Spook Squad (34 page)

Richie didn’t need all three of us to run him back to headquarters. I decided to take a detour and pick up some protection for Laura. If we were lucky, Laura’s interrogation would actually work in her favor. Hopefully Chance would prefer an unfettered spirit body to a borrowed physical body that was being questioned by a remote viewer and a telepath. I knew of a charm that could keep her spirit out, so I cabbed it to Sticks and Stones in search of the protective shaman necklace that had once been the pride and joy of Faun Windsong.

“D’you have a phone charger in here?” I asked the cabbie, a squat Eastern European guy in sore need of a shave and a stick of deodorant.

He glared at me in the rearview and pretended he didn’t speak English.

It would have been helpful to call ahead and have Crash meet me on the street with the necklace, but it would only take me a few minutes to run up and grab it. Plus, I wanted to have a quick chat with Miss Mattie. Hopefully she could give me some pointers on exorcising a sentient ghost who had no desire to move on.

Since the cabbie drove like a cabbie—which is to say, like a maniac—we made great time. Until we got to North Avenue, that is. And then traffic ground to a halt. “What’s the problem?” I said, but we were still playing the no-English game. I glanced at his license. “Sonofa…look, Bogdan, could I use your phone?”

He glared.

Fine. I pulled out my badge and clinked it against the plexi barrier between the front and back seat. “Give me your phone. Now.”

Bogdan understood that.

My thumb went for memory-dial three, the store, but of course that wouldn’t be any good. I called information instead and had them patch me through to the Sticks and Stones landline. It was busy. I tried again. And again. Busy. Traffic crept forward a few feet. Somewhere up ahead, sirens whooped, the long drone of emergency vehicles punctuated by the directional noise blat that would tell the rest of the drivers where the hell the sirens were coming from.

“Shit.” I slumped against the door and pressed my head to the window…and then I realized the window was greasy. I sat up again, tried Sticks and Stones a few more times, and I waited.

Traffic went nowhere.

 
It was half a mile between North and Division—less, now that we’d rolled forward another block—so I decided my best bet was to hoof it. I threw Bogdan’s phone at him along with a twenty. Not that I expected much, I told him to wait for me in front of the boarded-up palm reader’s if traffic ever moved again, and I took off for the store.

I’ve never found it helpful to jump to conclusions, at least when I wasn’t in a position to do anything about them. So I did my best to stay in denial until I was close enough to see what was going on with my own eyes. The fire trucks, the EMTs, they could’ve been there for anyone. The buildings in that part of Wicker Park were stacked up against each other like firewood—bad analogy—and it could have been any building on that block dripping with the sooty aftermath of a blaze.

Only as I neared, I saw it wasn’t just any building. It was Crash’s building.

I broke into a run.

“Move—police—move!” I didn’t bother with the badge. I used my body and my no-nonsense police bark to elbow through the crowd. When I got to the front and found some uniforms keeping the bustling throng at bay, I whipped out my badge to get myself in there and find out who was in charge.

The fire was called in just before nine, three hours prior, and firefighters spent well over an hour extinguishing the blaze and keeping it from spreading. No word yet as to how it started. It was out now, and crews were sifting through the sodden wreckage to figure out if anyone had been trapped inside, and to make sure nothing was still smoldering. “Casualties?” I was surprised at how calm and businesslike I sounded.

No, I was told. None yet.
 

Even though I knew enough to stop pestering the firefighters and let them do their jobs, I was beside myself with fear. Second floor, second fucking floor. And a store full of flammables—books, paper, cardboard, charcoal—not to mention accelerants like oil, aerosols and saltpeter. I took a deep breath in a morbid attempt to try and catch a whiff of sandalwood on the aftermath of the fire, but all that remained was the rank stink of muddy soot.

Without thinking, I pulled out my phone and hit memory-dial two, Crash’s cell. I hit it four or five times before it registered that my phone was still dead. Neighbors—someone would know him. I started working the crowd, badge out, questioning the rubberneckers as to whether they’d seen him. No, said the ones who knew who I was talking about. Haven’t seen him. Not today.

Right. Because at nine, the time when the fire had started, he wouldn’t be standing around loitering on the sidewalk. He’d be rolling out of bed to nuke himself a bowl of generic oatmeal, down some coffee, and get ready to open his store. If he was even awake yet. Jesus Christ.

As I searched through the milling onlookers, desperately seeking a telltale glimpse of bottle blond, I spotted three separate news crews entrenching themselves at various locations that had a clear line of sight to the aftermath. Automatically, I stooped and did my best to blend in. The FPMP indoctrination had done its job. Not only was I now paranoid about being tracked by Dreyfuss, his Psychs, and even his ghosts, but I was more worried about being spotted by someone who had a bone to pick with Psychs in general, and who’d love nothing more than a nice tall target to aim for.

A ripple of urgency went through the emergency response personnel as firefighters called in EMTs. The camera crews tried to push in while the cops pushed back. The wait for the EMTs was excruciating, though it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes between the time they ducked into the building and the appearance of their gurney nudging out through the broken remains of the doorway. Even though I saw plenty over the heads of the rest of the crowd, I craned my neck to get a glimpse of who was on that gurney. The only thing I saw was a sheet-covered body.

My world tilted. I pressed into the guy beside me, who shoved back with his shoulder and rocked me upright, and with my feet under me, I burst into action. “Police—stop right there—police—I need to see—”

There was too much crowd between me and the ambulance, though, and it rolled away before I could bully anyone into lifting up that sheet. I was left standing there inside the barricade in a pocket of quiet like the eye of a storm. I had to call Jacob. He must be at the FPMP by now. He’d have all those resources at his disposal, all those contacts. He’d figure out what’s what. I planted my hands on my hips, glaring at the milling crowd beyond the barricade that filled in the ambulance’s wake just as if it had never been there, and I scanned for a rubbernecker who was a likely candidate for commandeering a cell phone. Every time I feinted toward someone with their hand to their ear, the crowd swallowed them up.

Maybe a uniform would give me a crack at his radio. Wicker Park would be the Fourteenth Precinct…did I know anyone from the Fourteenth? As I searched in vain for a familiar face, a woman’s voice piped up close by. It took me a moment, over the murmuring drone of the crowd and emergency vehicles, to realize it was the only voice inside the barricade that was currently shouting.

“It was an accident—you make sure you put that in your report. Do you hear me, you useless pig? I said, do you hear me?”

I whirled around and found Crash’s downstairs neighbor giving a nearby police officer a piece of her mind, while the cop ignored her and helped another ambulance maneuver into position without running over any bystanders. I took two bounding steps toward her before I realized that everyone else was damp, charred and sooty, while Lydia was clean and dry. Her long, wavy gray hair was loose, her sweatshirt had a glittery Tibetan OM symbol on the front, and her skinny jeans belonged on a woman at least thirty years younger. Hard to say what her shoes looked like, as they were kind of transparent. Her feet too, for that matter.

“Lydia,” I called—and she spun around to look at me. I was flooded with relief, though I couldn’t say why. Crash’s neighbor was dead, after all—I should be dismayed. But in all my profound selfishness, the only thing I cared about was that I’d finally found someone who could tell me where Crash was. I pulled out my drained phone and held it to my ear, hoping that I’d look like a perfectly normal guy having a phone conversation, and I called out to her again. “Lydia, c’mere.”

She squinted at me for a sec, then said, “Well, if it isn’t the Knight of Cups.” She approached. The closer she got, the more ethereal she looked to my mind’s eye. Solid, but luminous. “Just my luck—the only one out here willing to give me the time of day, and he doesn’t smoke.”

The last thing her lungs needed was a smoke. “Have you seen Crash?” I asked her.

“Nope. Not lately.”

“The fire—”

“It was not arson. I bought some paint thinner, I’d been cleaning that damn graffiti off my walls. I must’ve spilled some on my clothes. I must’ve fallen asleep with a cigarette lit.”

“Sure.” My heart sank. Maybe she’d be willing to try and find Crash for me, but first I’d need to tell her she was dead. Once she realized she’d said what she needed to say (to someone who was able to hear it) she might very well move on and leave me hanging. Still…it didn’t feel right to keep talking around the charred elephant in the room. “Lydia, here’s the thing. You didn’t survive the fire.”

She stared at me for a moment, as if to decrypt a sick joke I might be attempting to make at her expense, and then she looked back at the fire-blackened wood panel that had been covering the vandalized remains of her front window. “Oh.” She looked at her hands, then looked at the charred building again. “Oh.”

“I’m not really talking on the phone. I can see you because I’m a medium.”

“Oh.” Lydia considered her hands again, front and back. “Right. Yeah.” When she looked up again, she gazed directly into my eyes. While I couldn’t name the color of her irises, and while I couldn’t begin to guess why a ghost would be wearing clumpy mascara, there was a gravity there, a wisdom, that calmed my racing heart. I shivered and took a deep breath, though carefully now, since my shallow, rapid panic-breathing had left me oxygen deprived and woozy. She said, “I guess that’s why I’m not burnt.”

“It probably would’ve been pretty painful if you hadn’t….”

“No kidding. They say burns are the worst.” She looked back at her hands, then snapped her fingers a few times. “It’s not like lucid dreaming, is it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, I can’t make a pack of smokes appear.”

“Listen, I’m worried sick about Crash. Could you…?” I left it open-ended, hoping she might come up with a bright idea.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” she said dismissively, waving her fingers like an illusionist, and scowling when the goods she’d been trying to materialize didn’t appear.

“How about Miss Mattie,” I suggested, “do you know Miss Mattie? Have you seen a big African American woman in a scarf?”

She ignored the question. “If my mind created these clothes I’m wearing—or if they’re some non-physical equivalent of my actual clothes—then where are my damn cigarettes?”

Maybe she was blocking them…after all, if it hadn’t been for her cigarette mishap, she’d be alive to smoke another day. “Forget about your cigarettes. Do you know Crash is fine, or are you just guessing?”

“If you’re asking whether I’m plugged into the cosmos, then no. At least…not yet. I do feel different, though.” She maneuvered her hands like a she was trying to create a ball of energy, though if she was successful, I couldn’t see the results.

“Maybe if you try to focus on him,” I said. “See if you pick up any—” on the street behind me a horn blared, loud and insistent. I turned to see what the problem was, and found a cab wedged up against the curb, with Bogdan hanging out the window, gesturing to me.

“Hot damn!” Lydia crowed. I spun around to find she’d summoned a spirit tarot deck while my back was turned. She fanned the cards and presented them to me with glee. “How about I draw a card for you, Mr. Medium? Go ahead, pick something—this one’s on the house.”

I was torn. On one hand, Lydia should be able to sift through the wreckage and figure out if Crash was still in there. Unfortunately, she was newly dead and didn’t quite have her bearings. Plus, I wasn’t entirely convinced she’d be willing to help me out even if she did. And then there was Bogdan, laying on his horn. Maybe I was better off calling Jacob, letting him interface with the emergency workers through FPMP channels. Hell, for all I knew Crash had FPMP tracking on him, and within minutes, a red dot on a computer monitor would let us know he was sitting in a coffee shop somewhere watching his building smolder.
 

I’d jogged a couple of steps toward Bogdan when Lydia called out, “Hey, Knight of Cups!” I turned with the intention of tossing back a quick apology for ditching her, but I saw she was holding up a card: The Tower. It was only a drawing, not a particularly sophisticated rendering at that, but the sight of the flaming tower with people leaping out the windows gave me a chill nonetheless.

When she had my attention, she said, “Flawed structures can’t stand…see the lightning bolt striking the tower? That’s knowledge, a new knowledge that rocks your world. Something you believe to be true is revealed as false.”

Images of Jennifer Chance’s spirit tumbling out of Richie’s body flashed past my mind’s eye. “That’s already happened.”

“Sorry, kiddo. I’m looking at your future.”

Bogdan’s horn bleated. I shifted my weight, staring at the awful card, torn between the urge to stay with Lydia and the urge to call for help.

Lydia must’ve seen something in my expression that she took pity on. She tamped her deck into a neat pile and said, “Crash has been staying with that fancy black kid—he rolls in just before eleven, in time to open the shop with maybe two minutes to spare. He’ll be fine. Actually,
fine
might be an overstatement. If he was on schedule, he got a good eyeful this morning, what with the fire trucks and the crowds. But he wasn’t home when the tower fell.”