PsyCop: GhosTV Part 37

"Call an ambulance."

"I think he's okay, give him a second."

"Don't-what good's a paramedic going to do?"

"If this has anything to do with that pill you gave him...." Jacob's face was the first thing I saw when gray sparklies dissipated, and I felt like I was back a hundred percent in the physical again.

340.

He'd hauled me onto his lap with my head cradled in one hand and the other one stroking my cheek. I put my hand over his-and saw tracers. Three or four hands that snapped into position one after the other. Okay, maybe ninety-five percent back.

"Vic?"

"No ambulance." I tipped my head back to try to make heads or tails of what was going on in the rest of the room. From my upside-down vantage point with my subtle bodies rattling around inside me, I saw Debbie March wrapped in the afghan. She was huddled against the far wall with a notebook on her lap, scribbling in it so hard I was worried she'd tear through the page. Her red hair hung in straggles, wet with goop, and her makeup was gone.

Bert Chekotah was as naked as the day he was born, and just as goopy-and the little creep had a much hotter body than he deserved, which, although it was pretty superficial, did explain some of his appeal. Maybe. Faun Windsong and Lyle were huddled around him, wailing. Con Dreyfuss stood with his back against the wall, gazing off into the distance. Or maybe he was listening. If I'd been looking at him with the GhosTV tuned to the psychic channel, I had no doubt his psyactive-enhanced flashlight eyes would be too bright to physically see through. Or maybe he had so many sets of eyeb.a.l.l.s that they saw too much for him to navigate.

"Vic, are you okay?" Lisa's voice. I cast around until I found her kneeling right beside me in Jacob's blazer, crying, with ectoplasm and tears glistening on her cheeks. The realization that she was the only other one besides Jacob touching me was a big relief.

"If you don't write it down," Debbie called to her, "you're going to forget."

"I...don't...care," Lisa said, between great, wracking sobs.

Wait a minute. I cared. I needed to know who'd been using my arm as a telegraph machine. I reached for her-more tracers-and patted 341.

her hand. It was freezing. "Were you really the one telling me to turn off the TV?"

"Yes," she said, certain at first...but then she grew puzzled as the specifics of it slipped from her mind, just like a dream.

"How?"

"I think I...I asked the si-no, I remember that. And then...." Come on, she'd been physical again for, what? All of two minutes?

And she didn't know how she'd managed to move my arm? "Think, Lisa. How did you do it if Karen had you trapped behind the door?"

"I asked the si-no..." her crying abated as she strained to recall the sequence of events. "And the si-no told me to pray. And so I prayed to my guardian angel."

What? Come on-give me a break. That couldn't be it. She might as well have said she drove an iron spike into the ground and invoked the power of Thor.

Jacob didn't care about the specifics. All that mattered to him was that we'd found Lisa. He gathered her against him, and me too, and held us both, and maybe he shed a tear or two himself. And for a moment it seemed it was just him and me and Lisa, and the rest of the world dropped away while we were reunited, and safe, and whole.

He kissed the top of her head, and mine...and then kissed my cheek, the side of my mouth....

"Well no wonder you weren't interested," Lyle huffed. "You could have mentioned your partner was doing you. Honestly." He wasn't the only one not feeling the love. Faun Windsong hauled off and slapped naked Chekotah so hard he staggered, and the sound was so loud it echoed through the Quiet Room. He was lucky she was on a Xanax and Valium c.o.c.ktail, otherwise he might've lost a tooth.

She didn't say why she'd belted him; she was too enraged. But she 342.

didn't need to. Dreyfuss coughed-or maybe it was a sn.i.g.g.e.r he'd covered with his hand, and although he was looking at a spot on the far wall, I could tell he'd just enjoyed that whack as much as Faun Windsong had.

As if it wasn't chaotic enough, a couple of the students shoehorned their way in, with one of the security guards from the front door in tow.

"Dr. Chekotah?"

"Professor March!"

As still more people packed into the room, Jacob rested his forehead against Lisa's temple, and gave me a world-weary smile. "You scared the h.e.l.l out of me. I thought you'd had an embolism, or a stroke."

"Nope. I just don't have enough brainpower to be awake in the physical and astral at the same time." Although, if I did...that'd be a pretty neat trick up my sleeve.

"How do you feel?"

Relieved. Disoriented. Surreal. But mostly... "Hungry."

343.

Chapter 39.

I took a long, deep breath, and I held it. Savored it. And wished I could roll around and rub my face in the smell of it.

Bacon. Crispy. Just the way I like it.

I was so famished I probably would have eaten anything, even spelt.

But once she'd taken a quick shower and swiped on some bright pink lipstick, Debbie hustled us over to a 1950's diner on the beach called Sambo's where the waitresses still wore polyester, the chrome napkin holders were s.h.i.+ny, and the coffee was strong enough to keep my mind off the tracers. And while we had plenty to celebrate with both her and Lisa back in the physical again, I think mostly we wanted to get away from the melodrama vortex at PsyTrain. Lyle'd had the good sense to know he was in over his head, and he alerted the board of directors, who swept in with their bifocals, briefcases and very disappointed frowns. Chekotah stepped down from his four-day director-s.h.i.+p to try to spare the organization some of the scandal, and Faun Windsong...I mean, Katrina Wojtowicz...was being considered to take his place. I thought it made sense. She always acted like the boss of everyone. They might as well make it official.

It seemed to me like something was missing-that I should file a report, or head into Warwick's office to brief him, or feel vaguely guilty about Bob Zigler doing all the boring paperwork. Given how much of my time as a detective is spent wrangling red tape, the luxury of being able to catch my breath felt positively decadent. But I wasn't on duty. Not with the Chicago Police Department, anyway. I suspected 344.

I might have been acting as day-labor for the FPMP in this whole debacle...but I'd never signed anything formal. And so I decided to tell myself I'd been here as a favor, helping out a friend, and that was that.

We sat in a big, semicircular booth, me on the outside, and Lisa next to me, pinned between me and Jacob like we were worried she'd disappear if we didn't anchor her between us. Debbie was on Jacob's other side, and beside her, opposite me at the other end of the bench, was Dreyfuss. I still felt somewhat out of alignment, but given that I caught Dreyfuss searching my face a couple of times, I was guessing his eyesight was almost back to normal.

Debbie chugged a giant mimosa, then flagged down the waitress and asked for another. I wondered if I might come down faster if I had one myself-or at least a Valium-but I decided the green and white pill was too potent to risk mixing it with anything else.

"What's taking them so long with the food?" Debbie said. The waitress had taken our orders less than five minutes ago. "I think my stomach is digesting itself."

If projecting my astral form gave me an atomic tapeworm, I couldn't imagine how hungry I would end up if I'd been fully astral, like the girls were. Which I hadn't known was even possible-but we'd all seen it, so apparently it was. Psych tends to be like that. Full of big, hairy surprises you'd just as soon do without.

Lisa didn't complain about being hungry. In fact, she didn't say anything at all. She stared down at the edge of the formica tabletop like she was sorry she'd ever been born. Even though I've never been sentimental, I knew enough to see that I should probably offer her some kind of comfort-though the thought of anyone being comforted by me was a laugh and a half. I was glad to see her, of course I was.

But now that the glow had worn off the giddy relief, I also wanted to grab her by the shoulders, shake her a few times, and ask her what 345.

the h.e.l.l she'd been thinking, inviting a sc.u.mbag like Chekotah into her bed.

Jacob reached down, took her hand and squeezed it. He was good at things like that-acting like a normal person should.

"While we're waiting for the food," Dreyfuss suggested to Debbie, "maybe you could treat us to a reading from your dream journal and shed some light on what happened."

Debbie knocked back most of the second giant mimosa, pulled a few sheets of folded paper from her pocket, and began. "I'm in my bathroom fixing my hair, and I'm going to see Detective Bayne in a few minutes, and I'm thinking about this book on automatic writing with a yellow cover when suddenly I feel dizzy and really cold. And then I was in the biology lab at Chemeketa Community College, and Karen was there. And she said I couldn't go anywhere until I finished my lab notes. Only she wouldn't give me a pen. How could I finish my lab notes without a pen? Then I saw Lisa was there, over by the refrigera-tor full of shrink-wrapped frogs and fetal pigs. She was working hard on a computer, and she told me I needed to focus. And I said what good would focusing do if I didn't have a pen?"

"What are you talking about?" Lisa said, when Debbie paused to finish off her mimosa. "That never happened."

Debbie frowned down at her notes. "I guess that depends on your definition of happened."

"What did you see?" Dreyfuss asked Lisa.

"I remember being cold and dizzy, but then I was somewhere else. It was misty, I guess. And Karen was there."

"What did she look like?" I asked.

"Pretty much the same as always." No blood? I gather she would have mentioned the blood, unless Karen usually looked like she'd 346.

just had open-heart surgery and left before they st.i.tched her back up.

Which I kind of doubted. "She was mad at me-she was always p.i.s.sed off about something-but then I realized she knew about...Bert." Lisa stared down at the table as if that was all she had the energy to say.

"And you remember when Debbie showed up?" Dreyfuss prompted.

"Uh huh. It was better with Professor March there because we could pray together, and it was easier then for the angels to help us." Debbie had been busy trying to get the waitress' attention and order another mimosa, but Lisa's description of events stopped her mid-wave. "I haven't prayed since I missed my period after I slept with Arthur Mirar on a dare from my cousin Junie. You told me you would type up my lab notes on your computer, so we started working together."

Subjective, much?

"So you didn't see the angels?" Lisa asked her.

The waitress finally emerged from the kitchen then, and she had the busboy in tow. It took two people to haul the groaning platters of pancakes and omelets to the table. Debbie asked for her third giant mimosa, but after that, we were all carefully silent as they laid out the food, refilled the coffee, and made sure we didn't want anything else...although, with the equivalent of breakfast for twelve, I don't see what else we could possibly need.

I hacked off a big wedge of a pancake stack with the edge of my fork, crammed it into my mouth and swallowed it. Then I started to hiccup.

"Put more syrup on there," Debbie said, "or you'll choke." Lisa was more practical. She started with the eggs. They went down faster. She ate them grimly, as if she would just as soon starve.

Debbie washed down a mouthful of pancakes with a swig of coffee followed by more mimosa, and then she said, "What difference does 347.

it make if I saw angels or not? I don't go for organized religion. You know that."

Lisa shrugged. If she was feeling s.h.i.+tty about herself, and the angels were willing to help her anyway, I imagine it really would suck to be told they were just symbolism being spewed out by her own brain while it tried to make sense of what it was seeing.

The only two people who weren't inhaling their food were also the only two who were more interested in listening than talking. Instead of speculating on what had happened, therefore contaminating whatever the three of us actually did remember, Jacob and Dreyfuss started making arrangements to get us back to Chicago. Dreyfuss invited Lisa and Debbie to come with us. Debbie looked at him like he was nuts, and said something about being a "West Coast girl" around a mouthful of corned beef hash. Lisa said she'd think about it.

What I wanted was to talk to Lisa alone, but crowd logistics were keeping that from happening. Or maybe I managed to subconsciously avoid a one-on-one because I was scared I might lay into her about the p.i.s.s-poor judgment she'd displayed in sleeping with Chekotah, and then she'd never want to come back home. Still, by the end of breakfast, despite the fact that her stomach must've been as painfully stuffed as mine was and the thought of getting on a plane was pretty d.a.m.n daunting, she told Dreyfuss she would pack her bags.

And when she did, I felt more optimistic than I had in a long, long time. I don't think it struck her as weird that I stole a play out of Jacob's playbook, covered her hand with mine, and squeezed.

Once the GhosTV was crated up and transferred to FedEx's capable hands, we ended up taking a van to L.A.X. and flying commercial back to Chicago. My overtaxed adrenal glands grudgingly surged into fight-or-flight mode as we pa.s.sed through the gate, but n.o.body stopped us, or seemed alarmed about our sidearms, or even made us take off 348.

our shoes. A quick glance at my boarding pa.s.s showed a four-figure number that I'd taken at first as a seating a.s.signment, but then I realized was the cost of the last-minute, first cla.s.s ticket. I supposed it was a veritable bargain compared to the cost of flying us there on a Learjet.

The interior of the 757 was, of course, nowhere near as snazzy as the white leather opulence of my first official flight-but I frankly felt a lot better having a hundred-some-odd people around, as opposed to being alone with Dreyfuss. Not that he spooked me anymore, at least not to the extent that he used to. It wasn't just a matter of familiarity, of knowing what he looked like with pillow marks on his face, or finding long, curly hairs in the sink when I went to shave. It was that whole astral conversation where I'd actually seen eye to eye with him, if only on one particular issue. And maybe the notion that I remembered it, while he likely didn't.

It also helped that I now knew who the FPMP's remote viewer was.

'Cos if I let that cla.s.sified info leak to the right nutjob, Dreyfuss would end up with a higher bounty on his head than me.

Jacob climbed into his window seat, then I stuffed my garment bag into the overhead compartment and moved to plunk down beside him. A cheerful stewardess with blindingly white teeth checked my ticket and directed me instead to the window seat across the aisle.

Jacob raised an eyebrow and caught my eye, but I shrugged. I was nearly forty. I should be able to survive having a few feet of s.p.a.ce between us for the duration of the flight. And then Lisa deflated into the seat next to mine, and I decided that maybe things were looking up. Con Dreyfuss parked himself beside Jacob. Better Jacob than me.

He's made of patience.

Lisa was inscrutable behind her big, dark Jackie-O sungla.s.ses. I wondered if she'd been crying again-she cries an awful lot, for a cop-or if she was so wrung out that she was past tears. She looked over at me and gave me a tight, somewhat chagrined smile.

349.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey." She took off her gla.s.ses. I don't think she'd been crying recently...but her eyes were a bit puffy. We both stared at each other. I don't think either of us knew where to begin. A few other first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers herded up the aisle, leading awkwardly with carry-on bags that jostled Lisa in the shoulder. Some of them grabbed pillows and blankets from the overhead and settled into their seats like they were at a pajama party. I didn't look for a pillow. Neither did Lisa.

I dug Faun Windsong's necklace out of my pocket and put it in Lisa's lap. "I think you should take this...it's nothing to look at, but it'll keep you safe."

Lisa plunked it right back in my lap. "What do I want with that thing?"

"But, wait. It's really real."

We played "hot potato" with it a few times, and finally Lisa said, "I don't care what it can do. I don't want it-I can take care of myself.

Give it to someone who needs the protection. Someone like..." her mouth worked as she consulted the si-no, "...Crash." Crash? I supposed I could visualize it hanging from the epaulet of his leather jacket. And I supposed, as Psychs went, he did need more protection than Lisa, or me, or Jacob, since his talent wasn't strong enough to really give him much of an advantage, and since he didn't carry a sidearm.

Yes, it did make sense. Though I wasn't sure it was really the si-no's idea. Maybe Lisa just didn't want a reminder of the whole Chekotah fiasco.

I couldn't think of anything to say. Trying not to be critical of her taking up with Chekotah was like trying not to think of an elephant- good luck with that-so I figured I might as well throw it out there so we could get past it. "It happens to the best of us," I said, meaning 350.

sleeping with someone we totally regret later. But at the same time, she blurted out, "You did your best."

We both stopped, then, and tried to figure out where the other one was headed with that. But considering that she made it sound as if I'd given something my best shot and then failed, I said, "I did my best with what?"

"Well, with...that TV set. Trying to help me."

Trying? It seemed to me I'd done more than just try.

"I mean," she went on, "you couldn't have known that every time you turned it on, Karen got stronger. I was saving up my energy, pray-ing hard, getting strong enough to open the door myself...but then suddenly she was twice as powerful as before." What? Whoa. The thought that I'd been feeding Karen's mojo the whole time knocked me off my high horse with a swift kick in the pants. "I guess that makes sense. I didn't actually know she was a medium until fairly late in the game." Even if I had, I'd felt such a sense of owners.h.i.+p in regards to the GhosTV that it probably wouldn't have occurred to me that I wasn't the only Psych in the path of its waves. And then there was the other area in which I hadn't been particularly helpful: Chekotah's sacred s.p.a.ce. I waited to see if Lisa had witnessed me hacking through Chekotah's defenses with the astral axe and leaving him wide open to attack-but if she did, she didn't mention it.

"I didn't know you were the one writing those messages." I sounded somewhat defensive even though I was trying not to. "I didn't know you could send automatic writing from the astral. h.e.l.l, I didn't even know you were astral."