Dead Schmed

I gave my dying
detective the name “Smed.” When I showed the first draft to Jonathon,
his overall reaction was positive, but he had a problem with my hero’s
name.

“Smed?” he said. “What kind of name is Smed? Can’t you come up with something better than Smed?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Something masculine. Something people can relate to.”

“You mean like Lance Studley?”

This
conversation took place by telephone, but I could almost see him sit
back in his chair and blink, tasting the name with his tongue.

“That’s not bad,” he said. “Only you don’t want it to sound too gay.”

I hung up.

After
eighteen months of living with Smed, I had learned to sense when he was
about to make another appearance. A sour taste in my mouth, an
unexplained itch between my fingers, a momentary haze before my
eyes—any one of these symptoms came to spell ghost. I was experiencing
all three. I turned in my chair and, sure enough, there he was,
standing on the ceiling, his entire head glowing bright red with pooled
blood, his white hair hanging straight down, pants riding up—or down,
depending on how you looked at it—almost to his knees. He was barefoot,
which I hadn’t seen before, and his toes seemed to be embedded in the
ceiling.

“You’re going to be famous,” I told him. “I’m putting you in a book.”

“A ghost story?” His voice had a nasality about it, no doubt due to his spatial orientation.

“Sort of. Only in this book you’re not dead yet.”

“That’s good, Pete. Listen, could I ask you to do me a favor?”

I shrugged.

“Pop me, would you?”

This
was the first time the ghost had ever asked me to do anything for him.
I rolled my office chair across the room, reached out a finger, touched
him. Once again, the moment of resistance, a puff of air, and he was
gone.

***