by Lee Killough
Behind him, Braff grunted.
Cole grimaced. Rear vision caught Braff almost on top of him, eyeing at the laptop. Damn. He had forgotten to keep track around himself.
Braff came closer to the laptop. “Where did that come from?”
Cole sidestepped enough to avoid physical contact but leave his finger still in contact with the screen. The blood in Dunavan’s car-
He lost contact with the screen as Braff, gaping, turned the laptop. “What the hell?” Then Braff’s eyes narrowed. He glanced around the office. “Okay, very cute. Who’s doing this? Fontaine? Sekulovich?”
Cole groaned. Braff thought it was some kind of practical joke. Son of a bitch.
Braff went over tried the door connecting to Fencing, looked into the interview room, and even unlocked the front door to check behind the clerk’s counter in the outer office.
Was there any way to make Braff take this seriously and pay attention to what was being written? He tried, scrawling: No stunt! This is for real!
Before Cole had time for more, Braff closed the laptop…right through Cole’s hand. “I don’t where you are or how you’re doing this, guys,” he called, “but the game’s over. I’m too tired to play.” He sat down and turned his chair toward his typewriter. Cole left him rolling a form into the typewriter.
7
Well, that was a bust, Cole reflected. Except now he knew to be careful how he relayed information. Hopefully with the home computer, Razor would be less likely to take it as a joke. Before heading to Razor’s place, though, he wanted to run Gao through the computer. Benay, too. Check whether either of them was in the system, with criminal connections that put them in a position to set up the hit on him. He wanted as much information as possible to give Razor, to prevent him from running into a bullet, too.
In the Southern Station downstairs, the computers outside the holding cells were busy. One in the sergeants’ office sat idle, however, screen saver running…with a chair conveniently at the keyboard and the office empty.
Okay, now to see what he could do with a regular computer.
Eyes closed, he wiggled his finger around on the Escape key until he felt the tickle. Opening his eyes, he found the screen saver gone. So far, okay. Could he open and operate the search program with just the keys?
To his relief, yes…though clumsily. Finding the contact point did not always work the first time, and since he had to close his eyes to find the contact, his hand could drift to another letter. Then he had a mistake to correct. He hoped the sergeant stayed busy elsewhere for a long time. He needed every minute.
The search on Gao came up negative. Cole exited, and gritting his teeth, slogged through entering Sara’s name for a new search. Damn it! If only he could type while looking at the keys.
“Dunavan, what’s this frigging hangup about surfaces you see? Get past- ”
He broke off. The computer had a hit on Sara’s name. Shit.
To his relief, it proved to be nothing serious. Two and a half years ago she had been among a number of guests detained when Narco raided a house party. She had been released without charges.
Still…drugs. Thinking of the fake tweaker, Cole made himself run the house party’s host. That revealed Mr. Antonio Novello had been charged with narcotics violations several times, though never prosecuted. The Nob Hill address suggested why. Money had not saved him from being blown away by his girlfriend six months ago, however.
Cole exited the search and slumped in the chair, feeling wrung out. If a little record search gave him this much trouble, how was he going to carry on a conversation with Razor via computer. Start things off with the computer, yes. Use it to alert Razor to his presence. Then they really needed to talk to one another. Somehow.
Was alerting Razor going to be enough? In Razor’s place he would need evidence a ghost was present. Sara’s lamp came to mind. Maybe he could play with the lights. Give Razor a message like: To show you I’m for real, I’ll turn the lamp in the corner on and off five times. Except Razor had no touch-on lamps.
A desk lamp sat on one of the sergeants’ desks. Cole swivelled and scooted over to see if he could affect it. No. Groping around in the base and switch had no effect. The lamp remained off. He drummed soundlessly on the desk. If Razor had a lamp already on, interfering with current might turn it off. And maybe not. What else could he do? A walk-through?
A key in the door lock brought him to his feet. Time to go.
Turning toward the door, he halted, staring at the chair still in front of the computer. Why- The thought broke off in a mental dope slap. Of course the chair never moved. He just scooted across the room without noticing, sitting on thin air…like cartoon characters who walk off cliffs and keep going until they notice the ground gone from under them.
As the door opened, Cole passed through the wall into the hall and headed for the rear entrance. Once out on the north terrace, he concentrated on visualizing Razor’s apartment and himself in it. An additional detail came to him…the big window behind the futon flanked by Razor’s framed collection of police patches and a watercolor of the Chimera painted by of Denise’s artist friends.
He waited expectantly. Only to remain standing on the north terrace. In disgust, he gave up.
“Have it your way,” he told the sky, and broke into a lope. “I’ll leg it.”
For the first several blocks he brooded over the inconsistency of ziptripping, analyzing every attempt, comparing the successful trips to the failures. To his frustration, whatever made the difference eluded him.
Crossing Market, a chair tied to the top of a passing car made him think of the chair he had not been sitting in. Which felt like a chair. The flip side of what-I-see-feels-solid…imagining surfaces where none existed? More mental stuff.
Could he choose to imagine a solid surface? Say a walkway about ten feet up so he could quit dodging people. He pictured a stairway and put one foot on the bottom step, then gingerly brought up his other foot beside it. It worked. He now stood eight inches off the sidewalk.
Another step worked, too, and another. Still, he eased his way up…just in case the illusion failed. When he caught his thinking, Cole laughed at himself. Even if gravity affected him, what was he afraid of, a fall killing him? He ran up the rest if the virtual flight to a height he liked, then pictured his walkway and stepped out on it. Seeing nothing under him remained a little unnerving but, yes, he decided, it felt cool, too…loping over the heads of the other pedestrians. If such an ordinary word as pedestrians applied to the prostitutes, gangbangers, drug dealers, junkies, and winos populating the streets of the Tenderloin.
After a couple of blocks, he noticed that now and then someone glanced up and appeared to see him. Mostly winos, unfortunately. One almost toppled over backward gaping up at him. This could be a new sobriety test, Cole reflected wryly. If you can see me, you’re under the influence. The one non-wino had a looking-at-other stare that signaled disconnection from reality.
As he started to doubt that any rational adult would ever see him, he noticed three prostitutes outside the mouth of an alley down the block. They stood off to the side of the alley, peering fearfully into it around the corner of the building. Moments later Cole heard a choked-off cry and a snarling male voice.
“Bitch! I warned you not to hold out on me!”
Reflex kicked in. Cole raced down the block and into the alley. Below him, a burly male had both hands around the neck of a woman wearing a lacey camisole and panties under a hip-length faux fur jacket. Clearly a prostitute and her pimp. Anger still boiled up in him. He despised men who beat up women, no matter what woman and for what reason. “Get your hands off her!”
“Baby, no, I swear,” she choked out. “Business just isn’t- ”
“Then you’re not trying hard enough!” The pimp slammed her head into the wall behind her.
Cole tried to drop on top of the pimp. Only to remain suspended. He grimaced. Of course. No gravity, no drop. He charged ran down virtua
l stairs. By which time the pimp had slammed the hooker’s head into the wall again. And Cole remembered he had no way to intervene.
Or did he?
He lunged through the pimp from shoulder to shoulder. “I said, get your hands off her, dogshit!”
The pimp yelped and jumped back, releasing the hooker’s neck. A moment later he reddened in fury. “Now you’ve done it, you stupid cunt! You’re dead! Give me that stun gun!”
She gaped in bewilderment. “What stun- ”
The pimp pulled back his fist. Cole went through him again, this time slowly. Maybe his anger helped. He barely felt the buzz. The pimp, though, jumped back another step.
Cole followed, and this time instead of walking through, kept in the pimp’s space. As the pimp backed away, Cole stayed with him. Through the buzz, Cole felt faint heat flowing into him. From the pimp?
Apparently. The pimp started shivering. Seconds later he retreated toward the alley entrance. “I’ll let it go this time…but you get out there and hump, bitch!” he snarled, and wheeling, stalked away.
Gaping after him, the hooker stumbled out of the alley.
The other prostitutes crowded around her. “Are you all right, honey? God, look at your neck. You’re gonna have huge fucking bruises. You ought to go home- ”
She shrugged them off. “I gotta go back to work or Danny’ll get really mad. I’ll be all right.”
“No, Dannyboy is the kind who’ll kill you sooner or later,” Cole said. Maybe the next time he beat her, which was likely to be twice as vicious anyway. Rescuing her did her no favor in the long run. “You need to drop a dime on him and find yourself a different job- ”
The sentence died in his throat. One of the prostitutes, a tall red-head in red leather hot pants and a matching waist-length jacket, had glanced at him. A second later she turned away, but excitement leaped in Cole. She saw him. He was sure of it! And she looked sober and rational.
The prostitutes spread out along the block. Cole followed the one in red to her corner. His corner, really. Despite a good job of battening down his willie and a nice manicure with long false nails, those unmistakably male wrists gave away her sex. “Looking for a date, Red?”
She dug a cigarette out of her bag and lit it. “Not with you, baby.”
She did see him! “Why not?”
One brow arched. “I’ve resurrected dead dicks in my time, but the body has to be at least breathing.”
Cole felt his jaw drop and snapped it closed. “You know I’m a ghost?” And accepted that without batting an eye? “How can you tell?”
“Well let’s see.” She dragged on her cigarette and blew the smoke at him. “Maybe because…you look like a ghost?”
“How’s that? I look like myself to me.”
The brow went up again. “Yeah? To me you look like those tapes of old TV shows… kinda faded, and fuzzy on the edges. Except you’re colored instead of black and white.”
That described bad security tapes, too. Terrific. I’m not live; I’m worn-out Memorex. “Is that how other ghosts will look to me?” He should check whether the horror in the garage had a ghost attached to it. He hoped it did not.
Red sniffed. “You ain’t gonna see other ghosts. You’re around because you got business to finish with living people.”
“That’s hard to do when you’re the only non-wacko adult who sees me.” Cole grimaced. “Why do you see me?”
She shrugged. “I been seeing spirits all my life…just like my mama and gran.” After a last puff, she dropped the cigarette on the sidewalk and ground the butt under one platform heel. “You’re the first to give me the third degree, though. It must come from being a cop.”
Cole ignored the jibe. “You can tell that, too?”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah. Even the ghost of a cop still looks like a cop.”
“Can I make someone else see me? When they’re rational and sober, I mean.”
“Do I look like a fortune teller?” She dug into her bag for another cigarette. “The odds ain’t good. Most people normally won’t, and some never will, no matter what.”
Normally? The word reverberated in him. “You mean it is possible to see me? When and how?”
She took a deep drag, then watched the smoke as she blew it out. “I don’t have a clue.” Her eyes focused past him, searching the street. “Look…I know you’re trying to figure yourself out and you seem like you were a decent guy. I appreciate what you did for Vicky and I hope you froze that prick Danny’s balls off. But…enough already. I’m trying to make a living here and I can’t fucking do it talking to you.”
Cole’s heart sank. Damn…he was losing her…and he had no official leverage to keep her talking. But let’s-continue-this-downtown had always been his last resort anyway. He put on a smile and slid his voice into a Jimmy Stewart impression that had served him well in the past for dealing with nervous or reluctant witnesses. “Honey, I–I can’t believe that with all the ghosts you’ve seen and-and the power of observation you’ve got in-in your job, you haven’t made some guesses about other people seeing ghosts.”
She snorted. “I bet you were a first class bullshitter.” After several seconds she sighed. “Okay…for what it’s worth, if someone wants to see you, they can usually learn. There’s a way to make yourself visible to almost everyone, too…for a few minutes anyway. This ghost back home does it. Don’t ask me how. I just know the room gets cold as hell when she shows up, like a deep freeze.” Her eyes focused past him again…on a car pulling up at the curb. “Now get lost.” Flipping away her cigarette, she slapped on a professional smile, then sauntered through him toward the john.
That definitely ended the conversation.
Cole trotted back up to his walkway and on toward Razor’s place. He noted the activity street below him — hookers and crack dealers doing business…homeless men and women settling into doorways for the night…officers confronting three young men about drinking in public, making them pour their beers into the gutter — but his thoughts lingered on Red’s information. If someone wanted to see him, they could learn. Razor ought to want to see him…once convinced he was there to be seen. Considering the walk-through’s effect on Danny the Prick, it and a computer message should be convincing enough. But…was wanting to see him enough to make it happen? Red did say “learn”. Expecting to see someone was not enough to make him visible close up to those people who glimpsed or heard him in the fog. Yet the Princess Fan and winos who saw him went through no apparent learning process.
He halted and stared down at the scene below. Maybe that was the way to go…let Razor know he was around, then turn off Razor’s reality check. The question was, how. Not by getting him drunk, not with Holly there. Was there any other way?
Yes, Cole realized, looking down at a homeless man asleep in a doorway. Everyone’s reality check shut off in dreams. So maybe he just needed to convince Razor he was dreaming in order to make Razor see him. He probably needed to start with Razor asleep, though, and Razor never went to bed this early. He had been a night owl long before he started working Night Investigations.
Which, Cole reflected, did not prevent seeing whether a dream visit worked on someone else. He eyed the sleeping man as he walked back down to ground level, then decided against using him. This needed someone he could be confident would not normally see him. Say, a clerk in one of the area’s cheap hotels.
Clerks at the first four hotels all proved awake…reading, knitting, watching TV…but stepping into the glorified hallway that served as the lobby of the fifth hotel, he heard gentle snoring. Behind the desk’s protective wire mesh, the clerk, a dwarf, dozed over a crossword puzzle. An ink blot spread out from where his pen point rested off to the side of the puzzle. Cole studied him. First challenge: he needed to wake the man. Yet make him think he was still asleep.
“Hey, man,” Cole called.
The clerk did not stir.
So it took more than talking to reach him. Closing his eyes, Cole ste
pped into the desk.
Opening his eyes again, he found he had cleared the desk but stood up to his knees in a set of steps that let the clerk reach the desk. However, the mental hangup about solid surface did not appear to affect him once inside the object. He moved forward without restriction.
The steps gave him an idea. The answer to convincing people they were still asleep might be making them think: That’s impossible; I have to be dreaming.
He laid a hand on the back of the clerk’s neck. Cold ought to rouse the man. “Hey! How’s it going, dude?”
As the clerk reached for his neck and lifted his head, Cole backed into the steps and crossed mental fingers.
The clerk blinked up at him. “Huh?”
At him. Seeing him. Yes! Cole grinned. Hooray for that fuzzy state between sleep and full consciousness.
Now for challenge number two. The clerk’s eyes had widened, registering the fact that Cole was on this side of the desk. “Hey…what- ”
“What am I doing in here with you? It’s a dream. See?” Cole pointed down at his legs.
The clerk looked down and blinked. Still seeing him. To keep the fantastic going, Cole climbed virtual stairs until his feet reached the clerk’s eye level and circled around behind him to the clerk’s other side.
The clerk craned his neck to watch him. “A dream?”
Cole cheered silently. “Are you having trouble with the crossword? Maybe I can help. I’m the puzzle fairy.” He stepped back down to floor level and leaned over the clerk’s shoulder. “Let’s see. Thirty-eight down, six letter word for a trip and a treat. Try junket. That’ll make fifty-three across, Potter villain, Snape.”
“Puzzle fairy?” The clerk’s eyes narrowed. “You look more like a cop to me.”
Cole shrugged. “I can be that if you want. It’s your dream.”
The clerk snorted. “Why would I want a cop in my dream? Give me a long-legged blonde riding my lap smothering me in her D-cup hooters.” He wiggled his brows.
Cole grinned. There was nothing small about the guy’s libido. “Sorry…I don’t do sex changes. Even with D-cup hooters, I make a lousy-looking woman. So I’m out of here.” He walked away through the desk. “Good luck with the rest of the puzzle.”