Past life, p.1
Past Life, page 1
part #3 of Painter Mann Series Series
PAST LIFE
(Painter Mann Book 3)
by Dick Wybrow
BOOKS IN THE PAINTER MANN SERIES
The InBetween (Book 1)
"One part Ghost story, 2 parts wise cracking detective, add mystery, murder, humor and action!" –Kelly Slater
“This is Christopher Moore meets Stephen King. A wild ride!” -- Gene B.
The Night Vanishing (Book 2)
"Dick Wybrow has the potential to turn this story into a long series of great reads and I hope he does exactly that." –Amber Robinson
"Loved this book, and the series to date. Fans of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett should give it a whirl." -- Jeremy Elwood
Past Life (Book 3)
"I was completely blown away, and now I really want the next one to see where this author is going next. This was a great addition to the series! Highly recommend."–Penny Noble
Check out Dick Wybrow’s Hell inc. series
Hell inc. (Book 1)
“One of the best comedic adventure stories I've ever read! Hilarious with a great deal of heart!” -- James Jones
“Not since reading Hitchhiker's Guide have I so laughed out loud. This is can't-put-down good!” -- Bobbi Shockley
Hell to Pay (Book 2)
"Crazy, funny and very clever. The book will keep you interested and smiling right to the end." -- Eddie D, Amazon "Vine Voice"
"This book is as funny as its predecessor. It's also a heart-warming story of true friendship, and without becoming sappy. I enjoyed this one just as much as the first, and truly hope there will be more additions to the series." – Tina Williams
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemble to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021, Dick Wybrow
www.dickwybrow.com
Cover by Warren Design
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. All and any parts of this book that are reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system
should clearly state details of the author/ publisher.
To My Sister Teri...
I purposely released this book on your birthday.
Seemed fitting since you were one of my first (belated) birthday presents.
You were my first best friend. And despite being half a world away, you will always be my first best friend.
PAST LIFE
(Painter Mann Book 3)
CHAPTER ONE
I felt the impact. Didn’t hurt of course, I don’t have a real body anymore, it’s one-hundred percent Casper. But it surprised the hell out of me.
I’d fallen into some sort of deep hole. Underground, somewhere beneath the bandshell. I knew the asshole chasing me would be up there searching, wondering where I’d gone.
Funny thing. That’s exactly what I was doing.
What the hell?
Surrounding me was the sort of dark that can make an atheist reconsider their options. Admittedly, I’m more of an agnostic. But in some cases, an agnostic is just an atheist with commitment issues.
If this hole was very deep, getting out would be hard. Or impossible.
I tried not to think it was impossible.
Dizzy from using all that juice, I lay there listening to the distant, echoing chatter of a couple of transients arguing up top about whose space was whose.
Then I heard him. Through all that dirt and stone and Georgia clay between us, his voice was faint. But it still sent an icy chill through me.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered.
I froze on the spot, willing him to go away. For a long, long minute, I just waited, listening.
It was hard to discern the movements of ghost from livie, but I’d been able to pick up on the differences. The sound ghosts made wasn’t actually sound. It was hard to describe. Intent?
Up top, I heard the guy sigh and curse under his breath. He’d bought it. In his mind, I was gone, maybe halfway across the county or the country now.
I could hear him shuffling away to leave, but he said, “We got a score to settle, you and me. What you did to my girl. Payback is coming.”
Then he was gone.
Despite myself, I exhaled. Just a habit from being alive, but it still felt cleansing.
“That boy got something in for you something fierce, now.”
My calm snapped away like I’d been electrocuted, and I sat up, quickly pushing my arms out reflexively to ward off any attack. Whoever had spoken, I couldn’t see them. That didn’t make sense.
Only another spook could have seen me, and in the dark, whoever it was, they would glow. How were they hiding from me? Why were they hiding from me?
Trying to sound tough, I asked in a growl, “Who are you?”
In truth, my tough sounded too plaintive. My growl sounded like it had come from some skinny stray dog’s empty stomach. Instead of establishing I was some badass mother not to be messed with, I’d sounded more like a pig-tailed toddler in the back of a station wagon whining that I had to go pee.
The man just chuckled, deep throaty, sing-song.
“Why can’t I see you?” I asked, my voice quivering. “You’re not… You’re not using voodoo or something, are you?”
The chuckle turned to a full-body laugh. The guy said, “Voodoo? Boy, what the hell is wrong with you? Sound like you had a hellacious time of things.” Another laugh. “Voodoo! I bet you got stories.”
I wasn’t going to be taken in by some folksy guy trying to play like he wanted to trade tales. Strangers can be dangerous, and I didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t, well, me.
“Why are you hiding?”
“I ain’t hiding.”
It was quiet for a moment, then I felt the guy move closer and shot him a warning. “I don’t like to be touched! Back off.”
Another laugh.
I growled, trying not to shout. “Why can’t I see you?”
The laughing turned into a sing-song sigh. He said, “Because you got your eyes closed.”
Oh.
When I opened them, I got a quick bead on my surroundings. We were in a long tunnel, earthen and damp. On one of the walls was a long strip of weather-rotted wood with rusted chains hanging off it. At the ends of the chains were broken manacles.
I looked back to the man who’d spoken to me. He kept smiling, but only nodded, as something silent passed between us.
I asked, “How do I get out of here?”
He leaned back against a wall, putting his hands behind his head. “You don’t.”
“What does that mean?”
He closed his eyes and shrugged. “S’pose you might as well rest up, get used to it for a while. I’ve been down here a hundred-fifty years.” He then opened one eye and smiled. “Give or take. And trust me: it take more than it give.”
One day earlier…
CHAPTER TWO
The Death of Mechanic Ray Scones
“Hey, Google, play the Rolling Stones,” Ray Scones said as he tossed his keys into the small wicker basket under the light switch. He sighed as he pushed his front door closed with a shoulder before walking into the dark house.
A tinny voice said, “Playing Stone Roses on Spotify.”
“Ugh, no!” he said, his head falling forward. If nothing else, Ray was happy Trish wasn’t home. She didn’t like it when he came in smelling like oil, dirt, and grease. In the summer, she would often make him go in through the garage. “Like a dog or something,” he’d tell the other guys at the Audi service shop to howls of laughter.
For the next few days, Ray would have the house to himself because his wife was trying to finish a script she wanted to submit to Netflix, a TV pilot she’d started at a weekend creative writing course down in Atlanta.
Apparently, all the Big Time Writers would hole up in hotels to finish their great works, so Trish Scones was now doing the same. It wouldn’t be the Ritz, but it was still more money than they both would have liked to have spent.
Ray had agreed, mostly because it was something that made her happy. And a very small part was that having the entire house to himself for a few days was a bit of freedom. Like being a bachelor but without the soul-crushing Tinder swiping.
Right now, more than anything, he just wanted a beer and to sit down to watch TV. He would have to get out of his clothes first. If Trish came home and saw grease stains on the couch from his coveralls, she’d shit kittens.
“Play the Rolling Stones,” he tried again, unlacing his work boots.
Silence.
Ray sighed. “It’s like playing Mother May I,” he mumbled. “Hey, Google, play the fucking Rolling Stones.”
Lights whirred across the small surface of the Google Nest Mini Trish had bought him for his birthday. She’d gotten it on a two-for-one deal, but he knew of course that she’d just wanted one for herself. Gi
The robotic voice said, “Playing the Funky Tones on Spotify.”
He swore softly and walked into the next room, while some odd bass-and-keyboard monstrosity bled out throughout the first floor. Another speaker in the kitchen had picked up the beat, pumping the lyrics through the house: “What, what? Listen, can you smell that? Listen, listen—can you smell that?”
Ray sighed. “The hell does that even mean?”
Instead of asking the tiny device to turn on the kitchen lights—who knew what it might do instead?—he flicked the switch with a greasy finger, making a mental note to clean it up later. Again, he could ask the “smart” speaker to set a reminder for him, but he worried it might instead donate the contents of their savings to some Save the Pandas charity.
Ray reached for the fridge, but then hesitated and looked at his hands. At the sink, he ran them under some warm water and grabbed an embroidered hand towel to strip off some of the grime. When he looked at the towel, he saw the monogram: TSD.
Ah, shit. One of Trish’s towels that weren’t supposed to be used as towels, something that never quite made sense to Ray. Another sigh.
He went back to the light switch, wiped off the greasy smudge there, and then pocketed the towel to dispose of it later—or maybe burn it.
After rummaging around the fridge—pushing aside some Greek yogurt and knocking over a couple tiny bottles of something called Yakult—he finally came out with the beer. He closed the fridge and saw someone standing in the doorway.
Ray took a step back and gripped the bottle tightly. His first thought was to throw it at the intruder. Then he saw what was in their hand.
“That’s my gun,” he said, his voice shaking with a sickening mix of fear and rage. “How the hell did you get that?”
* * *
Ray Scones stood in his kitchen, a faint humming in his ears. Confused and disoriented, he looked around to such a strange tableau. He couldn’t process it right away. Swaths of dark red were smeared across the walls.
He heard his back porch bang open. The screen door bounced—one, two, three—like it always did. He’d planned to fix that when he had time.
When he looked down, he noticed a big thick pool, like a can of dark-red paint had been kicked over. And then he saw himself—lying on the floor.
“What the hell?” Ray looked at his hands again, grease-stained and dirty. Trish was going to be so mad with all the blood everywhere. He reached for the towel, but he couldn’t get his hand in his pocket.
He tried again.
Then he looked down at his coveralls. He could see the pocket, but dammit, his hand would not slip inside! Above that gap, he saw the flesh of his chest, burnt and dripping with blood and gore.
Ray screamed, stumbled back, and passed right through the wall into the living room. He screamed again, and then stumbled to the floor.
A figure stood over him. “You’re all right,” the man said. “But, sorry to say, you are dead. Don’t worry. Happens to the best of us.”
From the floor, Ray shrieked again.
“And you’re going to have to stop screaming. It attracts the…” The other ghost put out his hand, but Ray flinched away. “No one can hear you. I mean, I can hear you. You’ve got a hell of a set of lungs. Not that you really have lungs anymore.”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Sorry man,” the other said. “Like I said, you’re dead.”
“Wh-Wh-What, where… how can…?”
“Well,” the man said and knelt down next to Ray, who was now up on his elbows. “The how is, far as I can reckon, that the young man who just skedaddled out of here shot you.”
“No.”
“Yes, that’s about the whole of it,” the man said, scratching some peach fuzz on his chin. “As for the where, you are now in the InBetween. It’s where people like you, like me, get kinda caught up when we’re killed.”
“No, no, no!”
“Listen, I can help you,” the other man said. “That’s what I do. I help others like you. Ghosts.”
Ray scanned the room, his eyes dancing in their sockets. “How?”
The man stood back up. “I’ll look into who that kid was, so that the world knows who killed you. It’ll rebalance everything, and you’ll get out of here. To do that… I need you to take a look at something. Get up. Come with me.”
“W-W-What? Why?”
“As I said, it’s my job.” The man smiled. “My name is Jimmy Withy. And I am the world’s best private investigator.”
CHAPTER THREE
My name is Painter Mann, and I was in trouble.
You might think that was an odd state for a ghost to be, sure. If that is your thought, then you don’t know much about being dead. Can’t blame you. I didn’t know much about that sort of thing until I’d died.
The dead don’t sleep, so I spent a lot of time wandering around. And window-shopping.
At that moment, I wasn’t staring into the shops of Marietta Square—a heavy-metal T-shirt and record outlet, a rundown wedding dress store, and a hole-in-the-wall bar called Wicked Lester’s. I was flying past them, without a second glance—oh, except for that “Kill ’em All” black shirt, which was new—taking each corner as quickly as I could.
It was dark, so I could easily be seen. And I was being chased. Again.
In my early days in the InBetween, maybe a year ago now, that had happened a lot. I still worried about getting caught by black-hearted thugs like the Ghost Mob. They had been hell-bent on waging war on the living, and I’d gotten tangled up in the middle of it.
But after I took out their power grid—one that could give physical substance to an army of the dead—they’d fallen apart. Drifted away. Some might have even passed on to whatever was Next.
However, that would only happen if their individual killers had been identified. That was how it worked. Those stuck in the InBetween were there because they’d been murdered and the perp hadn’t been identified yet.
Perp.
That was a new term for me. Sure, I had faint memories of hearing “perp” in TV cop shows, but I’d never felt comfortable just whipping it out. Still don’t. But my new instructor, a cop in suburban Atlanta, he used it like others say cat or danish.
Being the world’s best private investigator, or rather the best dead private investigator, carried a lot of responsibilities. Well, just the one—I had to find the names of peoples’ killers so the dead could move on.
But just because I was the world’s best dead PI didn’t mean I was any good at it. I wasn’t. So that mantle of “best” came with a caveat: I was the only one. So I was also the worst.
And given my skill set, “worst” was probably a better way of introducing myself.
That was why I’d taken up an apprenticeship with a cop in Marietta, Georgia, named Paul Barnes. He was smart about this investigator stuff. And the best part: he muttered when he thought and when he read. That gave me insight on how to work stuff out.
Of course, I was a ghost. He didn’t even know I was there. However, that was not the case of some bad spook who’d zeroed in on me yet again.
A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed he was back there, moving quickly. Nowhere near my top speed, but no one else in the InBetween could “skate” like I could. He was running fast, though, faster than any other ghost I’d seen here.
Over the past few weeks, I’d ditched this guy again and again. I’d never seen his face up close, but I could feel him. He’d become familiar to me.
After another street, I took a quick left and whipped by a covered streetlamp, where three teenage girls were smoking. They didn’t blink an eye as I rocketed past, and the smoke ignored me entirely.
Turn, run, turn. If I weren’t so scared, I would have smiled. Dude must wonder why I keep to the streets.
