“No I don’t. I’m retaining fluid.”
I sighed. My breath streamed into the cold air in a big, white cloud, as if I’d been smoking one of those cigarettes from the fancy black pack.
“Okay, okay. How about this? I can’t remember Camp Hell, and it’s starting to freak me out. And now I can’t find anything about it on the Internet, and nothing about me, or anyone else who’s ever been inside.”
“I can get you the number for Heliotrope Station. They’re still training municipal Psychs there.”
“Those pencil pushers at the community college? No, not them. They’re not the real Camp Hell. They adopted the name, but none of the same people are running that program. I mean the real Camp Hell.”
Stefan pulled out a red pack of smokes, picked it open, and lit one up. “Better,” he said. He stared at it as it burned down, and I waited. When it was about half gone, he said, “I looked for you when I got out. I couldn’t find you. I thought maybe you were dead.” Stefan took another drag. He scrutinized the cigarette. Smoke curled from his nostrils. “Remember when you talked the nurses’ aide into giving you half a pack of Newports so that you’d have something to give me for Kwanzaa?”
Kwanzaa rang a bell. I remembered Stefan’s voice saying it seemed like a much cooler holiday than Christmas, and that he’d never read anything that said that white people couldn’t celebrate it, too. But I didn’t remember the Newports. “I just told you, I don’t remember Camp Hell.”
He stared at me so hard I thought I might wilt. His cigarette burned down some more. “Repressed memories are out of my league. But I might be able to help you out if, for instance, you want to gain some weight. I’m a licensed empathic hypnotherapist.”
I shrugged. So few of my clothes fit me anyway. If I put on ten pounds, my favorite jeans would be too tight. “‘S’okay.”
“What about work? Job productivity, that’s the ‘big thing’ right now. I can charge lawyers and stockbrokers insane amounts of money to give them a business edge.”
“I sense dead people. I don’t want an edge. If anything, I’d want to dumb it down.”
He frowned at his cigarette, which dangled from his fingers and continued to burn down. He fished the pack out of his pocket and offered it to me, but I shook my head. He shrugged and pocketed the smokes. Then he turned his hand to look at the lit end of his cigarette. “Remember that time we smoked a banana peel?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” He scowled even harder, and glared at me a little. “That fat slob of a janitor, A.J. or T.J. or B.J. or whatever he called himself…. He told us we could get high if we dried a banana peel and smoked it.”
I shrugged.
“And so you snuck one out of the cafeteria in your pants, and I hid it in my room. I tried to dry it on the radiator, but it stuck there, and the whole room smelled like rotten bananas.”
“I really don’t….”
He talked over me, getting louder as he went on. “And then finally after about a week it was dry, all black and leathery and dry, and we made a bong out of a toilet paper roll and a piece of tin foil, and we hid in the corner of the smoking lounge.”
I could hear the hurt in his voice, that he had this memory of something we’d done, together—and my half of it, the portion that I was supposed to cherish and protect? Gone.
“And we got Fat Judy to go stand by the door, keep the orderlies out…and the telepaths were all rooting for us to be the ones to discover some way we could entertain ourselves to keep from going crazy…?”
I shook my head. It sounded exactly like something we would do. I just didn’t remember.
His cigarette had burned all the way down. He dropped the butt. “You got really sick,” he added quietly.
I didn’t remember.
“You vomited on my shoe. Not both of them. Just one. I threw it out. But I kept the good one.”
“I remember…that the front doors were made of black glass.” I felt sweat bead on my upper lip, then start to freeze in the winter air. I swiped it away with my sleeve.
Stefan sighed. “Good lord. You really are screwed up.”
-FIVE-
I used to think The Clinic was creepy. Locked doors, fake windows, the fact that my last doctor was testing experimental psyactives on me. But standing in the middle of a regular hall in a regular hospital where I’d reported to work that morning, I was beginning to think that The Clinic was downright inviting.
“What was the approximate age at the time of death?” Zigler prompted.
I squinted at the apparition. Stick arms, stick legs, sunken cheeks, hospital gown. She pawed at the fire alarm, ran a few steps, and disappeared. Then she flickered back into being in front of the fire alarm again. “Uh…twenty-five to…forty?”
“That’s quire a range.” Zigler’s pen squeaked.
“Look, it’s really hard to say. She looks like a cancer patient or something.”
“Communicative?”
“Nope. A repeater.”
“Have you asked the patient her name? Out loud?”
Cripes. As if I didn’t know a repeater when I saw one. “Hello, ma’am. I’m Detective Bayne, your friendly neighborhood medium. Care to identify yourself?”
The ghost’s hand went through the fire alarm handle. She darted away, flickered, and disappeared.
“She didn’t answer me.”
“You don’t have to talk down to them.” More squeaking of the pen. A sigh. “Okay. Next?”
I pressed my temples between my thumb and forefinger. Zig had gone through a whole pad already, and we couldn’t find anything that was willing to talk to us. And yet the repeaters were so thick I couldn’t take two steps without walking into one.
The next ghost was a kid sitting against the wall. He was dusky-looking with glossy black hair, maybe Mexican or Middle Eastern. Hard to say with his hand cupped over his face. Blood oozed from between his fingers, ran down his arm. I closed my eyes to escape from the sight of him for a moment, but it didn’t do much good. I opened my eyes again and crouched down.
“Hey,” I said. “Kid. Can you hear me?”
He started to cry, and he kept on bleeding. I tried to coax something out of him, got nothing, described him to Zigler, and moved on to the next one.
“Ma’am?” I said. The ghost whisked by me, posture impeccable in her white A-line dress and low white shoes. “Ma’am?” I followed. She ducked into a patient’s room. Zigler put his hand on my arm to stop me from following. He ducked in and asked the guy inside if we could take a look around, instructing him to be absolutely quiet.
“What are you, forensics or something?”
I peeked in and looked for the nurse. She seemed to be opening a window, except there was no window on the wall she was touching. Not anymore, at least.
“You’re PsyCops, aren’t you? Oh my God. Is that guy a telepath? Is he communicating with someone?”
“Sir,” Zigler said. “What did I tell you?”
“Oh. Right.”
The nurse was faint. I tried to shut out the psych-groupie’s excitement and focus on the ghost. She stared at the wall for a moment, nodding as if she was rehearsing something in her head, and then she leapt into the wall and disappeared.
I touched the spot and felt a chill. It faded in a few seconds.
“What’s he doing?” the patient stage-whispered.
My phone buzzed in my pocket before I could think of a sufficiently smartass comment to reply with. I gave Zigler the index-finger “just a second” gesture and went out into the hall to take Jacob’s call.
“I am so, so sorry. I tried to wake you up when I got home last night, but you were dead to the world.”
“Yeah, uh. I was…” zonked out of my mind on reds. “I took a sleeping pill.”
“How was your meeting with Stefan?”
“I dunno. Okay. I guess. It wasn’t exactly the warmest welcome I could’ve gotten. But he talked to me.”
My call-waiting beeped. I couldn’t tell who it was, not with Jacob on the line. But it occurred to me that maybe Stefan had cooled off a little overnight. Or warmed up. Or…whatever. “I got a call. I’ll uh….”
“It’s fine. I’ll see you later. Bye.” Jacob had given me his sexy “bye,” the one where his voice goes all low and smoky. I guess it was good for distracting me from ghostly nurses. I switched the call before I had a chance to get nervous.
“Hello?”
“You’ve thought about my offer?”
Sonofabitch. It wasn’t Stefan—it was Roger Burke. I’d thought it was too much trouble to change my phone number after he checked in to Metropolitan Correctional. And he’d never called me…until now. “Uh, no. Not really. I just don’t think it’s, y’know…realistic…if I suddenly take everything back.”
“Maybe you
can
come up with a better line to feed them—you’ve got your storytelling technique down pat. Here’s the deal: my lawyer says I’m looking at six years, minimum. You get them to drop the kidnapping and assault charges, and the DA might not have anything to charge me with at all. For every year you get them to knock off, I’ll give you a name. A good one, a living breathing person in the FPMP, complete with a job description. You get me off on time served? I’ll give you everything.”
He dropped his voice on the last word in a way that mirrored Jacob’s patented “bye.” I snapped my phone shut in a knee-jerk reaction, and stood there and gawked at the opposite wall for a good ten seconds before I realized that Zigler was standing beside me writing in his notepad.
“You okay?”
I closed my eyes and tried to calm down. “Yeah. Fine.”
“If you want to knock off early…I really think we’ve seen our share of activity for the day. Besides, it’ll take me hours to type this up.”
I dropped my hand to my side and caressed the pocket of my blazer. I had two Auracel and a Seconal with me. I’d love the freaky high of the anti-psyactive, but I wouldn’t be able to take it on a Wednesday afternoon, not if I planned to do any ghost hunting on Thursday. Years ago, if I did slip up and come to work in no condition to actually do my job, Maurice and I would have strolled around the neighborhoods for a few hours, hit a donut shop or a hot dog stand, and then called it a day. I was guessing Bob Zigler wouldn’t be quite as understanding if I came to work psychically stunted.
“Sure. Let’s get out of here.”
• • •
Since parking in the Loop was more trouble than it was worth, I took the train to Stefan’s office. There was a ghostly workman on the track at the station in my neighborhood, and a few see-through commuters at various other stops, but they weren’t any more gruesome than the ghosts I had to drive through at the more dangerous intersections on the surface streets.
Even so, my heart was pounding by the time I got downtown.
I went through Stefan’s lobby, and his elevator—beige, beige and more beige—and thank God for the bathroom, because I was sweating bullets by the time I got to his floor.
I washed my face and dried it and still felt clammy. I stuffed a wad of paper towels into my pocket, and went into Stefan’s office.
A receptionist at a sleek granite-topped desk looked up at me. Young. Female. Black. I probably gawked at her. I don’t know what I expected—that Stefan would just be standing in his office, all by himself, waiting for me to show up without calling?
“I need to speak to Mister Russell.” At least my voice sounded calm.
“He’s with a patient. Do you have an appointment, sir?”
A bead of sweat rolled down my side. “Detective. Victor Bayne.”
Her dark eyes flicked down to her appointment book. “Should I interrupt him?”
I glanced down at the book, too. Not that I could read it upside down, from where I was standing. “No.” I looked up at the clock. It was twenty to two. “How much longer will he be?”
“Five…ten more minutes? But then he has a three-o’-clock.”
Shit. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that Stefan had an actual job to do while he was at work? My hair was stuck to my forehead. I pulled a paper towel out of my pocket and blotted my face. Not very slick, but it beat dribbling sweat onto the granite desktop.
I turned and looked at one of the paintings on the wall. It was an architectural print of some kind, very detailed and a little warped, with too many stairways and whacked-out perspective. I was trying to figure out where one of the windows led when I heard a door open behind me.
“Carissa? Is Mister Mason here already…?” Stefan stood in the doorway to his private office. Another vest—bottle-green velvet today—and a startling white shirt with gigantic cufflinks. He looked at me as if he’d seen a ghost. Then he scowled, hopefully more in concentration than in anger. “See if you can reschedule Mister Mason, would you? I need to meet with Detective Bayne.”
Stefan showed his current patient out, then shuttled me into the office and closed the door behind me. He pressed his back against it, and spoke to me in a whisper. “What’s with you? I could feel you losing it through the wall.”
“That’s some trick.” I laughed. It sounded forced.
“It’s not funny. I’m worried about you.”
I blotted my upper lip with the clammy paper towel. “You can get scrips, can’t you? ‘Cos some Valium would really hit the spot right about now.”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“But you’re a therapist. You can get ‘em—you’ve got some kind of connection. Right?”
He walked towards me. My body remembered him, even after all these years, and I didn’t flinch back. He took me by the arm, and then I did cringe.
“It’s…uh…I hurt it on duty. Sprained.”
Stefan let go and took me by the shoulder instead, and steered me to the couch. “Sit.”
I sat.
He eased himself into a thick, imposing chair across from me, placed his hands on the armrests, and stared. He was tapping into me, I knew, and maybe if he hadn’t done it a thousand times before it would have sent me packing. But now I kind of wondered what it was that he’d see.
“I can get you Valium. But I won’t. Not unless you let me train you to defuse the panic attacks.”
“Christ. Is this one of those ‘teach a man to fish’ kinda things?”
“Do you enjoy being completely out of control?”
“Fuck you.”
“Very mature. But my offer stands. We work on your triggers, or you stop wasting my time and crawl back into the fourteen-year-old hole you came from. It’s your decision.”