Spook Squad

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Turns out, he was married.”

  Luckily, I was positioned so he didn’t see me biting back a laugh. Jacob is utterly sure about everything he does, and nine times out of ten, he’s right. But the look on his face when he isn’t? Priceless. “I hope you at least aced the class.”

  “A-minus,” Jacob grumbled.

  I bit the inside of my cheek to wipe the smile off my face.

  Good thing, since he was scrutinizing me. “You look a lot better now than you did when I got home.” He took my hand and pressed it to his cheek. His face still felt warm against it, but the temperature difference was nowhere near what it had been before. “How do you feel?”

  “I’ll live. I just need to go easy on the white light.”

  Chapter 19

  The hardware store isn’t exactly my first choice for a scintillating night out. But after my shower I was feeling about as normal as I ever do, and when Jacob said he had a quick errand to run, I opted to go along. We presume both our vehicles are monitored. On the way there, I filled him in on my day—the GhosTV, the repeaters and their dossiers, the white cotton gloves, Richie’s Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and even his bratty mood swing. Then Jacob parked at the far end of the lot, and as we walked toward the building at a glacial pace with the wind whistling around us, I whispered all the things I’d kept to myself. Between the fingernail demons and Santiago’s third eye, I’m sure Jacob was dying to react. He kept his cool, though. Even when I detailed my conversation with the elusive Dr. Chance.

  Once we cleared the automatic doors, Jacob touched my arm with two fingertips to signal me to keep quiet. Surveillance cameras overlooked the doors. I’d always figured them for anti-theft devices. Now, though, it was simply easiest to assume every retail camera in the city led back to the FPMP.

  As hardware stores go, it wasn’t a very big shop, just a mom-and-pop strip mall operation that had been bought by a national chain some years back. It probably wouldn’t last much longer in the face of the mega home centers so big they needed their own zip codes, but it was putting up a good fight. Silver garland was strung through the store and Christmas carols were playing, although the only people planning for December at this point were retail stores and obsessive gift-givers. At least the main display that greeted us still featured Thanksgiving gear: turkey fryers, roasting pans, pilgrim window decals, and of course, snow blowers. I paused and considered how much useful noise a snow blower could potentially generate, and filed that information away for future reference. Sure, I’d probably cut off my own foot if I cranked it up. But Jacob came of age in Wisconsin. He’d know how to work it.

  It was a blustery weekday night. There weren’t many other customers, just a young Hispanic couple searching for the correct light bulb and a guy in navy work clothes browsing the plumbing section. The only things in the store that interested me were the distinctly non-hardware items. I wondered if the stained acoustical ceiling tiles had ever been white, or how many people actually bought beef jerky from a communal jar on the counter. Jacob paused in front of a section labeled “Door Accessories.” It never occurred to me doors might need to accessorize. Among the thresholds and mail slots and replacement screens, Jacob found what he was looking for hanging from a small cardboard tag: a peephole. But instead of heading up to the register with it, he stopped at the key cutting station and rang the service bell.

  Since I’m apparently so hyperaware of the location of my keys, I don’t own a spare set, though I supposed it couldn’t hurt to have one made. However, Jacob didn’t pull out his keyring. He fished a loose key out of his pocket instead, which he handed to the pimply-faced Asian kid who’d come to wait on us. “Ten copies,” Jacob said.

  The kid paled, and stammered, “Ten? I dunno if we have enough blanks.”

  “Whatever you have, then.”

  Although the blanks were sorted by brand, number and shape, the clerk felt his way through the spinner as if he needed to touch each key to reassure himself he wouldn’t end up cutting a handful of scrap metal. While we watched, he matched the key, compared it to two more blanks, then settled on his first pick. “I have eight.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “It’ll take a while. You can go shop. I’ll come find you when they’re done.”

  “We’re in no hurry,” Jacob replied mildly, but the kid was so flustered that he ended up juggling the blanks in his attempt to keep from dropping them. Jacob wasn’t being particularly demanding, but that combo of self-assurance and intense eye contact (the demeanor that made me think naked thoughts) occasionally had the opposite effect, which left people intimidated and cowed. I could see it in their furled shoulders, their darting eye movements, their nervous laughs. Speaking of which…

  “I think all my questions are making Laura nervous.”

  Jacob gave me the “quiet” signal again. The kid plugged a blank into the machine and turned on the power. The grinding squeal that came out of the machine was impressively loud. Jacob motioned for me to continue. I told him about the way she’d been totally cool and deadpan about claiming she was never at the scene of Burke’s shooting, while inconsequential parts of the conversation evoked an uncomfortable laugh. “Thing is, I just can’t see her pulling the trigger. I spent a good half hour with her at lunch, too. I figured it couldn’t hurt to keep her busy while you were digging through her records.”

  I didn’t realize how ham-handedly I’d been fishing for a compliment until Jacob looked more chagrined than impressed. “Actually, I spent the whole day trying to track down Detective Wembly.”

  “Oh.” I’d been hoping my cloak-and-dagger routine would yield better results. I’m guessing his secret agent moves didn’t turn up anything we could use, either. Otherwise he would have mentioned it by now. “What did you find?”

  “Nothing.” He gathered his thoughts to the whine of the key machine. “A whole lot of nothing, though. A suspicious amount of nothing. It’s as if he never existed. No record of him at the Twentieth—but I remember the name. I can’t put it to a face, but it’s an unusual name, and I’ve definitely heard it before. I’ll bet we’ve both met him at some PsyCop function, or at least seen him. If Warwick says Detective Wembly worked at the FPMP, I tend to believe him. Plus there were a lot of redacted records right around three, four years ago. And the weird thing? The subject wasn’t blacked out…but the investigator was.”

  We pondered our best bet at finding a photo of Wembly to jog our memories, figuring one of us must know someone who knew someone at the Twentieth—someone who hadn’t cleared the memory card on their digital camera in a while.

  “And what about Laura?” Was it insensitive of me to bring up the possibility of paranormal creepy-crawlies so soon after we were reminded of the unfortunate fate of Jacob’s duvet? “As sick as it might seem, I’d rather hear that whatever I talked to downtown, whatever Burke saw, it wasn’t really Laura at all.”

  We clammed up as we strolled past the surveillance cameras on our way back to the parking lot. As Jacob sprinkled the freshly cut keys into the steel trash can just outside the doorway with a surprisingly loud metal-on-metal clatter, he said through the noise, “I guess I’ll need to prove it wasn’t Laura Kim.”

  * * *

  Buying the peephole was one thing. Installing it was something else entirely, because installation involved tools. Tools involved the basement. Looming shadows. The smell of old concrete and new rubber flooring. A GhosTV lurking under the stairs. I stopped short of the tool collection and stared at the blank screen. There was a vague plan taking shape, but for that plan to work, I’d need to figure out a better storage plan for the TV. If the GhosTV spooked me, I wondered how Lisa felt about it. She’d actually been stuck in an astral nightmare for days—and this dusty console was a vivid reminder. Me, I’d just seen some stretched heads. Which was pretty bad, too.

  I couldn’t leave the GhosTV sitting in the alleyway for any ol’ passerby to scoop up. It was too valuable to destroy. And giving it back to Dr
eyfuss would be an admission of my fear. Plus, while I hoped the time would never come, I might need the damn thing someday.

  Jacob veered around me and headed for his tool chest, unaware of my conundrum. He opened a red metal drawer full of tool-things, then handed me the hang tag. “What size drill bit?”

  I held our soon-to-be peephole up to the light—the print was minuscule—and read the directions three times to ensure I was telling him the right thing. “Half inch.”

  He began plundering the drawer.

  I focused on the finished part of the basement, the home gym. It didn’t see use every day, but I gathered it served its purpose. He never came upstairs looking twitchy from being underground. I said, “I was thinking…we could put in another bathroom down here, right? And extend the drop ceiling, make up a couple of finished rooms….” I wrapped my arms across my stomach and shivered.

  “You mean, a bedroom?”

  I nodded. “Something nice. Like a little apartment.”

  Hesitantly, I moved deeper into the murk of the basement’s unfinished half. There were no vermin currently in residence, at least not of the rodent variety. Jacob had located and grouted holes fastidiously, and we hadn’t snapped a trap in months. The spiders could be startling…but that’s what white walls were for. To discourage anything creepy from sneaking up. It was hard to imagine fresh white drywall. Difficult to picture ceiling tiles and laminate flooring. Right now, my senses were too busy screaming “basement” to properly visualize a private guest suite, a place Lisa might consider staying in the long-term.

  “Grab that tape measure,” Jacob said.

  As I’m not what you’d call “handy,” I needed to ask myself, “Does he mean that thing?” until I came upon the square metal item that registered as a tape measure. That’s probably how working the sí-no felt. Not as natural as knowing something immediately, but finding information accessible after a small lag and a moment’s consideration. I grabbed the tape measure and followed him to the stairs. He paused at the foot. “You’re talking about a real bedroom for Lisa. Even though she’s with…him?”

  “I give their couplehood another few weeks. A month, tops.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “I just spent the week working with the guy,” I said. “It was like being sandblasted with sarcasm.”

  Jacob stared down at the hang tag, turning it in his hands. I waited while he gathered his thoughts. Once he did, he said, “I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

  “You were too wrapped up in Burke’s shooting.”

  “It seems so obvious, in retrospect. There were shopping bags from a jeweler in his trash, but I figured he’d bought another new watch. And I thought the florist was another one of his surveillance partners.”

  “It probably is. That, and a safe zone where he doesn’t have to worry about dead spies.” Usually, I’d add a remark about it being simpler to abstain from killing people if you didn’t want the deceased to listen in…but I found I was no longer certain where Dreyfuss’ actions ended and the ghosts began. Especially not if Lisa was willing to trust him. Sure, she was probably blind to his faults now, in the throes of her infatuation. But at the beginning, before they fell for each other, back when he was just the FPMP guy with a smart remark for every occasion? She must have run him past the sí-no then. Or maybe that’s just what I wanted to believe.

  * * *

  I wasn’t entirely sure of Jacob’s commitment to keeping Lisa in the cannery until he drilled the hole through our front door. When I suggested we put it at her eye-level rather than ours, he agreed without a moment’s hesitation. Then I had to pretend I wasn’t feeling choked up and mushy by turning away and reading the minute print on the hang tag again.

  Ten o’clock rolled around, then eleven, and still no Lisa. Finally, against my protests, Jacob texted her to see what time she thought she’d get home. She replied within a few minutes, which was good. But her reply was, “Late…don’t wait up. Cya.” We both overanalyzed it, of course. Jacob said he thought it sounded friendly. I said nothing—because the Lisa-height peephole was probably too little, too late, and I felt my best friend slipping away into the clutches of Con Dreyfuss.

  It looked like she’d come home during the night, since the shoes she’d been wearing were now beside the door, and there were a few long hairs in the bathroom sink. But by the time we were up and around, she was already gone. I even waited ’til the last possible moment to leave, more than fifteen minutes after Jacob, and still, no Lisa. Finally I gave up and headed to the FPMP myself.

  I nearly missed the garage ramp. Again. Hard to say if Dreyfuss would admit there was some kind of psychic camouflage on it, or if my brain simply had a few fried synapses in the spot that should recognize the building. After circling the block I’d so recently walked on foot, though, I made it to the elevator bank with no time to spare.

  “Hold the elevator!”

  I squelched the impulse to “accidentally” nudge the close-button. Not only was I on time by the skin of my teeth, but now, embarking on my fourth day at the FPMP, my patience for Richie was paper thin. I’d done some research on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome while I was waiting up for Lisa, though, which made me feel guilty for getting so frustrated with him. I stuck out my foot and bounced the doors open.

  He jogged in from the parking garage and said, “Thanks.” It was a far cry from the enthusiastic handshake he usually greeted me with—then again, his hands were occupied with a cardboard tray that held four tall drinks. He saw me eyeballing them and said, “There’s a new smoothie cart down on Hubbard.”

  Business couldn’t be very brisk, given that it was November, a particularly dank November. And we were basically in the middle of nowhere—bordered by warehouses and storage facilities, highway ramps and a rail yard.

  “By the gym,” he said.

  I tried to imagine who’d travel to a neighborhood like this to work out. “Oh.”

  “I got one for you.”

  “Oh.” In light of the unexpected gesture, I felt like even more of an ass for dreading his inevitable monologue about football statistics and the unsuitability of my car. He held up the tray and nodded toward the tall cups, and I took one. “Thanks.”

  “Chocolate malt,” he said.

  I nodded and wondered if I was supposed to give him a few bucks for it. But then I decided that buying a bunch of smoothies for his co-workers might be akin to inviting strangers off the street to come join him in his skybox. A way for him to feel generous. Or maybe to buy people’s friendship and approval.

  On the fifth floor, he marched up to Laura’s desk and said, “I got you a smoothie.”

  She looked surprised, but she took it and thanked him.

  “Aren’t you going to drink it?”

  “I just brushed my teeth.” She set it on her desk. “I’ll try it in a while.”

  “It’s chocolate malt.” He squinted at the smoothie on Laura’s desk. I felt condensation bead the outside of plastic cup I was currently holding. Keeping his eyes on Laura, Richie found the straw of the closest smoothie with his mouth and took a long sip. “It’s really good.”

  “Great,” Laura said. “Thanks. You know I love chocolate.” Richie stared at her a moment longer, and she added, “I can’t wait to drink it. Later.”

  As he realized she wasn’t about to suck it down on the spot to appease him, his mood curdled. He made a sniffing sound, turned, and stalked off toward his office.

  Who knew he’d still be in a snit about yesterday’s exorcism getting interrupted? “That was weird,” I said.

  “I probably shouldn’t drink it anyway. Certain kinds of fruit enzymes trigger my headaches. Even if this is mostly chocolate and yogurt, there’s no guarantee the blender was clean to start with.”

  “He seemed awfully eager for you to drink it.” Maybe he’d hocked a loogie in there. I peeled open my lid and peered in. Now that I’d thought of the phlegm ball, there’d be no drinking of mine, either. I took
both smoothies and dumped them down the lounge drain, then reported back to Laura. “Can you let Dreyfuss know I’m ready to sweep his office again?”

  “Not today.” she leaned forward and dropped her voice. As if that would make any difference. “The Metropolitan Correctional Center finally agreed to let a team re-process Roger Burke’s cell, and also the location of his shooting. We’ve been trying to get a team in there for months. It could be the big break in Agent Marks’ case.” Well, the office repeaters weren’t going anywhere, I supposed. “Any physical evidence would be long gone. But psychic evidence…maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  My gut wanted to like Laura, so I figured I should give her a chance put some kind of spin on her story—to let me know she’d been privy to information that absolutely necessitated Burke’s elimination. Or imply that she’d been coerced. “If I did happen to get lucky…any idea what I might find?”

  “You’ll figure out whoever did this. We’ll all feel a lot safer once we know.”

  I held her gaze even though I was practically squirming with the desire to drop it, and tried to will her to come clean. She looked from eye to eye, reading me, hopefully struggling with the urge to tell me whatever it was she’d been holding back, so I stayed strong, and I forced myself to wait. Finally, she said, “If anyone can figure this out, it’s you.”

  What was that supposed to mean?

  Chapter 20

  We convened in a small meeting room: me, Dreyfuss, Richie, Jacob and Bly. I kept my eyes peeled for Dr. Chance, but she didn’t put in an appearance. Not that I knew of, anyway.