Ungrateful Dead by Naomi Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

“What else? Walls dripping blood, anything like that?”
    He sniffed, slumping back in his seat. “Things going missing. Just little things at first, paperwork, pens, like that. But then two weeks ago –” He cut himself off, face chalky-white like he might be sick. “Two weeks ago,” he whispered hoarsely, “one of the bodies ... moved. ”
    “Moved how? Like twitching-toes moved, or did a little jig moved, or what?” I leaned forwards, interested now despite myself. Could be someone was just screwing with Charlie’s head – and I didn’t think it would take much – or could be we had a genuine body-snatcher on our hands, if this corpse had disappeared entirely. That might be interesting. Probably not as interesting as Jenny’s cleavage, but who knew?
    “Moved,” Charlie repeated, eyes burning into me now as he tried to impress on me how goddam serious this all was, “as in sat up on the trolley and stared at me.” He turned green now, sweat beading on his forehead, fingers tapping erratically on the tabletop. “For a good minute or so, it just stared at me. Didn’t speak, but I knew it was her. The girl from Cloth Encounters. She’d possessed the corpse somehow. She...”
    I held up my hand to silence him. “Charlie,” I said carefully, “I’ve got to ask this, so don’t be pissy, okay? Had you been drinking that night? Taking any medication –“
    “Ethan! When have you ever seen me drinking?”
    I shrugged. “We don’t hang out a lot. You might have a whole bunch of bad habits I don’t know about. You might be a secret crackhead.”
    “Well I’m not,” he flared, scowling at me. “I wasn’t drunk or high or stressed or tired or anything else. I know what I saw.”
    “Okay.” I finished my beer and assessed him. “What else has been happening?”
    “Well, no more bodies have moved,” he said, “but everything else – the lights, things disappearing, the temperature stuff, that’s kept on. And I feel someone watching me, all the time. But my boss doesn’t believe me, and I just want some proof, Ethan. Just someone who’s word he’ll trust.”
    That pleading Basset hound look was back on his face. I shifted around in my torn leather seat, uncomfortable. God knows why Charlie thought my word was one his boss would trust. I mean, I’m a bum, right? I’m one missed rent payment away from being a full-time hobo and I had cold noodles for breakfast this morning. I wish I was joking about that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a good PI, but I’m pretty fucking useless at everything else in life. You wouldn’t look at me and think, Ethan Banning. Now there’s a stand-up guy who I can rely on . More like, Ethan Banning. Why does that guy always smell like Chinese food?
    If anything, I imagined me chipping in and saying, yeah, the morgue is totally haunted, would just make Charlie look worse. I mean, first off, who hires a private dick for a haunted morgue in the first place? And second, what kind of self-respecting private dick takes the case?
    My silence was making Charlie nervous. “Just spend a couple hours there with me,” he said. “I trust you, Ethan. You’re not a bullshitter. If you spend some time there and tell me I’m imagining everything, I’ll let it go.”
    “I dunno ...” I sighed, pushing my empty glass around listlessly. That pro-golfer’s garbage had been pretty nasty. I’d planned an evening of flirting in vain with Jenny, then going home to shower and wait for my paycheck from the golfer’s wife to arrive. The morgue didn’t really fit in there.
    “I’ll double your usual fee,” Charlie pushed.
    I guess I wasn’t as self-respecting as I like to believe. I finished my cigarette and dropped the dog end into my beer glass. “Let’s move.”
    You know what, you can get a lot of noodles for double my usual fee.
    ***
    Something like seventy thousand people are listed as missing in the USA right now, so it’s probably not surprising that missing person