Spook Squad

by Jordan Castillo Price

  When he tucked his phone back into his pocket, his sweatshirt rode up and flashed the edge of a holster. I’ve never known Con Dreyfuss to carry. Ever. The idea that he found it necessary to bring a firearm with him made me wonder if I should have thought twice about following him in.

  “What’s going on?” I hated how my voice shook.

  His stony expression didn’t change. He turned away wordlessly and began to walk. I stood there for a moment and considered squeezing back through the concrete gap, finding my sorry car and heading home, but what then? Jacob was still inside the FPMP. Anything I failed to do could have ramifications for him—ugly ramifications. And so I turned up my collar against the bone-chilling wind that whistled relentlessly through the rail yard, and I followed.

  Not only was Dreyfuss freer to move around in his sneakers and sweats, but he was a hell of a lot more nimble than me. We rounded a corner and came upon a tumble of cinderblock, timber and rusted drums. He scaled it like a mountain goat while I picked up a few dozen scratches and splinters clambering along behind him.

  The wall of rubble was a pretty good sound baffle. I hauled myself over the top. Dreyfuss was farther ahead. When I called for him to slow down and my voice was swallowed by the ambient noise, I realized the crank and rattle of the train yard was deceptively loud. I tore my slacks on a protruding nail hurrying to catch up with him, and barely caught myself from sprawling when I tripped on a loose board. He didn’t even break stride. Somehow, I followed.

  He’d led me to a maze of old outbuildings. The wind changed, moaning through the corridors created by the corrugated walls of industrial sheds and the sides of rusting freight cars. I smelled oil and dirt and winter-cold steel, but underlying it all—and growing stronger the farther in we delved—was the elusive scorched-air scent of electricity. The air above our heads was criss-crossed with cables, some as fat around as my thigh, supported by knobbly old wooden posts that were still shaped like tree trunks, roughly skinned, now petrified black with pollution and age. The cable hung in great tangles and spools off the posts, strung around the rail yard haphazardly, as if a giant baby had crawled up and looped it from one pole to another like a big ball of string. Somewhere beyond the metal and cable labyrinth, a bell began to clang, cutting through the murk of noise in its sharp percussiveness. A train was coming, but I didn’t hear it. I felt it through the soles of my shoes, and I smelled it as a spike of burnt electricity in the air. Dreyfuss hugged the edge of the maze, creeping toward a building now, a low brick building that looked like old Chicago, like the occasional cobblestone street that peeked through when tree roots or weather heaved the blacktop open. Like the cannery when I realized it had not always been my home, and I pondered the origin of the strange machines lurking in the unfinished half of the basement.

  Somewhere beyond the maze, the rumbling slowed. A long metallic squeal joined the chorus of noise, and a stunningly loud hiss crackled over the top of it all. Dreyfuss ducked around a corner and I rushed after him. It was a shallow dead end. I backpedaled quickly to keep from flattening him against the far wall. But it wasn’t a wall, I saw, when he moved aside a rotting plank covered in dead weedy vines. It was a door, an ancient door of hewn timbers weeping with rust where the corroding nails held them together. The verdigris covered lock above the doorknob was much newer than the door itself, but that wasn’t saying much. Fortunately, it was new enough for Dreyfuss’ handy dandy bump key to work on it. He pulled the magical piece of metal out of his pocket, wriggled it in, and gave it a whack. The door probably creaked as it opened, though the sound was lost amid the rail yard din. Beyond was darkness.

  He pulled a pocket flashlight and slipped inside. I followed.

  The ceiling of the small room was so low I couldn’t stand up straight, and the whole thing reeked of age. It wasn’t entirely sheltered from the elements. Broad cracks in the walls let gray daylight knife in, and gaps in the plank flooring allowed the dust sifting from the decaying mortar to settle into whatever emptiness lay beneath. Except for strings and coils of electrical cable that looked none too safe to touch, the room was empty. I expected Dreyfuss to unearth another door and lead me to a place where everything would suddenly make sense. Instead, he planted his feet in the center of the room, and he waited.

  “What’s going on?” I asked again—and the words were swallowed by a thick electrical hum that felt more like a stiffness in my eardrums than an actual sound.

  Dreyfuss peered at me coolly. I think he heard, but he didn’t answer.

  My forearms prickled. Beneath my sleeves, my arm hairs were valiantly attempting to stand at attention. So was the hair on the back of my neck. I swallowed. My spit tasted like nickels. I could only imagine what the electromagnetic field was doing to any eavesdropping devices we hadn’t known we were carrying. While it was a relief to know any unwanted communications signals would be scrambled, I wasn’t so sure what it meant for my own molecules. I’d always thought the people who claimed they contracted mysterious diseases from living around high tension wires were just looking for someone to pay their medical bills. I’d been wrong—the electricity was definitely affecting us. Even worse, if it was screwing with the physical, I could hardly imagine what it was doing to our subtle bodies.

  When Dreyfuss finally spoke, he said, “Might as well make yourself useful and see to it that no dead people are listening.” He dug something tiny out of his pocket and threw it at me. I felt it ping off my overcoat, and although I couldn’t hear it hit the floor over the drone of the electrical hum, I suspected it sounded like a Seconal capsule. “Your payment.”

  He wasn’t wrong—nothing would freak me out more than to swing my flashlight beam around and find Dr. Chance had been lurking in the shadows all along. But I could do without the judgment.

  I walked the perimeter of the shack, feeling for cold spots, looking for movement, but as far as I could tell, the place was clean. I wasn’t sure if the electricity could affect my ability, though, so I salted the area just to be safe, stretching my tiny pocket-sized supply to cover the length of all four walls. I topped it off with a few spritzes of my re-purposed breath spray, pumping until nothing but air came out, and then I flooded it with white light. It was the best I could do. Hopefully it would be enough.

  My white light was symbolic, though. It didn’t do a thing for my physical sight. Between the darkness and the distracting hum, I hadn’t even noticed that there was a second door in the far wall. I first saw it as a slice of light, which filled me with a surge of panic, at least until I realized that the light was entirely mundane daylight, and all I’d need to worry about was the silhouette that now filled the doorway. I blinked away tears while my eyes adjusted. Despite the fact that the hair on this silhouette floated up in a dark nimbus as it came into contact with the overflowing electricity, over the past few months I’d grown plenty familiar with this particular silhouette from outside the blue nylon tent wall.

  Lisa.

  A chain dangled from her hand. The antique key she’d been wearing around her neck protruded from the lock of the Depression-era door. Beyond her, a Grand Avenue bus wheezed by as if everything was same-old, same-old, but I was viewing it now from the other side of the looking glass. Here Jacob and I thought we’d been so clever with our key cutting and ice grinding. The lengths Lisa and Dreyfuss went through to talk privately made Jacob and me look like a couple of kids playing secret agent.

  Lisa closed the door behind her and we were plunged into near darkness again. An afterimage in the shape of the doorway danced in front of my eyes until they adjusted to lack of light, and when they did, I found them kissing. Lisa and Dreyfuss. Right there in front of me. Not in a lovey-dovey way, either. Desperate. Like the world was gonna end.

  They tore their lips from one another, but Lisa kept a two-handed hold on his face. “What happened?” She called over the droning hum.

  “I’m completely fucked. They know what I can do and I’m as good as dead.”

 
“No they don’t. Tell me what happened.”

  “Washington’s coming down hard. They dismantled our biggest project. Next thing they’ll haul off is me.”

  “No…no. I promise. No.”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Is today my day to die?”

  “No, llegarás a mañana. Just you wait and see.”

  “Who brought Washington down on my head?” Dreyfuss pulled away from her and pointed directly at my face. “Was it him?”

  Me? He thought I’d been the one to bring Washington in? Not on purpose. Inadvertently, though? I hoped not. I hadn’t even realized Dreyfuss wasn’t the only one spying on me—but I’d been careful not to leak anything. I was always careful. So I couldn’t possibly be the one who’d triggered the GhosTV raid. My mouth worked, though I couldn’t think of anything intelligent enough to say that would merit screaming it over the electrical hum. Lisa replied with something a lot longer than a simple yes or no. I didn’t hear what it was. Neither did Dreyfuss. He cupped his palm around his ear and shouted, “What?”

  She shook her head sadly, then steeled herself and yelled, “I can’t tell you anything about Vic.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I hollered. I was fairly sure I’d done nothing wrong, and obviously she could make an exception to the sí-no if it were to exonerate me. I grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her, and blue static sparkles danced around her wool coat. “Tell him! I didn’t do anything.” Or, at least, I didn’t mean to.

  Lisa glanced from me to Dreyfuss and back again. Her brow was furrowed. It should have looked hilarious with her hair floating all around her, but it didn’t, not one bit. I wished I was privy to whatever she was asking herself—but I supposed I’d need to be a telepath to hear it. Lucky me. I just saw dead people.

  Would she really hold back something that would clear my name all for the sake of proving a point, or was she protecting me? Whether I did something or not, I didn’t want Lisa to take the fall for my mistakes. I repeated, “Tell him.”

  She stared at me hard, her dark eyes boring into me for a long moment, then she turned to Dreyfuss and said, “No. It wasn’t him.”

  Dreyfuss shouted, “Someone told upper management about the GhosTVs. And exactly where they were kept.”

  “Oh, come on,” I yelled, “plenty of people know that.”

  Dreyfuss smiled grimly. “Actually, no. Only a handful of people knew about the set in my office.”

  And I was one of them. Fantastic. In my defense, I had absolutely no idea it was that big a deal. He’d given a set to me, after all…though he’d also given me a warning that I’d better not go blabbing about it. So what if I knew he locked the TV’s credenza. He locked his goddamn refrigerator, too.

  Lisa tried to haul Dreyfuss toward the door. “They got what they came for,” she said. “They’re gone now—they’re not listening. We don’t need to do this.”

  Dreyfuss and I were too busy having our own standoff to worry about something as mundane as the electrical field scrambling our guts. We both stayed put and tried to stare each other down. “Other people knew besides me,” I insisted. Richie and Carl must have seen it at some point—I knew absolutely nothing about Carl, but it’s always best to watch out for the quiet ones. Maybe Bly, too. And then there was Dr. Santiago, who could’ve had some kind of rivalry going on with Dr. K I didn’t know about, a rivalry where she’d benefit by sabotaging his work…although even as I thought up that scenario, I knew I was grasping at straws. All those people must have seen it at some point. All those people, plus Dreyfuss, and me…and Laura.

  My gut wanted to trust Laura Kim, but my gut’s proven itself to be spectacularly wrong on numerous occasions. The thought of suggesting Laura was the culprit made me sick. Especially when I couldn’t temper the accusation with an apologetic tone of voice. No, I’d need to scream it out in all its ugly glory, and I realized I wasn’t willing to. Not without definitive proof. Still, I felt the need to deflect the blame from myself, because even though Lisa had just conveyed the sí-no’s blessing on me, Dreyfuss looked like he wasn’t buying my innocence. Lisa dropped his arm, stepped away from him, and paused at the door. She looked to me, pleading with her eyes for me to leave the humming, crackling room with her. But I had a point to make. “I’m not the only one who knows about it,” I insisted. “The thing didn’t install itself in your credenza.”

  “No, Dr. K put it in. So he sabotaged his own project?”

  “All I’m saying is that what happened this morning could’ve been in the works long before I set foot in this place.”

  “No,” Lisa chimed in. So much for that argument. She looked a bit stunned, like she hadn’t been expecting the sí-no to spill out at that very moment. But now that it had, her internal stream of questioning was running through her mind. “It happened while you were here, Vic. This week. You know the person who’s responsible. A woman. It’s a woman.”

  I felt the blood drain out of my face.

  “Not Laura Kim,” Lisa called out. I could see it in her eyes—she was as relieved as I was that the sí-no was finally taking a firm stance on Laura.

  “Then it’s Santiago,” I said. “I never trusted her.”

  “Not Santiago,” Lisa snapped, pressing her shoulder impatiently into the door.

  “There is no other woman there,” I said. “Unless you’re talking about someone I saw in passing, in the lunchroom or the hall.”

  “No, you know her. You spoke to her. Where…? In the dining room? No. In Con’s office.”

  I ran back the tape in my mind and tried to figure out what she meant. Thoughts of the exorcism and the botched rosary brought back memories of repeaters and jellyfish. I supposed it was possible the jellyfish were female, and I did chat with them, even if it was just to tell them to hit the road. Maybe they were something more than habit-demons. Maybe they were some kind of spying device. But if they were capable of carrying information back to Dreyfuss’ superiors, who the heck would receive it in Washington? Even if they had a Psych hopped up on psyactives interpreting the message, all the jellyfish could do was undulate. They weren’t sentient enough to carry on a conversation. Not like….

  I closed my eyes and swayed on my feet. Not like Dr. Chance. It fit, it all fit. A female I knew. In Dreyfuss’ office. Pissed off at Dr. K and positive he was poised to snatch a Nobel for her GhosTV. “Is it Chance?” I asked weakly. Her name was swallowed up in our noise shield. I needed to come clean, even though it meant admitting that I’d been holding back the majority of what I knew. If the dead doctor had managed to figure out a way to exact her revenge, I’d need all the help I could get. I braced myself and shouted, “It’s Dr. Chance.”

  Dreyfuss went ashen. Lisa closed her eyes, took a steadying breath, clutched Dreyfuss’ hand and said, “I’m not saying one more word until both of you come outside.”

  Chapter 27

  Grand Avenue was dead in the gap between morning rush hour and lunch. Although the wind was bitter and sleet pelted our faces, it was an enormous relief to escape the electrical hum of the dank, low-ceilinged utility hut and to slide back into the real world, although that reality felt a bit flimsy now that I’d integrated so many new and scary concepts in such a short span of time.

  My ears were still ringing from the hum, and I worked my jaw hoping to make my eardrums flex and shake off the residual drone. We could speak freely now since the sí-no assured us no one was listening in, and while it was a relief to stop shouting over the noise, it was no relief at all to hear that Dr. Chance was indeed the one who’d told Washington about the GhosTVs.

  “One thing I asked of you,” Dreyfuss muttered at me. “One damn thing. To take care of Chance.”

  “There wasn’t any time. I was feeling her out, then she got in a snit and took off. I haven’t seen her since—and I did try.”

  “I’ve seen you try, Bayne. You try to do the things you deign to do, like pinning those lousy repeaters on me. You try ’til you puke. B
ut how hard did you really try to find Chance? Don’t answer. I’m sure by now you’ve rationalized that you’re the good guy, and you’re convinced you really did give it your all.”

  Lisa took Dreyfuss by the elbow and murmured, “You didn’t eat anything today.” He shook his head in disgust. “Baby, you need to eat or you’ll make yourself sick. You need your head in the game right now.”

  The smoothie cart Richie’d discovered was less than a block away, and Lisa had her eye on it. The old guy manning the cart was swaddled in winter clothes with his breath streaming away from him in a cloud. Not exactly the best enticement to try a slushy cold drink. Even so, it was quick, portable and available, so the three of us trooped up to the cart. As we watched Dreyfuss’ strawberry mango swirl churning through the blender, I tried to come up with a way to explain myself, to assert that I’d done what I thought was right at the time. Except I couldn’t, because now it was obvious I should have been less concerned with identifying the repeaters and more worried about tracking down Chance. Lisa ordered a chocolate banana smoothie for herself, then asked if I was getting one. Although I knew it was completely illogical, and although we’d be able to see the guy making them, I declined. I couldn’t get past the notion of Richie hocking loogies into the drinks. He’d been out of sorts lately too, crabby and quick to take offense, and now he was home sulking.

  Wasn’t he?

  “Is Richie hungover for real this morning?” I asked Lisa.

  “No.”

  “So he’s pissed off that I interrupted his rosary.”

  “No.”

  “Does he want to get back at me for Camp Hell?”

  “No…why do you ask?”

  “Because I was a raging asshole to him—yeah, I know, you’re shocked.”

  “No. He doesn’t see it that way. No.”

  What an unexpected relief. I still felt guilty as sin, but I deserved to carry that burden. What mattered was that I hadn’t messed him up any worse than the hand of Fate already had. “So he’s okay.”