Page 14 of Deader than Dead

“I’ll go,” Giant said, a little too quickly if you asked me. “Is the lift working today?”

Monstrous shrugged. “How the fuck should I know? Do I look like a lift engineer?”

Gargantuan sneered. “You don’t want me to tell you what you look like.”

Monstrous got in his face. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to say that you—“

Giant shoved me through the door. “Let’s go. You don’t want to get caught in the middle of this.”

He was right; I didn’t. I’d already suffered more than enough arguments for one day. The building didn’t look any nicer inside than it had from the outside. It might even have been worse, peeling paint and a musty odor giving the impression of at least a decade of neglect. “Does anyone live here?”

Giant marched me along the corridor, bare light bulbs flickering above our heads. “No. They used to, but O’Reilly convinced them they’d be happier elsewhere.”

I bet he had. I might have asked where they’d gone, but it was probably better not to know. Giant came to a stop in front of a row of lifts, the button illuminated. A grinding sound that wasn’t the slightest bit reassuring followed a press of the button. When the lift doors opened, it revealed a cornucopia of graffiti inside, most of it decidedly pornographic. I settled myself next to a three-foot cock in the corner, Giant going for the busty woman with the head of a goat and a naked butt that put Jennifer Lopez’s to shame.

“What do you do for fun?” Giant asked as the doors closed.

Fuck! We were going there, were we? Fan-bloody-tastic. It seemed the sweet cheeks and the fascination in my groin hadn’t been an accident. “Me?” Stupid question, when we were the only ones in here. He wasn’t talking to the cock, was he? I fixed my gaze on a pair of what looked like imps copulating, both seeming very into it. “Nothing interesting. Jigsaws…” I’d never touched a jigsaw in my life. What else might be a turnoff? “At the weekend, I usually help out at the church.”

“The church?” Giant frowned. “How does being a necromancer fit with being religious? Surely, they think that bringing them back is an affront to God, a perversion against the natural order of things?”

He had to have a brain, didn’t he? He couldn’t just be all brawn. I nodded in what I hoped was a thoughtful fashion. “It would be a problem if they knew, but between you and me, what they don’t know doesn’t hurt them.” I studied another of the drawings, this one depicting a man whose cock was split into two, a fist wrapped around both. Whoever had done this graffiti must have been on something.

I could feel Giant’s eyes on me, but I refused to look up. It seemed jigsaws and church hadn’t been enough to put him off. I needed to try harder before I found myself married to him because I was too scared to say no. “I’m very devoted to my mother, as well. That takes up a lot of time.”

“I see.”

When I risked a glance at Giant, he wore an expression like he’d just sucked a lemon. Oh, he had mother issues. “She’s a wonderful woman, my mother. I often wish I could be more like her. I mean, I model myself on her as much as I can. The way I dress. The way I behave. The way I—“

“We’re here,” Giant said, seconds before the lift dinged and the doors opened. I stepped out, Giant making no move to follow. “End of the corridor. Turn right. Tell them who you are and why you’re here.”

Before I could say anything, the lift doors closed, and he was gone. Perhaps I’d laid it on a bit too thick with the whole mother thing, my eagerness to remove myself as a prospective romantic partner leading me down the path of presenting myself as someone more likely to star in Psycho.

While it was a little less dingy up here, the walls at least freshly painted, and the odor of mustiness giving way to bleach, it wasn’t exactly what I’d call an attractive place to be. What sort of criminal organization was this? A new one in their infancy? Or one so bad they weren’t making a lot of money?

I followed Giant’s instructions, turning right at the bend as he’d said and walking straight into the barrel of a gun pointed at my head. Correction. It was no longer pointed at my head. It was pressing against my forehead. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! If I got shot in the head, I was finding some way of coming back and haunting Cade’s ass for all eternity. He wouldn’t be able to take a piss without me breathing down his neck. I threw my hands in the air, rushing my words out before the man on the other end could pull the trigger. “I’m the necromancer. Giant brought me up here. Fuck! His name’s not Giant, but I don’t know what it is. He never told me. None of them did, and I didn’t think to ask. I’m here because your boss wanted a job doing, and I’m the one who was sent to do it.”

The man slowly lowered the gun. Thankfully, before I lost control of my bladder. He grinned, an honest to God gold tooth glinting in the light. “You’re the necromancer, are you? You don’t look like a—“

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I get that all the time. Too blonde. Too tanned. Too normal. Just lead me to the corpse, would you?”

The man’s grin grew wider. “Impatient. I like it.” Too right, I was impatient. The sooner I did what they wanted me to do, the sooner I could get out of here. And next time I even got the slightest inkling of there being something hokey, I was telling Cade to stick his job up his ass. No weekend off was worth finding out what it felt like to have a gun pressed to my head. Fucking terrifying was the answer.

“You’d better come this way,” Gold Tooth said. “We were wondering where you’d got to. It’s time someone brought that two-faced cockroach back to life so we can ask him some questions.”

They weren’t even trying to pretend that there was anything legitimate about this. It made me yearn for the comparative simplicity of Maria and Alfred and their little slice of spousal abuse. Name calling and being ignored was far preferable to having guns pointed at me. It all begged the question why Cade had agreed to this job? Did they have something on him? Perhaps this was his way of showing me I was expendable. Apparently, on his roster of necromancers, I came bottom.

I did my best to regulate my breathing as I followed Gold Tooth down the corridor. While I might not have been able to hide my fear with a chambered bullet only millimeters from my brain—who the fuck would—it seemed wise to act like I did this sort of thing every day. A lot of the doors were open in what had once presumably been separate apartments, far too many men milling around for my liking. There must have been at least fifty up here, some chatting, some playing cards, some on the phone, one of them kicking the door shut with a sneer when he saw me glance in.

Finally, we reached the door at the end of the corridor, Gold Tooth delivering a sharp rap to its painted surface. Was O’Reilly in here? I couldn’t say I was eager to meet him. So far, I’d kept my existence off any crime bosses’ radar, and that was the way I liked it.

The door swung open, a small, wiry man appearing in the gap. Despite looking like he could have perched on Gargantuan’s shoulder without giving the man mountain the slightest bit of trouble, something about him said that this man was far more dangerous. It was in the eyes. They reminded me of a crocodile: cold and emotionless, but with an unmistakable intelligence lurking behind them.

“Got a necromancer for you,” Gold Tooth said.

Crocodile’s gaze slid my way. If he told me I didn’t look like a necromancer, I was going to… Well, I’d stand there and I’d take it, and I’d probably thank him for the compliment. As it was, he said nothing, waving us inside. There were three more men in the room, all of them armed. There certainly wasn’t a shortage of guns in this place. Were guns their thing? Drugs? Or something else? It was probably better I didn’t know.

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