The same time Danny & Co. broke for lunch, the Winchesters were just waking up. The afternoon sunlight had managed to pry through the motel's thick curtain—a natural, if unpleasant, wake-up call. It had been Dean's turn to make the food run. "Why didn't you just go to the grocery store?" argued Sam. "It's right across the street."
"Nah, they never have the breakfast sandwiches I like."
Sam shook his head at the "meal" his brother had managed to find. It smelled of frying oil and cigarettes. "Okay, but real food later?"
"Ofwh cwourse." Dean's words were muffled by the sausage sandwich he had already dug into. He swallowed. "There's that burger place a couple blocks away."
"You mean 'Nasty Burger'? The one with food poisoning in the reviews?"
"They've got pastrami burgers."
Sam sighed, "Whatever." He pulled over the laptop he'd been on when Dean came in. "I looked up this 'Fenton Works'. I was right. It was the place we passed by on our way downtown." Dean scooted his chair over.
"Yeesh, this their website?"
"Yeah."
"Can't expect too many customers if they still look like they're coding in 1996."
"Since when do you know anything about computers? Last week you asked me if a modem was a kind of cellphone."
"Hey, I use the internet plenty. Just not for research. Well, maybe some kinds of research." He wiggled his eyebrows.
"I guess I have you to blame for my internet history. This business is family-run. If you can call it a business. Doesn't look like it's making much money. No yellow pages or Yelp reviews. Just the site." Sam switched to another window. "And a whole lotta newspaper articles. The Fenton's have been getting a lot of publicity. At least in the ghost hunting scene. Which I guess is pretty big here considering how much they've made the front page."
"They don't call it 'America's Most Haunted City!' for nothing."
"Kind of weird huh? Everyone here knows ghosts are real. But no chaos, no panic, no rioting in the streets. Instead they turn it into a tourist trap." He looked away from the screen and up at Dean. "Kinda makes you wonder what would've happened if someone like Dad went public."
"He would've been locked up. In this town or any." Dean leaned over to squint at the website Sam had pulled back up. A blurry photo took up most of the screen. A family stood in front of a large green and white van. There was a satellite dish sticking out the top. It was a family of four: the parents, a hulking man and a thin but tall redhead. Both were brandishing odd-looking firearms and grinning at the camera. A couple of teenagers—a teenaged girl and a younger boy—stood off to the side, the family resemblance clear. The mortified kids looked like they wanted to be anywhere but in the picture. It all seemed familiar, though Dean didn't place why. "That's a lot of equipment for a non-profit. Where does he get the funds to make something like that?" Dean pointed at the thermos that'd been sitting on the table since last night's/morning's escapades.
"Either the guy is a secret billionaire or he's a serious DIY-er."
"You don't exactly make tech like that in your basement."
"I don't know about that... apparently the guy and his wife are up to their eyeballs in engineering PHD's."
"It's still a lot of tech. That site at least has a phone number?"
"Yeah. There's public contact information for anyone who has experienced, 'Extrasensory phenomena, spectral/telekinetic manifestations, or,' Get this, 'has seen that rampaging ghost kid'."
"Well, I think we hit the jackpot. We'll do the journalist cover?"
"Eh, better make it enthusiastic bloggers. Looks like these guys know the local media pretty well..."
"You mean use…?"
"Yeah."
"Egh. I hate tossing around those guy's names."
"Well it's one of the few we actually have permission to toss around."
"Whatever." Dean crammed the last bit of sandwich into his mouth. "Lwat's gwoah."
