Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (top ebook reader .TXT) 📕

just a touch gruesome, and I can never stop myself from wondering why the undertaker bothers putting shoes on the body.

Peter Smalls was a short, portly man in life, and apparently he was very fond of khakis and pastel polo shirts, because that’s what he wore in death. I’ve learned over the years that ghosts don’t have to show up wearing what they died in, which is a blessing given how many people pass in truly unfortunate circumstances that do not lend themselves to dignified apparel. He had a light beard, salt-and-pepper hair, and what was probably the beginnings of a good suntan, at least on his arms. Maybe a golfer. He was also just the slightest bit translucent, which was how I could tell he was a ghost. Well, aside from appearing on the side of the road in the middle of the night in his penny loafers without a car in sight.

“Peter?” I asked. “Peter Smalls?”

He turned to me. “Yes, that’s me.” He blushed a little and looked at his feet. “I’m sorry to ask this, but…do you know where I am and how I got here? I’m really embarrassed, but I have no idea. I think someone may have slipped something in my drink.”

I took a deep breath. “Mr. Smalls, my name is Lila Grace Carter. My…boyfriend for lack of a better word is Willis Dunleavy, sheriff of Union County. We’re on the side of Highway 49, about four miles north of Union. As to how you got here, well…this might come as a little bit of a surprise, but you’re here because this is where you died.”

I hate telling the dead about their new status. It truly sucks, as a generation after mine would say. You never know how they’re going to take it. They might be mad, or sad, or just shocked. But the one thing they almost all are…is disbelieving.

That’s where Mr. Peter Smalls stood out from the crowd. He didn’t seem shocked at all. Just gave me a little nod, more of a chin bob than any big acknowledgement, then said, “Huh. Okay then.” He looked up at me and said, “Are you my guide to the other side? I thought you’d be uglier. With horns, maybe.”

I gaped at him. “You think you’re going to Hell? And you’re…okay with it?”

“Well, I’d rather not, if I get a choice,” he said, still remarkably sanguine about his dramatic change of state. “But it’s not like I lived a perfect life, and given where I was headed home from, and the fact that my wife’s seven months pregnant, I figure if there really is something after death, and apparently there is, then I doubt I’m going to be seeing Kristen Bell in The Good Place.”

I wrinkled my brow, opened and closed my mouth a couple of times like a very large small-mouth bass, and blinked a couple of times at the man. “There’s…a lot to unpack in that assumption,” I said. “But let’s start with you telling me where you were going home from that you shouldn’t have been with a pregnant wife at home.”

He blushed again, making him the most embarrassed ghost I’d ever spoken with, and said something very quietly. I couldn’t understand him, so I stepped closer.

“I’m sorry. You’re going to have to speak up.”

He looked at me, blushed an even deeper red, and said, “Pole Cats. I was at Pole Cats. My Gloria is home round as a beach ball with our third daughter on the way and I was at a strip club. And I was drinking on a Sunday. And I was driving too fast. Or I reckon I was, since I wrecked my car. Where else would I go but straight to Hell?” He held out his hands like he wanted me to slap handcuffs on him, telling me that he very much did not understand how this whole ghost thing worked, and said, “I’m ready. Take me to my never-ending torment.”

I shook my head. “That’s not what I do. I’m not into the torment side of things, never-ending or otherwise. I talk to ghosts. I try to help y’all move on, to wherever it is you move on to. But I don’t pick sides, or assign elevators, or any of that.”

“So…you’re like the Ghost Whisperer girl on TV?” he asked, his eyes getting big.

“I reckon,” I said, making myself a mental note to get off my high horse and see if that show was on Netflix. If everybody and their brother was going to ask me if I was like her, I should at least see an episode.

“Lila Grace?” Willis called from where he stood leaning on the roof of the car. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” I replied. “Just talking to a dead guy. Like you do.”

He laughed. “Like you do. I do not, for the record, talk to dead people.”

“I find they lie less than the living. They don’t seem to care as much about people’s opinions.” I turned my attention back to Mr. Smalls. “Okay, I reckon we have to do some experimenting about what you can and can’t do. We already know you can talk. That’s good. Not all ghosts can, and that makes it harder to figure out why they haven’t moved on. But we don’t know if you’re going to be tied to this general area or not. And I don’t really know much about how ghosts get around. So why don’t you think about someplace that means a lot to you and see if you can go there. Then come back and tell me what happens.”

He screwed up his mostly-solid face in concentration, and then Peter Smalls just popped out of existence. Or at least out of view. For somebody who has spent a lifetime talking to dead people, I have spent remarkably little time asking them questions. Probably because most of them either can’t or won’t tell me anything about the afterlife, no matter how much I pester them. I have