Agent Bayne: PsyCop 9

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Or maybe that’s just what I was telling myself. Because whatever it is he’d seen in my records, I couldn’t rest without knowing.

  While I chewed on the implications of Andy’s death, Darla finished off the alphabet and capped her eyeliner. “Okay, Hardcore Vic. Let’s do this.”

  I centered myself, did my best to push my worries about my own issues aside, and focused on Andy.

  “Andy Parsons,” Jacob said, “are you still here?”

  The glass began its slow, lazy loop, and settled on the YES.

  “Tell us where you were shot.”

  Circles. And more circles. Occasionally veering into S-curves and strange loops. “Is he trying to write with it?” I asked—which didn’t seem to cause the glass to slow down in the slightest. “Andy, spell with the letters. We don’t know what you mean.”

  My shoulder felt stiff and my fingertips were numb. A new pattern emerged. Jerky. Like someone trying to draw a starburst. Careful not to touch us, Jacob hovered over and began recording letters. But I could tell by his scowl it was a no-go. That, and the fact that the glass landed on the Z more than once…and I doubted anyone was trying to spell pizazz.

  “Focus,” Jacob told me. The contrarian in me wanted to say, Maybe you should focus. But I couldn’t deny that I’d been thinking about Laura and my permanent record and the word pizazz. I visualized white light streaming down through the high ceiling, past the exposed ductwork and faux-industrial lights, and streaming through my thick skull via my forehead. I rallied myself with the directive, We need to figure this out before it all goes to shit. And I rested my fingertips on the glass.

  Darla shook out her hands, skimmed her fingers over her quartz necklace, took a deep, centering breath, and placed her fingers beside mine.

  The glass did a slow loop, then settled on NO.

  “Maybe he can’t spell,” Darla said. The glass zipped over to YES. “I wasn’t being serious.”

  “Even so,” I said, “the alphabet looks all messed up when you’re astral projecting. Letters and numbers are just a bunch of weird squiggles. The concepts of yes and no are pretty tangible, but the alphabet? Maybe Faun Windsong’s Ouija spirit was still on this plane. But Andy? Think how far his signal has to carry. Through the veil, through us…and maybe the act of spelling is just one filter too many.”

  The glass circled, then stopped beside YES.

  “The murder took place on multiple streets?” Jacob guessed. “In a parking lot? At a crossroad?”

  His guesses were all met with NO, and I wondered how long we could keep going. My neck was stiff and my head was starting to hurt. And after her encounter with Dr. Chance, Darla had to be in worse shape than me. “Hold on,” I told Jacob. “Let’s regroup, top ourselves off, and give this thing one final big push.”

  White, white light. I looked into the flame of the blessed candle and thought hard about how much power flowed through me. A lot. I knew it did. Enough to see and hear ghosts. Enough to sense repeaters. Enough to summon those weird invisible granules and a handful of slime. Was that enough, or did I need more? Maybe we should have taken Darla back to our place and hauled out the GhosTV. But we were so confident of our own abilities, we’d ended up here. And if we blew it now, we’d be too fatigued to try again, at which point it might be entirely too late….

  “Vic.” Darla clasped my hand. I flinched, thinking all that light I was trying to gather would jump to her like it always tried to with Jacob. But it didn’t. Because Darla and me—we were the same. Both our psychic reservoirs were full, and both of our left hands were icy cold. And the mojo had no reason to try to level out between us. She gave my hand a squeeze. “We got this.”

  “Then…let’s do it.”

  Chapter 37

  I’m not scared of the veil. Not…exactly. Back when I wrapped one of my subtle bodies around Jennifer Chance’s ghost and forced it to the other side, the veil put out a tangible pull, but that pull wasn’t for me. I might have ended up as collateral damage, but I didn’t. I made it back just fine, with all my nonphysical parts intact.

  Still, every now and then, when the sunlight bounces off a bit of chrome just right and momentarily blinds me, it takes me back to the time I touched the veil. That feeling of absolute rightness floods the shady corners of my mind…and I worry. Because when I think about it, I realize how tempting that destination actually is. So when I catch myself remembering, I stop.

  No doubt there’s a therapist out there who could help me bury that memory so deep there was no chance of me tripping over it. Dr. Kleinman hadn’t been all that old. Maybe she was still alive. Hell, maybe she was even still in practice….

  The glass began to move. Not the looping circles it had been doing before, and not the lopsided star pattern, either.

  Jacob hovered to one side, watching intently. “Where were you killed, Andy? We can’t find the scene. Where is it, Andy? Where?”

  White light. I dragged it down from the ethers for all I was worth, while Darla worked the talent however she did. The glass slid one way, then the other, back and forth, back and forth, like we were a pair of lumberjacks sawing through a tree trunk.

  My breathing deepened, as if I was exerting myself. Darla huffed. It escaped her in a cloud of frost. Come on, Andy, goddamn it, don’t be an asshole. And don’t let this sorry life of yours be for nothing. Deadfrost sprang from beneath our fingertips. It poured down the sides of the tumbler and left a silvery cascade of jagged stars behind. Where is it, damn it? Where the hell did you…?

  The glass cracked with a sound like the chime of a tiny, distant bell.

  The trembling note hung on the air as if it was frozen. I wondered if it was possible to freeze sound. Maybe. Since the frost wasn’t a physical frost.

  I wondered what it really meant to be dead. If death was really as important as we all made it out to be. And if my years of work as a homicide investigator meant anything in the grand scheme of existence.

  I pondered the meaning of life itself.

  “Vic?” Darla sounded worried.

  I realized I’d been seeing white. But only as color slowly bled back into my field of vision.

  “Is he…can you touch him?” Jacob was worried too.

  Me? Mostly, I felt numb.

  Darla stood up, got behind me, and took me by the shoulders. “Hey. Come back, you big goofus. Come on back.”

  I exhaled frost.

  My hand throbbed.

  Cold.

  Sharp.

  I stared down at the table and it took me an extra heartbeat to figure out what I was seeing. Blood and broken glass, but I attached no significance to them. I released the heavy shard I was holding. A cut on the palm—that was gonna sting. But the main thing was the series of lines carved into the tabletop.

  Good thing I was coming down off a white light high. Otherwise, the similarity to the Criss Cross Killer using me as a stylus would’ve freaked me out for sure.

  Since I’m out of my head when it happens, I don’t actually know what my body does when I’m transmitting. But I imagine the movements being stiff and jerky, all from the shoulder and only straight lines.

  My latest masterpiece was a pair of long parallel slashes with five perpendicular spindles between them. I considered it, and said, “If this is supposed to be a word, the penmanship leaves a lot to be desired.”

  Darla peered down at the marks. “It wouldn’t be a word. Not if the alphabet is too abstract to channel. But an idea? A picture? This could be a building, or a fence, or—”

  “Railroad tracks,” Jacob said. “And a bunch of them run right under Canal Street.”

  Chapter 38

  The cold outside felt different from the ghostly chill that came down when we channeled. More physical, somehow. Or maybe just more natural. We ditched the car in a tow zone as close as we could get to the rail yard, then power-walked the rest of the way. And with every step, I tried to suck down more white light.

  Portions of the massive rail ya
rd were at street level, but great spans of track stretched under the city streets. Snow was coming down in tight pellets, and the train track sound of metal wailing against metal filled the air. Even though we were still within visual range of our normal haunts, being one story down shifted my entire perspective. It always surprised me to glimpse the vast underpinnings of Chicago and see the cogs in motion that ran the great machine.

  With each stride, my hand throbbed, but nothing I couldn’t ignore. It was an awkward cut, but not deep enough for stitches, not if I managed to keep from flexing my fingers every time it started to clot. We’d wrapped it tight enough to hopefully remind me to stop clenching my fist. Though given my level of frustration, I’d probably end up doing it anyway.

  I strode up to the edge of the first track, then stopped to get my bearings. Jacob caught up to me, then Darla. She said, “It’s a heck of a lot bigger than I thought it would be.” She closed her eyes and held out her arms, in that way she does when she’s trying to pick up a ghost signal. After a moment, she said, “Loud, too. Like, really loud.”

  Her ghost hearing didn’t operate through her physical ears. Even so, the ambient noise was bound to be confusing, in the same way that glares and shadows made it harder for my psychic sense to see.

  White light. Maybe I could only hold so much, and the extra just spilled over the top. But that didn’t stop me from trying to cram in just a little bit more. I drew it down and scanned the area, but it felt too bright, too big. Darla was searching too, but she wasn’t doing any better than me. Too loud. We stood there a long moment, both of us desperately searching and neither of us finding. And then Jacob posed the question, “If I were to lure a federal agent out here to shoot him, where’s my best chance of not being caught?”

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw a busy parking garage in direct line of sight. “Not here. Too exposed.” I set aside my psychic ability and thought with my common sense. “But those viaducts, under there? Perfect spot.”

  I jogged toward the overpass, pumped up on white light and anxiety and that special kind of elation that comes from understanding precisely how somebody died. Right off the bat, I could see it was one of those blind niches where people could duck away from the prying eyes of society and get up to no good. The concrete walls were thick with graffiti and the ground crunched with discarded crack vials. Trash had drifted up against the far wall—fast food wrappers and broken bottles and half a naked plastic doll. There’d been a light in the ceiling, once. But it had been shot out long ago.

  I closed my eyes and drank in white light. Beside me, Darla did something similar. I opened my eyes. Without psyactives, without a GhosTV, I couldn’t sense the nonphysical to the point where I saw Jacob’s talent manifest as a webwork of red veins, but I knew the look on his face when he was doing his thing well enough to recognize it by now.

  All three of us were charged up and searching. But it took a passing freight car blocking the sun for me to catch a glimpse of what I’d come there to see: that ugly pirouette of death.

  “There.” I pointed. The train car rolled away as the switchers did their work, and I lost it. “We need to block the light.”

  Jacob made a call to try and arrange something a bit more permanent. I found myself wishing Laura Kim was still at her post as The Fixer, but at least Patrick was overachieving enough to be at the office on a weekend. Good thing. I’d have no idea who to contact, but hopefully he’d be able to figure out how to get the railroad cars moved. Darla called him to make the arrangements, and while we waited for that to happen, Jacob attempted to block the light with his overcoat while Darla and I focused all our attention on the spot I’d seen the repeater.

  “There’s so much interference,” she said.

  And she had to be running on fumes. I didn’t say as much, but every time I caught a look at her peeling lips, I couldn’t help but feel vicariously exhausted. “Let me see your hand,” I told her.

  She pulled off her glove and held it out, palm up.

  Tentatively, I placed my fingertips in the center of her palm. If it were Jacob and me, brimming with mojo and adrenaline, there would’ve been a spark big enough to practically spill into the physical. But me and Darla? Nothing. “Jacob?” I said. “C’mere a sec. See if you can push some light.”

  Jacob does a lot of prep to work with psychic energies. I’m not sure he technically needs to—I’ve seen how fast he can block a speeding ghost—but if he had too much time to consider how to go about it, he was sure to overthink everything. He shook out his hands and planted his feet as if he was going to attempt an overhead press. I yanked off my other glove with my teeth, held it there, and grabbed him with my free hand before he had a chance to convince himself he didn’t know what he was doing.

  It was like a power surge. A minor one. The type where your lights brighten for a moment, just before they flicker, and then all your electronics start blinking twelve. It wasn’t quite as showy as a lot of the psychic connections we’ve shared—but the amazing part was that Darla felt it too, through me. She gasped, looked at Jacob with new admiration and grabbed his other hand.

  It felt like she’d completed a circuit. It wasn’t power that welled through us, so much as a sense of stability. The physical world still looked like it always did, though when Darla turned her head to seek out the place of Andy’s death, her physical body left a faint tracer behind. “I hear the gunshot,” she said.

  And me? When I looked very hard, I saw the briefest flicker of Andy taking that bullet.

  It was only a repeater. It couldn’t tell us any more about the incident than the unhelpful long-distance ghost of Andy already had. But it did give us a good idea of where the shooter was standing.

  There was no shell casing. I’d be surprised if there had been, given the effort the shooter went through to retrieve the slug. Unless we were in the market for used condoms and dirty needles, there really wasn’t anything to be found on the ground. Nothing that we’d spot without a bank of lights and a forensics team, at least.

  I’d been so sure the murder scene would give us something we could use. Damn it. I dropped everyone’s hands and put my gloves back on. “Anything?” Jacob asked me.

  “Nothing we don’t already know.”

  He pulled out his penlight and scoured the area. “There’s snow on the ground. Maybe we can find boot tracks, tire tracks….”

  Given the popularity of the hidey-hole with the local crackhead population, I wouldn’t bank on it.

  “Guys,” Darla called over the noise of the rail yard, “I’m freezing and I need to sit down.”

  She looked like she’d been through the wringer—not just her physical body, I suspected, but her subtle bodies, too. “Go. Warm up.” Jacob handed her his keys. “Vic and I will do a quick sweep, then get you back to your room.”

  Darla crunched off through the crusty refrozen snow toward the car. “Anything in particular you want me to look for?” I asked.

  “How is it we can’t figure this out?” he said between the squeals of switching train cars.

  “We’ve got a location,” I said. “That’s got to be worth something. There’ll be security footage…somewhere.” Though, again, given the vigorous drug trade, nowhere that close.

  Jacob made a looping motion with his hand. “Once around, then we go look for video.”

  We split up. He headed off toward the switching station while I went the opposite direction. My light level was still high, but not high enough to see glowing blood spatter. Maybe with a generator and the GhosTV, I could figure out how the shooter managed to drag away Andy’s body and feed it through the mulcher. Unfortunately, given the number of spent hypodermics on the ground, Andy probably wasn’t the only one who’d bled in that sorry little alcove. My talent was wasted, but I still had to try.

  Even though I was pretty sure there was nothing for me to find, I did a final sweep of the scene, placing my feet carefully so as not to step on any potential evidence. Other than Andy�
��s repeater, there was nothing noncorporeal…hopefully.

  Unless this was the sort of place habit-demons spawned.

  I sucked down more white light.

  My phone couldn’t have picked up much charge in the brief time it was in the car, but maybe there’d be enough juice to snap a few pictures to look at later, while I wasn’t freezing my ass off and worrying about blobs attaching themselves to my person. I scowled the lockscreen open…and, wow, I hadn’t realized messages would accumulate like that on the home page. And also that I didn’t quite catch how Darla had toggled off the ringer. Darla and Jodi had all been vying for my scattered attention since the last time I’d checked. But the most recent message was from Patrick, just a few minutes old, and the caption beside it read URGENT.

  I swiped the message to read it. I was given the choice to archive or delete, and then it disappeared. “Damn it,” I snapped. “What did Patrick want?”

  “Calling Patrick,” my phone said.

  I knew damn well that any issues I had with the phone were caused by operator error. Even so, it was still annoying that it managed to understand me well enough over the squeal and screech of the train cars, but couldn’t figure out that I might want to actually see the urgent message before it recycled the pixels. And it wouldn’t do me any good to call Patrick, either. Not unless I found someplace to talk where we could hear each other.

  I was attempting to hang up without leaving a cryptic voicemail—fat chance—when, through a gap in the rail yard noise, I heard a ringtone. Just a couple of notes, and then something very big and very hydraulic let out an industrial gasp that buried the rest. I might not be able to name that tune, but I did get a sense of where it was coming from. Less than a dozen yards away, a rusted out boxcar stood with its door jimmied open. A guy was looking at me from the gap. Patrick. We locked eyes and he brightened, and motioned for me to join him.