PsyCop 6: GhosTV (17 page)

“Most practitioners agree that the silver cord itself can’t be cut. It is, as you say, a manifestation of the connection—but it isn’t the connection itself.”

I glanced at Jacob. Completely and utterly absorbed. Laser focus.

Cripes, what I wouldn’t give to be able to force myself to pay attention on command. At least if he was drinking it all in, I wouldn’t have to. And it wasn’t as if I wasn’t attempting to listen—I was. Really.

“The first stage of an OBE is often the point at which a projection fails. Subjects in this transitional stage often report hearing clanging bells or feeling strong vibrations.”

She went on to describe a dozen other things an unsuccessful astral traveler might experience fighting to free themselves, and more importantly their consciousness, from the prison of their flesh. “Many practitioners, when they do finally achieve projection, find they can’t see—ironic, isn’t it, since the astral body is known as the body of light. Either they experience their vision as if they’re looking through a semi-opaque blindfold, or their eyes won’t open at all.” Her gaze swept the room and landed on me again. I wondered if some part of her remembered that I’d had trouble opening my astral eyes my first time out.

“Why were you quoting Marie Saint Savon?” I blurted out instead, before it even occurred to me I had a question, let alone that I was verbalizing it.

Faun scowled. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“She was a medium. Since when does that make her an authority on astral projection?” I sounded pissy, and I knew it, but I just couldn’t hold back. The other students shifted uncomfortably. A few of them might’ve even held their breath.

“
Detective
Bayne,” she announced to the class, “is understandably busy doing his police work, so he’s not quite up to speed on the details of academia like we are here at PsyTrain.” She turned and wrote something on the board, and then turned back around, blocking it with her body, to gloat.

“In January, the Center for Psychic Studies recommended the medium ability be reclassified to include not only psychics who could sense spirit activity, but shamans, remote viewers, and soul travelers, as well. Our ability has a new title.” She stepped aside and revealed the words
light workers.

“You’re shitting me.”

Her eyes went flinty at my failure to bow to her authority on All Things Psychic. “No doubt even the Midwest will get up to speed…one of these days.”

The class began to snigger in response, but the amusement died fast when they looked at Jacob and me, cop-faced in our suits, and couldn’t figure out which authorities they should be trying to toady up to: the teacher or the law.

“That wraps up the morning session. We’ll meet back at one thirty in the floatation tank room for two shifts of focused breathing exercises. Bring your journals and your colored pen sets for your out-of-the-tank time.”

Floatation tank? As in, sensory deprivation? My throat closed, and sweat prickled my low back where it curved away from the back of the chair.

Faun looked at me, smiling, as if she could hear my adrenal glands pouring fight-or-flight juice into my veins. “You’re welcome to join us for a float, detectives.”

Jacob looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if he was perfectly game to try it. Maybe he really was fearless. “No thanks,” I muttered, barely restraining myself from telling her to shove her sensory deprivation tanks up her ass sideways. “We’ve got work to do.”

“I ain’t no fucking light worker,” I muttered in Jacob’s ear as we headed back to our room to regroup. I’m not sure what I was so pissed off about. The suggestion that I was stupid because I didn’t know about the crazy reclassification? Or the implication that I was a coward for not wanting to be locked in a coffin full of tepid water? Or both. “And ‘soul traveler’ is a ridiculous name for someone who projects.”

“So as not to confuse them with the guys who run the films at the theater,” Jacob said. I think he was smiling. Just judging by the back of his head.

“Y’know, maybe I have better things to do than to read all the journals and crap. All the junk mail, and the spam…who can keep up with it?”

“I hadn’t read about it, either. I would have mentioned something.”

“Right.” Of course. Why follow anything myself when I could count on Jacob to follow it for me? “I know.”

He opened the door, and a piece of furniture or two threatened to topple out of the room. We closed the door behind us and climbed over the spare bed. Jacob put his notebook on the nightstand and loosened his tie. I almost slammed my notebook onto the GhosTV, but caught myself at the last second and ended up pitching it underhand toward the bed. Its pages flew open like a dove flapping its way free from a magician’s top hat.

“Don’t get discouraged,” he said.

“I’m not discouraged.”

“You let her tone of voice get under your skin. Relax. Separate the information from the delivery; there’s a lot you could learn from her.”

“About what? The existence of a silver cord? Duh.” I squeezed into the bathroom and unwrapped my hand. It had scabbed over valiantly.

Now all I had to do was stop myself from opening the wound by making a fist. And punching Faun Windsong with it. Or Constantine Dreyfuss—either one would do.

“You get distracted pretty easily. You seem to have trouble focusing.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I wonder if you have ADD.”

Cripes. I needed more acronyms associated with my mental condi-tion like I needed to lose another ten pounds and then book a vaca-tion at a nude beach. “I do not have attention deficit disorder. That’s just something the pharmaceutical companies made up to sell more Ritalin.”

“And ‘in your day’ hyperactive kids were smacked into submission with the back of teachers’ hands.”

“Well…yeah. They were.” I ran cool water over my scabbed knuckles.

The cold stung for a moment, and then it felt good. Itchy, but good.

“You too, right?” He was only six years older than me, but I couldn’t resist. “Or did they make them stay after school to clean the clay tablets and sharpen the styluses?”

I turned off the water and blotted my hand on the towel. No new bleeding. That was good. No zinger forthcoming from Jacob, either.

That was…unusual. He always gave back as good as he got, and then some.

I peeked around the doorjamb. Jacob was seated on our bed with my notebook in his hands, flipping pages, scowling.

“That anarchy symbol…it’s a long story. It’s nothing.”

“Vic….”

“It’s stupid. Just ignore it.” Great. Had I written a single note? A sentence or two at the beginning of the lecture, but after that, nothing.

More proof that I was mentally deficient. My stomach sank. Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly disappoint myself any more, I found a new low to sink toward. Maybe the Ritalin would be tasty, I told myself. But even that failed to cheer me up.

“You wrote this?”

“They offered me a pre-doodled notebook, but I turned it down since I’m a hands-on kinda guy.”

He jerked his head toward the bed. “C’mere a minute. Sit down.” I dropped down beside him, probably harder than I needed to. The bedframe creaked.

Jacob spread the notebook half on his thigh and half on mine, with the spiral spine between us. Two solid pages full of loop-de-loops.

“You wrote this today?”

“I thought we already established that she didn’t exactly inspire my rapt attention.”

“Don’t you see it?”

I looked down at my doodles again. Was there some sort of course on doodle analysis he’d taken at the Twelfth Precinct? I wouldn’t have put it past him—he always goes for the extra credit. No doubt it had also taught him that guys who fill up pages of their new notebooks with loops have adult ADD.

“What?” I snapped.

He pressed his fingertip against the page, and whispered, “Words.” I lifted the page closer and began to formulate a jab about
someone
needing a prescription for reading glasses…and then I saw it, too.

nonononononononono….

Two fucking pages of nothing but
no.

My skin crawled as if it wanted to peel itself off my body and slink under the spare bed. I flipped back to the first few pages. My doodles had started as a bunch of nothing—other than the tiny Anarchy symbol up in the corner which, I remembered, had
felt
entirely wrong.

And that symbol, with the pen pressure and the slant, actually looked like it had been drawn by a different person than the one who’d looped the loops. Except it was me. I remembered doing it. All of it.

The first several lines were filled with loops, which after a while grew shorter and rounder, and then flipped upside down. Once they firmly looked like letter-o’s, they scrawled and spread, line by line, until they turned into scallops. Next page. More scallops. Then scallop-scallop-dip, which eventually tightened up into letter-n’s.
Nnnn
. Finally, after a few wobbly attempts, the word
no
appeared, plain as day.

And kept on appearing for three more pages.

“I don’t suppose it might say
on
,” Jacob suggested.

“Probably not.” I squinted at the GhosTV. “Unless it was trying to tell me to turn that thing on.” I checked the pages. “But every single line starts with a letter-n. So I’m going with
no
.”

“Karen Frugali,” he ventured. “Lisa’s roommate. Bert said she was a light worker.”

I sensed his line of reasoning was headed somewhere so nasty I couldn’t even bring myself to mock the title. “You’re thinking she was astral, and she was moving my arm?”

“Not astral. If she was able to get her astral arm into somebody and send a message, wouldn’t she have done it by now? I think it has to do with you. You’re a…medium. What if she’s dead?” My stomach bottomed out and I swallowed back the urge to heave—because if Frugali was dead, then Lisa…well, I just couldn’t think it.

I’m not superstitious or anything—I don’t think my thoughts manifest into reality just because I’ve thought them. But even so. I was not prepared to go there.

“Vic.” Jacob put his hand over mine. He clasped it more toward the wrist instead of the backs of my fingers, but even so, the gentle pressure of his hand tightened my skin, and pain radiated from the layers of scabs across the backs of my knuckles. “Keep it together. We need to work fast.”

“Okay. Yeah. I know it.” What I didn’t know was what, exactly, working fast would entail. My typical method was to find ghosts and talk to them—or let them talk at me. It usually worked. Except when it failed spectacularly. “But how?”

Jacob’s gaze slid to the GhosTV. “We figure out how to work it.”

“I’m sure Dr. Chance would be thrilled to help me.” After considering that for a moment, Jacob said, “She’s in Dreyfuss’ office. You have Dreyfuss here. And a plane.”

“What? It’ll take half a day to get there and back. If she’s even willing to talk to me. If she’s even still there.”

“Do you think Richie would be able to make her cross over if she wasn’t ready?”

Hell, I didn’t know if even
I
could make her go toward the light. I restricted my exorcism efforts to repeaters. I knuckled my eye in frustration and ended up splitting one of the new scabs, and blood seeped out. Great.

If I refused, Jacob would think I was putting my loathing of Dreyfuss and the idea of spending eight more hours in a Learjet with him ahead of my desire to see Lisa safe and sound—and while that
was
how I felt, my hesitation went a lot deeper. Some simmering gut instinct that told me chasing after Dr. Chance was a big waste of time—one that we couldn’t afford.

Jacob put his arm around me and said, “I wish someone could give Dr. Chance a spirit cell phone so you could call her and see how the TV works.”

That sent my mind spinning. If I sent a fax, she could read it…but then how could she communicate anything back to me? Through Richie? Don’t get me wrong, I’m crazy about Richie, but figuring out how to work through him would probably take longer than flying to Chicago and back.

Maybe someone at PsyTrain had a trick up their sleeve. It would have to be a hell of a trick. But supposedly everyone here was psychic.

Right?

“Too bad,” Jacob mused, “The only two people who knew how to work the GhosTV are dead.”

Wait a minute. I seized his hand so suddenly I left a smear of blood on it. “You’re a fucking genius.” I leapt up from the bed, charged through the bathroom and pounded on the door to Dreyfuss’ room.

“Okay, okay, keep your pants on.” Dreyfuss opened the door at arm’s length so I didn’t have an excuse to knock on his skull. Typical Dreyfuss—track suit, ponytail, and a platinum Rolex just this side of gangsta-bling. “You got something?”

“I dunno—maybe
you’ve
got something. There was a third guy on the GhosTV team, the guy with the crewcut who played the world’s most surly B&B owner. What happened to him?”

“Jeffrey Alan Scott.” The info was right at the tip of his tongue. He hadn’t even blinked. “Mr. Scott is the Feds’ guest at the Metropolitan Correctional Center for 25 to 40, but he could always parole sooner for good behavior.”

“Did anyone ask him how the GhosTV works?”

“Lots of people asked him lots of things. Lots and lots.” Pain shot through my knuckles. I hadn’t realized I’d been so keen to pop him one I was making a fist. My blood dripped to the floor, dark red splatters against the octagonal vintage tile. I heard the clatter of Jacob pulling a hank of toilet paper off the roll to wipe it up.

I breathed and did my best to stay calm, and in my most reasonable voice, said to Dreyfuss, “We need to be able to work this thing.” He nodded. “I honestly wasn’t trying to be a prick when I said that I figured you already had it down pat. Who would know better how it worked than the only guy strong enough to actually see the results?

You say it’s important? Okay. I’ll see what I can do.” Just like that? Wow.

As he turned to retreat, someone started hammering on the room’s front door. “Vic?” Faun Windsong. Or whatever her name was. Katrina.

“Are you in there?”

“Yeah?”