Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation Read Free

art was a
contempt for faith, and the methods all too similar to those of the enemy.
Raszer’s occupation came closer to being a “calling,” for before undertaking
it, he had been—of all things—an actor. A failed actor, to be sure, but not
thereby a bad one. In any place but Los Angeles, where fake it ‘til you make it
is the rule, he might have had more difficulty earning his PI license.
         The one
thing required of all shamans, from the Arctic Circle to the stark,
dusk-painted mesas of the Southwest, was that they die and be reborn, and
Raszer had. His heart had stopped, just short of bursting, seven years earlier.
It had been a tragedy of his own making in more ways than one. In those days of
cocaine and cold gin, Raszer had courted heart failure the way a $50 hooker
courts HIV, pissing away even the sweet wine of fatherhood. His death had been
a penance: the propitiation of a deity from whom he’d grown distant. Monica,
barely out of college and making a hundred a week as his press agent, had been
at his bedside in hospital. Even his adulterous wife had shown up to see him
off. It was she who’d screamed first when his vital signs returned, not because
it meant she’d have to endure the divorce proceedings after all, but because,
along with the heartbeat, there was a beam of light pulsing from his right eye.
         Now,
Raszer felt cause to wonder if the intervening years hadn’t been some sort of
extended NDE, a lucid dream waltzing him to this moment of sad truth. He leaned
over the wooden railing, feeling old ghosts rush in with the fennel-scented
updraft from the canyon, and realized that he was probably depressed enough for
meds. The wind shook the eucalyptus trees, freeing the raindrops to mat his
chopped, ash-blond hair. He lit a cigarette and walked into the garden.
         It
wasn’t just losing Scotty that had gotten him down. It was the reprise of his
oldest terror: that the earth was, at root, a place of loss. On that signal day
seven years ago, he’d thrown dice with a goddess, gambling his own life in
exchange for Brigit’s when a childhood illness had ravaged her kidneys—his way
of making up for being a lousy dad. The bet paid off, Brigit recovered, and in
gratitude, a reconstituted Raszer had made a vocation out of leveraging his own
soul to save others less durable. He placed ads in the personals and the trade
papers even before he was fully licensed:
    SOMEONE YOU LOVE IS MISSING. CALL STEPHAN RASZER, INVESTIGATOR OF
SPIRITUAL CRIME.
          This being Hollywood, capitol of religious
flim-flam and a place where people came to be lost and then found, the ads were
answered. He walked through fire for each client, and with each gig, the heat
cauterized his old wounds. It was bliss while it lasted, it was redemptive, and
it didn’t hurt that he’d gotten a nice house in the bargain.
         Just
beyond the small plots of mint, mandrake, and Salvia divinorum was a statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, carved
from coral by an old sailor on Santorini. On the pedestal, beneath her drawn
bow, Raszer had placed a small, jeweled box, and in the box was a lock of
wheat-colored hair. It had belonged to the only woman who’d loved him for all
he was and wasn’t, unconditionally and to death in his service. She’d been
beheaded in the Moroccan desert by a man Raszer had pursued, and Raszer had in
turn disemboweled the man with a seven-inch knife.
         He
picked up the box and held it as tenderly as if it housed the clockworks of the
universe, and as he opened the lid, a single tear fell from his eye into the
little nest of human hair. From a nearby live-oak tree came the offended squawk
of a California blue jay, whose nesting routine he’d intruded upon. On the
ground beneath its perch lay the beakful of twigs and fennel stalks it had been
carrying. Raszer set the box down and walked softly to the place. To his eye,
the twigs formed a rough pattern of long and short, as