“My boss is gonna get in touch with you,” I told Erin. “And whatever suggestions she makes, follow them to the letter to make sure you don’t take the fall for anyone else.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Just…listen to Laura. She’s good people.”
Erin nodded. She might not particularly like me, but she did trust me. And that was a start.
It was late by the time Jacob and I picked up our car…late enough to take another stab at setting something to rights that we should have handled long ago. We swung by the grocery store for salt…so much salt that the cashier asked if we were brining a turkey. And then she noticed our bloody eyeballs and decided she really didn’t want to know.
We gathered the prayer candles and Hoyt’s Cologne from the trunk and let ourselves into the basement of my old apartment. I’d been gearing myself up for a sad and heartfelt goodbye. But all the washers and dryers were going full-tilt, and I had no idea if Jackie would even hear me over the noise.
Jacob closed the door and jimmied it shut using the rubber stopper people normally kept it open with while they hauled laundry in and out. Since the washing machines were all coin-op, the controls were nonexistent, just the slots that ate the quarters, a button to pick the water temp, and nothing else. I could shut them up by pulling the plugs, but we couldn’t risk a first-floor tenant realizing we’d interfered with his laundry stirring up a huge ruckus.
I put the noise out of my mind and lit the candles. “Are you still feeling the psyactives?” I asked Jacob.
“Maybe. Hard to say.”
“You can’t see the nonphysical. That’s obvious. But you feel it. Right?”
Jacob shuddered. He hadn’t come out and said what it felt like when he tore the squirming parasite in half, but I’d wager he wouldn’t forget anytime soon.
I held salt awkwardly on my fingertips where they protruded from my cast. As I imagined white light infusing it from the heavens, I thought about Jacob’s energy, the red, ropy, veiny power, and how different it was from mine. “What if we each power up from a different chakra?” I blurted out. I was clearly talking out of my ass and deserved to be laughed right out of that basement.
But when Jacob looked up sharply, he wasn’t laughing. “How can that be? Everyone knows the crown chakra is the one that corresponds to psychic ability.”
“Maybe, maybe not. When it comes to Psych, I’ve never put much stock in what ‘everyone’ knows. When you were powered up on GhosTV waves and psyactives, it wasn’t white light you were mainlining. It was…earth energy.” I’d heard that phrase recently. Where? I cast my mind back…to the chair yoga guy on YouTube. Who’d been lecturing us about the earth, and balance, and grounding. Just as Jacob was hammering away at my ass.
My base chakra.
No wonder I’d come away with my extrasensory talent stunted. It had nothing to do with the yoga, but with Jacob and me. I’d been stockpiling crown chakra energy, then we went and neutralized every last bit.
Part of me was horrified. But how bad was it really, when afterwards, I’d had such an amazing night’s sleep?
I held out the salt to Jacob and said, “Try pulling from the ground up. Maybe it’ll be easier than you think. Darla says the reason salt amplifies energy is the crystalline structure. But there’s no reason it has to be my particular brand of energy.”
We sat quietly together. As we each did our best to activate our salt, I noticed movement on the floor. We hadn’t summoned the baby with our blundering actions. It just so happened that the nightly window of time—the one in which she intersected with the physical world—had finally arrived. The spot where the veil had been last time felt dry. Or maybe I was just too overextended to sense its presence.
“You’ve got this,” I told Jacob. Not because I wanted to stroke his ego—which was surprisingly vulnerable in places I least expected. But because I truly thought he’d be just as likely as me to set things right. “Where’s the veil?”
He looked around. His brow furrowed in frustration. I wanted to walk him through it somehow—me, the guy with a level so high that even when I lied about half the stuff I saw, I was nearly off the charts—but our talents were too different. Hell, it took some figuring to find common ground with Darla. Jacob’s ability and mine were practically opposites.
Jacob took a deep breath. I’d expected him to pass the baton back to me, but instead…he closed his eyes. “There.” He pointed toward the storage lockers. “I feel the veil.”
Once he’d pinpointed the location? So did I.
“Now what?” he asked.
I scattered my salt and focused on it, all those tiny little crystals purportedly amplifying my psychic mojo, and I imagined the white light surrounding Trinity and floating her toward the veil.
Nothing happened. Unless you counted the throb deep inside my head growing more pronounced.
We were in uncharted territory. I saw things, but Jacob felt them. When he grabbed a possessed medium, he could hold the spirit inside. And he’d gotten a good enough grip on the habit demon to tear it in two. “If the baby can’t get there herself…maybe you should help her along.”
Jacob groped on the salty floor. “To the right. No, the other right.” His struggle was agonizing. I wished I could take his hand and guide it, but I couldn’t risk touching him. Our energies might short each other out. “Jacob, no, the other way.”
It was no use. As the Kick ebbed from his system, helped along by all the fluids Dr. Gillmore had pushed through his veins, Jacob just wasn’t cut out for this kind of task. Without the GhosTV, he’d need to settle for being impervious to psychic scrutiny and possession. And frankly, after going around with a habit demon suckered onto my throat for who knows how long, I’d trade places in a heartbeat if I could.
He stood from his crouch. Giving up so soon? Maybe he was right—we were tapped out for now and should just come back another day. I tried to figure out how to say as much without coming off as patronizing, but he piped up before I could find the words.
And when he spoke, I realized, it wasn’t me he was talking to. “Your daughter needs you.”
How long had Jackie been there?
Jacob’s arm hung at an odd angle, and my vision shifted. I couldn’t see Jackie plainly, not like the ghosts I usually dealt with. But when I didn’t look at her straight on, I caught glimpses from the corner of my eye.
Jacob was holding her hand.
“You’re the only one who can do it,” he said gently. “Be strong. For your daughter.”
Although his eyes were closed, with Jackie at his side, he went directly to the spot where Trinity fussed on the floor.
When Jackie hesitated, I said, “You can’t just leave her there, Jackie. Pick her up.”
Apparently, it wasn’t the time for tough love. Jackie flickered and tried to bail, but Jacob refused to let go of her hand. He said, “It’s okay, Jackie. It’ll all be okay, but you need to do this. You, not us. Bring her to the veil.”
All the mediumship talent in the world won’t help if you don’t know how to deal with people. And Jacob? He knew people…and he knew how to get his way. He held Jackie there beside her baby long enough to gather up her courage, but not so long that her resolve could erode.
“Do it…for Trinity.”
And with that, he released Jackie’s hand.
When Jackie took her newborn baby in her arms—for the first time in decades—the room filled with light so bright it dazzled me. Not my physical eyes, but my second sight, though I tried to orient myself by blinking away nonexistent afterimages. It took a few seconds. When my vision finally cleared, the baby was gone.
“Jackie?” I called out.
No reply.
“It’s over,” Jacob said. “She’s finally at peace.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
There’s probably a medical reason why the day after working a bunch of heavy etheric lifting, every last part of my physical body
hurts like hell. We’d left a message with Laura that we’d debrief her at noon, just as soon as we got a decent night’s sleep. So I was surprised when my phone woke me with the announcement, “You have a text message that may be important.”
It had never done that before. But since it periodically revealed new features I’d never okayed, I wasn’t particularly surprised.
“Read it out loud,” I told the phone.
“Meet me at the newspaper boxes on Western in half an hour.”
“Who’s it from?”
“I’m sorry. That number is blocked.”
“Are you going?” Jacob mumbled, half asleep.
I considered whether or not it was FPMP National angling to haul me away, and decided they’d be more likely to batter down the cannery’s door than to have me meet them in a public place. In all likelihood, one of our witnesses had something to tell me off the record. Whatever it might be, since the Kick pipeline was shut down now, I figured it could wait. Then I considered if there was any likelihood I’d get back to sleep, and noticed daylight filtering in through the tiny window above the bed. I sighed. “Apparently I’m up now. I might as well go.”
I must’ve been expecting Jacob to offer to come with me, because I was surprised when he didn’t. Then I saw he was already out cold again. He’d done some heavy etheric lifting, too. Maybe more than his share.
Newspaper boxes were scarce in the city these days, since you’d have to go around with a pocketful of quarters heavy enough to pull down your pants to afford a single daily copy of the Tribune. But the Brown Line station was a busy hub that connected this neighborhood to the rest of the city. On the terrace outside, a line of metal coin-op boxes stood together in a brightly colored row like a chorus line of aging showgirls waiting to blow kisses at Ravenswood’s daily commuters.
There was no one lingering anywhere nearby that I could tell. Then again, I was probably early. I considered taking a Chicago Reader to reacquaint myself with the city’s cultural scene…or at least scan the goings on and reflect that I never did anything fun anymore. When I was young and surly, it’s where all the punk rock happenings were listed. And though I hadn’t been to a concert in years, I figured it couldn’t hurt to look.
Unfortunately, the box was empty.
The intersection had plenty of foot traffic streaming by, but when I was bent over the box, someone paused behind me, casting a shadow across the metal front. I whipped around, probably too fast, cursing myself for getting so sloppy. For all I knew, the guys from the Washington office were hoping to use me as a channel guide for their new TV.
For all I knew, it was an assassin.
But, no. The face I encountered, with its weary expression and its once-blond mustache faded to white, belonged to someone I’d shared a precinct with for more than a dozen years. And he’d never once tried to kill me.
“Sarge,” I said stupidly.
Warwick scanned the pavement, squinting. Spindly trees. A bike rack. A stream of normal pedestrians heading to their normal jobs. “So. We turned up a big stash of expired Palazamine in the pharmacy storeroom. Your new boss strongly suggested to us and to the Lincolnwood PD that we don’t press charges against the pharmacist for her involvement in this latest shit show…but she wouldn’t elaborate as to why.”
“It wasn’t Erin’s fault.”
“For…psychic reasons?”
“You could say that.”
“Uh huh.” Not only was Ted Warwick an early adopter in the PsyCop program, but he’d had a Psych in his own family…a beloved nephew. If Warwick didn’t buy it, I could only imagine what would happen if Erin ended up front of a random judge. Or even worse, a jury.
Not that I could blame them. The explanation that she was possessed by a ghost powered by habit demons who were luring in additional psychics to sop up their etheric resonance wouldn’t have convinced me. That was the best we could figure, anyhow. And I was still trying to wrap my head around it.
Warwick said, “I can take care of Welch if she cooperates. Any reason I shouldn’t let the DA throw the book at Troy Malone?”
“The receptionist?”
“When we confronted him, he made himself out to be the mastermind of the whole operation. At least until we leaned on him hard enough for him to implicate the pharmacist.”
I said, “At least tell me he flipped on Bertelli.”
“Bertelli wasn’t involved.”
“But all the video evidence—”
“Showed him adding drugs to the pharmacy, not stealing them. Not psyactives, either—painkillers. He’d been skimming them for his own recreational use, we can’t say how long—there’s still a lot of video to process before we have a definitive timeline—and when our investigation zeroed in on the pharmacy, he started scrambling to make sure the numbers all jibed. Zigler was the one who noticed he made Welch open up a new batch to fill your scrip instead of letting her use what was already open. We think he’s been substituting counterfeit meds to make up the shortfall.”
But I’d never once seen Erin interacting with Troy. “So Bertelli wasn’t even playing the go-between?”
“No. Malone found the Kick alongside his own prescriptions.”
Hold on a sec. “Troy got prescriptions from The Clinic? For what?”
“Neurozamine. Apparently, he’s a low-level telepath.”
No wonder he’d come up with such an elaborate way of keeping his mind from being read. According to Warwick, Troy thought Erin’s total lack of verbal acknowledgement about their venture was just her being cautious. She only communicated via notes tucked in with the pill bottles. He’d just figured she was avoiding all the security cams. He went along with it because he was secretly smitten…and infatuation can make us do some pretty bizarre things.
I said, “If you need proof that Erin wasn’t exactly herself, at least for your own peace of mind, you could check the handwriting on the notes against hers.”
Warwick watched as a couple wandered past, arguing in a language I couldn’t readily identify, then crammed his hands in his pockets and said, “I already have.”
“And?”
“The notes don’t match Welch’s writing. But they do match this book that Zigler turned up in the storage room.” He drew out a battered notebook and handed it to me. It was old and water-stained, and the pages were yellowed. I flipped it open. The writing was in cursive, with lots of cryptic abbreviations and words I didn’t know. The dates on the entries went back some fifty years. The numerals were foreign, with ones that looked more like sevens, and sevens with a bar through the middle.
“Did that belong to a certain Dr. Kamal?” I ventured.
“How much do you know about him?”
“It’s been a few years since I’ve had the displeasure.” In the physical, anyhow.
“Seems that a US Military sniper took him out one day on his way home from work…and a cleanup team made sure the body disappeared. And it seems that they did it on the recommendation of one Constantine Dreyfuss.”
The stunningly truthful conversation I’d had with Dreyfuss so long ago in the astral plane came rushing back to me. Once we took care of Kamal…. I hadn’t recognized the name, at the time. But now my brain slotted it in like it had been there all along. Freaky. Once he was gone, yeah. Once we’d cleaned house, at least I didn’t have to worry about getting plugged by my own team.
More implications than I could shake a stick at.
I hefted the journal. “What’s the gist of it?”
“Records. Initials and dates. Some kind of…genealogy.” Sarge’s pale-eyed gaze went icy as he stared out over traffic. “My nephew’s in there. With an entry that he’s been terminated.”
My heart hammered hard. Alex Warwick died just before I checked in to Camp Hell. “And me?”
“Not that I saw. But you should go through it anyways and make sure for yourself.”
I accepted the tacit agreement that neither of us would mention Warwick allowing me to make evi
dence disappear, and tucked the book into my overcoat pocket.
I walked home in a daze, begging myself not to get my hopes up. But if this was Kamal’s work and it spanned his Camp Hell years, I had to be in there somewhere. I was one of his guinea pigs, after all. In fact, given how far back it went, it might shed some light on my past.
On my family.
I crept upstairs. Jacob was still out for the count, sprawled on his side diagonally with the comforter balled up on his arms as if he’d caught it trying to run away. I stripped out of yesterday’s suit, grabbed a spare blanket, and climbed back into bed with him. He might be asleep, but his presence made me feel strong enough to open that stained, yellowed notebook and take a good look inside.
If I’d been hoping for entries like, “Dear diary, today I thought of a great new project. I think I’ll call it Heliotrope Station…” I was shit outta luck. Like Warwick said: it was all initials, numbers, dates and charts. My knowledge of science is limited to high school biology and secret underground FPMP labs, so if scientific method was in play, it was lost on me. If anything, the diagrams reminded me of a sports playoff bracket, where you start a bunch of teams, the winners play each other, and finally the list gets winnowed down to one winner.
Or, in this case, the “subject.”
The subjects were numbers and dates. Birthdates. All of them a similar year to mine, give or take five years. One of them must’ve belonged to Alex Warwick…one of the entries that also listed a death date.
The subjects weren’t in chronological order, either, so I had to do a lot of flipping around. My birthday wasn’t listed, but I was jaded enough to presume my birth certificate wasn’t accurate—either because I’d been left on a cold basement floor, like Trinity, or because someone like Kamal had walked into a hospital and swapped my records with someone else’s.
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