Smith's Monthly #23 Read online

  And he wanted to be famous.

  He wanted his parents to know he was famous.

  He knew that people should worship him and follow him and he needed the press and everyone to know he could carry through and earn their respect by killing.

  Eve was disgusted at the very belief.

  She froze him down solid and got him to drop his gun.

  Then she was about to tweak his nerve to put him asleep when she realized he had a friend.

  A friend as sick as he was.

  Lewis.

  Same age.

  Same sickness.

  Lewis wanted to be famous as well.

  Their plan was for Calvin to go into the mall first, start killing people, get the people stampeding toward the other side of the mall and Lewis would kill them as they ran toward him.

  Eve snapped the nerve on Calvin and he dropped the floor, out like a light just as Cascade reached them.

  “He’s got a friend on the other side of the mall,” Eve said. “Get help there quick. I’ll see if I can stop him in time.”

  Cascade nodded and was calling in instructions again.

  Eve instantly jumped to the other side of the mall.

  Lewis also had on a long coat and still had it buttoned. And he was looking puzzled because people were moving toward him, but there had been no shots fired.

  Eve merged inside of him.

  This kid was as sick as his friend. And was excited about killing and becoming famous.

  “Not today, asshole,” Eve said to the sick brain.

  She had the kid open his coat and then put his hands over his head. Then she had him lean back against the wall so the police that had just pulled up outside would see him.

  Then she had an idea.

  A nasty idea, but an idea.

  She went back to the part of the kid’s brain where Jewel had shown her with the girl killer a few weeks back. And there she set a command and rewired his brain just a little bit.

  At that point the police got there.

  Five of them approached and got the kid’s gun and got him on the ground.

  Then she left him, standing off to one side to watch.

  He wanted to be famous. Well, he was going to be famous for crying his eyes out anytime his name was mentioned.

  For the moment, the kid looked defiant and smiling. People were taking pictures of him on their cell phones.

  “What’s your name?” one of the cops asked.

  The kid started to say Lewis and burst into tears and collapsed on the ground.

  Eve looked around at all the people filming the gunman crying like a baby and laughed.

  She jumped back to Cascade. He and three other cops had the unconscious Calvin handcuffed and on his stomach on the ground.

  She touched Cascade’s arm. “Got the other one.”

  “Great,” Cascade said in his inner voice. “Are we done?”

  “Don’t know,” Eve said. She had a feeling she had missed something.

  So she said, “I’m going back into this guy to see if there’s anything we missed.”

  “Good idea,” Cascade said, again in his inner voice.

  Eve crawled inside the guy and got him to wake up some.

  He had no idea why his plan hadn’t worked. But then she saw that he had a second plan.

  And his second plan would kill even more than he would have killed here in the mall today.

  They had two cars loaded with explosives from his grandfather’s factory. He had driven one and Lewis had driven the other.

  The bombs would level both sides of the mall and both parking lots on the sides of the mall away from where he and Lewis had entered.

  And they were set to go off in exactly twenty-six minutes. Just as the police were emptying the mall.

  Eve quickly rewired this idiot’s brain as well to make him proclaim his plan over and over and over anytime anyone asked him any kind of question. And to proclaim his superiority over everyone else as well.

  And she also had him tell anyone who was listening how to defuse the bombs he had built.

  And he would do that over and over for the rest of his life.

  He was not going to be popular in prison.

  And he would deserve everything he got there, if he lived to get that far.

  EIGHTEEN

  CASCADE WATCHED AS Eve appeared out of the gunman and moved over beside him.

  Two cops had the gunman pinned and were about to bring him to his feet.

  “Both of their cars are rigged with massive amounts of explosives to go off in just over twenty minutes.”

  “Shit,” Cascade said in his inner voice.

  “Their cars are parked at the other two main entrances,” Eve said, touching Cascade and showing him what she knew about defusing the bombs.

  Cascade nodded.

  “Ask him to tell you how to defuse the bombs,” Eve said.

  Cascade nodded and stepped toward Calvin.

  “Any more of you idiots beside you and your partner on the other side of the mall?” Cascade demanded. “Anything else like bombs in your cars?”

  Calvin smiled and then got a frown as he started telling Cascade all about the bombs and his great plan to kill even more people.”

  Cascade felt disgusted. He could only imagine how Eve felt crawling around inside the guy’s head.

  “How do we disarm them?” Cascade demanded.

  Calvin was frowning, but he rattled off how exactly to disarm them, how to go in the passenger door and the detonator was on the floor of the passenger seat.

  There were now five cops there.

  Cascade asked what both cars looked like and Calvin told them, proclaiming how smart he was and how many people were going to die.

  “Can we trust him?” Officer Daniels of the Tigard Department asked.

  Cascade knew him as a good guy and really smart and a cop who often ran in when calling for help might have been a better solution.

  “I think we can,” Cascade said, nodding. “Get the bomb squad on the way and close off those entrances and get people leaving the mall through this and the entrance with the other gunman. I’ll take the car on the west side.”

  Daniels nodded. “I’ll take the east side.”

  At that Cascade turned and went around the mall toward the west at full run while Daniels went the other way.

  As he came around the corner he saw Eve pointing at the car he needed to find.

  He shouted for a couple of people near other cars to run and they did.

  “Sure wish I could teleport like you do,” he said to Eve as he got to the car winded.

  “More than likely you can,” Eve said. “Other superheroes can. You just haven’t learned how yet. So if this bomb starts to go, you just think you want to be back by the patrol car real hard.”

  “Is that possible?” he asked as he stared in at the massive explosives filling the back seat of the car.

  “Believe it is,” Eve said. “I have no intention of losing a partner this soon in our relationship.

  He nodded.

  With that, he took a deep breath and opened the passenger door.

  And nothing exploded.

  So far, so good.

  NINETEEN

  EVE WATCHED AS Cascade followed the guy’s instructions perfectly, leaning over the passenger seat and working with the detonator on the floor.

  Within one minute he had the bomb defused.

  He stood and stepped back.

  She touched him.

  On the outside he seemed cool and collected, but he was waves of relief inside.

  She said to him that she wished she could kiss him for that great work.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Think you can help Daniels?”

  “I can if you move away from this car,” she said.

  “Gladly,” he said, moving back and waving even more people out of the area.

  She jumped to the other side of the mall.

  Daniels had the passenger do
or of the other car open, but seemed to be having issues with something. He was just staring at the detonator.

  She merged with him.

  As Cascade had thought, Daniels was a good guy, living with a life partner who worked for Intel. They were considering trying to adopt.

  And he loved being a cop. He loved helping people.

  But he was having trouble remembering exactly which way to go. He had started to doubt himself and was about to back out and let the car explode.

  She carefully fed him some confidence and the correct instructions in such a way that he wouldn’t realize he got it from anything but himself.

  He nodded, took a deep breath and went back to work on the bomb.

  Eve stayed with him, keeping him completely focused and sure of the instructions.

  And with eight minutes to spare, he had the bomb disarmed.

  Then she planted the thought, “Just to be sure, back the hell out of here and clear the area.”

  He did just that and as he left the car, she turned and left him.

  He did exactly what Cascade was doing on the other side of the mall. He waved people away, then headed for the mall doors to get people away from the big glass doors and back down the hallway.

  If that thing blew after all, it wouldn’t kill anyone, but it was going to make an awful mess.

  She jumped back to Cascade and smiled at him. “He’s got it.”

  Cascade smiled, then said to everyone in the mall close to the doors. “Everyone down or take cover,” he said. “Just in case.”

  Nothing exploded.

  As far as Eve was concerned, tonight they were having a great dinner and wine and she just might do whatever she could to have sex with the handsome man who had saved a lot of lives today.

  Of course, it didn’t work. He was a human and she was a ghost.

  But it was still a wonderful dinner.

  PART FOUR

  They Don’t Want to Sleep

  TWENTY

  FOR A GHOST and a superhero, what exactly was the next level?

  He could see her just fine, but they couldn’t really touch each other. Granted, being in each other’s minds was pretty damn nifty as far as she was concerned, but they were both very, very horny.

  So far they had managed to avoid it because they had no answer to how to have a physical relationship. But Eve knew they had to solve this very, very frustrating problem.

  And fast.

  So on Saturday afternoon, Eve decided to go try to get some answers.

  Cascade was stretched out in front of the television by 9 in the morning in his apartment, and she had no doubt he would be asleep in ten minutes. Having a ghost in his head all the time was tiring. He hadn’t been a superhero much longer than she had been a ghost, so all this was new for both of them.

  She was tired as well.

  But the sex thing needed to get solved.

  She had set up a meeting with Jewel and her boyfriend, Tommy, at their normal breakfast place, the Golden Nugget Buffet in Las Vegas. So with an air kiss to her partner, she jumped from outside Portland, Oregon, to Vegas.

  Tommy had been a cop when alive and Jewel a doctor. They were the two Ghost of a Chance agents that had trained her in what she could do as an agent in this new life, and she had called Jewel a couple of times the first month for different forms of help.

  This morning, Jewel had on a beautiful blue blouse and had her long brown hair pulled back off her face. Tommy had on a T-shirt with a light shirt over it. With his close-cut brown hair, he reminded Eve a lot of Cascade.

  Both Jewel and Tommy were tall and exercised every day a great deal, mostly running.

  Jewel and Tommy had both died in a car wreck as she had done. They had just met and as a deputy, he was driving Jewel, as a doctor, to an emergency in the Montana mountains when a deer jumped in front of them and they had hit a tree.

  As had happened to Eve, instead of crossing over, Jewel had remained in this real world and been recruited as a Ghost of a Chance agent. Jewel and Tommy had been recruited as agents together and had fallen in love.

  Eve liked Jewel and Tommy a great deal and felt as if she could trust them with anything.

  They had already finished their breakfast and were sipping on coffee when she arrived.

  In one month, eating had become one of her real pleasures in being dead, besides being with Cascade. And being able to read other people’s thoughts and walk though things. That was all fun as well, but mostly she just loved every minute with Cascade.

  Jewel and Tommy were much later morning people than she and Cascade were, because of his job schedule. Jewel and Tommy had just finished breakfast, for her it was getting closer to lunch.

  The Golden Nugget had a wonderful feel about it. Brown cloth decorations, brown oak wood, and large windows looking out over the pool gave the place a feeling of relaxation instead of Las Vegas hurry-up-and-spend of so many of the casinos.

  There were only about twenty live humans scattered around the large room and Jewel and Tommy had a table off to one side near a planter. It seemed that they always had that table. Live humans never sat there.

  When Eve had trained here in Vegas after her death, she and Jewel and Tommy had spent a lot of time right here in this buffet at the same table.

  The smell of bacon and waffles filled the air and even though she had eaten a few hours before, she went for a waffle as dessert. Damn she was loving to eat, but Jewel had warned Eve that she had better get exercising fairly quickly. It seemed that ghosts could gain weight, and with as good as food tasted, Eve could see how it wouldn’t be hard to stack on the pounds.

  Eve joined Jewel and Tommy and they asked about her and Cascade’s first month and she filled them in as she worked on her waffle.

  “I sometimes miss just riding on patrol,” Tommy said. “It was always a combination of quiet boredom combined at times with acute awareness and broken by moments of panicked action.”

  “Would you leave this life for that again?” Jewel asked him.

  He laughed. “Not a chance.”

  All three of them laughed, then Jewel focused on Eve. “So what’s the problem?”

  Eve took a deep breath, trying to figure out where to start. Then she decided to just tell them what was happening instead of asking questions around the problem.

  “Cascade and I have fallen in love,” she said.

  “Wow, that’s wonderful to hear,” Jewel said, smiling a huge grin.

  “It will sure make spending all those hours together a lot more fun,” Tommy said, also smiling.

  “It is fun,” Eve said. “More than either of us have ever experienced before. We are sharing things I didn’t know I would ever share with anyone else. And he’s just an amazingly special person.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Jewel asked.

  Tommy laughed and looked at his partner, shaking his head at Jewel. “Sex.”

  “Oh,” Jewel said, suddenly sitting back as she realized Eve’s problem.

  “Yeah,” Eve said. “The problem, put bluntly, is that Cascade and I are beyond horny and damned if we can figure out the ghost-and-alive-connection problem.”

  “Oh,” Jewel said again.

  Eve pushed the remains of her waffle away. From Jewel’s reaction, this was not going to be an easy problem to solve.

  If there was a solution at all.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “WE NEED SOME help with this one,” Jewel said.

  Tommy nodded.

  And before Eve could stop Jewel or even ask who the help might be, Jewel said into the air, “K.J., a little help.”

  “Need a minute to finishing getting dressed if you don’t mind.” A voice in the air above the table seemed to echo from a deep chamber.

  Eve looked around, but, of course, no one was there.

  Jewel turned to Eve. “K.J. is our team’s boss. He is the one who reports to the gods and he is the one who gets us our assignments, unlike you and Cascade who just go out an
d save people.”

  “Good thinking,” Tommy said to Jewel. “K.J. has been dead for over a hundred years and has a reputation as a party person.”

  “One of the best, if not the best party person,” a man said, appearing next to the table. “Please, if you must spread my reputation, do it with some accuracy.”

  The guy was short, really, really short, wearing a gray pinstriped silk suit and vest, a pink tie with flamingos on it, pink slippers, and a bright pink feathery hat that had a tail on it that went down his back.

  Eve just stared, her mouth open. Her life in Oregon had been sheltered, clearly.

  He bowed slightly to Eve, the feathers in his hat flowing around him. “I am K.J. I have heard you are a fast study.”

  “I had good instructors,” Eve managed to say, nodding to Tommy and Jewel.

  K.J. glanced at the buffet, then looked at Jewel. “Before I move to get some maple syrup on this grand tie, what is your problem?”

  Jewel indicated that K.J. should sit down at the table.

  “A major issue I see,” K.J. said, sitting.

  “You have heard,” Jewel said, “that Eve is the first ghost agent to partner with a live superhero.”

  “How is that going?” K.J. said. “A grand experiment, if I must say.”

  “We are doing well,” Eve said. “Saved a bunch of lives so far.”

  “And that is why we are here in this ghostly state,” K.J. said, nodding.

  “But Eve and her partner, Deputy McCall Cascade, have a problem,” Jewel said.

  “You are with Cascade?” K.J. said, his eyes lighting up.

  Eve was surprised, because in all the times inside of Cascade’s head, she had never seen a thought about this sparklingly-dressed ghost. She was sure she would have remembered. And positive Cascade would have remembered K.J. as well.

  “I am,” she said.

  “Oh, girl, how do you keep your hands off of that hunk of a man?” K.J. asked. “I saw his picture when he was recruited and got so hot I had to retire for the day and take care of issues.”