Read Online AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop by Jennifer Petkus - Free Book Online

bathroom.
    About 7 a.m., Yamaguchi woke briefly.
    “Alex, you there?”
    “How you doing, partner?”
    “I feel like dog poo.”
    “Yes, I gathered that.”
    “What time is it?” she asked.
    “It’s about seven. Go back to sleep.”
    “Need to take you back to the station,” she said as she slowly tugged the covers away from her.
    “Forget it. Look, I’ll call a cab later — Metro’s pretty good at picking up the disembodied. Is the front door locked?”
    “Uh huh.”
    “OK, when you feel better, unlock the door and I’ll tell them to knock and open it for me. For now, go back to sleep.” He got no reply and realized she’d already gone back to sleep with her ear buds clutched in her hand.
    He realized that he’d been online seven hours straight, but the time had gone pleasantly after he’d found Melissa in one of the chat rooms. She was in New York City and she’d been dead 20 years, dying when she was 21. She died a long time before the discovery of the afterlife in 1997 and the start of the AfterNet in 2001, but remarkably she was a warm, funny, sane person, which Munroe doubted he’d have been in the same situation.
    She had found his unabbreviated sentence structure in the chat room “quaint,” while she used every contraction in the book, which he found maddening. He found it funny that at 41 years old, she was still a 21-year-old who seemed clued in to every fad of the last 20 years and apparently knew the plot of every episode of Friends and Seinfeld .
jollycopper: When did you start watching them?
messym: when they startd
jollycopper: They started before the AfterNet, didn’t they?
messym: ? Duh.
jollycopper: You watched them without sound?
messym: :) watchd em at def cupls house whre i lived most of the 90s. they wre gr8, cute baby 2, and they wer young, in there 20s & they watchd alotta tv. a real barbie and ken but nice. i still keep in touch, but they wre freakd when they found out id been livng with em. funny there almost 50 now
    Munroe had difficulty deciphering what she wrote at times. He bet it took more effort for her to come up with her abbreviations than to type out a complete sentence. He was wrong, of course, she was forever 21 and knew when something was hip or passé , further surprising him by using passé . She eventually gave in to his requests and began using fewer abbreviations and he had a long conversation with her. He was fascinated by how she’d spent all those years alone without going mad, and he realized that her frozen state of maturity was her defense.
    He added Melissa’s name to his buddy list and she said she’d do the same, but he had few hopes. I feel even more like a dirty old man than I do with Linda, he thought.
    Linda finally woke up again about eight and unlocked the door. She stumbled through the house like a zombie and other than a few incoherent ramblings didn’t speak except to say, “Good night, Alex,” after which she went back to bed.
    The taxi arrived fifteen minutes later, the driver relocking the door behind him, and took Munroe to the Cherry Creek Mall. A lot of disembodied gathered at the mall Sunday mornings, using the public terminals throughout as ad hoc chat rooms. The elderly mall walkers, who enjoyed the peace and quiet of the mall before it opened for regular business, often joined them. The living were understandably curious about what awaited them and the disembodied, many of whom had no living relatives and were unable to contact their relatives on the AfterNet, viewed the elderly as an extended family waiting to happen. Most of the disembodied who attended the coffee klatch were themselves older when they died. Munroe perversely enjoyed being one of the younger ones.
    The rest of the day he spent at the Denver Public Library, then the Tattered Cover bookstore and finally back to the station. He did get an email from Yamaguchi earlier in the day saying that she was alive. Back at the station, he also got an email from