Every Breath You Take

by Chris Marie Green

  “Job well done,” I said as me, Louis, and Randy drifted past the humans and out the open front door. We did it so subtly that they never even felt our chill.

  “Ish a job well done for you,” Randy said, looking more hangdog than ever.

  “What?” I asked. “If you wanted to have the honor of extracting a confession, I gave you a chance. Don’t bitch about it now, Randy Randall.”

  “I know.” He perked up slightly. “Maybe next time?”

  The boy killed me. He really did. But, darn it, I had a soft spot for Randy, seeing as he’d been the first to teach me the ropes of Boo World.

  “Yes,” Louis added from the other side of me, sounding a little more oomph-y now that we’d exposed another creep. Well, maybe not oomph-y, but somewhere in the vicinity. “Maybe next time.”

  I smiled at both of them, until I saw Amanda Lee’s Bentley pull to the curb down the street, under a palm tree. Through the windshield, I could see she was dangling something.

  It was the wad of cash that Rosilee and Victor had directed us to. They’d hid it from Julia, burying it in a metal box in Rosilee’s backyard at the house Julia still hadn’t sold. Rosilee had had the foresight to protect some of her assets from Julia, the executor of their parents’ will, after Julia had started showing signs of greed. But Rosilee and Victor had no clue that their sister would kill them eventually.

  Good old money. As far as Amanda Lee and I were concerned, neither of us needed the fee we’d started requiring for our services. Amanda Lee had made good investments over the years, and I sure as hell couldn’t spend any moola. But she’d been anonymously dropping off the bucks we made from each case to the best friend I’d had before I’d died, Suze. I refused for Amanda Lee to give her charity money—I felt good earning it for my friend.

  As we flew toward her car, a cascade of other spirits gathered about a hundred feet down the street. Amanda Lee either couldn’t see or hear them, or she was just so used to our freakin’ fan club that she’d learned to block them out.

  Louis shook his head. “Any minute, they’ll be jostling to be the first in line for our next case.”

  I turned to them and tried to be polite about this. “Not now, okay? We need to recuperate!”

  “Aw,” said one spike-haired boy ghost who looked like he wasn’t more than ten.

  “You’ll be first in line soon, kid.”

  He stomped away.

  Like it was cool to send a little ghost away, huh? I only wished I could help them all, but there were my killer’s other victims who had to come first, and Amanda Lee already had her own pet cases backlogged. And those were just the pro bono ones.

  After I gave Amanda Lee a sign that the spirits had dispersed, she rolled down her window and said, “It never ends.”

  “Ain’t it the truth?” Randy said but, unlike me and Louis, Amanda Lee couldn’t clearly see or hear him, so she didn’t react.

  I nodded toward the money she was still holding. Now that Rosilee and Victor had gone to the great beyond, we were free to cash in.

  “Can you slip that into Suze’s mail slot today?” I asked.

  Amanda Lee tucked the bundle into a pocket in her artist’s shirt. “Certainly. Before I get to that, though, we have another crisis to avert.”

  Both Louis and Randy sighed this time.

  “You don’t need to deal with this, guys,” I said. “Scram?”

  Randy gave me a half-mast salute. “Don’t mind if we do.”

  He conjured a travel tunnel, a big circle of artery pink hanging in the middle of the air. With a snap of speed, he flew into it. The thing swallowed him, then closed behind him and disappeared.

  I looked to Louis, who had his hands in his uniform pockets.

  “Off to a library?” I asked.

  It was his favorite place to be, reading over shoulders, learning everything he hadn’t had time for while he’d been alive. Total brain.

  “I was thinking of it,” he said.

  “Enjoy. Thanks for your help today.”

  “What there was of it.”

  Before I could console him, he brought up his own travel tunnel, dove into it, and whooshed away to his stacks of books and knowledge.

  Amanda Lee rested her hands on the steering wheel. “I don’t know what to do for him. I wish . . .”

  “We could help.”

  Our gazes locked. We’d been through a lot together, Amanda Lee and me. Things like her manipulating me into haunting a confession out of the supposed killer of her girlfriend, Elizabeth. Things like enduring how my own murderer had tossed major havoc into our lives only a few weeks ago.

  As she gestured for me to squeeze over the gaping window and into the car, I had the feeling that this crisis she’d mentioned wasn’t our usual haunt-to-confession case.

  So I didn’t go anywhere. Not yet. “Tell me about it.”

  Now she sighed, clutching the steering wheel and getting straight to the point in a very Amanda Lee–like way. “I’m afraid we’ve got some ghost hunters who’d like nothing more than to, as you would say, go all Rambo on you, Jensen. How is that for our latest round of trouble?”

  All I could do was laugh and listen to the Talking Heads start up their song in my head again.

  Same as it ever was . . . Same as it ever was . . .

  2

  As usual, Amanda Lee had put a car battery on the floor so I could recharge, and even though I knew that having it lying there made her feel like she was driving around in a junker from Sanford and Son, it was the cost of our purpose in life. . . . It was also because of my need to juice up again after each haunting.

  She’d already given me the basic scoop on the ghost-hunting team, but she wasn’t done just yet. “These kids are . . . What would they call it nowadays?” Amanda Lee said as the car rolled west, toward Elfin Forest. “Fame whores. Yes, I believe that’s the term.”

  “I’ve seen people call each other that on the Internet.” The battery was giving me a raging buzz, so I was trying not to sink into a stupor.

  “Then with all the TV watching and Web surfing you’ve been doing in your attempt to ‘get with the times,’ you’ve noticed that everyone these days will do anything for their fifteen minutes of fame. Except those fifteen minutes everyone used to get are more like a week these days. You’re not very much of a somebody unless you’ve got a Twitter account with a million followers, or even a YouTube show, such as these kids do.”

  “So, you’re telling me that fame whores are pretty much . . . everybody who’s alive today?”

  Amanda Lee thought about that for a sec. “Not everyone. But close.” She shook her head. “In any case, these ghost hunters are hungry for exposure and a chance to have a show on a ‘real’ TV channel, and they’re using your story to get there. But you know what my thought is on that?”

  “Let me psychically try to guess.” I held a hand to my head and closed my eyes, and said, “Ohmmmm . . .”

  When I opened my eyes, her brow was cocked.

  “How adorable you are, Jensen. Sincerely. But I’d like to give this team just enough information about you so they will wrap up their investigation and go on to the next spectacular ghost story on their agenda. That way, we control the information they feature on their show, and then they leave us in peace as soon as possible. You don’t want any more media attention than you’ve gotten in the past, and this is our chance to have the final say on your case, as far as the public knows.”

  I let that sink in. Amanda Lee’s reasoning for keeping the hunters out of our businesses sounded simple, practical. But something gnawed at me about having the hunters around, something bigger than inconvenience.

  I didn’t want my murder used as entertainment, and, believe me, I’d seen enough modern shows to know that death wasn’t as sacred as it used to be. Sure, people were still afraid of it now,
but they didn’t respect it. Back in my day, we didn’t have CSI cameras diving into the guts of a victim for everyone’s viewing pleasure. We didn’t watch court trials on TV and root for someone who looked like they might be guilty. The fact that some ghost hunters were poking around my murder made me feel kind of like I was being victimized in a tabloid way.

  And I didn’t want to be remembered on earth as a victim. Being a missing person without a gruesome death story was way more dignified.

  Amanda Lee might’ve felt my vibes on this, because it was like she was veering away from the deeper part of our conversation.

  “Meanwhile,” she said, “we’ll be keeping our eye out for your killer in Boo World—and we’ll take all the time we need to accomplish that. No one will force our hand.”

  That was pretty clutch, but . . . “Are you also afraid that these ghost hunters might draw my murderer back to me again? Is that why you came up with this grand plan?”

  “The notion did cross my mind. It’s also occurred to me that he might have already forgotten about you and become obsessed with his other victims who still might be in this dimension, and that’s the reason he’s hasn’t come back.”

  “Oh, he will.” I covered the car battery with my essence, absorbing all the juice I could. “He will.”

  Amanda Lee had set that jaw of hers, and I knew she’d already begun to construct the throw-them-off-the-scent story she wanted to give the hunting crew. It was like her determination had already doubled.

  I asked, “So, you didn’t give the crew the details about my murder when you met them this morning? They still think I just went missing and was never found?”

  “Jensen.” She sent me an indulgent smile. “First, you know I’m discreet. Second, didn’t anyone ever tell you ‘Don’t give away the milk for free’?”

  “Ah.” I’d heard my mom tell me that when I was little, but it’d been about boys, not ghost hunting. Still, I got what Amanda Lee was saying.

  She continued. “I negotiated a small consultation fee for your Help Suze Fund. In exchange, I’ll be doing an off-camera interview this afternoon, after they complete some more research. I assume I’ll be portrayed as one of those shadowy, mysterious figures who knows all about you because of my psychic skills. The team was quite excited, because my story should add some weight to the show. They told me they were going to hire a psychic, anyway, but I showed up first.”

  I was still back on the consultation fee, already adding up the money in my mind. Maybe Suze won’t have to reach into her savings again for rent this month! Excellent.

  “There is one slight issue, though,” Amanda Lee said.

  Isn’t there always? “And that would be . . . ?”

  She cleared her throat. “I have a strong sense that they don’t take me as . . . seriously as I’d like them to. They think I’m rather daffy.” She looked miffed at that. “But they’ll be persuaded soon enough. All I need you to do is listen to how the interview is going and guide me through it, should I need some assistance.”

  I lifted a hand from the battery, pointing at Amanda Lee. “This had better not be another séance situation, where we’re putting on a fake show for the humans. You remember how that turned out.”

  “For heaven’s sake, it isn’t remotely the same. I’m not trying to get any information out of them. I’m trying to push them away from you.”

  Well, she should’ve been dismayed by my comment. She’d let my murderer out of his limbo and into my dimension during that séance.

  The tires grred over the road just long enough for the sudden tension in the car to expand until it almost made the windows bulge. Then again, Amanda Lee and I were always traveling over some kind of rough patch.

  She tried to smooth this one over. “Just so you know, this interview shouldn’t last for more than a few hours. Afterward, I’ll be going to Ruben’s. He’s still under the weather.”

  “That man needs to get to a doctor. He’s been sick for weeks.” Thank God we had something else to talk about now. Good old Ruben.

  “His machismo won’t allow a doctor’s visit.”

  “Men.”

  Amanda Lee nodded. She wasn’t so much into the male variety, but she appreciated how tough they could be to deal with. Not that I’d had a ton of experience in life myself, seeing as my own flesh-and-blood boyfriend had gone off to college, unknowingly leaving me behind to wallow in a growing depression. He was in his fifties now, not the boy I’d fallen in love with, but it still smarted to think about him. . . .

  Eh, enough about Dean. Next thing, I’d also probably be groaning and moaning about another boyfriend I’d had more recently . . . or, should I say, the spirit who used to visit me, pretending to be the young version of my real Dean from the eighties? That jerk had left me behind, too, after manipulating my emotions with his masquerade. Even now I didn’t know who or what fake Dean was—I just knew he’d rejected me when I hadn’t literally given him my soul.

  Both of them could stay in the past, as far as I was concerned.

  My almost heart thudded dully, while Amanda Lee slid me a look. “Men.” She paused. “You said that word as if—”

  “We are totally not going to talk about boyfriends.”

  She lightly braked the car, probably at a light or stop sign. “All right, Jensen. But if you ever need to talk . . .”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  Okay, that had been weird. Like Amanda Lee fancied herself my big sister or Mommy Dearest now.

  She went back to what we’d been talking about, which was much safer, thank you.

  “You do realize that Ruben still has your bracelets. Do you want me to pick them up for you while I’m there?”

  “No, I don’t need those anymore.” I had a total love-hate thing with the rubber Madonna-type bracelets that I’d been wearing on my murder night. Turned out that my killer had taken them from my dead body and planted them in my friend’s car in Elfin Forest, where we’d been having a party. They’d found the bracelets in the vehicle, not realizing what part the jewelry had played in my murder. As far as they knew, I’d gone missing only that night, and they had no idea that a killer had been playing a sick game with them by sneaking into their car and leaving a demented taunt after he’d made me dead meat.

  I’d thought that those bracelets might be some kind of big clue in my murder, but it turned out that we didn’t need them now. Ruben, who’d been hired by Amanda Lee to look into my case, had worked some ex-cop PI connections of his to test the jewelry. Bummer that they hadn’t been able to find any DNA evidence on them after all.

  It wasn’t that I needed to identify my killer to eventually send him to hell or whatever there was waiting for bad men like him. But if I knew his name, then I could’ve researched him and maybe used what I knew about his personality against him. You know, like a know-your-enemies kind of thing?

  It’d been a good idea while it’d lasted.

  I could tell by Amanda Lee’s silence that she was already past the bracelets, thinking again about those other girls my killer had murdered. I’d tried to find them in Boo World, just like I’d tried to look up all of my dead relatives, and especially my parents, but it wasn’t like we had Ghost Facebook here. We had to rely on the spirits we met in passing for info, and, in this case, there were none.

  We’d now entered the road that went through the forest, and all I could see from my place on the floor was the cavern of oak branches arching past the windows. Into the woods, I thought. Toward the ghost crew.

  I could feel that we were also near the abandoned, sweet little cottage I’d started living in . . . er . . . haunting recently. Amanda Lee felt it, too—I could tell by her stiffening body language. She was so not stoked that I’d moved out of her Rancho Santa Fe casita to strike out on my own.

  We passed the entrance to the road that led to my place, and, eventually, she pu
lled the car to the shoulder. I drifted up to peek out the window.

  Trees guarding on both sides of the blacktop. A road leading to what seemed like nowhere.

  When I glanced at Amanda Lee, she was still stiff. I wondered if she was about to ask me if I’d mind giving her a peaceful hallucination so she could relax before the interview. It wasn’t like I would, though—it was too much like giving her drugs, and I’d done her that favor only once. The woman totally needed therapy, for sure.

  I slipped out of the cracked window, waiting for her, already feeling the lure of my death spot nearby.

  Had the ghost crew discovered the place where I’d been murdered?

  “How did they find out where I died when the police couldn’t even do it?” I asked.

  “As far as I know, they haven’t. But they’ve certainly come close.” Amanda Lee began walking into the woods. “They’ve done their research, so they guessed at the vicinity.”

  Her boots crunched through the leaves and shuffled small rocks as we wound through the pygmy oaks, whose branches wormed over the ground and burst into thick fingers of wood. Higher branches made it darker, weaving over the June sky more with every passing minute.

  As we walked, I saw something straight ahead near a large rock shaped like an arrowhead. I paused, hovering, trying to detect any awful energy nearby, because that was what I felt every time my killer’s dark spirit was near. Caution was always a good idea these days.

  But the air was just as swamped with normal energy as usual. Phew.

  Had I even seen anything behind that rock, anyway? Was it the witch of the woods? Because I didn’t want to ever meet that chick, to tell you the truth. She had a bad rep, riding around on a ghostly black stallion, darkness surrounding her with a cloak. Rumor had it that she cursed anyone who entered the woods, and bad things would happen to you if you ever returned. She and the so-called White Lady had cornered the market on ghost stories here in the forest—I’d know, too, because my friends and I had come to the woods that night to scare each other silly by telling tales to each other over a bunch of beer and loud music from a boom box.