Zigler walked out to the center of the parking lot, his gallon-sized coffee leaving a vapor trail behind him. He frowned and scanned the sidewalk.
I gave him a quick whistle between my teeth. He turned, and the dealer muttered, "Oh, shit." I might not have looked a whole lot like a cop, but Zig couldn't have been anything other than a police officer or a football coach. The dealer's steps, loud, crunching through ice, receded quickly as he sprinted back the way he'd come.
"What're you doing?" Zigler asked. He came over and handed me an ice cold water, which I took with numb fingers.
"You let him get away," whined the voice. "Why didn't you do something?"
I cracked the seal on the water and drank deeply. I felt chilled through and through, but my shirt was stuck to my back with sweat. "There's a chatty one over here," I told Zigler.
He looked impressed. Or spooked. I didn't know him well enough to differentiate one from the other. "Did ... it ... see the van?"
"I dunno." I turned my head in the general direction of the whiny voice. "Have you seen a white van with damaged rear doors held together by rope?"
The voice snorted. "Why're you going after the buyers? It's the dealers you need to hit. I swear, the corruption in this city ... you got some kind of quota you need to fill?"
"Are you saying you have seen the van?"
"What if I did? You going to do anything about it?"
"I take it you've got an axe to grind."
"Well, I ... No, of course not. It's the principle of the thing.
It makes no sense for you to punish the buyers, man. They're not the source of the problem."
Principle, my ass. He'd bought a bad batch of dope from this dealer and dropped dead, and now he wanted to get even. Still, there'd be no harm in tipping the station off to Mister Blue Light Special. "Okay. If the van checks out, I'll send someone from narcotics over for this jerk. Scout's honor."
There was a long silence. Zig's coffee steamed, and the automatic doors around the corner creaked open and whisked shut. Engines started as more cars pulled away with fresh coffee warming the cup holders.
I thought maybe the ghost had left, unwilling to barter. Or maybe he wasn't as lucid as I'd thought, unable to hold a conversation outside his usual parameters. But then he caved in. "The dude with the van comes Mondays and Thursdays after dark," the voice told me. "He's an older guy with glasses. I don't think he's scoring for himself. He looks clean."
I took another long pull at my water. My eagerness for cracking the case pushed memories of Camp Hell to the back of my mind. I still felt clammy, but at least the spinny-throw-up sensation was gone. "You ready to sink your teeth into a white van?" I asked Zigler.
Chapter Eleven
Zigler and I sat across from the convenience store in the Impala. Our hands were busy with deli sandwiches made from every possible form of meat that could be processed from a pig, washed down with coffee. Not the best culinary match, but we had to keep ourselves wired so we could stay awake as long as we needed to. A couple of cruisers waited nearby, one hidden in an alley, another shielded by the world's largest pickup truck. The murmur of the uniformed officers periodically checking in over the radio provided some background noise. Sundown was close. We ate, and we watched.
"Getting the paperwork together for this case is a dream," Zigler said.
I raised my eyebrows at him while I slurped my coffee.
Still a little too hot, but impossible not to drink it.
"Your word's good enough for any judge. You're like a walking search warrant."
I shrugged. It was kind of embarrassing. "More like a drug-sniffing K-9 unit—white van," I blurted out, sinking down in my seat and doing my best to look forgettable.
The van pulled into the parking lot, leaving its back doors facing us. There was a crust of gray salt thick enough to write "wash me" in it, but nothing that suggested there was a problem with the latch. No rope. The driver, a black man in navy blue coveralls, went into the store. We watched him buy a pack of smokes and a lottery ticket, get back into his van, and drive away.
A white SUV pulled in, and though it was an outside chance that it would turn out to be our target, we watched it closely anyway. The driver, a young Caucasian woman in a skirt, did not pull to the side of the building to score crack.
"So you had no visual on this witness, right?"
It seemed bizarre to be calling the whiny ghost with the chip on his shoulder a witness. He was a witness, technically—or maybe an informant. I guess I just didn't really think of him as a real person. Oh, he was "real," all right. Undoubtedly, I could coax some verifiable fact from him that would corroborate his existence. Maybe I just didn't think of him as a person.
"Only his dulcet voice," I said around a mouthful of cold cuts.
"How can you tell, when it's just a voice? At first, I mean.
That it's not coming from somewhere ... mundane."
"I can't. That's why everything takes forever to sink in. I've got to figure out where it's coming from."
"What about visuals?"
"White van," I snapped, and we both hid behind our gigantic sandwiches.
I held my breath as the van slowed nearly to a stop before pulling into the lot. It lurched on worn-out struts as it made its way over the hump of the driveway, then crept up to the convenience store, then past it. Toward the alley.
A bungee cord held the rear doors shut.
"Don't just sit there," cried a familiar whiny voice from the back seat of the Impala, "do something!"
I scrunched my eyes shut and debated telling Zig about the "witness." Would it freak him out, knowing we weren't alone in the car? Or was he like Jacob, a psych devotee ... though hopefully without the major hard-on Jacob got from all things paranormal.
"Let's go," I told Zigler, ignoring the ghost. I picked up the radio and gave the other guys a heads up. "This is it," I said, and one of the cruisers nosed out of the alley.
"Oh my God," said the whiner. "It's just like Law and Order."
"Shut up," I snapped. I needed to focus on the van; I couldn't afford to be distracted by some dead jerkoff's commentary.
"This is so cool."
"You've got visual, or just auditory?" Zigler asked as he eased into the parking lot. One of the cruisers pulled up behind us, blocking the driveway.
"It's the guy from the alley," I told Zig. "Still can't see 'im."
I glanced toward the back seat, but it just looked empty. I wished I could see him, at least an outline, a glimmer. That way I could do my one and only mental trick: a balloon of white light to contain him. It wasn't exactly foolproof, but sometimes it really did work. Unfortunately, it only worked if I had a visual—probably due to my limited imagination—and since I couldn't see the ghost, I couldn't conjure up any kind of barrier between the two of us.
We pulled up behind the van. I figured I'd have to just threaten the whiner and hope it was enough. "I mean it, fuckhead. You wanna screw it all up 'cos you couldn't keep your mouth shut?"
"No," he said, sullen and quiet.
"Then stay put and shut up."
Zigler shifted the car into park, close enough to the van to block it, but far enough away so that it wouldn't seem obvious, not right off the bat, anyway. We got out of the car.
My feet slipped against the frozen slush of the lot.
A uniformed officer rounded the opposite end of the lot, crouching behind a parked SUV. A long, brash honk made me glance toward the street. Someone really wanted their hundred and twenty ounce fountain drink, and they wanted it badly enough to piss off the cop who was deliberately blocking the lot.
"Stupid fuck," said the whiner. "It's a cop. Go around."
"I told you to stay put," I hissed, though I wasn't particularly surprised that he hadn't listened.
Zigler circled around the far end of the white van while I hung back so we'd both emerge at once. "He's there," said the whiner, so close to my ear he could've been riding on my shoulder. "Hurr
y."
I whipped my head around and glared in the direction of the voice, but I couldn't see anything ghostly. I tried squinting harder, but it didn't help. "Get back!" I whispered.
"But he's...."
I think it was the only time in my life that a psyactive, a drug that would actually amplify psychic powers, sounded good. If I ever saw this guy, he was gonna get the biggest, nastiest white balloon my poor, abused brain could cook up.
"Hands where I can see 'em! Get down on the ground!"
Zigler's voice. Shit. He already had a visual on the actual suspect. I hustled my way toward the side of the building and my heel skidded out from under me on a flat patch of ice. I hit the van shoulder first, smearing the entire sleeve of my freshly cleaned winter coat with road salt.
A guy rounded the corner of the van just as I hit it.
Caucasian, mid sixties, with a crazy shock of white hair and big round glasses that made him look like a cliché from an eighties' music video. Absent minded professor character, maybe.
"Stop," I barked at him in my most badass cop voice, "now!"
I made a grab for him, but he weaseled his way past me, agile with the adrenaline rush he was on from the possibility of getting caught.
"He's getting awaaaay.... "said the Whiner.
"Then follow him," I snapped, my feet scrabbling around on the ice as I struggled to pursue him.
"Really? Me? Don't you have to deputize me or something?"
"Go," I said, taking off toward the fleeing Professor. He was fast, way faster than me, and he never slid. A couple of uniformed officers sprinted after him: Brett Warjovsky, a young guy in his twenties who looked like he was in pretty good shape, and Mila Franco, a petite woman who'd probably fall behind because of her shorter legs. Franco split off and went up an alley while Warjovsky stuck to the suspect. I did my best to keep Warjovsky in my line of sight. The Professor had already effectively lost me.
Zigler's heavy cop shoes crunched through the ice-crusted snow beside me. He was breathing hard, and he was proving to be no better of a runner than I was. I shouldn't have been happy about that, but come on. Misery loves company. It was fine by me if was the beat cops who took the Professor down.
We rounded a corner onto a side street and found Warjovsky scanning the sidewalk for footprints. It was too dark to tell the fresh tracks from the ones that were hours old. "I lost him," he said, disgusted.
"He went into that house," said the whiner, his voice triumphant. "The one with the lights on."
"Mila," I called out. I caught a glimpse of her in the back alley and pointed at the house. She nodded and covered the exit.
Zigler, Warjovsky, and I thundered up the steps. Zigler fell to the back, and Warjovsky easily outpaced me, leaving me in the middle. "Police," Warjovsky barked, pounding on the front door. "Open up."
I fully expected Warjovsky to have to kick the door in, but a large Greek woman with mascara running down her face yanked the front door open. "A man," she wailed, "there's a man!" The Professor didn't live there, probably didn't even know her, and had managed to scare the crap out of her.
She opened the front door wide and we all thundered in.
"Stop where you are and put your hands behind your head," Warjovsky yelled, but the Professor had gotten this far; he wasn't going to stop now. He plowed into the back hall.
We poured into the hall, through the door, and out into the alley. Officer Franco was there, gun drawn, eyes fixed on the back door. No Professor. "Shit," Warjovsky said. I had to suppress a smile. He was so darn sincere. I don't think I'd ever been that sincere, not even at twenty-five, or however old he was.
"The basement," said the whiner. He sounded breathless, probably from excitement, since he didn't actually have to run anywhere, being a ghost.
"Downstairs," I said, slipping back inside. We pounded down the steps, ready to corner the guy. Only there was nothing down there but stacks and stacks of moldy magazines, neatly bundled and peppered with mouse turds, and a boiler with a puddle of rusty water beneath it.
"Detective," said Warjovsky. I looked, but he'd been talking to Zigler. He pointed with his flashlight. One of the magazine bundles listed to the side, and the squat window above flapped open as the wind hit it.
We all scrambled into the back alley, then swung around the side of the building where the suspect had slipped our net. "Where is he?" I said.
Franco shone her flashlight at the narrow sidewalk. "He went north."
"He went toward the street," said the whiner. "Y-you want me to follow him?"
"Go," I said. I realized that Franco, Warjovsky, and Zigler were all staring at me—and they all looked like they'd seen a ghost. "Come on," I told them, and jogged toward the street.
I welcomed the yellow circle of streetlight after the close, cold darkness of the alley, but I didn't have any idea which way the Professor had run once he'd slipped the alleyways.
"Um...."
"You're tracking him with a spirit?" said Warjovsky. He was breathing fast and shallow, probably not from running.
"I, um ... Yeah."
"Ohmygod," said Franco. She sounded like a mallrat. I don't think she even noticed.
"That doesn't mean we forget about old-fashioned police work," said Zigler. "Try to pick out his footprints."
"Yes sir," said Franco, turning her flashlight beam to the ground.
Zigler and I stepped to the side to have a little chat without the awed looks from the peanut gallery. "I wouldn't count on this guy," I said. "He's a dead junkie."
His eyes scanned the street for movement. "A lead's a lead. We check it out."
Franco and Warjovsky were conferring over a stack of overlapping, half-frozen footprints when the whiner returned.
"I think I found his house. He let himself in with a key."
Zigler was right. A lead was a lead. And this one really, really wanted me to catch the Professor. "Okay," I said. Let's go."
Chapter Twelve
Claymore Avenue was just like any other side street in this neighborhood: trees, brownstones, and every inch of curb space taken up by parked cars. Until you got to the end.
Claymore Avenue terminated at an old set of railroad tracks, the other side of which was occupied by a wide, uninviting stretch of overgrown field. Papery, brownish stems of dead weeds poked up through the snow, which mounded over humps that might be rocks, or low bushes, or possibly old tires. At the edge of the snow where the plow had left a small, gray cliff edge, crushed soda cans and plastic shopping bags poked out from the slushy mess. Windows were lit all up and down the street, except for this weird, forgotten end, where a neighborhood full of half-million dollar condos suddenly turned seedy.
Chicago's just weird like that.
It was a mixed zone, residential and light industrial. Only the industries weren't doing very brisk business these days. I stood in front of a small, red brick storefront whose entire facade had once been a plate-glass window, but was now covered by sheets of particleboard with Disciples symbols spray painted at varying heights. There were lights on upstairs, as if the flat above was occupied.
"Not there," said the whiner. "Across the street."
"I'm waiting for my partner. Do you mind?"
Franco radioed in for more backup on the 2-way radio she carried on her belt while Warjovsky scanned the street in search of our suspect. Zigler caught up with me and I nodded at the building across the street. It was a dingy three-flat with all its windows dark. A parking spot stood empty in front, a big black asphalt rectangle on a street dusted with snow. The white van's usual space?
"Go around back," I told Franco, who'd gone pale. And I don't think it was the suspect who had her freaked out.
"Warjovsky, cover the front door."
"You're going in?" he said. "You don't have a warrant."
"You gotta hurry, man," said the whiner. "He's in there with his missus, and I think they're gonna pitch all the evidence before you catch him."
I sure
hoped that didn't mean he'd cut Lynch into little chunks and was in the process of flushing the body down the toilet. "I'm going in," I told Warjovsky simply. His face screwed up, but he didn't try and stop me. That was that.
Zigler and I went to the front stoop and I tried the door.
Locked. I pounded on it hard, and shouted, "Police, open up!"
"Don't do that," whined our spirit guide, "they'll hide everything. Quick! You gotta hurry...!"
"Fuck," I muttered. I could hear running footsteps, hollow on hardwood floors, on the other side of the door. "Zig, we gotta go in. Now."
"Move," said Zigler. He backed up to the edge of the stoop and charged.
The door and the lock held firm, but the doorframe gave.
The long, rusty nails that held it shrieked as if Zig had caused them pain.
"In here, in here," said the ghost, his voice piped up high in excitement.
"In where?" I demanded. "I can't fucking see you!"
"End of the hall, then through the narrow door. The basement."
I'd barreled in quick, but slowed at the mention of the word "basement." There's always such nasty shit in the basement.
"Which way?" said Zigler. I pointed to the narrow door and he rushed forward. Better him than me.
He kicked the narrow door open, gun drawn, and charged down the stairs, bellowing, "Freeze! Police! On the floor! On the floor!" I let myself be towed along behind him, like I was swimming in the current of events and didn't have enough motivation to pull myself out of the stream. My gun was out, a familiar weight in my hand, and my feet found the stair treads, soft, rubbery non-slip pulling at the ice-damp soles of my shoes.
There were lights all over the basement ceiling, bare bulbs every few feet, but the dark, raw wood of the bottoms of the upstairs floorboards ate most of the light they gave out. It felt dim and shadowy, damp and unfinished.
"Drop it," Zigler hollered. "I said drop it!"
I hunched back against the basement wall to keep myself from getting shot. There was movement everywhere, and I looked around wildly, trying to get a bead on whatever it was I should be shielding myself from. My first thought was that I'd stumbled into some kind of underground hospital ward.
PsyCop 3: Body and Soul Page 10