Lethal Takeout Read online

  My jaw tightened and I knew, from experience and other people’s observations, that my eyes had the same texture and colour as an approaching storm cloud. I opened my mouth but Lee quickly intervened. “So what does DD stand for?”

  I didn’t hear the response. Some motion caught my eye and I swivelled slightly. The vaguely humanoid shadow quivered in the hallway. A dark mist obscured its features. I could’ve sworn I heard laughter, low and nasty.

  This is a safe place, I told myself. Repeatedly.

  DD glowered at me. “It stands for DD. That’s it. Nothing else.”

  “And who’s that?” I gestured to the hallway, but the shadow was gone and DD seemed to have highly selective hearing or she just took ‘obstinate’ to a whole new level.

  “Well, that’s settled then,” DD announced. “You can start work immediately.”

  “What? But I’m dead,” I protested, still not sure what that meant.

  “Obviously.”

  “It’s kinda like a permanent form of early retirement,” I persisted.

  DD smiled as if I’d just told her the earth was flat. “Now who told you that bit of nonsense?”

  My eyes cut over to Lee, who at that moment started to study a crack in the floor. From her focused expression, I figured it must be one fascinating crack.

  “After all, you’ll soon get bored,” DD said in a soothing voice. “Plus if you work here, you’re much more likely to fix that little dilemma of yours.”

  “Oh, you mean the one about solving my murder and righting my wrongs before I forget who I am?”

  She waved those trivial details away. “Yes, yes. Here’s the contract.” From out of the air, she pulled a long piece of translucent paper and flashed it before me with a flourish. The ink glowed bright red. “It’s quite simple, really. Just sign down there with your fingertip.”

  “I’d kinda like to read it first, if you don’t mind.” I scanned the document.

  “I kind of do,” DD responded, her thick lips pouting. “We’re in a bit of a hurry, and it’s really not necessary.”

  I ignored her. “It says here it’s for 1,000 years.”

  “Renewable,” DD interjected. “It renews automatically, unless you submit your notice in writing exactly one month before the renewal date.”

  “Does it really say that?” Lee asked, loosing interest in the crack as quickly as she had gained it.

  “Sure does,” I replied. “1,000 years is an awful long time.”

  DD waved her hands as if smashing the issue away from us and into the wall. “You’d be amazed how fast time flies when you’re dead.”

  “And forgetful. But still… does it have to be 1,000 years?”

  “Oh, would you get over that, alright, already!” DD snapped, her polite tone disintegrating faster than a roll of toilet paper in the rain. “Anyways, you’ll forget who you really are way before then.”

  “Charming,” I drawled.

  “Watch your mouth,” she warned me.

  I decided that DD was definitely daffy. So I shifted tactics and used the distraction technique. “Who sits in there?” I pointed to the white door at one end of the office.

  DD didn’t even look over. She shivered. “You don’t want to go in there. Not for any reason. There’s a gaping black hole behind that door.”

  “Really?” I watched the door, but the black hole stayed safely hidden.

  “Yes,” DD continued, her lower lip quivering like Jell-O.

  “Where does it lead?” Lee asked.

  “Nowhere you want to go,” DD whispered and shivered. “In the black hole… Where the Chief sits.”

  “As in the Editor-in-Chief?” Lee asked.

  “As in the Chief,” DD said in a flat tone.

  I started to float towards the white door with the black hole inside, rubbing my hands, my gaze fixed on the doorknob. “Where is he now? Do I get to meet him? Or her?”

  “You can’t go in. The Chief is out doing some…” DD hesitated. “Recruiting.”

  “Yeah, I noticed you’re kinda empty here.” I reluctantly stopped, glanced around and wondered where the computers and other equipment were. I also wondered if there really was a black hole on the other side of the door. “So how do you recruit for this place?”

  “The Chief has ways,” DD said vaguely. “In fact, your first assignment is to pick up the new recruits and bring them here.”

  “Ah… Shouldn’t they just come here when their jobs start?”

  “No. You need to find them and bring them here,” DD said firmly.

  “You two will get along just fine,” Lee chirped as she headed to the entrance. “Have fun!”

  I floated so fast towards her that I almost sailed right through her. “Are you serious?” I whispered. “This lady is wacky. And the Chief sounds worse.”

  “I think you may be exaggerating the situation just a little,” Lee replied and instinctively aimed a gentle punch against my upper arm. Her hand went through me. “Now that’s wacky. Just give it a try, okay? Please? For my sake? I really don’t want you haunting my apartment all the time.”

  Lee’s lower lip quivered and her eyes widened as she put on her small, defenseless, Chinese lady expression.

  I knew I couldn’t refuse her. Damn her and her cute Chinese lady expression.

  Lee recognised victory. “Lovely. Come by and tell me how your first day… uh, night went.” And with that, she exited the office.

  “Great,” I breathed out and turned to face DD.

  “Great, indeed. So this is the first one.” A translucent photo appeared in the air between us. It was the portrait of a red-haired woman who looked like she was fifty-something and trying to be thirty-something. Her blue eyes twinkled mischievously above a cloud of freckles that covered her nose and cheeks.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Her name’s Faye. Faye Random.”

  “Random? That’s kinda a strange name.” I rubbed my chin.

  “So is Axe,” DD commented dryly. “And she’s a bit like her name. Strange.”

  “Right. So why do you want to recruit her?”

  “She was a reporter. Of sorts.” DD sniffed, her nose twitching disdainfully.

  “Of sorts?” I eyed the photo.

  “She was a paparazzi. For a cheap tabloid.”

  “And what’s this place?”

  “An expensive tabloid,” DD announced triumphantly. “And a detective agency and club for ghosts.”

  “So if she’s so bad, why’re you hiring her?”

  “We’re not hiring her. We’re recruiting her,” she corrected me. “And the truth is, there’s a shortage of ghost writers these days.”

  “Hmm. Alright. So I go meet this Random lady and escort her here.”

  DD chewed her bottom lip again, eyeing her hands. I decided that she must still chew her nails. It was clearly a habit.

  “You may need to do a bit more than escort her,” DD said slowly. “You need to manage her activity.”

  “Why?”

  “She may cause some trouble along the way. And we need to avoid attracting too much attention.”

  “And why would she cause trouble?” My eyes narrowed. This was sounding as appealing as my last job.

  DD sighed and her shoulders slumped in defeat. “Because, janitor, she’s a poltergeist.”

  Shadow Talk

  Streetlights flickered overhead and night settled into a deeper darkness. Rain pounded against the sidewalk and through me as I zipped down Hastings Street towards the better-maintained parts of the city. While it was past rush hour, there were still plenty of people moving about, huddling inside their dark raincoats and scurrying to get home and out of the downpour. Overhead, spirits whirled in and out of sight, playing with the light and rain, smiling at each other and, occasionally, at the earthbound ghosts.

  Several minutes later, I stopped and smacked my forehead soundlessly, ignoring the bike courier who rode straight through me.

  “I don’t even know w
here the poltergeist is. Blast it,” I muttered and resumed moving. I floated through a car and joined a swarm of pedestrians flowing down the water-stained sidewalk. I glanced at the person rushing along beside me, the body swathed in a heavy, black raincoat, the face hidden by a large, dark red umbrella.

  “What do you think?” I asked the umbrella. “Should I go back to ask DD?”

  The umbrella quivered and slipped slightly to the side.

  “Agreed.” I nodded my head. “No way I’m gonna go back there.”

  Except I knew I would. I had no idea how to go about searching for the list of wrongs I was supposed to do something about. The only things I had were my memories. And as nasty as some of them were, I didn’t want to lose them.

  I continued to float along through the city without any destination in mind, following the eddies and currents of evening city life and mulling over a possible future as a permanent amnesia victim. A small group of protestors camped out in Victory Square, the small park on Hastings, were chanting some slogan that was lost in the drumming of rain and the splash of car tyres through puddles.

  I walked into and along the length of a crowded bus. About the only person not dressed in navy blue or black was a baby in a stroller. It (the baby, not the stroller) leaned forward, stared straight at me and waved its pudgy little arms, happily spluttering milky bubbles all over its face.

  “Well, I’ll be,” I murmured, my mouth turning up a fraction in a vague imitation of a smile. “Spooks are visible to janitors and babies.”

  I waved back and floated towards the back end of the bus and out of the baby’s sight. The little creature immediately started screaming blue bloody murder. Half the passengers shifted around to glare at the mother with a disgusted expression that clearly communicated “What a horrible mother. What did you do?” while the other half threw visual daggers of “We don’t care what you did. Just make it stop.”

  The screaming baby noise faded as I flew through the rear window. I hovered above the traffic, afraid to move. I didn’t have an elbow that itched like Lee’s, but I had much better eyesight. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a featureless cowboy plastered against the wall of a building, as if it was trying to blend in with the graffiti. I swivelled my neck around, thinking that if I had my body, my neck would be too tense to move.

  If I had my body, I’d be alive and not in this mess.

  The shadow dipped its head, probably its polite way of saying, “And now, I’m going to drain your energy. If I can catch you.”

  I nodded back as if to say, “And now, I’m going to run. If I can unfreeze myself.”

  It leaped into the traffic. A bus rolled through it but I could see the cowboy hat pushing out of the front tyre.

  I began to run, ghost style. When I glanced back, I could see the thing extracting itself from under the bus and start plodding after me. Man, it was slow. Not complaining here, but it was really slow for something that wanted to steal my energy.

  Slow, but determined.

  I followed the flow of traffic, losing the shadow again, until I arrived at a familiar place: the intersection of Hastings and Thurlow. You wouldn’t believe it was the same Hastings that Lee lived on. No used needles littered the sidewalk. Homeless people politely stayed out of sight. Trees and flowerbeds burst out of the sidewalk. People wore clothes that looked like clothes and not rags.

  From this location, there was no hiding what makes Vancouver beautiful. The snow capped mountains of the North Shore beckoned, while the north-facing, glass-walled sides of the office buildings commandeered a view of the calm waters slopping against cargo ships and sailing boats cruising the bay. Wide, tree-lined sidewalks neatly bordered the towering buildings.

  These buildings definitely weren’t crumbling or abandoned. Instead, they pushed themselves up sternly through the ground, reaching for the heavens like proud heroes of glass and steel, challenging the sky to a duel, or possibly a game of cards. The wet night transformed the concrete into black stone and the windows into molten silver. They were monuments to modernity and progress.

  I hated them.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against modern and progress, and I have no intention of living in a cave, even if I am a ghost and don’t need a bed. But the buildings bug me. They have no warmth, no soul. They’re so damn smug. And I was pretty certain they wouldn’t have any poltergeist paparazzi hanging around inside.

  I stared up at the one building I knew very well: my former place of work before I’d been shot. As much as I hated the place, this was at least familiar and safe. Hopefully.

  “What the heck,” I told the office workers swarming home. Like they cared. The spirits flashing through the clouds like spiritual lightening likewise ignored me, while a ghost of an old lady sitting by a flowerbed sighed and shook her head.

  I took that as an encouraging sign.

  After checking that the shadow cowboy was nowhere in sight (it wasn’t), I pushed myself through the revolving glass door and managed to avoid being hit by the transparent balls of energy bouncing around inside the glass. Automatically nodding to the security guard who couldn’t see me, I entered the elevator that was waiting there with its doors open like a gaping mouth of a snoring giant, without the snoring.

  While the street still had life in it, the building by now was pretty much deserted apart from the occasional guard or cleaning staff, so I had the elevator to myself. Of course, the elevator wasn’t going to move unless someone with a physical body pressed a button. I glanced up, wondering what it would look like in the elevator shaft, when suddenly the doors slid shut and the metal box lurched skywards. My legs began to sink into the floor, so I started floating upwards with the elevator. It stopped at my floor with another lurch and the doors slid open.

  Just as I started imaging that I had special powers and had willed the elevator to my floor, I looked up. Standing before me was the law firm’s senior partner and my former employer, Mr. CEO Perkins. As I studied my ex-boss, my lips curled, like I’d smelled something dead and not buried. I couldn’t help it. It was an automatic reflex I had around the guy.

  CEO Perkins was a big man in all ways. He was tall, making it so much easier for him to look over people and ignore them. He was wide all the way around, which forced people to step aside as he came down the hall. He was wealthy, so he could expect others to get out of his way. And he was influential. Really influential. After all, who else could convince half of Vancouver’s social elite to follow the latest diet craze, the Carrot Juice Diet? Vancouverites are pretty quick to follow quirky stuff like that, but still… Carrot Juice Diet? Who wants to live on carrot juice and water for a month?

  Back to CEO Perkins: It was for all those reasons that he was important to a lot of important people who mattered in the city. It was for those same reasons that he was detested by the unimportant people who were forced by circumstance to work for him. Lee and me, for example.

  The guy had the same smug, superior façade as the damn glass-walled building.

  Forgetting that I was invisible to everyone except babies and janitors, I automatically shifted my gaze away from CEO Perkins’s self-satisfied face, so that the lawyer couldn’t see my disgusted expression. I didn’t do that for anyone else, let me tell you; I didn’t have to because normally everyone avoided my gaze. Something about my eyes, Lee would tell me. Like they were old and dead long before I ever was.

  I growled, “Good evening, sir.”

  Of course, CEO Perkins didn’t see or hear me, which I figured was no change from before. CEO Perkins never saw or heard anyone who wasn’t a paying client, prominent person, or a staff member at the minimum level of junior partner at Perkins & Co. To be (very reluctantly) fair, I have to admit that, although CEO Perkins ignored low-level staff members, he wouldn’t normally walk through them either, as he attempted to do that night with a dead janitor. Yeah, you can bet I dodged that experience in a hurry and dashed out into the reception area.

  After th
e elevator doors slid closed, I glanced around the abandoned office of the law firm. Most of the lights were off; the building was one of those super efficient ones that had sensor lighting, sensor water taps, sensor soap dispensers and sensor pads for entering and exiting different floors About the only thing not automated with sensors was the staff, and even about that, I had my doubts.

  “Lee?” I whispered, but then remembered that Saturday was her night off.

  I wandered around the dimly lit, posh office. Normally, quiet, empty spaces didn’t bother me. I used to enjoy my evening shifts. But there was something about the office that wasn’t so comforting. I rubbed at my chin, glancing at the numerous shadows. Anyone of them could suddenly grow tentacles and leap on me.

  As I turned to go back to the elevator, my foot silently slid through a metal dustbin. “At least it doesn’t hurt,” I muttered.

  “There’s nothing more pathetic than a lost soul floating around his past.”

  I twirled around. If I hadn’t already been dead, I figure I might’ve died right then and there of a heart attack. Before me, in a gloomy corner of the office, between the photocopier machine and the water dispenser, a misty shadow extracted itself from the surrounding darkness and formed into a shape. As the shadow flowed towards me, I crouched slightly and clenched my hands into fists.

  “Don’t worry,” the shadow murmured, finally settling on the appearance of a tall, young man, dressed completely in black. His hair, eyes and skin were also black. Against all that darkness, his white teeth sparkled like neon-white fireworks against a night sky.

  No cowboy hat.

  “You were at The Ghost Post,” I blurted out, for once glad I was already dead, because this was one spook I wouldn’t have wanted to meet in a dark room while still alive. Heck, I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet him even while dead.

  “I was.”

  I waited for some sort of explanation or further elaboration, but the tall ghost stood there, his hands tucked into the pockets of his black blazer, looking like he was leaning against the photocopier, quietly watching with keen eyes. After several silent seconds passed, I said, “I’m Axe Cooper.”