Free Doyle After Death by John Shirley Page B

suspect they’re fooling themselves. Here, well, I can give you permission to pore over the town journals if you’re . . . well, there are rules. Later this week, when you are assimilated, I’ll give you a tour of the records room, cue you on the regulations. The books may help—­sometimes they choose to help.”
    â€œThe books choose?”
    â€œYes. You’ll see. Doyle will show you . . .”
    â€œOkay. So—­one thing more about Morgan Harris. He had no romantic involvements? With either sex?”“He had, actually, a bit of a liaison with a . . . what do you call it now . . . a transsexual person. But she left town, rather abruptly. He seemed to keep to himself after that, nursing a sense of rejection. Said she hadn’t told him she was going.”
    I got up to leave a few minutes later, feeling strangely fatigued though it was early in the day. At the door, the mayor licked his lips, hesitated, and then asked me, “I say, old boy—­you didn’t come over to this side with any tobacco, at all, did you?”
    â€œI ’ve got things to reveal to you, right here and right now , Fogg,” grated Bull Moore through clenched teeth, his piggish little eyes almost lost under his thick eyebrows.
    It was jolting, seeing Bull walk up to me. Winn had mentioned a Moore—­it hadn’t occurred to me it might be the Moore I’d known in the Before.
    I was more surprised by the sight of this thick-­necked, tuft-­bearded, bald-­shaven, broad shouldered man—­a man I’d known in Las Vegas—­than by purple oceans or birds that chanted at me.
    I just never expected to see the crazy son of a bitch again.
    Especially not here and now. I was peacefully standing in the morning light, waiting for Arthur Conan Doyle and Major Brummigen at the end of a street that ended in a swamp and then Bull came striding up. “Here and now, Fogg!” He looked around to be sure we were alone, though we stood at least thirty yards from the nearest house. The cobbled side street, leaving the cottages behind, continued through a field of soft, misty grasses, till ceasing a few strides from the edge of the swamp.
    Behind me, the sun was rising over Garden Rest, its light turning the green pools of the swamp a sparkling silver. The cypress trees, roots lifted like mossy skirts over the water, were thickly hung with Spanish moss; a woodpecker flashed in red and white between trees; something splashed back in the shadows. Cicadas buzzed—­or something that mimicked cicadas—­and the flooded woodland exuded a smell that was at once rank and delightful.
    Bull Moore tugged at his rust-­colored beard with his left hand, his right jabbing a finger at me to emphasize the words: “What you need to ask yourself Fogg is, Do I believe everything they’re telling you? ”
    â€œYou asking if you believe them or if I do?”
    â€œWhat? You know what I mean, dammit.”
    I stared at Bull Moore, still coming to terms with having met someone I knew from before I died—­especially when that someone was Bull Moore. I had a friend, Lou Stathis, who’d died of cancer. Just my luck it couldn’t be Lou walking up to me here, in afterlife; or maybe my white-­haired Science lab instructor, from high school, Mr. Croggins, the only teacher I’d really liked. Or my Aunt Hattie—­why couldn’t it be my dear old cocktail-­swilling Aunt Hattie?
    But no such luck. I drew Bull Moore. I’d had private-­eye dealings with him now and then—­he’d been a bubbling stream of information on every twitching survivalist, fringe loony, tweaking meth dealer and gunrunner in Nevada, whether or not those were all the same guy. But I’d never liked Moore’s company. Now, if anything, his personality seemed more outsized than ever. It was almost a caricature.
    I cleared my throat.