Skeleton Crew (11 page)

“Yeah, with lots of mustard.”

“I like mustard,” Caesar said.

“Okay, answer my questions and I'll bet Chavez…uh, the male…will give you food.” I'm not above bribery to get what I want, and anyway, it was Chavez's sandwich.

“You want to know about the ghost walkers?” Caesar asked. “The Xolos who walk with the dead?”

I was so surprised, my jaw dropped open. Most of what
humans would call intelligence was coming from the magic, but even so, Caesar was one insightful dog. “You know about them, Caesar? About what they do?”

“Yes, the truebloods, they set humans free when they die. Xolos don't need any help with dying, but humans are too stupid to find the way on their own.” He dropped his head to his paws, and added, “No offense.”

I laughed. “None taken. How do they do that, Caesar? How do they set the humans free?”

“With their teeth,” Caesar said. He said it in exactly the same tone my mother had. Okay, so maybe it was a stupid question.

“They bite the, uh, bodies? How is it no one notices this?”

Caesar sighed. “Not the bodies. They cross to the other side and bite the spirits, to tear them loose from the bodies.”

“How do they cross to the other side?” I asked, and then had an idea. “Is it when they're dreaming?”

“No, when we dream, we mostly just chase rabbits. Some times birds. Or cats—but cats can be scary.” Caesar laid his ears back.

“So how do they cross?”

“They just do. They can cross over whenever they want—only when they're awake, though. Usually they wait until no humans are looking.”

I'd never heard of anything that could cross physically from our world to the Between without a gate. Maybe ghouls. I'd run into a ghoul once and it wasn't my fondest memory. “But you can't do this, Caesar? Cross over and free humans, I mean?”

Caesar whined. “No, I'm not a trueblood. I think I've got
some Chihuahua in me.” I thought I detected a disgusted note in his voice.

“You're a wonderful dog, Caesar. Your pack loves you.” I wasn't sure he needed any encouragement from me but I didn't want my spell to leave him with an inferiority complex.

“I love my pack. They give me food, and I have my own house at the back of the yard, and I have my own bed in the kitchen where all the best smells are, and I don't even mind when the little ones pull my tail or twist my ears.”

“That's great, Caesar, it sounds like you have a nice life here. Can you tell me about the ghost walkers? Do you know what happened to them?”

“The Hunter has been taking them. Everyone's talking about it.”

Oh,
hell
yeah. “Who is the Hunter, Caesar? A human?”

“A dead one. He takes the ghost walkers when they cross over.”

“The Hunter is a dead human? A ghost? He takes the Xolos when they cross over to the Between?”

“Yes, he's been doing it for a while. The Xolos try to stay away from him but the Hunter is very sneaky.”

Something was bubbling up from the back of my mind, something I knew, something obvious I couldn't quite get my mental fingers around. “A ghost called the Hunter is taking the Xolos,” I muttered. “A ghost. Hunter. A ghost-hunter! Son of a
bitch!
”

“Yes?” asked Caesar.

“Not you, Caesar. I just figured out who the Hunter is. His name's Abe Warren and I've actually met the bastard. In a graveyard. He said he was looking for ghosts.”

“He was probably looking for Xolos,” Caesar said.

“Probably. You have any idea why he's taking them?”

“No. Not unless he likes the zombies. I don't like the zombies. They're smelly.”

“Truth, Caesar. Really smelly.”

“If you want to find the Xolos, you should ask the Hunter. You'll have to find him first. It won't be easy—like I said, he's sneaky.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm going to need some bait.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mrs. Dawson.

“I need a ghost to draw out the ghost-hunter,” I said. “And you're the only one I know. It'll be perfectly safe. Trust me.” Mrs. Robert Dawson—Maggie to her friends, Margaret to God-knows-who, and Mrs. Dawson to me—had once lived in my building. Now she unlived in my condo. I hadn't even known she was there until I learned to cross over to the Between. Then she tried to strangle me. We'd since settled into an uneasy peace—I tried to keep my socks and underwear off the floor and she tried to ignore me.

“I don't really think it's any of my concern what you need, Miss Riley.” She was standing by the French doors in my living room—the blue-lit, nighttime Between version of it, anyway—with her stick-figure arms crossed and an expression of stern disapproval on her wrinkled and powdered face. “Ghost-hunters and cemeteries and the like, I've never heard of such a thing!”

It was too bad she'd never heard of a cemetery—if she'd been properly introduced to one, maybe she wouldn't be haunting my condo. “It's really important, Mrs. Dawson. I
wouldn't ask if it wasn't. This ghost-hunter has been bagging our Xolos—Mexican Hairless Dogs—and that's causing the dead to rise when they, well, die, on account of the Xolos are psychopomps.”

Mrs. Dawson just stared at me as if I were a raving mad-woman. Maybe I hadn't explained it as clearly as I might, but really, you'd think a ghost would be a little more open-minded where supernatural shit was concerned.

“Okay, look. I know this is a big favor to ask. I'd owe you one.” Somehow I knew if I wanted Mrs. Dawson's help, I'd end up haggling for it. It always seemed to go down like that in the underworld. Humans may be greedy motherfuckers on the whole, but we've got nothing on the not-quite and no-longer human.

Mrs. Dawson eyed me suspiciously. “I'm quite certain there's nothing you could ‘owe me' that would convince me to act as your…your…your bait!” She didn't
look
certain. Gotcha, Maggie, you cranky old bitch. “Oh,” I said, turning away. “Well, if you're sure there's nothing I could possibly do that would be worth a short—and perfectly safe—stroll through a cemetery or two…”

“Move out,” Mrs. Dawson said.

“Dea—” I cut the word off midsyllable and jerked my head back around to peer at her. “What the fuck did you just say?”

“Cursing shows your true color,” she said. Color—not colors. Mrs. Dawson was a bigot from the old school. It was kind of refreshing. “I said, move out. I was here before you. This place belongs to me—what's left of it. Move out, tonight, and I'll go with you to the cemetery.”

I laughed. “You want me to move out of my own house?” I let the anger and frustration drain out of my face,
and I looked at her like I might look at a guy I'm going to clip. “I'll move
you
out first, Maggie. I'll bind your lily-white ass to a public toilet in Crenshaw. I've done it before.” Technically, the toilet hadn't been public and it hadn't been in Crenshaw, but I was improvising.

“Go ahead and try it, Riley! I'll claw your eyes out and grind them into the floorboards if you try to force me from my home.” Mrs. Dawson's eyes grew large and black, and the spectral flesh began melting away from her face like blood in the rain. Her jaw seemed to protrude from her skull and her bared teeth lengthened as her lips dissolved. She was going full spook on me.

So much for the fucking peace. I held up my hands and backed away. “Chill the fuck out, Mrs. Dawson. I was bluffing. I'm not going to do anything to you.” My calves brushed the edge of the sofa and I sat down on the edge of the seat. And just like that, the harmless little old lady was back. She smoothed the front of her elegant dress with trembling hands, and then crossed her arms again.

Jesus Christ. “Okay, I tell you what, I'll move out of my bedroom—”

“Done!” said Mrs. Dawson.

“I wasn't finished!” I protested. “I was saying, I'll move out of my bedroom for a month.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no? I'm offering to give you the bedroom for a whole month!”

“No.”

“Two months?”

“No.”

“Come on, Mrs. Dawson. Please? The piskies have the second bedroom. I'll have to sleep on the couch.”

“I'm well aware of that. There's barely anyplace left
in this house for me to have some quiet time to myself. And n—”

“No…yeah, I got it.” I sighed and buried my face in my hands. “Fine,” I mumbled. “You win. I'll move out of the bedroom.”

“What?” Mrs. Dawson said, cocking an ear my way. “My hearing's not what it was when I was—”

“When you were alive? Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be.”

Mrs. Dawson sniffed. “I was going to say, when I was younger.”

“Which century would that have been, exactly?” I dropped the volume and made sure to mumble directly into my palms.

“Insulting me won't get you what you want, young lady.”

I lifted my head and squinted at her. “How the hell did you hear that, if you're so deaf?”

Mrs. Dawson sniffed, again. “I didn't, but I'm not an idiot. I'm no stranger to bad manners and worse breeding, Miss Riley. It was hard to find good help, even in my day.”

I suddenly wondered if the tormented souls of pool boys, groundskeepers and maids were haunting the halls of my building. “Okay, drop it,” I said, shaking my hands in the air as if I could fling the frustration from my fingertips. “Let's, just, the deal is done…let me get my crew together and we'll meet you back here.”

“And when will you remove your things from my room?” I was pretty sure I could see a grin tugging at the corner of her withered mouth.

“When we get back,” I said. “I'll move my shit when we get back.” I pressed my hands against the cushions and bounced up and down a couple times, trying to gauge the
comfort level. Never mind that concepts like firmness were of dubious value in the Between. I'd slept on the couch before but only when I was hammered. Doing it sober would take some getting used to, but that went for most things.

 

Even after we'd reached an agreement in principle, it took us two hours to get Mrs. Dawson out of the house. First she had to do her hair. She was inexplicably unable to locate the brushes and combs she remembered from the early sixties, so this mostly involved a half-hour or so of preening in the mirror and brushing the white tangles with her fingertips. When she was finished, her hair still looked like she'd rolled Phyllis Diller, Albert Einstein and a troll doll for it.

Then she had to select the proper outfit. She accomplished this by disappearing through the living room wall for more than an hour into what must once have been her boudoir. She emerged wearing a combed cotton seersucker suit, white heels, white gloves and a white pillbox hat. I pointed out it was nighttime, we were going to a cemetery and I needed her to look spooky, and she pointed out I knew absolutely nothing about fashion. In ordinary circumstances, the hat at least would have been an improvement but her hair had been the spookiest thing about her.

“You look quite elegant, Mrs. Dawson,” Adan said. He'd crossed into the Between with Honey and Jack through the gate in my condo. I wanted to strangle him.

“Thank you, my dear,” said Mrs. Dawson. “Men are in and out of here all the time, but you're the first real gentleman to set foot in this house since my Robert passed.” She glanced at me and sniffed. I wanted to strangle her more.

“Jack's a gentleman,” Honey said.

I glared at her. “You're not helping.” I'd still never heard
Jack say anything. I was beginning to wonder if he was a mute. At some point the Silent Bob act starts to get creepy.

“I beg your pardon, young man,” Mrs. Dawson said. “I'm sure you people can learn proper manners as well as anyone else.”

“Nice,” I said. “You're even bigoted toward fairies.”

“I am not!” huffed Mrs. Dawson. “I don't have a bigoted bone in my body.”

“You don't have any bones in your body,” I said. “You don't even have a body.”

Mrs. Dawson burst into tears—well, she no more had tears than she had bones, but she gave it her best shot. “You are so cruel,” she whimpered. “Do you think I like what's become of me? Do you think I like being trapped here, separated for eternity from everyone who ever cared about me?”

“Gods, Domino,” Adan said. “Ease up a little.”

I tightened my lips and looked at the floor. “She could leave whenever she wants,” I muttered. “She's just too damn stubborn!”

“So how are we going to do this? What's our plan?” Adan asked.

“We get to the cemetery, Mrs. Dawson does the vengeful spirit bit. The rest of us use our glamour to remain hidden. When the ghost-hunter shows up, we grab him.”

“We grab him?” Adan said.

“That's our plan?” said Jack.

“You're not a mute!” I said. Jack shrugged. “Yeah, that's our plan. I like to keep it simple.”

“What if he hurts me?” Mrs. Dawson said, her bottom lip trembling pitifully.

“He's not going to hurt you. He has a crossbow, but we can grab him before he shoots you with it.”

“But what if something goes wrong?”

“Nothing's going to go wrong. That's the virtue of a simple plan.”

 

Something went wrong. It started with Mrs. Dawson herself. I hadn't expected her to have any real acting chops, but it wasn't unreasonable to expect a ghost to be scary. In fact, I'd seen it. The skeletal hag thing she'd pulled when she lost her temper with me had been a little scary. Problem was, she couldn't fake it. At all.

Our first stop was the cemetery where I'd originally encountered Abe Warren, the one Antoine had formerly haunted and where his brother Keshawn still lurked. Keshawn might have provided an understudy in the event Mrs. Dawson bombed, but it seemed his ghost was deteriorating, fading. When I went to his graveside I could barely make out his shade in the darkness and his voice was a barely audible whisper. He didn't have anything coherent to say, either. He couldn't actually go anywhere without a Xolo to guide him, but that apparently didn't stop him from decomposing. The ghost was dying and there was fuck-all I could do about it.

So it was all on Mrs. Dawson. I didn't have a script—all she had to do was meet some basic standards of scariness. She just needed to haunt the graveyard and raise a little hell. We all got into position, the piskies hovering overhead, Adan and me skulking invisibly behind tombstones.

“We're ready,” I said. “Show us the spooky stuff, Mrs. Dawson.”

She stood there clutching her purse and looking lost. “Well, I'm sure I don't…” She cleared her throat. “Boo,” she said.

I looked toward Adan. I couldn't see him, even with my
fairy sight, but I knew where he was. “Did she just say
boo?
Tell me she didn't fucking say
boo.
” The only answer was a choking sound that was frankly scarier than anything Mrs. Dawson had thus far produced.

“Mrs. Dawson,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even, “boo isn't scary. I'm not sure it was ever scary, but it definitely isn't scary anymore. Come on, give me some ghost. Express yourself. Let out that tortured soul.”

She just looked at me with a dazed expression on her face and shook her head.

“You're fierce,” I offered. She wasn't. Eventually, it got bad enough I was afraid the ghost-hunter would sniff out the trap even if he did happen to wander by. We hit the mist and relocated. Mrs. Dawson repeated her performance at Inglewood Park, Angeles Abbey down in Compton, Roosevelt in Gardena and Park Lawn.

By the time we got to Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights, the night was wearing thin on multiple fucking levels. Honey assured me it was almost dawn, though I hadn't noticed any change in the television glow of the Between. I'd never spent this much time in the shadow-world and I was beginning to imagine all the ways my body would protest the treatment when I finally got back into it. Most of all, I had a splitting headache that had started pinching my temples in Inglewood and got a little worse each time I used the invisibility glamour.

I crouched by a headstone, pressing the heels of my hands against the sides of my head. I tore one away long enough to wave it at Adan. I had to concentrate on keeping my ethereal brains inside my ethereal skull and steel myself to pull off the glamour one more time. Adan could coach Mrs. Dawson if he was up to it.

“Let's do it,” Adan said, smiling at her. “Get angry.
Think about Domino.” I growled at him, but he continued. “Think about her living in your house and…doing whatever she does. Come on now, let it all out.”

Mrs. Dawson's face darkened. Her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened into a thin line. She began to puff up like she was going to blow. Adan looked over at me and nodded. “This is it,” he said. I ground my teeth, swallowed drily and tried to bring up that ice-cold juice from the Beyond I'd taken when I squeezed the changeling. Pain lanced through my head and hammered me to my knees. I gasped and looked desperately toward Mrs. Dawson. After all this, I was going to blow it because I couldn't handle the glamour.

“Oooooo,” she said. “Wooooooo!”

Rage flared inside me and purged the pain in my head, leaving an empty and cold space in its wake. I stood up, drew Ned from the holster on my hip and stalked toward the ghost. I raised the gun, fully extending my arm in front of me, and placed the barrel against the center of her forehead.

“That's it,” I said, my voice low and calm. “I'm done with you, lady. I'd gun you down right here, but shooting's too good for you.” I moved the barrel down and pressed it against the bottom of her chin, tilting her head up to the starless cobalt sky. I leaned in until our noses were almost touching. “I'm going to banish you from your precious house, Maggie,” I whispered. “I'll bind you across the street, where you can see it, but you won't—”