Bitter Pill

by Jordan Castillo Price

  My federal agent status and my connection to Jacob allowed me a bit of roaming, but the pharmacy was locked up nearly as tight as the automatic weapons armory at the FPMP shooting range. An electronic lock protected a small suite of rooms. The main workroom saw most of the action. From there, one door led to a vault of valuable prescription meds, and another to a closet full of disused medical equipment. The whole thing was tucked away on the basement level, behind an industrial-looking safety cage, just across from the meeting room that served as the building’s official tornado shelter.

  I found Erin Welch, the pharmacist on duty, shutting things down for the night. She was a quiet, studious woman who looked a lot younger than she actually was. Her straight, dark hair fell forward toward her face. When she tucked it behind her ear, the gesture came off more like a college student than a forty-something professional. That thing about sustained eye contact? I didn’t tend to get it from her.

  “So,” I ventured. “There’s lemon bars in the break room.”

  “Oh. Um…thanks. I was just on my way out.”

  “Sure, I wouldn’t dream of keeping you. I know how it is waiting for a certain someone to finish just one more file.”

  According to the tradecraft, most people would find that remark relatable. Then again, if she was single, complaining about my superhot future husband could’ve had the opposite effect. Given the paltry replies I got from her whenever I tried to strike up a conversation, it was too soon to inquire about her marital status unless I was really freaking smooth. And I’ve never been accused of that.

  She gave a nervous almost-laugh and said, “Anyway….”

  I stepped aside while she finished keying in some kind of code beside the door, making sure I was looking pointedly at a random fleck of nothing on the opposite wall. It wouldn’t do for me to seem like I was trying to rob the dispensary, after all. Especially since I took so few Auracel these days, I’d accumulated a pretty sizable stockpile. What I really wanted was information.

  “Say, listen. I was wondering if you’ve heard of a new street drug called Kick.”

  She paused and actually looked me in the eye for once. Her brow was furrowed—then again, she was so serious, maybe she just had resting worry-face. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because…you deal with psyactive pharmaceuticals for a living?”

  “Oh. Right. Just the official medical grade drugs, though.”

  “Well, if you do hear anything—”

  She looked somewhere over my shoulder, not like she saw anything there, but like she was eager to end our conversation. “As I was saying, I was just on my way out. Good night, Agent.”

  “Have a good one,” I murmured. I was about to follow her out when I paused and turned to double-check that there truly had been nothing lingering behind me. Purely the power of suggestion, of course. They’ve done studies where someone on the street looks up and every other pedestrian in visual range follows suit. When a person looks at something, the rest of the tribe all want to know what grabbed their attention. But just as I’d suspected, there was nothing behind me but a locked door.

  I pulled down some white light and looked harder.

  Still nothing.

  No one had ever died at The Clinic. No one in modern history had even died on the property itself. That’s why it was custom-built in that particular spot.

  Even so, I wasn’t 100% convinced I was alone…but there was only so long I could loiter there by the locked-up pharmacy without revealing that my meanderings were more than just social. So I gave the area one final sweep and moved along.

  By the time I’d done my rounds and gone to gather up Jacob (code phrase: are you through yet?) the sun had set, the sky was dark, and repeaters had begun drifting into the crosswalks. Even though it meant having to readjust all the mirrors, Jacob drove.

  “Well?” Jacob ventured. “Any good gossip?”

  We presume the car is bugged, though we’re constantly reassured it isn’t. It can be so exhausting trying to figure out what you’re willing for your superiors to overhear. We’d both decided that chatting about the investigation was fair game. At least unless it implicated someone either of us needed to protect. “Following up on a lead,” I said. “Probably nothing.”

  “Most leads are.” Jacob pulled up in front of the cannery with a weary sigh. “Remind me again how I thought I would storm The Clinic, look through a few file folders, and flush out Dr. Kamal from wherever he was hiding?”

  That’s the thing about investigative work. You’re ninety-nine percent struggling through the weeds and one percent stunned it’s actually coming together. Come to think of it, that described weddings pretty well, too. At least, I thought it might. We were still hacking our way through the undergrowth in the nuptial arena.

  I opened our front door to an alarming slide of catalogs. They started coming after we innocently requested more information on custom wedding bands. Big mistake. Weddings are big business, and the industry was hell-bent on separating us from our hard-earned money by informing us of all the ways in which our special day could potentially be lacking.

  The catalog landslide was so voluminous today I couldn’t even gather it all in one load. Jacob stooped to round up the stragglers, and we both headed toward the couch to do a quick and dirty sort to ensure we didn’t accidentally toss an important bill.

  As nighttime rituals went, mail-sorting was a real pain in the ass. Usually when you wind down for the day, it’s by doing something soothing—or at least blowing off a little steam. Jacob had been spending his days mired in paperwork, and coming home to more of the same couldn’t be any fun. “Here’s what I want to know,” I said. “Once we do finally get married, how will all the catalogs know to stop?”

  Jacob gave me the side-eye. “What do you mean?”

  “The deluge can’t keep coming forever, can it? Does it time out after a few years? Or after a set number of mailings? Or is there some master list of weddings that will let everyone know to stop burying us in paper?”

  I thought I’d been making some wry observation about the state of consumerism and the irrelevance of mail in a digital age, but Jacob didn’t seem to find it particularly amusing. “You said finally.”

  “Finally what?”

  “When we do finally get married. That’s what you said.”

  Oh boy.

  “Out of the whole spiel I just gave, that’s the word you pick up on?”

  Jacob huffed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This Dr. Kamal thing is taking up everything I’ve got. I’m used to talking to people—with Carolyn—not picking through old records. I get home and my brain is mush, and I can barely decide what to have for dinner, let alone figure out our guest list.”

  “You’re reading way too much into this.”

  “Someone from Camp Hell ended up at The Clinic. He hired Patrick Barley—who made it all the way to the FPMP without anyone being any the wiser. I’m just supposed to compartmentalize that and go on with my life like everything’s fine?”

  Here’s the thing about Jacob. He’d been under the illusion that anything could possibly be fine a hell of a lot longer than I ever had. “You’ll find Kamal,” I said.

  “Don’t be so sure. It’s as if he just disappeared.”

  I tried to put the stack of catalogs I was holding on the coffee table, but the paper was glossy, and they slid to the floor with a papery sigh. I ignored them and turned my whole body toward Jacob, propping my elbow over the back of the sofa. “I get it. Kamal freaks you out. He freaks me out too. But we both know how it is when someone wants to disappear. If they’re really determined to fall off the map, it can be done. If you’re overwhelmed, tackle one thing at a time. Don’t even think about the wedding.”

  “So you’re saying…you don’t want to get married.”

  I batted a table-topper catalog out of his hand and shoved him back against the arm of the couch. “Look, mister. I would marry you in a big church ceremony in front
of everyone we know. I’d do it shotgun-style with the justice of the peace and a random witness off the street. I’d tie the knot at a destination wedding on a fancy beach, or a low-key picnic in the park, or any other venue we could imagine. I’d even write my own vows if push came to shove—though we both know I’d just find something online and try to pass it off as my own. Heck, I’d take you downtown and marry you tomorrow, if that’s what you wanted. But I’d rather not have the pall of Camp Hell and Dr. Kamal hanging over us while I’m sticking my ring on your finger, so in that case, I’m willing to wait until your investigation plays out.”

  Or until he decided that Kamal was essentially a ghost…and not the sort I could strike up a conversation with, either.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My pep talk with Jacob must have done the trick. He fell asleep fast, and greeted me the next morning with a vigorous session of rise and shine. We were so into it that we left a few minutes later than usual and ended up at The Clinic well after they officially opened…which was probably the only reason we stumbled across a familiar car in the parking lot—a car I’d always been particularly careful not to smudge.

  A pristine Impala.

  At first, it didn’t really surprise me to find Bob Zigler at The Clinic. He’d been seeing some kind of headshrinker there ever since the unfortunate incident in the zombie basement. I hadn’t seen Zig in a while, so instead of just leaving Jacob to his paperwork and heading downtown to HQ, I decided to stop in.

  It wasn’t that I missed Zigler. Frankly, we’d never been buddies, just co-workers. But it always seemed like maybe I should’ve said something or done something to help him cope with all the shit he’d seen on my watch. And maybe it was better late than never.

  Once we signed in at the desk, it wasn’t hard to figure out where all the action was. As medical facilities go, The Clinic is pretty quiet. There are no screaming children in the lobby. No screaming GSWs or mental health crises, either. Just workaday psychics having their blood tests or picking up their antipsyactives. No one kicks up a fuss unless someone’s fighting for the last slice of pound cake.

  But not today.

  A big red button lit up on the phone and it let out a horrible squawk. “What’s that?” I asked.

  Troy looked flustered. “Our emergency number.” The line went solid as someone picked it up elsewhere in the building, and then an urgent voice sounded over the PA. “Code Blue. Repeat—Code Blue.”

  Since Jacob and I are trained to run toward emergencies, not away from them, we hurried through the building. By the time we closed in on the emergency bay, judging by the screams, the Code Blue was already there.

  “They’re everywhere! Get ’em off me! Get ’em off me!”

  Doctors who normally found time to gossip with me around the coffee pot were now rushing past us for the hall the screams were coming from. I recognized that ward. I’d woken up there once myself, back when Roger Burke had dosed me with experimental psyactives until I puked all over myself and blacked out.

  In retrospect, I was probably lucky it had happened in public so he couldn’t get away with chopping me up and flushing me down the toilet to cover his tracks.

  Since we were official FPMP agents (and we had the sense to stay out of the way) no one stopped us. I spotted Zigler when we approached the room. That mustache of his is hard to miss. But then he shifted to one side and revealed another familiar face I hadn’t seen in ages.

  Carolyn.

  They were together. I read it immediately in their stance, in the tactical way they flanked the guy they were interviewing…in the way Zig was doing the talking while Carolyn did the heavy lifting without the subject being any the wiser. The guy currently under the microscope was your basic bureaucrat—an administrator whose presence wasn’t actually needed in a medical emergency. While the nameplate on his office door read Dr. Gary P. Bertelli, I don’t think he was the kind of doctor you’d see to get your appendix out. As he yielded to Zigler’s questions, his body language projected, I’m fine, you’re fine, and everything’s under control.

  But given the blood-chilling screams ringing through the hall, I didn’t trust his body language any farther than I could throw it.

  The PsyCops currently chatting with him had likely come to the same conclusion. Since her subtle nods wouldn’t be cluing in Zig on anything he didn’t already know, Carolyn peeled off and headed our way.

  I gave an inward cringe on Jacob’s behalf.

  It was coming up on a year ago that he’d pissed her off by leaving the Twelfth Precinct, and in that amount of time, he must’ve offered a good half-dozen olive branches. Eventually, he got sick of being shot down and stopped trying.

  Carolyn didn’t bother with a greeting—but she didn’t lay into him either, so that was mildly encouraging. “Are the two of you here in an official capacity, or for medical reasons?”

  “FPMP business,” Jacob said. He cut his eyes toward the screaming. “What’s going on?”

  “Kick, that’s what. Are you investigating it too?”

  In lieu of an answer, Jacob looked meaningfully at the swinging door as yet another doctor barreled through. Maybe, in a normal human, she would’ve sensed the falsehood of that single glance. But not a True Stiff like Jacob.

  She said, “Then we should pool our resources. Even though you’re the last person I want to see.” Ouch. “Kick isn’t just dangerous, it’s lethal—and it’s hitting the streets like a bomb. First we heard of it was a week ago, and now it’s all over the city. Low-level Psychs are overdosing left and right. We need to do something about it. Now.”

  A tendril of unease crept across the back of my neck. And then the cacophony in the ER got louder as it was punctuated by additional raised voices, including a doctor shouting over the general din, “She’s coding!”

  I realized with sudden, striking certainty that I should probably get the hell out of there…and that making tracks wouldn’t be any use. If a dying Psych this close shot out a spirit body hell-bent on finding a new skin suit, there was no way I could outrun it. Not when it could go right through the walls like a round from an AR-15. So I did my best to set my chakras spinning, shotgun a bunch of white light, and brace for impact.

  Adrenaline’s a powerful drug, and if there was a scale that could measure my psychic ability with any amount of accuracy, my mediumship would’ve shot off the chart. A temporary spike—but one that caused a flash of giddy lightheadedness to my physical body. I swayed, but just a little, and no one noticed. They were all too focused on the emergency bay.

  I made a decision. Since I’d never get away in time, I’d better see what I was up against.

  I shouldered through the swinging doors and flattened myself out of the way the best I could. While one medic was doing chest compressions, another shot something into the patient’s IV. I was taken aback by the twenty-something woman on the table. She looked so normal. Aside from being intubated and hooked up to a bunch of monitors, I mean. She was a tiny thing in wooly tights and a purple corduroy jumper…which had been unceremoniously hacked open at the top to stick electrodes to her chest. Her body heaved with the chest compressions while the monitors flatlined and droned their death-knell beep. But her hands were what got me. Not because of her purple sparkle nail polish…but how they were twitching in a way that had nothing to do with the CPR.

  If I hadn’t been rife with panic-induced vigilance, I might not have caught the moment her spirit popped out of her body. It was subtle. Like when you see a dark speck somewhere in your periphery and don’t know if it’s an eyeball floater or a gnat until you try to get a better look.

  I focused on the ghost…and wished I hadn’t.

  It wasn’t moving right.

  The thing jerked and stuttered like a creepy-crawlie in a Japanese horror flick or a club kid doing a horrible new dance. But before I could backpedal and redirect my mojo to my protective shell, there was a bright blip of incandescence—the source of the white light, which twanged a s
ick resonance through my third eye. Not that it was bad, only way too much to handle, and me just a little too close. Like electrical outlets—great for plugging in hairdryers…but not forks.

  I felt the source hum like a high-tension line, not with my physical nerve endings, but my extrasensory awareness. The ghost shambled toward me and I staggered out into the hall. I scrambled to get out of range. But then, with a startling etheric burst, it disappeared, leaving a vacuum in its wake that made everything flex painfully until I released my white-knuckled grip on my shielding. The girl in purple—her spirit—gone, too, in a soupy burst of afterimages that fluttered away while my second sight recovered. I relaxed, and an uneasy equilibrium settled in.

  Psychically, anyhow.

  Physically, the doctors were still yelling stuff at each other, pounding on her chest and pumping her full of chemicals while all the machines and monitors kept right on shrilling. They were still laboring under the assumption that The Clinic had never known the touch of death.

  One of the PAs—a mom-ish lady named Gina who was the queen of bizarre non-sequiturs—took notice of me peering into the room and said, “Vic! You shouldn’t be over here.” I didn’t resist when she dragged me toward the nurse’s station, where suddenly everyone took notice of me.

  I’ll say one thing about Zigler—he was always good at running interference. He asked Bertelli a very urgent question to monopolize the administrator’s attention while Carolyn and Jacob hustled me off to the nearest empty exam room. Carolyn’s eyes bored into me when she asked, “What did you see?”

  I hate describing my psychic experience to other people. Even when I minimize—which I typically do, just to be safe—it’s obvious most people really don’t want to know. But Carolyn was in a different category. Tough as nails and psychic, to boot. Plus, her talent would prevent her from asking unless she really did want to know. I said, “There’s not a lot to tell you. The victim wasn’t aware of me. Tough to really get a bead on her. She was kind of flickery and jerky and…she didn’t stick around.”