Page 25 of Dead Ringer

I shrieked and almost dropped the phone when a ghost popped into the air in front of me. It was the kid who acted like a bellhop at the Hotel. He didn’t have to act the part, since no one ever showed up with any luggage, but I thought it might be his way of being included.

This far from the Hotel though, the kid was barely more than a smudge of mist with big dark eyes. “Miss Darla! Charlie says there’s trouble! You gotta come quick!”

“Miss Rowe? Are you still there?” Sophia demanded.

I fumbled the phone back up to my ear. “Yes! I’m sorry, Ma’am. I’m on the case, and you’ll have your idol back before you know it.”

The ghost buzzed around in front of me again. “Charlie said you got to come! Something is going on! There’s a big ruckus in the parking lot! Hurry!”

Holy smokes, this wasn’t good. Charlie wasn’t exactly the kind of guy that was easily flapped. He was dead, after all, and nothing could happen to him. For him to have sent the kid, something really had to be going down. I needed to work my gams and get over to the Hotel, pronto.

“Where is my idol right now?” Sophia’s voice cracked like a whip. “Where will you be getting it from? What is going on?”

“Don’t worry, Ma’am.” I waved at the ghost, trying to assure him I was hurrying and to stop yammering when I was trying to hear my client. “I’ve got it handled. I’ll have it for you real soon.”

And then I hung up before she could speak again.

I tapped my cell phone against my skull a few times and kissed my job goodbye. Sophia Erepto didn’t strike me as the kind of woman who got hung up on. Or tolerated it. There was no way Mr. Howard wasn’t going to hear about this.

Well, one crisis at a time, I guessed.

I hesitated, and then, just in case, I turned my phone off. I didn’t want to deal with Ms. Erepto calling back.

“Alright, kid.” I slid into the driver’s seat, and the ghost blurred through the door on the other side, hovering above the passenger seat. “Let’s roll.”

Chapter Nine

So, the good news was, I’d found Magda Erepto.

The bad news was that she was in the road in front of the Hotel on the back of some greaser ghost’s motorcycle, doing donuts and whooping it up.

The pair of them were flying over the curb, up onto the carefully manicured lawn and sending other ghosts scattering for cover, Magda’s dark hair streaming loose behind them like a banner.

Charlie was standing in the front door, his big arms crossed in front of his chest, his mustache practically bristling up like an angry cat. He wasn’t the type to put up with a lot of nonsense, which was why I was okay with leaving him in charge. Charlie might be a bit of a wet blanket, but he was a good guy.

I watched as Magda and her fifties beau drove through one of the flower boxes beside the door with a puff of fog, and decided that all this had gone on quite long enough. I couldn’t believe I got dragged off my case for this, but at least I’d tracked down Sophia’s missing grandma.

With a sharp gesture, I pushed my sleeves back almost to the elbows. Then I brought two fingers up, stuck them in the corners of my mouth, and let loose a whistle that would have shattered the building’s front windows, if they’d been made of glass and not whatever ghostie stuff Damon had built the joint out of.

All the ghosts in the area whipped around to stare, including our undead Bonnie and Clyde. The motorcycle rolled to a stop in front of me; the engine silencing itself as I folded my arms, one shoe tapping against the pavement.

“What in the world do you two bozos think you’re doing?” I demanded, real annoyed like.

The greaser ghost guy just rolled the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, somehow not dropping it, and whipped out a comb to smooth back his hair. Ignoring the fact that he was dead and things like the wind couldn’t ruffle him, his hair had enough product in it that I was pretty sure it could have doubled as a helmet, so combing it seemed more like a statement than anything else.

Magda tossed her own hair over her shoulder with a practiced flip every teenager from just about any time period knows instinctively.

“Relax,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “Live a little.”

It would have been cruel to snap at her that she couldn’t ‘live a little’, seeing as how she was dead, so I just sighed instead. Was this how Poppy felt all the time, back when I was haunting her house? I was starting to feel bad for the shindigs I used to throw when I was a ghost. It was just, after being alone for so long, it had been glorious to suddenly be seen by people again, to talk to them. It was like taking a double hit of the giggle water.

I crooked my finger at Magda. “I need to talk to you.”

She pouted, actually pouted at me. If I hadn’t seen her appear as a gray-haired bluestocking all done up and straightlaced, I would have thought I’d nabbed the wrong ghost. But no, this was definitely the right one.

Magda had hiked the skirt of her dress up and done something so that it hung just below her knees, so she could easily kick her leg over the back of the motorcycle. I just shook my head. Then I had a small crisis because, holy smokes, I wasn’t turning into Libby, was I? My zombie ex-roommate made food that was absolutely the cat’s pajamas, but she was a complete Mrs. Grundy about any and everything fun. And the truth was: I’d rather die again than become a square like Libby. There was only so much sewing, cooking, and complaining one woman could do.

I waved for Magda to follow me into the Hotel, but she turned her back so that she could bend over and plant a smooch on the greaser ghost’s cheek.

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