A Kiss Before the Apocalypse rc-1 Page 2

  The case that had first brought them together had ended badly, the murder suspect dead and Mulvehill with a bullet in his gut.

  "You're a riot," Remy responded. "The stuff of Vegas floor shows. Really, if this cop thing doesn't work out…"

  Mulvehill laughed out loud as he reached into his sports jacket for his pack of cigarettes. "And you're an asshole. Tell me again what you were doing here." He pulled one from the pack and placed it in his mouth. "Very smooth, Detective." Remy grinned wryly. "It was simple surveillance," he explained. "Wife suspected he was having an affair. Nothing out of the ordinary."

  Mulvehill lit up with an old-fashioned Zippo. He flicked the cover closed with a metallic click, then slipped it back inside his pocket next to the cigarette pack. He took a long, thoughtful drag. Smoking helped him think, he often said. Helped him focus. He'd tried to stop once, but it had made him stupid.

  "So he shows up here with his secretary, they go in, and after a while you hear the first shot?"

  Remy nodded. "That's about it. By the time I got in there, he'd already killed the woman. I think he was getting ready to shoot himself, but I interrupted him."

  The homicide detective idly brushed some ash from the lapel of his navy blue sports coat. "So you think this guy could somehow see you — the real you."

  Mulvehill had been near death when Remy found him lying in a pool of blood in an abandoned waterfront warehouse. To ease his suffering and calm the terrified detective, Remy had revealed his true countenance. Death is only a new beginning, he had reassured the man.

  Remy nodded, replaying the conversation with Mountgomery inside his head. "I didn't drop the facade at all, haven't done it in a long time. But the way he looked at me — and that smile. He was definitely seeing something."

  The doctors said it was a miracle that Mulvehill had survived the shooting. After his recovery, the homicide detective had come looking for Remy, who had denied nothing — and offered nothing. But Mulvehill knew he had encountered something very much out of the ordi- nary, something that couldn't simply be attributed to loss of blood.

  Remy knew that Mulvehill's mother and grandmother had been strict Catholics, and had tried to raise him in the faith as well. As a young man, he had gone to church to please them, but he had believed Christian doctrine to be nothing more than fairy tales, fantasies to relieve the fears of the devoted when faced with their own mortality. But since his own brush with death, and his encounter with a certain private investigator, the Boston detective wasn't quite sure what he believed anymore. In fact, he'd even started to attend Mass again. Just to be on the safe side, he'd told Remy.

  But Remy had shown Mulvehill his true face by design. He had revealed himself on purpose. This was something else altogether. This dead man had seen beneath his mask.

  "That ever happen before?" Mulvehill asked, interrupting Remy's brooding. "Besides when you wanted it to, I mean?"

  Remy looked at his friend. "Not to me, but throughout the ages there have been holy men, visionaries, who could glimpse the unseen world and its inhabitants — usually before some kind of change in the world — something of great religious significance."

  Mulvehill sucked a final drag from his cigarette. "Anything coming down the pike that you know of? New pope or something?"

  Remy shrugged. "Well, the guy did talk about having dreams about the end of the world, the Apocalypse. He thought he was doing the woman a favor by killing her, thought I was here to take them up to Heaven."

  Mulvehill looked at his friend with a serious expression, a new, unlit cigarette having appeared almost magically in his mouth. "When the time comes, will you carry me up to Heaven?" he asked, fishing for his lighter.

  Remy grinned. "Sorry, that's not my job, but I imagine you're gonna have to drop a few pounds if you want anybody carrying your sorry ass up to —»

  Their playful banter was cut short by a sudden commotion. Healey ran from the motel room and beckoned to one of the uniforms. They exchanged some words and the cop spoke rapidly into his radio, then followed the detective back into the room. Mulvehill grumbled beneath his breath, threw his latest smoke to the ground, and hurried toward the crime scene.

  Remy followed, that strange, uneasy feeling in his gut returning.

  "What's going on?" Mulvehill asked a second uniformed officer who stood just outside the motel room.

  An ambulance pulled into the parking lot, sirens wailing, and screeched to a halt in front of the open door. Two EMTs jumped into action, hauling open the doors at the back of the vehicle and removing their equipment. Another ambulance had been there a short while ago, but it was gone now. There had been no lives for its technicians to save.

  The uniform speaking to Mulvehill appeared shaken. He made brief eye contact with the detective and then looked back into the room, which buzzed with surprising activity. "I think the other detective said something about them being alive."

  A harried-looking paramedic pulling a stretcher barked for them to get out of the way as he pushed through the door. Another followed with a second stretcher at his heels.

  There was a growing excitement among the gathered crowd, anticipation crackling in the air. They moved closer, an undulating organism hungry for anguish not their own.

  Mulvehill shoved the officer aside and stormed into room 35, with Remy close behind. The blanket-covered bodies of Peter Mountgomery and Carol Weir were atop the stretchers, oxygen masks on their faces. They were deathly pale, the damage done by gunfire blatantly evident. How could they possibly be alive?

  Remy stepped back against the wall as emergency workers pushed the stretchers past him, then approached Mulvehill and his partner, who stood beside the queen-sized bed. "It's the damndest thing," Healey was saying, obviously flustered. "They were getting ready to bag 'em when they felt a pulse on the guy. They checked the woman just to be sure, and she was still alive too."

  Mulvehill looked at Remy, his expression that of someone who had just been slapped.

  "Steven?" Remy asked, concern growing in his voice.

  "Why don't you go outside and get some fresh air," Mulvehill told his partner, squeezing the man's shoulder in support.

  Healey excused himself and headed for the door, shaking his head as he went. From outside they heard the mournful sound of sirens as the ambulance departed the lot.

  Mulvehill cleared his throat and fumbled for his cigarettes. "They're still alive, Remy," he said, the package crinkling from inside his coat pocket.

  "That's impossible. I saw the woman's body, Steven. Mountgomery shot her in the forehead." He pointed to the center of his furrowed brow. "And just to be sure, he put another one in her heart."

  Mulvehill was silent, glancing around at the several spots where blood had been spilled. It had already begun to dry, ugly dark stains that would never be completely washed away.

  "I saw him put that gun under his chin and blow his own brains out." Remy pointed to the wing-shaped stain on the ceiling. "That's brain matter up there. They can't possibly be alive."

  Mulvehill looked away from the ceiling and shrugged his broad shoulders. "Did you not see the ambulance take them out of here?" he asked. "They're alive. They both have pulses."

  The feeling in Remy's gut grew more pronounced.

  "Hey, it's not a bad thing — two people are still alive," Mulvehill reasoned. "Maybe it's a miracle or something."

  "Or something," Remy repeated as he turned and walked from the motel room, leaving his friend to make sense of it all.

  Though Remy looked and acted like a human being and chose to live like one, he was nothing of the kind. On occasion, his body functioned on another level entirely. He could feel things, sense things, that others couldn't. And right now there was something in the air that no one else could feel, something unnatural.

  As he walked across the parking lot, he glanced at his watch and swore beneath his breath.

  Late again.

  Remy got into his car, knowing that what had begun
in room 35 of the Sunbeam Motor Lodge was far from over, and that two hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses wasn't going to come close to compensating him for what he feared was waiting on the horizon.

  Chapter two

  Remy stopped his car as a group of Northeastern University students crossed Huntington Avenue on their way to the dorms from afternoon classes. Impatiently, he glanced at his watch, angry with himself for being even later than usual. One last student cut across at a run to catch up with the gaggle, and Remy continued on toward South Huntington.

  Well, at least something's going right, he thought, as he caught sight of a car pulling away from a space directly across the street from the Cresthaven Nursing Center. Remy performed an amazing feat of parallel parking, locked up his vehicle, and jogged across the street through a break in the dinnertime traffic.

  He pulled open the nursing home's front door, and took a moment to compose himself as he was bombarded with a sensory overload the equivalent of storming the beach at Normandy. Smell, sound, emotion, taste; they all washed over him, pounding him, as they did every time he visited. The first time, he was nearly driven to his knees by the onslaught, but he quickly learned that a few deep breaths would help him to center, making the experience bearable.

  "You are in some deep doo-doo, my friend," called out a large black woman dressed in a light blue smock and white slacks. She walked around the reception desk, waving some papers at him. "That poor woman's been waiting for you over an hour. I told her you were caught in traffic, but I don't think she's buying it."

  Remy smiled as the woman playfully tapped him on the shoulder with the forms.

  "I think she's catchin' on to us," she said conspira-torially, looking Remy up and down as she moved on through the lobby.

  He waved to the receptionist, then stepped up behind the nurse. "No one must know of us, my Nubian goddess," he whispered in her ear.

  The woman began to laugh, bending over and slapping her leg with the paperwork. "You are a crazy white boy, you know that?"

  "Joan, you wouldn't have me any other way." Remy smiled. He paused for a minute, enjoying the sound of laughter in a place where the atmosphere could often be so oppressive. "How is she today — giving you a hard time?"

  "If she's not careful, I'm going to toss her out on the street," Joan said, walking with him toward the ground-floor nursing unit. She moved away as a light came on outside a room on the opposite end of the hall. "Your mother's in the TV room," she called over her shoulder. "Why don't you go on and see her now so we can get some peace. Meet me in the supply closet at the usual time, and don't keep me waitin'."

  Remy laughed as he turned, amused, but not only by Joan's invitation.

  Your mother.

  No matter how often he heard it, the lie always struck him funny. The staff at Cresthaven would never believe the truth, that Madeline Chandler was, in fact, his wife. The lie existed because of what he was, of course. He appeared human, but had never been that. And he did not age.

  He stopped in the doorway to the TV room as an old man pushing a walker struggled through. He looked up at Remy with red-rimmed eyes, confusion and turmoil in his gaze.

  "Have you seen Robert?" the man asked, his voice like the rustling of dry leaves. "He was supposed to take me home."

  An aura of despair radiated from him in waves, nearly pushing Remy back with its strength.

  "I have to get home. Who's gonna take care of the house? Have you seen Robert?" the poor soul repeated, already forgetting that he had asked that same question only seconds before. "He was supposed to take me home."

  Remy gently touched the old man's shoulder and looked deeply into his aged eyes. "Robert will be here soon, Phil. Why don't you go see Joan, and ask her to make you a cup of tea?"

  Phil smiled, his rheumy eyes slowly blinking away confusion. "Tea would certainly hit the spot." He licked his dry lips. "Why didn't I think of that? Must be getting old." He winked at Remy and continued on his way down the hall, a new strength suddenly in his step.

  Remy watched his progress. He had spent many an afternoon talking with Phil about what the old timer called the good old days. Although his presence seemed to have a calming effect on these tortured souls ravaged by age, it still pained him to see the effects the years had on those to whom he had grown so close.

  It was never more obvious than when he saw his Madeline.

  Remy stepped into the doorway of the room that tried hard to be homey but never quite overcame that institutional air, and spotted the woman he loved. She seemed so small and frail, sitting in a lounge chair in front of the big-screen television. There was an ache inside him, and he wondered why he had ever wished to be flesh and blood. It was a question he asked himself with every visit to Cresthaven.

  Madeline hadn't noticed his arrival, and he watched her for a few seconds as she struggled to stay awake. Her eyes would flutter and close, her head slowly nodding until her chin touched her chest. Then she would come awake with a start, and the futile battle to remain conscious would begin all over again.

  Remy moved farther into the room. It was set up to resemble a living room; a couple of couches and chairs — both recliners and rockers — covered in vinyl made to imitate leather. Soft lamp lighting and framed Monet prints from the Museum of Fine Arts gift shop down the street completed the attempt at coziness. The TV sat on top of a large, dark, pressed-wood cabinet, a VCR on the shelf beneath, its clock perpetually blinking twelve a.m. The local news was just wrapping up the weather — cooler, with a chance of rain by the end of the week.

  He knelt beside his wife's chair as she drifted deeper into sleep, and touched her arm lovingly. Madeline lifted her head to look at him, her eyes dull, momentarily void of recognition.

  "How are you ever going to keep up with current events if you're dozing?" he asked her and smiled, before leaning in to kiss her cheek.

  The life was suddenly there, the dullness in her gaze burned away by the familiar mischievous twinkle. She smiled, reaching up to touch his face with an aged hand.

  "Caught me," she said softly. "Now you'll make me go to bed first again."

  It had been their nighttime custom; whoever fell asleep first while relaxing in front of the television had to warm the bed, while the other took out the dog, turned off the lights, and locked the doors. Madeline had been the champion bed warmer.

  "How're you feeling today, hon? You look better."

  She grinned and batted her eyes, patting the collar of her bright red sweatshirt. She knew he was lying. She had always been able to read his expressions. But she played along anyway, then changed the subject.

  "You're late. Joan said you were caught in traffic. Was there an accident?" She started to stand.

  Remy took her arm, helping her up. "No accident. Just the usual stuff. I was on a case longer than I anticipated." He guided her around the chair and toward the doorway.

  "Anything interesting?" she asked, pausing, peering down toward the lobby, then back up the hall toward her room.

  "Nothing all that unusual, until today." He was thoughtful as they slowly made their way up the hall. "The man I was watching killed himself and his lover in a motel on the Jamaica Way. No, let me correct that. I thought they were dead, but I was wrong."

  Madeline stopped and stared at her husband. "You thought they were dead but you were wrong? What's the matter with you, Remy — getting senile?" She chuckled and patted his hand where he held her arm.

  When they reached her room, Remy escorted his wife to the high-backed chair by her bed and helped her to sit.

  "It was the oddest thing, Maddie," he said as he sat on the bed beside her. "I confronted him after he'd shot his lover. He talked about dreams of the end of the world. Claimed that was why he'd shot the woman and planned to shoot himself."

  He stared through the window at the day care next door. It was dinnertime, but there was still a little Asian boy playing in the sandbox, and a little girl riding a bike in a circle, over an
d over again.

  "But you know what the strangest part was, Mad-die?" Remy asked. "He said he could see me. That he knew what I was." He looked at his wife and saw confusion on her face.

  "Well, did you want him to see you?" she asked. "Did you let him — to stop him from hurting himself?"

  Remy shook his head slightly. "No. It wasn't like that at all. It was as if he could see right through me."

  Madeline looked disturbed, turning the wedding ring upon her finger. It was something she had always done when something upset her. Remy reached down, took her hand in his, and squeezed it affectionately.

  "Hey, don't worry about it. The guy was pretty out of it. Maybe it was just coincidence that he saw me as an angel."

  Maddie squeezed back, gazing lovingly into his eyes. "You're my angel and no one else's, do you understand? I can't bear the thought of sharing you with anyone."

  She brought his hand up to her mouth and kissed it, and he knelt beside her chair, throwing his arms around her small frame. He felt her arms enfold him in a fragile embrace and was painfully reminded of a time when she could easily have hugged the life from him.

  "You won't have to," he whispered in her ear. "I'm yours, now and forever." Remy stroked her gray hair and remembered the vitality of her youth.

  When he'd first opened his agency back in 1945, he'd placed an advertisement in the paper for an office manager. Madeline had been one of the first applicants, fresh from secretarial college and overflowing with enthusiasm. And she was beautiful, inside and out. In their fifty-plus years together, Madeline Dexter had taught this earthbound entity more about being alive than he'd learned in six thousand years of wandering the planet.

  He leaned in close and kissed her gently on the mouth. "I love you," he said, looking into his wife's gaze. It was his turn now to bring her hand to his mouth and gently plant a kiss upon it.

  They were silent for a while, each basking in the warmth and love of the other.