Dead Men Scare Me Stupid

by John Swartzwelder

  Now that I was convinced that the ghosts were real, all I had to do was figure out what they wanted with me. That turned out to be easy too. The two ghosts walked in the door and told me themselves.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Like I said, I’m not exactly comfortable around the supernatural. Because of this, it took the ghosts almost an hour to coax me down from the light fixture, which they finally did with offers of food.

  As I nervously ate the sandwich they had promised me - which was surprisingly good. There’s something about coming out of a pocket that makes food taste better - they introduced themselves. The short tough looking one said he was Fred C. Cramer, of Indianapolis, Indiana. The wiry one was Ed Brannigan.

  “You remember us,” said Ed. “We’re your dead clients. Fred here got killed in the case you call ‘The Great Client Massacre’.”

  I looked at Fred and tried to recall his part in that case. “Uh… head blown off, right?”

  Fred shook his head. “Threshing machine.”

  Then I remembered. “Oh, yeah. Hi.”

  Ed continued: “And I hired you to find my wife’s real killer, remember that case? The one where you kept finding me?”

  I nodded. “Sure. Say, I hope that electric chair didn’t hurt much.”

  “Nah. I kind of enjoyed it. Gave me a buzzy feeling all over. In fact, for awhile there I was thinking of getting one for my house. But then my brain stopped.”

  “I think I owe both of you men an apology. A sincere apology. One that comes from the heart.”

  “Nah,” said Fred, “you don’t owe us nothin’. It was our own fault for hiring such a cheap detective.”

  “Sure,” agreed Ed. “$78.50 for a detective? He’s got to stink, right? We deserved everything we got.”

  “It’s nice of you to look at it that way.”

  “Oh, we’re nice ghosts,” said Ed

  “Very nice,” agreed Fred.

  They beamed at me. There was an awkward silence. It’s hard to know what to say in social situations like this – when you’re entertaining people you’ve recently gotten brutally killed. The etiquette books don’t say anything about it. I know. I checked. Finally I said, just to be saying something: “So… er…how have you been? How has death been treating you so far?”

  “Being dead’s all right,” said Fred. “You get into movies free. So you save money that way. And ice skating rinks. Us dead guys can skate all we want for nothing.”

  “Sure,” agreed Ed. “Being dead’s a goldmine. Savings everywhere you look. No clothes to buy, no haircuts. No expenses at all. And you have fewer worries, too. For instance, you don’t have to worry about your health anymore, or your weight or your sex appeal, because you don’t have any of those things.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “It is.”

  “The other clients you got killed say ‘hi’, by the way,” said Fred.

  “Oh, good.”

  The two ghosts seemed friendly enough, but I still couldn’t help feeling nervous. They were too transparent, for one thing. I don’t like it when I can watch TV through people. Admittedly, it makes scary movies that much scarier, but it makes all the other shows scary too. And that’s no good. Make yourself solid if you want to talk to me. That’s the way I look at it. That’s what I always say. But Ed and Fred couldn’t make themselves completely solid. It had something to do with ectoplasm, they told me. That was their answer to just about everything - ectoplasm. I never could find that word in the dictionary. I don’t know if they made it up or what. Maybe it’s in the dictionary, but it’s invisible, I dunno. Anyway, I couldn’t find it.

  “Well, it sure was swell seeing you fellas again,” I said, finishing my sandwich. “Oh, geez, is that the time?”

  “You should look at your watch when you say that,” said Fred, “not at us.”

  I looked at my watch and started to say it again.

  “Besides,” said Ed, “we’re not going anyplace.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Heck, no. We’re sticking with you.”

  “We came here to help you, pal,” explained Fred.

  “Help me do what?”

  “Everything. Your life’s a mess. You’re the most unsuccessful man in town.”

  “That study was flawed,” I pointed out.

  “But we’re going to fix up everything swell for you. Ain’t we, Ed?”

  “I’ll say we are.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  They weren’t ready for that question. They had to think for a minute.

  “We’re trying to win our wings,” said Fred, finally.

  “I didn’t know ghosts had wings.”

  “Well, we have to win ‘em.”

  “Plus we’re trying to win a bar bet,” added Ed.

  “And we like your face,” said Fred. “Is that enough reasons?”

  “One more.”

  They both thought some more. Finally Ed said: “And you need to do 5000 good deeds to get into Heaven, and we’ve only done 4000.”

  “4,999” said Fred, correcting him.

  “What he said,” agreed Ed.

  “Yeah, well, the thing is, I don’t need any help.”

  “You let us be the judge of that,” said Ed.

  “You’re not thinking straight right now,” said Fred. “On account of you needing our help so much. Isn’t that right, Ed?”

  “Yeah, he’s gone daffy from needing us.”

  “No, seriously, guys, I appreciate your wanting to help me, but I will appreciate it even more when you go away.”

  “Not us,” said Ed.

  “We’re staying,” said Fred.

  Despite my fear of the supernatural, I was starting to get a little annoyed by these two ghosts.

  “Piss off.”

  “Won’t.”

  I don’t like it when people won’t do what I say. It happens to me a lot, so I tend to get madder about it than most people do. “Look,” I said, “I’ll give you two birds just five minutes to get out of here.”

  After a couple of minutes, I regretted giving them so much time. We were all sitting there looking at our watches. This continued through the full five minutes, and well into the three minute grace period. Finally I lost my patience and tried to pick them up by the scruff of the neck and give them the bum’s rush out of my office. But I couldn’t get a good grip on them. It was like trying to throw a couple of bad smells out of your office. You can’t do it. After several attempts to throw them out had failed, I lost my temper and took a swing at them.

  It was like punching nothing at all. No, I take that back. It was like punching my lamp, because my fist went right through them and pulverized a nearby floor lamp. My next punch knocked the couch over. At that point I started swinging wildly, but only managed to destroy all the awards I had ever won, and knock my stamp collection to bits.

  I tried kicking them in the ass, but only succeeded in kicking myself in the face. Fourteen times.

  Then I pulled out my gun and shot my office to pieces.

  Far from being frightened or angry by this display of violence towards them, the two ghosts seemed to enjoy it, even encourage it. They kept popping up in different parts of the room like shooting gallery targets, as I blazed away, cursing. None of my shots hit their mark, but the bullets did manage to destroy whatever valuable thing was directly behind the ghosts. After ten minutes I didn’t have a window or a cherished memento left, and three people who came to complain about the noise were being rushed to the emergency room, complaining about the blood.

  Finally I stopped shooting. I hadn’t calmed down. I was just out of ammo. I threw my empty gun at them, knocking out my last remaining window.

  “Nice shooting,” said Ed. “You almost got me there a couple of times.”

  Fred surveyed the damage to the office. “The first thing we should do to help you get your life back on track is to spruce up this office. You’ll never impress clients with an office that looks like this. C’m
on, Ed, let’s get to work on our good deed.”

  “Oh boy!”

  They both faded away. I didn’t try to stop them.

  As soon as I was sure they were gone, I picked up the phone and called the cops.

  “There’s two ghosts bugging me,” I told the desk sergeant. “Get over here quick.” Then I gave him my address and tips on the quickest way to get to my office at this time of day. “Better use your siren,” I advised. “And you might want to fire your guns in the air as you drive. That will make people get out of your way quicker.”

  “Ghosts, eh? What exactly do you want us to do about these ghosts, Mr. Burly?”

  “I want you to get rid of them for me, obviously,” I said. “I want you to serve and protect. Haven’t you read the side of your car lately?”

  “The thing is, we’re a little busy down here at your local police station right now, Mr. Burly,” he said, politely. “We have a lot of real crimes to deal with, and unfortunately that means we have less time than we would like to deal with screwballs.”

  “Well, crap…”

  “Tell you what, why don’t you come down and file a report – better yet, why not mail us your report? That way the ghosts can help you fill it out. You could even include one of the ghosts in the envelope as evidence, if you like. And the other ghost could be the stamp. Say! That would get rid of your ghost problem, wouldn’t it?”

  I was beginning to lose patience with this polite, but less than helpful, underling. “Get me your Ghostbusters Unit,” I demanded.

  “We have no Ghostbusters Unit.”

  This started a different argument. I said I’d seen the movie personally several times and knew all about the department’s celebrated Ghostbusters Unit. He said he’d seen the movie as well, and it was his impression that the Ghostbusters were a private concern that had nothing to do with the police department. At least, not officially. I said that wasn’t the way I remembered the plot of the film. He said I should see the movie again, and pay more attention this time. I said I would when my schedule permitted, but suggested that it would save time if he would just connect me with his Ghostbusters Unit right now. At that point he transferred me to someone else in the department, who spent ten minutes trying to talk me off the ledge he thought I was on. Finally I hung up. I’m not on any ledge.

  As I hung up the phone, the two ghosts came in the door carrying a new lamp to replace the one I had punched to pieces, some windows they had found on the floor below, and a large sack of money. Ed handed the money to me. I asked what it was for.

  “We figured a guy who runs a cut-rate operation like yours, and dresses and smells like you do must need money pretty bad. So we got you some.”

  “Hey, thanks. Where’d you get it?”

  “Bank.”

  “We dropped some on the way here,” Ed admitted. “But most of it is still in there.”

  I looked out the window. Policemen were slowly following a trail of money that led from the bank to my building. Fortunately, thanks to passersby picking up souvenirs, and the wind picking up and carrying away even more, the end of the trail had been blotted out just before it reached the door to my building. When they got to the last bill, the policemen had to just stand there scratching their heads, and leaning on my doorknob. So I caught a break there.

  “Hey, look you guys,” I said, “You’re going to get me into trouble if you’re not careful. Bank robbery is a crime in this state.”

  “We’re way ahead of you,” said Ed. “We left a note at the bank clearing you of any involvement in this. In fact, we left lots of notes.”

  Fred nodded. “We wrote your name all over the place. Even on the walls. With the guard’s blood.”

  I spent the next twenty minutes trying to hit them with the sack of money. You’d think I would have learned after the first blows went right through them without harming them that the next three hundred would too, but I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking, I guess.

  While I was hammering away at them with the sack, a potential client entered my office.

  “Mr. Burly…?”

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” I said, smashing Ed with the sack, and firing a bullet through Fred’s head.

  The man stood there watching this for a moment, then slowly backed out the door and down the stairs. The last I heard he was in Ohio, still walking backwards. So there went that job.

  Finally, I gave up. I won’t say I had learned my lesson, I won’t go that far, but I did stop. It had finally gotten through to me that the sack wasn’t doing anything. Nothing I had done to get rid of the two ghosts had done anything. I decided that it would be easier to just get rid of me.

  So, while they were looking through the closet for other things I could hit them with - they were helpful, I’ll give them that - I fled. They wouldn’t be able to help someone they couldn’t find. Nobody can do that. Nobody’s that helpful.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They already knew where I lived and where I worked, but I was confident that they didn’t know where I hid.

  My usual place to do that was in a dumpster in an alley a few blocks from my office. Dumpster Number 7 had always been a good spot for me. People would find me in Dumpster Number 3. Easy. Might as well have been sitting on top of it. And they’d usually drag me out of the other dumpsters after a half hour or so. But they never found me in good old Number 7. It was lucky for some reason. I had hidden there so often in recent months, I was starting to get credit card offers there. And that’s not a joke. Credit card companies don’t send you offers like that just to be funny. They want your business too much to make jokes about it.

  Five minutes after I had arrived at Number 7, and gotten myself settled in, and was looking around for something to eat, I noticed I wasn’t alone.

  “This place is even worse than your other place,” said Ed.

  “We’re going to have to fix this up too,” said Fred, with a trace of annoyance.

  They began discussing ways to spiff up the interior of the dumpster. Fred thought a velvet painting on the lid might help. Ed thought a couple of throw rugs were the key. As for the rats, Fred was for throwing them out, while Ed felt brushing their teeth would be enough.

  I didn’t hang around to take part in this discussion. I was off and running again.

  Over the next week, I guess I must have hidden just about everywhere you can hide in Central City: In out-of-the-way motels, where the bellhops who carried my bags up to my room turned out to be Ed and Fred; in hobo jungles, where the mulligan stew kept saying “Hi, Burly”; in Dumpster Number 7 again, where there wasn’t room enough for all three of us to sleep - we finally had to hook two dumpsters together; in the city sewer system where I hid under an unusually large turd, which turned out to be Fred; and so on - from one great hiding place to another. Did you know there’s a small rusted out hole half way up the suspension bridge over the Central City River that you can wedge yourself into? There is. And did you know there are ghosts in there waiting for you? There are.

  I tried everything to throw the ghosts off my trail. I even tried changing my appearance. But the cut-rate plastic surgeon I went to didn’t do anything except put both my eyes on the same side of my face. That didn’t fool anybody. Just grossed them out.

  Everywhere I went, Ed and Fred were always there too. Usually they got there around the same time I did, or a little before. Sometimes they showed up later, complaining about the traffic. But whenever they found me, they always immediately went to work, doing everything they could to make my life better.

  The first thing they did was make sure that money was no problem for me in my travels. When I walked down the street, everyone around me had their pockets picked, with the money miraculously floating through the air and into my pocket. Sometimes cash registers would float out of nearby shops into my waiting arms. And armored cars tried to follow me home. I like money as much as the next guy, but this way of getting it made me uncomfortable. I knew it didn’t look good.

/>   People kept asking me for explanations for these strange events. They wanted to know how they happened – the physics behind them. I told them I didn’t owe them any explanations. They said no, but they’d appreciate an explanation just the same.

  Finally I figured out a way to stop the constant questioning. While they were still gaping at the sight of their life savings floating slowly into my hand, I’d instantly demand: “How did that happen? What did you just do there?” Get the jump on them, see? Take control of the situation. They’d stammer out something like “Well I don’t know.” And I’d say “Well you better figure it out, because it looks pretty strange to me.” Usually they’d just mumble something about sunspots or something and hurry away. So that’s how I solved that problem.

  Another problem that the ghosts inadvertently caused me was when they tried to get my detective business some free publicity.

  “Look,” said Fred, handing me a copy of the Central City Times, as he and Ed were helping me hide from them under a toll road, “we got your name in the paper. That’s got to be good for business.”

  I looked at the paper. It had a small picture of me, along with the caption: “Local Detective Suspected In String Of Robberies.” There were other articles about me on the inside pages, most of them in connection with hold-ups, kidnappings, burglaries, and other major crimes. Practically the whole paper was about me. Okay, publicity is good, I acknowledge that, but I was worried this was the wrong kind of publicity I was getting. But try to explain that to Ed and Fred.

  My two ghostly helpers even took a crack at pepping up my love life for me.

  “You seem to lead a pretty lonely existence here behind this mailbox,” said Ed, with concern, after he had found me hiding from him behind it. “That doesn’t seem right, a big good-looking guy like you.” He looked around the street for a moment, then spotted what he was looking for. “You like that woman?” He pointed at a tall blonde crossing the street.