Spook Squad (18 page)

I turned away and gulped water.

“If you’re gonna hurl, aim for the wastebasket.”

I’d seen one of those jellyfish things before, or something like them, at the hospital the Fire Ghost was haunting. The image popped into my mind like it was yesterday: a dark, cloudy thing trailing behind the gurney of a homeless woman with an impossibly high blood alcohol level. Had it been strung to her with a goopy tether? Hard to say, I’d only gotten a glimpse. Fuck, oh fuck. I cradled my head in my hands. I’d tried to follow up, but couldn’t get anyone to give me her name. Then I let it drop.
 

I didn’t know it was this bad. I didn’t know.

No, that’s not true. I knew, I’d seen the thing, and I dismissed it. There was too much other stuff going on, and I let it slip away. I cradled my head in my hands.

A button clicked, and Dreyfuss said, “Laura? Get Dr. Santiago up to my office, ASAP.”

“No,” I said, forcing myself to sit up and look normal, whatever that might be. “It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s passing.”

“Doc’s cool, a smart lady, you’ll like her.”

“It’s fine.”

Dreyfuss cancelled the doctor, sat back in his big leather chair, and watched me watching him. He patted his hair, and the jellyfish field swayed. “Bedhead? Lint? What’s so fascinating up there?”

What the hell was I supposed to tell him—that apparently he had fingernail demons floating around over his head? Connected to him? Feeding off him? Okay, demons might be too strong a word. Gremlins, imps…. No matter how I tried to frame it, no way did it sound even remotely reasonable. “I need to try something,” I said finally. “Don’t move.”

His eyebrows rose expectantly, but he stayed put as I stood and approached him.

“Okay,” I said, “close your eyes.”

“Is this a trust exercise? Like falling backward and expecting you to catch me?”

Actually, I just didn’t want him to see me sprinkling my invisible fairy dust. “What’s there to trust?”

“You’re armed. I’m not.”

I ejected the magazine and handed the Glock to him. He placed the unloaded gun on his desk with a shake of his head, like the move was a bit melodramatic for his taste, then shrugged and closed his eyes.

When I dipped into my left pocket, I found my supply of fairy dust was three, four times what it had been before. Sucking white light in front of a powered up GhosTV must’ve been the reason for the extra mojo. I grabbed a good handful, and I flung it at the jellyfish. I didn’t tell them to scram, not out loud, but I must not have needed to. There was a disruption in the field, all those transparent bodies rippling and roiling. Dreyfuss winced and flexed his fingers. I scooped out another big handful of fairy dust and flung it.
Beat it
, I thought.
There’s more where that came from. I can keep this up all day.
 

As I reached for a third handful, one of the fingernail demons detached itself and undulated away, rising up and disappearing through the ceiling tiles.

All day long.
I flung another handful, and two more detached and fled. Every time I reached into my pocket, the level of dust was higher. Once the first few took off, the remaining jellyfish lost their nerve. One by one they pulled loose and floated up through the ceiling.
And don’t come back,
I thought,
’cos I’d be more than happy to dust you again.
 

I was staring at the ceiling, waiting to see if the fingernail demons were gonna try and sneak back for more, when I realized the pulse was pounding in my ears so loudly, I was surprised Dreyfuss couldn’t hear it from where he sat. I ramped my focus down a few notches and did my best to breathe, I fell back a few steps, then told Dreyfuss, “Okay.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Was there a ghost on my head?”

“Not…exactly.”

He pulled off his scrunchie, shook out his corkscrew curls and groaned as he raked his hands through his hair.
 

“There are non-physical things that aren’t quite ghosts,” I said, hoping to make him feel better. Though as I said it, I realized it was probably no great comfort. “It was nothing
dead
.”

“I have a medium who costs me a cool two million a year, and it takes a fucking public servant to see…you got rid of it, didn’t you? Tell me it’s gone.”

As much as I dislike Dreyfuss, I couldn’t help but feel for the guy. “Yeah. You’re good now.”

“That’s just peachy. Look, I don’t mean to sound like an ingrate, but some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.” I knew the feeling. “I’m not lying when I say I’d love to have you on my team. Name your price.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I know you don’t like burning your favors, but Jacob needs to get into the Metropolitan Correctional Center. You’ve got to make that call yourself.”

“And here I thought you’d ask for more drugs.” He raked his hair back into a sloppy mess of a ponytail, pulled out his pillbox again and popped a Valium. My throat gave a little pulse like it wouldn’t mind swallowing one too. Before I could hint that it was rude of him not to share, his phone buzzed. He pushed a speakerphone button, and Laura’s voice said, “I located some dental records.”

“Bring them in,” Dreyfuss told her. Then he said to me, “If this was police work, you’d be waiting on a subpoena right now, and you know it.”

Since I was fully aware of that fact, I didn’t bother replying.

Laura came in and set a few sheets of paper on Dreyfuss’ desk. If she was alarmed to see an unloaded 9-millimeter sitting on it, she didn’t show it. “I have Dr. Santiago standing by,” she told him. “Are you okay? Your hair’s kind of—”

“It’s not me. It’s Detective Bayne.”

Laura looked me over critically, and I said, “I don’t need a doctor. It’s just eyestrain.” Or was it psychic overload? Or Seconal backlash? Either way, I didn’t want to get into it. “It’s practically gone.”

She glanced at the window and said, “I’m sure this glare isn’t helping any.”

I’d been so engrossed in the repeaters and the fingernail demons I hadn’t noticed any glare, but now that she mentioned it, the light was pretty intense. The roofs of the buildings in the train yard were covered in snow. Those roofs were sooty white, the November sky was murky white, and the light bouncing off them and pouring through the floor-to-ceiling window was making us all squint.

Laura marched up to the window. Somehow she managed to avoid stepping through any of the repeaters on the way. She veered around Richie's prayer mat, too. With a yank, she whisked the curtains shut. The room went dim, and afterimages shaped like the window drifted across my field of vision. I heard her re-cross the room as her high heels made gentle thumps against the berber, though when my pupils adjusted and my vision faded in, I was surprised to find her still standing beside the window where the curtain had been. Until I realized it wasn’t Laura I was looking at.

It was Jennifer Chance.

Chapter 16

Dr. Chance is the same stature as Laura Kim, five and a half feet tall, fit, somewhat angular. Like Laura, the ghost wore a plain dark outfit, but her blonde hair was a quick giveaway. That, and the bullet hole in her forehead. Chance’s ghost leaned back against the wall beside the window with its arms crossed, scowling, watching Con Dreyfuss intently through narrowed eyes. How long had she been lurking around behind that curtain? All morning? All year? What had she seen—and what had she heard? And more importantly, what secrets of mine did I inadvertently spill to Dreyfuss that morning, and by extension, to her?

Sentient ghosts don’t terrify me. They’re not exactly at the top of my list for “Things I Want to See Today,” but they don’t leave me soiling myself and crouching in the corner, either. I’d be lying, though, if I said the ghost of Jennifer Chance didn’t creep me out, especially now, knowing that in all this time it had never moved on…and that it still had its eye on Dreyfuss.

Make no mistake, Chance had been creepy in life, too. Whenever I hear a female character’s voice on TV go a little singsong, I get a flash of her coming toward me with a syringe. On bad days, the visual is accompanied by the tactile memory of her brushing my hair off my forehead while she gazed into my eyes.
 

I looked up at the ceiling so she didn’t know I’d spotted her. Dreyfuss looked up too, as if he needed to guard against head ghosts descending on him.

“You really should have Dr. Santiago take your blood pressure, at least,” Laura told me. “Just to be safe.”

“I’m fine.”

“Laura’s prone to migraines,” Dreyfuss said. “They lay her out for days if she doesn’t nip ’em in the bud.”

“It’s not a migraine,” I said. “It’s almost gone.”

Laura looked me over as if she didn’t quite believe me, but she knew enough to pick her battles. She said, “If you don’t need anything else, I’ll get back to the dental records.”

“Thanks,” Dreyfuss said absently, scanning the ceiling for threats he couldn’t see, while Jennifer Chance peeled away from the wall and strode after Laura.
 

Although I thought I was being smooth, when Chance passed by, a chill stole over me—and a major case of the heebie-jeebies. I flinched, visibly. She stopped in her tracks and looked me in the eye. Emotions played over her face, one after another: shock, anger, and finally, excitement. “It works?” A flicker, and then there she was right there, looming over my seat, Laura Kim forgotten, eyes wide with wonder and a hint of mania. Way too close. “This particular tuner setting works?”

I was not having this conversation in front of Dreyfuss. I squirmed away from Chance, gathered my sidearm and bullets from the desk and said, “I gotta use the john.”

Dreyfuss looked at me a bit strangely, but he couldn’t exactly forbid me to go to the bathroom. I ducked in, then closed and locked the door behind me while Jennifer Chance floated right through it. Then I turned on the taps in the sink and the shower to provide a bit of white noise, contorting myself to avoid brushing up against her. While I’d been loath to present my back to Laura Kim in the parking garage, my instincts with Chance’s ghost were the opposite. I found myself protecting my solar plexus like a shoplifter guarding a five-finger discount stuffed down his shirt.

“You see me now,” Chance said. “I know you do. I’ve been lying low all day and suddenly you have a visual. It must be the tuner.”

“Back up.” I snapped the ammo cartridge into place, which apparently only intimidates people in movies. Normally I would’ve used a “drop your weapon” tone, but instead I whispered since I wanted the conversation to stay between her and me. Hopefully the water splashing would be enough to confuse surveillance devices, at least without advanced filtering. I holstered the useless weapon. My headache was so blinding by now, I was dying to perch on the closed toilet seat, or maybe lie down on the floor to keep physical damage to a minimum in the event I keeled over. Since that would make me a stationary target, though, I stayed on my feet, angling away from her constant, solicitous touching. Still, it was only a single bathroom and there weren’t exactly a lot of places to go. When she grabbed me by the arm, I felt the tips of her fingers sink in. And in. And in. I jerked my arm away and sucked a huge gulp of white light, then threw it around her to keep her to herself. “I said, back the fuck up.”

“Calm down, Detective. I’m only checking your pulse.”

“Touch me again I’ll salt your ass where you stand. Get it?”

“Actually, I don’t…but I presume it’s nothing good.” She raised her hands in exasperated surrender. “Your breathing is rapid, there’s a mottled pallor to your cheeks, and you’re perspiring. It’s in your best interest to let me—”

“No.”

“At the very least, make a cool compress and put it on your forehead.” She made a big show of keeping her hands up, ironically, as if it was entirely unreasonable for me to distrust her. “There’s a washcloth right there.”

The contrarian in me wanted to tell her to shove the washcloth up her ass, but I was eager for something, anything, to dull the knife edge of my head pain. My “cool compress” was a wet wad of thick white terrycloth that I swabbed across my brow while I kept my eye on Chance. It was difficult to restrain myself from checking out the mirror, since the guy I’d glimpsed looking back at me was hollow-cheeked and waxy. Visual confirmation was unnecessary, though. I knew I felt like shit. What mattered was keeping my eye on the ghost.

This particular ghost looked pretty much like she did in life. The thing was, when I’d known her, she’d been posing as my general practitioner, with breezy hippie-chick clothes and a practical, nurturing bedside manner. The real Jennifer Chance was purely mercenary, and with my GhosTV-enhanced perception, she looked as solid as Dreyfuss or Laura. Her shoulders bunched together and her collarbones stood out, even though there weren’t any physical collarbones there to cast her chest in stark relief. The eyes that had faked compassion so credibly now seemed clinical and hard. Looking at those eyes made me feel so uncomfortable I actually fixed on the bullet hole instead. It shifted and shimmered under my gaze. When a single drop of crimson blood drooled out, I finally looked away…though only a bit to the side, still keeping her in my sights while I asked, “Why are you still here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I expected to hear
Because some FPMP goon shot me down in cold blood
, but instead she said, “Dreyfuss has my tuners.”

The tuners? Holy hell, she was
babysitting
the GhosTVs. “Gadgets you made…and yet you seem surprised that they actually work.”

She said, “We hardly got anywhere with them before the police ruined everything with their kidnapping charges—I wanted to
ask
you to test the tuners with us, but Burke said you’d never go along with it, not ever. He said no amount of money could get you to willingly take a psyactive, and given the way you were tripling your Auracel dose, I believed him. I trusted him.” She sighed. “I trusted him, and he was nowhere near as invested in the project as I was. In the end, all he cared about was bargaining his way out of prison.”

“No big surprise.”