by T Paulin
“Is the term client or customer?” Eli asked.
“Hmm. When people say client, it sends a certain message. Drug dealers have a clientele. Lawyers call their criminal defendants clients on the witness stand. Client sounds like a euphemism.”
“Okay. Customer it is.” The navigation system automatically included the day’s date, and Eli added Ghost Hackers Customer #1 to the address in the database.
Khan frowned at the navigation display as he crossed three lanes without using the signal light. “Better make it client after all. Customer makes it sound like they’re buying a ghost from us.”
“But it’s already in there. I’ll have to drill down through three menus to change the label.”
Khan grumbled an order, “Do it like the devil wins a court case.”
“What?”
“The devil wins a court case without arguing, Eli.”
Eli thought about that for a minute while he scrolled through the menus and changed the label. In this hypothetical court case, was the devil the prosecutor or the defendant? Well, that question pretty much answered itself. But… if the devil was so powerful, how did he let himself get arrested and charged in the first place? Was it all an elaborate ruse to get more souls?
* * *
Khan took a detour from the route and careened the van into a parking lot. They were at an army surplus store Eli had seen before, but never really noticed.
The store looked like the kind of place where Khan bought all his clothes, so Eli wasn’t surprised when they walked in and a guy greeted Khan by name, shouting it across the store jubilantly.
“Diesel!” Khan yelled back. “Did you ever get those angry polyps checked out?”
“I think I’ll keep them, actually. One of them looks like you, and the other one’s handsome.”
Khan and Diesel did an elaborate multi-step handshake and finished by bumping chests.
“Check out my new hire,” Khan said, nodding at Eli. “Low milage. Thinks on his feet. Can take a full blast from the booster without crying.”
Eli beamed with pride. So many nice things were being said about him. He shook Diesel’s hand.
Diesel was approximately forty, broad in the chest, and looked and smelled like he’d just completed a forty-eight-hour road trip. He had long, thick, black hair, pulled back and tied with what appeared to be a garbage bag twist tie. He had a thick stubble of facial hair, mostly dark, but with two white lightning bolts on either side of his mouth.
Eli experienced a strange wave of recognition that would be incredibly awkward to explain. You see, whenever he played a video game that allowed him to choose an avatar, he’d built this man—Diesel—from the boxer shorts up.
The resemblance was uncanny. And the name—Diesel—was even better than anything he’d come up with. Eli looked away quickly, embarrassed by his awe.
“Great shop you’ve got here,” Eli said, his voice deeper than it had ever been, scratching new depths on his vocal chords. He glanced around at the racks of cargo pants, olive green T-shirts, and broken-in boots. The three of them were the only ones in the warehouse-style store. The only other sound was the whirr of the ceiling fans high overhead.
Khan said something in a low voice to Diesel, who then walked over to one of the clothing racks and started tossing olive green garments at Eli.
“Anything with a stain is half price,” Diesel said. His voice was as unique and manly as the white lightning bolts in his beard.
Eli ran his fingertips across the soft T-shirt fabric, noting the tell-tale pilling. All these clothes had been previously worn, which was not a desired quality in a garment for Eli.
But, he wanted to make his new boss happy, so he took the clothes and walked over to the curtained-off changing rooms. He looked in the mirror at himself, and the clothes he’d thrown on that morning in the rush to leave the apartment—his polyester short pants and work uniform shirt. Apparently, he’d been on autopilot.
As he stripped down and tried on the new-to-him clothes, he thought about this notion of autopilot. He did a lot of things while in that mode, only slightly more conscious than Brenda during her alleged sleepwalking/sleep-eating.
What was autopilot, anyway? He disappeared sometimes when he was driving, and that couldn’t be safe. He’d be thinking about the storyline from one of his comic books, lost in another world, then would notice the clanging of the underground parkade’s gate opening. He wouldn’t remember the drive home, so who or what had been driving the van?
Eli stared at himself in the room’s narrow mirror.
There. He’d gone on autopilot yet again.
He was wearing army surplus clothes, and he didn’t remember putting them on. He turned from side to side, checking himself out. His medium brown hair looked glossy in the store’s bright lighting. Despite a few stains on the T-shirt, he looked good.
Really good.
In fact, he had a strong feeling that somewhere, out in the big world, somebody was creating a video game avatar that looked exactly like Eli Carter.
This made him smile.
He could hear Khan and Diesel arguing over something on the other side of the curtain. They had to be talking about a video game, because Eli could swear he heard the word Ray-gun.
Chapter Seven
When Eli stepped out of the changing room, he found Khan and Diesel wrestling on the bare concrete floor of the store.
Eli quickly looked away, embarrassed. He browsed the nearby racks, selected some more clothes to try on, and went back into the changing room.
The guys kept wrestling and grunting.
Being an only child, Eli hadn’t wrestled with siblings. Being a social outcast, he hadn’t wrestled much with friends, either. Most of his “play wrestling” happened with his girlfriend, in bed, which would explain his discomfort at seeing the guys locked in a playful embrace.
He tried on more clothes and took a photo of himself to send Brenda, to get her opinion.
He expected her to hate everything, but she replied back with a simple message: HOT!
Eli imagined there would be more “wrestling” in his future.
On the other side of the curtain, Diesel and Khan had resolved their differences and were taking free shots with a basketball.
Eli made his clothing choices, came out, and paid for everything. He’d kept on one of his new army surplus outfits, right down to pre-worn socks inside his new-to-him boots. He folded up his delivery uniform to stuff in a bag, even though he wanted to dramatically toss the polyester clothes into a garbage can.
Diesel gave him the fifty percent stain discount, but then said he was adding a ten percent surcharge for being friends with Khan.
Eli assumed the guy was joking, but when he got out to the van and reviewed his receipt, he saw the charge on the paper:
Friends With Khan 10% Bastard Surcharge.
“Um,” Eli said.
“What now?” Khan steered the van into a spin-out in the near-empty parking lot.
“Never mind.” Eli’s goal for the day was to be a good employee and impress his new boss. Complaining wasn’t in the plan.
“Eager to get to work?” Khan launched the van onto the busy street, narrowly missing a city bus. “I’m glad we got that poltergeist call. This is going to be an easy one.”
“A slam dunk, you said.”
“And a home run.”
“I just want to do a good job so you don’t regret hiring me.”
“This job is so easy, you could probably do it without me. What do you think, my man? Could you do it without me?”
Eli looked down at the receipt in his hand. “Without you, I would have saved ten percent on these clothes.”
Khan grabbed the receipt, read it, and laughed loud enough to drown out the angry honking from the cars he was cutting off as he wove through traffic.
* * *
“This is going to be a piece of cake,” Khan said as he turned onto the client’s street. “A walk in the park.” He pulled the van
up to the house. “Easy peasy.”
Eli pressed his lips together to keep from arguing. It had been a thirty-minute drive, and he was sick of hearing about how straight-forward and easy this job was going to be. Sick of it, and worried.
Khan wasn’t just tempting fate. He was giving fate rude hand gestures while hitting on its girlfriend.
They both jumped out of the van and started unloading the bags through the sliding passenger-side door.
Khan nodded toward the house and said, “Not bad.”
The home was painted purple, and looked to be three stories, including the attic. Its classic heritage style was popular with the restoration crowd. This one had either been lovingly maintained through its century of existence, or carefully restored. Each segment of the exterior had a different shape of wood shingle, painted in hues of purple. The gingerbread trim curling around the eaves was a pale, acid yellow-green. Eli would not have guessed those shades of purple and green looked so perfect together, but they did.
As they walked up the front walkway, a car with muffler problems grumbled along the street behind them, followed by two cars street racing, drivers and passengers yelling out of the windows.
Eli looked up at the stained glass windows on the middle floor, then down at the empty liquor bottles discarded in the home’s meticulously-weeded flower garden. This place was what Brenda would call a dream home in a compromise neighborhood.
Khan pressed the button for the doorbell. Instead of bells or chimes, the house emitted an angry buzz. Khan jabbed the doorbell in a staccato rhythm. The house buzzed like a hornet’s nest being struck by tennis balls.
After a full minute of buzzing, Khan turned to Eli. “Are you sure you got the right address?”
Eli held up his arm. The numbers scrawled on his skin matched the swirly wrought iron numbers on the house. But were the numbers on his arm correct? Back when he’d taken the call, Khan had rattled off random numbers to mess him up. Then again, Eli had been sure of the address when he wrote it down. There’d been no doubt in his mind. And this house was purple, just like the guy had said.
Eli gestured for Khan to step back off the welcome mat. “He said to let ourselves in and get started if he wasn’t home.” He pulled back the edge of the mat.
Lo and behold, there was the key. The late morning sun glinted off the metal surface, making it shine like a beacon. This had to be the house.
“Are you sure?” Khan asked.
Another noisy old car, full of yelling people, rolled down the street behind them.
“Here’s why I’m sure,” Eli said. “This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where everyone leaves a key under the mat.”
“There you go. Thinking on your feet, just like I told Diesel. I sure know how to pick ‘em.”
Eli knocked on the door one more time, then unlocked it with the key. “Were you even looking for someone when I came by last week? I didn’t see a Help Wanted sign in the window.”
“I’m always looking.” Khan led the way into the house. “No wonder he didn’t balk at the price. Nice place.”
The home was as attractive inside as it was on the exterior. The odor of new construction hung in the air—the scent of fresh paint, and fresh finish on the gleaming hardwood floors.
Khan pointed to the child-sized boots and shoes scattered throughout the home’s entryway. “A father’s got to protect his kids.” He picked up a child’s yellow rubber boot and frowned. “That’s odd.”
Eli peered around the corner, into the living room. It was bigger than his entire apartment, which gave him a pang of space envy. The room held contemporary furniture with square lines, but not so square as to clash with the gracious old home, with its tall baseboards and high ceilings.
The dark wood floors were clean and smooth, and it seemed like the sort of place where you’d take your shoes off, so Eli set down the bags and knelt to remove his new-to-him boots.
“That’s odd,” Khan repeated, still holding the yellow boot.
Eli pretended to be very concerned with the black shoelaces on his boots. Khan very clearly wanted Eli to ask what was odd, but Eli didn’t want to walk into another prank. He wanted to open the bags of gear and get down to business.
“Hmm,” Khan said, continuing to toss out verbal bait. “Very odd, indeed.”
Eli kept his back to Khan and unzipped the bag he’d carried in. The contents included a black box that looked like a car battery—the booster box they’d used at Mr. Quentin’s house—as well as a smaller version of the same thing.
Eli shuddered involuntarily at the memory of being zapped by the big one. There wasn’t much else in the bag, except for silicon-tipped barbecue tongs, yards of wires and cables, plus a spray bottle.
He shook the bottle and sniffed the nozzle. The smell was instantly recognizable as the thing Brenda sprayed on things she ironed. The scent was lavender, and Eli felt a surge of pride for recognizing it, with bonus points for remembering the word lavender.
Khan had moved on from the residents’ shoes, and was walking around the main floor, looking up at the ceiling and tilting his head to one side and then the other.
He wasn’t explaining anything, so Eli asked, “What’s this lavender water for?”
Khan snorted. “Lavender water is for laundry. What you hold in your hand is watered-down… well, never mind what it is. There are a few uses for the para-spray. Ghosts love it. The airborne ones, anyway.”
“Oh.” Eli sniffed it again, detecting nothing other than lavender. “Should I go and spritz it around the house or something?”
“Let’s check something else first.” Khan beckoned for Eli to follow him into the living room.
The living room was bright, with sunshine pouring in from a single large window. Neither this room, nor the house in general, felt very haunted to Eli. He wondered if this was the right address. It was obvious a young family lived here. Eli had imagined the client as a much older man, but unless a grandfather lived here with the family, Eli had wrongly guessed the client’s age.
“Maybe this is the wrong house,” Eli said. “I’ll call the client back right now.”
Khan ignored him, taking interest in something at the room’s window.
Eli pulled his phone out and tried to call the client. Unfortunately, the call had come in with a blocked number.
Having been a delivery driver for years, he knew how to solve a problem like this. Step one, you call dispatch. He did a quick search for the phone number for Ghost Hackers, programmed it in, and called.
Valentine picked up the phone. “Hello, this is Ghost Hackers.” Her tone was a thin veneer of politeness over an undertow of dark rage at having been interrupted from her work. It sounded like this to Eli: Hello, this is Ghost Hackers. Please kill yourself and never phone this number again.
Eli burst out with apologies and rapidly explained the situation. He asked if Valentine could get the client’s phone number from when he’d called the land line.
She groaned and muttered under her breath about new employees costing her time rather than saving it. She put him on hold by dropping the phone on the desk. He waited, listening to her tap away at a keyboard.
After two minutes, she picked up again and asked Eli for the address he was currently at.
He checked his forearm and gave the address.
“Yup, that’s it,” she said. “The call came from the land line at that address.”
Eli’s left eye twitched. He had a feeling she was telling him that so she could get back to whatever she was doing, but he wasn’t about to call her a liar.
He thanked her and ended the call.
“Valentine said this is the place,” he told Khan.
“Relax. This job is going to be easy.”
Eli clapped his hands. “Bring on the poltergeists.”
Khan nodded for Eli to come over to the window. He pointed to a tray of sprouting seedlings on the low, wide windowsill. “Wanna see something cool?”
“
Of course I want to see something cool. That’s a huge part of why I accepted this job.”
Khan grinned, all square teeth and dimples. “I thought you accepted the job because you had a crush on Val.”
“Your sister is beautiful, but she’s way out of my league. Also, I have a girlfriend that I live with. Brenda. She’s small, and sometimes she kicks me in the kidneys, but it hurts my feelings more than it hurts me physically.” Eli paused, aware that he was blathering, yet unable to stop himself for longer than it took to inhale. “All the other girls I’ve dated dumped me within a week or two, and Brenda was the only one who stuck. We slept together on our third date.” Eli wanted to stop blathering, but Khan was such a good listener. “The first time only took forty-two seconds. I know because I was counting.” Eli grimaced, but still the words kept pouring from him, with about as much control as he’d had over himself on that fateful third date. “It wasn’t anything like how you imagine it will be. There was a lot of apologizing.” Finally, with a tightening of his throat, the confession slowed. Eli swallowed, then concluded with, “Speaking of apologizing, I’m very sorry I just told you all that.”
Khan’s grin hadn’t faltered. He just nodded and pulled from his pocket a teeny, tiny silver pistol. It looked, to Eli, like a novelty cigarette lighter. The item was, in fact, not a novelty cigarette lighter, but Eli whistled and said, “Sweet lighter,” anyway.
Khan raised one eyebrow. “Did you say forty-two seconds?”
“I’d like for you to forget I said any of that. And please don’t tell Valentine. I don’t think it’s possible for a person to die of embarrassment, but I’d rather not find out.”
“Oh, a person can definitely die of embarrassment,” Khan said with an air of authority. “Ever hear of spontaneous human combustion? You can read about it in some of our old case files.”
Eli straightened up and stuck out his chest. Embarrassment hadn’t killed him yet, and with the quantity he’d endured, his current existence seemed a miracle.
Khan held the silver gun in one hand while he arranged the potted seedlings into a straight line. “Prepare to be amazed.” He grabbed the nearby watering can and doused the plants in water. “Diesel didn’t want to part with his latest find, but I twisted his arm while you were in the changing room. Literally.”