After the shooter fled, Sheyenne had the presence of mind to grab my phone from where it had skittered down the sidewalk. She shouted to Robin, explained what had happened, then rushed back to me. “Help is on the way!” She was terrified and distraught; being unable to touch me made the situation much worse for her. “I’ll stay with you—Robin’s coming. We’re going to get you fixed up.”
I lifted a hand, wanting to brush my fingers through her beautiful hair, but that wasn’t going to happen. “I’m fine.” I’m not good at telling bald-faced lies. “Did you see who did this? The license plate? The make of the car?”
Sheyenne was crestfallen. “Sorry, I was more worried about you.”
I levered myself onto my elbows. “The good news is, we must’ve stepped on somebody’s toes, or they wouldn’t have bothered to gun me down. That means we’re getting close to something.”
Unfortunately, in the past few days I’d been digging into a lot of old cases, making phone calls, asking questions. Who knew which one had pushed the shooter’s buttons? He, or she, might be my killer, or Sheyenne’s … or it could be a different person entirely.
The Straight Edgers might be infuriated because of the restraining order I delivered or the protective spell we placed over Sheldon Fennerman. I’d been in Basilisk asking questions, and if Ivory was involved in poisoning Sheyenne, she might have gotten nervous, especially after we went into Grandma Wong’s shop. Or, I’d followed Brondon Morris and Harvey Jekyll to their secret meeting in the warehouse. For that matter, the heirs of Alvin Ricketts could have been vindictive now that he’d sold his zombie puppies painting for a large amount at auction.
Sure, I had more enemies than I could shake a stake at, but I had a gut feeling that Jekyll was involved—a conclusion I drew partly from circumstantial evidence and partly because I just plain didn’t like the guy. Even if it turned out he had nothing to do with my murder, I still wouldn’t have minded seeing him screwed in his divorce.
I slowly sat up on the sidewalk. Sheyenne fussed over me and uttered a string of frustrated curses because she couldn’t lend me a hand and help me to my feet. By myself, I managed to stand up again.
I looked at the bullet holes that had torn through my sport jacket. “Son of a bitch, this was my only good suit.” A private investigator doesn’t require many jackets, but I need at least one without bullet holes.
The six slugs had passed cleanly through my chest. Fortunately, they’d missed my spine, which I really needed in order to keep myself upright. I poked my fingers into the large holes across my torso—it was like Frankenstein’s game of connect-the-dots. Every bit of damage to my body was tough to repair, and I had vowed never to become one of those shamblers who fall apart with each jostle or hiccup.
I heard a puttering muffler and recognized the sound of the Pro Bono Mobile. Sheyenne reappeared down the street in the headlights of the oncoming car. She flitted and bobbed like a will-o’-the-wisp, guiding Robin to where I was standing, then she yanked open the passenger door for me so I could collapse inside onto the musty fabric seats.
“Dan, I heard the gunshots on the phone,” Robin cried. “Sheyenne said—”
“Just get me to the sawbones, and we’ll see how bad the damage really is.”
* * *
In the month since crawling out of the grave, I hadn’t had any occasion to visit the Patchup Parlor of Miss Lujean Eccles, but thanks to word on the street, every zombie knows where to go for an emergency bodily repair.
Miss Eccles operated her business out of an old Victorian home. A large dead oak tree stood out front, from which dangled a tire swing for the human and inhuman children in the neighbor-hood. Sheyenne’s ghost had drifted ahead, passing through the Patchup Parlor’s front door to alert Miss Eccles we were coming. Robin helped me out of the car, slung my right arm over her shoulder, and supported me as I stumbled up the tulip-lined path.
I had a hard time getting my legs to move right, and I felt clumsy and stupid—worse, I was acting like a shambler, and that made me both embarrassed and horrified. Wasn’t death hard enough already? “I’m just disoriented, that’s all,” I said. “I’ll get better.”
“Yes, you will,” Robin said. “Or else.”
Miss Eccles clucked her tongue as she looked me over. “Oh, my, my!” She was a sweet, plump woman in her late fifties, with gray-brown hair piled in a beehive hairdo that looked like an ancient obelisk. “You look much the worse for wear!”
Robin hurried me into the front room, where I slumped onto an old Victorian flower-print sofa. “Can you treat him?” Sheyenne asked. “Somebody shot him because of me.”
“We don’t know why I was shot,” I said. “Not tonight, and not the first time either.”
I ran the ideas over and over in my mind. We’d asked questions of the clerk at Grandma Wong’s, but he hadn’t given us any names of toadstool customers. And how could anyone have had time to set up the shooting? Jimmy the stoner clerk was the only one who knew we’d asked the questions, and I’d been gunned down less than fifteen minutes after that. Unless Jimmy did it himself … but I doubted he was in any condition to shoot straight. My hand looks funny.
Though he gave us no names, Jimmy had mentioned that bartenders sometimes purchased the death cap extract, but the only bartenders I knew were Francine at the Goblin Tavern—she certainly had no beef with me—and Fletcher at Basilisk.
Fletcher Knowles.
Less than two months before my death, I had butted heads with him about his black-market blood sales. The nightclub manager had an ongoing feud with my previous client Harry Talbot—maybe I’d gotten in the cross fire somehow.
Sheyenne had worked at Basilisk, and she’d been poisoned with the toadstool extract.
And Fletcher was the one who had found my body not far from the nightclub.
When I came back from the dead, after reading the ballistics and autopsy results, I had pressed Fletcher about antique Civil War–era guns, specifically a .32 caliber revolver. He rolled his eyes, stroked his blond goatee, and insisted he used only garlic spray and holy water to keep patrons in line….
Now, while Miss Eccles pulled off my ruined sport jacket, Robin worked to unbutton my shirt and expose my chest. Hovering nearby, Sheyenne winced to see the wounds. The bullet holes looked nasty, dark craters in my puckered skin, now leaking embalming fluid. Bruno was going to have to top me off sooner than my regular appointment.
Robin had tears running down her face, but she didn’t say a word.
“What’s the prognosis?” Sheyenne asked. “If I weren’t a ghost, I’d try to fix the damage myself.” Her voice hitched at the end.
“Oh, my, my—I won’t pretend this isn’t going to be a challenge, but I’ve seen worse,” Miss Eccles said. “Don’t worry. There’ve been great advances in restorative mending. When I’m done you’ll barely even see the marks.”
Before the Big Uneasy, Lujean Eccles had owned and operated a taxidermy shop. Examples of her best work covered the parlor walls—a stuffed raccoon, a moose head, a leaping rainbow trout, and, for some reason, a rooster. I think taxidermy was still her first love, but she filled a greater need by offering pseudo-medical services for the undead.
She switched on two Tiffany lamps beside the sofa and bent close to my wounds. “Lean forward, please.” She studied the exit holes in my back. “We can use some wire and plastic braces to repair your ribs. The slugs missed your vertebrae, fortunately. I could have replaced part of your spine with a dowel or a broomstick if I needed to, but you wouldn’t have had much flexibility.”
“Are any of the bullets still in me?” I asked.
“No, through and through. Six neat holes in front, six in back—it’s all very clean.”
“What’s the internal damage, though?” Sheyenne asked.
“Mostly soft tissue, it looks like,” Miss Eccles said. “I’ll use a bit of packing material, tight little stitches here and there. I’ll reconnect what needs connecting, and you’ll be as good as … as you were. I’ve even got some scab-salve that really minimizes the marks.”
I looked up at Sheyenne, thinking like a PI again. “We need to retrieve at least one of the bullets so we can run ballistics. See if it’s the same gun that shot me the first time around.”
“I’m on it,” she said. “After I make sure you’re all right.”
Robin added, “We’ll get even later.” Her expression was hard and determined, much like Sheyenne’s. “And we will get even.”
Miss Eccles puffed out her rounded cheeks and blew out a tired-sounding breath. She lifted her head and raised her voice. “Oh, Wendy! Wendy, come in here, would you? Bring my kit. We’ll need some of that biofill mixture, the heavy-gauge sutures, and the fine flesh-colored finishing thread.”
From the dim doorway that led into the back rooms, I saw a waifish yet hideous figure, a distorted female form. She hesitated to come out into the bright light, but Miss Eccles clucked her tongue again. “No need to be shy, dear—these are friends. We haven’t got all night. Can’t you see this man needs our help?”
“Yes, miss,” Wendy said in a rattling voice. The young woman lurched into the parlor.
Though I had seen many horrific examples of creatures restored to life, this one would have won numerous prizes, and Wendy wasn’t exactly a testimonial to the quality of Miss Eccles’s work. I could see why the girl didn’t like to go out in public.
“This is my Patchwork Princess. I put her back together when no one else would.”
Sheyenne said nothing, but her eyes held deep pity. Robin, on the other hand, was ashen beneath her dark skin; she looked away and then seemed embarrassed for having done so.
“The poor girl was a wreck when I got to her—literally a wreck,” Miss Eccles said. “She threw herself in front of an oncoming train, and the damage was atrocious.”
“Sorry,” Wendy said.
“The dear thing was miserable, wanted to end her life. She never expected to come back, but then suicides have a greater chance of resurrection. So there she was, even more miserable than she’d been before. I couldn’t let someone suffer like that! So I went back to the train tracks with two empty bushel baskets, picked up every piece I could find, and brought her back here.”
“Thank you, miss,” Wendy said. Her arms weren’t attached right. Her head seemed askew, and she was a crazy quilt of tiny stitches. Triangular pieces of tan Naugahyde had been sewn in places where the skin was gone. “She did the best job she could. I’m grateful.”
“I took her under my wing. The poor dear’s been a great help to me, and now she realizes that life isn’t so bad.”
The Patchwork Princess tottered off into the adjoining room and returned with a carpet-bag, which she set on the end table atop a doily. Miss Eccles opened it and withdrew spools of sewing thread, darning needles, a crochet hook, and flesh-colored thread as well as thicker twine.
“I’d like to assist, if I can,” Sheyenne offered as Miss Eccles probed the tears in my skin. The plump woman nodded. “Boar bristle paintbrush.” Sheyenne placed the brush in the taxidermy-surgeon’s outstretched hand. Humming to herself, concentrating on her work, Miss Eccles used the brush to clean the bullet holes. “Knitting needle.” Sheyenne handed her the implement, which Miss Eccles gently eased through the wound and out my back to clean the channel.
Wendy fetched a pot full of gummy packing mixture. While Sheyenne helped Miss Eccles fix my shattered ribs and stitch together the major muscles, the Patchwork Princess hunched in a chair next to the Tiffany lamp. She spread my shirt and sport jacket in her lap, and with clumsy but determined strokes used a needle and thread to sew up the bullet holes.
While Robin watched with fascination, Sheyenne gave her the details about what we’d learned at Grandma Wong’s. “I’m sure this has to do with whoever poisoned me. We were snooping around, trying to find out who bought the death cap extract—and then Dan was shot.”
“I’ll tell Officer McGoohan,” Robin said. “We need the police force working on this too!”
I groaned. “No, let me talk to McGoo. He’s got his hands full as it is. Besides, I’m supposed to be a hotshot private investigator. If I can’t solve this, who can?”
Miss Eccles packed the body cavity with the biofiller, topped it off with cotton, then used almost invisible stitches to close the bullet holes, front and back. Wendy’s stitchery wasn’t nearly as neat or accurate as the other woman’s taxidermy work, but both finished at the same time. Wendy shyly handed me my shirt and jacket.
As I shrugged back into the shirt, my arms seemed to be working well enough. The marks on my chest weren’t unnoticeable by any means, but not nearly as bad as I’d feared. Robin fussed over my buttons (even under the best of circumstances, my fingers didn’t have their previous dexterity). When I put the sport jacket back on, I decided that the stitched-up bullet holes added character, like a badge of honor.
I made a point of looking at the Patchwork Princess to boost her self-esteem. “Thank you very much, Wendy. Looks like I won’t need a new suit after all.”
Her smile was crooked, but as bright as sunshine. Miss Eccles said, “You know where to come for a quick fix when the inevitable happens.” Sheyenne paid the woman and thanked her.
“The inevitable’s not going to happen anytime soon, Dan,” Robin vowed as the two escorted me out of the Patchup Parlor.
Sheyenne added, “And let’s not make a habit of this bullet thing.”