PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (13 page)

Stefan pushed his feet against the passenger-side floor and pressed his neck into the headrest. He stared up at the ceiling. “No kidding.”

• • •

It was after four by the time I got back to the north side. Zigler’s Impala was still in one of the special doctor spaces in the parking lot at LaSalle. I took the other one. And I congratulated myself on owning a car that was small enough to fit in a tight parking spot.

I found Zig in the records room with a stack of boxes on either side of him and a printout full of checkmarks and Xs front and center.

“How’s it going?” I said.

He looked up. His eyes were puffier than usual, probably from all the dust. “It’s not. You didn’t give me any names to work with, just physical descriptions—and even those are vague. The files are all names and stats. It’s not like comparing apples to oranges. It’s like apples to….”

“Ginger ale?” I suggested.

Zig didn’t think I was very amusing. “You’ve gotta find one that’s willing to communicate with you.”

“Right. Okay.” I didn’t mean to leave Zig with all the gruntwork, but I was kind of busy trying to figure out what had happened to me at Camp Hell to worry about some people who died before I was even born. Big chunks of time were needed if I wanted to do these regressions, I was expected to be at my actual job during work hours, and moonlighting for Constantine Dreyfuss seemed inevitable. Maybe I should switch from benzos to speed.

“Zig, you’re up on all the latest in the world of Psy. How many sixes or sevens are there?”

He looked up from his dead-end list. “What?”

“Sixes. Or sevens. Other than Marie Saint Savon. I know about her.”

“Yoshihiro Harimoto, level six medium just outside Tokyo. He’s a channel, speaks in the voices of the dead. But only in Japanese, so interest in him is limited to the Japanese-speaking part of the world.”

“But what about the U.S.?” Somewhere the FPMP could get their hooks in someone.

“The Joneses.”

I rolled my eyes. The Joneses were the running joke of the psychic world. No one knew their first names. Met in training, married, and went on to a seedy career in second-tier Vegas theme shows in which Mrs. Jones dug through the purses of the women in the audience and Mr. Jones announced the lipstick shades and prescription bottles from the stage a hundred feet away. “Seriously.”

“I am serious. There’s some speculation that they’re telepath six. Both of ‘em. And so tuned in to one another that they function as one mind. If they hadn’t gone into show business, who knows what they could’ve done with their talent?”

Telepath six? Did tests even go up that high? My stomach sank.

“I told ‘em what I saw. Everything. That was my mistake.”

The words were just as fresh as if I’d just heard them earlier that day; at two forty-five, to be precise. Damn. Maybe the Joneses weren’t as drippy as everyone thought. Maybe they’d made a huge, frivolous, sequin-spangled spectacle of themselves so that if they disappeared, someone would notice.

And here I was, seeing ghosts. There was no way to fabricate a Vegas act around that, not without pissing off practically every religion on the planet. Then I’d have to worry about both the zealots
and
the FPMP.

“If you could narrow this down to a single year, I might have a chance at figuring out who all these ‘repeaters’ are.”

“And then what?”

Zig scowled. I’d stumped him.

“This isn’t a Vegas act,” I said. “They won’t disappear in an explosion of sparkles and confetti if we figure out who they are, and name them.”

“Do you see another lead we should be looking at? Because I don’t.”

I planted my hands on my hips and stared at the rows and rows of boxes. “What you need here is a precog, not a medium. Someone to tell you where to focus.”

Zigler started packing up for the day. “I can’t use what I don’t have.”

-FOURTEEN-

When I got home, I found a black SUV parked in front of the cannery. It was the first time since we’d bought the place that someone other than Jacob or me had taken that spot. I stared at it for a good minute or two before it occurred to me that I’d need to park my car. I found a space down the block.

I trudged up the salty sidewalks to my walkway and approached the building. And then I noticed the second strange thing. Music, coming from our house, audible through the closed door.

If this was some kind of belated birthday party, I was really not in the mood for it.

The vestibule looked like its normal self, except for some extra winter coats hanging from the pegs and a couple of black nylon bags leaned up against the wall. I steeled myself for the festivities and walked into the main room.

There was a buff guy who looked like he was using a metal detector on our sofa. And another one on his knees, unscrewing the plate on an electrical outlet.

“Hello?”

The muscle guys both turned and made a “sh” motion at me. A hand dropped onto my shoulder and I jumped. Just Jacob. The music had been loud enough to cover his approach from the kitchen. He steered me toward the downstairs bathroom, hustled me inside, and closed the door behind us.

“You sure throw a weird party,” I said. “Who are those guys?”

“Keith and Manny, from the gym. Keith’s a private investigator. If someone’s eavesdropping, he’ll find them. But until they give us the all-clear, if we need to talk about anything sensitive, we do it in here. With the radio on.”

I wanted a pair of musclebound P.I.s combing through my house even less than I wanted strippers and a stale birthday cake.

“That cell phone idea won’t work,” Jacob said. “Keith says they transmit like karaoke machine microphones, and anyone within range who’s got the equipment will receive the signal whether it’s a new phone or not.”

I felt exhausted. There was nowhere to sit. I flipped down the toilet seat lid, planted myself on it, and pressed the heels of my hands into my closed eyes. “How long are they gonna be here?”

“Until they’re done checking the place out.”

I could see that arguing with Jacob would be like fighting a brick wall. And besides, it was his place, too. If he wanted his gym monkeys pawing through all of our stuff, who was I to say they couldn’t?

Back in the main room, I watched Keith—or Manny, who knows?—hook a very complicated-looking device full of blinking LEDs to a disassembled outlet. He took some readings and then moved on to the next one.

Once I’d decided that watching him work would be as much fun as helping Zigler with his files, I wandered into the kitchen, stood next to the sink and ate a bowl of cereal for dinner. Miraculously, nothing landed on my suit—which I was dying to get out of, but the thought of being naked with all that judgmental, muscular bulk in my house made me uneasy, like maybe I’d get a dodgeball to the groin if I dared take off my pants.

I went upstairs and sat on the bed, and tried to pretend that I didn’t hear music coming up through the floorboards, and that there weren’t a couple of strangers scanning all of my stuff, and that there wasn’t any reason for me to worry about someone keeping tabs on me. But I’ve never been all that great at Let’s Pretend.

Eventually, the music cut. When Jacob came upstairs to find me, I’d taken off my jacket and gun, but I was still in my dress shirt and slacks, lying on the bed and staring up at the tin ceiling.

“They’re done. They didn’t find anything.”

“Okay. I’m really glad that you took me seriously and all, but here’s the thing. You could’ve let me know about the sweep.”

“And how would I do that? Call you on your cell phone?”

“It’s just…I feel like I don’t have any privacy.”

“Because of the sweep? This is all about your privacy. I’m trying to make sure that no one hears what we’re saying but us.”

Supposedly the FPMP was all about my privacy too, but after the journey in time I’d taken to the women’s bathroom in the empty wing of Camp Hell, I had my doubts as to the real reasons any super-secret organization would keep an eye on high-level psychics.

Jacob showed no signs of heading toward bed when I took a Valium and turned in early. I felt bad, in a vague and nebulous way. It wasn’t so much that I wanted sex—after all, I could still feel our encounter from the night before. I just didn’t want him to be pissed off that some government acronym was following me around, and because he’d moved in with me, their scrutiny was his problem now, too. Because if I was being honest with myself, that’s the way things looked to me.

I woke up before Jacob did, which was nothing new, but after I’d made some coffee and eaten two bites of a hard-boiled egg that turned out to have a sickly green yolk, I decided not to wake him. The electrical outlet plates and couch cushions were all back where they were supposed to be, but I couldn’t shake the image of a couple of strangers going through my shit.

And what was worse than that? The legions of much scarier strangers who likely had being going through my shit ever since the Police Academy.

I put my coat on, wrapped a long scarf around my neck, and went for a walk. Which turned into a ride, once I came across an El station. The route is incredibly convoluted on Sundays, which I figured out when the train turned around and started heading back north instead of going all the way downtown. Evidently, I was supposed to transfer to another line at Belmont. But it was fine. There was no one spectral on the train car, and I wasn’t in a hurry.

The streets in the Loop were starting to look familiar from my visits to Stefan’s office, but they felt different on a Sunday than they had on other days—quieter, less bustling and more stately. The main Sunday crowd consisted of shoppers rather than office workers, and they carried a different energy with them, a certain excitement that made them seem as if they didn’t take the immense feel of the skyscrapers for granted.

Hunger didn’t motivate me, so much as the dull, acidic rumble of my empty gut. I stopped at McDonald’s and ate a couple of perfectly round breakfast sandwiches, popped an Auracel, and walked to the South Loop slowly enough to ensure the drug hit my system before I hit the prison.

A pair of older ladies whose arms bristled with Macy’s bags brushed by me. I tried to imagine myself coming downtown for something other than visiting hours at the federal penitentiary or hypnotic stabs at my buried memories. That I might just go shopping, or visit the aquarium, or ride the Ferris wheel on Navy Pier. I couldn’t visualize it.

I had no gun, no cigarettes to surrender at the prison. My biggest collateral was my willingness to recant my testimony. When Burke had first asked me to do it, I’d thought there was no possible way he could convince me. And now I was sitting on the fence.

The guard put me in a different attorney visiting room this time. It didn’t have a repeater pounding on the security mirror, but it did smell like a combo of disinfectant and piss. It reminded me of CCMHC, which wasn’t my favorite residence, but at least I’d never repressed the years I spent there.

The Auracel had me waxing philosophical about the parallel of my brain and the Internet, seeing the nuthouse plain as day but needing to be searched long and hard for traces of Camp Hell, when Roger Burke joined me in his shackles and orange jumpsuit. I think I may have even been smiling just a little.

“So you checked out Dreyfuss and found out he’s legit?”

I felt my smile wither. “We talked.”

“You talked to him.” Roger shifted in his chair, and his shackles clanked. “That was really smart, letting him know you knew about him.
Really
smart.”

“What did you say he did, again?”

“I didn’t. But don’t let his hippy-guy act fool you. He’s high up. They’re all like that, anyone who’s higher than those grunts in uniforms who sprout up at your crime scenes. You’d never pick ‘em out of a crowd. Like Jen.”

“Who?”

He looked at me like I couldn’t have been more of an idiot. “Doctor Chance. She played you like nobody’s business. And she didn’t even have to flash her tits to do it. Although, she probably would have. She had a thing for you.”

This was nowhere near the direction I’d wanted our conversation to go. What I’d actually wanted was to get a bead on whether or not I should agree to work with Dreyfuss, because even though it seemed like I really didn’t have any other option, I figured I could get some insight from Burke. Not that I could come right out and ask him for his advice. But I could gauge his reaction.

“This job that Dreyfuss wants me to do….”

“What?”

“I don’t know if I should take it. Sure, it’ll get me closer to him, give me an in. But it works both ways. He’ll get to know me, too.”

“He offered you a job.” Burke’s lip curled. “Bullshit. Don’t think that you’ll climb into bed with the FPMP and you’ll be safe. That’s not how it works over there. Dreyfuss thinks he’s the head of his department—maybe he is—but believe you me, someone’s watching him.”

“I can’t exactly refuse.”

“Sure you can. It’s not as if they can take you out for saying no. Marks would figure it out, and he’s too high-profile to pick off.”

True, Jacob did have his face splashed across the Tribune and the five o’clock news periodically, often enough that total strangers stopped him at the bank or the gas station just to say hello—and to be able to tell their friends, yeah, he looks even better in person. But if the FPMP was as super-stealth as all that, I was sure they could kill two PsyCops with one stone and get both Jacob and me at the same time, with a gas leak, or a housefire, or a dash of arsenic in our Korean takeout.

“So…you’re saying I shouldn’t work with Dreyfuss.”

“Oh no. By all means. Let Con work a con on you, make you think that you’re all ‘in the know’ while he’s probing into every last aspect of your life to see what you can be manipulated with. I won’t stop you.”

Burke’s reverse psychology left a lot to be desired if even I could see through it. Or did it? Maybe he was right. Maybe I should figure out how to walk away.

“The name I gave you panned out. So you can’t deny that I know what I’m talking about. Recant, and I’ll give you more names. And better yet, I’ll tell you how they keep tabs on all the high-level Psychs.”