Inherit the Dead

Detective, the money means nothing to me.” She stared at him, her gray eyes a mix of steely and needy that made Perry uncomfortable. “You will find her, won’t you?”
    “I’ll need a picture.” Perry glanced around the room; there wasn’t a single photograph anywhere.
    Julia disappeared down a hallway then reappeared with a wallet-size photo, a portrait, the girl’s face filling it.
    “Does she always look like this?” Perry asked.
    “You mean, does it look like her?”
    “Yes.”
    “It does.”
    Perry studied the photo: Angel’s hair looked like gold, her eyes a startling shade of blue. There was something old-fashioned about her, too, something that brought to mind movie stars of the 1940s and ’50s, her hooded eyes and the way the corners of her lips tipped up into a sly Kewpie-doll smile.
    “She’s a beautiful girl,” he said.
    “Yes,” said Julia. “Very beautiful. Everybody says so.” The veins in her neck stood out.
    Perry took one more look at the photo then slipped it into his pocket, feeling as if he’d accepted something forbidden.
    “Well then, you have everything you need,” said Julia. She folded her thin arms across her chest and glanced at the hallway, his cue to leave.
    He stood up, once again noticed the Jackson Pollock painting, andwondered why someone would buy a multimillion-dollar painting when she was about to die.
    Julia led him toward the door.
    “Your husband’s address?” he asked.
    “Of course.” She wrote it down on a piece of lavender notepaper and placed it in his palm, her bony hand wrapping around his. “Find her, Mr. Christo. Bring my Angel back to me.”
    One more time, thought Perry, it was not a question.

You sit in the rental car you can’t afford, not yet, but soon, soon, waiting outside her fancy apartment for almost an hour now, freezing, the heat switched off to save on gas, and finally he comes out in that ratty trench coat. Almost makes you laugh. I mean, Is he kidding? A private eye in a trench coat? What a fucking cliché. But this is no laughing matter.
    You straighten up, concentrate on what you have to do: follow him. Not easy, following someone who is on foot, in your car, in the city, taxis and buses and people cutting ahead of you, and you don’t dare use the horn and bring attention to yourself, worrying he will spot you.
    Then he stops beside a parked car, fumbles keys out of his pocket, his striped scarf blowing in the wind like a banner.
    You pull into a bus stop, hoping a traffic cop does not come by, and you watch from a half block away, sipping your third black coffee of the morning, holding the damn Styrofoam cup so tight it cracks and coffee leaks onto your hand and into your lap and you’re trying to mop it up, cursing, and keep an eye on him at the same time, and suddenly he’s driving away and you forget the damn coffee, pull out of the bus stop so fast you practically hit a taxi, the driver laying on his horn so loud you’re sure the private eye can hear so you duck, keeping your head down but peering over the steering wheel, afraid you will lose him, telling yourself to be calm, to breathe, to watch, your eyes like lasers taking in the scratches on the trunk and his license plate, which you memorize, just in case, as you creep down Second Avenue, keeping a few cars between you, the way people do in the movies. But then the traffic eases and he’s driving fast, weaving around cars, but no way you’re going to lose him because this is the most important thing you ever did in your life so it doesn’t matter if you’ve got hot coffee soaking your lap or that your head is aching and your eyes itch from too little sleep and your heart pounds from all the caffeine because it’s finally happening: it’s not just a dream anymore.
    You tell yourself to relax, to be cool as you watch him steer his crummy car into the single lane that’s merging into the Midtown Tunnel, your eyes on those paint scratches and license plate, repeating the numbers in your head until his car disappears into the tunnel and you follow it into the darkness with the plan in your head and murder in your heart.

2
STEPHEN L. CARTER
    P erry hated Long Island. Maybe it was the traffic, maybe it was the smells, maybe it was the sense that everybody else mired in the unmoving sea of metal on the expressway was heading out to a five-million-dollar house in the Hamptons in a vehicle worth ten of the aging but faithful Datsun (which was pretty much