Bustin'

  Bustin'

  Minda Webber

  There's something strange in the neighborhood, and Sam Hammett's not going to call anyone. Her family runs the business Paranormal Pest Pursuers, Inc.--unrivaled by anyone...except Monsters 'R Us, their new competitors recently arrived from Russia. And from the look of that crew, and Nicolas Strakhov, their boss, the war to come will be anything but cold. Luckily, business is booming, so Sam'll soon be bustin' up, bustin' down--bustin' every which way but loose. And there's more than the ghost of a chance she'll fall in love.

  Minda Webber

  Bustin'

  To my sister Marilyn, beloved friend,

  the best of aunts to my son Jake and a wonderful

  creative writing partner. Without her I wouldn't have

  gotten to do Saturday morning cartoons. I thank

  you for your advice and making me laugh. Also,

  for putting up with my eerie habit of hexing

  all mechanical or technological machines.

  Thanks for fixing them for me.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank Chuck Baltzell and Brian McDaniel for computer help; Beverly E, Christine D. and Mary Alice C. for reading this book when it was a mere second draft; Mary Jane M. for bringing the teddy bear babies to visit; my son for letting me drag him to every sci-fi movie since he was knee-high to a very tall grasshopper; Jeff G. and Steve C. for waltzing across Texas in my younger years (in reality, the Texas Panhandle); my cousin, Willie, for loving one of the best scary, funny movies, and running around saying, "Who you gonna call?" for six months after viewing the film; and last but not least in memory of my grandma Vick, for knowing how to tell a scary story better than anybody, like her potato story. Generally a potato story shouldn't be scary, but when my grandma told it—watch out!

  Gargoyles, Wings of Darkness and spitting like Camels

  Vermont, 2007

  Bustin' wasn't an easy business to be in. Courage, agility and expertise were required by those involved. Paranormalbusters, as those in the industry were called, had to be quick and skilled in all methods of capturing, communicating with, and moving all manner of supernatural creatures. One of the best Busters in the business was Samantha Hammett, known as Sam to friends and enemies alike. She was a hard-working, hard-fighting and soft-playing-the-piano kind of gal.

  Tonight, Sam had been hired by the Lady in Red to clear out the old warehouse on the outskirts of town. It was due to be renovated in a couple of weeks, made into apartments, but first a nest of gargoyles had to be removed.

  The routine clean-up job should have been just like any other, but something this time felt different. Trouble was brewing; Sam could feel it in her bones. But then, trouble was nothing new to her—not after working as she did for the family business. The Paranormalbustin' Pest Pursuers—Triple-P—had been founded in 1925 by Sam's great-grandfather. Those were the Roaring Twenties, the decade so named for the werewolves, vampires and werelions who first burst onto the mortal scene, howling, roaring and snarling. It was an era of bathtub gin and tubby goblins, flappers and flapping gargoyles. Jazzy blues played and blue ogres danced in speakeasies across the country, while speaking spectrals began haunting people everywhere. Triple-P should have been an instant success—and it was.

  Originally the company dealt only with ghosts, but later grew by leaps and bounds to handle werewolves, wererabbits, vampires, and a whole new catalogue of fiends, monsters and otherworldly creatures. The werewolves or vampires they dealt with were usually rogue, exiled from their principalities if they were vampires or packs if they were werewolves. Otherwise, those two species tried to fit in. Usually, they did a good job.

  In the supernatural world, vampires were tops. They had their own feudal system, and a king ruled over each continent. Princes and princesses helped maintain discipline and paid tribute. Werewolves had their own hierarchy, each with six or seven packs forming something they called a clanship. In each clanship, the king's rule was absolute. The location of each pack and the large number of pack members, however, meant that those packs each needed a chancellor. Each chancellor ruled over one or two packs with the help of blood kin, who were usually also some form of royalty. Packs even had knights, which were called gellogs, who helped keep the wolves in line and hunted down and destroyed any rogues. Sam had run afoul of a gellog a time or two in her career, but fortunately the encounters had only left her with a few scars. Those blended in nicely with the other scars she'd received from the rest of the otherworldly creatures she had helped capture and relocate.

  Just as Sam's family business had evolved, so had the term Paranormalbustin'—Bustin'—which had become a generalization for anyone extracting and removing paranormal pests.

  Yes, these days the company dealt with everything; some nights, fire-breathing demons or runaway dragons. Other nights, Triple-P might be chasing a gruff weredog who wanted to put the bite into crime, or a rogue vampire looking to devour Mr. Whistler's grandmother. And at holidays, Sam could always count on the grinches. They were a hard-drinking, rowdy bunch; indulging in too much spiked eggnog, they would put on their red Santa caps and start stealing Christmas presents. They were in the Hoo's Who of paranormal pests.

  Occasionally Sam ran into some really nasty poltergeists, like the Amityville Horror. Other times she captured grouchy gremlins—all cute and fuzzy when they had full stomachs. When hungry they'd go after your body parts. Then there were card-carrying witches and warlocks who might turn a person into a frog as soon as look at them.

  A few times she'd run into nice, normal ghosts, like the Captain and Mrs. Muir—a lovely older couple who loved to sail around the world in once sunken ghost ships. Or Casper; he was always a friendly face.

  But tonight there would be no friendly faces. As she now listened to the gargoyles crunching away inside the dilapidated old warehouse, she tossed her younger brother his safety helmet, complete with its large nightlight attached to the front. She turned her own light on. "Here's looking at you, kid," she said, quoting the movie Casablanca.

  "You're starting to sound cliché," her brother teased.

  "You're one to talk," Sam replied. Both of them had been bottle-fed on film noir; from the time they were born they'd lived in a home where dogma, dress and dialogue from 1940s movies was commonplace.

  "Now rig up tight, Bogie," she reminded him. "You know these guys would just love to snatch you bald."

  Gargoyles were notorious for plucking hair and using it to feather their nests back at the buildings to which they were so often attached. It was a particularly vile tactic in Sam's opinion, as she had always secretly longed to be a hairdresser. But then her family business would have gone down the drain.

  Glancing over at Bogart, she shook her head in regret. "Jeez, they wouldn't have far to go." Her brother had cut his long brown hair last summer, tired of her poking and prodding him with scissors and curling irons. Now he wore a military style, a buzz cut. At least he still let her highlight his hair, but there wasn't much challenge in highlighting hair that was less than an inch long.

  Even with the military cut, her little brother was a good-looking man, one who had girls on the brain and other strategic places. These pesky females called him at all hours of the night and day. Some even pretended to have ghosts in their homes so that Bogie would come by and scope out the situation… and them. More often they had bats in the belfry.

  The last lust-driven girl had donned a white sheet. After she'd jumped out shouting "Boo," Bogie had told Sam, he'd whipped off the sheet to discover the lady naked as the day she'd been born. How Bogie handled that particular paranormal pest was anybody's guess.

  Every once in a while, Sam wished she were half as attractive to the opposite sex as her brother. Instead she was perky cute in
a girl-next-door sort of way—if the girl next door happened to bust ghosts and other things that went bump and howl in the night. No, she would never be able to compete, and that • was driven home to her every day with the drop-dead gorgeous female vampires she sometimes ran into while working, or with the sexy femme fatales of the werewolf and werecat world. It might have bothered Sam more, but her philosophy was that when life gave you lemons, you learned to like things sour.

  "You ready? We need to make this quick. I got a date with a long-legged redhead," Bogie bragged, glancing down at his sister. His five-foot-eleven frame towered over Sam's diminutive stature.

  "So what else is new?"

  "Do I feel lucky?" he joked, doing his Eastwood imitation.

  "Talk about clichés."

  Laughing, he got down to business. "You ready to rock and roll a few gargoyles?"

  "Yeah. But be careful. I smell trouble in there. So keep your mind on the business at hand and not the pleasure to come. I mean, your date."

  He gave her a dirty look. "I'm not a kid anymore. I can take care of myself—and you, too!"

  "Just humor me."

  Sometimes Sam felt thirty going on fifty, while Bogie was twenty-three going on sixteen. He truly loved getting decked out in weird work outfits and being attacked by all kinds of bizarre creatures; he saw it as a neverending adventure. To Sam, this was business pure and simple. It was pride in a job well done. Although, to be honest, she would probably miss the action if she ever worked at anything else.

  "Don't fire until you see the yellow of their eyes," she warned. "Stay with me. No winging it, and no flying solo. We play by the rules or we don't play at all." Her baby brother sometimes forgot procedure in his desire for adventure.

  Bogie rolled his eyes, muttering under his breath as he checked his steel-mesh coveralls for extra dart cartridges. They wouldn't want to run out. In the dangerous task of hunting supernatural prey, preparation and precaution were the watch words of any day or night.

  "On the count of three, we bust in and shoot them with the dart guns," Sam said. "Remember to look to the rafters. Our visual scans from last night showed ten of the ugly little critters up there."

  "Gotcha," her brother replied. He clearly didn't like being told what to do.

  They both tensed, adrenaline running high, ready to do combat with the four-foot creatures and their extremely sharp teeth and claws. Gargoyles were also dynamic aerial artists; with their three-foot wingspans, they had the ability to dive bomb victims with startling accuracy.

  "One, two…" she began, but was interrupted by her brother's gleeful, "Three!" Then they were off at a fast run, Sam trying hard to keep up with the long-legged gait of her brother.

  Cursing his brief head start under her breath, she ran harder, her tranquilizer rifle heavy as her feet pounded into the dirt. She hated it when Bogie took point, since she was the elder sibling and it should have been her who first courted danger. After all, Bogie and her Uncle Myles were all the family she had left after that unfortunate Godzilla incident had killed her parents eleven years ago.

  Bogie hit the old slat doors hard, slamming them, open. From inside Sam could hear the gargoyles' cries of rage and shock. The crunching noises stopped abruptly, and the sound of flapping wings filled the air.

  Inside, Sam got a good look at the gargoyles taking to flight. She immediately raised her rifle and began firing. On her right, Bogie did the same. Her first two shots were aimed true, and two gargoyles plummeted to earth. Her brother wasn't as lucky: his first shot went wide.

  "Hey, you hit my gargoyle," he called out in frustration.

  "You snooze, you lose," she replied. She had to keep him on his toes.

  Her baby brother responded by hitting a gargoyle dead-on. His third shot was high, but it clipped a fiercely hissing gargoyle in the wing, doing enough damage so that the creature was forced to land, barely able to flap. It quickly passed out, and the score was tied; between the siblings' shots, four heavily clawed gargoyles were now lying on the cement floor.

  Bogie shouted with glee and Sam grinned, when a sudden loud noise caused Sam to duck.

  "Nuts!" The gargoyles were regrouping to pluck some hair, which meant soon they would begin the thing she disliked most about this kind of assignment: the spitting. Gargoyles spat like camels but were less attractive. Sam gritted her teeth.

  Yep, she realized as she felt a large wad of spittle hit her chest. She'd been right. And the mustard yellow goo with bits of wings and thin legs sticking out reminded her of her car window on a warm spring day when she was out driving in the country.

  Sparing a quick glance at her brother, she noted he too was covered in regurgitated bugs. Really it wasn't surprising, considering a gargoyle's main diet was insects. But, oh, how she hated these glob-spitting pests. Getting bug guts out of her work clothes was harder than getting them off her windshield.

  Firing rapidly, Sam managed to hit two more of the dive-bombing little buggers. Bogie also hit another two, which left them with two. That pair, suddenly realizing their fallen comrades still had not risen, fled into the rafters.

  "Rats! I hate it went they hide there," Sam griped.

  Ignoring her ill humor, Bogie pointed after the largest of the gargoyles, one which had just finished hacking a huge glob of yellow at them.

  "Wow! Did you see that? I bet that fellow spat his wad at least nine feet. That's pretty impressive. I'll have to measure it for the record books."

  Sam gave him a disbelieving look. "Here we are, covered in crud, and you're impressed with these spitting suckers?" Boys would be boys, she decided cynically, even in her line of work. "You guys and your pissing contests."

  Grinning, her brother gave her a high five.

  She ignored him and said: "Get off your duff and let's see if we can sew up these last fly-by-nights."

  Fifteen minutes later, the final gargoyle fell to earth. Checking her watch nervously, Sam noted that the first of them had fallen over twenty minutes ago. That left less than ten minutes before the knockout serum would wear off, less than ten minutes for them to bake these gargoyles with their sunlamp.

  Since gargoyles reverted to stone once the first rays of the sun hit them, it was fortunate for Paranormal busters everywhere that a high-powered lamp could get the same effect. Sam sighed wistfully. It would be so easy to just buy a huge sunlamp and turn it on full blast when entering a gargoyle-infested building, morphing all the creatures to stone; the problem with that scenario was, as soon as the bright light hit them, the gargoyles would go rock hard. If they were in flight they would then crash to the earth, cracking to pieces and literally biting the dust.

  No, while she might not like the nasty bug-spitting bastards, since they played hell with her laundry bills, she didn't want to cause their deaths. The Hammetts had always gone to great lengths to see that whatever supernatural pests or monsters they captured were removed and sent to some other location, preferably one that wanted them. Also, gargoyles were on the endangered supernatural species list, and the fine for killing them was hefty.

  Yes, Sam was conscientious about her family vow to do right by Busted creatures. She had moved ghosts to castles in Scotland, enjoying how fine they looked in kilts, and had turned attention-grabbing apparitions who could project into skeletal form over to universities where medical students could study them to their hearts' content. She had delivered gremlins to Spielberg in Los Angeles, and had herded bath-loving, fire-breathing dragons to Arkansas to fuel that state's numerous hot springs. Sam had also laid a few ghosts to rest, but only at their request to receive their heavenly reward.

  Tonight's captives were going to be sent to South America, where a scientific expedition was underway in the Amazon jungle. There the gargoyles would be used for pest control: the scientists would work in bug-free comfort, while the gargoyles would have the feast of their lifetimes.

  "You got the sunlamp ready?" she asked her brother as she watched a few of the creatures twitching. The
sedative was clearly starting to fade.

  "Right here," Bogie answered. He turned to switch the big lamp on.

  "Cool. Let's shake and bake." Sam liked this part best, because it reminded her of cooking a big batch of chocolate chip cookies—with the exception that these cookies had sharp teeth and deadly claws that could rip a heart out.

  As the sunlamp came on, Sam's sigh changed into a gasp. The lamp's usual bright white glow had been replaced. "What the hell? Not again!" Her eyes flew wide with disgust and horror as deep purple fluorescent light flooded the warehouse. The bright color might be pretty, but it was essentially useless in gargoyle capture.

  Two dazed gargoyles stumbled upright and took off in flight, with a third not far behind. Sam and her brother stood stunned and helpless, out of ammo. The three gargoyles fled, their wings flapping loudly as they raced out into the wide black yonder.

  "No more Miss Nice Guy," Sam growled, gritting her teeth while her blue eyes flared with rage. "I'll beat those dirty rats at their own game!" Enough was enough!

  Bogie looked confused. "Rats? We don't have anything scheduled after this, sis. Certainly no wererats."

  Sam rolled her eyes, raised her clenched fist to the night sky and shook it fiercely.

  The Gilded Age of Ghostbusting

  "Sabotaged again! Somebody's really giving us the shakedown. Boy, do they have a death wish or what!" Sam cried out in anger. "Somebody is going to pay and pay big!"

  Tonight's fiasco made three times in the past month that her family business had been undermined by some devious, dastardly deed. The first time had occurred with that mockery at Venckman Manor. The second had happened two weeks later, when a shipment of goblins on their way to Texas had been rerouted to Spielberg and tagged as gremlins. To say that the director was not amused was an understatement; there were more than enough goblins already in Hollywood.