I flipped open my phone, grateful for the little bit of light it gave off. Connor had earned the honorable position on my speed dial as number one and I dialed him up.

Although it was nearly 3 a.m., he answered almost immediately.

“This call may be recorded to assureexcellent customer service,” he said. “Please state the nature of your emergency, kid.” It was a joke, but thankfully it was also to the point.

I talked as loudly as I could as the thumping against the door and the howling of the wind in the bedroom grew louder. Connor listened intently as I explained the situation.

When I was done, the doorknob was slick with sweat, but I held on tight.

“Where are you now?” he asked.

“In my closet,” I said.

Irene’s voice assumed a high-pitched wail on the other side of the door and I pressed my head against some of my clothes to drown her out.

“Perfect,” he said. “Get dressed and get the hell out of there, kid. You’re not going to be able to rationalize with her spirit.”

Just like Tamara, I thought, and look what had happened to her. Dammit, I had to get her out of my mind. There would be time for being racked with guilt later.

“You get out of there and meet me down at the Odessa on Avenue A, all right?”

I fumbled in the dark for a pair of pants, using the keypad lights on my phone to help. I grabbed a pair but lost my balance attempting to put them on. My head thumped solidly against the wall and this time I felt the world fall out from under me.

“Kid? Kid?” Connor called out when I didn’t respond. “You there? The Odessa, okay?”

“Ow. Yeah. I’ll meet you there.”

“I can’t stress how careful you should be getting out of there, Simon. You know the expression ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?”

“Yeah.”

“Times that by ten,” he said. “Ghosts start to degrade in personality over time, and become more like raw emotion. You’re now dealing with an entirely irrational creature, a degraded spirit experiencing rampant mood swings. The logic of regular human conversation is beyond her right now, so don’t think you can talk her down or reason with her. Course, it doesn’t help that she has that telekinetic ability to throw stuff at you.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. “She’s gone totallyTwister over here.”

Tiny blasts of wind began shooting through cracks in my rapidly deteriorating closet door.

“Trust me,” Connor said, “you’ll wish you were only dealing with a scornful woman if she gets ahold of you.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, grabbing a shirt as I prepared to make my escape. “I’m a pretty fast runner when panic sets in.”

“Time to come out of the closet,” Connor said. I could hear him laughing as he said it.

“Sonot the time to make with the funny, boss.”

I threw open what remained of the door just as it ripped away from its hinges and blew right out of my hand. The sound of it tearing to pieces as it smashed against the opposite wall sent me running. I had no desire to be the next thing torn apart.

28

When I breathlessly entered the Odessa Diner, I noticed a flurry of movement coming toward me and my first panicked thought wasMy God, I’m about to get swarmed by ghouls. After the night I had been through, anything was possible, and I did a double take. Upon closer examination, it was merely a group of Greek waiters eager to seat me. They were simply enthusiastic, not the walking dead. I spotted Connor next to a table of plaid-clad punks at the rear of the restaurant and headed back.

Even though it was now 4 a.m., the diner was packed with Alphabet City residents and NYU students trying to take the edge off their binge drinking with a late-night infusion of food. That meant it was loud, but I didn’t mind. Right now, I felt safer in a crowd.

I sat down across from Connor as a waiter clunked down a four-inch-thick binder that I assumed was the menu. I ignored it for the moment and looked Connor over. He was far more composed than I was. To be fair, Ihad dressed in a dark closet while attempting to flee for my life, so the lemon yellow pants and purple shirt should be forgiven. Hell, I didn’t even know I owned lemon yellow pants! I looked to the next table and the punk rockers gave my outfit a thumbs-up.

“Were you followed?” he said. I shook my head. “How ya holding up, kid?”

“Well, Tamara’s still dead,” I said frankly, “and now another room of my apartment is getting trashed just after I put the place back together.”

“At least you got out of there alive,” Connor said encouragingly, “if not with your dignity.”

“With all due respect, Connor, shut up.”

“Oh, and don’t forget Cyrus,” he added. “He might be missing and his warehouse burned down, but several more Ghostsniffing junkies were brought in after you took off. It’s going epidemic. It’s all the rage.”

Someone cleared his throat nearby and I turned to see the curly haired waiter looking down at me. He tugged at the edge of his black polyester vest and flipped open a pad. “You ready?”

Connor was already eating some sort of sampler platter that had one of everything in the diner on it, all of it battered and deep-fried. I looked at my yet unopened menu, felt deterred by its girth, and shrugged.

“You’re not gonna eat?” the waiter asked. He sounded like I had just disgraced his whole family or slept with his wife. All shock, with a little disgust mixed in for good measure.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“You’ve got to sit at the counter then.” The waiter sighed and stared off at the far wall as he spoke. “That’s the rules. If you’re not going to eat anything, you have to sit at the counter. Tables are for our customers who are eating.”

I shook my thumb at Connor. “He’s sitting at a table. I’m sitting with him.”

“He’s eating,” the waiter said as if he had been having this argument since the dawn of time. “You’re not. Those are the rules.”

I looked to Connor, incredulous, but he merely shrugged. He popped something deep-fried but unidentifiable into his mouth.

I flipped the menu open. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll have a grilled cheese and a bowl of matzoh ball soup. Oh, and a chocolate milkshake…and a coffee.”

The waiter snapped my menu shut before I had a chance to say anything else and scurried away.

“I can’t believe that.”

“You know what I can’t believe?” He popped another deep-fried unidentifiable into his mouth. “I can’t believe they charge eight bucks for a grilled cheese! That’s without tomato or bacon even!”

“Do you mind if we talk about something more pertinent?” I asked testily. “How about, say, Irene going all Amityville on me?”

Connor looked at me seriously for a second, and then laughed. “Simon, listen, I’m sure whatever happened was bad. But the Inspectre taught me that any situation where you make it out alive and have the opportunity to sit down and bitch about it is, comparatively, a good situation.”

I mulled that one over until my milk shake arrived. A long sip and a bit of brain freeze later, I was noticeably calmer.

“I don’t want to beat an old departmental horse,” Connor said, “but there’s a reason why Other Division doesn’t shelter any of our clients, kid. They’re simply too unstable for us to deal with. Besides, we really don’t have any good way to contain them even if we wanted to. This isn’t likeGhost-busters. ”

“What about the way you were able to bind Irene?” I asked. “Or something similar to those jars in the secret room at Mandalay’s shop but bigger?”

Connor shook his head. “Binding Irene with a potion was an extremely temporary measure. As far as those jars the Ghostsniffers use, I wouldn’t wish that fate on any spirit. Any containment like that means absolute destruction of the soul, kid. Never forget it.”

My food arrived with a side order of mild disdain (courtesy of our waiter), and I dug in, determined to get at least eight dollars’ worth of enjoyment out of this grilled cheese. As I ate, I told Connor how I awoke to Irene screaming at the top of her lungs, how she seemed upset over the idea that I was chasing another woman.