Unfinished Death

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Jane wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, or how she got to this place. The last thing she remembered was finishing off a fifth of Jack Daniels with her younger brother, Mike. It was around 1:00 A.M. and they were still at her house after a three-day bender over the President’s Day holiday weekend. As she recalled, she’d sucked the last drag of nicotine from her cigarette, crushed the empty pack and attempted a bank shot into the wastebasket across the room. But that was her last memory before she awoke into this odd scene.

There she was—sitting alone in a high-back wicker chair on a pristine, wraparound porch that extended out from what appeared to be one of those ancient Colorado sanitariums where people went to recuperate from TB or pneumonia. She looked down at her clothes, expecting to see a hospital gown to go along with the clinical setting. Instead, she wore her standard blue jeans, poplin shirt, leather jacket, and roughout cowboy boots. She could feel the butt of her Glock biting into her rib cage. She swore she’d been clad in her Denver Broncos sweatshirt and
sweatpants just minutes before catapulting into this unsettling shift in scenery.

Good God. In all her years of heavy drinking, Jane had never hallucinated. And now, here she was—right in the middle of one hell of a disturbing delusion that felt a little too real.

She noted how heavy her hands felt against the wicker armrests. Her feet, in turn, hung like lead on the white-planked porch. As she gazed forward, she suddenly noticed the exquisite expanse of trimmed grass that seemed to roll for miles into the aqua sky. The air smelled sweet, like spring when life in Colorado comes alive after months of winter’s death and dormancy. The scent of blooming lilacs and sweet daffodils created an intoxicating perfume that calmed and caressed her senses.

Not 40 feet in front of Jane, a lone East Indian in his mid-forties unexpectedly appeared in the middle of the grass. He stared at her for a minute before cocking his head to the side and waving. She told her body to stand up, but somehow the message didn’t reach the correct part of her brain because she stayed inexplicably frozen to the wicker chair. The man climbed the seven steps that led to the porch and rested his lean body against the railing in front of her. The persistent woody scent of sandalwood enveloped him, an outward signature that seemed to herald his appearance. His smile was warm and genuine, his demeanor gentle and kind.

“Jane…Jane Perry?” he stated, almost as if he was reading her name on an invisible card that floated above her head.

Jane nodded. For some reason, speaking was difficult. The heaviness grew more profound in her body. What in the hell is happening?

He extended his hand. “Devinder Bashir.” Jane lifted her leaden hand off the armrest and shook his hand. He held onto it, his grasp reading her thoughts. “How very odd,” Devinder said in a faraway tone.

Jane tensed. She struggled to force out two words. “What’s odd?”

“You still have the weight of the world.” His eyebrows furrowed. “You’re not dead yet.”

Jane slammed back into her thirty five-year-old, aching body. She opened her eyes and sat up in bed. “Holy Shit!” she sputtered, her heart racing. Her Denver Broncos shirt was soaked in acrid sweat. Pressing her palm to her forehead, she attempted to assuage the relentless throbbing that bore into her skull. Jane felt halfway outside of herself, as she rolled off her bed and stumbled down the hallway to the living room. She found her brother, Mike, on the couch. He was right where she had left him just five minutes before. But a quick glance of the clock showed that five hours had passed. This makes no damn sense. Jane steadied herself on the kitchen counter, while another wave of excruciating pain rippled across her temples. This was unlike any hangover she’d ever experienced.

“You’re not dead yet,” the Indian man who called himself Devinder Bashir told her.

“Yet,” Jane whispered, as an uneasy shock traversed her spine.

Is this even real? she questioned herself. Or is this a freakish extension of the dream?

She lunged toward her sleeping brother, impatiently tugging on his shirt. He stirred briefly before starting to turn away, but Jane pulled him back toward her. “Mike! Wake up! Goddamnit! Wake up!”

Mike grimaced. He unhinged one eye to focus. “What the fuck time is it, Janie?”

“Six o’clock.”

“Fuck me. Wake me up at 11:00.”

Jane grabbed his shoulders with urgency, shaking him. “Mike! Wake the fuck up!”

Now, he was pissed. Well, as pissed as Mike Perry could be—which was more like what bothered looked like with most people. “What, Janie?”

“Slap me.”

“I don’t wanna slap you.”

“Mike, I’m not kidding. I need you to slap me.” Mike made a weak attempt that resembled brushing a hair off his sister’s face rather than a smack. “Fuck,” Jane mumbled, still feeling outside of her body. “Mike, I mean it, if you don’t slap me hard, I’m cutting off your beer!”

That got his attention. He landed a good cuff across his sister’s left cheek.

Jane shook off the sting and let out a satisfied breath. “Okay. I’m not dead.”

“You’re not dead?” Mike sat up. “Jesus, Janie. If you’re geeked up on meth, at least cut me in on some.”

“I’m not doing meth, Mike! It interferes with my job description.”

“Could’ve fooled me, Detective. What time is it again?”

Jane sensed the unfinished seam of another reality that was still wide open. “Time for a drink.”

After an uneventful night of dreams, Tuesday morning arrived. Jane knocked back a breakfast of three cups of coffee, four cigarettes and a two-day old chocolate donut. As she drove to Denver Headquarters, she could remember every moment of the dream. It still shook her core with the same uneasy shudder. To her knowledge, she’d never had a dream where a complete stranger introduced himself by his full name. Devinder Bashir. How in the hell did her subconscious invent that foreign name? Must have read it on a homicide victim list, she reasoned. Then again, she hadn’t worked a homicide with an East Indian vic or family member in years. Logic, use logic, she urged herself, while she lit a new cigarette off the dying ember of another. It was the booze, she decided. Yeah, that made the whole thing easier to swallow. At 35, her weather-beaten body was getting too old for three-day binges where incoherency was the objective. Drowning out the voices was always the goal, achieving that place of numbness where she could stare into the void and feel nothing. It was taking longer to get to that empty space and, once there, the sweet peace lasted less and less time. All addicts eventually
slammed against this wall. At this point, one either got help or dove deeper into the bottle. Jane figured that she could still swim pretty well, which made the latter option her preferred choice.

Just past 8:45 A.M, she peeled her 1966 ice blue Mustang into the parking garage on 13th and Cherokee. She finished off her sixth cigarette of the morning, as she walked to the elevator. After a three-day holiday weekend, she wondered how many people who had a pulse last Friday had given up the ghost by Monday night at the hands of another; people who had every good intention of seeing another week of existence, never seeing their sudden demise on the horizon. No sooner did that thought cross her mind when she heard Devinder’s voice clearly. “You’re not dead, yet.”

“Jane!”

She spun around. Detective Bruce Miles was walking toward her. He’d worked vice and narcotics for more than 20 years and it showed on his grizzled face. Miles was less than a year from retirement and had started to slow down. Cops called guys like Miles “slugs” or “hairpieces,” insinuating that they were just going through the motion and had lost their investigative edge. Jane couldn’t figure out how anyone could handle dealing with prostitutes, child pornography, hardcore druggies and all of the gutter swine that accompanied the vice gig. Years before, before she scored a slot in homicide, she had had her fill working assault and dealing with battered kids and drugaddled women. After 20 years of working with filth, she understood why Miles wasn’t as connected to the job as he used to be. She also sensed that he bent his elbow to the
breaking point at “choir practice” with the same passion and frequency as she did.

“Nothin’ like a three-day weekend to fuck up your Tuesday mornin’,” Miles grumbled.

“Catch a case this early?”

“Yeah. Suicide on Saturday night. Guy swallowed an Ambien, Valium, Oxycodone and whiskey cocktail.”

“Since when did suicide become a vice?”

“When you’re layin’ butt naked amidst your child porn collection when you kick.”

Jane tried to erase the disturbing image from her mind. “Fuck. You get all the choice cases, don’t you?”

Miles lit a cigarette. “This one’s got one of those added complications to make it even more interesting.”

“What’s that?”

“A cultural taint.”

Jane was somewhat aware of the stigma that stained a family when suicide occurred and the various superstitions that proliferated, especially in the more upper crust Middle Eastern bloodlines. “Muslim?” she asked.

“Nah,” Miles flipped open the file. “This guy is from the rice and curry crowd. Wealthy East Indian importer.”

Jane’s throat tightened. “What…what’s his name?”

Miles glanced at the page. “Devinder Bashir.”

It isn’t possible. That’s what Jane kept saying to herself, as Miles walked away and got into his Buick. No, no, this is a dream now. But no matter how many times Jane pinched, slapped and poked herself, she didn’t wake up. Be rational, she counseled herself, as she tried to reconcile the distorted thoughts racing through her mind. But there was nothing rational about this.

Nor was Jane’s next move. Instead of heading upstairs to her third floor homicide office, she ducked back into her Mustang and followed Miles out of the parking garage.

It took three cigarettes to reach the upscale neighborhood in Cherry Creek, where the grieving widow Bashir resided. In some ways, Jane was surprised that Miles didn’t see her tailing him. Then again, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the cop shed as of late. She parked the Mustang behind a large truck on the opposite side of the street and watched as Miles lumbered over to a thirty-something, blonde Caucasian woman watering her lawn. They shook hands before she led him into the sprawling two-story McMansion.

Jane lit another cigarette and mused over Devinder Bashir choosing a blonde, white chick as his wife. Jesus, she ruminated, she must have been some catch for him to marry outside his culture. Maybe she’s one of those white women who likes to meditate and chant, burn incense, listen to zither music, use Ayurvedic herbs, and can’t get enough Bollywood film classics? Devinder’s mother must love this cross-cultural union. Then, once again, the memory of the dead man manifesting to her in a boozeinduced dream reared its ugly head. That distorted sensation of standing outside her body swelled around her and was about to rattle her cage when she saw a rough-looking, Caucasian male emerge from the house’s three-car garage. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, well built and physically fit. The guy wore a tool belt, which he appeared to be well acquainted with. While Jane observed him from afar, over the next 20 minutes, he went about changing sprinkler heads on the lawn, securing the rain gutter over
the garage and doing a host of other sundry jobs. He continued to work when Miles re-emerged from the house, followed by Mrs. Bashir. She walked Miles down the brick lane that led to the street, shook his hand solemnly, and brushed her golden locks away from her grief-stricken face.