Ghostbusters The Return (7 page)

"Thanks, John."

"Now, the good news is that you two are big news. The press has been clamoring for interviews," said Fielding. "We need to keep that heat going, so we've scheduled a full slate of interviews for you tomorrow."

"What's the bad news?" Winston asked.

"You need to be ready by then. That means media training today. And it means - " Fielding tapped the hefty binder in Venkman's hand " - you have to get through all of this by tomorrow. I wouldn't count on any of us going home early tonight."

As Fielding and Winston continued to talk, Venkman stared at his running mate in disbelief.
"Money was being mismanaged left and right?" "I'd have been all over those guys?"
What happened to Winston? Since when did he know so much about this stuff?

Or could it be that Winston had been interested in these sorts of things all along, and Venkman just never noticed? It wasn't as though he'd ever spent a whole lot of time pondering Winston's political views, or the ways Winston spent his spare time.

Either way, the most likely result was a serious crimp in Venkman's style. He wondered if there might be a way to turn things around. Maybe Ray would make a more clueless deputy mayor...

But no, it was too late for that. He'd already publicly announced Winston as his running mate. Besides, he liked Winston. This all seemed to mean so much to the guy. Much as it might make his life easier, he just couldn't pull the rug out from under him.

None of which meant that Venkman had to give up his plans, of course. It just added a complication that he would have to work around. It was the price of friendship, he supposed with a sigh.

Venkman watched Winston and Fielding paging through the binder. Winston was saying something about school reform and fiscal responsibility.

Friends are a pain,
Venkman thought.

It's good to have friends,
Winston thought.

He knew full well that he wouldn't be standing here in a fancy suit if it weren't for Venkman. Peter was the golden boy who was the party's first choice. More and more, though, it seemed as though the party boys considered Winston to be an asset, too - and that felt pretty good. Either way, though, he didn't mind tagging along for the ride.

Actually, it was an attitude that had served Winston fairly well throughout his adult life. Growing up on the streets of Brooklyn, he never really imagined himself running for office...or even chasing ghosts, for that matter. With Winston's father working construction, the Zeddemores hadn't had the kind of money or middle-class lifestyle that folks like Ray or Egon had grown up with.

It was Winston's mother who had encouraged him to go into the service after high school, so that he could get a decent education on the government's tab. Sure enough, a few years later, he came out of the military with certification in electrical engineering...not to mention small arms training, a black belt in karate, and a stint in the Strategic Air Command ECM school.

With the military behind him, Winston fully expected to put his engineering background to work when he came home. What he didn't expect was to find the economy in what the President was referring to as "a downturn," with hardly a job to be had. Winston's father's connections helped him land the occasional construction job, but even those were few and far between. And there was only so long that he could live off Mama Zeddemore. He started off searching the want ads each day for electrical engineering jobs. But after a while, he was searching for any job at all.

So when he saw the ad for an "ectoplasmic containment specialist, he had no idea what the job might be, but he figured he had nothing to lose. Whatever it was, they were looking for candidates with weapons training and either military or law enforcement experience. He had plenty of military experience, all right. It was probably some kind of security job, he guessed.

Even today, he still smiled at the memory of what passed for his job interview. The whole thing had consisted basically of Janine asking him one question: "Do you believe in UFOs, astral projection, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, fulltrance mediums, psychokinetic or telekinetic movement, cartomancy, phrenology, black and/or white magic, divination, scrying, necromancy, the theory of Atlantis, the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, or in general in spooks, spectres, wraiths, geists, and ghosts?"

Winston's answer had been a simple one: "If there's a semi-regular paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."

A few minutes later, Ray, Egon, and Peter had come swooping back into the office. Business was booming, and they were up to their ears in phantoms. Before Winston could so much as say a word, Ray told him he was hired. From then on, his life became a mad rush of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that went bump in the night.

Winston never expected to spend the next several years doing what his mother affectionately referred to as "running around with a bunch of white boys, hunting spirits." A religious woman, she was always just a little uncomfortable with what he did for a living, despite his repeated assurances that his employers were
scientists,
not black magicians. Still, her discomfort didn't stop her from cutting out every news item that mentioned him and pasting it into a scrapbook about her son, the Ghostbuster. By this point, she was up to her third book.

When Winston called to tell her about the latest little twist in his career path, though, his mother's reaction was a whole different ball game. She hadn't believed him at first, of course. Deputy mayor? She thought he was pulling her leg. And, to tell the truth, he couldn't blame her; he was having a hard time believing it himself.

Once she realized that he was telling the truth, though, she was fit to bust. She was so overwhelmed that he had to hold the telephone receiver away from his ear to avoid going deaf from the excited shrieks. Her own son, possibly the next deputy mayor of New York? She couldn't get off the phone fast enough so she could call every single relative, living and dead - and then run up and down the block to tell the neighbors. Winston hadn't stopped grinning since then.

He had always known that his mama was proud of him. But now, he finally felt like he was living up to it.

That was why he was determined to make sure that he and Venkman won this election. It wasn't for the fame, which he suspected was part of Peter's reason for doing it. Winston's primary motivation wasn't even to help people and make a difference, although that was certainly a big piece of it.

No, the main reason he wanted to win the election was that he didn't want to let his mother down.

*     *     *

By the time Doctor Peter Venkman, candidate for the office of Mayor of New York, got home that night, he was beat. It was well after ten o'clock when he stepped out of a taxi in front of his apartment building. He was used to late nights; in fact, he was far more of a night person than a morning person. But tonight, his brain was suffering from information overload. After a day of photo shoots, briefings, and media training, his head was swimming with facts and opinions about public utilities, tax rebates, and garbage strikes. All he wanted now was to take a hot shower, leave a couple more apologies on Dana's answering machine, and hit the sheets.

"I sure do know how to live," he told himself.

Venkman stood there on the sidewalk for a moment. He moved his head around in a circle and rolled his shoulders a few times, trying to loosen up the tension in his neck. It helped a little. Feeling a bit better, he took out his keys and let himself into the building.

Once inside, he paused to open his mailbox. He pulled out a handful of envelopes and flipped through them as he climbed the stairs to his apartment. "Bill. Bill. Junk mail. Junk. Junk. Fabulous offer to win big. Bill."

The long day made the flights of stairs seem even more steep than usual. He wondered whether there were elevators in Gracie Mansion. There weren't all that many floors in the mayor's residence - certainly not as many as there were in the high rise apartment buildings that so many New Yorkers lived in. But, he figured that, as a city-owned building, the mansion probably had to have at least one so that it could be considered wheelchair accessible.
Well, if it doesn't
he decided, rounding the next landing,
that's going to be my first order of business when I take office.

Even in the privacy of his own thoughts, Peter Venkman always framed things in terms of "when." "If" just wasn't his style.

At last, he climbed the last few stairs and walked to the door of his apartment. He flipped briefly through his ring of keys and slipped the appropriate one into the deadbolt lock. As the key turned, he was startled by a voice behind him:

"If you're doing all of this to impress me, it's working."

Venlunan's eyebrows rose in surprise, and his lips curled into a smile. He turned to see Dana standing there with a cockeyed smirk of her own.

"What, this?" he said. "If you think the way I open a door is impressive, you should see me with a window."

She slowly stepped closer. "I meant the whole thing with you running for mayor."

He took a step toward her, meeting in the middle of the hall. "Oh, that. Guess you caught me. Yeah, it's gonna be on the front page of tomorrow's paper: 'Candidate Runs to Impress Girl.' "

" 'Girl? "

"Okay, 'Candidate Runs to Impress Independent, Liberated Woman with Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations of Her Own.' "

Dana fingered the lapel of his jacket. "Nice suit."

"Thanks. So...what brings you by?"

"I tried calling you at the office this afternoon but Janine said you haven't been in all day."

"Yeah, election stuff. How long have you been waiting?"

She glanced at her watch "About. . . forty-five minutes or so. One of your neighbors let me in. I suppose I look honest."

"Not to mention really, really hot. So where's Bu - I mean, Oscar?"

"Babysitter. And 'Butch' is fine."

"Well, it won't get him beaten up after school, anyway." Venkman breathed a mental sigh of relief. Dana was letting him call Oscar "Butch" again. If she hadn't completely forgiven him yet, she was on the way, at least. "Listen, do you want to come in?"

"It's probably beats standing out here in the hall all night. I think the woman in 3-G is watching us through the peephole."

Venkman turned toward apartment 3-G and waved. "Hi, Mrs. Tugfoigl. Be sure to tune in again tomorrow for another stirring installment of
Hallways of Our Lives.
Will Dana lay down her cello and take Peter back? Will Chenelle survive her fateful brain surgery? And what about Naomi?" He pursed his lips and ran toward apartment 3-G, planting a loud, smoochy kiss right on the glass of the peephole. Once he felt fairly confident that his neighbor had recoiled from the peephole in embarrassment, he walked calmly back to his own door.

Dana was giggling. He loved it when she giggled.

He opened the door and ushered Dana into the apartment. With a final wave to Mrs. Tugfoigl - more for effect than anything else he closed the door behind them.

Once they were alone, he slipped his arms around Dana's waist. "So what
did
bring you back?"

"Who says I'm back?"

"It was my raw, animal magnetism, wasn't it?"

Dana slipped out of his arms as smoothly as he'd slipped them around her. "You're right."

"About my magnetism?"

"No, that you're a dope."

With a grunt, Venkman mimed being stabbed through the heart. Was it any wonder that he found her so attractive?

Dana waited patiently until he finished staggering around in his death throes. When he was done, she asked, "Mayor, huh?"

"Why not?"

"I don't remember you mentioning any political aspirations before."

"They developed kind of suddenly. Here, let me take your coat. Oh, and any other pieces of clothing you'd like to remove."

Venkman spent the next hour filling her in on all the details over coffee. Or almost all the details, anyway; he left out the parts about scamming whatever he could out of the job.

Dana was not only an attractive audience, but an attentive one as well. She asked the occasional question, but otherwise, she didn't interrupt very much. As he let the story unfold, he noticed a funny look in her eyes. She seemed unusually focused, studying his face.

After awhile, he couldn't ignore it any longer. "What's up?" he asked. "Do I have something stuck in my teeth?"

"Hmm? Oh. No, it's nothing like that."

"So what, then?" 

"Nothing. I was just thinking.

"Yeah?"

"Well...you remember our conversation about responsibility?"

"Yeah?"

"Being the mayor is a pretty big job. It brings along a lot of responsibility. Do you think you're ready for that?"

To be honest, the enormity of the responsibility hadn't fully hit him until just that moment. He thought about how much work it had taken just to start to understand all of the issues today. He could only imagine how much tougher it would be to have to actually deal with all of them.

But then again, he figured he could give all the work to his staff.

"Sure," he said. "I can handle it. No problem."

She eyed him curiously. "What are you up to?"

" 'Up to?' Y'know, I'm deeply hurt that you just immediately assume that I'm up to something. Can't I just act out of civic mindedness? Can't I just try to help my fellow man? Can't I just want to give some thing back to this crazy, cockamamie city that I love?"

Dana didn't say anything, but the look on her face said she still wasn't convinced.

So Venkman kept going: "Can't I try to mend my ways and win back the woman who means more to me than any election - nay, more than life itself?"

Dana looked bemused. "You are so full of it."

"But charming."

Dana leaned back in her chair and let out a deep breath. "I don't know."

"Don't worry about it. There are lots of things I don't know about. Material dialecticism. Calculus..."