sindri42:stljedi:It’s going to be a bad night.Look, if it’s a real ghost, the busters get custody. I
sindri42:stljedi:It’s going to be a bad night.Look, if it’s a real ghost, the busters get custody. If it’s just a real estate developer in a costume it’s out of their jurisdiction so we gotta hand things off to these meddling kids and their dog.Patty rubs her face. “Okay, I—Abby, these are children. One of ’em’s wearing bobby socks and that one guy looks like he just fell out of the puberty tree and hit every branch on the way down.”Abby opens her mouth to argue, like she always fucking does, but Holtzmann beats her to it. “Tsk tsk tsk,” she says from the backseat, saying the word like it’s pronounced T-I-S-K, as she turns a page in her book. It’s called The Scatalogic Rites of All Nations. “Frederique has informed me that he is of age to buy beer, and the other three are able to legally buy cigarettes in this state.”“How do you—nope,” Patty decides midway through, and gets out of the car, making sure to take the keys with her. Last time she’d left Holtzmann unattended with the keys lying around, they’d found the car three days later in Cleveland, covered in confetti, Holtzmann lying on the roof with what Patty will swear on a stack of bibles was the ghost of James Garner, both of them stoned and having a serious talk about the best place to get calamari in LA. It’s best to just keep her contained.The gas station’s quiet; it’s three a.m. and there’s not a lot of traffic, which is good, since apparently they’re there to investigate some poltergeisty business. Poltergeistic? Poltergeisian?Abby’s gotten out of the car too, unfortunately, bustling around the front to start waving some sort of detector in Patty’s face. Fortunately there’s only so high up she can reach. “Look, I ran into them a few months ago on a side job—”“We’re running side jobs now?” Patty demands, although she’s not really feeling it. They’ve been slammed for work ever since that whole thing last year; she’d barely gotten time off to be best lady to her brother’s wedding in April. At least Abby looks guilty about it; Holtzmann would’ve just looked entertained and Erin would’ve looked constipatedly irritated. “Holtzmann had that new gun to try out,” she apologizes, which is actually a good apology because “that gun” had not been a chart-topper. “Anyway, we got there and these guys—”“Kids,” Patty correct, because: kids.“Were already there investigating, or…whatever it is that they… do, and it turned out that the ghost was actually the nephew of the old lady who owns the house; he was trying to get people to think it was haunted so he could buy it out from under her and put her in a home.” She shakes her head. “What an asshole. Really terrible ghost costume, too, the sheets had daisies. Anyway, they said if they ever came across some real ghosts, they’d call us, and look!” She waves the detector thing again. “The activity is off the charts, and it’s coming from the gas station!” And she beams up at Patty as though that’s helping any of this situation.Which it is not. “Okay, so Erin wasn’t on that little side job, then?” Patty establishes.“No, why?” Abby says, already re-engrossed in her detector. Patty turns her physically by the shoulders toward the butt-ugly Winnebago or whatever it is van, where Erin is twirling her goddamn hair around her finger as she smiles awkwardly at the non-puberty-tree dude (who’s still young enough to be her nephew (if her sibling were a few years older and had gotten married pretty young, so too young for her for sure)). “Oh,” Abby concludes. “I mean, maybe it’ll help her get over the loss of Kevin?”“Kevin’s not dead, he got married a few months ago. I was best lady, remember?”“You caught the bouquet, as I recall,” Holtzmann pipes up from behind them, having oozed out of the car at some point. She’s lost the book and gained a pack, along with a gun that doesn’t look a whole lot more promising then “that gun” had been. “Any progress on that, Patrice?”“I want a raise and I also wanna kill all of you,” Patty says, and goes to haul Erin away before the red-headed girl goes for her with both sets of french-manicured nails. -- source link