Free Ghostbusters The Return by Sholly Fisch Page A

chest. "I thought you'd never ask."

    She turned to the bartender. "I don't suppose you could be a dear and send room service to room 1218? We're going to need some ice. A lot of it..."

    Rudy's eyebrows rose. "Oh, really?" He wasn't quite sure what she had in mind, but he quickly decided that he'd like to find out. The next few hours could turn out to be very interesting.

    The bartender chuckled and reached for the phone beneath the bar. "Sure. No problem."

    She eased herself off the bar stool, brushing against Rudy as she rose. He was right behind her.

    "Hang on a minute," he said. He pulled a twenty dollar bill from his pocket and dropped it onto the bar beside his empty glass. "Oops," he said, sliding the bill toward the bartender with a wink. "I think I dropped some cash."

    "I'll keep an eye out for it," the bartender replied. He tossed Rudy a little two-fingered salute before slipping the bill into his pocket.

    Rudy turned back to his new friend. He slid his right hand into her left, their fingers intertwining. "Shall we?"

    "Mm-hmm."

    The two of them walked to the door, hand in hand. As they passed a tall window, they were enveloped in the warm glow of a shaft of sunlight. Rudy closed his eyes momentarily against the glare. As a result, he didn't notice the other effect that the light had on his companion.

    It turned her body translucent.

    Perhaps more important, Rudy also didn't notice the other change that was gradually taking place as they left the bar. While he held her left hand, the fingers on her right hand began to glisten. Slowly, they grew long, hard, and metallic, until they resembled a set of razor-sharp blades.

    "By the way," she purred, "How are your kidneys?"

    "My...kidneys? They're fine," he replied. "Why do you ask?"

CHAPTER 6

    "I'm telling you," Ray said, "There's something going on."

    "Why?" Egon replied dryly. "Just because in the last seventy-two hours, we've had to deal with twelve freefloating vapors, six class-four poltergeists, eight fullbody apparitions, and a swarm of ectoplasmic, urban-legend alligators that I'm still not sure how to classify?"

    "No, it's more than that. You have to consider the forms they've been manifesting, too. Sewer gators. Kidney thieves. Hook-handed killers. Heck, we had three vanishing hitchhikers this morning alone! When's the last time that happened?"

    "So you're saying that they're all connected."

    "They have to be, don't you think?"

    Egon nodded. "I'd say so. As coincidences go, I'd place the probability of this happening by chance as...just slightly less likely than all of the plankton on Earth suddenly jumping up and singing 'Hello, Dolly.'"

    "Which would make it slightly more likely than the plankton jumping up to sing 'Ice, Ice Baby.' "

    Why do you say that?"

    "Even plankton have some taste."

    Egon smiled at that. Ray always took it as a personal triumph when one of his jokes made Egon smile. It was the closest Egon ever came to laughing out loud.

    "Someone's bringing urban legends to life," said Ray. "We're not going to be able to stop this for good until we figure out who and why."

    "You're probably correct," Egon agreed. "But it'll have to wait until Peter and Winston return from their meeting, and we're back to full strength. For now, I think we'd better table the discussion and turn our attention to the matter at hand."

    "Right."

    Throughout the conversation, the pair had been slowly inching up toward a four-foot, potted cactus, their nutrona wands held loosely but ready. Large potted plants were not uncommon along the streets of New York, but this one was different. Ordinarily, it would have been strange enough that this particular plant stood in the middle of the street, or that both the cactus and its pot were a pale, chalky white. Or that the afternoon sun shone partially through it, rendering the cactus translucent. But in this case, all of those considerations were overshadowed by the thing that was even more unusual:

    The