Agent Bayne: PsyCop 9

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “It was Dave who did the asking. Courtney was writing down the letters, and Mercedes and I were working the board. I remember Dave was smiling when he said, ‘What’s it gonna take for me to get an A in English?’ The B in that class irked him to no end. It was the only non-A on his whole report card.

  “We all figured the answer would be obvious, like study harder. But the pointer started zipping across the board, letter after letter. I lost track, but I figured Mercedes must have had a funny reply in mind, so I just went along with it.

  “As the answer kept spilling out, I realized Mercedes wasn’t looking at the board. She was looking at me. And the letters kept coming.”

  Was I the only one in the room who found that phenomenally creepy? Hard to tell. Carl’s expression was neutral and Darla’s was stony.

  “The response was so long, initially we figured it was nothing. Randomness. Except Dave pointed out that the letter string didn’t look random. The patterns of consonants and vowels made sense, and there were no weird letters like Q, X and Z.

  “I wish we’d kept that message. After we figured out the words, we were so spooked that we tore it up and threw it away. The gist of it was that Dave wouldn’t get a better grade without switching schools. I remember the phrase rampant racism, though, because we had so much trouble figuring it out. Ram pant? Ramp ant? Finally, Courtney looked it up in a Scrabble dictionary and told us rampant was a real word.”

  “You lost me,” I said.

  “Dave was African American. And the class was reading comprehension with essay answers, not a subject like math, where the answers were empirically right or wrong. So consciously or not, our teacher was approaching all of Dave’s answers with the presumption that he wasn’t capable of understanding the material, and the best he could hope for was a B.

  “I’m not really sure who was communicating with us. Those mass-produced Ouija boards had the words good bye printed across the bottom—whenever we tried to get a name, the pointer would park down there and the session would be over.”

  Gee, that wasn’t creepy at all.

  “The answers we got weren’t precognizant. Nothing out of the realm of ordinary knowing. More like an adult willing to give a bunch of children a frank assessment of a situation. The board never shed light on any unsolved crimes or led us to buried treasure, so maybe that’s why my friends got tired of it.” She paused to consider. “Or maybe it was jealousy. Because it only gave us those long, detailed answers when I was working the pointer.

  “Once I called out Mercedes for trying to imitate the ‘real’ voice, our little group fell apart. She was the first one to stop coming over. Then Courtney—Mercedes convinced her I was ‘conceited.’ And there would’ve been too many salacious implications if Dave and I spent too much time alone together.”

  “Then what happened?” I asked. “Did you keep going yourself?”

  “I tried, but it just didn’t feel right. Sad. I guess I lost more than three friends that year.”

  “But that was what put you on the path to Camp Hell? A Ouija board?”

  She laughed easily. “I always forget how attached you are to that funny old name for Heliotrope Station! No, that wasn’t how I found it. I was at a workshop about the four sacred medicines, and afterward, the shaman mentioned the screenings to the class. I think he meant to discourage us, actually. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I made some phone calls, and eventually talked to Director Sanchez.”

  “And you got in, based on what?”

  “The interview.”

  “I mean, which part?”

  She laughed again like there was something sailing over my head, and she thought my obliviousness was cute. “The whole thing.”

  I didn’t have time to count to ten to keep myself from snapping at her, so I just forced my voice to be level. It came out a little strained. “What did you talk about during the interview?”

  “My meditation practice. Communing with the ancestors. What I thought about the afterlife. My sense of identity and inner knowing.”

  Fantastic. She’d been able to have that conversation in her twenties. I’d strike out if I attempted to put words to all of that today. Once I wrapped things up with Faun, I racked my brain as to what to do about my medium problem while Darla looked to me none too patiently for answers. “What the hell is Lightworking?” she asked in disgust.

  My thoughts exactly. “So…Ouija boards?” I had an image of a ghost hand sliding into mine to spell out the messages. “It doesn’t seem safe to mess with that all for the sake of a test.”

  “Oh, grow up,” Darla said. “It’s a subconscious ideomotor response. There’s no ghost moving the planchette.”

  Maybe not. Except…when there was. “It’s confusing enough trying to figure this stuff out, and your attitude’s not helping.”

  She gave me a sweetly venomous smile and said, “Then work harder, and we’ll both get what we want. You’ll be rid of me, and I’ll get to leave this pretentious craphole. Win-win.”

  Chapter 25

  Time flies when you’re having fun, and apparently it goes even faster when you’re pursuing a bunch of dead ends. When Jacob showed up at my office, I realized it was dark out and I was hungry enough to eat one of Darla’s houseplants.

  Carl let Jacob in, and Darla perked right up. When someone who’s never met Jacob before gets a load of him, I’ll sometimes have a little flashback myself of what it was like to encounter him for the very first time. His presence was like a car alarm—when he walked into a room, everyone noticed, whether they tried to play it cool or not. “Darla, this is Jacob Marks. We live together.” There. Now she knew.

  “Darla Daniels,” she supplied, in a tone of voice laden with, How the hell’d you manage that, Vic?

  “Good to meet you,” Jacob said, with more eye contact than I would have managed, given the mental energy he was pumping into his current investigation. Then he turned to me and asked, “Are you ready to go home, or do you need to stay?”

  It wasn’t as if I was doing much good where I was, and yet I didn’t want to give Darla any more reason to be snippy with me by clocking out after a mere ten hours. Thankfully, Carl was happy to shut down his computer and say, “Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to sleep on it.”

  We pulled out onto Grand and headed home, both of us quiet. Caught up in our problems, or unsure whether the Crown Vic was bugged? A little of each. I had a document littered with broad black marks dancing in my head, and I was bursting with the desire to unload my anxiety about my permanent record on Jacob. But by the time we got to the cannery, I wondered if it was really such a good idea. Because what could he do about it, other than give me a few shitty platitudes and then start worrying about it himself?

  He parked in our conveniently “haunted” spot. As we made our way up the front walk, the wind picked up, howling around us, and I realized it was the perfect opportunity to tell Jacob, without any electronic busybodies finding out I was on to them, that huge hunks of my past were redacted. But before I could figure out the least loaded way to tell him, he turned to me and said, “Okay, there’s no good way of saying this and you’re not gonna be happy about it. But I did what I had to do.”

  “What the heck is that supposed to mean?”

  His expression was grim. “You’ll see.”

  While he unlocked the door and forged in, I said, “Jacob? Hey. You can’t just drop a non-explanation like that on my head and—” In the cavernous darkness beyond the entryway, something skittered.

  My hand flew to my sidearm, but before it even cleared the holster, Jacob barked out in his bossiest cop-voice, “Stand down!” Not at whatever was rustling around in the dark, but at me. He startled me so badly, he was lucky I didn’t drop the gun and shoot out our new light fixture.

  He turned it on and the room lit up.

  Throw pillows were scattered across the floor, one of them torn open with its stuffing hanging out like a spill of intestines in a zom
bie flick. Ransacked. Not by robbers, but some secret branch of the FPMP, whoever beat up Con Dreyfuss and stole the GhosTVs. And now they were targeting us.

  Jacob crossed the room to the basement door, which was open about three, four inches. “Wait,” I croaked out. Because…fuck, the basement door was open and the lights downstairs were on.

  He was Jacob. So he ignored me. He yanked the door the rest of the way open and thrust his head in. I half-expected something to rip it off and lob it at me. But instead, a small bundle of gray fur slipped past him and barreled into the kitchen, claws scraping frantically on worn hardwood.

  When my brain re-engaged from its freakout loop, I said, “You got a cat?”

  He sighed. “It’s Veronica’s. All three of them. I have no idea how they managed to open the basement door.”

  I looked back at the living room. There was a yellow puddle beside the disemboweled throw pillow.

  “There was no time to get someone to take them,” he said. “It was a security risk to start calling around. It’s not ideal, I know.”

  In my relief, my neurochemicals did a lurch so sickening I thought I might vomit. Belatedly, I broke into a sweat. I hung up my suit jacket to save it a trip to the dry cleaner’s and said, “It’s fine.” My voice didn’t jibe, so I repeated it to try and force it to be true. “It’s fine.”

  Showering presented me with a great opportunity to calm the hell down and sort myself out. A cat? Three cats? Fine, make it a dozen, who cared? Cats might be unfamiliar, but at least they were something normal. In the face of the fear that someone had broken into our house and was waiting in the basement with a canister of tear gas—or, worse, a buddy of the sex demon that exploded in Jacob’s old condo had come back for revenge—I was thrilled to find out we were babysitting Veronica’s cats.

  A few weeks before, at a trip to the home center on a hunt for weather stripping, I’d found a showerhead that concentrated our so-so water pressure into something more satisfying. I planted myself under the blast face-on. It couldn’t really slough off everything I was trying to forget. But it did help me feel at least a little bit human.

  Jacob had the mess cleaned up and dinner on the table by the time I dried off. The same batch of frozen chicken breasts we’d attempted to eat before? Impossible. These could actually be cut. I was chasing some couscous around the plate when Jacob said, “It’s only temporary.”

  Unless Veronica ended up dead…which I chose not to point out. “We’ve got a ton of space. It’ll be fine.”

  It turned out, my assessment of the situation was uncharacteristically optimistic. Initially, the cats were scared of us and kept themselves hidden. But one by one, they sized up the situation and, when they realized we lived there and they’d be stuck with us, decided they wanted to interact.

  “What’s it doing?” I said. This cat was white with a single black ear, and it had parked itself in one of the dining room chairs, with nothing showing above the tabletop but its face. Its tiny, big-eyed face. “Why is it staring at me like that?”

  “It’s begging. Veronica told me not to give them people food. Specifically.”

  I ate a few green beans. The cat watched. “I’m sure it doesn’t like vegetables. Does it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a cat person.”

  “A little bit wouldn’t hurt.”

  “You don’t want to encourage the habit.”

  I ate a few more bites. Did my best not to look. But eventually found myself drawn back to that unnerving feline gaze. “Did you feed it?”

  “It has a huge bowl full of food downstairs. It’s not starving.”

  “Sure looks that way to me.”

  Jacob stood. “Okay, pal, you’ve worn out your welcome. Into the basement with you.” He made a grab, but the cat was too quick for him. With a thump, it landed on the floor and darted upstairs toward our bedroom. Jacob shook his head, sat back down and finished eating.

  I was almost done when I got that feeling you get when a ghost full of tire tracks is staring at you from the nearest intersection, and when I looked up, I saw it. A tiny white face with big green eyes and a single black ear, poking out from around the banister, gazing at me like I was the biggest jerk in the world for not sharing.

  “Sorry,” I told it.

  It turned disdainfully and ran back upstairs.

  As much as I hoped nothing of mine ended up shredded or peed on, I supposed I was glad for the distraction. Having that little bit of distance helped me decide to wait until I had a concrete piece of evidence in hand to bring up my redacted records with Jacob. Something that gave us a better idea of what, exactly, had been blacked out.

  I went downstairs to verify that the cats did, indeed, have a big bowl of food (yes, I even braved the basement after 9 p.m. on their behalf) and found that Jacob was not exaggerating. The bowl was huge, though the multicolored kibble in it didn’t strike me as particularly appetizing. There was also a litter box and a carpet-covered piece of cat furniture as high as my shoulder. The whole setup was in the finished half of the basement, where interlocking rubber gym tiles covered the floor and bright lighting kept all the shadows at bay. But cats have a feral bent to their feline brains, and I suspected they were drawn to the basement’s other half—the creepy half, where century-old machinery that was too heavy to dispose of lurked, draped with cobwebs, within the crumbling brick. “If you want to earn your keep,” I announced to the room at large, “feel free to catch a few spiders. Shouldn’t be any mice since we filled all the gaps with spray-foam, but if you were to prove me wrong, I’d definitely express my gratitude by slipping you some people food on the down-low.”

  Movement flickered among the shadowed remains of the once-great machines. Not a ghost. Just a gray and white tabby.

  Maybe temporary cat ownership wouldn’t be so bad. The box of poop they came with wasn’t ideal, but at least they didn’t require walking. They had each other, so they didn’t need attention from us. And their propensity to shred things might actually encourage Jacob to start picking up after himself.

  When I climbed into bed, Jacob put away his book and rolled on top of me, hoping for a little action. We kissed, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to close my eyes. Does a person kiss differently with their eyes open? They must, because pretty soon Jacob opened his eyes too, and said, “What?”

  “Can’t shake the feeling that they’re watching.”

  Jacob levered himself off me and looked around. “I don’t see any of them.”

  “Like that means anything.”

  “We do this all the time under surveillance.”

  “Not really….” Other than the chips in our phones and our guns, we’d never proven we were being actively spied on. He was Internal Affairs. He should know.

  “And you’re worried about an animal seeing you naked?” he teased.

  “No….” But knowing another living creature would be staring at me while I got nailed was seriously cramping my style. The sounds. The smells. The sight of my awkward body. My o-face. Way too vulnerable all around.

  We tried closing the door, but the room felt stuffy and claustrophobic. Plus I wasn’t entirely convinced we didn’t have a stowaway behind the furniture. Eventually, Jacob talked me into a furtive handjob beneath the covers. But me, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. Once I swabbed his jiz off my thigh with an old sock I rummaged out from beneath the bed, I brushed his hand away, rolled over and turned out the light. “I’ll take a raincheck.”

  With a disappointed huff, Jacob settled against my back and slung a heavy arm around me, and in less than a minute, started to snore.

  Chapter 26

  Apparently, I don’t normally sleep with my mouth wide open. I realized as much only because I woke to a crusty, dry tongue from nearly six hours of mouth-breathing, and a cat spooned around my head like a sideways mohawk. The tabby. I sat up, and it turned a few circles, picking at my pillow, then settled in and got comfy in the dent my head
left behind.

  I knuckled sleep out of my eyes. It felt good. So, groggy and disoriented, I went at it a little harder. But then I realized it felt a little too good. And when I stopped rubbing, it burned.

  Just what I needed. Pinkeye.

  I was sipping coffee with a warm compress on my eye socket when Jacob slogged it downstairs. “I’m coming down with something,” I told him. “Got anything I can take in your battery of vitamins that’ll knock it out?”

  “Let me see.” He took my chin in his hand and scrutinized my eyes. “You must be allergic.”

  And I find out now? “Hooray.”

  “Stop rubbing them,” he said. If I wasn’t supposed to rub my eyes, it shouldn’t feel so damn good. But given that relief never followed, I’d have to figure out a way to abstain. “We’ll pick up some antihistamines on the way to the office.”

  It would take him another half an hour to get out the door, and I figured it was in my best interest to stop breathing cat. “Actually, the range is open now, so I think I’ll swing by there first and see if there’s anything more they can tell me about Andy’s bullet.”

  I found Agent Watts taking inventory in the armory. “Well, if it isn’t Fifth Precinct,” she said. “I’m glad you’ve decided to be proactive about your re-testing.”

  “Actually, I just wanted to find out how much a bullet could tell us.”

  “Sure. I’ll help you with that. Just as soon as we do some kneeling drills.”

  I had no desire to scuff up the knees of my new black slacks for the sake of appeasing her, but since I could tell she wasn’t gonna take no for an answer—and since I had no desire to surrender my service weapon in thirty days—I forced my way through the training.

  My performance was so mediocre, Watts didn’t even need to come up with an insult for me to feel bad about it. And the info she could give me about the bullet wasn’t much help, either. According to ballistics, it was .35 caliber and fired from a Beretta. According to Watts, it was one of ours. Unfortunately, that wasn’t terribly helpful, since it could’ve come from about two-thirds of the agents’ service weapons.