I tried sending the paranormal film loop forward or back a few frames, to the point where his face looked more like his everyday face, more like something I could match with a mug shot. Nothing. Whatever I’d done with the fairy dust had cemented him in place, good.
I sucked some more white light and gave him a focused nudge.
Nothing.
I imagined his selfness, his soul, coursing back through the cosmos to inhabit the gruesome shell, to tell me something, anything of use.
Nothing.
My head was pounding now. I had Dreyfuss tweak the knobs, increment by increment. Together, we found a setting that felt so sharp-edged sparkling hyperclear that I wondered if maybe I needed to go get my eyes examined. If the first settings represented what I’d come to accept as “clear,” maybe middle aged farsightedness was finally taking hold. The repeater was so acutely vivid now I could practically count his skin cells. And there was still nothing I could use.
His eyes were wide and shocked. His face was contorted. His mouth gaped in a scream…but now, I could count his fillings.
Maybe I should ask for dental records. I thought it facetiously, but actually, it wasn’t a bad idea. We should probably act on it right away. The repeater might fade with time. Or he might be stuck here for good. There was no way of knowing. I needed to go lie down, but I might only have this one chance.
“Our top five,” I said to Dreyfuss, with my eyes fixed on the frozen repeater’s molar, “can you get me their dental records?”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
My head was about ready to detonate. I turned toward my chair to take a load off, and caught myself doing a double-take at Dreyfuss. Something hinky was going on, but it wasn’t the freaky eyeball phenomenon I’d witnessed at PsyTrain. While the multiple glowing eyeball look wasn’t pretty, I’d seen it before. It wouldn’t have startled me. This was different. The air around him was occupied, but not by repeaters.
I sat down, slouched in my chair and pinched my temples, then stole a look from under my palm. It was barely there, whatever it was, difficult to make out, but definitely centered on Dreyfuss. Smoke? No, it didn’t move quite like smoke.
He picked up his phone and there was definite movement in the non-physical, as if his motion had disturbed whatever it was. As if it was reacting to him. “Laura,” he said, “prioritize this. I need you to dig up some dental records, I’ll send you the list—and don’t wait until you have them all, bring them to me as quick as you turn them up. Thanks.”
He hung up, and the non-physical stirred again. It was as if an alternate plane occupied the same physical space as Dreyfuss, and in that plane, there was stuff. Cloudy stuff. Floating stuff. Stuff he couldn’t feel, although it seemed to sense him. It wasn’t a mist and it wasn’t a vapor, though. More like…I squinted. What the hell did it look like? For someone who was supposedly a visual thinker, I sure had a hard time figuring out what I was seeing. The stuff around Dreyfuss looked less like clouds, and more like…jellyfish.
My body reacted before I did, probably because my brain was busy trying to convince me that I wasn’t really seeing what I saw. I flinched, and tried to turn the motion into a kind of cough to cover my twitchiness.
Dreyfuss glanced up. Small glowing tracers followed his eyes, though that was normal, for him. “Are you okay?”
Don’t look, I begged myself. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The psychic jellyfish didn’t just happen to occupy the same physical space as Dreyfuss. They were tethered to him by long, thin strands of noncorporeal goop.
“Bayne?”
“Headache,” I lied. My headache was now a dull sheet of pain that I hardly felt, because my entire awareness had been hijacked. All I could think was, What the fuck are those jellyfish things?
“Do you want something for it? I’ve got aspirins with a pinch of codeine that’ll knock it right out.” He reached into his pocket, and all the jellyfish shifted. In fact, every time he moved his hands, he created a noticeable disturbance in the jellyfish field. The goopy tethers, I saw, were connected specifically to his hands.
My first thought was that maybe the Con Dreyfuss in front of me wasn’t really him at all. Maybe he was a poor husk who’d once been Con Dreyfuss, a snotty skatepunk who’d ollied through the wrong place at the wrong time, and the evil jellyfish overlords had taken over his body, puppeteering him into position all these years to take over the FPMP.
I watched him pull out his deep, deep pillbox and place it on his desk while the jellyfish trailed behind the motion. It didn’t look like the jellyfish entities were pulling the strings. They were actually kind of languid, like he’d wandered through a field of them and gotten himself tangled up. Now they were just being dragged along for the ride.
He flipped open a compartment, pulled out four pills and rattled them like dice. The transparent jellyfish quivered on the ends of their tethers. He set two pills in front of me, popped the other two, and washed them down with a slug of water. “Chalky.”
Keeping my headache no longer seemed important. Numbly, I did the same.
He said, “You really don’t look so hot. I’ve got an M.D. on staff, maybe I should have her sit in.”
“It’s fine,” I said automatically.
As he leaned back in his chair to consider how not-fine I actually was, I spied motion in the jellyfish field. Vibration coursed down one of the strands as the floating body where it originated gave a gentle undulation. Dreyfuss brought his hand to his mouth and clipped off the edge of his cuticle between his teeth, and the undulation stopped.
I turned away and gulped water.
“If you’re gonna hurl, aim for the wastebasket.”
I’d seen one of those jellyfish things before, or something like them, at the hospital the Fire Ghost was haunting. The image popped into my mind like it was yesterday: a dark, cloudy thing trailing behind the gurney of a homeless woman with an impossibly high blood alcohol level. Had it been strung to her with a goopy tether? Hard to say, I’d only gotten a glimpse. Fuck, oh fuck. I cradled my head in my hands. I’d tried to follow up, but couldn’t get anyone to give me her name. Then I let it drop.
I didn’t know it was this bad. I didn’t know.
No, that’s not true. I knew, I’d seen the thing, and I dismissed it. There was too much other stuff going on, and I let it slip away. I cradled my head in my hands.
A button clicked, and Dreyfuss said, “Laura? Get Dr. Santiago up to my office, ASAP.”
“No,” I said, forcing myself to sit up and look normal, whatever that might be. “It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s passing.”
“Doc’s cool, a smart lady, you’ll like her.”
“It’s fine.”
Dreyfuss cancelled the doctor, sat back in his big leather chair, and watched me watching him. He patted his hair, and the jellyfish field swayed. “Bedhead? Lint? What’s so fascinating up there?”
What the hell was I supposed to tell him—that apparently he had fingernail demons floating around over his head? Connected to him? Feeding off him? Okay, demons might be too strong a word. Gremlins, imps…. No matter how I tried to frame it, no way did it sound even remotely reasonable. “I need to try something,” I said finally. “Don’t move.”
His eyebrows rose expectantly, but he stayed put as I stood and approached him.
“Okay,” I said, “close your eyes.”
“Is this a trust exercise? Like falling backward and expecting you to catch me?”
Actually, I just didn’t want him to see me sprinkling my invisible fairy dust. “What’s there to trust?”
“You’re armed. I’m not.”
I ejected the magazine and handed the Glock to him. He placed the unloaded gun on his desk with a shake of his head, like the move was a bit melodramatic for his taste, then shrugged and closed his eyes.
When I dipped into my left pocket, I found my supply of fairy dust was three, four times what it had been before. Sucking white light in front of a powere
d up GhosTV must’ve been the reason for the extra mojo. I grabbed a good handful, and I flung it at the jellyfish. I didn’t tell them to scram, not out loud, but I must not have needed to. There was a disruption in the field, all those transparent bodies rippling and roiling. Dreyfuss winced and flexed his fingers. I scooped out another big handful of fairy dust and flung it. Beat it, I thought. There’s more where that came from. I can keep this up all day.
As I reached for a third handful, one of the fingernail demons detached itself and undulated away, rising up and disappearing through the ceiling tiles.
All day long. I flung another handful, and two more detached and fled. Every time I reached into my pocket, the level of dust was higher. Once the first few took off, the remaining jellyfish lost their nerve. One by one they pulled loose and floated up through the ceiling. And don’t come back, I thought, ’cos I’d be more than happy to dust you again.
I was staring at the ceiling, waiting to see if the fingernail demons were gonna try and sneak back for more, when I realized the pulse was pounding in my ears so loudly, I was surprised Dreyfuss couldn’t hear it from where he sat. I ramped my focus down a few notches and did my best to breathe, I fell back a few steps, then told Dreyfuss, “Okay.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Was there a ghost on my head?”
“Not…exactly.”
He pulled off his scrunchie, shook out his corkscrew curls and groaned as he raked his hands through his hair.
“There are non-physical things that aren’t quite ghosts,” I said, hoping to make him feel better. Though as I said it, I realized it was probably no great comfort. “It was nothing dead.”
“I have a medium who costs me a cool two million a year, and it takes a fucking public servant to see…you got rid of it, didn’t you? Tell me it’s gone.”
As much as I dislike Dreyfuss, I couldn’t help but feel for the guy. “Yeah. You’re good now.”
“That’s just peachy. Look, I don’t mean to sound like an ingrate, but some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.” I knew the feeling. “I’m not lying when I say I’d love to have you on my team. Name your price.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I know you don’t like burning your favors, but Jacob needs to get into the Metropolitan Correctional Center. You’ve got to make that call yourself.”
“And here I thought you’d ask for more drugs.” He raked his hair back into a sloppy mess of a ponytail, pulled out his pillbox again and popped a Valium. My throat gave a little pulse like it wouldn’t mind swallowing one too. Before I could hint that it was rude of him not to share, his phone buzzed. He pushed a speakerphone button, and Laura’s voice said, “I located some dental records.”
“Bring them in,” Dreyfuss told her. Then he said to me, “If this was police work, you’d be waiting on a subpoena right now, and you know it.”
Since I was fully aware of that fact, I didn’t bother replying.
Laura came in and set a few sheets of paper on Dreyfuss’ desk. If she was alarmed to see an unloaded 9-millimeter sitting on it, she didn’t show it. “I have Dr. Santiago standing by,” she told him. “Are you okay? Your hair’s kind of—”
“It’s not me. It’s Detective Bayne.”
Laura looked me over critically, and I said, “I don’t need a doctor. It’s just eyestrain.” Or was it psychic overload? Or Seconal backlash? Either way, I didn’t want to get into it. “It’s practically gone.”
She glanced at the window and said, “I’m sure this glare isn’t helping any.”
I’d been so engrossed in the repeaters and the fingernail demons I hadn’t noticed any glare, but now that she mentioned it, the light was pretty intense. The roofs of the buildings in the train yard were covered in snow. Those roofs were sooty white, the November sky was murky white, and the light bouncing off them and pouring through the floor-to-ceiling window was making us all squint.
Laura marched up to the window. Somehow she managed to avoid stepping through any of the repeaters on the way. She veered around Richie's prayer mat, too. With a yank, she whisked the curtains shut. The room went dim, and afterimages shaped like the window drifted across my field of vision. I heard her re-cross the room as her high heels made gentle thumps against the berber, though when my pupils adjusted and my vision faded in, I was surprised to find her still standing beside the window where the curtain had been. Until I realized it wasn’t Laura I was looking at.
It was Jennifer Chance.
Chapter 16
Dr. Chance is the same stature as Laura Kim, five and a half feet tall, fit, somewhat angular. Like Laura, the ghost wore a plain dark outfit, but her blonde hair was a quick giveaway. That, and the bullet hole in her forehead. Chance’s ghost leaned back against the wall beside the window with its arms crossed, scowling, watching Con Dreyfuss intently through narrowed eyes. How long had she been lurking around behind that curtain? All morning? All year? What had she seen—and what had she heard? And more importantly, what secrets of mine did I inadvertently spill to Dreyfuss that morning, and by extension, to her?
Sentient ghosts don’t terrify me. They’re not exactly at the top of my list for “Things I Want to See Today,” but they don’t leave me soiling myself and crouching in the corner, either. I’d be lying, though, if I said the ghost of Jennifer Chance didn’t creep me out, especially now, knowing that in all this time it had never moved on…and that it still had its eye on Dreyfuss.
Make no mistake, Chance had been creepy in life, too. Whenever I hear a female character’s voice on TV go a little singsong, I get a flash of her coming toward me with a syringe. On bad days, the visual is accompanied by the tactile memory of her brushing my hair off my forehead while she gazed into my eyes.
I looked up at the ceiling so she didn’t know I’d spotted her. Dreyfuss looked up too, as if he needed to guard against head ghosts descending on him.
“You really should have Dr. Santiago take your blood pressure, at least,” Laura told me. “Just to be safe.”
“I’m fine.”
“Laura’s prone to migraines,” Dreyfuss said. “They lay her out for days if she doesn’t nip ’em in the bud.”
“It’s not a migraine,” I said. “It’s almost gone.”
Laura looked me over as if she didn’t quite believe me, but she knew enough to pick her battles. She said, “If you don’t need anything else, I’ll get back to the dental records.”
“Thanks,” Dreyfuss said absently, scanning the ceiling for threats he couldn’t see, while Jennifer Chance peeled away from the wall and strode after Laura.
Although I thought I was being smooth, when Chance passed by, a chill stole over me—and a major case of the heebie-jeebies. I flinched, visibly. She stopped in her tracks and looked me in the eye. Emotions played over her face, one after another: shock, anger, and finally, excitement. “It works?” A flicker, and then there she was right there, looming over my seat, Laura Kim forgotten, eyes wide with wonder and a hint of mania. Way too close. “This particular tuner setting works?”
I was not having this conversation in front of Dreyfuss. I squirmed away from Chance, gathered my sidearm and bullets from the desk and said, “I gotta use the john.”
Dreyfuss looked at me a bit strangely, but he couldn’t exactly forbid me to go to the bathroom. I ducked in, then closed and locked the door behind me while Jennifer Chance floated right through it. Then I turned on the taps in the sink and the shower to provide a bit of white noise, contorting myself to avoid brushing up against her. While I’d been loath to present my back to Laura Kim in the parking garage, my instincts with Chance’s ghost were the opposite. I found myself protecting my solar plexus like a shoplifter guarding a five-finger discount stuffed down his shirt.
“You see me now,” Chance said. “I know you do. I’ve been lying low all day and suddenly you have a visual. It must be the tuner.”
“Back up.” I snapped the ammo cartridge into place, which apparently only inti
midates people in movies. Normally I would’ve used a “drop your weapon” tone, but instead I whispered since I wanted the conversation to stay between her and me. Hopefully the water splashing would be enough to confuse surveillance devices, at least without advanced filtering. I holstered the useless weapon. My headache was so blinding by now, I was dying to perch on the closed toilet seat, or maybe lie down on the floor to keep physical damage to a minimum in the event I keeled over. Since that would make me a stationary target, though, I stayed on my feet, angling away from her constant, solicitous touching. Still, it was only a single bathroom and there weren’t exactly a lot of places to go. When she grabbed me by the arm, I felt the tips of her fingers sink in. And in. And in. I jerked my arm away and sucked a huge gulp of white light, then threw it around her to keep her to herself. “I said, back the fuck up.”
“Calm down, Detective. I’m only checking your pulse.”
“Touch me again I’ll salt your ass where you stand. Get it?”
“Actually, I don’t…but I presume it’s nothing good.” She raised her hands in exasperated surrender. “Your breathing is rapid, there’s a mottled pallor to your cheeks, and you’re perspiring. It’s in your best interest to let me—”
“No.”
“At the very least, make a cool compress and put it on your forehead.” She made a big show of keeping her hands up, ironically, as if it was entirely unreasonable for me to distrust her. “There’s a washcloth right there.”
The contrarian in me wanted to tell her to shove the washcloth up her ass, but I was eager for something, anything, to dull the knife edge of my head pain. My “cool compress” was a wet wad of thick white terrycloth that I swabbed across my brow while I kept my eye on Chance. It was difficult to restrain myself from checking out the mirror, since the guy I’d glimpsed looking back at me was hollow-cheeked and waxy. Visual confirmation was unnecessary, though. I knew I felt like shit. What mattered was keeping my eye on the ghost.
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