Page 54 of Installment Immortality

He blinked again, before alarm blossomed in his face like a strange, terrible flower. “You dowhat?”

“Toilet paper,” I said. “Eggs, too, to help it stick to the cars. They damage the paint sometimes, so I’m not supposed to let anybody see me, but it’s a civic service and I have a lot of fun doing it. So again, are you okay, mister? Because vans are big, and it’ll take a lot of toilet paper to really mess yours up. I’d rather not, if you don’t mind moving along before I absolutely have to.”

He looked over his shoulder and back into the van. That was long enough for me to flicker out, and when he looked back, I was standing exactly where he expected me to be, still smiling angelically.

I promptly pegged him in the chest with a roll of toilet paper. He yelped, and I tried not to scowl.

You’d think after raising three generations of Price-Healys to adulthood that I’d have the aim of a Greek goddess, and yeah, I hit the guy. But I’d been aiming for his face, not his chest, and I was annoyed by my own inaccuracy.

“Hey!” he said, straightening up and looking wounded. “What was that for?”

“Just proving that I’m serious, mister,” I said, and grinned. It was easy to grin at the expression on his face.

“You shouldn’t throw things at people,” he said.

“And you shouldn’t be parking here,” I replied. I’d already confirmed one thing beyond all question: they weren’t somehow sneaking around City Hall on a permit from the mayor. If they were, this guy would be bragging about it. He looked like the sort of jerk who liked to brag to teenage girls about how cool he was.

“… fair enough,” he said, and stepped out of the van, closing it behind himself before I could get more than a glimpse of blinking lights and static-filled monitors. There was no sign of anyone else. I didn’t think he was working alone, not with that trio inside, but I suspected he was the only one they’d left to watch their backs.

Amateurs.

“My friends and I are doing a very important, sort of extracurricular project, and I don’t have a parking permit because there wasn’t any way for me to ask for one, but please don’t TP my van, I can’t really afford to get it detailed right now,” he said, all in a rush.

I raised an eyebrow. “What, your friends won’t help you after they left you out here to be their van guy? What could be so important that you’re willing to sit alone in a van like a giant creep in the middle of the night? Oh, are you trying to kidnap local kids? Should I be worried?”

“I’m pretty sure anyone who kidnapped you would put you right back where they found you,” said the man.

“That’s not very nice!”

“Neither is hitting people with toilet paper, and yet here we are.”

“Rude,” I said, biting my lip the way Elsie did when she wanted someone to think they might have a chance. Either he would find it incredibly off-putting, due to my age, or he would find it incredibly appealing for the same reason. If it was the first, I could back off and try something else—maybe bringing Elsie for a chat with him, maybe abandoning this angle completely. If it was the second, then he was the kind of skeeze who thought teenage girls walking alone at night were reasonable dating prospects, and I wouldn’t have to feel bad about anything we decided to do to him.

Not that I was going to feel bad one way or the other: he was working with the Covenant, if he wasn’t a full member—and having an American accent didn’t exempt him from membership. They might not have been very active in North America for the last few decades, but Americans had a tendency to travel, and vulnerable people can be recruited anywhere.

Ask me how I know.

To my vague disappointment, he stood up a little straighter, looking like he wanted to straighten the tie he wasn’t wearing. A cute girl was paying attention to him. He wanted to look his best. Gross much?

“If your uncle’s in charge of parking, I’m sure you’ve heard the old city hall is haunted,” he said, sounding suddenly self-important.

I shrugged, like that was the least impressive thing I’d ever heard. “Yeah, three ghosts, big spooky, much scare, wow. What about it?”

He blinked and frowned, looking suddenly less inflated and more wary. “Well, they’ve been here forever,” he said. “My friends are ghostbusters. Real ones, like in the movies. And they gave me a list of things to watch for when I’m trying to keep an eye out for ghosts. Things like outdated clothes and slang. Did you know that doge fell out of favor on the internet more than a decade ago?”

Since it had been more than a decade since I had a teenager to take care of, no, I hadn’t been aware of that. I tried to cover my surprise by looking down at my outfit. “This isn’t outdated,” I protested. “These are my creeping-around-in-the-dark clothes, and black is timeless. Besides, I wasn’t aware that saying ‘far out, man’ was an offense worth calling someone a phantom over.”

“I didn’t call you anything. I just implied.”

“Yeah, well, when guys like you imply things about girls like me, we’re somehow always the ones who wind up with our reputations in tatters, while you get to keep hanging out in your creepy vans like nothing happened.”

He frowned. “Okay, that’s a little extreme, and my van is not creepy.”

“If I were a ghost, could I have thrown that toilet paper roll at you? You should give it back, by the way. The stuff’s expensive.” It was still on the pavement where it had fallen after it bounced off of his chest, and Alice wouldn’t want it back after it had absorbed all that grease and oil from the street—I just wanted him to touch it and confirm that it was real, not some ghostly trick.

I mean, itwasa ghostly trick. The trick was just that I had blipped myself to Michigan and swiped the paper from the bathroom, then come back again before he could see that I was gone. Alice hadn’t changed where she kept anything since she moved into that house, and I’d been banking on that still being the case.

“Sorry,” he said, a little sullenly, and bent to pick up the toilet paper, grimacing at the wet, sticky feel of the side that had been against the pavement. “You sure you want this? It’s pretty nasty.”

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