"You dropped something," said Jacob.
I turned and saw one of the pendulums on the carpet, and the milagro beside it. And something thick and milky, which I supposed I should clean up, only I knew I'd just grind it into the carpet with the sole of my shoe and hope it blended in. At least it hadn't landed on the milagro.
"I'll get it," I said. I grabbed up the pendulum before Jacob could touch it, since Crash would find out and get angry if I let him. Because everybody always finds out about everything. Especially when I'd rather they didn't.
Despite the fact that my jaw ached and my right knee was carpet-burned, I still managed to get to the precinct by eight a.m. on a bright, chilly Sunday morning. I guess that's what clean living does for you. Bob Zigler was already there, thumbing through the case files. He also had a thick, hardbound book open on his desk with a Sears Tower paperweight keeping it from snapping shut. I suspected it was the first time I'd ever actually seen a paperweight in action.
I sat at my desk and arranged my paper clips according to size, smallest to largest.
"If the victims aren't at home," said Zig, without any preamble like,
Good morning
, "then they're likely tied to the scenes of their murders." He put his finger on the big text—
some kind of psychic handbook, then. I've hated any sort of academic study in the paranormal fields ever since Camp Hell.
What I wanted to believe was that everyone's psychic experience was so subjective that it would be impossible to write about it. That made it all the more annoying that I agreed with what Zigler's stupid book said.
"I propose that we walk their daily routes and see what there is to see," said Zigler.
They probably weren't killed along their daily routes, just snatched. Or lured away. Or, heck, even teleported for all I knew. But it was the only place we had left to look that wasn't a long shot. I nodded and scooped my paperclips into a pile.
Zig stood and finally made eye contact with me. "Mind if I drive today?"
Cripes. The age old struggle of who was going to drive. Zig was supposed to drive; he was the rookie PsyCop. And yet, there was a whole guy-code that said I was the "wife" if I let him drive me around, even if I was the one calling the shots.
And yet, the more I insisted on getting behind the wheel, the closer I was to figuring something wrong and either swerving around a ghost and hitting a pedestrian, or taking a living, breathing person for a ghost and mowing them right down.
In the end, it wasn't worth using up all my driving credit on the job.
"Yeah, sure. Thanks."
* * * *
Ronald Adamson, a middle-aged bill collector, had disappeared the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, somewhere between home and work. He lived alone and kept to himself.
His co-workers figured he'd taken some time off for the holiday, so his disappearance wasn't actually noted until late Tuesday night, when his ninety-five year old mother tried to call him from Akron and kept getting his answering machine.
Good thing they had a standing date to check in every Tuesday, or it could've been almost a week before anyone noticed Adamson was gone.
We drove to Adamson's house without speaking. It was a small, unremarkable bungalow that had been empty of ghosts, or any other sentient thing, when we'd checked it out on Saturday. We walked from Adamson's house to the El station, where we flashed our badges at the turnstile and were clicked through by the attendant, who stared at us as if we might offer her some entertainment by arresting one of the people milling around on the platform.
"Spirit activity?" Zig asked.
I scanned the platforms and the tracks. "None."
It was Sunday, so the crowd wasn't exactly the same as it would've been on the weekday that Adamson had disappeared. We canvassed several people on the platform anyway, but even the two of them who said they recognized the victim from their daily rush-hour commute couldn't remember with any degree of certainty whether or not they'd noticed him on the morning he hadn't shown up for work.
The commuters didn't talk to each other, even the ones who were there together. Most of them kept their noses buried in novels or newspapers, or were zoning out to their MP3 players. A train clattered up and they filed in, taking their own little bubbles of personal space with them. The train was half full. Not bad for a Sunday morning. On a Tuesday during rush hour, it would've been stuffed to the gills. But could something have happened to Adamson without a single person seeing anything?
Sure. If they'd been that focused on their newspapers and their earbuds.
"Going in?" Zig asked, indicating the train car with his chin.
I looked at the mass of bodies in the car. Which ones were alive and which ones weren't? "I'll, uh, take a pass." The train had seemed a lot more interesting from street level. Now that I was up close, without an Auracel ready to pop, the claustrophobic cars seemed less than inviting.
A new stream of commuters filtered onto the platform while we scanned the area for anything that our cop instincts might flag as significant. We watched the crowd turn over three times. Nothing.
"What do you want to try next?" I asked Zig. I probably should have been all macho and opinionated and insisted that the next step we take be something of my choosing. In reality, I just wanted to find a talking corpse and get it over with.
"Lunch," Zig said firmly. "Then Adamson's workplace."
Sounded fine to me. I wandered back to Zig's Impala and tried for the umpteenth time to figure out what a middle-aged collection agent, a Mexican waitress, and a strapping, young DePaul student had in common. I came up with nothing.
Zig headed north, past a number of neighborhoods that Jacob was undoubtedly combing for un-haunted houses and condos even as we sniffed out a place to eat. "Going anywhere in particular?" I asked.
"Good spot near my old beat."
Seemed out of our way just for food. I could challenge him, tell him to stick close to the scene, but I guess I just didn't care enough to cause a fuss. If I was going to butt heads with Zigler, I wanted it to be over something that made a difference to me. It was bad enough working on a Sunday while Jacob had the day off. I didn't need to make things worse by starting a needless argument over something as trivial as lunch.
Zigler pulled up in front of a hot dog stand that was hardly more than a painted plywood shack. Hot dogs, onion rings, fries, and bright bottles of condiments with happy faces on them adorned the front of the little stand in thick, amateurish brushstrokes. My mouth watered and my stomach rumbled.
Little joints like that, they knew how to make a hot dog. It was definitely going to be worth the trip. Maybe Zigler wasn't so bad after all.
We each got a couple of hot dogs with the works, hold the jalapenos, and stood side by side, watching the sixteen year old kid assembling the dogs with robotic accuracy, hands flying unerringly over the bins of onions, relish, tomatoes, banana peppers, and pickle slices. He worked fast, incredibly fast, nudging a sliding pickle into place before it could leave the waxed paper wrap without missing a beat. I wondered how long he could've possibly been working there, given his age. Was hot dog assembly something they taught in school these days? Maybe it should be, given that hot dog construction can't be outsourced to a foreign country without considerable loss in product quality.
The kid wrapped each dog with three economical motions—side, side, middle—and slid them onto the counter.
I shifted forward as I took out my wallet, since another customer had walked up while our order was being put together, and the guy behind me had started to crowd me.
I assumed it was a guy, anyway. Women didn't stand so close to strange men. Unless they were hookers.
The kid let the foam settle out of my fountain drink and then topped it off to the rim—a class act. The guy behind me crowded closer, and I glanced over my shoulder. Some people are just oblivious. Heck, I'm probably one of 'em, living most of the time with my inner vision going strong and my normal five senses on cruise control. Still, he had no reason to get all up in my personal space. There was plenty of room on the sidewalk.
I aimed a perturbed look behind me, only ... there was no one there. I craned my neck and looked down. I'm taller than most people, after all. Nope. No one. I looked at the ground, which had a dusting of new snow blown over the old slush.
Two sets of footprints: Zigler's and mine.
I turned back around to receive my paper-wrapped hot dogs and I felt it again, a sense of something moving in my peripheral vision.
"Sir?" said the kid with the fast condiment hands.
I handed him a crumpled five and took the hot dogs all in the same motion, like a guy doing an intricate hostage hand-off. "Yeah, thanks." I looked to the side—no one. I checked the ground. No prints. The kid stared at me, bewildered, wondering why I didn't seem to want my change.
I looked around for a tip jar and didn't spot one. "Keep it," I said, waiving the fifty cents or so back at him. He brightened. People don't tip much at pressboard stands.
Zigler strolled past me with his hot dogs and coffee and ambled over to a molded plastic picnic table, the round seventies kind with the attached seats around it that looked like a couple of parentheses. I couldn't tell what atrocious seventies color the table was, being that it was buried under four inches of snow.
"What're you doing?" I asked.
Zig swept a space free on the bench. It was yellow. "I'm eating."
"Here?"
He knocked some snow off the table with his elbow, put down his coffee, sat on the yellow bench, and unwrapped the end of a hotdog. The snowy residue beneath his styrofoam cup turned into a melted puddle.
Was he nuts? "Can't we eat in the car?" I said.
He shook his head. "I never eat in the Impala."
I tried to visualize whether or not there were any fast food wrappers in Zigler's car, but I'd bombed the remote viewing portion of my tests, too. Good thing. Remote viewers either get snapped up by the military or they mysteriously disappear. I suspected the military wasn't very much like the
A Few Good (Hot) Men
DVD that Jacob and I had rented before our Wisconsin trip.
I walked up to the table and wedged my orange soda into the snow, but only because I didn't want to spill it. I had no plans to clear myself a place and sit down at a snow-covered table like a big freakin' idiot.
I stuck one hot dog into my pocket, figuring it would keep warm there, and unwrapped the other with as much annoyance as I could project by scowling as hard as possible and using jerky motions to pluck at the waxed paper. Also, sighing.
A pickle fell off and landed in the snow, which had drifted to four inches all around the plastic picnic table. The pickle was warm from the hot dog, so it sank fast, leaving a pickle-shaped hole behind.
Damn it. Suddenly, I wanted that pickle more than I'd ever wanted a pickle in my life—but it was ruined. I bent over the hole in the snow, scowling down.
I hated Bob Zigler. And I wished to hell that I'd been assertive enough to drive.
"What're you looking at?" Zigler asked.
"Nothing," I snapped, while something else fell off my hot dog and plopped into the snow. Ketchup. I was leaking ketchup.
I struggled to wind the waxed paper around the bottom half the hot dog so that I'd get to eat at least a few condiments. After all, they were probably the only vegetables I'd get around to eating that day.
More ketchup spattered the ground. Damn. I thought I'd had it under control. I looked at the hot dog in my hand.
There were a couple of diced onions fixing to pop out, but no ketchup. Unless....
It'd be just my luck to screw up another blazer by doing something as asinine as stashing a hot dog in the pocket. I patted my side, expecting my hand to come away wet and sticky. But other than a light dusting of snowflakes, my suit coat was dry.
I looked back at the ground and another spatter of ketchup hit. Only the trajectory was wrong for it to have come from my hot dog. Another red splatter, bigger now, like someone was just holding a bottle and squeezing.
I raised my head, confused, and that's when I caught a flash of him, the guy who'd been crowding me at the stand.
My height, Caucasian, mid-twenties. And half his head missing. His left, my right.
I flinched and tossed my hot dog from hand to hand a couple of times in an attempt to keep from dropping it into the bloody snow. The half-headed guy flickered out, like he'd been projected from an old film reel that'd hopped off its track. But the blood kept on dripping. Splat. Splat. Splat. It even made little holes in the snow, just like the pickle. Only I was guessing that no one saw it but me.
I looked at Zigler, sizing up his reaction. He watched me, chewing slowly.
"I'm not eating here," I said.
"Why not?"
Spectral blood pattered at my feet. I took a few steps back. The bloody snow followed me, like some weird optical illusion, while the pickle stayed in the same spot. Another flicker, and my eye found a flash of bone where it'd splintered at the cheekbone and eye socket. I saw brains—just for a fraction of a second—but that was enough. I don't know why I always look at the brains.
"Christ." I turned on my heel, but there he was in front of me again, the half-headed man. He flickered, more visible than not, and I did my best to focus on his remaining eye. It wasn't a bad eye. Blue, though not as pale blue as mine. It really needed the second eye to look its best, but that notion was going to make me contemplate the slick glob of gelatinous stuff on his shoulder—his left, my right—and I really, really didn't want to look there.
"What do you want?" I snapped. He didn't answer me. He just stood there and stared—not even at me, specifically—and bled. Drip. Drip. Drip.
I turned on my heel and stomped toward the Impala. My socks were wet from walking through snow banks. I'd left my orange soda on the snow-covered table, and I didn't give a damn. I pulled on the Impala's passenger door latch, and it slipped out of my freezing fingers with the unsatisfying thump of a locked car.