Just Kill Me (17 page)

He looks over a notepad and moves his head around like a worm has crawled up his nose and he's trying to help it get comfortable. “I seem to recall that when you applied you had unlimited availability,” he says. “It's part of why we hired you.”

“That's gonna change once classes start anyway.”

I don't mention that I haven't actually registered for community college yet, and that I'm thinking I'll probably wait until at least the winter semester, when I won't be as busy with tours.

He mutters something about how this is why they shouldn't hire students, and I decide I just can't take it anymore.

Fuck it all.

I rip the Band-Aid off my lip ring as dramatically as possible, drop it on the ground, and stomp out of the store, storming through the parking lot, onto the sidewalk, and toward my house. On the way I text Cyn and tell her I'll be there in plenty of time for the tour.

Kacey sends me a text:

WORK WIFE:

Doug wants to know if you quit.

I tell her I did and she says she just might join me.

She won't, though. She'll be here for years, the poor unfortunate soul. Probably not as long as Doug, though. One day some funeral-parlor owner will bury him with his name tag still on.

I get home with enough time to grab a shower, do my makeup to make myself look a bit older, and put on a nice goth-casual ensemble. I'm ready to go with enough time left over to set fire to the porta-potty-blue uniform in the charcoal grill in the backyard.

I roast a hot dog off the flames and eat it on the way to the train station.

On Clark Street, Edward Tweed and Aaron Saltis say, “Rolling with the rotters.”

The Al Capone Tours guy says, “Ghost girl!”

Terrence the caricature guy bumps fists with me.

But Cyn doesn't say a thing when I first come up to the bus. She's leaning against it, twirling one cigarette in her fingers while another one hangs from her mouth. I don't normally see her smoke.

“What's wrong?” I ask.

“We've got eight people,” she says. “Tweed has two full buses. Almost ten times as many people.”

“We've had fewer before and gotten by.”

She sighs and nods. “So far. But insurance for this thing is insane. The licenses we need are coming up for renewal soon, and they aren't cheap. Not to mention Crook County's three-percent amusement tax on top of all the other fucking taxes. God. We've got to have something happen, or we're fucked. We aren't even coming close to breaking even tonight.”

I nod.

“What about the TV show?”

“Rick's still not convinced he trusts Brandon, and Brandon's still talking with Tweed, too. If Tweed gets the show or Ghostly Journeys opens a Chicago branch, we're just fucked.”

“Well, shit,” I say. “I hope we can hold on. I quit the grocery store today.”

She exhales. “Yeah, that was probably a mistake.”

I'll be screwed if the company goes under. Royally. Back to suffering through some crap job with nothing to distract me but an invisible girlfriend. Back to being completely pathetic. I realize that a good deal of my self-image, my self-esteem, is tied up in being good at this job now. What else have I got? I'm okay at acting, but not good enough to make it big or anything. You hear about people making a living writing erotic fan-fic, but I think it's a one-in-a-million shot, maximum.

I try to make it sound like I'm probably joking when I look at Cyn and say, “Think someone else at the nursing home might want to volunteer to become a ghost?”

She looks away from me, then up at the giant golden arches and the Ronald McDonald statue.

“A couple,” she says. “If we want to go that route.”

Just like that. She doesn't smirk or act like it was a joke, like Rick would have. She just acknowledges that making our own ghosts is an option.

I should be more shocked. But I think a part of me already knew that Mrs. Gunderson didn't just happen to die that night in Lincoln Park. And that part of me never felt guilty.

It's a good tour. But any way you cut it, we have just a few people. Tips come to six dollars.

When she slips me my three bucks, Cyn gives me a long, serious look.

“What?” I ask.

“You know what happened with Mrs. Gunderson, right?”

“I have a pretty good idea.”

She stares a bit more, then looks out the windshield. “I don't want Ricardo to know. He'd freak out. And it's better if he thinks any ghosts we run into might really be ghosts from a long time ago.”

“I understand.”

She leans back in the seat and watches people pouring out of the DarkSide Chicago tour buses ahead of us. Edward and Aaron shake hands with customers and collect tips.

“Rick should be a star,” she says. “But he's never gonna get there if he keeps being so stubborn.”

“You have to be willing to make some compromises to get what you want,” I say. “At least when you're starting out.”

“Usually you have to sell your soul to get the kind of life he wants,” says Cyn. “You have to step over everyone in your way. Make them wriggle like a worm on a hook.”

“Eyes on the prize.”

A trolley full of bachelorette partiers rolls past, and they all shout “Wooooo!” like they're imitating a ghost in a cartoon.

Cyn looks right at me and says, “So, you wanna go again?”

S
o, just to be clear,” I say as we ride along, “Mrs. Gunderson did volunteer, right?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course. It was all thoroughly planned out between me and her. We let Rick think it was a hazing prank, but she knew she was dying and she was totally on board. I wasn't sure the imprint thing would work, but since then it's been weird enough out there that I think there must be something to it.”

“Yeah.”

“If we'd actually done the gorilla-mask thing it might have left a stronger imprint, but I thought if she actually died right then, Rick might get suspicious. Better to do it on the sly.”

“True.”

She stops at a red light, then says, “Nursing homes are full of people who are way past average life expectancy, who are never getting better and can't wait for it all to be over with. If they were dogs, people would say it's inhumane to keep them alive,
but people expect other people to suffer as long as they can.”

“Right.”

“I was gonna take care of this guy in his bed later this week, anyway. They just found another kind of cancer in him to add to his collection. With chemo he'll make it three to six months, if he's lucky. And it'll be three to six months of hell with no light at the end of the tunnel. He tried and tried to get out of the chemo, but his family just wouldn't hear of it. Selfish bastards.”

“Sure.”

I'm speaking in monosyllables, just letting her talk. What else can I do? But now I start in with questions, making sure this is all . . . ethical.

“So, this guy knows what you do?”

“I told him. He thinks I'm full of shit about the ghost part, but if I modify things a bit and actually do scare him a bit right before, I think we could get a better imprint than we got before. He's not as friendly as Mrs. Gunderson, but that shouldn't make things any harder for us.”

“And no one will know what happened?”

“Not a chance. They'll think it was the cancer. After some reflections they'll decide it was better that he went quietly, without suffering.”

“You got the gorilla mask?”

“It's in the back.”

We drive into the bus lot in silence, then transfer into Cyn's pickup truck. I ask what happened to Marjorie Kay Stone's memoir, the one that told her about the brain punch in the first place.

“Burned up. Her whole house burned after she died.”

I don't ask how she died. I decide I don't want to know. She was pretty old. Old people die.

“What happened to the ghost you said was there?” I ask. “What happens to ghosts with nowhere left to haunt?”

“She just found another place to hang around. She just lives like a normal person most of the time.”

“I'll have to meet her sometime.”

Cyn doesn't answer.

We drive back out of the bus lot and onto Halsted in Cyn's truck without saying much more. We talk about TV shows a bit. Weather. Books. Street closings that we're going to have to work around on upcoming tours.

Everything except the fact that we're going to go kill a guy.

Ten minutes later we're in one of the bedrooms in the nursing home, and Cyn is nudging an old man's shoulder as he sleeps. He looks up with an annoyed scowl from beneath a push-broom mustache.

“What the hell?” he asks.

“Mr. Sturgeon?” she says. “Do you really want to be gone before chemo can start?”

He blinks and turns over a bit. His skin is leathery and tough, like the wrinkles have to fight for every dent they make. But they fight hard. Aaron Saltis has a misshapen face that looks like it was busted out of alignment in one quick fight with a blunt object. Mr. Sturgeon looks like he's been beaten down slowly, by degrees, for eighty years.

He looks up at Cyn, then says, “You mean that shit about making me a ghost?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm an atheist,” he says. “I don't believe in ghosts.”

“Well, when we say ‘ghost,' we don't mean, like, your soul,” I say. “Just, like . . . energy. The reeks and fumes of your puddled brain.”

He stares at me for a second, then says, “The what of my what?”

“Look,” says Cyn. “Do you want a quick, painless death tonight, or what?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. You're damn right I do.”

“Get up and hit the bathroom first,” she says. “As a favor to me. The less there is to leak out when your muscles relax, the better.”

He gets out of bed and uses a cane to hobble into the en-suite bathroom.

Everything sort of seems like a dream to me at this point. Cyn and I stand awkwardly in his room, looking at his stuff; she reads the titles of the books on his shelves out loud. All
nonfiction, mostly by cable-news loudmouths. I tuck a corner of his bedsheets back in, just because, and wait for the flush sound. He's old, and it takes a while. Cyn takes a book from the shelf, flips through it, and writes a response to something in the margins.