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#Post#: 807--------------------------------------------------
Phone Calls From The Dead, Pt 2
By: Infinimata Date: January 25, 2025, 10:08 am
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# Phone Calls From The Dead, Pt 2
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## John LeTour / 2025-01-25 15:30:13 | 11742
*To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe only the
truth* - Voltaire
Home (L.A.)
There was no ceremony as such. John reported to the chief's
office, signed one more piece of paper, received official
notification his sidearm and badge had been surrendered, and
walked back out onto the street.
That was it? he thought. Well, that was enough. I haven't been a
cop for months now anyway.
The next step mostly involved the phone. Back at his apartment
-- which seemed increasingly bare and hollowed-out even if
nothing had actually changed -- John sat at the little half-desk
facing the window and began dialing numbers. Colleagues, all of
whom had left before he had, and thus might well still think
well of him. Connections here and there. People who might be
able to set him up with a gig of one kind or another.
The biggest step was getting the ducks lined up for licensure to
be a P.I. -- you had to pass a background check, but signing the
papers meant he'd left the department on officially good terms.
No charges filed, not even a writeup for bad conduct. They knew
he would want those things, and they had been right.
Right as he hung up one call, the phone rang again. A number
that was all zeroes.
I've gotten a call from this number before, he thought.
"Petey," he said into the phone.
"He-e-e-y," cackled back a voice that was both familiar and
chilling.
----
## John LeTour / 2025-01-25 15:38:20 | 11745
*To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe only the
truth* - Voltaire
Home (L.A.)
"I followed your instructions," John said. "Although I'm
guessing you know that by now."
"Yeah, although ... see, where I am right now, the way things
work, it's *always* better if you tell me about these things in
your own words. Even if I know them. It's important you tell me
about 'em on you own. That way I know you're on the right page."
John nodded (stupidly, he thought; what, is he going to hear my
head rattle through the phone? the rate things are going he just
might) and started to talk about everything he'd encountered.
The laundromat. The café beyond. The hints about a larger world.
All of it, with as little editorial commentary as possible on
his end. Just facts. And also the facts about taking the offered
deal, about how that afforded him a clean exit from a very dirty
place.
"I'm not going to ask how you might know all this anyway," John
said, "because I'm guessing, like you said, where you are, you
can't really say."
"Naah, yeah. It's complicated. I'm in this weird situation where
I can only say things a certain way, so that you take the action
you need to take. So you see things the way you need to see
them. Because you see everything differently now, right? Even
just what's out your window?"
*Is that an instruction?*
John leaned forward and looked through the double-paned window,
down one story at the street below. Evening, twilight-streaked
concrete, palms, streetlights flickering on. Nobody loitering
outside, no idling cars, no sudden movements at other windows
the moment he moved.
But like everything else he'd been seeing since he came back out
of the laundromat, it was all somehow different. Different in
the way Raoul del Valla had said it was all different. del Valla
had done a tour of duty abroad and come back home to be a cop.
Or tried to. He couldn't even look at a city street in a "good,
quite" neighborhood without it being haloed by PTSD. Who's going
to come out of that doorway? What is that thing up on that
rooftop, if it isn't in fact a satellite dish? Everything
squirming, needling at you, sticking in you and staying,
twisting like those quills they use in acupuncture.
Everything felt like that now to John. And not just because of
what happened in the desert. That shuddering, struck-bell set of
shakes had faded, and was now being replaced with something
else, something a whole lot deeper and more reverberant.
"Dude, you there?" Petey's voice crackled in John's ear.
----
## John LeTour / 2025-01-25 15:44:11 | 11746
*To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe only the
truth* - Voltaire
Home (L.A.)
"Five and five," John said. "Sorry. I thought you were trying to
tell me something."
"I'm *always* trying to tell you something," Petey laughed.
"I'll cop to that. Here's what I'm going to tell you now. You're
on the right track with setting up shop on your own. But that's
just going to be the day face, okay? There's a night face, and
you're not gonna want to show it to most people. That's the
*real* work you're going to be doing. And you wanna make sure
your real work doesn't slop over into your day work. Everyone
else isn't gonna be ready for it. *You* aren't gonna be ready
for it. Because if you let that happen, it's going to hurt *you*
twice as much as anyone else."
"Is this like with Catherine?" John said.
"Sort of. More so. Worse."
Catherine. John had dated her briefly. She had the kind of cool
steely personality John figured could stand being married to a
cop. She didn't want to get very close to anyone, that was the
problem. John had more real need than she had real want. And the
one time she had seen anything about what John's work was like,
she took two steps back and never completely stepped back in
again.
"I got directions to someone else in this new circle," John
said. "You probably know who. You think it's a good idea to
follow that lead?"
"You got directions to *two* people," Petey said, "and both were
gonna reach out to you. But if they do, reach back. Those are
gonna be your people now. You better learn to live with their
type. You're their type, too."
"One more question." John tried not to feel or sound foolish.
"Any chance we can make this into something more than a phone
call sometime?"
"Ehhh...." John could just about hear the other man tilting,
then shaking his head. "Complicated. Tricky. This is the best
way for now. -- Listen, I got to drop something off. Stay
frosty."
John had more, but it was cut off along with the call.
----
## John LeTour / 2025-01-25 15:51:45 | 11748
*To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe only the
truth* - Voltaire
Home (L.A.)
For minutes after that all John did was sit and watch the rest
of the dusk turn into nighttime outside. But he wasn't looking
at the darkening horizon or the deepening shadows. He was trying
to see something that seemed behind his vision itself, the way
the squirming patterns of dots behind one's closed eyes try to
resolve themselves into light of their own. Something to be seen
beyond seeing.
It was a faint, but tangible, version of something he had felt
all in a rush in the desert. Not fear, not panic, not grief, but
the sense of how life turns and flows into death. And -- under
that -- the sense of how death turns and flows back into life.
It was not something he needed the violence of the desert to
know about; it was wending and bending all around him now,
quietly, the way snatches of music from another room assemble
themselves into a melody you recognize even without all the
notes heard.
The heart beats, John thought. The blood moves both in and out.
But we're not the heart; we're the blood.
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