Shit. He’d done his homework. No big surprise. “I dunno. I guess I just don’t want to get him any more tangled up in this.”
“In what, Vic? What are we doing?”
I sighed. We’d been on the road for a couple of hours. He could turn the Crown Vic back around and be rid of me easily enough. Heck, he could pull over and dump me by the side of the road, too. “Something’s up,” I said. “You know how my talent’s been a little...overly sensitive lately?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s something else, too. It’s gonna sound a little crazy...” like anything having to do with PsyCops sounded rational. “But it’s almost like I’m contaminated. There was this murderer who was executed a few nights ago, and it’s like I’m acting out his M.O. in my sleep.”
“You’re channeling?”
My third cup of coffee lurched in my stomach at the thought of a spirit using my body like a wetsuit. “I dunno. I’ve never done any channeling. Not on purpose, anyway. I think you need really solid defenses to mess around with that shit.”
“And you don’t have them? Solid defenses, I mean?”
I pressed my tacky forehead against the passenger window. “I thought I did. I mean, the dead used to just stick to the places where they died -- if not that, then their graves, or some other place that meant a lot to them. But now it’s like they’re coming out of the woodwork and following me.”
Roger drove in silence for a while. I fished around in my pocket for a sedative. The thought of all those cold, pale, grasping hands was making me antsy.
“What do they do? When they follow you.”
I had a pill on my tongue, so I swallowed before I answered him. “I...I dunno. They grab at me.”
“Have you tried talking to them? Asking them what they want?”
“Look, Roger, the dead aren’t rational people,” I said. Maybe he was just playing Devil’s advocate, but I felt my adrenaline surging as if I needed to protect myself. “You can’t just have a conversation with them. It’s not like they’re gonna give me a message and then be satisfied and go away -- that’s Hollywood bullshit. They don’t have a message and they don’t have a purpose and they don’t go anywhere.”
“So when there’s an earthbound spirit, it’s around forever?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. There aren’t enough mediums around to help the researchers come up with a solid theory. And it’s too fucking subjective.”
Roger glanced at me. He looked concerned, in a mild and boyish way. “But what do you think, Vic? You’ve had this ability your whole life. You must’ve put some kind of logic to it.”
Actually, I’d had it since I was twelve. Close enough. “I guess they disappear over time,” I said. “Otherwise I’d be fighting my way through mobs of Neanderthal spirits.”
“Makes sense.”
“Sometimes I think that ghosts are people who were unhappy in life,” I said. It wasn’t very scientific or very accurate, but it was an idea I’ve always had in the back of my head. I’d never really voiced it, since I couldn’t help but think of what it would mean for me once my time was up.
Chapter Twelve
We hit a big snarl of traffic in Saint Louis around six in the evening. We stopped to pick up some burgers, but I ended up getting swarmed by dead in the drive-through line and making Roger hit the road again before he had a chance to order.
The spirits thinned out once we were on the highway again. I offered to take the wheel for a while, if Roger could keep me on our route, but he told me there really wasn’t anywhere to pull over.
I took another pill since Roger didn’t need me to drive, and soon we’d gone past all the suburbs and made our way through more farmland again. I stared out at the stubbly, shorn fields dotted with gargantuan rolls of hay, glad that we were in an area that wasn’t particularly populated since I’d had my share of ghosts for the day. A transparent hitchhiker with hollow eyes appeared just as I thought that. He reached out toward me as the Crown Vic sped past him.
It’d been dark a couple of hours by the time Roger pulled up to a B&B somewhere in the middle of rural nowhere. I would’ve preferred a Super 8, a newer construction that had less potential for ghost activity, but every time we passed by a likely motel, Roger waved it away and said he was still good to drive.
“I dunno about this place,” I told Roger. “An old farmhouse, probably full of dead...farmers.”
“Just take a look,” he said. “We’ll ask to see the rooms before we commit to anything.”
Nobody swarmed me as I got out of the car; a good sign. We knocked on the front door and stood shivering on the porch for a good ten minutes before a burly guy with a gray crew cut came to let us in. He said that a double-occupancy room was available, if we wanted it. It felt funny to think of sharing a room with Roger, but since we’d just spent the past ten hours together in a much smaller space, I told myself there was nothing weird about it.
The room was kind of goofy and overdone, with hunter green wainscoting and wallpaper with a fishing motif. At least it wasn’t all hearts and flowers; it would’ve been way too weird to wake up next to Roger in a room that looked like a honeymoon suite, especially since I’d had that dream about him and Crash.
There weren’t any spirits lingering around, and that’s what mattered the most. Roger booked the room while I got our overnight bags out of the car.
There was a television tucked into a bureau at the foot of the two double beds, but I hadn’t been interested in TV since I realized I was getting reception from the other side in my own living room. An ancient rotary phone sat on the table between the beds, black plastic with a fat, curly cord connecting the handset to the phone. I wondered if it even worked. Maybe, maybe not. But it gave me an idea. “Do you need anything?” Roger asked me, reaching for the remote.
I needed lots of things, but I figured Roger was already doing everything he possibly could for me.
“I’m fine,” I said, wishing the new pills were as strong as Seconal. Doctor Chance had said they were sedatives, but they didn’t seem to be relaxing me at all. I pulled the plain bottle out of my pocket and looked at it, wondering if it was just some kind of placebo. Lisa would be able to tell me if they were real or not without a shadow of a doubt.
I went into the bathroom, ran the water to cover the sound of my voice, and flipped open my phone. Years of acting secretive had stuck with me, and even though Roger and I were neck deep in the whole California plan, I still only wanted him to know only as much as I absolutely had to tell him. The reception bars on the phone’s screen were tall, which was a relief since we were miles from civilization as I knew it. My thumb was poised to hit the memory dial to Lisa’s cell when the phone vibrated in my hand, startling me. I dropped it and it made a huge sound against the hunter green tile floor.
“Everything okay?” Roger called.
I gnawed at the inside of my cheek and quelled the impulse to tell him I was still “fucking fine,” since I could hardly get testy with him given everything he’d done for me. Still, the mother hen routine was starting to get old, and fast.
“Dropped my toothbrush,” I said, wishing I could’ve thought of something heavier on the spur of the moment. “Unlisted” showed on the screen, and I debated letting it go to voice mail. It could be Warwick checking up on me. It could be Jacob, who I was dying to talk to -- and yet if he knew what I was doing he’d probably try to talk me out of it. And it could be Lisa.
I picked up. “Bayne,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“This is Victor, the medium, right?” A man’s voice, definitely not Lisa.
“Yes.”
“Okay, yeah. I was just wondering about Miss Mattie.”
Recognition clicked in. It was Crash. He’d probably gotten my number from Miss Can’t-Tell-a-Lie.
“Now is really not a good time.”
“I acted like a dick before, you know? But it just blew my mind when you said you were talking to Miss Mattie.”
The mirror started fogging up. I turned the cold tap higher. “I’m right in the middle of....”
“I’ve been thinking about her all day. She was our next-door neighbor -- died when I was just a kid. But she always said I had the ‘gift.’ Like she did.”
Shit. I wanted Crash to go away. I wanted to talk to Lisa. “Uh huh.”
“So is she, like, watching me all the time?”
I sighed and drew a big happy face on the fogged up mirror with my fingertip, then smudged it out with my palm. “No. She comes and goes.”
“That’s a relief. ‘Cos I know a few moves that’d probably kill her all over again if she saw ‘em.”
I did my best not to imagine him naked.
“I can show you some, if you wanna come over.”
I closed my eyes and wished he hadn’t just said that. “I don’t think so.”
“C’mon, man. I know you want to.” He said “know” in such a way that I was sure he’d picked it up from me while we were grabbing wrists.
I sighed. “I’m in a relationship right now,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether or not that was actually true, since Jacob had left. A huge pang of loss swept over me, and I perched on the edge of the clawfoot tub so the emptiness didn’t bowl me over.
“No one has to know,” he said, a smile in his voice.
“With Jacob,” I added, because maybe if I insisted that it was the case, he’d come back.
At least the statement was enough to take the wind out of Crash’s sails. “Well, well, well. Didn’t take Jacob very long to find himself a shiny new psychic to show him some parlor tricks, did it?”
I had no idea. I just wanted to talk to Lisa.
“I’d invite you both over, but he’s kind of a prude about three-ways. And besides, he’s pissed off at me.”
“Looked like it went both ways,” I said.
“I never told him I was a saint. He just expected me to act like one and got all high-and-mighty when I didn’t.”
Good to know about the cheating. It just confirmed what I already believed: that it’s pretty low to polish your rod on the side, and Jacob wouldn’t have any of it. Sure, I was busy racing across the country with another guy, in an attempt to get a straight answer out of Lisa as to why I was turning Jacob into mincemeat. But it was still good to know.
Maybe Crash had called for a reason -- other than the fact that he wanted to get in my pants. Maybe Miss Mattie was guiding his hand. Or fate.
“Listen,” I said, glad for a reason to change the subject. “Is there any way to shield if you haven’t got any crystals or stuff like that?”
Crash snorted. “Like what, the ‘white balloon’ trick they teach in KinderPsych?”
I closed my eyes and wished I hadn’t even asked. I might have been better off not knowing my training was about as advanced as a five-year-old’s. I really, really wanted to talk to Lisa. “Okay, then. I gotta go.”
“Whatever. The invitation still stands. With Jacob or without.”
He hung up and left me staring dry-mouthed at the ugly tile floor.
Roger knocked softly. “You okay in there? Do you see something?”
I stood and looked at the mirror, half expecting to find a ghoulish apparition reaching for my reflection, but I was alone. Odd, considering the age of the building, but after all I’d been through, I wasn’t going to complain. “Nope,” I called. “All clear.” I tried Lisa’s cell phone again and got the same damn message I’d gotten since she’d settled in at PsyTrain. I texted “CALL ME” yet again. And then I splashed some water on my face so I looked like I’d been doing something other than hiding with my phone in the bathroom.
Roger lay back in one bed with ESPN playing on the TV when I emerged, a cloud of steam trailing behind me.