Double Cross

by Carolyn Crane

  Across the room, the piano player starts up a rendition of “The Look of Love” and gathered people start singing along.

  “Remember the precog who was killed last week?” Packard says. I’d thought that was strange, because if there’s anything a precog will pick up, it’s killers coming after him. Can the Dorks shield themselves even from a precog? Maybe operate in a slice of future a precog can’t pick up? And, obviously, the telepath they shot last week didn’t hear their thoughts. Everybody said they took her by surprise. You don’t take a telepath by surprise with something like that, I don’t care how much you’re skunking your thoughts. How do they see us, and make it so we can’t see or affect them?”

  I suck in a breath. “Any leads?”

  He shakes his head.

  The killers are called the Dorks because one of Otto’s decrees, in the week he took office as mayor, was that the city papers can’t give serial killers cool names anymore. The names are prechosen, like hurricane names, and kept in a vault to be selected randomly. Privately, Otto told me other D names include Doofus, Dolt, and Dickweed.

  “You won’t need those gloves for Ez anymore. The damage is done. She’s in, and there’s no getting her out until she wants out.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you.”

  Slowly Packard turns to me. “It’ll almost be worth it, just to see the look on Otto’s face when he finds out. You and me, conferenced into each other in dreams.”

  “Why should Otto care? So she screws around in our dreams.”

  “Dreams that she creates from our memories. She uses memories as her raw material.”

  “So what?”

  “Do you have any memories that you’d prefer not to revisit—with Ez and me along for the ride, experiencing everything from your point of view? Think of the experiences you’d most prefer to keep private. Those are the ones she’ll grab. Ez is like a collage artist, and the easiest memories for her to use are the ones with the highest emotional charge. The ones you work hardest to suppress. The ones you avoid, yet return to over and over. It’s those we’ll relive together. Along with what you felt and thought.”

  It’s here I get nervous.

  He looks into my eyes. “That is the one silver lining in all this. I’m thinking of certain moments at Mongolian Delites.” He places a finger on my throat, trails it down my chest. “The way you felt with me. The way anything was possible.”

  I grab his finger. “Don’t.” He hasn’t touched me like that since last summer. The way I’m bending his finger has to hurt, but he doesn’t show it. Naturally.

  I say, “How do you know it won’t be the playback of your most secret memories?”

  “Because,” he says, “it won’t.” His hesitation tells me he’s not so sure. That he’s maybe even worried.

  I let go. “As if it would even be that memory. A couple of stupid kisses.”

  “That’s what you call it?” Packard laughs. “No, no, Otto’s not going to like this one bit, when he hears.”

  “Can we get to the part where she’s actually a threat in some way?”

  “With every dream, she increases her hold on you,” Packard says. “She gets deeper into your mental content and gains power, then starts you sleepwalking. Eventually she gets you committing crimes in your sleep. By the time Otto sealed her up, Ez had gangs of sleepwalkers rampaging on her behalf. Remember the Krini Militia three years back?”

  “The cannibals? The ones who’d …”

  “Break their victims’ arms and legs? Then tear into their stomachs with their teeth and eat them? Yes. Those.”

  “I thought that was a Satanic cult.”

  “That was the official explanation. Unofficially? They were sleepwalkers under the control of Stationmaster Ez up there. As her hold deepened, she’d merely plant suggestions during the day that she’d activate at night. She’d make them file their teeth to get them sharp, then go out and kill.”

  “Shit.” I touch my tongue to my teeth.

  “Poor devils would wake up in the morning with bloody faces, and think they were having nightmares, along with a tooth-grinding problem that involved bleeding gums. They had no idea they were roaming and cannibalizing as they slept.”

  The pianist starts up a rendition of the Everly Brothers’ “Dream.” I can see from a quirk of Packard’s lips that he caught it. He gives me a look; he sees that I caught it, too. No discussion necessary. It’s amazing how unhealthily well we’ve gotten to read each other in the past year.

  “Dentists helped Otto’s men break the case,” he adds.

  “And now she’ll enter our heads through our dreams and command us?”

  Packard tilts his head in the way he does that means yes.

  “As we sleep?”

  “With some influence while we’re awake, but not much,” he says.

  “What are we going to do?” I’m coming out of glory hour hard.

  “Disillusion her. Fast.” He heads over to the bar and I follow. He orders a bottle of ginger ale and hands it to me.

  “Thanks.” I sip. It’s like cool velvet fire on my tongue.

  “We have a while until she gains that level of control,” he tells me. “At first she’ll just construct dreams out of our charged memories.” He straightens. “The Stationmaster is officially fast-tracked. After you get her fully obsessed with her mortality, Vesuvius will destroy her considerable pride in her accomplishments. Then Carter will crank up her rage and self-loathing.” He looks up at Ez; from where we stand, you can see her head and torso framed by the window. “The Stationmaster lives in a vicarious state, which makes her psyche fragile.”

  He’s reading her psychology; I can tell by the trancelike tone of his voice. He can’t see thoughts, but with the power to read psychology, he sees what’s behind thought.

  “She’s likely had few meaningful experiences of her own,” he continues. “She’ll feel as though she’s never really lived—especially now that she’s trapped in there. Highly intelligent, hates authority, easily annoyed by stupidity. Odd. The cannibal bit seems extreme for her psychological structure …” He trails off.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  He squints, still in his reading trance. “Hmm. When I read her the other day, her structure didn’t strike me as being aberrant. At the time, I thought it was the gestalt of the moment, but here it is again. Somebody who committed that level of crime usually looks more askew. I’m rarely wrong on reread …”

  “Maybe she’s a sociopath.”

  Packard shakes his head. “Sociopaths are full of gaps. Swiss cheese.” He pauses. “She never did confess.…”

  “She didn’t? Wait, are you saying she could be innocent?”

  Packard turns to me, startled out of his zone. He regrets what he just revealed; I can see it all over his face. “No. I’m not saying that at all.”

  “I think you are. Shit! If she’s innocent, that changes everything.”

  He clutches my shoulders. “In very little time, she’ll have total control over our sleeping minds and bodies. Is that really acceptable to you?”

  “But what if—”

  “Stop. I see patterns and weaknesses, not a person’s past. There can be numerous explanations for her seeming balance.”

  “Go and read her some more.”

  “No. Disillusionment is the only way besides death to force her to break the link. We have to put ourselves first.”

  “Even if she’s not planning on doing anything awful?”

  “That’s right.” He takes the half-finished bottle from me and drinks it down. Then he wipes his wet rosy lips with the back of his hand.

  I cross my arms. “Here’s my plan. I’m going to get back up there and finish for today, but then I’m going to do some research and make sure she’s guilty. And if she’s innocent, I’m going to tell Otto to let her go.”

  “You’re willing to lose even more autonomy?”

  “I won’t wreck somebody’s life just to save my ow
n ass.”

  “I think you will,” Packard says. “You’re saving your own ass each and every time you zing somebody. Because you don’t want to be a Jarvis.”

  I picture catatonic Jarvis in his La-Z-Boy, staring vacantly at the TV, a glistening line of drool descending from his bottom lip. Jarvis is like the disillusionist bogeyman for what happens when you break away from Packard and stop zinging—one of those things I wish I’d known up front.

  “Finish her,” he growls.

  “We’ll see.”

  He scowls, then turns and walks off, long and lean and loose, leaving a wake of fascinated onlookers.

  It’s not his looks, or his outfit, or the blood on his shirt—which isn’t so obvious, really—that makes people stare. It’s his presence. People notice him. They feel him. They watch him, even from across the room.

  I wander out into the crowd as he climbs the stairs. At the top, he turns and strolls, cool and lanky, down the catwalk, and past the coat check window. The exit sign at the far corner makes his cinnamon curls glow fire-engine red in the instant before he pulls open the door and disappears into the darkness.

  I head for the stairs and climb slowly, hoping to hell that Ez really is guilty of the cannibal thing.

  She has to be guilty. Otto would never imprison an innocent person; his standards of right and wrong are far too high, and mentally maintaining these force fields costs him too much.

  Ez sits behind her window, staring at her hands, stricken by my terror. Packard used to say I have so much terror, he couldn’t believe I wasn’t in a straitjacket. That was one of the things that enchanted me last summer—that he alone admired how screwed up I was.

  “Hey,” I say.

  She looks up. “How could you leave me hanging? You saw something, I could tell. You saw indications with my skin tonus!”

  I go through more concerned-nurse charades. We have another scary disease conversation.

  Ironically, there’s a photo of Otto Sanchez on the wall behind her. It shows Otto standing tall and proud at his mayoral inauguration, his medals and finery gleaming, dusky curls falling carelessly around his big brown eyes. The inauguration photo was taken from a lowish angle, making Otto—already a strong, tall bull of a man—seem even more imposing. The whole city is crazy about Mayor Otto Sanchez, including me. But I’m the only one lucky enough to have a date with him tonight. Our fourth date since our hiatus for the election. Our “do-over,” we call it. I’ll ask him about Ez. Surely Otto can give me some sort of reassurance about her guilt. But what if he can’t?

  Much as I hate to admit it, Packard’s right: I don’t want her to be able to control me in my sleep, even if it’s just to send me to the 7-Eleven at two a.m. for a carton of milk.

  “Don’t you think it would be good if I had a force-field descrambler?” she asks. “What if I suddenly need medical attention while I’m here at work, and the force field malfunctions or something and nobody can get in …”

  “I can’t give it to you.”

  “What does it look like?” she asks. “Do you keep it in your pocket?”

  “I can’t reveal details about it.”

  “I’m picturing you giving the descrambler to me. You walk up, carrying it in your hand with that same silver nail polish you have on now—which, by the way, is quite hot—and you slide it through to me. I’m picturing you standing right in front of this window and you so want me to have it, and pass it through … I can picture it so vividly …” She narrates the scenario in weirdly extreme detail.

  Stifling a gasp, I pull my hand away. She’s planting the idea so she can work with it later. She’s attacking me psychologically—just what I do to people! I cross my arms. “I’m more concerned about your immediate problems,” I say. “Namely, Morgan-Brooksteens parasites.”

  We go back and forth and somehow wind up on the topic of ingestion. She mentions the fact that eating crushed-up diamonds rips up your intestines, like it’s something everybody knows.

  I find this shocking. “I’ve never encountered a case of that directly,” I say, hoping she’ll explain further. As the nurse, it would be weird to quiz her too much about it.

  But the moment is lost when an elderly couple approaches. I move to the side. The man places the token in the metal tray. Ez uses a stick shaped like an L to pull it through.

  I can’t wait to tell Otto. He’ll find this diamonds tidbit as fascinating as I do, even though digestion isn’t our specific obsession. Otto and I are more concerned about vein star syndrome. We bonded over it exuberantly when we first met. God, we bonded over so many things. It tore me apart, because Packard had me convinced Otto was this cunning crime boss I had to psychologically attack.

  I zinged Otto while we were having sex the first time—a despicable praying mantis moment I regret intensely.

  “Diamonds,” she says once the couple is gone. “Not a hungry girl’s best friend.”

  I chuckle. She really is funny, but then it occurs to me that her obsession with harmful substances in the belly connects to what she made her sleepwalkers do.

  “Nurse Jones!”

  I know who it is before I turn, but of course I turn. And of course it’s Simon, sauntering down the walkway. Simon, my fellow disillusionist.

  He slides up between me and the railing, dark blue eyes shining against his pale skin and jet-black hair. Simon always reminds me of one of those translucent deepwater fishes, and the crazy outfits he sometimes wears do not diminish this otherworldly effect. Today he’s donned a long, ratty, white fake fur coat and white vinyl pants, with no shirt—all the better to see the many dragon tattoos on his chest. He looks like a space-age pimp. Simon and I used to argue about which of us was more screwed up. Why did I ever think it was me?

  I make a face, meaning Nurse Jones is at work. He flicks his black hair out of his eyes. “I have news. Catch up with me.” ASAP, he means. He heads off.

  I turn back to Ez, but she’s staring at Simon, cheek pressed to the glass to keep him in view as he leaves.

  “He called you Nurse Jones,” Ez says. “Did he used to be a patient or something?”

  “That’s confidential.”

  “I love his outfit. I would love to shake his hand for wearing that outfit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What? You can make your descrambler work for other people, can’t you?”

  I don’t answer.

  “What’s wrong with wanting to shake a person’s hand? And I’d like to check his coat, if you know what I mean.”

  A coat check joke. “You don’t want to check his coat, believe me.” Leaning on the counter, I describe the appearance of a Morgan-Brooksteens parasite-riddled spleen in gory detail.

  You always want to close with a disturbing image.

  Chapter

  Two

  IT’S JUST AFTER SIX when I step out of the piano bar into an evening alive with the sound of police sirens and the chop-chop of helicopters. Searchlights illuminate the dusky sky down toward the lakefront. Did they corner the Dorks? I pull my heavy black coat tight around me against the January chill, wishing I had big winter boots instead of heels.

  A helicopter’s searchlight sweeps my way, flashing on a row of leafless trees. I pull out my phone and call Simon, who directs me to a bar across the way. We click off without niceties.

  The bar is dim and long, and it smells like stale beer. A line of people hunches on stools in front of a presiding bartender. I spot Simon’s ratty white coat in a dark corner. He’s leaning on the jukebox, staring at nothing, looking every inch the unhealthy, unwholesome person he is. Packard loves to claim he saved all our lives, but with Simon it might actually be true.

  As I draw nearer, I notice Helmut sitting next to him. Helmut is a large, elegant disillusionist with a clipped little beard and a vicious talent for infusing people with despair about current events. That’s his disillusionist specialty. Simon’s, of course, is gambling and recklessness.

  Simon hands me an ouzo. �
��Your coat check girl, she’s really …” He gets this faraway look, like a connoisseur searching for the perfect description.

  “She’s Ezmerelda, the dream invader,” I say. “Thanks for distracting her.”

  Helmut stands. “The dream invader? The Krini Militia?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s hot,” Simon says.

  Helmut rolls his eyes.

  Simon swirls the ice in his drink. “I want to meet her. You have to introduce us.”

  “She’s dangerous,” Helmut says.

  Simon turns to him. “And your point would be …”

  Helmut grunts disgustedly. I sip my ouzo and close my eyes, enjoying the licoricy warmth in the back of my throat.

  “You’re glorying,” Helmut observes.

  “On the end of it. And I don’t have much time.”

  “None of us do,” Helmut says darkly. “Especially now. That’s what we’re here about. We need to do something about Packard.”

  “In what way?” I ask.

  Helmut frowns. “Did you not hear about the Dorks going after Rickie?”

  Simon says, “Don’t mind Helmut. He’s overreacting.”

  Helmut turns to him angrily. “It’s not overreaction; it’s self-preservation.”

  “What are you guys talking about?”

  “The Dorks,” Simon says. “Now that they have the mutant radar—”

  “Highcap radar,” Helmut corrects. “You know Packard was almost a shooting victim, too?”

  I jerk to attention. “What? I thought he arrived after.”

  “Moments after,” Helmut says. “He was on his way to meet with them—barely a block away, as I understand it. If he’d left seconds earlier, he could’ve been the one shot.”

  I feel hollow, shaky. “Oh my God.”

  “Not even a block away,” Helmut says. “And he won’t wear a vest, you know. I bought one for him, but will he wear it? It’s probably still in the package.”

  I picture Packard, splayed and bloody on the pavement, green eyes devoid of their bright challenge. I fumble for a chair and sit. “He should wear a vest at the very least.”