The Wrong Dead Guy

  29

  The next morning, Coop spent the entire drive to the DOPS building lying under a blanket in the backseat of Giselle’s car. She told him it had been woven by an old bruja in the hills above Bahía de los Ángeles in Mexico and that it guarded against the evil eye. This was only half-true. Yes, the package the blanket had come in had a Mexican postmark, and yes, it was woven, but she’d bought it on eBay, and for all she knew it could have been woven by a machine or indentured monkeys being paid in bananas. But it looked rustic enough and was covered in obscure squiggles that, while they were probably spots from a lousy dye job, could be mistaken for arcane magical symbols by someone freaked out enough to believe in magic blankets in the first place.

  Coop had been up all night after his encounter with Harkhuf. Giselle told herself that she’d encouraged him to burrow like a badger in the backseat to keep him from bugging her on the drive to work. The truth was that she was even more unsettled than he was. He believed in his idiotic magic necklace, but all she had was the image of a half-naked Coop shouting at shadows while standing in front of moving cars. If that bunch of rocks around his neck worked, it wasn’t working well enough. She was worried, and that was the last thing she wanted Coop to see, hence the fairy tale about a voodoo blanket. At least they agreed on one thing: he needed more help and maybe Bayliss was someone they could trust. It was worth a shot. She couldn’t keep coming up with magic blankets or divine beach towels in which to ensconce him.

  “We’re here,” Giselle said as she backed into a parking space in the DOPS underground lot. “You can come out, Sleepy Beauty.”

  Coop pushed the blanket down just past his chin and looked out. “Are you sure? It’s pretty cozy back here.”

  Giselle came around and opened the back door. “Don’t worry. It’s safe to come out. Nothing can get you here.”

  “If you’re sure,” Coop said. He wadded up the blanket and crawled out of the open door.

  Giselle brushed him off. “See? I told you you’d be safe as long as you stayed down. It worked like a charm.”

  “Yeah. That was some powerful shaman,” he said. “Oh. I forgot something.” Coop handed her a small cloth tab. Printed on it in crisp black letters was MADE IN CHINA in both English and Spanish.

  “The next time you stick someone under an enchanted doily, you might want to give it the once-over.”

  “I thought I did,” she said. She screwed up her mouth. “I guess I’m not that good a con man after all.” She started to throw away the tab but Coop grabbed it from her.

  “You don’t get off the hook that easy. This goes in the family memory. We can show it to the grandkids.”

  “We don’t even have kids.”

  “Well, someone’s grandkids. ‘Gather round little ones and learn exactly how not to pull off a con.’”

  “Have I told you lately how truly hysterical you are?” said Giselle. She locked the car and headed for the elevators. “I was only doing it for your own good.”

  Coop followed her. “See, if you’d slipped me a mickey, I might have bought it a little longer. You should remember that when you’re shanghaiing sailors down at the docks.”

  They got into the elevator and Giselle punched the button like it owed her money. “You’re enjoying this way too much for a marked man,” she said.

  “I think I’m enjoying it just the right amount,” said Coop.

  “Remember to keep your voice and your swelled head down when we get inside. Woolrich doesn’t want you here.”

  “I remember. And no one gets to know that his plan to use me as mummy bait is working.”

  “So much for the twenty-four-hour surveillance Woolrich promised.”

  “I’m happy they weren’t there. The last thing I want to see is my ass and Millennium Falcon shorts in the company newsletter.”

  Giselle took Coop’s hand. “It was very sweet of you to wear them.”

  “I know. And I’m never doing it again.”

  “I already threw them away. They’re not really special now that a car full of marauding juvenile delinquents has seen them.”

  He shrugged. “I was never a Star Wars fan anyway.”

  The elevator stopped and Giselle let go of Coop’s hand. She rounded on him. “You don’t like cats and now you don’t like Star Wars? What do you like?”

  “Crouching in backseats under mystical throw rugs.”

  They headed for Bayliss’s cubicle. Morty was waiting for them around the corner with a cup of vending-machine coffee.

  “Hey, you two. How’s tricks?”

  “Coop thinks he’s a comedian,” said Giselle.

  “He always makes me laugh.”

  “You should have seen him last night if you wanted a real laugh.”

  “What happened last night?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Coop. “By the way, I saw Minerva. She says you’re a bum.”

  “The fortune-teller? Why am I a bum?”

  As they passed an unoccupied desk, Coop picked up a newspaper and held it next to his face as they walked. “She says she set you up with someone and you never thanked her.”

  Morty coughed and tossed the coffee in the trash. “You mean the cute Japanese girl? She was a Jorōgumo. We go back to my place and all of a sudden she sprouts eight legs. She wanted to lay eggs in my brain.”

  “At least you’d have something up there.”

  “I already do. It’s where I keep my spare change.”

  “I saw the mummy last night in a dream,” said Coop.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” said Giselle.

  “He was in my head trying to take me over like that guard in the museum.”

  “Did it work?” said Morty.

  “What do you mean? I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Not before he stopped off to flash the neighborhood,” said Giselle.

  “I had a cousin who was that kind of flasher,” said Morty.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He lost his glasses and flashed a bull.”

  “How did the bull take it?” said Coop.

  “Not well. These days he’s flashing Saint Peter in Heaven.”

  Coop frowned. “I’m not sure flashers go to Heaven.”

  “They don’t. I checked with the afterlife placement department,” said Morty. “But saying Heaven is nicer than ‘He’s flashing sharks with chain saws in Hell.’ Anyway, it sounds like the necklace protected you.”

  “I’m not convinced,” said Giselle. “I think it was just Coop’s natural talent for dodging magic.”

  “What did the creep want?”

  “An amulet,” said Coop.

  Morty thought about it. “The amulet? The one we gave Woolrich?”

  Coop rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Maybe there’s some other way to get him off my back. Bayliss might be able to find out.”

  “Have you seen her since the audit?”

  “No. We want to check on her,” said Giselle. “How was she?”

  “I’ve seen people in worse shape, but she’s still a little on the fuzzy side,” said Morty. He held up a bandaged hand. “When I asked her how it was going, she stapled me to her desk.”

  “You poor thing,” said Giselle.

  “Maybe she likes you and wanted you to stick around,” said Coop.

  “If that’s her idea of a first date, I’ll pass,” said Morty. “Anyway, I bet she’ll be happy to see you. Just keep your hands in your pockets.”

  They found Bayliss at her desk. Where her keyboard normally sat was a pair of sneakers filled with paper clips. The walls of her cubicle were papered with colorful Post-its. Each one had an inspirational quote and a tiny drawing in black ink, but they all seemed a little off. Hang in there, baby was at the top left of her cubicle. While the saying was normally accompanied by an image of a cat hanging from a tree branch, Bayliss’s Hang in there, baby featured a dragon in an evening gown eating what appeared to be a washing machine full of bowling
shoes. Next to that was There’s no I in teamwork, with a drawing of an ice cream cone holding an ax chasing a bat with a machine gun.

  “That one doesn’t even make sense,” said Morty. “Why doesn’t the bat just shoot the ice cream cone?”

  “It’s probably a pacifist,” said Coop.

  “Shut up,” Giselle told them both. She put a hand on Bayliss’s shoulder. “How are you? It’s me. Giselle.”

  “Hi,” said Bayliss. She smiled and handed Giselle a small sculpture of a dog made from wooden coffee stirrers she’d glued together.

  “Bayliss,” said Coop. “Is this what they told you to do after the audit? Or did you come up with this on your own?”

  Bayliss looked around her cubicle. She pulled down a couple of Post-its and stuck them to a map of Mongolia taped over her computer monitor. “I keep trying to work,” she said. “But I get distracted.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. They want me to catalog all the office supplies for the building. It’s pretty boring.”

  “Especially with shoes for a keyboard,” said Coop.

  Bayliss looked at her desk. “Not again,” she said, exasperation in her voice. She put the shoes on the floor and took her keyboard out of the trash.

  “Do you want some coffee or something?” said Morty.

  Bayliss picked up her stapler and Morty jumped back. “Thank you. That would be nice,” she said.

  “I’ll go,” he said, and left quickly.

  “The Auditors did this to you?” said Giselle.

  “Who else?” Coop said.

  “I don’t think they mean to. It just works out that way,” said Bayliss. “I’ll be all right in a day or two. I just wish I had something to do that wasn’t figuring out which department has too many binder clips and which doesn’t have enough.”

  “Did you hear about our job the other night?” said Giselle.

  Bayliss brightened. “Oh yeah. How did that go?”

  “Great. We got everything Woolrich wanted. We confused a lot of guards, which was fun. And Coop got cursed by a three-thousand-year-old mummy.”

  Bayliss pushed herself back and forth in her chair for a minute. “What was that last one again?” she said.

  “I’ve was cursed by a mummy,” said Coop.

  “Cool.”

  “Not really,” said Giselle. “The mummy wants something. It wanted an amulet, but that’s gone.”

  “I’m trying to figure out if there’s something else it might want. Maybe if I can get it, the mummy will leave me alone.”

  “Wow,” said Bayliss. “That’s so much cooler than office supplies.”

  “Do you think you might be able to help us out with a little research? Who he was. Where he came from. What he wants.”

  Bayliss opened her mouth wide. “That sounds awesome. What’s the mummy’s name?”

  “Harkhuf,” said Coop, and he spelled it for her.

  Bayliss wrote the name on a Post-it with an eyeliner pencil. “We have all kinds of records on dead people. Come back later today and I’ll tell you what I found.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Coop.

  “Is there anything we can do for you?” said Giselle.

  “No. I’ll be fine,” said Bayliss. “I just need to dinosaur Jell-O escalator.”

  “I’m going to make sure the Auditors don’t bother you again,” said Coop. “I’m not sure how, but it will come to me.”

  “You’re sweet. You’re both sweet.”

  “Let’s meet at six at the café around the corner. Is that all right?” said Giselle.

  “It sounds fine,” said Bayliss. “But can you tell me one thing?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who put all these Post-its on my walls?”

  “We’ll ask around,” said Giselle sympathetically.

  Coop put Bayliss’s recycling bin on her desk. “If you’re feeling better, maybe you should take some down.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Bayliss said. “And I’ll do your thing, too.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hang in there, baby,” said Bayliss, reading each Post-it aloud as she pulled it down.

  Coop and Giselle went back to the elevator.

  “Is Bayliss going to be all right?” she said.

  “She said the effects will wear off. Maybe it’ll go faster if she does more interesting work,” said Coop.

  “I hope so. I don’t like seeing her like this.”

  “Me neither. Do you think Woolrich sent the Auditors after her?”

  “Woolrich? He hates them more than we do. He’s tried to have them fired lots of times. He’d probably like to have one of them on his wall.”

  “Why did you have to say that? Still, now I hate him slightly less.”

  “Are you really going to do something to them?” said Giselle.

  “I’m going to try. I’ll need to know more about them first.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Great.”

  “Okay. Now get out of here before Woolrich finds out.”

  “I’ll see you at six.”

  Giselle headed for her office. “Try not to moon anybody on the way home.”

  “I make no promises.”

  McCloud and Nelson were locked in his office, which was piled high with all manner of arcane, hideous, dangerous, and plain awful objects. One might say that it looked like the horrors from Pandora’s box, but that was locked safely in the ECIU archives.

  “What’s this?” said McCloud.

  Nelson stopped pawing around in an old steamer trunk long enough to look up. “John Dee’s skull.”

  “And this? It’s just a blur.” McCloud held up what appeared to be a framed photo of a gray smear. “There’s something scribbled at the bottom.”

  “That’s Woolrich’s autographed picture of Death. I’m saving it for someone I want to get into terminal trouble, if you get my drift.”

  McCloud pursed his lips and set the photo gently onto the increasingly large pile of spell books, charms, weapons, wards, cursed objects, and stolen tchotchkes.

  He picked up a feather. “What’s . . . ow!”

  Nelson looked over and smiled. “Careful. That’s the Marquis de Sade’s writing quill. It always tries to stab you in the eye.”

  “You might have said something sooner.”

  “Yes. I might have,” said Nelson.

  McCloud tossed the quill onto Nelson’s desk and looked around at the mess. “Tell me again why we’re going through all these old boxes?”

  Nelson kept working as he answered. “I’ve told you twice. You need to learn to listen.”

  “I remember what you said. We’re looking for something incriminating to use against Coop.”

  Nelson looked at him. “In order to . . . ?”

  “Have him demoted to a mook.”

  “And then . . . ?”

  “He’ll be sent down here to work under you in the mail room.”

  “What’s so hard to understand about that?” said Nelson, going back to rummaging.

  McCloud picked up a tangled mass of black hair. “This is disgusting.”

  “That’s Rasputin’s beard. They use it upstairs to clone him for parties. He’s a load of laughs. Denouncing all the men, trying to seduce all the women, drinking everyone under the table.”

  “What happens to the clones when the party is over?”

  “They give them twenty bucks and let them go. The city is full of Rasputins. I mean, who’s going to believe them, right? Like I said, a load of laughs.”

  “Charming,” said McCloud.

  “Maybe you had to be there.”

  “I guess I keep asking you about Coop because what we’re doing, it just seems a bit unethical.” McCloud rubbed his stump.

  “Is your arm bothering you?”

  “No. It’s just that I don’t remember falling into the shredder. You’d think that’s the kind of thing a person would recall.”

  “There’
s a simple explanation for that. Let me show you,” said Nelson. He touched McCloud’s forehead and said, “Macho Taco Guy Lombardo.” McCloud’s face went slack.

  “Do you remember falling into the shredder the other night?” said Nelson.

  “I sure do, boss. You pushed me,” said McCloud cheerfully.

  “No. You tripped and fell.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you remember falling into the shredder the other night?”

  “I sure do. Boy, am I clumsy.”

  “It happens to the best of us,” said Nelson, and he went back to work.

  “Wow. Look at all this neat stuff,” said McCloud. “Whose is it?”

  “It’s ours. Look for interesting items. Dark, scary things we can send to dark, scary people.”

  “You got it, boss.” McCloud pawed through the piles of deadly mystical detritus like a kid looking for a lost cupcake at the bottom of a ball pit. “Don’t people miss these things?” he said.

  Nelson held up a jar marked mixed nuts that spat venom and tried to wriggle away. He tossed it back into a box.

  “Around here, people don’t ask questions,” he said. “If you didn’t get something, you weren’t meant to get it. If you sent it and it didn’t get there, it wasn’t supposed to.”

  “But it’s us doing that,” said McCloud, elbow-deep in a Happy Meal box.

  “Only we know that,” said Nelson. “That’s what makes the system work.”

  “What’s this?” said McCloud, pulling a glass jar from the Happy Meal.

  “Einstein’s brain. Don’t drop it.”

  “Is it magic?”

  “No, but it will stink the place up.”

  “What’s this?” McCloud held a small metal box with a plastic handle on which someone had written PANDORA in Sharpie. “Wow. Is it Pandora’s box?”

  Nelson let out a breath and looked. “No. It’s Pandora’s lunch box. Put it down and don’t eat anything from it,” he said excitedly.

  “What’s special about these?” McCloud held out a fistful of red pens.

  “Nothing. I’ve been looking for those,” Nelson said, and tossed the pens in a desk drawer.

  “Smile,” said McCloud happily. A flash went off. Nelson closed his eyes, seeing a floating red dot. There was a tiny machine hum as a photo emerged from the camera. A few seconds later, Nelson heard McCloud softly say, “Eww.”