Desperate Souls Read online

  Then what—?

  Thrum-thrum-thrum …

  He heard it, loud and clear, like a great machine reverberating through water.

  Thrum-thrum-thrum …

  Drumbeats!

  His mind catalogued the building’s tenants. One or two of them might have been musicians at one time but no longer. They were all addicts, like him. If any of them had arrived with musical instruments, they had long since pawned them to buy drugs. No, the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that the drumming existed only in his head. Was his brain liquefying already? What further degradation must he endure?

  The answer came in the form of movement within his body: muscles drew tight, and his view rolled over from the ceiling to the floor.

  WHAT THE HELL?

  He saw his hands flat on the floor. Then his left knee came into view, and he stood erect. But this was impossible! Not only had his dead body risen from the floor, but it had done so of its own volition, without any input or desire from him.

  Thrum-thrum-thrum …

  Someone or something had seized control of his body.

  Dozens of thoughts crisscrossed his over stimulated brain all at once. Perhaps he could make this work for him. Maybe he could adapt to this new situation. All he wanted to do was get high …

  His naked body pulled on his dirty clothes and crossed the room.

  Wait a minute. What’s happening? I don’t want to go outside like this! I want to clean myself up!

  His body ignored him. It reached for the doorknob and opened the door.

  You can’t do this! You need me!

  His body stepped out into the dark hallway, following the drumbeat he heard in his head.

  Little more than a subconscious thought pattern, Louis screamed.

  TWO

  “Jake, over here!”

  Jake feinted left as Edgar barreled toward him, then danced beneath his former partner’s outstretched arms and passed the orange ball to the boy who had maneuvered beneath the chain-link basket.

  Grasping the ball in both hands, Martin twisted his body and leapt straight into the air.

  Edgar charged at him, but the ball rattled through the basket and struck the asphalt.

  “Score!” Jake raised both arms over his head and grinned as Martin’s sneakers touched ground.

  Edgar roped a muscular arm around his twelve-year-old son and staggered to a halt. The boy beamed at him.

  “This isn’t fair anymore,” Edgar said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “You’re getting too big.” He glanced at Jake. “And you’re in too good of shape.”

  “Eleven months without a cigarette,” Jake said, giving Martin a high five.

  “Yeah, well, this two-on-one thing ain’t cutting it anymore. I need help. Maybe I should ask Vasquez to join us and even things up.”

  “You would invite a woman to come along on Guys’ Day Out?” Jake winked at Martin. This wasn’t the first time Edgar had introduced his current partner, Maria Vasquez, into a conversation. Jake appreciated his friend’s intention, but he had no interest in dating. Sheryl had been dead just under one year, murdered by the serial killer called the Cipher. Jake still carried a piece of his wife’s soul inside him.

  “You’re just afraid she’ll dance circles around your ass.”

  “Used to be you didn’t need any help. You beat me and Martin without breaking a sweat. What’s wrong? You feeling your age?”

  “I don’t get to make my own schedule the way you do. I have a real job. Responsibilities.”

  Cracking his neck, Jake observed a medical helicopter crossing the cloudless blue sky. “So quit and come into practice with me.”

  Martin’s eyes widened. “Yeah!”

  Edgar snorted. “What, give up my pension to play private eye with you? I don’t think so.”

  “Imagine how the bad guys would tremble in their underwear if they knew Helman and Hopkins were working the street together again.”

  “Bad guys? What bad guys? The only bad guys you tangle with are cheating spouses and deadbeat dads.”

  Jake shrugged. “I’ve had my share of scrapes. And I don’t get to call for backup. I’m a lone wolf.”

  “You’re supposed to call in backup anytime you get in a jam, lone wolf. That’s what makes you ‘private’ and me ‘professional.’“ Edgar nodded to his son. “You gonna stand there listening to this man’s nonsense, or are you going to run a few laps? Give me half a mile.”

  “All right,” Martin said. “Don’t leave until I get back, Jake.”

  “You know it, partner.”

  Martin took off, all legs and arms and enthusiasm, and circled the track.

  “I can’t believe how big he’s gotten,” Jake said, meaning it.

  “Tell me about it. We can’t keep him in the same clothes for more than a season.”

  “I remember when he was only half as tall. Seems like just last year.”

  “I think time speeds up the closer we get to our own deaths.”

  Jake glanced at his friend. “Aren’t you the morbid one?”

  “Not at all. I live each day like it’s my last. How about you?”

  Jake returned his attention to Martin, who had circled half the track. “I’m working things out. But I think I’ve got a pretty positive attitude considering …”

  Considering he had resigned from the department in disgrace rather than submit to a mandatory drug test after killing two bad guys during a tavern robbery he had foiled. Considering Sheryl had given him his walking papers after discovering he had been on the take to support his cocaine habit. And considering the love of his life had been murdered by his enemies. Then there were the considerations Edgar didn’t even know about.

  Edgar clasped his shoulder. “You’re doing well.”

  Martin passed them and increased his pace.

  Knowing he would never have a son or a daughter of his own with Sheryl made Jake love the boy even more. “To be that young again, with that kind of energy …”

  “I think the same thing every time I see him.” Edgar chuckled.

  “He’s a great kid. You’ve done a good job with him.”

  Edgar shrugged. “His mother deserves the lion’s share of the credit. She’s the one who’s there for him every day. I’m just a weekend father and only then if the job doesn’t get in the way.”

  As partners, Jake and Edgar swung by the Jackson Heights house where Joyce and Martin lived whenever their caseload permitted it. Joyce and Edgar had never been married and maintained a friendly enough relationship for Martin’s sake. “You’ve set a good example for him.”

  “I hope so.” Edgar’s voice cooled. “Check that out.”

  Jake followed Edgar’s sight line. An emaciated Caucasian man lurked on the other side of the chain-link fence, scanning the field for a victim. Filthy rags hung off his skeletal frame.

  “Goddamned scarecrows are everywhere. The other day an old lady in Brooklyn got murdered in her own building. Some son of a bitch caved her skull in with a pipe. I just know it was a scarecrow. Black Magic is everywhere. That’s the kind of thing that drives a parent crazy.”

  Jake nodded. He had never witnessed anything like the drug epidemic sweeping the city.

  “If I catch those things anywhere near Martin …” He sighed. “The city just laid off another two thousand cops—can you believe it? We’ve already got our hands full with these Machete Massacres.”

  Jake had read in the newspapers that the corpses of several drug dealers had turned up, theirs limbs dismembered by machetes. As members of the Special Homicide Task Force, Edgar and Maria had their hands full. Jake did not miss that kind of action.

  “We’re still on for dinner, right?” Edgar said.

  “Of course. I wouldn’t miss meeting this new woman in your life for the world. Has Martin met her?”

  “Nah. I don’t think it’s a good idea yet.”

  “Why? He’s met your girlfriends before.”

  “Lady
friends. Dawn is different, though. She’s special. I don’t know if he’s ready yet.”

  Jake burst into laughter.

  Edgar shot him a look. “What?”

  “I never thought I’d see the day. Edgar Hopkins, murder police extraordinaire and eternal bachelor, head over heels in love.”

  Edgar looked away. “Fuck you.” Then he laughed, too.

  Jake took the R train to the Twenty-third Street stop in Manhattan, where he merged with a hundred other bodies exiting the dark subway station. Unemployment had skyrocketed, and more people used public transportation because fewer could afford taxis. On the sidewalk, he ignored panhandlers’ outstretched hands. Homeless people sat shoulder to shoulder with their backs against storefronts. Jake felt lucky to have a roof over his head.

  As usual, he passed through the cool dark shadow of the Tower, the high-tech office building he had protected as director of security for the reclusive billionaire Nicholas Tower and his company, Tower International. The high-paying job had been a short-lived assignment: when Jake discovered that Tower was manufacturing illegal genetic hybrids and had been responsible for the murders committed by the Cipher, he had fled. Old Nick then ordered the Cipher to murder Sheryl.

  Now the Cipher and Old Nick were both dead by Jake’s hand. So was Kira Thorn, Tower’s executive assistant, who had attempted to murder Jake in the apartment he had lived in with Sheryl. He had moved out soon after that, but first he mailed evidence of the company’s genetic experiments and illegal activities to the heads of the ACCL: the Anti-Cloning Creationist League. The grassroots organization had posted the evidence online, but government agencies dismissed the images and video footage as a hoax.

  A modern urban legend was born, and Tower International’s reputation died almost overnight. The government filed an antitrust case, which resulted in the megacorporation being broken into several smaller companies, and Tower International’s stranglehold on the genetics industry was broken. Every day brought a new scandal involving the company and saw a new Tower subsidiary fold.

  But the company still existed, with the Tower still its headquarters. Names and faces that meant nothing to Jake had assumed control of the corporation’s remaining assets. He did not trust them. If the government wouldn’t ensure that Tower International never again engaged in scientific skullduggery, Jake intended to do that himself. That was why he had set up his shop as a private investigator on the fourth floor of a small building on Twenty-third Street, where he kept an eye on the Tower. So far, he had observed nothing suspicious.

  Other unforeseen complications had arisen, though. Jake had underestimated Tower’s importance to the global economy. The company’s tentacles reached out to every industrialized nation on Earth, and when the government stepped in, their intervention helped cause the collapse of the global economy. Banks, manufacturing, medical advances, airlines, investments—virtually any institution in which Tower owned a stake—self-destructed. Jake had succeeded in bringing the old man’s company to its figurative knees but in so doing had wreaked untold damage on the entire world.

  He passed the Cajun restaurant, where he often ate and sometimes met clients, next to the building where he lived and worked and the storefront where a psychic worked. He had glimpsed the attractive woman who worked there through her front window but had not introduced himself because he never saw her outside. Inside the building’s vestibule, he punched his personal security code into a keypad and entered the building’s sparse lobby. No doorman, just several security cameras and alarms that Jake had installed as “security consultant” in exchange for reduced rent on his office. He had never met the landlord and made his monthly check out to Eden, Inc.

  Jake chose to take the building’s wide stairs over its confined elevator whenever possible. Although he had played basketball with Edgar and Martin for an hour, he liked any exercise he could incorporate into his daily routine. The stairs opened up onto each floor, allowing him to see the closed doors of his neighbors. On the fourth floor, next to a plain steel door, a simple nameplate off to one side read Helman Investigations and Security.

  He unlocked the door, entered the office, and pressed the keys on another security pad. The front room served as a receptionist area, even though he had no real receptionist. The suite had an old-fashioned railroad apartment layout, with each room directly behind the other. He passed through a kitchenette with a narrow bathroom, then his own office, which overlooked Twenty-third Street and afforded him a view of the Flatiron Building, the Woolworth Building, and the Tower. It was illegal for individuals to maintain residences in office buildings, of course, but he had the run of the place after hours and an understanding with the building’s agent.

  Entering his bedroom behind the office, he stripped off his damp T-shirt, shorts, and underwear and stepped inside the shower stall, a narrow construct with an opaque glass door facing his bed. He missed having an actual bathtub, not to mention a toilet in the same room as his shower, but he could not argue with the rent he paid.

  His signing bonus from Tower and Sheryl’s life insurance policy had enabled him to set up shop here. Contrary to what Edgar thought, Jake’s business did not thrive on divorce cases. He took his share of them but only when they met the same criteria as his other cases: he had to know that in some small way, his efforts helped someone. Although he had killed Kira in self-defense, he had executed the Cipher and Old Nick in cold blood and felt compelled to atone for his actions.

  Showered and shaved, Jake dressed in comfortable slacks, a blue shirt, and a tie. He typically worked in jeans and casual shirts, but since he had made plans to meet Edgar and his girlfriend for dinner, he decided to dress up a little.

  When the front door buzzed, he looked up at the security monitors above his office sofa and saw a thick Hispanic woman and a boy standing in the building’s vestibule. He buzzed them in, then waited in the suite’s doorway. As they got off the elevator, he saw that the woman was in her early fifties. Her footsteps echoed in the corridor, her weight shifting with each slow step.

  “Mrs. Rodriguez? I’m Jake Helman.”

  “Hello.” Dressed head to toe in black, the woman gestured at the boy standing beside her. “My grandson Victor.”

  Measuring the boy by Martin’s height, Jake estimated his age to be nine. “Hello, Victor.”

  The boy regarded him with sad eyes. “Hi.”

  Jake stepped back from the door, allowing them to enter. “Can I get you some water?”

  Carmen Rodriguez surveyed the office. “Yes, please.”

  “What about you, Victor?”

  Keeping his eyes on Jake, Victor shook his head.

  “How about a Cherry Coke?”

  The boy shrugged. “’Kay.”

  Jake led them into his office, where they sat on the leather sofa, and served them refreshments. He wheeled his chair around his desk and sat facing them with his legs crossed. “Why don’t you tell me how I can help you?”

  Carmen sat with her hands folded on her lap. “Do you have children, Mr. Helman?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She scrutinized him as if trying to determine his character. “I have two daughters. One lives in Puerto Rico, the other in North Carolina. I used to have three daughters, but Rosario died when she was twenty-eight. Rosario was Victor’s mother. She died of a heroin overdose.”

  Jake glanced at Victor. The boy sipped his Cherry Coke.

  “I hide nothing from the boy. He needs to know the truth. I raised him and his brother like they were my own. Now Victor’s brother, Louis, is dead, too.”

  The black dress, Jake thought. She’s in mourning. “I’m sorry.”

  “Louis was six years older than Victor. Fifteen. Very independent that one, always getting into trouble.”

  “May I ask how he died?”

  Carmen’s face seemed to change shape. “I don’t know.”

  “But you know that he’s dead?”

  “Si. I’ve seen him with my own
eyes.”

  Jake suppressed a frown. “I don’t understand.”

  “Louis used drugs. This Black Magic. When I found out, I gave him an ultimatum: give up the drug or give up your family. That same day, he moved out. That was three weeks ago. Three days ago, Victor came to me and said, ‘Grandma, I saw Louis. He’s selling drugs on the corner.’ These days in this economy, it’s hard for a young man to find honest work. Boys are likely to do stupid things for money.

  “I went to this corner, and sure enough, there was Louis, with two other boys. Victor was right; they were selling drugs. I’ve lived in Brooklyn all my life. I’m no fool. A young man starts slinging, there’s little chance of saving him. He’s headed for prison or the morgue or both. I went up to my grandson and called his name. When he turned to me, I wanted to scream. Estaba muerto. He was dead.”

  Jake felt an odd sensation in his body, as if the temperature of his blood had just cooled. “You mean he looked like death?”

  “No, I mean he was dead. He stood there like a functioning human being, doing the devil’s work. But he didn’t blink. He didn’t speak. He was dead. So were the other boys.”

  Jake tried not to exhibit any reaction. After all, he had seen things he never would have imagined possible, things that had sent him spiraling toward the brink of insanity. Phantoms searching for their souls. Angels and demons. Monsters. He knew that impossible beings walked the earth in different forms. “Mrs. Rodriguez, I’ve seen Black Magic junkies. We all have. They look very unhealthy.”

  Carmen fixed him with an appraising stare. “You have to be alive or only half dead to be a junkie. These boys were as dead as dead gets. A junkie is standing at death’s door, only he doesn’t know it. These boys crossed over and don’t care.”

  “What did they do next?”

  “They just stared at me with their awful eyes. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t do anything. Louis’s expression was no different than the others’. There was no spark of life or recognition in it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I did what anyone would do. I got the hell away from that corner. I went there intending to drag Louis home, but I ran away to save my own life. I still have one living grandson, and I aim to keep it that way. We avoid that corner. Louis is still out there, selling that drug.”