PsyCop 3: Body and Soul (16 page)

We'd left a little early so that I could swing by the alleyway where Andy Lynch's wallet had been found in the Dumpster.

The crime lab equipment was long gone; we may not have found the guy who'd stabbed Lynch in the gut for whatever cash he'd been carrying, but we got Irving and Esmeralda, and my guess was the alderman was happy enough that he had someone to throw the book at.

I would've been happy to question Lynch about his stabbing, but he hadn't stuck around. Not very good closure for the family and friends he'd left behind; but I, on the other hand, thought it was probably for the best that he'd hit the ground running in the afterlife instead of lingering, waiting to tattle to someone like me.

Jacob put the car in park and looked me over. "Do you want me to stay here?"

"And dig the hole all by myself? Ground's frozen."

Jacob reached into the back seat for the trowel and tub of quick-set concrete I'd brought home from SaverPlus. His face was very still, but his eyes looked kind of intense. If I didn't know him, I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in his head. But having spent so much time with him ... crammed together in that lousy little apartment ... having met his family ... having watched him sleep, early in the morning, his eyes moving back and forth beneath closed lashes, dreaming his verifiably non-precognitive dreams?

I could tell he was totally getting off on this.

Late November days are short, and the sun had already set by the time we came to visit Tiffany. The dim alleyway was lit by widely spaced yellow streetlights and everything looked washed out and surreal, like a poorly developed photograph. Except Jacob. He looked like he'd just stepped out of some noir film set. All he needed was a fedora. He called Stan and told him we'd meet him in half and hour, then he set down the tub of concrete, planted his hands on his hips, and looked around the alley with much more glee than I thought the situation warranted. "Is she here now?"

"I dunno. I never did get a visual on her." I dug in my coat pocket and pulled out the necklace I'd settled on. Gold. Very shiny. A butterfly with wings set in sparkly pink gemstones swayed as I held it out in front of me, trying to get Tiffany's attention. Which is stupid, when you consider that she'd seen Crash's pendulums straight through my pockets. "Hey, kid," I said. "C'mon out. It's safe."

Jacob found a patch of snow where an electrical line was anchored into the ground. He kicked the hard packed snow away, exposing a patch of dirt beside the asphalt. "How about here?" he asked me.

I looked around, wondering how Tiffany could possibly resist a sparkly butterfly. "Uh, yeah. That's fine."

Jacob crouched down and started digging a hole while I paced up and down the alley, absentmindedly walking a grid.

Tiffany might not show up, I reminded myself. She might be like Jackie, my most irritating dead neighbor—some days there, some days not, with no rhyme or reason that I could discern. Or she might be like the dead baby in the basement of my apartment building, visible only in the wee hours of the morning.

Or maybe she'd moved on. I looked down at the butterfly in my palm. Somehow, I doubted that. Ghosts that stuck around had their reasons. Otherwise, they'd be like the six victims in the zombie factory, dissolving like smoke on the wind as soon as the tie was severed with their bodies.

"Who's that man?" said someone in an outrageously loud stage whisper.

I looked around. No one here but us PsyCops. "That's my ... friend." I'd almost said boyfriend, which was reassuring, that truth mode had somehow begun trumping my natural impulse to hedge. It was just that I couldn't tell how old Tiffany was. Had she had friends with two mommies or two daddies—or had hers been a world where the adults had loveless hookups for a few bucks or a nugget of crack? "He's helping me make a spot for your necklace, so no one else can take it."

"Really?" she sounded dubious.

"Didn't I promise?"

Jacob bent over the hole he'd made, neatening up the sides, but I could tell he was watching me talk to Tiffany out of the corner of his eye. Guess I was showing Jacob a really good time.

"Let me see it again," she said, her whisper grown frantic with excitement.

Though she could probably see it through my clenched fist, I let it dangle. The streetlights caught the pink gemstones.

They twinkled.

"It's really for me?"

"Really. We're going to put it right in there, for safe keeping. And you can visit it any time you want." I was assuming a gallon of post anchoring concrete wouldn't hinder her enjoyment of the butterfly, since she was so good at seeing through things.

The butterfly charm rotated, though the wind was still, and a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature raced up my arm. "It's my favorite thing," Tiffany said. "Ever."

I walked up to Jacob, my arm trembling from the ghost-chill, and looked down at the hole. "Is it deep enough?"

He nodded, his eyes roaming up and down my body. I don't know if he was looking for evidence of the supernatural, or just taking in a good eyeful of me. I crouched across from him and dropped the necklace into the hole while he broke open the seal on the plastic tub. The plastic gave with a pop and a sigh. It was then punctuated by a squeal and the smack of metal on metal at the end of the alleyway, the ugly clap of a fender bender.

Figured. Just when we were having fun delivering presents to ghosts.

"We should probably go call that in," I said. The collision didn't sound loud enough to have caused injuries, but we'd need to check it out anyway since we were the good guys, Jacob and me.

Jacob handed me the trowel. "I'll go," he said. He slipped his hand around the back of my neck and pulled me toward him for a kiss.

Just a quick one, a warm brush of lips, the tickle of his goatee, but still—what a rush, out there in public where anyone could see us, heck, the ghost kid probably did see us.

I licked my lips as he stood up, dark bedroom eyes lingering on me for just a moment before he turned and sprinted to the end of the alleyway to check out the crash.

"Why did he do that?" said Tiffany.

I shrugged and stuck the trowel into the concrete. It was so stiff with cold that I could barely shove the blade in, like ice cream so frozen it bends the spoon when you try to shave a little off for yourself. "Because he likes me."

"But you're both boys."

"Sometimes boys like each other that way."

"Oh."

I scraped out a few puny scoops of the mixture, then decided that if I sat there scooping at it all night, it was going to air-set before I got halfway through. I upended the bucket, slid out the contents, and tried to jam the cylindrical mass of concrete into the hole with the flat of the trowel, instead.

"Just step on it," said somebody. I looked over my shoulder and found a Caucasian woman, maybe seventy, seventy-five, watching my progress. I would have taken her for a live one, if she'd been dressed for the weather, or if I could see her breath. She had on a shapeless, brown, smock-type dress, bright purple socks, and Birkenstock sandals. Her white hair was cropped short and stuck up at the crown of her skull. She looked like a hippy punk grandmother. Or maybe an ageing lesbian.

"It's too cold out to scoop," she told me, arms crossed, gesturing toward the cylinder of concrete with her chin. "Just step on it."

"I'll ruin my shoe."

"Oh, for God's sake," she said. She had a voice like Ethel Merman. "Cover your foot with a plastic bag."

Luckily in the city there's never a shortage of plastic bags when you need one, especially if you don't care whether it's coming apart at the seams or not. I pulled a fairly intact bag from between the links of a chain link fence, wrapped it around my shoe, and stomped.

It took a few good stomps, but I mashed the cylinder of concrete all the way in.

"Now some dirt," instructed the ghost. "Don't worry, it'll still set. And then some snow."

I realized Jacob would have a field day if he knew we had spirit supervisors on our team. He'd been out on the street for quite a while. "Say, you didn't just die in a car crash, did you?"

"Me? Oh, hell no. I fell through a rotten stair and broke three vertebrae."

"Gee. Sorry."

She shrugged and peered between a couple of buildings. "I should've known better. I'd been stepping over it all week, but had my arms full of power tools, the phone was ringing, and I miscounted." She pointed, and I came over to look. It was the back of a building. Brick. Square. Flat roof. Pretty plain, pretty industrial.

"It took me years to get through all the legal red tape and buy that place. Know what it is?"

"I dunno."

"Used to be a cannery in the eighteen fifties. Come look."

I glanced back at the other end of the alley. A police light strobed, red, then blue.

"Don't worry," said the old woman. "I won't bite."

"It's not that," I told her. "My, uh, boyfriend...."

"The handsome one. What about him?"

"He'll wonder where I am."

"You've got a cellular phone, haven't you?"

Cellular phone? It seemed like on odd thing to call it. I wondered how long she'd been dead. "Uh. Yeah."

"Then come look. I just want to show someone, before it gets torn down or made into condominiums."

I took a few steps down the narrow gangway between buildings. The ghost woman waited for me. She was smiling.

She seemed pretty jazzed to have me looking at the old cannery.

"See here?" she said, pointing to a rectangle of bricks that were a different shade of brown than the others around them.

"Used to be a coal chute."

"And here I thought someone had been bricked up alive."

"Hah! I like you. You're weird."

"Thanks."

We went around to the front. The facade was flat, with a patterned ridge around the top that flared out. "It took forever to get this side of the street zoned for mixed use,"

said the ghost, stepping through a gap in the fence. "I wanted a live/work studio, and the city wanted ... oh, I dunno what they wanted. A big manufacturer wasn't gonna pick this place up. Needed too much work. Cheaper to build new."

She ran her hand over the carved stone that framed the doorway. "See this? Lotus. A student attempt at Egyptian revival. This place is full of subtle details."

"What do you ... did you ... do?"

"Sculptor. I would've really done right by this place, you know?"

Graffiti covered the front doors, gang symbols, and more mundane stuff. The word "fuck." No explanation, just "fuck." I felt bad for the sculptor, having to see her beloved cannery like that. Unless maybe she was some kind of weird performance artist who'd done it herself. You never know, with artists.

"There's a key hidden under that round rock," she said, "if you want to go inside."

"Under a rock?" I said. "Cripes, the only other place that's worse is on top of the door frame."

"No one's bothered it for seventeen years, have they?"

I wasn't exactly itching to go inside, but I picked up that rock anyway, intending to show her how ridiculous it was for her to have hidden her spare key where any old crackhead could find it—and there it was. Fused to the mud. Right where she'd left it.

I pried the key up and wiped it on my jeans. I realized belatedly that I'd been trying to look somewhat decent for the realtor, which was why I'd been wearing good shoes rather than ratty high-top sneakers. Oh well. A little mud never hurt a pair of jeans.

"It's dark inside," she said as I turned the key in the lock.

I'd expected it to be stiff with age, but it felt like a regular lock.

"That's okay," I said. "I've got a flashlight."

"You just carry a flashlight around," she said.

"I'm a cop." I twisted the beam on and opened the door.

I'd expected the skittering of rats, but there was no movement. The old cannery was quiet and still inside. And huge.

The floorboards were gigantic, ten inches wide, and scarred with the footprints of machinery long gone. The bare brick walls were rough, and ancient wooden signs with ridiculous slogans like "Think safe!" hung on the wall that had no windows. A very scary wooden staircase hugged the opposite wall, leading to a second floor that extended maybe half the length of the building, loft-style.

"Are those the stairs you, uh...?" I searched for a broken tread with my flashlight beam.

"That's them. I guess I didn't follow the signs' advice. Say, you're really a cop?"

"I'm kind of a specialist. Y'know. With the talking to dead people and all."

"Doesn't that beat everything? You're all right."

My phone chirped and vibrated, and I nearly dropped the flashlight. Jacob. "Uh, hey," I said. The sculptor was watching me.

"Where'd you go?"

"Not far. There's an abandoned cannery a block over. You can see it if you go one building west from Tiffany's necklace and look down the gangway. I'll shine my flashlight at the back window."

I heard Jacob's boots crunch through the snow over the phone. "Got it," he said. "Anything you're doing there in particular?"

"Just ... uh ... talking to the late owner."

I started to hear his rapidly approaching footfalls with my other ear, too. He moves fast. It's all that exercising and running he does in his spare time.

Jacob paused in the doorway, hands on hips, and took the whole cannery in by the light of my flashlight beam.

"How was the accident?" I asked him.

"Fine," he said, waiving away my concern. "No one was injured. They just wanted me to sign a few things."

"Who, the patrolmen?"

"No. The drivers." He pulled his own flashlight out and shone it at the retro safety signs, and gave a low whistle.

"What did you say this place was?"

"A cannery. What did they want you to sign?"

"You know," he said, his light moving over the texture of the brick wall. "Just some autographs."

"Autographs?"

"It's not that big a deal."

I did my best to scoop my jaw up off the floor while Jacob disappeared around a corner. "Hey, there's an amazing kitchen in here."