“Apparently, they had so much good footage that they made it a three-part series.”
“Sweet hell on wheels!” I wondered how Doc felt about relocating to South America with the kids and me. I heard they had great steaks in Brazil. Or was that Argentina?
“Violet.” Mona rose and came over to my desk, patting my shoulder. “Rosy says the shows are great. She helped edit them herself. You know she wouldn’t do anything to make you look bad on television.”
Rosy was a member of the camera crew for the Paranormal Realty show. She’d saved my bacon twice since showing up in Deadwood—first by deleting a scene she’d filmed that starred me and a creepy little ghost girl with a haunted clown doll who wants me dead, and second by hiring me to buy Cooper’s house last month, which was also one of my listings so I’d made all of the commission. I was a big admirer of Rosy, but this fan girl had her limits.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I told Mona. “I trust Rosy’s editing expertise, but there is no way I’m going to watch myself on television once, let alone in three different shows. I’ll go to Jerry’s premiere party for an hour and then excuse myself politely and go home to hide under the covers.”
Mona visibly cringed.
My eye twitched this time. “What now?”
“Jerry is renting four big-screen televisions to set up around Charles’ Club so that everyone will be able to watch the first show along with us. He wants to treat it like an exclusive, red-carpet screening party.” She picked up a pencil from my desk, fidgeting with it. “He’s determined to make Ben and you local stars.”
The ringing of my cell phone interrupted the second act of my swearing monologue.
I looked down at the screen and saw Zelda Britton’s name. Zelda was the owner of a previous home listing of mine that came with a condescending ghost who used to share my Executioner profession over a century ago before her throat was slit. Zelda often acted as Prudence-the-ghost’s understudy these days, including such “medium” performances as voicing the insults and acting out the slaps from the uppity Executioner when we conversed.
I sent the call to voice mail. The last thing I needed right now was to be disparaged by a dead woman about my inability to kill bad guys the correct way.
“What if I don’t want to be a star?” I asked Mona, who’d returned to her desk. “What if I just want to sell real estate in a small town and enjoy my life the way it is?”
To be honest, there would be a few things I’d change given the option, such as relocating several “exes”—mine and Doc’s, for starters—to a bear-filled cave in Siberia, and making all of the spine-tingling “others” that I’d been dealing with lately disappear in a Samantha-the-witch finger snap.
“You need to tell Jerry that.” Mona rested her reading glasses back on her nose. “Because when I brought it up as a possibility, he couldn’t believe anyone would not want to enjoy a slice of fame and fortune.” She scowled over the top of her glasses. “I think he might have been hit in the head a few too many times with a basketball. But he’s sure easy on the eyes,” she added with a wink.
Mona and Jerry had a thing going, even though she denied it in the daylight. I didn’t know what had happened in the past between them and she wouldn’t tell me no matter how much I pestered her, but a while back I’d walked in on them in the midst of a back-bending kiss in his office. Lately, she swore there was nothing more to that kiss than curiosity, but I kept catching the looks she sneaked his way when she thought nobody else was watching.
My cell phone rang again. Zelda’s name showed on the screen once more. I reached toward the button to send the call to voice mail, but then hesitated. Maybe this wasn’t a Prudence-related call. Zelda’s husband might be out of town again and she might need some help.
“I’d better take this,” I told Mona and accepted the call. “Hi, Zelda. How are things up in Lead?”
“I think we have a problem,” Zelda whispered.
We? Was that the royal version of that pronoun, or did she mean me and her? “What do you mean? Did something happen to Zeke?”
“No, he’s fine. It’s Prudence.”
I glanced at Mona, who didn’t know I was on a first-name basis with the ghost in Zelda’s house, and I preferred it to stay that way. Mona was clacking away on the keys again, but I knew she was listening to my side of the conversation. “What’s going on?”
“She keeps stomping around up in the attic and yelling.”
How very ghostlike of her. Maybe I should bring along some chains for her to rattle next time I paid a visit. Wouldn’t that just piss off the haughty spook. “Yelling what?”
“Something about a Duzarx.”
“A what?” Where had I heard that word before?
“A Duz—” Zelda stopped and was silent for a few seconds. “There she goes again. Violet, I’m worried about her. Can you come over here and calm her down?”
I scoffed. Every time I went near Prudence she proclaimed how disgusted she was with my boorish lineage and threatened to pull out one of my canine teeth to add to her macabre tooth collection.
“I don’t think I’ll be much help, Zelda.” Especially on my own. I usually preferred to take someone along with me as a backup when I visited Prudence, like Harvey, or anyone with a steady heartbeat. Even after all I’d been through since moving to Deadwood last year, the dead Executioner’s parlor tricks often made my feet itch to run far and fast.
Zelda let out a squeak. “Oh my, she’s really getting loud now. Violet, I need you here. Prudence is scaring me.”
I squeezed the bridge of my nose.
