“Uh-oh. It’s the end of the world.”
Jacob’s grin widened until the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Seriously.” He stroked my cheekbone with his thumb and stared at me hard. “Between you and me, we’ll figure out a way to nail Barnhardt’s ass.”
I think a normal person would have thought the look Jacob gave me was scary. Not me. I thought it was hot.
Q
Tinny words mingled from a half-dozen televisions as the residents of the wheelchair ward vied to have the loudest TV set. Jacob, Carolyn, Lisa and I stood in a semicircle at the foot of Neils Barnhardt’s bed and stared. I was doing my best to superimpose the image of the Tuxedo Ghost over his features and convince myself it was really him. Lisa’s lips moved.
Jacob glared, and Carolyn looked worried.
The question on our minds couldn’t be answered with a si or a no, a question that none of us knew what to do with. Carolyn asked it aloud. “So what are we going to do?” Jacob’s glance slid over to the room’s second bed. It was empty; Barnhardt’s roommate had lingered in the dining hall. I can’t say I blamed him; if Barnhardt was my roommate, I’d make it a point to be anywhere but my room. The roommate’s bed was still rumpled, his pillow dented from the weight of his head. I didn’t need to be a telepath to know that Jacob was thinking how easy it would be to pick up that pillow and smother the sonofabitch.
“Don’t even,” I said.
Jacob raised an eyebrow and coolly turned his attention back to Barnhardt.
The old man lay in bed on one side with his elbows, knees and wrists all bent at painful angles, as if he’d clenched up to avoid a smack to the head and never been able to stop cringing. His eyes were open and staring, and his breath whistled in and out through his beaklike nose.
“Can he hear me?” asked Jacob.
Lisa blinked. “Yes.”
Jacob crouched down so that his face was level with Barnhardt’s blank stare. “I will find a way to stop you,” he said, quiet and way too pleasant. I watched Lisa chafe away a shudder.
I tugged her sleeve and backed into the hall. A pair of patrolmen hovered at the end. There was another pair by the elevator, a third in the lobby and a scattering of guys outside. I hadn’t seen so many checkered hatbands since the coffee shop on California came out with a double chocolate long john. I turned my back to the wary-eyed officers and spoke low. “I can’t see Barnhardt,” I said. “I mean, his astral body. Now what do we do?”
“How about those bath salts?”
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the box Miss Mattie had given me. It was squashed flat, with less than a spoonful of pellets inside. “I don’t think there’s enough. I don’t know what good it would do, anyway. It’s not like I can reason with the guy. I can’t even catch him.”
“Yes, you can. But you need something to….” Lisa stopped and talked to herself. “Something to make your ability stronger.”
Cripes. Telling me to ratchet up my talent was like telling Marcel Marceau to shut up.
“The Clinic’s not gonna give me any psyactives. No way. Not after that stunt that Burke and Chance cooked up. Besides, I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I can even tolerate those things. Not to turn all conspiracy-theory like Carolyn, but if the wrong people got wind that I could perform with enhancements, I’d probably be scooped up by someone a lot scarier than the Fifth Precinct.”
“No one has to know. Who’s gonna tell? I’m not gonna tell. We’ll just let Carolyn know that it’s not safe to give her any details and she won’t even ask.” I jammed the heel of my hand into my right eye. Ahh. That felt good for about half a second. Then it hurt. “I can distract Jacob while you and Carolyn do something about Barnhardt. How about that?”
Lisa talked to herself. “No. Jacob’s going to do something. Even you can’t talk him out of it.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. He’d promised me he wouldn’t. Hadn’t he? Or maybe he hadn’t.
Maybe I’d taken him swallowing a load of my jiz as a yes.
Lisa peeked over my shoulder. “What’s with all the extra cops?” I shrugged. “Slow day at the Twelfth Precinct?”
“No. They’re not from the Twelfth.”
I scratched my hair and tried to look over my shoulder as casually as possible. The two patrolmen stood, backs ramrod straight. I remembered the first two jokers from the Twelfth with their coffee cups and lousy postures. I turned back to Lisa and spoke even quieter.
“Are they even cops?”
Her eyebrows knit together. “Yes. I think.”
“Not regular cops.”
“No.”
Crap. Oh crap. Someone was watching Jacob, waiting for him to fuck up so they could swoop in and grab him. He was the high profile PsyCop, the one who made for good photos in the Tribune and the six o’clock news. Maybe he’d finally stepped on the wrong toes. Maybe our little hand-holding incident leaked out and someone with an axe to grind was looking to take him down a peg. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I slipped around Lisa and stormed back into Barnhardt’s room. “Jacob,” I said in a harsh whisper. He was bent over Barnhardt, and he straightened up and looked at me. “We’re being watched.” Jacob’s eyes cut around the room.
“Not here. In the hall.”
He nodded slowly. “And?”
“And so you can’t do anything stupid.”
“The more you talk,” said Carolyn, “the more he feels the need to prove himself. Just so you know.”
“I need to talk to Barnhardt,” Jacob said. “I want some answers from him. Can you do that for me?”
“I don’t even know where he is. I can’t see him. I was all hopped up yesterday, and I think that was the only reason I could.”
Lisa looked at me meaningfully.
I sighed. “But I’ll, uh… I’ll see what I can do. Just don’t touch him ‘til I come back.” I thought I could sense the eyes of the patrolmen on me even though they still stood at attention, looking straight ahead. Lisa led me to the elevator and we stared at each other awkwardly while we waited for it to putter up to the third floor. It sat with its doors closed for several seconds, then disgorged a couple of white-haired ladies in wheelchairs pushed by nurses in squeaky shoes.
We got into the elevator and glared at the doors until they closed.
“Well,” I said, “I guess we can see if Crash has more of that—” Lisa punched the second floor button and the elevator stopped.
“What?” I asked.
Lisa’s lips moved. She was on the trail of…something.
The elevator sat. And sat some more. And then the doors opened.
There weren’t any patrolmen on the second floor. Odd. Lisa strode up to the desk where the linebacker-turned-nurse watched NASCAR on a portable TV. He straightened up when he saw her coming at him. “Uh, yeah?”
“Sir, I need you to open the second drawer of that filing cabinet.” The color drained out of the guy’s face. “Uh, I mean….”
“Sir.”
What the heck? I did my best not to look as puzzled as the nurse obviously felt. He went for his back pocket instead, and without thinking I reached for my gun. “Whoa, whoa,” he said, hands in the air. “I was only getting my wallet.” I watched him pull it out slowly, with deliberate caution. He opened it up and peered inside. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got forty-three bucks. Take it. I can’t afford to lose this job—”
“Sir,” said Lisa. “The drawer.”
I craned my neck to try and figure out what was going on.
The big guy sighed and opened it.
Files. So what?
“In the back,” said Lisa.
He rolled his eyes, dug deep into the drawer, and came out with a plastic bag. “I don’t know whose that is,” he said, sullen-voiced and defeated. “I don’t know how it got there.”
What?
“I’ll need to confiscate that, sir,” said Lisa. He handed over the bag and she looked inside.
“I’m letting
you off with a warning this time. Understood?” The guy lit up when he realized that Lisa wasn’t going to turn him in. “Yeah, um…wow.” I followed Lisa as she marched back to the elevator. “What the heck was that?” I whispered.
She peered into the bag. “A pint of Jack. That’s a psyactive for you? Yes.”
“Your si-no is freaking me out.”
The elevator door opened and we got in. The car was empty. Lisa handed me the bag.
“We’ll have to find somewhere for you to drink that.”
“Straight? Warm? Newsflash—I’m not a big drinker.”
“I’ll buy you a Coke from the machine in the lobby. How’s that?” Less likely to make me hurl than straight whiskey. I shrugged.
We scored a regular Coke for me and a Diet Coke for Lisa, and hunted around for a room that her si-no approved of. It was a utility room. We went inside under the watchful but averted eyes of the patrolmen monitoring the first floor, and opened up our pop.
Lisa drank half my Coke and filled the can with Jack Daniels. I took a sip and my eyes watered. “It’s too strong. We should go to Sticks and Stones instead.”
“No.” Lisa talked to herself. “Crash isn’t there. It’s only six shots. You can do it. Even I can do six shots.”
“All at once?”
“No. But you weigh more than me.”
Not much. I took a few gulps and had to stifle my gag reflex. I also had to reassure myself that I wasn’t jealous that Crash had spent the night somewhere other than his own bed.
“I’m not going to be able to finish this.”
“Just do a few sips at a time.”
I swallowed a few more gulps. My stomach was on fire. The back of my throat was flutter-ing. But it wasn’t a bad buzz; I’d give it that much. Plus, unlike reds, I wouldn’t have to buy it from an old boyfriend’s pot dealer.
“See anything yet?” Lisa asked.
Oh, yeah. But it was a psyactive. That was the opposite of what I looked for in a party drug. I glanced around at the stacks of toilet paper and the gigantic electrical box on the wall. “There might not be much to see.”
“Oh. Right. Well, finish it up.”
I gagged down the rest of the can, washed it down with the rest of Lisa’s Diet Coke, swallowed back the urge to vomit, and stifled a burp. “Okay, let’s go look for Tuxedo Man.”
-SEVENTEEN-
“He’s on the third floor,” said Lisa.
I opened the utility room door and the long, plain hallway stretched, then snapped back.
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“I’ll probably look pathetic if I lean on you, won’t I?”
“Oh, come on. Take a few deep breaths. You didn’t have that much to drink.” Says you. I counted patrolmen to give myself something to do while I got my sea legs.
One, two, three, four.
“Come on, Vic, third floor. The elevator’s so slow you won’t even know it’s moving.” I went by a pair of officers and wondered if it was obvious from the way I walked that I’d been drinking. It had never occurred to me whether I had an Auracel walk, or a Valium walk, or a three-bottles-of-children’s-cough-syrup walk. I looked down at the linoleum tiles, picked out a column, and placed one foot carefully in front of the other.
“Would you hurry up?”
“Don’t rush me.”
A middle-aged couple was helping an old guy with a walker off the elevator. I rocked back and forth, heel-toe, heel-toe, while I waited for them to clear out. We got in and the doors shut. I’d planned on riding to the third floor in silence, prepping myself for a conversation with Barnhardt’s Tuxedo Ghost astral body, when I said something without much thinking about it. “Those extra cops aren’t here for Jacob, then.”
“No.”
“They’re here because of me. Why? To keep tabs on me?”
“Yes…I think. Partially yes.”
“Does Warwick know about them?”
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t Warwick keeping me in the loop?”
Lisa sighed. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be easier to ask him?”
“Oh, right. ‘Cos he’ll lay it all out there if I do.”
“No,” she admitted.
“I’ve got to know somebody who can tell me what’s going on.”
“Yes.”
I fired off a few more questions and Lisa answered. I had what I was looking for by the time the doors wheezed open on Rosewood’s third floor. I guess a few months of watching Jacob ask questions had taught me a thing or two. On one hand I was vaguely disappointed that I’d broken my promise to Lisa and used her si-no when I said I wouldn’t. On the other, she was the one who’d talked me into drinking the six shots of Jack that made me so chatty.
I tripped over nothing, staggered into the third floor lobby, and watched a bunch of cops rush by as a giant commotion erupted in the hallway. The commotion was in the bed-bound wing, not the wheelchair wing, so hopefully it meant that Jacob hadn’t killed anyone. Yet.
I flattened myself against the wall and wormed my way around three cops and two nurses who were clustered in Irene’s doorway. She was inside, screaming, “Shepherd! Shepherd!” in her rusty oilcan voice. I craned my neck to get a look into her room, but two of the cops were as tall as I was, plus they were wearing their hats, blocking my view of everything but the side of the wall-mounted TV. I crossed my arms and backed up.
I just about backed into the homeless guy. I caught myself and flinched. “That dumbass in the penguin suit flyin’ around again?” he asked me.
“I dunno. It’s too mobbed to tell.”
The homeless guy crossed his arms, mirroring my stance. “Huh. That why you here? Make that motherfucker stop ridin’ Irene?”
“If I can figure out how.”
“He one mean sonofabitch,” said the homeless guy. He hiked up his stained, tattered trousers and strode straight through a patrolman’s arm and a nurse’s hip.
“Shepherd! Help me, please.”
“I’m here, Irene,” called the homeless guy. “Y’all stop that carrying on.” Shepherd. I wondered if that was his name, or his vocation. And if he was the reason the halls weren’t full of cold spots, senile ghosts and repeaters.
A figure stepped through the wall and brushed at its sleeve as if it’d touched something nasty. I could see through him, but even transparent, he was easy enough to spot. “Mr. Barnhardt,” I said.
His head snapped up, and he squinted at me. “You? You’re with the police, aren’t you?” He smirked. It was an ugly expression. “Am I under arrest?”
“No. But we do have a few questions.”
The attention of the mob had shifted. I heard one of the nurses ask, “What is he doing?” while an officer steered her away with a stern, “Ma’am, over here.” Barnhardt started to turn away. Shit, there had to be some way for me to stop him. God’s love. Right. I focused on my third eye and found myself a little woozy. There was a whole rainbow of spinning chakras in my spine, too, and the thought of that brought whiskey-flavored bile up in the back of my throat, without me even knowing which direction the damn things were supposedly rotating.
White light. I imagined I was glowing. “I only want to talk. That’s all. It’s, ah…not often anyone talks to you these days. Am I right?”
He paused.
Now what? I wondered what Zigler would say to him, but I couldn’t figure out how to channel Zigler and radiate white light at the same time. “Listen. Maybe we can work out some kind of deal.” What on earth could I possibly tempt an astral traveler with? “You leave Irene alone, and I…uh…I teach you a few tricks.”
I congratulated myself, and hoped Barnhardt had no way of knowing that my psychic training was on par with a five-year-old child’s.
Barnhardt watched the officers herding the nurses toward the far end of the hall. Nothing to see here. Lisa stood a dozen feet away, looking in Barnhardt’s general direction while her lips moved: si, no, si, no. “Are you in charge?�
�� said Barnhardt. He looked at me closely.
“You’re drunk! Oh, this is rich.”
“Right, I’m in charge.”
“I thought it was the bossy one, the muscle-bound detective with the goatee and the little blonde assistant. The one who keeps threatening me.”
“Uh, no. Detective Marks answers to me.” At least I hoped he would.
“He’s really quite a card.” Barnhardt smoothed his pocket square. “He can poke at that withered shell all he wants. But what can he do to me? Nothing.”
“Right. Like I said. A few more questions and I’ll….” Shit. I mean, crap. I couldn’t offer him the white balloon. First of all, it was about the lamest sounding trick on the planet. And second, I was scared he might be able to use it on me somehow. “I’ll show you how to… make…stuff.”
“Solid things?”
“Astral things,” I lied. “They’ll be solid to you, though. And any other astral traveler.”
“Astral?” Barnhardt frowned and gestured toward his chest with one finicky-looking hand.
I imagined his hands twisted in on themselves, wrists pointing forward, and ended up swallowing more bile. “Is that what I am?”
He didn’t know? My heart gave a drunken hooray. I’d found someone even more ignorant than me. And at least I’d picked up enough jargon to fake it. “Well, sure. Of course, if you had a handle on your ethereal body, you could do a lot more…but like I said, we’ve got some questions that need answering, first.”
I started walking toward his room, realized that I’d misjudged how close I’d be coming to him, and reeled to my left to avoid getting any of his astral self on me. Lisa saw where we were headed and went ahead of me.
“You really are drunk. It’s not even ten o’clock.”
“Yeah, well. This job’ll do that to you.” I forced myself not to look at him to see if he’d followed.
For a minute there it seemed like it was just me, staggering along the hall where I’d have to pass the nurses’ station and another couple of patrolmen to get back to Barnhardt’s room. But then he spoke. “I need to know how to get rid of that filthy Negro. Can you show me that?”
PsyCop 4: Secrets Page 15