Spook Squad

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “What do you think?” Be nice. The man’s got the goods. Or if not, he can get them. “I’m here to take care of the…matter…we agreed to.” There. That sounded civil.

  “How’d you manage to fit me into your busy schedule before Christmas?”

  “You’ve got eyes all over my workplace. You tell me.” I took a breath and regrouped before I said anything more I’d regret. He’d always needed me a hell of a lot more than I needed him—that’s what I’d been telling myself. I didn’t like it when the tables were turned. “Do you want your exorcism or not?”

  “After seeing you in action at PsyTrain?” He rubbed his hands together in eagerness that might or might not have been exaggerated. “I can hardly wait.”

  I noticed a small hum as Dreyfuss trooped me through the series of doors and halls that led to his office. Magnetic locks. I guess no one was taking chances with any uninvited guests who managed to get past the secretary without a bullet in their back. He pulled out a key and unlocked the door—then slid a magnetic card through a reader as well. All this rigmarole for the few seconds it took to gather me from the lounge.

  The office wasn’t exactly like I remembered it. He’d added a leather sofa, re-positioned the desk and installed a couple more monitors on his computer—all of them now running a flying toaster screensaver. The repeaters were still there, though: the spin-around who’d taken three bullets, the guy crumpling to the floor by the bathroom, and the ducking guy who’d been shot in the throat. It felt like deja vu. They were exactly the same, but me? I’d changed. During my previous encounter with the Gunshot Trio, I’d figured them for permanent fixtures. Now I was confident I could send them packing with a sprinkle of salt…and a big dose of white light.

  And once I did that, I’d have nothing left to barter.

  “I still have company,” Dreyfuss said, “judging by the look on your face.”

  I nodded. No sense in denying it, not if I wanted him to want something from me.

  He said, “I had a feeling I might. Richie says a prayer for them every week. I guess no one’s listening.”

  “Not necessarily.” While it would be to my advantage to make Richie seem inept so I could maneuver myself into a better bargaining position, I’d seen him fade a repeater, the guy in the boardroom who’d shot himself. “Richie has ability. It’s just that some things are more…advanced.”

  As my honesty spoke for me in a way that any enticement I might dream up never could, it occurred to me that I really did have plenty to offer beyond scrubbing these more stubborn repeaters. I lined Dreyfuss up in my peripheral vision and said, “Like taking care of Jennifer Chance.”

  I expected him to deny having her silenced, but instead he went silent himself. I thought he might deny all knowledge of her—after all, we’d only spoken about her in the astral, so he probably didn’t remember any of it. But when he finally did speak, he said, “Is she here?”

  With a big pull of white light, I walked a slow circuit of the office and double-checked the swanky private bathroom. Other than the three repeaters, everything was clean. “Not right now.”

  “But you’ve seen her.”

  “I’ve sensed—”

  “Sonofabitch, you have.” He chewed off a cuticle with absent ferocity and blotted the blood on his T-shirt. “Is she hanging around a particular area?”

  I’d seen her in the boardroom as well as Dreyfuss’ office. “I don’t think so.”

  “Can she leave the building?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can she hide herself from you?”

  I didn’t know that either. I shrugged.

  “In other words,” he said, “she could be here right now.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Dreyfuss wasn’t willing to take that chance. He grabbed a hoodie off the back of his chair, pulled on the world’s ugliest knit hat, and said, “Come on, Detective. Let’s take a walk.”

  * * *

  I haven’t known enough sentient ghosts to have a good idea of how far they can roam, but they do seem to have ties to the place they died. Unless they attached themselves to their murderer…in which case, all the walking in the world wouldn’t help Dreyfuss.

  The neighborhood was an inhospitable place surrounded by highway ramps and viaducts, with old brick commercial buildings abutting newer, uglier structures of corrugated metal. We were the only pedestrians in sight as we walked to the main drag at a brisk pace, in silence. When we turned the corner onto Grand, the feeling of stark isolation eased. I saw a bus shelter with some college kids goofing around inside. A cafe. A gym.

  Dreyfuss approached a flower shop that looked so decrepit I wondered if it was some kind of front. At least until he opened the door and a greenish chemical odor hit me. It was hot and humid, and the moisture in the air carried the unfamiliar smells deep into my lungs. If it was a front, the set dressers were doing a really bang-up job.

  “Okay, now we can talk.” Dreyfuss cut his eyes to the lintel we’d just passed beneath. Above the door, an aloe vera leaf dangled from a length of red yarn: a warding charm. “This is a safe place.”

  I walked around the floor and checked all the nooks and crannies just to be sure. The pale girl behind the counter talking on her cell phone in Polish paused to watch me comb through her store. When she cut her eyes to Dreyfuss, he gave her a little nod. On his payroll, no doubt. I filed the interaction away for future reference.

  He browsed a shelf of ceramic figurines, not because he was particularly interested in big-eyed puppies or smiling frogs. From that vantage point he could keep his eye on the door and window without being seen. I planted myself beside him and said, “You knew Dr. Chance was still there?”

  “Apparently I wasn’t the only one.” I expected him to look at least a bit chagrined about killing her…but he didn’t. Actually, he seemed annoyed. With me. “When we were trying to work the GhosTV at PsyTrain, you never asked me to hit her up for the instruction manual, so I figured you knew she was dead. But seeing her at the office and keeping your mouth shut about it was seriously uncool. It never occurred to you to tip me off?”

  “What’s the worst thing she can do? Make a cold spot?”

  “Come on, genius, think. All the intel we keep at the FPMP—do you really want that falling into the wrong hands? Hire a low level medium amped up on psyactives, and a sufficiently motivated ghost could waltz in, look around, and go tell them all our psychic friends’ deepest secrets.”

  Maybe Dreyfuss should have thought of that before he killed someone in his building. “Isn’t it ironic that you, of all people, are worried about falling under a psychic microscope?”

  “Oh, the irony’s not lost on me,” he said. “But the worst part is, if someone working against us scared up a GhosTV, between the technology and the drugs, a pretty good performance could be coaxed out of a medium who barely registers on the richter scale.”

  Then why the hell did he leave one with me? I shot him a look, and he said, “Either you’ll master it, or you’ll build a bonfire with it. Either way, I know you’d never list it on eBay. Of course, if you did happen to figure out how to get reception on that damn thing, maybe I could scoop up the potential viewing audience before anyone else got a chance to snag them.”

  His trust in me was touching. If only I could leverage that trust to get a few reds off him. “I never agreed to be your GhosTV trainer. Just to exorcise the guys in your office.”

  “Guys. Multiple. How many are we talking?”

  I tried not to look too pleased about admitting how crowded it was. “I sense three.”

  “What about Dr. Chance? You can’t just let her hang around. If she’s there, you take care of her, too.”

  “If she happens to be there.” I implied with my tone that she probably wouldn’t.

  “Either you’re busting my balls just to get a rise out of me, or you’re after something more.” He looked me up and down, then turned to a shelf of small potted cactuses and began
browsing them intently. “Agent Marks is here of his own accord, you know. If I fire him just to get you to cooperate, it’ll only come back to bite you in the ass.”

  I hadn’t realized Jacob’s career might be on the table. I’d only been angling for some Seconal. Now that he’d mentioned it, I couldn’t help but toy with the idea of freeing Jacob from the evil clutches of F-Pimp. Holding that power in my hot little hands was seductive. The thing was, I’d just witnessed Jacob defending the damn place to Carolyn. He enjoyed being a federal agent. I wasn’t about to take that away from him.

  Before I outmaneuvered myself and ended up doing something I’d regret, I came right out and said, “I need a prescription.”

  He paused with his fingertip poised against a cactus spike. “Okay, then. Let’s negotiate. What’re we talking?”

  “Seconal.”

  He gave a low whistle. “They don’t subject PsyCops to random drug testing. If you’re having trouble sleeping, why don’t you just…?” He made a puff-puff pot smoking gesture.

  I glared at him as I considered whether I was willing to walk away from the whole thing—give him the one exorcism, take a barbell to the GhosTV, and be done with him and his ugly hat once and for all. If Jacob weren’t involved, maybe I would. But I didn’t want things to go sour for Jacob at the FPMP just because of me.

  Dreyfuss sighed. “Just sayin’. I could hook you up with some killer bud, no problem. But reds? They’re a bitch.”

  “Is that a ‘no’?”

  “I can’t get you an honest-to-God prescription without setting off a billion alarms. But as for scoring you some pills…you’re lucky I’ve got friends south of the border.” He pulled out his pillbox, flipped it open, and extracted a single red pill, which he held up to the light between thumb and forefinger. “Go home. Get a good night’s sleep. And I’ll clear my schedule so tomorrow we can give my office a good going-over.”

  One fucking pill? One? I held out my hand, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of snatching it from his grasp. Although when he placed the little red capsule in my palm, I’d say he looked pretty damn satisfied.

  * * *

  I parted ways with Con Dreyfuss when he picked out a fuzzy-haired cactus and brought it up to the register. Although I was on high alert from our sparring, when I turned the corner of the underground garage and found someone tinkering around in the general area where I’d left my car, I tried to keep calm and tell myself it was nothing. Someone doing something completely innocuous. Opening their trunk. Putting a bumper sticker on their car. But as I neared and saw it was indeed my car they were messing with, possibilities flooded my brain ranging from tracking devices to car bombs. Until I saw who it was, anyway.

  “Hey, Richie.”

  He jumped up and spun around, goggle-eyed, then broke into a smile when he registered who I was. “Hardcore Vic!” He wiped his hand on his overcoat, then reached his squatty hand out for a handshake. A freshly-wiped hand is unappealing to me since it draws attention to whatever was just on it, so I would’ve rather kept my hands to myself. Plus his fingernails were too long, with grayish crescents beneath the whites that looked less like fresh dirt and more like a couple weeks of neglect. But I was such a dickhead to Richie back in the day when the two of us were “classmates” at Camp Hell, now I felt the need to be extra-specially nice to him. So I shook.

  “Can you believe this piece-of-shit beater?” he asked. I glanced at my trunk. He’d written WASH ME in the film of road salt.

  Awkward. “Yeah, uh, that’s mine.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then said with absolutely no shame, “You know the hubcaps aren’t really metal, don’t you? They’re plastic.”

  “Right.”

  “You should get a Lexus. That’s a good car.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “I got my new one already—next year’s model, heh-heh, before it’s even out.”

  I tried to look suitably impressed.

  “It gots a heated steering wheel. Heated mirrors, too.” He crossed over to a numbered parking spot much closer to the elevator and pointed at a sedan. “Cool color, huh? Fire agate pearl.”

  It was brown.

  “You’re gonna work here,” he said, “right? So you’ll get to pick out your Lexus in a year, too.”

  “Probably not. I’m pretty attached to the Fifth Precinct.”

  “That’s not what Agent Dreyfuss says.”

  Oh, really? “What does Agent Dreyfuss say?”

  “That you’ll get sick of pushing pencils eventually. Heh-heh.” He thought about what he’d just said, then added, “What does that mean?”

  Chapter 5

  Did I care what Constantine Dreyfuss thought of me? No. Why should I? At least I did an honest day’s work. I didn’t pretend I was all “regular guy” and then go around in an ugly knit hat putting out hits on people and flying airplanes and commanding a squadron of Psychs. Not that Jacob and Richie constituted a squadron all by themselves. Undoubtedly there were more people with special brain chemistry at the FPMP.

  Maybe it wasn’t all secret-agenty and slick, but police work needed to be done, damn it. Even though from the minute I heard my first punk song I’d thought it was cool to make fun of cops, after a dozen years on the force—seeing what I’ve seen and knowing what I know—I can say with certainty that if you think cops are dicks, wait ’til you deal with a hardened sociopathic criminal. Then wait ’til you realize there’s plenty more where he came from.

  Lisa’s car was there when I got home, so I was surprised when I opened the front door to a slide of junk mail. Since she’s home more than Jacob or me, she tends to do most of the picking up. I’m not too bad about creating messes, but there’d be trails of Jacob’s clothes and books and miscellaneous stuff all over the house if we didn’t go around behind him and gather up the flotsam.

  “I’m home,” I called out, as slippery catalogs evaded my grasp and spread themselves farther into the vestibule. I stacked them more assertively, and wondered if it would be okay for me to talk about the cop-subject with Lisa, or if that would be like complaining about the price of your heating bill to someone camped out in a homeless shelter.

  “You’re home early.” Lisa had a jacket on, and a purse slung over her shoulder.

  “Another date?” I said, before I considered whether we really needed to go into it. She raised her eyebrows high, and I realized she wasn’t wearing any makeup, so probably not. “Uh…sorry…what I meant was, when do I get to meet the lucky guy?”

  “It’s a little weird.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “You know. The tent and everything.”

  “Right,” I said. When I really wanted to say, No, it’s not weird, it’s fine. Anyone good enough for you wouldn’t dare think any less of you because of the tent. And if this jerk does… “We could always meet at a restaurant.”

  Catalogs slid, despite my attempt to keep hold of them. A particularly slick publication with a big brown Lexus on the cover landed on my shoes. I shifted the mail and picked it up. It was addressed to Jacob. Surprise, surprise. I huffed in annoyance and dropped all the mail back on the floor.

  Lisa stepped around the pile. “I’m just going to get that haircut we talked about.”

  “Not short,” I said, and oh my God, since when had I developed the compulsion to micromanage her life?

  “Not short. Just a trim.”

  It was probably for the best that I didn’t use her as a sounding board to go off on the value of police work. All she’d ever wanted to be was a cop, and now she was a PsyTrain dropout living in a tent in her ex-partner’s living room.

  The door shut behind Lisa, and I was left on my own to ponder the weight of my decisions, the meaning of life, the big stack of mail on the floor, and the single Seconal pill. I could practically feel it sliding down my throat, but if Dreyfuss was doling them out one at a time, I knew better than to swallow it and leave myself without. Instead, I dug through Jacob’s stash of vitamins un
til I found some enzymes that came in capsule form. I unscrewed the capsule, tipped the powder down the drain, and blew the remaining enzyme dust out of the empty halves. Then I opened the red over a sheet of tin foil and split the powder between the two capsules with a butter knife, careful to capture every last bit of powder. I swallowed the adulterated vitamin to ensure no one else took it upon themselves to eat a strange pill they found on the kitchen counter. Not that either of the people I lived with would actually do that. Not after Lisa’s first and only Auracel incident, anyway.

  The relaxed euphoria didn’t set in immediately, but knowing it would soon was enough to take the edge off. While I waited for the barbs to kick in, I decided I might as well have a look at the car catalog to weigh in on my preferences early, so we didn’t end up with a big brown sedan with a shiny new tracking device in it parked out front once Jacob reached his one-year FPMP anniversary. There’d be no way around the tracking device, of course. I suspected they were already in our phones anyhow. But the thought of riding around in a brown car was depressing.

  Since the goofy puzzle was still monopolizing the dining room table, I took the catalog pile to the couch, kicked off my shoes, propped my feet on the coffee table and began flipping through the stack. As I was thumbing through to the Lexus catalog, I spotted a magazine sticking out from behind it, a thin wisp of a periodical called Inner Eye that caters to Psychs and psychic wannabes. Usually I just throw it on the pile in Jacob’s office—not only is it addressed to him, but I’ve always found it to be bone dry, mostly filler and conjecture. The current issue’s headline stopped me in my tracks, though. Murderer Walks Free. And then I got hung up on the cover photo—because I knew that fuckhead.

  It was the human scum who’d pummeled his girlfriend to death with a dog dish.

  One of the pages tore as I jerked it open to find the lead article. It was eight pages long. I read it through fast—once, twice—and then slow, lingering over the phrases “convicted with psychic-gathered evidence” and “judge with a record of anti-psychic bias” and “acquittal.” And just for good measure, “victim’s family is devastated.”