Although you’d think anyone in their right mind would want to get the perimeter sweep over with and get back inside for a nice hot beverage, Richie poked along, prodding Carl to take the lead. Finally he said, “Explain to Detective Bayne what you’re doing. I’ll monitor.”
That request did earn a brief look of surprise, but Carl took the directive with his typical stoicism. We walked their usual route. Between the train tracks, the El, the highway and the warehouses, it was not exactly pedestrian friendly. But with the proximity of the Salvation Army, Carl told me, it did attract a fair amount of homeless people who were happy to tuck themselves away in a nice deserted spot to try and get out of the cold. Occasionally, one of them would expire. And the FPMP wasn’t keen on anyone they couldn’t see lurking around their offices.
“If Agent Duff thinks it’s necessary in any spot,” Carl said, “we do a blessing.”
Richie trudged along beside me. Not his normal free-wheeling galumph, either. He hunched against the cold with his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his shoulders up around his ears. “Do you normally find much that needs blessing?” I asked.
“Are you testing me now?” Richie said. “What do you think?”
I thought it was way past someone’s naptime, but I refrained from saying so.
* * *
The end of the day couldn’t come soon enough. Between dour Carl and crabby Richie, I found myself wishing Dreyfuss would put in an appearance. At least he could hold up his end of a conversation. His Washington meeting kept him busy for the rest of the afternoon, though, and I ended up heading back home without checking in on Triple-Shot to see if he’d moved or faded, or if he was even still there at all. While I’d gotten to know Laura a lot better, what I’d discovered about her left me stumped. Still, the day hadn’t been a total bust. I’d figured out how Con Dreyfuss spent his evenings. And who he’d been spending them with.
Jacob wasn’t home yet when I pulled up behind Lisa’s car in front of the cannery, and that was fine by me. Although I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say, I’d still rather talk to Lisa alone. I’d had a bit of time to simmer down, and my initial shock at realizing the identity of the mystery man had worn off. I’d also had time to consider the fact that she’d been working up her courage to tell me all this time, and had planned on spilling the beans tonight. Still. What the hell had she been thinking?
I didn’t exactly mean to slam the front door, but thanks to an extra nudge from the wind, it sounded as if I did. So much for the subtle approach. Maybe that was for the best. After my meat grinder of a day, the only thing I wanted to do was get all my difficult conversations over with and enjoy one of my precious red pills in peace. I was debating how dickish I’d sound if I opened with, Okay, so I know about Dreyfuss, when I swung into the living room and found Lisa slumped at the dining room table, head in hands, poring over a pile of paper. She looked up at me, red-eyed. She’d been crying.
“Are you okay?” I crossed the room in a few steps, then stopped short, not knowing if I was supposed to hug her or pat her shoulder or what, baffled as to what I should do with my hands. “What happened?”
At my inept show of concern, the waterworks started. While Lisa cried, I jammed my hands in my overcoat pockets, ignoring the grittiness in my left pocket that might be spilled salt or might be a sifting of fairy dust I’d managed to summon without meaning to. Lisa swiped brutally at her eyes with a soggy wad of tissue, then blew her nose, took a centering breath, and said, “I gotta tell you something.”
“Okay.” I pulled a chair around and sat so I was facing her with my knees brushing her thigh. Luckily, her fiddling with the wet tissue excused me from needing to decide if holding her hands was expected of me or not. “It’s, y’know…” I decided not to blurt out what I already knew. If I was lucky, maybe Dreyfuss would break it off with her once he realized I was so desperate for reds, he didn’t need to use Lisa to get to me. “Whatever it is. It’s fine.”
“The guy I’ve been seeing…” she chewed on the end of the sentence for a while, then finally said, “it’s Constantine.”
And there it was. “I suspected.”
It sounded gentler than I know. Still, she was surprised. “He didn’t tell you. You didn’t see us together.” She didn’t bother hiding the fact that her mental process had become one giant sí-no. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter, it’s not important. He says his office is haunted for sure—and not the repeaters. Something was on him. What the hell was it?”
“Well…” shit, where to begin? “Sometimes, when a GhosTV is playing, I see things in the astral or wherever. Not ghosts.” I could tell that if the word jellyfish left my mouth, she’d freak. “Energy, maybe. I don’t think it’s dead. I don’t think it was ever a person.”
“He had an astral thing on his head?”
“It wasn’t…” I held up my hands and flapped them in the air above me. “Not directly on his head.” I figured I’d better not mention the goopy tethers, either. “In the general vicinity.”
Lisa frowned and thought, though I couldn’t imagine what she might be asking the sí-no now.
“Dreyfuss was the one who jumped to the conclusion there was a ghost on his head.” Not that I could blame him, considering he had three nasty repeaters around his desk and a sentient ghost lurking behind the curtain, and the medium on his payroll thought the Hail Mary involved boxer-briefs. “I tried to tell him, but…” I shrugged.
Lisa’s eyes tracked back and forth as she processed my explanation while I looked down at a tear-stained scrawl on a torn sheet of notebook paper.
Entity—yes. Ghost—no. Invisible—yes. Alive—? Sentient—? Evil—?
Ask the sí-no if it was a fingernail demon. Yeah, right. “It seemed to react when he bit his nails.”
She stared at her inconclusive notes, then said, “Oh.”
“Maybe it was like…a habit?”
“Oh my God.”
I put Lisa’s notes in a pile, tamped the paper edges into alignment, then began nudging the loose puzzle pieces underneath into an even row. “I got rid of it.”
She nodded.
“Come on,” I said, “you should be glad. Since his cuticles gross you out.”
She was quiet a long time, staring at the puzzle pieces I was arranging. Finally she said, “He didn’t tell you about us?”
“Not exactly. His handwriting did.”
“I thought you’d be mad.” She considered the statement, then corrected herself. “I knew you’d be mad.”
I had been. But seeing what a wreck Lisa was over the fingernail demons…well, who the hell am I to judge? “Tell me you gave Dreyfuss a going-over with the sí-no and he’s not just interested in your psychic ability, that he’s interested in you.”
“He is,” she whispered.
Dreyfuss was no Mexican firefighter, that’s for sure, but… “I guess I can see how he might come off as charming. If you like the wiseass type.”
“I wasn’t in the market, you know. I figured I was done with men, at least until I sorted out what happened at PsyTrain.” But since the two of them had met in Santa Barbara, she explained, he would occasionally consult with her on matters of FPMP intelligence. This was news, but like so much in my life, it didn’t exactly surprise me. After all, Lisa never seemed to be hurting for cash, so she’d obviously been working somewhere.
Dreyfuss, being paranoid, would only talk to her in person. He figured it was best to make their meetings look like dates to keep Lisa from attracting any anti-Psych attention. On their third fake date, in a dilapidated movie theatre with sticky floors, Lisa realized Dreyfuss was gazing at her with something more than businesslike interest when the lights came up. She was inclined to brush off the idea that the Regional Director of the FPMP was harboring romantic notions, but she couldn’t resist checking in with the sí-no…which confirmed that Con Dreyfuss had indeed taken a shine to her.
I wanted Lisa to be happy, I truly did. If Dreyfuss could
survive the sí-no’s scrutiny, more power to him. Still, I needed to be clear. “It’s really none of my business who you date,” I said, “but please…don’t discuss me with him, okay? You might trust him, but that doesn’t mean I do.”
She shook her head sadly. “This isn’t about you.”
“Sure. And the idea that I claimed he had a ghost on his head randomly popped into your mind.”
“But he was really freaked out and…all right. I get it. No talking about Vic.” She picked up a piece of grayish jigsaw and snapped it into the background just as Jacob’s key turned in the deadbolt. “I hope Jacob takes the news about me and Con as well as you did…but he won’t.”
I felt bad for her. It must be rough to enter into a conversation knowing it was gonna tank. But I also felt elated for me. Not only had Jacob been in the dark about the Dreyfuss affair, which meant he wasn’t hiding anything from me—but I’d also figured it out first. I’d have to do my best not to look smug.
“Maybe you should tell him,” Lisa murmured.
In the cannery, sometimes sounds bounce off the floorboards or brick in ways you don’t expect, usually sounds you’d been hoping to keep to yourself. This particular utterance was one of those sounds. “Tell me what?” Jacob called from the vestibule.
He found me sitting in my overcoat beside Lisa, who was puffy-eyed and red. Gravely, he repeated, “Tell me what?”
“I’m involved with Con Dreyfuss.” Stunned silence. “Dating him,” Lisa added, just in case he’d taken her “involvement” in some platonic way.
Jacob’s response was low—but thanks to the cannery, it carried. “What are you thinking?”
Clearly the wheels were turning. Lisa was looking hard at the table, and she wasn’t working on the puzzle. I scrambled for something to cut the tension and came up empty-handed. Finally Lisa said, “You know what? There’s nothing I can say that won’t make it worse.”
“I maneuver around that guy all day long, he’s listening to my phone calls and recording my movements, and now I find out that in the only place I thought I was safe from his psychic whatever—my house, my own house—”
“Jacob,” I said. “Take a breath.”
“I’m not spying on you.” Lisa’s voice shook.
Jacob said, “Out of every other guy on the planet…you pick Con Dreyfuss?”
“What difference does it make? I would never spy on you. How could you think I—oh. Right. Might as well come right out and say it. Because at PsyTrain I was with Bert. Is that it? I made one bad choice, and now everybody thinks I’m the weak link.”
Jacob said, “What I think is that Dreyfuss is manipulative, and you were vulnerable.”
Uh oh. Bad choice of words on Jacob’s part. Lisa brought out the big ammo. “I’m vulnerable? Who brought home a demon-thing that exploded in his bed? Not me.”
“Okay,” I interjected. Life was so much easier when we skirted all the ugly topics. “What’s done is done. Lisa’s personal life is her personal life. Jacob, you work with the guy. At first I was worried about that, but so far it’s fine. If Lisa says she’s not discussing us with Dreyfuss, I believe her.”
Whatever I’d said, it must’ve been the right thing. The mood lifted tangibly. Lisa took a deep, cleansing breath, then let it out. Jacob’s shoulders relaxed. “I’ll start dinner,” he said, and headed toward the kitchen.
“Good,” I said, “we’re all good.” What a relief. If I was worried about Lisa moving out before, I was twice as leery now, considering where she would end up going if she left anytime in the near future. True, she wouldn’t be able to spy on me if she were living with the enemy. But that still meant I’d lose her. The first few weeks of a new boyfriend were always the heady days. Hormones were raging and everyone was on their best behavior. As soon as the initial fervor died down, no doubt Dreyfuss’ cockiness would wear thin, and their relationship would shift from the torrid and clandestine affair it currently was to that awkward thing they’d both just as soon forget. Best not to be stuck living in the guy’s apartment when that happened.
I glanced over at her to reassure myself that we were all good, and light glinted off the tiny decorative key she’d taken to wearing around her neck. If at any point I spotted a matching lock somewhere on Dreyfuss, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from hurling. “As long as you don’t rush into anything.”
“Rush into what?”
“Just…anything.”
She frowned. “Like what?”
Uh oh. “Take it slow. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You moved in with Jacob like a week after you hooked up. So it’s okay for you, but not me?”
“Look, that’s not what I…you don’t need to move.”
“I’m not talking about moving anywhere. But I don’t need to ‘take it slow’ either. Con says he loves me.”
A startling crash made us both jump. Jacob muttered something, then squatted down to begin picking up broken shards of ceramic. My heart was pounding…and I told myself it was just the dropped plate I was reacting to. With Lisa watching me very closely, I kept my face cop-blank.
She didn’t need to read my expression to know how I felt about her announcement, though. Not when she had the sí-no. She squared her shoulders, looked me in the eye, and told me, “And I love him too.”
Although sound carries unbelievably well in the cannery, at that moment, you could’ve heard a pin drop. I grasped for some remark that would make it all better—a well-timed quip like the folks on sitcoms always seem to make. A wry comment to smooth everything out and return everything to the status quo, so anyone who’d missed an episode wouldn’t feel lost when they tuned in next week. Unfortunately, our lives kept getting messier, and no one-liner, no matter how witty, would sweep that mess under the carpet.
Jacob flung half a broken plate into the trash. It hit with a thunk that made me flinch. “I’m gonna grab some takeout,” he announced.
“Wait.” Lisa stood. “Stay. I’m going out. This is your place, you shouldn’t have to leave. You two want to talk. And I have things I need to do.”
I said we should all just calm down and order some pizzas, but that suggestion was about as effective as it’d been the last time I’d floated it. Lisa grabbed her purse and her coat, and was out the door in less than a minute. Jacob didn’t come out from behind the kitchen bouquet until she was gone. Although he was still wearing his distinctly-unhappy face, having the space to talk to me in private took some of the edge off him. “You never even got a chance to take off your coat,” he said, offering me a hand up from the dining room table. I took it, since it seemed preferable to heaving myself back onto my feet of my own volition. But then I saw his expression shift when he touched my hand. “It’s freezing.”
I sighed.
He didn’t let go, and I didn’t make any effort to hide it. Not from him.
He took my frigid hand in both of his, tenderly, and cupped it to his face. The five o’clock shadow on his warm cheek felt rough and familiar. He held my hand there, saying nothing. I stayed quiet too. Maybe I didn’t know exactly what we were communicating, and maybe I couldn’t quite name this mood, but I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was kill it.
Holding my hand still, he turned his face so his lips grazed my palm, and he blew. His hot breath tickled my palm, but despite the fact that it sent shivers down my spine, I didn’t pull away. My fingertips nestled in his goatee. He blew again…or maybe it was the ghost of a kiss. For the first time that day, I allowed the thick barrier of white light I’d been lugging around to drop.
“It’s not warming up.” His lips caressed my palm as he spoke, and his goatee tickled.
At least it wasn’t leaking.
* * *
Since I’d spent my day sweating through my shirt, which left me feeling generally clammy and rank, I attempted to warm up with a shower. Jacob followed me into the bathroom, though he sensed that I wanted the whole spray to myself and waited while I hosed off. It was
n’t unheard of for us to talk around the sound of running water, either. Though we needed to speak loudly enough to be heard through the frosted glass, it provided some illusion of camouflage.
“I’m not mad at Lisa,” Jacob said. Could’ve fooled me. “It’s just that she’s so damn young, and I don’t want her to make the same mistakes I did. I think back about how I was at that age. Thought I knew everything.”
“And you’ve changed how, exactly?”
He lobbed a bar of soap over the shower door. It bounced off my shoulder. “You couldn’t tell me a damn thing. I knew better. Even when I started sleeping with my Criminal Psych professor.”
“Undergrad?”
“Grad.”
That was marginally less creepy. I’ve seen pictures of Jacob in grad school. Once he’d shaved off his eighties mustache, he had a smooth baby face that was all smoldering eyes and lush lips. Biggish hair, too, but that was par for the course. I can’t say I blamed the naughty professor for wanting to hit that. “So how old was he?”
“He said he was thirty-eight—but I’m guessing he lied.”
“I can’t imagine what the two of you had to talk about when you weren’t bonking. And don’t tell me Criminal Justice.”
“That’s exactly it. We didn’t actually have much in common. At the time, though, I didn’t see it.”
Okay, that was encouraging. What could Lisa possibly have in common with Dreyfuss? Presumably, sex—which I really didn’t want to imagine. And his whole fetish for ethnic chicks…ditto. And their similar careers. And the fact that they were both off-the-chart Psychs who no one in their right mind could handle dating for long….
Best not dwell on it, since all I could really do was let things run their course. Any attempt to nudge them apart would only make them cling together more stubbornly. I rinsed, turned off the taps, and opened the shower door. Jacob was waiting there with a towel. It would’ve been more efficient to dry myself, but it felt a lot better when he did it. I pressed my forehead against his shoulder while he ran the towel up and down my back, with more groping than drying. I said, “I guess I should be grateful you never ended up sharing a suburban bungalow with Teacher.”
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