PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (30 page)

He took the building up on its offer, and walked toward the elevator. “Look, sleep on it before you do anything stupid,” I said, because I remembered how he’d sounded when he told me that the only time his kids ever cared about his career was the day he got the call that he’d beat out a thousand other candidates for the PsyCop job. “Warwick doesn’t need to know. I’ve got a whole stack of cutting-edge Psych research at home. Let me do some of the work. I’ll figure out our next move, for once.”

I glanced at him. He was focusing hard on the floor. He nodded.

“Give me your security pass,” I said. I was worried he’d turn it in to the front office to reassure himself that he didn’t have to come back.

Zig handed it over, shook his head, and looked pointedly at anywhere else but me.

-TWENTY NINE-

I called ahead, and Stefan’s secretary managed to cram me into his schedule. I had a feeling there were some people out there who were developing unhealthy attachments to nicotine gum because of me.

If I’d played the name-that-vest game while I was waiting to see Stefan, I would’ve lost. He wasn’t wearing one. He was head-to-toe black in a turtleneck and jeans, with a chunky silver necklace that looked tribal, maybe African. Since there was no special place for a pocket watch, he’d opted for a silver Rolex. I guess smoking cessation and work productivity were pretty good business, after all.

He tipped back in his chair, laced his fingers over his stomach, and stared down his nose at me. “How is work?”

“Work is, uh….” I hung my overcoat on the coat tree and looked down at myself. My entire right side was streaked with cinnamon sugar. Damn. I wouldn’t have thought it would show up so vividly on the navy. “Shit. Work is messy. Which is kinda why I’m here.” I took off the blazer and hung it up beside the overcoat. “See, I need to remember this one training session, and so I was hoping we could aim for—”

“What…is…that?”

I wondered what else I’d managed to spill on myself. I held up my arms and walked around in a little circle, which I realized, as I was doing it, was completely lame. “Where?”

“Strapped to your body.”

I had to take another good look at myself to realize that he’d been talking about my holster. “You mean my Glock?”

“You brought a
gun
into my office?”

“Well…yeah. It’s my service weapon. I came here straight from work.”

“And you’ve had it on you all along? Every time?”

Cripes. Stefan wouldn’t be the first person to get weird about the gun. I’d had a short-term boyfriend whose morbid fixation with it had caused me to permanently misplace his phone number. “You want cinnamon all over your couch? I’ll put my coat on so you don’t have to look at it.”

“No. I don’t think it’s the sight of the gun that’s bothering me. Just the thought of you having it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You think I’m gonna shoot you?”

I’d been aiming for sarcasm. But Stefan’s eyes cut down to the gun, and his laugh came a fraction of a second too late.

“I’ve got the FPMP following me around, and I’m not going anywhere without it. You’ll just have to deal.”

“Fine. Not another word.” He planted himself in the chair across from the hypnosis couch, and muttered, “Good lord.” Which, technically, was two more words. But I didn’t want to waste my hour bickering with him.

I thought about Einstein and Faun Windsong and Dead Darla as Stefan counted me back. If Einstein could exorcise a spirit, then it should be a piece of cake for me. I’d known this, once. Those pictures that you look at, where you can shift your focus and a pretty lady looking at herself in a mirror becomes a skull? It was like that. I’d have to shift my focus, and whatever had been holding me back would fall away. I’d be able to see.

I lost present-day Stefan around four, which seemed strange to me. I’d been diving down at seven or eight, sinking far, fast. But this time felt different to me. I hadn’t landed in a mediumship training session, which was where I’d been aiming. And I kept a stronger link to my present self than I had in my previous regressions.

The orderlies had just sprung me from the green room, and every time I looked at a light source and then moved my head, an orange tracer would trail behind. It was kind of like acid, though unfortunately, without the rock concert.

I think I’d been awake for about a day and a half. I’d touched dozens of personal effects, from a teddy bear to a wallet, to a wig. An actual wig—short, no-nonsense, dark blonde. I’d laughed at that when the silver box rotated into the room on the lazy Susan that connected me to the research area on the other side of the mirrored wall. Because how morbid could you get, stealing a dead woman’s wig and dumping it in the lap of a Psych who was pumped full of drugs. And how stupid would it be if I actually stooped to saying, “I sense a female presence,” because…duh. It was either that or a trannie.

Every time I put that dumb wig into the slot to return it and get the next object, it revolved right back around. Because I’d laughed at it, I realized. It was the first reaction I’d shown them in months, and they thought I’d gotten a read.

But there was no read to get. It was just a dead woman’s wig. That’s all.

The orderly had a wheelchair ready to bring me back to my room, but I told him I wanted to walk. It was an instinct I’d picked up at the loony bin, not to let the other residents see I was weak. Besides, the chair reminded me too much of Movie Mike, who’d supposedly been going to rehab, but now, rumor had it, would never walk again. His vision of himself as a Chess King model? Gone.

I looked up at the lights and a bunch of cool afterimages dragged down the hall. My keeper—I’d given up on learning their names—grabbed me by the upper arm so hard it hurt. His hand was big enough to close around my biceps. “C’mon, space cadet. Your room’s this way.”

I turned in the direction he was pulling me, and my hair fell into my eyes. They’d taken away our plastic safety razors a week after Krimski came on board. My scalp had gotten caught in the cheap electric razor I’d been given for my face, and the ‘hawk was too much trouble to keep up with the tiny manicure scissors. So I just wore my hair long and uncombed. It was the best rebellion I could manufacture without any access to proper haircutting tools. And besides, I looked pretty tough scowling through my hair.

The orderly dragged me to my room and tossed me onto the bed. The overhead light made a shape that looked like a caterpillar, and I watched that crawl around on the ceiling for a while. But the sound of papers shuffling distracted me, and when I stopped tracking the caterpillar, I found the stupid orderly had never left.

He stood by the barred window, where my texts and notebooks were spread over the shelf above the radiator. And he had my red notebook in his hand—the one I’d been using to write a note to Stefan.

“What the fuck?” I said. “Get out of my room.”

He glanced up at me and gave me an unpleasant smile. And his eyes—goddamn, he had the blond-haired, blue-eyed, reptilian look of Roger Burke, combined with the gym rat physique of Jacob’s private investigator pals. No wonder I ran across someone every now and then who seemed to rub me wrong for no reason at all. And to top it off, he had a mullet.

“Don’t go through my shit,” I said. “I’ll tell Krimski.” Who probably wouldn’t do a damn thing about it…but what else could I say?

“Krimski wanted me to check up on you.”

“Bullshit. You’re just an orderly.”

He licked his thumb and leafed through some more. I tried to take notes during focus group, but always seemed to end up doodling anarchy symbols over three-quarters of the page instead. I wondered if Big Blond Hockey Hair was anywhere near the note. Damn it. The whole staff knew I was queer anyway, but I didn’t want to let anyone in on that particular fantasy but the guy I’d intended to give it to.

He paused in the doorway that led to my institutional half-bath, and read. Probably focus group notes, since he didn’t seem particularly interested. “The wig,” he said, without bothering to look me in the face. “Is that supposed to mean something? ‘See if Mister Bayne will tell you about the wig,’ that’s what he said.”

I looked up at the ceiling again. The caterpillar returned. “You can take that wig, pass it back and forth, and take turns shoving it up your asses.”

He laughed. “What are you trying to prove, anyway? You should see your file, big black marks all over it, ‘will not cooperate,’ and ‘conceals information,’ scribbled in the margins. You think you’re some kind of badass because you don’t tell them what they want to hear?”

Well, yes.

No.

Not exactly. I held back because I didn’t trust them. Because a ghost had told me to be careful, and it seemed to me that he hadn’t had any reason to lie to me.

I tore my eyes away from the light-caterpillar and found the orderly reading my notebook a little more closely. I swung my feet over the side of the bed and grabbed the thing out of his hands. I was actually an inch or so taller than him, if I stood up straight. His arms were as big around as my thighs. But I was taller.

“Don’t go through my stuff.”

“Tell me about the wig, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“Leave me alone, or I’ll tell Krimski you’re harassing me. And he can always find more goons—but where’s he gonna get another medium?”

Mullet-head rolled his eyes and walked out. He left the door open, just to irk me, I imagine. I clambered over my bed and off the other side so I was facing the door, and tracers exploded everywhere. The entire wall was filled with light caterpillars that squiggled down from the ceiling. It took me three tries, but I found the handle, pulled the door shut, then ran over to the bed and flipped through the notebook so hard that the pages bent and tore.

Lecture. Lecture. Lesson. Essay. Doodles. And then I found it—the note that contained the fantasy that featured me, Stefan, a couple of med students from U of C, and a case of aerosol whipped cream. A page and a half of my most intimate thoughts. It had taken me nearly twenty minutes to get it down.

I tore it out of the notebook, ripped it into tiny little pieces, and flushed it down the toilet.

I was pissed.

Those notes were the only way for Stefan and me to be together anymore. We disappeared into various labs for days at a time, and emerged woozy or puking, or semi-conscious. The only time we actually saw each other was in the cafeteria. We couldn’t just leave, run off to the smoking lounge, or the basement stairwell by the pop machine, and get a few quick strokes in. And we’d tried—in the men’s room, which was as far away as we were allowed to go. I’d earned myself an embarrassing “no fraternization” lecture, and Stefan got locked in his room for three days straight.

I thought about writing a secret confession that I actually had the psychic ability to kill people from a distance, so that the goons who went through my shit could find it and think twice about being such dickheads. But I got a few words into it, then covered it up with a bunch of spiral caterpillars, and decided it was more fun to lie in bed and watch the lights perform.

The rattling of my door handle pulled me from a light doze. I clenched up inside, figuring that Mister Mullet had decided to take another stab at me, and wishing there was some way I really could make his head explode.

A large figure slipped into the room, but the shape was all wrong for the orderly. Black on black, and teased-out hair. My God. Stefan.

I jumped out of bed and pulled him against me. He felt big and solid. “What’re you doing?” I whispered. “How’d you get here?”

He cupped my face in both hands and stroked my hair. It was a lot longer than the last time he’d touched me which was, when? A month ago? Maybe two. “I wanted to see you. A lucky break with only one douchebag on duty, a well-placed
Boo-Hoo-You,
and here I am.”

I wondered who’d retreated into the bathroom to cry uncontrollably over nothing at all. I hoped it was Hockey Hair. It probably wasn’t, since Stefan and I were housed in two completely different sections. But it was fun to imagine that jerk sobbing like a little girl, anyway.

I touched Stefan’s lips. Black. Probably permanent marker, since his makeup had long ago run out, and it was doubtful that Krimski would send one of his goons out shopping for us. “You shouldn’t have come here,” I said. “You’ll get in so much trouble.”

“Not if I don’t get caught.” He pressed his mouth into mine. He tasted like mint. But in a weird way, I missed the flavor of cigarette smoke—not because it was tasty, by any stretch of the imagination, but because it reminded me of our honeymoon months, where we could get away with nearly anything—even though, at the time, we hadn’t realized it.

I guess if we had, it wouldn’t seem quite so bittersweet now.

I felt myself sway against him. I tightened my arms around his neck, and he guided me toward the bed. “I’m so high right now,” I told him.

“Any good?”

“Not too bad.”

Stefan bent me back over the narrow bed, then sank down between my legs. I eased my fingers into his hair. It felt floppy now, without hairspray to hold it up. “I gotta get out of here,” I told him.

“Why now?” He undid my jeans, pulled them down, then paused to unzip my combat boots and work them off, too.

“These fucking orderlies…I hate them. And I hate the sessions. And Faun Windsong. I hate not being able to go where I want, do what I want. Maybe I won’t get certified into a good job after all, but it’s getting to the point where I don’t fucking care—I’ll go flip burgers somewhere instead. Whatever testing they’ve got on me so far, that’ll be enough to keep the guys with the butterfly nets from coming after me. I just feel like I can’t even breathe without someone jotting down a note in my fucking file about it.”

Stefan’s tongue was on me, and the psyactives in my bloodstream didn’t stop my body from snapping to attention. Then again, I was a twenty-four-year-old kid, and they’d need to be some pretty potent drugs to keep me from rising to the occasion.

“I wrote you a note,” I told him as I pushed into his mouth, “but they’re going through my notebooks, now. So I tore it up.”