His Name Was Death (Dead Man's Tale Book 1) by J. Eric Hance

the center of the putrid refuse, a large recliner held a behemoth of a man. He was at least seven feet tall, and easily five hundred pounds. His hair was gray and grizzled, his skin dark brown with a sickly green hue.
    I didn’t need my Sight to see the three gaping gashes down the length of his left forearm, or the straight razor discarded on the floor at his feet. His hand hung limp and useless, the tendons severed by at least one of the gashes. The pea-green recliner was stained black down most of its left side, as was the cream shag carpet around the man’s feet.
    His aura was midnight black, but its thickness throbbed erratically between a hair’s width and many inches. The color suggested to me that death was certain; the wavering thickness implied the timing was less so.
    I wondered silently who this man was.
    The Sight answered my unspoken question.
    A puff of black smoke appeared, and coalesced into an image of this behemoth talking on the telephone. “Yep, dat’s it, Scott White.” The image vanished in another puff of black.
    I jerked, surprised.
    That could certainly prove to be useful.
    I started asking more questions, and the answers came in additional scenes amidst black puffs of smoke. Scott was sixty-two. He’d been a hermit now for six months, not once leaving his home; I couldn’t get any answers as to why. His hoarded supplies ran out just a few days ago. Unable to face the world, he decided to take his own life. When the first attempt failed, he tried a second; eventually, still single-mindedly focused, he tried a third.
    The monster before me was impressively committed to his own death. Down deep, though—so deep he hadn’t even known about it—there was an even more impressive survival instinct; it was strong enough to overcome the pool of his life’s blood being spilled down his chair onto the carpet.
    Too bad he’d waited so long to find it.
    Mr. White now struggled to pump his shotgun one-handed.
    I silently asked, again, what had driven him into hiding. No answers came. It’s possible I just asked the wrong question.
    But I didn’t think so.
    The questions that worked regarded either his identity, or his death—things directly related to the job at hand. Every question about why he’d become a hermit had failed. That made sense, in a way, since it didn’t impact what I was doing now.
    The limitation was still frustrating as hell.
    Having seen enough, I crawled away from the edge, propping my back against what remained of the wall. I needed a few minutes to think. If there’s a Reaper Manual somewhere, I bet it has a chapter for situations like this: “You and Your Zombie.”
    Or, perhaps, an old fifties-style, black and white instructional film: “So Your Assignment is Bat Shit Crazy.”
    Elliott looked to me for guidance. Unfortunately, I had none to offer. I’d rather hoped he would have some ideas.
    Where were his thirty years of experience now?
    The sound of a pumping shotgun finally cut through the silence, followed by Scott White’s deep, ponderous voice. “Hey, asshole, ya dead yet?”
    If he fired again, I was a sitting duck. I needed to keep him from pulling the trigger, or maybe trick him into shooting at something else. Looking around the entry for inspiration, my eyes fell on a closet at the far end of the entrance.
    A closet with an open door.
    I indicated the door to Elliott with a nod of my head.
    He looked quizzically over his shoulder, and then back at me. Confusion was evident in his expression.
    I held up three fingers, slowly lowering one at a time, and then pointed again at the closet.
    Elliott’s eyes grew wide. His head snapped quickly back over his shoulder to the closet, slowly returning to face me. The cat tentatively nodded his understanding.
    He mewed softly under his breath.
    I can’t say that I blamed him. In the semi-dark, Elliott’s white-dust-covered fur would be impossible to miss as he darted across the intervening space.
    In fact, I was