PsyCop 4: Secrets (8 page)

I waited for Lisa to talk. She didn’t. We crept forward a few yards, then stopped again. I glanced over at her. She was unreadable in her dark sunglasses.

“Look, the fact that you haven’t spoken to me for months? That pisses me off. But forget about that for a second. Right now, you’re freaking me out big time. Why are you here, and what’s the deal with PsyTrain?”

“I just need some Auracel.”

“You shouldn’t take it in a moving vehicle.” Total bullshit. “Don’t worry. I promise I’ll only ask you questions outside the realm of
si-no
. Are they letting you sleep? Do they have some kind of empath digging around in your head? What other meds are you on?”

“You serious?” Lisa glanced at me, but I couldn’t see her eyes. “Nothing like that. It’s not about PsyTrain, it’s about me.” Lisa stretched her feet out under the heater vent and pushed her shoulders back into the seat. She shifted and wiggled, and adjusted the tilt until she was so far down she’d need to strain to look out the window. “It’s really messed up to be a Psych.”

“There’s a newsflash.”

“I never understood why you took drugs all the time. I figured it was better to be able to see where the ghosts were so you could avoid them.” She sighed and pointed the dashboard vent at her face. “Now I see why sometimes you just get sick of all the knowing.”

“I don’t think you can compare our talents. They’re too different.” And besides, I don’t know shit. I mean, crap.

“It’s just a different way of interpreting information. But we both see stuff that other people can’t.” She turned to look at me, finally, but I left her in my peripheral vision and kept my eyes on the road. “Maybe no one’s meant to see it.”

“But we do. Lots of people do.” I tried to remember the statistic Crash liked to quote. “It’s like three or, uh, fifteen people out of a hundred.” I eased up behind a minivan with a kid at each back window pressing his mouth against the glass and blowing so that their little faces blew up. They looked like those carnival games where you have to aim the squirt gun at a clown’s open mouth. I thought of Clayton. And the camcorder. You don’t have to be psychic to end up knowing things you were a lot happier not knowing.

I pulled off the highway and onto the surface streets, which were packed even more tightly with cars, trucks, vans and busses. I got stuck under the traffic light waiting to make a left turn, and the dead guy wearing the sandwich board that said “Repent your sins” was ranting and raving so close to my car that my side view mirror protruded through his thigh. I hate getting trapped right next to that guy. A bunch of idiots beeped at me as if I could go anywhere, and the doomsday-guy’s hand started waving through the driver’s side window.

I flinched away. “Go toward the light,” I said automatically. I learned that from the movie
Poltergeist
. It never helped, but it seemed like the thing to say.

“You’re kidding,” said Lisa.

“Huh? Why would I…?” I spotted a hole in traffic and fishtailed out of the turn lane. “The streets are full of ‘em. Or maybe those are just the ones I usually see, since I never went door-to-door to take a census.”

“Nobody at PsyTrain could do that.”

“Do what?”

“Just see them. Just like that. Do they stand in the middle of the road?”

“Sometimes. Why do you think I swerve a lot? It’s not all just avoiding the potholes—

sometimes they look alive, until I get pretty close.” I glanced over at Lisa. She was staring at me. “So what
could
the mediums do at PsyTrain?”

“They’d say things like: ‘I sense a presence. It’s female. Older. A mother or a grandmother.’”

Yikes. I hoped I never had to face anyone whose grandmother gave me a visual. “They didn’t actually see things?”

“Maybe. But not much.”

I thought of the GhosTV that my good buddies Roger Burke and Doctor Chance had pieced together out of transistors and duct tape…and a bunch of other stuff I’d never been able to identify. Whatever that thing was made of, it had a definite effect on ghosts, to the point where I could turn the volume down and tune the spirits out completely if I didn’t want to see them. Maybe a tuner like that could amplify the ghosts and help low-level mediums get more than just fleeting impressions. And then after work was done, they could turn off their fancy electronics and go home to a nice, normal life. How pleasant for them.

“Where are you going?” said Lisa.

“Surprise. I moved.” During the three months in which you weren’t speaking to me. I somehow kept myself from saying that out loud, too.

She must’ve been able to tell I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the tone of my voice. “I’m sorry, Vic. Okay? If anyone knows it’s hard to be like this, it’s you.” I glanced at her. I really, really wanted to say,
Hard? You don’t know what hard is, missy.

But that was way too melodramatic for me. I settled on, “Hm.” I pulled into the parking spot I’d shoveled out earlier, which was still unoccupied. The cannery’s reputation for being haunted had its perks.

I took long strides up the sidewalk that Lisa couldn’t match without running to keep up.

But then I felt like an ass and glanced back at her. She looked small. And sad.

I suck at holding a grudge. By the time she got to the front door, I was holding it open for her like she was Queen for a Day. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll make you some coffee.” I slung my coat over a peg. Lisa held on to the jacket of her tracksuit like she’d try to bite me if I took it. “Leave your shoes on,” I said. “We’re not…uh…weird about the floors.”

“We?”

She could figure it out by asking herself a
si-no
. Maybe she was even being frugal with the
si-no
s she asked herself. “Jacob and me. We bought this place together.”

“That’s so fast,” she said. “I mean, congratulations.” I shrugged and led the way to the kitchenette. “I guess it’s fast. It just kinda happened.”

“When did you move?”

“Monday.”

“You haven’t unpacked?”

“Jacob’s been working.” I rinsed out the coffee pot and filled it with water.

“You got a…um….” Lisa pointed to the side of her neck.

Damn. The bite mark. I pretended not to care and got really busy making the coffee. I flicked the
on
button and turned back toward her. “So, not that it isn’t great to see you, but do you wanna tell me why you dropped everything and flew back here on the spur of the moment?”

“I told you. I want to try Auracel. They won’t give it to me at PsyTrain.”

“You already tried Auracel, remember? And it made you incredibly sick.” Auracel made everybody incredibly sick until they got used to it. But that was beside the point. “Why don’t you try explaining to me what’s turned you into such a head case about the
si-no
?

If you don’t want to do
si-no
, then just stop.” Lisa perched on one of the barstools and tucked her feet behind the rung. She clutched at her knees and rocked back and forth, eyes hidden behind the Paris Hilton sunglasses. I thought maybe she wasn’t going to answer me—and that maybe she really had turned into a whacked-out head case—but then she said, “Vic, do you believe in God?” Cripes. Could the conversation get any more broad or irrelevant? “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

“Nobody’s supposed to be infallible but God. The Pope, too, according to the Church. So what does that make the
si-no
? What does that make me?”

“The
si-no
isn’t infallible. It only works if something can be answered with a definite yes or no, right? I mean, sure, not everyone can do it. But it’s still just a…a skill. It’s like being able to tell if something’s big or small, red or blue. You happen to be able to see a lot more than most people.”

Lisa’s shoulders slumped. “What if the
si-no
were just like regular sight, like vision? If you can see a kid’s running into the street, don’t you have a responsibility to tell his mother?”

“Not necessarily.”

“How can you say that?”

“I’m not responsible for anyone else’s snot-nosed brat—people need to watch their own damn kids. And you’re not responsible for every hardship in the world. You’re responsible for you. Just you. That’s it.”

“And that’s why you go around looking for ghosts—scary ones, bloody ones—so you can interrogate them and find their killers.”

I rolled my eyes. “Take off those stupid sunglasses, will you?” Lisa slid the glasses off and set them on the counter. Her eyes looked squinty, the skin around them swollen, as if she’d been crying for days.

“I don’t know why I do it,” I said. “They give me a paycheck. What else am I good for, anyway?”

I poured Lisa some coffee. She took the cup from me and hugged it to her chest. “Vic, I don’t want the
si-no
.”

“So stop.”

“How can I? What if it saves lives?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Everybody dies eventually. Look at it this way: what if you never realized how powerful the
si-no
is? What if you were just a regular cop with a gun and a badge? Would you feel like you needed to solve every case on the board? In every precinct, every city? No. You’d do your job, and then you’d go home.” We drank coffee and listened to sirens in the background, cruisers by the sound of them, and we sat side by side and listened to the rise and fall of their wails. It hadn’t taken much effort to make Lisa forget about the Auracel. I had to wonder if she’d been after the meds at all, or if she’d just wanted an excuse to talk to me.

I hoped she didn’t think I had any answers.

Lisa set her mug on the counter. “Is it okay if I use your computer? I should probably email my coordinator at PsyTrain and let her know I’m all right.”

“Can’t they track that type of thing and come and get you?”

“Vic, I’m not a prisoner there. I just want to let them know I’m not dead in a ditch.”

“Oh.” I waved at the laptop. “Go ahead.” Did she know for sure that a couple of psy-goons weren’t going to show up on our doorstep and haul her away? I wanted to tell her to check her
si-no
, just in case. But I couldn’t very well do that if I’d just suggested that the answer to all her problems was to stop using her talent.

“Lisa?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know that there’s nothing about me on the Internet at all? Camp Hell, either?”

“There isn’t supposed to be, is there? I had to sign like a hundred papers that said I’d protect your privacy or else I’d lose my job, my credentials, everything.” She said this with minimal interest, as if it were old news.

I hovered in the doorway, debating exactly how I could get a little more information on these “papers” without sounding as completely freaked out as I felt. Lisa was leaning on me; she depended on me to show her how to navigate the world as a high-level Psych. If I was going to fall apart, I’d have to do it quietly and keep it to myself. At least until she sorted herself out. Then I’d totally grill her.

I went up to the bedroom and grabbed the sheet set in the mangled package and a pillow off the bed. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock, but I figured I could offer Lisa a Valium, or maybe half a red, if she just wanted to get some sleep. I tucked the fitted sheet around the couch cushions the best I could and spread out the blankets.

“Vic?” called Lisa from the kitchen. “Who’s Ash Man, and why does he care what you’re wearing?”

Lisa had a knack for things that I considered to be “guy” stuff. She liked to drive. She liked to play on the computer. And judging by the fact that she got Jacob’s humongous TV completely set up, right down to programming the remote, I was guessing she liked electronics. I wondered if I could possibly bribe her into letting me take the credit for the setup, but I decided that chances were slim that Jacob would believe I’d accomplished anything mechanical. Maybe I could say it was like those women you hear about who, in a burst of adrenaline, lift a car to keep it from crushing their beloved child.

Nah. He still wouldn’t buy it.

It was ten-ish when Jacob got home, and Lisa’s explanation of some feature on the gigantic remote control with eight thousand buttons was going in one ear and out the other. Jacob stopped in the doorway with his overcoat half off and his gym bag dangling from one hand, and he stared at Lisa as if he’d (finally) seen a ghost.

“Hi, Jacob,” she said.

He dropped his bag and came over, spread his arms wide, and gathered her into a big bear hug.

I hadn’t hugged Lisa, and she’d been my partner. I guess I’m just not a hugger. I’d been sitting down when we first greeted each other, so maybe that was why it hadn’t occurred to me. I guess I could have patted her on the knee. Or done something vaguely affection-ate.

“Are you okay?” Jacob asked her.

Lisa nodded. “Things were getting…it’s hard to explain.” They’d fallen back to arm’s length, but still held on to each other as if it were natural to touch other people who you weren’t trying to pick up during a two-for-one drink special. “Being a precog was starting to get to me.”

Jacob hugged Lisa to him one last time, then let go. “Your timing is incredible,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the
si-no
told you to come here to give me something to go on in this case.”

“Uh, Jacob?” I said. “Did you just hear her?”

If anyone wanted watertight evidence on this case to appear in front of Jacob wrapped up in a neat little bow, it was me. But Lisa was so wigged out about the
si-no
that she’d actually flown the coop and come back to Chicago.

“She can’t do it…tonight,” I said. “She’s on Neurozamine.” I wondered if I’d ever fed him a lie of such giant proportions before. Not that it wasn’t a believable lie—Lisa had been trying to score off me, after all. But that it was about something so important to him. And then I wondered if I had any “tells” that would alert him to my lying. I hunted for the volume button on the remote and fiddled with the TV in case I had a look, or a twitch, or a weird little gesture that might give me away.

Jacob gave Lisa a lingering, wistful look. “It’s that bad?” She nodded.

“I’m sorry.” He kissed the top of her head and then went to take off his coat and put his bag away.