PsyCop 6: GhosTV (38 page)

“Get out.” Karen hefted her axe like she damn well meant to use it.

Given that she was so adamant about guarding that doorway, I figured it must be important. Behind her, Lisa motioned for me to get going—right, as if I’d turn tail and just leave her trapped there beyond the looking glass. I was in cop-mode just as much as she was, and on top of that, Karen’s craziness didn’t scare me—though it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to watch out for that axe. I glanced down—Jacob was cradling Faun Windsong, who was gasping out huge sobs and covered in slime, but her head looked round enough. If I could pull Lisa and Debbie back through that door, maybe they’d be okay, too.

Of all the various scenarios I’d trained for, hostage negotiation was not one of them. Maybe that was another of Sando’s many skills, and we’d learn it during next fall’s training inservice. Even so, I knew the value of staying calm. So while Karen was bugging out and Lisa was screaming at her, I decided to take it down a few notches. I showed her my empty hands so that she could see I wasn’t going to draw on her—yet. Then I motioned for Lisa to stop the
Drop the weapon! 
routine, and said, “Look, I just want to talk.” Karen clenched the axe, but her psycho-eyes went slightly puzzled.

“This isn’t what you wanted,” I said, “is it?” Karen didn’t contra-dict me, so I went on. “You’re a smart lady—think about it. Yeah, Chekotah’s a creep, and yeah, he strung you along. But it doesn’t look like revenge is gonna make anything better. Keep going with this, and there’s no way it can end well.”

“There never was,” she snapped.

Behind her, Lisa motioned for Debbie to take Chekotah and start circling around so they were flanking Karen.

“Right,” I said, “I get it. Sometimes everything’s just another shade of crap. But listen, here’s something else I know. You’ve got a ton of talent—and you could do more with it.”

She must’ve been waiting for me to tell her to tone it down, because the look of confusion on her face was priceless.

“Forget the ‘light worker’ bullshit. You’re a medium.”

“No….” she didn’t sound very sure.

“You are. Your subtle bodies come apart like a bunch of nesting dolls.

But you’ve only been working on one muscle—the astral muscle—and leaving everything else to go flabby.” As someone who’d never had any idea he could project, but who saw ghosts like they were right there in front of him, I should know. “If you can do this astral thing, then you can sense spirits.” She was so strong, level-five at least, that with the right training, she’d probably be able to
see
them as well as I could. “It’s just a matter of focusing on a different subtle body.”

“Why should I care?”

“Because that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? The afterlife?” I searched her face. “Your son?”

At the mention of her dead kid, her expression froze, but her energy shifted palpably. She flickered. The door flickered. Lisa saw the change, and made the call to get out of there while the getting was good. “Go-go-go,” she barked, and tried to herd the civilians through.

There was a blur, and a whooshing sound filled my ears, and the three of them distorted and began to stretch—but Karen reached into the smear of light and astral matter, snagged something, and pulled.

Chekotah’s astral body pulled free from the stream and snapped back into the astral. Lisa and Debbie, it seemed, had broken through.

Commotion in the physical started up behind me, lots of shuffling and yelling, but I didn’t dare take my focus off Karen. She flickered, hard. But there was no way for Chekotah to get past her. It would serve him right for me to leave him behind, but I supposed I should at least attempt to pull him out, too. “Listen,” I said, “just listen a second. I know about spirits. Okay?”

The flickering stabilized. Karen stood before me, still blocking the doorway, but now the axe was dangling at her side and she was making major eye contact—not looking there occasionally and then looking away again, like normal people do—but unflinchingly staring deep into my eyes.

“When people die,” I said, “and you’ll be able to verify this for yourself—most of ’em move on. A few of ’em stick around. But the ones who stick around are usually messed-up. Murders and suicides, or people with unfinished business. As for accidents and illness—at the very worst, they leave a little residue. A repeater. A psychic impression of the final moments, like a moving snapshot. I think the spirits of those repeaters, they’re fine. They go wherever it is people…go. When they die.”

Karen was so still, I almost thought her astral pause-button had been triggered. But then she said, “Heaven?”

While I knew she probably wanted to hear that heaven was full of clouds and angels and Jesus and all-you-can-eat, calorie-free buffets, I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her. Not Psych to Psych. I felt something pulling at me, voices in my ear. It was getting hard to think, but I managed to say, “Maybe it’s heaven, or maybe it’s some higher plane. Call it what you want. I know there’s something more, though.

I’ve seen spirits go there…and join up with their loved ones again.” She didn’t cry. She was beyond crying. Her face twisted into an expression of such raw despair I had to look away.

“Don’t you get it?” I said. “You’ll see your kid again. When it’s time. But until then, what good’s it gonna do to rack up a bunch of casual-ties, all over this…guy?” I did my best to ignore the sensation of being shaken when it seemed to me I was standing still. I gestured at the sniveling little nerd she’d trapped beyond the door. “Forget about him. He doesn’t deserve you.”

While it blew my mind that I’d actually been in full agreement with Con Dreyfuss, especially to the point of repeating him verbatim, Karen seemed to experience a headful of epiphanies, too. Her expression registered a series of shocks. She released the astral axe, and it dissolved into a shower of sparks as it slid from her grasp. She was still blocking that door, though.

“Let him go,” I said gently. “I have no idea if there’s a big scorecard in the sky or not—but just in case there is, do you want to take the chance you’ll screw up your afterlife—for
him?
And even if it turns out to be one big free-for-all once you go into the light, what about the rest of
this
life? You can be so much more without him.” I’d been trying to appeal to the childless mother in her, but inadver-tently, I ended up speaking to the dog-eat-dog part of her that wanted to be the best, the brightest, at everything she did. She whirled around to get a look at astral Chekotah, and even though I had serious doubts about whether I’d have any aim when my physical body was being jostled around, I slipped my astral gun out of its holster in case the axe made a reappearance. But instead of splitting Chekotah like a cord of firewood—which I have no doubt she could have—Karen gave him a look of such pure contempt it made him shrink even smaller, and she pointed her finger in the direction of the Quiet Room, and she said, “Go.”

I couldn’t stick around long enough to see if he made it or not. My physical body was pulling at me hard, and the sickening psyactive in my system was the only thing that kept me from snapping back like a lightning bolt. It felt good to let go, to let it drag me into that shell, in the way that puking feels good after you’ve been hovering over the toilet half the night waiting to hurl.

My hearing came back first—pandemonium—while my vision took a moment to clear. And it seemed like there were hands all over me, though I was too stunned to recoil from all the unwelcome touching.

“Can you hear me?”

“Call an ambulance.”

“I think he’s okay, give him a second.”

“Don’t—what good’s a paramedic going to do?”

“If this has anything to do with that pill you gave him….” Jacob’s face was the first thing I saw when gray sparklies dissipated, and I felt like I was back a hundred percent in the physical again.

He’d hauled me onto his lap with my head cradled in one hand and the other one stroking my cheek. I put my hand over his—and saw tracers. Three or four hands that snapped into position one after the other. Okay, maybe ninety-five percent back.

“Vic?”

“No ambulance.” I tipped my head back to try to make heads or tails of what was going on in the rest of the room. From my upside-down vantage point with my subtle bodies rattling around inside me, I saw Debbie March wrapped in the afghan. She was huddled against the far wall with a notebook on her lap, scribbling in it so hard I was worried she’d tear through the page. Her red hair hung in straggles, wet with goop, and her makeup was gone.

Bert Chekotah was as naked as the day he was born, and just as goopy—and the little creep had a much hotter body than he deserved, which, although it was pretty superficial, did explain some of his appeal. Maybe. Faun Windsong and Lyle were huddled around him, wailing. Con Dreyfuss stood with his back against the wall, gazing off into the distance. Or maybe he was listening. If I’d been looking at him with the GhosTV tuned to the psychic channel, I had no doubt his psyactive-enhanced flashlight eyes would be too bright to physically see through. Or maybe he had so many sets of eyeballs that they saw too much for him to navigate.

“Vic, are you okay?” Lisa’s voice. I cast around until I found her kneeling right beside me in Jacob’s blazer, crying, with ectoplasm and tears glistening on her cheeks. The realization that she was the only other one besides Jacob touching me was a big relief.

“If you don’t write it down,” Debbie called to her, “you’re going to forget.”

“I…don’t…care,” Lisa said, between great, wracking sobs.

Wait a minute.
I
cared. I needed to know who’d been using my arm as a telegraph machine. I reached for her—more tracers—and patted her hand. It was freezing. “Were you really the one telling me to turn off the TV?”

“Yes,” she said, certain at first…but then she grew puzzled as the specifics of it slipped from her mind, just like a dream.

“How?”

“I think I…I asked the
si-no
, I remember that. And then….” Come on, she’d been physical again for, what? All of two minutes?

And she didn’t know how she’d managed to move my arm? “Think, Lisa. How did you do it if Karen had you trapped behind the door?”

“I asked the
si-no
…” her crying abated as she strained to recall the sequence of events. “And the
si-no
told me to pray. And so I prayed to my guardian angel.”

What? Come on—give me a break. That couldn’t be it. She might as well have said she drove an iron spike into the ground and invoked the power of Thor.

Jacob didn’t care about the specifics. All that mattered to him was that we’d found Lisa. He gathered her against him, and me too, and held us both, and maybe he shed a tear or two himself. And for a moment it seemed it was just him and me and Lisa, and the rest of the world dropped away while we were reunited, and safe, and whole.

He kissed the top of her head, and mine…and then kissed my cheek, the side of my mouth….

“Well no wonder you weren’t interested,” Lyle huffed. “You could have mentioned your partner was doing you. Honestly.” He wasn’t the only one not feeling the love. Faun Windsong hauled off and slapped naked Chekotah so hard he staggered, and the sound was so loud it echoed through the Quiet Room. He was lucky she was on a Xanax and Valium cocktail, otherwise he might’ve lost a tooth.

She didn’t say why she’d belted him; she was too enraged. But she didn’t need to. Dreyfuss coughed—or maybe it was a snigger he’d covered with his hand, and although he was looking at a spot on the far wall, I could tell he’d just enjoyed that whack as much as Faun Windsong had.

As if it wasn’t chaotic enough, a couple of the students shoehorned their way in, with one of the security guards from the front door in tow.

“Dr. Chekotah?”

“Professor March!”

As still more people packed into the room, Jacob rested his forehead against Lisa’s temple, and gave me a world-weary smile. “You scared the hell out of me. I thought you’d had an embolism, or a stroke.”

“Nope. I just don’t have enough brainpower to be awake in the physical and astral at the same time.” Although, if I did…that’d be a pretty neat trick up my sleeve.

“How do you feel?”

Relieved. Disoriented. Surreal. But mostly… “Hungry.”

I took a long, deep breath, and I held it. Savored it. And wished I could roll around and rub my face in the smell of it.

Bacon. Crispy. Just the way I like it.

I was so famished I probably would have eaten anything, even spelt.

But once she’d taken a quick shower and swiped on some bright pink lipstick, Debbie hustled us over to a 1950’s diner on the beach called Sambo’s where the waitresses still wore polyester, the chrome napkin holders were shiny, and the coffee was strong enough to keep my mind off the tracers. And while we had plenty to celebrate with both her and Lisa back in the physical again, I think mostly we wanted to get away from the melodrama vortex at PsyTrain. Lyle’d had the good sense to know he was in over his head, and he alerted the board of directors, who swept in with their bifocals, briefcases and very disappointed frowns. Chekotah stepped down from his four-day director-ship to try to spare the organization some of the scandal, and Faun Windsong…I mean, Katrina Wojtowicz…was being considered to take his place. I thought it made sense. She always acted like the boss of everyone. They might as well make it official.

It seemed to me like something was missing—that I should file a report, or head into Warwick’s office to brief him, or feel vaguely guilty about Bob Zigler doing all the boring paperwork. Given how much of my time as a detective is spent wrangling red tape, the luxury of being able to catch my breath felt positively decadent. But I wasn’t on duty. Not with the Chicago Police Department, anyway. I suspected I might have been acting as day-labor for the FPMP in this whole debacle…but I’d never signed anything formal. And so I decided to tell myself I’d been here as a favor, helping out a friend, and that was that.

We sat in a big, semicircular booth, me on the outside, and Lisa next to me, pinned between me and Jacob like we were worried she’d disappear if we didn’t anchor her between us. Debbie was on Jacob’s other side, and beside her, opposite me at the other end of the bench, was Dreyfuss. I still felt somewhat out of alignment, but given that I caught Dreyfuss searching my face a couple of times, I was guessing his eyesight was almost back to normal.