Free The Ferryman by Amy Neftzger

she may be the devil.”
    “She won’t boss me around. At least not for long. I’m working on it,” Karen assured him. “Have you met her husband?”
    “What husband?”
    “She’s married to Fortune.”
    “No!”
    “Yes.” Karen’s eyes widened to demonstrate her sincerity.
    “I didn’t know that,” he said as he sloppily stroked his chin. “But I wouldn’t be familiar with Fortune. I was never very fortunate. I never won anything. I was always losing things, like my car keys and jobs. In fact, I lost a lot of things, including my life, as you can see.”
    Karen quickly realized that Trevor wouldn’t be a good source of information on Fortune. No matter. Trevor seemed to have some insight on Fate, and that could be extremely useful. He might also know some bit of key information to help Karen escape her contract.
    “Fortune is very kind,” Karen said. She thought back to his dreamy eyes and nearly started giggling. “I don’t know how they wound up together.”
    “Yeah,” he agreed with an uncoordinated nod of his head. “She’s horrible. Always getting bossy and trying to make me get up and walk. What’s with all the walking?” Karen noticed that he was sitting in a puddle and she wondered if it was his own ghostly excrement.
    “How long have you been here?” she asked as she squatted down to his level. She cringed slightly when she caught a whiff of his scent. Ghostly waste may be transparent, but the fragrance is full bodied.
    “Couple of years.”
    “Do you ever get up?”
    “Why should I? I don’t need the exercise anymore.” Alley ghosts, Karen decided, were a bit like alley cats: shrewd and able to persist despite the influence of other forces that attempted to remove them.
    “Good point,” she agreed. “I just thought you might like a change of scenery.”
    “I need to stay here.”
    “Why?”
    “This is where it happened — where I died. My girlfriend will look for me here when it’s her time. We were very close.”
    Karen nodded.
    “She was beautiful and sweet and kind,” he paused for a moment and rolled his head slowly over to the other side. He squinted as he peered over at Karen. “I suppose I was lucky in one thing: she loved me. She was the only thing I had, and she was wonderful.”
    Karen thought for a moment. How would he know if his girlfriend had or hadn’t moved on in the past few years? He’d been in one place. Sure she was devoted to him at the time he died, but if he hadn’t been anywhere else since then he couldn’t know what she was doing. She might not be waiting at all.
    “Was she in the car with you when you died?”
    “No.”
    “Were you alone?”
    “What’s with all the questions?”
    “I’m — I’m just curious,” Karen said and then hesitated. “Fate seems pretty interested in you. I was wondering why.”
    “She seems pretty interested in you, also. She brought you here, didn’t she?”
    “Were you this sharp when you were sober?” Karen asked with a laugh.
    “A drunk man is never the best judge of his own wit or aptitude,” he said, and Karen laughed harder at this remark.
    “She wants me to do her dirty work,” Karen explained. Given Trevor’s keen intellect, she decided it would be useless to attempt deceiving him. “She wants me to get you to take a walk.”
    “I figured it was something like that.” He laughed the disjointed, shrill giggle of the inebriated.
    “Do you know why she wants you to go for a walk?”
    “No,” he said as he waved both hands rapidly in front of his face. “Don’t care.” He dropped his hands back into his lap and then fumbled around searching inside his bag of bottles.
    “Maybe we can outsmart her,” Karen suggested.
    “How?” He paused in his search to wait for her response.
    “What if you just took five steps to the corner?” she said. “Then you would have taken a walk, but you wouldn’t really be going anywhere, and I would also have convinced you to move. So, technically,