Blood Debt

the bow. It's caught in one of them eddies between the dock and the ship." Falling into step beside her, Polich shoved his hands in the pockets of grimy overalls. "We figured they'd send the city police."
    "Sorry. You're stuck with me until we know for sure you saw what you said you did."
    "You think we made it up?" asked one of the other men indignantly, leaning around his companion to glare at the cop.
    Corporal Roberts shook her head and sighed. "I couldn't possibly be that lucky."
    She wasn't.
    Bobbing up and down in the narrow triangle between the bow and the dock was the body of a naked man, his back a pale, flesh-colored island, the strands of his hair sweeping against it like dark seaweed.
    "Shit."
    Polich nodded. "That's what I said. You figure he's a jumper?"
    "I doubt it." While they did occasionally get jumpers off the Lions Gate Bridge, they hadn't had one yet who'd stopped to take his clothes off. Pointing her flashlight beam at the water, she slowly swept the circle of illumination over the corpse. Bruises, large and small, made a mottled pattern of purple against the pale skin. Not very old— and not going to get any older, she told herself grimly—he hadn't been in the water for long.
    "Funny what makes some of 'em float and some of 'em sink," Polich mused quietly beside her. "This guy's skin and bones, should'a gone right to the… God damn it! Would you look at that!"
    The other two longshoremen crowded in to see.
    Flung forward, Corporal Roberts tottered on the edge of the pier, saved at the last minute from a potentially dangerous swim by a muscular arm thrust in front of her like a filthy, cloth-covered, safety rail. Breathing heavily, she thanked Polich and snarled a warning at the other two.
    As they backed up, too intent on the body in the water to be properly penitent, one of them muttered, "What the hell could've happened to his hands?"

    Sunset the next night occurred behind cloud cover so heavy only the fading light gave evidence that the sun had set at all. At 7:23, Tony turned off his watch alarm and muted the inane conversation filling in a rain delay for a Seattle Mariners' home game. Who wanted to hear about a shortage of organ donors when they were waiting to watch baseball? He never dreamed he'd miss Fergie Oliver. Leaning back in his chair, he glanced down the hall, listening for the first sounds of Henry's return and straining to hear the rattle of ghostly chains.
    As the sun released its hold and his senses slowly began to function, Henry sifted through and ignored a hundred familiar sensations. An impossible breeze stroked icy fingers across his cheek. He willed his arm to move and switched on the lamp.
    The ghost stood where it had the day before—a nondescript young man, needing a haircut and shave, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Its edges were indistinct and although Henry could see writing on the shirt, he couldn't make it out—whether because the writing hadn't fully materialized or because the items on the dresser behind the ghost's semitranslucent torso distracted him, he wasn't sure. As far as Henry could remember, he'd never seen the young man alive.
    He half expected the specter to vanish when he sat up, but it remained at the foot of his bed. It's waiting for something. If a noncorporeal being could be said to have posture, the ghost's stance screamed anticipation.
    "All right." He sighed and leaned back against the headboard.
    "What do you want?"
    Slowly, the ghost lifted its arms and vanished.
    Henry stared a moment longer at the place where it had been and wondered what could have possibly happened to its hands.
    "It had no hands at all?" When Henry nodded, Tony chewed his lower lip in thought. "Were they, like, cut off or ripped off or chewed off or what?" he asked after a moment.
    "They just weren't there." Henry took a bottle of water out of the fridge, opened it, and drained it. The growing popularity of bottled water had been a god-send; while blood provided total nourishment, all living things required water, and the purifying chemicals added by most cities made him ill. Bacteria, his system ignored. Chlorine, it rebelled against. Tossing the empty plastic bottle in the recycling bin, he leaned on the counter and stared down at his own hands. "They just weren't there," he repeated.
    "Then I bet that's what he wants—vengeance. They always want vengeance."
    Raising an eyebrow at Tony's certainty, Henry asked just where he'd acquired his knowledge of