The inbetween, p.7
The InBetween, page 7
part #1 of Painter Mann Series
But if karma’s a thing, then there’s no use in stacking the deck against yourself. The world’s tough enough as it is. Even the afterworld.
Crossing through Wisconsin, I could’ve kept skating on the interstate, but it goes through some towns that are more populated, so I opted instead to cut across a series of lakes. It’s quicker, and there’s that bit of a drip charge across water. They’re also kinda pretty, especially at night.
However, you gotta cross a half dozen streets between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona in what my sixth-grade teacher learned me was an isthmus. It’s a strip of land over water between two larger land masses.
A bit like when you first kissed a girl as a kid, you leaned back a few inches and, blechy, there was a line of spit between the two of you. That’s kind of like an isthmus.
Now that I think about it, I believe that’s how Mrs. Drake may have explained it to me. Realizing that trying to recall those exact circumstances more clearly was an emotional Pandora’s box, I buried it back down to ignore it so it might continue to do untold psychological damage.
Back to smacking the hell out of the fat guy.
When I’m crossing near populated areas, I stick next to the curb, away from the middle of the street, in case some spook is haunting some moving vehicle. You’re pretty safe at the street side of the curb.
Unless you’ve got a dead mailman named Bernard Grimsby who’s parked himself next to a stone letterbox and is peering into the windows of some woman’s house.
I’d been going at a good clip, so when I smacked into him, I tumbled a half dozen houses down the street, end over end. When I’d got back to check on the guy, I saw he was crying.
Or trying to. Spooks don’t have tear ducts, but you can get a bit splotchy in the face if you’ve been wailing for a little while.
Grimsby was curled up on the ground, knees to his chest, sliding ever so slightly, drifting, and spinning in slow, small circles.
“You all right, man?”
“No,” he said, not yet looking at me. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
Looking toward the house, I saw a woman in a bra and blue jeans close the drapes. “Yeah, you mean peeking into people’s houses? Probably not the best use of your time.”
“No, no,” he said, finally looking at me. His face: very splotchy. Ol’ boy had been bawling his dry eyes out for hours. Maybe longer. “Here! I was sitting in my mail truck dri—uh, sifting through mail, and next minute, wham, I’m sort of tumbling through the street, not feeling a thing.”
“Yeah, you’re dead, dude.”
“I get that! Where is this?” he said then rolled over to face me. “Is this Hell?”
I shook my head and reached over to help him up. “Not yet.”
Bernie slumped back to the ground.
Eventually, he introduced himself and said he’d pretty much been hiding in the bushes the past few days. Never sleeping, never getting hungry, and avoiding everybody. He didn’t know what to do.
“Painter Mann,” I said, extending my hand. “My caseload is quite full, but I expect we can fit you in.”
He stared at my pulsing hand. My entire body was probably undulating with light since smacking into him. For the moment, I kept to myself that the fact my energy was nearly tipping past the FULL line had a little to do with why he was now on a quarter tank.
No use in confusing the guy.
Putting my hand back at my side, I said, “I’m the world’s only dead private investigator.”
“You got a job? In the afterlife?”
“Self-employed.”
“Do—do you like it?”
“Ah, the hours are good, but my boss is a dick.”
Nuthin’. Not even a smile from the guy. Maybe I hit him harder than I thought.
I needed to get back on the road, but I took a few moments to get Bernie up to speed. I ended with the reason why he’d gotten snared in the InBetween.
His mouth hung open for a moment. He repeated, “Murdered?”
“Yes, that’s usually what does it,” I said then sat down next to him. “But the caveat is if your killer is caught—or at least revealed—then you can move on. It sets the balance right or something.”
He stared straight ahead as a car rolled down the street. For a moment, he just watched as the lights grew bigger and bigger. I slid myself toward the curb as it roared past, running right through Bernard Grimsby.
“Somebody murdered me.”
I moved back.
He then slowly turned and looked over his shoulder at the car that had driven through him. “You can see everything. Flashes of fluid, pistons, the driver’s kneecap.”
“Yeah.”
“At least, I hope it was the guy’s kneecap.”
“Yeah, that’s why I sort of avoid ghosting through stuff,” I said and helped him back up. “It can be unsettling.”
He walked toward a house, his feet not exactly going in the direction he was heading. He looked down, saw this, and once again began to sob.
“It’s all so confusing,” he said. “You can help me?”
“I’ll try.”
Bernard led me a few blocks away from where I’d hit him. Even a few days on, he was still really unsteady on his feet. Think Bambi on the ice. While tripping balls.
I had him gently grab my arm while I skated, and he directed me which way to go. Funny thing, I had faint memories of doing the exact same thing on ice, many years earlier, with my kid sister. She couldn’t skate, so I’d wrap my scarf across my chest and under my armpits so she could pretend she was in a sleigh being pulled by a pony.
For an instant, Bernie even looked like he was enjoying the ride.
When things get too much, sometimes we just need someone else to take the wheel. Even just for a little while.
“Here,” he said, and we slowed near a corner. The curb was high, with squared-off edges. Above us, light spilled down from a street lamp, and the two of us shimmered a little, if only to each other.
I surveyed the scene. I couldn’t stay long, but Madison wasn’t too far out of my way. I could come back in a few days. “Your mail truck was here? On the corner?”
He nodded slowly, and his smile drifted away. On the other side of the curb, a beautiful, lush expanse of lawn rolled up toward a line of shrubs. From the street, you could only see a hint of the home’s eaves, the roof.
I walked around to where I imagined he’d been sitting in his truck. With the windows at the closest house hidden, there were likely no witnesses to what had happened.
“What were you doing at this point? Were you leaning over to the other seat or—?”
“I was drinking,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “Sipping a beer and watching a couple of people walk up the street.”
“Hey, man, no judgments from me. That’s gotta be a tough gig.”
“Yeah. But I sort of loved it.”
I bent down into a bit of a crouched position, but he came over and straightened me out. He said, “The seat was raised up on this carriage of springs. You’re sitting a lot, so it helps the back.” He then looked at me with a blank expression. “And I could see in the windows, you know, to see if people were, you know, home.”
“Uh huh.”
“No judgment, right?”
Standing there, I looked to my left and right as Bernie described how he’d been sipping his beer, then the next moment, a flash in front of his face, he sees this hand and something shiny sticking out of his nose.
“Wait, no,” he said, closing his eyes. “Not shiny. It was dark.”
“Like dirty or painted—”
“No, not… it was metal, so it was, like, rusted.”
I put my finger to my scalp and so wished I could give it a good scratch. I said, “Rust ain’t shiny, man. Are you sure th—”
“Hold on, his hand was shiny,” Bernie said. “Really shiny.”
I thought about it for a moment. “The guy who killed you was wearing rings?”
The dead mailman nodded, excited. “Yes, yes.”
“Could you identify any of them?”
He squinched his eyes closed and grunted a little. “No, but I wouldn’t know a class ring from a wedding ring or skull-and-bones ring or any of that. Still, I only saw it for a second,” he said, opening his eyes. “But the guy had a lot of rings on. Like Liberace.”
I put my hands on my hips. “You think you were killed by a dead, gay Las Vegas pianist?”
Grimsby frowned. “You know he was from Wisconsin, right?”
“You weren’t killed by Liberace,” I said and then had a thought. I moved toward the line of bushes on the nearby property.
“I know. Just saying the guy had a lotta rings on.”
There was a steep slope, but it could have been a hiding place. I called back to him, as he stood in the street, glowing under the light, “You said two people were coming toward you.”
“Pushing a stroller.”
“Right,” I said and glided across the line of shrubs. “Wouldn’t they have seen someone walking down the street with all his sparkly rings?”
“They rounded the corner about a minute before…” He stopped and let out a sob. Increasingly, his death was becoming a reality. It’s not easy to accept all your hopes and plans are over. Life always feels like there’s just a little more time, and realizing that ain’t true anymore can be so devastating, if you were still alive it might kill you.
I moved across the row of bushes, which was continuous all the way down the property, up to a driveway. At the blacktop, I looked back.
“That’s a long, long way to get to you,” I said, and he turned toward me. “Especially in the middle of the day when you never know who might come down the street.”
I moved back down the line of shrubs, this time more slowly.
They were perfectly manicured, squared off. You could have put a dinner plate on top of them, and it would have balanced perfectly.
Except for a small patch. It looked different.
“Maybe,” I said, slowing, “he jumped the bushes.” I eyeballed part of the hedge, wishing the streetlight were a bit brighter.
Bernie called up, spinning slowly in place, “Those hedges are kinda high. It would be a bit of a jump.”
My eyes trained on an area about two feet wide. “You’d think you would have heard a thump or something if the guy jumped.”
He was quiet for a moment, then said, “No, Cubbies were playing on the east coast, so I had the ball game on.”
Then I saw it. And, in fact, it was only because the streetlight hadn’t been brighter that I did.
“Holy shit, man,” I said and moved back a little from the line of bushes. “Oh Jesus, I don’t even know what to do with…” My voice trailed off.
“What is it?”
I jumped and yelped, not realizing that Bernie had slid up. His phlegmy voice terrified the bejesus out of me, just for an instant. “Whoa!”
“What?” he shouted back and began to slide quickly down the hill, his arms flailing in all directions. I grabbed his wrist and held him steady.
“Don’t sneak up on a guy!” I said then pulled him toward the part of the bush that had been damaged. “You see that?”
“No.”
“Look closer, man.”
He moved in and pointed out the area I’d seen, too. About a dozen tiny leaves of the shrub had been sheared off.
“So the guy hid back here and jumped over,” Bernie said softly. He shuddered. “He’d been waiting for me.”
“Probably,” I said.
“So it was someone… I knew?”
I shook my head. “Not necessarily. If the guy wanted something you had or was ripping off your mail truck for, I dunno, Social Security checks—”
“What? No, they stopped mailing those out way back in 2013. It’s all electronic now.”
“Okay, but if he wanted something in your truck, he could have followed you for a day or two to get your pattern down. Then picked where he wanted to, you know, do it.”
Bernie went to straighten up, but I held him steady.
“Look closer,” I said, my voice just above a whisper. “Do you see anything else?”
“Just the broken bits—”
“Come on, Bernie, this is important,” I said, my hand actually shaking a little. “Look and tell me if—”
“Wait,” he said then turned his head from side to side slowly. “Yeah, I think. It’s hard to really—”
“Just tell me.”
“It looks like…” The mailman traced his finger back and forth as he tried to find the words to describe what he was seeing. “It’s… the tiny leaves here, they… they’re like, barely, but they’re a slightly different color.”
He saw it. Same as I did.
“No, man,” I said and put my hands up to my eyes, then looked again. “They’re not a different color. It’s a different luminescence.”
“Uh, is that… isn’t that kinda the same thing?”
“No, no,” I said and looked up and down the hedge to see if I saw any other trace of it. “You know, as a kid, you ever catch lightning bugs in a jar or in your hand?”
“Sure, my parents took me out to a camp every summer. Dumped me there for two months,” he said with a heaviness that told me somebody coulda used some serious couch time back in his livin' days. “Some of the kids would go out at night and catch ’em.”
“You ever smash one by mistake?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “It was kinda gross, right? That glow-in-the-dark goo would be on your hand, then you’d wipe it on your jeans, and it would smear across your pant leg.”
Slowly, I nodded and looked at him. “Right. Just like that.”
He swallowed hard then said, “Oh my god, you think a big lightning bug dressed as a man killed me? As payback for all them bugs I squashed wh—”
“No, Bernie.”
“Whoa! Those weren’t shiny rings, then, those were hundreds of tiny lightning bugs, thousands, that came to get their revenge—”
“NO, man!” I said, and seriously considered slapping the guy, but I’d hit him pretty hard once already. “You weren’t killed by a swarm of vengeful, undead lightning bugs dressed as a dude.”
“Then what?”
I told him the truth. “I don’t exactly know yet.” Mostly the truth.
“So how do you go about investigating my murder?”
I glanced up toward the southeast. It was time for me to get going. I had unfinished business back in Minneapolis. I said, “I got to get back home, but I’ll swing on by within the week.”
“A week!”
“Or sooner,” I said. “I’ve got some ideas. Let me work this out.”
Bernie told me where he’d been lurking, haunting, the past few days, and I promised to get back as soon as possible. I headed out a bit slow at first, but thanks to Bernie, I had picked up a bunch of energy. Soon I reached Lake Monona, a quick hop over land to Lake Waubesa, then on toward Chicago. From there, I’d head north up Lake Michigan, then cut across.
It was only when I’d gotten to Interstate 90 that I let myself reflect on what I’d seen.
That faint luminescence on the bush made no sense, but he’d seen it like I had. It was leftover energy.
Just like how those thug spooks tracked me in the alley, using juice leaves a sort of residue. It usually fades after a few minutes or hours. But if we were looking at where the mailman’s killer had hopped the bushes, that was days ago! To leave that much behind? That would have had to come from a spook who was bursting, gushing with energy as if it was coming outta their pores.
The problem, of course, is that spooks can’t kill the living. Nor can we wear shiny rings like Liberace.
Whatever this was, it was something new.
Chapter Eleven
It had been a level of despair the Butterfly never thought possible.
Beyond sorrow, beyond anguish, beyond misery. The one saving grace—a term that bent her lips into a bitter smile—was that the pain was so terrible, so complete, that she felt almost detached from her body. Observing from the outside, looking in.
But she didn’t have a body, so what was left now wandering the dark streets of the city?
“This must be Hell,” she said, then flinched when a set of dreary eyes looked up from a heap of discarded clothes next to the doorway of a closed-up shop. She kept walking, and the milk-yellow eyes slowly faded out of sight again.
I’m dead.
Since leaving the old apartment, she’d become more and more comfortable with the phrase. It was beginning to feel more hers.
After wandering the city the first time, she had found the smallest bit of solace back home—the dimmest of stars in a dark, swallowing expanse of sky. But it wasn’t her home anymore. Now it was just his home. And in some way, she was still there. Her fiancé was still living with the memory of her, the digital frame a constant reminder of what he’d lost.
Over and over, the CCTV footage from that night outside their apartment played in her head. Hunched over, she ambled through the darkness, gripping her stomach, wincing. Then she had a realization.
Even before the second trial had begun (that little boy! Christ, Christ, Christ, the look of horror on the faces of his family in the courtroom!), she’d “paid her debt to society” with her life. But she had an outstanding debt.
Would he still be on that road? What kind of parents let their kids sneak out at night? For what? Chips and a drink at three in the morning. Where does a seven-year-old even get money?
Would the dead boy be at his home even now, pleading to his parents, silently screaming, distraught that they would not answer? Horrified that they were ignoring their beautiful boy. Didn’t they know he was there?
Her attorney had argued that the Audi’s dent could have been the result of hitting an animal. A dead dog had been found on the side of the road, and despite that discovery being some four blocks in the other direction, there had been a chance, it could be—
No, no! I don’t get that!
She didn’t deserve the false hope. No one had believed the possibility anyhow. No one except for one poor, gullible sap in the first trial who wouldn’t budge. Hung jury.
