[Marnie Baranuik 02.5] Cold Company

by A. J. Aalto

Someone knocked on the front door, SOS with a shave-and-a-haircut finisher. She was gripping the countertop like she might fall without its support. She pushed away from it and made her way to the door, ignoring the crutches that leaned against the hall closet.

  I stood and followed Paula’s limping trek to the front door, placing my bare hands on either side of the peephole and waiting for the Blue Sense to swell again.

  A young man, someone she knew and trusted, appeared alone in the peephole, balancing a pale green paper cone in his arms. Twenty, but still with a boxy, unfinished adolescent look about him, he made playful faces at the pinhole camera he knew to be just above the fish-eye lens of the peephole.

  “Wider, Dennis. I want to see what’s stuck in your molars,” Paula teased as she opened the door, taking the crinkling bundle from his outstretched arms. “Thanks for bringing these up.”

  I felt Paula’s relief. It was rare for me to Grope through the Blue Sense and actually hear things, but my brother’s input was incredibly strong considering he was new dead and not my own Bonded revenant. I thought to mention it to Harry, but he was standing at my back, and through the Bond we shared, I knew he was getting impressions at least as strongly as I was.

  “No probs, Rach. New boyfriend?” Dennis wiggled his dark eyebrows. “Or are these from Officer Friendly?”

  “Who?” Paula affected a confused look.

  “C’mon.” Dennis snorted. “That dude who barrels in here from time to time like he owns the joint? I deal weed, babe, I know a cop when I smell chops. Dude walks like he’s got umpteen balls and he’d shoot you in the face for trying to count them.”

  A cop? I glanced over my shoulder at Wes, who gave one cautious, barely-there shake of his head. I could feel Percy and Fryfogle watching us intently, shifting in their standard issue boots, the gear in their belts creaking softly.

  Paula laughed at the young man’s comments, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d done so. “How terribly astute of you, Dennis.”

  “Yeah, yeah, fancy words.” He sniffed the air. “Breakfast smells good. Got a shopping list for me yet?”

  She reached for her purse and grabbed an envelope: cash and a slip of paper. “Thanks, kiddo.”

  “Ulch!” Dennis made a grab for his chest. “Kiddo. Direct hit. Mortally wounded.” He made a dramatic show of sliding down the wall and crawling along the hall like a dying man across a Saharan dune. “I used to be a shopper like you until I... I...“ he wheezed. Paula watched him go with a chuckle until the heels of his well-worn sneakers disappeared one at a time into the elevator. His voice drifted to her as the elevator doors closed. “Phone’s ringing, Rach.”

  Paula shut the door and locked up. She took her time unwrapping the bundle of daisies, ignoring the phone. She cut the stems down to fit into the beer stein she took from the cupboard to use as a makeshift vase; the bobbing flowers with their sunny centers and crisp white petals didn’t seem to mind. They crowded her tiny two-seat breakfast table, so that she barely had room for her coffee cup and the small plate with her toast on it beside them.

  The phone rang again and again. When she picked it up fifteen minutes later, she said nothing. Her painkillers were finally kicking in, and she was able to march to the patio window with a confidence she didn’t feel. She hooked aside the fabric of the curtains the tiniest bit, and poked a vertical blind open just enough to peer through.

  And so did I. Fryfogle was getting bored with my roaming and hung back by the doorway into the hall, but Percy was at our heels with a quiet patience blossoming. Harry shifted his attention back to the phone receiver.

  “If we must get an impression from the phone, perhaps we should attempt it from a safe distance,” he said.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I said, matching Percy’s frown with one of my own.

  Harry went to fetch my socks from the hallway outside Paula’s bedroom, and dangled them in front of me. “Whilst you will get no impressions through your gloves, you should get buffered ones — the strongest present — through the cotton, love. I can of course help with additional filtering and suppressing of your Talents.”

  “Filter? Suppress?” I blinked with surprise. “You can do that?”

  “Duck and cover, sis,” Wes winced.

  “Try not to be absurd, my merry grig,” Harry scoffed, insulted. “Do not begin to doubt my abilities, lest my patience become further wiredrawn.”

  I held out my hands for him, and he slipped my socks on them, heel-side up, where they made little bumps like I was giving a stumpy thumbs-up. When I turned to face the cops, I felt like a dork. “Now you’re gonna see some serious business.”

  Fryfogle’s lips did another twitch-and-clamp maneuver, and I expected a frown from Percy, but she had decided at some point to take an open-minded approach, and her disapproval was held in check by curiosity.

  Using the socks to buffer the influx of psi, I put the phone back together in one piece and held it as Paula had. Wes hovered, but didn't touch me.

  At first, he said nothing. Must be my imagination, she thought, that palpable weight pushing through the receiver. Dominance, aggression, as though he could make her speak by the sheer force of his will.

  And then she saw him move; he peeled away from the side of the building and her lungs deflated. Trapping her tongue behind her guardian teeth, she waited him out with a cold, hammering heart.

  She could see the figure pacing, pacing, pacing; he appeared from behind the corner, turned on his heel to pace back, his left hand gripping the phone to his head, his right hand crammed in the pocket of his jeans.

  Voices hit me in the gut, where I could feel Paula's scars overlaid on my own middle, but Harry was there with a reassuring hand to stroke my back and steady my resolve.

  “That’s what he thinks you like?” Hearing the familiar, deceptive calm in his voice was a blow to the throat. “Daisies? Is that what you told him? No.” He drew the negative out in a melodramatic moan. “Daisies are cheerful. Daisies are bright. Daisies are too innocent for the likes of you.”

  “The man who she’s afraid of,” I said to Percy, “The one who took her originally. He didn’t send the flowers. He gave her shit about it that morning on the phone.”

  Percy made a note of this but said nothing.

  Paula knew better than to respond. Anything she said, anything at all, would only give him ammunition. With a trembling finger, she clicked the record button and reached for her cell phone.

  “Who is he?” He made a derisive choking sound, and it ratcheted up the tension in Paula’s shoulders. “Some lawyer with sweaty hands? Some high finance ape with more cock than brains? Or maybe you shacked up with one of those cops.” He spat the word like it was damnation. “I wonder if he cuffs you when you fuck.”

  Paula could hear the rage frothing in his thickening words and fought back a moan.

  “Who sent ‘em?” he said, running the words together. Whosentem. “You’re gonna tell me. I won’t be mad. Who sent ‘em?”

  I did, dumbass, Paula thought fiercely, and though it was so tempting, she very carefully did not say it aloud. I did, and it worked like a fucking charm, because there you are.

  “She sent them to herself,” I told Percy, but did not have to glance at her to know that the cops already knew this tidbit. Her silence was full of expectation, not surprise, like I had checked something off an invisible list.

  “Do you see him, love?” Harry asked. “This monster of a man?”

  His baseball hat, worn tilted as a counter-surveillance measure, obscured Paula’s view, but she had felt those broad, expansive shoulders and narrow hips, would have recognized that stiff, nearly military bearing, without ever seeing his face. An unintentional whimper leaked out of her throat and she cut it off, but not quickly enough.

  He stopped mid-stride, turned toward the building, lowering his head like a bull preparing to charge. “I hear you. Won’t you say something to me? Won’t you say how much you miss m
e? I know you do.”

  Paula hung up, threw the receiver on the couch, and thumbed the emergency contact with her cell phone. “Aaron?”

  He guessed, perhaps by the hyper-breathy quality of her voice. “You answered the phone.”

  “He’s here.”

  “On my way.” The sound of a door slamming. “Ten minutes out. Doors locked. Get away from the windows. Don't do anything else foolish.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “No, it won’t.” His voice hardened. “From now on, you do nothing unless you run it by me.”

  “She called someone named Aaron,” I told them. “Did you trace her cell phone?”

  I didn’t expect her to share that info, but she didn’t have to. Wes picked the answer out of one of the cops’ heads, and said, “She had no cell phone on record; must have been a burner.” Fryfogle radiated irritation underlaid with chagrin, and Percy took the invasive rebuke in stride, jotting another note in her pad.

  From where Paula stood, she could still make out his pacing form, flirting with the corner of the building. She knew she should move, hide, but the sight of him was hypnotic — people on the sidewalk brushed past him and had no idea who or what they were passing — and she worried that if she took her eyes off him, he’d magically appear in her shower somehow, or in her closet, like a bad slasher flick. She knew he wasn’t standing behind her, as long as she was pinning him in place with her gaze. She wanted to lean out the window and scream, “Look out, serial killer in the baseball hat!” but feared that, like some supernatural horror, he would leap up four floors and sink his talons and teeth into her.

  Serial killer.

  My guts churned like I’d just knocked back three shots of Fireball whiskey on top of some iffy chicken salad.

  Serial killer. They had me tracing a serial killer without fucking telling me? I squelched a bucket of rage and kept my face as clear as possible while holding the vertical blind still in my hand, but Harry felt my sudden fury, knew its source, and came to hover an inch closer. Wes’s eyes went wide and paled to eerie violet, but he wisely kept his lips together.

  I didn't. “You brought me in for a fucking serial killer abduction? This guy is a garden-variety psychopath, and while they're certainly top-tier assholes, I'm a paranormal investigator. You have people for this.” I turned and jammed a finger into Percy's sternum, backing her up in surprise until she bumped against Fryfogle.

  As soon as my finger hit her shirt, I took a blast of Percy's dismay, frustration, and helplessness, which was only amplified by Wes and Harry each putting a hand on my shoulders to pull me away. I saw all the case notes, all the coroner's reports, all the grisly photos, and the hospital-bed interviews she'd conducted with Paula as she convalesced. And, deeper than that, like a dark fish in a brackish well, an oily flicker of her own, deeply-buried encounter with a college tutor. It had turned her away from a love of horticulture and she'd jumped to criminology out of anger, vengeance, and remorse. My eyes swam and stung with unexpected tears, and I backed off.

  She gasped and touched her chest where my finger had dimpled the fabric, shaken but regaining her composure quickly. “We needed someone better. We didn't think you'd come without a monster.”

  “I came with two.” I shook my shoulders to get the dead guys to unhand me. “You already know what happened with her phone and this Aaron guy. We're wasting time with the play-by-play of what must have been a spectacularly shitty day for her. Why do you really need me?”

  “We need to find her. And him.”

  I went back to the hall, where I checked the temperature on the thermostat, because it felt like it was suddenly a million degrees too warm for me in the apartment. I was dismayed to once again hear them with Wes through the vision.

  Aaron had come up and been let in, explaining something that Paula was sure he’d already said a dozen times while he doctored coffee and propped himself at the breakfast table. “He thinks, ‘I inflict pain and punishment, so I am superior’. That’s a malignant narcissist’s view of interpersonal relationships.”

  Paula nodded numbly, sitting across from him. The daisies had been relegated to the counter next to the sink to make room.

  “He’s doing all he can to cope with the loss of you.”

  She read trouble in the set of his brow. “He’s taken another girl.”

  He didn't say anything, but she could see the truth in how his hands tightened on the coffee cup.

  “It is because of me. If I was still there—“

  “Paula, sit down.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “There’s no point in flogging yourself.”

  Paula stopped in her tracks across the cheap Berber, stiffening. Her eyes shot sideways at him accusingly.

  He blanched and said quietly, “I'm sorry.”

  “Why bother? He’s probably flogging her right now. Because I’m not there.”

  “Don’t—“ He stopped, paused, and tried a different approach. “You sent those flowers to yourself.”

  “Why would I send myself flowers?”

  “To test the waters, see what would happen.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “You happy with the results?”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” She poured her coffee in the sink, still steaming, and turned to face the refrigerator, not looking back at him. “Now I know: he knows where I moved to, and he’s watching.”

  “I’ve told you before; you do nothing without running it by me, Paula.” He grimaced. “We’ll have to move you again. I don’t want to hear a word about it, either, since it’s your own damn fault.”

  “Yes, Master,” she turned, snarling. “So sorry, Master. Forgive me, Master.” For a moment, she wavered on the verge of a meltdown, seeing her point strike home in the tightening of his thin lips, she glared defiantly at him.

  “Are you through?” he asked calmly.

  “Is he in custody?” She pointed in his face, hard. “That’s when I’ll be through. I’m not moving again. So give her the fucking respect of at least saying her name to me, so she’s not a faceless placeholder.”

  He pressed his back into the chair unhappily. “Gina Holtzman.”

  Though I was certain they already had the information, I told Percy and Fryfogle Holtzman’s name, and what little impression I got about the Fed named Aaron: long face, light hair, wide brow, and an incredible lack of tact and sensitivity towards the woman he was supposed to be keeping a watch over.

  I paced over to the breakfast table, where two coffee mugs once sat, where only black dust crumbs remained after the CSIU clean-up. Clearing my throat roughly helped, taking a glass of water from Harry’s outstretched hand helped a bit more, and by the time I faced the cops, I could speak again.

  “I really wish you’d warned me about the serial killer stuff, but we’ll talk about that later.” My own track record with them wasn't so hot, since I'd caught up to one once before, only to be supernaturally enthralled so he could shoot me in a trash-festooned alley, and that one was still at large. My hand hovered midair before touching the tabletop. “Any more nasty shocks you wanna warn me about before I continue?”

  When they didn’t answer, I glanced up at Wes’s face. He stared at the cops for a moment from under the brim of his fedora, then shook his head at me.

  “We need a name,” Percy said, “and we need to know where she is.”

  I nodded tiredly, and let my hand drop to the table.

  “It was dark by the time Paula convinced Aaron she was fine and he could leave,” I reported. Percy made her notes. “She ate a late dinner of ginger ale and frosted raspberry Pop Tarts right out of the box, and ignored the phone when it started ringing. The next two Pop Tarts she toasted, and had them with cocoa…”

  …and still didn’t feel warm. She checked the thermostat and found it hovering at 87. The phone rang. She huddled on the couch under a blanket and tried not to hear it, afraid to turn it off, afraid she’d miss some vital warning in its voice. Finally, she mo
ved to the window, threw open the curtains, and answered the phone.

  “Are you cold, sweetheart?”

  “I want to come home,” she whispered, voice hitching. “I want orange juice. I want to come home.”

  I wanted to yell at the woman in my vision, the woman who had been regaining so much strength, the woman who was giving up behind my eyes, but she was no longer here to hear me. I couldn’t stop her. All I could do was watch her make the choice. Wes’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

  The man on the phone faintly hissed through his teeth, but whether it was livid anger or unutterable joy, Paula couldn’t tell, so neither could I.

  She forced the words out. “Will you come for me?”

  “You don’t deserve to have me come for you.”

  “Please. I didn’t run away, they took me. The ambulance, the police, they took me from the cellar.”

  “You’re lying to me, Paula.” His breath huffed in the phone. “What happens to bad girls, what happens to girls who lie to me?”

  “I told them you’d never stop looking for me.”

  “You told them everything about me, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry. Please.”

  “No.” He bit it off. “I do not forgive you.”

  “Please, Master.”

  There was a long beat of silence, during which she watched his shadowy form cast another, longer shadow in the back lot. “You will come to me.”

  “When? How?”

  He gave her four words. She wrote it down on the pad by the phone. Finally, Paula looked something up on her phone, put the gun in her inside jacket pocket, threw up, and then left the building for the first time in six months.

  I passed the information along to Percy and Fryfogle once I'd choked down my fear and revulsion and steeled myself to act. Percy pretended to make a note in her book, but I knew it was for show. The pad had been placed in evidence; they already knew what she'd written.

  If so, what did they need me for? Percy’s fractured but enduring curiosity gave nothing away.

  Fryfogle made an unhappy noise. “This has been pointless.”

  I didn't care that he had liked my wiseass remarks earlier, or that he was twice my size and armed, I stalked over and glared up at him. “If I was useless, I wouldn't fucking be here. Now, since you obviously can't see 'sand pile first pass' from the ass you've shoved your oversize head up, maybe you do still need my help, chuckles?”