Can I Kick a Ghost in the Nuts?

by steve higgs

  Patience is a plus size girl with boobs bigger than my head and a whole lot of junk in her trunk. Her default setting was loud, which right now meant that eighty percent of the office could hear her and were subsequently covering the mouth piece of their headsets so the person at the other end would not also hear her. She has more attitude than anyone I have ever met and did not care what anyone thought about her or it.

  She dropped a three-pack of Krispy Kreme donuts on her desk and lowered herself into the chair. There was only one left in the pack, her lips were glistening with powdered sugar and as I watched, the last bite of dough-nut number two went into her mouth. She didn’t break eye contact once. I felt a bead of sweat roll onto my collar.

  ‘Good morning, Patience. How are you?’

  ‘Don’t you try that Disney Princess, white girl, butter wouldn’t melt shit with me. Where the fuck have you been?’

  ‘I was in Paris.’ There was no point in avoiding the conversation. She would get it out of me soon enough.

  ‘Paris? What’s in Paris?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, there is the Louvre, the Arc de Triumph, several…’

  ‘Nuh-uh. You know what I meant. I sat next to you all of last week and you never once mentioned that you were going to Paris for the weekend. So, something changed.

  ‘I was on a date.’ I conceded.

  ‘A date?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Paris?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With a man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you better start spillin’, girl. I need to hear all about your fuck-fest weekend.’ Patience instructed while talking a gulp of coffee and reaching for her final breakfast dough-nut.

  I took a sip of my tea and from behind my mug quietly admitted that there had been no sex. Patience’s eye nearly popped out of her head with shock and I knew I was in for a grilling. Thankfully at the same moment Sergeant Butterworth looked up from his desk.

  ‘Do you mind, Patience?’ asked Sergeant Butterworth. ‘Some of us are trying to work. I believe that if you turn on your computer there will be work for you to do also.’

  She fixed him with a look, her eyes bugging out at him like she could not believe that he had the audacity to interrupt her conversation. ‘Excuse me? Did you just interrupt me? Do you have no manners at all?’ Sergeant Butterworth was now out of his chair and coming across the office.

  ‘Patience, I need you to do some work.’ he said as he approached her work area. ‘I shouldn’t have to have a fight with you every day just to get you to do your job.’

  Patience leaned forward a little in her chair and indicated with her head that he should come closer. He came forward another step and leaned down.

  Patience hissed. ‘We are having a very private and personal conversation about Amanda’s vagina. Would you like to pull up your chair and join the conversation? Do you feel that you and your vagina can give us some insight as well?’

  His face turned purple and he opened his mouth to respond but Patience wasn’t done yet.

  ‘It’s hard for us girls here, surrounded by dicks all day. Sometimes we need lady chats and we shouldn’t have to feel bad about that. I should be able to talk about my period and the awful cramps I’m getting any time I like without being made to feel bad about it. If you got a problem with it maybe I should talk to HR.’

  As Sergeant Butterworth skulked angrily back to his desk Patience chuckled to herself. ‘See, girl? All you have to say is period or vagina and men run away terrified. Now, let’s get back to your broken vagina.’

  ‘Patience, my vagina isn’t broken.’ I replied, my voice distinctly more hushed than hers.

  ‘The fuck it is. Why else would you spend a weekend in Paris, on a date and get no dick?’

  ‘I spent a pleasant weekend with a gentleman, Patience. Such men still exist.’

  ‘Oh. So, he’s gay then?’

  ‘No… At least I am pretty sure he is straight. There was plenty of passionate kissing and there was something very hard digging into my hip while we did it.’

  ‘Hold on. You spent a weekend in Paris in the same hotel room and you did not have sex. How do you manage that?’

  ‘We had separate bedrooms.’ I answered.

  ‘You had… hold on, what kind of hotel room has more than one bedroom?’ Patience was staring at me now, her mouth a quizzical hole in her face.’

  ‘Um. The penthouse.’ I said quietly.

  ‘The penthouse!’ she shrieked. ‘OMFG! Who were you with?’ Everyone in the office turned to look at us. Sergeant Butterworth’s head looked like it was about to explode

  ‘Do you remember I told you about Brett Barker?’ She immediately swivelled to her computer screen, booted it into life and typed his name into a search engine. ‘Well, he asked me to go to Paris with him, so I went.’ As I finished speaking his face appeared on her screen.

  ‘Babe. Your new dick is rich. And when I say rich I mean Kanye West style rich.’ The picture on her screen was a good one that showed just how handsome Brett really was. ‘Girl, that man in fine. How did you not get sucked into the dicksand this weekend?’

  Just then the Superintendent walked into the room and with a quick, ‘Oh shit.’ Patience put on her headset and made it look like she was working.

  Thankfully we were busy then and I could avoid further interrogation for the rest of the morning.

  A Case for Me Monday October 18th

  I heard a text ping through on my phone about half an hour before I was due to take my lunch. I ignored it until my break time came around but pulled my phone from my bag as I stood up to head to the canteen. Patience and I had different lunch break times most days so I would be able to put off telling her about Brett for a bit longer yet. There wasn’t really anything to tell. Apart from that he is gorgeous, ridiculously rich, incredibly well-mannered… I could go on, but I was trying to ignore that he was literally perfect.

  The text message was from Tempest to tell me that he had a case he didn’t have time for right now and to ask if I wanted to look into it. He had forwarded me the email from the prospective client, so I switched to my emails to see what it was.

  This would be my first case.

  The client was the manager of the Pentagon Shopping Centre in Chatham. I knew it well. It was looking a little tired and worn but then Chatham was not really a place one went shopping unless you already lived there, and the indoor area, which was probably quite a draw forty years ago was now losing ground to bigger, brighter indoor shopping areas within an easy driving distance. He reported that he had a ghost living in his elevators. There was a poor-quality picture attached that showed two girls illuminated in the flash of a camera and man standing behind them. Each had a startled expression but the focus of the photo was the blurry, indistinct shape next to the man. It looked like a ghost, if one was willing to believe in such things of course. I could see through it so I had to admit that it had a certain ethereal aspect. The client’s email went on to say that a number of shoppers had suffered frights as the elevator they were travelling in lost power. The lights would go out and in most cases the elevator stopped moving, but only for a second or so. Shoppers had reported that their possessions, mostly shopping bags full of new purchases had gone missing and several had reported that they had felt a draft or had felt something touch them or brush past them in the confines of the elevator. Then there was the picture captured by the two girls.

  So, we had an unexplained mystery that the client was willing to pay us to solve. It was damaging his sales, he claimed and the shareholders were squeezing his nuts to get the punters back in and the problem resolved before the Christmas rush started in a few short weeks.

  I emailed back to Tempest telling him that I would take the case and would go directly to the Pentagon when I finished my shift this evening. In the meantime, I would contact the client and arrange for him to meet me because it would be after shopping ho
urs when I got there.

  I ate the salad I had brought with me for my much and drank a glass of milk. My lunchbreak was nearly over so I used the facilities and went back to my desk just as Patience was getting up to take her break.

  She made it clear that I still needed to spill the beans on my weekend but hustled off to get her lunch leaving me to settle back behind my desk. Today the pair of us were dealing with converting calls into dispatching uniforms in response. It was often tedious and it was not what I was usually assigned to do but in the dying days of my career with the Police it was what they had given me. I slipped my headset on again and the afternoon drifted away, absorbed by myriad minor incidents.

  It got really quiet around three o’clock so I pushed my chair back a bit and stretched without getting up.

  Patience swivelled to face me. ‘So?’ she asked.

  ‘There really isn’t much to tell.’ I started.

  ‘Don’t give me that shit. You spent the weekend in Paris with a multi-millionaire Adonis. There has to be shit to tell and if there isn’t shit to tell then you need to tell me what the hell is wrong with you.’ Patience had fixed me with a look that made it clear I wasn’t going to get away without telling her all about it. I opened my mouth to speak but she already talking again. ‘That man is fine with capital letters. F – I – N – E. If he had taken me to Paris for the weekend I would have ridden him like a pony on a carousel. That boy would be ruined for all other women for eternity. That’s how good sex with me is, girl.’

  I stared at her, slightly scared and very much in awe of her self-confidence. Maybe she was right. Was I stupid to have resisted sleeping with him? Had he expected me to and through not fulfilling my end of the bargain had I now ruined any chance of a second date? My mind slowly started to drift, filed with thoughts of Brett naked. I was willing to bet that sex with Brett would be good. Maybe really good. I was ready to bet that he knew what to do with a woman.

  Suddenly Patience’s voice cut through my fantasy. ‘Girl, are you even listening to me? I know that look. You are thinking about sex with him right now, aren’t you? You have that look in your eye and a stupid grin on your face.’ I shook my head and cursed myself silently.

  Patience had crossed her arms and was glaring at me. ‘If there was no sex then tell me about the romance. I am single and need to hear that romance still exists for someone.’

  I conceded and spent the next twenty minutes describing the hotel, the opera, the first-class seats on the plane, the first-class treatment everywhere we went and how he had been such an absolute gentleman all weekend. She was amazed that he went to the trouble of opening doors for me, shocked and envious that he had bought me a dress that was so expensive it didn’t even have a price tag and had then bought Louis Vuitton luggage so I could get it home, and she was utterly confused with how I hadn’t thrown myself at him when we had kissed passionately in the elevator. I had shrugged and said that it was too soon to be falling into bed.

  Then she asked when I was seeing him again and I didn’t have an answer. Should I text him? Thus far all the pursuing had been done by him. Was that fair? Would he welcome an invitation from me? Did I then invite him to my flat and make him dinner? I certainly couldn’t stretch to a night at the opera with champagne. What if he turned up in a Bentley or a Lamborghini? It would get stolen in seconds outside my place in Maidstone.

  ‘Patience?’

  ‘Yes, Honey?’

  ‘How long do I wait before I text him?’

  ‘Girl you don’t need to text him. Wait for him to text you.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Why? Girl how is it that a woman with an ass like yours is so dumb about men still? He spent all that money, he wined and dined you and treated you like a queen because he wants to get at that ass. Until you give it up you don’t have to do shit. After that, then maybe you got to call him or do things for him once in a while. Right now though, that boy is yours. Make him work for it.’

  I mulled that over.

  ‘How long since you last saw him?’ Patience asked rhetorically then answered her own question before I could speak. ‘A few hours, right? You saw him yesterday. Don’t you go looking all pathetic and needy by calling him just because he is hot and rich.’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’

  ‘You promise now?’

  ‘Yes, Patience. I promise that I will not call.’ She seemed satisfied finally. ‘For how long?’ I asked.

  This prompted another lecture about being the one that is chased rather than the one chasing. It went on for a while, interrupted only by us having to actually do our jobs. Patience was single as well and I wondered if her stance on approaching men or putting herself into a relationship was holding her back from changing her relationship status. I kept my mouth shut on that subject though.

  Author note:

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for downloading this extract from my new Novel. Amanda Harper is a character that grew from a series of stories I began writing some years ago about a chap that finds himself accidentally marketed as a Paranormal Investigator. She appears for the first time in her own story which you now have the first 4 chapters of – sorry for the tease, but I really want you to buy the book! It will be released on May 1st and is available for pre-order now for £1.99.

  If you want to read something else for FREE before committing, the first book in the Blue Moon series – Paranormal Nonsense, in which Tempest and Amanda tackle a serial killing vampire wannabe is available for FREE on Amazon now.

  Here’s the link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Paranormal-Nonsense-Blue-Moon-Investigations/dp/1521508887/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522167450&sr=8-1&keywords=steve+higgs

  And get your FREE copy of “Zombie Granny” when you sign up to my VIP mailing list. Here is the link: https://stevehiggsbooks.com/?s=success