“Shoulda thought this through,” Zach muttered.
“Yes, you should have,” Clare agreed, closing the safe and the panel and carefully pulling her shoe boxes back to their proper place. She rose from the floor and brushed past Zach—behind him so she couldn’t accidentally hit the picture frame. “And you’re welcome to return . . . for homemade peach pie and vanilla ice cream . . . when you’re done stashing that portrait somewhere else.”
His breath came out on a chuff. “Pretty sure Mrs. Flinton wouldn’t like it in one of her safes in her mansion.”
“You could put it in your apartment safe.”
“Where it might glow, and be seen from the windows, even with the drapes closed.”
“Too bad.”
“May as well get a little workout in the office building’s gym while I’m gone. I missed that today, and boy do my muscles know it.” He left the closet, bent, and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be back. Save that pie for me.”
“You’ve got it.” But she accompanied him down the stairs.
“What did the only other autographed photo go for at auction?” Zach asked.
“Less than the asking price of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. How much less, I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh.”
Clare blinked and stopped on the stairs. Zach glanced back at her. “What?’
“When I researched the price, I discovered that photographs of Wild Bill Hickok are even rarer than those of Jesse James.”
Zach smiled slowly. “And our new friend Texas Jack Omohundro hung out a lot with Wild Bill.”
“Yes.”
“What about autographs?”
She nibbled her bottom lip. “I’m not sure I saw anything about Wild Bill Hickok’s autograph.”
Brows going up and down, Zach said, “Worth a mint, then.”
“Perhaps. I know the biography I’m reading about Texas Jack has a picture of Wild Bill Hickok’s signature from when the three of them, Jack, Wild Bill, and Buffalo Bill acted together.”
“You think we can put in a request to the universe . . . or to Texas Jack . . . for an authentic Wild Bill Hickok autograph after you help Jack move on?” It warmed her that Zach accepted absolutely that she’d have no trouble fulfilling her duty to her latest phantom. She smiled. “I think it would be tacky to ask Texas Jack. True, this last gift is a little creepy and I’d rather not have something else so difficult to . . . handle. Also true that one of my major projects sensed my feelings and gave me a wonderful reward . . . but I don’t want to actually, ah, project a request to Texas Jack or Enzo and definitely don’t want to say anything to the Other—”
“Nope. The Other, he’s supercilious, condescending, and contrary.”
The adjectives she’d have used were patronizing, threatening, and dangerous.
Zach finished his descent of the stairs. “I’ll ask Enzo.”
Ask me what? Enzo appeared in the hall.
“About gifts from the universe after Clare moves a spirit on.”
“Guns would be better,” Clare said.
“What?”
“Guns of those who used them in the Old West are more valuable than signatures.”
Zach perked up. “I suppose they would be.”
“Though they could also be creepy,” she pointed out.
Shrugging, Zach said, “Just a tool.” He touched the small of his back, where he’d holstered his own tool—his own weapon.
“I think the emotions attached to that photograph make it creepy. Emotions would be attached to guns, I’m sure.”
“Uh-huh,” Zach said, moving into the entryway.
Enzo leapt around him. Are you going out, Zach? In the truck, Zach? Can I ride with you in the truck and go out?
“Heading downtown, Enzo,” Zach said.
Enzo wiggled his whole body. Take me. TAKE ME! I LOVE going downtown and smelling the good smell of old ghosts! He sniffed lustily.
“Sure, you can come along.” His fingers sank into the top of Enzo’s ghostly head as he tried to pet the Lab. “Clare, you got one of those canvas shopping bags I can put this in?” He angled the rectangle of the hidden framed photograph at her.
Grimacing, she found one in the settle bench and handed it to him. “Don’t bring it back.” Then she disabled the security system.
“I won’t.” He paused. “It occurs to me that if you gave—or we had Tony Rickman give—our old client Dennis Laurentine a call, we might get a good price and quick cash for this. He might like it for his collection.”
Something inside Clare relaxed. “Another arrogant being.” She nodded. “I would feel all right selling that to him.” She frowned. “But I don’t want to pay Mr. Rickman a commission.”
“Gotcha.”
“If he wants to charge us for storing the portrait, fine. I’ll find out where Mr. Laurentine is and offer the photograph for sale.” She paused. “It’s a good thing everyone in the antiques business believes I inherited all these items from my great-aunt Sandra, who had them stored.”
“How long you think we can go on with that before people get suspicious?” Zach asked.
“Her house was pretty big, and though she didn’t hoard, she did like and appreciate a lot of antiques and objets d’art.”
“As well as inheriting stuff from the previous ghost seers in your family who lived in Chicago.”
“As well as that,” Clare agreed.
“See you later.” He bent and kissed her again, looped the straps of the bag over his left shoulder, took his cane from the stand near the door, and left.
* * *
Zach’s truck had just turned at the corner when the sprightly tone of Clare’s cell announced a call from Mrs. Flinton.
“Good evening . . . Barbara.”
“Good evening, Clare dear. Do you have plans for this evening?”
Clare hesitated. “Not really. Would you like to come over for peach pie and ice cream?”
“Thank you for the invitation, dear, but Mr. Welliam has convinced me that it has been too long since I’ve attended a meeting of the Denver Parapsychological and Psychic Association. Naturally, we’d like you to come with us, dear.”
“It’s late.”
“Not that late,” said the chipper voice of someone who preferred nights. “And the DPPA likes meetings that take place fully after dark. Some psychic gifts and talents are stronger then. We can pick you and Zach up on the way.”
“Zach isn’t here.” The lucky man.
A small pause. Perhaps Mrs. Flinton had considered dragging him out of the psychically gifted closet, too. “Oh. We can pick you up.”
Clare would have liked to have waited for Zach, but he took his workouts seriously and she had no idea when he’d return. But she recalled Zach’s patient look just that morning when she’d told him of promoting her accounting business . . . instead of her ghost seer business. Perhaps she did need to take another pace or two farther away from the closet she’d been hiding herself in as a psychic.
“All right, Mrs. Flinton.”
* * *
Enzo kept up happy comments as Zach drove them downtown. With a little narrowing of his eyes, he could see an extremely faint outline of the phantom dog. He’d always heard Enzo better than seeing the Lab, even when Zach’d first met Clare . . . and did so now when the Lab had his paws on the dash and his head through the windshield.
With time, Zach might be able to see Enzo better, and ghosts like Texas Jack, too. Zach smiled. Look how that telepathy thing with Clare was shaking out. Shaking her up. For some reason it wasn’t shaking him up, particularly, and he got satisfaction out of the whole shaking-Clare-up thing. Maybe because she’d really rattled him to the core last week.
Loving her, being in love with her, shook him. A lot easier to accept her psychic gift, his own gift,
than the fact he adored a woman, and had told her so. Once.
All right, maybe a couple of times when his bones had still been shivering from the dawn where they’d nearly lost Enzo and their lives.
But not since.
And yeah, he’d admit that he was waiting for her to tell him she loved him before he admitted it to her again . . . and knew that was all about pride and ego and—
We’re here, Zach! Look at those squirrels!
Zach didn’t see the must-be-dead-and-gone squirrels.
Look at that cowboy waving at me! Enzo’s whole body quivered.
“Go,” Zach said, and the wavery air in the passenger seat disappeared before Zach turned onto the downward ramp to the building’s garage.
He gritted his teeth and parked in his handicapped space. He hated having the new license plate with the damn wheelchair on it, but had to concede it saved his foot, ankle, leg . . . whole body . . . from aching like a rotten tooth. Not like the building had an abundance of those spaces, either. He supposed he should be grateful to Rickman for giving him this one. Though since Rickman ran a security and investigations business and handled personal protection, no doubt other members of his crew had used the space temporarily before. Sometimes they got wounded in the profession.
Zach still didn’t feel grateful. After nabbing the bag, Zach slid his key card to unlock the door and headed into the hallway, concentrating on keeping his footsteps and his cane tapping silent. A good exercise.
As he neared the intersection of the hall with the elevator bay to the left and the gym to the right, the elevator door opened and he tensed. So did Tony Rickman. Then the guy nodded, started toward him, glanced at the shopping bag looped over Zach’s left shoulder, and did a double take.
Rickman actually backpedaled, quick, until he stood against the wall, primed for a fight. He held up his hand palm out. “Stop.”
Zach did, raising his eyebrows.
“What do you have in the bag, cop? What sort of gruesome evidence?”
“Clare and I have been calling it creepy, ourselves,” Zach said conversationally. He thought of taking the bag off his shoulder and swinging it in his free hand, but that would be mean. And it might cause Rickman, who obviously felt vibrations or some such from the portrait—helluva thing—to take Zach down. Or stomp on and destroy the picture. Explaining that to Clare would be a misery.
“What. Is. It?” Rickman asked. Sounded like he said it between gritted teeth.
“It’s a photograph of Jesse James, autographed to his friend and killer, Robert Ford.”
Rickman’s face went expressionless in the way that Zach saw as complete revulsion. Rickman’s nostrils flared. “I don’t like it.”
Zach shrugged. “I don’t either.”
Scowling at the bag, Rickman said, “Why are you bringing that here?”
“Clare didn’t want it at her place. She’s still going through the boxes delivered to her from her great-aunt’s house in Chicago.” A lie in the way he’d put the two sentences together, but this time Rickman didn’t pick up on that. His frown stayed fixed on the canvas grocery bag.
Rickman grunted, then said, “I don’t want it in my office safe either.” With a jerk of his head, he turned on his heel. “There’s a general building safe down here.”
Chapter 18
Rickman led the way to the main corridor and went left, wended through another couple of hallways. Finally he stopped at a nondescript door and blocked Zach’s view of the numeric keypad he used to open the door. The action irritated Zach a little. He was the ex-cop here. He could be trusted. He’d bet his substantial disability pension that Rickman and his special-ops guys had broken into more than one vault.
So he stopped just within arm’s reach of the man and offered him the bag by its handles, smiling. “Go ahead and stow it. I’ll let you know when we need it back.”
Obviously Rickman didn’t like the idea that he’d have to retrieve the thing. They stood a solid minute staring at each other. “You’re new to my company and still in your probationary period.”
“Yep.”
“Christ.” Running a hand through his hair, Rickman took the bag and slid silently into the vault. The hallway immediately felt better to Zach. Still had a faint smell of machines and a trace of gym, but felt fine.
When Rickman came back, Zach noted the slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. Interesting that the portrait had physically affected Rickman. Before the door slid shut, Zach began walking to the gym.
Rickman caught up with him easily, of course.
They were back at the elevator bay before Zach said, “Psychometry, the ability to learn facts about an object, or the people who owned the item, by sensing vibrations or whatever from the object. You could be useful.”
“That’s what the government thought, though my commanding officers never referred to any little skill I might have.” Teeth clenched and jaw angled up, Rickman stared straight ahead and not at Zach. He took a couple of paces toward the door to the parking garage.
A while back Zach had realized his old tribe of police officers only welcomed him as one who’d lost the good fight, but that he could make a new place for himself in Rickman’s small tribe of operatives. An honored place, since he had more investigative skills and training than all of the others put together. He hesitated, but if he wanted that tribe, he had to act, and now.
So much for a workout; talking with Rickman was more important. So Zach went to the glass doors of the garage where the man stood. “I don’t think I’ve told you about the crows,” he said.
Rickman stopped, pivoted to face him.
Zach continued. “I don’t think your wife, Desiree, knows about the crows either. I don’t believe Clare would have told her.”
Rickman jerked his head at the camera mounted near the ceiling, one that might also be recording the conversation—Zach didn’t know. And he didn’t know if it was Rickman’s camera or the building’s. “Let’s talk about this outside,” Zach’s boss said.
“Sure.” Zach tried his best to amble casually, but all walking, strides, and foot movement had to be relearned or shown more in the attitude of his body than locomotion.
Stopping beside the passenger side of Zach’s truck, Rickman waited for him. Zach unlocked the doors and they both swung in. He glanced at the shadows and realized no garage camera would be able to read their lips.
“What crows?” Rickman pressed.
Zach thrummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Not looking at his boss, he said, “I have a touch of the sight.”
A few heartbeats of silence, Rickman cleared his throat. “What kind of sight?”
“Foresight. I can sometimes get . . . omens.”
Rickman sucked spit through his teeth in a commiserating sound. After another thirty seconds or so of quiet, the man said, “That might explain a few instances of luck for you lately.”
Zach grunted, then said, “Yes.”
“Crows?” Rickman queried.
“My Scots grandmother taught me an old, old rhyme.” Him and his brother, but he wasn’t going to speak to Rickman about Jim. And Zach sure wasn’t going to reveal that his childhood “gift” of being able to locate loved ones had died when Jim had. Zach’s foresight was relatively new—since he’d been shot during that stupid mistake he’d made. “It’s a crow-counting rhyme, you know, for how many crows you see: one for sorrow, two for luck, like that.”
Angling his head, Rickman said, “How does that work?” He paused, and what he said next was not quite an order. “Exactly?”
Now Zach stared straight ahead at the uninspiring concrete pillars of the garage. “I see crows. If I see, say, three . . . three for a wedding . . . I know something like that’s upcoming.” Then he mumbled, “Four for death.”
Rickman pounced. “Four for death. You’ve seen that and it’s come true
.”
Zach’s fingers tightened and released around the steering wheel. He didn’t remember gripping it. “Oh, yeah. I saw them. Death happened. Mostly last week.”
“Tough,” Rickman said.
“Yeah.”
“That it?”
Zach cleared his throat. “Apparently it’s only me who can see the crows. Clare’s been with me sometimes and I’ve, uh, tried to point them out, and she doesn’t see them.”
Only their breathing broke the quiet.
“You’re my kind of man, Zach,” Rickman said. His phone rang, a romantic, lilting song Zach would never have thought Rickman would like. He glanced at Zach, raising his brows as if asking whether he should answer.
Zach shrugged.
Rickman opened the call, and immediately the high voice of Desiree Rickman came, speaking rapidly.
Zach heard, “Clare’s here, bring Zach and come,” and his whole body tightened in alarm.
“Where?” Zach asked.
“The Denver Parapsychological and Psychic Association’s meeting. Maurice Poche is there. With a TV crew.”
* * *
Mr. Welliam drove them to a large, square one-story brick building that had once been a warehouse in lower downtown Denver. The place itself was well lit, along with an attached parking lot. Unlike at Lookout Mountain, few stars could be seen even though the moon had set.
The couple rushed Clare in, past a woman with a clipboard asking for signatures, and Clare already stood by the puny refreshments table of store-bought cookies and lemonade before she realized that the main cluster of people surrounded Maurice Poche.
And a couple of cameramen she recognized filmed the room, too. They wore the bright fuchsia T-shirt of the television channel. So that had been a waiver? Perhaps, and Clare was glad she hadn’t signed.
“You never know what will happen here,” Mr. Welliam burbled, and Clare bit her lip to keep from alienating the cheerful man and client. She’d made the poor decision to come, so now she’d have to deal with the consequences of her own actions.
Ghost Talker Page 14