PsyCop: GhosTV Part 22

"What were you thinking about when you put your hand in your pocket?"

"Just looking for some salt."

"Because...?"

I nodded toward the bed. "To help this poor guy move along."

179.

"Well...what's it going to hurt to try it? Use it like it's salt." I reached in again. There was definitely more grit inside. "You think I'm summoning this stuff?"

"I hadn't thought about it yet." Jacob shot me a wry smile. "But apparently that's what you think."

I stifled the urge to flick some fairy dust at him, not only because he couldn't see it so it wouldn't really look very impressive-but also because I didn't know what it actually was. Proving how annoyed I felt wasn't worth the risk of smiting him with spirit crud.

The moves of an exorcism came to me quickly now, like the lyrics to the theme song of a syndicated TV show. Suck some white light through my third eye, strengthen my protective bubble-aha...my vision got a bit milkier when I did that with the GhosTV playing in the same room. Interesting. "It's time to move along," I said, not in a cop-voice, but not like a pushover, either. "Your business here is done."

I pinched some fairy dust out of my pocket and treated it exactly like I would have treated salt-which is to say, I imagined cleansing white light pouring into it just before I scattered it.

The resultant shower of sparks was so bright, my field of vision went white. But afterward, when I should have seen dancing afterimages of red and green, all I saw was an empty bed. My retinas hadn't been involved. I'd been watching it all with my inner sight.

So when tears sprang to my eyes, I couldn't really blame the light show. I knuckled them away before they had a chance to spill. Why the waterworks? I'm not sure. I'd had proof, time and time again, that the boogie man and the monsters under the bed were really real.

Maybe what I'd never seen with my own eyes was the evidence that my own mojo was real, too.

180.

Chapter 20.

I stared at the empty bed for a few seconds while I composed myself, and finally, when Jacob couldn't take the not-knowing anymore, he asked, "You okay?"

I nodded. "Yeah. I'm good."

"So...it worked."

Another nod. My throat felt funny, and if I spoke, it would come out thick and emotional. If I were to guess, I'd say Jacob wanted to scoop me up and crush me against his chest, but he was holding back. The tension of him keeping himself in check reverberated through the room. But he gave me the s.p.a.ce I needed to pull myself together.

When I was finally ready, I eased back on the white balloon I'd been holding, and the colors in the room grew vivid again. My skin p.r.i.c.kled, then relaxed, like gooseflesh does when it fades as the furnace kicks in. Lightheadedness washed over me. Psychic fatigue? Nah, probably physical. No doubt my psychic shenanigans did things to my heart rate, blood pressure, and who-knows-what-else.

My eyes were dry when I finally blinked. I had no idea how long they'd been open. A neck roll released a loud, satisfying crack deep in my spine, and I pictured energy rus.h.i.+ng up through the floor this time, rather than down from the ceiling. Grounding energy. Up through the soles of my feet, flowing through my chakras, setting all those rainbow-colored pinwheels to spinning.

181.

I actually felt pretty darn good, considering I hadn't slept in my own bed, I'd just exorcised a repeater without any salt, and I'd swallowed something called spelt.

With my newfound energy and centeredness, I took another look around the room to see what there was to see with my GhosTV-augmented senses-and I spied the thing that had initially caught my eye, the light s.h.i.+ning up from the carpet by the bathroom door.

"Something over here." I crouched and wondered if I'd be able to see through the floor-and if I did, would it be considered telepathy, or remote viewing? And hadn't Faun/Katrina said something about mediums being lumped in with remote viewers nowadays? Before, it had sounded pretty stupid. Not just because she was the one who'd said it, but because I didn't see how talking to dead people had anything to do with going astral or spying from the privacy of your own home.

But if a one-trick pony like me could do it...maybe it really was somehow connected.

A wooden door smacked into the side of my head and interrupted my epiphany.

"What," I snapped, "you don't knock anymore?"

"It was ajar." Dreyfuss looked slightly sheepish. Maybe. "And I thought Jacob might want to login to his Q-mail account and find out who the world's most memory-intensive LOLcats e-mail joke is from." He glanced down at the spot where I still saw light s.h.i.+ning up through the carpet, despite the distraction of sniping with him, and his voice went marginally more serious. "What's with the blood?" Blood? My heart hammered in my throat. Even though I knew Lisa had been one floor down when she'd disappeared, what if, somehow, her blood had risen up through the carpet?

"It's Vic's." Even as Jacob said it I realized he was right, and the calm in his voice ratcheted my adrenaline back down. "He cut his hand."

182.

I looked harder at the glowing spots on the carpet, even tried closing one eye to see if it made any difference. Nope. It didn't look like blood to me. It looked like light.

"I can see that." Dreyfuss' track shoes were less than a yard from the s.h.i.+ning blood residue. He hadn't made any move to go around me and wedge into the room. "So if you know whose blood it is, what's so interesting about it?"

With the idea of telling him to b.u.t.t out for two seconds so I could gather my thoughts, I looked up and told him....

Nothing.

Because Con Dreyfuss had light leaking out from the perimeter of his eyeb.a.l.l.s.

"Is there something you want to say, Detective?" When he moved his head, his eyeb.a.l.l.s multiplied, like maybe he had two pair. Or three.

I looked away, and although the impression that he had half a dozen eyeb.a.l.l.s and a lit candle in his head like some kind of human Jack o' Lantern stuck with me, I tried to act like I hadn't seen a thing.

He knew I'd seen something, though. Whether he was operating on visual, nonverbal cues like Jacob usually did, or he had some sort of empathic gift himself, I couldn't say. Obviously, he was on to me. I figured a partial truth would tide him over until I could decide exactly how much I wanted him to know. "We tuned the GhosTV to the repeater station and found a hundred-year-dead TB patient."

"Did you, now?" Dreyfuss swept the room with his flashlight eyes.

"And here I'd heard this place was so clean you could eat off the floor." He stepped around me and crouched to look at the GhosTV's settings. Had Jacob and I just cracked the code that still stumped Dreyfuss' lab? And if so, what ramifications would it have? If those same settings worked for Richie and another GhosTV was in the FPMP's 183.

clutches, Dreyfuss would be able to boost Richie up a few cla.s.ses, maybe to the point where he'd actually see the ghosts. Maybe to the point where he'd be able to exorcise Dr. Chance.

I was about to add some bulls.h.i.+t about the signal going in and out to buy us some wiggle room, but when he walked past me, the light leaking out from behind his jumbled-up eyeball caught his iris and lit it up like the taillight of a car.

I turned away. The spelt would be like sandpaper in my esophagus if I allowed it to come back up. Jacob waved at me behind Dreyfuss'

back and caught my eye, scowling at me like he'd noticed my s.h.i.+fti-ness, too-and he wanted to know what gave. There wasn't really any way to signal, "His eyes are all f.u.c.ked up," to Jacob, so I shrugged instead....

And then I saw the veins.

The effect was subtle at first, like light bending above hot pavement.

Jacob's veins were bulging. Not like he'd just hit the gym, either. They were bulging like someone was inflating them with a bicycle pump...

and they were red. And now that I'd noticed it, I couldn't see anything other than the webwork of bulging, throbbing, ruby-red veins that seemed to hold him together like a mesh shopping bag.

Not only was he veiny, but his forehead...d.a.m.n, his forehead was huge, and it throbbed in time with his veins. I stood up fast, and ran my fingertips over Jacob's cheek. It felt the same as it always did.

Maybe a little more stubble than usual. I touched his temple. My fingers told me that was the same, too. But it didn't look the same. My psychic eyes were telling me another story.

"What?" he mouthed.

"Turn the TV off," I said. My voice sounded surprisingly calm.

Jacob reached around the crate and did it without me having to ask him twice.

184.

The veins and the spooky eyes didn't disappear immediately. I looked all over the room so Dreyfuss couldn't see where I was actually looking, but I kept my eye on them in my peripheral vision. The weird special effects dwindled, the way the screen went from a gray field of static to a softly glowing point that grew smaller, smaller, and smaller, until finally, it disappeared. I looked at Jacob head-on again.

He looked like I remembered him-my big, handsome lug of a guy with a vertical crease in his regular-sized brow. Thank G.o.d.

His focus, and Dreyfuss' focus, were on me, so I needed a plausible explanation for why I was acting so weird, and quickly. (I know, I know-just pick one, right?) Since both psyactive and antipsyactive meds had pesky physical side-effects, I figured it wouldn't be too far out to claim the GhosTV was making me woozy. "I was starting to feel light-headed from the TV," I said. If I needed to retract that physical symptom later, I could always blame the hippy food. "Maybe a little headache. But it could be jetlag."

Dreyfuss said, "You don't get jetlag from crossing two time zones." c.r.a.p. I should've known better than to tell aviation-fibs to a pilot. I touched my temple, hoping it wasn't too melodramatic of a move, but knowing I didn't want to a.n.a.lyze my "symptoms" any further, since that would just give Dreyfuss more rope to hang me with. My hand was soaking wet. I jerked it away from my face. Maybe I wasn't bulls.h.i.+tting. Maybe I really did feel sick. I turned it palm up-both my hands-and the injured hand was wet.

Sticky-wet.

With clear goo.

Jacob and Dreyfuss both noticed, both swooped in to gawk at the freakshow. "My G.o.d," Jacob said under his breath.

What I wanted to do was wipe my spoogey hand off-but I didn't want that slime on my pants. I only had two pair with me, after all. Instead, I stuck my hands behind my back and glared at both of them, hoping 185.

they'd give me some s.p.a.ce. Not that they really could, given that we were standing in the three-foot aisle in the middle of the room.

Jacob cut his eyes to Dreyfuss. "Is that...?"

"Ectoplasm. Nothing else it could be."

"Like Ghostbusters?" I scoffed.

"Like Victorian seances." Dreyfuss kept his smirking as low-key as possible, though I couldn't help but notice how amused he was by my distress. "Ectoplasm was supposed to be the outward manifestation of the medium's connection to the spirit world. I'd always figured it was a fraud-though I gotta say, I'm really getting a kick out of being proved wrong."

"Vic." Jacob gave me his biggest, saddest, most soulful, dark-eyed look. "Let me see."

What I wanted to do was tell Dreyfuss to turn around; it seemed too private to let him ogle. I was just as curious as Jacob was, though, so I brought the sticky hand forward. It looked like I'd been playing with the hair gel. Jacob caught me by the wrist-and did he really need to hold onto me all that tightly?

He gave the slime a sniff, and I nearly tossed my spelt-cookies. "It smells like ozone."

I had no idea what ozone was supposed to smell like, so I took a whiff, too. I guess it sort of smelled the way electronics smell after they've been sitting in the attic too many years and you plug them in to see if they still work.

Dreyfuss pulled a small plastic bag out of his pocket, and said, "May I take a sample?"

"Are you kidding me?" I turned my arm away, and did my best not to imagine myself strapped down to a gurney with a medical team standing by to amputate my right hand.

186.

"You hate the government. I get it. But this is a big deal. And what if it turns out to be our key to finding Lisa?"

"Nope, you don't get to play the Lisa-card every time you want me to jump through the FPMP's hoops. This has nothing to do with Lisa.

You just want to suck some stem-cells out of it and do something messed-up with my DNA. And it's not gonna happen. No way."

"All right. If that's how you're going to be." He looked me up and down. "How about this? Just let me see it. Unless this happens to you all the time-and judging by your reaction, it doesn't-it's ridiculous to lose the opportunity to at least look, all for the sake of being petty." Frankly, my urge to keep my personal stuff personal was so strong that I was perfectly willing to sacrifice knowing what I could or couldn't do if it meant that Dreyfuss wouldn't know, either.

"Vic," Jacob said quietly. "Don't worry about him. Let me see." I show Dreyfuss, then Dreyfuss has one up on me. I keep it to myself, then Jacob gets p.i.s.sed. Talk about a no-win situation. Dreyfuss had already seen it, though. And when I clenched my hand and gave it a little squish, it didn't seem to me that it might actually do anything more than what he'd already glimpsed, which was to sit there and be slimy. And so I opted to make Jacob happy, and I pulled my hand out from behind my back and unclenched my fist.

There it was. Still goopy.

Jacob took a few snapshots of it with his cameraphone, which I let him do. If we were alone, I would have asked him if he planned to jerk off to them later. Sarcastically. Sort of. Obviously, though, I was in no mood to let Dreyfuss see the tender pink insides I keep hidden beneath my sh.e.l.l.

Within a couple of minutes, the glop of goo started to shrink. It felt even colder, which I didn't mention. I could tell Jacob later.

187.

Toward the end, it dissipated so quickly it looked like time-lapse photography, shrinking smaller and smaller, following the lines of my palm, until finally it was gone, and the only difference between my two hands was that the ectoplasm hand still felt cold. And it was covered with scabs, though that was, of course, old news. Ectoplasm topped friction wounds any day, and long after my scabs healed, I'd still think of my right hand as my ectoplasm hand.

Someone knocked on the door, startling the h.e.l.l out of me, and I actually s.h.i.+elded my hand from view-not that there was anything left to see. Jacob climbed over the corner of the spare bed and spoke in a low voice to whoever was on the other side. And then he started pa.s.sing stuff over the top of the GhosTV console to Con Dreyfuss. Two more boxes, these made out of corrugated cardboard, roughly the size of suitcases.

"Your laptops made good time," Dreyfuss said.

And then, a pizza.

The smell of oregano and salty grease filled the overstuffed room.

Suddenly, I was ravenous.

"Don't mind that," Dreyfuss said. "It's just my lunch." Oh. The pizza was for him. Right. Because I'd already eaten lunch. If you could call it that.

I didn't want to eat an FPMP pizza anyway.

"I got you different models so you could tell 'em apart." He handed a laptop box back to Jacob. "Yours is ultra-portable. Detective Bayne's is built to withstand more punishment, though I don't recommend you use it to drive nails."

Jacob balanced his box on top of the garment bag that was resting on the crate lid on the spare bed. "These'll need to charge."

188.

"Nope. I had them install fully charged batteries, and set up everything but the pa.s.swords."

I waited to see if Jacob asked for any clarification on the mysterious "them." He didn't. He didn't need to.