Fatal Secrets Read online

  Yup. I had been a janitor, after my original careers proved too dangerous and before I was murdered. You wouldn’t think that janitor work was a hazardous profession, but you never know what you find while taking out the trash.

  “Oh no.” I closed my eyes and groaned. “Not good.”

  “You’re right it’s not good,” Faye complained with a pout. “There’s not one mention of me and how I saved Lee from those killer cowboys.” The air around her sizzled as she flung the newspaper onto the floor.

  “I was reading that,” Shadow said, his voice low, smooth and dangerously dark.

  I opened my eyes and wondered for the umpteenth time what made Shadow seem so lethal. He was the youngest looking one of the bunch of us, apart from Faye. He could’ve passed for a recently graduated high school student, if he wasn’t dead and if you didn’t look into his glittering eyes. His eyes always carried a threat even when he was laughing. Especially when he was laughing.

  He wasn’t a poltergeist, like Faye. He wasn’t even trying to learn poltergeist skills, like I was. Yet I knew which ghost I didn’t want to piss off. I’d rather go to the site of a murder and face down the slow moving, dim-witted deathmark left behind by the murdered person than get on Shadow’s bad side.

  Faye Random hadn’t figured that out yet. Or maybe she liked danger. Or maybe this was her idea of getting his attention. Bad idea.

  “Why don’t you ask your famous Axe Cooper to pick it up?” Faye snapped back, the sneer on her face ruining the pretty, cute girl look she usually had going.

  Shadow shifted around to face Faye, his movements calm, the way a predator eases through the grass towards its prey. Darkness pooled around him, a cloak that matched his black wardrobe and charcoal skin. He’d started doing that little trick recently, summoning a dark cloud out of nothing. I wondered if it was a new skill he was working on or something he’d hidden from us before.

  “Okay, children, enough of that pettifogging,” Lee commanded as she carefully placed a tray with a small pot of Chinese tea onto the table.

  “Pet a frog?” Shadow asked, smirking. He turned his back to Faye.

  “Must be her word of the week,” I commented.

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “It means bickering over unimportant matters. So stop pettifogging.” She flopped down beside me in a flurry of black fabric, her Kung Fu suit shiny against the worn fabric of the sofa. She stared at us with that stare that always reminded me of something between a dentist’s drill and a jackhammer. “Or I’ll call in a priest to conduct an exorcism.”

  “You’re no fun,” I said, studying her outfit. I had once seen her closet. She only had three outfits hanging in there, all of them identical black Kung Fu suits. I focused on the wide sleeve of her Chinese pyjamas, making it flap around while I practiced my poltergeisting.

  Faye flitted away. “I know where I’m not wanted,” she said grandly, and flounced through the wall. Bob murmured something that sounded like ‘Good night’ except fancier, and followed her.

  I stopped bothering Lee and gazed out the window as Faye and Bob darted off, heading towards the office of The Ghost Post. The apartment seemed a lot roomier and quieter with Faye gone. I smiled, until I saw the newspaper on the floor. It reminded me this was no smiling matter. My name was now public. People I’d deserted over three years ago would be reminded of my existence.

  I didn’t want anyone remembering my existence.

  Especially since I was forgetting things. Just like I’d been warned by those two freaks with wings. All earthbound ghosts lose their memory sooner or later, unless they figure out whatever it is they need to figure out, so they can move on. Having people remembering me, coming to find me, would just complicate my already complicated death / life.

  And then there was the coincidence. I’m always highly suspicious of those things. The day before seeing my name splashed through a front-page news article, I’d read a story about a couple colleagues of mine, friends of sorts from before I was a janitor, when I was engaged in a more hazardous career path.

  I hadn’t expected Jacob Lincoln to still be alive, and I knew for a fact that Amos Lincoln wasn’t. I remember burying him. Can’t remember why or how he’d died, but I distinctly remember digging his hastily chosen grave in Dead Man’s Flats. And nothing more. Although I had a nagging feeling that I was somehow involved in his demise.

  Yup. I was loosing my mind. Literally.

  Jacob and Amos. Yeah, their parents had been pretty ambitious with the biblical names. Too bad it hadn’t helped those kids out. Amos was dead and Jacob would soon be too if he really had agreed to provide testimony against his employer.

  The coincidence part? Jacob’s employer had been my employer until my pre-janitorial career path had taken a rather unfortunate turn for the worst. As a ghost, I didn’t have a stomach that could clench up, but I still felt like I did.

  “Why isn’t it a good thing?” Shadow asked, his dark eyes still sparking. Bad news had that effect on him, making him as close to happy as he could get.

  I shrugged, wishing he would follow Faye’s example and leave. Lee and I needed to talk. “Nothing.”

  Lee scoffed. “Tell him.”

  Shadow leaned in, eyes gleaming. “Tell me what?”

  “Nothing.” My jaw tightened and I crossed my arms. I didn’t flinch or look away from Shadow’s penetrating stare. I’d faced down thugs back when I was alive and had something to lose, like my life. True, none of those thugs were anything like Shadow, but whatever. No way was I backing down, especially since I was already dead.

  “Unless you can read minds, Shadow,” Lee said dryly, “you have better luck finding a winning Lotto ticket in a Chinese fortune cookie than getting Axe Cooper to talk.”

  “He’s that stubborn?” Shadow murmured, his eyes unblinking.

  “Oh, yes,” Lee said, flicking her long black braid over the back of the sofa.

  “I’m sitting right here,” I grumbled. “Don’t talk over my head like I’m not.”

  “The way you’re slouching, we have no choice but to talk over your head,” Lee shot back with a straight face and a straighter back. She should’ve been a trainer for the army.

  Shadow chuckled. It was not a happy sound.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” I said, in a tone that would’ve shut most people up. Shadow and Lee weren’t ‘most people’. I guess that’s why they’re my friends, but I kinda wish they’d act normal once in a while and be intimidated by me, or at least leave me alone when I clearly didn’t want to get into a show and tell session.

  “Fine,” Shadow said softly, his eyes full of a malevolent ‘not fine’ gleam. “Keep your secrets for now.” He leaned close until he was way too up close and personal for my liking, and lowered his voice. “I’m pretty good at extracting secrets.”

  “Guess you were a dentist back in the day, eh? So, how’re the plans for the retirement party going?” I asked, floating up slightly and turning to face Lee.

  Lee gazed up at the ceiling. “Plans are going just fine, Axe. It would’ve been great if you were…” She paused and tapped a slim finger against her pursed lips. “I don’t know, maybe alive? So you could help me, you know?”

  “Yup,” I agreed, my manner mild but my eyes were storm clouds. At least, that’s how Lee described them when I was irritated: storm clouds and beware the lightening bolts. “Being murdered kinda messed up my plans too.”

  “Death can be inconvenient,” Shadow smirked as he floated towards a corner of the room. “Good night, Lee.” His voice echoed around us as his form dissolved into the shadows.

  “Now that’s a neat skill,” Lee commented. “Why can’t you do that, Cooper?”

  “Forget the parlour tricks,” I said, putting on my grimmest expression. I needed her to take me seriously. Being twenty years my senior, she sometimes went all maternal and patronising on me. Apart from annoying the hell out of me, it would make what I had to tell her sound juvenile in her mind. “This is bad.
You know what that article might mean?”

  Lee sighed. “Axe Cooper, you worry too much.”

  Yup, there goes the whole maternal, patronising, I-am-your-wise-elder-and-Kung-Fu-master tone. Great.

  “It states quite clearly, in black and white and read all over, that… You. Are. Dead. I believe,” and she scooped up the paper to peer at it. Without her glasses, she had to peer really closely. “Yes, here it is: ‘Axe Cooper, the recently murdered janitor’. And again, further down: ‘Axe Cooper was gunned down on the orders of CEO Perkins, and died immediately.’ And blah blah about the investigation into several related murders and huge financial fraud.”

  She slapped the paper down onto the coffee table and stared at me, her thin black eyebrows arching over her narrow dark eyes. “You’re dead. Even if they read this paper all the way out in Calgary, the message is that you’re history.”

  I shook my head. “Calgary isn’t that far away. And that’s not the message they’ll get.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I’ve done this before.”

  Lee laughed. “Done what before? Been murdered?”

  “Nope.” I hesitated and looked at the corner where Shadow had vanished. Lee knew more than anyone else about me, about my past. But there were still a few things I’d kept to myself. Okay, there was a lot I kept to myself. Like this: “I pretended to be.”

  Rubbing her ears, Lee leaned back into the sofa, her eyes as wide as they could get for a Chinese lady. “Come again?”

  “When I was making my escape, I faked my death. It was the only way to get them off my trail and protect…” I frowned. “Others.” I shook my head. “There’s no place I could hide that’s far enough away. And definitely not Vancouver. I mean, it’s just a mountain range away. And they have a… a branch here, so to speak.”

  “Huh.” Lee folded her hands on her lap and studied them for a moment. “That’s front page news. Anything else you want to tell me? Some more secrets?”

  I shook my head. There were more, but nothing I wanted to tell her. “You pretty much know the rest. Except how determined they were to find me before I disappeared. They’ll hear about this.” I pointed at the paper and paused, checking I had her attention. “They’ll come here, Lee. And they’ll start looking for me by tracking down my friends. I only have one friend who isn’t already dead.” I leaned towards her. “They’re coming for you.”

  Lee stared back at me, her hands still folded on her lap. She sniffed. “That’s what I like most about you, Axe: your unshakable optimism.” And with that, she poured herself a cup of green tea.

  The Party

  This was by far the strangest party I had ever attended. And that’s saying something. It even beat out the one where everyone drove around the beach on their Harley Davidson motorcycles, which isn’t as crazy as it sounds.

  See, I’d been invited to a beach party by an associate with a dubious lifestyle choice involving illegal substances. It was one of those what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it situations. You know the type: where you’re pretty sure it’s a set-up of some kind but you feel you have to go anyways, because everyone you don’t trust is going and you really can’t afford to miss out on what might be plotted behind your back. Obviously, you (along with everyone else) will want to be able to make a speedy get-away in case someone pulls out a weapon of almost mass destruction. So you too will drive around the drink and snack tables on your motorcycle.

  So that’s how we all arrived at the party, driving around on motorcycles. Just as we all started to relax, one of the waiters dropped a glass bowl that made the sound of a small bomb as it cracked against the concrete patio overlooking the beach. Glass and fists went flying, and almost a hundred motorcycles raced away in all directions. Salt water and motorcycles. Bad combo.

  No motorcycles came crashing through Lee’s retirement party, although some of the guests did walk through the walls.

  Around the apartment were clusters of the living: a few janitors in one corner; the three Chinese families who lived in the same building were chatting on the mismatched sofa set; the landlord Mr. Smits (a small, fat, red-faced who still insisted that I wasn’t dead, just avoiding rent payment) and his card buddies were permanently posted by the dining table, gobbling up jasmine scented rice with sweet and sour pork. A few random residents popped in and out to give their congratulations.

  Fluttering around the ceiling, invisible to the guests, were all the ghosts Lee knew: Bob, Timmy the guard, Shadow and Faye. Only DD, manager of The Ghost Post, was missing. There were a few other ghosts in another corner of the ceiling, friends of Shadow. They looked a bit dodgy, the type of characters you would not want to meet on the street if you were alone. Even if you weren’t alone, you wouldn’t want to meet them, and if you really had to, then you definitely would want to have your gang backing you up. That, at least, was my assessment based on experience.

  “Can we please make scary noises and levitate things?” Faye begged in a whiny voice.

  “It’s a retirement party, Faye,” I said, “not a Halloween party.”

  “Just a little levitation and noise. Please? Pretty please?”

  “Nope.”

  I drifted away from the sulking poltergeist towards Shadow.

  “You should really let her do something,” Shadow murmured, his back flat against the ceiling. He could pass for a shadow, until you looked into his face. “This party could use a bit of life to it.”

  I joined him against the ceiling. “Nope. I’m under strict orders to keep her under control.”

  Shadow snickered. “Good luck with that.”

  DD danced into the room. DD wasn’t the dancing type.

  “Okay, what’s she up to?” I muttered to Shadow. When there was no answer, I turned around to see a dark outline sink into the shadows and disappear. “Coward.”

  “We’re now on Farcebook,” DD announced to the ghosts, her bulging eyes bulging even more than usual, her thick lips quivering. She reminded me of a cross between a frog and a human with two braids of brown hair. No offense to any frogs out there.

  Bob sighed as he oozed off the bookshelf he’s been clinging to. A slash opened up in the blob-like, translucent grey form and he explained, “Facebook. The Ghost Post now has its own Facebook page.”

  “Congrats,” I said. “You’ve joined at least one tenth of the Earth’s population.”

  “Indeed,” Bob said. “Axe, could I have a word with you in private?”

  Before I could respond, DD turned on me. “Yes. And why haven’t you signed your contract yet?”

  I winced. I’d been hoping she’d forget about that. I really didn’t want to sign something that was binding for 1,000 years. I kind of hoped to be wherever I was supposed to be long before then. “Still weighing my options,” I muttered.

  “Weigh them faster,” DD retorted and began an enthusiastic and detailed explanation of how she’d signed up and what she’d put up and who she’d already friended and…

  I zoned out, eased away from the huddle of ghosts and floated towards a window. Rain splattered against the glass. I was tempted to poke my head through the glass, but instead pretended I was still alive and couldn’t do those sorts of things. I sunk into a chair, leaned my elbow on the windowsill and peered through the water rivulets out into the night. Watery yellow glowed out of several windows in the buildings nearby. The dim light caused the rain to shimmer as it floated down gently around a nearby street lamp.

  Maybe it was the lighting, or nostalgia for my life, when I was actually alive and before I’d crossed the Rockies to hide out in Vancouver. Whatever magic it was, a Christmas illusion settled on the scene. The large drops of rain solidified into snow. Even the sidewalk glowed with a whitish film. It seldom snows in Vancouver, so I let the illusion stay, savouring it for a brief moment, imagining that I was back in Calgary, enjoying a real winter, safe and warm and alive.

  The illusion didn’t last long. They never do. Reality wormed its way in quickly and
I focused in on the street. Vancouver’s Eastside is a pretty stunning place, renowned for gang violence, drug addiction and prostitution. The area maintains the highest HIV infection rate in North America, affecting 30% the local population. That fact has absolutely nothing to do with this story, but I really wanted to share it.

  Lee’s apartment is tucked behind the storefronts lining Main Street, near the intersection with East Hastings, well within the borders of Vancouver’s very own Skid Row and within walking distance from Gastown and Chinatown. The short, narrow street in front of the apartment building is blocked on one end, so there’s never any traffic. Only people who live here, or sell drugs to people living here, or have gang wars with people selling drugs, ever come into it. Except of course for the cowboys who’d tried to murder Lee a month ago. But that was a rare exception.

  Visitors to our part of the city would be nervous walking around these streets, with the sidewalks and alleys littered with homeless drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes and used needles. During the day, if you kept your wits about you, it was fine to walk around. Night too, to be honest; it just didn’t look or feel quite as fine. Then again, the kind of people you see walking around at night definitely didn’t step off a tour bus.

  But for those who are part of the community, who know the rules and play by them, it’s safe. It’s home. And while I didn’t have any friends apart from Lee and Shadow, I knew most of the people who lived in the neighbourhood.

  And that’s a really longwinded explanation for how I noticed a man loitering under the street lamp. He was obscured by the sheets of rain that fell like a curtain around the circle of light. Despite the lack of visibility, I could still tell that something about him didn’t fit in. He wasn’t from the neighbourhood. And yet, there was something familiar about him. These two facts taken together sent off little warning gongs in my head.