Kiss & Hell (2 page)

“Um, look, I said,
boo
as scary as I could. It’s all I got.”

And apparently, Aunt Gwyneth was keeping some pesky company.

Noted, and didn’t we just go over this?
Delaney mentally whispered with building irritation to the voice that wouldn’t get out of her head. A voice now officially fucking with her much-needed paycheck.

“So why aren’t you scared?” the husky, not unpleasant voice queried. His words whistled in her head, swirling in a seductive, siren’s call kinda way.

Please. As if. It would take a shitload more than some disembodied voice whispering something as lame as “boo” to scare her. She knew scared—scratch that—she knew shit-in-your-pants, full-on terrified and she wasn’t going back.
Because this happens all the time to me. It’s what some might say is my calling in life, and after the shit I’ve seen go down, not much scares me—especially a word as weak as
boo.
And one more time—for the record—I’m busy. Go away. Find another medium to stalk,
she relayed mentally as sternly as she could.

Delaney cleared her throat and turned her attention back to the Dabrowski family and their desperate need to have questions answered by their beloved aunt Gwyneth. She asked once more, “Aunt Gwyneth? Your family is here and they have some questions for you. Come, talk to me.” She used her soft, “cajoling the dearly departed” tone to woo Gwyneth into communicating with her.

“Damn right I have some questions,” Gwyneth Dabrowski’s nephew Irv said, interrupting Delaney’s mojo with his gruff impatience. “I wanna know why the hell she left the vacation house at the lake to that fruit Leopold. What kind of a frickin’ name is that, anyway? A pansy name, that’s what. All playing with roses like they were his friends and doing weird girlie crap all the time. He was the gardener, for Chrissake! The lake house shoulda been mine, the piece of shit!”

Another rustle of chairs and the crinkle of an expensive leather coat greeted Delaney’s ears. “Irv! Shut up already, would ya? Didn’t Ms. Markham say we had to be quiet while she called on Aunt Gwyneth so as not to provoke or frighten the dead? Do you really want to piss Gwyneth off in death the way you did when she was alive?” Irv’s wife, Edna, chided him with her nasally thick New York accent. “Oy, Irv! You never listen. Now be quiet, and let the lady do what we came here for.”

“I hate to interrupt again,” the man in her head apologized, “but I just have to know. What’s a medium, and why would I want to stalk it?”

Delaney scrunched her eyes shut. This was so not the time to come across a wayward spirit, looking for guidance. Especially when today, of all days, she really needed some moolah.
I’m a medium, and you’re interrupting my very carefully planned séance. Now go away. I have rent to pay.

“That still doesn’t explain what a medium is. Do you mean that’s your size? Because you don’t look like a medium to me. I’d have gone with small.”

Delaney suppressed a giggle. At least he was a complimentary spirit. And far too put together for her liking. He didn’t seem disoriented on this plane at all . . .
Look, didn’t I just say I was busy? You ain’t the only freakin’ spirit out there, and right now, I’m being paid by a very nice family to contact their dead aunt. You, on the other hand, are what I’d call a freeloader—one of those spirits who think the whole spirit world revolves around just them and they can infiltrate a séance whenever they feel like it. I have some pretty strict rules about that—especially when cash is involved. And seeing as you’re one of the rare ghosts who has his wits about him, you get it when I say knock it the fuck off. Go back to wherever you came from and visit me during my normal business hours. Capisce?

“But you still haven’t explained the medium thing to me,” whoever pushy was reiterated in a soft but steadily increasing, insistent tone.

Again, you’re not listening, and to top things off, you’re being exceptionally rude. Now shut up and go away before I, like, send out the spirit world’s version of a SWAT team and have your ass dragged off to some alternate dimension.

“You can do that?”

Okay, so no, she couldn’t do that. Color her caught. That would be way overstating her importance in the spirit world. Delaney sighed.
Look, do me a solid, okay?

“A solid . . .”

Yeah, you know, like, a favor?

“Oh. Sure. Whaddya need?”

Wow, again, she couldn’t help thinking, he wasn’t at all like the typical spirits who darkened her doorstep. He didn’t seem even a little confused about where he was, nor did he seem terribly agitated. In fact, his tone was almost too friendly. Which, again, made her suspicious.
You. To. Shut. Up. Now, for the love of all that’s holy. Please, before the dogs start to bark and I lose my shot at making some cash.

“You have dogs?”

Six—all as supernaturally sensitive as I am. If they sense an uninvited presence, one that’s hacking me off much like you are, not only am I doomed, but so are your eardrums. Now please, let me finish this up, and then we can connect.

“You have six dogs?
Six?
Doesn’t that break some kind of law or at least an ordinance?”

I’m sure it does, but it probably won’t be the first law I’ve broken, or the last. And tell me something?

“What’s that?” he rumbled, sort of husky and almost too easygoing for her well-honed, ghostie antenna.

Maybe he was a plant. A shiver raced up her spine. She didn’t need this—not when the rent was due. Or maybe he was a dead actor. Dead celebrities loved a captive audience; they had one in her and contacted her often because of it. But he didn’t sound at all familiar. Stirring from around the table refocused her on getting rid of this new entity.
Is there a little old lady with you? Dripping diamonds and sapphires and wearing a red sweatsuit with white racing stripes down the arms?

“Yeah, yeah, there is.”

Then tell her front and center. Her family has some questions for her, and I need—

“The money. You said that. Um, she says, and I’m only repeating her words, ‘No fucking way.’ ” He cleared his throat, the sound reverberating in her head. “Sorry, but that’s what she said. Word for word. Honest.”

His words made Delaney pause because they sounded so sincere. Maybe he’d been a Boy Scout in life. Or a priest. Shit. Priests were always a messy, messy affair when it came to crossing them over to the great beyond. If their deaths involved any kind of religious overtones, or a stall in their faith, they were the hardest to convince they should go into what the living called the light. The light was sort of a sham as far as she was concerned. It wasn’t always a light, if what some of the comments she’d heard just before the crossing were accurate.

She well remembered the college football player who’d blown his knee out just before draft picks and had lost his chance to play pro ball. His version of what some would call Heaven was Soldier Field and an endless stretch of green. Then there’d been the rich socialite—her idea of utopia was an upscale mall with row after row of stores like Cartier, Cole Haan, and Tiffany. Apparently, sometimes the light was what you made of it—your love for shopping or your dream of playing football in the NFL come true.

“Didn’t I tell ya, Edna?” Irv interrupted Delaney’s conversation with the as yet unnamed entity. He let go of Delaney’s hand and thwacked the table with his meaty fist.

Edna’s row of thick bracelets clanked, jarring Delaney’s tenuous at best connection with Aunt Gwyneth as she, too, let go, rearing up in her chair and leaning forward toward Irv. “Tell me
what
, Irv?” Her words were raspy and clearly annoyed.

Irv’s wide, bulldoglike face screwed up, adding more wrinkles to his pudgy cheeks. “That this broad was a shyster. A fuckin’ fruitcake! I told ya this would never work! But no, ya just had ta throw some cash out the window like I piss it out in the damn toilet every morning to pay for your crazy ideas. This is a load of bullshit, and I want my damned deposit back, you freak!” Irv bellowed.

And Irv’s bellowing startled the dogs.

All six.

Which meant there’d be no shutting them up.

Which also meant her landlord, Mr. Li, would be downstairs to hassle her tout de suite.

Because it would remind him she was twenty days overdue with her rent.

Fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck.

Do you see what you’ve done?
she scolded, channeling the interfering voice in her head and tuning out Irv’s angry rants now mixed with the incessant, shrieking yaps of her dogs.

His voice blew through her head, calm like a soft ocean breeze—all reasonable. “Well, that’s what Gwyneth said to tell you. I was just doing what you asked. She also said she wouldn’t have given Irv the
fucking
house on the lake if they’d peeled her skin off while she was still alive. He’s a putz, she says. A no-good, lazy piece of shit—”

Again, shutting up would behoove you right now. Especially if you need my help. I can’t concentrate on you and the Dabrowskis all at once. Now let me try to salvage some of this while I can, and you practice waiting your freakin’ turn.

“My turn for what?”

She didn’t have time to answer him. Irv had popped up, with a squealing, protesting Edna following close behind him. The scrape of his chair against the floor, the stomp of his feet while Edna shot Delaney a look of sympathy, meant game over.

The tinkle of the bell on her front door signaled their raucous, angry exit.

Booyah.

Delaney laid her head on the cool surface of her old wood table, letting her cheek rest against it. She puffed out a sigh of defeat while rolling her forehead over the hard oak. Damn these dumb-ass entities that couldn’t be bothered with just a little consideration for a working girl. What about “Get the fuck out of my head” didn’t they understand?

Always yammering, day and night, night and day—in her head—in the grocery store—while she was in the bathroom—when she was trying to wax her legs. And always it was at the most inopportune of moments—like the ones that involved freakin’ cash.

She didn’t hate her gift. There were just times she wished she could put it on mute and finish a whole television program without experiencing other-dimensional difficulties.

The dogs, yipping as though someone was swinging them around by their tails, forced her to act. Placing her hands on the wood, Delaney pushed off to rise from her chair and head to the back of her store where her small apartment was.

“Guys! Shut up!” she yelled to her dogs with frustration. “What do you suppose the Dog Whisperer would say if he could hear how unruly you knuckleheads are? Christ on a cracker! Cesar’d shit a Pit Bull if he could see your behavior. Didn’t we just spend a whole weekend learning that
I’m
the leader of the pack, and when I tell you to can it—you can it?”

Five and a half pairs of soulful eyes collectively rolled when she entered her small, makeshift living room as if to say,
Here comes the “I will use the duct tape” speech.
Six bodies in various shapes and sizes lined up on her couch, shaking with anticipation, their tails of various colors wagging. “Don’t. Even. Don’t you even give me the eye roll, you beasts.” She waved a finger under their wet, eager noses. “You know, it just isn’t enough that I saved every last one of you from the chopping block in one way or the other, is it? You’d think I’d be due a little grateful, but nooooooooo. We can’t have Mommy earning a living or something crazy, now can we? I’m telling you, if you can’t all be quiet, I’m not kidding when I say there’s a roll of duct tape in your very near futures, and don’t think—”

“You really
do
have six dogs,” the male voice said matter-of-factly, reentering her head with the ease of applying room-temperature butter to toast.

Now that she and the disembodied voice were alone, Delaney communicated as though he were standing right in front of her—even though he still hadn’t made a physical appearance. For some stuck souls, it took time and even some wooing before they’d make themselves visible to her.

Delaney clasped her hands together and cracked her knuckles. “Yep, and thanks to you yakking me up in my head, the dogs heard the commotion from my irate customer, then I went long with the Dabrowskis and pissed off that Irv. He wasn’t exactly a believer to begin with, and you showing up didn’t help one iota.” She made a circle around her face with a finger in the direction the voice had come from. “See this? This is my really tweaked face. I just lost eight hundred bucks because you wouldn’t get off my cloud. Now go away and come back tomorrow. I’m too hacked off to ship you off to the other side right now.”

“Eight hundred dollars? You charge poor, grieving families eight hundred bucks to contact their dead loved ones?” His voice, silky smooth as it was, held a hint of indignation.

Delaney planted her hands on her hips, the jingle of her bangle bracelets ringing in the small space of her living room/dining room. “Please. Save the righteous indignation. It’s not like I can have a real nine-to-five when you bunch keep popping up in my head unannounced. Imagine what it would look like to Wal-Mart shoppers if I greeted not just the living, but the dearly departed, too. Some of you wankers can be really, really pushy when you want something from me. That includes you, pal. I do what I have to do to survive, and as you yourself can see, I’m for real. I really can talk to the dead. It’s not something I do often, take money, I mean. But every once in a while, when business is slow in the winter, like now, I do what’s necessary to make the rent and pay for my ramen noodles, okay? So don’t be a hater.”

“Sorry.” His contrite mumble echoed in her head.

Delaney groaned, flipping on her lamp with the beaded burgundy shade. It cast a pleasant glow over her very gloomy situation. “Apology accepted. Now go back to wherever you came from until I’m feeling more like making nice. Right now, I just want to relax and watch some TV while I cook up another way to make some cash.”

“Can I ask you something?”