collected himself into a ball and began rocking back and forth, knees hugged tight to his chest. His eyes were fixed on a spot on the floor six inches in front of his shoes, and he was muttering something to himself, though what it was, I couldn’t hear. A prayer, I suppose, if he were so inclined. Or it coulda been a grocery list.
“The hell’s the matter with
“Cut him some slack,” I said. “Poor bastard’s had two corpses get up off his table in as many days.”
“Well, then, you’d think he’d be getting used to it by now.”
I approached Ethan, crouching down beside him and putting a hand on his shoulder. It was a friendly gesture, but he flinched nonetheless. “Listen, Ethan,” I said, in the sort of tone you might use to soothe a frightened child, “you did good. You honored your end of the deal, and now I’m going to honor mine. Me and Gio —er, Mr Frohman —are taking off, and my guess is, you’ll never see either of us again, OK?”
I don’t know if he heard me. I suppose it didn’t matter. I’d said my piece —and besides, once we were out of Ethan’s life, everything would eventually return to what, in the world of a mortician, passed for normal. That was more than you could say for either me or Gio here, a fact that went a long way toward blunting my sympathy and assuaging my guilt.
Gio, for his part, was busy struggling into the jacket of his burial suit —a jacket that, with the proper support, could’ve sheltered a family of four. Once he managed to squeeze himself into it, he sat down to pull on his shoes, grunting with exertion as he tried to reach his feet.
“Jesus, dude, it ain’t that I’m ungrateful for you bringing me back and all, but next time you find me a body, you think I could see something in a medium? I mean this guy’s freakin’
At that last, he tossed his loafer to the floor in sudden fright, the intended end of his sentence forgotten. When the shoe hit the tiles, a fat orange-brown cockroach spilled out of it and skittered under the stainless steel mortuary table. Gio recovered quickly, blushing at his startlement and retrieving his errant loafer. I, on the other hand, did not. At the sight of the cockroach, a chill crawled up the length of my spine as though on spindly insect legs, and a cold sweat broke out across my face and neck.
“Hey, Captain Mumbles,” Gio yelled toward the fetal Ethan, full of false bluster now in compensation for his bout of fear, “what kind of funeral home are you runnin’ anyway? I mean, I know you keep dead bodies and shit in here, but can’t you fucking
“Leave him alone,” I said, my voice thin and tinny to my ears. “The roach wasn’t his fault. You want to blame somebody, you’re going to have to take it up with me.”
Gio balked at my admonition, wheeling toward me with an eye-roll and a derisive snort. “What, you moonlighting as his housekeeper?”
“Francis,” I said, my voice dripping quiet menace, “I’m telling you to drop it.”
Something in my tone must’ve convinced him, because the predatory smile that his chiding of Ethan had brought to his face faltered, and then disappeared altogether. He followed my gaze to the spot where the cockroach had disappeared from sight and stared at it with an expression like clouds gathering. “So that thing,” he said, his words devoid now of all humor, “it’s like some kinda bad guy or something?”
I shook my head, though my eyes never left the shadowy underside of the mortuary slab. “More like some kind of sign,” I replied.
“OK, then, a sign. But a sign of
“A sign we’re running out of time.”
“Get your things,” I said, “we’re going.”
“Everything I got in the world right now, I’m wearing. Where the hell we going?”
I drew my thumb and forefinger across my lips as if to zip them, and then nodded toward the door, still staring at the spot on the floor where the cockroach had been. Truth be told, I didn’t know if it could understand what we were saying, or whether my reticence would delay my Deliverants’ pursuit either way. What I
Out in the driveway, Gio caught sight of Ethan’s tiny, ancient hatchback. “You’re kidding me, right? I seen Matchbox cars bigger than this thing. No way this dude you stuck me in is gonna fit inside that piece of shit.”
“Yeah, well, he’s going to have to, because it’s all we’ve got.”
He eyed the Fiesta up and down and shook his head in disbelief. I had to admit, the car didn’t look much larger than his Frohman-suit, and its faded blue exterior was flecked with enough rust to make me wonder if it was structurally sound enough to carry him. As we climbed into it, I heard him mutter something about clowns and sardines, but it was kind of hard to hear him over the squeaking of the shocks.
I thumbed the ignition, and nothing happened. I frowned, and tried again. Nothing still. Three tries later, the old girl sprung to life, but I guess my frown stayed put, because Gio clapped me on the shoulder and smiled.
“Hey, man, lighten up! We ain’t neither of us dead yet —we may as well have some fun while we’re here! ’Sides, you and me decked out in a coupla kick-ass suits, hunting down the shit-bag who killed me? We’re like the fucking Blues Brothers, man! We’re on a mission from
I’ll admit, mob stooge or not, I felt sorry for the guy. Poor son of a bitch was wrong on so many counts, I didn’t even know where to start. So I didn’t. Didn’t bother to point out that he and I were dead already, or that if God was the one pulling our strings, He was a supreme deity with one sick sense of humor.
No, I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I shook my head at the damned man’s pointless optimism and threw the Fiesta into reverse, wincing as it labored backward into the quiet suburban street.
9.
The Shady Acres Rest Home was a sprawling clapboard mansion in the southern style, nestled in the sun- scorched Alabama countryside about an hour’s drive from Montgomery. Years of unrelenting heat and humidity had reduced the once-white paint to a blistered patchwork the color of old newspapers, which draped like lace over the ash-gray wood beneath. In the lot beside the building, a few dusty old sedans glinted in the afternoon light —staff, I assumed, because the row of spots marked
I climbed out of the car and felt the hot breath of the Gulf breeze against my cheeks. We’d been driving for going on fifteen hours, Gio and I, our only stop three frantic minutes at a strip-mall in St Louis spent swapping the Fiesta’s plates with a pair from a navy blue VW Rabbit. Gio spent the first few hours of the drive peppering me with inane questions —about my job, my life, about the places I’d been and the people I’d dispatched. He’d also blathered at length about the guys he’d whacked and the scams he’d pulled working for the Family out in Vegas. No doubt he felt some kind of kinship between us, seeing my job as nothing more than the supernatural extension of his own. But it wasn’t —not to me, at least. Unlike Gio, I took no joy in what I did, and God willing, never would. Besides, thanks to Danny, I already had more friends than I could handle —the last thing I needed was another. So I mostly kept quiet, and waited for Gio to talk himself out. Somewhere around Nashville, road-weariness set in, and he lapsed into a sort of drowsy, companionable silence. I’m not gonna lie, I was grateful for the quiet, but if you want to know the whole truth, I was glad to have some company as well. So long as he kept his yap shut, at least.
“So,” Gio said, the Fiesta rocking as he grabbed hold of the oh-shit handle above the passenger seat and hoisted his fat frame out of the car, “you gonna tell me what the hell we’re doing here? Besides sweating to death, that is,” he added, mopping his prodigious brow with his tie.
“We’re here to see an old friend,” I replied.
Gio eyed the nursing home with skepticism. “Exactly how
“Old enough.”
“This dude gonna know where to find the guy who offed me?”
“No, he’s not.”
