PsyCop 5: Camp Hell

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Victor knows you from Heliotrope Station?” Carolyn asked. Or maybe stated.

  “That’s right.”

  She walked over to the print with the funky perspective, tilted her head and looked puzzled. “Do you have an online presence? Victor seems to think the lack of information about him on the Internet is something he should be concerned about.”

  “Geez,” I said, “Your small-talk skills are worse than mine.”

  “My practice has a website. Of course, my name isn’t my name. What’s your talent, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Telepath two.”

  “Mm. I’ve always had a soft spot for telepaths.” He looked at Jacob. “And you?”

  “NP.” That’s short for non-psychic. Giving those two initials was probably just as difficult for Jacob as spelling it all out.

  “I thought you were a PsyCop.”

  “I am. One Psych, one Stiff on each team.”

  Stefan’s unreadable gaze lingered on Jacob. “If you say so.”

  “Are you doing anything for dinner?” Jacob asked. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  Now what was he up to?

  “Maybe next time. Fernando would never forgive me if I stood him up.”

  “Bring him along.”

  “Thanks, but no. Theater tickets.”

  “Ah.”

  Given that Carolyn didn’t have anything to say about that, Stefan’s excuse must have been legitimate. Then again, he didn’t actually say he had theater tickets. I hadn’t told him anything about Carolyn’s talent—but maybe I didn’t have to. Stefan was the strongest empath I’d ever met. Maybe he already knew.

  -NINE-

  Carolyn nabbed the back seat of the Crown Vic before I could take it. I briefly considered sitting in back alongside her, leaving Jacob up front by his lonesome. But that would’ve been weird.

  “It’s good to see a Psych in private practice,” she said. As if the atmosphere in the car wasn’t thick enough to cut with a dull plastic knife.

  “I…guess.” Stefan and I had never talked about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Maybe we never thought we’d make it out of Camp Hell fit for anything but Medicaid.

  “I hope he takes us up on our offer,” Jacob said.

  “Our offer? You mean, your offer.”

  Jacob was busy navigating a packed on-ramp. He gave me a quick glance in reply. “Would you prefer I don’t get to know him?”

  “I don’t care if you…that’s not the point.” I checked myself to see if I was being truthful. I was, as far as I could tell. “I just…I’m dealing with Heliotrope Station right now.”

  His hand landed on my knee. “I know.”

  I jiggled my opposite knee. “Look, I know you wanna be there for me…and stuff. But I….” I had no idea. I sighed, and I slumped back into the car seat.

  “I don’t suppose this conversation could wait until you dropped me off,” Carolyn said.

  Jacob squeezed my knee. “You shouldn’t have to face this alone. We’ve got each other.”

  I snorted. “You just wanted to make sure Stefan and I didn’t pick up where we left off.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Yes you did,” said Carolyn, from the back seat.

  Whoa. Slipping up and telling a flat-out lie, right in front of the Human Polygraph? Jacob shook his head. It served him right for bringing her along. He could’ve sprung for her to take a cab back to the Twelfth.

  “Seriously? You’re worried about what I’m gonna do? That’s some nerve, after you spent all that time hanging out with Crash behind my back.”

  “I’ve met Stefan now. He strikes me as a decent person. I’m not worried.”

  I wouldn’t go so far as to label Stefan as a “decent person,” whatever that means. He’d just scored me under-the-table Valium. How decent could he be? But he clearly wasn’t interested in sleeping with me anymore. I suspected that’s what Jacob really meant, whether he knew it or not.

  Jacob pulled up in the parking lot of the Twelfth and let Carolyn out of the car. If any of the men in blue moving among the parked cruisers were FPMP plants, I couldn’t tell. Then again, I don’t think the FPMP was watching Carolyn very hard. She was good at what she did, but her ability was so narrow and specific that it only ranked as a medium on the Richter scale of psychic ability.

  The parking spot by the cannery was open, as usual. I’d need to make sure that no one knew our building wasn’t haunted any longer, at least until the snow drifts melted from the dirt patch off the alleyway that passed for our backyard.

  I helped with dinner. I’m reasonably good at chopping things up, especially if Jacob is very specific about what size everything should be. It takes me ten times longer to do it than it does him, but at least I can feel like I’m contributing to the food cause.

  Jacob, meanwhile, was measuring, sautéing, and bringing water to a boil, all at the same time. Showoff. “You know I’m crazy about you,” he said. “I can’t help but want to know who you’re spending time with, whether I need to be worried or not.”

  “I know you’re crazy,” I said. It really was hard to stay mad at him. He gave me his big-eyed look that was the best approximation of innocent that he could muster, and mostly it just looked hot.

  “Stefan says I’ve got some problems with, uh, anxiety.”

  Jacob didn’t disagree.

  I fished my new prescription out of my pocket. “I’m taking a Valium.”

  No opposition.

  “And, uh, it’s not through The Clinic.”

  Jacob pressed himself against my back and mashed me into the kitchen counter. He rested his chin on my shoulder and looked at the bag. “So Fernando does exist.”

  “I imagine Carolyn would have mentioned it if he didn’t.”

  “I’m all for you getting better. Take the Valium. We’ll rent a movie and relax.”

  The rest of the night was surprisingly mild. I probably could’ve drilled home the fact that I was annoyed that Jacob had been keeping tabs on me, but I wasn’t really annoyed, not anymore.

  My prescription probably had something to do with my mood. The Valium was sweet, even better than Seconal, and I suspected that there was something to be said for getting a prescription from a real, live American pharmacy, even if the name on that prescription was Fernando.

  I fell asleep halfway through a car chase and slept like a baby, and when Zig and I headed over to LaSalle the next morning, I felt both mellow and alert, all at the same time. If not for the dry mouth, it would’ve been the best I’d felt in ages.

  The aftereffects of the drug didn’t seem to affect my talent one way or the other. Ghosts were still thick, but they didn’t seem as freaky-making when I waded through them.

  I felt so gregarious that I almost told Zigler I was considering changing my name to Fernando. But then I figured he probably wouldn’t be as excited about my new prescription as I was.

  “Where do you want to start,” he asked me. “Second floor, cardiac unit?”

  “Wasn’t there a snack machine downstairs?”

  “On the lower level?”

  “Yeah. The basement.” I tried the word out. No willies. Amazing.

  I think Zig noticed. He stared at me over that thick carpet-pile strip of mustache for a second, then shrugged. “Okay.”

  We rode the elevator down with a nurse wearing scrubs covered in bright blue and neon green seahorses. “Excuse me,” I said. “What’s the deal with all those crazy patterns? I thought scrubs used to come in solid colors.”

  She glanced at me. Her eyes were sunken, like she hadn’t slept in about four days. “I dunno. I guess they’re easier to keep clean.”

  The elevator dinged open and she headed for the cafeteria. “She must mean it’s harder to see the blood stains.” I stepped off the car and Zigler followed. He stood next to me and stared. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sheesh, couldn’t I make a simple observation?

  There w
ere cafeteria smells in the corridor, coffee and fried things, and some form of meat. Underlying it all was the smell of disinfectant. It smelled similar to Heliotrope Station. Not exactly the same, as if maybe the formulation of the disinfectant had changed over the years, and perhaps the menu was more varied. But it was similar. I noticed the similarity. And I felt okay about it.

  Zigler had his pad out and his pen poised. I must have been giving “the look.”

  I shook my head and he lowered the pen. “Let’s find the vending machines,” I said. I was dying for a piece of gum.

  A ghost in a custodian’s uniform passed by, but he disappeared through a wall before I got a good look at him. “This place could use a good cleaning,” I said.

  Zig squinted at the floor. “Seems reasonably clean to me.”

  “Ghosts, I mean. Why so many?”

  His eyebrows bunched together. “Obvious reasons.”

  “Yeah, but…” I shrugged. It didn’t seem like it necessarily had to be that way. I’d just spent a week in a nursing home where I could go hours without seeing any spirit activity. Heck, plenty of fresh ghosts had “gone to the light” right before my eyes.

  “What do you think makes someone a repeater?”

  Zigler fed a dollar into the machine and ordered up a plastic-wrapped brick of peanut butter crackers. “If you haven’t figured it out, I don’t think anyone knows for sure.”

  I dropped some quarters in and pressed a button, watched with fascination as the giant chrome corkscrew turned and turned, and my gum inched closer, closer, teetered on the edge, and then finally, when I thought it might end up stuck in that limbo between paid-for and mine, it fell.

  “I know my antenna picks up more signals,” I said. I stripped the wrapper from a stick of gum. It folded like an accordion when I jammed it into my mouth. “But there’s gotta be some other medium around who’s better at putting words to this stuff. Maybe someone who’s more intellectual about the whole…deal.”

  Zig brushed orange crumbs from the front of his blazer. “You ever met another medium?”

  “Sure, I…” I stopped short and drew a blank, had to really dig for a second to remember. Yes. Two. There were two other mediums at Camp Hell. Which meant that mediumship as a talent was sorely underrepresented in the larger pool of Psychs. “They were kinda…” I shrugged. “One of ‘em was dumb as a bag of rocks.” We’d called him Einstein. His actual name was Richard. His I.Q. was eighty on a good testing day, which was borderline retarded, depending on which charts and tables you look at.

  Faun Windsong was the other, and despite the fact that we never called anyone by their real name, we did indeed call her Faun. Probably because we all knew it wasn’t the name on her birth certificate. She’d changed it when she turned eighteen, in an attempt to embrace her Menominee heritage. I think she was something like one-sixteenth Indian.

  Maybe one sixteenth is all you need. Faun didn’t just accept her talent. She reveled in it. Thought she was some kind of big deal for being able to “speak to the ancestors.” Except she couldn’t really speak to them. She got vague impressions.

  Cold spots were her specialty. She was usually standing right in the middle of someone when she “sensed” one. I never mentioned it—in retrospect, I’m not sure why. She was so full of herself that I would’ve loved to have taken her down a few pegs. But now that I thought about it, I never piped up when I saw them on our graveyard outings.

  In fact, I agreed with Faun a lot of the time. It was as if I had a string you could pull, and I’d repeat a stock phrase. “I do sense a cold spot,” or, “The energy feels male,” or, “Someone is trying to make contact, but I just can’t make the connection.”

  “Vic?”

  I blinked.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” Zig was scowling at me, which I interpreted as “concerned.”

  My gum had lost some of its flavor. I spit it in the garbage and started a new piece. “I’m seeing a therapist.”

  Zig’s eyes widened. “Oh.” He held up his hand. “Say no more.”

  He’d been seeing someone for a couple of months now. He had a hard time wrapping his head around the idea that a dead body could be made to move around, given some herbs, incantations and ingenuity.

  I ran a hand through my hair. Zig might not want me to talk about it, but I felt the need to explain, so that maybe I could understand, too. “I’m remembering…stuff.” I nodded. “A lot of stuff.”

  “Is that good?”

  “So far? It’s okay.”

  He nodded. “I’m going to get some coffee.”

  I watched him plod down the hall toward the cafeteria, and I realized that I actually liked Zig—in a wow-he-never-hassles-me kind of way. Maybe I needed to hang out with straight guys more often.

  My phone gave off its generic ringtone, and I realized I should probably put Stefan’s number in my memory dial. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have enough open slots.

  I wondered if he was calling me to talk about Jacob. I was sure he’d have something to say, I just couldn’t tell what it would be, given the all-purpose raised eyebrow he’d maintained through the entire encounter.

  “Hello?”

  “Detective.” It was a female voice on the other end of the line, which threw me for a loop. I scanned through my mental Rolodex of women I knew who would address me as “Detective” and came up empty-handed.

  And I’d been so positive it was Stefan that I hadn’t even answered with my work-greeting, my last name. “Yes?”

  “I’m calling for Constantine Dreyfuss,” said the woman’s voice. “He wonders if you’d care to join him for a cup of coffee.”

  -TEN-

  I coasted through the rest of the day at LaSalle. Sure, I saw ghosts and I described what they looked like, what they were doing, to Zigler—but most of my attention was on the diner I planned to stop at on my way home. And not for a club sandwich.

  The smell of fries and scorched hamburger belted me when I walked into Uwanna Burger, but my usual response—uncontrolled salivation—was markedly absent. My mouth was bone dry. I swallowed, and wondered if I’d taken a Valium without realizing it. I hadn’t. In fact, I wanted to make sure I was wound up and jumpy when I met my guy from the FPMP. I wanted to keep my edge.

  I scanned the place, and looked for someone in a suit. A scattering of people were in various stages of finishing their meals, and none of them looked like a “Constantine” to me. I ordered a coffee but didn’t bother putting any cream or sugar in it. I’d only gotten it so I could sit without anyone looking at me sideways. I didn’t think I could actually swallow it.

  The only clean booth was by the plate glass window in front. My head would be right behind the giant U if I chose to sit there—a perfect sniper target. I chose to bus one of the dirty tables toward the back of the diner, and sit there with someone else’s salt scattered on the tabletop all around me instead.

  I kept my eye trained on the front door and I made designs in my Styrofoam cup with my thumbnail. And I wished Jacob was there, because he’d know what to say and do.

  A long-haired, middle-aged guy in a big navy parka paused at my table on his way back from the bathroom. “Weed?”

  Jesus. Why did someone always try to sell me drugs when I was having a panic attack? I shook my head and glared harder at the front door.

  “Seriously, it’s good stuff.” He made to slide into the booth with me.

  “What the fuck? I said no.”

  He was undeterred. He parked himself across from me and looked very earnest. “You won’t find anything better. North Side’s totally dry lately…except for my source.”

  Very seldom do I get the urge to hit people. But I wanted to flatten him. “Look, asshole, I’m a cop—and I’ll give you three seconds to get the fuck out of my face.”

  He held his hands up in surrender, though I noted that he made no effort to get up. “Okay, okay. I had to do that, double-check your reaction. I didn’t think you’d
be so hostile. Whoever wrote up your personality profile did a pretty lousy job of it. Can we start over again?”

  I did my best not to gawk. “Who are you?”

  “Con Dreyfuss. Constantine, actually, but everyone calls me Con. I’d offer to shake, but you look like you’d just as soon bite my hand off. Hard day at work?”

  Now I really wanted to punch him. “You tell me. You’re the one keeping tabs on me.”

  “Oh, touché.” He swept salt into a pile with the side of his hand. I saw that he bit his nails. “I’ve gotta tell you, my organization’s not some kind of George Orwell trip, you know? It might sound like it, with all the hush-hush and the non-disclosure clauses. But if you had to deal directly with the public? Trust me, Detective, you wouldn’t like it. Not at all.”

  He swept the salt over the side of the table. “That old folks’ home almost got ugly, you running around drunk, all those witnesses. We’ll need to hire more agents if you keep up the high profile.”

  “Why did Roger Burke give me your name?”

  He looked surprised. “Oh, so that’s how you spotted us. Most Psychs either tune in to us within the first year, or they never notice. Depends on the talent, I guess. It’s really hard to tail a precog, for instance.”

  “So you’ve been on me since I got out of the academy.”

  “Not me, personally. I made the Midwest Regional Director five years ago. Before that, I was in Florida.”

  “Didn’t a level-four medium buy it in Florida last year?”

  He looked pleased. “I’ll bet they’re sorry I transferred.”

  I tried to determine if “Con” was anything like he appeared to be, or if he was just another Roger Burke—someone who came off like a normal guy, but had the soul of a scorpion inside. Stefan would be able to tell me. Jacob, too—he’d known at first sight that something didn’t add up with Burke. But I wasn’t willing to hold up either of them to FPMP scrutiny, not until I figured out just how dangerous it was to be in the know.

  “I know your name,” I said. “I’ve seen your face. So, now what?”