Dream Thief Detective

I wasn’t supposed to be there.

The dream belonged to a woman named Eva Marchetti, and I had no business inside it. Not legally. Not ethically. But the girl who hired me had paid in cash and desperation, and those two currencies have always spent well in my line of work.

So here I was, standing in the middle of a supermarket at three in the morning.

Not a real supermarket. A dream supermarket. Everything was slightly wrong. The fluorescent lights hummed in a key that hurt my teeth. The floor tiles were clean enough to eat off, but the rows stretched on forever, each aisle identical to the last. Canned goods lined the shelves in perfect military rows. No prices on anything.

The air smelled like bleach and something burning.

I checked my watch. I had forty-seven minutes before Eva’s REM cycle ended and I got kicked out of her head. Forty-seven minutes to find the memory she’d buried so deep even she didn’t know it was there.

Her husband wanted it found. He was the one paying.

I started walking.

The dream shifted as I moved. That’s the thing about dreams, they don’t like intruders. They sense you like a body senses a fever. The supermarket began to warp. The ceiling dropped six inches. A display of oranges turned into a display of human eyes, blinking, wet, watching me.

I didn’t flinch. You can’t flinch in a dream. Flinching gives the dream permission to hurt you.

“Eva,” I said, my voice flat. “I’m not here to scare you. I’m just looking.”

She didn’t answer. She never did. Dreamers don’t usually know you’re there. They feel you as a presence, a wrongness, a draft from a door they forgot to close. Most of them wake up with a headache and a vague sense of unease. They never remember my face.

That was the deal. I entered, I searched, I left. No trace.

The supermarket aisle ended at a wall of fog.

I stopped. Fog in a dream meant a boundary. A place the dreamer didn’t want to go. A locked door in the mind. Whatever Eva had buried, it was behind that fog.

I reached out and touched it.

Cold. Wet. It clung to my fingers like spiderwebs. The dream shuddered. The lights flickered. Somewhere behind me, a child started crying.

I stepped through.

The supermarket vanished. I was standing in a bedroom. A girl’s bedroom, pink walls, posters of boy bands, a desk covered in textbooks. The bed was unmade. The window was open, curtains billowing in a wind that smelled like rain.

I knew this room. I’d seen photos of it in Eva’s file. This was her childhood home. The house she grew up in, before she married Carlo, before she became Eva Marchetti, wife of the man who ran half the shipping on the East Coast.

The man who wanted me to find what she was hiding.

I walked to the desk. The textbooks were open to a page about the solar system. Pluto was still a planet. That dated the dream to before 2006. Eva would have been twelve, maybe thirteen.

A diary sat under the textbooks. Red cover, a little lock on the side.

I didn’t touch it. Dreams protect their secrets. You can’t just open a locked diary and read the answers. You have to earn them. You have to follow the thread.

I looked around the room. The bed. The closet. The window.

The window.

I walked to it and looked out. The view was wrong. Instead of a suburban street, I saw the ocean. Black water under a black sky. Waves that didn’t move. A single boat floated on the horizon, its lights dead.

Something was in the water. Something large. Something that made the hair on my arms stand up.

I pulled back from the window. My heart was beating faster than it should. I’ve been doing this job for eight years. I’ve seen worse than a creepy ocean in a twelve-year-old’s dream. But there’s a reason I work alone, and there’s a reason I don’t stay long.

The dream was getting defensive. It knew I was there. It was trying to push me out.

I turned back to the desk. The diary was open now.

That wasn’t right. I hadn’t touched it.

The pages fluttered in a wind that didn’t exist. I leaned in close. The handwriting was girlish, looping, the letters round and careful. But the words made my stomach drop.

*I know what he did. I saw him. He thinks I didn’t see him but I did. He put her in the ground and he smiled while he did it. I can’t tell anyone. He said he would kill me too.*

The ink smeared. The words dissolved. The diary closed itself.

I stood there, breathing hard. This was the memory. This was what Carlo wanted me to find. Something Eva saw when she was twelve years old. Something involving a man who put a woman in the ground.

Something involving a smile.

The bedroom started to dissolve. The walls peeled away like wet paper. The floor tilted. The pink turned to gray turned to black.

I was falling.

Not falling. Being pulled. The dream was ejecting me. I’d found what I came for, and now it was done with me.

I hit the ground hard.

I woke up in my own bed, drenched in sweat, the clock on my nightstand reading 4:23 AM. My head pounded. My hands were shaking.

I lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling.

Eva Marchetti had seen a murder when she was twelve years old. She’d buried that memory so deep it only surfaced in dreams, disguised as fog and supermarkets and oceans that didn’t make sense. And her husband wanted me to find it.

Why would a man want his wife’s buried trauma unearthed?

Unless he was the one she saw smiling.

I sat up and grabbed my phone. I had a burner number for the girl who’d hired me, the one who’d paid in cash and desperation. I typed out a message.

*Found something. Need to meet. Tomorrow. Same place.*

I sent it before I could talk myself out of it.

The phone buzzed a minute later.

*No. Not tomorrow. Now.*

I stared at the screen. The address she sent wasn’t the coffee shop where we’d met before. It was a warehouse near the docks. The docks Carlo Marchetti controlled.

I should have said no. I should have deleted the message, burned the phone, and walked away from this whole thing. I’ve learned the hard way that when a job starts feeling wrong, it’s already too late.

But I was curious. That’s the problem with this work. You see what people hide, and you can’t unsee it. You want to know the rest.

I got dressed.

The warehouse was dark when I got there. Rain had started falling, a thin cold drizzle that soaked through my jacket. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped inside.

The girl was there. Young, maybe nineteen, with dark hair and Eva’s eyes. She was standing in the middle of the empty space, her arms crossed, her face pale.

“You found something,” she said. Not a question.

“I found that your mother saw something when she was a kid. Something bad. Someone buried a body.”

The girl’s face didn’t change. She already knew.

“He buried it in the backyard,” she said. “My mother told me once, when she was drunk. She said she watched from her bedroom window. She said he looked up and saw her watching, and he smiled.”

“Your father.”

She nodded.

“He’s been dead ten years,” she said. “But my mother still has nightmares. She still wakes up screaming. And my stepfather, Carlo, he’s been trying to get her to remember. He says it’s for her own good. He says she needs to face it.”

“But you don’t believe him.”

She looked at me. Her eyes were wet, but she wasn’t crying.

“I think he wants to know where the body is,” she said. “I think he wants to dig it up and move it. Because if anyone finds it, they’ll find what my father did. And Carlo was there that night. He was my father’s partner.”

The air in the warehouse went cold.

I looked at her. At the desperation in her face. At the cash she’d paid me, the cash she’d probably stolen from her stepfather’s safe.

“You didn’t hire me to help your mother,” I said.

“No.”

“You hired me to find out what Carlo wants to hide.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

Behind her, in the shadows at the back of the warehouse, a door opened. Footsteps. Slow and deliberate.

A man’s voice, smooth as oil.

“I was wondering when you’d figure it out.”