Maybe I should’ve hit a yoga class while I was waiting for the baby to appear instead of sitting here watching the prayer candles flicker. Fat lot of good that realization did me now. I took a deep, centering breath, and tried to scoop up the baby again.
It was no good.
“How can I help?” Jacob asked. He might not have been able to see the ghost, but he knew what I looked like when I floundered around ineffectively.
“Just gimme a sec.”
I pictured all my rainbow chakras spinning, took a deep, cleansing breath, and opened up the top of my head to the white light. Not sure if the edge of desperation was a hindrance or a help. Only that I must’ve really expected to succeed, given how distressing it was to fail.
I couldn’t tell if I was powering up anymore or not. For all I knew, the psychic power was only passing through, like a spent scoop of coffee, with all the caffeinated goodness long ago filtered from the grounds. I might very well be at capacity. I took up the bottle of Hoyt’s Cologne and sprinkled it around the baby, then anointed my own hands. It smelled like pumpkin spice flavored aftershave. Hopefully getting the olfactory senses involved would give me some kind of edge. I sat with the stink of cloves for a long moment, and then I reached, yet again, for the squirming half-seen baby.
Still nothing.
It hardly seemed right to pitch a handful of salt and try to command the spirit, but I was running out of options. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a tickle at the back of my throat seemed to suggest that maybe that baby would be safe on the other side by now, if only I had access to a half-dose of Kick.
My anxiety ratcheted higher still.
Jacob edged forward and said, “This isn’t all on you. Let me help.”
“Fine. Let’s do the salt.” He brought it over, pried up the flimsy metal chute, and dumped a big mound into my palm. White light…white light…white light. It seemed like the salt should light up to my inner eye, but it didn’t. I was too weak.
I could probably see it if I was on Kick.
No, goddammit. The only thing I’d accomplish by taking that drug would be landing myself in the ER. Or worse. Besides, I didn’t even have any.
Jacob settled his hands over the top of it and his kinesthetic energy prickled through the crystalline structure. I felt it as the slightest brush of magnetism, like when a synthetic sock fresh from the dryer wants to cling to my polyester hoodie.
Between my mojo and his, the salt was as ready as it would ever get.
I poured it in a thin circle around the baby and tried to imagine my power was amplified. If it had any effect at all, it was so subtle, it might be wishful thinking. Since I was visual, I tried to visualize her floating up off the cold basement floor and into the warmth of the light.
Nothing happened.
Frustrated, angry—and most of all, disappointed—I stood up and brushed off my knees. “I’m sorry,” I said. To the baby. And to Jackie.
“For what?”
I spun around, but as usual, there was nothing to see. “Jackie?”
“What’re you doing down here?” she said, and all the things I associated with her, the hustle, the stubbornness, the edge of desperation…all of that was gone. She sounded quiet, and young, and phenomenally sad.
“I’m trying to help your baby.”
A long pause. Then, “Her name is Trinity.”
“Okay. Trinity. She needs to cross over. You both do.”
“I was gonna come back for her, y’know. I just needed money for the train. Twenty dollar will get you to St. Louis. I heard of a women’s shelter out there where we could start over. Then my baby girl and me, we’d get on that train…and we’d be free.”
My heart went out to her. To both of them. Not that Jackie wouldn’t have bled out anyway in the train’s bathroom halfway to Peoria…but at least they would have been together. And maybe Trinity would have survived. “Forget about St. Louis. You can be free now.”
Silence.
“Jackie?”
“Is she gone?” Jacob asked anxiously.
I put my finger to my lips and held my breath, and just when I thought we’d really blown it, Jackie spoke again.
“I was gonna get my life together. For Trinity. Stop using. Get a job, a real job. Find us a place to live, just the two of us. No one would ever raise a hand to her. Ever. You know what I’m saying?”
I considered how much I could realistically promise her was on the other side of the veil. I’d only had a glimpse myself, and from that glimpse, it felt more like inner peace than St. Louis. “Whatever’s over there, it’s got to be better than this. And the two of you will be together, just like you wanted.”
“No, we won’t,” she said sadly. “Trinity is pure, but I got too much sin on me. I was gonna try to make things right. To be a better person. But I just ran out of time.”
“Tell her the man who stabbed her was convicted,” Jacob demanded. “Tell her he came to justice.”
It wasn’t about justice, I realized. It was that Jackie couldn’t move on because she didn’t feel worthy of heaven. And before I could reassure her that whatever she’d endured on this earth must surely be punishment enough for anyone, something very subtle rippled through the ether. Whatever small window of visibility Trinity possessed was done for the night. The baby was gone.
And so was Jackie.
CHAPTER THIRTY
No wonder Jackie was lucid one minute and desperate to turn a twenty-dollar trick the next. She was subject to the same mysterious etheric rhythms as her daughter.
In her case, I wasn’t sure which was worse. Knowing she was dead, or not knowing.
Once the prayer candles were cool enough to handle without dripping wax all over ourselves, Jacob and I packed up our gear and headed home, and got back to the cannery well past midnight. Jacob kept trying to wrap his head around the situation as best he could, but I had precious little explanation to give him.
Jacob was desperate to reassure me. Or maybe to reassure himself. “We’ll try again—we’ll be better prepared next time. Carl would come help if we asked. Or we could bring the GhosTV.”
Which, if I were telling the God’s honest truth, I didn’t even know how to use. Other than showing me that Jacob’s power was pulsing under his skin in red, ropy veins, even the TV might not do us a damn bit of good.
Frustrated and disillusioned, I climbed into bed with my earbuds and phone, hoping to get enough sleep to function the next day. I chose Calming Comet from the Mood Blaster menu and an amber-tinted galaxy opened up. Maybe all the orange was to counter the “blue light” that supposedly kept people awake…or maybe just an aesthetic choice. Not only were the graphics and the music different from Perky Planet, but the game was different too. Instead of bouncing, bursting action, I guided my comet through a soothing flow around and between planets. When I hit a celestial body, there was no fiery explosion. The comet just nudged it aside. Not much of a challenge—and maybe that was the whole point. As the music droned along and the whub-whub-whub of the binaural pulses slowed down, I felt my eyelids drooping. By the time the comet tucked itself into the Milky Way with a happy sigh, I was drowsy enough to fall asleep with the lights on.
Sleep comes in many stages. If I was willing to wear a fitness tracker, no doubt it would tell me which stage I was in when my phone rang. And it would probably be a deep one. I snorted awake and scrabbled around for my phone, then realized it was right there at the end of my earbuds. It was 3AM and I didn’t recognize the number, but since I’d given out my card to anyone at The Clinic who would take it, I picked up.
“Bayne.”
“Agent? It’s Dr. Gillmore. I just got a call there’s an overdose on the way to LaSalle. And it sounds like Kick.”
Thankfully, Jacob drove, because I was still half-asleep. We turned into the parking lot on two wheels and screeched to a halt in a handicap spot—and I damn near had a heart attack thinking Jacob had mowed down a big fat pedestrian…until the guy flickered an
d reappeared halfway through our front bumper, clutching at his left arm.
I opened up the top of my head and groggily sucked down white light. The repeater staggered, fell, then reappeared in our bumper. Oh well. As long as he didn’t try to follow us, I probably didn’t need to worry about him. But even though I knew the likelihood of a repeater sticking to something was minimal, Jacob’s car definitely had an exorcism coming in its near future.
Plenty of folks on the daytime staff at LaSalle know me from all the time I spent throwing salt on the victims of the hospital fire that had been doused some eighty years ago, but to the night guards, I was just another groggy guy in a rumpled suit. While Jacob peeled off to square us away with the guards, I found Dr. Gillmore pacing by the emergency bay. “Where’s your usual partner?” she asked.
“Zigler? He’s home in bed with his wife, I presume. Zig stayed on with the police department when I left. Jacob’s FPMP.”
We watched as Jacob said something that left both guards suitably impressed with his credentials…and I realized Gillmore was checking out more than just his body language.
I couldn’t help but brag a little. “He’s also my future husband.” I must’ve sounded like I was being a smartass, judging by the look she gave me. “If the crises ever stop coming long enough for us to tie the knot, anyhow.”
“Huh.” She unabashedly scrutinized his butt. “Some folks say work and pleasure don’t mix. But I can see where you’d make an exception.”
Whatever brief moment of bonding had just occurred, it came to an abrupt end as an ambulance peeled up and the paramedics scrambled out to grab the gurney. “Madeline Cruz,” one of the paramedics announced. “Fifty-six. Found unconscious by her stepdaughter.” I was accustomed to getting a general feel for a person at a quick glance—gender, race, age, weight, height and clothing—and no way would I have pegged this Cruz woman as a day over 40—not until I got a look at her hands. She’d had work done on her face. Expensive work. Even her pajamas screamed money. How the hell had someone like her ended up on Kick?
“BP 160 over 90, pulse is 110 and erratic. We thought we were looking at a seizure….”
“But there’s no history of seizure,” Gillmore guessed. The paramedic confirmed it. On the gurney, the woman twitched—a spastic flap of her hands while her heels drummed arrhythmically. My skin crawled, and I realized that in my grogginess I’d totally been neglecting my white light. Damn it. I focused on my third eye and pulled.
“Let’s get her started on an IV—”
Whatever Gillmore was about to say, she was cut off by the appearance of a brick shithouse of a guy from the waiting room with a bloody towel pressed over his eye. “What about me?” he demanded.
The paramedics flinched away—he was really formidable, and he was angry, too—but Gillmore stood firm. “Sir? Go back to your seat and we’ll call you just as soon as—”
“I’ve been here an hour. You want me to lose my eye?”
Up until that point, everything had been moving fast. But it was a controlled speed. Now, though, with an angry bleeder gearing up for a tantrum, things turned chaotic. The guy with the eye was clearly scared, and guys who’ve found that bluster and intimidation are the quickest way to get what they want were unlikely to take a “no” answer sitting down. Everyone’s attention was on the eye guy except the paramedics, who were busy transferring Cruz to a bed. I flattened against the back of the emergency bay to stay out of their hair. “On three,” the leader of the team said. “One, two….”
As they hoisted the woman over, her twitching intensified into something more like flailing, and one of the paramedics took a diamond ring to the cheekbone. And now we had two bleeders.
“I’m fine,” he declared as he grabbed a wad of gauze from a nearby stock of medical supplies. He’d probably need a stitch or two, or at least a butterfly suture bandage. But while his partner was looking at him and mentally assessing the damage, something small clattered to the floor and landed directly between my feet.
A contact lens case.
Ask me if I ever developed a cop instinct and I’ll deny it up and down. But even before the tiny plastic case hit the floor, I knew there was something inside it other than contact lenses. I don’t need to wear contacts myself, though I’ve dated guys who have. And every one of them kept their lenses by the bathroom sink…not in their pajamas.
I pocketed the case, then glanced around to see if anyone noticed. Jacob’s attention was on the yelling eye-bleeder guy. The security guards’, too. The paramedics were distracted by the bleeding cheek. Cruz was twitching on the bed. With no one looking, I reached into my pocket and gave the case a subtle shake. Something inside rattled…suspiciously like a pill.
I eased my hand out of my pocket.
Somehow, Gillmore managed to explain to the eye guy that it was his eyelid bleeding, not his eyeball, which calmed him down enough for the team to turn its attention back to Cruz. They started a drip and pumped her full of saline, anticonvulsants and sedatives, and the twitching stopped.
At least, her twitching did.
My foot was tapping on the linoleum as if I’d been watching a jazz combo, not a potentially fatal drug reaction.
Again, I realized my white light was low, and I made an effort to fill my tank. If Cruz shed her mortal coil and tried me on for size, clearly neither of us would be too keen on the results. Would it be weird of me to slip in my earbuds and play a few rounds of Perky Planet to top up my light levels? Probably so.
The lens case felt heavy in my pocket, despite the fact that it weighed almost nothing. Because I was tampering with evidence? Hardly. Authorities already had samples of Kick in analysis, and any prints on the case would be from the victim. While there was a precog in the FPMP’s employ, the hits she got were so random and obscure, they tended to throw investigators off the scent. The cases where she consulted took twice as long to solve. No, it felt heavy because I knew that if I needed to boost my white light, a cruise through the galaxy on my new app would certainly be noticed, but I could turn aside and swallow a pill with no one being any the wiser.
The pill in my pocket might not be Seconal. But I felt that old, familiar yearning at the back of my tongue nonetheless.
The team stabilized Cruz well enough to transfer her to ICU, where her hysterical husband was waiting. Gillmore stepped up beside me, planted her hands on her hips and scowled at the empty emergency bay. “Guess I jumped the gun in calling you in. It’ll be a while before she regains consciousness.”
“You did the right thing,” I murmured…and patted my pocket to reassure myself that the pill was safe and sound.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The ride home was middle-of-the-night quiet. No one was around but us, some bakery delivery vans, and a dozen or so intersection repeaters.
“I’ll need to question Cruz when she wakes up,” Jacob said.
“She has a teenage stepdaughter, doesn’t she? Start there.” Hopefully it was just some stray pills the kid brought home from a party and not a whole new pipeline of deadly recreational psyactives.
There was the opportunity to get another two and half hours’ sleep that we really couldn’t afford to blow off. Jacob was out within ten minutes of his head hitting the pillow. It’s not that the shit we’d seen at the hospital didn’t affect him. It was that working sex crimes had been so much worse that in comparison, this new gig could sometimes be a relief.
Would it help for me to break out my new app and pledge my brainwaves to whichever fraternity would promise to send me off to dreamland? Maybe. But a good night’s sleep doesn’t come without a cost, and I strongly suspected the reason I had trouble holding onto my white light was because of my sojourn earlier that evening with Calming Comet. I’d need to be on my game in the morning. No two ways about it.
But was that really an issue, since I had a psyactive at my disposal?
The rational part of my brain tried to shut down that idea just as soon as it took form. Bu
t that’s the thing about thoughts. It’s impossible to unthink them.
I’m all for better living through pharmaceuticals, but I couldn’t recall a time when psyactives have ever done me much good. Usually, they’d need to build up in your system for weeks, kind of like antidepressants. Those were the kind Roger Burke dosed me with. They didn’t enhance my working capacity at all—they just made the entire spirit world eager to slip under my skin. And then there were the horse pills Con Dreyfuss supplied. Effective at helping me drag Jennifer Chance across the veil? I suppose. But given the physical toll they took on my body, I wasn’t keen on trying them again. Not with my own MRIs so fresh in my mind.
But Kick wasn’t formulated from the horse pills. It was the safe-ish one, with something extra added to sidestep the need for weeks of buildup. And I was perfectly fine now. So if I did end up turning to a little chemical support, there’d be nothing to worry about.
A little voice told me Kick was only fatal the third or fourth time around, so actually, the fact that I’d probably taken its precursor made it more dangerous, not less…but I decided that had nothing to do with me. It was a good long while since Burke slipped those psyactives in my coffee. Any psyactive sensitivity would’ve worn off by now.
Never mind the fact that those drugs had probably been tested on me back at Camp Hell, too. Though that was years ago.
Years and years.
And back then, I’d had so many drugs coursing through my system….
The memory floated to the surface of my mind. Just a fragment at first—the scenery skimming by the window of the van I was riding in—then another memory, and another. Faun Windsong staring out the opposite window like she’d forgotten what a tree looked like. In the row behind us, Richie whining, “Stop it. I mean it! Stop!” followed by Dead Darla’s quiet snigger.
And the look on Krimski’s face when he swung around from the front row and said, “Do you think this is a game?”
Krimski was the administrator who took over Camp Hell once the first director went on a permanent vacation. He was a middle-aged guy with deep creases in his face that most definitely weren’t laugh lines. I would’ve gotten a dangerous vibe off him even if I hadn’t seen the spirit of the previous director strangled in his office.
Bitter Pill Page 19
