PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (16 page)

I ate a piece of toast in hopes of sopping up some stomach acid, but I passed on the coffee. Which was probably the cause of the caffeine-withdrawal headache that had spread over the top of my skull by the time I got to work.

I pulled into my usual parking spot at the Fifth, slid through a frozen puddle of God-knows-what, and scraped the bottom of my shoe against the threshold of the front door in an attempt to get the slime off the treads. I turned toward the stairwell that led to my second-floor office, and nearly collided with a uniformed officer, my height, and maybe thirty pounds beefier.

The FPMP guy.

“Agent Dreyfuss would like to speak to you,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll see what my schedule is and give him a….”

He held up a cell phone. “His secretary’s on the line.”

I took the phone. It was a different brand than mine, and it felt strange in my hand. I noticed that it was warm, and had to quell the urge to wipe my fingers against my pant leg. I turned away from the FPMP cop, as if that gave me any privacy at all, and headed toward the drinking fountain. “Bayne,” I said into the strange cell phone.

“I’ll connect you to Agent Dreyfuss.” It was a woman’s voice, cool and even. I’d spoken to her once before. Maybe. Hard to say for sure. She had the voice of a Midwestern newscaster. “Please hold.”

I tried to imagine what Dreyfuss’ secretary would look like and came up flat. He might be a super-secret federal agent, but I couldn’t shake the image of him as a long-haired, neo-hippy pot dealer. Who’d then, in all seriousness, offered me reds. Even after he’d outed himself as the FPMP.

“Hello, Detective. Let’s pretend I’ve inserted some obligatory friendly banter about the weather here. Frankly, I didn’t notice what it was doing outside. I was too busy wondering if you’d finally decided to take me up on my offer.”

“Not…really.”

“Because I’m guessing it can’t be much fun trudging through ghosts at LaSalle General. Am I right, or am I right?”

He had a direct line to my day job. Great.

“Of course it’s full of ghosts,” he said. “People die there every day. I mean, what do they expect you to find? It’s like Warwick’s got you searching for hay in a haystack.”

“Thanks for your concern. I’m all misty-eyed over it.”

“I guess I can’t fault you for your attitude. The Police Academy teaches rookies to embrace their inner asshats, doesn’t it? You never see many timid cops.”

“If you’re through with the lovefest, I’ve got a job to do.”

“No you don’t. A bunch of old ghosts? Zigler’s got about a million files to pull and ponder. I told Warwick I could use you today.”

“So we’ve stopped pretending that I’ve got a choice about this. Is that it?”

Dreyfuss laughed like he really enjoyed sparring with me. “You’ve always got a choice, Detective. You could tell me to go and soak my head, and troop over to LaSalle with Detective Zigler like we never had this conversation. You could pop in for a little afternoon delight at that psychic shop in Wicker Park you’re always hovering around. Heck, you could even drain your savings account and jaunt off to Mexico City with Detective Marks, and pretend the FPMP never existed.

“Or you could do the smart thing, and let Officer Andy drive you to my office. ‘Cos my staff medium says there’s a cold spot in here. And it would be a very lucrative thing for you to explore that temperature drop in a little more detail.”

That’s it? He wanted me to scope out a ghost for him? I’d had visions of experimental drugs and tripped-out machinery, and wrist restraints, and maybe vivisection. Checking a room for ghosts seemed too damn simple.

Then again, who else could really do it but me?

“Lucrative…how?”

“Five big. Cash money. Not bad for a couple hours’ work, wouldn’t you say?”

My heart pounded in my throat. Had Roger Burke been encouraging me to do this thing for Dreyfuss, or trying to scare me in the opposite direction? I thought hard. Whether Burke had been trying to or not, he’d seriously freaked me out.

So I figured he was trying to keep me away from Con. And I did the opposite.

“Ten,” I told him. After all, I didn’t want to seem too enthusiastic.

I gave the phone back to good ol’ officer “Andy,” and he led me to his cruiser.

It’d been a few years since I had my own squad car. They were a lot nicer inside now, sleeker and more rounded—but smaller too, and I needed to tuck my elbows in to keep from brushing against “Andy.”

I didn’t talk, and either did he, which was good. I was too busy being hung over, and fuming at the way Dreyfuss had laid out every plan I could possibly think of. Except the “afternoon delight” contingency. Even the thought of Crash bent over that bed of his with his jeans pulled down and his naked, tattooed ass pointing right at me couldn’t flush out the brainworm those two words had planted in my gray matter.

“Andy” took surface streets to the North Loop, where he slid into an underground parking garage I could probably drive by a dozen times without ever noticing. Heck, I’d probably still miss it now, if I came back to look for it.

Maybe there was a spell on it, or a ritual, or whatever you want to call it. Some psychic skin to make you look the other way. I turned up my internal faucet and strengthened my silver full-body condom, even though the effort nauseated me.

I followed “Andy” to the elevator. He waited for me to get in first. I imagined him shooting me in the back, my blood spraying against the mirrored back wall. But there was no gunshot. He came in behind me and pressed five, the top button, and the door closed.

No music piped into the elevator; the only sound was the quiet whoosh of the car sliding on cables. I imagined the elevator dropping. Five floors. It wouldn’t be much, in the movies. But in real life? No doubt it would leave me a quadriplegic.

The elevator door opened. “Andy” stepped out, then sidestepped, so I’d have to fall into place beside him. Through my overcoat, I pressed my palm against the reassuring shape of my Glock. Nice to know there was no trust lost between “Andy” and me.

The Fifth Floor of the Nameless FPMP Building was the epitome of elegance that Stefan’s high rise was trying (and failing) to be. Lights were low and cool. The desk cut a striking curve around an empty space punctuated by tall plants and a few classy pieces of  wall-mounted and individually lit sculpture. I didn’t have words for the paint colors. Orange, but not bright, sort of gold; a green, or maybe a gray, but bluish. Something else not quite black; a metal with hints of red.

Good thing I never wanted to be an interior designer. I’d need to learn a whole new language.

An Asian woman in an immaculate black suit looked up from behind the desk. She wore dark-framed glasses, which looked like they were only decorative, something to add to the severity of her suit. She stood and pushed open a door that looked like it was part of the paneling. “Follow me.”

She led us into a comfortably large room. It wasn’t a waiting room that a dentist or a car dealership might have; there wasn’t a single dog-eared magazine to be found. Instead, a tea set rested on a silver tray—probably real silver, with two pots, a bowl of sugar cubes, a creamer, and a bowl of something that looked suspiciously like chocolate curls. Jeez.

“Agent Dreyfuss will be a few minutes,” said the secretary. “Help yourself to coffee or tea. My name is Laura. If you need anything, let me know.”

Asian-lady didn’t look like a
Laura
, any more than the computer tech support guy in New Delhi struck me as a plausible
Jason
. But Laura spoke flawless English—she’d been the one patching me through to Dreyfuss all those times; I recognized her voice—so maybe Laura really was her name.

As much as anything there was real, and not just a slick veneer plastered over a scary group of ruthless spies.

I wished I could sink down into one of the deep leather chairs so I could stop trying to ignore the quiver in my knees, but “Andy” didn’t sit, so neither would I.

Instead of traditional art, framed magazine covers decorated these walls, each one featuring a famous psych. I recognized Marie Saint Savon in her rustic, tweedy outfit, with her single gray braid hanging over one shoulder. I could name the other psychics, too. Uri Geller gazed out in a dramatically lit shot with one hand furled under his chin. Jeanne Dixon faced a 1960s press conference in a jaunty pillbox hat. Edgar Cayce smiled down at me in that reassuring way of his, as if to tell me that sometimes you just had to take things in stride.

Unfortunately, I’d already tried burying my head in the sand, and this was where I ended up.

The door hinges were so well-oiled, the floor so solidly anchored, that I didn’t hear Constantine Dreyfuss until he sucked in a great big breath and let it out with a whoop. “It’s cold out there, huh?”

I did my best not to look as if he’d just scared me half out of my skin. He stood just inside the waiting room door in a bunch of layered sweats, wiping his nose on the hem of his outermost sweatshirt. “Nothing like a good run to get the heart pumping.”

Pretty much any other thing I could think of was preferable to a run. But I kept my mouth shut.

Dreyfuss turned to the tea set, fished a sugar cube out of the bowl with his fingers and popped it into his mouth. “So.” It sounded like
Tho
, since he was talking around the sugar. “You need anything to get started? A beer maybe? A little….” He raised his fingertips to his mouth in a pot-smoking gesture, and made a puffing noise.

“Cripes—no. Where’s your cold spot?”

“You don’t beat around the bush, do you? Are you positive that you’re a government employee?” He gave the sugar cube a few loud crunches, then swallowed. “You haven’t even touched the java.”

“I don’t want any.”

“You sure? It’s pretty awesome.” He poured himself a cup. The smell made my mouth water. I glared at him.

Dreyfuss took a sip, added some cream, took another, and then a long swallow, followed by an, “Ahh.”

I tapped my foot.

“You sure you don’t want any? What else’ve you got to do while we’re waiting for the staff medium to join us?”

Oh, great. Their own guy was coming to keep tabs on me. What level, I wondered. And how pissed would he be that I’d been called in to double-check his work?

Dreyfuss sipped and sighed, and wandered past Marie Saint Savon’s magazine cover. “Too bad Marie kicked the bucket,” he said. “There’s never been another medium like her, before or since.”

I stared at a blank spot on the wall. Dreyfuss might be able to force me to work for him, but there was nothing that said I had to be buddy-buddy about it.

“You ever been to France, Detective? No, I imagine not. Wouldn’t it be cool to visit her grave, get her take on the whole spirit world now that she’s on the other side? I wonder if you’d need a translator.”

“No one knows where she’s buried.” Sonofabitch, he’d baited me into a conversation. I reminded myself to stop talking. But I’d already made eye contact.

Dreyfuss was smiling. “Of course someone knows where she’s buried. It’s not as if she buried herself. I specialize in information, Detective. If you wanted to visit with Marie, I could make that happen.”

“What I want is for the FPMP to leave me alone.”

“I’m talking realistic wants here, not pie in the sky. As long as psychs exist, the FPMP—”

He stopped talking when the silent door swung open. I’m sure that whatever he was going to say, it would’ve been a crock of shit, anyway.

A guy stepped into the room, probably my age, but male pattern baldness had done a number on him and left him with only a ring of hair from ear to ear, so he looked older. And familiar.

He looked from Dreyfuss, to “Andy,” to me, to Dreyfuss again, and gave a timid smile.

I knew that smile.

“Einstein?”

He spun around to face me and nearly overbalanced. “Why’d you call me that? No one’s called me that in years.”

My God. It was him. He’d been a thin, wimpy, soft-shouldered guy in his youth, and now he was a pudgy, bald, middle-aged guy. His eyes were the same, though. So sincere, you suspected you could make him cry by teasing him about his Velcro-fastened shoes…if only he was smart enough to know you were making fun of him.

“It’s me. It’s Vic. Victor Bayne.”

Einstein blinked, and furrowed his brow.

“From Heliotrope Station. C’mon, man. There were only a few of us mediums. You and me, Faun and Darla.”

His eyes went wide and he smacked himself in the forehead with his palm. “Hardcore Vic? You’re kidding me!”

Shit.

Einstein rushed over and grabbed my hand. He pumped it up and down so vigorously, I almost forgot to be embarrassed about him dredging up that old name. Nowadays, the only thing “hardcore” about me was the DVD selection next to my bed.

“Wow, you look really good.” He held on to my hand, but pushed me back to arm’s length. “You’ve got all your hair and everything. And you’re wearing a suit!”

From anyone other than Einstein, that would’ve been an insult. But he didn’t really have the capacity to differentiate between one of Jacob’s tailored suits and my bargain-rack specials. He just knew I had a job where I couldn’t show up in jeans and high-tops.

“I’m a detective.”

He gave his trademark giggle, heh-heh, and memories hit me in a rush. Stefan and me, imitating that goofy little laugh of his. Him going along with it—laughing right along with us, because at least it meant we were paying attention to him. That we knew he existed. “Whoa, that’s so neat. Just like TV, huh?”

“We spend more time on paperwork than they do on TV.” God damn. I was such a fucking prick when I was young. “I guess I should call you Richard.”

“Richie. What about you?”

“Vic’s fine.”

He nodded. “I’ll try to remember.”

Yeah, me too.

I did end up having that cup of coffee. Or three. And not because Dreyfuss offered, but because it felt so good to see Richie. Of everyone at Camp Hell, I never would’ve thought he’d be someone I’d reconnect with. That it would feel so good to see him outside that razor wire fence, well-rested and well-fed. Well-paid, too, according to him. He told me he drove a Lexus, and had a vacation home in Michigan.