Bitter Pill

by Jordan Castillo Price

  I stopped behind my old building and stared at it from the back. There was currently a light on in the apartment where I used to live. Were the walls still painted landlord white, or was whoever lived there now the ambitious sort of person who’d try to jazz up their apartment with things like artwork and paint?

  As I was staring up at the lit window, faintly, I heard, “Hey, white boy. Where you been at?”

  I rolled down the window—in retrospect, this made zero sense, I know—and said, “The answer to a blowjob is still no.”

  Jacob’s head snapped up at that. Lucky for me he’d been texting HQ and not calling.

  “All right, I feel you. You got that big fine man and all. Mmm hm—he sure is tasty. I was just being friendly cause we neighbors and all. No crime to be friendly, is it?”

  “Hold on…you recognize me now?”

  “I wasn’t sure without that ugly car of yours till I got up close and seen it was you. But, yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

  Because the other night she’d taken me for a stranger trolling for a twenty-dollar whore. Judging by her tone of voice, though, she’d be insulted if I pressed the matter. “Say, Jackie…I was wondering if you heard anything about a drug called Kick.”

  “You mean Special K?”

  Why was everybody so keen on Special K lately? “No, that’s a horse tranquilizer. Kick is more like…acid.”

  “Never heard of it. You wanna get high, how ’bout some Mary Jane?” She proceeded to name a good two dozen pot dealers, even though I insisted I wasn’t in the market for weed. Guess she was just worried about me going home empty-handed.

  She promised to keep an eye out for Kick, we said our goodbyes, and I pulled out of the alley. I was well aware that Jacob was watching me…but it was full dark now, and I was more worried about misreading a spectral car crash repeater. Eventually he said, “That sounded pretty congenial.”

  “It was.”

  “But the other night, you told me she was hardly more helpful than a repeater.”

  I’d called her a few more choice words afterwards, too, as I ranted to Jacob over dinner. We turned on to our street, which peters out into a scrap of unused land surrounded by a chain link fence, and I caught a glimpse of the moon between a gap in the trees. It was a partial moon. Waxing or waning? I wasn’t sure. But maybe its phase had something to do with it. Astrology, astronomy…. How should I know what it was that made the dead act the way they did?

  As we lay in bed that night—Jacob snoring, me staring at the ceiling—my thoughts kept circling back to something Jennifer Chance told me once, after she killed herself. That everything felt foggy and strange, and she was a slave to her urges and compulsions.

  Hell, I could say that for the majority of my thirties. In fact, even now that I’d crossed the big 4-0…I was still struggling with the yen I thought I’d left behind ages ago.

  I’d be lying to myself if I pretended sleep was in my immediate future. I was so keyed up I’d been jiggling my foot beneath the covers. Good thing Jacob sleeps like a sedated log. Otherwise he’d ride me about the twitching blanket, for sure.

  Thinking about ghosts was clearly not lulling me to sleep—not that it ever did—so I figured I’d try some reading. There was always more research waiting for me than I could ever hope to digest, and it periodically left me nodding off in the recliner. That tactic lasted maybe ten minutes. After which I discovered that not only did I have no clue whatsoever about a passage I’d just read a half-dozen times, but that I’d violated my no-screens-in-bed rule, and was now more wide awake than ever.

  And also, that my foot-jiggling had intensified to the point that Jacob actually grumbled and rolled away from me.

  If I couldn’t read away my restlessness, I reasoned, maybe I could walk it off. I deepened the furrow in the cheap hallway runner for a few minutes, but that was useless. Plus there was a loud squeak right by the bedroom door I couldn’t seem to step over or around. I did a few laps around the living room and even considered hitting the home gym. But even though I knew the cannery’s basement wasn’t haunted, I still got the heebie-jeebies when I thought about being down there alone at midnight.

  I pulled on yesterday’s pants and my slightly beery winter coat. Not because I thought a drive would be relaxing. Just that it seemed better than waking up Jacob and having us both be useless come morning. The roads were empty. I meandered through the neighborhood and wound up at the drug store, in search of some over-the-counter solution to my insomnia. But when I got to the door, it didn’t magically whisk open for me. I checked the hours. It closed at ten.

  I could’ve sworn the joint was open twenty-four hours…but that would explain the dim lighting and mostly-empty parking lot—and what those other cars were doing there, I couldn’t even begin to guess. But as I turned away from the door, I experienced a twinge of something that felt suspiciously like relief.

  I opted not to analyze it too closely, since I was obviously overtired and stressed.

  Before I knew it, I was parked outside the dive bar. I wanted to believe I was hoping to shake down more information about Kick…but I knew damn well it was that yen for Seconal at the helm. My guy wasn’t even holding. I knew that…and apparently, it didn’t matter. Being inside that bar—the sights, the sounds, and particularly the smells—had woken a disturbingly familiar urge in me that I’d figured was long dead.

  But what if it had only been buried?

  Well, shit.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I kicked up some gravel peeling out of the gin mill parking lot. I told myself I’d rather sit awake all night than wind up hooked on Reds again. And I ignored the fact that if I thought I actually could score, I might not’ve been able to resist walking through the doors of that goddamn bar.

  On the way back to the cannery, I passed my old apartment building again. I pulled over in front of a fire hydrant I’d blocked on numerous occasions, itched absently at the side of my neck, and stared into the courtyard. This wasn’t my life anymore, I reminded myself. I didn’t get a faceful of murders every day, come home to a shitty apartment and drug myself to sleep. Not anymore.

  And yet, the routine felt not only familiar…but comfortable.

  I’m sure the notion of comfort was nothing more than an illusion. Not only did that life suck—I couldn’t go back. The apartment had a new resident. The Fifth had a new PsyCop. And my dealer had no Seconal.

  Unless my recent visit had prompted him to procure a few pills. Just in case I changed my mind.

  I was gazing up at my old window when I heard Jackie calling me. “Hey! White boy!”

  I rolled down the window. Again, despite the fact that there were no actual sound waves traveling through glass. I was eager to talk to her. Everyone was buzzing about Kick lately. Maybe she’d have a lead for me. A name. Something important for me to research that would put me to sleep. “Any news?” I asked.

  “Sure, baby. Here’s the headline: twenty dollar’ll get you some real fine pussy.”

  I did a double-take—which was useless, since I couldn’t see her—and said, “It’s me. Vic.” Actually, I wasn’t so sure she’d ever registered my name. “Remember? Just a few hours ago, you said you’d find out about Kick for me.”

  “Kick, huh? The rough stuff cost extra—”

  “Jackie, damn it. It’s me.” I sucked down white light, thinking that if I could just see her, meet her ghostly eyes and make some kind of connection, I could pull her out of that ugly rut she was in. I leaned out the window so the streetlight shone on my face and said, “Come on, it’s not like I’m that easy to forget.”

  “What do you care? There’s no return customer discount. Whatchoo think, I got a punch-card—buy nine pussy, get the tenth one free?”

  I was sorely tempted to send her and her vagina packing to the other side for good. In fact, if I had my sacred salt on me, I might have flung a handful in her general direction. I’d left my salt back at the cannery, though. I was running on fumes, and wh
atever white light I pulled down was leaking right back out. In the end, I thought better of sitting there arguing with a dead hooker while my reserves were running low. If she took it in her mind to do more than just proposition me, I could very well wake up to find myself splayed on a stained mattress somewhere with a compromised virtue, a pocket full of twenties, and no memory of how I’d gotten there.

  I skedaddled back home, closed the cannery door behind me, and leaned back against its solidity. Even though it was nearly a month since the cannery was psychically fumigated, our constant bolstering of the vibe had a cumulative effect. I felt calmer, mostly.

  Except for the nagging thought that a certain red pill would really augment that calm feeling in the best possible way.

  Eventually, Jacob got up to pee and realized I wasn’t in bed beside him. He found me parked at the dining room table, basking in the lambent glow of research on my laptop. “Are you up really early…or really late?”

  I glanced at the time in the corner of the screen. Nearly four. Ugh. “What do you suppose makes people crave things?” I asked him. “Is it neurotransmitters? Dopamine?”

  “To some extent.”

  “Then why are there dead junkies out there jonesing for their next hit? What is it that keeps pulling Jackie back to her favorite street corner even after her brain and its reward centers are long gone?” And why was I wanting Seconal—to the point of distraction—long after the physical addiction was old history?

  Jacob was too groggy for any kind of theoretical debate. He coaxed me back to bed and folded himself around me…and even though I would’ve thought I’d have a hard time nodding off that way, given my mental state and the fact that his forearm was seriously impeding my diaphragm, eventually I did drift off.

  Two hours’ sleep was not nearly enough.

  Since I was clearly out of it, Jacob shoved a travel mug of strong coffee into my hands, piled me into the car, readjusted all the mirrors, and drove us to The Clinic. He nearly ended up wearing that mug of coffee when I plowed into the back of him at the entrance.

  “New policy,” the guy at the desk—Troy?—told us. “Dr. Bertelli wants everyone to sign in now.”

  He pushed a clipboard through the slot in the window where he normally handed over my drugs, but thankfully spared us a recap of last night’s Clairvoyage marathon. Jacob signed and dated. I scrawled my name underneath. Under “Purpose of Visit,” he’d written INVESTIGATION in neat block letters. I put a pair of tic marks below it to indicate the same. It was all I could do to stop myself from jotting down, What the hell do you think I’m here for?

  Barely nine and I already needed a nap.

  I slid back the sign-in sheet. Instead of buzzing the door open, Troy produced two more clipboards and pushed them through. “Liability waivers,” he said.

  I squinted. The print was ridiculously small. And the urge to nod off at the mere sight of it was profound.

  “We’re here on an official FPMP investigation,” Jacob said. “We’re not signing anything.”

  “Sorry—I’m just the messenger.”

  Short of breaking down the door, the only thing to do was check in with HQ and see how they wanted us to proceed. Jacob took a snapshot of the documents and sent them to Laura. We cooled our heels in the waiting room while she ran it all through the legal department, and eventually came back with instructions to sign. We headed to the empty conference room commandeered by Jacob and his research. Carolyn and Zigler joined us a little while later. “What’s with the new hoops we’ve gotta jump through?” Zig wondered.

  “Maybe Bertelli’s hiding something,” Jacob said. “Or maybe he’s just being cautious. Either way, let’s make the most of our time here in case he somehow manages to get us all blocked from The Clinic.”

  Zigler said, “Maybe someone here has connected a few dots now that they’ve had time to sleep on it.”

  Jacob agreed. “We’ll split up and re-canvas the staff.”

  The mood in the trenches was understandably subdued. A group of clinicians who normally dealt with things like routine bloodwork and Auracel-induced nausea had a death on their hands. Counting the folks who’d died at LaSalle, more than one. These weren’t just random deaths, either, but patients they knew by name and had seen on a regular basis, many of them for years. There was no easy banter at The Clinic now, no homemade peanut butter cookies in the break room. Everyone was grim. And focused. And scared.

  Everyone has their own way of coping with trauma. Some folks get loud and panicky and start yelling at their coworkers. Some make completely inappropriate jokes that piss everyone off. Some fall back on their training, function like a well-oiled machine, then go home and cry into a couch cushion.

  Some tell you what they watched on TV last night.

  Troy Malone—The Assassin’s front desk replacement—had a front row seat to a drama way more intense than any primetime show. No doubt he was in his glory. “Say, listen,” I said. “I wonder if you’ve got time for a few questions.”

  “Absolutely. Maybe some detail I saw could be the key to the whole investigation. Like on Cold Case: PsyCop Edition, when that clairvoyant detective has the crazy dreams, the ones where they do those closeup shots of a random jumble of stuff, and then his Stiff weaves them all together to figure out what happened—”

  “Sure. Like that.” I did my best to steer the conversation away from basic cable’s latest, greatest Psych drama and toward something I might actually use. Because I couldn’t discount the fact that this guy had access to all the medications of the psychic population of the greater Chicagoland area. If anyone was in a good position to skim psychic pharmaceuticals, it was him.

  Except there were no psyactives being distributed, not anymore. Just Auracel and Neurozamine—antipsyactives. “Actually,” Troy said, “you’ve got a scrip ready. If you want it.”

  “Might as well, while I’m here. So, how many prescriptions would you say you hand out on any given day?”

  “Well, it’s heavier after the first and the fifteenth—that’s payday for a lot of people, and copays can run pretty high. On an average day, maybe ten or twelve. Mostly right after we open or right before close. Or lunch hour. Lunch can get pretty busy, so I have to take my break late, after one. I eat a protein bar at ten so I don’t get lightheaded. Which reminds me—did you see the Dr. Precog episode where the new lab assistant diagnosed a type-1 diabetic with nothing but a candy bar wrapper?”

  “Probably not—I’ll have to catch it sometime.” Right after I finished detailing the mildewed grout in my downstairs bathroom with a toothbrush. “Thanks.”

  I tossed my bag in the recycle and pocketed the amber plastic bottle inside, thanked Troy for his time, and headed down to the pharmacy to see how long it had been since any of The Clinic’s patients received a psyactive in their pill bottle—because maybe I could blame the whole thing on Patrick. Though the FPMP had his prints on file, so probably not. Erin was busy pushing little pills around a scale with a rounded metal spatula. She reassured me that no psyactives were currently being prescribed, and any clinical trials had been well before her time.

  Did she seem nervous? Yes. But lots of people got flustered around investigators for no good reason at all. Plus, she’d passed Carolyn’s innate lie detector test. I was about to go on a little fishing expedition anyway when the announcement system startled us both with a beep. “Code Blue! Repeat, Code Blue!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When I turned on my heel to high-tail it upstairs, Erin chose that particular moment to let her true feelings be known.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she called out over the urgent ‘Code Blue’ announcement. “Are you a medical professional? Were you going to scrub in? Christ, all you FPMP assholes swaggering around like you own the place—how will you feel when someone dies because you got in the way of their actual medical treatment?”

  Wow. Now, that was something to unpack later. But not until I got a look at the latest emer
gency.

  The pharmacy was tucked well away in the most secure corner of the basement, and I’m not exactly quick on my feet. I jogged to the stairwell and up a flight of grated metal stairs, already winded. I was just swinging around the midpoint landing when I saw him.

  It was just a flicker at first. A trick of the light. And me, running up that metal staircase with so much visual information it was hard to tell what was what…until I ended up skidding to a halt on the landing as something stepped through the door. And not by opening it first, either. A flicker. A jerk. And I realized, with a sinking feeling, I recognized the guy. Reginald had found another hit of Kick. He was back at The Clinic. And I’m guessing if he was transferred to LaSalle this time, it wouldn’t be to the intensive care unit, but the morgue.

  “Reginald!” I said—without realizing that, hey, my white light level was practically nil. Blame it on distraction, blame it on lack of sleep. It was a dumb move. And as the flickering ghost of the dead Psych locked eyes with me, I realized just how dumb it was.

  White light. I pulled, but the connection felt sloppy and ragged. My physical senses aren’t the only ones that suffer when I’m running on fumes. But one thing I can say for fear—it’ll wake you up. Fast. As the ghost turned and walked toward me, step by flickering step, I felt my white balloon strengthen as I pumped all my energy into my protective shield. “Reginald, what can you tell me about the Kick? Where’d you get it? Who’d you get it from?”

  Reginald was halfway to the landing now, close enough for me to get a good look at his face between flickers. But the expression was enough to chill me to the bone. His eyes were wide, pained…but almost unseeing. And it wasn’t just the fact that he was coming toward me that spooked me, but the way he was moving. All wrong. As if an apprentice puppeteer was running the show—and they were woefully unrehearsed. I scrambled down the stairs backwards and somehow managed not to land in a heap at the bottom. Reginald’s ghost kept right on coming.