PsyCop 4: Secrets (19 page)

“Sir.”

What the heck? I did my best not to look as puzzled as the nurse obviously felt. He went for his back pocket instead, and without thinking I reached for my gun. “Whoa, whoa,” he said, hands in the air. “I was only getting my wallet.” I watched him pull it out slowly, with deliberate caution. He opened it up and peered inside. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got forty-three bucks. Take it. I can’t afford to lose this job—”

“Sir,” said Lisa. “The drawer.”

I craned my neck to try and figure out what was going on.

The big guy sighed and opened it.

Files. So what?

“In the back,” said Lisa.

He rolled his eyes, dug deep into the drawer, and came out with a plastic bag. “I don’t know whose that is,” he said, sullen-voiced and defeated. “I don’t know how it got there.”

What?

“I’ll need to confiscate that, sir,” said Lisa. He handed over the bag and she looked inside.

“I’m letting you off with a warning this time. Understood?” The guy lit up when he realized that Lisa wasn’t going to turn him in. “Yeah, um…wow.” I followed Lisa as she marched back to the elevator. “What the heck was that?” I whispered.

She peered into the bag. “A pint of Jack. That’s a psyactive for you? Yes.”

“Your
si-no
is freaking me out.”

The elevator door opened and we got in. The car was empty. Lisa handed me the bag.

“We’ll have to find somewhere for you to drink that.”

“Straight? Warm? Newsflash—I’m not a big drinker.”

“I’ll buy you a Coke from the machine in the lobby. How’s that?” Less likely to make me hurl than straight whiskey. I shrugged.

We scored a regular Coke for me and a Diet Coke for Lisa, and hunted around for a room that her
si-no
approved of. It was a utility room. We went inside under the watchful but averted eyes of the patrolmen monitoring the first floor, and opened up our pop.

Lisa drank half my Coke and filled the can with Jack Daniels. I took a sip and my eyes watered. “It’s too strong. We should go to Sticks and Stones instead.”

“No.” Lisa talked to herself. “Crash isn’t there. It’s only six shots. You can do it. Even I can do six shots.”

“All at once?”

“No. But you weigh more than me.”

Not much. I took a few gulps and had to stifle my gag reflex. I also had to reassure myself that I wasn’t jealous that Crash had spent the night somewhere other than his own bed.

“I’m not going to be able to finish this.”

“Just do a few sips at a time.”

I swallowed a few more gulps. My stomach was on fire. The back of my throat was flutter-ing. But it wasn’t a bad buzz; I’d give it that much. Plus, unlike reds, I wouldn’t have to buy it from an old boyfriend’s pot dealer.

“See anything yet?” Lisa asked.

Oh, yeah. But it was a psyactive. That was the opposite of what I looked for in a party drug. I glanced around at the stacks of toilet paper and the gigantic electrical box on the wall. “There might not be much to see.”

“Oh. Right. Well, finish it up.”

I gagged down the rest of the can, washed it down with the rest of Lisa’s Diet Coke, swallowed back the urge to vomit, and stifled a burp. “Okay, let’s go look for Tuxedo Man.”

“He’s on the third floor,” said Lisa.

I opened the utility room door and the long, plain hallway stretched, then snapped back.

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“I’ll probably look pathetic if I lean on you, won’t I?”

“Oh, come on. Take a few deep breaths. You didn’t have that much to drink.” Says you. I counted patrolmen to give myself something to do while I got my sea legs.

One, two, three, four.

“Come on, Vic, third floor. The elevator’s so slow you won’t even know it’s moving.” I went by a pair of officers and wondered if it was obvious from the way I walked that I’d been drinking. It had never occurred to me whether I had an Auracel walk, or a Valium walk, or a three-bottles-of-children’s-cough-syrup walk. I looked down at the linoleum tiles, picked out a column, and placed one foot carefully in front of the other.

“Would you hurry up?”

“Don’t rush me.”

A middle-aged couple was helping an old guy with a walker off the elevator. I rocked back and forth, heel-toe, heel-toe, while I waited for them to clear out. We got in and the doors shut. I’d planned on riding to the third floor in silence, prepping myself for a conversation with Barnhardt’s Tuxedo Ghost astral body, when I said something without much thinking about it. “Those extra cops aren’t here for Jacob, then.”

“No.”

“They’re here because of me. Why? To keep tabs on me?”

“Yes…I think. Partially yes.”

“Does Warwick know about them?”

“Yes.”

“Why isn’t Warwick keeping me in the loop?”

Lisa sighed. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be easier to ask him?”

“Oh, right. ‘Cos he’ll lay it all out there if I do.”

“No,” she admitted.

“I’ve got to know somebody who can tell me what’s going on.”

“Yes.”

I fired off a few more questions and Lisa answered. I had what I was looking for by the time the doors wheezed open on Rosewood’s third floor. I guess a few months of watching Jacob ask questions had taught me a thing or two. On one hand I was vaguely disappointed that I’d broken my promise to Lisa and used her
si-no
when I said I wouldn’t. On the other, she was the one who’d talked me into drinking the six shots of Jack that made me so chatty.

I tripped over nothing, staggered into the third floor lobby, and watched a bunch of cops rush by as a giant commotion erupted in the hallway. The commotion was in the bed-bound wing, not the wheelchair wing, so hopefully it meant that Jacob hadn’t killed anyone. Yet.

I flattened myself against the wall and wormed my way around three cops and two nurses who were clustered in Irene’s doorway. She was inside, screaming, “Shepherd! Shepherd!” in her rusty oilcan voice. I craned my neck to get a look into her room, but two of the cops were as tall as I was, plus they were wearing their hats, blocking my view of everything but the side of the wall-mounted TV. I crossed my arms and backed up.

I just about backed into the homeless guy. I caught myself and flinched. “That dumbass in the penguin suit flyin’ around again?” he asked me.

“I dunno. It’s too mobbed to tell.”

The homeless guy crossed his arms, mirroring my stance. “Huh. That why you here? Make that motherfucker stop ridin’ Irene?”

“If I can figure out how.”

“He one mean sonofabitch,” said the homeless guy. He hiked up his stained, tattered trousers and strode straight through a patrolman’s arm and a nurse’s hip.

“Shepherd! Help me, please.”

“I’m here, Irene,” called the homeless guy. “Y’all stop that carrying on.” Shepherd. I wondered if that was his name, or his vocation. And if he was the reason the halls weren’t full of cold spots, senile ghosts and repeaters.

A figure stepped through the wall and brushed at its sleeve as if it’d touched something nasty. I could see through him, but even transparent, he was easy enough to spot. “Mr. Barnhardt,” I said.

His head snapped up, and he squinted at me. “You? You’re with the police, aren’t you?” He smirked. It was an ugly expression. “Am I under arrest?”

“No. But we do have a few questions.”

The attention of the mob had shifted. I heard one of the nurses ask, “What is he doing?” while an officer steered her away with a stern, “Ma’am, over here.” Barnhardt started to turn away. Shit, there had to be some way for me to stop him. God’s love. Right. I focused on my third eye and found myself a little woozy. There was a whole rainbow of spinning chakras in my spine, too, and the thought of that brought whiskey-flavored bile up in the back of my throat, without me even knowing which direction the damn things were supposedly rotating.

White light. I imagined I was glowing. “I only want to talk. That’s all. It’s, ah…not often anyone talks to you these days. Am I right?”

He paused.

Now what? I wondered what Zigler would say to him, but I couldn’t figure out how to channel Zigler and radiate white light at the same time. “Listen. Maybe we can work out some kind of deal.” What on earth could I possibly tempt an astral traveler with? “You leave Irene alone, and I…uh…I teach you a few tricks.”

I congratulated myself, and hoped Barnhardt had no way of knowing that my psychic training was on par with a five-year-old child’s.

Barnhardt watched the officers herding the nurses toward the far end of the hall. Nothing to see here. Lisa stood a dozen feet away, looking in Barnhardt’s general direction while her lips moved:
si,
no,
si,
no. “Are you in charge?” said Barnhardt. He looked at me closely.

“You’re drunk! Oh, this is rich.”

“Right, I’m in charge.”

“I thought it was the bossy one, the muscle-bound detective with the goatee and the little blonde assistant. The one who keeps threatening me.”

“Uh, no. Detective Marks answers to me.” At least I hoped he would.

“He’s really quite a card.” Barnhardt smoothed his pocket square. “He can poke at that withered shell all he wants. But what can he do to me? Nothing.”

“Right. Like I said. A few more questions and I’ll….” Shit. I mean, crap. I couldn’t offer him the white balloon. First of all, it was about the lamest sounding trick on the planet. And second, I was scared he might be able to use it on me somehow. “I’ll show you how to… make…stuff.”

“Solid things?”

“Astral things,” I lied. “They’ll be solid to you, though. And any other astral traveler.”

“Astral?” Barnhardt frowned and gestured toward his chest with one finicky-looking hand.

I imagined his hands twisted in on themselves, wrists pointing forward, and ended up swallowing more bile. “Is that what I am?”

He didn’t know? My heart gave a drunken hooray. I’d found someone even more ignorant than me. And at least I’d picked up enough jargon to fake it. “Well, sure. Of course, if you had a handle on your ethereal body, you could do a lot more…but like I said, we’ve got some questions that need answering, first.”

I started walking toward his room, realized that I’d misjudged how close I’d be coming to him, and reeled to my left to avoid getting any of his astral self on me. Lisa saw where we were headed and went ahead of me.

“You really are drunk. It’s not even ten o’clock.”

“Yeah, well. This job’ll do that to you.” I forced myself not to look at him to see if he’d followed.

For a minute there it seemed like it was just me, staggering along the hall where I’d have to pass the nurses’ station and another couple of patrolmen to get back to Barnhardt’s room. But then he spoke. “I need to know how to get rid of that filthy Negro. Can you show me that?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. I can show you the tools, but you’ve got to be strong enough to use them.”

“Oh, I’m strong.”

And so modest. Lisa was at the door of Barnhardt’s room. She held the door open for me—for us—and whispered, “He’s here,” to Jacob and Carolyn. And I don’t think she was talking about me.

A curtain was partially drawn around Barnhardt’s physical body, which was good, because I really didn’t want to see that face any more than I had to. “Okay, Mr. Barnhardt. Detective Marks has a few questions for you.”

Barnhardt didn’t want to look at his body any more than I did. He turned to face the doorway and crossed his arms over his chest. “I hope this doesn’t take all morning. I like to visit the cafeteria for lunch so I can keep up on the gossip.” I looked at him, and then at Jacob. “He’s ready. What did you want me to ask him?” Jacob smiled.

A big smile.

Uh-oh.

He peeled back the blankets and treated me to a view of Barnhardt’s withered body, its spine drawn down in a fetal position, and sticklike legs that protruded from adult diapers.

I’d need to go stare at some car crash victims to erase that image from my mind’s eye.

And in the middle of it all, a short, flexible tube that stuck out of his belly. In Jacob’s other hand, a syringe.

“I only have one question,” he said. He placed the syringe into the tube and hit the plunger. “How does it feel?”

“How does what feel?” said Barnhardt.

I pointed to a snapshot on the wall. “Say, who are those people in the photo?” I thought I might actually throw up. What the fuck was Jacob thinking, poisoning him when everyone could put the four of us in the room with him? And how could Carolyn just stand there and watch him do it?

“How should I know?” whined Barnhardt. “That belongs to the cretin in the other bed.

Stein or Stern or something like that. Snores so loud the bed frame rattles.” I looked at Jacob. He was watching me. Still smiling. I did my best to telepathically scream,

“What the hell?” I don’t think he received it.

I figured I’d try to buy a little time. “So, uh, Stern. Right. Did you know him before?”

“Before what? Before I figured out how to leave that hideous shell? No, of course not, we lived on different…floors….”

Barnhardt’s hand went to his stomach like he’d been shot. Crap, oh crap. I looked at Jacob and shook my head. How could he do this to us? To me. To either of us. We were all in on it, all four of us. Lisa might survive women’s prison if she joined a Mexican gang. Carolyn would probably be a smear on the wall within the first week. I could squeak by if I was still good at being invisible. But Jacob would be a big trophy kill, shanked by some tough guy looking to prove himself, probably beaten and tortured first.

Jesus Christ.

“What’s happening?” Barnhardt demanded. He slid sideways toward his body as if a big gust of wind propelled him. I glimpsed a sparkle, and then another, and all at once I could see it: the legendary silver cord that was supposed to connect the astral body to the physical. The cord was stretched taut.

“What’s happening?” Jacob said. His voice was low and anticipatory, the opposite of Barnhardt’s shrill yelping, but his use of the very same words that Barnhardt just said totally creeped me out.

“Silver cord’s getting a lot stronger. It’s reeling Barnhardt in.”

“You—you tricked me!” he screamed at me, as if it were my idea. “You can’t do this to me.