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Usually these ransom notes asked the recipient to get a specific tattoo that corresponded to a tattoo on the kidnapper’s body—and afterward whichever family member complied would have lost a lot of memories, and be unable to feel affection, and never again dream at night. The kidnapper would have taken those things. But a kidnapper would always settle instead for the blood of a person whose soul was broken in the way that Torrez’s was, and so the robbed families would often come to Torrez and offer him a lot of money to step in and give up some of his blood, and save them the fearful obligation of the vampiric tattoo.
Sometimes the kidnapper was the divorced father or mother of the ghost—courts never considered custody of a dead child—or a suitor who had been rejected long before, and in these cases there would be no ransom demand; but then it had sometimes been possible for Torrez to trace the thief and steal the ghost back, in whatever pot or box or liquor bottle it had been confined in.
But in most cases he had had to go through with the deal, meet the kidnapper somewhere and give up a cupful or so of blood to retrieve the stolen ghost; and each time, along with the blood, he had lost a piece of his soul.
The phone began ringing again as Torrez tipped up the can for the last sip of beer; he ignored it.
Ten years ago it had been an abstract consideration—when he had thought about it at all, he had supposed that he could lose a lot of his soul without missing it, and he’d told himself that his soul was bound for Hell anyway, since he had deliberately broken it when he was eighteen, and so dispersing it had just seemed like hiding money from the IRS. But by the time he was thirty-five his hair had gone white and he had lost most of the sight in his left eye because of ruptured blood-vessels behind the retina, and he could no longer understand the plots of long novels he tried to read. Apparently some sort of physical and mental integrity was lost too, along with the blood and the bits of his hypothetical soul.
But what the kidnappers wanted from Torrez’s blood was not vicarious integrity—it was nearly the opposite. Torrez thought of it as spiritual botox.
The men and women who stole ghosts for ransom were generally mediums, fortune-tellers, psychics—always clairvoyant. And even more than the escape that could be got from extorted dreams and memories and the ability to feel affection, they needed to be able to selectively blunt the psychic noise of humans living and dead.
Torrez imagined it as a hundred radios going at once all the time, and half the announcers moronically drunk—crying, giggling, trying to start fights.
He would never know. He had broken all the antennae in his own soul when he was eighteen, by killing a man who attacked him in a parking lot with a knife one midnight. Torrez had wrestled the knife away from the drunken assailant and had knocked the man unconscious by slamming his head into the bumper of a car—but then Torrez had picked up the man’s knife and, just because he could, had driven it into the unconscious man’s chest. The District Attorney had eventually called it self-defense, a justifiable homicide, and no charges were brought against Torrez, but his soul was broken.
The answering machine clicked on, but only the dial tone followed the recorded message. Torrez dropped the Budweiser can into the trash basket and walked into the living room, which over the years had become his workshop.
Murder seemed to be the crime that broke souls most effectively, and Torrez had done his first ghost-ransom job for free that same year, in 1983, just to see if his soul was now a source of the temporary disconnection-from-humanity that the psychics valued so highly. And he had tested out fine.
He had been doing Bible repair for twenty years, but his reputation in that cottage industry had been made only a couple of years ago, by accident. Three Jehovah’s Witnesses had come to his door one summer day, wearing suits and ties, and he had stepped outside to debate scripture with them. “Let me see your Bible,” he had said, “and I’ll show you right in there why you’re wrong,” and when they handed him the book he had flipped to the first chapter of John’s gospel and started reading. This was after his vision had begun to go bad, though, and he’d had to read it with a magnifying glass, and it had been a sunny day—and he had inadvertently set their Bible on fire. They had left hurriedly, and apparently told everyone in the neighborhood that Torrez could burn a Bible just by touching it.
He was bracing a tattered old Bible in the frame on the marble-topped table, ready to scorch out St. Paul’s adverse remarks about homosexuality for a customer, when he heard three knocks at his front door, the first one loud and the next two just glancing scuffs, and he realized he had not closed the door and the knocks had pushed it open. He made sure his woodburning stylus was lying in the ashtray, then hurried to the entry hall.
Framed in the bright doorway was a short stocky man with a moustache, holding a shoebox and shifting from one foot to the other.
“Mr. Torrez,” the man said. He smiled, and a moment later looked as if he’d never smile again. He waved the shoebox
toward Torrez and said, “A man has stolen my daughter.”
Perhaps the shoebox was the shrine he had kept his daughter’s ghost in, in some jelly jar or perfume bottle. Probably there were ribbons and candy hearts around the empty space where the daughter’s ghost-container had lain. Still, a shoebox was a pretty nondescript shrine; but maybe it was just for travelling, like a cat-carrier box.
“I just called,” the man said, “and got your woman. I hoped she was wrong, and you were here.”
“I don’t do that work anymore,” said Torrez patiently, “ransoming ghosts. You want to call Seaweed in Corona.”
“I don’t want you to ransom a ghost,” the man said, holding the box toward Torrez. “I already had old Humberto do that, yesterday. This is for you.”
“If Humberto ransomed your daughter,” Torrez said carefully, nodding toward the box but not taking it, “then why are you here?”
“My daughter is not a ghost. My daughter is twelve years old, and this man took her when she was walking home from school. I can pay you fifteen hundred dollars to get her back—this is extra, a gift for you, from me, with the help of Humberto.”
Torrez had stepped back. “Your daughter was kidnapped? Alive? Good God, man, call the police right now! The FBI! You don’t come to me with—”
“The police would not take the ransom note seriously,” the man said, shaking his head. “They would think he wants money really, they would not think of his terms being sincerely meant, as he wrote them!” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Here,” he said, extending the box again.
Torrez took the box—it was light—and cautiously lifted the lid.
Inside, in a nest of rosemary sprigs and Catholic holy cards, lay a little cloth doll that Torrez recognized.
“Amelia,” he said softly.
He lifted it out of the box, and he could feel the quiver of his own daughter’s long-lost ghost in it.
“Humberto bought this back for you?” Torrez asked. Three years after her kidnapping, he thought. No wonder Humberto waved to me this morning! I hope he didn’t have to spend much of his soul on her; he’s got no more than a mouse’s worth left.
“For you,” the man said. “She is a gift. Save my daughter.”
