Styx (14 page)

“He hasn't made any contact whatsoever since his disappearance?”

She brought her emotions back under control. “No, Inspector, no contact whatsoever. If he
wanted
to drop off the face of the earth, if this is all some kind of plan he set in motion himself, then I'm the
last
person he'd contact.”

“I know,” said Delacroix. “I'm sorry. I have to consider every possible scenario.”

“Well, consider this scenario: my husband isn't coming back, because he hasn't ‘disappeared.' He's
dead
. Otherwise, what would you be doing here? I lived with a cop for fifteen years, I know how you people think—and I don't need your pity. Rafe's dead. You think the Stuffer killed him. But I know better: it was his own goddamn obsession that killed him.”

She hadn't come right out and said it, but if the woman had told him her husband's death had been at least to some extent a relief, Delacroix would have believed her.

“We don't know that for sure, Mrs. Gerard. We still haven't found a body.”

“You don't need his body to be sure.
I'm
sure. And just because our marriage had gone to hell, don't think I don't care. I
do
care. Rafe had his good points, too. It's just . . . that seems so long ago. You know, he actually used to be really romantic.”

Styx, romantic? The same guy who'd been called on the carpet again and again for excessive violence during arrests and interrogations, who'd barely survived not one but two Internal Affairs investigations for putting suspects in the hospital?

“He
had
something,” said Isabelle softly. “I don't know how to describe it.”

Delacroix thought back to the last time he'd seen Styx. Yes, he had to admit, although he couldn't stomach the man personally, Styx definitely
had
something. Maybe it was why they didn't get along.

Because Joachim Delacroix had something, too.

“Would you mind if I took a look around his office?”

One of Shelley's paws was in Isabelle's lap now, and she gently slid out from beneath it. The dog and the man had been two of a kind, Delacroix thought. The detectives often awarded one another affectionate nicknames, and, although they'd never bestowed one on Styx, they could well have called him “the pit bull.”

Isabelle slid open a door that separated the living room from a small study. As he joined her, Delacroix asked, “He never said anything about the Stuffer case?”

“Not a word.”

“Never talked about work, about any of his colleagues?”

Delacroix had no idea where the question had come from. He felt a need to prove himself, not just to John Crevits, not just to Isabelle Gerard, but somehow to the ghost of Raphael Styx. He needed something to show that his invasion of Styx's home had been worthwhile.

“No, I told you, Inspector. We hardly saw each other. For the last few months, he barely even lived here. He was somewhere else. He just put in an appearance from time to time. Sometimes, in the morning, I'd find a magazine open on the couch or a dirty dish in the sink, a clue that he'd been here, nothing more.”

She waved him into Styx's inner sanctum.

“If you want to take anything with you, be my guest,” she said. “I can't imagine there's anything here that'll help. If he had anything important, it'd be in his office at the station.”

She turned away, as if unwilling to breach the privacy of her
husband's space, and went back to the dog, who remained motionless on the sofa.

Delacroix felt uncomfortable in Styx's study. The desk was practically bare. There was a camp bed set up in a corner, and he wondered if Styx would sleep here after an argument with his wife. There was an old wardrobe, and he opened it. There were two black suits on hangers.

Jesus, the guy only had two suits?

He couldn't remember ever seeing Styx in a police uniform. He always wore the same outfit: black jeans, black boots, and a black brushed-velvet sports coat over a black or dark-gray shirt.

Could have used a little more color in his life
, Delacroix thought, swinging the wardrobe doors closed.

Since his first promotion, from patrolman to detective, Delacroix hadn't needed to wear the boring Ostend PD uniform either. Like most young men of his social class from the Congo, Delacroix was a
sapeur
, a card-carrying member of La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, an informal association of fashionable men who spent half their pay or more on tailor-made colorful suits and expensive leather shoes and, cane in hand, waltzed their way through life like the most elegant of 1940s-era bandleaders.

Poor men in a poor country on a poor continent, the sapeurs lived rich lives beyond their means, lives of joie de vivre. They dined on three-course meals, they partied the nights away as if their lives depended on it, they seized each day in triumphant, joyous hands—and they dressed the part from head to toe, with silver cuff links and ironed pocket squares and a blindingly colorful new suit for every day of the week.

“Thanks for talking with me,” he said, a half hour later, as Isabelle Gerard let him out of the apartment. “And for the phone. We'll trace the last calls in and out—discreetly, of course.”

“Discretion,” said Isabelle of the languid eye. “You know, he forgot my birthday this year.”

Delacroix didn't know what to say to that.

“I don't mean forgot it until the next morning. He forgot it altogether, never said a word about it. He just didn't care. I don't think I really existed for him anymore. He was living in another world.”

The irritating twitch in Styx's shoulder had gotten worse. He stood across the street from his own apartment. There was a police car parked before the door. He'd waited until full dark to come out and had been there now for more than an hour, hoping for some sign that would allow him—no,
require
him—to hobble through a break in the evening traffic and stick his key in the lock.

But the impulse gradually faded. The longer he stood there, the less he could see himself actually doing it, the less he could even
conceive
of himself walking through that door in his condition. Isabelle would hardly recognize him. He didn't need a mirror to know his skin had gone a color not part of the visible spectrum. You couldn't even call it gray at this point. He was the color of nothingness.

And the corpse-reek his body gave off was getting worse.

It was after eleven when he saw a dark figure stroll out of the Milho Apartments. Styx recognized the jaunty walk: Who else but Joachim Delacroix would stand out so boldly against the night in his pale-green linen suit, a coral scarf draped rakishly around his throat instead of a tie, a collarless Italian shirt unbuttoned halfway down his coal-black chest?

“Jesus,” he muttered, “he thinks he's in fucking Miami.”

Styx could guess what Delacroix was doing there, the backstabbing bastard. He might be a zombie, but his brain still worked well enough to figure this one out: Delacroix had taken over his case.

Styx watched the young dandy head for his patrol car, beeping it open with a sissified little remote. The prick.

He crossed the street, dragging his right leg like a fallen tree limb. His shoulder jerked spastically, worse than ever. Maybe the twitch was more than a reflex, an autonomic fight against the permanence of death. Maybe it was at least partly mental.

He reached the Opel just as Delacroix started it up, braced himself with a hand on the roof, and leaned down to tap the passenger-side window with an index finger. This time, his nail tore free and dropped to the asphalt.

The window hummed down.

“Can I help you?” Delacroix asked.

Styx was surprised at how casual the rookie sounded. He'd expected him to jump out of his €400 loafers. Then he realized that the garden lights that lined the driveway were too dim to reveal the gruesome truth.

“You don't recognize me, do you?”

“Excuse me?”

“What were you doing in there, Delacroix?”

“Who are you?”

“I'm the man you replaced, Inspector.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Comforting the lonely widow, were you?”

“Who
are
you?”

Styx could feel that Delacroix was about to raise the window and back away from the confrontation. He opened the door and slid in beside the rookie, relieved to be off his feet at last. His deep sigh made him sound like a tourist ready for a joyride through nighttime Ostend.

“Can I get a lift?” he asked.

“Get the hell out of my—Jesus, what's that smell?”

“That's me, I'm afraid,” said Styx.

“You
stink
, man!”

“Still don't know who I am?”

Delacroix was staring right at him, but the nitwit still had no clue.

“I'll give you a hint,” said Styx. “I'm missing.”

“Missing?”

“Let me ask you something, Delacroix. How's the Stuffer case coming along? You find anything helpful in that cabana?”

Delacroix stared at him.

“You must have found
something
.”

The young cop opened his mouth, but no words came out.

“I know you didn't find
me
.”

“Styx?”

“Bingo! That wasn't so hard, was it?”

“Styx, is it you? Shit!”

“I hope you mean that in a
nice
way.”

Styx could hear the rasp in his voice. He wasn't talking so much as mumbling. This was the first time since the incident with the Stuffer—okay, fine, the first time since his
death
—that he'd engaged in an actual conversation.

He reminded himself of John Hurt in
The Elephant Man
.

I . . . am not . . . an animal. I am . . . a human being.

“It—it's not possible,” Delacroix stammered.

“Why not?”

“You're dead. Styx is—”

“Dead? Yeah, well, here I am.”

“You were murdered. We saw the photos. We saw the blood in the cabana. Who the fuck
are
you?”

“Who the fuck do you
think
I am?”

And at that moment Styx pressed the overhead button that turned on the car's dome light.

“Holy shit!” Delacroix's arms shot up, his hands blocking out the awful sight. The front of one wrist touched the back of the other, forming a crude cross, and Styx wondered if the dandy thought he was a vampire.

Close
, he thought.
Guess again!

The rookie's right hand dropped to his hip, and suddenly he was pointing his service revolver straight at Styx's head.

“What happened to your face? Your eyes? Your mouth? You look like—”

“I look like I got run over by a truck, I know. And then barbecued on a grill. Listen, calm down. I don't know how to explain it. All I can tell you is that I
am
Raphael Styx, and the fucking Stuffer shot me three times, once in the heart. I can show you the wounds if you want to see them, just like in the pictures, but I don't recommend it. I don't know what to do about the stink. My whole body's rotting away. I have no idea how long I'm going to last, but I'm here now, back from the Apparently-Not-Necessarily-Final Darkness.”

He leaned in close and put a hand on the barrel of Delacroix's gun and pushed it down.

“I'm back, kid,” he said tightly.

“But how—?”

“I don't know how. I just know I
died
. The life leaked out of me there in that cabana, and it was no near-death experience. It was a
death
experience. I was fucking
dead
, and as far as I can tell I still am. Except I'm here.
Un
dead.”

“Undead,” Delacroix repeated dully.

“I know it sounds crazy, but I need you to believe me. You're my only hope.”

“Undead? You mean like—?”

He could see Delacroix trying to say the word, but he seemed to worry that saying it would make it real.

“Yeah,” Styx nodded, “I mean like.”

“I don't believe it,” said Delacroix.

“And yet.”

“I'm going to puke.”

“Save it for later. I need your help.”

Styx saw Delacroix's gun hand trembling. The poor schmuck had a decision to make, but Styx didn't have time to wait. He hauled up the old Glock he'd found at his father-in-law's place and pressed the barrel to the young cop's temple.

“I'm going to ask you to take things very slowly now, Delacroix. Try to stay calm. I don't want to hurt you, so please don't make things worse than they already are.”

Delacroix laughed hysterically.

“This is bullshit, Styx! It's too weird for words.”