetrator confesses as soon as we show the badge. Most people, they can’t live with the guilt. You get a confession, you can get an exhumation to confirm it.”
So, I’d have to solve the case to prove that there was one. Or not. I did not bless Frank Parker for bringing his death to me.
Seattle has a reputation for cancer treatment, but there are still only a handful of hospitals doing long-term care. The doctor’s name was on the death certificate, so it didn’t take long to find out where he was working and make an appointment to see him. Parker’s oncologist didn’t remember him, particularly. He was in a hurry, and aside from confirming the cause of death, he had nothing to say.
The hospice Frank Parker had died in was just down the street from the oncologist’s office. I walked there and had to steel myself against the brush of ghosts and streamers of emotional residue that hung the walls and fluttered past me like rotting drapes as I entered. The dull-white building hummed with fear, pain, and despair amid the odor of chilled flowers, bland food, and cleaning fluid.
I asked around until I found a nurse who’d been there when Parker was a patient and was willing to talk—up to a point. She wasn’t any less tired or harried than the doctor, so I suspected she was using me as an excuse to sit down for a little while. She paid no attention to the swirling fog of switched-off lives that flowed through the place as if it were an oxbow in the stream of the afterlife.
“I can’t tell you anything about the patient’s condition or care. Only that two sons and a daughter-in-law came around a few times. They all seemed nice,” she said, her aura a thin smog of exhaustion around her. Her face creased with thought, then she smiled, a momentary blush passing through the dull color of her energy corona. “The couple had a toddler with them once or twice. Rambunctious little thing. Sad way to see grandpa, though. Hmm. There’s a note in here about the unmarried son carrying in a gun, once. We asked him not to come back, but we didn’t enforce it.”
“A gun?” I asked. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? Probably just a punk acting tough.”
“Did anyone else visit Parker, volunteers, friends from church?”
The transitory color around her died. “No. We do have a few volunteers, but… They call this Death Row, y’know. Every patient here’s gonna leave in a bag. It’s kinda depressing for the kids, so they bring us coffee and drop things off, read to some of the more lucid patients, but they always keep it short. The older volunteers are better, but even they don’t linger.”
That was sad, but it didn’t help me figure out what was driving Frank Parker out of his grave. “Were any of the family here when Parker died?” I inquired.
“They all were,” she said. That didn’t make it any easier for me, since it didn’t narrow the field of suspects.
Maybe motive would be more enlightening. “What was Parker like—was he an easy patient?”
“I really don’t remember,” the nurse replied, shaking her head in an off-hand manner, little green spikes of dishonesty dashing away from her and into the darkness that lurked at the corners of the room. “At that stage, they’re usually in pain most of the time, on a morphine drip. I think he had bad reactions to chemo: nausea, pain, rash, vomiting, headaches, hair loss. He had fever a few times, was too weak to move himself, needed a lot of help. The family pitched in a lot.”
“Could his symptoms have been poisoning?”
She looked bemused. “That’s what most chemotherapy is—calibrated doses of potentially toxic substances to kill off the cancer, but not enough to kill off too many healthy cells. All drugs are potential poisons, and a lot of the drugs we use are heavy metals in the same broad family as arsenic and so on. Toxicity is all about dosage. Chemo is low-dose. Poison is high-dose. And morphine only reduces the pain, so once they’re at that stage, we’re just waiting it out.”
She made a face that hardened into a shell of professional distance, her aura going darker and colder before she went on, “Let’s be real. This place is the bargain basement of oncology. We’re not going to work any miracles in a county facility with no research funds and patients who are at the end of their insurance money. We do our best, but everyone knows this is the last stop, and if we let every patient into our hearts, we’ll go crazy. We can’t let ourselves love them or become angels to the family. Some nurses do weird things when they think they’ll be loved for this. The family can be just as bad. We can’t let that happen, for all our sakes. It’s bad enough knowing that some of these guys could go just a little easier, but we don’t have the legal option to let patients opt out of life. If you think that makes me cruel…well we’re the cruelest bunch of stone-hearted monsters you’re ever going to meet.”
She colored under a sudden red flush of impotent anger, and stood up. “I have to get back to work.”
“Just one more question,” I said. “Do your patients ever…get a little help out of here from their families or friends?”
Her eyes narrowed to wary slits, colors flickering in her energy corona like suspicious satellites reflecting distant suns. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Afraid of cracking that stone heart of yours?”
With a snort, she turned her shoulder to me and began stalking down the hall, the colors around her form shifting to the hue of a dark green sea. “I bleed gravel.”
I shook my head and left the hospice. I already knew about Parker’s family from the death certificate and obit files: two sons, a daughter-in-law, a grandchild. If he’d been poisoned, it would have to have been one of them. The grandchild was out, being a mere toddler at the time and not likely to have slipped something clever into grandpa’s medication cup. I’d have to talk to the sons.
I put in another call to Solis. My mysterious leads had paid off for him in the past, so he reluctantly agreed to meet me at the address I provided. But he didn’t like it and he said he’d be late. That was fine with me.
I used my cell phone to call ahead. Daniel Parker, Frank Parker’s younger son, was just as reluctant to talk to me as the doctor, but he agreed, since I was nearly on his doorstep. He let me in when I arrived.
Daniel was about thirty and had the trim, quick wariness of a feral cat, and a dark, old scar down the length of his left temple and cheek. He had a curious yellow-orange light around him as he ushered me in with a finger to his lips. “Tanika just fell asleep. Today’s been rough, so can we keep this quick and quiet?” I guessed the color of his aura was anxiety over something that wasn’t just me.
“Sure,” I said, following him into a tiny home office lined with heavy tomes and stacks of discarded bar-review guides, files, and scribbled yellow pads. “Is Tanika your daughter?”
“Niece,” he said over his shoulder as he closed the door behind us. He took a seat near me. “She’s been sick a while. Been a rough couple years for all of us, y’know, with dad and all. What did you want to ask me about him, anyway?”
“I wanted to ask you about what happened at the hospice.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Man, that was two years ago. Who’d make a big deal out of that now?”
I just kept my mouth shut and my eyes level on his face.
He dropped his gaze and rubbed one finger nervously over his scar. “Look, I was a stupid kid, I ran with the wrong guys. It was hard, but I was trying to get out. Studying for my bar exam. But some of those guys…they don’t let go easy. They kept showing up. The gun was the only way I thought I could be safe, then. I wasn’t gonna shoot anybody. I just wanted to be left alone. If it comes up now, I could be disbarred. But it was nothing. Nothing happened. Why ruin my life over that?”
A thin scraping sound moved down the corridor outside.
