He had a good point. Solid. Sharp. Pointy.
“One thing I did figure out while I was there is that they are all liars and manipulators. You can’t believe anything they have to say.”
“Is that a comment about Reyes?”
“If the fiery pit fits.” When I got up to leave, he added, “I’m working on something. I promise, Charles, the minute I know more, you’ll know more.”
He groaned and got up from his seat to follow me to the door.
I opened it, then turned back to him. “Swopes, I know you don’t like to talk about it, but you can’t just go to hell and come away unscathed.”
A humorless grin spread across his face. “Sure you can. What would you do if you were sent to hell?”
I stepped out. “Stop, drop, and roll? What I mean is, did anything bad happen? Did they, I don’t know, hurt you?” I leveled a probing stare on him. “Did they torture you?”
His grin morphed into something that resembled pity. “No, Charles. They didn’t torture me.”
He closed the door before I could say anything else. I stood there a solid minute, stunned, unsure of what to do, what to say, how to help. The only thing I knew for certain was that he’d just lied to me.
Not really in the mood to deal with Darth, I decided to try a new voice on the way home. I plugged in my phone, brought up the app, then listened as KITT powered up all systems. I was a huge Knight Rider fan growing up, dreaming of a car that could talk to me, one that could warn me of impending doom like terrorists ahead or cops running radar. And when Misery transformed into a supercar with a turbo engine and an array of onboard weapons, I was sold. At last. I could finally nuke people who refused to get out of the left-hand lane. Life was good.
But Garrett had been tortured. In hell, no less. The concept was so foreign, even with everything that I knew, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around what he could have gone through.
What would they have done to him? I doubted the Chinese water torture came into play. But he was incorporeal at the time. Could the soul be tortured? Then I thought about all the people who supposedly went to hell, who supposedly spent an eternity burning in agony. Was that real? Could the soul burn? Could it be cut? Torn? Brutalized?
My mind reeled with all the potentialities bouncing through it. It was hard to imagine hell as a physical place, a real place, even though Reyes was created there. Grew up there. It was just so foreign. So otherworldly. So creepy.
KITT broke into my thoughts, suggesting we fire a missile before telling me to take the next exit. Alas, I did not bond with KITT as much as I’d hoped. His music kind of sucked and his weapons were useless against the power of ignorance. I’d voted him off the island before I even pulled into my parking space.
“What do you think?” I asked the elderly dead guy in my passenger seat. I’d picked him up somewhere around Lomas and Wyoming. He seemed nice. He was also as na**d as the day he was born. Trying not to look at his penis was proving harder than I thought it would be. “Is it breezy in here to you?”
He didn’t answer, so I left him to his thoughts and took the stairs up to my third-floor apartment, where I found a sticky note on my door. I’d been getting them a lot lately. Ever since my number one suspect in an arson case took the apartment I’d coveted for years and moved in down the hall. Two things led me to suspect the son of evil incarnate had taken up flamethrowing. First, he’d smelled like smoke a few nights ago, and I later learned that a condemned apartment building had been torched that very night. Second, the first time I saw Reyes Farrow was in that very apartment building being beaten by the monster who raised him, Earl Walker. After a little more digging, I discovered that at some point in his life, Reyes had lived at every address the arsonist was hitting. The realization caused a ribbon of dread to knot in my stomach, to twist it into a mass of raw nerve endings that pulsed with empathy and regret for what Reyes had gone through.
I looked down at the note. This one read: What are you afraid of?
What was I afraid of? The fact that he may be the very person burning down buildings left and right? The fact that I might have to have him arrested and sent back to the same prison in which he’d spent ten years doing time for a crime he didn’t commit? The fact that arsonists have a unique psyche that leans toward either extreme arrogance or extreme sexual deviance? Reyes had neither as far as I knew, but did the idea of finding out otherwise scare me?
“Hey, Ch-Charley.”
I looked over my shoulder and saw my new dead friend Duff standing beside me, shifting his weight from side to side with nervous energy. “Hey, you,” I said, unlocking my door.
“I – I thought m-maybe you might need someone to talk to after wh-what happened.”
And there went my heart. Damn it. Time to see the cardiologist again.
“I’m okay, but thank you.”
“Oh, g-good. I’m glad.”
Part of my job was to help people cross over when they were ready. Sometimes that included the role of shoulder. As in to cry on. I held the door ajar and offered him my full attention. “Do you know what I am, Duff?”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and kicked a nonexistent rock at his feet. “Y-yes.”
“You know you can cross through me when you’re ready.”
“Y-yes, I know. I just thought m-maybe I’d keep an eye on you for a while.”
I straightened. “An eye on me?”
He did it fast, but I saw it anyway. He glanced toward Reyes’s apartment. “Y-yes, you know, in case y-you need help or s-something.”