When the ghosts saw me coming toward them, they yelled, “Jen!”
As I came in for a landing, I saw that Randy looked better than I’d expected, along with Louis, even though both of them seemed off in some slight way. Scott was even here, now that we knew the dark spirit wasn’t after Wendy. Someone had fetched Old Seth, too, and it looked like he’d gotten over his mourning period for Cassie, because he was floating closer than anyone to Amanda Lee, his cowboy hat pushed back on his head, as if it made him hear the human gossip better.
Every one of them, including Amanda Lee, checked out how colorful I was, thanks to my final encounter with fake Dean. But, as usual, none of them commented right off the bat, and I was glad for it.
Of course, my essence buzzed dully with the hurt that I couldn’t quite shake, but I’d get over it soon. Really.
Amanda Lee walked over, gazing pointedly at my healed arm, then away from me, back to the onlookers. Taking out her phone, she pretended she was having a conversation on it while chatting with us, just to cover our discussion. “The police are onto Tim, and it isn’t only because I tipped them off and they found his name written in blood on the table. A neighbor saw him getting in Mrs. Cavendish’s car and escaping from her house.”
“He doesn’t have much luck with neighbors and committing crimes, does he?” Strike two for him, since he’d been caught by another neighbor when he was nine, when he’d set that fire.
“True,” Amanda Lee said. “So they’re searching his house and are looking for him on the roads. I’ve already been interviewed, as well, since I discovered Margaret’s body.”
“What reason did you give them for being in her house?”
“I was truthful. Mainly.” She shrugged. “I said I know Nichelle, and I was going over to her home to pick up clothes because I was harboring her from Tim. Where the story changes a tad is that I ‘heard’ Margaret scream and went over to see why. They told me I was fortunate Tim didn’t attack me, as well, but little did they know that I was perfectly safe.”
She sent me a confident glance that told me she knew that me or one of the ghosts would always come to the rescue. I would sure try, even if we would have to do all our heroics on our own, without help from something more celestial, like fake Dean.
Pushing him from my mind again—how many times would I have to do that?—I asked, “Are they interviewing Nichelle about Tim?”
“Yes, they already did at my home.”
Wow. I guess I’d spent some time in the star place, much longer than I’d realized.
Amanda Lee said, “Nichelle didn’t hold anything back from them. She was able to tell her story to someone who can actually put him away now.” Amanda Lee touched her turquoise necklace. “I only wish it hadn’t come to this.”
“You and me both.”
A beat passed, loaded with regret. What could we have done to stop Tim from getting to Margaret Cavendish, though? What hadn’t we tried?
Randy, Louis, Scott, and Old Seth air-ambled over to us.
“D’ja tell her?” Randy asked. He was the same old joyful sailor, but there was a slowness to his voice. And why not, when a part of him had been stolen?
Scott was clearly excited to be on active duty. Leave it to a cop’s son. “Twyla’s still got to be on Tim’s trail somewhere out there,” he blurted out. “There’s still hope that she’ll bring him in.”
Amanda Lee was light-years ahead of this conversation, and she looked me over but good. “I hear you met your killer today.”
Right to the point. The chill-out Amanda Lee had definitely worn off and the General was back full force.
“Yeah, meeting him was the highlight of my week,” I said.
“Randy told Louis everything, and Louis told me.” Amanda Lee fiddled with her necklace as she still held her phone to her ear. “How are you doing?”
“Peachy. We got along famously, you know? He was even kind enough to give me a heads-up about haunting the shit out of me.”
“Maybe something can be done when Ruben has the opportunity to take a close look at your bracelets. He’ll be sending them out to a lab he uses. I was able to pick them up from Brittany’s office today before Randy called me with your SOS.”
“Even if we lucked out and IDed my creep,” I said, “what good will it do? He’s dead, and we can’t exactly arrest him.” I surveyed the crowd. “You probably know that he can impersonate ghosts he draws essences from, so he could be anyone we run into in this dimension.”
Louis said, “We’ll have the advantage of feeling his bad vibrations if he comes face-to-face again with us, Jensen. That’s going to help us know when he’s around.”
Even Louis sounded more bummed out than usual, compliments of the dark spirit.
Amanda Lee gave me a reassuring smile, like everything would be fine and dandy. I was about to tell her what fake Dean had said about her being the one who would be responsible for sending the dark spirit away, but then she walked toward her car down the street, still focused on what we could do for Nichelle.
This would be a conversation for another time.
We ghosts followed her, and after she got into the Bentley, we hovered outside.
She rolled down a window and still pretended to talk on her phone. “If you all come in, we can brainstorm on our way back to Nichelle.”
Old Seth backed off. “Sorry, ma’am. I’m not much for tight squeezes.”
He was a big cowpoke and would probably take up half the backseat. The friction between ghost essences might even create sparks all over the place.
As he held out his hand to the rest of us, he bowed. “Be my guest. I’ll take the air, if you don’t mind.”
We were fine with his offer, so Louis and Scott went to hover in the backseat, me in front, and Randy stuck near the roof, looking down on us all as Amanda Lee started the car. Old Seth raised a hand in farewell outside, watching us leave.
As we traveled down the neighborhood streets, palm trees and pastel houses under the gray-flannel-dulled sky, Amanda Lee said, “So Tim went after someone else because he couldn’t have it out with his girlfriend.”
“Or his mother,” I said.
Randy talked down to us. “Whass next for ’im then?”
Scott said, “The police catch him, and justice will be done. That’s what my father would’ve told me when he was on the force.” He smiled. “I like to think he’s on heaven patrol now, itching to lecture me about driving too fast and staying out too late.”
Ghost. A.D.D.
Back on track. “It’s not that I don’t believe the police will catch up to Tim before he hurts someone else, but . . . What if Tim evades them? What if he gets a chance to hurt someone else before all is said and done?”
Amanda Lee gripped the wheel. “Serial offenders become more arrogant with each attack, so he might get bold if he doesn’t get caught.”
Didn’t I know it. According to my killer, he’d gotten so good at what he did that he deserved a gold medal or something. The only thing that was keeping me from being totally depressed about him hunting me down again was the fact that someone had busted him and the world had been freed of him.
Had being the operative word.
I said, “Tim discovered today that killing excites him. His psyche has known it for years, but he consciously realizes it now. He’ll have a craving to get the same rush he felt today. What if he makes it across the border, to a place where no one is up on the news, and he strolls into a bar? He’s going to see a brunette in Mexico, and she’ll become another red queen for him.”
Randy’s sailor tie was wagging back and forth with the motion of the car. “Twyla’s got to find him.”
“And when she does?” I asked.
Louis said, “She’ll have enough brains to manipulate a phone to get in touch with the cops and Amanda Lee.”
“If she don’t kill ’im first,” Randy said.
God, I hoped she wouldn’t. Even obnoxious Twyla didn’t deserve a dark ma
rk.
“And then . . . ?” I asked.
Scott scooted up toward Amanda Lee’s seat. “We let the cops do their duty. I told you that.”
“Then he’ll simply go to jail, if he’s even convicted?” I asked. “Let me give you a different scenario—he gets put away, but there’s this thing they call parole, and if his behavior is good, then he gets out.”
Louis asked, “But what if he’s rehabilitated in prison?”
Amanda Lee shook her head but didn’t say anything.
“What worries me most,” I said, “is that Tim might get some guidance in steering clear of the law, and it’ll take a while for him to get caught. My killer’s still around, and what if he decides to train Tim? He seemed to enjoy doing that today, egging him on, giving him ideas. And even if my killer doesn’t do that, Tim’s cravings aren’t just going to go away.”
I could feel the sympathetic vibrations from them all over the car because I’d brought my killer up.
I looked each ghost in the eye. “Since Tim wants to kill, he needs to know without a doubt that he’s going to get hell for it. That’s what we should’ve done with him in the first place.”
“We tried that, didn’t we?” Scott asked.
Louis stared long and hard at me. “I think Jensen’s talking about something else. Something along the lines of Pavlov’s dog?”
“And Bingo was his name-o,” I said.
Louis’ voice became more animated. “Classical conditioning. A learned response to stimulus. When Tim gets those bad urges, we’ll give him a shock—even more of one than we were giving him with suggestions to his psyche.”
“These shocks,” I said, “would be physical, not mental. Mental didn’t work with him.”
We all kept our thoughts to ourselves the rest of the way to Amanda Lee’s, but I already had a firm idea of what I wanted to carry out with Tim if or when Twyla found him: the kind of justice that would lock him away for good, whether it was in a jail cell or his mind.
Amanda Lee pulled into her posh Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood, the streetlights awakening to fight the gloom. She finally spoke.
“All I can tell you is this—if I could have had a moment with the woman who’d killed my Elizabeth, I wouldn’t have waited for the police and the courts to give Farah justice. I hope the shocks you give Tim are worse than the ones his victim had at the end.”
Her words resonated with Louis and Scott in the backseat, because they stayed deathly quiet. Randy nodded from his spot on the ceiling, and I knew where he stood.
Amanda Lee rounded a corner, then slowed down as a barrage of misty forms sped right at us.
“Hey!” Scott yelled as Amanda Lee swerved to avoid the lookiloo ghosts.
When I got a better view, I saw that the two muscle-heads who’d been playing cops and robbers near Amanda Lee’s pool were sailing alongside the car now, yelling unintelligible words and pointing up ahead to the side of the street.
Amanda Lee slammed on the brakes because, there, near the curb eight houses down from Amanda Lee’s place, sat a blue Prius with a TEACHERS HAVE CLASS bumper sticker on the fender.
We idled in the middle of the street. Amanda Lee’s eyes were wide, her hands slipping off the steering wheel as she motioned toward the car.
She was having a psychic vibe. “It’s Margaret’s,” she whispered. “How did Tim know where Nichelle is?”
I recalled my dark killer’s words. But I told him something rather helpful, too. . . .
Had this been the second suggestion he’d made to Tim? He’d told him where Nichelle was being kept, and that’s why Tim had been so on fire to steal Mrs. Cavendish’s car?
But if the car was here . . . where was Twyla?
I squeezed through a gap in the window, zooming toward Amanda Lee’s house, where the front window by the door was shattered, a porch chair lodged in it while the curtains blew around the chair and silence rocked the air. More lookiloos were hovering near the damage and waiting for us, including the turn-of-the-century man in his straw hat and fancy pale suit, plus one of the Native Americans dressed in the rough white shirt and short pants he’d probably gotten from a mission.
“Hurry,” one of the muscle-heads said. “That Tim dude just bashed the window in and went running inside and—”
That’s when the screaming started.
23
I needed to get inside—but, dammit, Amanda Lee had ghost-proofed her home.
The screaming continued just as Scott, Louis, and Randy flared up to the porch, stopping cold at the door.
Tim’s voice was muffled through the shattered window. “Shut the fuck up, Heidi!”
Heidi. But what about Nichelle? Ruben?
Behind us, I could hear Amanda Lee’s running footsteps, and I turned to her.
“Don’t!” I yelled. “If you go in there, he might hurt Heidi or you.”
“Where’s Ruben?” she whispered, the porch lantern casting a shadow over her face. “Nichelle?”
“I don’t know, and I’m not gonna know if you don’t lift those incantations and the smudging that’re keeping us out.”
Her hands were shaking as she held her phone and her keys. “I think I have to be inside to erase those . . .”
Great. “Then you’ll have to go in . . . quietly. We’ll be waiting on the threshold for you to finish.” I motioned to her phone. “Let’s wait on any calls, though.”
She raised her eyebrows at first, then took my meaning. We needed the cops eventually, but would they arrive before I could Pavlov our killer, making one final attempt to reprogram him in case he ever roamed free again? I had to look at the long-term game here, not the short-term. I had to try to fix him and hope the attempt didn’t backfire.
Amanda Lee didn’t stand around. She strode forward, shoving her phone in a pocket of her skirt, then carefully mounting the porch steps. Holding her breath, she inserted a key into the lock, slowly turning it, closing her eyes when the key clicked home.
We all held our almost-breaths now, waiting to see if Tim had heard, but he was still busy telling Heidi to shut up somewhere that sounded like he was near the back of the house.
She stopped screaming.
Had Tim hurt her? And were Nichelle and Ruben with her? If that was the case, then why was Tim still in the house yelling at Heidi?
I ghost-crossed my fingers, bobbing in the air impatiently as Amanda Lee’s hushed anti-incantations carried to us.
Scott said, “Ruben could’ve rung 9-1-1 when Tim shattered the window. The heat could be on their way.”
The Native American lookiloo floated forward, his English stilted but good. “He did not use his phone, or a gun.” The ghost had as many wrinkles as Ruben on his dark, grayish complexion, and the reminder of our PI made me even more anxious.
Where was he? And Twyla?
The man in the turn-of-the-century suit coasted up to the side of the Native American. “We were listening and watching the humans through the kitchen window when this happened. I know we were supposed to be waiting around the rest of the property, just in case Tim showed, but we figured what were the chances that he was gonna connect Nichelle to Amanda Lee?”
During this confession, the Native American had meandered off, going around the corner toward the back of the house, where I was sure he’d be looking through the kitchen window, keeping tabs on the situation.
Anyway, it was clear that the lookiloos had been listening in on conversations after I’d left today. That didn’t mean I was going to let them know everything else about the case—especially what I suspected my dark killer had implanted in Tim’s head to get him here.
The suited man continued. “After we heard the front window smash, Tim was inside before any of us knew what was going on. We couldn’t even get inside.”
“The house is protected from spirits.”
“No joke.” He was thrilled to be a part of this—I could tell because he talked with his hands a lot and totally enunciated his words. “
To continue, Ruben was in the john, and I think he left his piece in there when he took a piss. He didn’t have it when he left with Nichelle.”
Was he talking about leaving a gun in the bathroom?
He continued. “He didn’t need it, anyway, ’cos he ran out the back of the house, and without his phone, too, ’cos he was moving too fast with Nichelle to grab it from the kitchen. Heidi was taking a nap, however. When she heard the commotion, she ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife and her phone from the counter. Tim found her, and she must have decided to hold him up in the kitchen so Nichelle could get away. Heidi started calling the police, but Tim slapped that phone away first, then she told him that she was the only one home. He didn’t believe her, and that’s where we are.”
Amanda Lee was still working on those incantations and smudging. How many had she put on the house? Shit.
“Tim didn’t find the gun?” I asked.
“Not that I know of. He’s only been around the house with Heidi in tow, trying to find Nichelle. He ain’t doing a careful search.”
“And what about Twyla?” I asked. “You know the ghost in the eighties getup? Is she with Tim?”
The three remaining lookiloos shook their heads, and my essence sank.
Had Tim lost her during the car chase? Or had something worse happened?
“Okay,” I said to the lookiloos. “Why don’t you scout around for Ruben, and if you find him and Nichelle, make sure they get somewhere safe. We’re going in to help Heidi.”
“Me, too,” one of the muscle-heads said, flexing his humungo bicep.
“No.” I paused. “You know what might work to distract Tim from Heidi, though? Rapping.”
“Like Pitbull?” said the other gym rat. This one was so bulky that his arms were permanently curved at his sides.
When he started rapping like the Sugarhill Gang, I waved him off. Jeez, new ghosts.
The guy in the old-time suit grunted. “She means rapping, you dip. You know, knocking? Like ghosts do?”
I pointed toward the side of the house. “Knock on the kitchen window, just enough to get Tim’s attention. Don’t overdo it—and I’m not kidding. He already had a run-in with the paranormal today, and he’s going to be wired up enough as it is.”
Another One Bites the Dust Page 29
