points, and he squirmed in the bed, trying to shrink from the foul-smelling pot. He sat up wide-eyed, his lips trembling. “Get that away from me! Get her away!”
Mavis took a step away from the bed, satisfied. “That does it.”
“You mean you’re not even going to apply the stuff?” I admit I was disappointed, though I didn’t really want to be around for the suppository part of the procedure.
“As I said, it’s a powerful restorative spell. The mere threat of having this in one’s orifices is usually enough to give the patient-victim all the energy he needs.”
“Thank you so much, Mavis.” Then I added, very advisedly, “I owe you one.”
“Oh, we’ll be calling soon.” She tipped her pointed hat to me and led her sister back out into the hospital corridors. As they left, I heard her suggest to Alma that they should stop at the hospital cafeteria’s all-you-can-eat salad bar before they went home.
Sheyenne’s delight to see her brother recovering lasted only a few seconds before her reaction set in; she’d been stewing most of the night. “Travis, Mom and Dad are dead. I’m dead! Isn’t that good enough for you? Why would you want to kill yourself like that?”
He tried to make a joke. “Can you think of a better way than death through sex? Coming and going at the same time.”
She slapped him, and her hand went right through his face. “I thought you were desperate! You said you had no money. How could you pay for something like that?”
Travis turned his head on the pillow, tried to withdraw into the bed. The silence hung for a few moments, until I spoke up. “Sheyenne, you already know where he got the money.”
Sometimes when you love somebody, you don’t want to see what’s staring you in the face. It’s that voluntary blindness when it comes to family members. She gaped at her brother. “You didn’t! You pawned our jewelry to spend the money in a brothel?”
“Not all of it,” he said in a very small voice.
“I don’t believe this, Travis! Even after I’m dead you’re still jerking me around!”
“Look, I’m sorry.” He weakly raised his hands. “She was so pretty and . . . I got carried away. I didn’t think it would turn out—”
“Just stop at ‘I didn’t think’!” Her spectral form glowed brighter as her fury became incandescent. “I—I need to leave before I say something I will regret for the rest of my . . . forever. I don’t know why I bother.”
In disgust, without even a glance at me, Sheyenne departed straight through the solid wall. I was required to leave by more conventional means, but not before I turned my most baleful glare on Travis. And zombies have a knack for baleful glares.
“I’m tired,” Travis muttered; it sounded like a whimper. “Leave me alone, I need to rest.”
“Normally I don’t get involved in family matters,” I said in my most threatening tone, “but if you mess with Sheyenne, I promise I’m going to get very involved.”
At my undead pace it was difficult to storm off, but I did the best I could.
CHAPTER 25
At noon, McGoo invited me to attend the autopsy of Snazz the gremlin, as his personal guest. VIP seats. It’s great to have friends in the right places.
I arrived at the thick metal door at the rear of the morgue, and the fidgety ghoul attendant asked for my ID, compared it with the approved names on his clipboard, and checked me off the guest list.
Inside, McGoo lounged in a hard plastic chair, holding his usual cinnamon latte. “Hey, Shamble, how many ghouls does it take to wallpaper a room?” Before I could stop him, he said, “Depends on how thinly you slice them.”
I looked around the morgue. “What are you trying to do, make all the corpses get up and walk out of here groaning?”
“You never appreciate fine humor.”
“Hmm, I haven’t heard any in a long time.”
The murdered gremlin was laid out on a stainless-steel slab. All around us, tables were cluttered with Bunsen burners and bubbling beakers filled with colored liquids, differentiation tubes, glass and metal coils. I actually felt my hair stand on end from the static electricity in the air: A Jacob’s ladder buzzed and snapped with a rising electrical arc; a plasma ball flickered with tentacles of contained lighting. Since it was a sunny day with no thunderstorms in the forecast, the lab’s skylight was closed, the lightning rods withdrawn.
The coroner, a small-statured and frenetic man with