Death Warmed Over - By Kevin J. Anderson Page 0,35

(a good idea, considering the part of town), and the reinforcement was too much for me. So I tried another PI trick and threw myself against the door, attempting to break it down. I nearly dislocated my shoulder, but I couldn’t smash the dead bolts.

By now, I was positive I’d heard another groan, a weak cry for help inside the apartment. So I turned to my last and best trick and went down to the manager’s apartment, slipped him a twenty, and talked him into letting me inside. He didn’t seem convinced about any emergency, wasn’t happy with Sheyenne at all. Apparently, she’d been late on her last month’s rent.

I made him get his priorities straight.

After he used his key to unlock her door, I pushed my way inside to see Sheyenne lying on the floor, already on death’s doorstep. Her skin was pale and grayish, her eyes half-open, her breathing heavy and wet, her pulse thready. She had vomited several times. I could see she had tried to crawl across the floor, but couldn’t get anywhere.

“Call an ambulance!” I yelled to the manager, who seemed more worried about the mess on the floor than about the dying young woman. I picked Sheyenne up and carried her down the stairs and out the front door to the sidewalk. The paramedics arrived a few minutes later and rushed her to the hospital.

She’d been poisoned—a high concentration of the alkaloid toxin distilled from the “death cap” toadstool, Amanita phalloides. Even if the poisoning had been caught early, the mortality rate was greater than 50 percent . . . and no one had found Sheyenne in time, because I was stupid and stayed away to give her space. By now the toxin had done its work: severe liver damage, renal failure . . . nothing the doctors could do to save her.

It was long and painful, a horrible, lingering way to die.

I never left her bedside in the hospital. Sheyenne wavered in and out of lucidity, but she always knew who I was. “I thought you wouldn’t call me back, Beaux. Thought I’d . . . scared you off.”

“Never,” I said. “Just waited too long.” Then I let out a long sigh. “I wish I could find some way to help you, Spooky.”

Shadowy hollows surrounded her eyes, but her smile was the same. “You’re doing it, just by being here. I’ve got no one.”

“You’ve got me.”

“I wish I could stay with you, Beaux. But someone wanted me dead. You’re the private detective. Find out who did this to me. For me, please?”

“I promise I’ll solve this case. I’ll find your murderer, if it’s the last thing I do.”

“You’re so sweet,” she said in a breathy voice. “Have a good life.”

She died an hour later, but I never forgot my promise to her.

One of her last acts in the hospital had been to scrawl a note, a holographic will, granting me custody of her meager worldly possessions—nobody really cared, since she didn’t have any living relatives. When her ghost did not appear immediately after her death, I thought she was gone for good.

Weighed down with grief and anger, I went to her apartment to clear out Sheyenne’s stuff and was surprised to discover that her snotty building manager was already intending to sell her possessions in order to recoup his lost rent. I had no intention of letting him do that, and we ended up in a shouting match. As a favor to me, Robin drafted and signed an impressive-looking legal document that intimidated the manager, and I hauled out the boxes myself, put them in the storage unit that we retained for holding old case records.

Feeling lost and alone, I dropped all my other cases to work on hers, to track down who might have poisoned my Sheyenne. But my other cases didn’t forget about me, and I should have paid more attention to the fact that a cocktail waitress/nightclub singer/med student wasn’t the only one with enemies in the Quarter.

Less than a month after she died, there I was late at night, minding my own business—or Sheyenne’s, actually—when one of those cases caught up with me in a dark alley not far from Basilisk. I’d taken the same shortcut back to the office that I always do. Someone came up behind me, put an antique Civil War pistol to the back of my head, and fired a round through my skull.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t one of those cartoon villains who likes to gloat