Anton Strout - Dead Matter

Jane gave a pained smile. “Fair point, sweetie.” She put one of Connor’s arms over her shoulder and started carrying him out with me.

“Thank you,” I said. Our group limp toward the open gates was maddeningly slow. “Besides, he’s my partner. If I let him die here, I’ll be the only one left to finish all that paperwork and I’ll be damned if I let that happen.”

“Yer all heart, kid,” Connor said, laughing through gritted teeth. It sounded like the rattling of bones.

Rule one while hailing a cab with a bloodied man? Let the woman stand alone at the curb to flag one down. Connor and I waited in the shadow of the church. As soon as a cab pulled over, Jane got in as Connor and I scrambled out of the shadows toward it. I helped the barely conscious Connor get in, then jumped in after him, slamming the door shut behind me.

The driver looked back at the three of us with skepticism on his face, but when I shoved a fifty through the partition at him, he was happy to take us up the West Side Highway to Connor’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. As soon as the cab started moving, Connor passed out and we rode in silence until the driver turned onto Fifty-fourth and pulled up in front of Connor’s apartment building between Tenth and Ninth avenues.

I found Connor’s keys in the pocket of his blood-covered trench coat and cycled through them until one of them unlocked the door leading into his empty lobby. We leaned him against the elevator wall as we rode up, thankful that no one was around. When we reached Connor’s floor, Jane and I helped him out of the elevator, but by the time we reached his apartment door, Jane looked ready to drop.

“Oh, my God,” Jane said, straining under Connor’s deadweight. “It’s like having a two-hundred-pound baby. I’m so not changing his diaper.”

I propped Connor against the wall as I determined which key would unlock the door.

“At his age, they’re called Depends,” I said, finally finding the right key.

Jane laughed, and Connor’s head stirred.

“I can still hear, you know,” he muttered. “And when I’m feeling better, I’ve got an ass kicking ready just for you, kid.”

“You’ve had enough ass kicking for today,” I said, “most of it on the receiving end.” I turned the lock and the door swung open. “Let’s get you inside and sit you down.”

I reached just inside the door and felt around, flicking the switch I found to light up Connor’s living room. The room lit up. All along the exposed-brick walls of the main room were vintage movie posters, many of them featuring Connor’s fave, Humphrey Bogart. Another wall was completely white, doubling as a built-in movie screen with a set of four deluxe theater seats right in front of it. Jane looked impressed.

“This is better than the IMAX at Lincoln Center,” she said. Jane stepped into the room but stopped immediately. I wondered why, but a second later, I knew.

Something sour filled the air, like milk or cheese gone bad. Half-empty pizza boxes were stacked everywhere like a creepy game of trash-inspired Jenga. This level of disarray was a total departure from Connor’s anally organized desk back at the office.

“Sorry ’bout the mess,” he said. “If I had known I was having company, I would have bulldozed.”

A lone leather couch ran along the opposite wall and we deposited Connor down onto it. I clicked on a lamp next to it, angling it to look at his face. Apart from the eyes swollen shut, it looked like there was more blood than actual damage, which was good. I looked up at Jane.

“You wanna check his bathroom for some kind of first-aid supplies? Gauze, bandages, anything…”

“Is that part of your nurse fantasy?” she said, but headed off into the apartment to find the bathroom.

“Ix-nay on the urse-nay in front of our work colleague, hon,” I called out after her.

“Seriously,” Connor muttered. “I’d hate to add vomit to all this mess just because of your cutesiness.”

I pulled off my coat and laid it over one of the theater chairs before kneeling down next to Connor.

“So, I said, looking for further signs of damage. “Is that the sort of thing you’ve been doing with your time off?”

“What the hell do you care?” Connor said. The sudden venom in his voice made me pull back. It was quite unlike the Connor I was used to. “How I spend my vacation time from work is my business. Hell, I’ve accrued more than enough time off in the past five years.”

“That’s the thing, Connor,” I said. I looked him dead in the eye. “You don’t really take vacation… like, ever. And then you take almost a whole month at once? I mean, look at your place. This isn’t like you at all.”

Connor looked away. I wanted answers, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. Instead, he sat there in silence as we waited for Jane. She returned with an armful of plastic bottles, a few tubes of ointment, and a few boxes of gauze pads and Band-Aids.

“Will this do?” she asked, dropping it all on the couch next to Connor.

I nodded. “Thanks.”

I grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide, poured it onto one of the larger gauze pads, and used it to wipe away some of the blood on Connor’s face. Little pockets of bubbles arose to show where the skin was broken. Connor let out a slow deep breath.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No worries,” Connor said. “It’s all my own doing.”

“Yeah, about that,” I said, switching to a fresh pad of gauze. “Just what the hell was all that about in the graveyard, anyway? Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

Connor shook his head and I had to adjust my dabbing before more blood could run into his scruffy beard. “It’s not a death wish, kid. I was Knocking.”

Jane had also taken up some gauze and dabbed at one of the cuts on Connor’s left hand. “Knocking?” she asked.

Connor turned to look at her through the tiny gaps of his puffed-up eyes. “Drawing spirits back to their grave,” he explained. “And then out of them.”

Jane looked horrified. Her eyes crunched up with distaste. “Why on earth would you do something like that? Why would anybody?”

She poured hydrogen peroxide into one of the deeper cuts across his knuckles. Connor hissed and laid his head back against the arm of his couch. “Ask your boyfriend about that. He’s been on the job long enough now. Should be able to Poirot it out for himself.”

Jane turned to me and I felt the sudden pressure to perform like a trained animal, but I needed to know, too. What had brought Connor to this point? Why this whole disconnect from the world for the past month? What had happened? Then it hit me.

“This is about your brother, isn’t it?”

Connor’s silence was confirmation enough.

After a few moments, he finally spoke up. “We had Aidan’s address…”

“No,” I said, interrupting. “We had an envelope we found in the madness that was Cyrus Mandalay’s messed-up art show invitations.” Aidan had disappeared twenty-two years ago at the beach, and no one had ever been able to turn up a lead… until we’d found that envelope.

“We had an address,” he repeated, almost as if he wasn’t hearing me. His eyes looked frantic, mad.

I grabbed Connor by the shoulders and forced him to look at me. “You know what we found there,” I said. “Nothing. That building had been torn down years ago. All that we found was some half-constructed eyesore on the Manhattan skyline that took up most of the city block.”

Connor looked into my eyes, then closed his, not wanting to look at me. Tears rolled down his face. Gone was the man I called my mentor.

“I don’t get it,” I said, standing up. I turned to Jane. “He’s always been stronger than this. Why now? His brother was already missing for twenty-two years. I can’t believe that one piece of false hope now has driven him to all this.”