Bitter Pill

by Jordan Castillo Price

“After dark.”

  Great. Since it was March, that would be fourteen hours out of any given day. “And what day was it?”

  “You think I can go check my social calendar? I told you—a white man tried selling Kick at the roach store, he got shut down, and that’s all I know. I should’ve known you wouldn’t appreciate my hard work.”

  “Of course I appreciate it. If you could just narrow it down. Yesterday? The day before?”

  Silence.

  “Jackie? Jackie!” I swung around stupidly, knowing full well I wouldn’t get a visual but not knowing what else to do. She didn’t answer. I took an angry pull of my slushy, then muttered, “Goddammit.”

  We headed over to the store in question. It was doing pretty brisk business, despite the roaches. After the way Bertelli had panned out, Jacob was pleased to have something authoritative and useful to do. While I called down white light and did a quick scan of the store to make sure nothing worse than insect life was lurking in the nooks and crannies, he persuaded the clerk to surrender the past week’s surveillance footage.

  Jacob contacted the office, and fifteen minutes later, an on-call specialist showed up with a laptop to download the files. I knew she was a specialist because she did the whole thing in ten minutes flat. And I knew she was on-call because she was wearing high heels and bright lipstick, something you hardly ever see at HQ.

  I felt bad for interrupting her date night. But as a fellow one-trick pony who got sent out to look at murder scenes any time of the day or night, I could relate. When she was done, the specialist tucked her laptop under her arm and told us, “Both of you will have full access to the footage, and our team will get to work on identifying the salient parts.”

  “We’re looking for a white guy over thirty-five.” Of which we’d seen at least half a dozen come and go in the time we’d been standing there. “After dark,” I added.

  She didn’t seem too put out by my lack of intel. Then again, surveillance in general was nothing if not tedious. It took a special kind of patience to maintain that kind of focus…a patience I sorely lacked.

  I dropped my half-full slushy into the trash and climbed into the car. I said, “There’s gonna be a mind-numbing array of white guys buying scratch-off lottery tickets in our future. And what are we even looking for, anyway?”

  Jacob shook his head. “Hopefully I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “If only we could narrow it down to a specific night.” If I had Jackie’s phone number, I’d call her, try to make nice and encourage her to scour her memory for anything at all that might be of use. I glanced at my phone—not that I actually thought I could call her, but purely out of habit—and realized that I might have a way to contact her after all. If the case Bob Zigler dug up for me was the right one, anyhow.

  I tapped my email and opened the attachments, scrolling immediately to the shots of the crime scene. I never thought I’d be grateful for the experimental psyactives I’d sucked down in my morning Starbucks, but in that time, I’d had my one visual of Jackie. And it was gruesome enough that I’d never forget. A matted wig. A sparkle tube top. And an ugly shank protruding from her breastbone.

  I’d heard the anecdote from Jackie several times before. She’s the type of ghost I’d come to think of as a complainer—someone who dies before they’ve had a chance to come to terms with it, usually from someone else’s negligence or malice. Back when I worked homicide, complainers were my bread and butter. They were the ones who couldn’t wait to blow the whistle on their own murderers.

  Hearing about it and seeing it—by the bright lights of the crime scene photographers—were two different things.

  Jackie’s fatal injury was bad enough on its own…but the photos were something right out of a horror movie. I imagine at the time the whole thing went down, it was dark and shadowy, tucked away between the back porch of an apartment building, a telephone pole, and a dumpster. For the purposes of the photographers, though, the whole thing was lit up bright as day.

  A stained, bare mattress slumped on the ground. Either it was too heavy to make it into the dumpster, or it was light enough to drag back out and help an enterprising young woman earn her twenty bucks. That gnarly old mattress would probably have been awful enough…even if it weren’t saturated with blood.

  My red slushy churned in my belly as I flicked through the photos. It was a stunning amount of blood for such a small knife. Arterial hits can really bleed, and normally that’s what I would’ve figured—until I saw the angle of the crime scene photos took special care to focus on the victim’s legs, splayed wide, with her short shorts shoved to the side and a massive stain of crimson blooming onto the mattress under her bottom.

  I was gonna be sick. I rolled down the window and gulped some air until I got it under control.

  “What is it?” Jacob asked. He looked for somewhere to pull over, but it was dinnertime and we were too close to a restaurant to even dream of finding a spot.

  I closed my eyes, clapped my palm over them, and turned the phone face-down in my lap. But none of those things could obliterate the image that was now seared into my memory of Jackie bleeding out from between her legs. Jacob managed to find a hydrant and pull over by the time I lost the battle with my gag reflex, and I got the passenger door open before I decorated the interior of Jacob’s car like the crime scene photos. It wasn’t a full-on hurl, though, just a couple of wet heaves. And the slushy tasted the same coming up as it had going down.

  I straightened back up and Jacob had his arm slung across the headrest. He massaged the back of my neck. I hadn’t realized how tense it was. When I finally felt I could talk, I said, “It’s the case report for Jackie’s murder—and it’s bad. Not just what she suffered, how rotten her life was, either. But how I’ve treated her. I don’t think I ever thought of her as an actual person. Not until now. And…I feel like a real asshole.”

  “Can I see?”

  I turned my phone over and angled it so we could both have a look. Jacob narrowed his eyes, and I could practically see the search engine churning in his mind. Crimes like these straddled both our areas of expertise, and he wondered if he was already familiar.

  He scrolled through quickly, getting an overall impression of the scene, then went back to the beginning and zoomed in on the report. Sometimes it helped to read about things in cop-speak. Dry. Factual. Even clinical. The facts themselves were bad enough. They didn’t need all the dramatic narrative my brain wanted to add.

  Jacqueline Mason had been twenty-three at the time of her murder, some two decades prior. That would put me in my last few weeks at the Cook County Mental Health and Jacob fresh out of the Police Academy. Cause of death, blood loss.

  Maybe it was splitting hairs, but this finding pissed me off. “Who the hell was Medical Examiner back then? This is a prime example of blaming the victim. She didn’t die because someone fucking stabbed her, but because she’d bled out after it.”

  Jacob agreed. “That is a weird finding,”

  If I found the perp, all these years later, would the FPMP make things right? Well, there was no making it right, not really. But if I told Laura it would rid the world of one more ghost, how could she resist pulling some strings?

  Jacob zoomed in closer on the report. “Vic, take a look at this.”

  Decedent had a four-inch serrated knife protruding from the right of the sternum three inches below the collarbone at a depth of 53 mm, piercing the right lung.

  The damage inflicted between her legs, however, was determined to have come not from the guy who’d stabbed her, but from a baby born only two hours prior. Detectives had indeed located Jackie’s assailant. There was a significant amount of investigation put in to ascertain the timeline, too, because when they tracked down the perp, covered in Jackie’s blood, they wanted to try and charge him for a double-homicide. Jackie had been trying to turn a quick BJ. Her customer decided he wanted something more.

  The guy, who had a history of erratic behavior, denied an
y knowledge of a baby and claimed he panicked when he shoved her shorts over and found a maxi-pad full of blood—way too much blood for a period. In the end, they could only charge him with aggravated assault, which could see him walk in as little as a year. I would’ve gone for assault with a deadly weapon at the very least, but maybe it was comforting to know that my collars weren’t the only ones getting away with murder. On the bright side, he managed to hang himself at the county lockup before he even received his slap on the wrist.

  The newborn infant was found dead in the basement of an empty apartment building nearby that was undergoing renovations. There was no way the crews could have heard its cries over the floor sander and vacuums.

  It was a girl.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Not only was I an asshole all these years for glossing over the fact that Jackie had died horribly.

  I was a complete dickwad for thinking of her as a “complainer.”

  Jacob flicked back to the crime scene photos. “That garage in the background…that’s across the alley from your old apartment, isn’t it?”

  He’d zoomed in in such a way that Jackie’s body wasn’t visible, though you could still see a splatter of blood on the blond brick. The graffiti was different twenty years ago. An exuberantly colorful DJ tag instead of the word “fuker.” But the distinct sag of the doorway was already well underway.

  I’d always figured the baby in the basement had a sad story. I’d never realized it would hit me so hard.

  Back when I left my car at the mechanic’s, I’d grabbed everything from the glovebox and center console, shoved it in a shopping bag, and tossed it in the trunk of the Crown Vic. I retrieved the bag now and pawed through it, looking for the old keychain I’d so recently rediscovered in my glovebox. I’d turned in the keys to my apartment when I moved out. But I’d been short one of the keys to the outside door, and given that no one ever closed the things properly anyway, management charged me twenty bucks for the inconvenience and called it good.

  The corner store we’d just exited had a pretty esoteric selection of goods: ramen from halfway across the globe, tamarind soda from south of the border, and faded air fresheners from 1972. They also sold prayer candles, cheap incense, and Hoyt’s Cologne, an alternative to Florida Water that was just as stinky, albeit in its own special way. Hoyt’s is usually used by people hoping for a run of good luck. I imagined Jackie and her daughter were long overdue to turn their luck around.

  I bought a handful of white prayer candles, a bottle of Hoyt’s, and a regular tub of iodized salt, then rejoined Jacob in the car. He was still reading through the police report in detail, but the gist of the story was enough for me—more than enough. Part of me was worried that he’d try to talk me out of what I needed to do. Jackie had the potential to help us with our current case. Did it really make sense to lay her to rest now? After all, she’d been plying blowjobs in those alleyways for nearly twenty years. What difference would it make if she stuck around just a little while longer?

  Thankfully, there was no hesitation at all when he drove us back to the scene. And thankfully, my key still worked.

  Jacob made to tap me on the shoulder but drew back at the last minute, worried he’d steal my white light. But I wasn’t charging up just yet. “Should I wait in the car?” he asked.

  “No, you’re fine. Stay.” A knot of unease rested in my belly over the notion of revisiting my least favorite basement—one I thought I’d never need to see again. “I could really use the company.”

  Other than a different padlock hanging off the storage locker that used to be mine, the basement hadn’t changed. It smelled like cheap laundry detergent and damp concrete. I found the spot where I’d seen the ghost baby—Jackie’s baby—but there was nothing there. But given that I’d just encountered Jackie in the vicinity earlier that evening, I had a strong suspicion it was only a matter of time.

  Prayer candles will burn for a week, so I lit them right away and placed them around the perimeter. I’d been taught to find magnetic north and form a compass, but it’s been my experience that ghosts aren’t necessarily that particular. Maybe it wasn’t the ghost’s preference that made the difference, but mine. I didn’t put much stock in which direction I was facing, but I felt less inadequate with a handful of salt and a snootful of cheap cologne.

  “It’ll be a while,” I told Jacob. “I’ve only seen it—the baby—really late at night.”

  “However long it takes. I’ll stand over by the stairs and make sure no one disturbs you.”

  It probably wouldn’t make any difference if I had an audience or not, but I appreciated the chance to get my head on straight. Guilt isn’t a very useful emotion. It’s distracting and it puts me off my game. I sat between two of the lit candles on the cold concrete and thought about Jackie. I wouldn’t have been able to help her back when she was alive. I was too young. Not only did I have no authority, but I had no autonomy, either. By the time anyone saw fit to give me a gun and a badge, the deed had already been done.

  I could’ve helped the dead baby’s ghost when I first saw it, though. I’d been too much of a coward. The cold seeping into my sit-bones through the fabric of my slacks was hardly penance enough for my failure to take action.

  Even with Jacob standing sentry at the foot of the stairs, it was hard to focus. I could hear someone’s TV through the floorboards, a schmaltzy sitcom soundtrack, and every time a toilet flushed, the pipes rattled. I slipped in my earbuds with the sole intention of drowning out the noise…but soon realized that Mood Blaster did a lot more than block out the TV. Would the right binaural pulses magically pump me full of white light? Unfortunately, no. But they did help me stay in the right frame of mind to fill up my reservoir myself.

  I didn’t need a watch to tell me when the time was near. My skin prickled in anticipation and my senses were drawn to the spot on the floor I was always so careful to avoid. The time for avoidance was over, though, and now I had to face it head on and bear witness.

  I was as full of light as I could really hope to be without a psyactive in my veins and a GhosTV in the background. And when the baby appeared—Jackie’s baby—I was watching.

  It waved its fists and gave a thready cry. Normally, this was the point where I’d talk to the ghost and urge it to cross over. I couldn’t usually hear repeaters. But sometimes I did. Hard to say for sure that the baby was a full-fledged spirit and not a repeater, since she couldn’t talk back, only cry. I wasn’t sure how much words actually mattered anyhow, at least with the way my particular brand of mediumship worked. I visualized the veil, somewhere over by the circuit breakers, and then imagined the baby being drawn toward it.

  Highly evolved spirits are usually the ones to take earthbound souls and help them find their way, but the crossing guards of the dead tend to station themselves at hospitals and cemeteries, where they’ll get the most traffic. There was no one like that here. Just me.

  I pocketed my earbuds and knelt awkwardly on one knee about a yard away from the apparition. Jacob was watching, and he drew closer. His face was earnest. I imagined he was practically flooding the area with his earnestness. But I only sense the manifestation of his ability when it’s thieving the white light I’ve so fastidiously gathered.

  It was hard enough to try and figure out what to say to a ghost baby without someone else listening in, but I did my best to draw support from Jacob’s presence instead of embarrassment.

  “It’s time to go,” I told the baby gently. “I know you weren’t here for long. And I can’t say for sure if it’s on to the next thing, or if you’ll get some kind of do-over. But this plane is for the living and you need to move on.”

  The newborn infant whimpered and squirmed.

  I should’ve imagined the veil in closer proximity. Ideally directly beside the tiny spirit, so all I’d have to do is nudge her over, then jump back before I got pulled in behind her. But, no. The wall by the circuit breaker was the first thing that popped into my head, an
d now the position was fixed in my mind’s eye. For all I knew, I hadn’t summoned it, but simply noticed it. I glanced from the baby to the unseeable portal and gauged the distance. A good three, three and a half yards.

  I knew what I had to do. But I didn’t like it.

  I glanced up at Jacob and wondered exactly how I should phrase it. If you see me start to die, you should probably grab me before my spirit drains out. Yeah, that would go over really well. “Wait for me to the right of the breaker box. I’m feeling a little…woozy. So catch me if I fall.”

  He seemed to buy it. And why not? It wouldn’t be the first time I pushed hard enough to make myself sick.

  If it came down to it, was I ready to cross? No. I had way too much unfinished business. Not only did I need to get Kick off the streets, but I had to put a ring on that big lug over there watching me with such palpable concern. I pulled harder at the white light and gathered myself up, and hoped to all hope that there was some kind of intelligence to the other side that would bounce back a clumsy medium who wasn’t ready to go. I’d seen plenty of dead folks, though, who were no more ready than I currently was…which I did my best not to think about.

  I shuffled forward on my knees and murmured, “No more concrete floor and rattling water heaters where you’re going. Just puffy white clouds and lullabies.” Even more white light—my capacity expands when I’m terrified—and I reached down to take her.

  My hands passed right through.

  It surprised me. I was so hopped up on light, it seemed like I should have at least felt a chill. I shifted my focus to my subtle bodies, my etheric form, and I tried again.

  Nothing.

  It just goes to show that even I have my moments of overconfidence. I should be good at exorcisms by now, I reasoned. But when I thought about it, did I really experience sensation in my etheric body? Other than the occasional chill, no. My technique involved reasoning, cajoling and begging. But how does a person do any of these things with a newborn?