Spook Squad (35 page)

Chapter 30

Funny, how the inside of that rank taxicab felt comforting and familiar now, compared to the chaos outside Crash’s building. I sagged with relief against the taxi’s greasy window and cradled Bogdan’s phone against my cheek. Jacob told me he’d found a message from Crash on his cell when he checked his messages on his way back to HQ, so he’d known about the fire. Unfortunately, there’d been no way for him to fill me in before I found out the hard way. If Crash wasn’t caught in that blaze, though, that was all that mattered. I was confident he would handle the logistics of the fire the same way he’d handled that irate customer, which freed up my mind to figure out what to do about Jennifer Chance.

We’d need to formulate a plan in a secure space—on this, Jacob and I could both agree—and we weren’t talking about dodging surveillance electronics this time, either. I briefly considered the flower shop, but I realized that the florist wouldn’t necessarily have the things I might need for an exorcism. Let’s face it, the next time I met up with Chance, I’d need to be armed with something a hell of a lot more effective than butter-flavored popcorn salt.

“I’m bringing in the heavy artillery.” I didn’t want to come right out and say
GhosTV
. Not that I thought Bogdan cared one way or the other, but for all we knew, Chance’s ghost was breathing right down Jacob’s neck with her spectral ear pressed against the side of his phone. “The very large and bulky heavy artillery—the one that almost crushed my hand in San Diego.”

Jacob said, “I’ll come get it…if that’s what you think is best”

I actually had no idea whatsoever. All I knew was that we had to do something.

There was evidence that Lisa had left the cannery in a hurry that morning. Mail was scattered over the vestibule floor. A full cup of cold coffee sat beside the jigsaw puzzle. Lights were on. The TV was on too, playing a soap opera that none of us watched, at least as far as I know. I took a few steps toward the TV, then backtracked to where we stored Crash’s house blessing supplies in the kitchen…until I realized we’d moved it to the downstairs closet, or was it Jacob’s office? I’d performed a lumbering line dance, taking two steps in each direction and wasting half a minute, and I was no closer to exorcising Jennifer Chance than I’d been when I walked through the front door.

Get it together.

I paused, took a deep breath, and checked in with myself. White light? I hadn’t thought about it in hours. The faucet was on its normal flow, a kind of medium-low, the minimum amount it took to keep a basic barrier between my subtle bodies and the rest of the world. I cranked it up to fortify my defenses, and I considered which tools I had at my disposal. Yes, I did feel a vibration in the sage and incense Crash used on ritual day, however I personally had good results with perfumey off-the-rack Florida Water. Plain old table salt did me just fine, too. Even the iodized stuff.

Now was not the time to start experimenting, but memories of the way the potassium Safety Step lay dead in my hand led me to second-guess myself. Maybe I was limiting myself by using table salt. Maybe if I activated some of that chunky grayish sea salt, my exorcism would pack a bigger punch. I broke for the kitchen and grabbed the fancy stuff in the round glass crock with the cork top—it even came with its own precious little wooden spoon, tied to the neck of the crock with a length of jute. The spoon clattered to the floor and slipped under the kitchen cabinet base when I ripped the top off and flung white light at the chunky crystals. The mineral lit up to my inner eye like a bonfire. Finally—something that worked. I crammed it in my pocket. There were so many other spices in there—normal spices, not the weird processed stuff like Richie had. Bay leaves, pepper, thyme…my Camp Hell lessons tugged at my memory, and I started wondering if I should have made more of an effort to try out different herbs, if I’d been selling myself short all this time…if I was a miserable failure of a human being and I fucking deserved to have Jennifer Chance wearing me like Halloween costume, driving my car, handling my gun, sleeping in my bed, touching my man….

Panic would
not
help any of us. Deep breaths. Deep, even breaths.

A key rattled in the front door, and Jacob called my name. “Vic?”

“In here.” Jacob was home. He’d read all that tedious, cryptic exorcism material, and he probably remembered it all, too. He’d know what to do. Relief flooded me, and I turned toward the front hall.

Agent Bly stood awkwardly in the doorway. My panic returned full force—
body swap
—until I realized that Jacob was right behind him. In his own body. I turned away and did my best to look like I was searching for something very important on the coffee table and my hands were not shaking. Deep, cleansing breaths. Reality was not coming apart at the seams. It wasn’t. Everyone was themselves. Mostly. Unless they were a medium. In which case, they might not be.

“I came to help with the heavy lifting,” Bly explained.

I grunted. His sympathy annoyed me. No doubt he’d felt my panic spike like a slap in the face, but he merely stepped aside to let Jacob past, and then cocked his head and considered the big blue tent. I tried to pretend he wasn’t even there, since the worst thing I could reveal was the fact that I didn’t really know what I was doing, which he must have already known.

I focused on Jacob. Just him. “Here’s what I’ve got. I juice myself up—salt, chemical psyactives and the GhosTV—I pump myself up with everything I got. Then I send that freak packing to the other side.”

Jacob nodded. And that was that.

Until Bly chimed in with, “How are you going to keep her contained? She might slip into you and do some serious damage before the rest of us figured it out. How do the rest of us help while you’re dealing with her spirit? And how are you going to find her to begin with?”

While I was dying to tell Bly to shut up and mind his own business, he did have a point. Several of them.

“You know,” Jacob said, “the protection necklace might be gone…but the shaman who made it could help us.”

“He’s in Chicago?”

“Florida, last I knew.”

“There’s no time—”

“Vic.” Jacob stopped me with a pointed look. “We don’t need him here. Your talent runs ten times hotter than his, but face it, he’s studied longer and he knows what he’s doing. Talk to him first, before you rush in. That’s all I ask.”

It galled me to go crawling to someone I hated for advice, but Jacob was right, Bert Chekotah was the only authority on exorcisms we knew.

Jacob made all the arrangements, then set me up in his office. It was disconcerting, the green light on the webcam and the little box in the corner of the screen with the three of us in it, me scowling, haggard and pale, looking like I’d just been through the wringer. I scowled harder. I would have preferred a simple phone call, less fuss and muss, but given that no one seems to have a common vocabulary for dealing with Psych stuff, I couldn’t deny that a video chat would be our best bet at understanding each other.

Jacob and Bly were both looking grim and frazzled, too. They stood to either side of my chair like a pair of beefy, crop-haired bookends, except Jacob had soulful brown eyes, while Bly had those pale colored contacts that made his irises look hinky. It was all I could do not to stare at them. I watched the contact bar instead. A phone icon lit up green and the computer made ringing sounds. Jacob reached over my shoulder and clicked the icon…and then Bert Chekotah filled the screen.

I did a double-take, because the shaman I remembered was always harried from keeping too many plates spinning in his professional life, and too many women from finding out about each other in his personal life. But the guy settling back in his chair adjusting his headset mike looked about five years younger. His tan was deep and his hair was longer, windswept and carelessly flattering. Instead of the rumpled linen suit in which I always pictured him, he had on a faded T-shirt and a beaded turquoise necklace. He looked like a surfer now, or maybe beach bum stoner, or an artist who made sculptures out of driftwood and sold them to tourists. He looked handsome, too, the type of good looks you can’t really ignore, not if you’re being honest. I’d seen the mewling, spoiled brat inside him, and even so, it was just as hard to keep my eyes off his sculpted cheekbones as it was to not stare into Bly’s creepy contact lenses.

“One thing you need to understand about an exorcism,” Chekotah told us, “is that there are spirits, and there are ghosts. My people believe that everything in the world is imbued with spirit. Not just human beings and animals, and not just living things, like plants, but everything. Lakes. Mountains. Rocks.” He held up a sports drink in a plastic bottle. “Even this. I think that what my people refer to as ‘spirit’ would be called subtle bodies in other cultures.”

Made sense to me. Mediums’ spirits rattled around looser inside them than everyone else’s, too. Maybe our spirit eyes were askew from our physical eyes, and our spirit ears were pitched slightly different. Whatever the misalignment, it allowed us to sense things in that other plane of existence, be it repeaters, or ghosts, or even spectral jellyfish.

“Spirits aren’t all beneficial,” Chekotah said. “Some are tricksters, and it can go beyond harmless mischief. Some enjoy causing pain and suffering. They can’t be exorcised since they’re not really dead, but they can be bargained with, or even appeased. One person’s aggressor might be someone else’s protector.”

“So a pissed-off dead woman who’s hijacking other people’s bodies,” I said. “Spirit, or ghost?”

“The angry remnant of a human being…that’s a ghost.” Chekotah looked grim. “Traditionally, my people kept none of the belongings of the dead—they put the body out for the elements, along with all of its belongings. They left it in the swamp and didn’t look back. Nowadays, though, think about how materialistic modern culture is. No one’s going to get rid of their dead relative’s stuff. It might be valuable, so they’ll want to keep it for themselves, or maybe sell it on eBay. Every last item they hold on to leaves a tiny pinhole that pierces the veil between death, and life. Enough small items—or something with a big enough emotional charge—will weaken that veil enough for ghosts to cling to this world and avoid crossing over. A ghost cares about one thing, and one thing only: luring the people who were once its friends and family into the land of the dead, so it doesn’t have to suffer alone.”

That explanation gave me an idea on how to find Chance’s hiding place, though I wasn’t convinced that all ghosts cared about was death. After all, I had it straight from the source that Jennifer Chance’s big concern was who got credit for her GhosTVs. Not that she wouldn’t get a kick out of inflicting a ton of collateral damage too. “Spirit, ghost, whatever she’s called, how do I get rid of her? Salt? Or something else?”

Chekotah considered my question in this new thoughtful, unhurried manner he’d adopted, then said, “In the beliefs of my people, even a mineral has a spirit. If salt is what focuses your energy, then use salt. The energy comes through you, and you harness that energy with ritual. But ritual is a personal thing. You need to do what resonates with you.”

“I’m not asking you how to focus my ability. I need to know what it is you do to the ghosts once they’re in range that makes them cross over. Do you visualize a door and give ’em a shove through it? Or hit their spirit body with a blast of energy that makes it evaporate? Or…what?”

Chekotah looked startled in his video. So did Jacob and Bly, in the small box down by the corner. I wasn’t accustomed to letting people know I literally saw these things, and I didn’t trust either Chekotah or Bly with my secrets. I didn’t have the luxury of being cagey, though. I needed to stop Chance from inhabiting anyone else.

“I’m in trance for that part of the ceremony,” Chekotah said.

“You must remember something. The Criss Cross Killer, sticking to Jacob. What were you thinking when you scraped him off?”

Chekotah closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and whispered to himself as he rocked back and forth. I shifted impatiently in my seat. Jacob and Bly looked grim. But before I could say,
You know what, forget it, I’ll just wing it like I always do,
Chekotah spoke. “Hugo Cooper had his feet firmly in this world, but his connection to Jacob felt weak, like a spider’s web. All I had to do was brush it away. He was filled with anger, but it wasn’t enough to keep him here, not without the connection.”

Like the silver cords that connected astral travelers to their bodies. And the goopy tethers that anchored the jellyfish to Dreyfuss’ fingernails. Something was connecting Chance to this world, something only I could see. “So I find the tie, and I cut the connection. Got it. Thanks.”
 

“And then you guide them to the veil. The door you were talking about might work for this, if you see it as a door. But they won’t go willingly. You need to escort them to it.”

“By visualizing them going through?”

“No, with your spirit. Guide them to the edge of the veil, and then the pull will take over.”

Oh, hell. “Lemme get this straight,” I said. “You project out of your body, grab the ghost, shove it up against the veil, and trust your silver cord to keep you from getting sucked into Deadland too.”

He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Basically.”

I had a hard time believing that someone as selfish as Chekotah would put his own subtle bodies on the line. Maybe the pull of Deadland was strong for actual dead people, but it must not be too intense for someone with a living physical body to call home. Not if that weenie was willing to brave it. Then again, maybe he was stronger than I’d been giving him credit for. It’s not as if mediumship rankings meant anything…not that they’d ranked themselves at PsyTrain anyway. But he had managed to put up those sturdy astral barriers around his room, so maybe he did know what he was doing after all.

“Do you need some chant to help you shift your vibration?” he asked. “I could send you some MP3s.”

Chant wouldn’t do squat for me. Those painful experimental psyactives would work perfectly fine. “No. Thanks.”