Death Warmed Over (Dan Shamble, Zombie PI #1)

I remembered that Sheyenne had had a terrible first few days after she returned as a ghost. She tried valiantly to adjust, pretended to go on as if nothing had changed, but the loss never stopped tugging at her.

One day, not long before my own murder, Sheyenne had floated up to me with a troubled expression on her face. “Would you come with me back to my apartment? Just to have another look around, in case we find any clues?”

“I packed everything up and put it in storage,” I said. “Your landlord’s probably cleaned the place by now.”

“I know . . . but it’s something I’d like to do.” Her sad expression pulled at my heartstrings. “Would you go with me? Please?”

“For you, I’d go anywhere,” I said, and it was probably true.

We returned to the apartment building where she had lived while going to med school and working at Basilisk to pay the bills. She drifted beside me up the steps to the entrance.

I had an odd déjà vu of the night we’d strolled here after our date, the two of us in light conversation, occasionally and then more frequently bumping against each other as we walked along, finally holding hands. Every unnatural in town had probably smelled the pheromones we exuded....

“I don’t know if I can convince your landlord to let us in,” I said. I had not made a good impression in my previous encounters with him.

“I had a spare key,” Sheyenne said. “You can use that.”

“What if he’s changed the lock by now?”

“He’s too cheap. Besides, the former tenant is dead—why would he bother?”

We went up the stairs to the second floor. The third step creaked, and I remembered it from before. We had laughed at it then. Odd how little details like that stick in your memory.

Her door was 2B (“Or not 2B?” I remembered my Hamlet joke from that night). The hall floor was covered with weathered peel-and-press carpet squares. Sheyenne bent down and lifted the corner of one with a ghostly hand to reveal her spare key. “I knew it’d still be here.” She handed me the key, and I inserted it into the lock. Sheyenne, being a ghost, simply melted through the door, eager to see what she could find.

As I turned the knob, I heard startled yelps from inside. I pushed the door open, afraid Sheyenne was in trouble—and saw a terrified Korean family seated around a table playing dominoes. Parents, three kids, and an old grandfather.

“What are you doing here?” Sheyenne demanded.

Upon entering the apartment, I experienced a flood of memories, and not the good ones . . . not memories of how Sheyenne and I had started kissing as soon as we passed through the door, not the memory of her low-lit bedroom down the hall. No, what I remembered was when the landlord and I had found her sprawled and dying on the living room floor, already jaundiced and emaciated, too weak to move from the toadstool toxin.

This Korean family playing a game of dominoes did not fit the picture.

The three children screamed—not an unexpected reaction when a ghost floats through the wall and a strange zombie barges through the door. The father and grandfather stood together, ready to defend their home; the mother gathered her children. One young boy grabbed a handful of domino tiles and hurled them at me. “Go away!”

“He’s rented it already, Spooky,” I said. Her landlord had wasted no time. “This isn’t your place anymore.”

“But there’s got to be a clue in here. I know we missed something!”

I apologized to the terrified Korean family. “We’re very sorry. We didn’t mean to intrude. Wrong address.”

Dying had been hard enough for Sheyenne. Then she had to confront the fact that all the everyday details of her life were quickly and completely erased.

Yes, I could understand why Uncle Stan would try to cling to his lost loved ones. But he didn’t have to be obnoxious about it.

Although Brad Dorset looked skeptical about the suggestion, Robin continued, “I’ve had some successes with mediation in cases like this. While I’m not a family-practice lawyer, I am a specialist in unnatural law, and we do have many clients who are ghosts. I presume you brought the medium along so you could summon Uncle Stan?”

“I can go into a trance right here and call him.” Millicent Sanchez extended her forearms across the table so that her silver bracelets rattled. “Whenever you’re ready?”

Robin studied her yellow legal pad and double-checked her notes. “I have enough information for an initial discussion.”

Turning her hands palm up, the medium touched thumb and forefinger together and began to hum deep in her throat, as if practicing some form of Buddhist meditation.

Before she could finish her formal summons, the ghost of a chubby man appeared behind her, put both thumbs at the sides of his mouth, and stretched his lips in an inane clownish gesture. “I’m already here. I come and go when I want to!” He let out an exaggerated huff. “And I’m very offended. Jackie, you were always my favorite niece. This hurts my feelings!”

Jackie Dorset hung her head, her lip trembling as she fought back tears.

“She’s your only niece,” Brad said.

“You were never good enough for her!” The ghost loomed over Brad. “Jackie should have waited for someone better.” Uncle Stan stormed and wove around the room, fluttering papers, rattling the doorknob, setting up a spectral wind. “You’re not getting rid of me—I’m family! You have to keep me around.”

Hearing the ruckus, Sheyenne flitted through the closed door of the conference room and gave Uncle Stan a withering frown. “That’s not acceptable behavior from a ghost.” Stan huffed at her, and she was about to scold him further when the office phone rang and she whisked herself back to the receptionist’s desk.

The medium said in a thready voice, “The family respectfully requests that you leave them in peace, that you move on. Travel toward the Light.”

In response, Uncle Stan jangled her silver bracelets, then yanked off her scarf, flapping it in front of her face like a matador taunting a bull. Millicent Sanchez grabbed at the fabric, trying to snatch it out of the air, but Stan kept taunting her.

Jackie began sobbing. “Uncle Stan, stop it, stop it!”

“Sir, we’d prefer to keep this amicable, but if you persist in this unreasonable behavior, we will be forced to take formal legal action,” Robin said.

“Go ahead and try!” Stan chortled. “What are you going to do, send some charlatan with a Bible and a dowsing rod? Paint the house doors red?” He stuck out his tongue, gave a loud raspberry, and flitted past the kids—who looked up in shock and dismay.

“He deleted our high scores!” wailed Joshua.

“You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.” Uncle Stan hiccupped, then farted—mere affectations, since no air traveled in or out of any orifice of a poltergeist. Then his ghost vanished with a popping sound.

The Dorsets looked shaken and hopeless. The medium grabbed her scarf and tied it around her hair again in an attempt to regain her dignity.

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