The man in the suit took charge, heading back first, the gym rats following.
It occurred to me that none of us had ever exchanged names or death stories. So much for ghost etiquette in these hurried times.
Focusing again, I realized that Amanda Lee was still doing her house cleansing, and I listened for any more screams. Nothing. I prayed that the raps would consume Tim’s attention and give Heidi a few minutes of safety.
Finally, Amanda Lee finished, rushing out of the door and not stopping. “You have five minutes before I call the cops, so do what you need to do!”
We rushed inside, but Louis was the one who slowed us all down.
“He’ll recognize our cold wind, Jensen, so we can’t go fast and stir up the atmosphere.”
Always with the caution, but he was right. I knew we should get the lay of the land first. We also wanted to keep Tim here for the cops while easing into our plan for retooling his urges, which hopefully wouldn’t take all that long.
Shocks in general never did.
I forced myself to slow as we all advanced on the kitchen. The first thing I saw was Heidi in a chair facing us, three cell phones on the table in front of her: Nichelle’s, Ruben’s, and her own? She had a bloodied lip as she looked out of the corner of her eye at something behind the wall.
It had to be Tim.
If he wasn’t near her, that was a good thing. Louis obviously thought so, too, because he stopped Randy and Scott near the brink of the room.
Tim’s voice was ravaged. “Fuck, look at this. You made me bleed.”
“The shattered window cut you, Tim,” Heidi said levelly.
The sound of a paper towel roller banged through the air. Then a rapping followed.
Bang-bang-bang.
“There it is again,” Tim said. “Is there a basement where Nichelle could’ve hidden? Tell me, you bitch. I’ve looked everywhere else.”
From the expression on Heidi’s face and the messiness of her ponytail, I had the feeling that Tim had dragged her around by the hair to do a quick search.
“Most Southern California houses don’t have basements, Tim,” she said.
Maybe every place had a basement in Tim’s mind. He’d grown up in one, still lived in one, as far as his subconscious was concerned.
I crept to the entrance, peering around the corner to find him holding a knife—probably the one Heidi had grabbed. He was standing at the evening-shaded kitchen window, inspecting the area around it, probably to see what was making the knocking sound. He had cuts on his arms and legs, and the red-blotched paper towel he held to his face with his other hand told me that he’d staunched a decent amount of blood.
I remembered his blood on Mrs. Cavendish’s skin. T-I-M K-N- It was satisfying to know that he’d sealed his fate with his bleeding, and I wanted to seal it some more.
Shaking, I held back the need to scream up to him, materializing so fast that it’d make him crap his pants. But what good would that do? Haunting methodically was better—especially the kind I wanted to try, shocking him out of his nasty cravings. And we had one more chance at it.
But our inaction right now made me feel sidelined, just like I’d been all my life. Watching everything pass by, reacting instead of acting.
Tim leaned against the wall near the window, where one of the muscle-heads’ faces peeked in from the falling darkness. I made a cutting gesture through the air. That’ll be enough rapping, thank you.
He disappeared.
Tim blotted more blood from his arm while staring at Heidi, tapping the knife against his thigh. He was wearing shorts, his skin exposed, and I wished he would shred himself. That’s just one of the reasons I didn’t cuff the knife away from him yet. The other was because he’d know we were here if I did it.
Slowly, slowly, the haunting would creep up on him, then—bam. He’d be done for.
“You never liked me,” he said to Heidi accusingly.
She kept her tongue, her gaze straying to a pueblo cookie jar on a counter, like she was thinking of hopping out of her chair, grabbing it, and bashing it over Tim’s head. Join the club.
But . . . patience.
Tim added, “Everyone tries to shit on me at some point. But you did it right away, Heidi. You poisoned Nichelle’s mind against me.”
“Tim, I never disliked you.” She kept her hands on the table, so calm, so collected. “I love my best friend as much as you do. You know what it’s like to love. You get protective.”
She was trying to relate to him, and that’s why she kept using his name. She wanted him to see her as a person, not a thing to hurt.
But he wasn’t buying it. “I know Nichelle’s been here. Her phone’s right there on the table.”
“I wish I could tell you where she is, Tim, but I don’t know. She gave me her phone when she dropped by my house this morning and took off. She said she’d get a disposable one from a convenience store so she wouldn’t have to listen to all your calls coming through. I agreed because I wanted to monitor them.”
“Why?” he raged.
We ghosts revved up, but Tim had only lifted the knife in her direction from across the room.
Heidi remained smooth. “I was worried about you, Tim. I was thinking of ways I could help you to make you less upset. I was going to call you to discuss things.”
He walked away from the window, tossing the bloodied paper towel aside. When he approached her, his knife at his side, he raised his other hand, reaching for her brunette ponytail. He had the same smile on his face that he’d had when he’d touched Mrs. Cavendish’s hair postmortem.
Louis and Scott buzzed hard, right along with me.
But Randy went for it, pointing to a phone on the table. It dinged.
Heidi looked up at Tim, and when he grabbed for the phone, she swallowed and took a deep, subtle breath.
He accessed the screen, reading it, then slammed the phone down. “What the hell is this?”
Randy gestured to the phone again and it dinged once more. He grinned at me, Scott, and Louis, but even if it was cheeky, it wasn’t the same kind of Randy grin as before.
When Tim took another look at the screen, he shoved the phone off the table, and it clattered to the floor.
I couldn’t help myself—I moved to the phone and saw what was bothering Tim so much.
Texts from . . . Mrs. Cavendish?
Can I get you anything from the store?
Just checking if there’s anything from Japan in mail. Just a package from . . . someone. Thanks again for looking after house while gone.
I’d have to learn this trick of conjuring old texts from the air.
Tim laughed nervously, brushing his hand over his hair as he moved to the counter. He stabbed the point of the knife at the tile and twisted the blade.
Just as he yanked the knife back to him and started toward Heidi, Randy sprang into action, whirling in front of her, blocking her.
Tim cringed, sensing the disturbance in the air and, ridiculously quick, he turned and grabbed a pan off the stove.
Cast iron?
He swung it toward Randy, catching him full in the torso, making him dissipate through his middle and drop to the floor with a muffled, “Unngh!”
Tim was laughing, and it made me only angrier, boiling inside.
“I hate that cold wind,” he said to Heidi. “There were ghosts in my house today. Crazy. I can’t even believe it, but I’ll tell you what—I’m carrying around iron from now on since it makes the wind go away. I even used a crowbar from Mrs. Cavendish’s trunk on some wind when I was laying low in a parking lot after I throttled her. And you know what? No more wind after that!”
Was he talking about attacking Twyla with the crowbar after she’d caught up to him? Was that why she wasn’t here?
My hatred burned, and I gestured toward Tim’s wrists, manipulating the electricity in the air and jerking the pan and knife away. They clattered to the ground, and Tim backed up, hitting the refrigerator and cowering
against it. Meanwhile, Randy was on the floor crawling toward a power source, clutching his hazy middle, the dissipation creeping up and down, eating him away. When he reached Nichelle’s discarded phone, he drew energy from it.
Scott, Louis, and I moved in on Tim, but I got to him first, surging forward, sucking to his skin, sliding under it. Hallucination time, Pavlov style, starting with my image of a jail cell.
Around us, the walls turn gray and stark. A cell with bunk beds, a steel sink, bars blocking the opening.
We run for those bars, grasping them with our hands, shaking them and trying to get out. The cell begins to shrink around us, smaller and smaller, unless we’re getting bigger and bigger . . .
It all stops, and the sound of clanking keys makes us glance to the left, where a woman in a skintight guard uniform approaches, her keys hitting her thigh, her dark hair long and braided over her shoulder.
Mist scrambles her face.
When she stops in front of us, a smile comes through the mist. Inviting. Tempting.
Our blood shivers, then pounds to life. And when she reaches to the front of her blouse, ripping it open to reveal luscious breasts, we salivate.
“Do you want me?” she asks in a low, seductive tone.
“Yes,” we say.
“You can take me. You can take anything you want, Tim.” She strolls toward the bars, holding her breasts in her hands, massaging them. “Take me, baby.”
Our hands grasp through the bars, but she steps back, away from us.
“What are you doing?” she says cruelly, closing her blouse. Suddenly, she’s holding two glasses of lemonade instead. “I didn’t invite you in because I wanted you.”
Our temper seethes, burning through us, bathing our sight in red.
“I thought you liked me,” we say through our teeth, rage licking at our nerves, making us clench the bars.
She smiles and hands us a lemonade, but we grab her wrist instead, pulling her into the bars. She drops both glasses and they shatter.
We bend and pick up a shard with one hand. No one is going to mess with us. She’ll see that we can’t be controlled or fooled like this.
As we raise the shard to cut her—
I pulled out of Tim, but only enough to zing him with a bolt of my energy.
Bad dog.
He started, shocked. He began to quiver with the cold and the full-body electrocution. Looked like the power he’d bitten out of me during our last dream was gone.
I went back in and introduced the image of Mrs. Cavendish. . . .
We are in our backyard, looking through the slats of the fence that separate us from Mrs. Cavendish. She’s lying on a lounger in her bathing suit again, worshipping the sun, mocking us with her toned, tanned body.
She sees that we’re peeping, smiles, crooks her finger at us.
“Come over, Tim. I’ll call Triple-A for you, but really what I mean to say is that I’ll bang you silly. Please?”
We climb the fence, landing on the other side, heading straight for her, our lust high and taking us over.
But she rolls off the lounger, grabbing a towel to hide her bareness. “What’re you doing?”
Anger explodes in us, but . . .
A tiny shock jolts us, like a loaded memory of a sensation we’d just felt a minute ago, and we startle.
We shake it off, reaching out for her neck—
I busted out of Tim again, drawing on all my energy and doing the same thing as before.
Zzzzt!
He jerked with the jolt this time, quaking as he fell to his knees.
I was about to go in again when I heard Louis’ voice banging through my perception.
“The cops are here!” he yelled. “Let’s give this up to them, Jensen!”
Tim had stumbled to his feet, swaying and shivering, wildly looking around. But Heidi was already gone, along with the knife that’d been on the floor. She obviously hadn’t wasted a moment when he’d gone into a spacey state that she couldn’t have understood, but she’d been as smart as always and motored out. Scott was gone, so he must’ve flown out with her.
I was weaker from giving Tim the hallucination and the shocks, but fake Dean’s touch had filled me up with a lot of excess juice. Also, there was the little matter of motivation.
I could go all night with this.
“I’m not leaving yet, Louis,” I said. I wanted to make Tim hallucinate and then shock him until his brain was fried. I couldn’t seem to stop the need for it.
“Jensen . . .” Louis said as the sirens got louder.
Bummer. I merely pooled the rest of my energy and materialized to Tim in a swan song. For now.
“Hi,” I said to him with a little wave.
Tim started to scream, but then it choked off. Did he . . . recognize me?
Had my killer showed Tim my image? Or did Tim know me from his dreams?
When he squashed that scream and started to smile, it reminded me of the leer on that granny mask in Elfin Forest, and I knew that my dark killer had shown my image to Tim, just for kicks.
He laughed, crazy and not altogether there, then sprinted out of the room.
I took off after him. I liked a chase. The cops would probably get him first, anyway.
Still, as the sirens screeched louder, I kept thinking, Fry him. It wasn’t the same as killing. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Create a vegetable who couldn’t murder. And it wouldn’t be killing on my part—it wouldn’t be wrong.
Tim was taking the long way, running past Amanda Lee’s pool, circling back to where he’d parked Mrs. Cavendish’s car eight houses down.
Would the cops know about the deserted Prius?
I guessed not, because when I tracked Tim there, he ducked inside, avoiding a patrol car that tore down the road to Amanda Lee’s.
He fumbled with the car keys, taking them out of his shorts pocket, as I easily slipped through a cracked window, intending to jar the keys away from him.
When I manipulated the air to slap the keys from him, he fought me, managing to get the keys in the ignition and start the car. And when he burned off in a scream of tires, I realized that he didn’t want to just get away.
He wanted to take out a few cops while he was at it.
As I was about to blast into his head, seeing if I could control him into stepping on the brakes, something nebulous and gray materialized about a hundred feet in front of us.
A ghost?
As we hurled closer, Mrs. Cavendish and her mesh cover-up body came into clear view, and she was leveling a glare so lethal on Tim that even I froze.
Her glare turned into a full-throated roar as she opened her mouth and let out a banshee yell that nailed through my essence. Tim shoved his hands over his ears, cringing, the car squealing to the left where a streetlamp pole loomed.
Closer . . .
Closer—
With all the strength I had left, I shot out of the same window I’d come in just before the car crunched into the pole and something exploded from the steering wheel. As I hovered nearby, the engine hissed, split down the middle. Tim didn’t move.
His ghost didn’t emerge, either, and that meant he was still alive.
He was there for the taking. But I wasn’t just seeing Tim in that car. No, I also saw my killer. Yeah, I could fry his brains like Picnic ’n Chicken, letting out all my frustration and anger on both of them.
I could make a difference in this world, all right. A big one.
There was a commotion down the street as cops ran toward us, but all I really saw was Mrs. Cavendish floating with purpose toward the car.
She stopped by my side, locking her haunted, dark gaze on me. In her eyes, I saw the need for the same justice I wanted with my killer. A personal reckoning that would untether her from this dimension.
But then I remembered our limits as ghosts. They cramped inside of me, unjust and unfair. Why couldn’t we take care of our own business instead of leaving it to something else?
Hel
pless. I’d never felt more helpless and enraged.
Mrs. Cavendish stared at Tim. “He deserves a painful death.”
I couldn’t let her, but what could I do? “You’re a new ghost and you don’t know what it means to kill a human.”
“Nothing’s going to stop me.” An anguished smile pulled on her lips as the cops arrived, surrounding the car with their guns drawn. “I was just about to meet a man who was stationed in Japan in the army. We’d been writing to each other for years, and I was going to fly out next month. I hadn’t dated anyone since my husband died years ago. This man was my new future, but that’s not all Tim took away from me.” She gestured to herself. “I never thought this could happen to me. He violated something I never thought could be touched, and it wasn’t just my body.”
“I thought the same thing after I was killed.”
“Then you understand why Tim Knudson should suffer like I did.”
When she moved forward, I wanted to reach out and grab her arm to stop her but I couldn’t, so I only said, “Darkness is going to come to you, and you don’t know where your wrangler will take you after that. I’m pretty sure it won’t be a good place.”
“Are there any good places left now?”
As Tim stirred in the front seat, I said, “Do you even know how to kill?”
“I’ve been practicing.” Mrs. Cavendish had an answer for everything.
Without any ceremony, she gestured to a garden spike in a neighbor’s front yard and made it fly straight toward Tim’s head. It impaled him in the temple, his head dropping forward onto the cushion that’d come out of the steering wheel.
I fisted my hands, not only because I feared for Mrs. Cavendish, but because I wished I’d been the one who felt good about killing him, wished I could’ve done it with my own murderer.
When Tim’s ghost spun out of the window, he was flummoxed, turning around and around to see where he was. When he saw Mrs. Cavendish, he stopped, then started to laugh.
She laughed, too, but she sounded way scarier.
Then a wrangler skyrocketed out of nowhere, but it wasn’t gentle—Tim had already been judged, like Farah Edgett had. It whipped its arm out like a lasso and encircled his neck, burning his skin, making it steam. He caterwauled as the creature brutally dragged him under its bridal veil, almost like it was devouring him.
Another One Bites the Dust Page 30
