“Shit.” I slumped against the door and pressed my head to the window…and then I realized the window was greasy. I sat up again, tried Sticks and Stones a few more times, and I waited.
Traffic went nowhere.
It was half a mile between North and Division—less, now that we’d rolled forward another block—so I decided my best bet was to hoof it. I threw Bogdan’s phone at him along with a twenty. Not that I expected much, I told him to wait for me in front of the boarded-up palm reader’s if traffic ever moved again, and I took off for the store.
I’ve never found it helpful to jump to conclusions, at least when I wasn’t in a position to do anything about them. So I did my best to stay in denial until I was close enough to see what was going on with my own eyes. The fire trucks, the EMTs, they could’ve been there for anyone. The buildings in that part of Wicker Park were stacked up against each other like firewood—bad analogy—and it could have been any building on that block dripping with the sooty aftermath of a blaze.
Only as I neared, I saw it wasn’t just any building. It was Crash’s building.
I broke into a run.
“Move—police—move!” I didn’t bother with the badge. I used my body and my no-nonsense police bark to elbow through the crowd. When I got to the front and found some uniforms keeping the bustling throng at bay, I whipped out my badge to get myself in there and find out who was in charge.
The fire was called in just before nine, three hours prior, and firefighters spent well over an hour extinguishing the blaze and keeping it from spreading. No word yet as to how it started. It was out now, and crews were sifting through the sodden wreckage to figure out if anyone had been trapped inside, and to make sure nothing was still smoldering. “Casualties?” I was surprised at how calm and businesslike I sounded.
No, I was told. None yet.
Even though I knew enough to stop pestering the firefighters and let them do their jobs, I was beside myself with fear. Second floor, second fucking floor. And a store full of flammables—books, paper, cardboard, charcoal—not to mention accelerants like oil, aerosols and saltpeter. I took a deep breath in a morbid attempt to try and catch a whiff of sandalwood on the aftermath of the fire, but all that remained was the rank stink of muddy soot.
Without thinking, I pulled out my phone and hit memory-dial two, Crash’s cell. I hit it four or five times before it registered that my phone was still dead. Neighbors—someone would know him. I started working the crowd, badge out, questioning the rubberneckers as to whether they’d seen him. No, said the ones who knew who I was talking about. Haven’t seen him. Not today.
Right. Because at nine, the time when the fire had started, he wouldn’t be standing around loitering on the sidewalk. He’d be rolling out of bed to nuke himself a bowl of generic oatmeal, down some coffee, and get ready to open his store. If he was even awake yet. Jesus Christ.
As I searched through the milling onlookers, desperately seeking a telltale glimpse of bottle blond, I spotted three separate news crews entrenching themselves at various locations that had a clear line of sight to the aftermath. Automatically, I stooped and did my best to blend in. The FPMP indoctrination had done its job. Not only was I now paranoid about being tracked by Dreyfuss, his Psychs, and even his ghosts, but I was more worried about being spotted by someone who had a bone to pick with Psychs in general, and who’d love nothing more than a nice tall target to aim for.
A ripple of urgency went through the emergency response personnel as firefighters called in EMTs. The camera crews tried to push in while the cops pushed back. The wait for the EMTs was excruciating, though it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes between the time they ducked into the building and the appearance of their gurney nudging out through the broken remains of the doorway. Even though I saw plenty over the heads of the rest of the crowd, I craned my neck to get a glimpse of who was on that gurney. The only thing I saw was a sheet-covered body.
My world tilted. I pressed into the guy beside me, who shoved back with his shoulder and rocked me upright, and with my feet under me, I burst into action. “Police—stop right there—police—I need to see—”
There was too much crowd between me and the ambulance, though, and it rolled away before I could bully anyone into lifting up that sheet. I was left standing there inside the barricade in a pocket of quiet like the eye of a storm. I had to call Jacob. He must be at the FPMP by now. He’d have all those resources at his disposal, all those contacts. He’d figure out what’s what. I planted my hands on my hips, glaring at the milling crowd beyond the barricade that filled in the ambulance’s wake just as if it had never been there, and I scanned for a rubbernecker who was a likely candidate for commandeering a cell phone. Every time I feinted toward someone with their hand to their ear, the crowd swallowed them up.
Maybe a uniform would give me a crack at his radio. Wicker Park would be the Fourteenth Precinct…did I know anyone from the Fourteenth? As I searched in vain for a familiar face, a woman’s voice piped up close by. It took me a moment, over the murmuring drone of the crowd and emergency vehicles, to realize it was the only voice inside the barricade that was currently shouting.
“It was an accident—you make sure you put that in your report. Do you hear me, you useless pig? I said, do you hear me?”
I whirled around and found Crash’s downstairs neighbor giving a nearby police officer a piece of her mind, while the cop ignored her and helped another ambulance maneuver into position without running over any bystanders. I took two bounding steps toward her before I realized that everyone else was damp, charred and sooty, while Lydia was clean and dry. Her long, wavy gray hair was loose, her sweatshirt had a glittery Tibetan OM symbol on the front, and her skinny jeans belonged on a woman at least thirty years younger. Hard to say what her shoes looked like, as they were kind of transparent. Her feet too, for that matter.
“Lydia,” I called—and she spun around to look at me. I was flooded with relief, though I couldn’t say why. Crash’s neighbor was dead, after all—I should be dismayed. But in all my profound selfishness, the only thing I cared about was that I’d finally found someone who could tell me where Crash was. I pulled out my drained phone and held it to my ear, hoping that I’d look like a perfectly normal guy having a phone conversation, and I called out to her again. “Lydia, c’mere.”
She squinted at me for a sec, then said, “Well, if it isn’t the Knight of Cups.” She approached. The closer she got, the more ethereal she looked to my mind’s eye. Solid, but luminous. “Just my luck—the only one out here willing to give me the time of day, and he doesn’t smoke.”
The last thing her lungs needed was a smoke. “Have you seen Crash?” I asked her.
“Nope. Not lately.”
“The fire—”
“It was not arson. I bought some paint thinner, I’d been cleaning that damn graffiti off my walls. I must’ve spilled some on my clothes. I must’ve fallen asleep with a cigarette lit.”
“Sure.” My heart sank. Maybe she’d be willing to try and find Crash for me, but first I’d need to tell her she was dead. Once she realized she’d said what she needed to say (to someone who was able to hear it) she might very well move on and leave me hanging. Still…it didn’t feel right to keep talking around the charred elephant in the room. “Lydia, here’s the thing. You didn’t survive the fire.”
She stared at me for a moment, as if to decrypt a sick joke I might be attempting to make at her expense, and then she looked back at the fire-blackened wood panel that had been covering the vandalized remains of her front window. “Oh.” She looked at her hands, then looked at the charred building again. “Oh.”
“I’m not really talking on the phone. I can see you because I’m a medium.”
“Oh.” Lydia considered her hands again, front and back. “Right. Yeah.” When she looked up again, she gazed directly into my eyes. While I couldn’t name the color of her irises, and while I couldn’t begin to guess why a ghost would
be wearing clumpy mascara, there was a gravity there, a wisdom, that calmed my racing heart. I shivered and took a deep breath, though carefully now, since my shallow, rapid panic-breathing had left me oxygen deprived and woozy. She said, “I guess that’s why I’m not burnt.”
“It probably would’ve been pretty painful if you hadn’t….”
“No kidding. They say burns are the worst.” She looked back at her hands, then snapped her fingers a few times. “It’s not like lucid dreaming, is it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, I can’t make a pack of smokes appear.”
“Listen, I’m worried sick about Crash. Could you…?” I left it open-ended, hoping she might come up with a bright idea.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” she said dismissively, waving her fingers like an illusionist, and scowling when the goods she’d been trying to materialize didn’t appear.
“How about Miss Mattie,” I suggested, “do you know Miss Mattie? Have you seen a big African American woman in a scarf?”
She ignored the question. “If my mind created these clothes I’m wearing—or if they’re some non-physical equivalent of my actual clothes—then where are my damn cigarettes?”
Maybe she was blocking them…after all, if it hadn’t been for her cigarette mishap, she’d be alive to smoke another day. “Forget about your cigarettes. Do you know Crash is fine, or are you just guessing?”
“If you’re asking whether I’m plugged into the cosmos, then no. At least…not yet. I do feel different, though.” She maneuvered her hands like a she was trying to create a ball of energy, though if she was successful, I couldn’t see the results.
“Maybe if you try to focus on him,” I said. “See if you pick up any—” on the street behind me a horn blared, loud and insistent. I turned to see what the problem was, and found a cab wedged up against the curb, with Bogdan hanging out the window, gesturing to me.
“Hot damn!” Lydia crowed. I spun around to find she’d summoned a spirit tarot deck while my back was turned. She fanned the cards and presented them to me with glee. “How about I draw a card for you, Mr. Medium? Go ahead, pick something—this one’s on the house.”
I was torn. On one hand, Lydia should be able to sift through the wreckage and figure out if Crash was still in there. Unfortunately, she was newly dead and didn’t quite have her bearings. Plus, I wasn’t entirely convinced she’d be willing to help me out even if she did. And then there was Bogdan, laying on his horn. Maybe I was better off calling Jacob, letting him interface with the emergency workers through FPMP channels. Hell, for all I knew Crash had FPMP tracking on him, and within minutes, a red dot on a computer monitor would let us know he was sitting in a coffee shop somewhere watching his building smolder.
I’d jogged a couple of steps toward Bogdan when Lydia called out, “Hey, Knight of Cups!” I turned with the intention of tossing back a quick apology for ditching her, but I saw she was holding up a card: The Tower. It was only a drawing, not a particularly sophisticated rendering at that, but the sight of the flaming tower with people leaping out the windows gave me a chill nonetheless.
When she had my attention, she said, “Flawed structures can’t stand…see the lightning bolt striking the tower? That’s knowledge, a new knowledge that rocks your world. Something you believe to be true is revealed as false.”
Images of Jennifer Chance’s spirit tumbling out of Richie’s body flashed past my mind’s eye. “That’s already happened.”
“Sorry, kiddo. I’m looking at your future.”
Bogdan’s horn bleated. I shifted my weight, staring at the awful card, torn between the urge to stay with Lydia and the urge to call for help.
Lydia must’ve seen something in my expression that she took pity on. She tamped her deck into a neat pile and said, “Crash has been staying with that fancy black kid—he rolls in just before eleven, in time to open the shop with maybe two minutes to spare. He’ll be fine. Actually, fine might be an overstatement. If he was on schedule, he got a good eyeful this morning, what with the fire trucks and the crowds. But he wasn’t home when the tower fell.”
Chapter 30
Funny, how the inside of that rank taxicab felt comforting and familiar now, compared to the chaos outside Crash’s building. I sagged with relief against the taxi’s greasy window and cradled Bogdan’s phone against my cheek. Jacob told me he’d found a message from Crash on his cell when he checked his messages on his way back to HQ, so he’d known about the fire. Unfortunately, there’d been no way for him to fill me in before I found out the hard way. If Crash wasn’t caught in that blaze, though, that was all that mattered. I was confident he would handle the logistics of the fire the same way he’d handled that irate customer, which freed up my mind to figure out what to do about Jennifer Chance.
We’d need to formulate a plan in a secure space—on this, Jacob and I could both agree—and we weren’t talking about dodging surveillance electronics this time, either. I briefly considered the flower shop, but I realized that the florist wouldn’t necessarily have the things I might need for an exorcism. Let’s face it, the next time I met up with Chance, I’d need to be armed with something a hell of a lot more effective than butter-flavored popcorn salt.
“I’m bringing in the heavy artillery.” I didn’t want to come right out and say GhosTV. Not that I thought Bogdan cared one way or the other, but for all we knew, Chance’s ghost was breathing right down Jacob’s neck with her spectral ear pressed against the side of his phone. “The very large and bulky heavy artillery—the one that almost crushed my hand in San Diego.”
Jacob said, “I’ll come get it…if that’s what you think is best”
I actually had no idea whatsoever. All I knew was that we had to do something.
There was evidence that Lisa had left the cannery in a hurry that morning. Mail was scattered over the vestibule floor. A full cup of cold coffee sat beside the jigsaw puzzle. Lights were on. The TV was on too, playing a soap opera that none of us watched, at least as far as I know. I took a few steps toward the TV, then backtracked to where we stored Crash’s house blessing supplies in the kitchen…until I realized we’d moved it to the downstairs closet, or was it Jacob’s office? I’d performed a lumbering line dance, taking two steps in each direction and wasting half a minute, and I was no closer to exorcising Jennifer Chance than I’d been when I walked through the front door.
Get it together.
I paused, took a deep breath, and checked in with myself. White light? I hadn’t thought about it in hours. The faucet was on its normal flow, a kind of medium-low, the minimum amount it took to keep a basic barrier between my subtle bodies and the rest of the world. I cranked it up to fortify my defenses, and I considered which tools I had at my disposal. Yes, I did feel a vibration in the sage and incense Crash used on ritual day, however I personally had good results with perfumey off-the-rack Florida Water. Plain old table salt did me just fine, too. Even the iodized stuff.
Now was not the time to start experimenting, but memories of the way the potassium Safety Step lay dead in my hand led me to second-guess myself. Maybe I was limiting myself by using table salt. Maybe if I activated some of that chunky grayish sea salt, my exorcism would pack a bigger punch. I broke for the kitchen and grabbed the fancy stuff in the round glass crock with the cork top—it even came with its own precious little wooden spoon, tied to the neck of the crock with a length of jute. The spoon clattered to the floor and slipped under the kitchen cabinet base when I ripped the top off and flung white light at the chunky crystals. The mineral lit up to my inner eye like a bonfire. Finally—something that worked. I crammed it in my pocket. There were so many other spices in there—normal spices, not the weird processed stuff like Richie had. Bay leaves, pepper, thyme…my Camp Hell lessons tugged at my memory, and I started wondering if I should have made more of an effort to try out different herbs, if I’d been selling myself short all this time…if I was a miserable failure of a human being and
I fucking deserved to have Jennifer Chance wearing me like Halloween costume, driving my car, handling my gun, sleeping in my bed, touching my man….
Panic would not help any of us. Deep breaths. Deep, even breaths.
A key rattled in the front door, and Jacob called my name. “Vic?”
“In here.” Jacob was home. He’d read all that tedious, cryptic exorcism material, and he probably remembered it all, too. He’d know what to do. Relief flooded me, and I turned toward the front hall.
Agent Bly stood awkwardly in the doorway. My panic returned full force—body swap—until I realized that Jacob was right behind him. In his own body. I turned away and did my best to look like I was searching for something very important on the coffee table and my hands were not shaking. Deep, cleansing breaths. Reality was not coming apart at the seams. It wasn’t. Everyone was themselves. Mostly. Unless they were a medium. In which case, they might not be.
“I came to help with the heavy lifting,” Bly explained.
I grunted. His sympathy annoyed me. No doubt he’d felt my panic spike like a slap in the face, but he merely stepped aside to let Jacob past, and then cocked his head and considered the big blue tent. I tried to pretend he wasn’t even there, since the worst thing I could reveal was the fact that I didn’t really know what I was doing, which he must have already known.
I focused on Jacob. Just him. “Here’s what I’ve got. I juice myself up—salt, chemical psyactives and the GhosTV—I pump myself up with everything I got. Then I send that freak packing to the other side.”
Jacob nodded. And that was that.
Until Bly chimed in with, “How are you going to keep her contained? She might slip into you and do some serious damage before the rest of us figured it out. How do the rest of us help while you’re dealing with her spirit? And how are you going to find her to begin with?”
While I was dying to tell Bly to shut up and mind his own business, he did have a point. Several of them.
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