Spook Squad (15 page)

Throat Bullet went down in a spray of spectral blood.

“What I wouldn’t give for the Victor Bayne ticket to this event,” Dreyfuss murmured. “You’re right on the fifty-yard line.”

“And today’s exorcees,” I whispered. “Who are they?”

“Dunno. I was living in Tampa at the time.”

So he claimed. “If you were to guess….”

“I just so happened to put together a few likely candidates.” He hit some keys on his keyboard, and his triptych monitors lit up with a grid of photos. Some mug shots, some candids, some work I.D.s. “Maybe you have a ‘sense’ of who it is we’re actually talking about here.”

Did he actually want the repeaters identified for some mysterious purpose of his own, or had my entire conversation with Sergeant Warwick been recorded and analyzed, and he knew who I was really gunning for? I scanned the photo lineup. There were a couple dozen in all, most of them thirty-something white guys, with a couple of Hispanics or Arabs sprinkled in. One black-suited guy looked familiar—not from the repeater show, though. Maybe from yesterday’s lunch, or the underground parking lot. Which would mean Dreyfuss had seeded the lineup with fake hits to see if I was lying. I dunno if he thought I’d pick wrong because I couldn’t really see the repeaters, or because he thought I wanted to misdirect him on purpose.
 

When you think about it, including that one guy I half-recognized was pretty clever of him. For all I knew, the majority of the guys in those mugshots were still living and breathing and driving around in their FPMP Lexuses. Which meant that unless I wanted to come off as a fraud, I’d need to point out the real guys. And he knew I knew it.

“If I did happen to have an opinion,” I said, “why should I share it with you?”

“Because I think it’s high time we put this idea that I’m the next Hitler behind us.”
 

“Hitler, no. J. Edgar Hoover, maybe.”
 

“I’ve got reports on each of these guys.” He placed a large sealed envelope on his desk, then pinned it down with his gloved hand before I could grab it. “I believe you’ll find anything bloody that went down here is old news. Hijinks from before I took this job five years ago. I’m willing to bet a pair of Bears tickets on it.”

“Just a pair?”

“Hell, a whole skybox and a blowjob from the quarterback. If you’ve got the cajones to be honest here, I know it’s a bet I won’t lose. Because I might push your buttons, and I might piss you off. But I’ve never lied to you. Not once.”

Apparently our sparring had fallen out of the whisper range. Richie began praying louder to indicate he was not amused that we were talking through his exorcism. “…
and blessed is the fruit-of-the-loom Jesus
….”

Unbelievable. Was my head going to explode from the dumb? I thought it just might. “Okay,” I whispered, “so what if the repeaters aren’t yours? That only proves you don’t kill people in your office.”

“Aha!” he hissed. “They’re only repeaters then. A skipping record. Psychic residue.”

Fuck. I hadn’t meant to let that slip. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“That’s why you can’t just ask them who they are,” he added.

“I never said that.”

As he gloated with a big, smug smile over scoring the secret, I threw caution to the wind and snatched the envelope out from under his fingers. Maybe he could have even held onto it, if it weren’t for those gloves. But I yanked that paperwork right out from under him and sprinted out into the hall as I tore it open. He was quick—but I had a head start. By the time he caught up to me, I’d fanned out the dossiers to ensure I wasn’t being baited with an envelope full of blank paper.

I wasn’t. Some were clean computer printouts. Some were speckly photocopied documents. One was a purple-inked mimeograph. But at a quick glance, they all looked like the real deal to me.

Dreyfuss ripped off his cotton gloves and flung them down on top of the torn manila envelope I’d dropped. He didn’t try grabbing the papers away from me, though. Instead, he planted his hands on his hips and gave me a narrow-eyed look that challenged me to find out exactly who the repeaters were.

Hopefully, I could do more than that. Hopefully I could find out what had become of Detective Wembly.

It was easier to go through the stack out there in the hallway. Richie’s mangled prayers were less distracting, and the sting of incense was less pronounced. I looked at each photo carefully, noting age, hair, facial features. I also glanced at the writeups. One guy was in the Russian mob. Another was CIA. Someone else was with the phone company. No Wembly.
 

It all looked real to me—but that’s what forgers do, create documents that look real, and I had no doubt Dreyfuss had access to a competent forger. And, of course, there was the guy I’d seen at lunch, though when I got to his mugshot, it claimed he was a Turkish ambassador’s bodyguard. I handed his sheet to Dreyfuss and said, “Nice try.”

Dreyfuss scanned the paper. “You lost me, pal.”

“Stacking the deck with FPMP employees isn’t exactly the best way to earn my trust.”

Dreyfuss looked at the sheet again. “Ha! The missing Turk is the spitting image of Russ from this angle. Wait ’til I show him!” His reaction was incredibly spontaneous, and it seemed totally sincere. A good act, but that only meant Dreyfuss was a good actor. He folded the paper, slipped it into his pocket, and said, “Forget about him, then, is anyone else a hit?”

I stuck my head through the doorway.

“…full-of-grace, the-Lord is with-thee…” Richie bellowed. Triple-Shot was looking fainter than usual.

I pulled my head back out before the Fruit of the Loom cycled around. He must have been praying a rosary, which meant I had fifty opportunities to stop myself from slapping him upside the head.

“What did you see?” Dreyfuss whispered.

A big dumbass who, by all accounts, should not be able to exorcise a dead fly. “Do you want the repeaters obscured for a week, or do you want me to I.D. them? You can’t have it both ways.”

“So his ritual actually does something?”

I shrugged. “It’s like painting over a water stain on the ceiling. These guys are vivid enough that eventually they leach back through. But yeah. In the short term, it works.”

“Whaddaya know? Victor Bayne actually told me something worthwhile without putting me through the wringer first. I’m beginning to think you might be sweet on me.”

“Must be the manicure.”

He strode back into the office and put a halt to the exorcism. Carl stood up, knees cracking, and went about snuffing the candles. Richie didn’t know what to make of the interruption, though. “I’m only on my twenty-second Hail Mary. If I take a break now, I’ll have to start from the beginning.”

“That’s fine.”

“But…I wasn’t done.”

“We pay you for your time and expertise, Richard. You’re not doing piecework in a factory. If you need to start again later, what difference does it make?”

Richie didn’t seem particularly mollified, but Dreyfuss’ tone was edgier than usual. As I waited to see if Richie really was stupid enough to keep arguing with the guy who’d just scored him a skybox to go with his Lexus, Dreyfuss’ phone buzzed. He reached across the desk and hit a button. “Go ahead.”

Laura’s voice said, “Washington on the line.”

Dreyfuss didn’t look very excited. In fact, he seemed annoyed. “Okay, gang, I gotta take this. Time for a coffee break.” He shooed me out into the hall with Richie and Carl.

“Oh well,” Richie said. “I don’t drink coffee, but the cocoa is real good.”

We settled in the lounge with the cushy leather furniture and the walls decked out in framed magazine covers. Carl went into a tiny kitchenette off to the side and set about making the coffee without being asked. I’m not sure if it was because he knew Richie enjoyed being waited on, or if it was better not to let the hot water fall into the wrong hands.
 

“That thing Agent Dreyfuss said about you and Agent Marks…” Richie said. “Was he just trying to be funny, or is it true?”

“Which thing?”

“Brokeback Mountain. Are you good friends, or are you ho-mo-sexuals?”

I hadn’t realized Einstein could listen and pray at the same time. “Both. We live together.”

Richie scowled as if he was thinking very hard. Finally, he said, “There are plenty of ladies you could have sex with, y’know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Really. The bars and restaurants are full of them.”

I took another good look at him and beheld him in all his bald, stoop-shouldered glory…and I wondered if wing night at the Blue Room might be code for something spicier than Buffalo wings. And then I wished I could rinse off my brain.

“Now that you have a choice,” he said, “you could find a lady to have sex with instead.”

I’d been about to go help Carl with the coffee (whether he needed my help or not) but the thin, brittle remains of my patience went
snap
. I pushed back into my seat like I was hunkering down for trench warfare, and said, “I don’t know what kind of whacked out religious Tea Party propaganda you’ve been listening to, but it’s bullshit. Being gay is not a choice. I’ve been queer ever since I can remember and I never stopped to deliberate over which gender would float my boat.”

“Uh, I don’t know too much about tea or boats. I just figured that in Heliotrope Station, you had to go along with Stefan because he was the strongest empath. Now that he’s not messing around in your mind, you can do whatever you want.”

I couldn’t have been more stunned if Richie had picked up a coffee urn and broken it over my head.

“He was mean,” Richie added.

The fragrant coffee went down like mud. My first impulse was to insist that there’d been no need for Stefan to give me a nudge. Back then, I was twenty-two, attitudinal and horny. He was a goth boy in eyeliner with a naughty smile that went straight to my guts. We’d been a match made in purgatory. And that was without taking our psychic abilities into consideration.

Mean? Yeah, he was mean. That was probably what I liked about him. Because when you’re nothing more than an overgrown teenager, “mean” is imitating the way people swing around to face you when they talk; it’s mimicking the last insanely stupid thing they said, then recreating their annoying laugh. It’s implying their rooms are haunted, or making them burst into tears for no good reason.

You could chalk up our bullying to a lot of things—my guess is that we were overcompensating for being a couple of gay punks, psychic misfits to boot, by acting unbearably obnoxious. But at some point you grow up and become a functioning member of society. When I saw Stefan’s practice, the way he was helping people cope with their old demons, I figured him for a fully fledged grownup.

And then I found out his metamorphosis was all on the surface. Underneath, he was still the guy who’d made Movie Mike shit himself in the cafeteria.

“How big is your TV?” Richie asked.

I stared at him longer than a normal person would have, though I don’t know if the rhythms of normal conversation made an impact on him or not. I saw him now, homely and middle-aged, but I imagined him then, a doughy little wimp. Not like I’d see spirit activity, not in a sixth-sensory way. But in my imagination I saw what he used to be, and I saw what he’d become. The whole thing was discouraging.

“Mine’s a seventy-incher,” he went on, “high-definition. It gots the internet on it…well, that’s what the box says. I can’t figure out how to turn on the internet part. The remote’s really stupid.”

And even after all these years, it was tempting to say, “Oh, I’m sure it’s the remote that’s stupid.” But I resisted.

“It gots 3-D too, but I need to hook up the blue-ray for that.”

I was considering suggesting he just flip the TV onto a pair of sawhorses and use it for a dining room table when Dreyfuss joined us. “Sorry for the interruption,” he said glibly. “Let’s get back to smoking some ghost.”

Chapter 14

Richie was easy enough to read—at least until he pulled out a big zinger from the past—but Dreyfuss was about as transparent as a film canister. Still, it seemed to me that after his private phone call, his good cheer had become a bit more forced, and his eyes were sharp enough to leave wounds.

Richie finished his hot chocolate and said, “Are you sure you really want an exorcism?” He’d adopted the tone of a mom asking her incontinent kid if he really didn’t need to go potty before embarking on a car ride. “Because it’s pretty dumb to stop halfway through.”

Dreyfuss appraised him, and then he turned to me. “What do you think, Detective? Have you seen all you need to see?”

Damn it, he knew I hadn’t. “Maybe I could do another sweep of your office first. Before the ritual. Establish a baseline.”

“You’re the guest.” Dreyfuss pulled a wad of bubble wrap out of his pocket, handed it to Richie and said, “Take care of that for me, would ya?” and motioned me to precede him while Richie hunkered down in a lounge chair and got to work. A series of pops ensued that followed us down the hall, though the sound stopped abruptly once the stout door behind us whispered shut.

 
I never thought I’d be relieved to be alone with Dreyfuss.

The prayer mat was right where Carl had left it, and the charcoal puck was still smoking gently. The presence of the religious paraphernalia itself hadn’t faded the repeaters, but the partial rosary had caused Triple-Shot to go flickery. I watched him take his three bullets, jerking as each one hit. His face was a twisted mass of fear and shock. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to match him to a stoic photograph.
 

I turned to Throat Bullet instead, and took a good, long look at his face, suspecting that I already had a match. Then I stared at a few more random places in the room so as not to broadcast what I’d actually been looking at. Dreyfuss was at his desk, gloveless, gnawing a cuticle as he watched me search. I gestured, and he handed over the dossiers. I flipped through and found my match.

“By the way,” I said, “you owe me yesterday’s pill.”

Dreyfuss pulled out his pillbox, dug out a red, and set it on the desk in front of me.