NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT NIGHT, I felt like I was doomed to be somebody else’s dinner. The New Seattle Southwest Precinct looked monstrous in the still of the dark. From a distance, the two large windows on either side of its mahogany-doored entrance loomed like a madman’s eyes, glinting with the reflection of what little light the nearby streetlight dared to shed in this part of the city. It was watching my coming with hungry anticipation.

NSPD Sergeant Alphonse Lloyds was standing on the corner off the side of the building, his sizable frame silhouetted solely by the tip of his cigarette lighting up at my approach. It might as well have been a lighthouse, calling to me in the fog that blanketed the realm. The nearby streetlight seemed miles away in comparison.

“Look who showed.” said Lloyds. “I was wondering what made the rats go running.”

“I thought you said you were out of smokes?” I replied, fishing out the pack from my coat pocket.

Lloyds took one final lengthy drag of his cigarette, before flicking the remainder of it into the nearby gutter, the last embers of it left sputtering. Everything bled to black.

“I am now.”

“Providence provides.” I said, tossing him the pack.

“Hallelujah.”

A moment later, Lloyds took a pull from a fresh cigarette, the cherry's flare giving me a good look at the damage done to him since I saw him last. He had always been a fan of the drink, but the past few months he seemed to have really hit the sauce.

Animated, craggy jowls where the razor couldn't reach stubble and a nose redder than fruit, ripe for bursting. He'd been fighting a losing battle with his hairline for quite a while, but the few tufts remaining seemed like the last company of soldiers left during a war long lost. But his eyes were clear as crystal, measuring the making of me from tip to toe like a butcher might a hefty slab of meat, looking for the prime cut.

“Never took you for a godly sort.” he said at length, his face accentuated by shadow. Something uncomfortable embered in his eyes, something I couldn’t quite place my finger on.

“I’m not anymore.” I said.

“War?” he asked in a self-evident tone.

I just nodded.

“Same.”

We stood there for a while brooding as silence crept, reminiscing about all the bad things we did for good reasons.

Lloyds sucked down smoke by more than a lungful, then exhaled it to speak in a pitying compassionate voice usually reserved for talking to the terminally ill.

“You’re dead, Paixley.”

Slowly, over the course of illimitable seconds, it began to feel like someone was scraping away the lichen that had come to smother the walls of my brain ever since I came back into town earlier that evening.

In the wake of such vacuums, reality seeped in. Like peeling off the crust off an old wound, it felt painful and freeing in equal measure.

And then it hit me like the wrong side of a brick.

“I’m dead.” The words left my lips a statement, not a question.

Again.

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Flashes of a memory lightninged through my mind of a dimly lit street and a rain-slick road. Fastly approaching headlights and a claxon far, far too late. My chest started aching painfully from the memory of an old impact.

That car crashing into me back in ‘48 should’ve been fatal. It had been fatal. I was declared dead on the scene, half my chest caved in such a way that left most of my organs a soup.

It wasn’t until hours later already on my way to the morgue that I showed signs of life. A miracle, they said.

I could hear Lloyds asking me something, but it was difficult to understand him over the sound of mortar shells whistling down towards me.

No, not a miracle. Just lucky.

Lloyd’s lips moved again, the shape of two worms writhing in the smoke of it all.

“What?” I asked. My voice sounded croaked.

“I said: like I told you on the phone, it’s a real doozy. Your landlord found you in your office last week with a bullet to the brain. He phoned the Blues at first then realized his mistake and gave me a call right after, remembering we went way back. I’ve a feeling he was just hoping I could keep the noise down for him.”

Lloyds was staring into the middle-distance, seeing nothing.

“Saw you myself, body full of rot and half your skull like a jigsaw shot around the place. You know, like one of those children’s puzzles.”

Lloyds took another drag to buy himself some more time to explain and I realized the look I saw in his eyes was one I was intimately familiar with, that of hard memories resurfacing up from grounds thought stamped on tight.

“Carlyle and Jacobson were first on the scene still trying to figure out who you were by the time I got there half an hour later. Thicker than spit I tell you, the both of them. Your name was on the damn door.”

Lloyds lets out a raspy chuckle, bringing us both back to the reality of the night.

And you’re certain it was me? I didn’t ask the question out loud, but Lloyd’s must’ve read it in my silence.

“It’s hard to believe, I know. But I’m telling you, even with half your head gone, I’d recognize that dumb look on what was left of your face anywhere.” he said.

I lit up a Cocky of my own and it flared up like a localized conflagration that dispelled the mist but little else, trying damn hard to ignore that deep-seated vibration I felt in my bones. Shaky smoke wisped away from me and I realized that my hands were quaking again. Or maybe they had never stopped.

The tobacco on the tongue tasted cheap, like the kind of cheap that came from a bad deal, and my lungs were in revolt, all of a sudden taking offense to the smoke they were always craving.

“But I also knew,” Lloyds continued, “that something wasn’t right. It never is with you. I spoke to your neighbors, your landlord. I tried Nancy, but she never returned any of my calls.”

Nancy. Christ.

“They mentioned that you’d been acting differently lately. Amicable, friendly. Striking up conversations to chat nicely in the hallway. You know, not *you*.”

Lloyds paused to ash his dying cigarette.

“Then your landlord said something that made me itch in that special place inside the back of my head. He said a few days before I found you quietly rotting that you’d swung by his office and flipped your lid, shouting about wanting your deposit back. That you wanted him to cut all the services to your place and give you the check by the end of that week.”

That explained the disconnected phone, I thought.

“But what really tickled my gums was the way he phrased how you were acting at the time. He said you looked like a hunted animal. Those were his exact words. Like someone had a gun to your temple and was threatening to let the lead fly at any moment.”

I noticed that Lloyds had stopped smoking altogether, his Cocky having petered down to a stub. He was watching me intensely through the curtain of cigarette haze between us, as if searching for something hidden beneath the surface of my face.

My voice was the sound of crunching gravel when I finally spoke up again.

“How in the hell is that possible? So, what, my body’s lying in a grave somewhere, kissing dirt?”

Lloyds shook his head. “No. The second I figured something sour was going on, I had them ice you instead. You’re down at the morgue, kept nice and cold. I had your place locked down and told what’s his name, Van-route?, to not touch any of the bedlam. Wouldn’t have been the first time you came back from the grave, so I figured I’d just wait and see if you’d come calling like a high school sweetheart. Lo and behold."

Lloyds cracked a side-grin, but I could feel the suspicion seeping in his behavior.

Couldn’t blame him. Not everyday you see a dead man walking.

Not in this neighborhood at least.