I shrugged. “I dunno. I can show you the tools, but you’ve got to be strong enough to use them.”
“Oh, I’m strong.”
And so modest. Lisa was at the door of Barnhardt’s room. She held the door open for me—for us—and whispered, “He’s here,” to Jacob and Carolyn. And I don’t think she was talking about me.
A curtain was partially drawn around Barnhardt’s physical body, which was good, because I really didn’t want to see that face any more than I had to. “Okay, Mr. Barnhardt. Detective Marks has a few questions for you.”
Barnhardt didn’t want to look at his body any more than I did. He turned to face the doorway and crossed his arms over his chest. “I hope this doesn’t take all morning. I like to visit the cafeteria for lunch so I can keep up on the gossip.” I looked at him, and then at Jacob. “He’s ready. What did you want me to ask him?” Jacob smiled.
A big smile.
Uh-oh.
He peeled back the blankets and treated me to a view of Barnhardt’s withered body, its spine drawn down in a fetal position, and sticklike legs that protruded from adult diapers.
I’d need to go stare at some car crash victims to erase that image from my mind’s eye.
And in the middle of it all, a short, flexible tube that stuck out of his belly. In Jacob’s other hand, a syringe.
“I only have one question,” he said. He placed the syringe into the tube and hit the plunger. “How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?” said Barnhardt.
I pointed to a snapshot on the wall. “Say, who are those people in the photo?” I thought I might actually throw up. What the fuck was Jacob thinking, poisoning him when everyone could put the four of us in the room with him? And how could Carolyn just stand there and watch him do it?
“How should I know?” whined Barnhardt. “That belongs to the cretin in the other bed.
Stein or Stern or something like that. Snores so loud the bed frame rattles.” I looked at Jacob. He was watching me. Still smiling. I did my best to telepathically scream,
“What the hell?” I don’t think he received it.
I figured I’d try to buy a little time. “So, uh, Stern. Right. Did you know him before?”
“Before what? Before I figured out how to leave that hideous shell? No, of course not, we lived on different…floors….”
Barnhardt’s hand went to his stomach like he’d been shot. Crap, oh crap. I looked at Jacob and shook my head. How could he do this to us? To me. To either of us. We were all in on it, all four of us. Lisa might survive women’s prison if she joined a Mexican gang. Carolyn would probably be a smear on the wall within the first week. I could squeak by if I was still good at being invisible. But Jacob would be a big trophy kill, shanked by some tough guy looking to prove himself, probably beaten and tortured first.
Jesus Christ.
“What’s happening?” Barnhardt demanded. He slid sideways toward his body as if a big gust of wind propelled him. I glimpsed a sparkle, and then another, and all at once I could see it: the legendary silver cord that was supposed to connect the astral body to the physical. The cord was stretched taut.
“What’s happening?” Jacob said. His voice was low and anticipatory, the opposite of Barnhardt’s shrill yelping, but his use of the very same words that Barnhardt just said totally creeped me out.
“Silver cord’s getting a lot stronger. It’s reeling Barnhardt in.”
“You—you tricked me!” he screamed at me, as if it were my idea. “You can’t do this to me.
You have no right.” He tried to dig his heels into the floor but the silver cord pulled harder, picking up steam as whatever Jacob had put in Barnhardt’s stomach took effect.
I watched Barnhardt’s body suck him in. Stomach first, then shoulders and hips, his astral self folding in on itself even more hideously than his physical self had. His legs and shoulders disappeared, his feet, and last but not least, the top of his pomaded head.
“What did you do?” I asked Jacob. I patted my pocket. The prescription from The Clinic was gone.
Jacob glanced down at the syringe, then looked back at me, positively beaming. “While you and Lisa were gone, the nurse came in with Barnhardt’s morning meds. It gave me an idea. Half a tab of Auracel, crushed. Fast-acting when it’s delivered straight into the stomach. He’ll get used to the nausea eventually, won’t he?” The look in Jacob’s eyes told me that he hoped Barnhardt wouldn’t.
-EIGHTEEN-
“I’m serious,” said Lisa. She hugged me hard with her arms around my neck and pulled me down to her height. “Promise me you’ll look into getting some kind of coaching.”
“After yesterday’s moment of glory, I think Alcoholics Anonymous might be more fitting.”
“That’s not funny. And you didn’t promise.”
I hugged her back. “I don’t know if I can promise that.” Lisa let go of my neck and stared hard into my eyes. I’m really not so hot at eye contact.
I held for a second or two and then looked somewhere over her shoulder.
“I want you to email me,” she said. “But no si-no s. Not until I figure out….” She trailed off.
“Yeah, I know. I get it, remember?”
She went on tiptoes and pulled me down one more time to give me a quick kiss on the cheek. My gut unclenched when she finally let go of me and moved on to Jacob. I guess I’m just not a touchy-feely kind of guy.
The two of them hugged and kissed, and Jacob told Lisa yet again how he couldn’t have caught Barnhardt without her. Hard to say whether that’s what she needed to hear. I do think you should give credit where credit’s due. But if I were Lisa, I couldn’t help but wonder who would be the next one to suffer if I didn’t live and breathe the si-no.
She came at me again and I steeled myself for another hug, but instead she pressed Crash’s MP3 player into my hand. “Don’t forget to give that back to him,” she said. I needed a reason to see Crash like I needed a hole in the head, but better me than Jacob.
I stuffed the player into my coat pocket as Lisa headed for the terminal.
Lisa turned and waved before she went through terminal security. Jacob and I waved back.
She put her bag on the conveyor belt and her sneakers in a box to pass through the X-ray, walked through the metal detector, struggled back into her sneakers, waved at us one more time, and headed off toward her plane.
“She seems better than she did when she first got here,” said Jacob. “More optimistic.” I shrugged.
“I think you’re good for her. Not that you handle…everything…the same way I would. But you’re used to living with your abilities.”
Well, the alternatives to living with my abilities were jumping in the river or flying down to Mexico for an under-the-table lobotomy. Except the river was frozen, I’ve never flown, and I wasn’t about to start now.
Although flying might not be as scary as I’d always assumed. The airport had all my favorite fast food, and was practically ghost-free. Maybe flying wouldn’t always be completely out of the question. Maybe I’d start with something a little closer. Like Vegas.
Jacob and I turned and stared walking back toward Short-Term Parking. I was mildly curious about the moving sidewalks, but they were full of people dragging wheeled luggage behind them, and moms with big, obnoxious strollers. It turned out that Jacob and I walked a lot faster than those sidewalks moved, anyway.
“You’re awfully quiet,” he said.
I shrugged again. What did he want me to say? That he’d scared the crap out of me more times than I could count in the past week?
The after-hour visits to Crash were brutal, first the half-hour where I was positive Jacob had been stepping out on me, and then the knowledge that he’d rather talk to Crash than me about his problems. And the whole thing with Barnhardt. He got into sticking it to that guy more than he strictly needed to. Maybe I liked that about him, though. I wasn’t sure.
If you’re going to stomp out t
he bad guys, you might as well enjoy it. I guess.
There was always the possibility that the issues were all in my head. Or should I say, the probability. Jacob had always seemed so damn normal. He had a real family, he took care of himself, he stood up for what he believed in. It was disturbing to come to the conclu-sion that he was willing to lie and scheme to get what he wanted. Or maybe just to realize that he was good at it.
“Do you want coffee?” he asked me. “I’m meeting Carolyn at noon, but I have enough time to stop for a cup.”
“We’ll get it to go,” I said. My stomach was sour from yesterday’s Jack and Coke, but I figured some extra cream would make it go down okay. Even though O’Hare featured a Starbucks every fifteen feet, I got my large triple-cream, double-sugar at McDonald’s. Every cup of Starbucks I tried still tasted like hidden psyactives to me, despite the fact that I watched the barista make them from start to finish.
We walked more slowly, carrying our steaming hot cups of coffee with their helpful warn-ings printed on the side. “Tell me something,” I said.
Jacob paused and looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t be sure I would get the truth from him. He was too good at keeping secrets.
“You’ve known for a while that my name doesn’t come up on any search engines, right?” I felt like I was leading him, but too bad. I needed to get to the meat of it.
He nodded and sipped his coffee. He’d looked away, and not because a crumpled up candy wrapper on the floor had caught his attention. Because he was uncomfortable with where my questions might go, or because he was cooking up a whopper? Maybe I should have asked him with Carolyn looking on, but let’s face it, I was no more happy about her getting involved in my personal life back in Room 304 than she’d been.
“Carolyn says it’s about privacy,” I told him. “But I don’t think so. What do you think?” Jacob turned toward the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window where planes taxied back and forth, through miles of parking lot and runway beyond. I stepped up beside him. If I shifted my vision, I could see his eyes reflecting back to me in the window. I could also see a transparent construction worker carrying around a dismembered arm out on the field.
“I signed something.”
“Yeah, I know. So did Lisa. So did Zigler. Hell, I think I signed something too. I didn’t read it, though. All I cared about was getting out of Camp Hell.” The construction worker’s ghost waved its dismembered arm around with its other arm.
He was no repeater. There was a lot of him left, I think, since he was focusing on one of those guys with the big earphones who go around signaling with a pair of flashlights in some kind of mysterious code.
“Vic.”
I looked at Jacob’s reflection.
“I signed something recently.”
“And when were you planning on telling me?”
He had the decency to look chagrined. “I would have said something, but really, it was all common sense stuff. Not to disclose your mediumship abilities to the press, or leak anything about it online, or discuss it with anyone outside my family. I wouldn’t have done those things anyway, so I didn’t see the harm. As for telling you?” He took a drink of his coffee, likely to buy time to gather his thoughts. “I didn’t think you’d want to know.”
“That better not be a theme.”
He shook his head. “How did Warwick figure out what was going on between us? I didn’t think you’d told him we’d moved in together since you never mentioned it. He tracked me down at the Twelfth, had Carolyn sign off, too.”
“Someone’s watching,” I said. “Notice how extra cops seem to appear if I go anywhere more than a couple days in a row? And Warwick’s not at the top of the pecking order. He’s answering to someone.”
“Who?”
I thought back on the answers I’d forced out of Lisa on the elevator. I probably would’ve stopped hounding her if she hadn’t gotten me drunk. “According to Lisa, I don’t know him. But I will.”
“I’ll help you find out.”
I looked at Jacob’s reflection. He was nodding, looking more or less sincere. I’d even go so far as to say he looked relieved. No doubt he preferred to keep all the skeletons in our closet laying out there in the open where they couldn’t come back to haunt him.
“I’m gonna do some more digging,” I said. “And you’ll have to stop filtering out all this stuff that you’ve decided I don’t want to know.”
Jacob finished his coffee. He crushed the cup in his hand and held it there. “I’m on your side.”
“You’d better be.”
He eased up against me so that our upper arms were pressed together. We stared at the field. Jacob watched the planes. I watched the one-armed ghost.
“Tell me something,” I said.
“What?”
“I dunno. Anything. I’m really sick of playing detective when I’m off the clock.” I watched the reflection of Jacob’s eyes as he looked up toward the sky and scanned his memory for something he was willing to disclose. I had no doubt there were plenty of secrets in there for him to choose from.
“Maurice’s retirement party,” he said.
Wow. He’d gone back farther than I thought he would—all the way back to day one, in fact. “Yeah?” I said carefully. Suddenly, I was worried that he was right. Maybe there were certain things I didn’t want to know.
“I didn’t just happen to go downstairs into the basement when you were taking your pills.”
My mouth went dry. I took a sip of coffee. It didn’t help.
“I was there because….” He shrugged and sighed, and looked very intently out the window. “I’d seen you at the Horner Park Picnic.”
The Twelfth and the Fifth straddle that park. Most of the cops who hit those picnics are into civic stuff, community policing, after-school programs. Maurice and I usually showed up for the free hot dogs.
“I knew who you were,” he said.
I’d known who he was, too. Even back then. There were only a dozen or so PsyCop teams in the city, depending on who was retiring, who was on leave, and who’d recently taken a bullet to the head. We all knew each other, at least the names and the faces.
“I’d never really gotten a good look at you. And once I did….” he shrugged. “Well, I had to see if maybe you were interested.”
I let my breath out slowly. “That’s it? That’s your big secret? That you came to Maurice’s party hoping to hook up?”
Jacob finally turned toward me and gave me a dazzling smile. Whatever resolve I’d mus-tered to be angry with him drained away. He’s that hot. “What did you expect?”
“C’mon, let’s go.” I turned toward the parking lot and started walking. Jacob fell into step beside me.
What had I been expecting? Jesus, for a second there I thought he was going to tell me that he wasn’t a PsyCop at all, that he was some super-secret agent who’d been sicced on me to keep me in line. That maybe his family was a bunch of actors, and maybe he wasn’t even gay.
God damn. I actually had been braced for something that bad. It wasn’t that big of a leap, especially since my third PsyCop partner and my general practitioner had both turned out to be a hell of a lot more sinister than they seemed.
“How’d you know I was queer?” I said. I think I managed to sound like I wasn’t having a major mental meltdown.
“You weren’t watching the women’s softball team.”
“So?”
“It was drizzling out. And the uniform T-shirts were white. You could see right through them.”
“Huh.” I drained my coffee and pitched the cup into a garbage can. “Now that you mention it, I kinda wondered why Maurice had his eyes glued to the field.” We found Jacob’s car, got in, and pulled out of the parking lot and onto the expressway.
“I think Lisa’s right,” said Jacob.
Well, of course. She’s psychic that way. I looked out the windshield without answering him. I didn’t know what he was talking about, just that Lisa probably was
right.
“You should get some kind of training,” he said. “This hit-or-miss style of yours—I’m not keen on it. Why take more risks than you have to?”
“I had training,” I said. “Two years’ worth. And then two more at the police academy.” Jacob watched me out of the corner of his eye. “Heliotrope Station wasn’t training.”
“Sure it was. I’ve got the textbooks to prove it. I even highlighted a few of the words in them.”
“You want to be honest? Let’s start being honest. They experimented on you for two years at Camp Hell, then you coasted through two more at the Academy because Warwick was greedy for a medium and he fixed all your grades. Does that sound about right?”
“I’m not so sure I like the new, improved, honest you. Let’s go back to pretending everything’s fine the way it is.”
Jacob dropped his hand on my knee. I suppressed a flinch. “You trained on the firing range to learn how to shoot,” he said. “But your talent? That’s all over the place. You knocked yourself out on the stairwell doing God-knows-what. And then you showed up in Barnhardt’s room reeking of whiskey. I get that you’re skittish about training. It’s under-standable. But playing it by ear isn’t working for you anymore. You need better control over your talent.”
I heard him. Kind of. Actually, most of it sounded like static because my brain kept repeat-ing the “they experimented on you for two years” soundbite over, and over, and over for the rest of the drive. It wasn’t the idea of it that was skipping like a warped LP, mind you.
What blew me away was hearing it in Jacob’s voice. Don’t get me wrong, I knew he knew.
He knew my timeline, how many years I’d spent in bad places, or worse ones. But I guess I’d always figured that he didn’t really know, in his gut, what I’d been through.
The tone of his voice told me that maybe he did. I wanted to make him pull over and simply tell me, in his own words, everything he thought I’d done and seen. No doubt he’d get some stuff wrong. But I’ll bet he’d get at least part of it right, too.
PsyCop 4: Secrets Page 16