Spook Squad

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Maybe,” I said finally.

  He was watching me, hard. He knew he’d piqued my interest. “Never tried, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve always thought it was a crying shame you were stuck ticketing jaywalkers with those bozos on the force. You know I’d love to put you on the fast track for personal growth and development.”

  Excitement surged through me as he reached into his pocket, and I figured I hadn’t blown my chance at those last three Seconals after all. But it wasn’t his magic pillbox he pulled out this time. It was a keyring. He opened his lowest desk drawer, took out a slim black folder and placed it on his desk, careful not to bleed on it. “All the Psych trainers in the world can tell you to clear your mind and breathe and chant and ring the Tibetan prayer bowls…but it’s all a bunch of theory. None of them can really guide you from a place of experience.”

  He’d lost my attention with the folder. People don’t keep their pills in a folder. Unless there was a prescription in there…but he’d already told me a Seconal prescription was out of the question.

  “After all,” he said, “who’s gonna tell Michelangelo how to paint a ceiling?” He was happy to supply his own answer. “Not the guys down at the Home Depot. That’s for sure.”

  Unless it was a prescription for some kind of psyactive that might allow me to talk to Triple-Shot. After the mickey I’d let him slip me in Santa Barbara, I didn’t want anything to do with Dreyfuss’ experimental drugs. Unless they were benzos.

  “But there is one person who can provide Victor Bayne with the benefit of her experience.” He opened the folder, but the sheet of paper inside wasn’t a prescription at all. It was a piece of notebook paper, slightly yellowed. My heart sank at the sight of it—because while he’d been trying to arouse my curiosity as to what it might be, I really had sold myself on the idea of a new prescription. He was watching my face fall—and I didn’t care. All that setup, for a stupid note?

  And then he said, “Marie Saint Savon.”

  * * *

  “It’s in French.” I tried to sound cocky, but my voice was shaking. ’Cos once I registered what he was showing me, scoring pills was the last thing on my mind.

  “I took a few semesters in high school,” Dreyfuss said, “but I was too busy watching Conchita Suarez in the front row twirling her long black hair to remember much more than the basics. They wouldn’t let the Cuban kids take Spanish just to raise their GPAs. Lucky for me.”

  “So you don’t know what this list says?”

  “I didn’t say that. There’s such a thing as a translator, y’know.”

  I read a line. I was so excited I kept going back on myself, reading and re-reading, trying to make sense.

  Resentir un frisson. Okay. For all I knew, the Frisson was an overpriced luxury sedan. I looked to Dreyfuss for an explanation. He read the line out loud, and while I wouldn’t know a good accent from a bad one, he sounded pretty damn French to me. “It means to feel a sudden drop in temperature,” he explained, “along with a big case of the willies. A cold spot.”

  He read the next couple of lines. “Le voir mourir—seeing a death…not a spirit, but the death itself. You call ’em repeaters. Parler a l’ame—chatting with spirits.”

  Holy hell. Marie Saint Savon had left behind a laundry list of medium abilities. In order of difficulty, no less. I read the final line out loud. “Craquer les morts. What the hell is that supposed to be? Dead crackers?”

  “Now that would be an interesting snack to serve at a football game.” Dreyfuss gazed down at the yellowed page. “Craquer is more about forcing them to do what you want. You know, like when you’re questioning a suspect and they finally crack. Breaking them.”

  Breaking the dead? Maybe that wasn’t so farfetched. Look what I’d done to Jacob’s biggest vase.

  “You know what I don’t see on this list?” Dreyfuss asked.

  “Do I even want to know?”

  “Astral projecting. Fully awake. Standing up.”

  “I don’t actually have that ability,” I said quickly. “It was the drugs. I was pumped full of crazy-strong psyactives and I was running on pure adrenaline—”

  “Relax.” His shrewd eyes were right on me, unflinching, and he spoke in a voice so calm and low it was hardly more than a whisper. “Your secret’s safe with me. After all, you’re holding onto my nearest and dearest confidence yourself. So it behooves me to keep certain matters between us.”

  “As a rule, I don’t project,” I insisted. “It’s never happened to me anywhere but PsyTrain.”

  “Never mind the specifics. What I’m trying to say, if you’d put a lid on your panic attack, is that you’ve uncovered some new abilities above and beyond Marie Saint Savon’s chart, and that with certain augmentations, you can achieve them. If you can do the difficult stuff, the unheard-of stuff…then the skills on this page should all be do-able. Put your mind to it, maybe you can compel spirits.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “So you say—but I doubt you’ve ever tried. You want to know who that third repeater is?” He knew damn well I did. “Force his spirit to tell you.”

  * * *

  I considered asking Dreyfuss to leave so I could concentrate, but I knew that scenario would give him an advantage. If he was in another room, he could do whatever he wanted unbeknownst to me, while my every move would be visible to his psychic eye. So I let him stick around. I pretended it didn’t bother me, either.

  My white light level was pretty high, though most of the juju was currently pumped into my protective shell. Keeping up with the armor was second nature. Once I’d visualized it in place, I hardly gave a thought to maintaining it. Using the white light to affect other beings was more problematic for me, because I had to let the energy flow through me and then into something else. Jacob was better at letting go than I was. He could steal the light and blanket the room with it…but since he can’t actually see what’s going on, having him assist would be like blindfolding him, handing him my sidearm, describing a target and expecting him to hit it by squeezing out a spray of bullets. I’m guessing it worked with the Fire Ghost because he could hardly miss her. Plus she was so eager to get out of there, she met us halfway.

  I approached the repeater, a fortyish Caucasian guy in a dark suit. A bullet to the thigh jerked him back, then another to his opposite hip flung him the other way. The final bullet in his shoulder spun him around. Shoulder wounds aren’t normally fatal, so it must have been an arterial hit. Probably so, judging by the spray of blood. Maybe, since his death was imminent, that third bullet knocked his spirit loose before his physical body actually expired. Thinking along those routes made me anxious about predestination and free will, though, so I told myself the actual moment of death wasn’t in question. It was the identity of the repeater…and whether I could figure that out.

  He was flickery from Einstein’s ritual. Was it possible to un-exorcise him? Maybe white light didn’t run on a one-way street. If not, I could theoretically throw an exorcism into reverse. If Richie was able to affect the repeater with those ridiculous botched prayers, it seemed to me I should be able strengthen the ghost signal. Not with prayer—I’m not completely sold on the idea of a guy with a big white beard in the sky—but with energy.

  I watched the critical moment unfold. Thigh. Hip. Shoulder. Blood spray. My intent was usually to break up the energy and send it off to its proper place. Not a physical location, but a plane that overlaps it. I’m not sure the name mattered—astral, ethereal, the metaphysical scholars try to label these planes of reality, but they never seem to agree with one another, so it was vague in my mind. Go wherever it is that you belong. Not here. That’s the gist of my usual command.

  What would that look like in opposite-land? I did my best to ignore Dreyfuss, ignore the repeater, and focus on the question. The opposite of “go away”?

  Come back.

  I felt a shift in my understanding, a realization that
calling something back should, in theory, work. I wouldn’t need to make a big show of it, either. While I do use my physical voice to talk to sentient ghosts, I’d long ago stopped speaking with repeaters. They never reacted as if they were hearing me, and I could salt them perfectly well without saying anything aloud.

  To be honest, I could salt them perfectly well without salt, too. But I hated the way my hand felt after I reached into my pocket and pulled out my psychic fairy dust. My own salt was currently in my overcoat, which was in the lounge. I was in no mood to try to explain to Richie what I was doing by going out there to retrieve it, so I supposed my salt packets would have to stay where they were. Given the choice of letting the FPMP supply me with salt or using my own non-physical stock, I opted to tap my own mojo and suffer the clammy-hand later. I’m sure I didn’t actually need to reach into my pocket either, but I’d never bothered to break the habit. It was good camouflage to keep the people around me thinking that I needed to employ some sort of physical prop in order to perform.

  I planted my feet, centered myself, and dipped my left hand into my pocket. I felt the telltale tingle immediately. Not surprising. My white light was in overdrive. I fixed myself on the repeater…and floundered. It wasn’t just that I told them to scram, I realized. There was a whole feeling attached to it. A feeling of untangling a knot, and of scrubbing a stubborn stain off the bathroom sink. A feeling of cleanness. Of rightness. Of release.

  How the hell was I supposed to feel that in reverse?

  “Filthy captivity” wasn’t exactly the vibe I was aiming for, I knew that much. Solidity, maybe? Substance? I sucked a big gulp of white light and imagined the repeater growing more opaque. Controlled.

  Lucid.

  The fairy dust was ready now, more than ready. My hand prickled unpleasantly, as if tiny shocks of static were playing over my fingertips. I wasn’t strong enough to leak ectoplasm on my own, not without the help of a big fat psyactive. So while there wouldn’t be any jelly involved, I would end up with a creepy, numb hand to show for my efforts. I was eager to get to that stage of the game, because at least then, I knew the “ick” would begin the process of wearing off.

  I pinched. A granular sensation played between my fingertips, crackling with energy. With my internal faucet pouring white light into me, and the idea of solidity fixed firmly in my mind, I pulled out my fairy dust. I thought, come back, and I salted the repeater.

  My vision flashed white.

  It was a little bit like the sparkles you see when you press on your closed eyelids, except it had nothing to do with my optic nerve and everything to do with my sixth sense. I’d just focused a load of white light, maybe more than my wiring was designed to handle, and the conduit needed a second to cool off.

  Maybe it wasn’t even an entire second. More like a moment, a breath. Even so, I was logy with relief when the dazzle wore off and I got my physical sight back. I glanced at Dreyfuss first. He sat behind his big desk, eyes boring through me while he picked at his cuticles without knowing he was doing it. Good, that was good. I could deal with him watching me, especially since I didn’t have any other choice.

  The repeater, unfortunately, hadn’t reacted to my attempt quite like I’d expected.

  He’d frozen.

  It was something straight out of a sci fi flick, where the camera pans around some exaggerated action while the actor stops in an impossible pose. This freeze-frame was the shoulder hit, the critical hit. His body was torqued, with his legs, hips and right arm flung forward, and his left arm, shoulder and head snapped back. The spectral bloodspray was a galaxy of tiny frozen globules fixed in the air around the point of exit. One of his shoes was half off.

  “I don’t think he’s gonna talk,” I admitted.

  “Because he won’t,” Dreyfuss asked, “or because he can’t?”

  “He can’t.”

  “Because…?”

  “He just can’t. That’s not how it works.”

  Dreyfuss leaned forward, but he kept the big desk between him and me. And the repeater. “What’s the complication? Maybe we can MacGyver a fix.”

  That spot between an unsolvable problem and an earnest problem-solver is one I always try to avoid. “There’s no workaround, okay? He’s a repeater. Repeaters don’t talk.”

  If Dreyfuss was surprised I admitted spirits talk to me (in actual words) he didn’t show it. “So repeaters are shells.”

  “Not even that,” I said. “They’re more like a snippet of film.”

  “Energy.”

  Everything’s energy, or so the theorists tell us. But thinking about the way everything’s made of atoms—or the empty space between them—makes me start to wonder if everything was really nothing, and as thoughts went, it wasn’t a very appealing notion.

  “Energy from the moment of death?” he asked. I nodded. “But spirits are different.” I didn’t confirm or deny that, but it seemed he didn’t need me to. “Okay, so what if you don’t focus on the repeater. What if you focus on the person instead, and you invite them back for a little chat?”

  “How is the repeater not the person?”

  “It’s totally different…isn’t that what you just told me? A repeater is a moment, an imprint of a moment of violence. But a person’s mind, their spirit, the essential them-ness—that’s the part you’d need to tap if you want to talk to this guy and get an I.D.”

  “I can’t focus on the person if I’ve got no idea who he is.”

  “You’ve been going at this for a long time and you’re starting to get fatigued. I understand. But we’re right on the verge of something here. Don’t you feel it?”

  All I felt was weariness and frustration…until he pulled out his pillbox. As I debated whether I’d be pushing my luck by asking for five pills for this final I.D., he said, “Maybe you don’t think you’re able to call this guy back, but a dozen reds says you can.”

  Chapter 15

  And so I tried. I sucked white light, and I tried to picture Triple-Shot speaking to me, and I imagined that my white light was calling to him. I tried and I tried, ’til my mouth was dry, my head throbbed and my pits were damp. Finally, when I was so woozy I needed to sit down, I lowered myself into a chair and said, “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Are you sure?” Dreyfuss said tentatively. My head snapped up as I registered his tone. It was unlike him to be anything other than one hundred percent certain. “Maybe you just need a little help.”

  He rolled his chair over to the credenza behind him, turned a key in its lock, and slid open a panel. Inside was the tube of an old-fashioned TV.

  It wasn’t like the massive tube TV from the bed and breakfast in Missouri, and it wasn’t like the old console in my basement. But there was no doubt in my mind it was a GhosTV.

  He caught my eye. “What do you say?”

  “Gimme a minute.” I swabbed my forehead with the sleeve of my jacket, and though I hated to ask for anything, I said, “Can I get a water?”

  Dreyfuss rolled over to another panel and unlocked it. There was a small fridge inside. He locks his fridge…and here I thought I was paranoid. Still seated, he pulled out two waters and tossed them both to me, one after the other, in an easy underhand. “One for each of us. You pick.”

  It was a relief that I didn’t need to be circumspect about how little I trusted him. I tossed one of the waters back. He caught it neatly, cracked the seal, and drank. I did the same. My temples were pounding. A Valium would help some. An Oxy would be better yet. No doubt Dreyfuss could score them if I asked, and no doubt he would pop one right along with me to put me at ease. But I didn’t—because I was clearly the worst negotiator on the planet, and asking for a painkiller would probably undercut my Seconal. Besides, I’d rather hold on to the headache, as a reminder to stop being so sloppy around him and keep a few of my secrets for myself.

  No matter how badly I wanted those pills, I could tell by the twisting of my guts and the painful tightness in my neck muscles that there’d o
nly be one more “try” in me that day. “Okay.” I might as well get it over with. “Turn that thing on.”

  * * *

  He powered up the tube. I did my best to breathe, and center myself, and relax. GhosTVs bring on headaches for me, and since I was already in the midst of one, I’d need to pace myself. No telling if a headache is only an angry firing of the nerves or an important vein fixing to pop.

  “It’s set to the parameters we got from Jeffrey Alan Scott,” Dreyfuss said, hushed and reverent, as if he was announcing a golf match. “Let me know if you need ’em tweaked.”

  I waved him off and he shut up. One more try…and I didn’t have energy to spare for a chat while I was attempting it.

  As I adjusted to whatever it is the ramped up TV signal does to my brain, the repeater grew solid—rock solid, like I could mistake him for physical, if not for his mid-air spinaround. Given the posture, he seemed more like a waxworks figure than a ghost. Or a frozen moment of violence. Or whatever he actually was.

  The level of detail was freakish. I could see the jacquard pattern of his tie fabric, count the blood globules. I eased around him. Not a nail-biter, this one. Hairy forearms, though. I could count the hairs. Hell, it felt as if I could pluck one, if I’d wanted to…but I didn’t try. Touching it might shatter the illusion before I’d seen what I needed to see.

  I focused on his face. So much detail that it transcended my discomfort at rubbernecking this guy’s final moment—but enough detail to I.D. him? Maybe not while he was screaming like that. I looked at him, hard, and gave the relevant details that would narrow the search. Hair: medium brown. Eyes: medium brown. Skin: medium-toned Caucasian. Birthmarks: none. For such a spectacle of a repeater, he was nearly impossible to fucking describe.