Spook Squad (2 page)

“I’m no quitter,” Lisa said—and she was even bringing out the big ammo now, the no-finger, which she proceeded to wag in Carolyn’s face, bangle bracelets jingling. “Don’t you ever call me a quitter.”

“I’m not—”
 

“I got suspended helping you people. And PsyTrain is none of your business.”

Although Carolyn was about as white bread as a person can be, Lisa’s “talk to the hand” posture didn’t daunt her. In fact, instead of backing off, she took an even closer look. “How many carats are those diamonds?” she said.

Since Carolyn doesn’t do her shopping at SaverPlus like Lisa and I do, she doesn’t realize that the best one can hope for at the second floor jewelry counter is rhinestones and crystal. Lisa’s idea of adornment is big plastic sunglasses and a little diary-type key she wears around her neck. She buys her bling from spinner racks, not glass cases. Even so, she backed off from Carolyn, startled—and she took her hand and its bangle bracelets with her. But instead of educating Carolyn on the ways of the budget conscious shopper, she said, “What does it matter to you?”

“Four carats? Five?”

Carats? Right. I was fully aware that Lisa had answered the question with a question to dodge Carolyn’s built-in polygraph—but before I could ponder why she would suddenly feel defensive about wearing costume jewelry when everyone knew it was fake, the front door banged open.

Jacob. Great timing.

“Carolyn?” He dashed into the living room as if he was in danger of missing her—as if he didn’t stand between her and the only escape route. “I just left you another message.”

Carolyn turned and looked at him coolly, though an unshed tear still glittered in her eye. “I know.”

His shoulders sagged, though so imperceptibly I was probably the only one who’d noticed. His impeccable suit, his carefully honed physique, even his ramrod posture, everything about Jacob was rigid, controlled perfection. A man of steel…but not inside. I’ve never wanted to be an empath—too damn confusing—but at that moment I could have really used the insight, ’cos it was a real struggle to figure out how emotions had tanked so fast. Here Lisa and I were contentedly fitting pieces of half-naked cardboard men together, and before I knew it, the atmosphere was soupy with anger, frustration, resentment and hurt. The stupid part was, we were all on the same damn side.

“Look,” Jacob told Carolyn. “What I’ve been trying to get you to hear is, there’s no reason we can’t keep working together.”

“Other than the fact that you retired.”

“Come on, think about it. You’d help a lot more people if you would—”

“No, Jacob. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t help more people, I’d help a different kind of people. If I followed you to the Federal Psychic Monitoring Program, I’d be looking out for Psychs—and it would be a hell of a lot more dangerous than what I’m doing now.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. The majority of my perps are single guys, acting alone. Once we find them, once they’re charged and arraigned, they’re not my problem anymore. You’re dealing with big, organized groups. They’ve got money behind them, they’ve got widespread religious support, and worse than that, they’ve got their fears that one day all the NPs will wake up in a slave state where they do nothing but bow down and serve their evil psychic overlords.”

I don’t know how she got that sentence out in a single breath, and I think she didn’t either. She stopped and blinked, and then the thought occurred to me that Carolyn didn’t really have much of a knack for hyperbole, thanks to her talent keeping tabs on her truthfulness. And then I realized she wasn’t exaggerating.

That’s how Carolyn actually thought the Non-Psychs saw us. And it scared the crap out of her.

“My daughters aren’t even in high school yet. They need their mom.” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “I can’t work with you. Not at the FPMP.”

“If there is a threat out there, don’t you want the best Psychs in the world on your team? Besides, you’re overestimating your opponent. They’re not nearly as organized as all that. Tell her, Vic.”

How was I supposed to make Carolyn feel better when I’d just answered my door with a Glock in my hand? “Uh, I don’t know. Safety in numbers?” It was the best I could do, at least to Carolyn’s face.

“More like a bigger target,” she said.

This was so not the way I’d hoped Jacob’s reunion with Carolyn would play out. I said, “Listen, it’s late. We’re all tired. I can order us some pizzas and maybe once we eat, we’ll all be thinking straight.”

“Actually,” Jacob said, “I need to put in a couple of hours at the firing range. Night training. You want to come with? I can make a call, see if there’s room—”

“I’ve just put in a ten-hour day,” Carolyn snapped. “Now I’m going home. To my family.”

Jacob looked to Lisa and me to see if either of us would tag along. I could definitely use the practice, especially at night. The Fifth Precinct requires one firearms session a year. That’s right: one. Since I’m not an overachiever, initially I didn’t put in any extra time on my own. Not until I failed my first recertification—and you only need to hit seventy percent of the targets to pass that thing.

I should have jumped at the chance…but I didn’t want the FPMP to think I was easy.

Jacob looked to Lisa. She said, “Actually, I already have plans.” She gave a sheepish shrug. “Sorry.”

Carolyn didn’t call her out on these purported “plans,” so they must have existed. The awkwardness between the four of us was thick enough to cut with a spork, but at least Lisa was no longer going Jerry Springer Baby Momma on Carolyn, and Jacob wasn’t tooting the Federal Psychic Monitoring Program’s horn. I gave the ropy muscles at the back of my neck a couple of squeezes, said, “Well, I guess I’ll go see if Crash wants pizza,” and turned to retrieve my phone from my overcoat.

“Vic,” Jacob said. I tensed, because I really thought I’d successfully weaseled my way out of that awkward conversation without resorting to an untruth, but I didn’t bolt when he reached toward me. I was prepared for a caress, or maybe a hug, some sort of attempt to entice me to stay and keep trying to convince the girls we were all still one big, happy family. But instead he just plucked something off the back of my shirt and handed it to me.

It was a puzzle piece with a tacky smear of jelly on the back of it. I turned it photo-side up. Fake tan flesh-tone—and it looked suspiciously like a set of washboard abs.

Chapter 2

Parking sucked by Sticks and Stones, but that was nothing new. On the first floor of Crash’s building, huge sheets of plywood covered the place where the palm reader’s front window used to be…now
that
was new. I found a spot on a side street and sprinted toward the store with my cooling pizza. At the front door, I paused briefly to consider the board-up job, then toed some sparkly chunks lodged in the crack of the sidewalk to see if they were rock salt or broken glass. Hard to tell, especially while I was balancing a large double-cheese veggie supreme in my hands. I went upstairs before the cheese could congeal any more than it already had.

Thanks to a formidable boiler system, the temperature in Crash’s building is subtropical, even in the dead of winter. Although it was below freezing outside, Crash answered his door in bare feet, holey jeans and a skimpy white T-shirt at least two sizes too small. The shirt was gray with age and half-hearted washings, and it clung to him like a second skin. Next to the dull T-shirt, the ink on his arms looked twice as vivid. I don’t think he’d been aiming for that specific effect. It looked more like he’d just grabbed the first clothes he laid his hands on. Instead of standing in its usual careful spikes, his peroxide blond hair was damp, finger-combed back, showing dark, wet roots.
 

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” he said. He acted like he was talking to me, but I suspected he was addressing the pizza. Business hours were over, so he locked the door behind me, whisked the pizza over to the cash register and plunked it down on the plexi countertop.
 

He doesn’t have much by way of furniture. Even if he owned a table, there’d be nowhere to put it. There are four tiny roomlets behind the shop: a cramped office, a galley kitchen, a closet of a bedroom, and a bathroom where you can hardly turn around to pee. It was easier to just hang out in the shop where we had some elbow room. I enjoyed Sticks and Stones that way, after-hours dim with a couple of lit candles flickering behind the register and the scent of sandalwood and myrrh lingering in the air. It felt safe from prying eyes—psychic eyes.
 

It usually felt safe from your garden-variety mayhem too, tucked away on the second floor, out of harm’s reach. But not tonight. “What happened to the windows downstairs?”

“Smash and grab. Not that Lydia had anything to grab—the storefront is basically a waiting room with a lot of black curtains and some cheesy esoteric symbols on the walls to get her clients in the mood for their readings. They trashed her big neon palm reader sign, too. I loved that thing…I hope she can replace it.”

“Won’t insurance cover that?”

“Dunno. Maybe she can’t afford to carry any. One thing’s for sure, my insurance bill got shuffled to the top of the stack this month.”

Crash handed me a folding chair and I set it up on the customer side of the counter while he delved back through the beaded curtain. “I’m out of pop,” he called from the kitchen, “but I can make iced tea.”

“Don’t worry about it. Water’s fine.” I had thought about picking up a 2-liter at the pizzeria but it seemed like too much trouble to carry. I opened the box and peeked at the pizza. There was a bit of slideage going on. I nudged the cheese back into place as best I could, closed the box, and licked the grease off my fingers before he came back with the drinks.

Crash set down a stack of McDonald’s paper napkins and a pair of coffee mugs filled with water, then whisked open the box. “All the toppings. You sure know how to spoil a guy.” By now, the pizza was at that temperature where you might end up with an empty triangle of saucy crust if you pulled it the wrong way. But he finessed out the perfect amount of cheese and toppings…then ate it as if he hadn’t seen food for days.

Maybe it had been a while since he’d been shopping. Or maybe he needed to choose between groceries and insurance. I wondered how little I could eat without seeming too obvious, and I wished I’d had the foresight to not only add soda, but breadsticks to my order.

“So Carolyn seems pretty pissed off,” I ventured.

“The operative word there is
seems
. She can’t pretend something’s not bothering her when it is. It’s actually pretty refreshing…once you get used to it.”

“Jacob’s trying to lure her over to the dark side.”

“Oh? And what—you’re jealous it’s not you he’s wooing?”

I choked on a mushroom, coughed it up into my mouth, swallowed it again and said, “Right…I’m jealous.”

“Don’t be that way. Here’s what I’m saying: it’s obvious the pigs and the feds should both be plying you with cocaine and handjobs to try and buy your allegiance. But Jacob hasn’t messengered you any offers yet, has he? How long has it been?”

I’m not sure if Crash realizes how hard-hitting his flattery can be. I’m not even sure he was trying to flatter me. “Couple of months.”

“A couple of months.” He looked at me sagely and tapped his tongue stud against the backs of his teeth. “And no one’s offered you so much as a quick stroke or a tasty bump? C’mon, it’s so obvious. They’re scared you’ll take off in the opposite direction if they so much as lean toward approaching you.”

“The FPMP doesn’t need to sweet talk me. I owe them an exorcism.”

“True. But still, F-Pimp hasn’t sent out anyone to break your kneecaps and collect the debt.”

“I don’t see what they’d want with me in the long-term anyhow. Once they’re clean, they’ll stay clean.” Presuming they stopped killing people in their offices, anyway.

“You’re smart to keep your distance, if you ask me. You’re a better fit for the police.”

“I…am?”

“Sure. As much as my left-wing, bleeding heart, painfully liberal Buddhist philosophy requires that I razz the cops every chance I get, it’s obvious that when you work, you’re in the zone.”

I’d never thought much about it. Then again, police work was the only sort of job I’d ever done…despite my own personal and philosophical aversion to the force.

“Today, for example,” Crash said. “What did you do today?”

“You might not want to hear about it while you’re eating.”

“I’ve got a cast-iron stomach. Try me.”

I thought I’d stared hard enough at the dumb jigsaw puzzle to numb the day out of my brain, but apparently I hadn’t. As soon as Crash asked, everything rushed back. The victim’s ghost. The vehicle. The fucking bully of a husband who had his wide-eyed-innocent look down pat. The homicide had been given up for hopeless, but my chat with the dead woman had obtained the search warrant to seize his blood-riddled 4x4. The evidence wasn’t fresh and gory, though it was extensive, dried to invisibility on a black paint job that lit up like a disco ball with a few spritzes of luminol and a pass of black light. As bloody homicides go, since the evidence was old and dry, it was one of the less gruesome scenes. It’s not just blood that sticks in my mind, though. The thought of what atrocities one human being can commit on another was the part that haunted me.

Crash’s appetite wasn’t visibly dampened. “If that’s not an example of being in the zone,” he said, “I don’t know what is.”

I’d never considered the idea that I had a “zone.” I can’t say it felt good, exactly, though it did feel satisfying. But before I could get too carried away with myself by reveling in the thought, a sharp knock on the front door startled me back to everyday reality. Crash went very still, listening. Or maybe feeling. Softly, I said, “You’re not expecting anyone, I take it.”

He shook his head as a guy on the other side of the door called, “Hello? Hello, are you there? I saw lights on from the alley.”

“A friend?” I guessed.

Crash cocked his head and focused on the voice. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”