PsyCop 5: Camp Hell

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Most ghosts just died over and over, but this one was talking to me. If Darla hadn’t been there, I might have even been able to ask it a few questions. But I was glad she was there, because the fact that it saw me, was talking to me, scared me shitless. I felt like I was going to spew, but there was a ghost between me and the nearest toilet. I staggered out into the hall and prayed that the drinking fountain still worked. The knob was gone. I darted across to the men’s room and locked the door behind me.

  “Vic?” Dead Darla tapped on the door.

  “I need a minute.” I went to the sink and tried the taps. Water chugged out, reluctantly at first. I splashed water on my face and looked at the paper towel dispenser. It was empty. I dried my face with the hem of my T-shirt. A few deep breaths, and my breathing seemed to be under control. Good. I unlocked the door and looked out. There was Darla, fluttering her mascara-tarred eyelashes. “Hey,” I said. “I’m, uh, chock full o’ meds right now. I think I just wanna hang out down here. Alone. For a little while.”

  She tried to figure out what I meant—whether I was trying to snoop around and augment my test scores, or whether I had diarrhea, or whether I was just weird. Whatever the case, I wanted to be alone, and that was the last thing she wanted to hear. But I’m guessing she was reluctant to burn any bridges, either. “Oh, okay. I have a Sixth Sensory Skills workshop after dinner. Are you in that workshop? Maybe we can hang out afterward.”

  “I’m not sure. I might. I’ll, uh, see if I see you.”

  “Well, all right, then.” I think she might’ve hugged me, but I had the door open in such a way that only a six-inch strip of me showed. She was still smiling at me when I closed the door, locked it, slumped against it and let my breath out in a long, slow hiss.

  “Shit,” I said, out loud. Darla had felt a cold spot? Sensed a female presence? I could’ve told her what kind of earrings the ghost was wearing, which tile exactly she’d slid on, and how far her blood had spread.

  And then there was the slit-wrist guy. I’d heard him, clear as if he’d been in the room with me. I guess that, technically, he was.

  I had no idea what to make of the stuff he’d said about testing too high. I didn’t know if ghosts could lie or not. But even if he could, why would he? He had nothing to gain by making me score badly on a psychic abilities test.

  I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be afraid of—but whatever it was, it was bad enough that he chose to buy his way out with a razor blade. Either that, or someone else had helped him do it, just to make it look like a suicide. I supposed I could go in there and ask him. Yeah, right.

  The thought that I might’ve taken that test without first talking to Dead Darla—or her very dead friend—made my institutional lunch threaten to repeat. I’d have to dumb it down. Say I “sensed” stuff rather than saw or heard it. Maybe even get some details wrong, the age, the gender. Point to the wrong spot.

  According to my preliminary Psych tests, it really was ghosts that I was seeing, and not schizophrenic hallucinations.

  Damn. Good thing the Thorazine had done the talking for the first round. I’d pointed out which morgue vaults had movement in them, but I was too zonked out to follow the crazy stories the inhabitants were going on about well enough to repeat them.

  I splashed more water on myself, tweaked my ‘hawk into place, untangled my safety pin earrings, then pressed my cheek against the coolness of the old tile wall and wondered if it might have been safer for me to stay in the nuthouse.

  Time passed, a lot of it, and I figured I’d better be somewhere findable unless I wanted to turn up on the scrutiny end of a search party.

  I’d been hoping to sneak back to my floor unnoticed, but no such luck. There was a teased-haired Art School Punk in a black Nehru jacket at the top of the stairs. His back was to me, and he was busy beating up the pop machine. He stopped shaking the thing and looked at me over his shoulder. His eyeliner was perfect. “It ate my quarter,” he said. His voice was as smooth and deep as a radio announcer’s.

  “You won’t get anything by shaking it,” I told him. “They’re built to hold on to the cans that way.” I was familiar with the make and model. We’d had one at the loony bin; it was a good source of extra income for me. A thirsty schizophrenic will do anything for some pop.

  I knelt down and pressed open the chute. If I angled myself just right, I could sneak an arm up into the works and coax one of the cans out of its track. It wasn’t easy. I practically had to twist my shoulder out of its socket, and it was cold in there, as cold as you could get without freezing. But it was about the only parlor trick I could do. That, and talking to dead people.

  I reached, and strained, and finally, finally, I poked and prodded hard enough to make something give way. There was a thunk and a roll (Slip. Crack. Bleed. Don’t think about it…) and a frosty can of ginger ale rolled out of the chute. I pulled my frozen arm out and handed the can to the eyeliner guy.

  “I like a man who knows how to use his hands,” he said. He had a very naughty smile. “Come back.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re in your car.”

  “What car?” Me? Owning a car? That was hilarious. I didn’t even own a Walkman.

  “I’ll count again, from ten to one. And this time, you will come back.”

  No, that’s not what he was going to say. What he had said? He’d told me I needed a reward. He took my frozen hand between his, so big and warm, and breathed on it. That was the sexiest thing anyone had ever done to me. And then….

  “Ten, you begin to be aware of the sounds and feelings of the present. We’re in your car. Your very small car.”

  I don’t have a car. If we go in the stairwell, no one will see us. No one uses that stairwell. It smells like piss, and we think it’s funny.

  “Seven, you’re aware of your body, the way it rests against the seat. The trash bag overflowing with fast food napkins under your right hand….”

  We think it’s…funny. Damn. It felt so good to laugh with him.

  “Three, you think that maybe it would be a good idea if you came back so that I can eat something before I faint….”

  I opened my eyes. My windshield was foggy. The digital clock on my dash read 2:46. That couldn’t be right. It was ten after twelve.

  “Two, you’re breathing, you’re relaxed.”

  “Holy fuck.”

  “And one. Please don’t make me count down again.”

  I gawked at Stefan. He was so old. “What time is it?”

  “Almost three. Look, we’re not going to do this on the spur of the moment anymore. We can’t. You’ve got to allot enough time if you’re going to be diving in that deep, that fast. Call my office before you come. Give me a chance to juggle my schedule.”

  “Dead Darla. I met Dead Darla again. I remember her. She used to like me. Before….”

  “Before she realized we were fucking each other. I remember full well the force of her loathing when she caught us coming out of the stairwell and she told me my pants were on inside-out.” He smiled. “It was pretty funny. When you think about it.”

  No kidding. I’d never expected so much gratitude for a lousy can of pop.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Stefan snapped. “My schedule’s all screwed up and I’m starving. And it’s not as if you’re hurting for company.”

  Shit. I hadn’t been giving him a “look.” Had I? I was just confused. Five minutes ago, I’d been a young kid who was busy showing off for a psych with a come-hither smile and perfect eyeliner.

  Stefan had been a middle-aged guy fantasizing about a cheeseburger.

  “Besides,” he said. “You’re not even my type anymore.”

  “I wasn’t looking at you like…I mean, I don’t want to…I’m not trying to….”

  “And that lover of yours will skin me alive if I so much as linger too long over a handshake with you. So no funny stuff.”

  “You picked that up? From Jacob?” He hadn’t acted like he was
jealous of Stefan, not once they’d met. But who was I to differentiate the way people felt from the things they chose to say?

  “Not…per se.”

  In other words, Stefan wasn’t planning to elaborate on what he meant. I wished I could miraculously produce a granola bar from thin air; maybe I could use it to bribe a straight answer out of him. “Don’t worry about Jacob. He’s fine. And I’m not flirting with you. This regression stuff…it’s just confusing.”

  Stefan pushed his feet against the passenger-side floor and pressed his neck into the headrest. He stared up at the ceiling. “No kidding.”

  • • •

  It was after four by the time I got back to the north side. Zigler’s Impala was still in one of the special doctor spaces in the parking lot at LaSalle. I took the other one. And I congratulated myself on owning a car that was small enough to fit in a tight parking spot.

  I found Zig in the records room with a stack of boxes on either side of him and a printout full of checkmarks and Xs front and center.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  He looked up. His eyes were puffier than usual, probably from all the dust. “It’s not. You didn’t give me any names to work with, just physical descriptions—and even those are vague. The files are all names and stats. It’s not like comparing apples to oranges. It’s like apples to….”

  “Ginger ale?” I suggested.

  Zig didn’t think I was very amusing. “You’ve gotta find one that’s willing to communicate with you.”

  “Right. Okay.” I didn’t mean to leave Zig with all the gruntwork, but I was kind of busy trying to figure out what had happened to me at Camp Hell to worry about some people who died before I was even born. Big chunks of time were needed if I wanted to do these regressions, I was expected to be at my actual job during work hours, and moonlighting for Constantine Dreyfuss seemed inevitable. Maybe I should switch from benzos to speed.

  “Zig, you’re up on all the latest in the world of Psy. How many sixes or sevens are there?”

  He looked up from his dead-end list. “What?”

  “Sixes. Or sevens. Other than Marie Saint Savon. I know about her.”

  “Yoshihiro Harimoto, level six medium just outside Tokyo. He’s a channel, speaks in the voices of the dead. But only in Japanese, so interest in him is limited to the Japanese-speaking part of the world.”

  “But what about the U.S.?” Somewhere the FPMP could get their hooks in someone.

  “The Joneses.”

  I rolled my eyes. The Joneses were the running joke of the psychic world. No one knew their first names. Met in training, married, and went on to a seedy career in second-tier Vegas theme shows in which Mrs. Jones dug through the purses of the women in the audience and Mr. Jones announced the lipstick shades and prescription bottles from the stage a hundred feet away. “Seriously.”

  “I am serious. There’s some speculation that they’re telepath six. Both of ‘em. And so tuned in to one another that they function as one mind. If they hadn’t gone into show business, who knows what they could’ve done with their talent?”

  Telepath six? Did tests even go up that high? My stomach sank.

  “I told ‘em what I saw. Everything. That was my mistake.”

  The words were just as fresh as if I’d just heard them earlier that day; at two forty-five, to be precise. Damn. Maybe the Joneses weren’t as drippy as everyone thought. Maybe they’d made a huge, frivolous, sequin-spangled spectacle of themselves so that if they disappeared, someone would notice.

  And here I was, seeing ghosts. There was no way to fabricate a Vegas act around that, not without pissing off practically every religion on the planet. Then I’d have to worry about both the zealots and the FPMP.

  “If you could narrow this down to a single year, I might have a chance at figuring out who all these ‘repeaters’ are.”

  “And then what?”

  Zig scowled. I’d stumped him.

  “This isn’t a Vegas act,” I said. “They won’t disappear in an explosion of sparkles and confetti if we figure out who they are, and name them.”

  “Do you see another lead we should be looking at? Because I don’t.”

  I planted my hands on my hips and stared at the rows and rows of boxes. “What you need here is a precog, not a medium. Someone to tell you where to focus.”

  Zigler started packing up for the day. “I can’t use what I don’t have.”

  -FOURTEEN-

  When I got home, I found a black SUV parked in front of the cannery. It was the first time since we’d bought the place that someone other than Jacob or me had taken that spot. I stared at it for a good minute or two before it occurred to me that I’d need to park my car. I found a space down the block.

  I trudged up the salty sidewalks to my walkway and approached the building. And then I noticed the second strange thing. Music, coming from our house, audible through the closed door.

  If this was some kind of belated birthday party, I was really not in the mood for it.

  The vestibule looked like its normal self, except for some extra winter coats hanging from the pegs and a couple of black nylon bags leaned up against the wall. I steeled myself for the festivities and walked into the main room.

  There was a buff guy who looked like he was using a metal detector on our sofa. And another one on his knees, unscrewing the plate on an electrical outlet.

  “Hello?”

  The muscle guys both turned and made a “sh” motion at me. A hand dropped onto my shoulder and I jumped. Just Jacob. The music had been loud enough to cover his approach from the kitchen. He steered me toward the downstairs bathroom, hustled me inside, and closed the door behind us.

  “You sure throw a weird party,” I said. “Who are those guys?”

  “Keith and Manny, from the gym. Keith’s a private investigator. If someone’s eavesdropping, he’ll find them. But until they give us the all-clear, if we need to talk about anything sensitive, we do it in here. With the radio on.”

  I wanted a pair of musclebound P.I.s combing through my house even less than I wanted strippers and a stale birthday cake.

  “That cell phone idea won’t work,” Jacob said. “Keith says they transmit like karaoke machine microphones, and anyone within range who’s got the equipment will receive the signal whether it’s a new phone or not.”

  I felt exhausted. There was nowhere to sit. I flipped down the toilet seat lid, planted myself on it, and pressed the heels of my hands into my closed eyes. “How long are they gonna be here?”

  “Until they’re done checking the place out.”

  I could see that arguing with Jacob would be like fighting a brick wall. And besides, it was his place, too. If he wanted his gym monkeys pawing through all of our stuff, who was I to say they couldn’t?

  Back in the main room, I watched Keith—or Manny, who knows?—hook a very complicated-looking device full of blinking LEDs to a disassembled outlet. He took some readings and then moved on to the next one.

  Once I’d decided that watching him work would be as much fun as helping Zigler with his files, I wandered into the kitchen, stood next to the sink and ate a bowl of cereal for dinner. Miraculously, nothing landed on my suit—which I was dying to get out of, but the thought of being naked with all that judgmental, muscular bulk in my house made me uneasy, like maybe I’d get a dodgeball to the groin if I dared take off my pants.

  I went upstairs and sat on the bed, and tried to pretend that I didn’t hear music coming up through the floorboards, and that there weren’t a couple of strangers scanning all of my stuff, and that there wasn’t any reason for me to worry about someone keeping tabs on me. But I’ve never been all that great at Let’s Pretend.

  Eventually, the music cut. When Jacob came upstairs to find me, I’d taken off my jacket and gun, but I was still in my dress shirt and slacks, lying on the bed and staring up at the tin ceiling.

  “They’re done. They didn’t find anything.”

 
; “Okay. I’m really glad that you took me seriously and all, but here’s the thing. You could’ve let me know about the sweep.”

  “And how would I do that? Call you on your cell phone?”

  “It’s just…I feel like I don’t have any privacy.”

  “Because of the sweep? This is all about your privacy. I’m trying to make sure that no one hears what we’re saying but us.”

  Supposedly the FPMP was all about my privacy too, but after the journey in time I’d taken to the women’s bathroom in the empty wing of Camp Hell, I had my doubts as to the real reasons any super-secret organization would keep an eye on high-level psychics.

  Jacob showed no signs of heading toward bed when I took a Valium and turned in early. I felt bad, in a vague and nebulous way. It wasn’t so much that I wanted sex—after all, I could still feel our encounter from the night before. I just didn’t want him to be pissed off that some government acronym was following me around, and because he’d moved in with me, their scrutiny was his problem now, too. Because if I was being honest with myself, that’s the way things looked to me.

  I woke up before Jacob did, which was nothing new, but after I’d made some coffee and eaten two bites of a hard-boiled egg that turned out to have a sickly green yolk, I decided not to wake him. The electrical outlet plates and couch cushions were all back where they were supposed to be, but I couldn’t shake the image of a couple of strangers going through my shit.

  And what was worse than that? The legions of much scarier strangers who likely had being going through my shit ever since the Police Academy.

  I put my coat on, wrapped a long scarf around my neck, and went for a walk. Which turned into a ride, once I came across an El station. The route is incredibly convoluted on Sundays, which I figured out when the train turned around and started heading back north instead of going all the way downtown. Evidently, I was supposed to transfer to another line at Belmont. But it was fine. There was no one spectral on the train car, and I wasn’t in a hurry.

  The streets in the Loop were starting to look familiar from my visits to Stefan’s office, but they felt different on a Sunday than they had on other days—quieter, less bustling and more stately. The main Sunday crowd consisted of shoppers rather than office workers, and they carried a different energy with them, a certain excitement that made them seem as if they didn’t take the immense feel of the skyscrapers for granted.