Free The Sleeping and the Dead by Jeff Crook Page B

place sometime.” I don’t know why I said it. Just making conversation.
    â€œDo you have a ghost, Jackie?”
    So I told him about the faceless woman on my bed, but I failed to mention my other special friends. Crazy as he was, I didn’t want him to think I was crazy, too.
    â€œA full-body apparition!” he sighed. “That’s damn cool. And it’s a rare haunting, maybe one in a thousand where you get a spirit actually interacting with the environment, unlocking doors, tying knots. I’d love to see her. Maybe we can come over tonight?”
    â€œI don’t know. I mean, it’s not like Ghostbusters , is it?”
    â€œNo, nothing like that,” he laughed.
    â€œBecause I’m at a good place in my life. I don’t want anybody bringing Ouija boards or conducting séances or anything like that.” I had enough problems in that department without a bunch of freaks stirring my personal pot of demons.
    â€œWe’re scientists, Jackie, not mediums. We’ll take pictures, maybe some digital video with infrared, EVPs, check for EM fields, temperature fluctuations, that sort of thing.” He unplugged my Leica and showed me how to mount the infrared filter, then gave me a copy of Adobe Lightroom. He didn’t charge me for any of it.
    â€œSo, what do you say?”
    â€œI’ll think about it,” I said.
    He walked me to the door. “One more thing. If the seller wasn’t a pro, I doubt he knew about the infrared problems with the Leica. He wasn’t trying to rip you off.”
    â€œThanks, Deiter.” Maybe he was right. I hoped so, anyway. I liked James and didn’t want to write him off as a thief.
    I ran through the rain to my car. Deiter stood in the doorway in his ratty pajama bottoms and watched me drive away.

 
    8
    A FTER I LEFT D EITER’S , I got a call from Preston Park to photograph a wreck on I-240 involving a tractor-trailer and a motorcycle. The biker earlied-out beneath the trailer, doing an estimated buck-twenty. There wasn’t much left of him above the zipper except a big red dent on the trailer’s back door. His mother called Preston Park wanting to sue the truck driver, the trucking company, the city of Memphis and maybe God Himself for making it rain. The scene was jacked up on epic scale, traffic jammed for eight miles, car after car full of Adam Henrys trolling for a look at the corpse folded up under the truck axle. It was enough to make you hate people on principle, but I was happy not to see the motorcyclist anywhere. He hadn’t hung around and I was starting to think God had let this cup pass from me.
    The rain was coming down in a gray veil and the air was steadily getting colder. I took about two dozen pictures of the accident. The job only paid fifty bucks, but it wasn’t just for that fifty bucks, it was for every fifty bucks to come after. Besides, Preston was a friend and a decent man, something you wouldn’t expect from a personal-injury lawyer. He passed on more cases than he took, and he wouldn’t take a case unless it was clear his client was a victim and not some leech trying to get paid for a hangnail. Some lawyers I wouldn’t cross the street for, not if they were giving out diamond nose rings.
    As I sat at the corner intersection waiting to turn in to his office parking lot, I spotted James St. Michael coming out of Preston’s office with a black banker’s umbrella under his arm. He got into a silver Lexus, backed out and drove away before the light changed. I honked but he didn’t hear me.
    I found Preston sitting behind his desk in his dinky office. His receptionist was also his wife, a gorgeous blonde of Cuban descent named Leta. She waved me through while drying her nails and babbling into a telephone crooked against the side of her face. Preston greeted me at the door, pulling me into his office with his gentle hands. I was soaked to the bone and