The Obituarist 3: Delete Your Account

By Patrick O'Duffy

Kendall Barber is having a very bad day.

His obituarist business is failing, his relationship is on the rocks and he’s pretty sure one of his friends has been murdered. All of that is bad enough – and then his office explodes. Kendall’s past has come back to haunt him, and it’s coming with guns, bombs and a truckload of regrets.

It gets worse from there.

Before the week is out, Kendall will be beaten, burn, torn up and hospitalised. He’ll have to alienate his closest allies and team up with his greatest enemy. He’ll have to talk to young people about internet security, uncover the truth about his friend’s death, avoid getting murdered by at least two separate sets of bad guys... and he’ll have to decide what kind of man he truly wants to be.

It’s a lot to deal with.

The solution is obvious – fake his own death and start over again. But that’s easier said than done. Can Kendall stay one step ahead long enough to assemble what he needs to make a fresh start? Or will his enemies – or worse yet, his own stupid conscience – finish him once and for all?

The third and final book in the Obituarist series raises the stakes higher than ever before, asks the big questions and puts its hero through the wringer. You know you wouldn’t have it any other way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick O'Duffy
• Release date: May 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463252741

Patrick O'Duffy

Patrick O'Duffy is tall, Australian and a professional editor, although not always in that order. He has written role-playing games, short fiction, a little journalism and freelance non-fiction, and is currently working on a novel, although frankly not working hard enough. He loves off-kilter fiction, Batman comics and his wife, and finds this whole writing-about-yourself-in-the-third-person thing difficult to take seriously.

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The Obituarist 3.0: Delete Your Account

Patrick O'Duffy

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 Patrick O'Duffy

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License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is dedicated to the computer that died – twice – while I was writing it.

You tried, but you didn't beat me.

It's also dedicated to Nichole, who is the sunshine on my shoulder.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ONE

I was the only person at Benny Boorns' funeral.

Seriously, the only person. Not even a priest to give a service. Just me, sweltering in a second-hand suit, standing at the side of the grave and wondering how long I had to stay there before I could leave. Theoretically I could go at any point; it's not like I would miss anything. But there were a couple of gravediggers loitering at the edge of the cemetery, smoking and waiting to fill in the hole, and I didn't want to bug out too quickly in case they judged me for it.

I feel like gravediggers are probably the judgey type.

I moved to the left to get under the shade of a tree and away from the morning sun. It should have been cold, dark and rainy; that's how funerals work on TV, and what can you trust if you can't trust television? But the weather didn't give a damn about Benny, or me, and so it was hot, bright and muggy, even though it was only a little after 9am.

Who schedules a funeral this early in the day, and on a Monday? Is that why no-one else showed up? Or did the cemetery manager know that no-one would show up and schedule the funeral for the dawn session, leaving the peak-attendance spots for dead people that the living gave a shit about?

Bah. I was just marking time for show at this point.

I looked down into the grave at Benny's coffin. It wasn't one of the giant fancy ones that's covered in silver filigree and takes six men to carry it; it was plain and it was tiny, an economy-sized child's coffin, like a black wooden packing crate for a broken bar fridge. Benny had been a small man, his growth stunted and twisted by a smorgasbord of birth defects and congenital health issues. His wheelchair weighed twice what he had, and they hadn't bothered to bury it with him. Kind of a shame; at least that way he could have rolled into the afterlife instead of having to crawl.

Fuck, this was a morbid start to the day. I needed escape from the gravity well of death. And coffee.

'I know I should say something sad and poignant, Benny,' I said to the coffin, 'but it'd just annoy you and make me look stupid. Let's just call it a day, alright?' With that, I headed for the cemetery gates.

The gravediggers – 'burial ground custodian' is, I believe, the formal job title – stirred to life, walking back towards the grave as I pulled out my phone to get an Uber. One stomped past me, not bothering to conceal that he was double-fisting his cigarette with his breakfast McMuffin, but the other still retained some sense of shame, possibly from a Catholic upbringing, and stopped for a moment. 'I'm, ah, sorry about your friend. I guess his other friends all had to go to work.'

'Benny didn't have any friends,' I said. 'He was a really unpleasant, antagonistic person and nobody liked him.'

'Oh. Well, I mean… you liked him, right?'

'No, I can't say that I did. But someone had to come and see him off. Might as well be me.'

The gravedigger – sorry, custodian – seemed both confused and offended by what I'd said, as though a statue of the Madonna had farted in church. 'Christ, this fucking town,' he muttered, and went to join his friend in dirt-piling detail.

This fucking town indeed. No argument from me.

My Uber was a dirty grey van that had likely been previously used for child abductions, and in a better part of town it wouldn't have been considered app-appropriate or possibly even legal. But this was a rundown cemetery in a bad neighbourhood in the shitty end of Port Virtue, a city where visible bloodstains were generally considered 'touches of character', and this was as good as it was going to get.

The funk of my sweaty underarms made a heady backseat cocktail as it mixed with the saccharine spearmint stink of the car's air freshener, so strong you could have used it to disguise the smell of rotting bodies. Which might have explained the colour of the upholstery. I wound down a window, checked my voicemail and tried not to think too much about… shit, about anything.

There wasn't a lot in my life right now that rewarded much thought.

I wanted a shower and clean clothes, but I didn't want to walk to work in the heat, so the Uber dropped me off at my office. I walked upstairs and opened the office door, which bore the text KENDALL BARBER OBITUARIST on a pane of glass with a crack running through it. It had been cracked for years now; I'd given up on ever having enough spare cash to replace it. Once I got inside, I stripped off my jacket, shirt and tie, and gave myself a quick splash-clean in the bathroom.

'Super professional, that's me,' I said to the empty room.

I changed into one of the backup shirts hanging behind the bathroom door, just next to the bar fridge where I kept cold water and beer. Mostly beer these days. I looked it over as I changed; yep, pretty much the same size as Benny's coffin.

With that cheery thought in mind, I returned the voicemail from Benny's lawyer, whose name vanished from my memory the moment he started speaking.

'Obviously we'll execute the will as soon as possible, Mr Barber, but I need to wait for approval from the police before I can go ahead.'

'Police?'

'Since Mr Boorns… well, since he took his own life, the police do have to make an investigation. But I've spoken to Officer Bernardo, and she assures me that it's just a formality. We should have clearance tomorrow.'

I thanked whatever-his-name, who assured me that he would be here to support me in this difficult time, and sat at my desk.

Suicide. Okay.

Personally, I was sure Benny had been murdered.

But I had bills that needed paying, and Benny and his lawyer weren't paying clients. This wasn't my responsibility, not this time.

'Sorry, Benny,' speaking again to an empty room, 'but you know how it is.'

I turned on my laptop and got to work, ready for a solid day of attending to the unfinished business of the dead.

TWO

Twenty minutes later: Man, fuck this job. Fuck it right in the ear.

I closed a dozen browser tabs with one decisive click, thumped shut the laptop and pushed it away from me like it was a colicky baby about to blow.

'I'm done,' I said to the empty room. 'I'm done. I can't even even.'

Okay, these histrionics were becoming a habit and I was acting out for an audience of myself, but again – fuck it. Right in the ear. I'd earned the right to have a morning snit. And even if that wasn't true (and it wasn't), I was going to have one anyway.

I looked over to the side room. There were three beers in my refrigerated mini-coffin, and the urge to have one (and the rest) beat strong in my veins.

But it was only 10.30 or so, and while I'd recently started exploring the fast-paced world of daytime drinking, that was a Rubicon of failure I wasn't (yet) ready to cross.

Alright, fine. Coffee. Coffee would do.

I trotted down the stairs to the ground floor and out into the street, where an embarrassment of cafes and coffee shops had sprung up over the last year or so. They came and went like the tide, as gentrification ebbed and flowed and the hot new baristas moved to better ventures that made artisanal paleo quinoa porridge and had fewer heroin dealers as clientele.

(Turns out dealers are shitty tippers. Go figure.)

Fortunately, one place had stuck around long enough for me to collect nine hits on my loyalty card. There was no-one in the place other than a woman with a worrying number of bad tattoos, sitting outside smoking and reading her phone. I went inside and ordered the largest, strongest coffee they could manage short of a bucket of hot water with a packet of