Ghost Guard (4 page)

THREE

“
RUBY? RUBY, where are you? Ruby, give me back my keys, dammit!”

Abby hated going into the dungeon that was the Gasworks basement, a place only snails and mice and the occasional bat appreciated
in its full glory. She hated the slimy sandstone walls, the soft muddy floor, the cobwebs that seemed attracted to her like magnets. Most of all she hated having to navigate the avalanche of clutter Ruby had accumulated over the centuries of her death. Not that some of the stuff wasn’t charming. Ruby was a packrat, and she’d been up to her little game for a long, long time. Some of the stuff, Abby reckoned, would have made even the finest auction houses look like tawdry garage sales.

“Ruby?
Come on, where are you? I need my keys!” Abby’s words fell flat in the cramped, damp space. She had to almost kneel and crawl into Ruby’s lair, a tiny area in the darkest, farthest reaches under the Gasworks foundation. After several feet, the narrow passage opened up, but only a little. Then Abby realized the room was quite capacious. It was simply crammed so full of stuff, it seemed tiny. Clothes. And not just any clothes, but fine linens that spanned human history. Abby tried not to pry, yet she knew at least one of the gowns dated back to Victorian times. And a peplos went back to ancient Greece. She had too many things to list, but what caught Abby’s eye was the massive record collection. All vinyl. No CDs or even cassettes. Then there were the shoes. Tons and tons of shoes. Imelda Marcos would have felt like an underachiever compared to Ruby.

Abby had to shove aside two heaps of items, handbags and umbrellas and big summer hats just to get to the center of the mess, where she found several old television sets, some of which were black and white, all of which were tuned to an old Western, most likely a John Wayne movie.

“Ruby?” she scanned the darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive ghost. “I need my—” on an ancient dresser, mingling with a heap of other keys, she spotted her purple horseshoe. “Ah-ha!”

She reached for her keys, and as soon as she got hold of them, an ear-spli
tting screech, accompanied by a frosty blast of air, sent Abby reeling backward. Then she felt something tugging at her hand, and right away knew what, or who, it was.

“No, Ruby! These are mine!”

Ruby squealed and whined and hissed and fussed. Nothing would make her let go of that keychain. Nothing.

“Ruby!
Come on, be reasonable…Ruby…FINE! Take it!” Abby released her grip, and Ruby took off like a rubber band, bouncing off the walls, reveling in her newest acquisition. Then she huffed at Abby’s next proclamation. “You can have the horseshoe, but you can’t have the keys.”

Abby held out her hand. Ruby skulked up to her, frowning, and deposited the keys in her palm.

“Thank you, Ruby,” she said, but Ruby was too wrapped up in delight to answer. On her way out, Abby wondered why a ghost with no real feet to speak of would need so many shoes.

ABBY’S APARTMENT WASN’T too far from Gasworks. Just a short jaunt up Nicolai, over the railroad tracks to Front Avenue, and then a right on Ninth. The 937 Glisan Condos. The modern building took up half a city block. She liked how its glass balconies and random window patterns cut fractals against the Portland skyline. She also liked how the place was brand new. New building meant nobody had died there. That meant no spirits roaming the halls, haunting the elevators, bugging the hell out of her. Seeing dead people came in handy for her line of work, but sometimes she just wanted to turn it off and get a good night’s rest.

That part of town had seen a remarkable turnaround from its former life as a heavy industrial and warehouse district.
The Pearl, housing some of the city’s elite artists, athletes, writers, performers, and businesspeople. The cream of the Portland crop. Abby considered herself one of the crowd, though, naturally she couldn’t tell anyone what she actually did for a living, opting instead to pose as a successful musician.

“Home at last,” she hung her coat in the hall closet and stepped through the foyer to a tasteful little antique French school desk she’d converted into a table. She looked at herself in the mirror. “Hideous,” she pushed her fingers through her hair, trying to instill a little order.
Nothing. It fell in tangles about her skull. “Just hideous.”

She placed her handbag on the table and hung her keys in their designated spot, a custom holder made of shells and driftwood she’d purchased in Cannon Beach. Didn’t exactly go with the table, but she liked it.
Reminded her of her childhood camping trips with her grandfather.

In the kitchen, she headed straight for the liquor. Three fingers of Grey Goose and a splash of orange juice for color. She’d given up the pretense of telling herself she was making a screwdriver. Call it what it was already—a shot. It tasted so good she had another, and was glad she’d left it in the freezer.
Gave it a nice mellowness as it slid down her throat.

After the second shot, she hit the glass hard on her countertop and
gazed out through the large picture window at a panoramic view of the Eastside. The Convention Center’s glass spires stood tall, their greenish auras and red blinking signal lights keeping watch over the Rose Quarter, where the Trail Blazers played. To the right of the Convention Center sprawled the lights of Portland, a striking contrast against the ruddy, gray night sky.

It was beautiful. The home she’d always dreamed of. Expensive, sure, but her position at Ghost Guard more than paid for it. Not a surprise, since it was one of the top Para-Intelligence special units in existence.
One-of-a-kind. Never before had living field agents been teamed up with the dead to plan, execute, and, of course, cover up missions on such a level. Sure, there were the early trials with spirit guides, but those didn’t pan out. They didn’t have the group cohesion. They didn’t have the understanding of how the spirit plane coexisted with the physical world. But, most of all, they didn’t have Rever Ott.

Rev.

She needed another shot.

“Hell with that son of a bitch!” she poured and tossed back another. That made four. Not that she wanted to count, but did anyway. The room began to tilt ever so slightly.
Time to stop throwing down booze like it was water. At least for now. She might need it if she was going to continue to remind herself of Rev, though. So she took the bottle of Grey Goose, now only a third full, and sauntered through the great room. Vaulted ceilings and giant windows permitted a momentous vista of the city’s nocturnal effervescence. She passed the staircase and headed straight for the balcony. Her favorite spot.

Outside, she heard the city’s heartbeat, felt its pulse,
smelled its vitality. An earlier downpour had faded into a smattering, not enough to bother her in her semi-drunken state. The rain felt good on her smoldering skin. She’d developed a bit of a reaction from the Madam Dominika disguise. Looking like an eighty-year-old woman was a difficult task for someone in the prime of her youth. Twenty-six years old. Not a wrinkle on her body. It took about two hours and ten pounds of latex, but she did it. With the help of Morris and Ruby, she did it. Looked pretty damned convincing too. Not that any of that mattered to Rev.

“Asshole!” her voice got lost in the steady din of traffic below. She saw the reflection of the urban lights in the inky blackness of the Willamette River. Then she perked up.

“What the hell am I thinking?” she scurried inside and found her guitar, slung the strap over her shoulder, cranked up the Marshall, and plucked the opening riff to one of her all-time beloved metal tunes.

“
Oowww!” she cried out sultrily. Abby had a specific sound, a soulful, richly-textured voice that suited her well as she grooved her shoulders to the beat, tossing her head forward and back over and over, messing up her hair even worse. She didn’t care.
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
were grinding her worries away. Rev melted into the background, joining her mother, her nosy, whiny upstairs neighbor, and the City of Portland Parking Bureau on the list of stressors that became mere irritants once she had a few nips of vodka and played a tune on her Les Paul.

“I saw him
standin’ there by the record machine…Knew he must have been about seventeen…”

She strummed and sang, skipping out to the patio again. Suddenly lightheaded, she had to pause for a second. That plus she’d forgotten the rest of the words to that verse. No matter. It gave her the chance to regain her breath for the next part, which she belted out for all downtown Portland to hear.

“Singin’ I love rock and roll…

So put another dime in the jukebox, baby!

I love rock and roll…

So come and take your time and dance with me!”

“Hey!” an angry voice from above joined the chorus. “You know what time it is?”

The grouchy neighbor, right on cue.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she cranked up the volume and sang louder, roaring another
“Owwww!”
with added emphasis.

“Dammit! I’m calling the Super!”

She went inside again and unplugged the guitar, though she didn’t feel like sitting in a quiet room. It was only eleven. The night was too young to think about sleep. Besides, she was wound up from work and needed something to calm her down. She pictured the story from the song. Standing by a jukebox. Asking a stranger to dance. That’s what she needed. A few hours in a seedy rock club.

FOR ABBY, THE BEST PART about living in the Pearl was everything she ever wanted could be found within a five block radius. Avant guard museums and upscale boutiques and luxury condos. Just about every taste in cuisine, clothing, art or any other cultural desire could be satisfied within a short walk. With that luxury, though, came one tiresome detail—the sheer number of spirits lingering about. It was like that in every big city in the world, but it seemed Portland had more ghosts per capita than anywhere else she’d ever lived.

As soon as she set foot on the sidewalk, a horse galloped up to her, and she almost flinched out of the way before realizing it would pass right through. In the saddle was a man wearing a dusty hat, a dingy suit, and cracked boots. He rode on without even noticing Abby, though she was used to such behavior from ghosts. He wasn’t being rude. He just didn’t know she was there.

The wayward haunting did nothing to diminish her desire for live music. To find the right place, she only needed to follow her ear. She came upon Jimmy Mak’s, a low-key bar with an understated front entrance. Someone walked out, letting the music from inside spill onto the street. Jazz fusion. Sounded good, but she wanted something harder, more gut-wrenching. Something to reach into her and tear out every last vestige of that damn Rev. Why did she have to be so worked up over him? Why care? Because he was the heart and soul of Ghost Guard, that’s why. If it weren’t for Rev, the whole thing would collapse. They all knew it. The commanding officers at Para-Intelligence knew it too. That’s why they turned a blind eye to his little indiscretions.

She kept walking, hanging a right at Third Street and taking that to
Couch. That’s when the next paranormal encounter of the night occurred. A woman fell from the building Abby was walking past. It happened so fast she didn’t have time to react, though she’d seen the performance so many times it didn’t faze her. A piercing scream, then
Whoosh!
the woman flew to the concrete in front of Abby’s feet, slamming on the ground and just shattering. It was an ugly sight, and would have disturbed Abby greatly…had it been real.

“Oh, hi, Abby,” the woman’s wrecked face broke into a smile. Literally it broke. And when she stood, her arms fell out of their sockets
. Her legs, bent and twisted, barely held her weight.

“Hi, Jane,” Abby said. The woman was
well-known in this part of town. Jumping Jane. The girl who, after being jilted by her lover, decided to end it all by stepping off a ledge. “Keeping busy?”

“Always,” and before another word was exchanged, Jane vanished from Abby’s supernaturally-sensitive sight. One second later, she heard another shrill shriek as the dead woman plummeted to the ground again. Poor thing, Abby thought. Jane had been at that for a long time, and she’d be at it for quite a while longer.

A little further down the street, Abby remembered the perfect club—Filthy. Tonight she wanted to let out some anger, and a hot black dress plus a rock and roll bar equaled a whole evening of free drinks along with all the dance partners she’d ever want.

She knew she was headed for trouble when she saw three young men notice her approaching from the intersection of Third and Davis. By the way they studied her up and down, she should have turned and walked
back right then. But the music called to her. All she wanted was some loud, live, skull-shattering tunes, and those guys were in her way. So she strode straight up to them and stared, head tilted, earrings dangling, hair sliding off her neck and exposing her shoulder.

The young men were surprised at her boldness. Each looked like copies of the other, something Abby found amusing, since it was their desire to be different that made them dress the way they did. Baggy pants so low they might as well have been socks. Multiple pockets, but their keys and leather billfolds hung from chains attached to their belt loops.
Tattoos of dragons and snakes. One was cool. Jimi Hendrix. The only redeeming quality of that fool. He’d mutilated his face by jamming a wooden stake through the soft cartilage of his nose, and had two disturbingly large round hoops through his ears. The heaviest guy, the one in the middle blocking the door to the bar, had three metal studs in a vertical column down the bridge of his snout. That was in bone. She had no idea how that was done.

“There’s a three dollar cover to get in,” the tallest one eyed her cleavage. “But in your case, I think we can let it slide. As long as you promise me a dance,” he smiled. Three teeth were missing.
Probably from fighting. Nice.

She shook her head and reached into her razor-thin handbag.

“No thanks. I think I’d rather just pay the cover if you don’t mind.”

The two friends of the would-be Casanova chuckled, which prompted him to stand straight and make an even more determined attempt.

“Come on. Don’t be that way. I just wanted one dance, that’s all. You can do that, can’t you? I mean, I’m not
that
ugly, am I?”

She didn’t want to tell him the truth.

“Just let me pay so I can go in, all right?”

“Your money’s no good here,” he crossed his arms and motioned with his head. “Go on in.”

One of the other guys, the one with the bone piercing, held open the door.

“Thank you,” she nodded. “At least there’s one gentleman out here tonight.”

The two chuckled again, which sent the pushy one into a rage. He shoved the door closed with more force than necessary, startling Abby. She reached for her clutch bag again.

“Did you just dis me?” he growled. “Because I gotta tell you
, it seemed like you just dissed me. Nobody disses me.”

S
he held her hand in her bag.

“Don’t come any closer, if you know what’s good for you.”

“Whatcha gonna do, huh? Whatcha got in that little, tiny purse? You’d better have a really big gun inside there.”

The other two young men laughed again, this time not so friendly.

“No, I don’t carry a gun. Don’t need one when I have this!” she produced a small, flat device resembling a makeup compact. The spectral phase inducer, or SPI, one of Morris’s latest inventions, simulated the effects of a paranormal encounter. And it worked well. She opened the lid and slid her finger along the panel inside, putting it on the highest setting. All the bells and whistles.

“
Wha…what is that!” her assailant’s eyes got wide. Then he bundled himself inside his coat and looked at his friends. “Hey, did it all of a sudden get really cold out here?”

“Yeah,” the heavily-
studded guy zipped up his jacket. The other one did the same. Then they all three noticed Abby’s arm. It looked almost transparent. So did her other arm. Then the rest of her body.

“Dude, her eyes!” the one with the most ink pointed at her while helping his friend get away. “Look at her eyes!”

“No!” his friend shielded his face. “No, I don’t wanna!”

She got closer to them, a crackling static as she moved, a
wispy trace of ethereal luminescence when she lifted her hand. It gave her the illusion of being lit from behind in a heavy fog, along with several other juicy little tidbits. The chill in the air. The howling wind. Morris had thought it useful for Abby to mimic the appearance of a ghost. As the only live field agent in Ghost Guard, she often was put in vulnerable positions, and Morris felt she needed the protection. It seemed to be working. She pointed at the persistent young men. Her voice had a hollow, deep timbre.

“Treat women with respect. Understand?”

The three guys stepped away, oblivious of anything else in the world but the female phantom. She smirked and let her electric eyes dart between them.

“Y-yes, ma’am,” they spoke in unison, voices trembling.

She pulled the door open a crack and raw, deafening tones battered her eardrums. She slipped in, being sure to turn off Morris’s machine before someone else spotted her. Bad enough she had to use it on those boys. But they needed to be punished. The rest of the night belonged to her and her alone. No more Ghost Guard. No more stress.