But Gryphon was allowed one of those moments that he’d come to cherish, a moment when his Greek chorus of the damned fell mercifully silent. He got to hear the white noise hum inside his head, the emptiness where thoughts should be. Of course he had none; he felt hollowed out, flushed, wiped clean. The crowds of people who had shared space inside him had carved away pieces of himself until he had nothing stored up anymore. But again, that was okay. He found he preferred the silent nothingness, as he so very rarely had it.

Once he got home, he went straight to his room for a nap, and promptly had a dream.

He was sitting in a chair outside a changing room in a small clothing boutique that looked kind of familiar, although he couldn’t remember the last time he shopped for couture dresses. Soft music played in the background, and the air smelled vaguely of vanilla and linen. As he sat, waiting to see what happened, a kind of dowdy salesclerk walked by, hanging up dresses and slacks that women had decided not to purchase. He recognized her as Julie, and realized what was going on. “Something bothering you, Julie?” he wondered.

Again, this was not like her. She didn’t talk much; she kept to herself. She was the perfect backseat driver in that you often forgot she was there. She paused by the racks and seemed to look at him reluctantly, as if he was invading her sanctuary. “Why do people do this?” she asked.

What the hell ..? “Do what?”

She made vague gestures that meant absolutely nothing, then gave up with a sigh and let her arms collapse to her sides. “Hurt each other. All we seem to do is find people that hurt each other.” She paused briefly. “Men. Men who hurt women.”

“Sometimes they hurt other men too. And kids. And sometimes pets.” Her facial expression grew increasingly stark, suggesting this was the wrong tack to take. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you. Except occasionally we run into a woman who’s done something awful. They just have a tendency not to be serial killers – that’s more of a man hobby.”

Her eyes flashed briefly with pent up aggression. “Why?” This is what bothered him about Julie: he always got the sense she was a time bomb, an accident waiting to happen. And who would blame her? Beaten to death by a husband she had grown to hate. She was one of those people you could describe as “She was always so quiet” when the news crews came around to ask you if you knew your neighbor was going to go off and shoot up a mall. She was the perfect picture of a person pre psychotic break.

“I don’t know. One almost killed me too, you know. It’s just … there’s a lot of sick people in this world. I don’t need to tell you that.”

Julie turned away in disgust, fussing pointlessly with a rack of dresses. “But why?”

“I don’t know. If I knew, maybe I could prevent it somehow. As it is, all I can do is clean up the mess that they are. And, you know, if given a choice, I wouldn’t even do that. I always wanted to be a slacker.”

She didn’t appreciate his attempt at humor (or was it honesty? Being a slacker sounded great) as she turned away even more and went off to find something else to do. “I just want it to stop,” she said so quietly he could barely hear her. “I don’t know why I’m still here.”

Before he could answer her – well, no, before he could think of an answer for her – a phone rang, drawing his attention away. As soon as he realized there was no obvious phone within the boutique, the dream tore around him, fractioning like a pane of glass, and he woke up blinking into his pillow. The phone kept ringing, and cursing at it didn’t make it stop.

Finally he crawled out of bed and found the phone, and made a gravelly noise that could have been interpreted as “Hello”. “Are you okay?” Varner asked.

“Fine. I’m just tired,” he muttered, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“I bet.” He said it in such a way that he implied he wasn’t sure how he ever got up. Or maybe he was reading too much into it.

“Look, I only called to let you know that you’re off the hook for today; I don’t think I’m going to need you. We’re still running the partial print, and we’re getting stick from the real estate place in charge of the store’s lot.”

“Stick? Why?” Gryphon remembered he went to sleep damp, which might explain why the sheets were clinging to him like cellophane. It felt like they were trying to hold him down, and he could barely move.

“Supposedly the boss of Sunshine Realty is away on vacation, and the sycophant who’s filling in for him isn’t sure he can release the records of everyone who might have had access to the property without his blessing. Can you believe that? People have been killed and chopped up on the property, and this fuck’s worried his boss’ll be mad if he gives us the information.” Varner snorted derisively, and he heard a faint thunk, like he’d just slammed something down on his desk. He imagined it was a coffee mug. “I told him this guy could kill in the meantime, he could flee the state, and this moron tells me it’s all “hypothetical”, and his job isn’t. I’m runnin’ this guy’s record – he’s gotta have a parking ticket or something I can harass him about.”

“Death is an abstract thing when it happens to strangers.”

Varner paused for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s philosophical or monstrously depressing.”

“Probably both.”

Varner grunted. “Probably.”

There wasn’t much else to their conversation, although Gryphon offered to pay him a visit and scare the shit out of him. Jason thanked him and turned him down … for the moment. He said he’d get back to him.

Gryphon didn’t feel like sleeping anymore, so he peeled himself out of the blankets and went to take a hot bath. He sat in the tub until he could feel the warmth in his bones, and then he dried off and found some warm clothes to wear. Since his chorus remained blissfully silent – maybe they were tired too – he decided to go downstairs and try the computer.

He didn’t do it a lot for obvious reasons, but when he got to, it was a fun time waster. Thanks to his passengers he knew of a lot of porn sites, but there was no way he could visit them with a crowd looking over his shoulder and commenting. It was just too weird.

Spirit Guides did have an email address accessible to them all, but Gryphon never liked to check it. After all, now that they were starting to get well known, people were starting to email him, wanting him to make contact with their dead son or grandmother, not understanding that wasn’t how his abilities worked at all, and he was not some comforting con man who asked a handful of leading questions and then told them what they wanted to hear. He was rarely the harbinger of good news. How could an angel of death ever be good news?

Tad dramatic there, sport, Hugh said.

Perhaps. But if he wasn’t an angel of death, what was he?

Out of curiosity, he entered Sunshine Realty into a search engine, and finally narrowed down the categories to Oregon (he hadn’t expected so many Sunshine Realties). He checked out the website of two that were closest in the area to the store, and they were very basic, unimpressive things. There were small pictures and descriptions of homes and apartments and other properties available in the area, from run down trailers to million dollar condos. (The latter of which always baffled him. If you had a million bucks to drop on a home, why the fuck would you do it on a condo?)

Eventually he skipped over to the realtors page, and saw that the Sunshine people wore ugly mustard yellow jackets and similar empty smiles, making them look like Stepford real estate agents. You might by a home from them, but only out of fear that they’d lay an egg in your chest if you didn’t.

His eyes glided over the eerie, insincere smiles (although the vaguely sincere smiles were honestly creepier), and then something made him stop scrolling down the page. It was a thumbnail sized photo of an agent named Harold Cook, who had an almost perfectly capsule shaped head, highlighted by the fact that he was one of those bald guys who shaved their wispy strands off in the hopes that people would think they were trying to be cool, not trying to hide a lack of follicles. He had a long chin, pointed, which added to the capsule look, and his eyes were almost lost beneath beetled brows that suggested his hair, when it existed, was a sort of blondish-brown.

He looked so bland, so ordinary, he blended in well with the page. Gryphon wasn’t sure why he’d stopped here, and then he realized it was the eyes. He’d seen those eyes looking at him through a visor worn over his face to protect him from the blood splatter. This was him; this was the river killer.

The screen fuzzed and jumped like a t.v. with poor reception, and Gryphon pushed himself away from Clay’s desk, the wheeled chair carrying him across the room until he slammed into the far wall. The computer looked okay, but who knew for how long?

Call Varner, Mr. Aronofsky insisted. Let him bring him in.

“That isn’t what they want,” Gryphon told him, returning to his room to grab his coat and car keys, and put some dry shoes on. “Besides, I found him first.”

He was in the phone book, and why not? It wasn’t like serial killers would get special private numbers. They were psychopaths with some concept of normalcy – they didn’t like it, but they knew they had to pretend to be like everyone else, to be anonymous, to hide their fixations to get away with it. If they blatantly flaunted their preoccupations, they’d be caught quickly. To keep killing, they had to pretend they were so average you’d never notice them. How awful that must have been for them, to hide in the closet like boogeymen, and pretend to feel things like everyone else. They probably would have made fabulous actors if killing people didn’t give them such a hard on.

He almost called his number, but when he picked up the handset, he heard static crackle like tin foil, and knew his power was building up. It was mainly Ruby, of course, seething just below the surface, but no one was too thrilled with the idea of a serial killer. They and the pedophiles just didn’t have a huge fan club.

Gryphon drove out to the address listed with his phone number in the book, as it was only a few miles away. He lived in a leafy suburb known as Deer Point, in a two story pre-fab house painted a delicate blue-grey, with a neatly trimmed lawn and sparkling clean driveway. Children’s toys were scattered about the lawn, and Gryphon stood in the driveway before becoming aware of the voices of children and a woman inside the house, along with the sound of a television.

He didn’t need to go up and knock on the door to know Harold wasn’t here. Somehow he sensed his target, the man he wanted, wasn’t within his range. He didn’t know how he knew this, except death recognized death; his ghosts would let him know where there were others. And Harold probably didn’t know it, but he was leading a ghost parade.

Gryphon drove out to the Sunshine Realty office that employed Harold, but he wasn’t there either. He sat in his car, frustrated, wondering where this fuck could be, when Ruby said, He’s hunting. You know where he likes to hunt. Go meet him there.

Of course. In retrospect, it was totally obvious.

He drove back to the bad side of town, where the store was, and even though the parking lot was still cordoned off with crime scene tape, he idled in the lot for a moment, until Anna appeared in the passenger seat, blood still running down the center of her face, dripping off her chin. “What’s up, chico?”

“Show me where he picked you up.”

She shrugged, looking out the passenger window before pointing down the street. “Go that way.”

He did. He followed her instructions, driving deeper into the sad part of town, the place where nobody came unless they absolutely had to, or was a psychopath hunting for an easy kill. Just beyond the corner where he picked up Anna was a very seedy looking bar, small and dark, set squat in a building that used to be a hotel and was now … well, who the hell knew, the signs were contradictory and unilluminating. The windows were dirty, beer bottle brown, and a lower pane in the chocolate bar shaped window had been smashed and “replaced” with plastic wrap taped in a thick layer on the inside.

Gryphon felt drawn to it, and knew what was waiting for him inside. “I see somethin’ funny,” Anna told him as he got out of the car. He never saw her get in, and he never saw her get out either; she was simply there once he was outside the car.

“What?”

“It’s … I dunno. Like a dark line.”

“It’s him,” he said, although he wasn’t sure how he knew that. “You can almost always find your killer. In a strange way, you’re bonded.”

“Ick.”

That summed it up pretty well.

Smoking had been banned from all bars, and yet as soon as he walked in, he was greeted by a smoky room, a layer of grey smoke curling around the dim yellowed lights like flocks of moths. Country music played somewhere, and the wood was so dark Gryphon felt like he was walking into a void.

Harold was easy to spot. He sat in the darkest corner, an untouched glass of beer in front of him, studying the hookers who were attempting to ply their trade with the sad sacks at the bar. As soon as Gryphon approached his table, he saw all the river ghosts – save for the deeply confused Rita – standing behind Harold. Anna remained beside him, though, as if afraid to join the entourage.

He pulled out an empty chair and sat down, staring across the cigarette burned table at Harold. “Hello. Remember me?”

Harold stared at him blankly, as if he was a hallucination from eating bad clams. “Who the fuck are you?”

“The end. Are you aware that the police are right now trying to get a list of people who have access to the store property? You must be on the list, Harry.”

He had a dead eyed stare, like a shark. “My name isn’t Harry.”

“It is whatever I say it is,” he told him. “I’m the last living person you’re ever going to talk to.”

He scowled at him, brow furrowing as his thick eyebrows dipped down towards his eyes. He was probably in his forties, a bit older than your usual serial killers. “You don’t wanna fuck with me, kid.”

“Oh, I know, you’re the big bad river killer. But I’m not a hooker or a junkie or a runaway, so I kinda fall outside the bounds of your usual victims.”

Now Harold had stopped looking through him and just glared at him hatefully. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. But you better get up and leave me the fuck alone, or you will end up dead.”

Gryphon smirked, as Anna said, “He really is a dick, isn’t he?”

“You can’t kill me, Harry. You can’t even touch me. You have no control here.” To prove his point, Ruby went to work. Harold’s hand raised of its own volition, and he looked at it, startled, before he slapped himself hard across the face, the noise of flesh striking flesh filling the bar. He did it so hard he almost knocked himself off his chair.

“What the fuck -” he began, but then he slapped himself again, his wedding ring catching on his bottom lip and ripping it open. The beer in his glass was sloshing, and the lights overhead were flickering.

“You really should stop hitting yourself. You’re causing a scene.” Anna and the other ghosts were laughing themselves sick over this. But people were starting to look over at the crazy man hitting himself with such violence.

Harold now stared at him in open disbelief, all attempts at his tough guy façade – which was probably real, a hint of the true monster peeking through his thin veneer of normalcy -disappeared in the face of his complete shock. “What the fuck are you doing to me?” he demanded, although his voice had lowered to a hiss.

“Introducing you to victimhood. Not fun, is it?” Ruby slid his beer glass across the table, and let it crash to the floor, splattering more cheap beer on a surface that was pretty much warped from the constant spills.

He was trying to move his hands, his body, get up from the table, but Ruby held him where he was. Beads of sweat popped on his forehead, and veins started to bulge at his temples. He was fighting it, but it didn’t matter. Hugh had already proven that the dead could pretty much be as strong as they wanted to be, and against the indignant hatred of Ruby, he wouldn’t have had a chance even if he was strapped to a Sidewinder missile in the midst of launching.

The bartender came over. Here, he had to double as the bouncer, a thankless job, and he was a large dark skinned man with the build of a high school linebacker who was about four years past his glory days. His head was shaved bald too, but it looked better on him, and when he crossed his arms over his broad chest, his biceps bulged like rising dough. “What’s goin’ on here?” he asked. He had the faintest hint of a Southern accent.

“This … asshole’s … crazy,” Harold said, spitting out each word through clenched teeth, like he could barely speak the language. His throat muscles were starting to cord; it looked painful.

Gryphon looked up at the bartender and shrugged, twirling his finger beside his head in the universal gesture for “bugfuck”. “Harry didn’t take his medication today. I’m supposed to bring him home.”

“Bull … shit,” Harold hissed.

The bartender’s almond eyes darted over to Harold, appraised him, and instantly dismissed him, looking back at Gryphon with the smallest wince of sympathy. “You need help getting him outta here?”

“No,” Harold gasped. He was ignored, like most of the genuinely mentally ill were.

“No, I got it. He’s usually a good boy for me.” Gryphon looked across the table at the straining, failing, battling Harold, and said, with truly irritating condescension, “Aren’t you, Harry?”

“Fuck you!” Harold snapped, a single pearl of blood tinged spit flying from his lip to the center of the table.

The bartender dropped a big, meaty hand on Harold’s shoulder, and said, “Let’s get you home, buddy.”

He was trying to be kind, and Gryphon was honestly touched to find someone who wasn’t completely burned out by people in such a place. He supposed he should have left him a big tip, but he hadn’t brought any cash with him; he’d have to come back and give him some another time.

The bartender hauled Harold to his feet, and he seemed stiff, like his joints had frozen. He probably thought that Harold really was suffering some side effect from forgotten medication, that he was a deeply fucked up individual, when really he was just trying to escape from an invisible straight jacket. When Gryphon moved beside Harold and grabbed his arm, Harold seemed to shiver, an attempt to pull his arm away from him that had no hope of working. But he was trapped and he knew it. Harold was trying to send a request for help with his eyes, but it honestly just made him look crazier, and the way the bartender gave Gryphon a pat on the back, he knew that no one saw anything but a crazy man being helped out of a bar before he started hurting himself even worse. It was probably driving Harold apeshit.

Good.

Gryphon “helped” Harold outside, really just hauling him out, while Harold’s struggle to escape remained mainly internal. As soon as they were outside in the cold, damp air, which smelled of mildew and exhaust, Gryphon sighed, and said, “You ready to have some fun, Harry?”

“What the fuck are you?” Harold demanded, his voice still strained.

Gryphon eyed him coldly, and gave him a smile that felt like a snarl, and probably looked like it too. “I already told you – the last living person you’ll ever talk to. So tell me, Harry, how did you think you were gonna die?”

He glared at him sidelong, his eyes white and wild. “You don’t scare me.”

O’Leary continued to do so, although he was struggling to get a hold of himself. He sobbed in a strangled sort of way, like he was trying to physically hold back the tears and failing miserably. He still was refusing to look at him.

Maybe a minute passed, the plopping sound of the rain in puddles an oddly appropriate counterpoint to his strange, squished sobs. “I didn’t mean … I panicked …”

“I was black, so you fucking shot me!” Jeff snapped, and Gryphon was pretty sure he saw the puddles around them waver in response. He was only a ghost, but that didn’t mean his anger lacked power.

“… shots were being fired, Jones went down … I shot the first person I saw …”

“First black person you saw,” Jeff insisted.

“ … I fucked up, okay? I know I did. I’m not proud of it.”

“Jeff seems to think there’s more to it,” Gryphon prompted.

“Fucking yeah there’s more to it,” Jeff said.

O’Leary looked up at him, tears streaking his broad cheeks, his entire face ruddy in a way that seemed unhealthy, although Hugh volunteered it was an “Irish thing”. (Of course Gryphon really didn’t want to know why he thought that or how he knew that – he knew enough about Hugh to fear information of this sort.) “What? I made a stupid fucking mistake. What more could there be?”

“He seems to think there’s a racial element.”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “What?”

Tell him you know he’s a fucking racist cracker asshole, Taneesha said.

You don’t know that, Mr. Aronofsky said. We have no idea what happened that night.

My gut instinct is to go with the dead guy, Taneesha replied.

O’Leary shook his head, but it seemed more mournful than anything. “I’d have shot the first thing I saw no matter what it was. Black, white, Mexican … house cat, probably. It was so fucking stupid … I just panicked. I’m a cop; we don’t panic.”

He’s apparently never been at a four alarm blaze when a cop thinks his partner’s still inside, Hugh said.

“Everybody panics at some time,” Gryphon said comfortingly, although he wasn’t sure that was true or not. Hugh and Ruby both seemed immune to panic; Ray would claim he was, but Gryphon knew that was simply self-delusion. Hugh had spent his life semi-detached from humanity and himself; panic was just too strong an emotion for him to muster up. Ruby had no time for panic, as that was a softer emotion for weaker people. “But you made things worse. You lied about it.”

He sighed like he’d just been hit in the stomach. “My job is my life. What else did I have?”

“So it was worth my life, is that it?” Jeff replied.

“It was wrong and you know it. Not just the lying, but letting his death be blamed on someone else. Sure, they were bad guys, but they didn’t kill him.”

O’Leary sniffed and wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his arm. “They killed others.”

“Maybe, but not him. Just like this was a witch hunt without a witch. There’s a serial killer out there right now preying on women, and I’m probably the only one who can stop him, so why don’t you admit your guilt and stop fucking bothering me?”

O’Leary looked at him in surprise, red and puffy eyes looking half shut. “What d’ya mean admit my guilt?”

“Apologize to Jeff. He’s right here.”

He looked around as if he actually expected to see him. Jeff waved his hand, and said, “Right here, fucko.” Not that that was any help to O’Leary.

“Why is he here?”

Gryphon sighed wearily. “Haven’t we been over this? He’s following you around. Ghosts sometimes do that.”

“You fucking killed me,” Jeff snarled.

“He’s really not letting this “you killed me” thing go,” Gryphon told O’Leary, since he couldn’t hear him.

O’Leary closed his eyes, and seemed to mentally count to ten. Gryphon just shivered, and wondered if he should wring his clothes out before tossing them in the dryer. At least he probably wasn’t dehydrated anymore. “Jeff, I’m sorry,” O’Leary said, almost hissing the words through his teeth. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I didn’t become a cop to hurt people.” He wiped the rain off his face, or maybe it was tears; it was hard to say now. “If I could do that night over again, I would. I’ve lived with it all these years, and I’m tired of it. I wish I could take it back.”

Jeff was quiet for several seconds. “Can I kill him?”

“Would it change anything?” Gryphon asked.

O’Leary gave him a funny look, thinking he was talking to him. “Huh?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Talking to Jeff.”

Jeff sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Guess not. Might make me feel better, though.”

Gryphon shrugged. “It might. But we’d have to do it, and I’m too tired right now.”

He huffed a noise of disappointment, and grumbled, “I’ll hafta think about it.”

“Good, he’s thinking about it. Let’s go.”

Gryphon didn’t wait for O’Leary’s reply, he simply sloshed over to the SUV, and walked around to the passenger side. He was inside the behemoth when O’Leary said something, and he had to scramble over to the vehicle to talk to him. He opened the driver’s side door and looked up at him, face dripping like it was melting. “What the fuck d’ya mean he’s thinking about it? Thinking about what?”

“You really don’t want to know. Just consider it good news.” He pulled a wet hank of hair up from his scalp and wrung it out, sending water dribbling down to O’Leary’s leather seats. “Can we go now?”

Gryphon knew that getting water all over his upholstery would upset him and make him move, and it did. He got in the SUV, reluctant macho sorrow turned to comfortable annoyance, and maybe he was worried just a little bit about what he refused to say.

The silence between them was tense and uncomfortable, and the SUV ran a bit rough, but it was probably lucky to run at all. When he dropped him off at Clay’s house, he said, “You know, you’re really freaky.”

Gryphon could only shrug. Thanks for the news flash, asshat, Ruby replied.

He went up to his room to dry off and get some dry clothes, and he asked Clay if he’d do a Google search for him. There were times when he could actually use a computer, and there were times when he could erase the hard drive just by being in close proximity. He felt he was more likely in the latter than the former, so he let Clay do the work for him. He told him one of the river ghosts he’d encountered had wanted him to give a message to someone, and that’s why he had to find him.

Once Clay tracked down the info he wanted, he offered to drive him, but Gryphon turned him down and pulled the tarp off his car, where it sat at the side of the driveway. He may have moved into a new home, but it was hard to let the old one go.

He drove out to Axel Beech’s place, blasting the heater to keep the chill away.

Axel lived in a trailer on a good sized piece of land, but the lawn didn’t exist; the ground all around was mostly mud, with small tufts of yellow grass here and there among the mud pits. There were trees, but so far away they could have been in another county – they certainly didn’t belong to his property. If a caption appeared in the bottom of his vision reading “After the apocalypse”, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

He slogged up the three little steps that made up the front porch, noting the silver glimmer of an old pony keg under the gap between the trailer and the ground, and as he knocked on the flimsy door, he marveled at how he alone could have ripped this thing off the hinges. Usually he needed his people and their awesome dead people power to help him, since he was as muscular as a ninety eight year old retired spinster with osteoporosis, but this door made him feel like the Hulk. He could rip it off and pound his chest with his fists, bellowing in triumph.

After a moment, the door rattled open, and he was face to face with a man in his early thirties, with a wispy thin mustache and thinning brown hair the color of faux wood paneling, wearing an old Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt and tighty whiteys. He was neither thin nor fat, but he had the soft build of someone who drank more than was medically wise, and offset any physical gains manual labor normally would have given him. (Was his underwear stained? Oh god, he wasn’t going to look …) The guy looked at him blearily, like he just got up, his eyes glazed and bloodshot in such a way that he was obviously hung over. “Who the fuck’re you?” he slurred.

“Karma.”

He just eyed him like he was trying to focus. “Weird name for a dude.”

Wow, Hugh said. He’s a rocket scientist.

Maybe he was a bit sharper when he wasn’t hung over, but he wouldn’t have bet money on it. “I’m here to talk to you about Clifford Wax.”

It seemed to take a moment for the name to sink in, penetrate the fog of the lingering alcoholic haze, and then he didn’t respond, just tried to close the door on him. This one was easy to stop and shove back open – he didn’t even need to ask Hugh for help.

Axel stumbled back into his kitchenette – slash – living room as Gryphon came in the door, slamming it behind him. Which didn’t have the scary impact he’d hoped since it was like slamming a pet door shut, but he never claimed to be Mr. Butch ‘99. “You really should consider yourself lucky, Axel. That I’m not a cop; that you have received a hung jury.”

His thick dark eyebrows, messed up from sleeping on his face, drew down in obvious confusion. It seemed there was a four second delay between what was said to him and when he processed it. “I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about. Get out of my house. I’ll call the cops.”

“Will you? Go ahead. I can’t wait to tell them how you killed Cliff and left his body at the bottom of the well he hired you to fill in. What was Sean’s last name? Cliff didn’t know.”

Axel stared at him like he could make him go away if he just stopped blinking. “What’re you, one of his butt buddies?”

“Butt buddies? Oh yes, all child molesters are gay in your world, huh? Trust me, they’re not – I’ve encountered loads of them, most even alive. Cliff was a damaged human being who liked little girls, which should have been clear on the website. Seriously, you kill a guy for being a pervert, and you don’t know what his perversion is? That’s just sloppy.”

Axel found his anger and launched towards him, fist raised to strike, but he’d barely covered half of the meager distance between them when someone – Ruby or Hugh; he didn’t know, didn’t much care either – threw him back hard against the kitchen counter, making the dirty dishes in the sink behind him clatter like skeleton teeth on stainless steel. The empties lined up on the other side of the counter started rattling like they were having a small earthquake, and the beer and whiskey bottles on his coffee table soon joined in as the energy started building in such an enclosed space. But it was hard to hear over the sound of raindrops reverberating through the tin can trailer.

Axel looked at him through wounded eyes, not comprehending what was happening here. “How’d you do that?”

“Do what? I did nothing. I’m just standing here.” The best part? That wasn’t even a lie.

He glanced at the rattling bottles, still not getting any of this. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m the speaker for the dead, and I’ve got to say, you’ve put them in a bad position. They don’t like murderers as a rule, but it was better than likely they would have killed Cliff themselves, so there’s some debate on whether you should die or not. That’s the hung jury I was referring to earlier.”

Axel didn’t look impressed. “You’re fucking nuts.”

“What you have to understand is that you can never do this again. You got lucky, Axel – the man you killed was honestly guilty of the crimes he’d been accused of. But that’s not always the case. Justice is blind, deaf, dumb, and as far as I can tell, limbless. Innocent people get sent away, and guilty people walk clean. It happens more than anyone actually knows. The only reason I know is because I encounter the victims, I share their lives, and I don’t have an evidence chain to follow or require a lawyer to save my ass. Did you know a third of murders are never solved? I think that’s the general number – it varies among racial and economic divides, as well as from state to state. That’s a no brainer, isn’t it? Either way, it’s more than most people know outside a cop shop. Forensic evidence is great, but it is not the miracle worker television would have you believe. Sometimes the only people who know who killed them is the victim, but not everybody can hear them. Or anybody.”

I don’t know who killed me, Taneesha said. Since she was the victim of what seemed to be a drive by shooting gone awry, she didn’t even see who shot her, and as far as he could tell from what he could dig up online, her case remained unsolved. It was gang territory, and witnesses willing to risk their lives and come forward were thin on the ground. Random murders, where there was no connection between the victim and the killer, were the hardest cases to solve.

Axel looked like he still wasn’t processing any of this. He grabbed one of the rattling bottles and made to either throw it or hit him with it, but it exploded in his hand, sending some fragments of alcohol tainted glass straight into his face. He yelped in pain and grabbed his face, dropping to his knees on the thin strip of peeling, yellowed linoleum that made up the kitchen floor.

“Attack me with glass?” Gryphon asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “Wow, that was so idiotic I’m just stunned. Why not try and use a taser on me? Now that’d be funny.”

Gryphon saw a bit of blood oozing out under his hands, down his cheek, but they must have been superficial cuts, because head and face wounds usually bled like a motherfucker even when they didn’t hit anything major. “What the fuck d’ya want from me?” Axel cried, anguished, but it seemed more from confusion than genuine pain. The yeasty smell of beer mixed with the scent of fresh blood in a way that was truly nauseating, although it was slightly better than the old beer and sweat sock smell that seemed to permeate the trailer. You couldn’t tell he was an alcoholic bachelor with sporadic hygiene, could you?

“Your word that you will never, ever kill anyone again. If you do, I will find out, and you won’t get off as lightly as you are now. In fact, if you ever see me again, you’re a dead man. One way or another.” He crouched down to be at his eye level, but since Axel wasn’t looking at him, it was a spectacularly wasted gesture. “In fact, one of my passengers brought up a good point on the way over. You know people who bash gays? They’re usually acting out in fear of themselves; they’re afraid there’s something gay in them and they just can’t stand it, but rather than take the violence out on themselves, they take it out on a complete stranger. It’s basic psychology. So what does that make a person who gets so riled up he kills a child molester he’s never seen before? A man who’s obviously single, has no children, lives far from the victim, and yet checks sex offender websites. Maybe runs one? A man obsessed with sex offenders? What does that say?” Axel started crying pathetically, still not looking at him, bringing his knees up to his chest and curling into a ball against the base of the counter. “There’s a couple different choices here really, Axel. You could be a former abuse victim, once upon a time, or you could know one. Or maybe there’s something in you that you recognized in Cliff or his crimes, and you couldn’t stand it.”

He hit close to the bone. Axel shouted, pained and panicked, “Get out of my fucking house!”

Gryphon grabbed him by the chin and forced him to look at him, through tears and snot and blood. Brown glass glistened in cuts above his eyebrow, underneath his eyelid, half way between his eye socket and ear. “Some friendly advice: get therapy. Don’t make me come back here and kill you too.”

He hiccupped a sob, and Gryphon knew he wanted to bluster, take up some macho posturing to prove he wasn’t scared of him, but he was and he couldn’t hide it. All he did was sniff and whimper and nod very faintly.

Gryphon let him go, and stood, someone opening the door for him. (Yeah, it did smell pretty ripe in here, and if you had a smell that could bother the dead, well then brother, you stank.) He almost expected Axel to get up and try and attack him while his back was turned, but he was too scared now to bother. It wasn’t the fact that he could attack him without moving; what scared him was he got under his skin somehow. He almost felt sorry for the pathetic sack of shit.

Maybe we should have killed him, Ruby said, once he got in the car.

Gryphon looked back to see Wax just standing there between the raindrops, like he was waiting for a bus. It made him briefly wonder if a bus of the dead would be any worse than a standard transit bus during rush hour. Probably not. It might actually be more peaceful and smell better. “He’s dead, Cal.”

O’Leary glared at him, like he thought he was just saying that to piss him off. “What? No he isn’t.”

“I assure you, he is.” Gryphon didn’t stick around to argue with him – he simply got out of the big, giant vehicle, vertigo briefly hitting him in his climb down to the ground, and walked over to the ghostly Wax, rain instantly drenching him like he’d just stepped under a cold shower. “What happened to you, Clifford?”

The ghost finally moved, as if seeing him for the first time. That was probably true. “Who are you?”

“Gryphon. I seem to speak for you people.”

“You people?”

“The dead.”

He blinked his eyes owlishly, as if the term “dead” was still new to him. He still seemed to exist between the raindrops in spite of his paunch. “It wasn’t fair.”

“It never is.”

“He was … I haven’t done anything wrong. Lately.” He gestured in a vague way, like he was scrabbling for a fingerhold on an invisible rock face. “I’ve been alone. I haven’t -”

“Excuses are for the living, Cliff,” Gryphon sighed irritably. He knew simply from being this close to him that he wasn’t nearly a good man; he’d led a pretty selfish and mean life. Of course he did, if he liked molesting little girls. Gryphon just wanted to get this over with so he could move on to something more productive. “What happened?”

Wax gave him a wounded look, but Gryphon ignored it in an almost hostile way, enough so Wax could see it through the prism of his own narcissism. “I hired this guy to come in and fill this old well on the property. It dried up a long time ago; it’s just a big hole going twenty feet down. I found a raccoon in it once. It was just a safety hazard, and I knew if some dumb shit trespassed and fell into it I could be sued. So I hired this guy to fill it in.”

“And?”

“And … I guess he recognized me? Said he saw me on a web site. Did you know some fuckhead out there has a web site full of so called sex offenders? I mean, Jesus Christ, I’m not a sex offender. These idiots act like younger girls can’t be sexual, like they don’t -”

“Shut the fuck up and tell me what happened to you,” Gryphon snapped, feeling the pressure of Ruby inside his head. She wanted to kill him. She didn’t know if she could actually kill a fellow ghost, but she desperately wanted to try.

Wax gave him that wounded look again, but now it had a hard edge. Gryphon was pretty sure he didn’t feel things like “normal” people – he probably didn’t feel at all. He was one of those emotionally empty people that you seemed to see around more and more these days. He had no idea why, but Gryphon knew it was true. Emotional death was growing frighteningly common. “Fine. That fucking asshole came over one day with a buddy to help him with the backhoe, and while he was in my kitchen, getting payment for the job from me, the fucker hit me over the head with something. It didn’t knock me out, just stunned me. Then they used plastic ties to bind my hands, and shoved a dirty bandana in my mouth to keep me from screaming. Then they dragged me out, dropped me in the well … and filled it in.”

“Buried you alive.” That was pretty horrible, he shuddered at the thought, but Ruby seemed to think it was only what he deserved.

“Do you know what it’s like to breathe in dirt?”

“Actually, yes.” Thanks to all his passengers and the various ghosts he encountered over the years, he knew second hand – although it felt like first hand – of all the grotesque ways to die. “How long have you been dead?”

He stared at him like he was the biggest idiot he had ever encountered. “How the fuck am I supposed to know?”

Good point. Gryphon decided randomly on the figure of three weeks, although he had no idea why. He decided that he should get to what he was here for. “Do you know what happened to Juliet Saltzman?”

He snorted in disbelief and shook his head. “That bitch again. God, she was too fucking old for me.”

“I notice that wasn’t an answer.”

“I don’t know where the fuck she is. But I think I’ve seen her on Lonely Girls, under the alias Caramel. She just ditched, y’know? Got outta this fuckin’ town. She was smart.”

“Lonely Girls?”

It’s a website, Sylvio said.

Is there something you’d like to share with us? Hugh wondered.

Fuck off, Sylvio said defensively. My roommate was the king of porn and wannabe porn. I don’t know how he paid for it all.

Gryphon distantly heard a sharp whistle behind him, surely O’Leary in the other world, but it wasn’t quite enough to break the connection. “Nobody knows I’m dead?” Wax asked, looking vaguely distraught. “Nobody even noticed that I was missing?”

“Apparently not. Not even the cop who wants you behind bars worse than anything.”

“That son of a bitch. Tell him he can go fuck hims-”

O’Leary shook his shoulder, and Gryphon jolted as the connection snapped, and he shrugged him off reflexively, taking a couple of steps away into the weed choked lawn, which was now starting to flood due to the intensity of the rain. The ground was completely saturated and could hold no more water. “Would you stop doing that?” Gryphon snapped at him, trying to get his reeling head under control. Sometimes reality shifting was harder than at other times.

“What? You’ve been standing in the rain for five fucking minutes!”

The full sense of his body came back to him, soaked to the bone and cold, and he shuddered convulsively as the wind briefly gusted, the chill cutting into him like a razor blade. He wrapped his arms around himself to try and keep warm, but all he did was squish water out of his sleeves. “Wax was killed by two men, a handyman he hired, Axel Beech, and a friend of his he only introduced as Sean. They dumped him in the old well he hired them to fill in, and only then did they fill it in. He’s buried in the back acre of the property. I can find his body if you want to call it in.”

O’Leary studied him, raindrops suspended in his eyelashes, and it seemed to take him a full minute to process the information. “You’re not shitting me? He’s dead? Why the fuck these guys kill him?”

“They saw him on a website of registered sex offenders. I guess they decided to play vigilante.”

O’Leary shrugged. “Can’t blame ‘em, I guess. A pervert piece of shit like Wax. Did you ask him what he did with Juliet’s body?”

“He had nothing to do with her disappearance.”

“Bullshit.”

“He couldn’t lie to me. I’d know if he was, and I’d know if he had the death surrounding him. He didn’t. He said he thought he saw her recently on a website called Lonely Girls, using the alias Caramel.”

The ex-cop scoffed. “So now he’s maligning her name? That sick fucker.”

“He had nothing to do with her.”

O’Leary turned and started slogging back towards his SUV. “Now that he’s dead, I guess we can tear this place up looking for corpses. Ain’t like he can complain.”

Gryphon felt soppy and miserable. He had about an inch of water in his boots and his teeth were starting to chatter; his skin felt clammy and his chest was starting to ache, while his breathing suddenly felt strained. He had a sudden panicky flash to what it must have been like to drown, which was his most feared way to die: to drown. He’d always been terrified of drowning – he never learned how to swim because that much water just terrified him. He had no idea why then or now that that had to be his worse fear, and now it seemed extra funny since he’d died a thousand ways, many probably more horrible than drowning, and yet the fear remained, a rock solid reminder of his own sense of self. He was always a quiet geek, afraid of his own shadow, and now he dealt in nothing but death. Was that karma, or just the universe’s idea of a big fat joke?

O’Leary opened the driver’s side door, and Gryphon said, “Hugh, help me.”

The door ripped itself out of O’Leary’s hand and slammed shut, so hard that the monster vehicle rocked on its shocks and he swore he heard the driver’s side window crack. O’Leary turned back to him, bug eyed, as the SUV’s windows rippled like the water running down them. “What the fuck ..? Did you do that?”

“Who else could?” Gryphon wondered. The energy crackling around him made him feel a bit warmer. “I will not be dismissed. Helping you was my mistake, but I will not be ignored the moment I give you news you don’t want. I’m in charge here, not you. Do you understand me?”

O’Leary stared at him, goggle eyed, and his right hand was clenching and unclenching beside his hip. “Do you still carry a piece?” Gryphon asked. “I wouldn’t go for it. You’ll just make them mad.”

That made him freeze, stop his unconscious grab for a weapon. “Who?”

“My passengers. Do we have to go over this again? I’m not alone; I’m never alone. And you will never get all of us.”

Dial this back, Mr. Aronofsky warned. He’s not our enemy.

Sure he is, Ruby said casually.

Scaring cops is so much fucking fun, Hugh said, sounding almost giddy.

The SUV was now making an odd creaking noise, loud enough that even O’Leary broke his paralysis long enough to look back. “What the fuck are you doing to my car?”

“It’s not a car, it’s a monstrosity,” he said, although he muttered under his breath, “Enough, Hugh, I’m sure he’s got the point.”

Just let me see if I can lift it.

Didn’t you hear him? Mr. Aronofsky barked. He so rarely raised his voice it was still startling to all of them. Stop it now.

Jeeze, all right. No need to get so pissy.

The car settled and stopped making that noise, but there was another sound soon after, like ice cracking during a spring thaw, and Gryphon saw little furrows in the glass on the passenger side. One good push and it would probably shatter all over the seat. If that was the worst the SUV got out of this, it was very lucky. “Jesus fuck,” O’Leary sighed, running a hand through his wet hair, knocking his own hood back. He probably didn’t give a shit at the moment.

“You knew I was a freak when you heard about what happened in the interrogation room,” Gryphon said. “You can’t pretend to be shocked now.”

“Why do you keep hurting my fucking cars? What did they ever do to you?”

“They have electronics and glass. Both of them are rather fragile around me.”

He scoffed, putting his hood back up, but otherwise looking everywhere but at him. “You? Don’t you mean us?”

“Do you really want to start this, Cal?”

“Since when did I give you permission to call me Cal?”

“The moment you called me Gryph.”

He grunted, annoyed, and turned back to the SUV. “Can I check and see if this still runs or not?”

“Be my guest.”

As soon as he opened the door and started checking to see if anything worked, Gryphon was aware of Jeff McCandless standing beside him. “Aren’t you going to ask him?” he wondered. It was slightly bitter, but mostly weary.

He kind of didn’t want to, mainly because he could imagine the fallout, but he supposed now was the time. O’Leary was probably as scared of him as he was ever going to get. Gryphon waited until he pulled himself out of the cockpit, frowning. “I smell burned insulation in there.”

“You’re lucky Hugh didn’t pick it up and throw it.” He paused briefly, but only long enough for him to realize he was changing the subject. “Are you going to tell me the truth about Jeff McCandless now?”

O’Leary turned back suddenly, like he’d just jabbed him in the ass with a taser, and he paled so dramatically he was afraid he might barf. “Wh – why do you bring that up?”

“I know what you did, Cal, I think it would be best if you said it, for your conscience if nothing else.”

He started shaking his head, but after a moment looked at the weedy, wet lawn, the water starting to puddle and pool around their feet. The way the grass was weighed down and swirled with the water, it almost looked like they were standing in a shallow pond. “It wasn’t … there’s no need to -”

“Jeff seems to think there is a need. He won’t stop haunting you until you tell the truth.”

O’Leary’s eyes had an odd paleness to them, like he was looking into the future at his own hideous demise. He was still shaking his head, but faintly; you could basically only see it in the minor wiggle of his nascent jowls. “I can’t. It’s not …”

“You have to, or we don’t leave.”

He still didn’t want to look at him. He looked around him, at the slowly collapsing house which seemed to radiate the emptiness of death, and O’Leary decided looking down at the lawn pond they were standing in was the best option. Gryphon found himself looking at his bright yellow hood, where the raindrops beaded and ran down its shiny surface like it was coated with wax.

“I – I was a replacement, last minute, for another officer who was hurt in a car accident. I didn’t know. I didn’t -” his voice choked on a syllable, and only then did Gryphon realize he was actually struggling not to cry. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. It should have been better contained.”

Jeff grunted. “This is pathetic.”

“I’ve heard enough excuses today,” Gryphon said sharply. “Get to the point, Cal.”