Free Dead Man's Hand by Richard Levesque Page A

her.
At the time, I hadn’t felt all that sympathetic: I was exhausted
and shaken up and still wondering why I’d started down this path in
the first place. I still didn’t know if she’d been straight with
me, if she was spending her down time getting rolled with the drugs
Neat Pete had been overseeing at the lab, or if that smell I’d
picked up on the night she’d shown me the hand had just been the
lingering scent of her dinner.
    I’d decided it didn’t matter; the ride I was
on with her was about done now, and I didn’t have to have all the
facts in order to be able to get out and walk away. If the hand
failed to re-animate, I wouldn’t be getting a vacation, but at
least I had the satisfaction of knowing the Grommets were beholden
to me. Sure, I could call in the favor and use it to have Max
Patterson’s debts forgiven, but Pixel would have to prove herself
worth it first.
    On the phone, I’d insisted on a day’s rest
and had set up the meeting at her place for the early evening. Now,
after having slept till almost noon and worked on a few loose ends
with other cases, I stood here with Pixel and watched the dead
man’s hand as it began to twitch.
    “ My God,” Pixel whispered
when she saw that Bascom’s process was beginning to
work.
    She reached for it, but I stayed her hand.
“Be careful.”
    She gave me a quizzical look. “It’s not like
it has teeth.”
    I gave her a be-my-guest gesture and stepped
aside. Pixel must have re-thought it for a moment, as she picked up
the cutting board rather than just lifting the hand off it. She
carried the whole thing to her computer desk and set it down in
front of the keyboard. Then, a bit gingerly, she grabbed the thing
near its base and nudged it forward, lifting it just a little to
place the fingers on the keys.
    We waited, both of us expecting the muscle
memory to kick in at the familiar feel of the keys beneath its
fingertips.
    But nothing happened.
    We waited longer, and the hand just
twitched.
    It wasn’t going to work. Pixel’s plan had
been an interesting one, but nothing more. All those dead men last
night, me almost among them, all for nothing. No pay off for Pixel,
no vacation for me. All wasted.
    And then, after a few seconds more, I
understood why.
    “ It’s not going to work,” I
said. “Not like this.”
    Pixel gave me another questioning look.
    I nodded toward the desk. “Put the hand on
your tablet.”
    “ My tablet?” she asked. “I
don’t get it. Why would…?”
    “ Just try it.”
    She pulled a drawer open, took out her
tablet, and switched it on. When it had booted up and she’d called
up the keyboard, she set it down on the cutting board and picked
the hand up, not so gingerly this time, to place it on the
tablet.
    Almost immediately, the
fingers began to move. P , it typed. Then I . I glanced at Pixel, my teeth
gritted. The X followed, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. The E came next, and then
the L. It paused
and started with the P again.
    Pixel looked at me, her mouth open now,
confusion on her every feature.
    “ Ace…” she said. “Why would
Lester Rincon be typing my name?”
    I swallowed and looked at the floor, then
back at the hand. “It’s not Lester Rincon’s hand,” I said.
    She raised an eyebrow. “But you said the
zombie’s right hand was missing.”
    “ It was. And there was
another body there, too. Another dead zombie with a missing
hand.”
    “ And you think this
one…”
    I nodded.
    “ But why would Pete lie
about it?”
    “ Because he didn’t want to
tell you whose hand it really was.”
    She just looked at me, still not getting
it.
    “ You said he was driving
past your father’s place when he saved you from the
satyrs.”
    Now she got it. Her confusion was gone,
replaced by horror. I knew it would only get worse as she thought
about how she’d kept this hand in her fridge for the last couple of
days, and worse still as she thought of how her father had finally
ended up in the middle