Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (14 page)

“You’re right,” Spencer said.  “I don’t care much.  Least, not about you an’ what happened to, eh, what’s her name?”

“Shannon,” she said.  “You know her name.”  In the school atrium, she was now climbing the steps.  A goth boy she didn’t know looked at her when she spoke.  The kid asked her if she was talking to him, but she just kept talking as if he wasn’t there, and then he pretended he wasn’t.  “If you don’t care about her, then why are you asking?”

“Because, I wanna know what they said about me.”  He got hold of another tumbler
pin.  Kaley could feel it, and also felt it slip away.

“What who said?”

“The cops.”

Oh, of course
. 
It’s about him
. 
It’s always about him
.  “I tried telling them what we saw.  I didn’t want to at first, but…the missing cop.”

“Emerson,” he said, regaining the lost tumbler
pin.  His tongue was just touching his top lip whenever he wasn’t talking, and his eyes were squinted in concentration.  “Yeah, I read all about him in the paper.  He the one got eaten by the house?”  Kaley nodded.  “I never saw his picture in the paper, just read the story, but I figured it had to be him.”  A satisfying click, so faint it was almost inaudible, and then Spencer pulled his picks out and addressed the final lock.  “So, they wanted to know about that little detail.  I guess they said ‘Where’d he go?’ an’ shit like that, huh?  Ya finally cracked, tried to explain it, but they couldn’t understand.  Like trying to explain a three-dimensional object to a one-dimensional animal.”

Kaley tilted her head. 
Where did that come from?  Was it coincidence, or is he picking up thoughts from me?
  It had certainly happened that night in Atlanta.  Spencer’s thoughts had been like a radio transmission distorted and faint at first, but they had become clearer the closer he came to Kaley and Shan.  His thoughts had begun to bleed over into hers, and vise versa.  They’d seen things in each other, things that had made them both not just a little uncomfortable.

“Yeah,” she said, watching him work, and stepping through a set of double doors on the second floor of
the school.  Absently, she thought about breezing by her locker to offload some of her books, but decided she was going to be cutting it close as it was.  “Yeah, they wanted more.  Child psychologists were brought in.  They thought it was shock.  I guess some of it was, right?”

“Probably,” said Spencer, only half interested. 
He only cares about the bits concerning himself
.  “What else did you tell ’em?”

“
Pretty much what you heard on TV or read in the papers.”

“Bullshit.  Ya told them somethin’ else.”

“Like what?”

“Like that I was a fuckin’ pedophile, too, an’ that I was in on it with Dmitry an’ those fuckers.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah?” he said, fishing for the final tumble in the lock.  “Then how come my mug’s all over Interpol’s website, an’ how come they got a profile
on me sayin’ I was involved with the Rainbow Room and the
vory
?”

“I don’t know, I swear.”

“Don’t lie to me,” he said, working more furiously.  His tone was like that of a volcano, considering the pros and cons of erupting.

“I’m not,” she said.

“You told them somethin’ else.  I’m never wrong about people.  I know you told them somethin’—”

“One of your fucking problems, Spencer, is that you’re
almost
never wrong!” she shouted.  Then, she emphasized again, “
Almost
.”

A sharper click this time.  The final lock was
picked, and at about the same time that the tardy bell was ringing at school.  Given this new impetus, she hustled on down the hall to room 208, Mrs. Cartwright’s room. 
She’s going to kill me
.  It was funny, not only was she present in two places at once, but her mind and intentions were also in two places—she was simultaneously concerned about the life of the boy in the basement as well as worried that she might be sent to Principal Manning again for tardiness.  Strange how a simple school bell could provoke such a response, even at such a dire time. 
Like Pavlov’s dog
.  She’d read about
that
as well.

Kaley watched as
Spencer withdrew his improvised lock picks and stood up, tested the doorknob, and opened it slowly.  He pulled his Glock out from his jacket and stood back away from the door as he swung it wide.  Water was trickling down these stairs, as well, foaming and frothing all the way down.  Spencer didn’t seem to see it, either.  He was as oblivious to it as the kids at school were.

Spencer
stood to one side of the door and peeked inside.

“There’s nothing down there besides the boy,” Kaley said.  “If there was, I would’ve told you.”

“How do I know that?” he said.  Spencer reached inside slowly and flipped the switch, illuminating the long staircase below.  “You don’t think I know what you are?  You don’t think I know exactly what you’d like to do to me if given the chance?  Huh?”  Kaley looked at him, perplexed, as she approached her home room.  Spencer chuckled.  “After what you did to Dmitry an’ the others, an’ after seein’ inside my head, seein’ what I’ve done, you don’t think I know what you’d do to me if you could?”

Kaley shook her head.  “I would never—”

“You would never only because you
can’t
.  An’ ya wanna know how I know you can’t?  Because you haven’t.  Because you
didn’t
.”  Spencer turned his back on her and took his first step down the staircase, gun up and pointed at the foot of the stairs.  He whispered back to her, “And I know you’d try to kill me if you thought I was gonna hurt somebody you liked, or some other innocent.”  He took another step down.  “And you know I’d do whatever it takes to hurt
you
if you try to fuck with me.  And you know that I know that you know that I know.  So don’t say ‘I would never’ and act like it’s for altruistic principles, baby cakes.  Spare me.”

She didn’t like the way his mind worked.  She didn’t like being this close to it.  Oily and sludgy
, it was like being caught in tar pits; the more she struggled the more she felt pulled down into a mind bereft of what she felt was essential to humanity.  However, that “tar pit” of a mind was focused, and pensive.  It seemed to resent doing anything but concentrating fiercely on the here and now, yet it had an eye cast towards the future.  The mind also resisted multitasking, by and large, even though by the look on his face he frequently
appeared
to be juggling many considerations at once.  There was nothing and no one indispensible to that mind.  It also discounted any significance in the feelings of others, as well as in their souls and their opinions.  Opinions, emotions, empathy; these things were all anathema to Spencer’s mindful, if devilish, approach.

And there was something frighteningly inviting about that mind.  It beckoned with a song of total abandon.  It told Kaley that all she needed to do was shirk off her heavy, burdensome emotions, and she could live free, too.  As free as Spencer.  Her heart and mind eventually retaliated, but it was difficult. 
“You’re wrong,” she told him.  “I’m not like you.  I’m not a psycho and I don’t kill people for fun like y—”

“Lemme tell ya a little secret, schweetheart,” he said, in a voice like a gangster from a 1950s flick.  “Everybody’s got a little psycho in ’em, just waitin’ to get out.  It’s just that there’s these little obstacles, these, ah…façades that are in our way, a glitch in our programmin’. 
Society pushes you this way, pulls you that way. Tells you to act like this or be like that.”  He stopped at the foot of the stairs.  “Only the strongest overcome social pressures to be
this
or to be
that
.”

“And let me guess, you’re
one of those strong ones.”

“That’s a bingo, Johnny, tell her what she’s won.”  He looked at the large steel door standing in his way.  There were three separate locks here, too.  Spencer sighed.  “Ya can’t just read Zakhar’s mind an’ find out where he hid the goddam keys?”

Kaley thought for a second, but could not detect Zakhar anymore, especially not over the slick, icky feeling that was emanating from the room on the other side of that door.  She had been inside there once, but now that she was becoming used to it all, used to this “fourth-dimensional” state of hers, she could see and hear and smell and feel things she hadn’t before. 

It was more than just the water trickling down the steps behind her, and the foam frothing at her heels.
  It was a slinking thing that stunk.  The basement and its stairs reeked of such hideous evil she almost vomited.  At once, she became disoriented again by the fact that she was both in a staircase in Russia with Spencer Pelletier, and at Cartersville Elementary School stepping through the doorway into Mrs. Cartwright’s first period math class.  Kaley took a step down the stairs (found her seat in Mrs. Cartwright’s room), hands moving across the slippery walls (threw her backpack onto the desk and started getting her notebook and pencils out), watching Spencer carefully for any sudden movements (looked at Kalecia Kimbrough sitting behind her, whispering to a boy named Jonathan who sat beside her), and braced herself for what might happen once Spencer met the boy (took her seat and arranged her things on her desk; math book at the center, notebook to the left, pencils at the top in the indented pencil-holder).

The mind and attention were split, yet focused on both worlds. 
This bifurcation was not something that Nan had ever commented on.  God?  Emotions?  Fear?  Love?  Angels and demons?  The Charm?  Oh yes, on these topics Nan had spoken at great length and with the glimmer of experience in her eye.  But the splitting of mind and body?  Telepresence?  Being in two places at once?  Nan had had nothing to say on these things.

But Kaley did recall this one
little tidbit, though.  On her Nan’s porch, during a powerful rain, when Shan had come running in from the storm crying because she’d slipped and fallen in the downpour.  “Dry those tears up, now.  Dry ’em up,” she said softly, folding Shan into her arms and taking her inside.  “Far worse things you gonna see than that, girl.  You an’ yo sista both.  Far worse things.  Things
I
ain’t even prepared for.”

Did she know?  Did she
that we would—

“Yo, Earth to Ghost Girl!  Can you get into Zakhar’s mind or not?”

“No,” she finally said, snapping out of it.  “No, I can’t read the dead man’s mind.  It doesn’t work like that.  I can’t…I mean, he’s
dead
.  I can’t detect the thoughts of a dead man.”

He sighed again,
and took his hairpins and paperclips out from his pocket.  “Then get comfy.  This could take another minute.”

When the plane touched down, he immediately unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up, much against the direct protests of the lone stewardess.  Before they were even taxiing over to the hangar, he had his bags pulled and had pushed past the only other passenger on the plane, and was standing by the door, waiting.

He hadn’t taken a flight directly into Chelyabinsk Airport, that wouldn’t do at all.  If his contacts were right,
then Moscow Police had already gotten the word out, FSB and Chelyabinsk officials had knowledge of his impending arrival, as well.  For this reason, his people had arranged for him to land on a private airstrip just outside of the city.

The doors finally opened, and he stepped directly out into the cold Siberian air.  Snow and ice dominated the world.  Wind snapped at him as he stepped down the
airstairs and onto the concrete floor of the warehouse.  The wide bay doors to the hanger were still open, allowing great gales to come sweeping through.

Shcherbakov smiled. 
Russia was welcoming him home, and it was always good to be home.

He reached into his pocket and took out his ushanka, and pulled
it over his head.  He reached into another pocket and pulled out a packet of Sobranie cigarettes and the silver bear’s-head lighter his father had given him for his eighteenth birthday.  Shcherbakov lit up, inhaled, relished, and blew out a cloud ostentatiously.

The dark-blue Lada Granta was parked just outside those immense bay doors,
chains wrapped around its snow tires, engine still running, a man at the wheel and another man standing outside, wearing his own ushanka and a long black wool coat.  Vitaly Zverev was exactly how Shcherbakov remembered him, tall and frail-looking, bald, with a face frozen over by a lifetime of sadness.  And why not?  The cruelties visited on their two families could fill volumes.  He approached his cousin and embraced him.  No words were spoken.  None need be.  The trunk was popped open and Shcherbakov tossed his briefcase inside, and then slipped into the car behind the driver’s seat.  Zverev got into the front passenger’s side.

A blizzard like nothing he’d seen in a decade saw them off.  There was an unbreakable silence in the sedan until they got well away from the little airstrip, all eyes on the lonely roads heading east and west, everyone silently searching for the agents they hoped wouldn’t descend on them.  Shcherbakov looked behind him, all around him, even up at those slate skies, barely visible through the
dense snowfall.  He would not put it past FSB to send their bravest helicopter pilots after him in this weather.  They had been humiliated enough by their inability to capture him, and the men and women of FSB were famous for their shortage of playfulness and humor; this wasn’t a game to them, though it occasionally felt that way to him.