Ezekiel Benchley had been a good man in life. He had worked hard, tried his best as a single parent to his two sons, saved up a little money, gone to church, given to charity, all the good things. All the right things.
And now, here he was: dead. Deader than a door nail. And, by damn, he was going to get his revenge. OSHA had ignored the faulty catwalk railings, had dismissed the slipshod repairs to the huge vat covers, and, worst of all, the inspectors had laughed at how he died! It was just damned humiliating to die by falling into a vat of chocolate being melted and mixed for candy bars.
The factory owners had cheated in a grotesque way by pulling out as much of the chocolate as they could before calling the emergency folks and getting his body out. That was how he was able to be with all four of them-complimentary chocolate.
They should have thrown the book at the factory, so no one else died the way he did. They didn't. They deserved to die.
He had jammed the huge candy bar down the first one's throat. He had poisoned the second one's hot chocolate. He had knocked over the liquid alcohol fuel beneath the third one's chocolate fondue pot-she had died in the fire. So had her boyfriend, which was unfortunate, but, hey. Eggs, omelets.
So he was almost all done. One more, and he'd be able to go. Or...not. The factory owners were guilty, too. He had to think about it.
In the meantime, there were these two OSHA internal affairs guys visiting number four, asking him questions. One was incredibly tall, with red-brown hair and long arms and legs; the other was a handsome dark-haired SOB with freckles. The questions they were asking...well. They were obviously smarter than the four inspectors. Somehow or other, they had linked all three deaths.
This was not good.
He'd gotten pretty damn good at moving things in the short time he'd been a ghost, so he managed to sneak half of number four's chocolate into the tall one's coat pocket. Not the dark-haired one's-he'd eaten his way through inspector four's sugar cookies like a locust. The guy would probably eat his chocolate anchor before he could do anything about them.
The way they were talking...whoa! They were real live ghost hunters! Like Ghostbusters, or that cheesy web series his eldest boy was into. They wanted to kill him!
No fucking way.
He followed them into their dingy motel room, and started throwing things.
Didn't faze them. They shot him! And it hurt! How the heck did that work?!
Okay: time to do creepy sound effects and throw things.
While they were dodging and coping with everything he could throw at them, the tall guy was wrangling an iPad around. He was now crouched in a corner, reading a news article.
"Dean! Get this!" he shouted, ducking beneath a lamp Ezekiel hefted at him. "Ezekiel Benchley-died by falling into a chocolate vat in the factory-". He fended off the coat tree Ezekiel was trying to stab him with. "Buried in Middleton Cemetery-"
"Well, goddammit, how the fuck are we supposed to salt and burn him if he's got us pinned down?! In our own fucking motel room! How the hell?!" Dark-hair was shooting wildly in all directions as he yelled.
"He drowned in chocolate...Killing his victims using chocolate...Chocolate-?!" Tall guy rummaged in his pockets, found the chocolate, staggered to the motel room door, and chucked it out the door, across the parking lot.
Ezekiel watched, frustrated, from the opposite end of the parking lot, as they peeled out in their car.
A few hours later, he was ghost toast.
Later, Dean slipped the envelope with the anonymous whistle-blowing tip into the postal service box on the corner. "Dude was vengeful, but he had his reasons," he explained to Sam, as they drove off.