“Need a leg up?” he said.
I stared at the eight-foot fence. “Can’t you just lean on it and knock part of it down?”
Jacob raised an eyebrow.
“The last time I went over a fence, I sprained my elbow. And since then, my other arm got hit by a car.”
He gave me a sharky smile. “Come on. I’ll give you a good push. You’ll only have to worry about your landing.”
I had no doubt Jacob could throw me over the fence like a big, gangly football if he wanted to. And also, since I’d brought him this far, there was no turning back now. Jacob’s a pretty patient guy. But there were some areas where his self-control had clear limits.
Camp Hell was one of those areas.
I pitched the exorcism kit I was carrying over the top of the fence. “Fine. Give me a boost.”
My arms said ow, and ow, but I managed to make my way over without damaging any other part of my body. And even though my elbow was still smarting, the sight of Jacob scaling the fence in his form-fitting black jeans and leather jacket was enough to dull the pain.
I picked up my exorcism kit, and Jacob pressed his hand against the small of my back. “What do you think? Was this it?”
I stared at the empty lot. It had no street address of its own. Instead, it was tucked away in the middle of a bunch of other properties, mostly industrial, or maybe storage. Patches of ground were covered in snow. Others had last year’s brown husks of weeds poking through. I tried to picture the building itself, and then just a few details. The reflective black glass doors. The view of the parking lot from the smoking lounge. But everything was different now.
I shook my head. “I dunno. It’s changed too much.”
Jacob slipped his arm around my waist. “It’s okay.”
“For me it is. But I’ve got to make sure Warwick’s nephew is gone. You know?”
He nodded. “All right.”
We walked carefully. The ground changed, from old asphalt to old concrete, and then, to dirt—fill dirt thick with pebbles and stones. There had been a building there once. But whoever tore it down had done a thorough job of it.
“Spirit activity?” Jacob asked.
“Nope. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“I’m that obvious, huh?”
I decided there was no good way to answer that. Instead, I reached over and stroked the back of Jacob’s neck where his hairline ended, just over the collar of his leather jacket. He shivered, and gave me a dark-eyed look that told me he’d be happy to throw me down and add a few more marks to my collection.
I felt myself smile back at him. Even though I was possibly standing smack on top of the corpse of Camp Hell.
His gaze went to my mouth, and he brushed his lips over mine. I pressed my forehead against his, and funneled white light into the two of us. I couldn’t say if he was glowing or not, given that we were standing outside under a pale gray overcast sky. But I suspected that he was.
We stood there together, quiet, glowing. And then Jacob’s gaze shifted to something over my shoulder. “How about that red roof?” he said. “You remember that?”
I turned to looked at the squat, industrial skyline at my back. Gray, gray, brown, tan, gray…. Red. A burst of color in a sea of neutrals. It did indeed tug at my memory since, after all, I really am a visual kind of guy. I held on to Jacob’s sleeve, gave his forearm a squeeze, and stared.
The red roof. I’d been able to see it from the classroom where I’d spent so many hours in focus groups with Faun Windsong, and Dead Darla, and Richie. I stepped onto the packed fill dirt and walked toward the red roof, pulling Jacob along behind me. I stopped right under my old classroom.
“Yeah,” I said. “This is the spot.”
“You okay?”
Surprisingly, the sureness that Camp Hell used to be there didn’t send me into a panicky cold sweat. “I’m okay.”
I walked forward, Jacob right behind me, and did my best to pick out the perimeter of the building. There were areas I’d only been to a few times, mostly the storage spaces, or the administrative wing. But there were others where there wasn’t much else to do but stare out the window and wonder what kind of life could possibly be out there for a freak like me.
I saw a tree, a papery white birch among a straggling of neglected maples, or maybe oaks, which look the same to me once the leaves have dropped. And I realized that I remembered that tree with its pale, smooth trunk, the odd one out among all the other trees that were dark and gnarled. I’d seen the birch from a window in the stairwell behind the pop machines.
“The basement was over here,” I said. I pointed at a patch of ground, and tried to envision myself walking down a flight of stairs, turning, and going down another. A steel door. A hallway. Here: a drinking fountain. A fire extinguisher. A pair of doors. Men’s room. Ladies’ room.
I’d retraced the steps. All at ground-level, of course, but my vision was shifted inward. I stood in the spot where the repeater slipped and fell, and cracked her head open on the sink. I looked for her, but didn’t see her. Maybe she was still there, but buried under twenty feet of backfill, slipping and falling for all eternity. I hoped not.
“I don’t really see anything,” I said. “But I think I want to clear the area. Just in case.”
Jacob pulled the dashboard compass out of his pocket and consulted it. He squatted beside me, and cleared away a stubborn mound of snow that had clung to a bit of rubble. He jerked his hand back and a bead of blood welled on his fingertip, bright red, like the red roof. “Broken glass,” he said.
I squatted beside him and pushed the snow away more carefully. The stump of a prayer candle had cemented itself into the fill dirt, but the glass holder had cracked from the cold. The base was held together with white wax, but the sides had fallen away, all but the sharp point that had drawn blood on Jacob. “Maybe this is why the area’s clean,” he said. He sucked the blood off his fingertip, then wiped his finger on his black jeans. “Due north. Another medium got here first.”
We looked more carefully, and found the remnant of a candle on the east point. The others were long gone. Whoever’d cleaned house had done it a long time ago.
“You think it was Richie?” Jacob asked. “You said he used prayer candles in his exorcisms, right? And he would’ve known about this spot.”
“I dunno. I don’t think it matters. If I call him and ask, I’ll need to make up some excuse why I can’t go bowling with him, and….”
Though I had no great love of bowling, the real reason I wouldn’t call Richie was that he was employed by the FPMP, albeit in a more transparent capacity than Stefan. Since I preferred to keep my pineal gland bullet-free, I’d decided to step back and let the FPMP go about its business with no further help from me.
Dreyfuss had stopped calling me after I’d watched Roger Burke buy it. I wondered if Laura had told him she’d seen me at the scene of Burke’s shooting, or if he’d gathered it from his sources at the Fifth Precinct. Or the FBI. Or if I’d been spotted by his stupid remote viewer.
I touched Jacob’s knee and fed him some more white light. If we weren’t willing to slip off to an uninhabited desert island, then we’d need to keep ourselves glowing white, go back to doing our jobs, and make as few waves as possible. I felt a deep pang of loss at the realization that someone else was going to end up with the two remaining GhosTVs…heck, maybe they’d even get junked without anyone even knowing what they really were, since the gigantic tubes were so heavy and archaic in the age of flat-screen, high-definition everything. But I couldn’t risk visiting Chance again. There were too many ghosts full of bullet holes in Dreyfuss’ office. I wasn’t about to add myself to their number.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t perform an additional exorcism,” Jacob offered. “just to be safe.”
I met Jacob’s eye and suppressed a smile. He’d like that. “I’m pretty sure it’s clean.”
“One hundred percent sure?”
I rolled my eyes and
gave his knee a squeeze. “Yeah. Sorry.”
I stood, and my knees popped. Jacob followed, and his didn’t. He planted his hands on his hips and squinted toward the edge of the property line. “The aftermath of that fire in LaSalle lasted for decades,” he said. “But there’s nothing left of Camp Hell but an empty lot. Go figure.”
“Doctor Gillmore thinks the admin at LaSalle swept the fire under the carpet. Records from 1949 are nowhere to be found, even though some of the files date back to the Second World War. The Tribune buried the fire on page five with some vague mention that the number of ‘casualties’ was unclear, and some big rah-rah spin about how they were going to remodel. So the best we can figure is that money changed hands somewhere to cover it up.”
I poked some broken glass with the toe of my sneaker, and added, “I imagine Camp Hell’s coverup involved a lot more than just money.”
Jacob gazed longingly at a point between the north and east candle where the exorcism had happened without him. “I don’t think it would hurt anything to go over this spot one more time. I’m sure you’re a lot stronger than whoever else they’ve got on their payroll.”
I laughed, a short, sharp burst that surprised me, surprised both of us.
Jacob smiled tentatively. “What is it?”
I stared at the spot where Warwick’s nephew had warned me never to tell anyone what I could do, and then I slid my hand into Jacob’s and pulled him close. He slipped his other arm around me and held me. I kissed him, and tried to clear my mind of everything but him and me. I looked deep into his eyes, and tried to determine if I was ready to let him in on the one thing I’d been carrying with me since my first round of psychic testing.
He stared back at me like a man who’d fallen for me, hard. And that part inside me, the one that usually tells me to run, or to shut up, or to just play along and make myself invisible and hopefully whatever I’m dealing with will just go away? That part of me said, Yes. Tell him.
“I’ve got more talent than everyone on their payroll put together,” I said. Jacob squeezed me tighter. His eyes never moved from mine. “I’m so far beyond level five it’s not even funny.”
Jacob held me so hard I was worried he might crack a rib, and he crushed his mouth to mine, filled my mouth with his tongue. I felt his fingers dig into my back, even through my jean jacket and two sweatshirts. His hand roved downward, and he took a good handful of my ass, and squeezed. I pressed my crotch against his thigh and enjoyed being manhandled.
Jacob kissed me until I thought we’d both pass out from lack of air, then he tore his mouth from mine and pressed his wet lips to my ear. “You have no idea what that does to me.”
I was fairly sure I did. But I still liked hearing him say it.
-end-
Beautiful • Mysterious • Bizarre
fiction by Jordan Castillo Price
Don't Miss the Next Story ~ Sign up for Jordan's Free Monthly Newsletter Today! ~ www.tinyurl.com/jcpnews
PsyCop 5: Camp Hell Page 30
