Acheron Highway: A Jonathan Shade Novel Read online

  When she left, he shook his head. “She thought I was trying to ask her out.”

  “I thought so too.”

  He waved me off. “The equipment ain’t what it used to be, though the little blue pills certainly help.” He gave me a wink. “I’m trying to find someone for Ryan.”

  “Maybe Ryan should find someone for himself.”

  “He’s a social retard.”

  “Well, there you go. You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Shouldn’t we have a few drinks first? Place doesn’t really start hopping until after nine.”

  “At that point, we won’t be able to hear ourselves think.”

  The waitress returned with our drinks. She set a beer in front of me and I tasted it. Fat Tire. I gave her a thumbs-up.

  “It’s my favorite,” she said, touching my arm and giving me a nice smile.

  “That makes it taste even better.”

  “I hope so. My name is Dori. Let me know if you need anything else.” She gave me a wink.

  Walter watched the exchange and popped an olive in his mouth. When she left, he shook his head. “For a woman who’s supposedly off the market, she was pretty nice to you.”

  “She wants a good tip.”

  “Right.”

  “You were going to tell me about Zach.”

  “Oh, I could tell you about Zach.” He took a gulp of his martini.

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  He sighed. “You know those dead people who keep rising?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned across the table and spoke quietly. “I’m pretty sure Zach’s the one who raised them.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The son of a bitch is a necromancer.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “You don’t seem surprised. His wife?”

  “What about her?”

  “Let’s just say Tony Alamo had nothing on Zach.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh yeah. Gina was murdered four years ago, but she still goes to church on the occasional Sunday.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I saw him kill her.”

  “Go on.”

  Walter finished his drink and ate another olive. “Zach thought he was alone with her when he drowned her in the bathtub.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s right. I sent my spirit body back in time and saw it happen.”

  I leaned back in my seat. “OK.”

  “I’m getting the distinct impression you don’t believe me.”

  “Spirit body? Give me a reason.”

  “I was in the army. Career military.”

  “And that means you’re honest to a fault?”

  “I don’t talk about this with most people,” Walter said and looked around. “It’s super secret, highly classified.”

  “Right. Well, you got a free drink out of the deal. Shall I take you home?”

  He slapped his palm on the table hard enough to make the napkin holder with the condiments bounce. People turned to look at us. Walter didn’t care.

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Super secret, highly classified?” I said. “Come on, Walter.”

  “It was back then.”

  “I’ll pay the tab and take you home now.”

  “You ever hear of Project Stargate?”

  “The remote viewing thing?”

  “Yeah. We did some amazing things.”

  “From what I recall, that program had about fifteen percent accuracy. You could do better than that by guessing at things.”

  “That’s what they told the media. Those of us who could actually do it were nearly a hundred percent accurate. But if the media knew there were real-life psychic spies able to astral project through time and space, I don’t know how well the public would take that news.”

  “So you’re going to tell me that ancient aliens hunted down our dinosaurs and Elvis slept with Bigfoot to give birth to Barack Obama?”

  “I see how you are,” he said. “You have no problem with seeing people get raised from the dead, but you don’t believe I can release my spirit into the ether to see things.”

  “Look, Walter, I’ve seen some pretty weird shit in my day, but very little of the New Age crap turns out to be anything other than charlatans trying to con people out of their life savings. I tend to be skeptical in that department. I mean, come on. Pyramid Power? Crystals and psychic readings and all that? In my view, the Project Stargate program was just a way to get paid for doing nothing. You just had to wave your hands and say, ‘We have to keep up with the Russians!’ and the money would flow for some of the stupidest shit ever.”

  “Are you done?”

  I wasn’t but I took hold of myself and gave him a nod.

  He nodded back. “I guess I’ll just have to prove it to you.”

  “You aren’t going to go into a trance here are you?”

  “I’m not going to do anything here, Mr. Shade. I prefer peace and quiet to focus and slip into the ether. You have to understand that there are bad things out there and while I could just slip out of my body right now, that would be a bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “They could be waiting for me.”

  “They?”

  “I call them demons. I don’t know what they are really, but they seem like demons to me. They tend to hang out in crowded areas, so I try not to leave my body undefended.”

  If I believed him, I might be creeped out, but I knew better. I can see ghosts, so if there were spirits around crowds and such, I’d be able to see them. This clown was as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.

  Walter looked around, caught the waitress’s eye, and pointed at his empty martini glass.

  She gave him a nod and glanced at me. I took a sip of my beer and shook my head.

  “It’s best to have privacy and protection when you project. What I’ll have you do is choose a place for me to go and have a look.”

  “The Underworld?” I said.

  “Ha! Don’t tell me where you want me to go. That defeats the purpose.”

  The waitress returned carrying another martini with extra olives. “Here you go, sir.”

  He nodded to her. She picked up his empty glass and gave me another glance and a smile.

  When she walked away, Walter said, “You should ask for her number.”

  I shrugged.

  He sipped his martini. “I think I’ll have one more of these before we go.”

  “Drunken spirits. Fun times.”

  “My spirit doesn’t get drunk, just my body. It eases the strain of leaving it.”

  “Doesn’t protect it, though.”

  “There is that. Of course, that’s where the club comes in.”

  “The club?”

  “My remote viewing club. I’ll call the guys and have them meet us at my place.”

  Wonderful. A whole remote viewing club. Just what I needed. Whackjobs unite.

  #

  Thirty minutes later, back at Walter’s, the crew arrived.

  The first guy to walk through the door was a middle-aged man with long, graying hair and eyes that darted this way and that as if he expected to get attacked at any second. Too many video games?

  He stuck his hand out. “I’m Fred Twitty. You’re the PI?”

  “Safe bet,” I said and shook his hand.

  He looked at his palm when he released me, shrugged, and gave Walter a nod. “Walt, Cynthia’s trying to park. She’ll be a minute.”

  I glanced at Walter, and he winked at me. “Cynthia just bought an SUV. She’s been driving a little Subaru for years. She’s worried she’ll run something over because the truck is too big for her.”

  Cynthia entered the house. She stood four foot nine in high heels. I guessed her age at fifty-five. She wore Coke-bottle glasses, and when she waved to me, the skin flaps under her arms jiggled like two kittens in a gunny sack.

  “It’s past my bedtime,” she sa
id, “so this better be good.”

  “Thanks for coming,” Walter said.

  She waved him off. “I need a drink.” She headed for the kitchen.

  The fourth and final member of the Remote Viewing Club arrived a few minutes later. Walter introduced him as Lou, and he looked like he’d been old back in Esther’s day. That said, he walked with confidence and seemed to be in better shape than all of them. He wore a wrinkled bowling team shirt and black slacks that exposed far too much of his mismatched socks, one white and one gray with a checkered pattern.

  He had a firm handshake. “I want to be home in time to watch Leno,” he said. “Betty White is supposed to be on tonight. Va-va-voom!”

  All of the members lived in the neighborhood except for Cynthia, who owned a house several miles to the west.

  “Jonathan here doesn’t believe in remote viewing,” Walter said. “Shall we prove ourselves to him?”

  “I’d rather prove it to James Randi and collect a million smackers,” Fred said.

  “What would you do with a million bucks?” Lou asked.

  Fred looked this way and that then grinned. “I’d travel the world and see all the mystical places from the pyramids to Easter Island.”

  “You can view them from here and save time and money. Just send your spirit.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Let’s get set up,” Walter said.

  “Where’s Ryan?” Cynthia asked.

  “At work.”

  “Little bastard owes me five bucks.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  We moved to the basement. Walter had three rooms set up side by side with one-way glass windows on either side of the center room so you could see into the side rooms. In the middle room, there were four chairs and a table that held an old computer with a dot-matrix printer. Walter caught me looking at it and he pushed my arm. “I don’t replace things unless they’re broken.”

  “Yeah, but that’s from the eighties.”

  “Still works. This is the monitor station. We keep records of all our excursions in the filing cabinets there.” He pointed to a row of five gray metal cabinets.

  The side rooms each had a recliner and a table. A pair of headphones hung over the back of the chair, and a tape recorder sat on each table. Beside each tape recorder was a sketchpad with two pencils. There were small speakers set into the walls, but other than that, the walls were blank—just painted a light beige. No other furnishings.

  “Lou and I will be the viewers. Cynthia is my monitor, and Fred will monitor Lou. You’ll stay in the center room with Cynthia and Fred. We’ll go into our stations and get ready. When it’s time, Cynthia and Fred will give us the number and we’ll project ourselves to the target. We’ll describe what we see and maybe draw it too.”

  “Let’s get this shindig started,” Lou said.

  He gave me a nod then disappeared into the room on the left. Through the one-way glass, I watched him take a seat in the recliner. He put on the headphones, leaned way back, flipped me the bird, then closed his eyes.

  “Get ready to have your mind blown,” Walter said. He punched me lightly on the arm then disappeared into the room on the right. He settled into the recliner, slipped on the headphones, and gave us a thumbs-up.

  Cynthia gestured to a chair, but I decided to remain standing. “It could be a while,” she said. She rolled up a sheet of paper from the printer and detached it. She peeled off the sides with the little sprocket holes and dropped them into a wastebasket then placed the paper on the table. She took a pen out of a drawer and handed it to me.

  “Think of a person, place, or thing that you’d like them to go check out. Don’t tell us what it is. Got one?”

  “You bet,” I said. I focused on Kelly. I figured it would be easy to verify and it wouldn’t be dangerous. For example, if I had them check on Sharon and it turned out they were telling the truth and could actually go and see her, then it could compromise her location. I knew Kelly would be in her dojo. She used to have a place on Colfax, but that place no longer exists, so she got a place on 32nd and Sheridan in a strip mall by a 7-Eleven. Parking sucked but rent was cheap.

  “Choose a number. Doesn’t matter what the number is, but go with four digits so we don’t repeat one we’ve used before.”

  “One one two two,” I said, thinking Boogie Boogie Avenue.

  “Write it down.”

  I wrote 1122 BBA on the paper.

  “Big Bad Apple?” Cynthia asked.

  “Bionic Boy Asshole,” Fred said.

  “Ben Beats Aardvarks,” I said. “It was a comic strip a friend of mine drew in high school.”

  “I trust your friend is in the psychiatric ward,” Fred said.

  I didn’t have a friend named Ben who drew comics, but I didn’t want them to know I was making light of their team with a children’s rhyme, so I just smiled.

  Cynthia and Fred went over to their seats and pulled up microphones. They spoke the numbers, and I watched as both Lou and Walter nodded.

  Then it just looked to me like they went to sleep.

  After fifteen minutes, I suspected that was exactly what they’d done.

  A few minutes later, I was sitting down, nearly asleep myself.

  At twenty-two minutes and twelve seconds, Walter sat up and said, “I’m at the target.”

  Cynthia leaned toward her microphone. “Pull back and view it from above.”

  “It looks like a building, but I don’t think that’s the actual target.”

  I looked over at Fred, but he just shrugged. “Sometimes Lou doesn’t talk during his sessions, so being a monitor isn’t as important as with Walter.”

  I looked through the window at Lou and shook my head. If they turned on the sound in his room, we’d hear snoring.

  “I’m going to push forward,” Walter said.

  “Go slowly. Keep your focus. Are you in the present day?”

  “It feels like it. I didn’t feel any time displacement when I entered the ether. OK, I’m entering a room. Dark. Something’s sweeping past me...whoa...I think it’s made of wood, and it keeps whipping past. Let my eyes adjust to the darkness. Hold on. OK, things are coming into focus a bit. I’m in a room. I think it’s a some kind of attic or storage room, but I could be mistaken. Shelves on the wall.”

  “What’s on the shelf nearest you?” Cynthia asked.

  “A row of lighthouses.”

  That surprised me. Kelly had been replacing her collection of lighthouses gradually over the past few months. Brand didn’t understand the symbolism, so she kept them in the room above the dojo. That wasn’t something Walter could have known.

  “This isn’t the target, but the target is near. I sense that I should go lower.”

  “Follow your instincts,” Cynthia said.

  “Going to the lower level. Whoa! Bright light!”

  “Readjust.”

  I looked at Walter through the window. He covered his eyes with his hands. “That was intense! Let me reset my focus.” He lowered his hands. “I can’t see right now, but I hear clanging. Sounds like a scraping, then a clang of metal on metal, and grunting. OK, things are swimming into view again. My head is throbbing. I can’t stay here much longer. Get some Advil ready for me when I come back.”

  “I have some in my purse. Look around. What do you see?”

  “Mirrors. Reflections of movement. Swords. Let me spin around. I’m at a martial arts studio, I think. There’s a gorgeous Chinese woman sword fighting with a big, heavyset white guy. My head is killing me. The light change was too much.”

  I pulled out my cell, scrolled down to Kelly’s name, and called her.

  “I’m coming back now. What’s that noise? I hear music. OK, coming back.”

  Kelly answered the phone on the fourth ring. “Is there someone I can kill for you yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Sparring with Brand.”

  “Swords?”


  “Yes. Just about ready for some hand-to-hand. Why?”

  “No reason. Talk to you soon.” I ended the call. Walter was a little too specific for me to have reason to doubt him.

  Fred knocked on the window to Lou’s room. Lou jerked awake, rubbed his eyes.

  “What did you see?” Fred asked.

  “I’ll draw it,” Lou said as he grabbed the pen and a sheet of paper.

  Walter entered the monitor room with his palm to his forehead. “Light changes sometimes trigger migraines for me.”

  Cynthia handed him two Advil.

  Walter moved to a water cooler and filled a small paper cone. After he downed the pills, he looked at me. “You wanted me to check on a person. I couldn’t tell which was the target because my head felt like it was about to explode. Chinese woman or big white guy?”

  I had to admit that I was impressed. “The woman.”

  “I thought so but I wasn’t positive.”

  Lou entered the room nodding with confidence. “I found the target,” he said.

  He held up a drawing of a giant sunflower and a stick figure in a dress lying beside it with exes for eyes.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “A killer sunflower. Not sure where it is, but it looks just like a regular sunflower until you lean over to sniff it. Then, pow, you’re pushing up daisies.”

  “Wouldn’t you be pushing up sunflowers?” Cynthia asked with a grin.

  “OK then,” I said. “I think I’ll be leaving now.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Walter said.

  “Watch out for those flowers,” Lou said.

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  Walter didn’t say anything until we were out in the cold air by my car. Then he gave me a heavy sigh. “They mean well,” he said, “but they haven’t had training.”

  “Killer sunflowers? I think Lou’s been raiding the peyote stash.”

  “Truth be told, they’re really just my bowling team. We have a league on Monday nights. They think the remote viewing is cool, and they want to be a part of it.” He rubbed his chin then looked at me, serious. “That woman you sent me to see. She was the target. The music I heard at the end was a ring tone. Were you calling her?”

  I nodded. “Can you find anyone or anything using this viewing technique?”

  “Not tonight. My head is still pounding. I can try tomorrow. I’ll have Cynthia come by. She can’t do the viewing, but she’s a decent monitor. I don’t like to slip into the ether when I’m alone.”