Elizabeth Basque - Medium Mysteries 01 - Echo Park by Elizabeth Basque Page A

spoke up first. “We found Michael,” she said with enthusiasm. “I talked to him.”
    “ Ahem,” Mack coughed.
    “ We talked with him,” she corrected herself. “And we want to talk to you about it.”
    “ Oh? About what?” I waited for more.
    “ We thought of a plan. Something that might help him…you know…”
    I did know. Carla was a sweetheart. She almost had too much life in her to be dead.
    “Well, where is he?” I asked. “And what’s this plan of yours?”
    “ I’m here,” Michael said from the other side of the room. I hadn’t even known he was there. Now he moved toward me, and I detected a change in him. He wasn’t quite as sad as he had been before, only this morning. “Hi,” he said, his lips curling ever so slightly into a hopeful smile.
    “ Hello.” Would I ever get used to the fact that practically the only beings I spoke to were those of the spirit world?
    “ When Michael told his story,” Carla explained, “I began to wonder what went wrong. Why he didn’t go, too…like my mother went. Then I thought, well, maybe, that was because being a ghost is part of his life’s plan.”
    That was a curious thought. I considered it. Could be. In my line of work, you never knew what was just around the corner. “Okay,” I told her, “go on.”
    “So, I went to find him, but I couldn’t.”
    Michael looked downward again, but Carla went on. “So I decided to find Mack.”
    “The lass has moxie, no doubt about that.” Mack’s tone was a mixture of irritation and admiration. “She told me huh ideah , and I have to say, it’s not half bad.”
    Michael was quiet; he seemed to need some form of approval before speaking. He was still guilt-ridden.
    I risked a disapproving glare at Mack. I didn’t want him filling Carla’s and Michael’s minds with hopeless encouragement.
    “ Not in the least, my deah,” he shot back.
    He’d caught my thought, but Carla hadn’t. She looked at him with brief curiosity. “We think we’ve come up with a way Michael can fulfill his destiny.”
    “And,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette, “what do you think his destiny is ?”
    “ I have to stop those dealers,” Michael declared. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
    “ Wait a minute. Wait just a minute,” I said.
    I glared at Mack again. Stop the dealers. Stop the drug dealers? That was like making world peace. Mack moved his hands downward in a gesture for me to calm myself.
    “ It could work,” Carla said, excited now. “I mean, if we all pull together as a team.”
    “ Not all of them. I know that’s impossible,” Michael now ventured. “But I think I could at least stop the ones I know. Knew .” He tried to correct himself. He still knew them, but they thought of him as dead, long gone.
    “ What could you possibly do to keep them from - -” I stopped talking midsentence. What could a ghost do, indeed? Better yet, three ghosts?
    Carla, Michael, and Mack smiled down at me from where they hovered. It dawned on me just what they could do, and I grinned back at them, nodding.
    Mack bellowed a bwa-ha-ha-ha laugh in a disembodied, terrifying roar that gave me goose bumps, and said in an exaggerated tremulous voice, “Ebenezer! Wake up, Ebenezer Scrooge! ”
    “ Oh my God, Mack. You are s oooo bad,” I said, but couldn’t help laughing until tears came out of my eyes.
     
     
    Chapter Nineteen
     
    “ Here’s the plan,” Michael said with growing enthusiasm and a look he shot my way that was clearly hoping for my support and approval. I thought he was a little frightened of me. I didn’t know why. Maybe he’d never met a psychic before. He was warming up, though. “Three dealers. One for each life I stole from this Earth.”
    “ Sounds logical,” I said.
    “ And, one ghost-haunting for each dealer.”
    I raised an eyebrow.
    “Carla and Mack have agreed to help me,” he explained further.
    “ Really?” I glanced at Mack out of the corner of my eye. “I can