Ghoul Interrupted (29 page)

Brody turned left into the hospital parking area. “Sure, M. J.,” he said easily. “I’ll be discreet.” He then used his key card to get us into a section reserved for hospital staff. “I’ll take you in with me and get you patched up before the official start of my shift,” he said, finding a slot to slide his truck into. “That way you won’t have to wait for me to get a free minute. You’ll have to fill out paperwork afterward, but at least this way it’ll be quicker.”

I thanked him and we headed in.

 

As it turned out, I did have to wait. Heath didn’t come to collect me until nearly nine o’clock, and by then I was so hungry I could’ve wolfed down a crusty old pizza and been quite happy about it.

When my S.O. finally did come through the double doors, he brought Gilley along, and I was so relieved to finally see them that my irritation ebbed a bit.

“How’s your hand?” Heath asked the moment he found me in the waiting room.

I held up my palm, now covered in gauze. “They tell me it’s not fatal.”

He grinned. “Good to know.”

“You spend too much time in hospitals,” Gil said, handing me a bag with a club sandwich, fries, and a chocolate cupcake in it.

After peeking inside, I sighed happily. “God love you, Gilley Gillespie.”

“Come on,” Heath said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “You can eat in the car. We’ve got some news to share.”

I ate rather ravenously while Heath drove us back to the hotel. “I see you got your car fixed,” I said diving into the sandwich the moment my butt landed in the front seat.

“Rocky’s fast,” Heath said. “Too bad he doesn’t do construction,” he added.

That reminded me of his house and I asked, “Have you heard from the insurance company?”

“Not yet, but they said it could take a week before the fire department sends them their final report.”

“Let’s just hope there’s no clause in your insurance policy excluding damage caused by paranormal activity,” Gilley said from the backseat.

Heath eyed Gil soberly in the rearview mirror. “No kidding. I’m just glad that no sparks flew when you and M. J. were in that jail cell.”

I felt a small jolt go through me (no pun intended). “Oh,” I said, “that
would’ve
been bad!”

Gil fished around in his backpack and held up an orange canister. “I was prepared,” he said proudly.

“What’s that?” I asked him, squinting in the dark.

“It’s a travel fire extinguisher,” he explained. “I’m thinking of making it part of our standard ghostbusting equipment from now on.”

“Good thinking,” I told him, and thought how funny it was that even three months ago I would’ve made fun of him for buying such a thing.

“Did Pena say anything about your car being in the middle of the road with a flat spare?” I asked Heath.

Heath glanced sideways at me. “Naw. I think he and Cruz got into another fight about the existence of the demon. He was in a really bad mood and didn’t talk much.”

We arrived at the hotel shortly after I polished off the last of my sandwich, and Gil brought Doc into our room so that my birdie could get a little one-on-one time with us while we discussed what to do next.

Once Gil had handed over Doc to me and I’d placed him on the arm of my chair, he surprised me by thrusting out his left foot and yelling, “Drumstick!” He then set that one down and stuck out his right foot, looking down at it he repeated “Drumstick!” Then he went back and forth from right foot to left in a little birdie cancan, calling out “Drumstick, drumstick!” While I sat there both stunned and horrified, my sweet, sweet birdie finished his chorus by ruffling his wings, singing, “And buffalo wings!”

For the next several minutes Gilley and Heath were lost in a fit of laughter. Doc felt encouraged by this, and began a long litany of fart noises, interspersed with the occasional repetition of the birdie cancan.

Meanwhile I concentrated a stern glare at Gilley, but he didn’t notice for several rounds of drumstick. “What?” he asked innocently when he finally saw my furious face.

“Why?”
I roared.

Gil gave a half shrug. “You leave me alone with your bird all day, darlin’, and you know I’m gonna think up something new to teach him.”

I sighed and offered Doc a peanut. He stopped with the farty noises and cancan almost immediately and dug into the shell.

“Can we please focus here?” I grumbled when Gil and Heath continued to rib each other and chuckle. Only to a couple of guys would that disturbing feathered comedy routine be funny.

They both cleared their throats and mumbled apologies. “So!” Gil said, setting his iPad on its kickstand and getting out his keyboard. “Heath tells me you walked right into another imprint today.”

“I did,” I confirmed. “We found a small vortex in a cave up in the foothills, and that amplified the energy enough to toss me right into one. I was able to see Daryl on the day he found the vessel which held the black hawk spirit, and I also caught a glimpse of what the sacred pot looks like.”

“I hear Daryl wasn’t alone,” Gil added as his fingers began to fly over the keys.

“He had a partner. Some guy named Wyatt.”

“Did you get a last name?”

“Nope.”

Gil frowned. “That’s going to make it a little trickier,” he said.

“I can describe him,” I told him.

Gil looked up from his tablet screen. “Shoot.”

“Tall,” I said. “About Heath’s height with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes.”

“How old?”

“Uh . . .” I had to think about it for a second. “I think around our age, maybe a little older. Early-to-mid thirties.”

Gil typed away and I wondered if he was hacking into law enforcement records as we spoke. “There’s nothing about a guy named Wyatt in Cruz’s e-mails,” Gilley said, which let me know exactly where he was getting his info.

“Yeah, but aren’t you only looking in the e-mails you sent from Cruz’s computer to yours?” I asked. “I mean, there could be mention of him in one of the older e-mails.”

Gil gave me the patronizing look that someone who considers himself a mental giant might reserve for someone exiting the short school bus. “I’m
in
Cruz’s e-mail, M. J.”

I felt a small burst of alarm. “How did you get into his e-mail from here?”

“I reset his password, and put a tracer on his e-mail so that when he reset it again, I’d get a text and voilà! I can root around in here at will.”

“Gil!” I snapped. “Don’t you think he’s gonna
notice
that?”

Gilley remained unfazed. “Oh, relax!” he told me. “He’s never going to notice unless we’re both in his e-mail at the same . . . uh-oh.”

Gilley sat forward and his typing took on some urgency. “What’s happening?” Heath asked into the prolonged silence that followed.

“Gilley just tipped his hand,” I said, crossing my arms and shaking my head at him.

“It’s fine,” Gil said, and a few keystrokes later he sat back and wiped his brow. “Phew!”

Gil smiled winningly at us then and found us looking expectantly back at him. “Right,” he said, hunching over the keyboard again. “Wyatt something . . .”

“Why don’t you start with Daryl and see if that leads us to Wyatt?” I suggested.

“I’m already on it,” Gil said, like he didn’t need me to remind him.

And then I remembered that the two grave robbers had mentioned something about a professor. “Hey, Gil?”

“Busy,” he said, his fingers still flying over his keyboard.

I ignored him and continued with, “While you’re looking into Daryl, see if he was enrolled in any of the local colleges or universities.”

Gil stopped typing and looked up at me. “Why?”

“In the imprint, they mentioned taking the vessel to someone they called ‘the professor.’ I’m thinking that maybe they were enrolled in some sort of class with someone who might’ve been an expert on Native American artifacts.”

I didn’t think it was possible, but Gilley’s fingers actually typed faster. After several minutes he finally said, “Aha!”

“You found Wyatt?” I asked.

“Uh, no.”

“Did you find the professor?” Heath offered.

“Er . . . no to that too.”

“Then what did you find?” I said impatiently.

“An address for Daryl,” Gil said.

I stared at him. “How does
that
help us?”

“Maybe you can ask some of his neighbors if they know this guy Wyatt,” Gil suggested.

I leaned back in my seat and Doc fluttered on the arm of the chair, sensing my irritation. “A lot of legwork was something I was hoping to avoid, Gil. I mean, isn’t there anything else out there in cyberspace on Daryl or his buddy Wyatt?”

“Not according to public records,” Gil replied. “I mean, I’ve got some charges levied against Daryl for grave robbing and a DUI a few years ago, but nothing traceable to any other involved party.”

“Crap,” I said, realizing this was going to be harder than I thought. “Okay,” I conceded. “Heath and I will go root around Daryl’s place tomorrow and see if we can’t come up with a little more information.”

Gilley stretched lazily in his chair. “While you two are off doing that, I’m gonna call Gopher and see if I can’t bum some equipment from him.”

“I thought we were buying it with the two grand Pena was giving us?” Heath said.

Gilley did the short-school-bus look again and said, “Why pay for what we can borrow?”

“Take a temperature check with him too, will you, Gil?” I asked. I was worried that our producer was going to start getting impatient with the amount of time we were taking off. “Make sure we still have jobs to come back to once we finish up here.”

Gil tapped his lip. “Good thinking. Make sure we’re all still employed before we ask to borrow expensive equipment.”

After that, we all turned in.

“What a dump!” I whispered when Heath pulled to a stop in front of a run-down mobile home at the very back of a trailer park in a rather seedy section of Los Alamos.

The trailer was weatherworn and in a bit of a shambles, with paint peeling off battered siding and decaying wood. The windows had paper taped over them and the door looked ready to fall off its hinges.

The yard was littered with beer cans and trash all in various stages of decay. An old milk box held up one side of a set of wooden steps leading to the door, and I wondered who’d be brave enough to step onto those going either in or out.

“I don’t want to get out of the car,” I admitted.

The door to the trailer suddenly popped open, and an elderly woman with curlers in her hair and a cigarette hanging from her wrinkled lips eyed us with suspicion.

“Looks like we’ll have to get out and talk to her,” Heath said.

“Yippee,” I said woodenly.

We hopped out and approached the trailer, being careful where we walked. The whole place smelled of smoke and mold, and the combo caused my stomach to bunch. Still, Heath and I both pressed forward on our mission to find out more about Daryl West and hopefully his buddy Wyatt. “Hi there!” Heath said, all friendly-like.

“What you want?” the woman snapped.

I held back the urge to correct her English.

“We’re here about Daryl,” Heath told her, getting right to the point.

The woman’s suspicious eyes turned downright hostile. “He ain’t here.”

Her answer surprised me somewhat, as, by the looks of her, she’d be the type to tell us he was dead and to go away and leave her alone. I wondered suddenly if she’d been told about Daryl’s fate. I also wondered if she was related to him. Either way, she didn’t seem like someone willing to tolerate a lot of questions. Whatever we asked about Daryl, we’d have to ask carefully. “Actually,” I said as nonchalantly as I could, “we’re really trying to find Daryl’s friend Wyatt.”

The old lady continued to scrutinize us, and puff on her cigarette, which was in serious need of having its ashes knocked off, lest they dribble onto her housecoat. . . . Oops. Too late. “What you want with Wyatt?” the old lady asked, swiping at the ashes now dirtying her clothing.

Heath and I exchanged a look and he nodded to me to take the lead. “We need the expertise of a friend of his,” I said.

“Expertise?”
she said, mocking my word choice.

I was careful to hold my distaste for her and her mocking tone in check. “Yes, ma’am. Wyatt told us that if we ever found anything that needed to be . . . uh . . . appraised, then we should go see this guy he knows. A guy he calls the professor.”

The old lady cocked her head, pulled the cigarette butt out of her mouth to tap it on the side of the trailer before flicking it with two fingers onto the dirt a few feet from where we were standing. I refused to flinch. “Why don’t you just go to Wyatt’s?” she asked next.

“We couldn’t find it,” I said quickly. “I mean, I’ve only been there once, and I’m having a hell of a time finding it again.”

“Why don’t you call him?”

I held up my phone and wiggled it. “My old phone got stolen last week, and I never backed up the contact list. I had to start from scratch all over again.”

“So how’d you find us?” she asked, and I assumed that the “us” included Daryl.

“Information,” I said. “He’s listed at this address.”

I had no idea if that was true or not, but I hoped that she wouldn’t check before she helped us.
If
she helped us, that is.

The old lady rolled her tongue around for a few moments—and I wondered if she was playing with some ill-fitting dentures. Finally, she said, “I ain’t seen either Wyatt or Daryl in a week.”

I nodded like that didn’t surprise me.

“They go off sometimes together when they come into a little money, and then Daryl don’t come home for a few days and when he does, he’s usually drunk off his ass and not a penny to help me pay the bills.”