Moon Dragon (17 page)

I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed to lie down. Finally, I shrugged and said, “We could say that a couple of the robbery-homicide dicks at East drank me under the table, and I passed out, so they decided to prank me by staging a shooting. Only I had a drug reaction to the drink, so everybody thought I was dead.”

“
Is
that what happened, detective?” Now his look is sharp, severe. He’s suddenly a police captain again. Not a worried brother in blue.

“Hell if I know, Cap.” This time my voice trembles slightly, and I hate myself for it. “I can’t remember a thing. Not since…what is today?”

He has to check his computer screen. “Tuesday.”

“I remember coming to work yesterday morning. I remember drawing a canvass up in the Heights, that domestic shooting with the rapper, right?” I strain to recall anything since then. McDonald’s lunch, eaten in an unmarked Crown Vic with Malena Ayon, my partner. Paperwork back at my desk. Phone call to Devon, my husband? Maybe. Not sure. Then nothing.

“So you don’t know who…did this to you.” He points at my left breast again. Not a habit I want to encourage.

I shake my head. Now I really do feel like crying. Can I? Am I even capable of it? If my heart muscles are dead, then my circulatory system isn’t working, isn’t feeding my liver and kidneys and various glands. Like my tear ducts. By now my lymphatic system, along with my renal, should be in full shutdown. But I’m breathing. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I even had a few hits from the spring water bottle on my desk when I first came in. Nothing had come spraying out of the bullet hole, either, like it would’ve in the movies. How am I absorbing it, the water?

“
What?”
I ask, irked. He’s still staring at me.

“You actually look pretty normal, except for the blood all over the front of your shirt. Try buttoning your jacket up—see if covers it.” It doesn’t. Quirk sits back down again. “Look,” he goes on with a loud sigh. “Here’s how this is going down. As far as I’m concerned, you’re neither dead or alive. Just a normal overworked cop after a triple-shift, in other words. So I’m pretending none of this ever happened, because honestly, I can’t think of any other sane way to deal with it. It’s like a bad dream. But you can’t rat out any of the guys at East or any other precinct for this—otherwise we’ll get IA all up our ass, right? And you don’t want that any more than I do. Because if you’re outed, then the Feds will probably show up and try to redact your ass all the way to Guantanamo or take you apart in a secret lab or something. More to the point, with the hiring freeze, I can’t replace you. So think of some explanation that doesn’t involve the department, okay? I like the drug interaction thing. Work with that. Maybe smear some lip gloss or something over the blood, just so people think it’s a fake.”

“Okay,” I say. “Just let me go to the bathroom first.” My itch has become a physical need. Like having stitches removed.

“Seriously, detective—this stops with you, okay? Any more crap like this—giving it to other police, eating brains, fingers falling off you, whatever—I want you out of here, understood?  Because I can’t cover for you. And put on a little makeup, will you? You do look kinda pale!” he calls after me.

Luckily, the squad room is still empty. But it won’t be for long. I grab my purse and head to the women’s restroom, which was created by cutting the old men’s room in half with plywood and plasterboard, and lock the door behind me. Then I unbutton my shirt, pull my breast out over my bra, and for the first time, have a look at the wound in the mirror. It’s…ugly. Really horrible looking. Actually, speaking professionally and objectively, the shooter did a very clean, tidy job—thank God they didn’t double-tap me in the forehead afterwards. On any other vic, I’d be grateful it hadn’t made a big mess; this just looks so horrible because…
it’s me
. However, I gotta admit that whoever did it knew what he was doing. Or she. A perfectly executed lethal shot, though I can tell immediately by probing with my fingers that one of my ribs has been shattered. Shit! Now,
that
hurts…

I stick the tweezers in the wound and work them in very, very slowly. In med school, I would have had a high-intensity lamp and magnifying glasses to do this with; in the here and now, I’m having to rely on my sense of touch and whatever I can glimpse in the dimly lit and none-too-clean mirror over the sink. The hole opens like a pair of lips; maybe I’ll be able to seal this up with superglue or something, then cover it with theatrical makeup or polymer. Inside the glistening red meat that lies beneath, I can spot shards of bone and gristle. For some reason, I don’t want to pull these out—like with bad wisdom teeth, I can somehow pretend I’m whole as long as they’re still in me. So I keep going, wincing and hissing with the sharp stabs of pain, until I spot something glinting from inside what I would guess to be my right ventricle.

The bullet that killed me.

I’ve been in the hospital as a patient a few times, especially back in the days when I was in a patrol car. I’ve had broken bones, knife cuts, a flesh wound from an Uzi, a miscarriage once, a kidney stone…I thought I knew what agony was.

Trust me, I had no idea.

The moment I work the tweezers into the lifeless heart tissue and grasp the metal jacket, then all the pain in the world shows up and smacks me all at once. I almost faint dead away standing there. I’ve only got the one shot, all or nothing, at getting it out. I give it a single yank and hear something clattering in the sink as I black out on my feet. Protect your face, is my last conscious thought; then somehow I catch myself by leaning forward into the peeling wood vanity, almost toppling into the mirror face-first.

After a few minutes, I come to again. The bullet lies glittering up at me from near the sink’s drain-hole. I take a closer look at it under the light. A .9mm para. Police issue, but full metal jacketed, not hollow point—if it had been hollow, it would have spread my heart all over my rib cage. This is the kind of cartridge you’d use for target practice, not patrol. It would have fit my Glock. I put it in an evidence baggie, then in my pocket. Any DNA or prints on it had probably been compromised by the sink, but they aren’t really what I’m interested in. I want the ballistics from it.

That might tell me whose gun it was fired from. All police department-issued firearms have their barrel striations measured and kept on file, so that any bullets fired from them have their “fingerprints”.

That done, I put on some blusher and pinch my cheeks. It’s amazing how much better I’m feeling with that thing out of me. I have a sudden fierce craving for a cup of coffee. I put on some lipstick and then smear the stick over the blood on my shirt. When Cappy’s right, he’s right; it works wonders. I even touch up my mascara a bit. Then I unlock the door and go downstairs with the man. It’s showtime.

And if it was somebody in the stationhouse who’s set me up and then shot me, then they’re about to get one hell of a surprise when I show up…

3.

Actually, showing up turns out to be the easy part. I’m really surprised—and, okay, touched—by how grim everybody in the stationhouse had been about my death. Everybody on the night shift, anyway. And how stunned and happy, pretty much, they seem to see me alive again and kicking. No one stands out as a suspect really. Unless they all are.

The worst part is all the hugging. I beg off as much as I can, pleading my broken rib. This fits in with my vengeful-gangbangers-pranking-me narrative and gives me an excuse to wince and whine a lot and not let anybody notice how cold my skin is. And for the captain to send me off to the hospital.

“Take as much time as you need,” he tells me. “See what the doctor says—take the rest of this week, say. Shoot for full workload next Monday.” Meaning, get your act together by then.

I already know what a doctor would tell me—I almost was one, once. “You’re dead, lady.” That’s what three years of med school will teach you: no pulse, no blood pressure? Yep, dead as a doornail. So I don’t need no damn hospital, except maybe for cosmetic purposes.

Instead, I head straight home. Now that the shock is wearing off, the thing I’m dreading the most is telling my husband. I mean, aside from being whatever I am—dead, half-dead, undead—forever. You know. Like for all eternity. Unless I really am some kind of zombie, like in that show
The Walking Dead
or something. But do zombies come with expiration dates? I guess I’ll have to Google that.

OK, my mind may be dazed and confused by what’s just happened to me, but I’m still a cop. Viewing this objectively, as I would with any other murder victim, a few really wrong things jump out at me. Aside from the me being dead but still walking around
aspect of the situation, I mean. Like the lack of an exit wound. And the missing time. An hour, I believe. And it seems to me I wouldn’t have died instantly from a major heart trauma. There would have been a lot of gurgling, burbling, and spraying blood around. I’ve never actually witnessed anyone being shot through the heart, only seen the aftermath, but I seem to remember reading about a few cases in med school and at the police academy. At the very least, there would have been a lot more blood around.

Of course, there was; I’d just assumed it was fruit juice. But it occurs to me for the first time that maybe I was shot somewhere else and then dumped at the warehouse.
But by who
?

In police work, it’s usually the most obvious suspect who turns out to be the criminal. Like the boyfriend. Or the husband.

My hubby’s name is Devon James Puckett. Hubby, half-hubby, maybe un-hubby. I don’t really know anymore. Here’s the thing. I said I’d never cheated on him, and yeah, that’s technically true. If it’s just sex we’re talking about. But if it’s commitment, then yeah, I guess I’ve always put him second. And sort of snuck around about it, making feeble excuses and a few outright lies. You know, acting real guilty, except not guilty enough to change my ways. Let him down over and over. Because I always put my work first. As he’s bitterly said several times in front of several different counselors,
The Job
is my real husband.

And I guess that’s true. The lure of becoming a cop was enough to get me to drop out of med school, to my mother’s eternal and bitter disappointment. In fact, I could have been a surgeon—I had most, though not all, of the necessary qualities. And the grades. Of course, if I’d been a surgeon, my marriage would have ended up on the rocks anyway, most likely. But hey, at least I would have been rich.

The thing is, women who were abused as girls usually fall into two categories: the ones who deal with it and move on, and the ones who don’t. Guess which kind I am. But see, even the ones in the first category often have a lot of marital problems later in life, and a surprising number of us end up in a uniform of one kind or another—military, police, nursing, prison, that kind of uniform. I thought a doctor’s scrubs would be enough, but I was wrong. I needed more control, needed to feel like I was preventing others from being victimized like I was.

At least that’s what a police shrink told me once. Oh shit, and I forgot to mention that as I left tonight Cappy wanted me to see the guy again ASAP. Cap said—get this—I needed “grief counseling”. Huh, I told him; I’m not bereaved. Sure you are, he said. Think about it. So it’s written up; my first appointment is next Monday. Something tells me it won’t go well. But right now, as I park my banged-up Toyota Corolla in our driveway, I’m sort of thinking the same thing about me telling Devon that I’m, you know,
dead
. I’ve had to break a lot of job-related weirdness to the poor guy over the three years we’ve been together. But nothing quite like this…

I’m guessing it might be a deal-breaker.

And another thing. The detective in me knows that Devon is by far the likeliest person to have murdered me. Or to have contracted it out to someone else.
Cui bono
, see. So a part of me is going to be judging him, weighing his every word, checking him out for tells, like him being surprised I’m still able to walk and talk. Or lying to me. Though I highly doubt Devon had anything to do with my death— for one thing, he practically pukes at the sight of my sidearm if I unholster it. Not that being a vegan and a pacifist lets him off the hook. I just can’t see him being that…well, decisive, somehow. And for another, he’s way too stingy to hire a hitman—not out of one of his own personal accounts, anyway. Mine, maybe.

It goes even worse than I expect, and I’m expecting the worst. For starters, there’s another woman in the room when I walk in the front door. It’s true she’s one of those sketchy pale green people I’ve been seeing everywhere, but she’s sitting on the couch watching TV and looking like she owns the place. Oh, what the hell; it’s time I faced facts. She’s a ghost. She’s what I would be if the .9mm parabellum had killed me—killed me all the way, I mean. Yeah, she’s dead alright.

By now, I’m getting pretty used to these dead people and ghost-trails, ghostly buildings and cars and trolleys and even a few horse-drawn wagons. And the dead underfoot all over the place. There hadn’t been any upstairs at the stationhouse, for some reason—maybe because the building had no second story in the old days—but there had been plenty on the ground floor. They kept wandering in and out of the duty-room and the break kitchen during my little Lazarus-back-from-the-dead performance for my co-workers. There had even been a little dead girl in big bow ribbons and a pinafore. They don’t float or fly or slime you or anything; they seem to just walk or drive around all day and hang out. I guess that’s what you do when you’re dead and have a lot of time on your hands. Like…eternity.