Ghosts of Christmas Past

by Corrina Lawson

  “Okay. Right.”

  “It’s a long story. Look, do you mind if we go somewhere else to talk? I don’t know if Salvatore’s bosses are going to sic the cops on us or not but they know who you are and they know this car, so the sooner we hide and regroup, the better.”

  “Do you know why they tried to arrest me?”

  “They think Salvatore knows something he shouldn’t know, and they were going to grab you to get him out of hiding. I’m not sure what it was. They mentioned a murder and stealing city property.”

  “Murder?”

  “I’ve no idea what that meant. The good news is that if they don’t know where he is, there’s a chance we can find him first.” And, hopefully, alive.

  “What? Why? Where do we look next?” Cassandra restarted the car.

  “Let’s go to a safe place so we can go over the stuff I found in Salvatore’s office.”

  “Where the heck is safe around here?”

  “Al and I have a hideaway, for when it’s better to be out of sight. You might have noticed, it’s not always good to trust the cops.”

  Cassandra snorted. “Okay, I still think I’m tripping, but let’s go talk. If I’m actually sober, I really need a drink.”

  No sirens sounded, there was no pursuit, and they made it across town to the warehouse without incident. Lucy almost called Al a few times during the drive but decided against it until she could text him with the untraceable burner cell phone at the warehouse.

  This involved a murder and corrupt city employees. This was bad.

  They really needed a name for their unofficial secret hideout. Maybe she should officially call it the Batcave. Al used that name when making fun of what had been his own idea. But it made perfect sense. Al was up against corruption in his department, and Lucy needed to keep her abilities a secret. They needed a sanctuary.

  “Pull around to the back,” Lucy said as Cassandra drove into the warehouse’s parking lot.

  Lucy reached into her pocket and pressed a remote as they turned the corner to the section that backed up against a hill.

  A large part of the wall slid away. “Drive right in,” Lucy said. “It’s big enough to fit the car.”

  Cassandra looked at her sideways. “You can’t fool me. You’re really Batgirl, right?”

  “’Fraid not. More like the Shadow.”

  “‘Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows!’” Cassandra actually smiled as she drove in. Motion lights flicked on. Cassandra took her keys out of the ignition and stepped out of the car.

  “Wow,” she said. “I could get to like this acid trip if Salvatore were part of it and not missing.”

  Lucy smiled. Cassandra wasn’t freaked. It was going to be okay.

  “It’s a little bare yet,” Lucy said. “This is where they used to store tires, I think.” She gestured to the steel cages that still dotted the concrete floors. The ceiling was at least thirty feet over their heads. It had been a bitch to get some of those lights to work. “Come this way, it’s more homey.”

  Lucy led Cassandra down a short passageway that opened to a section of the warehouse that was basically a living room, complete with couch, chairs and massive throw rug. Off to the side was a bare-bones kitchen area with some steel cabinets, a small table, a tiny stove and an industrial-size fridge, a leftover from the previous tenants. Al had bitched about getting the plumbing to work right on that fridge and the sink.

  Nothing matched, of course, but the couch was comfy, there was food and, more important, Internet at the desk/office area to the side of the kitchen. That was courtesy of Daz, who’d set up an off-the-grid system with a firewall for them. He’d also paid cash for the cell phones so the calls couldn’t be traced.

  Lucy grabbed one of the cells from the kitchen counter and texted Al. All she said was “Hey, how’s it going? Noir”, but that was code for “Call me, it’s urgent but not an emergency”. She should hear back from him soon.

  They could work together again. He’d like that. So would she, if only because that would push all their issues to the side, at least for the holidays.

  And because as good as being Noir felt today, it would have felt better with Al as her partner.

  She pulled two sodas from the fridge, hoping Cassandra stayed mellow about all this.

  As she sat down on the couch, Lucy realized she felt more at home here than anywhere else in the Double C, more even than Al’s apartment or the artists’ colony. This was safe.

  And this was her place, as much as it was Al’s place. They’d built this. But it had been over a month since they’d been here together.

  Cassandra took the soda. “Okay, now tell me the long version of your story, Ms. Invisible.”

  “Um, yeah, okay.” Where to start? She’d only told the full story to Al. Her parents got most of it but she’d left out the invisibility part. The reunion had been so emotionally intense Lucy hadn’t wanted to rock the boat.

  She took a deep breath and started at the beginning, talking with how she ran away from home because her parents refused to pay for an art college and instead insisted she major in business at a state school.

  Cassandra wrinkled her nose. “I thought you were going to tell me they were abusive. They sound very normal, if clueless.”

  Lucy sighed. “I know. I was a stupid idiot. They only wanted what was best and I could have gone to college and taken art courses as electives. But I was so pissed and we argued about it all the time. I realized after about three weeks on my own that I should go home.” She stared off into space. “But then I cut my hand and went to this off-the-books clinic for treatment.”

  The rest was harder to tell, especially as her memories were still somewhat fragmented. But the doctor running the clinic had kidnapped her. Lucy had become a lab specimen to the woman she’d come to know as Doctor Jill. Doctor Jill was insane, trying all sorts of human experiments that might cure her monstrously misshapen brother, Jack.

  Other runaways had been specimens too but Lucy couldn’t remember their names, their faces or even if they survived. Beth claimed that was due to the electric shocks that Doctor Jill had sent through her brain.

  But Lucy knew she’d been one of the ones to last the longest, almost six years. Until she’d cracked, her telepathic ability had clicked into place and she’d become invisible.

  “So I escaped, but it took time for me to get my head straight. By that time, Doctor Jill was gone from that clinic. I tracked her to the Double C because I wanted to stop her from hurting anyone else. It was all I could think about.”

  Cassandra’s eyes were wide, her jaw slack. “Damn, I just… God, Lucy.”

  Lucy narrowed her eyes. “I won, they lost. Anyway, when I tracked them here, I ran into Al, who was investigating the murders during a bank robbery. I knew it was Jack, the monster, who’d done it. Al wanted to rescue a teller Jack had grabbed from the back. I was sure the teller was going to be Jill’s next lab rat.” She stood up and began pacing. “I wanted to just flat out get them. We teamed up and found them together.” Al had accepted her invisibility. He’d even been attracted to someone he couldn’t see. Dammit, they had to work things out.

  “Anyway, me and Al found Jack and Jill in this very warehouse. We confronted them, there was a big fight, and Jill and her pet monster died. Oh, and we rescued the bank teller.”

  “Holy fuck,” Cassandra said. “I read that in the papers, how the teller was rescued. That was you and your cop?”

  “Yep.”

  “And yet you set up shop here after?”

  “I know, sounds crazy, but the electricity was set up already, and off the grid too, so we used it. And dismantling every last part of the lab was freeing.”

  Cassandra came over and hugged her. “You’re something else, Lucy.”

  “Thanks.”

  “By the
way, do you realize you pace in a perfect square? About nine feet by nine feet, I’m guessing.”

  “I do?” Fuck. That was the size of the room where she’d been held captive. Every time she thought she’d purged that captivity from her system, she found another remainder.

  Cassandra wiped a tear away with the back of her hand. “So your cop kept your secret? And now you use this as a Batcave?”

  “Yeah.” My cop did a lot more than that, Lucy thought. She bet he’d noticed her pacing and never said a word.

  “Your cop doesn’t mind bending rules,” Cassandra said.

  Lucy shrugged. “Al pays attention to the rules that matter. He gets justice.”

  “I won’t argue with that. Uh, but don’t you think the neighbors are going to notice you coming and going?” Cassandra sat down again, sipping her drink.

  “Um…well, we brought in some of the neighbors ourselves. I had a friend with money. So, Al vetted some homeless families and we helped them move into the still-usable houses across the way. They’re our neighborhood watch now.”

  Better not mention that the people who provided the money were from the Phoenix Institute. Beth and her bodyguard, Daz Montoya, had offered more help, but Lucy worried that came with strings, like joining their crusade. Beth wanted the Institute to lead a drive for acceptance of people with psychic abilities.

  No way, not yet, not for her, Lucy decided.

  “This Al is getting more interesting all the time.” Cassandra shook her head. “So you’re creating your own neighborhood here, Batgirl?”

  “Al’s idea. He wanted to try something that would help people before, you know, they ended up dead.”

  Cassandra smiled.

  Lucy put her feet up on the couch. She should hate the warehouse. But Al and she had won. Dragons had been slain here. Beth had said some people did better running as far away from trauma as they could, while others did better facing it head on. Lucy knew which type she was.

  “Okay, so now that you know the whole thing, we need to look at this stuff I grabbed from Salvatore’s office.” From her coat, Lucy pulled out the calendar page, postcard, thumb drive and metal trinket and spread them out on the coffee table.

  “That’s definitely Salvatore’s handwriting.” Cassandra glanced at the calendar page only briefly. She rubbed her eyes and stared at Lucy for a good, long thirty seconds. “So, you just turned invisible, walked up to his office and grabbed this stuff.”

  “Yep.”

  Cassandra blinked. “How the hell do you do that?”

  “It’s not really turning invisible.” Lucy explained about the telepathic command and how people only just thought they couldn’t see her.

  “I was so scared, and I wanted to hide from Jill so bad that I thought long and hard about her coming back to my cell and not seeing me. So she didn’t.”

  “And Al fell in love with you before you learned how to turn this on and off? Meaning he couldn’t see you at all? Not for weeks?”

  Lucy nodded. “Not till I found a way to control the invisibility. Er, I mean, telepathy.”

  “So Al cared about you before he knew you were, uh, you.”

  “Yeah.” Cassandra was more right than she realized. Lucy’s memory had been full of holes from the six years of medical torture. She’d no memory of any life before her kidnapping. Noir had been a self-creation, a desperate statement that she was still somebody.

  That Al fell in love with Noir meant the world. But now that Lucy existed again…

  “Al is… He understands. He gets it.”

  “Clearly.” Cassandra looked around. “Especially if he even set up a refuge for you.”

  “He only wanted me to be safe,” Lucy said.

  “‘Only’? Lucy, a man goes through all this for you, he’s all in.”

  “He never said anything about… I mean, we’re living together, but he buries himself in the job. I think he’s annoyed we don’t work on cases together as much as he wants. It feels good when we work together but…I’m not a cop, not like Al.”

  “You’re helping me like a cop would,” Cassandra said.

  Lucy shrugged and tapped the papers. “The people in Salvatore’s office had some weird things to say about why they wanted him.”

  “Like what?”

  Lucy related the conversation between Schneider and the man helping her.

  “Schneider’s a piece of work. Salvatore never talks much about his job but he’s mentioned her a few times when she’s pissed him off. She’s a card puncher, she doesn’t care about the job. Burned out, he said. I’m surprised she cared enough about a dead guy to get so angry. But what could she be talking about, accusing Salvatore of stealing city property? What the hell is there to steal, anyway? Post-its? And who was murdered?”

  “That’s what I couldn’t figure out. Maybe Schneider and this guy are doing an accounting trick to somehow siphon off city money to themselves.”

  “That’s embezzling, not stealing property, and I got the impression from Salvatore that Schneider isn’t that bright. But maybe she’s that stupid.” Cassandra picked up the trinket. “Hey! I made this.”

  “That was underneath his desk, as if it had been dropped or kicked there,” Lucy said.

  Cassandra put it on the corner of the flattened calendar page. “Salvatore would never do that. He takes care of what I give him. They must have knocked it over when they searched his office. Well, it can watch over me now.”

  Lucy stood. “You study the calendar and I’ll see what I can do with the thumb drive. Oh, why did he have the museum postcard?”

  “I told him about our exhibit. He was psyched for me.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Cassandra grabbed Lucy’s arm.

  “Lucy, you really think my guy’s alive?”

  She nodded. “If they’re worried about him talking or hiding evidence, or creating a scheme to get you and lure Salvatore to them, that means they haven’t caught him yet.”

  “We have to find him first.”

  “Yes. I bet he was worried about pulling you into danger and that’s why he didn’t come home.” Or he might be dead somewhere.

  “Protecting me, that would be just like Salvatore.” Strength returned to Cassandra’s voice.

  Lucy walked over to the computer station and cracked her knuckles. “Now let’s play cop and see what we can do to help him.”

  “Playing cop. Hah. Last thing I ever thought I’d do.”

  Me too, Lucy thought, and realized how much she liked doing this, fixing a problem. Not to mention having a chance to nail someone like Schneider. She and Al had to find their balance again. Somehow.

  She looked around the warehouse again. All in. Yes, Al sure was. This place was a symbol not only of their being together but their working together.

  Al saw them as the same thing.

  “Your Al’s going to help us sort this out?”

  Lucy nodded. “He’ll buzz soon. But we should try to figure out as much as we can in the meantime. The more info we can give him, the better.”

  Chapter Five

  Al felt the phone’s vibration in his overcoat pocket and cursed the circumstances that prevented him from answering. That had to be Noir, and he was dying to talk this case out with her, now that it’d rolled around in his brain some, especially since she was due to be part of the Local Artists exhibit at the museum.

  But the police commissioner’s office, currently occupied by an annoyed commissioner, wasn’t the place to return her text.

  Truth was, Al wanted to be anywhere but here, even if the commissioner had tried to get into the spirit of the season by putting a Christmas tree in the corner. It did nothing to relax Al, especially since it reminded him of the crime scene and the stiff in the coffin.

  At least the lights on the tree were steady and not blinki
ng.

  “You aren’t thinking of reaching for that phone vibrating in your pocket, are you, Captain?” the commissioner asked.

  “I want to be in touch if anything breaks with the case,” Al said.

  “Good, that will give you something to follow up on when we’re done. Murder in the museum. We’ll have national press down on us like flies on a rotting corpse.”

  “I’d be working on it now if I wasn’t here.”

  The commissioner stood and placed his hands flat on his desk. Unlike the previous occupant of the office, an old white guy who’d been on the take for years, the new guy was young, a Double C native and seemingly idealistic. Or he was putting on a good show in order to use the job as a stepping stone for a political career.

  Al wanted to believe the first but he suspected the second.

  “You think I’m wasting your time, Captain James?”

  “There aren’t any clues to the murder in your office, if that’s what you mean. Sir.” There. Al had eaten too many honest responses in his time on the force. No more. And they said people mellowed when they got older.

  “So that’s a yes, then.”

  The commissioner stalked around to the front of the desk. Al belatedly realized the guy was taller than him. Well, if he was kicked out of the office, he could answer the text sooner. He thought for a second about commenting on the commissioner’s ugly tie, which featured a red-nosed Rudolph, but decided the commissioner would definitely kick him out for that.

  “You don’t think much of me or this office, Captain?”

  “As a general rule, I don’t think about this office at all. It’s never been much help to me.”

  “It that so?” The commissioner’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Yep.” Shit. He should have just been polite and then he’d have been out of this and back to work by now. Too late.

  “My goal is to improve this department and thus help rebuild this city.”

  “Good luck with that,” Al said.

  “You don’t trust my intentions?”

  “I don’t understand why you pulled me in. I don’t need to be told how to do my job.”