The Death Whisperer Read online

Weylock’s lips split into an icy smile.

  It looked like the FBI’s Most Wanted list would soon be one name shorter.

  Chapter Eight

  Kulok’s black Mercedes pulled up to the tall penthouse building from which Marat Solokov ran his criminal enterprise. Once upon a time, he’d been a prized asset to the organization. Loyal, brilliant, ruthless. A man who expanded the business and, in short order, became an invaluable addition to the Russian mob.

  But as Solokov’s success grew, so did his ego. Avarice overcame caution, and emotion defeated intelligence. The brilliant strategist started making mistakes and pissing off the wrong people. He was out of control, and the powers that be had signed his death warrant.

  Powerful people wanted Solokov dead, and they were more than willing to part with a small fortune to get the job done.

  As paranoid as he was brilliant, Solokov never left his penthouse. Fiercely loyal men sporting the deadliest firearms money could buy guarded every entrance. A top-of-the-line electronic security system monitored every square inch of the tower. The place was a modern-day fortress, impenetrable and inaccessible.

  Kulok was the man chosen for this impossible job.

  But even Kulok’s handler had been hesitant about this contract. He knew his client had deservedly earned the reputation as a miracle worker, but there were challenging jobs and then there was suicide. Even if Kulok should make it somehow to the top floor and succeed in putting a bullet in Solokov’s black heart, how did he plan to get out of the tower alive?

  When Kulok’s handler had voiced his concern, the hitman had shrugged it off.

  Don’t worry about it, Grigori. You make sure the money shows up in my bank account, and I’ll make sure Solokov pisses no one off again.

  Remembering the exchange with his handler made Kulok smile. The old man worried like a grandmother.

  The psychic hitman took a deep breath and focused on the top floor, careful to maintain enough distance from the building so as not to raise any suspicion. Even now, secret cameras were observing him, but as long as he stayed put in his vehicle, no one would bother him. Or at least not yet. Hang around too long within the vicinity of the skyscraper, and all bets were off.

  He looked at the rear-view mirror, and the emaciated, alabaster faces of three of his ghosts stared back at him. Jay was the only one who glared at him with defiance.

  Hold on to that fire, my friend, and don’t let go of your hatred. Soon enough, you’ll realize it’s the only thing you’ve got left.

  “Time to show me what you’re made of. Get up on the roof.”

  With these words, the spirits vanished.

  The world rippled and warped, and a moment later, it was as if Kulok himself was rushing up the side of the skyscraper alongside his ghostly hunting dogs. A world of glass and chrome and steel enveloped his senses.

  Kulok was inside the minds of three spectral servants yet outside of them, an astral projection of his physical self that controlled the dead trio as they surged ninety stories into the air. Kulok felt like he was controlling three drones at the same time. Kulok liked to refer to the whole experience as remote viewing on fucking steroids.

  This shit was unreal, and Kulok loved every second of it.

  As they reached the top of the tall building, Kulok hazarded a glanced downward and took in the dizzying view of the city streets below. Tiny cars crawled down cement arteries populated by ants.

  Perhaps this is how God sees the world, he thought.

  The assassin’s head shifted back to the top floor’s glass windows, and the three spirits melted through the glass.

  A world of luxury and wonder that put even Kulok’s extravagant tastes to shame greeted their arrival. Every piece of furniture in Solokov’s penthouse had to cost a fucking fortune.

  Who the hell said money couldn’t buy you happiness? After this job—and the money it brought in—maybe Kulok would upgrade his own digs.

  Two of the ghosts swept through the apartment, determined to locate their mark and get it over with. They knew that the sooner they succeeded, the sooner Kulok would let them rest.

  Only Jay resisted.

  For like a few seconds.

  Pathetic, but it also made Kulok respect him more. He granted the dead detective an ‘A’ for effort, but this wasn’t a fight Jay could win. Kulok was in fucking charge here. After a brief battle of wills, Jay’s spirit joined the other two spectral minions.

  It took them less than ten seconds to locate Solokov in his lushly appointed boudoir. The crime boss was sharing his bed with a girl who seemed to have leaped out of the latest Sports Illustrated calendar except that she was wearing a lot less than those bikini models.

  Kulok admired the woman’s beauty for a second before making one of his ghosts snap her neck. A small mercy, a token of respect for one of nature’s miracles. At least she never saw it coming, gone in a blink of an eye.

  Solokov’s eyes went wide as he saw an invisible force kill his little sex queen. His grief proved short-lived as the three spirits snatched the shocked crime boss in the effeminate purple bathrobe and dragged his fat, hairy ass across the marble apartment floor.

  Up ahead, the windows of the penthouse apartment jumped into view. Solokov tried to scream but only managed a few choking sounds as phantom hands continued to pull him across the expensive floor with inhuman strength.

  None of Solokov’s loyal guards heard his muffled cries. His soldiers would conclude that their boss had killed his trophy girlfriend in a drunken fit of anger, and consumed with remorse, had dived out the window to the streets below.

  Only the folks paying Kulok would know what happened here tonight. They would wonder how the skilled assassin had pulled off this impossible hit. Even if he revealed the secret of his success to them, they wouldn’t believe him.

  Kulok watched as his ghosts hurled Solokov’s meaty form through the tinted window.

  Glass exploded spectacularly, and then gravity took over. Solokov plunged ninety stories toward the streets below, Kulok remaining side-by-side with the crime boss almost as if they were tandem skydiving. What a fucking rush!

  His eyes flashed with twisted delight as the man’s out-of-shape body detonated on the asphalt and shattered into a bloody pulp.

  And then Kulok was back in his body. He clutched the steering wheel of his Mercedes, breathing heavily.

  Fuck, this shit was better than sex!

  A car alarm wailed into the night.

  His work was done. It was time to get the fuck out of here.

  Kulok pulled into traffic and smiled at the ghostly broken figure in the expensive bathrobe, staring down at his own shattered body with a confused expression of horror.

  The tires screeched past the ghost, and for a moment, the confused spirit met his gaze. Kulok said, “Welcome to the other side, asshole.”

  Kulok’s laughter filled the night as Solokov’s spirit receded into the night.

  He had not deemed Solokov worthy of joining his army of undead assassins. The volume of work allowed him to be selective about who he brought into his little undead club. Only if they showed potential did they receive an invitation. That fat fuck wasn’t worth the effort. Besides, he was still enjoying the process of breaking the detective.

  Never in a million years would Kulok have thought he was no longer the only man in town who could talk to the dead.

  He’d find out soon enough.

  Chapter Nine

  Jay stared at the smashed-up dead man in the blood-stained bathrobe. Terrified eyes peered back at the detective from a caved-in face masked in brain matter.

  He’d helped push the poor bastard out of the penthouse window and sent him to his death. Maybe even worse than death. Was this ghost about to join the hitman’s spectral army?

  Almost as if Kulok had read Jay’s thoughts—and perhaps that was just one more skill in the hitman’s psychic bag of tricks—the hitman waved the dead mark off.

  Jay touched the pentagram carvin
g on his neck, realizing the hitman hadn’t marked Solokov in the same way. Apparently, the Death Whisperer only deemed certain souls worthy of joining his ghostly assault force. Talk about a fucking honor.

  Rage bubbling inside of him, the dead detective watched as the confused spirit of Marat Solokov vanished down a dark alley. Jay knew that Marat was no angel, but that didn’t justify his role in the man’s death. And then there was the brutal murder of the woman in Marat’s bedroom. Jay was thankful that his hands weren’t the ones that had broken the poor woman’s neck. He eyed the spirit who’d performed the dirty deed: a skinny Hispanic fellow in a wife-beater with gang tattoos all over his body.

  The dead gangster averted Jay’s probing gaze. Perhaps even in death, the gangbanger shared little love for a cop. Or maybe the time he’d served as one of the hitman’s attack dogs had numbed his soul until only a husk of the former man was left.

  The third spirit looked back at Jay from the back of the luxurious Mercedes. The masklike features of the heavyset Asian man with the deep gash around his throat were unreadable. Jay didn’t bother to try talking to them. In fact, he wasn’t even sure if he could communicate with the other ghost slaves.

  Were these dead men offering Jay a preview of his future? As time wore on, would his rage subside until only a shadow of his former self remained?

  How long had these two lost souls served as Kulok’s undead foot soldiers? And for how much longer would any of them have to do the assassin’s evil bidding? How many innocent lives would Jay have to take before he could break from the hold this monster had over his soul? Or, even worse, how many before he no longer cared?

  I’m a cop, not a goddamn killer, he thought, fury pulsing through him.

  The hitman met Jay’s gaze and smiled.

  “I know this must be hard for you, Detective. Going from solving homicides to committing them.” The hitman’s voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. It gets easier with time. Just ask your friends. Most of these scumbags weren’t exactly Boy Scouts, but death has a way of changing you. After a while, you fucking realize that dead or alive, it’s all the same shit.”

  The hitman’s nihilistic laughter reverberated through the night.

  Chapter Ten

  Weylock hoped the dead might offer him further guidance as he passed through the cement arteries of the bustling city, but they remained quiet. That’s how it worked sometimes. The dead followed their own mysterious timetable. Weylock would have to be patient.

  While he cut down Times Square, electronic billboards lighting up the early evening, he fought back the temptation to visit 26 Federal Plaza. Even at this hour, there would be people working at the FBI headquarters. Maybe even agents he used to know. He wouldn’t talk to them, of course, but what would he give for just a glimpse of his old life… but no. Why reopen old wounds and remind himself of everything he’d lost and what he could never get back?

  There were so many memories in this city. Multiple times, Weylock stopped at a street corner and froze, eyes staring emptily into space as pedestrians and cabs blurred past him. Lost in memories.

  If not for his expensive suit, some cop might have grown suspicious of the lost-looking man lurking for minutes on end in one place. But as long as the world believed he had money—and therefore didn’t represent an immediate danger—they just dismissed him as another Wall Street trader or lawyer tripping out on the latest designer drug.

  Why did it have to be New York of all places?

  He answered his question: You travel the world hunting monsters, and the chances are good that one day you’ll end up working a case in the world's capital.

  After a few hours of this aimless wandering, Weylock ended up on the N train on his way to Astoria. Despite his reluctance to stir up old ghosts, he was headed to his former home in Queens. Weylock had inherited the small house from his parents and didn’t have the heart to sell it. No one had been back there since his wife’s murder three years earlier. On some weird level, he felt like he was making a pilgrimage to a mausoleum. Every cell in his body told him that this was a terrible idea, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Perhaps a higher force was guiding him. Maybe he had to let go of some of his own ghosts before he could liberate the poor souls under the Death Whisperer’s command.

  It was a little after eight when he got off the train at the last stop, Ditmar’s Avenue. It took him another twenty minutes of walking through the lively Greek enclave before he reached his destination.

  Looking up at the two-story house with the darkened windows drove home Weylock’s loss.

  For a few short, joyful years, he and Avery had been happy here. They’d been planning to start a family, right before the end. Now, the sound of children would never fill its empty rooms.

  As if someone was commandeering his body—an eerie yet familiar sensation, considering his earlier possession—Weylock entered the property. The front door was locked, so he tapped into the demon’s magic and phased through the sealed garage door as if he were a ghost himself.

  His beloved Ford Mustang sat in the dark space, coated in a thick layer of dust. Specks swirled around him and tickled his nostrils, and he stifled a cough. He hadn’t driven his vehicle in three years, but nostalgia made him rent the same model whenever one of his missions required a set of wheels to get around.

  Weylock walked up the stairs and entered the first floor of his former home. A sense of abandonment had infected the air and infiltrated the structure’s sagging walls. Most of the furniture and personal belongings were gone. Nothing of his past remained.

  If this were the cheesy movie version of his life, he would have stumbled across a framed photograph of himself and Avery. Mercifully, Sister Karechak, the woman who’d helped him get committed at the Monastery of the Holy Knight, had removed all the signs of his old life.

  Sister Karechak was the first one to suspect that the possessed special agent might become his generation’s Hexecutioner. She saw something in Weylock’s desperate struggle that made her think he could defeat his demon. Even thinking of the first female exorcist to ever be sanctioned by the Vatican (an honor normally reserved for priests) put Weylock’s demon in a rage, and he wisely cleared his mind.

  After taking a few steps in his home, Weylock grew still as he had on so many street corners earlier that day. Like some defective robot, it took longer for him to process his surroundings and accept that he was back in the house where he’d strangled his wife.

  No, I didn’t do any such thing, he reminded himself. It was the demon. I would’ve never hurt Avery, not in a million years.

  He balled his fists and shook all over as he stepped into the bedroom where his wife died. For one horrifying moment, he feared that Avery’s accusing spirit would be waiting for him in the chamber, a bloated, rotting distortion of the beautiful memory that lived on in his mind.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” he said out loud, almost like he was trying to reach his dead love. But he knew she was in a place where not even the Necrodex could reach her.

  “There was nothing I could have done,” he added lamely.

  “Perhaps you could have eased off your investigation,” a mocking voice whispered. “Perhaps if you hadn’t come after me so hard, I would have left you alone.”

  Weylock gritted his teeth.

  There was no way his old self would have ever backed off an active murder case. Special Agent Jaxon Weylock was a bloodhound who didn’t stop until he brought a killer to justice.

  That same dogged tenacity had helped him catch the Butcher of New Orleans and the Shadow Stalker.

  And he believed it would stand him in good stead as he went after the monster that the press had baptized the Preacher. Or so Weylock had believed.

  He hadn’t realized until it was too late that he wasn’t merely chasing a monstrous serial killer, but a demon.

  Weylock stared at his old king-sized bed, one of the few pieces of furniture left in the old
home. This same bed where he made love to his wife, where Avery had died, where his hands had strangled her.

  He struggled to shake the memories off.

  He should never have come here. What the fuck was he thinking? There was a psychic hitman who needed his attention. This sick, twisted trip down memory lane was a colossal waste of time…

  The thought broke off as the shadows rippled and shifted around him in the silent home. Suddenly, he was looking at Avery’s dead form on the bed.

  No, he realized with almost a sense of relief. The corpse belonged to another woman. The dead lady was blonde and bleeding from her chest, where a bullet had pierced her heart. Splayed in front of her was the body of a teenage boy, dead eyes pointing at the ceiling.

  Weylock was still processing this latest haunting when he heard the cough of a silencer.

  He spun toward the sound and witnessed a handcuffed man slumped dead in a wooden chair, forehead showered in gray matter.

  The dead were speaking to him again.

  Weylock stared down at the latest victim, then turned toward the bald hitman whose smoking pistol still pointed to the dead man at his feet.

  Detective Jay Hollow, the dead whispered.

  The hitman had taken the life of a cop and had murdered his wife and teenage son. The parallels to Weylock’s loss were obvious. But this was even worse. A good man had watched helplessly as some monster had taken away the two people that were most precious to him.

  Weylock shook with rage, and out of habit, he whipped out his FBI-issue Glock, ready to empty his magazine into the hitman. By the time the gun came up, he was once again alone in the cursed place.

  Fuck.

  How many times would he have to go through this? Show me where I can find this fucker already!

  Weylock stared into the room's corner where the latest vision had played out, his face coated in sweat. Then his gaze fell on the floor, and he spotted a business card that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.