Spook Squad (17 page)

I planted my feet, centered myself, and dipped my left hand into my pocket. I felt the telltale tingle immediately. Not surprising. My white light was in overdrive. I fixed myself on the repeater…and floundered. It wasn’t just that I told them to scram, I realized. There was a whole feeling attached to it. A feeling of untangling a knot, and of scrubbing a stubborn stain off the bathroom sink. A feeling of cleanness. Of rightness. Of release.

How the hell was I supposed to feel that in reverse?

“Filthy captivity” wasn’t exactly the vibe I was aiming for, I knew that much. Solidity, maybe? Substance? I sucked a big gulp of white light and imagined the repeater growing more opaque. Controlled.

Lucid.

The fairy dust was ready now, more than ready. My hand prickled unpleasantly, as if tiny shocks of static were playing over my fingertips. I wasn’t strong enough to leak ectoplasm on my own, not without the help of a big fat psyactive. So while there wouldn’t be any jelly involved, I would end up with a creepy, numb hand to show for my efforts. I was eager to get to that stage of the game, because at least then, I knew the “ick” would begin the process of wearing off.

I pinched. A granular sensation played between my fingertips, crackling with energy. With my internal faucet pouring white light into me, and the idea of solidity fixed firmly in my mind, I pulled out my fairy dust. I thought,
come back,
and I salted the repeater.

My vision flashed white.

It was a little bit like the sparkles you see when you press on your closed eyelids, except it had nothing to do with my optic nerve and everything to do with my sixth sense. I’d just focused a load of white light, maybe more than my wiring was designed to handle, and the conduit needed a second to cool off.

Maybe it wasn’t even an entire second. More like a moment, a breath. Even so, I was logy with relief when the dazzle wore off and I got my physical sight back. I glanced at Dreyfuss first. He sat behind his big desk, eyes boring through me while he picked at his cuticles without knowing he was doing it. Good, that was good. I could deal with him watching me, especially since I didn’t have any other choice.

The repeater, unfortunately, hadn’t reacted to my attempt quite like I’d expected.

He’d frozen.

It was something straight out of a sci fi flick, where the camera pans around some exaggerated action while the actor stops in an impossible pose. This freeze-frame was the shoulder hit, the critical hit. His body was torqued, with his legs, hips and right arm flung forward, and his left arm, shoulder and head snapped back. The spectral bloodspray was a galaxy of tiny frozen globules fixed in the air around the point of exit. One of his shoes was half off.
 

“I don’t think he’s gonna talk,” I admitted.

“Because he won’t,” Dreyfuss asked, “or because he can’t?”

“He can’t.”

“Because…?”

“He just can’t. That’s not how it works.”

Dreyfuss leaned forward, but he kept the big desk between him and me. And the repeater. “What’s the complication? Maybe we can MacGyver a fix.”

That spot between an unsolvable problem and an earnest problem-solver is one I always try to avoid. “There’s no workaround, okay? He’s a repeater. Repeaters don’t talk.”

If Dreyfuss was surprised I admitted spirits talk to me (in actual
words
) he didn’t show it. “So repeaters are shells.”

“Not even that,” I said. “They’re more like a snippet of film.”

“Energy.”

Everything’s energy, or so the theorists tell us. But thinking about the way everything’s made of atoms—or the empty space between them—makes me start to wonder if everything was really nothing, and as thoughts went, it wasn’t a very appealing notion.
 

“Energy from the moment of death?” he asked. I nodded. “But spirits are different.” I didn’t confirm or deny that, but it seemed he didn’t need me to. “Okay, so what if you don’t focus on the repeater. What if you focus on the person instead, and you invite them back for a little chat?”

“How is the repeater not the person?”

“It’s totally different…isn’t that what you just told me? A repeater is a moment, an imprint of a moment of violence. But a person’s mind, their spirit, the essential them-ness—that’s the part you’d need to tap if you want to talk to this guy and get an I.D.”

“I can’t focus on the person if I’ve got no idea who he is.”

“You’ve been going at this for a long time and you’re starting to get fatigued. I understand. But we’re right on the verge of something here. Don’t you feel it?”

All I felt was weariness and frustration…until he pulled out his pillbox. As I debated whether I’d be pushing my luck by asking for five pills for this final I.D., he said, “Maybe you don’t think you’re able to call this guy back, but a dozen reds says you can.”

Chapter 15

And so I tried. I sucked white light, and I tried to picture Triple-Shot speaking to me, and I imagined that my white light was calling to him. I tried and I tried, ’til my mouth was dry, my head throbbed and my pits were damp. Finally, when I was so woozy I needed to sit down, I lowered myself into a chair and said, “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Are you sure?” Dreyfuss said tentatively. My head snapped up as I registered his tone. It was unlike him to be anything other than one hundred percent certain. “Maybe you just need a little help.”

He rolled his chair over to the credenza behind him, turned a key in its lock, and slid open a panel. Inside was the tube of an old-fashioned TV.

It wasn’t like the massive tube TV from the bed and breakfast in Missouri, and it wasn’t like the old console in my basement. But there was no doubt in my mind it was a GhosTV.

He caught my eye. “What do you say?”

“Gimme a minute.” I swabbed my forehead with the sleeve of my jacket, and though I hated to ask for anything, I said, “Can I get a water?”

Dreyfuss rolled over to another panel and unlocked it. There was a small fridge inside.
He locks his fridge
…and here I thought
I
was paranoid. Still seated, he pulled out two waters and tossed them both to me, one after the other, in an easy underhand. “One for each of us. You pick.”

It was a relief that I didn’t need to be circumspect about how little I trusted him. I tossed one of the waters back. He caught it neatly, cracked the seal, and drank. I did the same. My temples were pounding. A Valium would help some. An Oxy would be better yet. No doubt Dreyfuss could score them if I asked, and no doubt he would pop one right along with me to put me at ease. But I didn’t—because I was clearly the worst negotiator on the planet, and asking for a painkiller would probably undercut my Seconal. Besides, I’d rather hold on to the headache, as a reminder to stop being so sloppy around him and keep a few of my secrets for myself.

No matter how badly I wanted those pills, I could tell by the twisting of my guts and the painful tightness in my neck muscles that there’d only be one more “try” in me that day. “Okay.” I might as well get it over with. “Turn that thing on.”

*
 
*
 
*

He powered up the tube. I did my best to breathe, and center myself, and relax. GhosTVs bring on headaches for me, and since I was already in the midst of one, I’d need to pace myself. No telling if a headache is only an angry firing of the nerves or an important vein fixing to pop.

“It’s set to the parameters we got from Jeffrey Alan Scott,” Dreyfuss said, hushed and reverent, as if he was announcing a golf match. “Let me know if you need ’em tweaked.”

I waved him off and he shut up. One more try…and I didn’t have energy to spare for a chat while I was attempting it.

As I adjusted to whatever it is the ramped up TV signal does to my brain, the repeater grew solid—rock solid, like I could mistake him for physical, if not for his mid-air spinaround. Given the posture, he seemed more like a waxworks figure than a ghost. Or a frozen moment of violence. Or whatever he actually was.

The level of detail was freakish. I could see the jacquard pattern of his tie fabric, count the blood globules. I eased around him. Not a nail-biter, this one. Hairy forearms, though. I could count the hairs. Hell, it felt as if I could pluck one, if I’d wanted to…but I didn’t try. Touching it might shatter the illusion before I’d seen what I needed to see.

I focused on his face. So much detail that it transcended my discomfort at rubbernecking this guy’s final moment—but enough detail to I.D. him? Maybe not while he was screaming like that. I looked at him, hard, and gave the relevant details that would narrow the search. Hair: medium brown. Eyes: medium brown. Skin: medium-toned Caucasian. Birthmarks: none. For such a spectacle of a repeater, he was nearly impossible to fucking describe.

I tried sending the paranormal film loop forward or back a few frames, to the point where his face looked more like his everyday face, more like something I could match with a mug shot. Nothing. Whatever I’d done with the fairy dust had cemented him in place, good.

I sucked some more white light and gave him a focused nudge.
 

Nothing.

I imagined his selfness, his soul, coursing back through the cosmos to inhabit the gruesome shell, to tell me something, anything of use.

Nothing.

My head was pounding now. I had Dreyfuss tweak the knobs, increment by increment. Together, we found a setting that felt so sharp-edged sparkling hyperclear that I wondered if maybe I needed to go get my eyes examined. If the first settings represented what I’d come to accept as “clear,” maybe middle aged farsightedness was finally taking hold. The repeater was so acutely vivid now I could practically count his skin cells. And there was still nothing I could use.

His eyes were wide and shocked. His face was contorted. His mouth gaped in a scream…but now, I could count his fillings.

Maybe I should ask for dental records.
I thought it facetiously, but actually, it wasn’t a bad idea. We should probably act on it right away. The repeater might fade with time. Or he might be stuck here for good. There was no way of knowing. I needed to go lie down, but I might only have this one chance.

“Our top five,” I said to Dreyfuss, with my eyes fixed on the frozen repeater’s molar, “can you get me their dental records?”

“I’ll give it a shot.”

My head was about ready to detonate. I turned toward my chair to take a load off, and caught myself doing a double-take at Dreyfuss. Something hinky was going on, but it wasn’t the freaky eyeball phenomenon I’d witnessed at PsyTrain. While the multiple glowing eyeball look wasn’t pretty, I’d seen it before. It wouldn’t have startled me. This was different. The air around him was occupied, but not by repeaters.

I sat down, slouched in my chair and pinched my temples, then stole a look from under my palm. It was barely there, whatever it was, difficult to make out, but definitely centered on Dreyfuss. Smoke? No, it didn’t move quite like smoke.

He picked up his phone and there was definite movement in the non-physical, as if his motion had disturbed whatever it was. As if it was reacting to him. “Laura,” he said, “prioritize this. I need you to dig up some dental records, I’ll send you the list—and don’t wait until you have them all, bring them to me as quick as you turn them up. Thanks.”

He hung up, and the non-physical stirred again. It was as if an alternate plane occupied the same physical space as Dreyfuss, and in that plane, there was stuff. Cloudy stuff. Floating stuff. Stuff he couldn’t feel, although it seemed to sense him. It wasn’t a mist and it wasn’t a vapor, though. More like…I squinted. What the hell did it look like? For someone who was supposedly a visual thinker, I sure had a hard time figuring out what I was seeing. The stuff around Dreyfuss looked less like clouds, and more like…jellyfish.

My body reacted before I did, probably because my brain was busy trying to convince me that I wasn’t really seeing what I saw. I flinched, and tried to turn the motion into a kind of cough to cover my twitchiness.

Dreyfuss glanced up. Small glowing tracers followed his eyes, though that was normal, for him. “Are you okay?”

Don’t look,
I begged myself. But I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The psychic jellyfish didn’t just happen to occupy the same physical space as Dreyfuss. They were tethered to him by long, thin strands of noncorporeal goop.

“Bayne?”

“Headache,” I lied. My headache was now a dull sheet of pain that I hardly felt, because my entire awareness had been hijacked. All I could think was,
What the fuck are those jellyfish things?

“Do you want something for it? I’ve got aspirins with a pinch of codeine that’ll knock it right out.” He reached into his pocket, and all the jellyfish shifted. In fact, every time he moved his hands, he created a noticeable disturbance in the jellyfish field. The goopy tethers, I saw, were connected specifically to his hands.

My first thought was that maybe the Con Dreyfuss in front of me wasn’t really him at all. Maybe he was a poor husk who’d once been Con Dreyfuss, a snotty skatepunk who’d ollied through the wrong place at the wrong time, and the evil jellyfish overlords had taken over his body, puppeteering him into position all these years to take over the FPMP.

I watched him pull out his deep, deep pillbox and place it on his desk while the jellyfish trailed behind the motion. It didn’t look like the jellyfish entities were pulling the strings. They were actually kind of languid, like he’d wandered through a field of them and gotten himself tangled up. Now they were just being dragged along for the ride.

He flipped open a compartment, pulled out four pills and rattled them like dice. The transparent jellyfish quivered on the ends of their tethers. He set two pills in front of me, popped the other two, and washed them down with a slug of water. “Chalky.”

Keeping my headache no longer seemed important. Numbly, I did the same.

He said, “You really don’t look so hot. I’ve got an M.D. on staff, maybe I should have her sit in.”

“It’s fine,” I said automatically.

As he leaned back in his chair to consider how not-fine I actually was, I spied motion in the jellyfish field. Vibration coursed down one of the strands as the floating body where it originated gave a gentle undulation. Dreyfuss brought his hand to his mouth and clipped off the edge of his cuticle between his teeth, and the undulation stopped.