Bitter Pill
Page 25
Jacob gave a gentle snort, and I glanced down at his sleeping profile and resisted the urge to stroke his hair. Strikingly good-looking, albeit with stray whisker growth around his goatee and deepening crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes…and no red bulging psychic veins in sight. Good thing mediums were the only ones who saw talents by light of a GhosTV. Otherwise, those telepaths from Washington would’ve known that he was more than just a highly trained NP.
Bad enough having me on everyone’s radar. At least one of us could sleep soundly.
I went through the notebook again, studying the birthdates of each “subject” to try them on for size and see if a date might somehow fit me. It was then that I noticed I knew one of those birthdates.
Not because I thought it was mine.
But because it belonged to the man at my side.
Jacob might come off like he thinks he’s the center of the universe, but obviously he wasn’t the only human being born on that particular date. That’s what I told myself. Then, I looked at the playoff bracket above his birthdate and saw initials, JM and SL. Jerry Marks and Shirley….
I gave Jacob a nudge. “Hey. What’s your mother’s maiden name?”
“Larson.” He was quiet a few moments, trying to fall back asleep, but then his curiosity got the better of him. “Why?”
I considered telling him I was just trying to retrieve a password. It was bad enough going through Camp Hell myself, but at least I’d been cognizant of the fact that I was there. Him, though? What if it turned out that all these years, he’d been part of some grand psychic experiment and not even known it?
I’d always envied his normal life…I hated to cast a pall over it now. But, in the end, I decided that whatever this was, it was too big for me to sweep under the rug. And besides, he deserved to know.
“Well, mister?” I gave his hair that caress I’d been holding back. “Rub the sleep out of your eyes. You’re gonna want to see this.”
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Bitter Pill is not the last PsyCop novel - stay tuned for PsyCop 12 later this year! And if you’re in the mood for more PsyCop right now, check out the collection PsyCop Briefs: Vol.1, containing twenty short stories and novellas chock full of between-the-books Vic-and-Jacob goodness.
ABOUT THIS STORY
I DID A re-listen of the earlier PsyCop audiobooks to prep for Bitter Pill. While it was a huge treat to spend so much time with Gomez Pugh (whose Vic voice is just like I hear it in my head), it was also bizarre to be transported back to a time when poor Vic didn’t even know how to salt a ghost. I think it’s definitely possible to get so close to the top of your game that there’s not much left for you to learn. That’s not to say Vic won’t continue to evolve, just that some of the tricks he picks up in these later novels are more interpersonal and social than psychic.
I know a lot of writers who use binaural pulses to up their productivity. I generally don’t like any of the sounds that pull me up into the higher (beta) frequencies. I’m more like Vic, I prefer the stuff that brings me down. There’s a site/app called brain.fm that uses binaural and other tones to entrain brainwaves. I bought a lifetime membership some time ago but find I only use it when I need to drown out barking dogs. Of course, it would be amazing if brainwave apps were a magic bullet. Slip on the headphones and fall right into inspired productivity.
Alas. There is no magic bullet. Not that I’ve yet discovered, anyhow.
I was pretty excited to have Vic team up with Zigler again, even though Zig’s not exactly a flashy character. To me, he represents the everyman, the non-psychic who finds extrasensory stuff understandably scary. But whenever he’s the one whose investigative work turns up something important, I always do a little “hooray” for him. There’s something to be said for being tenacious and smart. (I found it funny that in Body and Soul, Vic’s initial reaction was “I hate this guy.”)
I was promoting Among the Living recently and was shocked to realize I’d started this series 13 years ago. When I revisit the early stories, I generally only notice it around the technology. The other day I saw a guy at the grocery store whip out a flip phone, and I thought, “Thank God Vic’s not the very last holdout!” No doubt a decade from now, Vic’s current smartphone will seem just as quaint as his flip phone.
With a wedding looming and now Kamal’s notes in play, I’m eager to see where the next PsyCop will take Jacob and Vic.