Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

wasn’t going to answer.
     Finally he spoke, his voice entirely level. “I did.”
    “Did you enjoy it?”
    The pause was even longer this time, and his voice was different. Husky. “Oh, yeah.
     I fucking loved it.”

THREE

    B EING dead sucked.
    He hated it when she went in a car. You’d think the plane trip back here from D.C.
     would’ve been worse, but somehow a plane—at least a big one like the 757 she’d flown
     in—established its own space, a locus he could hang onto. He’d been able to hold together
     okay in the plane.
    But cars were a bitch. Al Drummond sailed along behind the white Ford like he’d been
     tied to the bumper. He didn’t have to work at it. That wasn’t the problem. All he
     had to do was relax, and she pulled him with her.
    He didn’t feel the wind, the pressure of air zooming past, shoving at his hair and
     face and skin, making his eyes stream. That would’ve been fine. That would’ve been
     great, but he never felt the air anymore. It was the sheer speed that tattered him,
     made him into something that didn’t feel, didn’t have eyes to stream, didn’t have
     ears to hear or any goddamn way to experience the world. Most of the time he felt
     like he had a body, even if it wasn’t the same kind he’d had before he died. But not
     when Yu went zooming around in a damn car.
    You were gone for over a month…
    He’d lied to her. That didn’t bother him. He was a good liar. It wasn’t enough to
     just smooth your face out to official blankness. Any moron could learn to do that,
     but a good cop learned to lie, too. But it had been luck, not skill, that made this
     particular lie work. He’d been shook up enough for it to show, so she’d put his hesitation
     down to that.
    And if she hadn’t, so what? He wasn’t going to tell her where he’d been.
    Yu was right, damn her. He’d thrown in on the wrong side.
    Twenty-seven years of law enforcement. Twenty-seven years of stakeouts, bad food,
     and the slow, painstaking build of cases some asshole of a defense lawyer couldn’t
     shred. Plenty of failures along the way, but some triumphs, too. He’d been a good
     cop.
    And he’d thrown it away. Wiped it out. It didn’t take a genius to spot the when and
     why. The job had reached out in the person of Martha Billings and killed Sarah. He’d
     reached back to return the favor. Most people would say that’s where he stepped wrong,
     where he made the decision that destroyed him. He didn’t agree. It hadn’t felt like
     a choice, like being faced with a decision he could choose or reject. Martha Billings
     had killed Sarah. Martha Billings would die.
    She had, too. Burned to a crisp. Just like Sarah.
    And Yu wanted to know if he’d enjoyed it. That memory was one bright, hot spot of
     pleasure in the endless gray his life had become the moment he learned Sarah was gone.
    No, killing Billings wasn’t where he’d taken a horribly wrong turn. Maybe that had
     been wrong, but only in the unstoppable way that cancer is wrong. Staying on the job
     after he killed her, though, hiding what he’d done—that’s what twisted him. He should’ve
     done what he had to do and turned himself in. At the time, he’d thought that getting
     himself thrown in prison would’ve handed Billings a postmortem victory. At the time,
     he’d felt that stopping Billings wasn’t enough. He had to stop everyone like her,
     too.
    At the time, he’d been bumfuck crazy. Which was why he hadn’t noticed the other reason
     he stayed on the job. So he could piss on it.
    The job had killed Sarah, and he’d wanted revenge on it, too. Only he hadn’t known
     that’s what he was doing, not until a month or so after he died, when he’d done what
     he’d told Yu was impossible. He left.
    Getting himself fully, properly dead turned out to be harder than he’d thought.
    Not that he’d seen extinction as the only possibility, but he’d been pretty sure that’s
     what would happen. His world—the only world left to him—was about two hundred yards
     in diameter. Get three hundred feet away from Yu in any direction and everything turned
     fuzzy. Keep going and it got…not dark. Darkness was a lack of light, and out there
     in the gray it was like vision itself didn’t exist. Out there was
nothing
.
    Nothing had sounded like a damn good place to end up. He’d expected to become nothing,
     too, when he left Yu, though he’d conceded it was possible he’d get that white light
     people