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.”

“Yes,” Gryphon replied, not even bothering to be defensive. Either way they thought he was nuts: either he was talking to himself or talking to a ghost, or thinking he was talking to a ghost while talking to himself. There was no way to win.

She gave him a funny look, but eventually turned away and got on the radio, which she originally intended to do, ignoring him completely. He liked it that way.

He slept again, until Varner shook him awake. “Gryph, you wanna go home?”

“That’d be nice,” he admitted, still not fully awake yet. He got out of the car, and the cold, damp night air woke him up a little, at least enough to make him stop yawning. But Varner’s car was more comfortable than the squad car, which was a problem.

Still, on the way back, Varner told him that they found lots of evidence that they were sure would help identify victims and just maybe the killer. They were looking into who might have a key to the padlock on the back door, but since making a “dupe” (duplicate key) wasn’t that difficult, they didn’t think that would get anywhere. He asked if they found a finger, and told him it belonged to Anna Alvarez. Varner gave him a new species of funny look, and gave it to him for a long time, but eventually looked away and went back to chattering hyperactively. Had he been gulping coffee? He must have been. They probably didn’t allow Red Bull at crime scenes.

The lights were off in the house, save for the solar lights lining the drive and the porch light, so he tried to quietly sneak in and didn’t know how successful he was. But he didn’t hear anything as he got undressed and collapsed into bed, exhausted from speaking to the dead for too long. Who knew that would take it out of you?

Inevitably he found himself back inside the store, lit only be a Coleman lantern, as the killer butchered someone, cutting them up into component parts. But as Gryphon stood there, watching him perform his grisly task, he suddenly stopped, his shoulders tensing. He turned his head slowly, looking over his shoulder, his face hidden behind a mask that kept the blood off of him. Gryphon could see nothing of him but his blue eyes, regarding him like some kind of ghost, which was ironically appropriate.

This must have been a dream - there’s no way this could have been happening. And yet, he got the curious sensation of being in a room with another person. He wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t just his passengers keeping him company. This was weird, and it made his skin crawl a bit … but on the other hand, he got a sense that the man looking at him was just as freaked out, maybe even a little more.

“You better hope the cops find you first,” he said, hoping that he was somehow sharing space with the man. Although there was no way he could be. (Right?) The man just stared at him, his eyes cloudy behind the mask, but Gryphon sensed the turn of his anxiety, the clenching of his stomach. Somebody was talking to him; somebody was threatening him. A ghost.

He was being threatened by a ghost.

Gryphon was woken up by the pervasive smell of strong coffee and a rhythmic pounding over his head and against the glass. It wasn’t raining; it was pissing down with a drunkard’s intensity. It was a true Oregon rain, something violent and nasty and undoubtedly cold. The light was grey, like it was being filtered through dirty cotton, and it struck him as a tremendous day to sleep in.

Get up you lazy ass, Taneesha cracked.

Okay, so, maybe not.

He eventually stumbled downstairs to find Clay sitting at the rustic kitchen table, holding a coffee mug with autumn leaves stenciled on the side, staring off into space. Gryphon checked the clock on the microwave, and just as he thought, it was pretty late. Clay should have been at work at his day job by now.

“Something wrong?” he wondered, grabbing a cup off the mug tree beside the sink and gravitating towards the coffee maker.

It took him a moment to respond, his tired eyes sliding towards him. “Oh, yeah. My back was acting up again this morning, so I decided to take the day off.” Clay had hurt his back installing an air conditioning duct a week or so ago. Just a pulled muscle, but those hurt, especially when you did a lot of bending and lifting. His doctor had given him heavy duty painkillers, but he didn’t like to take them - which baffled Gryphon, as he’d happily take them now, and he didn’t have a bad back.

“Oh. If there’s anything I can do to help -”

Clay snickered, which made Gryphon give him a funny look. “What’s so funny?” He found the sugar and started dumping teaspoons full of it into the strong black coffee Clay usually made.

You ever heard of diabetes? Mr. Aronofsky said. You’re not indestructible.

Actually we don’t know that, Hugh said. He could be.

Don’t encourage him, Mr. Aronofsky scolded.

“You’ve done enough for us, Gryph,” Clay said, after taking a sip of his coffee. From the way he winced and set it down, it was still too hot to drink.

That gave him a suddenly bad feeling. “Did I get you guys in trouble?”

Now his snicker from before became a chortle, and he wasn’t sure how to take that, so instead of sitting at the kitchen table he leaned against the counter, out of hitting distance. “Far from it. We heard from Mrs. Bledsoe, the woman who hired us to exorcize Phillip Chapman from the house in Salem. She’s giving us a five hundred dollar bonus. She said you could feel the difference just walking in the house. There was no sense you were being watched, no slamming doors, no inexplicable cold breezes. She seemed stunned, like she expected us to be frauds.”

“They all treat us that way.”

“I know. But I think they must know they hafta stop now.” He shoved his mug across the tabletop with his fingertips, and then shoved it back towards him, the liquid equivalent of playing with his food. “We gotta call this morning from a guy down in Los Angeles. He offered to pay us to fly down there. There’s a mansion down there where a family was killed, and supposedly it’s a hot spot of ghost activity. And we heard from someone who works for the Fortean Times. They want to interview all of us.”

“The Fortean Times?” That sounded vaguely familiar, but not in an useful way.

“It’s a British magazine that deals with strange phenomena, but it’s not a tabloid rag. It’s actually very respected, a big deal.” His eyes darted towards him, almost bashfully. “Although the guy said he wanted to talk to us, I know he really wants to talk to you.”

“I’m horrible in interviews,” Gryphon said, shaking his head. “They want to talk about me, and I’m not about to expose what’s left of my family to this … stuff.”

You mean admit to them what you’re actually doing, Mr. Aronofsky said.

“And I can’t go into great deal about what I do. I mean, I don’t control this, I don’t understand this, I’m just a poltergeist “agent” whose best friends are all dead people.”

I ain’t your friend, Taneesha snapped.

Clay studied him for a moment, his expression unreadable, and Gryphon just knew he was going to ask him a question he had no desire to answer. Finally he did. “Why don’t you ever tell the complete story of how you became an agent? You start and then you stop.”

“Because I have to.”

“Why?”

“’Cause if I told anyone everything that happened that night, they might be legally liable, an accessory after the fact.”

Clay’s eyebrows lifted slight, and Gryphon grimaced at him. “C’mon, what do you think my passengers really want? To do things they never got a chance to do, or live one more day? They’re poltergeists, Clay - they’re dead as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore.”

You stole that from Buffy, Taneesha accused.

Yeah, but it’s still amazingly apt, Hugh said.

Clay must have gotten his meaning, as his eyes widened slightly and he paled faintly, blood draining out of his face. “You’re - you’ve said they’re not all violent.”

“They’re not. But most of my passengers are murder victims. What do you think they want? Sending someone to rot in prison doesn’t feel like justice to most of them.”

Fuck no, Ray agreed.

I want to strangle Doherty to death with his own fucking intestines, Ruby added.

I wanna shove a sawed off shotgun up Dave’s ass and blow the top of his head off, Ray continued, as if trying to top her in a gruesome death competition. Ruby still had the edge, mainly because it was easy to imagine her plunging her hands in Doherty’s stomach and ripping out his intestines to throttle him. Ray was angry but had the unfocused nature of a follower requiring a leader - Ruby seemed more like the Terminator. She didn’t need a leader, just a target.

“Believe me, if you could hear them talk, you’d shit your pants.”

Clay looked like he wanted to say a thousand things, but had lost the ability to talk. Gryphon sipped his coffee while he waited for him to regain his speech. He felt bad for Clay and Shane, when it came down to it. They were true believers, guys who honestly hoped ghosts existed and went about trying to prove it. Now they had their proof, and it was so much more fucking scary than they ever credited it for. The dead were not a happy people - what a shock.

Finally, Clay asked, “Did Louis Stanhope really disappear?” His Adam’s apple bobbed wildly in his throat, enough so that it was almost hypnotizing to watch.

“Do you really want to know?” He sighed, and told him, “He’s missing. He will never be found. Leave it there and be glad you don’t know the details.” Actually he’d already been found, but since his body was burned beyond all recognition, it was just assumed he was a homeless man who accidentally set his squat on fire, and was dumped anonymously in a potter’s field. He would never be found, as he was already buried as a John Doe. For the purposes of the world, he was so gone he was barely even a memory.

Clay stared at him with his storm cloud eyes, wanting to ask more but not daring, and jumped about a foot when there was a knock at the door.

We didn’t do that, Hugh claimed, as others chuckled.

“That’s either Varner or O’Leary,” Gryphon guessed, wandering out of the kitchen to the living room.

Opening the door revealed O’Leary standing on the porch, looking sullen and miserable huddled beneath a yellow rain slicker that he had probably ripped from the back of the Gorton’s fisherman. He glared at him like the downpour was somehow his fault. “You ready to head out to Wax’s house?”

Wax’s house? Wasn’t that a horror movie with Vincent Price? Rather than lob out that bon mot - surely O’Leary wouldn’t appreciate it - he said, “Give me a minute to get changed.” Which probably should have been obvious since he was wearing blue velvet Old Navy “lounge” (pajama) pants with a little cloud and crescent moon pattern all over it (and they were about a size and a half too big for him, which just added to the general comedy), and a pale olive tank top that was also a size too big for him, which was doubly odd since it was a cast off from Clay, who had a similar bird like build to him.

These probably looked like a sleeping outfit to Clay and O’Leary, but it was all a ruse. He had slept in his underwear. He only put these on to go downstairs, so no one could see his ribs standing out in relief on his chest, or see the unexplained, oblong bruises that dotted his scrawny legs like the harbinger of the plague. It actually bothered him to spy himself semi or totally naked, which was probably a bad sign overall.

He left O’Leary dripping in the small foyer as he went back upstairs and changed into some more weather appropriate clothes, which was basically a heavy fisherman’s sweater that made him look like he was being swallowed by a rather large piece of a wool/acrylic polyblend, and heavy jeans that would weigh approximately a thousand pounds when they did get soaked, but would take a long time to soak through. He had a coat with a hood, but it was a dorky brown jacket with black fleece surrounding the hood - it couldn’t have made him feel sillier. But it was waterproof, so he couldn’t complain.

He went back downstairs to silent but troublesome tension, indicating that O’Leary and Clay had had a brief but awkward conversation that had left both of them feeling unsatisfied, although they weren’t about to spring the details on him. O’Leary was a big wet glowering yellow thing that he followed out into the deluge, and he had a new car today. No, not a car - a tank. Some kind of black SUV that he had to climb into carefully, lest he fall and break his neck while scaling Mount Vehicle.

Inside, the front seat - cockpit? - seemed vast, with a huge dashboard full of all sorts of displays and thingamabobs that he could only guess at, and the seats seemed to be made of black leather that squeaked under their wet asses. He began to think of A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, but he wasn’t sure why. Rain pounded hollowly on the roof, sheeting down the enormous windshield, making him feel like he was in a deep water submersible.

O’Leary was quiet until he started the leviathan and pulled out of the gravel drive, but Gryphon got a sense that he wanted to tell him something, so he simply waited. When they were on the road, the whole SUV humming like he imagined a tank with great shock absorbers would, O’Leary finally said, “So … I heard you found that store for Varner.”

“Yeah.”

Thick, awkward pause. “Did he, uh … did he say anything about me?”

What the fuck was this? Was he a kid of divorced parents, having his dad grill him about his mom’s new boyfriend? Just when he thought his life couldn’t get more bizarre, it went ahead and did just that. “Not really, no. I figured out that he recommended me to you.”

“Yeah.” O’Leary studied him out of the corner of his eye, and did so for a long time. Gryphon tried to ignore him, figuring he wasn’t going to play this game. Did he want to know if he told him about the raid? If he told him that, in his opinion, that the entire strike team lied in their version of the story? He wasn’t about to say. Let him twist in the wind.

They drove out into the rural countryside, the green fields a pleasant contrast to the gunmetal grey sky, and Gryphon actually saw a wet, miserable looking cow. When was the last time he’d seen a cow? He suddenly felt like a kid on a driving holiday. Maybe weekend dad would take him to a petting zoo.

He turned down an unpaved, rutted road where holes had become surprisingly deep mud puddles, and slowly on the left side of the horizon a rather sad looking clapboard house started to come into view. It looked like it was starting to lean slightly to one side, and the roof seemed to stick out over the side in an ill fitting manner, like it had been removed as one whole piece and then slammed back down in disgust. It had probably once been white, but was now sort of a dirty snow color, the trim nude wood that had bled through the paint that had once been there. It was the perfect serial killer house, complete with an overgrown yard, weeds twisting around the body of an Oldsmobile that may or may not have had tires.

“This is Wax’s place?” Gryphon asked, a bit surprised. “He’s really let it go.”

“I don’t think child molesters are known for their gardening skills.”

“You’d actually be surprised,” he replied, knowing from sad experience that many were quite neat and tidy. Also religious, but that was another can of worms.

O’Leary gave him another funny look, but had to shift his focus to the dirt road as a deep pothole nearly sent them airborne.

It was then that Gryphon noticed a man standing at the edge of the yard, watching them drive up. He was deep into middle age, with a sizable paunch and a few wisps of meager hair covering a scalp with a waxy sheen. Oddly enough, he seemed untouched by the rain, and O’Leary drove so close to him he nearly hit him, but he didn’t move, and O’Leary didn’t react at all.

Didn’t he look familiar? Yes. It was Clifford Wax, with about twenty five pounds and several lines added to his mug shot. And oh yes, he was dead.

“Prepare to be disappointed,” Gryphon warned the ex-cop.