Spook Squad (33 page)

“Don’t move,” Bly bellowed at me. At
me
. Dumbass.

“Just what the fuck do you think I was doing?” I snapped back.

“Vic, stay still,” Jacob shouted—and his tone, I realized, wasn’t bossy at all. It was frightened.

“To your right,” Bly said. “Live wire. Don’t move.”

Oh.

The length of electrical cord lay on the floor where Richie had dropped it—no crackling, no sparks, nothing to indicate it was a potential hazard. But the far end of it, I saw, was clearly plugged in. The business end where an appliance would normally be attached was bare, three coppery wires with about half an inch of rubber shielding stripped away. And there I was, soaking wet, standing in a puddle maybe a foot away from the exposed tips.

Bly grabbed a pot holder off the stove and pulled the plug, then yanked the cord away from me just to be safe. “Okay. You’re good.”

Jacob, meanwhile, was attempting to subdue Richie without breaking those flabby little arms. “Settle down,” Jacob said, “just settle down, and no one will get hurt.”

Bly glanced at Richie—he focused—and Richie stilled, then gradually relaxed.

Maybe Einstein did just try to electrocute me…but it spooked me the way that single empathic glance had laid him out as effectively as a bottle of Xanax. I re-doubled my white light in case Bly decided maybe I needed to be forcibly calmed, too.

With my right side soaking wet, I was now hyperaware of the disassembled electronics all around me. Doing my best to keep myself to myself, I eased up to the table and looked down at Richie. He was so relaxed that his subtle bodies had been jarred loose. The border of his head was out of register. He looked slightly doubled all around, as if his outline had been mis-printed.

“What were you thinking?” I asked him.

“It was a joke,” he said, “only a joke. Like a joybuzzer. Hee-hee.”

Bly shook his head in disagreement, though being face-down, Richie couldn’t see it.

“Come on,” Richie said as Jacob fixed his hands behind him with a vinyl wrist restraint. “Can’t you take a joke?”

The moment Jacob let go of his hands, Richie’s astral body rippled. Whatever Bly had done with his power-empathy, it left Richie struggling to contain himself. His fingertips slid out beyond his physical fingers without Jacob’s grasp to hold the bodies all together. I needed to de-escalate the situation, but what could I say? “Let’s all calm down,” I started with…and then I saw that the fingertips protruding from Richie’s stubby fingers were too tapered, the nails were too neat to be his—hell, his laugh didn’t even sound right—and I realized the subtle body inside Richie wasn’t Richie at all.

The disassembled TVs and classical music suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense. The person so desperate to see Laura Kim wasn’t Richie—it was Jennifer Chance. My head reeled as I worked back to the last time Richie had been his blithe, Bears-loving self. Chance must have been riding around in Richie’s defective body for days, suffering from his crappy eating habits and his tunnel vision. She must be jonesing for a better ride. As an untrained medium, Laura Kim had no experience keeping tabs on her subtle bodies. Her physical shell would be a much better fit than Richie’s, too. But if Laura wasn’t available, I realized with a shudder, Chance was willing to settle for me.

Bly did a double-take at me as the revelation rocked my world—but he wasn’t a telepath. He’d get the gist, but not the particulars. Even the strongest empath in the world wouldn’t pick up on the specifics of what I knew, only the fact that I’d just had a big “a-ha” moment. In this case, a way to transmit the details would have been phenomenally useful. It’s hard to convey “we need to keep Chance from sliding into me while I salt her” with a meaningful glance. I had to settle for flapping my hands in a “keep him still” gesture, and I focused on my part of the operation: the exorcism.

I cranked my internal faucet to maximum, flooding myself with white light, and grabbed for my salt…although before I even touched my empty pocket, I remembered I’d used it all earlier that morning. Fine. I needed salt, but luckily I was standing in a kitchen. No problem. I began pawing through the cabinets. Apparently the real Richie isn’t much of a cook. While Jacob keeps crocks of granular sea salt with his herbs and spices, the closest thing I spotted in Richie’s kitchen was a shaker of butter-flavored popcorn salt. Although I’ve been known to work with some dubious equipment, I didn’t want to risk letting Chance float free because synthetic butter flavoring was tainting my supplies.

I dug some more, not that I expected to find a big jar of myrrh hiding behind the barbecue spice blend and the marshmallow-studded hot cocoa mix. I searched for sage, cinnamon, basil—all the common pantry stuff that had good vibrations for esoteric work—but anything basic or straightforward was nowhere to be found.
 

I jammed my hand in my pocket and tried to summon ethereal salt, but with my heart racing a mile a minute, I wasn’t able to shift the white light out of protection mode into a more creative capacity. The attempt made pain lance through my head, a sickening pain that warned I’d better watch myself. Maybe sidewalk salt would do the trick. It might not be exactly the same as table salt, but it was a hell of a lot less adulterated than anything in Richie’s cabinets. “Everyone stay put,” I said, looking from Jacob to Bly in hopes that they could keep the situation intact long enough for me to prep the world’s most impromptu exorcism.

I darted back toward the front door and found a half-empty sack of something called Safety Step…which didn’t seem very promising. I scanned the packaging. Magnesium? Uh oh, that didn’t sound right. I thrust my hand into the bag, while back in the kitchen, Chance said, “At least untie my hands,” through Richie’s mouth. “I’m half your size—what kind of threat could I possibly pose to the two of you?”

“It’s for your protection as well as ours,” Jacob said, while I scooped out a handful of Safety Step and aimed a big stream of white light into it.

No reaction—nothing. Nada. Zip.

I dumped the Safety Step on the floor and wiped the last few pellets off my damp palm. It left a swath of grayish white across the front of my black wool overcoat. Richie probably owned real exorcism gear somewhere—and I’d probably be able to utilize it, even if it was hyper-Catholic—but unless it had a big neon sign on it that read
Ghost-be-Gone
, there was no way I’d find it before Chance got wise to me and ditched Einstein’s body. I slipped back into the kitchen and headed for the popcorn salt.

“Let go, Marks, you’re dislocating my shoulder,” Chance whined through Richie. “I’m telling Dreyfuss you idiots treated me like a common criminal.”

I’m not sure if she actually felt Richie’s pain, or if she was angling to free a physical set of hands. Her ghost arms were more or less aligned with Richie’s, so either she was anchored in Richie, or she was forcibly keeping herself inside to keep his personality from reasserting itself. My best guess was that she could leave whenever she wanted.

“I think it would be okay to un-cuff him,” I said, doing my best to tell Jacob with my eyes to follow my lead. I needed Chance to stay in Richie, at least for the moment, and I worried that she’d give up the physical body if the physicality was too painful. “Like he said, it was just a joke. Our practical jokes go way back—we were always pulling pranks on each other. No harm done.”

Jacob reached for a pair of tin snips on the countertop…and Bly knocked them away. “I’m bringing him in.”

“Wait, hold on—” I said, but Bly steamrolled me.

“For everyone’s protection.” He hauled Richie’s body up by the arm and forced it toward the doorway. With no way to fit through it three-abreast, Jacob let go.

It was like double-vision, but only for a split-second. As soon as Richie’s body was pulled from Jacob’s grasp, Jennifer Chance tumbled out, translucent, rumpled and disoriented. She shuddered and rolled her shoulders like she’d just woken from an unsatisfying nap with a crick in her neck, and then whirled around and looked directly at me. Commotion—Richie’s body went down like a sack of bricks when Chance ejected—but I couldn’t worry about that while Chance was loose. The look in her spectral eyes set off all my warning bells, the look of someone with nothing left to lose. I snatched across the countertop for the popcorn salt, but I grabbed short. It tipped over the side and bounced off the floor, and a scattering of electronics rained down on top of it. Desperate, I drew down a gulp of white light and steeled myself as she set her shoulders and barreled toward me—and then the only thing I knew was the concussion of a spectral being slamming into my chest.

On impact, I sucked the white light into my protective membrane. My peripheral vision sparkled and my knees went weak, from the force of the impact, or the sudden flow of psychic energy, or both. I knew I was still me, though, and only me. And the more she battered her spirit against my white light condom, the more sure my barrier grew. It was like the first time I’d parallel-parked without hitting the curb. It didn’t guarantee that every future parking job would be perfect—but it did leave me with a pretty good idea of the way it should feel when I got it right.

Chance was impossible to keep a visual on. She’d cranked up her spectral transparency somehow, and I saw her as an overlay to the melodrama that was going on in the kitchen doorway, Richie sprawled on the floor with Bly clearing his airway. Jacob was in the act of pulling out his phone when Chance’s assault slammed me into the fridge. Jacob abandoned Richie and made toward me.

He only wanted to help—I knew it in my gut—but I didn’t want to risk Jacob’s idea of “help” translating into him stealing my white light and leaving my solar plexus open to a hostile invasion.

“Stop,” I yelled, at him, at Chance, and I made a grab for a ghostly arm. If I could get hold of her, I hoped, maybe it would keep her at arm’s length so she couldn’t sneak in. My hand passed through her arm like a fork through aspic. Jacob paused, then kept coming, “I need the light,” I snapped, and I grabbed for Chance again. This time, though, I made a small tweak to my protective sheath, shifting the membrane from outside my ethereal body to just beneath it. I grabbed again—and this time I caught something.

Jacob, meanwhile, had taken me literally. He flicked on a work lamp that was clamped to the edge of the kitchen table, and swung the force of the hundred-watt bulb directly in my face. My breath whooshed out in a great gasp of surprise, frozen, visible, illuminated by the glare of the high-wattage bulb. Although the room was warm, my breath escaped me as a big blooming cloud of frost.
 

It shouldn’t have mattered—it was only a light, for crying out loud, only my breath—but the moment my concentration slipped, Jennifer Chance went gelatinous again. She snapped out of my grasp and disappeared with a sticky, wet “pop.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bly hissed. He and Jacob were both staring at me with the whites of their eyes showing all around.
 

“It’s fine,” I said, “take care of Richie.” The last of the frost snaked out of my breath, ebbing as quickly as it had come once the supernatural source was gone. Now I felt shaky and feverish. A bead of sweat snaked down my forehead, hit the permanent furrow between my eyebrows, and made for my left eye. I brushed it away…and left a trail of frigid slime across the bridge of my nose. I looked down at my numb hand. It was covered in a chunky bluish coat of ectoplasm that hung so thick it pattered to the floor around my shoes. I held my goopy hand away from myself, and I shuddered.

There’d been no contingency plan for possession—no shorthand or procedure in place. I’d formulated an ad hoc plan, though, to grab hold of Chance and salt her with popcorn salt before she could slide into anybody else. Too bad I couldn’t explain it in three words or less while we were all getting knocked around the kitchen. Although I’d done my best in a lousy situation, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was satisfied with our performance. Jacob backed me up, although since he couldn’t read my mind, he’d ultimately done more harm than good.

I shook cold goop off my hand—it splattered the linoleum—and I gave Bly the nastiest look I could muster. Him, I was pissed at. Because that jagoff actually could read my mind, and he’d set the whole shitstorm in motion by second-guessing me anyway.

Chapter 29

The good news was that Richie would be okay. When his crusty eyelids fluttered open and he got his bearings, it tugged at my heartstrings. Looking back, I could kick myself for not noticing he’d suddenly quadrupled his vocabulary and acquired a new gait. When someone’s acting weird, my first thought has never been that they might be possessed…although now, I suppose I’d always consider it a possibility, especially if the weird person was a medium.
 

Although the destruction of the 70-inch flatscreen would be a major shock to Richie’s system when he finally pieced together where all the tiny electronics in his living room had come from, mercifully he had no memory of the weekend. I wasn’t surprised. When the Criss Cross Killer took me for a joyride, he’d blotted out my consciousness too.
 

The bad news was that Richie said we should call Dr. Santiago right away, and that we should tell her he had “one of those blackouts”…again.

The even worse news was that now we didn’t know where Jennifer Chance was hiding.

The worst news of all was that right now Laura Kim was frazzled and vulnerable—and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn the events of the day had triggered a headache. Bad timing. A convenient migraine would allow Chance to slip into Laura, then quietly hunker down inside her and wait out our investigation.

Since Richie was asking for Dr. Santiago, we unanimously decided that getting him back to the FPMP made a lot more sense than calling an ambulance. At least at the FPMP they’d take us seriously when we explained he hadn’t been hungover when he called in sick that morning—he’d been possessed. Who better to monitor against re-infection than Dr. Santiago, who was familiar enough with Richie to spot a pattern of un-Richie-like thoughts now that she’d know to keep an eye out for them. Hopefully they could pull Laura Kim down off the torture rack since we now had good reason to doubt she got up off her sickbed and blew a hole in Roger Burke herself. I couldn’t begin to guess why Dr. Chance would want to plug her old partner, but I’m sure we could tease out her motivation now that we knew where to look.