Bustin'

by Minda Webber

  "Don't know about his talent, but I did hear that Andy only paints one scene, over and over."

  Sam raised an eyebrow, encouraging her uncle to go on. Myles lit a cigarette, rolling it beneath his fingers.

  "Well, sweetheart, that's the problem. Andy only paints cans of soup."

  Sam laughed. "This wealthy aristocratic vampire prince has a castle full of soup can paintings?" Since the royal vampire's move to Dodge about eight months ago, she had been curious about him. Unfortunately he was rarely in town, and when he was in Dodge, the Prince ran in a different circle. Her circle was more square. Prince V. was an extremely attractive vampire with raven-dark hair, and he was considered to be a top-notch heartbreaker, painting the town red with his arm candy when in residence. Sam might be cute and even sexy at times—when she went all out—but she wasn't anybody's arm candy. She wasn't even a main course—especially not for a bloodsucker. Her IQ was too high, being in the triple digits, and she didn't have the kind of legs that stretched from here to eternity.

  Rumors were that the Prince was descended from Peter the Great. His vampire heritage was less clear, although it had been suggested that Prince Petroff Varinski was descended from Vlad the Impaler. Prince V. was said to be over six hundred years old—old enough now to stand the early morning hours of daylight as well as the last few hours before twilight.

  She chuckled. "Just think. Instead of Rubens or Toulouse-Lautrec's can-can dancers, this very royal Prince is stuck staring at Campbell's commercials. How fitting for his very expensive American castle."

  Myles shrugged. "I hear he's a straight Joe." That lingo meant the Prince wasn't a people person—at least not one with a taste for people. He might snack a little on a human, but he wouldn't drain them dry.

  "So, he's into synthetic blood then?" Sam remarked thoughtfully. "Good. Much safer that way." She could trust this playboy prince with her neck, just not her virtue. Though that particular problem probably wouldn't come up. "Okay, so Andy's ghost has got to go. Who's next in this lineup of silly squatters?"

  Myles chuckled. "I thought you'd never ask, doll. We got ourselves a galloping gourmet. A ghostly one. His name's Jules, and he's a regular wine guzzler. He's fighting with Varinski's human chef, who's fit to be tied by her apron strings. Which by the way Jules has done to her, along with throwing crepes and Russian caviar all over the place and sucking down their oldest, boldest wines with a vengeance."

  Sam pursed her lips, thinking. She bobbed her head as a realization lit her up like a bulb. "Of course! The famous Chef Jules. He died, what—ten years ago? He cooked for royalty and was a renowned winer."

  "And apparently he still is. Hence, he's at the Prince's castle, and is creating a real stir. And no matter how many cans of it are painted, you know the saying: Too many cooks spoil the broth."

  "Even if one of them is dead," Sam agreed. "Or maybe more so when one of them is dead." She shook her head, since everyone with any sophistication whatsoever knew that chefs' temperaments were more notorious than those of artists. "The Prince really does have a ghost of a problem. So give me the rest of the story. Who's behind door number three?"

  Myles crushed out his cigarette, narrowing his eyes. "You ain't gonna like this one, angel. Rasputin."

  She gasped. "The Mad Monk? The monk connected to Czar Nicholas and his wife Alexandria? That monk?"

  "Yeah, doll. That's the one. The worst apple in Varinski's barrel."

  Pursing her lips tightly, Sam shook her head. "Rasputin. That's not good. Not good at all." The Mad Monk had been almost impossible to kill when he was alive: poisoned, drowned, stabbed and strangled—all in one night. Which was amazing, since the mad, bad monk hadn't been a shapeshifter or a vampire. Now that Rasputin was dead, it would be even harder to get rid of him. But she didn't really have a choice; her family's business was on the line. If Prince Varinski had hired Monsters-R-Us to do this ghost removal, then he would continue to hire them for any other properties he had. And he had plenty. Sam could not afford to lose this kind of business or publicity. Not now. She couldn't wait for her ship to come in.

  "I'll just hijack the damn boat." she muttered.

  "Is the castle on a boat?"

  "No, just thinking out loud. When will the Strakhovs do the removal?"

  "They're tied up for a few weeks. They have a couple of scheduled jobs around here, and of course they have to track those trolls they missed tonight."

  "Serves the supernatural-business-stealing bullies right," Sam declared emphatically. "Now, what about the Prince? When will he go to the castle?"

  "He's out of town for a few weeks more. Traveling on business across the country."

  Sam smiled like the cat that ate the cream. "Well, if those Strakhov brothers think I'm going to let them claim royal clients from right under our noses, they've got mush for brains."

  Myles stared at her. "What do you have planned in that pretty little head of yours?"

  "Capitalism at its finest." Her self-satisfied smile grew bigger. "Real competition. I intend to go up to the Prince's castle and clear out those ghosts before Prince Varinski comes back—and before the Strakhov brothers know what's hit them. Bogie will just have to work the rest of our jobs alone for the next week or two."

  Myles raised an eyebrow. "For a bird, you're getting foxy. Still, I'm not so sure about this. You always think you know what you're doing, that you're too slick to get into trouble. But a lot of things could go wrong on this deal, Sam. Russians can be a crafty lot. They're smart apples, all in all. A determined people, able to endure a licking and keep on ticking."

  Sam agreed—and disagreed to a degree. "I'm not worried. We beat them at the atomic race and the space race, no? I think some Yankee ingenuity can beat them at the race to see who gets whose ghost. Besides, I'm like the Canadian Mounties—I always get my ghost. Especially if it will get Nicolas Strakhov's goat. Er, and never mind that the Canadian Mounties are Canadian."

  And again, she really didn't have much of a choice. Right now, necessity was the mother of both invention and outlandish strategies. "I'll clear out the ghosts. Once that's done, I'll explain to Prince Varinski that my ghost extraction and relocation were a courtesy service provided to show him how efficient we Triple-P'ers are. When I prove how good we are, he'll forget all about the Strakhov brothers, comrades from the Mother Country or not."

  "You can't just show up on the doorstep, doll!"

  "I can if I'm the prince's latest squeeze." Her uncle looked shocked. "No way, Sam. I am putting my foot down. You ain't ever gonna be some Russian vampire goon's floozy!"

  Patting him on the shoulder, she replied humorously, "Of course not. The Prince isn't in residence. I'll just say he told me to go ahead of him until he can meet me. That way I have free rein of the castle. I'll clean the suckers out before the bloodsucker arrives. Then, when he does show up, I can give him a clean bill of health. See? All's well that ends well."

  Myles shook his head. "I still don't like it. You got a dark passage and a deadline. If you miss, there is gonna be one dead reckoning—and I hope you ain't the one dead. You gotta remember, sweetheart, that these aren't angels with dirty faces, these are vampires with bloody fangs. And crazy ghosts! Don't let 'em tuck you in for the Big Sleep."

  "I won't." She hugged Myles, loving him for being his usual goofy but caring self. He had been a fixture in her life for as long as she could remember, and in spite of his living out every 1940s Bogart movie, she wouldn't have it any other way. Family was family. And if they didn't love her, who would?

  No Use Crying Over Spilt Milk—Unless It's the Last Carton

  Sam had gotten an early start on her trip to Prince Varinski's castle, dubbed Mandelay. After a three-hour drive, she found herself headed up the winding gravel path to the castle. Staring out her window she took in the beauty of the place: dark green lawns with huge flowering rhododendrons, large shaggy bushes sculpting themselves against the gray-black rocks of the coastal cliff, and gnarled trees twisted
by the sea's high-saline winds lined the background.

  Ahead of her the massive castle, four stories tall, was isolated on a tall cliff overlooking the ocean. The gray stone was covered with ivy that wrapped its tenacious tentacles onto the stone like a lover's embrace. Built back in the 1880s, this was a standing monument to the wealth of the Gilded Age.

  "Nice homey little place. If home happens to have twenty kids and twenty sets of grandparents," she muttered to herself. Still, Sam had to admit that she was a little surprised, as she had been expecting something more along the lines of Frankenstein's castle.

  When the butler opened the door, her impression of the place was again one of vastness and wealth. The floor was white marble with deep blue veins. The walls were also stone, with magnificent tapestries in place and an odd can of chicken soup splashed here and there. She didn't have to be a genius to know that Evil Andy the Spook had been hard at work.

  The butler was a retiring man in his sixties. He had a spare frame and was dressed to the nines in a dark suit with a white shirt and a very starched collar. He looked very nifty, Sam observed.

  "I'm Mr. Belvedere," he informed her.

  After a lot of lying and false smiles, the butler seemed to accept her explanation that she was the Prince's latest squeeze. In fact, the butler seemed delighted to finally meet someone connected so intimately with the Prince. It seemed he had yet to meet his new employer.

  Sam was shown to a spacious bedroom on the second floor of the castle with a lovely ocean view of rocky coastline and foamy white waves. Taking in the view, she allowed a big grin to cover her face as she congratulated herself on her deception. Just wait until Nicolas "client-stealer" Strakhov found out that she had scooped him on this phantom pest parade! She'd bet the sneaky Slav would be green with envy, and she couldn't help but wish to be a fly on the wall or an invisible woman when he discovered her deceit.

  Leaving her room, Sam discovered more signs of the brush-wielding bogey. It seemed Andy had been a busy little ghost. Not that it took much detecting skill. Huge cans of soup were painted haphazardly all around the castle. Sam shook her head. Andy wasn't much of an artist.

  Familiarizing herself with the grand old residence, she finally found herself in the castle kitchen, where the cook Mrs. McCutcheon was busy creating a masterpiece of a cake with chocolate cream frosting. Sam smiled. Anything with chocolate was a masterpiece to her way of thinking.

  Within minutes she and the cook—"Rebecca"—were good friends, and Sam sat down to tea. She also got a piece of that marvelous cake. After savoring the first few bites, Sam got down to business: "I hear you've been having a few problems with an apparition named Jules."

  Rebecca McCutcheon groaned. "That ghost is a monster! He's also a cocky, crabby chauvinist chef," the cook added bitterly. "He believes that a man's place is in the kitchen and a woman's place is to peel his potatoes. He's also jealous of my pastry-making."

  Sam had to agree. This lady had a way with desserts. "So, give me the scoop. What does Jules do and when does he show up?" She could tell that this was just more than a cook and wine steward's sour grapes and cooking envy.

  "He throws food, curses in French, guzzles the wine, makes the pots and pans fly," Rebecca explained angrily. "He is an evil ghost. An evil ghost, banging his pots and pans and making my sauces boil over, while he flies around the room swigging sauvignons. And I make a much better quiche," she added smugly.

  "Horrible. The fiend." Sam didn't really see a major tragedy, but if the cook wanted to bellyache, Sam would let her. After all, everything was relative in life. What was one cook's demon could be another's devil food cake.

  "That fraudulent foreign chef makes the milk go sour in the cream for my pastries. It's tragic. Tragic," the woman complained tersely, her pretty round face red with indignation.

  Sam nodded politely. She had seen other ghosts do much worse things than throwing temper fits with food and pans or getting soused on good wine, but then again this wasn't her kitchen and Sam hated it herself when milk went sour. There was always that first bitter, surprised gulp, followed quickly by a curse and milk spewing everywhere. Still, there was no use crying over the stuff.

  "That idiot thinks he's so special, since he studied in France. Like a Frenchman's taste buds are better than my own hardy Irish stock. He's always bon appétit-ing me. As if I'm too stupid to know what that snooty spectral is doing when he ruins my food or what he's saying in the meanwhile."

  Suddenly, the cook began speaking in French. Sam watched in fascinated amusement as the woman got her Irish up, but she couldn't tell what the cook was spouting since she didn't speak any foreign language except goblin. She also didn't know if the cook was repeating the ghostly chauvinist chef's curses or simply showing off her knowledge of a foreign language.

  "English, please," she suggested.

  "Sorry. Sometimes I forget myself. But I am so angry. That madman of a spook won't leave my utensils alone. Sometimes I see him with a bottle of wine and a ladling spoon. Sometimes I see him with his faux chef's cap. Sometimes I find pastry cooling on the cabinet shelves—pastry I didn't prepare. The ghost is a fiend. Imagine, leaving his pastry to cool on my shelves? His favorite is chocolate-covered éclairs, but he uses too much cinnamon," the cook confided.

  Sam's mouth had begun watering. Perhaps she could entice Chef Jules to spend a few months at the old Hammett home. Her brother was a decent cook, but he still didn't do desserts.

  Helping herself to another small slice of cake, she quickly took another bite, closing her eyes in ecstasy as she tasted the sensual softness of the creamy frosting. Eating chocolate was her favorite activity, even more than making love or riding dragons.

  "I don't know what I'll do when the Prince arrives. What will he think when the kitchen is covered in potatoes au gratin and cream puffs with green slime? That temperamental menace even throws grapes!"

  "Ah, the grapes of wraiths. Unfortunately I've seen that before." The image wasn't a pretty one, not Sam's ideal decorations. "Perhaps I might talk with Jules. I have some experience in ghostly manifestations," she bragged slightly.

  "You do?" Rebecca McCutcheon's voice was full of admiration and awe. Her assistant, Beverly, a girl in her early twenties, with a lush figure, quickly joined the adoration society.

  Sam explained briefly a few of the things she could do to handle the temperamental chef. When she was done, she checked up on the other situations. She left with an earful from the cook's assistant about Rasputin. Of all the ghosts he was the worst, which wasn't a big surprise to Sam. In life Rasputin had been evil; she doubted death had sweetened his disposition.

  So, Andy was an artist with awful taste and bad technique, but he just wanted to be universally loved for his originality. The galloping ghostly gourmet, Jules, was a spoiled, chauvinist chef who had a tendency to drink too much wine, even in ghostly form, and who had a really nasty temper. But Rasputin was the ghost of a different color. In fact, he was downright dangerous. It appeared that the afterlife had had no good effects on the malicious, promiscuous poltergeist whatsoever. He was still into drinking himself stupid and arranging orgies in all shapes and sizes, and his favorite place to play and disrupt lives was the library, where he was known to appear at all times of the day and night.

  Hoping to learn a little more about the galling ghost, Sam sat down in the library for a couple of hours, waiting for a sudden flash of white or signs that the vodka on the sideboard was beginning to diminish. But she waited in vain.

  As she rose to leave, sighing, a little kitchen etiquette reminded her that a watched pot never boils, and a mad, bad Russian monk who had been a ghost for almost a century would probably appear when she least expected it. He'd want to get the drop on her so to speak.

  "Ha!" A ghost would have to get up pretty early in the day to get the drop on her. She was a good egg but a hard-boiled ghost detective, and she hadn't lived with her uncle so long without some of his detecting skills rubbing off on her. "Mr
. Rasputin, you don't stand a ghost of a chance with me," she warned the empty room—just in case the malevolent monk was playing hide-and-seek. "I'll be back, and then you can just make my night."

  Five People You Meet at an Orgy

  Shaking her head, Sam glanced again around the castle's large library, which was filled with the Prince's servants. Everywhere people were in states of undress, with the loud strains of "The Stripper" blaring from a CD player. The room was now filled with candles of all scents and sizes, and was oozing lust like a leaky sieve. The mood, Sam reasoned was supposed to be one of romance, with buckets of champagne littered here and there, but it would be a cold day in hell before she would consider this group romantic.

  Sam was too stunned to be totally repulsed, and a faint curiosity was wending its way through her brain. She watched in morbid fascination as if watching a train wreck in slow motion.

  "Well, well. This is certainly a hot time in the old castle tonight. And it isn't even a demon convention, just a devilish ghost with lust on the brain," Sam muttered, her fingers pattering a beat on her jeans. Yup, Rasputin was at it again, and it appeared that his old black magic, that same old feeling he had engendered while alive, was alive and well even though he was dead.

  The beyond-plump housekeeper, Mrs. Winters, who was not a day under sixty, was dancing a tango in her slip for the head gardener. Mrs. Winters, a woman who had greeted and treated Sam with a frosty civility, had evidently begun to thaw considering the way she was gyrating her hips. To make matters more bizarre was that the good-looking gardener wasn't resisting; he seemed more than willing to plant some seed in such an abundantly fertile and willing field, even though Mrs. Winters was December to his May-ish twenty-four. But then, in orgies, anything went. At least, that was what Sam thought. She really wasn't up on her orgy etiquette.