I had a track record, but it was the opposite of good. And anyway, I didn’t actually believe we’d get out—because how could they replace us? Now that that psychic abilities were no longer a one-way ticket to the nuthouse, who would be stupid enough to sign away all their civil liberties, and their medical rights, on top of it?
“What’re you gonna do when you get out?” I said.
“Me? I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
Either had I. “We should get an apartment, in Boystown. Paint the walls black.”
“It has to have a bathtub,” he said. “If I never see another shower in my life, it’ll be too soon.”
“And windows that open. Without bars on them.”
“And a pizza place next door. Or Chinese takeout. Or a bakery. All three.”
“Or a record store.” I’d had a record collection, once upon a time. Not extensive, but hard-to-find pressings of bands who’d never made the top forty. I wondered where they’d ended up. Probably in a garage sale at my last foster home. I could find those albums again. And Stefan and me, we could mingle our record collections.
“So there wasn’t anything you could’ve told them tonight to get them off your case?” he asked me.
“Like what?”
“I dunno. You didn’t even get a little glimmer? Not from anything?”
I watched the lazy Susan revolve in my mind’s eye. “Nope. Nothing. They thought I did, though. I opened the box and—get this—there’s a wig inside. A fucking dead lady’s wig. I think I laughed. I mean, who wouldn’t? And when I put the wig back in the slot, it just came rolling back out again. Over and over. It was funny, for maybe fifteen minutes.” I really hated to admit that sometimes I lost my ability to find humor in the absurdity of it all. “But they kept showing me that wig…for maybe, I dunno…twelve hours.”
Stefan clasped me against his chest tighter.
“D’you think they take shifts?” I told him. “Krimski would have to pay ‘em overtime if they watched me for more than eight hours.”
“I don’t know. Focus on the sound of my voice. Feel your feet on the floor, and your body where it rests against the couch.”
What? That didn’t make any sense. I wondered if Camp Hell’s funding had been cut, like Krimski had told me it would if nobody started to perform, or if now they could afford to pay the psy-goons overtime to watch me while I stared at a dead woman’s wig for twelve hours straight.
“Five, you’re breathing, you’re relaxed. You’re firmly anchored in your body, and you’re tuning in to the present.”
Jesus. I was in Stefan’s office. My holster felt clammy against my side. I was hungry. What with the fire ghost and the emergency regression, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
And I was a little…excited. Oh God. Did it show? I had a boner, it had to show. Unless it just looked like my pants were bulging, the way cheap dress slacks sometimes do…except that wouldn’t slip by Stefan. He was an empath. If I was turned on, he’d totally know. Shit.
“Two, you’re refreshed, and you’re centered, and you’re fully awake. Did you hear me, Victor? You’re fully awake.”
“I heard you.”
“All right, then. One. Open your eyes.”
I opened my eyes, half-expecting to find Stefan with teased black hair and permanent marker on his lips. But, no. It was present-day Stefan, with his black turtleneck and his pointy sideburns. I looked away.
“Want to talk about what you just saw?”
Where he sucked me off? And we talked about moving in together, and then a month later I disappeared into the Police Academy without so much as a Thank you, ma’am? No, not really. I slid down to the opposite side of the couch so I could get up without fear of prodding him with a really inopportune hard-on.
“I’m starving. I need to eat.”
“I have a diet shake in the fridge. You can drink it if you’re having a low blood sugar headrush.”
I tried to pull on my blazer, realized it was inside-out, then shook out the sleeve and yanked the thing on, spraying cinnamon sugar. “No thanks.” I glanced at the windows, planning to say that it was late, that Jacob was expecting me, that I should get home…and I realized that the windows were all dark. I looked at the wall clock. It was nearly nine. “Is that right? It’s nine o’clock?”
“You were so eager to locate this particular training session, it seemed like I shouldn’t bring you out until you were ready.”
“Oh God.” I flipped open my phone, which had been in my overcoat, set to vibrate. A message from Zigler. One from Jacob. And one from Unavailable.
“Really, have the shake. And you can tell me what you’re so upset about. Because the regressions are only half of the healing process. You’ve got to make sense of them.”
“Look…thanks. For everything. Really. But I gotta go.” I slapped a few hundred dollars on Stefan’s desk without counting it, and I drove like a madman all the way home.
**
In a way, it was good that a half-hour drive separated me from Jacob. I felt like I’d just cheated on him—without meaning to, of course. All I’d wanted was to figure out how to exorcise an evil spirit. I’d gotten a fourteen-year-old blowjob from Stefan instead.
Stefan’s countdown had been exactly the same as always. I’d been aiming for exorcism. So why jump back to a moment with my pants around my knees? Why now?
I parked in front of Jacob’s Crown Vic, slammed the car door, jammed my hands deep in my pockets, and crunched up the rock-salted walkway. I wondered if I could activate a twenty pound bag of sidewalk salt to make it that much harder for remote viewers to spy on Jacob and me. And I suspected that I could.
Jacob thundered down the stairs from our loft as I hung up my overcoat in the foyer. He skidded to a stop in the doorway and looked at me, all smiles. I was trying to figure out what to do with my sportcoat.
“Did you put a donut in your pocket again?” he asked me.
“I’ve just had one sorry-assed day.” I dropped the jacket on the floor. He picked it up and draped it over his arm, and followed me into the kitchen.
I opened the fridge, dug around for a minute, and found a few cold pieces of pizza wrapped in foil. I unwrapped a piece and ate it while I leaned over the sink so that I didn’t have to wash a plate. Jacob stood beside me and watched.
I swallowed the last corner of crust, which I usually throw out, but I was starving, so I didn’t. Then I turned on the tap, drank a few swallows of water to move the ball of congealed cheese and dough stuck in my esophagus down towards my stomach. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and I turned to face Jacob.
He looked like a kid on Christmas morning, trying hard not to smile, and failing miserably.
“What?” I asked.
“Did you get my message?”
“No, I….” I was busy avoiding my messages, because I didn’t want to hear the one from the FPMP. “I thought I’d just focus on getting home before sunrise.”
Jacob grabbed me by the biceps and pulled me up against his chest. He put his mouth to my ear, and whispered, “You were right.”
Really? No, seriously. Really? “About what?”
“I can do this thing…it’s like….” Whatever it was like, it left him speechless. He got his arms around me and crushed me against his rock-solid body. He squeezed all the air out of me, and I let myself dangle against him, because maybe if Jacob was this happy, some little corner of the world was still okay. He kissed me, clashing teeth with me in his impatience, and his hands roamed up and down my back. One hand traced the lines of my holster, the other one grabbed my ass hard. He broke the kiss, then pressed his mouth to my ear again. “I have a talent. For sure.”
I almost asked if he was sure he was really, really sure, even though I’d been the one who suggested that he might. Because now, when I saw his reaction to it, I realized that if I’d been wrong, he’d be devastated.
But he seemed positive, and that gave me hope. I spoke
with the last of the breath in my lungs, a little croak. “So, what can you…do?”
“I can shut down other Psychs’ talents.”
He was so sure, in fact, that he said “other” Psychs, as if he was positive that he could count himself among our number. “Who did you test this with?”
“Don’t worry—just Carolyn and Crash. But Carolyn’s telepathy is accurate enough that after we practiced it, she could tell when I was blocking her and when I wasn’t. She said it was like I’d flipped the light switch off.”
“You’ve been together for years. How is it she’s never noticed before?”
“I never did it with her. It’s a very conscious thing I need to do to activate it. A mental shift.”
Like the beautiful woman in the mirror who turns into a skull. “Oh. I get it.”
“And even Crash could feel it.” Jacob smirked. “He says I used to do ‘that thing’ to him whenever we argued—so he just figured the blank sensation he’d pick up was the way he registered my anger.”
Two Psychs for two. I was guessing that if we wanted to broadcast to the whole world over our cell phones, we could call Lisa and verify that she couldn’t answer a si-no that Jacob asked while he was actively blocking her. But I didn’t think we needed to go there.
Jacob hustled me into the main room, where the books and reports from Dreyfuss covered the dining room table. They were all open, weighted down with knick-knacks, unopened cans of protein drink, even the TV remote. The pages bristled with colored sticky notes. Jacob circled the table once, then picked out a report that looked like it had been printed out on a dot-matrix printer and then photocopied through about twelve generations. “Here. Listen to this.”
He read: “The talent of the psychic partner will be balanced by the absence of talent in the non-psychic partner, and care must be taken in the selection of the NP. The candidate should score neutral in every category, over a minimum of five separate testing days. Further, he should prove resistant to clairsentient probing.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the original PsyCop proposal. And look.”
He thrust the document at me. The paragraph he’d been reading seemed to have some kind of printer malfunction toward the bottom. The last sentence was hardly more than a light pattern of dots. The only reason it read as a sentence to me at all was because Jacob had deciphered it. “Shitty copy.”
“But that’s not all.” Jacob pulled our current PsyCop handbook from the pile. He’d highlighted a section bright orange. The paragraph was the same, word for word. But the last line was missing.
I dragged a chair out and sat down hard. My gun dug into my ribs. “All right—that’s interesting and all. But I don’t think it’s earth-shattering. Everyone knows that Stiffs are harder to influence and possess, and that they’re supposed to balance out Psychs.”
“Because the balance is mentioned again later on in the proposal. But the key thing here in the testing is resistance to clairsentients, not the neutral scores in everything else. And the part that really mattered, that’s the portion of the test that was never instituted.”
“Why does it not surprise me that a Psych test evolved into half-assedness? Wait, scratch that. I know why. I took a modern test at LaSalle, and I scored as NP.”
“How could someone test for a medium unless they had a ghost in their kit?” Jacob said.
I took up the line of reasoning. “And how could they test for a psychic shield unless they had a reliable Psych hanging around for him to shut down?”
Jacob pulled up a chair, rotated it so it faced me, sat down, and pulled my hand into his lap. He worked my fingers and palm in his strong, warm hands, and stared into my face so earnestly I thought one of us was going to start blubbering. I’m not sure who.
“Zigler tried to quit,” I said.
“Quit what?”
“Quit being a PsyCop.”
Jacob stroked my hand with his thumb. “What happened?”
“I found something at LaSalle.” I swallowed hard. “In the basement. Fuck, it was one of the worst ghosts I’d ever seen. It lit up the whole room with ghostfire.” I shuddered. “And Zig…he read my expression, I guess. He figured that if I was spooked, he didn’t want any part of it.”
Jacob gave a low whistle. “I didn’t see that coming. So what would you expect him to do?”
“Well, he….” I stopped, and thought. What had I expected from him?
“What could either of you do?”
“I could get rid of it.”
Jacob stared me in the eye.
“Exorcise it,” I said. Even though it had been obvious what I’d meant, it seemed like it was important that I use the technical term, even though it meant admitting that I knew what I was doing, sometimes.
Jacob sat back and stroked his goatee. “You’re serious. I thought you’d been studying up to get rid of repeaters.”
I stared down at the sea of books, and the words all ran together. “If Einstein could do it, Richie, I mean—the guy’s a level three, if even that—then I should be able to do it, too. I saw him fade a suicide out of existence with a few Hail Marys. So if there’s a big, nasty, psycho fire-ghost in the hospital, and its negative vibes are killing patients, I’ve got to at least try to flush it out.”
Mind you, I was fully aware that my own logic didn’t quite jibe with the advice I’d once given Lisa. I’d told her that she wasn’t responsible for eradicating every last evil in the world, just because she had the gift of si-no.
Maybe the fire ghost was out of my league, and if so, it didn’t seem too bright to put myself in danger, if I could walk away instead.
On the other hand, it was actually my case. My job.
“I’ll help you,” Jacob said.
I wanted to say no. It wasn’t his responsibility, it was mine. And he didn’t see that spirit, feel it deep down in his core, get a sense of how twisted and wrong it actually was. I wanted to tell him that, but I didn’t. Because it wouldn’t have made any difference. Jacob had something to prove—to himself, to me. And he intended to prove it.
-THIRTY ONE-
Jacob emerged from our basement with cobwebs in his hair, and a battered, red spiral-bound notebook in his hand. I took the notebook from him and flipped it open. Anarchy symbols. My handwriting from when I was twenty-four looked different than it did now. Neater. And I pressed harder back then, too, leaving impressions of my writing on the page beneath. I still left my o’s open on top and crossed my t’s crooked and to the right, but now I had a looser, easier scrawl that didn’t eat into the pages below.
I flipped toward the center of the notebook, wondering if some of the notes covered up impressions of the sex fantasy I’d written for Stefan fourteen years ago. Forensics could probably scan the book and recover it from the impressions I’d left in the paper. I might’ve been blushing a little, but if Jacob noticed, he probably chalked it up to the excitement of the ghost hunt.
“I think candles would help,” I said. Because although I was primarily visual, I remembered how the cinnamon sugar had turbocharged my powers, and I though a few basic props were in order if I was going to pay another visit to that scary-assed ghost. “Salt, too. And…” I was being facetious with this last part, “do we have any rue?”
“Crash left a bag of supplies here when he did the house blessing.”
Lo and behold, we did indeed have rue. And charcoal, with Crash’s signature resin, copal, to burn on top of it. We had sage smudge sticks and a Baggie of fuzzy green stuff that I couldn’t quite place until I dipped my fingers into it and felt it. Mugwort. Drinkable, as an infusion. Supposedly grants prophetic dreams—in other words, a natural psyactive. A half-dozen white candles, too, tied in a bundle with a red ribbon. Red and white. Protection. And if I shifted my vision while I looked at them, they seemed to give off a subtle glow, even unlit. I figured they’d been activated by Crash.
There was even a prepackaged container of “Double Cross” incense
. It looked like it was manufactured by the same company that made the High John soap, the one that had given me a rash. I set that aside. Instinctively, I trusted more in simple ingredients that I activated myself than I did in factory-made blends. Or maybe that wasn’t instinct talking at all. Maybe it was training.
“This ghost looked pretty strong,” I said, “and I’m thinking it’s had its hooks sunk into LaSalle for fifty, maybe sixty, years now. We need to be careful.”
Jacob nodded.
“So…boil some water. It’s tea time.”
While Jacob got the mugwort started, I scooped some sidewalk salt out of the bag in the vestibule, funneled white light into it until it glowed, then scattered it around our downstairs bathroom. I put an incense burner full of smoldering copal on the countertop, and I burned one of the activated white candles.
The room felt right.
I hung a clean suit on the hook inside the bathroom door while I showered, so the smoke and the steam and the protective vibes could permeate it while I washed the stink of the day, both physical and spiritual, from my body.
Jacob came in with our tea while I was soaping up for the fifth time. He put the cups beside the sink and started to strip.
“Uh-uh, we shower separately,” I told him. “You’ve got to save your mojo. You’ll need it.”
He slid the shower door open a crack and leaned against the pastel-colored tiles. “You’re serious?”
“Dead serious.”
He nodded. We could take a tumble anytime. But big, juicy exorcisms were harder to come by.
Once we were clean and centered, suited up in clothes that smelled like Crash’s store, and sloshing with bland mugwort tea, we climbed into Jacob’s car and headed toward LaSalle.
I gave him Zig’s security card, and the staff didn’t bother to check the name on it against Jacob’s badge. They knew the police had been scouring the building all week, and we looked like cops. We might not have smelled like cops. But we looked the part.
My heart pounded in my throat as the elevator doors closed, and the car started to sink. “I feel like I’m buzzing,” Jacob whispered.
PsyCop 5: Camp Hell Page 25