by Vivi Andrews
“Big Joe is invisible?”
“This isn’t a joke! Murder victims cannot confront their murderers. It’s bad.”
“Define bad.”
“If we’re lucky, he’ll just maim Big Joe a little.”
“I can think of worse things. And if we aren’t lucky?”
“You know that part at the end of Ghostbusters where Rick Moranis turns into a mutant dog, and Gozer the Gozerian blows the top off a skyscraper and opens up a portal for all of the supernatural nasties to come through?”
“Eliot could do that?”
“If he went poltergeist on us and decided to call up some demonic force to take vengeance on Big Joe, that’s the least of what he could do.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s bad. So we keep Eliot away from Joe.” Jake looked around as much as possible without coming out from behind their cover. “Where is Eliot, anyway?”
Lucy glanced around, surprised. “He should be right here. He can’t go far.”
The gunfire stopped suddenly and for a moment silence reigned in the warehouse. Then a low rumble sounded, like a freight train coming, and the warehouse’s foundation began to shiver and roll.
“Shit! It’s an earthquake!”
“No,” Lucy said direly. “It’s Eliot.”
Eliot drifted out to the end of his leash, pausing to examine the ethereal tether linking him to Lucy. He liked the link; it was like a psychic manifestation of their love.
It was unfortunate that she had been drawn to the warehouse by her sense of duty. Eliot would have preferred that she let the PI die—death was really not nearly as terrifying as he had expected it to be. If he’d known this was what death was like, he wouldn’t have been so afraid of it while he was still alive.
Eliot drifted up above the crates, wondering how his life would have been different if he hadn’t been afraid. Afraid of women. Afraid of risk. Afraid of Big Joe. Afraid of life.
He wasn’t afraid anymore. His death would be different. He had Lucy. It was amazing how different the world looked when there was a sweet blonde smiling at him at the end of the day.
Lucy hadn’t been smiling on the way to the warehouse. Words had been coming out of her pretty mouth that would have made a sailor flinch, and most of them had been directed at Eliot. He hadn’t expected her to react so strongly to the PI’s life being threatened. Women were a mystery.
Eliot glanced down at the love of his death and saw her bent in close conversation with the vile PI.
The PI was exactly the sort of man Eliot detested—tall, confident, probably disgustingly good at sports and anything else that society defined as manly. Eliot had never fallen into the manly category, no matter how broadly it was defined, and he had never cared for the members of his sex who did.
The PI was bad news. Unfortunately, Lucy didn’t seem to see that. She was inexplicably drawn in by the PI’s brawny, obvious charm.
Her infatuation would pass. Eliot wasn’t concerned about that. The shimmering tether between them was proof of their entwined destinies, mortal and ghost.
Eliot drifted a bit farther and poked his head out from behind a crate, drawing a barrage of fire before he ducked back. The bullets couldn’t harm him, but he hadn’t yet grown accustomed to his invincibility.
Eliot stuck his head out again and felt another, darker tug yanking him away from Lucy. Both links drew at him, the effervescent purity of Lucy and the strange, murky force of a thick, oily rope, coiling around him. For a moment he was suspended between the two. Then the link to Lucy snapped. Without her, he was jerked forward so suddenly he knocked over a crate, but his momentum didn’t stop there. He flew forward unchecked, directly into the gunfire. Dozens of bullets passed through him, but as he continued to fly forward, unaffected by them, the sound of guns firing slowly tapered off, replaced by the uneasy muttering of superstitious men.
Eliot’s movement halted suddenly.
He stood in a small, clear area directly below Big Joe’s office. Around him, Big Joe’s men stared at him with a mixture of shock and horror. For the first time in the company of these big, gun-toting mafiosos, he wasn’t afraid.
Then he looked up and saw Big Joe Morrissey.
Chapter Eight: Vengeance is a Dish Best Served in a Blender
Lucy’s brain had a tendency to short circuit in stressful situations. That was the only explanation for what she did when she realized Eliot was about to do his Godzilla poltergeist act on a bigger stage.
Lucy jumped up from behind the crate and sprinted toward the eye of the storm.
“Shit! Lucy!”
She ignored Jake’s harried shout behind her and kept running. Crates shattered and the fragments—along with all of the stolen merchandise inside—began whipping around the warehouse like debris from an indoor tornado. As Lucy dodged Eliot-shrapnel, she had a sudden sympathy for the food inside a blender.
Hardened criminals ran screaming past her in the opposite direction, but Lucy didn’t hesitate. She bent her head and plowed through the storm, stumbling once as the floor dropped out from under her feet unexpectedly, only to roll up again with the next wave of Eliot’s anger.
Lucy pushed her way through the cyclone, bent double against the force of the wind and avoiding being skewered by sharpened points of crate fragments by luck alone. Her eyes were fixed on the heaving floor, so her only hint that she was close to Eliot was the increase in the howling roar and a lessening in crate shrapnel.
Lucy looked up, squinting into the eye of the storm. Eliot hovered at the epicenter of it all, five times his normal size, huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf. He flashed like a neon-green strobe light. His face was grotesquely distorted, abnormally swollen and yellowy-green. His mouth opened in a Van Gogh scream, though the only sound coming out of it was a high-pitched keen that sounded more like an air-raid siren than any sound a human voice had ever made.
“Eliot!” Lucy screamed up at him, bracing her feet to keep from being tossed about.
Eliot gave no indication that he had even heard her. All of his attention was focused on a dark, cowering figure in the office on the second story that looked down over the warehouse floor.
Lucy reached for the link between them, hoping to yank him back like a recalcitrant pit bull and surprise him out of his rage, but the link had been severed.
“Eliot!” Lucy screamed again, and got the same lack of response.
Strong arms wrapped around her and jerked her off her feet. Lucy found herself kneeling on the ground, her body shielded from the worst of the storm by Jake’s bulk as he crouched beside her. “I’m hoping you have a plan!” he screamed in her ear.
What a coincidence. She’d been hoping the same thing.
“I’m open to suggestions,” she screamed back.
“I vote for running like hell,” Jake shouted. “Big Joe is on his own.”
Lucy shook her head. Eliot was too volatile and he was her responsibility. She wasn’t about to flee to safety—at least in part because if Eliot did what he was capable of, there might not be anywhere safe to flee to. She may not know how to stop him, but she wasn’t going to start running.
“Eliot!” she screamed again. Again there was no response from the verdant poltergeist, but there was an echo.
For a moment, she thought it was her own voice, reflecting back from the open office above. Then a rail-thin woman with gravitationally improbable breasts stepped out of the shadows. She had short, shaggy, bleached-blonde hair and bloodshot, puffy eyes. She tottered forward in her spandex mini-dress and stiletto heels, screaming the accountant’s name above the wail.
Suddenly, the cyclone of sound was sucked out of the warehouse like a reverse sonic boom, leaving an eerie quiet in its wake. “Candy?” Eliot asked plaintively, his voice distorted by his misshapen throat.
Candy trembled on her stiletto heels for a moment and then threw herself against the railing, sobbing melodramatically. “I’m so s-s-sorry, Eliot,” she heaved brokenly between sobs. “I did
n’t w-w-want to. You were always so n-n-nice to me.”
“Oh, Candy, I never blamed you!” the poltergeist assured her.
“Of course not,” Lucy muttered to herself. “She’s only the one who stabbed you in the heart while riding you like a bucking bronco. Why should you blame her?”
“Big Joe m-m-made me do it, Eliot! He threatened my l-l-little girl.”
Lucy frowned. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t entirely Candy’s fault. She didn’t look much more than nineteen, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a daughter. Especially considering the company she kept.
The other figure in the office leapt to his feet, rushing forward to shove the groveling, sniveling Candy aside. “She’s lying!” Big Joe Morrissey yelped hysterically. “Why would I kill you, Eliot? You’ve always been loyal to me!”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering, Joe,” the Eliot poltergeist growled. “Why would you want to have me killed?”
“I didn’t! I wouldn’t! How could I?”
“He said you knew too much about the organization,” Candy chimed in helpfully. “He said that any piece of pussy who shook her thing at you could get you to spill all of his secrets. He said you were a liability ’cuz you were so pathetic.”
“Shut up, you whore!” Joe screamed. Big Joe backhanded Candy, who didn’t make a sound or even flinch as the blow knocked her to the ground.
“Don’t touch her!” Eliot roared, the rafters quivering in response to his rage. “I may have had to stand by while you smacked her around in life, but in death I am a different man. You will not lay a single finger on her ever again.” The last two words boomed through the warehouse, rattling the supports that kept the office aloft.
“Eliot, please!” Big Joe wailed. “I am begging you. Is that what you wanted? You have Big Joe at your mercy, my boy. Whatever you want of me, it’s yours.”
“You killed me, Joe,” Eliot said. “You don’t have anything to offer the dead.”
“Eliot!” Joe squealed, a stuck pig in Armani. “Eliot, you don’t want to kill me! You’re not a murderer.”
“You don’t know what I am,” Eliot growled ominously. “But you’re right about one thing. I don’t want to kill you.”
Candy looked up from where she had been thrown to the floor. “You don’t?”
“Death is too good for you. I like death. I’m a fucking god dead. You don’t deserve death.”
“Oh, thank you, Eliot! Thank you! You’re right! You’re so right. I’m not good enough for death!”
Eliot continued as if he hadn’t heard the mob-boss’s whimpering thanks. “What you deserve is a lifetime of suffering. Don’t you agree, Candy?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Big Joe’s sex toy replied with relish. “Would you like me to castrate him, Eliot?” she asked cheerfully.
Big Joe whimpered as his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the floor in a dead faint. Candy nudged him, none too gently, with one spiked heel. “Pussy,” she scoffed.
“Tie him up, Candy,” Eliot instructed, his puffed-up poltergeist form slowly diminishing, the green strobe-light effect waning as he became less green and less deformed, reverting back to accountant geekdom. “Make sure you tie him good and tight.”
“What are you going to do to him?” Candy made a beeline toward a cabinet along the wall and pulled out a length of well-used rope.
“Big Joe likes power and respect. So we’re going to take away his power and make him a laughingstock.”
“How?” Candy asked without looking up from her hog-tying.
“I’m going to take away his empire, turn him in with enough evidence to send him to jail for the rest of his natural life and when people ask him what his downfall was, he’ll tell them that a dead man took him down. People will think he’s crazy or a fool.”
Candy looked up, but Eliot was no longer looming huge and green and intimidating. He was back to his normal size and standing on the warehouse floor, his illumination just a pale white sheen. Candy gave Big Joe one last kick and walked to the rail. “What about me, Eliot?”
Eliot smiled shyly. “Big Joe keeps the key to his safe on a chain around his neck. The safe is hidden under his bed,” he said. “I think you’ve earned a bonus, don’t you, Candy? Maybe just enough to buy a tropical island and disappear with your daughter.”
“Are you kidding me?” Lucy jumped up and stalked toward her ghost. “She kills you and you’re going to reward her? All because she tricked you into having sex with her?”
“She didn’t want to kill me,” Eliot said defensively. “It was Big Joe.”
“She’s still the one who stabbed you! Murder mid-coitus, you called it.”
Candy began sniveling. “I’m so sorry about that, Eliot.”
The ghost smiled and floated up to the balcony to pat her on the back. “I’m not sorry, Candy. I would have gone through my entire life terrified of living, if you hadn’t killed me. Now I’m not afraid anymore. I stood up to Big Joe. Me. Eliot Mellman. I took down the big man. You did me a favor, Candy. I was wasting my life, but now I’m ready to enjoy my death.”
A blade of brilliant white light pierced Eliot’s abdomen. He looked down at it, blinking in confusion. “What the hell?”
His ghostly form began to rotate slowly in the air as more swords of light burst out of him in a rainbow array, each beam intensifying to a pure white.
“Lucy?” Eliot called out, panicky. “Lucy, what’s happening?”
“You’re transcending, Eliot,” Lucy called from directly beneath him. “Relax, just let it happen.”
“I don’t want it to happen,” he whined. “I want to stay with you. I want to be a ghost forever.”
“You’re ready, Eliot,” Lucy said. “You forgave your murderer, even if she didn’t deserve it. You protected me, even when I didn’t need it. And you stood up for yourself. You said it yourself. You, Eliot Mellman, stood up to Big Joe Morrissey.”
“I wasn’t afraid,” Eliot said wonderingly, but his voice was already breaking up and fading away. His ghost form coalesced into a knot of light then shattered, tiny sparkling particles exploding out in every direction.
Big Joe Morrissey, who had just come to, screamed like a twelve-year-old girl and passed out again. Lucy looked around for Candy, but she was already gone.
Chapter Nine: What Have You Learned, Dorothy?
Lucy and Jake managed to find one crate that hadn’t been reduced to splinters and perched on it side by side, ignoring Big Joe’s whimpering pleas from the balcony and waiting for the authorities to arrive to cart him away.
While Big Joe had still been unconscious, Lucy had entertained the idea of painting his face like a clown or writing a phony confession, but when he woke up and immediately began babbling incoherently about exploding dead men, she figured his credibility would be shot without any additional help from her. Although painting his face would have been fun either way.
“Nice of Eliot not to kill him,” Jake commented idly as they waited in the hurricane-struck warehouse. “It’s a lot easier to explain finding him here babbling like a lunatic than the presence of a corpse.”
“He couldn’t kill him.”
Jake turned toward her, a frown already in place. “You said it would be like the end of Ghostbusters. You made it sound like the freaking Apocalypse and now he couldn’t have done anything?”
“I didn’t say he couldn’t have done anything. I said he couldn’t have killed Big Joe. A murder victim cannot kill the person who murdered them. That sort of post-life eye-for-an-eye stuff would upset the balance of life and death. If Eliot had tried, he would have ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe.”
“Ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe is okay, but taking vengeance on people who are actually to blame isn’t?” Jake asked incredulously.
“Ripping a hole isn’t okay, per se. It’s more a nasty side effect of breaking the rules.”
“Thank God Eliot was feeling merciful.”
L
ucy snorted. “That wasn’t mercy. Eliot liked being dead. He didn’t want to share that with Big Joe.”
Jake picked up a piece of crate shaped like a spike and spun it between his hands. “Is that normal? For dead people to get off on being dead?”
“No. Eliot was different. In a lot of ways. Most ghosts couldn’t do the kind of damage he did either.”
“But the—” Jake made a Big Bang gesture with his hands, “—that was normal?”
“Yep. That’s transcending. He resolved his issues, released his worldly cares and moved on to whatever’s next.”
“He didn’t seem like he wanted to move on.”
“He accomplished what he needed to. He stopped letting people take him for granted. He stood up for himself and wouldn’t let Big Joe walk all over him. He wasn’t going to put up with injustice anymore and once he stood up for his beliefs, for what he knew was right, once he realized that he was worthwhile, he transcended. It was past time people started treating him with a little respect and stopped jerking him around. Stopped treating him like a child and giving him the most ridiculously convoluted mixed signals so you don’t know whether you’re coming or going—although you certainly aren’t coming because someone is such a cock-tease and never follows through with what his body promises you.”
“We aren’t talking about Eliot anymore, are we?”
“You think?” Lucy snarled. “How dare you?”
Jake shifted to the opposite edge of the crate, eyeing her warily. “How dare I?” he repeated cautiously.
“You think you can just waltz into my life, get me all fired up and then just walk away? Just because you’re too hot for your own damn good doesn’t mean you can treat women like that.”
“Lucy.”
“Oh, don’t Lucy me. Let me give you a hint, Casanova. When you have a girl pinned up against a refrigerator panting for you, the absolute worst thing you can say to her is it won’t happen again. It’s the dimples, isn’t it? It’s because I’m too cute. You don’t think of me that way, right?”
Jake grabbed her and shut her up with a kiss. His touch was even more scorching than she had remembered. By the time he released her mouth, her bones had been thoroughly liquefied by the heat.
