Page 30 of Hot Ghost Summer

The mechanical click of the hard drive in Hollis’s laptop spinning up is followed by a tinny, unprompted audio that snatches my attention. A clip from the show Lucifer plays, the actor’s perfectly bored face looking straight at the camera—straight at me. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

I frown. “No need t’ be so rude.”

Taking a few steps, I set the ray gun on the table.

“I didn’t expect ghosts t’ be so noisy. The one at that site we went t’ yesterday almost deafened me, and now you with the microwave, the shower, and that video clip.”

Wait a minute… I narrow my eyes at the laptop. The screen is dark, all trace of the harsh scene Hollis just played gone. But this isn’t the first time something mean has flashed up on a screen since he died.

“This isn’t the only time you’ve done this, is it?” I ask, treading closer to the suspiciously still and quiet laptop. “Last night, that was you too?”

I close my eyes and visualise the message he displayed when I was chaining the gate.

“You killed me.”

“What does Vollkoffer mean?” I ask, dropping to my knees in front of his laptop.

For a long minute, nothing happens. Impatient, I bring my hand closer—intending to click the trackpad—when an internet screen appears with the term already loaded.

Is an informal, somewhat derogatory German and Austrian slang term that translates to ‘complete idiot’ or ‘total blockhead.’

“So… that message wasn’t to you, it was from you? You think I’m the murderer?”

His phone screen, charging beside the laptop, lights up with a message.

I don’t think so, I know so.

Recoiling, I present my palms.

“Whoa! Hollis, no. No way.”

A loud buzzing, which originates in the phone, spreads to the laptop. Earlier, when this happened, I didn’t know what it was, but now I do. Anger.

I shuffle back, closer to the table and the plasma ray. “No, Hollis. I promise that wasn’t me. The safety was on the whole time.”

Louder now, the sockets in the wall crackle and fizz, the lights flicker rapidly, and the metallic taste of static electricity floods my mouth.

“Okay, look. I’m sorry. Truly. Everything was so loud, and it all happened so fast, but I swear…” A ball of hot emotion chokes off my words, and I push up to standing. “Hollis, I swear I didn’t murder you.”

Every appliance in my flat turns on simultaneously, and the strength of the current flowing through the wires fills the small space with the acrid aroma of burning plastic. I back away until my thighs bump into the table behind me.

Pleading now, I swallow my pride. “Okay, okay. Truthfully. I saw how you looked at me in the office, and well… I know that look. You know? And I figured it wouldn’t hurt t’ get your attention a bit, see if I was right. Because you have this way about you, all stern-like, and I’d kind o’ been hoping that our day would have ended with you ’ere—”

The light bulb above my head explodes.

Instinctively, I vault over the table and grab the plasma ray as I drop onto the floor on the far side. Years of firearms training mean I already have the barrel lined up with the dangling end of the ceiling wire where the bulb used to be, but only a few blue arcs of electricity are visible through the scope.

Okay, maybe I’d misread the situation completely yesterday, and Hollis doesn’t have a touch of the Dom about him.

My flat falls silent, except for the single vibration that alerts me to a new message on the screen of Hollis’s phone. I read it through the scope of the weapon I hide behind.

You shot me.

“No,” is my firm reply. “I didn’t. That’s what I was just saying…”

Are you defending shooting me with the fact that you wanted to fuck me?

A heat creeps into my cheeks. “Well… yeah. Why would I kill the guy I was hoping t’—”