PsyCop 2: Criss Cross (5 page)

I hadn’t actually expected to feel her touching me, since all the ghosts I’d ever seen were totally noncorporeal. But her fingers were clammy and dead against the back of my hand. A wave of revulsion swept over me and I fought to keep my lunch from coming up. I jerked my arm away, then ran my fingers through my hair in an attempt to cover up the gesture. I had no desire to try talking to her, and even less desire to explain my reasoning to eager Roger. “Let’s get out of here,” I told Roger calmly. “There’s nothing to see.”

The kid’s ghost followed us, but I walked fast, slamming the car door and hoping Roger would get a move on, too. I pressed my thumb into my forehead, but then thought better of it. Some Psychs do that to stimulate their crown chakra; mine was plenty hyper on its own.

Roger fastened his seat belt and started the engine. The little girl ghost stood in the parking spot we’d just backed out of with her thin arms reaching toward the car. “Where to next?” asked Roger. “The park?”

I nodded, wondering how I could get him to stop off so that I could get something for my stomach. I racked my brain in an attempt to find something innocuous to purchase, but couldn’t think of a single thing I needed. Maybe water. The human body’s made up of something like ninety-nine percent water. Water was a perfectly normal thing to need, right?

“Hey,” I said as we neared a teeming supermarket. “I need to stop here a second.”

I must’ve sounded casual, since Roger turned on his blinker and pulled into the lot without any questions. “I’ll just be in and out,” I said, opening my door as he passed by the entrance while his car was still moving so he’d have wait for me rather than park and follow. “Need anything?”

He looked a little perplexed at my sudden burst of motion, but he didn’t challenge me. “Nope,” he said. “I’m good.”

Thank God. I jogged through the automatic doors and swerved around a woman who seemed to have twenty or thirty kids in tow. At least six, anyway, and most of them howling. But none of them were trying to put their hands on me, and that was good enough for me.

I trailed along behind them until I felt grounded enough to move on to the drug aisle. I picked up a few rolls of antacids, the small ones that you can hide in your pockets. I remembered a time when I hid more interesting things than antacids in my pockets and I felt sorry for myself. Then I grabbed a water from a refrigerated unit at the end of a checkout line, and rejoined Roger in the car.

“Thirsty,” I said, toasting him with the water. And then I drank it so I wouldn’t have to talk to him while he drove the rest of the way to the park.

I was thankful that the East River looked nothing like the Calumet. It was deep and rushing, and its surface started about twenty feet below street level. Not the type of slow, shallow river in which a guy would bob around in a rowboat.

It occurred to me that if I just hurried up and talked to a dead kid and found out where it was buried, we could go back to the Fifth. Heck, maybe I could even go back home. I turned off my phone so it wouldn’t disturb me and started looking in earnest.

We hiked up to the guardrail at the edge of the river and looked down. Someone had drunk a twelve pack of Busch Light and dumped all the cans and even the cardboard box onto the riverbank below. If the river had been higher the litter probably would’ve floated away by now, but instead it just sat there in the dirt, an unsightly reminder that most people suck.

I bent at the waist and hung over the rail, looking hard for ghosts in the water. But the surface was just grayish, greenish rushing water. Nothing more.

Since a ghost could theoretically hang out on the banks, just like those empty beer cans, I hiked up the river, pausing periodically at the guard rail and squinting down into the river. After walking what probably amounted to several city blocks, we came across a black metal footbridge.

I trooped to the center of the bridge with Roger tailing me and stared down, fully expecting to see faces flowing past twenty feet below. Nothing.

We crossed to the other side and combed through that for at least an hour. My stomach continued to churn, and I surreptitiously opened the antacid wrapper inside my pocket with my thumbnail. I crunched on the tablets whenever I could sneak one into my mouth without Roger noticing. I wished I’d eaten something a little blander for lunch, like maybe gruel. It's hard to try to pick out ghosts with your stomach screaming for your attention.

Eventually I spotted a park bench half-hidden among a cluster of scraggly shrubs and made my way over. I sat, and Roger sat beside me. He pulled out a notepad and started writing, presumably detailing all the areas we’d scanned and come up empty.

I cast my mind back to the files from the morning. I’d memorized the kids’ first names: Michael, Lucy, Dawn, Hubert... who the hell names their kid Hubert, even in the 70’s? Must’ve been a family name. I pressed my thumb into my forehead. I stared in the direction of the river and actually
tried
to see the kids. Nothing.

I let my breath out and sagged against the park bench, draping my elbows over the back. The cell phone store would be open. I figured we could go back there, scan the place, and call it a day.

I looked at Roger and was about to say as much when I saw it. There was a face in the bush behind Roger’s head.

I focused on the face and it grew clear. A man, late thirties-early forties, with the top of his head sliced off.

I wanted to jump back and yell out the first swear word that popped into my head, but there was Roger. I have no idea why, but I just couldn’t let Roger know I’d been spooked, just like I wouldn’t tell him about my stomach ache. Probably it's a guy thing. I just blinked.

The shallowly-decapitated guy’s eyes widened, as if he’d just realized that I could see him, or maybe as if he’d just seen me. He’d probably want to tell me what’d happened. Industrial accident. Gruesome mob hit. Whatever.

A hand appeared in the bush beside the face and reached toward me.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I snarled, and it was Roger who jumped.

I ignored Roger, went around him, and grabbed at the bush, tearing off a branch. The ghost with the shave-topped head groped at me again.

“What the fuck do you want?” I said, swinging the branch like a baseball bat. It passed right through his hand. “Talk to me, you stupid fuck.”

A second head coalesced. It was mutilated like the first, but its scalp flapped from the side of its skull like a bad toupee. Another hand reached out of the bush toward me, and another.

“Stop it,” I yelled, swatting the bush with the branch I’d torn off. Another mutilated head appeared, and another. They weren’t exact copies of each other, either. Like a bunch of different, unrelated guys got clipped by a ceiling fan on a rampage.

Another pair of hands sprouted out, and another, and something cold and psychically slimy trailed over my wrist where a spectral hand touched me.

I whirled away and ran toward the river, the branch still in my hand. I was screaming, but I didn’t give a fuck. I barreled into the guardrail, which clipped me right at hip level, and flung the branch into the rushing water.

“Aaaaaaghhh!”

And then I threw up.

Chapter Four

I think if I were anyone else, they would’ve taken me to the hospital. But...think about it. A guy who sees dead people, and a hospital where people are dropping like flies. Bad combination.

There’s a special clinic in the near north suburbs where I fill out inane psychological tests every four months to see if I’m crazy yet and get my prescriptions. It’s a low, blond-brick building, constructed ten years ago at the end of a residential street. There’s no signage on the building, so I’ve always just referred to it as “The Clinic.”
 
And no one had ever died there. Not yet, anyway.

After my freak-out and apparent collapse, Roger called Warwick, who rushed over in person to take me to The Clinic.

There was a Paranormal Psychiatrist on staff who I’d been seeing so long that he called me, “Mister Bayne,” instead of, “Detective.” Doctor Morganstern, man of a thousand sweater vests. He was the one who’d gotten me into the Auracel trials a year before the FDA gave the drug a stamp of approval. I wondered if he had any fun new drugs that would help me hold it together.

A nurse drew a couple vials of blood, took my vitals, and ran through my physical symptoms without going into my psychic experience. I’ve always gotten the impression I was only to discuss those things with Morganstern.

I lay back in a comfy bed, in a room that looked more like a very small hotel suite than a hospital room. The bedspread and curtains were done in a muted floral pattern, and there were a couple of live plants on the dark wood nighstand. I peeked into a cabinet expecting to find a television, but the cabinet was empty. No big deal. If there were a set, it probably would’ve had cable, and so my static station would’ve been playing all-day soap operas.

There was a brief knock on the door and a woman in her early thirties let herself in. She was slim and pretty, with ash blonde hair cut short and just a little spiky, with glasses so delicate I could’ve crushed them in the palm of my hand. She wore a boxy sweater over brown corduroys. “Hello,” she said, glancing down at a clipboard she carried and then back at me. “I’m Doctor Jennifer Chance.”

Oh, God. I had a big breakdown in a public park and I had to deal with some doctor I’d never even met? Great, just great. “Is Doctor Morganstern around? Did you page him? Not that there’s anything wrong with you -- I just want to talk to Doctor Morganstern.”

“I’m sorry,” Doctor Chance said. I thought I could detect some genuine sympathy there. “Doctor Morganstern is in Japan.”

“Oh,” I said. And that seemed to be all there was to say about it. I wanted to argue with her, to try to put off doing anything until Morganstern was back, but I wasn’t sure my problem, whatever it was, could wait. I hadn’t realized how attached I was to him until he wasn’t there.

Doctor Chance took my account of what had happened to me, what I’d seen, what I’d done. It seemed odd to me that she wasn’t wearing...oh, I dunno. Scrubs. A lab coat. But then again, neither had Doctor Morganstern.

Chance questioned me for nearly an hour, writing notes even as she spoke. I wondered if that was something like being ambidextrous, the ability to speak and write at the same time. I’m lucky I can walk and breathe simultaneously without choking.

Chance shuffled some papers. “Your intake sheet says you vomited and then partially lost consciousness. What have you eaten today?”

“A Polish sausage, a curly fry, some coffee.”

“And earlier?”

I felt like a lecture would be coming, but there was nothing I could do to avoid it. Then again, I had no reason to think Doctor Chance was the lecturing type. I sighed. “Coffee. And coffee the day before. A donut yesterday morning. That’s all.”

“Is it common for you to skip meals?”

“No. I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.” She wrote some notes. “It’s a cop thing,” I added lamely.

“I’m scheduling an upper G.I. for you first thing in the morning. Eat bland foods as your appetite allows, then no food after midnight, no water after two a.m., and no more coffee today. Got it?”

“You think I have an ulcer, don’t you?”

“It’s too early to say. But given your medical background, we have to take more precautions than we do with the general public.”

Right. It was more likely that the force wanted to keep me alive so they didn’t have to go through the trouble of finding and training another Psych.

“Drugs?” she asked.

Shit. I wanted to lie about how much Auracel I’d taken the day before. I always lied. But they were testing my blood as we spoke, and lying wouldn’t get me anywhere.

“Auracel, ninety milligrams about twenty-four hours ago.” Chance recorded the number without making me repeat myself, or mentioning that it was triple the highest recommended dosage, or doing a spit-take. I probably should’ve told her about the Seconal, but Seconal’s been discontinued for some time and I hadn’t exactly gotten it through a reputable connection. If it showed up in the tests and they called me on it, I could just say I’d forgotten.