PsyCop 4: Secrets (17 page)

Jacob turned to me. “You all right? You look a little green around the gills.” I sat down on the steps to the roof. “Yeah. Gimme a minute.” I put my head between my knees and hoped the sparkles would go away.

Lisa and Carolyn crowded onto the landing with us. “Vic, that’s not him,” said Lisa.

She’d already used all of her
si-no
s for the day, damn it, but I was in no shape to point that out.

“He needs to go,” said Carolyn, and I realized she was talking about me. “Victor’s done chasing ghosts for the day. Jacob, you’re staying. Lisa, take him home, put him to bed.” No, that wasn’t what I needed. My power wasn’t like theirs; it didn’t tap me out. It was
 
only that stupid white balloon I’d been trying to do, that’s all. The homeless guy pulled on my balloon…I kept that part to myself. There was no way I could make it sound even remotely coherent.

“I’m fine. I just need a cup of coffee….”

“She’s right,” said Jacob. “You can come back in the morning.” I tried to determine whether or not I was going to black out. I’m pretty good at knowing which way things are going to tip, which probably means that I’ve experimented too much with other peoples’ prescriptions. There’d been a dull roar in my ears while Jacob and Carolyn squared off, but it was starting to ebb. I’d probably stay conscious if I didn’t stand up too fast.

“Seriously.” I looked up into the tight cluster of bodies on the landing, “I’ll lay down in 304 for a few minutes and everything’ll be….”

There were four people there. Not three.

The fourth man was wearing a tuxedo. And if that wasn’t enough to make him stick out, he was see-through.

“He’s blacking out,” said Carolyn. “Get a nurse.” Lisa took off. Tuxedo Man shimmered as she passed through his arm and shoulder.

“Who’re you?” I asked him. His pale eyes went wide as he realized that I could see him, and my instincts told me he was going to bolt. Quick as I could, I pulled a white stream of

“God’s love” down to my forehead, then shot it out at him. It was a good balloon—I saw it. But he sailed right through it, and through the wall.

“Freeze,” I barked out, and took off after him. I meant to, anyway. Until everything went black.

There was a penlight shining in my left eye. “Sir? Can you tell me your name, sir? Can you tell me what day it is?”

“Detective Victor Bayne, Fifth Precinct. It’s Friday the twenty-third.” Since Zigler fills out all the reports, I don’t normally know what the date is, so I was lucky that Sunday was my birthday and I could count backwards by two. “I’m fine, I don’t have brain damage.” As far as I knew, anyway. I waved the nurse away. “Look, it’s a Psych thing. You don’t need to do this. Really.”

“Don’t try to sit up,” said Jacob. He squeezed my hand.

Wait a minute. He was holding my hand? Cripes. I hoped the nurse just thought that was par for the course for PsyCops. Or something. Back in the bathroom, Carolyn had been right. If Jacob and I were going to work together, we might as well put rainbow bumper stickers on our cars and go ahead with a big, gay housewarming, because he was no good at hiding it.

“I need to talk to Detective Marks,” I said. “Alone.” I didn’t know if calling Jacob by his last name would make us seem like less of an item, but it was worth a shot.

“I’ll page Doctor Phillips,” said the nurse, but Carolyn took her into the hall, I’m guessing to explain about my particular medical situation: that since the time Doctor Chance used me for a little on-the-side drug testing, I could only go to one certain place and be seen by an entire freakin’ committee.

“Jacob.” I pulled his face down toward me, since I didn’t want to risk blacking out again, and keeping my head down was my best bet. “You’ve gotta be more careful.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. I know how you feel about me. You don’t have to prove it by holding my hand.”

He realized what he’d been doing and let go. “Something was going on in here.” Right. I told him about the Tuxedo Ghost. Even though it sounded like a villain from an after-school series aimed at teenaged girls, Jacob didn’t crack a smile. I didn’t go into the balloon-pulling. I didn’t understand what’d happened well enough myself to be able to explain it to anyone else.

Jacob brushed my hair off my forehead and stared down at me like he was about to scoop me up in his arms and ride off into the sunset with me. “Hey,” I said. “I’m pretty tough, I swear. A strong cup of coffee and I’ll be good as new.”

“We should call The Clinic.”

“Uh-uh, no way. I was using my talent off the clock; I don’t want them to make a big deal of it. I overextended, that’s all.”

Jacob looked doubtful.

“Have you ever known me to refuse medical attention if I might get some drugs out of it? No? Then I must be all right.” I got my good elbow under me and pushed up from the floor.

“I’ll have them get you a wheelchair.”

“Hell, no. I’d rather drag myself along by my teeth.” My palm pressed into something gritty. I wiped it on my pant leg, then realized what I’d done and checked for damage. I’d expected a smear of grime to show up gray on my navy slacks, but instead a few translucent, pale crystals rolled off my leg and bounced back down to the floor. The High John bath salts.

The last time I’d blacked out while tapping into my talent, I’d been on the psyactives that Roger Burke had slipped into my Starbucks. This time, I had High John all over me. Maybe the salt acted as a sort of psyactive without me having to swallow it. That was good, given the taste of the box. Plus, theoretically, I could rinse it off once I was through being a ghost super-seeker.

Jacob helped me stand, but I walked out of the stairwell on my own two feet. I noticed a pair of patrolmen by the nurses’ station, and two more by 304. They all looked like they meant business. The goofballs with the coffee cups from the day before were nowhere to be seen.

Lisa and Carolyn jumped up and mobbed me when I came into the room. “It’s fine,” I said, “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” said Carolyn.

Damn. I was woozy enough to slip up and lie to her face. Those little ones sneak up on you. “Fine, I’m queasy. Are you happy?”

“Thrilled. So what happened out there?”

“I was trying to trap this guy, make him stop and talk to me, but he blew right past my ba…uh, my barrier.”

Everyone’s eyebrows drew down a few notches. It would’ve been funny if they weren’t all scowling at me. It was Carolyn who finally spoke. “You’re trying to command spirits?”

“Well, I…. It’s a hell of a lot easier than chasing them, given that they can fly and walk through walls.”

“That’s Marie Saint Savon territory,” said Jacob. Marie was the most powerful medium who’d ever lived, at least the only one who’d ever actually known she was seeing spirits.

I think there are probably some winos on Canal Street whose talents are equally as strong; they just never figured out that weird shit they were seeing was real.

I shrugged off their concern. “It’s not like that. I was only trying to get them to stay put for a second. And you can see how well that went. Anyway, I was chasing the homeless guy and he was basically flipping me off, when this other guy pokes his nose in to see what all the commotion’s about. Sounds stupid, I know, but he was wearing a tuxedo.”

“That’s him,” Lisa blurted out.

We all froze and stared at her. She pressed her lips together and her eyes went huge. But she could hardly take it back. “That’s the guy,” she said quietly, as if any of us had the slightest doubt about what she’d meant.

“We’ll search the floor,” I said, “starting with Irene’s room.”

“No,” said Jacob. “You’ll go get some rest.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not as if anyone else can do the sweep.”

“And it’s not as if it gets any easier for you if you’re tapped out. Go home, recharge your batteries, and we’ll tackle it in the morning.”

“He’s right,” said Lisa. “Let’s go.”

Lisa hustled me into the hall. I leaned over and whispered, “If it wasn’t so serious, I’d say you just want to stop for more fries.”

“It’s not that.” She paused as we passed some patrolmen and started up again once they were out of earshot. “Your ghost isn’t gonna come back tonight. I asked. So why not use the time to get your strength back?”

The elevator doors opened. The nurse with the tight perm was pushing the paralyzed guy with the bony wrists, and we had to wait while she rocked the wheelchair over the thresh-old. Again. “How come this guy’s always in the elevator?” I asked her.

“Mister Barnhardt? He’s got physical therapy twice a day. The doctors are trying to see if he can regain any mobility after his stroke.” She rocked the chair free and wheeled Barnhardt into the lobby.

“His room used to be on the second floor,” I said.

“That’s right. But the rooms on Three are better equipped for the chairs.” The elevator door whispered shut before we had a chance to climb in. Lisa clucked her tongue and hit the down button again, but the door stayed closed.

I gestured at Barnhardt with my head. “Is he…you know…aware of anything going on?” The nurse shrugged. “It’s hard to say. Possibly.”

I refrained from shuddering until she’d marched away on her creepy white shoes. “Lisa, seriously, if that ever happens to me, either shoot me or pay someone else to do it. Or tip me into the river.”

Q

We grabbed a couple of pizzas on the way home and stuck the menus on the fridge. The cannery was starting to look like an actual home, albeit one with 20-foot ceilings. Jacob was home by six. There was no doubt in my mind he would’ve stayed at Rosewood for several more hours if there weren’t two Psychs for him to come home to.

“Do you think the tuxedo is important?” asked Lisa.

“Well, Vic?” said Jacob. “Do ghosts normally have different outfits, or do they wear whatever they were buried in?”

I was about to say they were stuck with whatever they’d been wearing when they kicked the bucket. After all, I see ghosts in all kinds of costumes, uniforms and fashion disasters.

Jackie, the dead hooker who lived in the bushes at my last apartment, spent her afterlife in a bloody tube top. Jackie would whip up a different outfit if she possessed the ability, wouldn’t she?

And yet, there was Roberta in her gigantic lavender hat. She’d appeared about thirty or forty years younger as a ghost, and she’d probably been wearing her all-time favorite outfit.

“It varies,” I said. “I can’t even begin to figure out the reasoning.”

“So this man could’ve been a butler,” Jacob said, “or an actor, or just someone who had a reason to wear a tux at a formal occasion. How old was he?”

“How old was he when he died, or how old of a ghost?” Jacob shrugged. “Anything you can remember.”

“I didn’t get a chance to really analyze.” I did my best to conjure up the look of him.

He felt prissy to me, slim across the shoulders, though that might’ve just been the cut of the suit. And his hair-that’s what was weird. His hair had been pomaded. “He looked old-fashioned, like maybe he traipsed out of an early Bond film. But Roberta looked really retro, and she just died. So that’s no help.”

“How old did he look?” asked Lisa.

“I dunno. Forty. Ish.”

“So let’s say he was born around 1920. He’d be in his eighties today.” I nodded. “And he would’ve died at Rosewood. We can pull all the records and start trying to find him, but how would a positive I.D. help us? I think we need an exorcism. Or a GhosTV.”

“Or….” Jacob stroked his goatee, looking like a Bond villain himself. “What if we got some Auracel for Irene so this guy can’t bother her?”

“That would never fly,” I said. “She’s too old. Too weak. She’d feel sick all the time. It’d ruin whatever quality of life she’s got left.”

“Can you tell us anything else about this guy?” said Lisa. “Height, weight, hair and eye color?”

“Maybe five ten. Slim.” I couldn’t remember his hair color. How strange. Just the way it was plastered to his head. He wasn’t as solid as the homeless guy, so maybe that was why I had trouble pinpointing his coloration. I’d gotten a look at his eyes, hadn’t I? I had, because I remember how shocked he’d looked when he realized I could see him.

“Blue eyes,” I said, and immediately thought of pathetic Mister Barnhardt with his slack, withered face, one ice-blue eye at three o’clock and one at twelve. “Holy crap. Barnhardt.”

Jacob leaned toward me. Lisa chafed away gooseflesh on her arms.

“What if the attacker isn’t even dead?” I said. “What if the stroke tossed his spirit out of his body and he’s hanging around Irene because he knows she can sense him?”

“Yes and no,” said Lisa.

Jacob lined her up in his laser-vision. I started to protest, but he held up a hand. “She’s so close, Vic. Let’s do it and get this thing over with.” Lisa nodded. “He’s right. I do this, and then no more
si-no
for the rest of the trip.” She chewed on her lower lip and thought. “The stroke isn’t what caused all of this.” Her mouth moved as she
si-no’d
herself. “He could do it before the stroke. But it’s him, all right. He’s raping her with his astral body.”

“You’re sure it’s him,” said Jacob, standing up. Lisa nodded. “That’s all I need.”

“Wait, wait, wait….” He was already rounding the corner to the vestibule. I jumped up and followed. “Hold on. What are you doing?”

“Old people.” He slid into his coat. “They’re pretty fragile. And accidents happen so easily.”

“Are you crazy? You work with the human lie detector. You can’t finish off Barnhardt. Not without getting caught in a heartbeat.”

Jacob cupped my face in both his hands, stared hard into my eyes. “I’ve got it all figured out. I take care of his body, then you can send his soul packing. Problem solved.”

“I’ve never gotten a ghost to leave if it wasn’t damn well ready. Not once. And what if his physical body dying makes his astral body stronger?”

“He won’t try anything else tonight,” said Lisa. “Why don’t you sleep on it? We’ll come up with something else.”

I looked back at Jacob, and wondered if I could plead with him not to go all vigilante just by using my eyes. “I think she’s right,” I said. “Come to bed.” And I didn’t mean to turn in early; it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. I hoped he’d get my meaning.