Bogart & Sons

“I was actually always the responsible one,” I complain. “What happened to me?”
“You know the theory, Eve,” replies Genet – magnanimous, benevolent, sage. “Stressor, break, cycle-”
I’m being compared to a serial killer. Beautiful.
When I was a kid, it was all ‘you must understand losses’, ‘you must make the hard decisions’, ‘you must realise the consequences of your actions and accept them’. And I did.
I’ve been adult long enough. I’ve accrued fatalism and cynicism to fill several lifetimes. So, by rights, now I should get to be carefree…?
Genet’s phone beeps.
“Another body. Same M.O.”
I follow.

“Sister,” Mithra repeats, still stunned.
I lean over her shoulder and type into the search engine. From the results I select a photo of two girls (ages twelve and fourteen). The bigger girl stands, demure, in a dark blue pantsuit. The smaller one wears a violet dress and grins happily.
“She’s pretty.”
Funny thing is, whenever someone says that, I know which one of us they talk about. And it’s never me.
“Her name means ‘flower’ in Japanese,” I add, somewhat pithily.
Back then, my name didn’t mean anything. Maybe that is why I now call myself after a Gorgon.

The morgue is quiet in the middle of the night. It’s very clean and looks borderline futuristic – all sterile white light and stainless steel. I’ve seen evil laboratories that looked less like evil laboratories.
I was led to believe there would be a line of dead bodies under white sheets, with only their toes poking out, tagged like produce. The telly lied to me. Again.
Every shiny surface reflects me back at me.
All cadavers have been frozen inside drawers, all instruments put away, all signs of life abolished. This place is… well… dead.
Someone taps me on the shoulder.

I haven’t stepped foot into a forest since Yorick and I walked into one, both got bitten by probably the only venomous snake in the country, and he died. (I pretty much died too, for a while.)
It’s not that I’m afraid of forests. Forests are fine.
I’m not even afraid of venomous snakes.
But I am scared of coincidences. Everyone should be. It’s part of our
wiring – the fear of the unknown (I’d say fear of death, but I lost that when I ‘died’).
I look at the line of trees, shrug, and stride forth. Here, snakey, snakey, snakey…

“Sometimes,” I mutter, “before I properly wake up, half-dreaming, I believe Yorick is coming back.”
Genet squeezes the nape of my neck and moves closer. I suspect he does actually want to kiss me, but that would make him a villain, and he’s presently rather set on the wise mentor role.
“You’re too old for fairytales, Eve,” he says. “Once someone dies, they are dead.”
Yes, yes. I can see that much in the crime scene photos strewn over his desk. Death is pretty reliable.
I think if I ever again wanted a love affair, I would choose someone reliable.

I wake to a hand pressing down on my mouth.
“You didn’t write.”
I knock the hand aside. “You didn’t write.”
Yorick laughs, far too bitter already at eighteen. “Monitoring our e-mails and cell phones. Classy.”
That does sound like my father. And, now that I’m awake, I realise that Yorick has scaled nine stories to my balcony to talk to me after being dealt weeks of communications blackout.
So this is love.
*
Years later I hang up on my mother, change my number, my e-mail address and my name. My family taught me how to burn bridges: stop writing.

“Where are you?!” Mithra demands from the bud in my ear.
“Run-ning late,” I pant.
“As long as you’re running,” she replies worriedly.
Freerunning, more like.
It’s not a coincidence that the traffic in the city centre has been paralysed by a series of simultaneous strategically-located accidents. Someone really doesn’t want us preventing the assassination of the Mayor.
I wish I had any freerunning experience at all. Jumping fifteen feet down is not fun, and I would be worth fuck-all to Mithra with a broken clavicle.
Alright, time to use superpowers.
“Mith’, make sure all photos of me are overexposed-”

By day Mithra and I work as private investigators for our own agency. It’s a tiny business, but it keeps us afloat. People lose things all the time, things worth paying a fat check. People get hurt, too. They want justice.
However, sometimes the case is solved yet justice won’t be happening.
By night we are what the media call ‘vigilantes’. Superpowered outlaws that fight crime with crime. Superheroines.
And if someone notices a connection to the agency’s cases?
You’ve got to look clueless. Oh dear, Mr Policeman – we use a computer, do you think it could have been hacked?

The last spark of hope dies in the dead of night. The lead is a dead end. Literally. Chesterfield’s confirms the missing woman as one of the cadavers in their morgue.
I stare at my cell phone – battery’s dying – and try to restart my brain. What now?
“We’ll deal with this tomorrow,” Mithra decides, and yawns.
“It is already tomorrow,” I reply, and lift my phone so she can read the time.
“Dying.” Can’t seem to shake the idea. They’re dead, but-
He’s not trying to kill them.
Oh.
He’s trying to save them from death.
I’ve found the motive.

“How did you get home yesterday?”
Mithra gingerly sits. “Okay. Everything hurt, and I had to come up with an excuse for the hubby, but he cooked dinner, brewed tea and took care of me. He’s so adorable.” She smiles softly. “Yourself?”
“Me?” I fake a chuckle. No one makes coffee for me; I’m followed everywhere by Yorick’s ghost. Still, no need to rain on Mithra’s parade. “Same as always. Had a hot date… with my laptop.”
“And you had take-away again, because the only consumable matter in your flat is alcohol,” she accuses cheerfully.
She’s wrong. There’s coffee, too.