Ghostbusters (22 page)

They'd not only saved the day, they'd made their fortune. Their meal ticket sat smoking between the soy sauce and the chili paste. Being the first to catch a ghost was as Kuhnian paradigm shifting as being the first to meet space aliens. Erin could see the Ghostbusters on every talk show in the world, the front pages of every newspaper, and the cover of
Time
magazine. Not to mention the supermarket tabloids: “Holtzmann Spends Thirty-Five Mill on Cold Fusion Smart House”; “Abby's Secret Recipe for Ghost Shrimp”; and “Erin and Brad: Say It Isn't So.”

Validated and vindicated, Erin dropped into a wide, squatting wushu stance, then she and Patty added a bit of whip to their nae nae.

Erin beckoned their receptionist, who had yet to join in. “C'mon, Kevin!” she cried. “Let's see what you've got.”

He shook his head no. Which surprised her. She couldn't imagine that he was
shy
. He was a model and an actor, right? And a semiprofessional hide-and-seek player? He sought the limelight. He loved the limelight. He was all about the limelight.

“Give us
something,
” Patty insisted.

Kevin stared at them stone-faced, as if he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. Then just as Erin had given up on him, he rose out of his chair and busted a move that was all his own. He was incredible, and Erin and Patty cheered. They all danced over to where Abby and Holtzmann sat at their worktable. They had the device they had found at the theater disassembled in front of them, and they looked intense.

“Guys, cheer up,” Erin encouraged them. “It's time to celebrate. This is what ‘legit' feels like.”

Swept up in the joy of the moment, she snatched the trap off the table, puckered up, and gave it another energetic kiss. Kevin stopped busting and peeled off at once.

Abby winced. “Okay, you gotta stop kissing the trap.”

“I know,” Erin said. “But it's like the more you guys say, ‘Don't kiss the trap,' the more I want to kiss the trap. Holtzmann, get in on this!”

Holtzmann held up a wait-a-minute finger as she shifted attention from the heap of parts disassembled from the weird sparking thing on the table, to the different heap of parts on her workbench. “Rain check,” she said. “Exciting things happening over here. Newly printed circuit boards, superconducting magnets rebuilt, beam accuracy improved and extended by producing a controlled plasma inside a new RF discharge chamber in the redesigned wand, a cryocooler to reduce helium boil-off. And—wait for it—a mothergrabbin' Faraday cage to attenuate RF noise and provide physical protection to avoid quenches. Can I get a woot woot?”

“Woot woot!” Abby and Erin cried.

Kevin rejoined them. He looked nonplussed. “Ummmm,” he said, hesitating as if he was trying to remember what he came over to say. Then he blurted out, “There's a Smartin Christ here to see you.”

After a few days of constant exposure, his malapropisms no longer challenged her. Erin adroitly translated the Kevinese: “Smartin Christ—you mean Martin Heiss? The famed scientist? The paranormal debunker? Here? Inside this building?”

There is nothing to be nervous about. We are for real,
Erin reminded herself as she and the other Ghostbusters followed Kevin to the reception area.

A very dapper man in a a three-piece suit with a dramatic hat and holding a walking stick was standing with his back to them, scrutinizing papers on the wall filled with scientific notations and crazy-looking squiggles. It was all highly scientific and completely accurate.
Surely he would be able to see that.

But he had already told all NY-Local 1 News's viewers that they were just frauds. He had a lot invested in making sure the public still saw it that way.

What do we care? We aren't frauds. And the whole world knows it,
Erin assured herself.

“Mr. Heiss. Welcome to our laboratory,” she said more calmly than she felt. Suddenly she didn't want him looking at their equations.

He turned around, left hand cupping his right elbow, fingers of his right hand touching his chin—a classic speculative pose.

“Is now a bad time?” There was a mischievous glint in his eyes, and his lips formed the faintest hint of a mocking pout.

In person, Martin Heiss was a bit of a jerk. A pompous, smug, self-satisfied jerk.

Could he sense that Erin was weirded out by this uninvited intrusion? Did he think that meant that they had something to hide? She caught herself reverting back to old Erin, the self-doubting, fearful Erin. What the heck did she have to be defensive about? They had caught a frigging ghost, for pete's sake. An empowering image flashed through her mind: her shouldering a proton pack, then beam-smacking his tailored butt down the stairs and out of the building, like what Patty had done to that dude in front of the theater. Liar, liar pants on fi-ahh!

“Actually, it is—” Abby began, but Erin cut in.

“Not at all. Please, have a seat.” She turned to Kevin. “Kevin, could you get Mr. Heiss some water?”

The professional paranormal debunker sat down. The Ghostbusters joined him, their expressions ranging from anxious to indifferent to jolly.

“I sure hope you don't mind being recorded.” Again he flashed that self-satisfied smirk, as if he thought they were stupid and he was so smart that he was going to make them look even more stupid on TV.

Erin's inner bravado began to weaken—in postproduction editing he could put whatever they said in an unflattering context. “Well, I actually would prefer—”

He whipped out a camera and put it on the table. Then he hit record. He also pulled out a notepad.

Weiss the weasel had played it perfectly, and from the way his smirk broadened into a grin, he knew it. If she challenged him now over the fact that he was recording the interview, he could air her unwillingness to go public. That would make the Ghostbusters seem like charlatans.

“Oh, okay.” Erin shifted in her chair. Then Kevin set down a glass of water that was inexplicably only one-eighth full. Just enough for Heiss to choke on?

“Let's start light and easy,” Heiss said, actually batting his eyelashes at her. “Ever hear of the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge? James Randi offered to pay one million dollars to anyone who can prove paranormal claims under scientific testing criteria. No one has. Why are you pretending to catch ghosts?”

The unprovoked insult and condescension lit Abby's fuse. She said, “We only know what
four percent
of the universe—”

“Breathe,” Erin told her gently. Turning to Heiss, she said, “Sir, we believe in the scientific method. I've dedicated my life to it. We have been working on bringing the paranormal into a controlled environment so we can supply that proof. This has been very difficult to do. But we have now done just that.” She gestured to the ghost trap. “At 4:23
P.M.
today we successfully trapped a Class Three vapor.” She said it clearly. Let him record
that
.

“You're saying there's a ghost in the box?” Again, there was glee in his eyes and a smirk on his mouth.

Contempt dripped from his chin like ectoplasm. Mockery, apparently Heiss's forte, was the lowest form of humor, and Erin wanted to make him eat a yard of it. “Yes, I am,” she said with confidence. She was proud of what they had achieved, and rightfully so.

There was another flurry of eyelash batting. “Well, I would just love to see it. Wouldn't that be a treat.”

Abby stepped in. “You can't. We still have to establish the best method of testing that can contain it in the lab.”

“What a shame.” Phony sigh. He quickly wrote something in his notebook.

“Otherwise we would show you,” Erin assured him.

“Hey. You gotta keep it contained.” He shrugged, beaming at her. “What can you do?”

Erin decided to appeal to him, one scientific professional to another. “Listen, I know this sounds like we're making it up.” She gestured to their jumpsuits and proton packs. “Obviously, we look a little ridiculous right now.”

“You look like the Orkin of Bullshit.”

Ooh, she could tell that he loved saying that. His eyes shined in triumph. He had probably worked on it on the way over. What a
jerk—

“Well, it was real nice of you to stop by,” Patty said.

Erin realized it was the first time she had spoken to Heiss. He'd probably riled her up making fun of their uniforms. And who was he, anyway, to sit there and rush to judgment when the scientific method
demanded
that one keep a clear and objective mind when new theories were being advanced? He wasn't just a jerk, he was more than a jerk. He was a scurrilous, slanderous, pompous buffoon who made a living by humiliating people. Well, she was about to put him in his place.

“You wanna see it?” Erin said. Her caustic tone and inflection made it a declarative statement: You don't have the balls to see it.

“I would love to see it,” he said, assuming the elbow-resting, chin-cradled speculative posture.

“Too bad. He can't,” Abby insisted.

“I think he should see it,” Erin shot back.

“This jerk's approval doesn't matter,” Abby said. “There are more important things at play.”

“I bet,” Heiss said. He was just
loving
this.

Erin had already locked in her course. “We're showing him.”

As she stood up and started over to the trap, Holtzmann and Patty shot each other looks of alarm. They bolted for the wall hooks, pulled down their proton packs, and shouldered them. The devices made a scary pinging sound that built to a roar as they powered up to max output. Patty and Holtzmann tapped their wands, ready to recapture the freed ghost.

Erin moved the trap from the lazy Susan to the floor in front of the table. “I would stand over there behind us,” she suggested to Heiss.

He didn't move a muscle. “I weirdly think I'll be just fine here,” he insisted, practically hugging himself with glee.

Abby stepped beside Erin and blocked her hand from the trap's reset. “Erin, no. We finally caught an entity. I'm not letting you do this.”

“Okay, fine, fine, I get it,” Erin said.

Abby said, “Good,” and backed off.

Just as Erin knew she would.

She immediately hit the release button and the two halves of the trap snapped open with a loud clunk. A cloud of steam puffed out and rose to the water-stained ceiling. Then … nothing.

No ghost.

Heiss's bemused expression was terrible to behold—it looked painted on.

“Oh come on,” Erin said after a few very long seconds passed. She tapped the side of the box with her toe. Still nothing. Gave it a harder kick. Nada. She was baffled. How could the specter have gotten out? Had the force field broken down? Had the power supply failed for a microsecond? Had that caused the polarities to reverse? Had its not-of-this universe molecules simply evaporated? Had it found an unknown way to return to the other side?

Shaking their heads in disbelief, Patty and Holtzmann lowered their wands.

Heiss stood, and with a flourish turned off his camera. “Well, it was lovely meeting you—”

In the span of a single heartbeat, a crushing and humiliating defeat became something infinitely worse. Without warning the theater ghost burst out of the trap, and fangs bared, in full demonic mode flew straight at Heiss, who seemed rooted to the floor. The intervening distance was less than ten feet. Before anyone could say or do anything, it swung the debunker into the air and threw him through the window. Right through it, with tremendous force—window frame blown out, glass shattering. Glittering fragments hung in the air as Heiss's shoe soles toppled out of sight; his warbling scream presumably cut short by unyielding pavement. The ghost darted through the emptied window frame and disappeared.

“Oh my god!” Patty cried. They ran to the window, and as they stuck out their heads the ghost vanished over the rooftops across the street. Erin stared down in shock. How far the mighty had fallen.

Shortly after they put in a 911 call, sirens began to wail in the distance, and a few minutes later an FDNY EMT ambulance and NYPD squad cars arrived, lights flashing. Then the second part of the ordeal began.

A patrol officer named Stevenson took charge of the scene. He pulled aside and interviewed the Ghostbusters. He quickly made it clear that he was no more accepting of the existence of the paranormal than Martin Heiss was. It was still too soon to know how to refer to TV's favorite debunker. “The late” seemed somewhat premature. Heiss had been rushed away in the ambulance with screaming sirens and spinning lights. Erin recalled that when the firemen left with dead Mrs. Barnard, there was no such fanfare, but rather a quiet, leisurely departure.

“I'm going to ask you one more time,” the officer said. “And if you tell me a ghost threw him out the window again, I swear to Christ, you're all answering this behind bars.” He stared hard at Holtzmann. “Okay, here we go. What happened?”

Holtzmann muttered, almost inaudibly, “Ghost did it.”

Stevenson cocked his head and glared at her. He looked like a Tasmanian devil about to take down a wombat. “Say that louder, please? I just want to be sure I'm hearing you right.”

But this is supposed to be our day,
Erin thought. It wasn't fair and it wasn't right. In a few unforgettable seconds, hard-earned glory had slipped through their fingers. Their ghost was gone, and Martin Heiss was just another stain on the sidewalk of life.

The police officer was about to put on the cuffs when several black SUVs pulled up. Two men in suits got out and flashed wallet badges at the cops.

“Official business. We've got this,” said the red-haired man, stepping through the line of uniformed police.

“You need to come with us,” his dark-skinned companion told them. He had a very intense and soulful expression, not angry or hostile. It took a second for Erin to put her finger on it: the expression in his eyes was disappointment. Like he could see through every layer of a person's façade and into their private thoughts, and what he saw saddened him.