“So you’re dead?”
“As if you didn’t know. Douchebag.”
Detective Charlie Dees stood in a dark storage room above a Seattle craft brewery. Bone-chilling rain pelted against the windows. It was December 24th and he was there by necessity rather than choice. He’d expected the stakeout to be cold, damp, and depressing. He was equipped for all three. He hadn’t expected the ghost of Samuel Cho, and wouldn’t have known how to equip himself if he had.
Sam, his former partner, appeared to have risen from the grave to insult him. Charlie wasn’t surprised by the second part. Sam had never been one to keep his big mouth shut, and they hadn’t parted on good terms. But the ghost thing threw him.
The room was pitch black, as any light would have blown the surveillance. Sam’s ghost glowed only dimly, maybe out of a lingering cop respect for Charlie’s stakeout. Its feet hovered a few inches off the ground. Spectral mud clung to its unruly hair and transparent handcuffs secured its hands in front of it.
Charlie didn’t believe in ghosts. But he knew from decades of police work that sanity was a sliding scale sort of thing. And he was, just at that moment, going through some shit. A psychic break manifested as an hallucination of Sam’s ghost made sense to him.
As when he’d been alive, Sam read Charlie easily. “Tell yourself any story you like. Won’t change what happens next.”
“So you’re here to, what? Haunt me? Make me feel guilty? I don’t.”
“Yeah you do. But this isn’t that. You wouldn’t listen to me anyway. I’m only the appetizer. The amuse bouche of a richly deserved shit buffet. There’s three more behind me. Past, present and future. Then dessert.”
“So it’s a Scrooge thing? Jesus. Someone needs to work on their originality.”
“Whatever you say, Charlie. Best buckle up. It’s going to be a long night.”
Sam flipped the middle fingers on his cuffed hands and faded away. Charlie exhaled and sent vapor swirling through the cold air where the ghost had hovered seconds earlier.
Maybe it’s a coping mechanism. Sam was right. He did feel guilty. Or maybe a hybrid of guilt and general shittiness, and not just because it was that time of year. As therapy went, a fucked up Scrooge thing was at least predictable. And temporary. Now that he thought about it, this was exactly the kind of twisted response his subconscious would cough up. Nothing halfway functional like tears or a nervous breakdown. Hell, it might even help. No need to have a heart attack.
Still, Charlie stared at the darkness for a full minute in case there was more to come. He was a watcher, and stillness came naturally to him. When nothing happened he found his thermos and poured himself a cup of hot water. Years ago he relied on coffee or maybe something stronger. But now he was an old hand. Hot water warmed you up without dulling your senses or jangling your nerves.
He’d set binoculars on a tripod in front of his folding chair. He looked through them at his target across the street. Frankie ‘The Rock’ Dawkin, a former biker now running a freelance drug pipeline across the Canadian border. Frankie was in his fifties, like Charlie, and looked to be enjoying his quasi-retirement. His girlfriend—who at that moment was walking around Frankie’s loft apartment in her underwear—was fifteen years younger at least. Judging by the presents under his tree Frankie was expecting nieces and nephews Christmas morning. Or maybe the girl had kids.
They drank mulled wine and watched a movie on Netflix, a sight that depressed Charlie greatly. He had a kid and a couch and a girlfriend and yet here he was, feeling like shit and freezing his ass off.
He wished he had the balls to get up and walk away. He’d been thinking about quitting when Sam’s ghost arrived. Of walking out of the storage room and leaving the whole thing—the job, and everything that came with it—behind. Every year the emotional price got higher. It was time to go. It would be like any divorce: ugly, but you’d feel better afterwards.
He alternated between retirement plans and silently mapping ways to kill Frankie Dawkin and get away with it until the first of Sam’s ghosts appeared. Charlie caught movement out of the corner of his eye and saw the thing materialize at the door. As if its ghostly molecules were drawn together by some magnetic force. Charlie checked his watch. It was eleven PM on the nose.
The ghost’s name was Junior Jones. Charlie knew this because Junior had haunted his dreams for almost a decade before gradually retiring in favor of other, more recent transgressions. Junior Jones had been a rapist, drug dealer, and pimp. The first time Charlie fired his service weapon it was to shoot Junior Jones in the chest.
In Charlie’s dreams Junior wore a black hoodie and dirty jeans. Now he was clad in rags, torn strips that might have been a monk’s cassock or a heavy cloak. It killed his street thug aura, but he was still unmistakably Junior Jones.
“Time to go, Chuck.”
“I’m busy.”
“Don’t think you got a choice, Officer.”
“Oh no?”
Charlie stayed on the chair. To stand would have been to give the ghost authority and he was damned if he’d do that. Teleport me, motherfucker, if you’re all that. The thought had barely cleared its first synaptic junction when Charlie felt himself falling, as if sucked through the floor. The lights across the street vanished and he was flying across a starry sky that was flat and curved at the same time.
He landed awkwardly on the lawn of the small yellow house where he’d grown up. Predictable, he thought. If you’re doing Scrooge, you’d start here. Even before he checked the cars he knew it was the early 70s.
He wondered when he’d last watched a version of A Christmas Carol but couldn’t place it. Maybe it was ambient, a cultural stamp so ingrained it didn’t have a single identifiable source. Regardless, there didn’t seem to be any way around it and the ground was cold and wet, so he pulled himself up.
“Yeah Charlie, stop number one. Eight years old and you’re already fucked up. I mean, we’re going to see a few things but don’t kid yourself. You started out bad. Ain’t really right to blame anyone else.”
Charlie didn’t disagree. But he didn’t want to give Jones the satisfaction.
“So what is this, divorce day?”
“Shit no. That was in July. This trip is Christmas only.”
The ghost walked straight through the wall and Charlie felt compelled to follow. There was a sick fascination to it. He had few happy memories of this place. Maybe none at all. But like a car crash or a dead body, you had to look.
He cleared the wall and found himself in a dirty kitchen. His parents, both half cut, snarled bitterly back and forth. Junior pointed and Charlie saw his eight year-old self, wearing saggy underwear and a battered t-shirt, walking tentatively down the hallway towards the fight.
Charlie frowned. He had no memory of the scene. Not that he could recall every Christmas, and he’d awoken to his parents fighting too many times to count. But by his eighth birthday he was smart enough to stay in his room.
Mind you, his parents’ reactions felt authentic. His father stopped the argument but otherwise did nothing, looking at the kid silently. He’d rarely had much to say to Charlie, then or later. Standing beside Junior Jones, Charlie couldn’t even make out the man’s face. Couldn’t pull it into focus.
Charlie’s mother turned her back on her husband without a word and led the younger Charlie back to the bedroom. Charlie and Junior followed. She stopped at the door and waved him towards his bed.
“Didn’t touch you much, did she?”
“No.”
“Even then she thought men were worthless. Might be why, is what I mean.”
“Fuck you.”
“You think she made you what you are? Or was you always that way and she just read you right?”
Charlie felt the urge to punch him, but then he remembered that he’d already shot Junior to death in a filthy squat somewhere in South Park. So a punch seemed redundant. He watched the kid crawl under the covers as his mother shuffled back to the kitchen and the argument, which he knew would continue with only short intermissions for another two years or so.
Charlie sensed a knot forming in his stomach and wondered how he’d made it past fifty without an ulcer. The room spun and they were on the move again.
Down a cold alley and through time, the two of them arrived at Charlie, now twelve, beating up Lev Zebowsky somewhere around dinner time. Lev was in the street instead of at home because he was Jewish and not celebrating anything. At least not in any way that Charlie could figure at the time. Lev had a candy cane and Charlie wanted it. It wasn’t about the candy, it was about the power to take.
“Speaks for itself, no?”
“You think I don’t know? You think this is news? Too bad I didn’t pop you on Christmas Eve. We could relive that a couple of times.”
Lev Zebowsky faded into darkness. Charlie wished his shame would fade too, but that stuck with him.
“You know, fuck this whiny bullshit. I don’t need to relive my past to know what happened.”
“Oh no? Got a good handle on yourself, yeah? ”
“I got the same handle you do. You’re just my latest bullshit attempt at conscience.”
Junior grinned and snapped his fingers and the two of them slammed into a McDonalds parking lot on Station Street.
“Maybe, Chuck. But then, maybe not. I picked this one out special. I’ll bet you barely remember it.”
It took Charlie a moment to get his bearings. It was Christmas Eve, 1986. He was in the eleventh grade. Gangly and pimple-faced. Through the window he saw himself in the process of dumping Jennifer McNally and doing a poor job of it.
He did his best not to show Junior his confusion. Ok it was a Christmas memory. But hardly pivotal. She was a junior year crush. Had they even kissed? He couldn’t remember, so probably not. Jesus, Charlie, you can’t even torture yourself properly.
“Cause and effect, Chuck.” Junior smiled sadistically.
“What kind of Scrooge are you? I barely knew her.”
“Yeah I know. She’s a closed door, Charlie. Nice kid. Got a nice family. And right at this moment she’s carrying a huge torch for you. And there you are kicking her to the curb. Know why?”
“Who cares?”
“You didn’t think you were good enough. I mean deep down. In the bilges somewhere. Seventeen years old and you already knew you were dogshit. That’s the takeaway Detective Charlie Dees. That’s what the past has to tell you. You haven’t lost sight of your youthful innocence or whatever the fuck. Your heart was rotten from the start.”
They were falling again and now Charlie welcomed the darkness and wondered if that was the point. If deep down he was grappling with the most cliché of cop exits. Screw that, he told himself. We all have it coming but not that way and not now. This is a purge. A stomach pump. A scouring. The point is to come out the other side clean, or at least clean enough to keep walking.
Then he was on the floor of the storage room, yelling at nobody in the dark. Across the way the lights went out a second time, but now it was Dawkin going to bed. Charlie sat on the floor beside his leather duffle for a few minutes as the sweat soaking the back of his shirt slowly dried.
He felt sick, felt it all the way to his bones. The past was a binge and he couldn’t shake the hangover.
He struggled to focus. It’ll pass, he told himself. Like all hangovers. How many times had he lain on a couch, or the floor, waiting for the pain to ease and knowing he’d done this to himself? And besides, it’s therapy. Or it could be. If you’re strong enough, you can force this to be therapy.
He laughed softly to himself as he rose from the hard concrete. Keep saying that, Charlie. Maybe you’ll even come to believe it.
He checked his watch. 11:30. If he was Scrooge, the whole thing had to go down by midnight, right? Which was fine, because he had to wait anyway. He wanted to wait. Charlie pulled night vision goggles from his bag and easily picked up Frankie and his girlfriend making love on a bed at the back of the apartment. Shouldn’t have bought a loft, he thought. There was nowhere to hide.
Then Sam was beside him. The ghost bent and looked through the binoculars. Charlie wondered if he needed night vision gear or, being a figment of Charlie’s subconscious, simply knew what Charlie knew.
“So,” Sam said, “That’s the guy. On Christmas Eve, too. That’s cold. Even by your standards that’s cold.”
“They were your standards too.”
“Nah. You’re harder than I ever was. That’s why we’re here.”
Charlie felt the temperature in the room dropping and supposed that it was fear. Once, he’d dreaded the unknown. Tonight it was things he knew that caused the too-familiar churn in his stomach.
Sam’s ghost nodded towards the window. “You want me to wait til you’re done?”
Charlie shook his head, no. Later he couldn’t say if this was procrastination or a desire to do things in the right order. Maybe it didn’t matter. The ghost of Christmas Present was coming regardless.
His name was Alan Fleck and like Junior Jones he had been a criminal. Charlie killed him at four in the morning on Feb 2, 2014. Like today it was raining. He knew this because he hadn’t slept for 36 hours before pulling the trigger. When the crash finally hit he was down for an entire day, missing the only Superbowl victory in Seattle Seahawks history.
He won a thousand dollars on the game and it took him four days to find the energy to collect.
As with the Ghost of Christmas Past, Fleck wore tattered rags. He had more scars that Charlie remembered, as if he’d been beaten in the afterlife. No question he deserved it, though. Amongst many other sins, Alan Fleck liked little girls. Charlie would have killed him for that alone.
“You’re a mistake.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t feel bad about popping you.”
But already he was falling, flying, and then screaming headlong at an all-too-familiar window. Fleck disappeared through the glass and Charlie followed, tumbling down the hallway of his own apartment. The impact felt like a baseball bat to the stomach, and yet it went unnoticed by the occupants of the place.
Of course he knew who they were. Jordan, his daughter, and Jessica, his girlfriend of five years. Charlie’s two Js, as he liked to call them. They were curled on the couch under a blanket and the sense of value, of importance that he knew was his way of experiencing love, hit him harder even than the hallway. He felt an overpowering need to protect them. He’d do anything to keep them safe.
Just like that he felt vulnerable to Alan Fleck in a way that neither Sam nor Junior could have pulled off. He forgot about his subconscious and who was doing what to whom and for what reason. This was his whole life and he simultaneously wanted to stay and to get as far away as possible.
“You know why we’re here?”
“Sure as hell isn’t to make me see how I fucked things up.”
“I had a wife too. She loved me, in her way. But I don’t get to go back and see her. I don’t get your special treatment.” Alan Fleck had the nerve to be jealous.
Fleck turned back to the couch and the two J’s.
“This is the only thing you’ve ever done right. Found yourself a little bit of humanity. Like that Nazi dude who moved to Cleveland after the war. Raised a family and pretended his past didn’t exist. Remember him? Was in the news about the same time as you and me. Thing is, humanity comes with baggage, don’t it? Suddenly you got empathy. Standards. You can tell yourself stories, but somewhere inside all the shit you’ve done starts to rot you out.”
“You love them more than life itself I’ll bet. But it makes you hate yourself. Because you know you’re not worthy of them. You sure as shit don’t deserve their love. When you finally became a human being, you set yourself up as judge, jury, and executioner. And you know all the evidence, don’t you? What’d you get paid the day you murdered me? What was my life worth to you, huh?”
Charlie didn’t answer, so Fleck went on.
“Well, this ain’t no Christmas story. We can fly clear across the universe and back, you ain’t coming out of it changed for the better. This,” Fleck waved a spectral hand at Jessica and Jordan, “this is hard core happiness right here. It’s going to hurt like nothing else on Earth when you lose it.”
Charlie didn’t want to leave but knew it was inevitable, and it was. He dropped through the floor and smashed into the mud in a small field that butted up to the Snoqualmie River. Beneath portable floodlights a team of detectives and forensic techs were digging. Charlie could see right away that they had the right spot. Shit.
“You screwed up, Charlie.”
Charlie knew it was true. He watched as they pulled Sam Cho’s body from its shallow grave. He looked just like his ghost, right down to the mud in his hair. A technician removed one of Sam’s shoes and retrieved a GPS tracker about the size of a quarter.
Fleck watched almost gleefully. “How much do you think he told them?”
Charlie didn’t reply. If you’re busted, he thought, talking only makes it worse. He watched them slip Sam into a body bag and felt tears on cheeks. He didn’t feel guilty so much as lost. Irretrievably lost.
The dead man was talking but Charlie wasn’t listening. The voice inside his head drowned out external noise. This is who you are. You’re the guy who shoots his best friend in the head because it was that or life in prison. It was that or take responsibility for all the crap you’d done and it turns out you’d cross every last line on Earth before ever, ever facing that.
He didn’t need a ghost to make the point.
Without warning he dropped again, through the mud and into a dark suburban living room, where two rain-sodden detectives were telling Alyssa Cho that her husband and the father of her three children was shot execution style, as the news liked to say.
She was crying, but only lightly. That was shock. She’d go to pieces later, he knew. The cops hadn’t told her yet that her husband was busted ripping off drug dealers, with a side hustle as one half of a contract hit team. Or that he’d offered to flip on his partner in return for a lighter sentence and an agreement that the state would only seize some of the cash he’d stashed away. If he’d survived, his house and the college fund would have been protected. Now the state would take it all, the cherry atop life-crushing disaster sundae. Good luck coming back from that.
The pain was a vice, turning without mercy. As punishment Charlie forced himself to watch as Alyssa bravely tried and failed to give useful answers to the detectives’ questions. Her mind was on her kids and her future and a gaping chasm of loss that she could sense but not really see yet. Charlie had looked long and hard and knew that it had no bottom.
“I want to leave.”
“I don’t take orders from you, Charlie Dees.”
“Yeah you do. We’re only here because I’ve been picturing this all night. I conjured you up because of this. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. You work for me.”
“If you say so.”
Charlie turned away from Alyssa, finally, started to vomit and didn’t finish until he heard it hitting the storage room floor.
He cried then, before rinsing his mouth and sitting back in his chair. It was time. If he was going to act he had to do it now. He opened the duffle and removed a small backpack he’d prepared earlier.
His plan was simple, elegant, and heartless.
Frankie Dawkin was going to shoot his girlfriend and then take his own life in the kind of murder-suicide that was shockingly common this time of year. The homicide detectives would be stunned when they discovered the murder weapon had been used to kill Seattle police detective Sam Cho a day earlier. As Sam had been busted ripping off mid-level crooks just like Frankie, the whole thing had a kind of symmetry to it. It would’ve been better if they’d found Frankie before they’d found Sam, but no matter. Internal Affairs or the Feds or whoever was out by the river digging up Sam’s body would be screwed. And Charlie Dees would be in the clear.
All it took was a sufficiently rotted soul to actually go through with it.
He made it through Frankie’s security system in seconds. In Charlie’s considerable experience people generally felt safer in apartments than houses. This was not substantiated by the facts, and it made them easier to kill.
But standing in the dark loft, gun in hand, he was suddenly frozen and knew it was conscience. It had been with him all evening, a dangerous cocktail of guilt and grief and self-loathing. The job was logical and necessary. Charlie had been killing people for more than a decade and this was by far the most necessary murder he’d ever contemplated.
And yet he couldn’t do it. Every second he spent in the apartment increased his risk. But somehow the ghosts had had their effect. Or perhaps he’d simply had his fill. Knew that he didn’t have it in him, and the ghosts and their entire fucked-up Scrooge story was his subconscious telling him so.
It’s not surprising that Charlie missed the Ghost of Christmas Future standing in the kitchen. The ghost was hooded and his robes were intact, so he was more of a large, deep shadow than anything. Charlie made his decision. Fuck it. He lowered his gun and turned to leave and fell through the floor.
He only confronted the ghost when he landed beside him on the grounds of what looked like a Federal penitentiary. Charlie guessed the Florence ADX super max, but it was only a guess. They watched as he was led into a caged open yard in an orange jumpsuit. You get one hour of open air a week in a super max.
The ghost shrugged, as if to note that it was hardly a profound revelation. They flew again, this time finding Jessica tending bar in a sad, mostly empty establishment with a half-hearted tree in the corner. Charlie looked out the window and figured it was Texas. Definitely not the Pacific Northwest, anyway.
“Where’s Jordan?” Again the ghost shrugged but didn’t speak. So Jessica had stepped away, then, as he feared she would. His arrest, his story, his complete destruction was too much for her. Jessica had run, and she’d left his daughter behind.
“Did she go into the system? Foster care?”
The ghost nodded. It was slow motion torture.
“Show me.”
The ghost shook his head. No. Charlie was struck by the fear that she was already gone. Or, worse, that she was lost the way he was lost. Foster care, guilt, stigma. But more than that. She probably hated him now, and whatever good he’d done as a father was forever undone. Her childhood, like his, was a doorway leading to dark stairs that went forever downward.
Charlie and the ghost returned to a future version of Seattle, where they floated slowly above rain-soaked streets. Cold, hard, and ugly. Charlie had spent years scraping human debris from these corners and the rat-infested squats around them. He knew well what could happen if a kid’s world imploded, if her family and worst of all her sense of self disintegrated.
He squinted at pock-marked hookers shivering in doorways, hoping to see her and not to see her.
They passed a Union Gospel Mission for battered women and Charlie pictured Jordan bruised and beaten. How many statements had he taken? How many times had he stood outside an ER bed while nurses and a female officer completed rape kits?
He tried to rush the doors but found himself powerless, trapped on a kind of demented carnival ride running adjacent to his worst fatherly nightmares. But no Jordan. Never any proof. Never clarity. Diabolically, the ghost left the details to his imagination.
They gained altitude, floating high above a crime scene, a body eviscerated in the gutter, blood running into the sewers. Bored detectives sipped coffee, barely taking notes. A murdered street kid, a savaged hooker… cops hated those cases. They had a terrible clearance rate and forced you to spend your time with shitty people in a pointless cause.
Charlie screamed. Wished and begged for it to end, knowing it didn’t matter. Knowing it was in his head, his imagination, and it wouldn’t end when they left this place.
Almost immediately he found himself back in Frankie’s loft apartment with a murder weapon in his hand and Sam Cho standing opposite.
“So. Here we are.”
Charlie shivered. Tried to control his trembling hands but failed. The gun wobbled all over the place.
“If you had any honor you’d eat that thing.” Sam had a way of pushing you the way you were already leaning. “The lesson, in case you’re wondering, is that you’ll never get out from under. The past is shit, the present is shit, the future is shit. The only question is how long can you bear to watch?”
The good thing about a Scrooge story, Charlie told himself, was that it ended. He looked at his watch and realized it was after midnight. He felt his hand steadying. Sam Cho wanted him to shoot himself. So probably his conscience did, too. They could both go fuck themselves.
He had a daughter and a girlfriend he loved and their future was in his hands. It was Christmas morning now. He exhaled hard and the force of it dissolved Sam Cho. Charlie was done with ghosts.
He shot Frankie Dawkin first, because he wanted a contact wound and a nice clean line, the kind you’d see on a grief-stricken suicide. He shot the girlfriend second, holding the gun in Frankie’s lifeless hand to get gunshot residue in all the right places. Catching her scrambling out of bed told the kind of messy story he wanted for the scene. No forensic evidence in the world could say which shot came first.
He was out the door clean in less than a minute and watched patrol cars respond as he packed up his stakeout. He took one last look around to make sure the room was empty. It was. He wished the darkness a Merry Christmas and softly closed the door behind him.
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