“The repeaters? You’ve had the ectoplasm splatter on your shoes. It’s not like I’m saying anything you don’t already know.”
“Yeah, still…I lost count of how many times your file contains the word unknown.”
I jerked around so fast my seatbelt snapped taut against my shoulder. “You’ve seen my file?”
“As the lead on the assignment? Sure. I get some basic info.”
I did my best to quell my giddiness over the thought of actually seeing my permanent record—and threw up a protective white balloon to hide whatever wasn’t quellable. “How much ‘info’ are we talking?”
“Like I said, it was all redacted.”
“A paragraph? A page? A novel?”
Bly drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and it took him a moment to answer. When he did, I suspected he was speaking as an empath, not an FPMP agent. “Maybe no one’s shooting at us on this gig, but even so, I’m not gonna be the one to train bad habits into you.”
“What bad habits? If the shoe was on the other foot, you’d want to know.”
“Forget about your past, at least for the time being. Your history is on ice right now. Someday your life might depend on your ability to assume another identity. Devote all your brain power to your cover identity and your mission.”
He wasn’t willing to talk? Fine.
I’d have plenty of time to wear him down.
We approached our new base of operations and turned down the alley. From the back, the townhouses looked even more cramped and pre-fab than they had from the front. I wasn’t even sure which one was ours. Bly pressed the garage door opener, and one of the stalls lumbered open.
Even though the condos were squashed together tighter than my balls, I had to admit, when we pulled into that garage, it was a hell of a lot more convenient than driving around the neighborhood looking for a spot like we sometimes did at home.
We climbed out and let ourselves inside. There was more furniture in the townhouse, now that the place was “ours.” Equally as unfamiliar as the staging furniture, but bigger. The rooms felt crowded, not just because there were boxes everywhere. “Couldn’t the stagers have handled this?” I complained.
“It’s more realistic if we unpack it ourselves.”
“Fine. Let’s get moving.” I grabbed a box marked Clothes and hauled it up the stairs, and straight into the bedroom where I’d seen the pair of twin beds when I did my walkthrough with Carl. But there were no beds anymore. Just a bunch of exercise equipment. I checked the other second-floor bedroom. It was still an office. Different furniture, but clearly an office.
“Did you need a hand with that box?”
I faced off with Bly in the hallway, and over the boxes we were holding, said, “I figured we’d have a guest room.”
“Neighbors pick up on patterns. Even if you snuck around in the dark, it’s not worth the risk of blowing our cover when someone figures out we’re sleeping in different beds.”
Maybe. But…. “The previous owner died upstairs. We’re supposed to sleep there?”
“It’s clean. You said so yourself.”
I did, didn’t I? But that was before anyone told me I had to live there. I crept upstairs and found the big master bedroom had been upgraded with a fresh redesign. The woodwork was still natural, but now the walls were painted a pale blue, and the carpet felt springy underfoot, even through the soles of my white leather sneakers. Heavy wooden dressers and a single, king-sized bed. I tried not to think too hard about how awkward bedtime was gonna be. It was easy enough for the time being—mainly, I was busy sniffing around for traces of decomp.
Bly set the box he carried in the closet, then planted himself in the center of the room with his hands on his hips, looking very much like a cop. “Should we do another ritual, just to be safe?”
While it wouldn’t really hurt to throw more salt, I suspected the only purpose it would serve would be to put my mind at ease. “There’s no ghost here. There never was.”
“Then why are you bothered by the thought of sleeping here?”
Good question. Probably because, even though I was desensitized to the sight of a dead body, and despite the fact that I knew certain basic mechanics of the afterlife, I still harbored traces of the intrinsic fear of death. Whether it was nature or nurture that put it there, I couldn’t say. But it was probably a good thing I wasn’t cavalier about sleeping in a room where someone had so recently croaked.
“You’re not worried about the fact that someone died here?” I asked him.
“Think about all the people who’ve walked this earth. Chances are, at some point or another, death has touched everything. A fifth level medium tells me there’s no ghost, and that’s what I pay attention to. If you said it’s clean, it’s clean.”
I took a deep breath, searching for a telltale whiff of rot. “Maybe so…but I have enough trouble sleeping as it is. We’re swapping the bedroom with the home gym downstairs.”
“That’ll work.” He keyed in a quick text and sent it. “If anyone asks, make sure you bitch about how much the movers charged us to come back.”
“Who could possibly care?”
He walked to the front window, pulled back the edge of the curtain and motioned me over. Across the street, a figure was silhouetted in their bay window, arms crossed, staring directly at our house. “You’d be surprised how fascinating people find new neighbors.”
Great.
I took one last look at the big bedroom, tried to imagine myself sleeping there, then headed back down.
It wasn’t long before some “movers” showed up. I didn’t know any of them, but Bly did. He knew lots of people. He was a generalist, which meant the Director could plug him in wherever a high-level empath was needed, from questioning a stubborn source, to calming the nerves of an edgy team, to scoping out an unsuspecting subject.
I cracked open my wardrobe and, thankfully, found a pair of sweatpants. Once I’d dispensed with the skinny jeans, I set to work hauling boxes. Despite the fact that the burly agents weren’t actually movers, they made quick enough work swapping all the furniture around, and while I might have looked busy hanging up clothes, I wasn’t too occupied to notice how they acted.
If two guys at the Fifth Precinct had gone undercover as a married couple, they’d never hear the end of it. At the FPMP, no one even gave so much as a suggestive eyebrow waggle.
Not bad to be working with grownups for a change. Still, when the stagers left and I was alone with Bly, I felt awkward and lame. And knowing that he damn well knew that was how I felt made it even worse.
It was late by the time the fake but helpful movers left me and my new husband alone with our remaining boxes. “What are we gonna do about dinner?” I said. “Pizza?”
Bly answered with a scoff.
“You just burned a ton of calories moving furniture,” I reasoned. “You seriously can’t have just one pizza?”
“Says the guy who can stop at one pizza.” He beckoned me into the kitchen. I followed.
The first floor of the townhouse was all open, a living room that flowed into a dining room that flowed into a kitchen. Technically, I suppose the cannery was the same deal, but it felt different in a housey house. Small, and kind of forced.
The kitchen itself seemed promising, though. The appliances were all brand-new, stainless steel, and the stove looked expensive. Jacob would enjoy this kitchen, I thought. And then I felt a stark pang of loneliness.
Bly grabbed a Styrofoam cooler from the fridge and pulled out a couple of shrink-wrapped plastic trays. “Chicken or fish?”
“Fish.” They looked awfully small.
He tossed them into the built-in microwave—which Jacob would’ve also liked—and got them nuking.
While the food warmed, he parked himself at the counter and pulled out his phone. “I’ll send you the briefing on our subject, but the basics are this. Sylvester Hale, 82, next-door neighbor to the south.” The briefing joined all the other unre
ad missives in my FPMP app with a ding of shame.
“The one who keeps failing the pricy mediumship test?”
“That’s the one. And now he’s making a big stink on social media about it.”
Once I wrapped my head around a guy twice my age on social media, I said, “So does he have a leg to stand on, or is he just fond of his own complaining?”
“You know more than anyone how inconclusive the tests can be—even with the new questionnaire section you and Darla put together. Director Kim figured that between the two of us, we could figure out if there was something the tests all managed to miss.”
“And now we get to live in a house where someone just died. Lucky us.”
The microwave beeped. Bly pulled out the trays and slid one across the table. I went through every drawer, twice, and finally located the silverware in the first place I’d looked. We peeled back the plastic and ate, and were done in five minutes. It tasted good enough—could’ve used more salt—but the portions were awfully skimpy. I could still go for a pizza, but Bly couldn’t afford to put on any weight and start looking like his old self. Since his weight loss program was keeping him alive in more ways than one, I figured I shouldn’t press it.
Bly tossed the trays before I embarrassed myself by licking mine clean. He said, “I’ll be splitting my time between here and HQ—but it fits with our cover story of me being the big shot marketing guy, and it’ll give you plenty of potential one-on-one time with Hale. We’ve got until the end of the month to figure out if his claims hold any water.”
“The end of the month?” I was already feeling claustrophobic.
“Or sooner, if you can swing it. Once we have what we need, you get a ‘job offer’ in California you can’t turn down, and we’re out of here.”
6
You’d think I would be used to climbing into bed with a big gym rat of a guy every night, and so my new identity would be nowhere near as distressing for me as it was for Bly. But when it came time for lights-out, I found myself unexpectedly bashful.
I attempted some conversation to break the ice. “You got someone waiting for you back at home?”
“Naw. I’m more of a lone wolf.”
“That must suck—being used to sleeping alone, and having to acclimate yourself to this.”
He perched on the edge of the mattress in plaid pajama bottoms and a well-worn T-shirt while he set an alarm on his phone. “Let’s just say I’ve slept in more precarious situations. I did some scary undercover gigs, back when I was a PsyCop. This? Piece of cake.”
Did he have to go and mention cake? I was still hungry from that paltry dinner.
The bed was the same size as the one I shared with Jacob, but it seemed a lot bigger. Probably because Bly wasn’t sprawling all over the mattress and trying to get down my pants. We lay there together in the dark, side by side, staring up at the ceiling. “I have a hard enough time sleeping in my own bed,” I admitted.
“Yeah, I figured.”
“You can tell, just by…I dunno…?”
He folded his hands over his chest and considered his reply. “There are certain types of people in the world. Maybe it’s an oversimplification, but it fits more often than not. Some folks are just content with the way things are. The rest of us think too much. Especially those of us who feel the need to put ourselves at personal risk to try and stop the predators from ravaging the prey.”
“The world isn’t fair,” I said. “I’m not naive enough to think my efforts can balance the scales.”
“No. But you keep trying to nudge it in that direction, anyhow. And if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself.”
I considered whether or not it disturbed me that Bly had my number. It didn’t, not really. Most likely, I was just inured to the idea of the empaths in my life viewing all my secrets on full display.
I stared at the ceiling some more. No tiles to count here. Just a bland white nothing. I reminded myself that I liked bland white nothings. And I deduced that Bly’s breathing hadn’t yet shifted into anything that sounded like sleep. “So,” I ventured awkwardly. “Narcotics.”
“The fewer specifics you know about my PsyCop years, the better.”
Maybe so. He must’ve still been a threat to someone too big to take down, otherwise he wouldn’t have nixed the pizza. Still, I couldn’t just force myself to forget about the fact that I knew him before, back when he was John Wembly, the cheerful, paunchy PsyCop with the huge mop of hair.
Bly rolled over and put his back to me. “Get some sleep—undercover work takes a lot out of you. Maintaining a new identity can be deceptively taxing.”
I mirrored his pose, which left me back to back with him and staring at a window.
I wasn’t the only one with a past. Had Bly always been a so-called “lone wolf,” or had John Wembly left a wife or family behind? I usually presume everyone but me has parents, siblings. But high-level Psychs tend to fall into their own category. Most of the ones I knew at Camp Hell who did have families made it seem like their relatives were pretty eager to hand them over.
A bare tree outside cast a shadow across the glass, and I watched it wave in the breeze. Not quite as mind-numbing as counting ceiling tiles, but not bad. Eventually, I felt myself relax. Jacob would be sawing logs by now—deviated septum, he claims—and I wondered if he was currently snoring. Had Bly’s breathing deepened toward sleep? Hard to say. I was starting to slip away myself, and didn’t much care. But as I nodded off, he decided to answer my initial foray at conversation. “Having the whole bed to yourself isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But I’ve never had a relationship that didn’t go to shit once it got past the honeymoon stage, so I figure I’m better off doing without.”
7
A bare tree made fingernail sounds on the window all night, and the mattress didn’t feel like my mattress, but eventually I did drift off. I might have even slept to a reasonable hour, if I didn’t startle myself awake by realizing my foot was touching Bly’s.
I went downstairs to put on a pot of coffee. Did Bly drink coffee? No idea. But he used to be a cop. So, probably. As I dumped a random amount of grounds into the basket, I imagined Jacob not-so-subtly encouraging me to measure it. And then I felt that lonely pang again.
I considered calling him, but I’d been specifically told not to, and I didn’t want to come off as the rank amateur I really was. Undercover agents don’t check in at home. That’s just the nature of the job. And unless I wanted to fabricate a violation and report Bly to Internal Affairs, there was no reason to call Jacob professionally. So, I’d have to content myself with the idea that just a few neighborhoods away, my big lug of a man was sprawled diagonally across our bed, struggling toward wakefulness, or maybe abusing the snooze button.
While the machine coffeed, I parked myself at the kitchen table and told my phone, “Pull up my briefings on my current assignment.” It cheerfully disgorged enough reading material to keep me busy for the rest of the week. I scrolled down to the photos.
Sylvester Hale was a retired professor who was now a fixture in the local gay literary scene. He’d been doing guys since Rock Hudson graced movie screens, and wore his camp like a big chip on his shoulder. In the black-and-white promo shot in his dossier, he wore a natty little suit with a bow tie, and a cape. He gazed at the camera as if he was daring someone to make a remark about it, so he could leave them verbally disemboweled.
I poured myself a coffee and sipped it. Not my usual cup—it felt strange against my mouth. I told myself it was just a cup, and got back to my reading.
There were a few talking points suggested. Frank Lloyd Wright. Really? Progressive politics. As if. Schnauzers…huh. Maybe I could do something with that. How hard would it be to act like I was undecided about getting a dog? Jacob and I had even discussed it once, in passing, when we saw a painfully cute punk rock lesbian couple, half our age, walking a gaggle of mutts in bandannas. Not a real discussion, given that we’re never home. But a wistf
ul sort of “wouldn’t it be nice?”
I was staring at the wall, thinking about the way Jacob’s eyes go soft and moody when he’s feeling sentimental, when a series of stair creaks announced Bly was joining me. He was showered and dressed in his overpriced office casual, with his pale blue contacts in. Funny, how effectively two little discs can shield you from the world.
“The bookstore you’re scoping out today doesn’t open till ten,” he said. “You could’ve slept in.”
Jacob never made silly observations like that anymore. “What can I say? I’m a morning person.”
“The sooner you decide whether or not the old man is a medium, the sooner you’ll be back in your own bed.” He filled a travel mug with coffee and took a sip, winced, and beckoned for me to follow him to the door. “Time to put on a show for the neighbors.”
“Okay,” I said, with no comprehension of what that might entail.
Just inside the door, he paused to key something into his phone, then handed me the coffee and pulled on his winter coat. “I’ll exit the building. You count two seconds, then follow. Call me back and hand me the coffee. Then kiss me goodbye on the stoop.”
Crap. Part of me must have known something of that nature would be expected of me sooner or later, but I must’ve been hoping for later. And what kind of kiss, exactly, were we talking—cheek? Doubtful. Mouth? Probable. But most importantly…tongue, or no tongue?
Before I could overthink it, he simply said, “Go,” turned around, and walked out the door.
One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. Go.
As I pulled open our front door and the early morning sun peeking through the buildings beaned me between the eyes, a flash of a childhood memory floated to the surface. They did that once in a while nowadays. It was as if Stefan had dropped a candy bar wrapper into the emptiness where a mysterious hypnotist had cleaned house long ago. Every now and then, an intrepid ant would scout its way toward the bait and present me with a small glimpse of my past. Inconsequential. But somehow comforting.
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