Spook Squad (19 page)

“With your talent and my invention…. I wish I’d known about the barbiturate habit. I could’ve sourced them for you—all the Seconal you’d ever want—but I let Burke talk me into doing things
his
way, and look where it got me. I’m dead. You’re performing like a dancing bear for a handful of pills. And the vultures here are circling my research, trying to reconstruct it and take all the credit.”

She wasn’t even pretending to be coy about listening in on my dealings with Dreyfuss…but what about the flower shop? Was that really a sacred space, or had she been lurking among the potted ferns? Since that field trip was the only time I’d discussed owning a GhosTV with anyone from the FPMP, maybe I could determine whether the charms and protections actually worked, or if she could go anywhere she damn well pleased. Including my home. “So Dreyfuss has all of your…tuners?”

“Not all.” I braced myself to see if she’d allude to the florist talk, and instead she said, “They shipped one off to PsyTrain…it must’ve been a few months ago. Between the lab here and whoever they’re working with at PsyTrain, they’ll probably get their Nobel nominations within the year—for
my
invention.”

“That’s what this is all about…the Nobel Prize?”

She rolled her eyes. “They don’t give out posthumous Nobels.” Well, duh.
Everybody
knows that. “The best I could hope for at this point is the National Medal of Science. That, and keeping the vultures from claiming my work as their own.”

Given that she was dead, I didn’t really see how winning some kind of medal would make any difference one way or the other. It wasn’t as if she’d get the satisfaction of flaunting it in front of her rivals. Still, if the obsession keeping her here was not about her murderer but instead the GhosTV, maybe she could be reasoned with rather than exorcised. If she could be reasoned with, maybe she’d be willing to bargain. It would be a crying shame to let all her FPMP surveillance go to waste. “I’m looking for some information,” I said. “What would it cost me to find out how a missing PsyCop named Wembly disappeared?”

Cocking her head, she gave me a look of pity and moved to pat me on the arm. It was a glimmer of the old Dr. Chance—the fabricated Dr. Chance. I backed away before she could touch me, and her sympathetic gaze turned frosty. “There’s one tuner that Burke didn’t manage to turn over to the authorities—the prototype. Get your hands on it before Dreyfuss does. Release it to the scientific community with my name on the research. And demonstrate that the technology works.”

It seemed like a hell of a lot of legwork to go through. Maybe, once upon a time, I would have entertained the possibility. But since I’d probably be able to come by the Wembly information with a few sí-nos, it hardly seemed worth it. Unfortunately, she picked up on my unwillingness before I was able to lead her on with a few promises I had no intention of keeping.

“That’s the price—but obviously you’d never be willing to pay it. Because Dreyfuss has you convinced that the minute the public knows who you are and what you can do, you’re as good as dead.”

“I didn’t say that.” Although it struck me as chillingly possible.

“You don’t need to. It’s written all over your face.” She reached for my wrist—I pulled back. I sent a blast of psychic light into the white balloon around her, too. She scowled. “You’re a coward,” she said, “just like Burke. Since I can’t dash off a prescription, you have no intention of helping me.”

“That is entirely not…” She whirled around and sailed through the far wall. I was alone. “…true.”

That last blast of psychic juice had cost me, physically. In addition to the blinding headache, I was nauseated now, lightheaded and exhausted. I swabbed my face again and turned off the taps. The mirror was steamed up, so I switched on the vent, then sat on the closed toilet seat and pressed my face into my hands. She was making me out to be some kind of selfish creep—and if I was so damn selfish, would I go around trudging through murder scenes in my futile attempts to bring the killers to justice? Would I subject myself to mangled repeaters and salt them for the sake of closure if I only cared about myself? Who in their right mind would shout out, “Look, world, I’m a big ol’ medium who can prove to you this GhosTV’s got reception,” if their only reward would be a bullet to the face and an unmarked grave…right next to Detective Wembly.

*
 
*
 
*

While I don’t know exactly how Con Dreyfuss’ remote viewer talent works, I was pretty sure that between his Psych skills, his surveillance equipment, and his uncanny knack for picking up on everything I didn’t want him to know, I’d emerge from the bathroom to him sending Jennifer Chance his regards. But instead he said, “Did you hurl?”

“I’m fine.”

He was mousing through a bunch of web pages on his triple monitors, mostly text, though a scientific diagram flashed by on the left-hand monitor and a closeup of a bright red capsule on the right. I stepped around the Russian repeater and sat myself down across from Dreyfuss so he couldn’t see how unsteady I was on my feet. He said, “So is it just the downers with you, or do you need uppers to peel yourself out of bed?”

“Why, are you running a two-for-one special?” The pain in my head spiked, then hung there, impaled. I glanced at Triple-Shot. He was as still and solid as a department store mannequin.

“If you don’t need to double-dip now, one of these days you will, and it’s a nasty cycle. Barbiturates are archaic and crazy-addictive, and the upper-downer cocktail is nothing to mess with. I’m not throwing stones, here. Just sayin’—pharmaceuticals have evolved.”

“You’re running low on reds. Is that it?”

Dreyfuss gave a long, exasperated sigh. His eyeballs left a short string of tracers behind. “You think you’re the only one who has trouble sleeping? Hardly. But if the ultimate goal is survival, this is not the most promising route you could take. Dr. Santiago could help you wean yourself off the reds with something more twenty-first century—and then transition from those into something cleaner. Herbs. Acupressure. Biofeedback. It’d be totally off the record. No one needs to know but you, me and Santiago. If you find yourself feeling sentimental for that Seconal buzz—you can always console yourself with a few Jägerbombs.”

“Drinking ramps up the ghosts. And I tried hypnosis. It seemed like it was working, too. Unfortunately,
someone
bribed my no-good therapist ex into reporting back with all my personal details.” To compound irony with irony, the dead doctor in the bathroom just claimed she would’ve given me all the Seconal I could want, while the pothead was trying to make me go holistic. I almost laughed, until even worse pain lanced through the existing pain in my skull. “Look, forget about the sleep aids for now. Could I get a couple more of those codeine aspirin?”

Before he could whip out the magical pillbox, Dreyfuss’ phone buzzed. Laura’s voice said, “Dr. Santiago is here.”

I said, “I told you not to—”

“I didn’t. Laura did.” He gave an unconvincing apologetic shrug, then said into the intercom, “Send her in.”

Like I needed a doctor to tell me I’m taking too many pills as it is. The muscles running up the back of my neck were as tight as piano wires, but when I went to massage them, I nearly jumped out of my chair. It felt like someone had just draped a frozen gel pack across my skin. I touched my fingertips to my cheek. Cold. Not like frostbite—my fingers weren’t red and they didn’t sting or burn. But pressed against a normal-temperature part of my body, they felt like they should’ve been frozen solid. The worse part? My palm was ever so slightly damp. And not with sweat. Numb, too. Mostly in my left hand, my salting hand. But I felt a little tingle in my right hand as well. Great. An FPMP doctor was on her way, and I was leaking ectoplasm.

There was a jaunty knock. Dreyfuss buzzed open his door and a busty Latina in a clingy wrap dress and four-inch heels breezed in. Her thick black hair hung past her shoulders in loose curls, her lipstick was fire engine red, and she didn’t look a day over thirty. She also had a third eye in the middle of her forehead, which I told myself I probably shouldn’t stare at, though it was easier said than done. “
Hola
, Constantine.”

“
Hola
, Doc.” He indicated me with a sweep of his hand. “This is—”

“Victor Bayne,” she said, before he could finish. “Agent Bly’s new PsyCop friend.” Her Spanish accent was thick and lilting, almost as if she was playing it up for effect. She looked me over with a sultry, knowing smile. Meanwhile, I found myself wondering if I’d managed to pass out and wake up in one of those weird Mexican telenovela soap operas where the male characters are a bunch of average schmoes and the women are scantily clad and smoking hot, and everyone acted like extra facial features were totally normal.
 

Dr. Santiago gazed into my eyes with all three of hers. Assessing my pupils, or reading my mind? I started singing
Row, Row, Row Your Boat
to myself just in case. “Laura says you have a pretty bad headache. When did it start?”

“Today?” I wiped my hand on my slacks to chafe some warmth back into it and rub off the goo, hoping she’d just figure it was sweaty. “Maybe an hour ago.”

“Ever had one like it before?”

“I…guess.” I was hesitant to pour out my soul to Santiago. If she was employed by the FPMP, aside from her psychic talent, she was probably no slouch in the doctoring department, either. Maybe Dreyfuss already knew everything there was to know about me, but I wasn’t eager to run through my medical history in front of him, even though, ironically, he’d be a lot more likely to patch me up with a handful of pills. For sure I couldn’t let on that I was leaking ecto too, if I didn’t want to end up staring at Dr. K’s gaptoothed grin from inside a Plexiglas box.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…

“Any idea what triggers it?”

“It’s kind of like eyestrain. Like staring at the TV too…long.” As I said it, I realized there was an inanimate object I could blame that would get me out of revealing too much personal information. I didn’t care to admit the pain was caused by fumbling around with the talent I spent most of my time trying to ignore. “GhosTVs are hell on my head. That’s all.”

Dr. Santiago looked puzzled, and Dreyfuss let out a laugh. “He’s talking about the psychic tuner.”

“You’re running it right now?” Santiago exclaimed. “Then start by turning it off.”

“But the—” I gestured toward Triple-Shot, worried that my chance to identify the missing PsyCop was about to dwindle to a pinpoint in the center of the tube once the signal was cut.
 

“They’ve been here for ages,” Dreyfuss said. “They won’t disappear when we pull the plug.”

“Wait,” I said.

Dreyfuss stopped with his hand poised above the dial.

“Before you touch anything, I want to jot down those readings.” Because if I started with these crystal-clear settings, maybe I could experiment at home. Figure out how to prep myself for the next time I was called upon to do some heavy-duty ghostbusting. Figure out how to get a repeater to talk, so that the next time I faced the remnants in the FPMP building, I could determine whether Dreyfuss had anything to do with Wembly’s disappearance or not. I approached the credenza, pulled out my notepad, and thanks to the numbness that had now spread over both my hands, dropped my pen. Fine. I was about to get down on one knee to look at the dials more closely anyway. I picked up the pen, fumbled it, and dropped it again. Then I dropped the pad. And the pen. Again.

“Allow me.” Dreyfuss grabbed the pad and pen out of my numb hands before I could drop them yet again, jotted down the settings and switched off the TV.
 

My head pain ebbed slightly.

“You should leave the building,” Santiago recommended, “walk around a little. Have lunch. Anything it takes to get out of the tube’s range. Whatever it does, whatever signal it produces, we have nothing to measure it with. So we don’t know how long it really takes to shut off completely.”
 

The signal decayed as soon as the power was cut, but I didn’t go into it, not when I might be able to use the leverage of that knowledge later. Besides, I had other concerns. Dreyfuss had finished noting the last reading and was handing the pad back to me. Since I wouldn’t put it past him to “accidentally” record the wrong readings if it suited his mysterious purposes, I double checked the note to make sure they were correct. And then I got a good look at his handwriting….

A quirky back-slanted cursive.

I’d figured the way he greeted Santiago with
hola
was a chummy affectation. I’d figured wrong. I pictured the card that had fallen out of Lisa’s bouquet.
Para la rosa más hermosa.

“So…” I was shocked at how calm my voice sounded. “Which is your better language—French, or Spanish?”

“Definitely Spanish,” Dreyfuss said. “My first wife was from Monterrey…and it behooved me to know what she was telling the family back home about her insufferable spouse.”

Sonofabitch. No wonder Lisa was being so cagey about her new love interest. It was no yoga instructor, no fireman, no torrid lesbian affair. All this time, my best friend had been playing grab-ass with the Regional Director of the FPMP.

…life is but a dream.

Chapter 17

Lisa. And Dreyfuss. Together. Lisa,
my
friend, making phone calls to Constantine Dreyfuss in
my
house, speaking in a language I didn’t fucking understand. Here I thought eavesdropping on me through Stefan was a low blow.
 

Worse still, I couldn’t so much as think about it. Not there. Not yet. Because Dr. Third Eye was able to creep inside my mind, so my every thought might as well be public record.

Row, row, row your boat….

I stood, head swimming, and jammed the GhosTV settings into my pocket before any telltale ectoplasm could leak onto the paper. Dreyfuss was watching me. Santiago was, too. I ran through some multiplication tables—
nine, eighteen, twenty-seven, thirty-six
—and my God, did Jacob know? Did he know what was going on and choose not to tell me? He must know. How could he not? He worked with Dreyfuss and he lived with Lisa, and he was the smart one.