And then I realized it wasn’t his physical body that was flopping around.
I sucked down white light for all I was worth. Half a second ago, I knew Oscar personally and felt scared for him. But he was dead now—and as strong a Psych as he was? Now I was scared of him. My head gave a little throb and a wave of lightheadedness washed over me, but I ignored the physical symptoms. I’ve dealt with all that and worse. Besides, I really didn’t think I was capable of overloading my own systems on the power of panic alone. Not without a GhosTV or an experimental psyactive.
Oscar sat up. Or, rather, his ghost did. It wasn’t the transparency that gave him away—the ghost was pretty damn solid. It was the look on his face. A look of frozen horror.
I scrambled backward and banked off a rolling table. A plastic vomit-catcher clattered to the ground, but the sound was obscured by the shrilling of the monitors. Someone shouted “Clear!” and the electronic clap of the charge popped through the electronic cacophony. Oscar’s ghost flickered transparent and a halo of something lit up all around him. Only for a fraction of a second. But in that brief glimpse, I knew the situation was seriously fucked.
The doctor called out orders, and his crew intubated him and shot the IVs full of drugs. But as the ghost swung its legs off the table and staggered toward the door, I had the sneaking suspicion that whatever they were doing was an exercise in futility.
As ER bays went, this one was a hell of a lot more spacious than the curtained stalls over at LaSalle. Even so, I couldn’t back up far enough as the ghost of Oscar lumbered past. He didn’t brush up against me directly…at least, I didn’t think so. But a squirmy resonance licked through my nerves as he passed by. Even though I wanted nothing more than to make tracks in the opposite direction, I was drawn to him. Not because of my reluctant hero complex—if I can’t stop him, nobody can—but a visceral gut reaction to his proximity.
Carolyn and Zigler were fixated on Oscar’s physical body while the team tried to revive him, but Jacob noticed me peeling out into the hall. The farther the ghost got from the body, the more it picked up steam. It didn’t walk. It didn’t run. It skittered along like a fucked-up bag of spiders. Me? With my whole self screaming at me to go the other way…I gave chase.
The ghost shuddered down the hall and rounded a corner. I swerved around a nurse and sprinted after it. And Jacob took off after me.
The branch the ghost was heading down led to the lobby and the stairwell. I figured it was heading for the exit—that’s what I would do—but it passed the turnoff and kept lurching forward, toward the stairs. Good thing for those new keycard readers, I thought, before I realized it could obviously go right through the door. Or could it? Just as I wondered, the door flung open and Erin rushed out with an armload full of IV bags. My own heartbeat skipped as I realized she was right in the path of the ghost. At the last minute, thank God, it staggered around her.
“Wait!” I called out, and reached toward the door…just as the ghost lurched through and it slammed shut behind him.
Erin backed against the wall to get out of my way. But it wasn’t a clear path I needed. It was access. “Open this door,” I barked out. She juggled IVs, terrified. Jacob caught up with us and took the bags that were sliding from her grasp. She pulled out a keycard on a bungee cord and slid it through the reader. Nothing. Too fast. It was new, and she didn’t have a feel for it yet. Again. It slipped from her hands. She grabbed at the cord. It took her three grabs to catch it. Another swipe—facing the wrong way now.
I was just about to snap at her to pull it together when finally, finally, the card reader clicked green. I barreled through the door, desperately sucking white light. The stairwell was empty. I pounded down the metal stairs. This was where I went face to face with Reginald’s ghost, I realized. This was where I salted him and he flew all apart.
No keycard reader at the bottom. I tore open the basement door and flung myself through it, fully aware that the ghost might be standing right there just waiting for me to bungle out into the open. But it was walking with such screwed-up purpose, I didn’t think so.
At least, I hoped not.
I burst out into the main hallway. There’s not a lot going on in the basement level of The Clinic. Meeting rooms. Restroom. Janitorial. Pharmacy.
Everything seemed to revolve around the pharmacy. Unless he was making a beeline for the circuit breakers, the pharmacy was where the ghost of Oscar Valdez was heading.
I rounded a corner. Oscar, or what was left of him, shambled toward the pharmacy. Erin was still on the stairs, I knew that, so he wasn’t heading toward her. But something about the urgency that ghost was displaying triggered the cop in me to follow. I scrambled after it, drinking down white light. And just as I thought I would lose my target to a closed, locked door, a percussion from the defibrillator upstairs pulsed through the ether. The ghost lit up, flashed brightly, and blinked invisible for just a nanosecond. But in that gap when the ghost disappeared, a nimbus of chaos flashed bright all around it—the halo I’d seen before when doctors shot a jolt of electricity through Oscar’s physical body. The halo I’d glanced when I salted Reginald. Only now, against the backdrop of the empty basement hallway, I got a better look at that halo.
And it was seething with habit demons.
It was just a flash. A glimpse. But that quick look was enough. I backpedaled quick, and Jacob—who couldn’t see all the invisible gruesomeness overlaid on physical reality—smacked into my back. White light leapt from me to him. “Goddammit—don’t touch me!”
“I’m sorry!” He sounded panicked—he couldn’t have seen the flash of discharge, but he might very well have felt it. “You just stopped all of a sudden and I—”
“The pharmacy—it went in the pharmacy.” Cripes—had all of them been heading for the pharmacy?
“I’ll get Erin.” Jacob turned on his heel and pounded back up the stairs while I stood ready on the balls of my feet and tried to cobble together a protective shell of white light. He didn’t mean to steal it. I knew that intellectually. But the thought of my defenses being whisked away in proximity of the thing that used to be Oscar scared the living crap out of me.
Frankly, part of me was relieved that I couldn’t go after that ghost. Okay, all of me. Like, really freaking relieved. Because the last thing I needed was the habit demons stuck all over it to decide I was a tastier target.
I had resigned myself to dredging up some sort of expression of disappointment that wouldn’t sound too obviously contrived when the pharmacy doorknob turned. I froze, horrified, and backed away. But it wasn’t the contaminated ghost that pushed the door open. It was Dr. Bertelli.
At least, I hoped it was. I’d better check. “Oscar?”
Bertelli did a double-take at me. “What’s that? Wait, never mind. What are you doing down here when I explicitly requested you stay on the first floor?”
It sure as hell sounded like Bertelli. “Code Blue Star,” I told him—as if that had any bearing at all on what was going on. “I’ll need to access the pharmacy.”
“Under no circumstances can I allow any unauthorized personnel unsupervised access to our patients’ medications. Just think of the liability! No, it’s impossible. It would put our patients at risk—and our patients always come first.”
While my sidearm was a comforting hardness against my ribs, and while I would’ve loved nothing more than to bully my way into that room, real-life law enforcement isn’t like the movies. You can’t just wave your gun around like a disgruntled headcase at a preschool. But body language speaks just as loud as a weapon. I got right up in Bertelli’s face and said, “If you don’t open that door right now, I will cite you for obstruction.”
Since I was no longer a cop, I couldn’t cite anyone for anything. But he didn’t know that…and like a good white-collar asshole, he was suitably impressed by my stance. Oh, he hemmed and hawed all right, something about the board and something else about indemnity, but he opened the damn door.
I dragged down another volley of white light—did I feel that in my eyeball? Cripes, I hoped not—and rushed into the pharmacy.
Where I was entirely alone.
I sucked even harder at the white light, since a cagey ghost can camouflage itself better than a raisin in a chocolate chip cookie. Was what remained of Oscar flickering just outside my range of vision? I pulled harder, and looked. I didn’t think so. But I had to make sure.
Jacob and Erin joined Bertelli in the doorway. “I need a few minutes in here,” I told Jacob. “And I need to concentrate.”
“Alone?” Bertelli cried. “Only authorized personnel have access to the medication—”
“Erin can stay.” I looked at her to see if she had any qualms about me volunteering her as my babysitter. She was pale and her eyes were wide behind her thick glasses, but she gave me a shallow nod of agreement.
Bertelli wanted to complain, I could tell. But he could hardly object to me being in there if I was monitored by the person in charge of the pharmacy. I gave Jacob a meaningful look, cut my eyes to Bertelli, then glanced at the far end of the hall. He nodded and said, “Let’s give Agent Bayne the space to do his job,” and then herded the complaining administrator a short distance away.
“Why do you need to see the pharmacy?” Erin asked. Her voice shook.
“You probably don’t wanna know.” I drank down white light as she let me into the workroom, then opened up the vault and the storage locker too. “You’d better stay by the hall.”
I’ll give her credit. She didn’t jump to the conclusion that I was just out to pocket some Valium.
I took stock of the workroom. No ghost. I pulled harder at the white light and approached the climate-controlled bunker where the medication was kept. No ghost there, either. Finally, I checked out the equipment storage. The cluster of disused medical goods was chaotic, all jumbled up, sideways, backwards, upside down. Poorly lit, to boot. “What’s the deal with this?” I asked Erin.
“It keeps the outdated stuff out of everyone’s way.”
“Why don’t they just get rid of it?”
“Liability, I guess. Someone could hurt themselves with it and trace it back to us.” I pondered the jumble of crap, and she added, “Dr. Bertelli caught the last pharmacist taking naps in there.”
A roomful of clutter was the last place I’d personally want to nap. Still, I couldn’t see why anyone would care about a bunch of decrepit medical equipment.
I backed up, and took stock of the rooms as a whole. Nothing. If the suite hadn’t been locked to me, I could’ve seen exactly where the ghost went. If he disappeared through a particular wall, for instance. Or sank through the floor. Or if he just stopped in the middle of the room and flew apart. Thanks to Bertelli’s ghostly cock-blocking, I’d never know.
Of course, there was always the chance that Oscar Valdez hadn’t left the pharmacy at all. “Remind me—how many refills do I get on my last prescription?”
“The painkillers? None. That’s pretty standard—the team would have to write you a new scrip. Why, is your eye bothering you? I can page someone.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and waved off her concern. If whatever was left of Valdez really was possessing her, he would’ve made a surprisingly good pharmacist.
I did one more sweep of the pharmacy, and then headed back upstairs. The bleating of all the monitors had died down, and everyone was distraught and hushed. And the form in the emergency bay that was once Oscar Valdez was now just another sheet-covered body.
Someone on staff, a woman, was crying. These guys’d had zero casualties up until a week ago, so I wasn’t surprised they weren’t as cavalier as the folks at LaSalle General. And Jacob had taken advantage of the opportunity to do some comforting. This was good. The more we could get the staff here to think we were on their side, the better off we’d be. Not that we weren’t on their side. More like we needed to do whatever it took to stop Kick from spreading. But when Jacob turned to avail himself of the nearest box of tissues, I realized that it wasn’t some random nurse he was comforting, but Carolyn.
I’d never seen her cry before.
I didn’t know what to make of it.
Carolyn went out to the car to collect herself. It took her nearly an hour before she could pitch in and do her share of the work. It turned into a long, grueling day. We questioned a bunch of people, including the Stiff half of Oscar’s PsyCop unit, to retrace his steps. But frankly, chances were, he scored the Kick off-duty, so no one was surprised when his coworkers turned out to be a bust.
Still, we had to try.
What was it that had inspired Oscar to play psyactive Russian roulette? Was it the missing kid he found—abducted, but alive? Or the kid he was still trying to locate?
He should have known better.
Not because he was a precog...but because he was a cop. He refused to acknowledge his limits and he insisted on using just one more time. And now? Not only was the kid he was looking for languishing in some sick bastard’s bed—or maybe a shallow grave out by the landfill—but so were all the other kids Oscar would never have a chance to bring home.
Selfish. That’s what it was, him trying to force his talent open with Kick. Just plain selfish.
And now look where it got him.
The ride home that night was pensive. Jacob and I were both rattled over what happened. Losing a brother in blue always hit hard. Losing a fellow PsyCop was positively brutal. Not only that, but I’d lost a really solid ghost to a locked door—a ghost who could’ve given me solid intel on the source of the drugs.
When we got home, I gave Darla another call, but her voicemail was still the same. Damn it. If only I could have her for half an hour, we’d get a shot at contacting Valdez and breaking this case wide open.
If only I could figure out how to call a ghost long-distance myself.
Note that I had no doubt of my capacity to reach past the veil. After all, Darla got only the vaguest twinge of an impression where I saw a full-blown repeater. It was my ability in question. The fact that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
Or the fact that I was naturally focused in a particular direction. Visual where Darla was auditory. Physical where Darla was etheric. Could a medium even train themselves to shift from one focus to another, given enough time, effort and patience, in the way a right-handed person might learn to write left-handed if they had no other choice? Or was it as futile as trying to change your facial features by simply thinking about them?
I’d been standing there in the vestibule staring at Darla’s number on my phone for who-knows-how-long when the sound of something breaking in the kitchen brought me back to present-day reality with a sudden jerk. I headed in, and found Jacob standing amidst the carnage of a dropped container of chili. And since we were transitioning from plastic storage containers to glass and our kitchen floor was ceramic tile, not only were there globs of saucy ground beef and beans all over, but shards of broken glass, too.
I refrained from observing that it reminded me of a week-old murder scene I’d once worked. Judging by the look on Jacob’s face—a look that was entirely out of proportion with the dropped chili—he wouldn’t have found it even remotely cute. I grabbed a plastic bag out of the drawer and said, “We’re all upset about Valdez.”
Jacob gave a little start as if he hadn’t even registered that I was there. “I didn’t really know the guy. Only in passing.”
O…kay. I knelt just outside the splatter zone and picked out the biggest, most dangerous-looking hunks of glass, though everyone knows it’s the sneaky little shards that’ll get you. I grabbed a spatula, hoping to avoid finding said shards the hard way, and started shoveling the fragment-studded chili into the bag. Jacob grabbed a serving spoon and followed suit. When we excavated down to the tile—hooray, our grout work was now orange—he said, “You stopped so suddenly.”
“Stopped…what?”
“If I could’ve avoided touching you, I would have. Give me some
credit. I do know how this all works.”
Wow. We’d both been ruminating over the death of Oscar Valdez, but for entirely different reasons. His, a lot more personal than mine. “I know you do.”
“Just because I can’t actually see it like you can—”
“Jacob—I know. I didn’t mean to snap at you. You just surprised me, is all.” In a stunningly dangerous moment, I might add, though pointing that out would only make things worse.
“Put yourself in my shoes. I lost Kamal’s trail and can’t figure out where the hell Patrick Barley came from. Laura hardly even speaks to me. I used to think I was good at being a Stiff, acting as the right-hand man to a high-level Psych. But I felt that energy jumping between us and there was nothing I could do to stop it. You think training is sparse for mediums? It’s nonexistent for…whatever it is I’ve got.”
I was supposed to be the one with the inferiority complex. Not him. “Hey.” I grabbed Jacob’s hand and squeezed it against the handle of the spoon. Nothing extrasensory leapt between us. “Even with whatever support the Program can give us, this is a bigger case than either of us is used to tackling. The stakes are high. Plus, it’s personal. It’s bound to be frustrating. And of course we want to do better. But, heck, even if we weren’t psychic, we’d just feel daunted in some other way. Cut yourself some slack.”
He nodded, then nudged off my hand to delve beneath the sink for some liquid cleanser with bleach. I yanked off a wad of paper towel and swabbed up all the liquid and the remaining few beefy crumbles. Jacob squirted on the cleanser and pushed it into the grout with our kitchen sponge.
Despite the talk, he still felt shitty about grabbing my white light, I could tell. And I still felt shitty for barking at him.
Bitter Pill Page 15
