Spook Squad

by Jordan Castillo Price

  I nudged his leg into a more comfortable spot and pressed against him harder. “Try again tomorrow from work. You’ll probably get a different supervisor, plus you’ll look a lot more impressive on their caller ID.”

  Even though it had turned out to be a bust, I told him about my bum theory of Agent Bly using Laura Kim as a shooter. He was quiet for so long, I listened for the sound of his breathing changing in case he’d drifted off on me, but finally he said, “If the sí-no won’t pinpoint Bly, maybe it wasn’t him…but the FPMP is full of high-level Psychs.” He sat up and shed his exhaustion like a sweater in a sauna while I quietly wondered if I would’ve been better off waiting ’til morning to talk shop. “If a strong enough empath can plant an emotion, maybe a strong enough telepath can plant an idea and make someone else think it’s theirs.”

  He headed downstairs glowing like a kid on Christmas morning and coaxed Lisa into unzipping the tent flap. Personally, I wouldn’t have woken her up for a sí-no, but Jacob had been picking at this case for months without solving it, and now he’d scented blood. No way was he about to let it rest until morning. I leaned on the railing and looked down at the two of them while he did his best to seem both charming and apologetic. Maybe he pulled off the charming part, then again, I’m pretty biased. “You still think Laura Kim didn’t shoot Roger Burke?” he asked eagerly.

  Lisa shot a peeved look up to the loft, as if I were the one down there asking sí-nos at midnight. She said, “I’m not looking at Laura. How can I get that through to you?”

  Jacob plowed ahead as if he didn’t notice her annoyance. “But did the bullet that killed him come from Laura’s weapon?”

  Lisa went quiet. I held my breath. It felt like the whole cannery held its breath. When my lungs started to ache, she said, “Yes.”

  My mind was racing, but before I could sort out any implications, Jacob asked, “Did one of the other Psychs force her hand?”

  Although Lisa’s voice was quiet, in the still of the cannery, it carried loud and clear. “No.”

  “Was she the one who fired it?”

  “Do you know what you’re asking me to do?” Lisa asked plaintively. “Con trusts Laura with everything. With his life. You’re asking me to tell you she’s responsible, she’s involved—that maybe she even did it—and it’s not fair to put me in that position if the sí-no isn’t clear. It’s just not fair.”

  “Maybe Dreyfuss should be more concerned about her,” Jacob said. “Maybe he needs you to look out for him.”

  “Laura is not a danger to Con, or to me. Period. And if the sí-no isn’t saying whether she fired the damn gun, then you need to either figure out some other approach or let it rest. You know that if ballistics matches the bullet to her weapon, it’s all over for her. How do you think I’ll look if you take Laura down, and it turns out she was somehow in the wrong place at the wrong time—and then Con finds out you acted on a sí-no? I’m willing to try to get him to drop the investigation and move you into something else so it’s not your problem anymore—because, face it, do you really care who took out Burke after everything he did? Laura could lose her job. She could go to prison. So I’m not pointing the finger at her—I’m not willing to take responsibility for any of this.”

  She zipped up the tent with three quick jerks as if she really wished there was a door to slam.

  Jacob was too keyed up to drift off, I could tell, so I treated him to a quick hummer in hopes of helping his sleep mechanism kick in. Even so, once I was done getting my hair pulled and my tonsils prodded, I was the one who was drifting off when he broke the silence with, “I was hoping you’d be done at the FPMP by now.”

  Despite the fact that I was half asleep, or maybe because of it, I caught a faint note of wistfulness in Jacob’s delivery. It wasn’t exactly a lie—he really was hoping the exorcism would be short and sweet, and I’d get it over with and roll on with my life. But part of him would be sorry to see me go. He felt conflicted, and that made two of us. I couldn’t see myself getting involved with a bunch of eavesdroppers who shot people in their offices. Except psychic police work was an exercise in futility, and the stuff that Laura Kim claimed they did at the FPMP had merit. But how did the missing PsyCop fit in? I shuffled the problem to the back of my mind. No sense in trying to make any big, sweeping decisions since I didn’t need to, not yet. Tomorrow’s assignment was clear. I still owed Dreyfuss his damn exorcism.

  Chapter 25

  When I reported to Laura Kim the next morning to see how I’d be deployed, I hoped to linger for some chitchat. I wasn’t about to tell her she was a medium—she seemed just as happy to be in the dark on that matter, and I can’t say I blamed her. My main concern was figuring out how she was involved in Burke’s shooting. The more time I spent with her, the more likely it was I might find some small inconsistency that would unravel the whole assassination scenario in a way the sí-no would definitively confirm. To say I found her fascinating would be an understatement. Today she wore a black suit with a burgundy shirt and matching lipstick, and while she wasn’t beauty-queen pretty, her features looked striking and exotic to my Caucasian eyes. Definitely too hot to have tied the knot with Dreyfuss.

  He’d mentioned multiple ex-wives before—I didn’t recall exactly how many—but as I watched Laura taking a call while she pulled up some database on her computer, I imagined the two of them walking down the aisle. And then I began to dread him presenting my best friend with something more permanent than a diamond tennis bracelet.

  “If you’re feeling that bad,” Laura was saying, “I should send Dr. Santiago to your place and have her check you out.” A pause. “Be honest with me…did you watch the game at a bar? Were you drinking?” Another pause. Laura sighed. “Make sure you drink plenty of water. You’re probably dehydrated.”

  It almost sounded as if she’d been talking to a teenage kid, but I doubted the FPMP’s staff physician would be deployed in the case of a tailgate gone too far. When she ended the call, I said, “Richie?”

  She nodded. “A few years ago, he developed a bad habit of ‘extending’ his weekends. Agent Dreyfuss put a policy in place stating he wouldn’t get sick pay without a doctor’s note if the absence occurred after a day off. So when he calls in on a Monday, I know it’s serious. It’s too bad. He’s predisposed to drinking, and he doesn’t have the impulse-control to say ‘when.’ Add that to his low blood sugar incident at the prison on Friday….” She trailed off and sighed. “It’s just too bad.”

  “Maybe you should reconsider sending Dr. Santiago on a house call.”

  “He started losing his temper when I even suggested it.”

  The smartass in me wanted to suggest they send empathic Agent Bly over to smooth his ruffled feathers. But even though the sí-no cleared Bly, I didn’t want to invite any more interaction with him than was necessary. “If Richie’s out today, who’ll be the other half of my buddy…system?”

  The elevator doors whooshed open and three guys in black suits stepped off. I didn’t think there was much cause for concern, given that everyone at the FPMP was a suit, until I noticed Laura’s eyebrows hitch up. Two of them strode past her desk, keycards in hand, without acknowledging her. She stood up and asked, “What is this?”

  Suit #3 flashed a pass of some sort and said, “We’re collecting some equipment from Agent Dreyfuss’ office. Then we’ll be out of your hair.” Mild words. They were totally at odds with the bully-boy body language, which said, stand aside, peon.

  Laura was quick, though her movements were controlled, not panicked. She buzzed Dreyfuss and said, “Three Agents from Washington on their way in. Their access cards overrode the locks. I couldn’t stop them.”

  Through the intercom, there was a sigh. “Understood. See if Santiago and Bly can…well, hello, gentlemen.” Dreyfuss cut the connection.

  The elevator dinged again, and this time it was Dr. K who staggered out. His bushy hair was wild, his glasses were crooked, and his paunchy cheeks were so flushed I thoug
ht he’d keel over in a fit of apoplexy. “Dey barged into the lab…” his Russian accent had gone thick. “Dey took the tuner.”

  Laura nodded, fingers flying over her keyboard. Uneventful exterior shots of the FPMP from each angle filled the quadrants of her monitor. More typing, and four angles of the underground garage took the place of the exteriors. Men in black stood at the ready beside a black armored van…and it didn’t look like anything out of the Lexus catalog. She dispatched Bly and Santiago immediately. “Find out what’s going on,” was all she told them. Although for someone with as much psychic firepower at her disposal as Laura had, she didn’t seem very hopeful she’d get to the bottom of things. I could imagine why. What good were high-caliber psychs against a bunch of goons in black who were just following orders? The muscle probably didn’t know much more than what they were supposed to grab and how much damage they were allowed to inflict.

  A couple of the parking garage shots showed nothing but parked cars. Laura dismissed those, keeping two goon shots onscreen. She then pulled up live camera from Dreyfuss’ office, two angles. Dreyfuss stood to one side with a sheet of paper in his hand, shaking his head in disappointment as the goons swept the office with a handheld meter. At the touch of a keystroke, we had audio. “We’ll need you to unlock your desk, sir.”

  “Sorry,” Dreyfuss said. “Not until I’ve read this form.”

  “You haven’t…looked at it.”

  “And I’m a very slow reader. Sometimes I wonder if I’m dyslexic.”

  As Dreyfuss stalled the team in his office, Santiago and Bly approached the team in the garage. Bly blended right in with the other grim guys in suits. He didn’t engage them in any way—he simply stood by while Santiago sashayed up in high heels, blood red lipstick, and a slinky floral print dress. None of the goons ogled her, but they all stiffened as if it cost them something to resist giving in to a catcall and a leer. We didn’t have audio on her, but it wasn’t necessary. Her huge gestures were stage-worthy, and her line of questioning wouldn’t be any more complicated than, “Oh my God, what are you people doing?” Because that question was just a cover for what was really going on. Her mind, probing theirs.

  One of the invading agents did finally break down and look her way—and I saw Bly, off to the side, unnoticed, was looking right at the agent who’d cracked.

  Bly found the chinks in the opposition’s armor, and Santiago dove in for recon. They handled themselves like old dance partners. Just like Jacob and me. The footage was too grainy, too small, to really make out the looks on the goons’ faces. But it seemed to me the goon under Bly’s sway had an actual expression on his ugly mug, rather than the disconnected blank stare they usually wore—the Big League equivalent of my cop-face.

  Dr. K clapped a hand on my shoulder, swaying. “Do you know how much work they will ruin? Why now? Why so sudden? If I had a chance to wrap things up…” he turned away, shaking his head in disgust.

  I’m not sure what it was that got to me. Was it watching Bly and Santiago tag-team the intruder? Or hearing Dr. K lament that the work he’d been doing would all be for naught? Or was it just that I’d grown accustomed to the FPMP, and I didn’t appreciate a bunch of outsiders walking in and acting like they owned the place…in which case, I could assume I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe I actually was, since I found myself rooting for Con Dreyfuss.

  “They took my computers, my reports, my phone, even my notebook,” Dr. K moaned. I suspected his backups were toast, too. And for what? I’d seen the lab in action—and I’d taken part in enough experiments exactly like the ones he was running to know he wasn’t doing anything that should merit this level of interference. Where the hell were these assholes when I was kept awake forty-eight hours at a stretch, when I was poked and zapped and squirted up with psyactives that scorched through my veins like battery acid? Nowhere. And now some bored telekinetic stares at a plant while a GhosTV is playing in the background, and the whole damn cavalry charges in…at whose bequest? Washington’s?

  “I take it Dreyfuss’ boss is none too happy about his stalling tactics for the banker in Iowa,” I commented.

  Laura responded with a humorless laugh and turned up the volume in Dreyfuss’ office. “There’s really nothing interesting in there,” he told the goon who was fitting a power drill to the manual lock on his credenza. Another suit plucked the CPU out from under his desk. “And there’s nothing on my hard drive that’s not sitting right there on the mainframe for everyone’s reading pleasure. But go ahead, take it. It was time for an upgrade anyway. Those components are such a pain in the ass to recycle.”

  The whine of the drill blotted out the sound, but only for a few seconds until the credenza was open. Dreyfuss was saying, “Help yourself to some yogurt if you’re hungry.”

  Maybe there was nothing more exciting behind door #1 than a refrigerator. Soon enough, though, with the help of their industrial drill, they exposed the GhosTV.

  It wasn’t that they were deliberately rough—but clearly, they had nothing invested in preserving the unique technology, either. Whereas the TV in the lab could be hauled off in one piece, Dreyfuss’ TV had been fitted specifically to the credenza, and as the goons pulled it free, a bunch of electronics spilled out behind it like entrails. I could give two shits about the GhosTV—I’d been fucking kidnapped to test the damn thing. So when the federal repo men started cutting wires, why did I feel each and every snip echoing in the pit of my gut? “Should we stop them?” I said.

  “Don’t,” Laura said. “They’ll be authorized to use whatever force necessary.” She turned her attention to her phone, pressed some buttons, and said into her headset, “This is Laura Kim…no, in fact I prefer not to hold. We have an unacceptable situation in Chicago and I need to— Damn it.”

  “Well, I’m done here,” Dr. K said. “I might as well go get a drink.”

  Laura’s phone lit up. “Stop him,” she told me. “He’s wrapped his car around a telephone pole before. This time he might not walk away.” She turned away to field the calls, leaving me to deal with Dr. K.

  Currently, the scientist was jabbing the elevator call button repeatedly, hard enough to break the thing. “Whoa, whoa,” I said. “Maybe Con’s got a copy of your data somewhere. I’m sure you’ve got schematics. You could build your own.”

  “Believe me, I would have…we’d be testing them all over the country by now if I knew what it was about the old tubes that made them work. It wouldn’t just be a government project, either. Once business saw the potential, money would pour into development. Every company would want their own remote viewer, and anyone with enough money would be able to make their own.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “That’s what it does. Not like a television set—you can’t turn it on and see what was happening somewhere else. But sometimes, when the tester is in an alpha state, he can see things. Report back on them. Do you understand how important this is? Ever since the Cold War the military has been trying to develop remote viewers.”

  I’d seen remote viewing in action, and I’d seen the GhosTV doing its thing. Dr. K was talking about apples and oranges, although I could see where the end result would seem the same.

  Dr. K shook his head. “Once the tuner technology is refined, it could make anyone clairvoyant.”

  “If everyone is potentially psychic, the anti-Psychs don’t have anyone to harass,” I said. The GhosTV didn’t actually “make” people psychic. Mostly, it loosened up their subtle bodies and allowed them to go astral. The majority of them didn’t remember their trips. Even so, it would be a game changer. If Dr. K managed to take the GhosTV to the next level, eventually he could make the FPMP obsolete.

  As my head reeled with the implication of the research, the Washington goons filed out of the lounge. One was hauling the GhosTV guts toward the elevator. Another had Dreyfuss’ CPU. Dr. K and I backed away, giving them plenty of room. “You may want to hold off on that,” Laura called after them. “I
’m on the phone with your boss right now.” But they ignored her—just doin’ my job, ma’am—and once the elevator doors shut behind them, they were gone.

  Chapter 26

  Dreyfuss strolled out behind the goons looking thoughtful and unhurried. Dr. K charged up to him, gesticulating wildly and begging him to do something, but the drama didn’t sink in. He was tuned in to his own thoughts—and he was staring directly at me. He patted Dr. K on the shoulder, calming him, then turned back to me and said, “Detective? Let’s go for a walk.”

  I’d expected another excursion to the flower shop, but once we were outside, he led me toward a gap in the concrete wall beneath the viaduct instead. It occurred to me that it might lead to some kind of escape pod, or maybe a panic room. It then occurred to me, as I squeezed through the rough concrete, that there could be someone waiting on the other side of the gap to put a bullet in my brain. If there were, that person couldn’t be very big. Jacob wouldn’t have been able to slide in greased and naked. I could barely cram through myself.

  There was no hit man on the other side of the gap—but no fancy secret emergency equipment either. Just railroad ties and rusted freight cars. Dreyfuss had led me into a small lot formed by an exit ramp abutment, a peeling outbuilding and an unfrequented corner of the rail yard. He squinted up at the gray morning sun peeking between the distant North Loop skyscrapers with his phone pressed to his ear. “Hola,” he told whoever was on the other end, then, “Y’know that place I hoped we’d never meet? I need you there.”