Kiss & Hell Read online

  “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?”

  Delaney ran a tired hand over her forehead, then yanked out the clip that held her hair up and threw it on the end table. “Like me saying the word no has stopped you thus far?”

  His chuckle, warm and killa manly, left a slither of a chill riding her spine. “What’s ‘shipping me off to the other side’ mean?”

  She ran a hand over each of her dogs’ heads lovingly, reaching into the pocket of her floor-length floral skirt and feeding them each a treat. “Uh, you know, up there.” She pointed a finger to her water-stained ceiling.

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  Delaney plopped down on her small couch, sending her pack of dogs scattering to either side of her. Her half Chihuahua, half Poodle—her Poo-Chi, as she’d dubbed him when she’d found him in an alleyway by her favorite Indian restaurant—instantly hopped into her lap, making her grunt while he settled in. She chucked him under the chin.

  From the size of him now, no one would ever know he’d once been skeletal and starving, scrounging for food in bags of trash. His stout, barrel-chested body had just recently tipped the scales at almost eighteen pounds. Waaayyy overweight for what was a mix of two toy breeds. Way. “Dude, that’s my ovary you’re standing on,” she reprimanded with a grunt, but her face settled into a warm smile
.

  Each dog dutifully took its place beside her while she kicked off her satin slippers, crossing her legs at her ankles. “Again, let me reiterate. I kinda don’t care why you’re here right now. It’s been a long day, I’m wiped, and I just lost eight hundred much-needed bucks. I have six mouths to feed and you blew their kibble for the week because you couldn’t wait your turn. That means you’ve stolen from the poor and now potentially homeless. Nice, very nice. Proud?”

  His voice came from behind her now. Right over her shoulder. “You talk about these mutts as if they’re your children.”

  Delaney tilted her head backward, directing her gaze in the direction of his voice somewhere near her window, letting out a gasp-snort. “First of all, watch your tone when it comes to the dogs.” Delaney ruffled her one-eyed Shih Tzu-Pomeranian’s head when he stuck his face pointedly in hers, scratching him just below his fuzzy, multicolored ear. His one eye bobbled at her with that vacant, indirect stare Shih Tzus were famous for. Poor baby had been destined for the Needle of Nevermore, and all because he had only one eye. The shelter’d said he was unadoptable—Delaney’d swept in and called that notion ridiculous, then adopted him and toyed with the idea of secretly calling him Cyclops, or Cy for short.

  “My tone? We’re talking mutts here.”

  Delaney planted a kiss on his muzzle before responding. “They’re not mutts. Not to me. They’re my babies. Dogs who happened upon some misfortune, but were fortunate enough to find me and my bleeding heart. Second of all, they are like my children, bonus being I don’t have to pay for college when they grow up, and they can’t ask to borrow the car. And it’s not like I’m going to have any kids, anyway. You need at least a date for that. And when wet blankets like you show up and rain on my social schedule at all hours of the day and night, demanding my attention, it makes it almost impossible for me to make a love connection. Ya feel me? No one wants to date the crazy chick who talks to herself.”

  There was no self-pity in her statement. Not even a little. Her life was what it was. There just hadn’t been a man she’d come across who was strong enough to handle her otherworldly charms—not so far, anyway. And even if that man never came along, she was good being alone. Well, there was one man in her life who got it. Her brother, Kellen. He didn’t share her gift, but he believed. That she had one person in her life who understood was more than most who shared her gift had.

  Besides, letting other people become involved with her had some hazardous risks she’d just as soon not take. So she’d stopped taking them.

  “I feel like I should apologize again. I didn’t mean to insult you and your . . . dogs.”

  Delaney lifted her head, glaring at her only purebred dog—a black Dachshund with bladder control issues—who was tugging at his festively decorated dungaree wraparound diaper, trying to yank it off.

  She nudged him with a gentle elbow, drawing his soft, doe-brown eyes to hers. “You—knock that off. I can’t have you peeing all over the place or Mr. Li will have my head. I did decorate the diaper for you, didn’t I? Do you know how many hours I spent with that stupid BeDazzler, hooking you up so you’d have pretty man-panties? Now quit being so ungrateful. And you”—she pointed behind her head at the voice—“should feel like apologizing again. You stiffed me out of eight hundred smackers. I don’t suppose your bank account’s still open on the other side, now is it?”

  His silence was palpable, resounding in her head.

  She nodded her head, affirming her statement. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

  “So you don’t date?”

  Delaney lifted herself off the couch, heading toward her small, narrow kitchen, six dogs at her heels. She popped her refrigerator door open, rooting around for some leftover Hamburger Helper. “Not since, like, 2005 or so, I think it was. Ira Warstein will never be the same, and I can’t say as I blame him. I decided, right then and there, after he’d been cracked in the head by his mother’s platter of carefully prepared gefilte fish, that not only did it look outwardly like I had the crazy goin’ on, but people were now getting hurt because of me. So end of. I’m just too hard to explain. Conversations like the one we’re having, where only I can hear you, harder still.”

  “You hit him in the head with a platter of fish?”

  She waved a hand at the voice, now in the center of her kitchen. “Don’t be ridiculous. I would never hit someone with anything, let alone a platter of fish. Our date was rudely interrupted by a very angry ghost who wanted my immediate attention and just couldn’t hang on to his britches while I made polite excuses to leave.” Delaney turned to stare at the empty spot in the room she’d pinpointed his voice in. “Sound vaguely familiar?”

  His tone was sheepish this time. “I’m apologizing again, right?”

  She shook her head in a firm no, brushing long strands of her auburn hair from her eyes. “No. You’re going away. I already accepted your apology. We’re golden.”

  “But I can’t go away.”

  “Yes, yes, you can. It works like this. You disappear until, like, tomorrow, while I feed the dogs, eat my crappy leftovers, and watch Ghost Whisperer.” She looked down at the eager puppies who’d gathered at her feet the moment she’d opened the fridge door. “We always watch Ghost Whisperer, don’t we, babies?” she cooed in a tone reserved just for her animals.

  His voice, if not his physical presence, remained firmly rooted to the center of her kitchen. “No, no, I can’t go away.”

  For the love of some meaningful, much-needed quiet time, he’d damned well better. “Hookay. I think we need the big guns here. Are you going to make me sic Darwin on you?”

  “Who’s Darwin?”

  “My dead Rottweiler—he’s still with me in spirit, though I can’t figure why he won’t hit the endless Milk-Bone highway in the sky. We’re a work in progress even in death. But that does mean he’s with you, too—wherever you are. And I hear his bark is definitely as bad as his bite. So scurry along now before I give him a ghostly ring-a-ling, and he eats your rude, interfering, money-stealing ass.”

  Five and a half pairs of eyes looked woefully in the direction of the voice, then back at her. Dinner—they wanted some. Delaney sank to her haunches on the floor, digging in her cabinets to find the last of the dry dog food she had.

  “So what are the dogs’ names?”

  Delaney sighed and lifted the half-empty dog food bag to the counter, ignoring the fact that this entity was at least trying to sound interested in her life—the one he’d interrupted so pompously. “Would you get the hell outta my head? You’ve long surpassed eager, and you’re well on your way to bordering obnoxious. I really, really need to lay down some ground rules for you bunch. And it’s not that I don’t understand that most times you can’t control how you pop in and out of my life, but you don’t seem to have that particular problem. In fact, you don’t seem disoriented at all. And as much as I’d like to delve right into that ghostly oddity of yours, I’m all out of patience. Now, for the love of Casper, go do ghostlike things and come back tomorrow.”

  “I was just curious.”

  “I know, and you know what they say about curious.”

  “I’m already dead. That theory no longer applies,” he offered with another chuckle—one that wasn’t terribly unpleasant.

  She threw her head back, exhaling with a ragged, put-upon sigh. “Dog.”

  “What?”

  “Dog. The dogs’ names are Dog.”

  “All of them?”

  Delaney nodded. “Uh-huh. And stop moving around so much, you’ll scare dog number three in my adoption lineup.” She pointed to her Lhasa Apso-Beagle, who was making continual, frantic circles at what Delaney suspected were the feet of her overbearing entity, attempting to nab and capture her tail. “She has anxiety issues—abandonment—food phobias out the wazoo, et cetera. As neurotic as a dieter around a plate of french fries, my baby is. In essence, your unearthly presence is making her crazy, and if you make her crazy, she’ll chew up m
y carpet. I don’t have the money to pay my rent because of you. Do you want me to have to pay for new carpet, too?”

  “Why haven’t you given them all names? You gave Darwin one.”

  “Why does that interest you so much?”

  “I’m not sure I know.”

  Delaney pinched the bridge of her nose—tonight was definitely a night for some chamomile tea and a healthy dose of white willow bark. “Okay, Q and A is almost over. This is your last answer. I named Darwin because at the time, I only had one dog’s name to remember. I don’t know where you come from, or if you come from a family with a lot of siblings, but it’s flippin’ hard to remember names when a bunch of kids are getting into something and you catch them all at once. My mother used to say she wished she’d named my brother and me Bob, and I understand why now. Anyway, it’s harder still to remember the names of six dogs that’re all yapping because some rude ghost’s entry into your life created chaos. Dog is easy to remember. It gets everyone’s attention in an instant, and I didn’t have to come up with anything clever like Rutabaga or Petunia. Besides, who could name a dog that wears a diaper BeDazzled in faux rhinestones? There’s a lot of pressure involved in that. If I go one name too far south, I’d trash his self-esteem. He’s already scarred—I figured I’d leave his dignity intact by not naming him something ludicrous like Fifi. And now”—she glanced at her microwave’s clock—“your time is up and my show’s almost on. Go. Away.”

  Blessed silence greeted her.

  Score.

  Delaney cocked her head but once after she’d finished pouring out six bowls of food, and heard nothing but the sounds of anticipatory, mealtime doggy breathing. She let out a sigh of relief. He’d come back, and when he did, she’d be happy to help. She had to admit, she was curious about his story.

  She’d never encountered a ghost who was as oriented on this plane as this one was. She’d only met one other supernatural entity who was as coherent as this one, and that entity, she’d just as soon forget entirely.