Inherit the Dead

while longer about how her best friend was going out with a jerk, how Mom and Cornelius wanted to take her to the Bahamas for spring break, how calculus was so hard—who ever needed calculus in the real world, anyway? And then they hung up. And even though the talk had been good, that hollow place he’d felt open in the lobby of Julia’s building grew wider and wider until he thought he might disappear in there, never to be heard from again.

    Finally at home, he tossed and turned before falling into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed that he stood on the balcony of Julia’s apartment, looking down those long twenty-four floors to the river of traffic below.
    “We all go there sooner or later, Detective,” Julia said.
    She was beside him, her gnarled hand on his shoulder. When he turned to look at her, the silk pajamas were gone, replaced with a black cloak and hood. In her hand, she held a sickle. She pulled back her hood to reveal the gray, twisted face of an old crone.
    He backed away from her, a scream of horror caught in his throat. In the enormous living room was Angel’s car, dark and abandoned. He looked inside and saw only empty leather seats and a Gucci bag opened on the floor.
    He heard a strange knocking and realized quickly that it was coming from the trunk. But he didn’t have the key. The knocking grew ever more panicked and insistent, and his fear ratcheted to a crescendo. He started banging on the trunk.
    “Angel,” he yelled. “I’m coming, baby.”
    But then Angel was standing there, golden and willowy, smiling. She issued a little chuckle, as if the whole thing was terribly funny. He reached for her, but she shimmered like a mirage.
    “Don’t worry,” she said.
    She clicked the small black remote in her hand, and the trunkopened with a pop . He raced to it, and inside he found his own daughter curled tight into a fetal position. She was purple pale and so, so still. He called her name over and over and took her into his arms, rocking her the way he’d done when she was a child.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” But they both knew it was far too late.
    Perry continue to rock her, but then she was gone and everything was black and it was raining hard and he was trying to get across the street, to get somewhere, anywhere.

13
S. J. ROZAN
    I n the morning Perry was still trying to shake off the dream.
    Half an hour later he circled to the sidewalk, down the four flights of creaking, slanted stairs. He’d showered, he’d dressed, but his caffeine was still to come. Last week, his Mr. Coffee had busted spectacularly, frying the ancient fuse, plunging half the tiny apartment into darkness. He’d fixed the fuse, but before he’d gotten around to a new machine, he’d realized he’d rather drink his coffee at the counter at the diner than at his cheerless kitchen table—though the diner’s coffee always tasted burned. He turned up his collar against the dispirited drizzle and walked the half block to the diner. He didn’t take his customary counter stool today, though. He ordered his coffee to go. It was some kind of commentary on his life, one he was careful not to shine too bright a light on, that even sipping burned take-out coffee from a cardboard cup on the street on a gray and spitting morning like this was preferable to starting the day at home.
    Home? He lived in that shabby fifth-floor walk-up, had for years now, but home?
    Get out and move, that’s what it was all about.
    Well, not quite all. Sometimes it was about sitting still, but thatwas only with Nicky. As it would be later today, when they ensconced themselves at that overpriced café in Brooklyn Heights that she liked so much and she told him, between bites of burger and spoonfuls of hot fudge sundae, what her past couple of weeks had been like.
    He couldn’t wait.
    Meanwhile, though, he had work.
    That’s what it was: it was work. Angel’s face—a face he’d never seen except in a photo—drifted into his mind and lodged there. He told himself, as he walked, slurping coffee, skirting puddles, that this was normal; this was the way he always worked. He told himself that it had been this way even in his cop days, that he’d fixate on a suspect, on a victim, who’d haunt him and who he’d find he couldn’t shake. He crumpled his coffee cup and tossed it into a trash can on top of other sodden garbage.
    He didn’t believe a word he was saying.
    He threaded his way along the sidewalk, occasionally