There were half a dozen gurneys lined up neatly under all those bare bulbs, and stainless steel carts full of equipment pressed against the walls.
The patients all rocked and flailed on their gurneys, and my eyes went to the restraints—black hook-and-loop tape against upper arm, belted closure over chest—don't look. Find the guy with the gun. Don't fucking look. I couldn't afford to have another Camp Hell flashback, not if I wanted to walk out of there on my own two feet.
I tried to focus on something else. The little black designs drawn on their foreheads. The way the patients were all strapped onto a bed of dried leaves that went shush-shush-shush as they moved. That was nothing like Camp Hell at all.
Camp Hell had at least been sterile, if nothing else.
"Drop it," Zigler yelled again, and he crept between a couple rows of gurneys with his gun leveled. I spotted the Professor against the back wall, waiving a telescoping steel baton. But not like he was trying to hit one of us with it. He looked more like an orchestra conductor who was trying to get a guy on a gurney to follow his cue.
"Drop the club," I yelled, because two cops screaming at you is way more scary than one. "Back away from the table."
He lunged for the guy on the gurney instead, and cupped the twitching patient's chin in his hand and ... it's hard to say exactly what he intended to do. Maybe he was giving the patient the metal rod to bite on. Thinking too hard about that would not only result in a Camp Hell flashback, it would give me a month's worth of nightmares about the Cook County Mental Health Center, too.
A round from Zig's weapon spun the Professor around, sent the metal rod clanking to the floor. Zig had nailed him in the arm. Dark blood oozed through the hole in the Professor's coat. It didn't spurt like an arterial hit would have, so he wasn't in any danger of dying from it, not unless he was a hemophiliac or he had a weak heart. But I'm sure it didn't tickle.
"Oh, God," he said, knees buckling. "Oh my God." Maybe he'd faint. Most people make it through their lives without getting shot; he wasn't one of the lucky ones.
"Put your hands where I can see 'em," Zigler shouted, closing in on the guy fast.
I had my cuffs out, moving around a gurney to get to the Professor before he realized he wasn't actually hurt all that bad and started to rally, but I just couldn't stop myself from looking at the patient.
It was a hefty Caucasian guy, maybe fifty, twitching so much the whole gurney shook, giving off a kind of shush-creak, shush-creak noise. Weird thing was, his arm looked like Uncle Leon's. A ghost arm, slapping itself against the gurney, right on top of the physical arm, almost in synch, but not quite. What the hell?
"Keep your hands up or I'll shoot you again," Zigler barked.
"Oh my God, you shot me," the Professor blubbered.
I rounded the gurney with the flopping guy on it and snagged the professor by his wrist. He was as thin as I was and not quite as tall, so I was more worried about getting stuck by a wayward needle than I was about him overpowering me. "Take off your coat," I told him.
"You shot me," he said again, crying full-force now, snot running into his white mustache, tears fogging his big, round glasses.
I'd expected a struggle when I grabbed him, especially since he'd run so hard from us. But the fight had gone out of him, either when Zigler'd shot him or when he'd started to cry like a baby. "You have the right to remain silent," I told him.
"Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law..." I'd usually let my old partner, Maurice, be the one who slapped the cuffs on. Either it was easier to arrest someone than I'd always thought, or the Professor was such a pushover that Jacob's sister could've taken him down. Maybe I'd expected Zigler to step in, but he hadn't. He was taking his cues from me. "Hey, Zig," I said, once the Professor'd been secured, "Check that guy. What's wrong with him?"
Zigler turned toward the gurney. And while he did that, the basement got even more crowded.
"Holy crap, it's herrrr," whined someone who'd been blessedly silent for the past five minutes—the ghost deputy.
I'd been hoping he'd moved on already. Dang.
But wait. Who was
she
?
"Zigler, behind you," I called out.
An old woman rounded the foot of the stairs. She wandered behind Zigler, maybe five feet tall, stooped with osteoporosis. Her face was set in brown, leathery lines and her hair hung to her waist, black streaked with gray. With her broad nose and flattened, aboriginal face, she could have been one of many ethnicities: Hispanic, Native American, Inuit, Maori. She wore a floor-length denim skirt with the hem in tatters and a mishmash of men's shirts stacked one on top of the other, gingham, stripes, paisley.
Zigler swung around, gun in hand, but the woman ignored both of us, fussing over the patient strapped to the gurney nearest the stairs. She laid something over its eyes, and it stopped twitching.
"Ma'am," said Zigler, his voice low and dangerous. "Keep your hands where I can see them."
"Look out, Esmeralda," cried the Professor. "They shot me!"
Esmeralda ignored the Professor, ignored Zigler, and made her way over to the next patient. This one was another Caucasian guy, mid to late forties. Somehow familiar.
Esmeralda hummed to herself as she placed small discs over the patient's eyes, one at a time, thumbing them out of her cupped palm like tokens at a roulette wheel. The patient settled down immediately, but the things on his eyes looked like coins weighting down the eyelids of a corpse, and the double images I got from the patient next to me were starting to freak me out.
A flash of navy blue, and Warjovsky appeared on the stairs. "Detective?" he asked, looking from Zigler to me.
"Stop her," said Zigler, gesturing at the Esmeralda as she shuffled to another patient, hand cradling her corpse coins protectively. I guess Zigler couldn't bring himself to shoot an old lady, especially one that was doing nothing more threatening than ignoring him.
"Freeze," said Warjovsky, but Esmeralda kept on walking, unfazed. She had her hand up, ready to thumb a coin onto the eyelid of the next twitching patient. "Alto," he said, trying again in Spanish.
Zigler and Warjovsky closed in on Esmeralda from either side as she went about her business and subdued the patient with her coins. Three down, three to go. I glanced at the one closest to me, keeping one eye on the Professor. I peered at the patient's face to see if he was in pain, but his expression was unreadable. Lopsided. Glazed.
Frankly, he looked dead. Except that he was moving.
"That's enough, Ma'am," said Zigler. "Drop it. Leave your hands where I can see 'em."
I almost wondered if maybe Esmeralda was deaf, or didn't speak English, but given that the Professor had spoken to her—in English—I couldn't be sure. Maybe she only spoke English selectively.
She was trapped between two gurneys with Zigler in front of her and Warjovsky behind. She tried to sidestep Zigler, but he matched her. She dodged back to her original position, and he lunged to block. She toppled into a gurney and it rocked ominously, a handful of dried leaves rustling over the side.
"What's wrong with these people?" I asked the Professor.
"I don't know," he wailed. "We found them this way."
He didn't know? Maybe I'd buy that, but I suspected that even if he didn't, Esmeralda did. I grabbed the Professor by the hair and forced him to look at me. His eyes went round with shock and his mouth worked as sobs died in his throat.
"I'll ask you again," I said, my voice low and calm. Cripes, I was channeling Jacob. And it felt amazing. "What's wrong with them?"
"They're ... they're...."
"Shut up, Irving," warned Esmeralda. So. She did speak English.
I squeezed his hair harder and glared. God, I was good.
"They would have died anyway," he blubbered.
Esmeralda sighed so loudly I could hear it from across the basement. I glanced up and she was rolling her eyes. "I don't know nothing," she said. "Now get me a chair. I gotta sit down."
"Hold on to her," Zigler told Warjovsky. Zigler approached me. I let Professor Irving slump back down onto the floor.
Zigler's eyes flickered over to one of the patients who was still moving around. "What's going on?" he asked me, voice low.
"I dunno." I moved to let Zigler keep an eye on Irving while I got a better look at the patient. "Sir?" I asked the guy on the gurney, not that I really thought he could hear me. I slipped into a latex glove and fumbled for my penlight to check his pupils. "Can you hear me, sir?"
"Jesus," said another voice, a new one. "My mother's gonna have a coronary."
I glanced up to find the second patient over, the one who'd looked familiar, swinging his feet to the floor. He cracked his neck, one side, then the other, and smoothed his hair.
Only his body was still strapped to the gurney. Damn.
"Ronald Adamson?" I asked.
He frowned. "Um. Yeah. It's a little foggy, though. But I'm pretty sure that's me. Call me Ron ... I think I prefer Ron. Alls I know is, my mother won't like this. And when something sets her off, it goes on, and on, and on. I'm talking letters to the editor, phone calls to her Congressman's office ... anyone who'll listen. And even the ones who don't. You should've seen the trail of bodies she left in her wake when my cousin Frankie forged a check from her bankbook."
"That's Adamson?" Zigler asked. He shifted his weight, unsure whether to run over and look at Ron's body or stay and see what was going on with the twitchy guy in front of me. There was just too much to see.
"What's going on here?" I asked. Because if Adamson could tell me, I'd save a lot of time poking at this stranger who was afflicted with God-knows-what.
"I, uh ... I'm not really sure."
Great. A vague ghost. I don't run into too many confused dead, the ones who just wander around without any malice or important messages to convey to the living. I think that either their families' prayers or the intervention of a low-level medium were usually enough to get them to float off toward the light.
I wasn't sure if he'd disappear if I let him know he was dead. "This guy," I said, pointing to the guy on the gurney in front of me. "What's wrong with him?"
Ron Adamson's ghost cocked his head. "I wanna say he had a heart attack. But I'm not sure how I know that."
Zigler snapped his gloves on and pressed his fingers into the guy's neck. "I can't find a pulse," he said. "Pupils are unresponsive."
"Oh boy," said Esmeralda. She looked up at Warjovsky.
"Can I get a drink? I need a drink. And I need to go to the bathroom."
I glanced at Ron Adamson's quiescent body, and back at the body on the gurney in front of me. If I looked hard enough, I could see a ghostly face overlaying the slack features. "I don't think he has a pulse," I told Zigler.
"What do you mean?"
"His, uh ... his spirit's just kinda laying there on top of him. It's not inside him where it should be."
"Oh, God," muttered Professor Irving from the floor. "Oh, God. What are you?"
Of all the nerve. I gave Irving the filthiest look I could muster. I might be stuck seeing double, but I wasn't the one with half a dozen bodies in my basement.
Zigler kept digging around for a pulse. I didn't have a shorthand to explain to him that he couldn't find one. Electric frog—that wouldn't mean anything to him. Not now. Not unless we worked together for a good long time, and I did something that was like pulling teeth to me. Not unless I opened up a little and showed him some of the skeletons in my closet.
"He's dead, Zig."
Zigler kept poking his fingers into the folds of the guy's fleshy neck.
"What do you mean, he's dead?" said Warjovsky. "He's moving."
I could've kept on insisting, but I figured Zig would come to the same conclusion soon enough. I looked back down at the Professor. He'd rolled himself into a ball. "What the fuck were you doing?" I said, voice low. "What's with the coins on the eyes? What are they, silver? That club you had out—is that silver, too? What were you trying to do with it?"
"I don't know, I don't know," he sobbed.
I looked over at Esmeralda. She knew. And she was considering me with her eyes narrowed—probably wondering how much I'd figured out, and what she could get away with lying about.
"Zig, I gotta take a statement from Ron Adamson before, uh ... while I still can."
Zigler, however, had just come to the realization that he was touching a dead body that was still moving. His face went so white it looked like skimmed milk, and he yanked his hand away, shaking it as if he could dislodge death-cooties.
"What the fuck?" Warjovsky blurted out, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed, and swallowed again. We needed to get him upstairs before he contaminated the basement. "You saying these are zombies?"
"Stupid gringo," Esmeralda muttered from her seat in the webbed nylon lawn chair that Warjovsky had found for her.
"Zig? Let's have Warjovsky get Esmeralda to the station and call the paramedics for Irving." I was about to tell them that I could handle the basement myself, but then I thought better of it. Sure, I saw nasty stuff every day, ghosts with big chunks missing out of them, and shattered bones sticking out, glistening organs sloshing around, and blood perpetually dripping.
But so did Zigler. The corporeal equivalent of that, anyway. He'd seen hundreds of dead bodies if he'd seen a dozen. I wasn't going to get our partnership off on the right foot if I talked down to him, let him know that I could handle these bodies, since I thought they were too much for him.
Even if that was actually what I thought, I didn't have to come right out and say it.
"I kinda need to focus," I said. And I think a little color came back into Zigler's cheeks with the promise of the rest of his work happening upstairs, away from the twitching dead people. "So you get Irving out of here."
Zigler nodded and hauled Irving to his feet. "Let's go."
Meanwhile, Ron Adamson had started to go shimmery around the edges, staring off to the side at something, someone, I couldn't see. "Dad?" he said. "Dad, is that you?"