Dear Agent McAgent,Michael is playing basketball back in the yard, waiting for his grandpa to finish the cabbage rolls. Ten years later, Michael is hopping courtroom to courtroom, playing with people's lives, making them guilty in front of other people, the jury. He is the player, the jury is the arbiter. The defense just can't wait to knock him down. He tried to forget, scratch that, he wanted to forget his friends, too lazy to do something with their lives, the neighborhood, drowned in cheap vodka, his family, too tied up with the past. Nothing illegal, nothing dangerous, just old and repeating thuds on the sidewalk of a ball jumping up and down. Until he met his old friends. Until money brought drugs and booze and hookers. Until Michael killed someone. A knife in his hand 10 seconds earlier was in someone's chest. Just some bookie that was high on the latest synthetic coke drug. Probably low level Russian Mafia. Now spread on his bloody kitchen floor. He killed him because he is possessed. That’s what Michael thinks, anyway. He only has his friend Victor to help him, not because he called him, but because he saw everything. Eli was too drunk to join them in picking up the money they've won off the soccer match.
The possession angle could be used as a defense case, but he really believes that. The black lady teleporting out of thin air makes him more nervous and paranoid every time he sees her. She tries to help him. That’s what she says, at least. Someone wants to kill him. Well, Death. And not really him, but the extra passenger in his head. He is overdue. Michael is just caught in the middle.
A drug fueled sleep feels like a toy bus ramming you in the head slowly. He doesn’t even remember that. Michael just wakes up on sidewalks, on his floor, or with a bloody knife in his hand. Not his fault if he can’t remember.
Michael is getting restless. Forensics will pick up a track, anything and he’ll be behind bars. Prosecution will love to make him an example. Inmates will eat him up. And worse than that, the robotic walk of a crippled detective is following him everywhere he goes. He can outrun him. But Maykovich still finds him. He knows everything. At least, that’s what he says. Michael is his special case.
Drugs will explain paranoia. Hallucinations will explain his motives. But nothing explains why Michael is getting better and better at running, fighting his way out, seeing millennia old memories of dead people and dead people dancing around him, helping him or trying to kill him. How are they dead? They’re just like him. Hosts carrying ghosts.
Sleepwalkers. A paranormal thriller novel, aprox 70,000 words.