The Posthumous Man Read online

  "So, you see it as your job to tail me home from work and interrogate me because you see me with some guy?"

  "Today's a big day like I said. Awful damn peculiar of you to take time out to make a new boyfriend."

  Felicia dropped onto an antique chair. She seemed perfectly at home in the house, but at the same time, the place seemed too old for her. It felt like the home of elderly people, not a single woman under thirty.

  She ran her hand through her hair and regarded me for an instant. Silent thoughts flickered dimly in her blue eyes. She chewed her lip.

  Finally she asked DB, "Where's Stan?"

  "He's around."

  "Get him over here."

  "I'll text him."

  "Do that. I want to discuss this new development." She stood up and told me, "Elliot, you come with me."

  "Where you two going?" DB asked.

  "To my bedroom," she snapped. "For some privacy from you two assholes. Get Stan over here so we can all have a talk. You two let yourselves into my house, so please, please, make yourselves at home."

  With that she turned and left the room. I sat there a moment, unsure of what to do. The twins made eye contact and started signing to each other.

  "Excuse me," I said and stood up and followed Felicia.

  -CHAPTER FIVE-

  Felicia's Room

  I followed her through a dining room with polished hardwood floors and a long dining table, past a little white-tiled half-bath, and into a master bedroom. A four-post bed stood against pale blue walls that climbed nine feet to a vaulted ceiling. An enormous gray and navy rug covered most of the floor. A door opened into a white-tiled master bath with a sliding glass door. The place was neat, lovely, and oddly quaint for a young woman.

  Felicia said, "You can sit down on the bed if you want."

  I sat down and watched as she opened the double doors on a deep closet of clothes.

  Without turning around, she said, "I guess I owe you an explanation."

  "I'm note sure you owe me anything," I said "but I'd appreciate it."

  She pulled out a pair of jeans and black tank top. As she carried them over to a dresser she said, "The thing of it is, I don't know what I should tell you." She opened a drawer and pulled out a wine-colored underwear set. "Should I tell you everything or nothing? It's not too late for you to go, but if you do want to go time is running out." She carried her clothes to the door of the master bath. "On the other hand, it's not too early for you to decide to stay, either. It should be obvious, just based on how intense these assholes are, that this deal is real. You know I need the money. Maybe you do, too. I don't know. But there is money to be made if you want to make it."

  She went into the bathroom and closed the door. I heard water run in the shower.

  I leaned down and put my face in her pillows and inhaled the promise of her skin and hair. My eyes watered. I pressed against her pillow until the water shut off in the bathroom. Then I sat up.

  After a few minutes, she came out freshly showered and dressed, sat on the bed and tucked one leg under the other. Her wet hair dripped down onto skin that smelled clean and warm and moist. For a moment, she examined my face like a jeweler searching for flaws.

  "Well?" she said. "What do you think of what I said?"

  "Will they let me stay?"

  "If I say you're with me, and if you don't take any of their cut of the money, then yes."

  "What about this Stan guy? Is he the boss?"

  "Pretty much. He's the one everyone is afraid of, anyway, which is the same thing."

  I nodded. "I want to stay."

  "What kind of cut do you need?"

  "I don't give a shit about money."

  "You independently wealthy?"

  "I don't have a dime to my name."

  "Then why don't you care about money?"

  "I just don't."

  She frowned as if I'd tried to convince her that down was up. "So, why would you stay?"

  "Because there's nothing else for me. I have no life outside of this house, nowhere else to go. I killed myself yesterday, Felicia. I ended my life. And then, somehow, I woke up this morning in a new life. This one here with you. So I don't know what else to do. Either I live this life or I kill myself again."

  Felicia ran both of her hands through her hair and laced her fingers together behind her head. "Jesus." She pursed her lips. "Okay."

  "So tell me. Who are these people? What are they doing?"

  She dropped her hands in her lap. "God, where to start?"

  "Start at the beginning. Who's Stan?"

  "He's ... a criminal's criminal, I guess you'd say. He's got his hand in a lot of things. Burglary. Drugs. Hijacking."

  "How'd you get involved with him?"

  "I was dating a guy. Fuller. Fuller works with Stan occasionally. I was really into drugs at that point, drugs and bad boys. I was smoking dusted weed, popping pills, hooking up with shady guys. Sometimes I'd steal pills and syringes for Fuller. Then one night he introduced me to Stan. And, at first, Stan scared me because he was the only guy Fuller seemed to be afraid of. Plus, he's just weird. He always seemed to be off in his own head. He'd start talking about random stuff all of the sudden. I just didn't get him.

  "Then Fuller and I broke up, and I stopped doing drugs. Went into recovery. Stopped hanging out with all of those guys. I was doing okay for a while. Exercising, eating right, reading. And then one night, Stan showed up here with a knife wound. Somebody had stabbed him over ... something. I don't know what it was, but they stuck a six-inch blade through his navel. I helped him. After that, we started hanging out, even though I wasn't doing drugs anymore."

  "Nice guy to hang out with, a drug dealer you stitch up after a knife fight."

  Felicia said, "I'm being reprimanded by a suicide?"

  "Sorry. Must be the residual preacher in me. I'm just saying this Stan guy seems like the wrong type to hang around with."

  "I know," she said. "But that was why, of course. I like bad boys. Or usually I do. Stan's not bad in the usual way, though. He's not being a badass to impress girls. He's bad in a weird, fucked up way."

  "What about the twins?"

  She waved them away. "DB's a little man with a badge. Tom's a little man without a badge. Together they're about as dangerous as a junior high food fight."

  "They seem dangerous to me."

  "I can handle them. Stan's the wild card. When this deal goes down, he's the one to watch."

  "And just what is the deal?"

  She stood up and walked to other side of the room and listened at the door. Content with whatever she heard or thought she heard, she walked back to the bed. She didn't sit down, though. She stood over me and stared at me with those sharp blue eyes and said, "If I tell you what's going down, it means you're in on it. You're locked in."

  "I know."

  She nodded.

  "The hospital gets in daily shipments of supplies. Scrubs, catheters, needles. Whatever. It all goes through the shipping and receiving dock at the distribution center and gets processed by the materials management office. All except for the pharmaceuticals. For insurance reasons, all the drugs go up a short alley on the back of Ward Tower and go straight to the pharmacy where they're held in a bulk storage vault. The trucks back in, unload onto a service elevator, and go straight up to the vault. The vault is covered by surveillance cameras, and you have to have a bar-coded ID badge to get in. Past 7 p.m., you can't get into the vault at all. Sets off an alarm at the hospital central control.

  "But tonight's different. In the last few months, you might have heard about this big drug company price-fixing scandal on the news?"

  "I haven't exactly been keeping up with the news."

  "No. Well, last year the government sued a bunch of pharmaceutical companies for overcharging drugs covered by Medicaid. The government won the lawsuit, and one of companies that lost was this generic retailer, Activity Plus. They got busted overcharging medical providers, including UAMS, for presc
ription meds. The lawsuit bankrupted Activity Plus and they're going out of business. Part of the settlement is that they're unloading their stock at a discount to all of the hospitals they overcharged."

  "Which, I take it, brings us to tonight."

  "Exactly. Tonight they're bringing in a big bulk shipment of Oxycodone." She stopped. "You know what that is?"

  "Like Oxycontin."

  "One and the same. The truck should be carrying sixteen pallets of Oxy. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty thousand 80mg Oxycodones."

  "Shit."

  "Yes, shit. Shit, exactly."

  "Is Stan gonna keep them?"

  "No, he's not looking to get into the drug lord business. That's too long term. He's a thief. He just wants to grab the shipment and turn around and sell it. He's got a buyer set up."

  "How much is the haul from a shipment that large?"

  "A cool two million."

  "My God."

  She nodded and spread her palms out. "Take the truck before it unloads. Take the loot to the buyer. Get the cash."

  "Who's the buyer?"

  "Fuller."

  "Your ex-boyfriend."

  "Yes."

  I sat back against her pillows. "That's a hell of a deal."

  "It is."

  "A hell of a deal. I guess my only question is, why are you telling me about it?"

  She sat down on the bed next to me. "Because back there when DB told you to get lost, you didn't." Her leg touched mine. "These guys needed me for the information about the hospital and the shipment. They don't really need me now. And while they don't have any reason to fuck me over now that the deal's going down, guys like this don't always need a reason. The money is reason enough."

  "You want someone watching your back."

  "Yes."

  "I've never considered myself a physically imposing man. Or a brave man."

  "But you didn't run. You didn't give DB your name. Your impulse was to stay put and stay quiet. You had my back for no reason at all. But now you do have a reason. I can give you a piece of my cut of the money."

  "I told you, Felicia, I don't care about money. I never did, and I care less about it right now than I ever have. I just want to be ... to stay close by you. If you want me here, then I want to stay."

  Those hard eyes seemed to soften. "You really don't have anywhere else to go, do you?"

  "No."

  "What happened to you?"

  Leaning back further into her pillows, I closed my eyes.

  I dropped the phone and ran. Out my office door, down the hall, down the steps.

  car was parked in my usual space. Right where I'd left it. Tree limbs bent in the wind and leaves slapped at a sky drained of color.

  I opened my eyes. She reached over and took my hand.

  "Tell me," she said. "What happened?"

  I pulled my hand back. "No."

  "I don't—"

  "That's all I want from you," I said. "You don't have to sleep with me and you don't have to give me any money. Just don't ask me about my last life. Ever."

  She drew back her hand and rubbed it as if it had gone numb.

  "Okay," she said.

  -CHAPTER SIX-

  Stan the Man

  A few minutes later, DB called from the dining room, "He's here."

  Felicia stood up and slipped on some black thong sandals. She nodded and said, "Are you ready to meet Stan the Man?"

  I followed her through the dining room to the open front door where DB and Quiet Tom stood waiting like disciples. Leaving me there, Felicia hurried past the twins and rushed down the steps to the tall man who was walking up the driveway.

  Stan the Man had scarlet hair and an ax-shaped face hoisted high on a scrawny neck. As he led Felicia back up to the house, he hunched over her, a long arm clamped around her shoulders, his face close to her ear. As they moved from under a leafy canopy of shade into the sunlight, his slicked-back hair blazed a brilliant orange and his off-white suit shone like white fire. A fat knot of an Adam's apple jutted up and down in his neck when he said, "I never like to discuss bidness outside, darlin'."

  Felicia said, "I just wanted a chance to explain—"

  He clutched her elbow and guided her up the steps. "Aw, you can wait," he said. "Ain't heard the explanation yet couldn't be improved by air conditioning."

  Stan let Felicia enter first. Then he walked in behind her, closed the front door, slipped his long hands into the pockets of his suit coat and stared at me.

  "I hear we have a new bidness associate."

  "Stan—" DB started.

  Stan's right hand flashed out of his pocket, a slender finger lifted. "Wait," he said. He pointed at me. "How about you take it, brother."

  Except for rutted acne scars on his cheeks, Stan's face was smooth and pale. It was difficult to tell how old he was, and in some ways, with his off-white suit and lanky frame, he had the air of a geeky boy preacher. Then his thin lips disappeared into his serpentine mouth as he began to smile at me, and something changed. With his scarlet hair smoothed back against his scalp and his money-green eyes picking me apart, he suddenly looked more like Satan's nasty kid brother.

  He said, "You do talk don't you, boy? We already got our-selves a mute."

  "I talk."

  "Then do so."

  Before I could reply, DB jerked his thumb at Felicia. "He's with her. She wants to bring him in on the deal."

  "I didn't ask you nothing," Stan told DB, "so be quiet and let the man speak." His reedy voice had an oddly fickle quality, thin one moment and thick as cream the next.

  DB said petulantly, "I was just going to say Felicia wants to bring him in."

  Quiet Tom signed something to his brother.

  "Shut up," DB answered him. "I'm the goddamn cop here."

  "Boys, boys," Stan chided. There was some inner calculus going on. Stan read people, and he had begun to read me. I'm not sure what he saw on my life-battered face, but I think he could tell I was the only one in the room who wasn't afraid of him yet.

  Felicia filled the small silence with, "This is Elliot, he—"

  "I didn't ask you shit, Felicia," Stan snapped.

  Then he pointed at the kitchen and told me, "Why don't we go in here and have us a little powwow? Just the two of us. That way we can talk without all this butting in."

  I glanced at Felicia. She walked over to the dining room table and sat down and stared at her hands. I don't know what I wanted from her just then, but she gave me nothing.

  Stan watched me watch her, and he gestured toward the kitchen.

  "Sure," I said.

  He strolled into the kitchen, and I followed him. He stopped at the sink, his back to me, and turned on the water.

  "I take it you're sweet on Felicia," he said.

  It seemed too complicated to explain, so I just said, "I guess."

  "What's your name? Not Juan."

  I touched the name tag on my shirt and realized he was watching my reflection in the window. I leaned against the wall and let him watch.

  "Elliot Stilling," I said.

  "Elliot Stilling. That name sounds familiar. You somebody I heard of?"

  "I'm nobody."

  "Nobody's nobody."

  "Most people are nobody."

  Stan shut off the water and turned around. His white suit coat was unbuttoned. He wore an olive shirt with a cardinal tie, and everything appeared freshly cleaned and pressed. He dried his hands on a dish towel.

  "Well, I suppose that's true, Elliot." He tossed the towel on the sink and slid his hands into his pockets. "How do you know Felicia?"

  "From the hospital."

  "Ah. Yes. Course. Felicia makes lots of friends that way."

  "I suppose."

  "You fucking her?"

  "Pardon?"

  He smiled. "I love a feller with manners. I asked if you was fornicating with Felicia."

  "No," I said. "I'm not."

  "Why not?"

  "What?"

>   His smooth face reddened, but he kept smiling. "Now, I hate repeating myself, Elliot. For you and me to get along you're gonna need to grab holt of that pretty quick. I absolutely motherfucking hate to repeat myself."

  "I'm sorry. Your question threw me off a little."

  "Felicia ain't exactly famous for her discriminating taste in sexual partners," Stan explained. "And she don't have platonic relationships with the men folks. So when you say you ain't fucking her, it sorta smells like bullshit to me."

  "We just met."

  "Just when?"

  "Today."

  That seemed to genuinely surprise him, but he just sucked on his bottom lip. "Hmm." He thought about it for a moment. When he'd thought about it enough, he asked, "You in love with her?"

  "I told you, we just met."

  Stan raised his eyebrows. "Well, that ain't too soon to be in love if it was love at first sight." He squinted. "Was it love at first sight?"

  "Not exactly."

  "That's good."

  "Why is it good?"

  "Because men fuck Felicia. They don't fall in love with her."

  "See," I said, "when you say that, it makes me want to save her."

  Stan shook his head sadly. "If that's true, boy, you're pouring yourself a long tall drink of misery."

  "Maybe, but that doesn't mean I have to be a problem for you."

  "You're already a problem for me."

  "Not too much of one, though."

  "That's the question, isn't it? How big a pain in my ass are you going to be?"

  "You think I'm here for the money?"

  "Ain't you?"

  "No. I'm here for the girl."

  "Ah, but the girl is here for the money."

  I didn't know what to say to that.

  "You see the problem," Stan said.

  "I suppose."

  "What do you know about the money?"

  "Just about nothing."

  "You tell me what you know, and I'll judge how close it is to nothing."

  I told him what she'd told me about the robbery. I wasn't sure if I should, but Felicia had not indicated in any way that I should play dumb about what was going on, so I told him all I knew.

  When I was finished, Stan said, "It's a heap of cash."