“Big wooden console, heavier than a weight bench, and duct tape holding the special guts inside. I’ve got it, all right. And I’ve been waiting for a good excuse to get rid of it.”
Chance huffed out a breath. It was expelled from Darla in a billow of frost. “You are your own worst enemy. You’d do something so stupid out of petulant spite? If you actually harnessed the power of my tuner, you could have the world at your feet. Money and power—yes, of course—but even more important, knowledge. A smart man would leverage those secrets to ensure his continued success. You, though? Even you should be tempted by an unlimited stream of information…something so detailed, you could mete out all the punishment you could hope for, enough to satisfy even your overdeveloped sense of justice.”
“All the evidence in the world wouldn’t stop my perps from walking. The problem’s not lack of evidence—it’s the public’s suspicion of Psych. Leave Darla now, or I’m calling Dr. K.” I slimed the handset on my desk with my ectoplasm hand, and hoped Chance didn’t realize I had no idea whatsoever how the FPMP phone system worked. One thing I knew about lying—you can’t oversell it. I could have counted down, given her one last chance to relent, but instead I calmly hit the 0-key and hoped it pulled up a staff directory.
Because I realized I wasn’t bluffing. I could dump that damn GhosTV on Dr. K without a backward glance. Part of me might always wonder what it would be like to wield Marie St. Savon-level talent. But mostly, I’d be thrilled to bid that monstrosity adieu.
If you know your party’s extension, please dial it now, the phone told me, and I inwardly cursed the fact that I’d grown so accustomed to letting Laura do everything for me, back when she was the Operations Coordinator and I was a lowly contractor.
But I must have hidden my chagrin well. Chance said, “All right, I’ll go,” through Darla’s chattering teeth. “But this interaction has given me plenty of food for thought. I hadn’t realized it was possible to come back…until today.”
The vibrational field might not have been the same one I was used to working with, but even so, I felt Jennifer Chance leave the room, like a change in pressure and an unpleasant wave of static. Darla’s back arched as if she’d been zapped by an electrical current. And just as suddenly, she slumped. Jacob caught her before she spilled onto the floor. Her blood smeared his collar, and her face left a trail of snot and deadfrost across the front of his jacket.
“Is Chance gone?” Jacob asked.
“Yeah. And as long as Darla doesn’t go looking for her, hopefully she’ll stay gone.”
At the sound of her name, Darla came around, pushed herself off Jacob and gave a long, wet snuffle. “What the hell?” she said woozily. “What happened?”
“You’re okay,” Jacob said in his best control-the-situation cop-voice. “Everything’s okay—”
“Bullshit it’s okay…is this blood? Damn it!” She shoved out of her chair, smeared the thawing goo off her face with the back of her hand, and staggered toward the door.
“Darla,” I said, “wait.”
She shrugged me off as she gained momentum. “Chill out, Vic, I’m just going to the bathroom.”
The general-use unisex FPMP restrooms are nowhere near as fancy as the john in Dreyfuss’ old office, but they’re reasonably nice. I’d like them even better if there was less wood and more clean, white tile, but they looked more like domestic powder rooms than institutional public toilets. Jacob hung back in the hall, but I crowded in with Darla while she got a look at herself. She was no longer turning blue, but the shredded skin hanging from her lips was enough to shock anyone.
Darla leaned across the sink, peered at her reflection, and said, “Well, that’s scary. How did it look—full-on Linda Blair?”
“Everything but the pea soup.” Though between the snot and the ectoplasm, the two of us gave The Exorist’s effects crew a run for its money.
“I hardly ever go that deep.” Darla ran a paper towel under cool water, wrung it out, and began carefully blotting her mouth. It looked swollen and tender, but now that she’d stopped breathing out ice crystals, not too much worse than a really fierce case of chapped lips. “Did your guy at least give you something useful?”
“Unfortunately, an old nemesis of mine butted in before you found him. She died in the building—hell, the lab might even have tissue samples squirreled away—so I’m declaring the FPMP headquarters a no-channel zone from here on out.”
If I were Darla, I would’ve been majorly freaking out. But I guess she didn’t find the thought of a ghost using her as a mouthpiece as disturbing as I did. “Sucks to be us. What now?”
“I think you should see a doctor.”
While Darla started to insist that she’d be fine, Jacob shouldered in and said to me, “Can I talk to you in the hall?”
Darla made a shooing motion. “Go. I don’t need you to help me blow my nose.”
I stepped into the hall, and Jacob took me by the arm and said low in my ear, “How is it possible for Chance to do that?”
“Guess Darla’s reception is different from mine.”
Understatement of the year.
Jacob paused with his hand on my forearm, then instead of releasing it, pulled me into a fierce and impulsive kiss, right there in the hallway of the FPMP. Yeah, it was Saturday…but still. He followed up the lip-lock by gliding his forefinger across my lower lip. “Promise me you’ll never do that. I couldn’t deal with knowing something dead was speaking through this mouth.”
“You and me both, Mister. You and me both.”
Darla came out of the bathroom with her makeup scrubbed off, carefully dabbing lip balm on her peeling lips. She said, “The more convoluted this gets, and the worse I strike out, the more I feel the need to prove myself. But I’m gonna have to call it a day. I’m wiped out.”
But who knew when FPMP National would show up? I might be on Laura’s shit list, but frankly, I was scared for her. “Are you sure there’s no way we can pool our resources?” I asked.
Darla said, “Isn’t that what we’re already doing?”
I turned back toward the office and motioned for her and Jacob to follow as an idea formed in my mind. We might not have solved the whole medium problem yet, but those interviews I’d done gave me an idea. “Maybe, between the two of us, there’s a way to reach Andy without letting him take over your whole consciousness.” I opened Carl’s supply cabinet, moved a few liturgical candles out of the way, then started shoving things around in earnest.
“What?” Darla said. “Like a psychic splicer cable?”
“Kind of.” Censer, charcoal, prayer mat. Damn it. “But I doubt I’ll find what I’m looking for in Carl’s box of tricks.” I turned to Jacob and said, “Where can we get a Ouija board?”
Chapter 36
“Seriously?” Darla rolled her eyes. “A Ouija board? You know they churn those things out of the same factories that make Battleship and Monopoly.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but it’s just a tool, a way to focus our talent, together. I’ve exorcised ghosts with cinnamon sugar sprinkles. Even if the Ouija board rolled off the same line as Cards Against Humanity, Andy wouldn’t be any the wiser.”
Darla gave a pish-posh flip of the hand. “What I’m saying is, we don’t need to waste time tracking down a board. We can draw our own.”
“That can’t be safe,” Jacob said.
“Not here,” Darla agreed. Sort of. While contradicting him. “We can do it at my hotel. Your stowaway won’t be looking for us there.”
Metaphysically speaking, we were so far out of my league, I couldn’t say if that made sense or not. So I filled a case with frankincense, blessed salt and candles just in case.
We piled into Jacob’s car and I plugged in my phone to charge, but on a Saturday, traffic was sparse enough to land us at Darla’s place before the screen even woke up.
FPMP Regional had put up Darla in a hell of a hotel. No crystal chandeliers and flocked wallpaper like you’d find in the
heart of the Loop. This one was all polished concrete, oversized rivets and exposed beams, with artwork that looked like the painter had wandered away before they got a chance to finish their canvas. It was the way the cannery would look, if we had the sensibility, money and desire to make our industrial-functional look industrial-chic. I was glad we didn’t. Otherwise, it would be too pretentious for me to live there.
Darla’s room was gigantic, with ceilings even higher than ours at home. The room dwarfed the furniture, which was all chrome and leather and distressed wood. Unceremoniously, she cleared a stack of books and papers off a broad wooden table made from a reclaimed industrial door. She grabbed a short tumbler from the modern kitchenette and set it face-down on the tabletop. “Now all we need is an alphabet.”
“Actually,” I said, “we could probably get away with two words: yes and no.”
Darla pulled a glittery eyeliner from her purse and scrawled each word on the table’s surface. “Makes sense to me. We can always add more later.”
“I don’t like this,” Jacob said. “Vic, after what you just saw, how could this possibly seem like a good idea?”
“It’s different,” I said. “We’ll be doing it together. And you’re here.”
Darla quirked an eyebrow at that reasoning.
“I’m a little more than an NP,” Jacob told her. “I have a resistance. But even so, I don’t want to be rash.”
I barked out a tiny laugh. “And since when has that become a concern for you?”
“Since I realized we weren’t rid of a certain someone after all.”
I highly doubted that Jennifer Chance could hear us talking about her from beyond the veil, but I had to admit, Jacob wasn’t the only one who was concerned. I’d hate to draw her back into my life just because I was looking for Andy. Darla was fine with it, though. Considering that she’d been the one on the receiving end of a spectral chemical peel, she was taking it all in stride. “Look, don’t believe everything you see about Ouija boards in the movies. If demons really used them to possess little kids, in our line of work, we’d hear about it. Vic and I will stay in waking consciousness the entire time. And if it gets weird, we stop. Easy as that.”
Jacob locked eyes with me, then looked at Darla. I surreptitiously chafed some goosebumps off my forearm and said, “So…just to make sure everyone’s who they say they are, can you tell me something that only Darla would know?”
“Seriously?” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Fine. You used to think hamburgers were made of ham—and Richie was the one who corrected you. Happy now?”
“You could’ve picked something a little less embarrassing.” Then again, the fact that she hadn’t was probably an even better indication that we were really dealing with Darla and not Jennifer Chance.
Jacob didn’t find it funny. In fact, he had that look about him I knew all too well. “Think for a second, Vic. The potential benefits can’t possibly outweigh the risks. You’re both opening yourselves up to God-knows-what, not just to earthbound spirits, but anything dead or undead. And for what? I’d sleep a lot better at night knowing who killed our agents and why—but not if it meant I gave up you to do it.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I know my limits, and you know me. I’m hardly the overachiever of the year. If I feel it going south, I’ll pull out. I promise.”
“But the risk—”
“It’s just a matter of me letting go of the glass.” His worrying made me uncomfortable. Not because I thought it was unreasonable, but because I hated the idea of what would become of him if anything ever did happen to me. I was used to him being blasé—and I could just be annoyed with him about it and move on. But this new, post-morgue, zombie-tackling Jacob who actually realized exactly how vulnerable we were made it hard to be cavalier. “Look, we need your head in the game. So set aside what you saw in the office and start filling up with white light. And whatever you do, make sure you don’t steal either of ours.”
“Should I even ask?” Darla said. “Anyway, like I said. It’s no big deal. We’ll each do our own ritual, and calm ourselves down into an alpha state. It’s no worse than watching TV.”
She paused. Wondering if maybe Richie’s origin story actually did contain a grain of truth? Maybe. I know I was.
While she stared into one of her crystals, I sucked down white light. My hand still felt clammy from the invisible salt I’d conjured back in the office, but a body’s only capable of so much high alert, and my state of heightened reaction had faded to a queasy nervousness. Holding onto the light feels precarious, like walking up the stairs with a too-full cup of coffee you’re trying really hard not to spill. But it’s a good feeling too. Centered. Powerful.
We lit a few candles and seated ourselves at the table, with Jacob off to one side holding a pen and notepad at the ready. I positioned myself so that I couldn’t see him scowling his disapproval at me and focused on Darla instead.
“We got this,” Darla told me. She placed her fingertips on the base of the upturned glass. “No problem.”
I almost asked her which hand I should use, but then realized how silly that would’ve been. The clammy one, obviously. I mirrored her gesture, and we looked at each other, and waited. And within seconds, I felt profoundly silly. Because nothing happened.
“I think you’ve gotta ask something.” Darla shut her eyes. “Jacob? Whenever you’re ready.”
Solemnly, he said, “We need to speak to Andy Parsons. Andy, can you hear us?”
The situation was serious. There was a lot on the line. Jacob was sick with worry over me and I’d just had a chat with Jennifer Chance. There was absolutely nothing funny about what we were doing.
Except the fact that the whole situation was completely absurd.
I swallowed down a laugh. Rocked with the effort to keep it in. And felt like I was a knuckleheaded twenty-something in the chapel with Darla again. My face twisted with the effort to keep that laughter from escaping—because Jacob might forgive plenty of trespasses, but humiliating him would not be one of them.
“Andy,” he said, “if you’re here, give us a sign.”
Damn it, did he have to sound so ridiculous? I screwed up my whole, entire face and squinched up my eyes. And just when I thought, forget it, there’s no way I can possibly take this thing seriously….
The glass slid toward me.
My eyes shot open.
The glass stopped. I pulled my hand away and said to Darla, “You pushed it.”
“We both did. It’s the ideomotor response I told you about, remember? But you need to chill out and let it happen.”
Creepy—but at least it quelled that annoying urge to laugh. I sighed and re-settled myself in my chair, put my fingers on the glass, and said, “Okay, take two. Calling Andy Parsons.”
White light. White light. White light. I did my best to hold an image of Andy’s annoying face in my mind’s eye while picturing the light pouring in through my crown chakra, and my subtle bodies getting all charged up and glowy. And when the glass moved again, I did my best not to guide it, to just let the gentle weight of my fingertips go along for the ride. It moved toward me, arced, and traveled back toward Darla. Looping and returning.
“Andy,” Jacob said. “Are you here?”
The glass finished the arc it was tracing, and stopped beside the word YES.
“Do you promise on your immortal soul that you are Andy Parsons?”
The glass jerked a few inches, then picked up another one of those loopy, swirly paths. Back, forth, around…and settled again on the YES.
“Andy, we need to find out where you were killed. Was it nearby?”
The drinking glass started looping again. It was a weird sensation, the feeling of it tracing these gentle curves. My arm felt slightly numb while it was happening. Not like anything paranormal was going on. More like trying to grab something under the table and realizing you have no real sense of where your body is in space. It looped, circled, and settled on the YES.
“Were you killed inside FPMP headquarters?”
The glass moved again, faster this time. Looping. Looping. It skidded to a stop on NO.
Did it feel the same to Darla, I wondered—a weird arm, a movement that was obviously ours, yet vaguely involuntary? I’d had non-corporeal entities inside me before, and I knew damn well what it felt like: nothing. When Lisa reached out from the astral and wrote on the wall in my blood, I’d stood there having an entirely different conversation while it happened, none the wiser. And when the Criss Cross Killer gouged up Jacob with my hands, I had no idea.
Jacob named all the nearby landmarks he could think of, and each one was a NO. I strained with the effort to relax and go with the flow, but part of me wondered if maybe my ideomotor was stalled, and I kept pulling the glass toward the NO because I was scared to find out what had really happened to Andy, in case Laura was somehow behind it all. Laura had no reason to want Andy dead, right? There were other ways to shut him up. I couldn’t think of any that were quite as foolproof, but Laura was a lot better at fixing things than me.
“Grand Avenue?” NO. “Halsted?” NO.
No, I couldn’t see any reason Laura would want to protect anyone outside the official FPMP. But if it wasn’t her, then who was it?
“Canal Street?”
The glass skidded to a halt in the center of the table. I met Darla’s eyes and raised my eyebrows. She did the same and shrugged.
“Canal Street,” Jacob repeated. The glass swept through a figure eight and parked itself in the center of the table.
“Is it in a building?” he asked. NO. “Is it in an alley?” NO. “Is it in a vehicle?” NO. “But it is on Canal Street.” The glass swept across the table and parked itself in the center.
“Still thinking you don’t need an alphabet?” Darla said.
“Okay,” Jacob told her. “Go ahead.”
Darla penned the letters, large and clear, in her silver eyeliner. As she paused to re-sharpen, I thought about Andy. Interested enough in me to do extra research—digging around in something that ended up getting him killed. Maybe the information wasn’t inherently dangerous. If he’d just left everything alone like Dreyfuss said instead of running to the press, he wouldn’t have been mulched.
Agent Bayne: PsyCop 9 Page 24