fic: The Red Gravy Ghost
fandom: Xover: SPN/Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor series.
pairing: Dean/Sam; Rickey/G-man.
rating: G is for case file. At least no one's about to accuse me of being too ~literary~.
spoilers: none for SPN; takes place directly after Liquor, but well before Prime.
notes: I started this last August. It's 9300 words. The only person who will ever read this is delighter, but that's just 'cause she's awesome like that and forgives me for being two months late for xmas. Labour of love, baby.
summary: G-man hires some ghostbusters to come and exorcise Liquor.
A few weeks after he stabbed that little cokehead freakshow in the throat with a vegetable peeler in the walk-in of his restaurant, Rickey started to get that feeling again. The one that left a wet slime on the back of his neck whenever he had to go in there alone to grab tenderloin for the special. The one that prevented him from staying for more than a shot after service ended, even though the rest of the crew was hanging out at the bar easing their way toward a makeshift pub crawl.
G-man noticed it pretty quick. The way Rickey wouldn't turn off all the kitchen lights at the end of the night despite Lenny bitching about last month's electrical bill. The way he'd find excuses to stay in the same general space as G when they were banging out their prep work before the rest of the crew arrived in the early afternoon. Kitchen, office, dining room, bar. If he couldn't keep G in sight he'd at least find a way to keep a shouted conversation going through the swing doors or down the hall. It was getting to the point where Rickey was embarrassed, the way he kept avoiding going into the walk-in alone, practically at all. G-man never said a word, of course, but the simple fact that he was sticking closer around - trying to make Rickey feel better about being afraid of his own damn refrigerator - was enough to make Rickey's teeth grind.
It was the worst the night that damn nosey food critic Chase Haricot came in with a legal pad and asked to be seated near the kitchen. Their maitre d', Karl, gladly provided the inelegant seat. He came back to the kitchen to report, stopping a safe distance from where Rickey stood expediting a good rush of orders and inspecting plates before they went out.
“Love a god,” growled Rickey, garnishing some gulf fish.
From the saute station G said, “Why don't you wait till he does something irritating before you get irritated?”
“I feel like he's spying at my keyhole or something,”
“He's just researching that book a his,” said Tanker as he dropped off his table twenty desserts for inspection, “Probably wants to write down all your favourite curse words.”
“Yeah, you think he wants to hear me blaspheming at your sorry ass because this friggin' dijon-flavoured ice cream is selling like dog turds?”
G-man frowned over his dark glasses at Rickey, but didn't say anything.
But sure enough, a few hours later, after the dinner rush had tapered off, Mo the bartender poked her head through the kitchen door to say to Rickey, “I got a guy here sucking back screwdrivers since eight, says he'd like to talk to you when you got a moment.”
“Tell him to suck himself for a while,” muttered Rickey.
“You want I repeat that verbatim?” Mo lifted her eyebrows.
“No,” said Rickey. “But I hope you ain't being polite, either.”
He dawdled, unnecessarily supervising his crew as they broke down their stations for a good five minutes, then wiped his hands, adjusted his sweaty bandanna over his forehead and went out into the dining room.
Haricot was sitting at the opposite end of the bar from Sid Schwanz - their other journalistic regular, the one they paid in booze not to write the story Haricot was currently humping to death. Rickey'd heard the book was gonna be called Dark Kitchen and it made him kind of sick to think about it. Stabbing Mike Mouton in the throat had seemed like the best choice at the time, but now he was kind of wishing he'd taken a chance with more of Mike's bullets. No restaurant needed this kind of publicity, or at least no good restaurant.
“How'd you like your redfish?” he asked Haricot as the man stood up to shake.
“Delicious, marvellous as always, chef.”
“Yeah? Good.” Rickey made no move to sit down.
Haricot seemed not to notice, “Listen, I stopped by tonight to get your input on part of the story that seems a little unclear to me - the exact location of the walk-in? How exactly you ended up there? Maybe I could get a peek?”
Rickey huffed a sigh. Looked around and scratched at his neck. “No.”
Haricot managed a polite pause. “No?”
Rickey didn't like his tone. Tried to make the excuse plausible. “I run a tight kitchen, Haricot. I don't particularly got time for a tour.”
Haricot switched tack smooth as a sailor, “What about the original gang execution, back in the eighties. Another Mouton, wasn't it? Care to comment on that?”
“I didn't know the guy, did I? From what I've heard it was the sucker's own damn fault, messing around with-” The lights flickered once, twice, and went out, mid-sentence.
Instantly thinking of a power outage and the havoc it would wreak on his chilled and frozen stock, Rickey turned on his heel to head back to the kitchen. He'd give it five minutes before he'd get Karl to comp the meals of the last few straggling diners and then start shuffling food around to keep things from spoiling.
He got back to the kitchen to find everyone still and quiet: the overhead lights kept making brief little spasms of yellow flicker, like they might come on if they could just get their shit together. “I don't think it's a power outage,” said G-man, “something in the wiring, maybe.”
“What? A twenty-pound canal rat?” said Tanker, rubbing his crossed arms.
But Rickey had a feeling in his gut, and despite the heat of six-burner ranges and ovens roaring for the past seven hours, the temperature had dropped enough to ease his worry about any milk curdling. There was that same chilly sweat on the back of his neck, dripping down his spine.
The kitchen was basically done up for the night, except for the dishwasher in the back, looking wide-eyed askance about whether he should keep scrubbing pots in the dark. “Someone wanna tell Karl to take care of whoever's left out there,” Rickey told no one in particular, “and y'all get going on home.”
He heard them heading out, G-man going with them to talk to Karl about the customers. Rickey kept taking careful steps through the kitchen toward the walk-in.
Did he have any comments on the mob execution that had happened in his own walk-in, way before he'd ever leased the building? Except for the fact that he dreamt about it regularly, no. Except for the fact that he'd nearly got shot there himself, by the deceased's nephew, no. Except for the fact that he was breathing icicles right now. Except for the fact that there, in the flickering light, was some motherfucking kinda mold or mud, maybe, slipping down the door.
Rickey inched closer, his breath coming shallow. His ribs hurt, the way he was tensed, his hands up like to touch it.
Black, scummy-looking shit. Dripping like tar or bile seeping out the airtight seal of the stainless steel door. Running down the front and smelling like old man tobacco and horse shit. It came away on his fingers, clinging and spreading a dead cold through the bones of his fingers, down to his wrist, his elbow like the pain of a sudden blow.
Rickey fell over himself, scrambling backwards. He felt barbed knots of fear slice through his guts. His hand felt dead.
He knew what was behind that door. Knew it didn't have anything too pleasant to say. It'd been there all along. Knew about the vegetable peeler in Mike Mouton's psychotic fucking throat. The Angola prison term. These things Rickey knew, even as he knew he must be hallucinating, knew he must be going batshit, seeing stuff like this.
Tar was pooling over the rubber matting on the floor, and the temperature was making Rickey's whole body numb, absent, and he could see the steel door swinging outwards, toward him, a rush of something flowing like a river outward till it covered everything, black as the bottom of the Mississippi.
--
First thing in the morning, before Rickey or probably half the city was awake, G-man snuck out of bed to make the call to the only person he knew who might be able to offer some advice.
Tight-lipped and Catholic as she was, his oldest sister, Melly, barely even acknowledged what G-man was saying. She made a few noncommittal sounds as he gave a watered-down version of the incident at Liquor, and finally cut him off mid-sentence with “Hold on a sec, Gary.” And put the phone down while she rustled around for a good long while on the other end. Then she read him a phone number with an out-of-state area code and hung up, saying, “I gotta go to Mass.”
G-man took a breath and dialled the number before he lost his nerve or Rickey came down to the kitchen and asked what the hell he thought he was doing.
They'd found him curled up and comatose under the salad station, and it had taken an awful lot to wake him up. When they finally did, it hardly seemed worth it. Rickey was near on hysterical, and G-man ended up slipping him a few painkillers to put him back down.
The line rang maybe three times, and then went to voicemail: “This is John Winchester, I can't be reached. If this is an emergency-” G-man didn't quite know what counted as an emergency to this guy, but he took the alternate number down anyway. He didn't have much else to go on, and he didn't want Rickey going anywhere near the restaurant until he could find something like an expert opinion on whatever the hell had happened. Rickey had come up with some choice ravings, and G-man wasn't so stupid as to miss the signs. He'd seen them once before, and that was good enough for him.
He dialled.
“What?” said a rough voice on the other end. It sounded pretty close to Rickey's when he'd been woken up at - what - five in the morning, was it?
“This Dean Winchester?” said G-man.
“Yeah, who's this?”
“My name's Gary Stubbs. Uh, G-man, actually. But your dad helped out my folks a good twenty years ago, when I was just a kid. Down here in New Orleans. A, uh... poltergeist?”
“Oh yeah?” Dean Winchester did not sound like he particularly cared, but he hadn't hung up.
“Listen,” said G, wondering if maybe he'd got the wrong Dean Winchester, “Is this a bad time? Can I call you back?”
On the other end of the line, Dean cleared his throat, sounded just a bit more awake. “You got another poltergeist or something, G-man? Did it kill someone?”
“No, I mean, yeah, a ghost - in our walk-in.”
“You got a ghost hiding in your closet?”
“No, the refridgerator.” G-man tried to catch his thoughts enough to explain, “I mean we got a ghost in the walk-in refrigerator at our restaurant. It ain't killed anyone that I know of, but it scared the holy spirit right outta my partner last night, he pretty much lost his mind, if you know what I'm saying. Black goop, he said, and the power went out, we had to kick out some customers and Rickey, he got what somebody said was frostbite? It's September down here, man, we get crotch rot, not frostbite.” G-man paused, shifted uncomfortably in his seat just thinking about the crotch rot.
“Yeah, alright,” said Dean. There was a yawn. “New Orleans is it?”
“Yeah, Broad Street at Toulouse. Restaurant called Liquor.”
“Sounds like a fine establishment.” A long pause, and G-man heard another voice say something clipped and irritable in the background. “So listen, we're maybe half a day's drive right now, but we got some business to finish up here in Arkansas. Maybe we can get down there tonight. How's that sound?”
“That'll be good,” said G-man. “You just stop by the place, we'll get you some dinner and some drinks, maybe you'll take a look at the walk-in.”
“Sure thing,” said Dean, and he took down the phone number at the restaurant in case they got lost.
G-man hung up, wondering exactly how pissed Rickey would be when he found out he'd hired the Ghostbusters to come and exorcise Liquor.
--
If anything, dinner service that night was busier than ever.
When Rickey had woken up at ten, it'd felt like coming back from the dead. He nursed his headache and strangely white fingertips with a lot of Excedrin and a covert bottle of beer. G-man fussed a bit, kissing him on the forehead and offering a mug of coffee, but Rickey didn't want to talk about fainting like a pussy, or the big wall of black he'd somehow known was river-mud, coming for him. George Mouton's name swam around in his head like a restless eel, and even though he could see G-man physically biting his tongue on the suggestion, he knew that taking the night off would just leave him a basket case. Afraid of his fucking walk-in. Let that get around the grapevine and he, G-man and Liquor would be a laughingstock before they keeled over, dead of ridiculous.
When they got to the restaurant at eleven, it was fine. Karl was there on some thin pretext, and so were Terrance, Tanker and Mo.
“What?” Rickey said to the little red-headed bartender, “You gonna polish glasses for six hours?”
“I'm doin inventory,” she retorted evenly, “That Schwanz pal of yours is drinking me out of Stoli every other night.”
“Well don't expect to get paid,” Rickey declared, levelling looks at all of them. 'Course everyone knew that G-man kept the books and cut the cheques, but he wasn't about to act grateful for their fucking pity. Nothing like having your crew witness your first and only mental breakdown.
Still, though, the kitchen seemed alright. The lights were on, the walk-in empty of everything but the necessaries, their seafood order and the foie gras and duck G had suggested for the special. But Rickey had to sneak into it just to check it out without G-man hovering over him all motherish. Yeah, nothing. The stainless steel gleamed like a funhouse mirror, free of any of the tobacco-stink from the night prior.
It didn't take long to fall into the rhythm of the night's work, though. Rickey took the saute station and let G expedite, just to keep himself from thinking about anything other than entrees. His frostbitten fingers felt strangely immune to the heat - even more so than his chef's calluses normally left him - and he caught himself playing too close to the element a few times, titillated by the deadened nerves.
Halfway through the worst of the rush Karl dropped by to murmur something to G-man. A bit later G called out an order of one roast duck terrine special and one ribeye and had Rickey prepare an amuse bouche to send out before the quail and veal cheeks apps. Rickey could've saw with his eyes sewn shut that G-man had some sort of party out there he wanted to impress.
“Food critic?” he called over, a little pissed he even had to ask.
“Naw,” said G-man, and Rickey was too proud to ask for clarification, of course. But he was pretty sure he was right: food critic, health inspector on an off-night, or a bigshot chef. All of which G-man should've had the decency to inform him about. But Rickey also knew that he'd been freezing G out with his sore ego over the day. He couldn't blame him for a bit of reciprocal cold-shouldering. So instead he took very good care of the duck terrine, and made a grudging allowance for the ribeye, seeing as the ticket had specified its only redeeming quality: bloody.
An hour later, when G-man started wiping his hands and checking his jacket for any real ugly stains, Rickey stepped up beside him. “You swanning out for your health inspector buddies?”
G-man made a kind of you-caught-me grimace and Rickey grinned his very best, to show that he'd be good, and wiped the sweat and splatter off his own hands and face. “I'll tag along.”
Karl had seated the VIPs in a quiet corner that provided a good view of the bustle of the rest of the dining room without being completely forgotten itself. There were two of them, the carnage of their meal lying around their plates with an air of victory - quail crushed and dismembered, cow blood on the tablecloth, even the garnishes had disappeared. The one who'd ordered the steak had one of Mo's specials in his hand - liquor on liquor, mostly - and the other one had a half-bottle of red drained beside him. Except for their lack of paunch, the two fully fit the New Orleans pre-requisites in terms of food and alcohol, and Rickey bathed them both in smiles, hoping G was appreciating the effort.
“You enjoy your meal, fellas?”
“Yeah, definitely. Best food we've had in-” Duck Special sent a look at Ribeye that seemed accusatory. “Years, probably.”
“It was damn amazing,” put in Ribeye, lifting his whiskey and whiskey in salute. “We'll be back for breakfast.”
Rickey's smile felt a little stretched as he said, “If you feel like cooking it yourself, maybe. Chefs sleep late, these parts.”
“Yeah?” said Ribeye, smirking like he knew something Rickey didn't. “Well I have a suspicion we'll all be ready for another round of those steaks come sunrise. See if I can convince you then.” He stretched decadently in his chair while Duck Special shot a disgusted look across the table.
Rickey was having a hard time figuring out what kind of health inspectors these were, with their fake smiles and pretty faces. Definitely not chefs. Or foodies. Just good old down home boys with mud on their boots and food in their bellies. And pissed, on top of it, or at least Duck Special was. He was glaring at his partner like a put-upon stripper.
Self-conscious, a little awkward, Rickey looked back to G-man for some sort of stabilizing influence, even as Ribeye turned his wise-ass smirk back up to them like his buddy hadn’t just hissed something under his breath.
G at least had the good grace to step forward on cue, “Well, we certainly appreciate you boys coming down here tonight. I'm G-man, we talked on the phone. Dean, right?” He and Ribeye shook hands like colleagues, which threw Rickey even farther off. Then Duck Special got introduced as Sam, forcing a tight smile as Rickey stared down at him in mounting confusion.
Quick as he could, he made an excuse for himself, leaving G-man and the two VIPs making tattered conversation at the table. He paced around the kitchen 'till G-man eventually followed suit and then he dragged him back to the office for a bare semblance of privacy before hissing, “What the hell you gunning for, G? You hired them for something - relationship counsellors or hookers or what?”
It took G-man probably ten minutes to stop laughing long enough to mortify Rickey even more by telling him the truth.
--
It got decided somehow - mostly by the way Dean Winchester shuffled his drink over from table to bar and then sat smiling cattishly at Mo 'till she refilled it - that the best thing to do was wait out the ghost in the restaurant. By eleven the customers had all filed out and the kitchen staff had re-occupied the dining room, lined up at the bar and swilling drinks and acting macho and superstitious around Dean, who seemed to encourage both simply by virtue of being.
In the meantime, G-man noticed his partner, Sam, doing some subtle rounds, questioning the lingering staff about times they'd been by themselves in the kitchen, rumours they'd heard about the property before they ever worked there. New Orleans local history, colourful tales and more recent misdeeds. Someone even handed him a copy of Haricot's newspaper article from straight after the Mike Mouton incident, which he scanned with a deep line in his brow, over on his own in one of the booths.
G-man didn't like to leave Dean and Rickey alone together - he sensed that some kind of mutual-assured-destruction sensibility was the only thing that held them back from picking at each other too much. As it was, Dean kept making cracks at everyone's expense except Rickey's, who was starting to prickle on behalf of his crew, for lack of a better reason to prickle. Still, Terrance would keep things solid if G slipped away for half a minute.
“You wanna hear my theory?” he said as he slid across the leather bench to face the solemn-faced kid.
Sam raised his eyebrows and nodded, taking a sip of the water he'd switched to after dinner. He seemed a little less irritable with his partner on the other side of the room. Calmer. G-man figured it for one of those dumb little fights that got ugly fast, for whatever reason, but ultimately didn’t mean anything. He’d been massaging Rickey’s temper for enough years to be a damn expert on type-As and their ulcers. For a second, he paused and considered how to give the kid some kind of reassurance on all the rough edges, how they’re raw and sore when you’re twenty-three and angry, but it gets better. You figure out how your pieces fit together. Then you’re smooth as stones tumbled in the river, and the years just wash over you.
But. Not the place or the time, really. G-man took a breath and said instead, “Maybe old George Mouton's pissed about Rickey taking his restaurant, screwing his nephew over and getting a good deal out of both, publicity-wise. I don't know how these things work, but if a ghost needs a motive, or something...”
“It's common for a spirit to latch onto a place, or a person,” said Sam. “As the place of death, I think the walk-in's our best candidate. You ever consider replacing it?”
“That's a expensive prospect,” G-man said, wishing he could consider it without crawling to Lenny. “We only got this one second-hand. I don't think the books could take it right now, to be honest with you.”
“Well, I'd say double check. You know where they buried George Mouton?”
G-man scowled at the table, “I bet up in Metairie.”
“We'll start there,” sighed Sam. “We salt and burn the bones.”
“You mean like dig him up?” G-man couldn't keep the squawk out of his voice.
Sam nodded, lips pressed together.
G-man closed his eyes briefly. Oh, his soul.
--
Rickey had a hard, long moment of deliberation when G came back to the bar with the duck special kid in tow. On the one hand: he wasn't about to leave his restaurant at the mercy of a pair of nutjob con-men. On the other hand: G-man had a gentle, Catholic soul, and he couldn't rightly send his partner up to Metairie to unearth a murdered body out of sanctified earth.
G was looking at him with his mouth flat, his arms crossed, ready to shrug acceptance of whatever Rickey decided as correct and right. Being the tough-as-nails co-chef, which Rickey saw through easy, because it was an act that came up every day. His loyal second, no matter what was happening in the bedroom or the back room. Rickey loved him for it. Loved him, and wanted to skulk into his arms and mouth his neck and forget all this crap. But Rickey knew, deep down, what it would do to G to go.
So he took a breath and said, “My car or yours?” to Ribeye.
--
Out of all of New Orlean's cemeteries, Metairie was probably one of the newest. Late nineteenth century deaths, rather than somewhere in the seventeen hundreds. But it still had the whitewashed family crypts and the dumb-ass kids running around drinking and stealing tourist wallets just like all the others.
Rickey was actually pretty glad of the crowbar Dean had lent him.
They slogged through a season's worth of mud sliming the cement pathways, shining flashlights on tombstones. Rickey angled east, toward the relatively new areas - his mother's mother had died sometime in the early eighties, and he could probably remember where her grave was, vaguely.
“So you and G-man, you've never run into anything like this before?” Dean asked, somewhere in the nineteen-tens.
“Naw, just this.” Rickey skirted a monument of a weeping angel. “We don't hold much with that gothic vampire shit. Just not our thing.”
Dean chuckled, just out of sight in the darkness, “Most hunters would say you can't avoid it, down here. Lots of history, lots of angry spirits.”
“Oh yeah? Well, I live on Marengo Street. We got lots of sno cones.” Rickey couldn't help playing the crotchety local. It sure beat the hell out of hyperventilating victim. Damn boneyard. He really should've sent G-man, might have cured him of whatever church-going instinct was currently possessing him.
Rickey twitched the flashlight's beam to his right: nineteen-sixties. Almost there.
--
By an hour after midnight, the rest of the crew had wandered out, feeling suitably virtuous with their racked-up voluntary overtime. G-man had jotted down hours on his notepad. He wasn't as much of a jack-ass as Rickey when it came to keeping the work environment pleasant.
So now it was just him and Sam sitting at the bar in a weirdly companionable sort of silence. The television across the counter was playing a muted basketball game and they watched it half-heartedly. G-man was almost hoping for the flicker of lights, the blackout that had happened last time. Make him feel like less of a pantywaist shrieking at shadows if there was something to actually shriek about.
The channel switched to commercials and Sam twisted his smudged up water glass in his hands, got up to go around the bar. “Can I get you anything else, G-man?” he asked. So polite. That strained kind of beggar politeness that grew up out of fear or necessity somewhere back in the annals. Big-eyed orphan politeness.
It all made G feel shifty and uncomfortable. Growing up in a family of seven dozen, politeness was for strangers, barely even guests. He got up himself, came around to wash his glass in the sink, drop it in the tray for the sanitizer. “So how you two come to be partners?” he asked, figuring it was at least some kind of friendly topic.
“I guess we were born into it,” Sam smiled at the ice bucket, and tossed his hair out of his eyes as he manipulated some cranberry juice out of the lowboy, “Do you mind if-?”
G-man waved and swiped at the ring of condensation his own glass had left on the bar. “Yeah,” he said, “I feel that way too, some days. 'Course, we just run a plain old restaurant. No lost souls around here. At least not normally.”
He watched Sam frown around his juice as he sipped at it, looking like he was about to add something else. All night the kid's silence had been heavy - not warm and comfortable like with Rickey, but toiling, like they were struggling full on toward some distant reveal. G-man felt like he himself was waiting for something - a question. He looked out the corner of his eye, saw that something staring him down. Like the kid was burning up with questions, like G-man was the real authority here, at least in all the ways that mattered.
But then the lights flickered. Once, twice, off.
--
Three feet east of Vivian Mohan, Beloved Daughter, 1947 - 1979 Rickey ducked under yellow police tape and practically coasted down the rest of the muddy incline on the other side on his ass.
Dean grabbed him by the nape of his jacket, and Rickey cursed the ruined houndstooth slacks even as he glared around for a handhold that wasn't a tombstone or statuary. Dean's flashlight roved around the edge of the incline - no, drop-off. Mudslide, so a lot of mud. And a lot of half-buried, water-damaged coffins.
The rest of what must have been a good fifty plots looked to have sloughed straight off into a drainage ditch, blocking a lot of dirty water and creating a bit of a coffin-strewn swamp at the bottom.
“There was some flooding last week,” Rickey supplied, recalling a headline.
“Oh yeah?” said Dean. He was counting coffins.
“Well. We could burn ‘em all.” Rickey ventured.
Dean cast a sour look visible in the flashlight's reflected glare. “I thought you said you weren't into that goth shit.”
Rickey gave a shrug and let go his handhold, sliding all the way down on his muddy ass. Dean followed, mostly on his feet, and Rickey put his crowbar to good use. He cracked open the top of a solid pine box, while Dean moved on ahead and put his shovel into whatever he could find 'till it was at least half-unburied.
Under the dirty orange of the city glow Rickey felt positively degenerate, exposing twenty-year-old bones to the night air. As he splintered open their covers, he didn't look inside to the contents. Whatever conflagration Dean had in store, it'd clean out these bodies pure as an autoclave. That was his understanding. Rickey swallowed back his bile and kept his arms swinging, his back aching.
On the other hand, Dean seemed almost cheery as he bent over the collapsed stacks of coffins farther down the ditch. “This is almost worth the trouble,” he grunted, and grinned over. “Digging's always the worst part.”
“I'da bet getting hauled in by the cops for necrophilia was it,” Rickey muttered.
Dean snorted. Eventually, he circled around to start examining the opened boxes. “You recognize this guy?” he kept asking. Like Rickey was some sort of expert in dead mobster lowlifes.
“It's not like I knew the guy personally,” Rickey protested, scowling into another coffin full of shrunken skin and desiccated flesh. “And I'm sure not gonna recognize him looking like this.”
Dean shrugged, sprinkled on the salt and butane sparingly. “Well, we'll probably have enough to roast most of them, but I don't wanna be making a trip to the corner store in the middle of it.”
“It'll probably be pretty spectacular,” Rickey agreed.
But they didn't run out of salt or fuel. They ran out of coffins - followed the trail of them to the muddy swell of real water, running water, engorged with god knew what and flowing strong.
Rickey scowled. “This canal porobably heads straight back into Lake Pontchartrain.”
Dean shook his head, turned, lighting a match. “If we missed him here, we'll know pretty soon.” He dropped it into the first coffin.
By the time they left, the city's muddy glow had brightened to hellish streaks, lapping against the smog cover, and though the flames themselves weren't visible over the crest of the parking lot, the entire rest of the cemetery was backlit to a hideous orange.
--
Sam spared a glance - something that said stay behind me and watch my back at once - and went around to fish a goddamn sawed-off out of his bag in the booth. G-man would've cursed if he hadn't been so wound up by the lights going off again. Friggin' sawed-off in his restaurant. Rickey would've thrown out his fucking back if he saw that.
But the kid, he just took a few soft steps like a big old hunting cat and slipped in through the kitchen doors, G-man at a respectful distance. No longer the authority, but he wouldn't argue it.
Water - black, oily, thick as syrup - wound around the soles of their shoes, rising to their ankles quick and cold. The light off Sam's little flashlight didn’t so much as pierce the surface.
It was gushing from the walk-in door, streaming down the sides of it, down its steel face like an ugly mother of a water feature. A river going on to soak the carpet in the dining room. Rising to their knees as G-man stared down at it, slack-jawed. Muttered half the start of a prayer.
Sam didn't hesitate even that much. He reached for the slimy handle and jerked it open, shotgun steadied against his forearm. Looked just like a professional, G-man thought, if only there'd been something there to shoot at. The eight-foot wall of black river mud yawned down over them, stinking of dead fish, dead garbage, dead men. Horse shit and tobacco. It swallowed them whole.
--
When Rickey walked through the front door at Liquor he saw a single glass sitting on the bar under the grey light of the television screen, which was buzzing static. The lights were off. The dining room was empty, immaculate.
Behind him, Dean's flashlight came up again, ranging over harmless details.
Rickey didn't have the patience for it. “The kitchen,” he growled, tracking cemetery mud straight across the green pile carpeting and not fucking caring for once. He'd left G-man here with only that ghostbusting whacko for company and god only knew if this was some sick bid to do them both in, sell their kidneys or just empty the safe of cash and run. Whatever kind of dumbass idiot he was to leave G-man alone, he deserved whatever happened. But G-man didn't. G didn't deserve any of this stupid shit.
He pushed through the swing of the doors, the flashlight lurching through behind him as well. Reflections off the steel on the ranges - and the lowboys and the pots and knives and the hood fan - glared emptily. Rickey slid in a few steps further, feeling the cold on his arms, the smell in the air. Tobacco, rot, shit.
He took an uncertain step toward the corner that sheltered the walk-in and prep area, but Dean was already there, gliding along. Looking like a goddamn marine, with his sidearm in hand and the flashlight steady in his fist.
He slipped quick around the corner and Rickey swallowed down all his misgivings as uncharitable when he heard the coarse growl, “Sammy-”
They were there. Both of them sprawled face down on the rubber matting. Soaking wet and half froze to the floor, with the walk-in door wide open over them, blasting out icy air, but not quite covering the smell. Muddy hair, dirty skin, clothes reeking and stiffened in cold and offal.
Dean was perched over his partner, feeling bones for damage, slapping cheeks and looking for wounds. Muttering soft and insistent, “Come on, Sammy, you ain't drowned yet, wake up. C'mon.”
Rickey found G-man a few feet away, curled under the prep table like a sick dog. He just pulled him up and cradled him, feeling the weak suck of air on his cheek as G took in breaths. The puddle of iced muck he'd been lying in soaked through at Rickey's knees. It smelled and looked like they'd been plucked up from some sewer or bog and deposited here. The rest of the kitchen sat gleaming, quiet.
Rickey met Dean's eyes over the frozen bodies in their arms. Dean's eyes were dark, but calculating as he gazed at the gape of the walk-in's entry. “I know what we're gonna do with this bastard,” he murmured through Sam's sudden coughing fit.
--
At their house on Marengo Street they put them in the shower. Rickey dug up some extra clothes for Sam, who only barely fit into a loose pair of G's sweat shorts, worn thin and soft with age, and a huge old Mardi Gras t-shirt featuring a pair of neon pink flamingos and numerous stains that was still tight across Sam's shoulders and showed a pale strip of belly under the hem. Then he left the two in the kitchen with a pot of coffee brewing and a blanket to huddle under while he went upstairs to look after G-man, who'd been put in bed with a mug of boiled water until the shower was free.
He undressed his boyfriend like a three-year-old, steadying him while he stepped out of his pants and reaching his shirt up over his shoulders. G didn’t stop shivering the whole time, his head jerking and his whole body tense.
Then Rickey sat on the toilet lid while G-man showered, giving him the quick and clean version of the apparently unsuccessful trip to the boneyard. And then dressed him in sweats and a natty bathrobe, after. And when they went back downstairs, he heated a saucepan of milk for G's coffee, took out a bottle of Bailey's.
The kitchen had taken on that sickly pre-dawn grey through the slats of the blinds, and Rickey felt the standard weariness of early-onset middle age taking hold as he leaned against the counter, looking at his two professionals. He and G-man had interrupted an acidic silence, coming into the room, and Rickey didn’t particularly like feeling like an intruder in his own damn house. “So am I gonna have to lease a new kitchen or what, fellas?” he said, finally, pouring a glug of alcohol into his dark roast. “You're the god-given experts, here.”
Dean’s brow lifted in a way that Rickey recognized all too easy, but he folded his arms and waited even as G-man started with, “He just means-” and Dean put his elbows on the table and said, “Your building'll be fine. Maybe your refrigerator there, too, if you still want it.”
G-man cast an accountant's glance over at Rickey, “Yeah, we want it,” he murmured.
“The spirit's fixed on you, Rickey,” put in Sam, from under his blanket. His wet hair stuck out around his ears, giving him a vagrant look. “After the grave got hit by the flooding, this ghost got riled up, focused on the closest thing to vengeance he could find. In this case, you stand in for his murderers, because of what you did to the nephew.”
“So you're saying it was hanging around all along, since the eighties? George Mouton’s ghost?” Rickey hadn't liked the feeling of that walk-in since he laid eyes on it. But he'd put that down to superstition, or just bad eggs that morning. He was never one to put much stock in that crap, anyway. Although, here he was.
Sam shrugged. “It's possible. It's not an exact science. Some spirits only act up once a year, once every ten years, whatever. We don't really know what they do in between.”
“Hit up the bars, backpack across Europe,” Dean muttered into his coffee. Sam's jaw worked, but he didn't say anything. Apparently his near-death experience hadn’t softened whatever spat they were having. Rickey didn’t have much patience for it. He rolled his eyes.
“So how do we get it off him?” G-man cut in, obviously alarmed.
“Just a little bit of hoodoo, I'd say.” Dean waved a hand, “Nothing you boys haven't seen before.”
“Like I said,” Rickey raised his hands, “We're just kids from the Lower Ninth-”
“Yeah, sno cones, not vampires. I heard you.” Dean shrugged, all bared teeth and cocky sunshine. “I'm telling you, though. You probably have half the herbs we need sitting here in your kitchen. I'll make a few phone calls, get some goofer dust, a lodestone. Missouri'll know someone down here. We'll have you fixed up in no time.” He stood up, drained his coffee and went out to stand on the stoop, cell phone to his ear. The door banged behind him.
Sam glanced up at them, “He's right, it won't be hard if it's fixed onto you. Should've done it this way the first time around.”
“I don't know what stopped you,” Rickey muttered, glancing at G's pale face and damp skin.
Sam looked more apathetic than apologetic. He looked worse off now than he had when he’d been lying frozen in a pool of sludge, actually. Miserable. “Trial and error.”
Rickey shook his head and poured another cup of coffee for G. They all sat in silence, listening to Dean barter with someone on the phone outside. Dean’s voice was hard and clipped and impatient, and Rickey remembered what his dad used to sound like forever ago, issuing orders to his mom. That was back before he was five even. Something he hadn’t thought of in years.
G’s hand rested on the tabletop, and Rickey put his own over it. Thumbed the knuckles and wrapped his fingers under the palm and squeezed.
Across the table, Sam watched their two hands with something Rickey didn’t care to look at, much less name, naked on his face.
--
Dean said it’d be easy but it actually looked pretty damn unpleasant from where G-man sat, muffled in clothes and nursing his fourth coffee, on the stepladder by the dessert station. He sat listening to Sam read Psalm 37 straight out of his own bible, not letting Rickey see him nodding along, muttering the parts he knew, glad for it. If only because right now, Rickey looked more like a sacrificial victim than a baptismal candidate.
Rickey had rabbit blood stars painted on his forehead, the backs of his hands, just above his armpits at the shoulder joints, on his upper thighs. Sam had mixed up some kind of tea for him to drink, and he had sachets of smoky-smelling herbs dangling at ankles and wrists and around his neck, a little white rock cupped under the arch of each foot.
But G couldn’t help but smile at Rickey’s goose-pimpled skin and hard nipples, his vain little suck at his chef’s belly whenever he remembered that he was pretty much standing half-naked there on the rubber matting in front of the walk-in. Like Tanker might walk in and ask to make a cider-drenched tarte tatin as the dessert special any time now. Which - given a few more hours - he would.
Dean had his rifle cocked - full of salt, apparently, not that it made either of them feel that much better - and a huge glass jar of something smelling a hell of a lot stronger than store-bought liquor at his elbow. Moonshine. He looked half-bored, and the way his roving gaze never quite reached over to Sam made it more than obvious why he was itching to get it over with.
G-man couldn’t say he’d be sad to see them gone, either, and as Sam dropped the last few stanzas in a rushed roll of O Lords!, he let out a long breath. G's eyes met Rickey’s, still sparking blue with impatience under the crusted star, and he smiled a bit.
Ridiculous damn ghostbusters were maybe worth it.
The glass jar shattered on the floor when Dean pushed it off the counter, and the alcohol in it was an instant rush of glass shards and liquid over rubber mats and tile, probably two gallons of it spreading to spatter at the foot of the closed walk-in door five feet away.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Rickey turned to look at Dean, cursing, as Sam struck a match.
And they both took a second to stare, mouths open, as the kid lifted an apologetic shoulder.
But then he dropped the little flame and fire swept all along the floor, surrounding Rickey where he stood, flowing back to Dean and the broken jar.
G-man was on his feet, struggling out of his sweatshirt, thinking he could maybe beat the fire down with the fabric long enough for Rickey to hop out through the flames. But Sam had a hand hooked around his arm, and G-man very quickly saw two things.
First, that a small, but strangely even circle had formed around Rickey’s feet, marking a line that the fire didn’t cross even though everyone could see that Rickey’s feet and shins were shining with liquor, fully ready to burn.
And second, that black bile was seeping through the seals of the walk-in.
“It’s alright,” said Sam, even as G-man started coughing through the stink of tobacco and smoke and rot, thrashing toward Rickey and the fire. The fire which was somehow strengthening, not depleting after the first flash of fuel was consumed. Still it was growing, the heat thrown off searing the air in his lungs. G-man made another lunge.
“No, he stays there!” Dean barked, waving G-man off with the barrel of his rifle while Sam sunk his grip deeper into his biceps. “We’ve almost got it.”
“Are you kidding me?” G-man squawked back, even as Rickey demanded, “I’m not burning, why the fuck aren't I burning?”
“Get the hell out of there!” G-man gaped at Rickey, who looked confused and angry, but not in pain. Not agonized, at least.
“Stay where you are,” Sam repeated the order, backing off himself. Away from the fire, away from the writhing black that coiled and shuddered down the door.
It crept like a slow waterfall, like a reluctant dog. Drawn first to the floor, then to the fire, then to Rickey. G-man watched it flow until it paused at the same circle the fire had, and curled there around Rickey's feet, a hideous black snake. So black that it swallowed the eye even as the flames overran it, hotter and higher like aurora borealis in the shine of the night sky.
G-man didn't see the man, didn't see the ghost. But Rickey said later that he looked just like old Mike had, except balder and fatter and angry as fuck because all his black goo was burning up.
When the rifle went off it sounded like a small explosion, the sound bouncing huge off the silver appliances, and G-man felt the harsh hot spray of salt and tossed flame as something terrible burned up right there in front of them all.
He opened his eyes and the flames were dying down low enough for Rickey to step off the little white lodestone, over the morass of dirty liquor and broken glass to the rubber mat. His chest and throat and arms were smeared with greasy black ash, and his eyes were red and wild. G, still clutching at his sweater, stepped forward and wrapped Rickey in it and his arms and stood there. Kind of shocked, both of them shaking and breathing loud.
They didn't move, except for how Rickey's fingers kept rubbing against the nape of his neck, thumb placed under his jaw, pressing gently. Out of the corner of his eye, G-man saw Dean walk out the back way. Sam said, “I think that's pretty much it, guys.”
G-man knew that if Rickey said anything, it would turn into a temper tantrum about the state of his kitchen faster than anything. Only so much mortification and abuse a guy could take in one night. Especially from a couple of tourists. So G just kept holding him and said into Rickey's shoulder, “Thanks, Sam. See ya.”
Sam went out the front.
--
The dinner rush that night started at four-thirty and lasted straight straight through eleven. Order after order kept pounding in and Rickey kept the whole crew sweating just by virtue of being quiet as a corpse. He didn't raise his voice once. It kept them all nervous, like maybe he might lose it, push someone's face into the fryer. Neither he nor G had slept in forty hours, so Rickey couldn't guarantee it wouldn't happen. G himself wasn't much more talkative, but he had his eyes open, catching a couple of fuck-ups before Rickey did.
He'd resorted to lamb provencal for the special. Stuffed with a vodka and olive tapenade and ratatouille nicoise, it was dinosaur fare, but Rickey made sure it was plated beautifully and people ordered it, so. All that really mattered was that the vegetables came on time and the chops were fresh from the supplier, so they weren't using anything from the walk-in. So none of the crew was going into the walk-in.
Because everything in the walk-in was covered with the same greasy grey ash that had coated his skin after whatever had happened that morning. It'd taken a bottle of solvent - for cleaning the fryer - to get the stuff off him and the entire time he'd been thinking about crematoriums and swamp-mud. The shit was worse than either and G-man had ended up turning the solvent on himself after he was done swabbing Rickey.
But they had their lamb chops, and G-man was frying them up as steady as if someone were timing him. And the rest of the crew was keeping their heads down and hands busy and no matter how many four-tops came at them they weren't in the weeds.
At twenty past eleven, Rickey was peeling through his lowboy, trying to guess whether those last few tables were going to order some post-drink appetizers and run him out of prosciutto-wrapped figs, when Karl slid in from the front. The maitre d' was wearing his signature green silk suit, immaculate as always, but his face showed the strain of a long night. He gave Rickey a nod but kept going, straight to G, leaning over to confide with the smooth, confidential murmur they'd hired him for.
Rickey scowled as Karl walked back out, knowing already what he'd said, but not liking anything being kept confidential from him in his own damn kitchen anyway.
G-man's hand on the small of his back wasn't tentative - it found just the right vertebra, the one that burned with the hours of bent-backed slaving and sang with relief at the pressure of knowledgeable fingers. Rickey didn't look over his shoulder. But then, G-man didn't say anything, just brushed a rough - and barely welcome, given the fact that the whole damn crew could see them - kiss on Rickey's cheek.
And then G-man checked his bandanna, wiped his hands on his apron, and went out to the dining room.
Rickey put his hands flat on the counter. Stared at the whiteness around his fingertips, the frostbite. Smiled down at it, actually. Grinned, because he had his damn kitchen back, and even if he was going to spend the next four hours throwing out stock and wiping burnt-up black off the walls of his walk-in, he would still be in his own walk-in.
And that counted as a win.
--
Sam was seated at the bar, halfway through - G-man caught Mo's eye with an eyebrow and a nod and she raised five fingers with a little grimace - his fifth pint of beer. There was no trace of the special G had sent out for him earlier, so he could only hope the kid wasn't drinking on an empty stomach.
G-man settled onto the stool beside him, and Mo pointedly dropped a couple of glasses of ice water in front of them.
“Your partner didn't want to come get his paycheck?” G-man asked, casual.
“No,” Sam's mouth twisted. Even in the soft light off the bar, the kid's eyes looked tight, his cheeks pink, like he'd been caught by a blush or a wind chill. “Never knew him to turn down a free meal, either.”
“I didn't know Rickey upset him that bad,” G-man said, thinking he'd be funny and then realizing he was an asshole. They'd probably fought - the kind of fighting you can only do when no one's around to hear it, mean and snarling like dogs. Just ripping at each other. G could practically see the wounds.
Sam's mouth turned even more sour, and he took another long swallow of beer.
“You know,” G-man said. And stopped there. He and Rickey had been together a long time. Since seventh grade. Together together since sixteen. All his life he'd had Rickey, and now they had their kitchen. Everything else was external and secondary. What advice did he have to give? The advice of the rich man to the poor, the healthy to the ill.
“He keeps fighting it,” Sam said, hoarse, into his glass.
G-man shifted in his seat, scowling, swallowing platitudes. “Why's that?”
“He says it's wrong, says it makes things worse.”
G-man acknowledged that with a nod. Country boys. And yeah, sometimes it made things worse, sometimes. “Does it?”
Sam chuckled without raising his eyes. “He's the only thing worth it.”
G-man nodded. Tossed his whiskey round his glass once, twice. “I wouldn't do this without Rickey. This place wouldn't exist. Without him, I'd be grilling steaks down in the French Quarter and drinking my paychecks away and-” and he'd never say this, not to anyone who wasn't half so pathetic as this kid here, “catching diseases from boys off the street. I might be dead, without him.”
Sam was looking at him with hazy eyes. Listening hard.
G-man shrugged, said, “You gotta decide where you'd be without him. He's gotta, too.”
The kid pushed the last warm inch of his beer away, took a swallow of the water. For a moment, G-man thought he saw that same toiling question burning up behind Sam's eyes. Again, that confession, hovering, same as before. But then Sam just muttered “Law school,” and wiped his hand over his eyes.
G-man snorted, slapped a hand on Sam's back, “Fate worse than death. You better go talk some sense into him.”
He walked Sam to the door, got him into a cab. Paid the driver, because it was the least he could do. G couldn't admit to himself - wouldn't admit to Rickey, either, whenever his bitching about the fire finally stopped and he decided to get nostalgic for those nice young men who'd saved his kitchen - that it was a relief to see the back side of them.
G-man knew they'd dodged a bullet, here. The same part of him that prayed knew that there were things they didn't want to know. Ghosts, cemeteries. Whatever else those boys dealt with. Nothing to envy there. Just relief, pure and sweet.
G turned, walked back through the dining room where the servers were vacuuming and setting out fresh tablecloths; through the kitchen where his crew was breaking down their mises en place; and found his partner in the cold air of the walk-in, smeared with ash and solvent and muttering about food waste costs. G-man made damn certain, though, after he closed the walk-in door behind them, to shut Rickey the hell up and remind him of something that wasn't spoiled, and damn well wasn't going to go to waste, either.
pairing: Dean/Sam; Rickey/G-man.
rating: G is for case file. At least no one's about to accuse me of being too ~literary~.
spoilers: none for SPN; takes place directly after Liquor, but well before Prime.
notes: I started this last August. It's 9300 words. The only person who will ever read this is delighter, but that's just 'cause she's awesome like that and forgives me for being two months late for xmas. Labour of love, baby.
summary: G-man hires some ghostbusters to come and exorcise Liquor.
A few weeks after he stabbed that little cokehead freakshow in the throat with a vegetable peeler in the walk-in of his restaurant, Rickey started to get that feeling again. The one that left a wet slime on the back of his neck whenever he had to go in there alone to grab tenderloin for the special. The one that prevented him from staying for more than a shot after service ended, even though the rest of the crew was hanging out at the bar easing their way toward a makeshift pub crawl.
G-man noticed it pretty quick. The way Rickey wouldn't turn off all the kitchen lights at the end of the night despite Lenny bitching about last month's electrical bill. The way he'd find excuses to stay in the same general space as G when they were banging out their prep work before the rest of the crew arrived in the early afternoon. Kitchen, office, dining room, bar. If he couldn't keep G in sight he'd at least find a way to keep a shouted conversation going through the swing doors or down the hall. It was getting to the point where Rickey was embarrassed, the way he kept avoiding going into the walk-in alone, practically at all. G-man never said a word, of course, but the simple fact that he was sticking closer around - trying to make Rickey feel better about being afraid of his own damn refrigerator - was enough to make Rickey's teeth grind.
It was the worst the night that damn nosey food critic Chase Haricot came in with a legal pad and asked to be seated near the kitchen. Their maitre d', Karl, gladly provided the inelegant seat. He came back to the kitchen to report, stopping a safe distance from where Rickey stood expediting a good rush of orders and inspecting plates before they went out.
“Love a god,” growled Rickey, garnishing some gulf fish.
From the saute station G said, “Why don't you wait till he does something irritating before you get irritated?”
“I feel like he's spying at my keyhole or something,”
“He's just researching that book a his,” said Tanker as he dropped off his table twenty desserts for inspection, “Probably wants to write down all your favourite curse words.”
“Yeah, you think he wants to hear me blaspheming at your sorry ass because this friggin' dijon-flavoured ice cream is selling like dog turds?”
G-man frowned over his dark glasses at Rickey, but didn't say anything.
But sure enough, a few hours later, after the dinner rush had tapered off, Mo the bartender poked her head through the kitchen door to say to Rickey, “I got a guy here sucking back screwdrivers since eight, says he'd like to talk to you when you got a moment.”
“Tell him to suck himself for a while,” muttered Rickey.
“You want I repeat that verbatim?” Mo lifted her eyebrows.
“No,” said Rickey. “But I hope you ain't being polite, either.”
He dawdled, unnecessarily supervising his crew as they broke down their stations for a good five minutes, then wiped his hands, adjusted his sweaty bandanna over his forehead and went out into the dining room.
Haricot was sitting at the opposite end of the bar from Sid Schwanz - their other journalistic regular, the one they paid in booze not to write the story Haricot was currently humping to death. Rickey'd heard the book was gonna be called Dark Kitchen and it made him kind of sick to think about it. Stabbing Mike Mouton in the throat had seemed like the best choice at the time, but now he was kind of wishing he'd taken a chance with more of Mike's bullets. No restaurant needed this kind of publicity, or at least no good restaurant.
“How'd you like your redfish?” he asked Haricot as the man stood up to shake.
“Delicious, marvellous as always, chef.”
“Yeah? Good.” Rickey made no move to sit down.
Haricot seemed not to notice, “Listen, I stopped by tonight to get your input on part of the story that seems a little unclear to me - the exact location of the walk-in? How exactly you ended up there? Maybe I could get a peek?”
Rickey huffed a sigh. Looked around and scratched at his neck. “No.”
Haricot managed a polite pause. “No?”
Rickey didn't like his tone. Tried to make the excuse plausible. “I run a tight kitchen, Haricot. I don't particularly got time for a tour.”
Haricot switched tack smooth as a sailor, “What about the original gang execution, back in the eighties. Another Mouton, wasn't it? Care to comment on that?”
“I didn't know the guy, did I? From what I've heard it was the sucker's own damn fault, messing around with-” The lights flickered once, twice, and went out, mid-sentence.
Instantly thinking of a power outage and the havoc it would wreak on his chilled and frozen stock, Rickey turned on his heel to head back to the kitchen. He'd give it five minutes before he'd get Karl to comp the meals of the last few straggling diners and then start shuffling food around to keep things from spoiling.
He got back to the kitchen to find everyone still and quiet: the overhead lights kept making brief little spasms of yellow flicker, like they might come on if they could just get their shit together. “I don't think it's a power outage,” said G-man, “something in the wiring, maybe.”
“What? A twenty-pound canal rat?” said Tanker, rubbing his crossed arms.
But Rickey had a feeling in his gut, and despite the heat of six-burner ranges and ovens roaring for the past seven hours, the temperature had dropped enough to ease his worry about any milk curdling. There was that same chilly sweat on the back of his neck, dripping down his spine.
The kitchen was basically done up for the night, except for the dishwasher in the back, looking wide-eyed askance about whether he should keep scrubbing pots in the dark. “Someone wanna tell Karl to take care of whoever's left out there,” Rickey told no one in particular, “and y'all get going on home.”
He heard them heading out, G-man going with them to talk to Karl about the customers. Rickey kept taking careful steps through the kitchen toward the walk-in.
Did he have any comments on the mob execution that had happened in his own walk-in, way before he'd ever leased the building? Except for the fact that he dreamt about it regularly, no. Except for the fact that he'd nearly got shot there himself, by the deceased's nephew, no. Except for the fact that he was breathing icicles right now. Except for the fact that there, in the flickering light, was some motherfucking kinda mold or mud, maybe, slipping down the door.
Rickey inched closer, his breath coming shallow. His ribs hurt, the way he was tensed, his hands up like to touch it.
Black, scummy-looking shit. Dripping like tar or bile seeping out the airtight seal of the stainless steel door. Running down the front and smelling like old man tobacco and horse shit. It came away on his fingers, clinging and spreading a dead cold through the bones of his fingers, down to his wrist, his elbow like the pain of a sudden blow.
Rickey fell over himself, scrambling backwards. He felt barbed knots of fear slice through his guts. His hand felt dead.
He knew what was behind that door. Knew it didn't have anything too pleasant to say. It'd been there all along. Knew about the vegetable peeler in Mike Mouton's psychotic fucking throat. The Angola prison term. These things Rickey knew, even as he knew he must be hallucinating, knew he must be going batshit, seeing stuff like this.
Tar was pooling over the rubber matting on the floor, and the temperature was making Rickey's whole body numb, absent, and he could see the steel door swinging outwards, toward him, a rush of something flowing like a river outward till it covered everything, black as the bottom of the Mississippi.
--
First thing in the morning, before Rickey or probably half the city was awake, G-man snuck out of bed to make the call to the only person he knew who might be able to offer some advice.
Tight-lipped and Catholic as she was, his oldest sister, Melly, barely even acknowledged what G-man was saying. She made a few noncommittal sounds as he gave a watered-down version of the incident at Liquor, and finally cut him off mid-sentence with “Hold on a sec, Gary.” And put the phone down while she rustled around for a good long while on the other end. Then she read him a phone number with an out-of-state area code and hung up, saying, “I gotta go to Mass.”
G-man took a breath and dialled the number before he lost his nerve or Rickey came down to the kitchen and asked what the hell he thought he was doing.
They'd found him curled up and comatose under the salad station, and it had taken an awful lot to wake him up. When they finally did, it hardly seemed worth it. Rickey was near on hysterical, and G-man ended up slipping him a few painkillers to put him back down.
The line rang maybe three times, and then went to voicemail: “This is John Winchester, I can't be reached. If this is an emergency-” G-man didn't quite know what counted as an emergency to this guy, but he took the alternate number down anyway. He didn't have much else to go on, and he didn't want Rickey going anywhere near the restaurant until he could find something like an expert opinion on whatever the hell had happened. Rickey had come up with some choice ravings, and G-man wasn't so stupid as to miss the signs. He'd seen them once before, and that was good enough for him.
He dialled.
“What?” said a rough voice on the other end. It sounded pretty close to Rickey's when he'd been woken up at - what - five in the morning, was it?
“This Dean Winchester?” said G-man.
“Yeah, who's this?”
“My name's Gary Stubbs. Uh, G-man, actually. But your dad helped out my folks a good twenty years ago, when I was just a kid. Down here in New Orleans. A, uh... poltergeist?”
“Oh yeah?” Dean Winchester did not sound like he particularly cared, but he hadn't hung up.
“Listen,” said G, wondering if maybe he'd got the wrong Dean Winchester, “Is this a bad time? Can I call you back?”
On the other end of the line, Dean cleared his throat, sounded just a bit more awake. “You got another poltergeist or something, G-man? Did it kill someone?”
“No, I mean, yeah, a ghost - in our walk-in.”
“You got a ghost hiding in your closet?”
“No, the refridgerator.” G-man tried to catch his thoughts enough to explain, “I mean we got a ghost in the walk-in refrigerator at our restaurant. It ain't killed anyone that I know of, but it scared the holy spirit right outta my partner last night, he pretty much lost his mind, if you know what I'm saying. Black goop, he said, and the power went out, we had to kick out some customers and Rickey, he got what somebody said was frostbite? It's September down here, man, we get crotch rot, not frostbite.” G-man paused, shifted uncomfortably in his seat just thinking about the crotch rot.
“Yeah, alright,” said Dean. There was a yawn. “New Orleans is it?”
“Yeah, Broad Street at Toulouse. Restaurant called Liquor.”
“Sounds like a fine establishment.” A long pause, and G-man heard another voice say something clipped and irritable in the background. “So listen, we're maybe half a day's drive right now, but we got some business to finish up here in Arkansas. Maybe we can get down there tonight. How's that sound?”
“That'll be good,” said G-man. “You just stop by the place, we'll get you some dinner and some drinks, maybe you'll take a look at the walk-in.”
“Sure thing,” said Dean, and he took down the phone number at the restaurant in case they got lost.
G-man hung up, wondering exactly how pissed Rickey would be when he found out he'd hired the Ghostbusters to come and exorcise Liquor.
--
If anything, dinner service that night was busier than ever.
When Rickey had woken up at ten, it'd felt like coming back from the dead. He nursed his headache and strangely white fingertips with a lot of Excedrin and a covert bottle of beer. G-man fussed a bit, kissing him on the forehead and offering a mug of coffee, but Rickey didn't want to talk about fainting like a pussy, or the big wall of black he'd somehow known was river-mud, coming for him. George Mouton's name swam around in his head like a restless eel, and even though he could see G-man physically biting his tongue on the suggestion, he knew that taking the night off would just leave him a basket case. Afraid of his fucking walk-in. Let that get around the grapevine and he, G-man and Liquor would be a laughingstock before they keeled over, dead of ridiculous.
When they got to the restaurant at eleven, it was fine. Karl was there on some thin pretext, and so were Terrance, Tanker and Mo.
“What?” Rickey said to the little red-headed bartender, “You gonna polish glasses for six hours?”
“I'm doin inventory,” she retorted evenly, “That Schwanz pal of yours is drinking me out of Stoli every other night.”
“Well don't expect to get paid,” Rickey declared, levelling looks at all of them. 'Course everyone knew that G-man kept the books and cut the cheques, but he wasn't about to act grateful for their fucking pity. Nothing like having your crew witness your first and only mental breakdown.
Still, though, the kitchen seemed alright. The lights were on, the walk-in empty of everything but the necessaries, their seafood order and the foie gras and duck G had suggested for the special. But Rickey had to sneak into it just to check it out without G-man hovering over him all motherish. Yeah, nothing. The stainless steel gleamed like a funhouse mirror, free of any of the tobacco-stink from the night prior.
It didn't take long to fall into the rhythm of the night's work, though. Rickey took the saute station and let G expedite, just to keep himself from thinking about anything other than entrees. His frostbitten fingers felt strangely immune to the heat - even more so than his chef's calluses normally left him - and he caught himself playing too close to the element a few times, titillated by the deadened nerves.
Halfway through the worst of the rush Karl dropped by to murmur something to G-man. A bit later G called out an order of one roast duck terrine special and one ribeye and had Rickey prepare an amuse bouche to send out before the quail and veal cheeks apps. Rickey could've saw with his eyes sewn shut that G-man had some sort of party out there he wanted to impress.
“Food critic?” he called over, a little pissed he even had to ask.
“Naw,” said G-man, and Rickey was too proud to ask for clarification, of course. But he was pretty sure he was right: food critic, health inspector on an off-night, or a bigshot chef. All of which G-man should've had the decency to inform him about. But Rickey also knew that he'd been freezing G out with his sore ego over the day. He couldn't blame him for a bit of reciprocal cold-shouldering. So instead he took very good care of the duck terrine, and made a grudging allowance for the ribeye, seeing as the ticket had specified its only redeeming quality: bloody.
An hour later, when G-man started wiping his hands and checking his jacket for any real ugly stains, Rickey stepped up beside him. “You swanning out for your health inspector buddies?”
G-man made a kind of you-caught-me grimace and Rickey grinned his very best, to show that he'd be good, and wiped the sweat and splatter off his own hands and face. “I'll tag along.”
Karl had seated the VIPs in a quiet corner that provided a good view of the bustle of the rest of the dining room without being completely forgotten itself. There were two of them, the carnage of their meal lying around their plates with an air of victory - quail crushed and dismembered, cow blood on the tablecloth, even the garnishes had disappeared. The one who'd ordered the steak had one of Mo's specials in his hand - liquor on liquor, mostly - and the other one had a half-bottle of red drained beside him. Except for their lack of paunch, the two fully fit the New Orleans pre-requisites in terms of food and alcohol, and Rickey bathed them both in smiles, hoping G was appreciating the effort.
“You enjoy your meal, fellas?”
“Yeah, definitely. Best food we've had in-” Duck Special sent a look at Ribeye that seemed accusatory. “Years, probably.”
“It was damn amazing,” put in Ribeye, lifting his whiskey and whiskey in salute. “We'll be back for breakfast.”
Rickey's smile felt a little stretched as he said, “If you feel like cooking it yourself, maybe. Chefs sleep late, these parts.”
“Yeah?” said Ribeye, smirking like he knew something Rickey didn't. “Well I have a suspicion we'll all be ready for another round of those steaks come sunrise. See if I can convince you then.” He stretched decadently in his chair while Duck Special shot a disgusted look across the table.
Rickey was having a hard time figuring out what kind of health inspectors these were, with their fake smiles and pretty faces. Definitely not chefs. Or foodies. Just good old down home boys with mud on their boots and food in their bellies. And pissed, on top of it, or at least Duck Special was. He was glaring at his partner like a put-upon stripper.
Self-conscious, a little awkward, Rickey looked back to G-man for some sort of stabilizing influence, even as Ribeye turned his wise-ass smirk back up to them like his buddy hadn’t just hissed something under his breath.
G at least had the good grace to step forward on cue, “Well, we certainly appreciate you boys coming down here tonight. I'm G-man, we talked on the phone. Dean, right?” He and Ribeye shook hands like colleagues, which threw Rickey even farther off. Then Duck Special got introduced as Sam, forcing a tight smile as Rickey stared down at him in mounting confusion.
Quick as he could, he made an excuse for himself, leaving G-man and the two VIPs making tattered conversation at the table. He paced around the kitchen 'till G-man eventually followed suit and then he dragged him back to the office for a bare semblance of privacy before hissing, “What the hell you gunning for, G? You hired them for something - relationship counsellors or hookers or what?”
It took G-man probably ten minutes to stop laughing long enough to mortify Rickey even more by telling him the truth.
--
It got decided somehow - mostly by the way Dean Winchester shuffled his drink over from table to bar and then sat smiling cattishly at Mo 'till she refilled it - that the best thing to do was wait out the ghost in the restaurant. By eleven the customers had all filed out and the kitchen staff had re-occupied the dining room, lined up at the bar and swilling drinks and acting macho and superstitious around Dean, who seemed to encourage both simply by virtue of being.
In the meantime, G-man noticed his partner, Sam, doing some subtle rounds, questioning the lingering staff about times they'd been by themselves in the kitchen, rumours they'd heard about the property before they ever worked there. New Orleans local history, colourful tales and more recent misdeeds. Someone even handed him a copy of Haricot's newspaper article from straight after the Mike Mouton incident, which he scanned with a deep line in his brow, over on his own in one of the booths.
G-man didn't like to leave Dean and Rickey alone together - he sensed that some kind of mutual-assured-destruction sensibility was the only thing that held them back from picking at each other too much. As it was, Dean kept making cracks at everyone's expense except Rickey's, who was starting to prickle on behalf of his crew, for lack of a better reason to prickle. Still, Terrance would keep things solid if G slipped away for half a minute.
“You wanna hear my theory?” he said as he slid across the leather bench to face the solemn-faced kid.
Sam raised his eyebrows and nodded, taking a sip of the water he'd switched to after dinner. He seemed a little less irritable with his partner on the other side of the room. Calmer. G-man figured it for one of those dumb little fights that got ugly fast, for whatever reason, but ultimately didn’t mean anything. He’d been massaging Rickey’s temper for enough years to be a damn expert on type-As and their ulcers. For a second, he paused and considered how to give the kid some kind of reassurance on all the rough edges, how they’re raw and sore when you’re twenty-three and angry, but it gets better. You figure out how your pieces fit together. Then you’re smooth as stones tumbled in the river, and the years just wash over you.
But. Not the place or the time, really. G-man took a breath and said instead, “Maybe old George Mouton's pissed about Rickey taking his restaurant, screwing his nephew over and getting a good deal out of both, publicity-wise. I don't know how these things work, but if a ghost needs a motive, or something...”
“It's common for a spirit to latch onto a place, or a person,” said Sam. “As the place of death, I think the walk-in's our best candidate. You ever consider replacing it?”
“That's a expensive prospect,” G-man said, wishing he could consider it without crawling to Lenny. “We only got this one second-hand. I don't think the books could take it right now, to be honest with you.”
“Well, I'd say double check. You know where they buried George Mouton?”
G-man scowled at the table, “I bet up in Metairie.”
“We'll start there,” sighed Sam. “We salt and burn the bones.”
“You mean like dig him up?” G-man couldn't keep the squawk out of his voice.
Sam nodded, lips pressed together.
G-man closed his eyes briefly. Oh, his soul.
--
Rickey had a hard, long moment of deliberation when G came back to the bar with the duck special kid in tow. On the one hand: he wasn't about to leave his restaurant at the mercy of a pair of nutjob con-men. On the other hand: G-man had a gentle, Catholic soul, and he couldn't rightly send his partner up to Metairie to unearth a murdered body out of sanctified earth.
G was looking at him with his mouth flat, his arms crossed, ready to shrug acceptance of whatever Rickey decided as correct and right. Being the tough-as-nails co-chef, which Rickey saw through easy, because it was an act that came up every day. His loyal second, no matter what was happening in the bedroom or the back room. Rickey loved him for it. Loved him, and wanted to skulk into his arms and mouth his neck and forget all this crap. But Rickey knew, deep down, what it would do to G to go.
So he took a breath and said, “My car or yours?” to Ribeye.
--
Out of all of New Orlean's cemeteries, Metairie was probably one of the newest. Late nineteenth century deaths, rather than somewhere in the seventeen hundreds. But it still had the whitewashed family crypts and the dumb-ass kids running around drinking and stealing tourist wallets just like all the others.
Rickey was actually pretty glad of the crowbar Dean had lent him.
They slogged through a season's worth of mud sliming the cement pathways, shining flashlights on tombstones. Rickey angled east, toward the relatively new areas - his mother's mother had died sometime in the early eighties, and he could probably remember where her grave was, vaguely.
“So you and G-man, you've never run into anything like this before?” Dean asked, somewhere in the nineteen-tens.
“Naw, just this.” Rickey skirted a monument of a weeping angel. “We don't hold much with that gothic vampire shit. Just not our thing.”
Dean chuckled, just out of sight in the darkness, “Most hunters would say you can't avoid it, down here. Lots of history, lots of angry spirits.”
“Oh yeah? Well, I live on Marengo Street. We got lots of sno cones.” Rickey couldn't help playing the crotchety local. It sure beat the hell out of hyperventilating victim. Damn boneyard. He really should've sent G-man, might have cured him of whatever church-going instinct was currently possessing him.
Rickey twitched the flashlight's beam to his right: nineteen-sixties. Almost there.
--
By an hour after midnight, the rest of the crew had wandered out, feeling suitably virtuous with their racked-up voluntary overtime. G-man had jotted down hours on his notepad. He wasn't as much of a jack-ass as Rickey when it came to keeping the work environment pleasant.
So now it was just him and Sam sitting at the bar in a weirdly companionable sort of silence. The television across the counter was playing a muted basketball game and they watched it half-heartedly. G-man was almost hoping for the flicker of lights, the blackout that had happened last time. Make him feel like less of a pantywaist shrieking at shadows if there was something to actually shriek about.
The channel switched to commercials and Sam twisted his smudged up water glass in his hands, got up to go around the bar. “Can I get you anything else, G-man?” he asked. So polite. That strained kind of beggar politeness that grew up out of fear or necessity somewhere back in the annals. Big-eyed orphan politeness.
It all made G feel shifty and uncomfortable. Growing up in a family of seven dozen, politeness was for strangers, barely even guests. He got up himself, came around to wash his glass in the sink, drop it in the tray for the sanitizer. “So how you two come to be partners?” he asked, figuring it was at least some kind of friendly topic.
“I guess we were born into it,” Sam smiled at the ice bucket, and tossed his hair out of his eyes as he manipulated some cranberry juice out of the lowboy, “Do you mind if-?”
G-man waved and swiped at the ring of condensation his own glass had left on the bar. “Yeah,” he said, “I feel that way too, some days. 'Course, we just run a plain old restaurant. No lost souls around here. At least not normally.”
He watched Sam frown around his juice as he sipped at it, looking like he was about to add something else. All night the kid's silence had been heavy - not warm and comfortable like with Rickey, but toiling, like they were struggling full on toward some distant reveal. G-man felt like he himself was waiting for something - a question. He looked out the corner of his eye, saw that something staring him down. Like the kid was burning up with questions, like G-man was the real authority here, at least in all the ways that mattered.
But then the lights flickered. Once, twice, off.
--
Three feet east of Vivian Mohan, Beloved Daughter, 1947 - 1979 Rickey ducked under yellow police tape and practically coasted down the rest of the muddy incline on the other side on his ass.
Dean grabbed him by the nape of his jacket, and Rickey cursed the ruined houndstooth slacks even as he glared around for a handhold that wasn't a tombstone or statuary. Dean's flashlight roved around the edge of the incline - no, drop-off. Mudslide, so a lot of mud. And a lot of half-buried, water-damaged coffins.
The rest of what must have been a good fifty plots looked to have sloughed straight off into a drainage ditch, blocking a lot of dirty water and creating a bit of a coffin-strewn swamp at the bottom.
“There was some flooding last week,” Rickey supplied, recalling a headline.
“Oh yeah?” said Dean. He was counting coffins.
“Well. We could burn ‘em all.” Rickey ventured.
Dean cast a sour look visible in the flashlight's reflected glare. “I thought you said you weren't into that goth shit.”
Rickey gave a shrug and let go his handhold, sliding all the way down on his muddy ass. Dean followed, mostly on his feet, and Rickey put his crowbar to good use. He cracked open the top of a solid pine box, while Dean moved on ahead and put his shovel into whatever he could find 'till it was at least half-unburied.
Under the dirty orange of the city glow Rickey felt positively degenerate, exposing twenty-year-old bones to the night air. As he splintered open their covers, he didn't look inside to the contents. Whatever conflagration Dean had in store, it'd clean out these bodies pure as an autoclave. That was his understanding. Rickey swallowed back his bile and kept his arms swinging, his back aching.
On the other hand, Dean seemed almost cheery as he bent over the collapsed stacks of coffins farther down the ditch. “This is almost worth the trouble,” he grunted, and grinned over. “Digging's always the worst part.”
“I'da bet getting hauled in by the cops for necrophilia was it,” Rickey muttered.
Dean snorted. Eventually, he circled around to start examining the opened boxes. “You recognize this guy?” he kept asking. Like Rickey was some sort of expert in dead mobster lowlifes.
“It's not like I knew the guy personally,” Rickey protested, scowling into another coffin full of shrunken skin and desiccated flesh. “And I'm sure not gonna recognize him looking like this.”
Dean shrugged, sprinkled on the salt and butane sparingly. “Well, we'll probably have enough to roast most of them, but I don't wanna be making a trip to the corner store in the middle of it.”
“It'll probably be pretty spectacular,” Rickey agreed.
But they didn't run out of salt or fuel. They ran out of coffins - followed the trail of them to the muddy swell of real water, running water, engorged with god knew what and flowing strong.
Rickey scowled. “This canal porobably heads straight back into Lake Pontchartrain.”
Dean shook his head, turned, lighting a match. “If we missed him here, we'll know pretty soon.” He dropped it into the first coffin.
By the time they left, the city's muddy glow had brightened to hellish streaks, lapping against the smog cover, and though the flames themselves weren't visible over the crest of the parking lot, the entire rest of the cemetery was backlit to a hideous orange.
--
Sam spared a glance - something that said stay behind me and watch my back at once - and went around to fish a goddamn sawed-off out of his bag in the booth. G-man would've cursed if he hadn't been so wound up by the lights going off again. Friggin' sawed-off in his restaurant. Rickey would've thrown out his fucking back if he saw that.
But the kid, he just took a few soft steps like a big old hunting cat and slipped in through the kitchen doors, G-man at a respectful distance. No longer the authority, but he wouldn't argue it.
Water - black, oily, thick as syrup - wound around the soles of their shoes, rising to their ankles quick and cold. The light off Sam's little flashlight didn’t so much as pierce the surface.
It was gushing from the walk-in door, streaming down the sides of it, down its steel face like an ugly mother of a water feature. A river going on to soak the carpet in the dining room. Rising to their knees as G-man stared down at it, slack-jawed. Muttered half the start of a prayer.
Sam didn't hesitate even that much. He reached for the slimy handle and jerked it open, shotgun steadied against his forearm. Looked just like a professional, G-man thought, if only there'd been something there to shoot at. The eight-foot wall of black river mud yawned down over them, stinking of dead fish, dead garbage, dead men. Horse shit and tobacco. It swallowed them whole.
--
When Rickey walked through the front door at Liquor he saw a single glass sitting on the bar under the grey light of the television screen, which was buzzing static. The lights were off. The dining room was empty, immaculate.
Behind him, Dean's flashlight came up again, ranging over harmless details.
Rickey didn't have the patience for it. “The kitchen,” he growled, tracking cemetery mud straight across the green pile carpeting and not fucking caring for once. He'd left G-man here with only that ghostbusting whacko for company and god only knew if this was some sick bid to do them both in, sell their kidneys or just empty the safe of cash and run. Whatever kind of dumbass idiot he was to leave G-man alone, he deserved whatever happened. But G-man didn't. G didn't deserve any of this stupid shit.
He pushed through the swing of the doors, the flashlight lurching through behind him as well. Reflections off the steel on the ranges - and the lowboys and the pots and knives and the hood fan - glared emptily. Rickey slid in a few steps further, feeling the cold on his arms, the smell in the air. Tobacco, rot, shit.
He took an uncertain step toward the corner that sheltered the walk-in and prep area, but Dean was already there, gliding along. Looking like a goddamn marine, with his sidearm in hand and the flashlight steady in his fist.
He slipped quick around the corner and Rickey swallowed down all his misgivings as uncharitable when he heard the coarse growl, “Sammy-”
They were there. Both of them sprawled face down on the rubber matting. Soaking wet and half froze to the floor, with the walk-in door wide open over them, blasting out icy air, but not quite covering the smell. Muddy hair, dirty skin, clothes reeking and stiffened in cold and offal.
Dean was perched over his partner, feeling bones for damage, slapping cheeks and looking for wounds. Muttering soft and insistent, “Come on, Sammy, you ain't drowned yet, wake up. C'mon.”
Rickey found G-man a few feet away, curled under the prep table like a sick dog. He just pulled him up and cradled him, feeling the weak suck of air on his cheek as G took in breaths. The puddle of iced muck he'd been lying in soaked through at Rickey's knees. It smelled and looked like they'd been plucked up from some sewer or bog and deposited here. The rest of the kitchen sat gleaming, quiet.
Rickey met Dean's eyes over the frozen bodies in their arms. Dean's eyes were dark, but calculating as he gazed at the gape of the walk-in's entry. “I know what we're gonna do with this bastard,” he murmured through Sam's sudden coughing fit.
--
At their house on Marengo Street they put them in the shower. Rickey dug up some extra clothes for Sam, who only barely fit into a loose pair of G's sweat shorts, worn thin and soft with age, and a huge old Mardi Gras t-shirt featuring a pair of neon pink flamingos and numerous stains that was still tight across Sam's shoulders and showed a pale strip of belly under the hem. Then he left the two in the kitchen with a pot of coffee brewing and a blanket to huddle under while he went upstairs to look after G-man, who'd been put in bed with a mug of boiled water until the shower was free.
He undressed his boyfriend like a three-year-old, steadying him while he stepped out of his pants and reaching his shirt up over his shoulders. G didn’t stop shivering the whole time, his head jerking and his whole body tense.
Then Rickey sat on the toilet lid while G-man showered, giving him the quick and clean version of the apparently unsuccessful trip to the boneyard. And then dressed him in sweats and a natty bathrobe, after. And when they went back downstairs, he heated a saucepan of milk for G's coffee, took out a bottle of Bailey's.
The kitchen had taken on that sickly pre-dawn grey through the slats of the blinds, and Rickey felt the standard weariness of early-onset middle age taking hold as he leaned against the counter, looking at his two professionals. He and G-man had interrupted an acidic silence, coming into the room, and Rickey didn’t particularly like feeling like an intruder in his own damn house. “So am I gonna have to lease a new kitchen or what, fellas?” he said, finally, pouring a glug of alcohol into his dark roast. “You're the god-given experts, here.”
Dean’s brow lifted in a way that Rickey recognized all too easy, but he folded his arms and waited even as G-man started with, “He just means-” and Dean put his elbows on the table and said, “Your building'll be fine. Maybe your refrigerator there, too, if you still want it.”
G-man cast an accountant's glance over at Rickey, “Yeah, we want it,” he murmured.
“The spirit's fixed on you, Rickey,” put in Sam, from under his blanket. His wet hair stuck out around his ears, giving him a vagrant look. “After the grave got hit by the flooding, this ghost got riled up, focused on the closest thing to vengeance he could find. In this case, you stand in for his murderers, because of what you did to the nephew.”
“So you're saying it was hanging around all along, since the eighties? George Mouton’s ghost?” Rickey hadn't liked the feeling of that walk-in since he laid eyes on it. But he'd put that down to superstition, or just bad eggs that morning. He was never one to put much stock in that crap, anyway. Although, here he was.
Sam shrugged. “It's possible. It's not an exact science. Some spirits only act up once a year, once every ten years, whatever. We don't really know what they do in between.”
“Hit up the bars, backpack across Europe,” Dean muttered into his coffee. Sam's jaw worked, but he didn't say anything. Apparently his near-death experience hadn’t softened whatever spat they were having. Rickey didn’t have much patience for it. He rolled his eyes.
“So how do we get it off him?” G-man cut in, obviously alarmed.
“Just a little bit of hoodoo, I'd say.” Dean waved a hand, “Nothing you boys haven't seen before.”
“Like I said,” Rickey raised his hands, “We're just kids from the Lower Ninth-”
“Yeah, sno cones, not vampires. I heard you.” Dean shrugged, all bared teeth and cocky sunshine. “I'm telling you, though. You probably have half the herbs we need sitting here in your kitchen. I'll make a few phone calls, get some goofer dust, a lodestone. Missouri'll know someone down here. We'll have you fixed up in no time.” He stood up, drained his coffee and went out to stand on the stoop, cell phone to his ear. The door banged behind him.
Sam glanced up at them, “He's right, it won't be hard if it's fixed onto you. Should've done it this way the first time around.”
“I don't know what stopped you,” Rickey muttered, glancing at G's pale face and damp skin.
Sam looked more apathetic than apologetic. He looked worse off now than he had when he’d been lying frozen in a pool of sludge, actually. Miserable. “Trial and error.”
Rickey shook his head and poured another cup of coffee for G. They all sat in silence, listening to Dean barter with someone on the phone outside. Dean’s voice was hard and clipped and impatient, and Rickey remembered what his dad used to sound like forever ago, issuing orders to his mom. That was back before he was five even. Something he hadn’t thought of in years.
G’s hand rested on the tabletop, and Rickey put his own over it. Thumbed the knuckles and wrapped his fingers under the palm and squeezed.
Across the table, Sam watched their two hands with something Rickey didn’t care to look at, much less name, naked on his face.
--
Dean said it’d be easy but it actually looked pretty damn unpleasant from where G-man sat, muffled in clothes and nursing his fourth coffee, on the stepladder by the dessert station. He sat listening to Sam read Psalm 37 straight out of his own bible, not letting Rickey see him nodding along, muttering the parts he knew, glad for it. If only because right now, Rickey looked more like a sacrificial victim than a baptismal candidate.
Rickey had rabbit blood stars painted on his forehead, the backs of his hands, just above his armpits at the shoulder joints, on his upper thighs. Sam had mixed up some kind of tea for him to drink, and he had sachets of smoky-smelling herbs dangling at ankles and wrists and around his neck, a little white rock cupped under the arch of each foot.
But G couldn’t help but smile at Rickey’s goose-pimpled skin and hard nipples, his vain little suck at his chef’s belly whenever he remembered that he was pretty much standing half-naked there on the rubber matting in front of the walk-in. Like Tanker might walk in and ask to make a cider-drenched tarte tatin as the dessert special any time now. Which - given a few more hours - he would.
Dean had his rifle cocked - full of salt, apparently, not that it made either of them feel that much better - and a huge glass jar of something smelling a hell of a lot stronger than store-bought liquor at his elbow. Moonshine. He looked half-bored, and the way his roving gaze never quite reached over to Sam made it more than obvious why he was itching to get it over with.
G-man couldn’t say he’d be sad to see them gone, either, and as Sam dropped the last few stanzas in a rushed roll of O Lords!, he let out a long breath. G's eyes met Rickey’s, still sparking blue with impatience under the crusted star, and he smiled a bit.
Ridiculous damn ghostbusters were maybe worth it.
The glass jar shattered on the floor when Dean pushed it off the counter, and the alcohol in it was an instant rush of glass shards and liquid over rubber mats and tile, probably two gallons of it spreading to spatter at the foot of the closed walk-in door five feet away.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Rickey turned to look at Dean, cursing, as Sam struck a match.
And they both took a second to stare, mouths open, as the kid lifted an apologetic shoulder.
But then he dropped the little flame and fire swept all along the floor, surrounding Rickey where he stood, flowing back to Dean and the broken jar.
G-man was on his feet, struggling out of his sweatshirt, thinking he could maybe beat the fire down with the fabric long enough for Rickey to hop out through the flames. But Sam had a hand hooked around his arm, and G-man very quickly saw two things.
First, that a small, but strangely even circle had formed around Rickey’s feet, marking a line that the fire didn’t cross even though everyone could see that Rickey’s feet and shins were shining with liquor, fully ready to burn.
And second, that black bile was seeping through the seals of the walk-in.
“It’s alright,” said Sam, even as G-man started coughing through the stink of tobacco and smoke and rot, thrashing toward Rickey and the fire. The fire which was somehow strengthening, not depleting after the first flash of fuel was consumed. Still it was growing, the heat thrown off searing the air in his lungs. G-man made another lunge.
“No, he stays there!” Dean barked, waving G-man off with the barrel of his rifle while Sam sunk his grip deeper into his biceps. “We’ve almost got it.”
“Are you kidding me?” G-man squawked back, even as Rickey demanded, “I’m not burning, why the fuck aren't I burning?”
“Get the hell out of there!” G-man gaped at Rickey, who looked confused and angry, but not in pain. Not agonized, at least.
“Stay where you are,” Sam repeated the order, backing off himself. Away from the fire, away from the writhing black that coiled and shuddered down the door.
It crept like a slow waterfall, like a reluctant dog. Drawn first to the floor, then to the fire, then to Rickey. G-man watched it flow until it paused at the same circle the fire had, and curled there around Rickey's feet, a hideous black snake. So black that it swallowed the eye even as the flames overran it, hotter and higher like aurora borealis in the shine of the night sky.
G-man didn't see the man, didn't see the ghost. But Rickey said later that he looked just like old Mike had, except balder and fatter and angry as fuck because all his black goo was burning up.
When the rifle went off it sounded like a small explosion, the sound bouncing huge off the silver appliances, and G-man felt the harsh hot spray of salt and tossed flame as something terrible burned up right there in front of them all.
He opened his eyes and the flames were dying down low enough for Rickey to step off the little white lodestone, over the morass of dirty liquor and broken glass to the rubber mat. His chest and throat and arms were smeared with greasy black ash, and his eyes were red and wild. G, still clutching at his sweater, stepped forward and wrapped Rickey in it and his arms and stood there. Kind of shocked, both of them shaking and breathing loud.
They didn't move, except for how Rickey's fingers kept rubbing against the nape of his neck, thumb placed under his jaw, pressing gently. Out of the corner of his eye, G-man saw Dean walk out the back way. Sam said, “I think that's pretty much it, guys.”
G-man knew that if Rickey said anything, it would turn into a temper tantrum about the state of his kitchen faster than anything. Only so much mortification and abuse a guy could take in one night. Especially from a couple of tourists. So G just kept holding him and said into Rickey's shoulder, “Thanks, Sam. See ya.”
Sam went out the front.
--
The dinner rush that night started at four-thirty and lasted straight straight through eleven. Order after order kept pounding in and Rickey kept the whole crew sweating just by virtue of being quiet as a corpse. He didn't raise his voice once. It kept them all nervous, like maybe he might lose it, push someone's face into the fryer. Neither he nor G had slept in forty hours, so Rickey couldn't guarantee it wouldn't happen. G himself wasn't much more talkative, but he had his eyes open, catching a couple of fuck-ups before Rickey did.
He'd resorted to lamb provencal for the special. Stuffed with a vodka and olive tapenade and ratatouille nicoise, it was dinosaur fare, but Rickey made sure it was plated beautifully and people ordered it, so. All that really mattered was that the vegetables came on time and the chops were fresh from the supplier, so they weren't using anything from the walk-in. So none of the crew was going into the walk-in.
Because everything in the walk-in was covered with the same greasy grey ash that had coated his skin after whatever had happened that morning. It'd taken a bottle of solvent - for cleaning the fryer - to get the stuff off him and the entire time he'd been thinking about crematoriums and swamp-mud. The shit was worse than either and G-man had ended up turning the solvent on himself after he was done swabbing Rickey.
But they had their lamb chops, and G-man was frying them up as steady as if someone were timing him. And the rest of the crew was keeping their heads down and hands busy and no matter how many four-tops came at them they weren't in the weeds.
At twenty past eleven, Rickey was peeling through his lowboy, trying to guess whether those last few tables were going to order some post-drink appetizers and run him out of prosciutto-wrapped figs, when Karl slid in from the front. The maitre d' was wearing his signature green silk suit, immaculate as always, but his face showed the strain of a long night. He gave Rickey a nod but kept going, straight to G, leaning over to confide with the smooth, confidential murmur they'd hired him for.
Rickey scowled as Karl walked back out, knowing already what he'd said, but not liking anything being kept confidential from him in his own damn kitchen anyway.
G-man's hand on the small of his back wasn't tentative - it found just the right vertebra, the one that burned with the hours of bent-backed slaving and sang with relief at the pressure of knowledgeable fingers. Rickey didn't look over his shoulder. But then, G-man didn't say anything, just brushed a rough - and barely welcome, given the fact that the whole damn crew could see them - kiss on Rickey's cheek.
And then G-man checked his bandanna, wiped his hands on his apron, and went out to the dining room.
Rickey put his hands flat on the counter. Stared at the whiteness around his fingertips, the frostbite. Smiled down at it, actually. Grinned, because he had his damn kitchen back, and even if he was going to spend the next four hours throwing out stock and wiping burnt-up black off the walls of his walk-in, he would still be in his own walk-in.
And that counted as a win.
--
Sam was seated at the bar, halfway through - G-man caught Mo's eye with an eyebrow and a nod and she raised five fingers with a little grimace - his fifth pint of beer. There was no trace of the special G had sent out for him earlier, so he could only hope the kid wasn't drinking on an empty stomach.
G-man settled onto the stool beside him, and Mo pointedly dropped a couple of glasses of ice water in front of them.
“Your partner didn't want to come get his paycheck?” G-man asked, casual.
“No,” Sam's mouth twisted. Even in the soft light off the bar, the kid's eyes looked tight, his cheeks pink, like he'd been caught by a blush or a wind chill. “Never knew him to turn down a free meal, either.”
“I didn't know Rickey upset him that bad,” G-man said, thinking he'd be funny and then realizing he was an asshole. They'd probably fought - the kind of fighting you can only do when no one's around to hear it, mean and snarling like dogs. Just ripping at each other. G could practically see the wounds.
Sam's mouth turned even more sour, and he took another long swallow of beer.
“You know,” G-man said. And stopped there. He and Rickey had been together a long time. Since seventh grade. Together together since sixteen. All his life he'd had Rickey, and now they had their kitchen. Everything else was external and secondary. What advice did he have to give? The advice of the rich man to the poor, the healthy to the ill.
“He keeps fighting it,” Sam said, hoarse, into his glass.
G-man shifted in his seat, scowling, swallowing platitudes. “Why's that?”
“He says it's wrong, says it makes things worse.”
G-man acknowledged that with a nod. Country boys. And yeah, sometimes it made things worse, sometimes. “Does it?”
Sam chuckled without raising his eyes. “He's the only thing worth it.”
G-man nodded. Tossed his whiskey round his glass once, twice. “I wouldn't do this without Rickey. This place wouldn't exist. Without him, I'd be grilling steaks down in the French Quarter and drinking my paychecks away and-” and he'd never say this, not to anyone who wasn't half so pathetic as this kid here, “catching diseases from boys off the street. I might be dead, without him.”
Sam was looking at him with hazy eyes. Listening hard.
G-man shrugged, said, “You gotta decide where you'd be without him. He's gotta, too.”
The kid pushed the last warm inch of his beer away, took a swallow of the water. For a moment, G-man thought he saw that same toiling question burning up behind Sam's eyes. Again, that confession, hovering, same as before. But then Sam just muttered “Law school,” and wiped his hand over his eyes.
G-man snorted, slapped a hand on Sam's back, “Fate worse than death. You better go talk some sense into him.”
He walked Sam to the door, got him into a cab. Paid the driver, because it was the least he could do. G couldn't admit to himself - wouldn't admit to Rickey, either, whenever his bitching about the fire finally stopped and he decided to get nostalgic for those nice young men who'd saved his kitchen - that it was a relief to see the back side of them.
G-man knew they'd dodged a bullet, here. The same part of him that prayed knew that there were things they didn't want to know. Ghosts, cemeteries. Whatever else those boys dealt with. Nothing to envy there. Just relief, pure and sweet.
G turned, walked back through the dining room where the servers were vacuuming and setting out fresh tablecloths; through the kitchen where his crew was breaking down their mises en place; and found his partner in the cold air of the walk-in, smeared with ash and solvent and muttering about food waste costs. G-man made damn certain, though, after he closed the walk-in door behind them, to shut Rickey the hell up and remind him of something that wasn't spoiled, and damn well wasn't going to go to waste, either.