The Ghost Exterminator (5 page)

Chapter Six: Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen

Karma smiled smugly as she hung up the phone after her second conversation with KC’s newest hysterical client.

Not that she took pleasure in her clients’ hysteria. Well, perhaps a bit, but certainly not an undue amount. It was always particularly gratifying to have them crawl back to her, begging and sobbing. The day the world learned to solve its own problems was the day she was out of a job, so she made a point of being amused by ignorance and gross incompetence whenever possible.

Karma’s smile faded.

Jo wouldn’t be pleased to learn she was going to have to deal with Haines again. Or perhaps she wouldn’t mind it too terribly much. Karma had a hunch that Jo and Wyatt were not quite as indifferent to one another as they would have her believe, and her hunches were rarely wrong.

The image-conscious Mr. Haines was
not
the kind of man Karma would have chosen for Jo, who had enough difficulties with her self-image already, but people so rarely let her tell them to whom they ought to be attracted.

Jo needed someone accepting. Someone who would be charmed by her apparent contradictions, paranormal skills and lightning-quick mood swings. Karma had only spoken to the man on the phone a handful of times, but she was quite certain Wyatt Haines was not that man. Quite the opposite.

And there was definitely something odd going on in that house of his. Jo’s recounting of last night’s events had set off a number of warning bells in Karma’s mind, not the least of which was Wyatt Haines’s suspicious involvement.

Still puzzling over the possible ramifications of last night’s anomalies, Karma picked up the phone and dialed Jo’s home number from memory. When her ghost exterminator answered groggily on the third ring, Karma belatedly recalled she had ordered her home to sleep.

“Sorry to wake you, Jo, but I need you back on Wyatt Haines.”

“Karma? What Haines?”

“Wy-att Haines,” Karma enunciated precisely, waiting for Jo to wake up fully. Due to her tendency to call her employees when she needed them rather than during normal business hours, this wasn’t the first time she’d caught Jo napping. She knew from previous experience that it would be a solid five minutes and a lot of repetition before Jo was firing on all cylinders.

“The stuck-up businessman?” Jo mumbled, and the sound of shuffling came through the line. Karma imagined her employee stumbling blindly toward the kitchen and hoped Jo had some coffee readily on hand. “D’you do a Vulcan mind-meld on him?”

Karma bit back a laugh. She did like Jo. Absolutely no verbal filter and the most fascinating leaps of logic. Karma tried not to have favorites among her many extremely talented employees, but there were days when Jo made that pretty damn difficult. Of course, there were days when they each made it difficult, in their own ways.

“Actually, he came around on his own. Some sort of incident involving a permanent marker, although I couldn’t quite make out exactly what happened. He was a trifle distraught.”

“A trifle. Yeah, that sounds like him.” Jo paused for a loud slurp of coffee. “Was he clearing his throat a bunch? He does that.”

“I didn’t notice. Would you care to tell me why you felt it was necessary to mention Ciara’s condition to him?”

“What?” Jo’s confusion came through readily. “I didn’t…oh, wait, I did. He was giving me shit about my combat boots, so I volunteered to strip.”

“Very professional,” Karma commented dryly.

“Yeah, well, he was being an ass. I didn’t say anything about Ciara. Just that some of our people work naked.”

Ciara Liung was an extremely sensitive psychic who specialized in finding lost and stolen items—sports cars, jewelry, you name it, Ciara could find it. Human lo-jack. However, the nature of her gift was such that, while she was working, the touch of anything on her skin, even her own clothing, was distracting to the point of pain. Her weakness was a well-kept secret at KC. The local FBI office had a man whose entire job it was to liaise with Ciara and even he had no idea that their best finder spent most of her time floating naked in her pool.

“You aren’t going to tell Ciara, are you?” Jo asked, interrupting Karma’s musings. “If she’s pissed at me, I’ll never find my keys again.”

Karma ignored the whining. “Do you have Haines’ office address in the dossier I gave you? I need you to get there as quickly as possible.”

Jo followed the change in subject without missing a beat. “What am I supposed to do when I get there?”

“Get his permission to re-inspect the house and remove the ghosts from his body.”

There was a long pause, then Jo gave a thoughtful slurp and mumbled, “Huh.”

“Jo? You can remove the ghosts, can’t you?”

The extended silence that met her question was far from comforting.

“Jo? Can you?”

“Maybe,” Jo piped up finally. “Probably,” she amended, although if anything she sounded less sure. “I definitely have some ideas. This isn’t exactly well-charted territory we’re covering here. But don’t you worry. I’m gonna boldly go where no ghost exterminator has gone before.”

“Been watching much
Star Trek
lately?”

“Fell asleep watching the SyFy channel. It’s Trekkie month. This week is all Shatner awesomeness and next week the TNG kick-ass marathon begins. SyFy channel rocks my world. Even if they did stupidly change the spelling of their name. They are Trek-tastic so I must forgive them. How could I survive with only USA and TNT to quench my syndicated thirst?”

Karma refrained from mentioning that she had never seen a single episode of
Star Trek
. She needed Jo out helping Wyatt Haines, not storming into the office to force Karma to view the
Shatner awesomeness
.

“How quickly can you be at Haines’ office?”

“Warp speed, baby.”

“Good.”

“No, no, Karma. Your line is ‘Make it so’.”

Karma coughed to hide her laughter and then obligingly commanded, “Make it so, Banks.”

Jo gave a squeal of delight and shouted, “I need more
power
, Captain!” in a terrible Scottish accent as she threw down the phone. Karma gave in to her laughter as soon as she heard the line go dead.

Warp speed turned out to be eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Jo timed herself. Considering she had to throw on a fresh T-shirt and yesterday’s jeans, drive halfway across town, find parking, and take the slowest elevator on the planet up nine floors while listening to Muzak, eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds was pretty damn awesome.

She stepped out of the elevator to escape the most painful synthesizer version of
The Phantom of the Opera
she’d ever heard, only to find herself in a beige office suite so sterile surgery could probably be performed on any flat surface.

The receptionist, wearing a white button-up shirt and khaki skirt, was nearly as colorless as the rest of the office. She smiled blandly, and said in an expressionless monotone, “May I help you?”

Jo didn’t need to double check the name engraved on the wall behind her to know that she was in Wyatt’s office. The receptionist had about as much personality as the average droid. “I’m here to see Mr. Haines. Jo Banks. Karmic Consultants.”

Droid-girl glanced down, checking some sort of list and then looked up and offered Jo another automated smile. “You can go right back. The last door down the hall on your left.”

Jo saluted and headed off down the hall, looking for some scrap of flavor along the way. There were no paintings, no decoration of any kind—not even some trite Successories poster telling the employees to achieve or visualize, climb every mountain, reach for the stars, or whatever inspirational platitude corporate America approved of this week.

The last door at the end of the hall was not a door, but an open doorway. It led into a small waiting area with enormous mahogany double doors at the opposite end and a small curved desk off to one side. The woman sitting at the desk beamed at her as soon as she walked in.

“You must be Jo!” she twittered excitedly. “I’m Moonbeam, Wyatt’s secretary.”

Jo locked her jaw to keep it from dropping to the floor as Moonbeam swept around the curved expanse of her desk and moved toward her with her arms outstretched for a hug. Moonbeam looked to be in her early sixties, her long, flowing brown hair liberally streaked with grey. She wore a plethora of colorful silk scarves, some wrapped around her hair to keep it back from her face, some draped across her shoulders and still more around her waist as belts. A loose, peasant-style blouse and flowing calf-length print skirt completed the classic hippie look, along with a pair of flip-flops with crystals sewn onto the straps.

Before Jo could react, Moonbeam embraced her enthusiastically, enveloping her in warm arms and the powerful scent of lavender oil. Moonbeam gave her an extra little squeeze, released her and floated back around the other side of her desk.

“I’m so glad you’re here!” she enthused. “I’ve been so worried about Wyatt. He’s been under so much stress lately, opening the new inn and then all of the Episodes with the Nightmare on Elm Street. I try to help, but he refused to let me Feng Shui his office and he didn’t go to a single one of the yoga classes I signed him up for. There is something seriously wrong with that boy’s chakras, let me tell you. I’m not trying to say that it’s his fault. Far from it. The poor boy is a Virgo with a Scorpio moon, born to be a controlling prick. You can’t escape your sign, but if he doesn’t learn to harness his energy in a more positive manner, I know it’s going to corrode his soul. When I saw him drawing on his face this morning, I just knew it was a cry for help. I called Karmic right away. I knew you would be able to help him find the balance in his chi.”

Jo debated telling Moonbeam that she wasn’t there for Wyatt’s chi, but decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Instead she smiled and said, “Is he ready for me?”

Moonbeam sighed and shook her head, taking the question in an unexpectedly philosophical direction. “I just don’t know, Jo. I completely agree that he will never find balance in his soul unless he is ready to accept it, but how do you know when a man is ready to embrace change?”

Jo cleared her throat, then realized she sounded like Wyatt and muttered, “Crap.”

“Excuse me?”

Jo felt her face heat and tried for a subject change, feeling more off balance the longer she spoke to Wyatt’s unexpected secretary. “That’s a nice desk. It’s different from the ones in the rest of the office.”

Moonbeam smiled and ran her hands along the smooth edge of the desk. “I can’t work around angles. They absolutely
destroy
my chi. Wyatt was very understanding and found this for me.”

“You must be a wonderful secretary.”

It was the understatement of the year. If Wyatt was willing to put up with angle-free, chi-conducive desks and her attempts to balance his soul, Jo could only imagine that, beneath her fluffy exterior, Moonbeam was the kind of woman who could single-handedly run the state department.

“He’s a sweet boy.”

Not the description Jo would have used, but she wasn’t going to argue with the Secretary of State. “Is he in?” Then she realized that the question was
much
too open-ended for Moonbeam and quickly clarified, “His office. Is he in his office?”

“He most certainly is. You go right on in.” Moonbeam pushed a (round—no angles) button on her desk and the mahogany doors swung open. Jo strode toward Wyatt’s inner sanctum, debating with herself whether the free-spirit secretary was the reason Wyatt had been open-minded enough to call Karmic or the reason he was so closed-minded in the first place.

Chapter Seven: Tea with Mussolini

Wyatt sat behind his desk, his face raw and chapped after scrubbing the top two layers of skin off in an attempt to disprove the
permanent
label on the marker. He hadn’t had much success. There were still faint grey lines on his face in a Groucho Marx configuration.

He knew he looked ridiculous, so he was duly impressed when Jo’s lips didn’t even twitch as she dropped into the chair facing his desk and took in his experimental artwork. He would have attributed her lack of reaction to professionalism, if not for the fact that she was still sporting black jeans and combat boots. Yesterday’s tank top had been replaced with a Black Sabbath T-shirt that looked like it had been painted on. He could actually see the lace pattern on her bra through the fabric. Not that he was looking. He certainly wasn’t staring hard enough to cross his eyes and drooling like a feeble-minded idiot, though the urge to do so was nearly overwhelming.

“Mr. Haines?”

Okay, so he was staring and his eyes were crossed, but there was no drool. He was willing to accept small victories today. “Ms. Banks. Thank you for coming so quickly.”

She arched one eyebrow suggestively and Wyatt felt blood rushing south away from his brain. Dear God. He had
not
meant it like that.

Wyatt cleared his throat, trying to kick-start his brain and get back in control of the situation. If he had ever been in control. He thought he had. At one point. He vaguely remembered what control felt like.

“I fell asleep and drew on my face,” he blurted out uncontrollably.

A ghost of a smile flirted around Jo’s mouth, vanishing so quickly he wondered if he had imagined the crack in her expressionless calm. “The ghosts inhabiting your body are children. If the Episodes, as you called them, are anything to go by, they are children who are very adept at pranks. We should have expected them to make their presence known in this way as soon as you relinquished conscious control of your body.”

“
We
didn’t expect any such thing,” Wyatt growled, his tenuous control of his temper going the way all of his control had gone. “
We
didn’t expect anything to happen when
we
went to sleep, because
we
did not believe that
we
were haunted.”

“But you do now, huh? Persuasive little buggers, aren’t they?”

“Ms. Banks.”

“Mr. Haines,” she mimicked his somber tone, but under hers was a layer of amusement that he couldn’t begin to feel.

“Jo,” he said her name on a plea, knowing he sounded weak and pathetic and for once in his life not caring. Desperation could do that to a man. “Fix it.
Please
.”

“Did you try nail polish remover?” At his defeated groan, her expressionless mask melted as sympathy filled her eyes. “It’s been a daunting twenty-four hours for you, hasn’t it?”

“Fifteen hours,” Wyatt growled, knowing he sounded like an ungrateful prick and having a hard time caring when the alternative was accepting her pity. Wyatt Haines was not a man to be pitied. “I’ll be fine as soon as you fix this.”

The sympathy evaporated from her face—thank God—and her mouth tightened into a bow as she glared at him. “It might not be that easy.”

“It is that easy. It has to be that easy,” Wyatt insisted, hearing desperation creep into his voice. “You said my stomach was haunted and you un-haunt things. Un-haunt my stomach.”

“Well, first of all, they aren’t in your stomach anymore. And secondly, haunted people are a little different than haunted houses.”

“Where are they? My brain?” Wyatt groaned and closed his eyes. “I’m possessed, aren’t I?”

Jo slammed her fist on his desk. He opened his eyes at the bang to find her glaring at him. “What is it with you and demons? You aren’t possessed. Your house isn’t possessed.
No demons
. Get it?”

“But you said…”

“I said haunted people are different. Frankly, I’ve never seen a ghost inhabit the body of anyone who wasn’t a very strong medium. There has to be a powerful supernatural link between the host and the spirit or it just doesn’t work. It’s like Whoopi Goldberg in
Ghost
.”

He winced. “Please don’t tell me that movie is a documentary.”

Her eyes shot daggers at him. “You’re a prick, you know that? I was trying to explain this to you in a way you would understand and you have to be an ass. Of course, it isn’t a documentary. Whoopi Goldberg is an
actress
, not a medium. She isn’t a nun, either, in case you were confused by
Sister Act
.”

“Never saw it.”

“You have no culture, you know that?”

“Whoopi Goldberg is culture?”

“Movies. Life outside of profit margins. That’s culture. I’m amazed the ghosts bothered to haunt you. I bet if I left you alone they’d get so bored hanging out in you they’d leave on their own within a week.”

“Because I won’t take them to see
Sister Act
.”

“Oh, shut up.” She dropped back into the chair and crossed her arms across her chest. “I need to get back into the house. You need to give me permission.”

“You can’t just take the ghosts out here?”

She tipped her head to the side and Wyatt could see her considering whether or not to lie to him. The devil of it was, he couldn’t tell which way she had decided when she finally sighed and opened her mouth. “How much did you see last night?”

Wyatt frowned. “How much did I see? I didn’t
see
anything. You went into the kitchen then you tensed up and sort of stumbled back and forth like things were pulling on you. Then you fell and there was an earthquake—not that the two were related, but it was a pretty nice bonus at the end of the show.”

Jo was up out of the chair so quickly it looked like she had been launched. She slammed her fists onto her hips and leaned across the desk aggressively. “
Show
? Did I just hear that? Are you implying—
still
implying—that I’m a phony? How do you explain the moustache then, huh, Mussolini?”

He raised a hand defensively to cover his upper lip. “I thought it was more Marx than Mussolini. Did Mussolini even have a moustache?”

“Mussolini, Marx, Stalin, whatever. You look fascist. Was that your goal or are you willing to admit there might be something supernatural at work here?”

Wyatt froze. She had to ask him straight out, didn’t she? He couldn’t just go on humoring her belief in the unbelievable. Not if he wanted her help, at any rate. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the words. It would be too much like joining her insanity. “I meant Groucho Marx, not Karl,” he said instead.

She didn’t say a word. She just spun on her heel and stalked toward the door.

Realization hit like a fist in his gut. She was going to walk out and leave him like this, drawing on his face, watching the SyFy Channel and doing God-knows-what-else every time he fell asleep.

“Jo!” He stood and came around the desk, moving toward her quickly, even though he doubted he’d be able to intercept her before this became a scene for the viewing pleasure of his entire office.

To his surprise, she stopped before she even reached the office door, though she didn’t immediately turn around. “Groucho Marx,” he heard her say pensively as he came up behind her. “What decade was Groucho Marx popular?” she asked.

“What, you don’t know Groucho Marx? Don’t you have any culture?” Her shoulders stiffened at his sarcasm and he immediately felt like an ass—not his most tactful moment. When she gave her head an irritable shake and took a deliberate step toward the door, he spoke hurriedly. “1930s? I don’t know. The Marx Brothers made most of their movies in the thirties, didn’t they? But he was also the host of
You Bet Your Life,
which was on in the forties and fifties, I think. Why?”

She turned to face him, and he could see her puzzling over something. Jo was about as opaque as a sheet of glass. Every thought, every emotion, showed right there on her face. The openness seemed out of place when matched with her biker chic wardrobe and badass posturing.

Although it was possible it was all an act. Part of Wyatt still desperately wanted to believe that he was the victim of an elaborate con. Jo would make a hell of a con artist. Reeling him in with her killer body and suckering him into admitting he believed in ghosts with her open, honest face. It would be so much easier to blame this all on her and explain it away as a hoax if another part of him—the irrational, hormonal part, probably—didn’t want so badly to believe her.

Jo spoke, completely unaware of his internal debate over her trustworthiness. “How many kids do you know nowadays who have the faintest idea who Groucho Marx is, let alone would think to draw his face onto yours as a prank? I’m thinking your inhabitants might not be such recent arrivals into the spirit world as I initially thought.”

“Does that change anything? You can still get them out, right?”

She pulled a face and fidgeted just enough to make him
extremely
nervous. “Okay, so here’s the thing. About getting them out. It might not be quite as straightforward as just pulling them out, you know?”

Dread congealed in his stomach. Or maybe that was the ghosts. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Jo squirmed a bit as he frowned down at her. “Yanking a ghost out of a host can be sort of, ah, uncomfortable, or so they tell me. I’ve never actually… Okay, technically I don’t think
anyone
has ever actually yanked one out. Pushing them out as a medium when they don’t want to go is supposed to be pretty, ah, unpleasant, shall we say? So I can only imagine that the pulling… you don’t look so good.” She reached out to brush her fingers against his arm. “Are you okay?”

He probably looked like he was about to lose his breakfast, which was how he felt. Although, considering that his breakfast had been scotch, it was probably a good thing to get it out of his system. “Why can’t you just do what you did last night?”

She pursed her lips, irritation suddenly flashing in her eyes again. “Yeah, my little
show
. You didn’t see anything? No lights? No glimmers? Nada?”

“You fell.”

Jo rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Sherlock. I’ll be sure to put that in my report.” She shook her head, visibly exasperated. “I cannot imagine why the ghosts went into you unless I somehow—” She broke off suddenly and coughed into her hand. “That is, it doesn’t make sense that you would host them. You’re about as sensitive as a rock, you hate them, they don’t particularly like you, and—”

“Hey,” he protested, irrationally insulted by the assumed dislike of her imaginary ghosts, “How do you know if they like me or not?”

“Dude, that house was totally pulsating with anti-Wyatt vibes last night. They probably think of you as an interloper, some kind of evil stepfather figure who’s going to force them to eat their vegetables. Although…” she tipped her head, her thoughts racing across her face again, “…if you
were
a sort of parental figure, even an evil one, then it would make sense in a twisted sort of way that they ran to you when they were scared.”

“I’m not evil—stepfather or no. You’re the one who scared them. Why didn’t they decide you were the evil stepmother and go haunt your stomach for a while?”

“I didn’t scare them,” she snapped. “The house was doing the whole tug-o-war thingy. I just sort of dropped my end of the rope and they did a slingshot thingy into you. Which I wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t distracted me in the first place.” She frowned. “I need to get back into that house.”

“To get the ghosts out.”

She nodded vaguely. “That might work. If we can get whatever was pulling at me last night to come back and try to yank the ghosts out of you, then I can open a portal and zap ’em right through.”

“If,” Wyatt repeated, developing a real hatred for that word. “And if that doesn’t work?”

“Plan B.”

“Which is?”

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, buddy. I’ve got contingency plans on top of my contingency plans. We’ll get those little buggers out of you.”

He would have been comforted, if he hadn’t thought he heard her mutter “eventually” under her breath as she turned and wandered toward the wall of windows that overlooked the river.

“I don’t understand.” He followed her, knowing he sounded petulant and irritable and not caring in the slightest. He was either being haunted or scammed, so either way he was entitled to pitch a fit. “Why is getting them out of me harder than getting them out of a house?”

She turned to face him, leaning back against the window with her hands shoved into the front pockets of her jeans. The pose did interesting things to her tight T-shirt. Of course,
everything
did interesting things to that damn T-shirt.

“It helps if instead of thinking of it as getting them
out
of the house, you think of it as putting them
in
to a portal. Some people call it transcending. The trick with a person is that first I have to get them
out
of you and then I have to put them
in
the portal. The second part is easy. Well, it’s easy for me. But it’s the first part that’s more of a challenge.”