"I'm sorry."
Jacob shot me a heavy-duty look. "Why are you sorry? What could you have done differently?"
I didn't know. But I was too chickenshit to volunteer that not only had I initiated the contact, but I’d gotten the tipoff from Roger Burke.
“So this guy at the Fifth, the one you spotted—what’s his name? What shift does he work?”
“Jesus. You’re not going to….”
Jacob turned away and scowled at the snow. He was itching to do something, that much was obvious. To grab someone and wring some answers out of him. Physically, if need be.
“If I do this FPMP job,” I said, “it’s because I’m trying to get on the inside and figure out more about them—see who they are and what they know. You can’t charge in and put the thumbscrews on one of their guys.”
Jacob mulled that over, then nodded grudgingly. “I could arrange to meet him some other way. Get to know him. Hang out where he drinks. Join his gym.”
“I hate to break it to you, but you don’t do subtlety very well. If he’s straight, which he probably is, you’ll creep him out. And if he’s queer, he’ll think you’re cruising him. Anyway, I didn’t get his name.”
Jacob scowled even harder. “I’m getting us some new phones.”
“Okay.” Chances were slim to none that I’d remember my new phone number, but it seemed like a good idea anyway. “I’m sure there’s a way we can block out what we’re saying at home. Power tools, a blender, something that makes a lot of noise.”
“Or porn.” Jacob’s lips had turned up at the corner, but I wouldn’t have called his expression happy by any stretch of the imagination.
I pulled my hand from my pocket and reached out to him. He did the same, gave my fingers a quick squeeze, then turned and walked back toward his car.
Jacob’s patience wouldn’t last forever. I had to figure out how deep the FPMP had their hooks in me. And how to live with it, or tear myself free, once and for all. There had to be some way. I was psychic, after all, and so were dozens of my acquaintances and colleagues. If I didn’t know anyone who could find me a loophole, then I wasn’t worth the paper my fifth-level certification was printed on.
-TWELVE-
I met Zig in the records room at LaSalle, which, unfortunately, was located in the basement.
“Aren’t these things on the computer?” I asked him.
He planted his hands on his hips and looked at the long rows of bankers’ boxes. “They digitized everything back to 1985.”
“Okay. So why do you want to look here?”
“It was something you said to one of the nurses that got me thinking. You asked her about the patterns on her outfit. But you told me that you were accustomed to seeing everyone in blue, and that would be, what? Mid-eighties?”
I shrugged.
“And yet this nurse you saw, the outfit you described—white, right? All white. Down to the shoes.”
“…yeah?” I couldn’t imagine why it would matter.
“What if the place is thick with old activity? Everyone you’ve described is wearing a hospital gown. How would you know—without their hair done up, or makeup, or shoes—if they’re current, or fifty years old?”
I stared down a row of faded boxes. The boiler room was next door, which made the file room warm and uncomfortably humid, and the old cardboard smelled faintly of mildew.
“If something did happen fifty years ago,” I said, “what good will it do to piece it back together?” My phone rang and I checked the Caller I.D.—Stefan’s office, returning the call I’d left before anyone was actually there. “I gotta take this,” I said, and I made my way down an aisle of floor-to-ceiling shelves of cardboard boxes. “Hello?” Just a few feet in, the sound of my voice was muted, and my footsteps practically disappeared, as the cardboard absorbed the noise along with all the moisture in the air.
“So that call you left with my service this morning,” said Stefan. “Is your big emergency an actual emergency?”
I’d been a little twitchy when I’d spoken to the guy who’d answered the phone. “You mean…?”
“Medical, psychological, what? Should I be referring you to the Emergency Room?”
I stared up at the ceiling and tried to determine if I’d end up in Admissions if I rose up through the stained acoustical tiles. “I really have to talk to you. In person. Today.”
Stefan informed me that unless I was either experiencing acute psychosis or dying, he wasn’t willing to come in on a Saturday for me.
“I wouldn’t have called your service if it wasn’t important,” I said. I hoped I sounded earnest.
Stefan sighed so long I thought it would go on forever. “Oh, all right. I’ll meet you there.”
Zig didn’t look very happy about sorting through all those boxes alone, but he didn’t seem to want to know where I needed to go so urgently, either. I drove downtown and parked in a tall ramp with a twenty-dollar price tag, and ended up wishing I’d just taken the train. When I got to Stefan’s office, I motioned for a piece of paper, and wrote a note that we’d have to go outside. Stefan went along with me, but not without looking at me like maybe I really was having a psychotic break after all.
“I’m not paranoid,” I said. We walked fast and whispered, and a block away, the El rumbled by. I couldn’t imagine how the FPMP could hear us. Unless I had a chip in me. Oh God. “There’s this thing called the Federal Psychic Monitoring Program, and they send agents to watch me when I’m at work. I think they have my phone tapped and they can read my e-mails.”
“That’s absurd. You can’t just tap someone’s phone….”
“Whoever told you to change your name after Camp Hell? I think it’s them. They’re probably watching you, too.”
Stefan paused, and whoever was walking behind us had to do some fancy maneuvering to keep from ramming into his back. At first, I thought it was an agent, maybe one with a listening device, some sort of amplifier that only looked like a cell phone. But if it was one of the FPMP, he was doing a damn good impression of a Foot Locker employee trying to order some lunch.
“I took the money and I changed my name. That was years ago. What makes you think they’re still watching me?”
“Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they keep tabs on you to make sure you didn’t slip up and tell someone about Camp Hell? They’ve been watching me for, what, fourteen years? If you did fall off their radar, you’re back on it now that you’re seeing me as a patient.”
“Everything’s under the table. You’re not on the books. I’ve never even created a record for you in my database.”
“It doesn’t matter. They follow me.”
People streamed past us—a woman in a business suit and sneakers. A delivery boy with bags of sandwiches and a tray of steaming coffee. A guy in lycra pants, powerwalking. Stefan watched them walk past, his expression unreadable. “What proof do you have?”
I leaned into him. “I met one of them,” I said in his ear. “He wants me to do a job for him.”
“What’re you going to do?” Stefan said carefully.
“Play along. I have to do it. What else can I do?”
“Maybe you can get something out of it.” He peeled away from me, pushed his hands deep into his huge overcoat, stared out at a line of yellow taxis, and sighed. “I wasn’t thrilled about changing my name. But look what I can show for it—my practice. My career. I like what I do. I’m good at it. But without seed money, to go to school, to get the business off the ground, I never would’ve been able to do it. Who would loan money to someone like me? Back then, I mean, when the best I could hope for was a full one-hitter and an apartment door without an eviction notice on it?”
“I don’t need money.” Which wasn’t strictly true, now that I had a mortgage to pay that was three times the rent on my old apartment, and I was hoping we could have a shower installed in the upstairs bathroom. Who wouldn’t want more money? But I wasn’t destitute.
Stefan gave a bleak
smile. “Everyone needs something. Work with them. It’s not the end of the world.”
A bike messenger had a near miss with a taxi, which resulted in a deafening blitz of car horns and cursing. However fucked-up I thought my life was, at least I wasn’t a bike messenger in subfreezing weather.
“I remembered some more Camp Hell,” I told him. “Einstein. And Faun Windsong.”
Stefan’s gaze turned inward as he thought back. “And Dead Darla.”
“What?”
He looked at me with his eyebrows raised.
Damn. Just when I thought my memory was there, only rusty and neglected, flabby from inactivity, there’d be a nugget of something that seemed like I should recognize it—but whatever it was, it simply wasn’t there, no matter how hard I reached.
“I want to do a regression.”
Stefan reached into a gap in his overcoat and pulled out his pocket watch—with the satisfaction of someone who actually gets to use his pocket watch in the company of someone else who notices. “You really are bound and determined to talk me into working on a Saturday.”
“I won’t do it in your office, though.” I looked around for somewhere we could go. There were benches in Grant Park, but I doubted I’d be very receptive to hypnosis with the wind skimming across the lake and belting me with ice crystals. “We’ll go in my car.”
“What’s wrong with my office?”
“You’re not there 24-7. Someone could’ve come in, installed cameras, microphones. Have you lifted up the drop ceiling lately, looked underneath?”
“If you think my office is bugged, who’s to say your car isn’t?”
He had a good point. I’d need to take it to the dealership and have it combed over. “It’s the best place I can think of right now. Will you do it, or not?”
Stefan made a face. Disgusted, but resigned. “If you don’t go into trance in five minutes or less, I’m not going to keep going. I haven’t eaten lunch yet, and my blood sugar gets really low when I skip meals.”
“Don’t worry. I have a granola bar in my glove compartment.”
Stefan followed me to the parking ramp. We didn’t speak as we climbed the stairs—neither of us was in good enough shape to spare the breath.
“That’s your car?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“How do you fit your massive muscle-man into it?”
I felt my cheeks flush. It was the first time he’d mentioned Jacob. “We usually take his Crown Vic if we’re going anywhere…together.”
“Good lord, I thought you’d at least have a mid-sized sedan.” Stefan unbuttoned his overcoat and made a big show of adjusting all his layers before he got in.
My granola bar was long gone. I had nothing to offer but a starlight mint—which Stefan accepted, but with very little enthusiasm. He chewed it up and swallowed it, sighed dramatically, cranked the passenger seat all the way back, and began to speak in that deep, slow, hypnotic way of his. “Close your eyes. You’re going to count back, from ten to one, and focus only on the sound of my voice….”
“Nice Mohawk.”
I squinted at the pale chick with the humongous dyed-red hair. She was wearing too much pancake makeup. I had to fight off the urge to drag my fingernail down her cheek and see what was underneath. I’d been heading for the smokers’ lounge, not because I smoked, but because I was high with the novelty of being able to go where I wanted, when I wanted, for the first time since I was nineteen. “So,” she said. “You’re a medium?”
I couldn’t tell if she was challenging me or making conversation. I’d been told that other people at Heliotrope Station could see and hear things, too. And unlike me and the other jerks at the CCMHC, we might even agree on what those things were, so I didn’t shift into full-on asshole mode when I answered. “That’s what they tell me.”
“I’m a medium too,” she said. “A strong level four. My name’s Darla. They call me Dead Darla.” She smiled, an evil smile that she’d probably practiced in her makeup mirror. “I don’t mind. I kind of like it.”
“Vic Bayne….”
“Cool name. So, what’s your level?”
“I, uh… they haven’t tested me yet.” Supposedly I still had Thorazine in my system, so they’d held off on the “testing” that seemed to be the ultimate placement exam of the psychic world.
Darla slipped her hand through my arm and pressed herself against me. She was as wide as I was tall, and hard to say for sure, but I think I felt her tits against my arm. Damn. If I told her I was queer, she’d know that I knew she was flirting with me, and she’d be embarrassed. I figured I’d just do my oblivious act. And eventually someone would find me and another male resident with our pants down, and everyone would whisper about it in the cafeteria, give me a few nasty looks, and after that I wouldn’t have to worry about the unwelcome female attention anymore.
But for now, Darla was soft and pillowy against my arm. She pulled on me, and stood on her tippytoes like she had something good to tell me. I leaned over.
“I can give you some hints,” she whispered. “The better you score, the higher paying job you’ll get once training’s over.”
“Okay,” I said. Because I was busy trying to figure out how to take my arm back without pissing off Dead Darla, and it seemed to me that I made an enemy out of her, I’d be really, really sorry.
She pressed my arm into her softness. It couldn’t have all been tits. Really difficult to tell, with the big, oversized black sweater she had on. She pulled me away from the smokers’ lounge and down toward the pop machines. “First, the tester will give you an item that belongs to a dead person and try to get you to tell them who it belonged to. They switch that every time, so I can’t help you with that, but I think maybe that’s more to see if you’ve got any precog tendencies or not.”
“Precog?”
“Precognitive. Knowing something without seeing or hearing it directly. Knowing the future.”
“I’ll bomb that for sure.” If I had any kind of precog edge, I wouldn’t have landed myself in the nuthouse by telling Mister Lubowski, my homeroom teacher, about the accident I saw that no one else could see…and then insisting I was right until they shot me up with sedatives and put me away. Fucking field trip. I would’ve cut class that day and cruised Boystown instead if I’d been precognitive.
Or at least I would’ve taken it all back sooner, everything I’d described, maybe said I was just making it up for attention. But no. I laid it all out there, everything I’d seen, down to the last spurting compound fracture. And before I knew it there was a straightjacket with my name on it.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Darla. “I just made stuff up, whatever came into my head, and I still scored high. See, if you really are a medium, you’ll be able to tell them about the dead lady.”
We slipped past the pop machines and down a dim flight of stairs that smelled like urine. “They never use this part of the building for anything else.” She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe they’re scared they’ll clean the ghost out if they hose it down.”
“Can that…happen?”
“A few physical things affect ghosts, but mostly salt, I think. Some Voodoo-based rituals use substances like soap and ammonia, though, so I think they’re gonna keep playing it safe. Because what’ll they do if they scare off the testing ghost? Kill someone just to make a new one?”
She smiled her evil smile at me. Too bad she wanted to do more than just pal around together. She seemed to know a lot about the way things worked.
The stairwell let out into a dingy hall with a few old offices on either side, a drinking fountain at the end, a red fire extinguisher in a rusted box, and a pair of restrooms. Dead Darla opened the ladies’ room door. I hung back like a vampire that hadn’t been invited across the threshold. “Come on.” She flashed her wicked grin over her shoulder. “No one will know.”
I took a step forward. The reluctance to enter a ladies’ room gave way to the realization that if we were as completely al
one as she said we were, she might want to do it. I prepared a lie. Crabs? No, genital warts. That would cool her off.
Darla walked toward a hole in the wall where a sink used to be with her arms spread wide. “Right here,” she said, “is a cold spot.”
-THIRTEEN-
I blinked. Dead Darla stood in the middle of a fucked-up film loop of a woman falling and cracking her head on the sink that wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t see the sink. But I saw the blood.
Darla closed her eyes and held her hands out to each side, palm up, as if she was trying to catch raindrops. “It feels like a woman, to me. That’s what I told them. And it’s sudden. An accident.”
Slip. Crack. Bleed.
Yeah, it looked like an accident to me.
I rubbed my upper arms and my teeth started to chatter. I expected to see my own breath, but I didn’t. “It’s freezing in here.”
“You feel it too?” Darla opened her eyes and beamed at me. “What about the details? Are you getting any of them?”
“The details, that’s where they’ll get you.”
I swung around. A man stepped out of one of the stalls, transparent, gaunt. His arms hung before him, wrists slashed vertically from elbow to palm. Suicide Charlie at CCMHC had told me that was the proper way to cut yourself if you really meant business.
The guy who’d spoken had been successful, judging by the fact that he was now transparent.
“Vic?”
I glanced at Darla. The woman she was standing in fell and split her head. Again.
“I told ‘em what I saw,” said the guy with the slit wrists. “Everything. That was my mistake.”
“I don’t like it in here,” I told Darla. I backed toward the door.
“This isn’t a malicious spirit,” she said. “She won’t hurt you.”
“That’s right,” said the bleeder. “It’s the head honchos around here you’ve gotta look out for. And the Feds. See, they tell you to do your best. And when you do…?”
PsyCop 5: Camp Hell Page 9
