PsyCop 6: GhosTV (12 page)

“I don’t want to owe him anything.”

“He never said you would, did he?”

“So far, just an exorcism—but I’m sure there’s wiggle room for him to tack some extras onto my bill somewhere down the line. I wish he’d just be straight with me. There are too many angles to this thing. Too many ways it can turn out bad.”

He held me for several long moments, and then he said, “There’s got to be some reason he shipped it all the way to California.”

“There’s a reason he does everything. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Look.” Jacob turned me around so that we were facing each other, with a displaced dresser to one side and the crate on the other, and a mattress behind each of us. “After Heliotrope Station, the thought of anyone recruiting you for your talent makes you shut down. I get it. But what about the Fifth Precinct? That turned out okay, otherwise you never would’ve stuck with it this long.”

“Maybe I don’t want to screw that up.”

He worked my forearm through the sleeve of my jacket with his thumb. “Then you need to look. Because hiding your head in the sand isn’t helping anything.”

I glanced at the crate. The gunmetal gray plastic was pebbled with texture, with a few scrapes showing on one of the sides right around doorknob-height. The corners and edges were chased with metal, and the whole thing had a strap around it that closed with a barrel lock.

I tried to picture myself opening it up, but I’d gotten myself worked up to the point of imagining a one-way ticket back to Camp Hell, or somewhere worse. Somewhere they weren’t just trying out random meds to see what would happen to Psychs’ brains. Somewhere they damn well knew…and they used them to manipulate us like a bunch of drugged-out puppets. “I can’t.”

He kissed me. It was gentle, something I felt more in his goatee tickling my upper lip and my chin than on my mouth, and he said softly, “Then I am.”

He turned, keeping one hand anchored on my arm, and thumbed the barrels to 0-2-2-3. The lock clicked open.

“So…you actually do know when my birthday is,” I said. And there, it was me trying to cut the tension, not him.

“Of course I do. I’d just lost track and the date snuck up on me.” He glanced down at the open lock. “Are you doing this with me?” I couldn’t. I shook my head.

“Are you going to stop me?”

Was I? It didn’t feel like it. I was paralyzed. I gave my head another curt shake that could be interpreted as a
no
.

Jacob popped a couple of clasps, top and side, and gave the crate a wiggle. It stayed shut. He ran his fingers along the closed seam, found a clasp on the bottom he’d missed the first time around, and snapped it open.

A dark crack appeared. The front of the crate separated. It didn’t open on a hinge like a door; it pulled off like the lid of a big shoebox standing on its side. Before I could see anything, Jacob demanded, “What the…?” as if the case could talk back to him.

And given some of the things I’d seen over the last few years, I really hoped it couldn’t.

“It’s a TV set,” he said. “An old one.”

I half-heard that last part over a great whooshing in my ears, because the apathy and avoidance I’d so carefully maintained over the mammoth crate came crashing down like a thrill ride at the amusement park, and my heart was pounding so hard I felt like my blood was going to burst through my veins and squirt out my ears. The lid was blocking my view. I took it from Jacob a lot more calmly than I felt, and held it there to one side of me while I looked.

I’d been expecting the GhosTV.

I was wrong.

The TV set inside the crate was decades older than the GhosTV I knew.

It was a seventies model in a more elaborate wooden console, with sparkly brown fabric covering the panel that hid the speakers.

Even though it was definitely not the set from the motel room in Missouri, my heart kept on pounding as if it knew something I hadn’t quite admitted yet. Like it remembered that even though the original GhosTV was in an evidence locker in St. Louis, Roger Burke and his cronies had cobbled together more than one GhosTV. And it was pretty sure I was currently looking at one of those “extras.”

“Help me unpack it,” I said. My voice was so thick with emotion that it startled Jacob.

“Is this…?”

“Not the one from St. Louis.” I took a careful breath and let it out.

“But I think it might be one of the others.”

“You hold the crate. I’ll get the set out.”

Fleetingly, I toyed with the idea of ruing my lack of athleticism—but everything’s got limits, and the desire to wallow in my self esteem issues couldn’t hold a candle to the thought that I could very well be in the presence of a genuine GhosTV—without a gun to my head or a shot of sodium amytal wending its way through my veins. Besides, holding the crate turned out to take a good amount of actual effort.

I was glad it wasn’t me prying the console out of its protective foam packing. It looked heavy.

“Do something with that crate,” Jacob said, struggling to maneuver a TV set as big as him with nowhere to put it.

I slung the crate onto my bed, and hoped I hadn’t just pulled a groin muscle.

“It was sideways in the box,” Jacob said. “Is that how it’s supposed to sit?”

“I doubt it. They’re supposed to blend in with their surroundings.”

“Then grab the top. I don’t want to drop it when we’re getting it into position.”

I did what he said, and then immediately wished I’d placed my feet in a better stance. Lift with your legs, that’s what they say, right? That’s all fine and good—but how are you supposed to lower something? The set was at a thirty-degree angle. One false move and it’d crush me.

“Got it?” Jacob said. He didn’t even sound like he was exerting effort.

“I’m at an awkward angle.”

He huffed, bearing the weight with one arm so he could reposition his hand. His fingers appeared, wrapped around the edge of one of the console’s feet a few inches away from my face. I experienced a surge of gratitude for those big, strong hands. “How’s that?” I planted my feet a bit better. “Can you pull the bottom back so it’s got somewhere to swing down?”

He walked the set back carefully. “You sure you got it? We could switch.”

Could we? Not unless I was able to walk
through
him. “Yeah, it’s good. Let’s do this.”

Just when I thought I didn’t have any left…me and my fucking pride.

We should have switched, me steering, him bearing the weight. But no. I chose to be the one easing the behemoth to the floor—and while I had nothing to gauge its weight by, since it wasn’t the size, shape or density of a human being, it had to be a few hundred pounds, minimum.

The console was at 4 o’clock, I had nowhere to back up, Jacob was grasping at wood trim, and my hands felt like someone was trying to tear them off with a big pair of pliers.

“Flex your knees,” he told me. “Breathe.”

I let my breath out in a loud gasp.

“Easy,” he said. “Keep telling yourself, a couple more inches. That’s it.”

“I…can’t.”

“You got it, just a few more.”

My hands burned, really burned—and my back and my knees and my arms and everything else on me was a blinding, red wall of pain. But I couldn’t drop it—could
not
drop it—no matter what. I’d dreamt about it every time I faced the one-eyed headache I got from swallowing too much Auracel. The sickening meds I took just covered up the spirits, but the GhosTV did something else. What if it scrambled the signal?

What if it actually affected them instead of just making it so that I didn’t need to see?

“Almost there,” Jacob said. Calm. Velvety smooth.

Yes. I could do it. I’d set that monster TV down without dropping it.

A few more inches, for real this time. The floor was near. I could feel it. Almost there, just like Jacob said. Almost.

But then the console smashed my hand into the corner of the dresser…and pain? The pain I’d been in was nothing compared to the agony of my hand being crushed.

The console slipped.

Blind panic. I could practically feel the delicate wiring tearing from its sockets, the tubes shattering—the GhosTV, dead before I’d even turned it on.

It took me a heartbeat to realize that the pressure on my hand had eased. Jacob’s shoulder brushed my arm. He’d shifted around the console. He’d caught it. “Easy,” he said. “All the way down.” When the cabinet’s feet touched down, I barely felt it over the throbbing in my knuckles. Jacob took my hand—so gently, for such a big hulk of a guy—and brought my skinned knuckles to his lips. “That’s gonna swell.”

I wiggled my fingers, one at a time. They moved. Probably not broken—just pulped. The knuckles looked white and gristly. Blood started to bead up from the scrapes, belatedly, as if it had been too busy pounding through my panic centers to notice something as unexcep-tional as a friction wound.

Jacob turned to the console once it was apparent that my hand still worked. “How do you know if it’s really…what you think it is?”

“There’ll be stuff inside, controls that aren’t original to the set.” He crouched, and shone his pocket flashlight through the vents in the back of the cabinet. “When I was a kid, Uncle Leon and I took an old set apart to tinker with, so I might be able to spot anything unusual…but from here it’s hard to tell what’s what.”

I leaned over the console as well as I could without putting my weight on it. The back panel was screwed on. I tried tugging on the top of the cabinet. Nothing. Felt around the tube to see if it hinged out like the original GhosTV. Nope. It was in there pretty good. I slipped my hands underneath. Nothing strange there, either.

Jacob straightened up, pocketed his flashlight, and said, “The original—was it plugged in?”

“Uh. It must’ve been.”

Jacob held up the two-pronged power cord and raised his eyebrows at me. I nodded. He plugged it in, looked to see if I was going to turn it on. When I made no move to do it, he flipped the switch.

Snow.

We watched my favorite channel for a minute, and then he said, “Is this how the other one—”

“No, there was a game on. But it was just a recording. It had a DVD player mounted inside the cabinet. And something else, a thing with a digital readout and some knobs.”

Jacob changed the channel. They were all snow. “Even if there was reception, we’d need an antenna and a digital converter.” I didn’t think reception was the point. At least, not the reception of TV broadcast.

He switched from UHF to VHF and looked at me expectantly. “Anything?” I didn’t think so, but unless there was a ghost in the room, would I even know? The only evidence I’d had that the original GhosTV was doing anything at all was the fade-in, fade-out of the local spirit population. “It might work, it might not. But if this place has been cleaned out—even by mediums who don’t think they need to rate their talent with numbers—we’re never gonna know, because there’s nothing to see.”

“We could ask Dreyfuss…” Jacob began.

“I’m not asking him.” Not until I had no other choice.

With my flashlight, I searched for telltale wear, excessive smudging, breaks in the patina, or other clues that might hint at a spot that’d been messed with, but other than the areas where Jacob and I had manhandled it out of the crate and searched it ourselves, there wasn’t even so much as a fingerprint on it.

Jacob pulled his keys out of his pocket and unfolded a little Phillips-head screwdriver from the keyring. “Should I?” It’d be stupid to go this far and not go all the way. I nodded. Jacob turned off the set, unplugged it, and got to work on the screws in back.

“Bring your flashlight over here,” he said as he tipped the back panel off. I wedged myself as close as I could, and we both shone our lights in.

The first thing I noticed was that the inside of the console was as squeaky clean as the outside. No dust, no cobwebs, no crud. Other than the pristine state of the old wires and electrical parts, there was nothing special about this TV set. I sat down hard on one of the beds as the strain of the day washed over me.

“On the St. Louis TV—how big were the extra parts?” Jacob asked.

“Pretty big.” And pretty fucking obvious, too.

In a move worthy of a contortionist, Jacob pressed his ear to the floor so he could look underneath the cabinet. He straightened into a crouch, sighed—and then caught the look on my face, which I’m guessing was the look of a kid who just figured out that Santa’s nothing more than a drunk in a red suit. “Don’t jump to any conclusions.

Someone went through a lot of effort to ship this here.”

“Did they? Or did they find it at a local swap meet and put it here to fuck with my head?”

“I’m sure Dreyfuss knows how it—”

“That asshole next door scares the crap out of me. Okay?”

“Babe.” He never calls me
babe
. He tried to reach for me, but there was a big, honkin’ TV console in his way. “I think you’re feeling the plane ride, and you’re worn out and dehydrated.” And jonesing for a Valium. He didn’t say as much, but I’ll bet we were both thinking it.

“This thing’s got to work,” he said. “And I’ll bet there’s some way we can use it, right here, right now.” He crammed his way between the TV and the dresser until he squeezed through to the pocket of space in front of the bathroom door. “You don’t even need to ask him yourself. I’ll do it.”

“So he can start fucking with your head, too? No way.”

“Then what do you want? Do you want to risk messing this thing up by turning the wrong knob? Do you think you’ll be able to sleep knowing that it’s here, right here, and you haven’t got any idea how to use it?” He turned his darkest, most forbidding laser-eyed look on me. “What about Lisa? Isn’t she what really matters?”

“Oh, sonofa….” I stood up from the bed with the intention of giving the console a final once-over, when something in my low back that’d been irritated by the heavy lifting sent a spasm from my ass cheek all the way down to the back of my knee. Before I could catch myself I pitched forward. In our loft, I would’ve ended up sprawled on the floor. But there’s a little thing called “elbow room” in our loft. In that puny room crammed with beds and dressers and crates and furniture, I found myself hurtling straight for the old TV.