Good Lord, Deliver Us Read Online Free PDF

victims felt compelled to trap themselves in dead-end
alleys just to give Kharis a sporting chance of murdering
them.
    Horror movies. A big thrill. But
mostly for people with childlike minds.
    Anyway, Z guessed that many of his
early favorites: the mummy, Dracula, demons, fiends, hobgoblins,
zombies, and werewolves -- couldn't actually be categorized as
ghosts.
    What were ghosts, anyway? Creatures sent
from Satan? An electrical phenomena? A powerful personality taking
on a life form of its own? Spirits like elves or fairies? Gremlins?
The souls of dead people?
    If Z didn't have a clue
about ghosts, how was he supposed to hunt them? .... Pardon me , Z thought,
remembering. Defend the person who would hunt them.
    The office phone rang.
    Hoping for a case with quick pay
attached, Z leaned forward to pick up the phone. "Bob Zapolska
Detective Agency."
    "This is Hugh Calder."
    "About to call," Z said, chagrined;
covering his embarrassment with a lie, a small lie sometimes OK
when there was a benefit to it. (Big lies, he reserved for helping
clients.) Anyway, listening to political speeches on TV had Z
feeling better about being your average, ordinary, everyday,
garden-variety liar. Made him feel good by showing just what an
amateur he was in the falsehood game.
    "I missed you yesterday,
but I know you're busy," Calder was saying. "And this won't help. I
just got a call from the Vice Chancellor. I don't know why he's
contacting me, but I've never been good at figuring
administrators." Z knew why. It was because Ashlock wanted nothing more to do
with Z, Z too
good at deciphering administrators' spiel. "Here's the deal. He
wants me to tell you that the job starts tonight. If that's too
soon for you to make it, he'll understand."
    "I can make it." The Vice
Chancellor wasn't going to kiss Z off that easily. If Z eventually blew
the whistle on Ashlock, Z was not going to make it easy for the
crook to say Z was making trouble only because Z couldn't do the
job.
    "Good. He said 10:00 P.M." A pause on
the line. Calder -- thinking. "Something he said that I didn't
fully understand, though. Something about a "poltergeist expert"
coming? Do you know what he's talking about?"
    Ashlock was talking about his ghost
hunter, of course. "No."
    "Like I said," the plump psychologist
continued cheerfully, "no way to figure administrators. A breed
apart. By the way, the address of the place is 2609 E. Franklin.
It's on the back side of the campus. Beyond the
stadium."
    "Right."
    "And Z?"
    "Yes."
    A space of time followed in which Z
could swear he heard the precise ticking of Calder's fine-watch
mind. "I don't know how to put this. But I've got a feeling
something's ... not right. And I don't even know why I think that.
Maybe something in the intonation of Chancellor Ashlock's voice."
Again, the introspective pause. "What I feel I should say, though,
is watch yourself."
    "OK."
    "That's it, then."
    "Right."
    "I'll see you later."
    They hung up.
    Z knew what wasn't "right" about the deal, but saw no sense in
getting Calder all upset. Nothing Calder could do about the Vice
Chancellor's crooked ways. Calder wasn't in charge of hiring the college's
administrators.
    Exhausting that line of thought, Z
made a mental shift.
    Tonight.
    Quick work, hiring a ...
poltergeist expert ... on such short notice. (Maybe ghost
hunters did advertise in the Yellow Pages.) .....
    A more reasonable possibility was that
Ashlock had already been down the ghost hunter route when Calder
had slipped him Z's name. Covering all bases, the Chancellor's call
to Scherer had opened Ashlock's eyes to the possibility of hiring Z
to burn down the house -- the quickest way to make the "ghost"
problem disappear. Z's honesty blocking that path -- Ashlock had
simply gone back to the original plan of hiring a ghost hunter to
discredit the whole idea of a ghost being in the offending
house.
    The Vice Chancellor was certainly
right about one thing. Ghosts were just the sort of "vitally
important"