Chapter Fifteen
The Lawrence County Sheriff’s Department seemed like a decent enough group of guys. I’m not sure if any of them were psychic. If so, it was probably a low-level talent who’d never been certified, but who was sensitive enough to notice that something just wasn’t right about the B&B, or the guy with the crewcut, or maybe Jennifer Chance as the blushing bride. Crewcut Guy would’ve taken me down at the back stairway if a couple of deputies didn’t already have him trussed up in the back of their SUV.
Even though these fine, corn-fed deputies had just saved my ass, I let Maurice handle the problem of getting me alone in the vicinity of Roger Burke to get a statement from Morganstern. Statements from dead people aren’t considered hard evidence, but they go a long way toward turning up the paydirt.
Maurice had this way of telling people what to do without being bossy and then making them feel good for doing it.
He managed to explain that I was a level five medium without creeping them out, and got them to agree to let me talk to Morganstern while Maurice gave his own statement.
The initial rush of Amytal had worn off, but I was still woozy and off my game. I sat in a storage closet that abutted the holding cell where they’d dumped Roger Burke. I used a mini cassette recorder that Maurice kept in his glove box for those times when I was too wrecked to write. Good thing he hadn’t cleaned out his glovebox since he retired.
“They’ve been planning this for almost a year,” Morganstern said. “Once they got the technology to this point, they targeted some mediums and put together these safe houses.”
Hearsay. Morganstern had only been dead about ten days and didn’t know about their planning process firsthand. But still, I repeated his statement into the recorder. It might turn out to be useful later.
“Why’d they take me across state lines?” I asked him. “Won’t that bring in the Feds?” Something inside me withered a little at the prospect of dealing with the Feds again, like I hadn’t seen enough of them after the incubus serial killer. I wondered if I’d have to get an apartment in Missouri so that I could finish all the damn paperwork.
“It’s six of one, half-dozen of the other,” said Morganstern. “Ideally, they could just recruit you and then nobody would come after them. But if things went sour, either the Feds would figure them out or the Chicago Police Department would. They figured the locals had more to lose by your disappearing and could move a heck of a lot faster, so they took you out of local jurisdiction. There were safe houses in Wisconsin, Indiana and Iowa, too. They were just looking for a way to lure you into one.”
I wondered if I would’ve noticed Roger driving me north to Wisconsin on our trip to California and blanched. Probably not. I’d been too busy looking for ghosts. And then I wondered if every safe house had one of those nifty GhosTVs. I conveniently paraphrased Morganstern’s last statement to say, “They had several safehousees in adjoining states,” without mentioning specifics. I wanted one of those TVs.
***
I’d scored some cold medicine on the way to the Sheriff’s Department. It was a sloppy way to counteract whatever traces of psyactives were left in my system, but it was the best I could do without a prescription and a pharmacy in a major metropolitan area. The ghosts weren’t reaching for me anymore and trying to slip inside. But I’d give my left nut for an Auracel.
My statement to Sheriff Wilkes was kind of a blur. Since the only thing I needed to keep to myself was the location of the other three safe houses, I let everything else just spill out. I got the impression -- not that my people-skills are anything to write home about -- that Wilkes found the whole thing pretty farfetched, but that he was doing his best to be professional and cover all the bases.
Wilkes was on older guy, maybe sixty-five, pushing seventy, with a thick head of steel-gray hair and serious bulldog jowls. He looked like he’d never cracked a smile in his life. He asked me a few preliminaries and then just let me get my story out, disjointed and patchy as it was. I told him about Roger. I told him about Chance. I told him about the B&B and Crewcut Guy and the Amytal and the TV. My whole schpiel took maybe an hour. I probably could have gone on a little longer, but my tongue was sandy, my concentration was for shit, and I just wanted to go back home.
Wilkes wrote on his notepad for a long stretch while I did my best to focus on his pencil holder, and then he cleared his throat. “And where is Doctor Morganstern now?”
“He’s gone.”
“For good? Or is he going to haunt the broom closet?”
I narrowed my eyes. I suspected Wilkes was mocking me now that he had his statement in place, but maybe not. Maybe he was just curious. He was so deadpan, it was difficult to tell. Crash would probably know. Empathy and all that. Crash also would’ve probably spit on Wilkes by now and then called him a pig.
“I think Morganstern’s work is done and he’s moving on.”
“Mmm-hmm. Suppose Officer Burke cuts some kind of deal with the Feds and gets himself a break? What then? Can the doctor come back?”
I had no idea what Wilkes was getting at. “I guess it’s a possibility.”
“So what’s to keep people in the Great Beyond if there’s a revolving door that’ll just let them come and go however they please?”
If Wilkes and I were friends batting ideas back and forth over coffee, I wouldn’t have minded the question. But we weren’t friends. And I was fairly sure he was mocking me now. Jackass.
I sighed and reminded myself that people make fun of things they don’t understand. Maybe Wilkes really did think he’d have Morganstern moaning and rattling chains right down the hall, and he was saving face by acting like a tough guy. I glanced up at the ceiling in the corner of the room that I’d avoided looking at throughout our interview. A taut rope that came from nowhere swayed gently, with a hanged body twitching in its noose. The ghost’s feet danced just over the corners of Wilkes’ desk, one in a worn-down cowboy boot, the other in a holey gray sock.
“I dunno,” I said, cutting my eyes away from the bloated rigor of the ghost’s face. “I guess that once they’re good and dead, they stay that way.” I started humming to myself to drown out the noise of the creaking rope while Wilkes finished dotting his I’s and crossing his T’s.
***
Maurice let me finish my cold medicine and doze, off and on, all the way back to Chicago. We’d been at the sheriff’s department practically another whole day and, thankfully, the Feds agreed to meet with us on our home turf. I considered us lucky to be able to get back home. If the Feds wanted to pull rank, they could easily have forced us to stay in the boonies. But Maurice and I were credible enough, at least to people who didn’t really know us, and I imagined their agents would rather get a nice hotel room on Michigan Avenue than stay at some truck stop off Route 66.
My phone died around the fiftieth time I called Jacob just to say hello. I missed him something fierce, and I needed to look into his eyes while he told me he hadn’t left me. But it was probably just as well that my cell phone crapped out. I was starting to sound like a babbling idiot.
I was sleeping pretty well, given the cockeyed angle of my neck, when Maurice rested his hand on my shoulder. “Victor. We’re here.”
Early morning sunlight slanted through the gaps in the apartment buildings. It was my street, but it looked strange somehow. Not quite real. Jackie the Prostitute was nowhere to be seen, but maybe I couldn’t count on getting a visual on her anymore, not without the spiked doses of Starbucks. And my sinuses were so bone-dry I was pretty sure the cold medicine was still in effect, too.
Maurice looped his arm through mine as he hauled me out of the car. I batted at him since I could walk by myself -- probably -- but he ignored it. I decided it was easier to just lean on him and let him deal with the rusty courtyard gate.
“You’re gonna stay with me, right?” I asked as Maurice hauled me up the three flights of stairs to my apartment. They seemed narrower and dingier than I’d noticed before.
“I got you home, didn’t I?”
He took the keys out of my jacket pocket and tried them, one after another, in my lock. He was squinting at them and trying to figure out which one to try next when the lock tumbled and my front door opened in. Jacob had flown to California and back, and somehow managed to make it home before me. He grabbed me, and pulled me to him. “Thank you,” he said to Maurice.
Jacob. I hugged him, hard. My street, my building, nothing seemed exactly like I’d remembered it. Except for Jacob. Jacob felt real.
“You still want me to stay with you?” Maurice said. Even though my face was pressed into Jacob’s chest and I couldn’t see Maurice, I could tell he was smiling. “I’m gonna head on home and catch up on a little shut eye.”
My apartment looked familiar, small and trashy and white, as usual. I made the rounds anyway, peeking in cabinets and drawers and checking the TV to make sure I didn’t have any unwanted visitors. Jacob leaned on the doorjamb between the kitchen and living room while I scrutinized all the static channels between the real channels by jabbing compulsively at the remote. “Don’t you think you’d better just come to bed?”
I looked at him. “How can you say that? Hugo Cooper’s floating around here somewhere, just waiting for us both to go to sleep so he can get inside me and take another stab at you.”
Jacob crossed his arms and looked massive. “I’m not going to let some dead murderer control where I can and can’t sleep.”
“Jacob....”
“He was only able to use you while you were on those psyactives. Take your Auracel and he won’t bother us. Lisa said so.”
I pushed past Jacob and went to my medicine cabinet. There were two Auracels left. Combined with the cold medicine I’d taken, one should get me through the night. I could go into The Clinic the next day and talk somebody there into giving me a refill. I doubted they’d have any objection since the new doctor they’d hired had fucking kidnapped me.
I tried not to dwell on the thought of having to start with a new doctor after all these years. And not to let Jacob see me all bleary-eyed at the idea that I’d never again see Morganstern in a new and even more atrocious sweater vest.
I swallowed one Auracel and washed it down with a palmful of tap water. Jacob had resumed his man mountain pose behind me in the bathroom doorway. “How can you be so calm?” I asked him. “I had the Criss-Cross Killer inside me.”
“Evidently he’d been following me, since I was his arresting officer.” Jacob shrugged. “I’m sure he would’ve loved to get inside me if he could, but I guess being a Stiff has its advantages. I had a shaman at PsyTrain smudge me before I left. He says it’ll help. That, and time.”
“They’ve got shamans at PsyTrain?” I said lamely. Jacob wedged himself past me and turned the shower on. The pattering of water on porcelain was soothing and familiar, and the tiny bathroom soon filled with steam.
Jacob stripped, and though I could pick out the X I’d carved into his chest, it wasn’t as distinct as it might’ve been if it weren’t for his chest hair. I let him pull my T-shirt over my head and unzip my jeans. I toed off my sneakers and stepped out of my clothes, and Jacob guided me into the shower.
He squeezed a shot of musk body wash into his palm and ran it down my chest. I leaned into the feel of his hands, so strong and sure, so safe. I thought he’d been leaving me, and all the while he was getting himself over to PsyTrain and talking his way in to see Lisa. I probably should’ve just trusted him. Maybe I did. Maybe it was me that I couldn’t trust.
Jacob’s hand slipped between my thighs, wet and slick, while the water sprayed against the back of my head, lulling me into my familiar Auracel daze. I wondered if I was ever totally present for Jacob, or if he always had to search for the real me between the cracks of all the drugs I took.
“It’s okay,” he said, that non-psychic empathy of his, and he slid his palm around enough to make a lather.
I sighed and propped my shoulder against the shower wall.
His hands moved over my hips and met again on my ass, kneading me, teasing me with a soapy finger. I pressed my forehead into his shoulder and tried to stop worrying. My cock had already been convinced that everything was hunkey-dorey. It was poking Jacob in the thigh, stiff and ready.