But if a one-trick pony like me could do it…maybe it really was somehow connected.
A wooden door smacked into the side of my head and interrupted my epiphany.
“What,” I snapped, “you don’t knock anymore?”
“It was ajar.” Dreyfuss looked slightly sheepish. Maybe. “And I thought Jacob might want to login to his Q-mail account and find out who the world’s most memory-intensive LOLcats e-mail joke is from.” He glanced down at the spot where I still saw light shining up through the carpet, despite the distraction of sniping with him, and his voice went marginally more serious. “What’s with the blood?” Blood? My heart hammered in my throat. Even though I knew Lisa had been one floor down when she’d disappeared, what if, somehow, her blood had risen up through the carpet?
“It’s Vic’s.” Even as Jacob said it I realized he was right, and the calm in his voice ratcheted my adrenaline back down. “He cut his hand.”
I looked harder at the glowing spots on the carpet, even tried closing one eye to see if it made any difference. Nope. It didn’t look like blood to me. It looked like light.
“I can see that.” Dreyfuss’ track shoes were less than a yard from the shining blood residue. He hadn’t made any move to go around me and wedge into the room. “So if you know whose blood it is, what’s so interesting about it?”
With the idea of telling him to butt out for two seconds so I could gather my thoughts, I looked up and told him….
Nothing.
Because Con Dreyfuss had light leaking out from the perimeter of his eyeballs.
“Is there something you want to say, Detective?” When he moved his head, his eyeballs multiplied, like maybe he had two pair. Or three.
I looked away, and although the impression that he had half a dozen eyeballs and a lit candle in his head like some kind of human Jack o’ Lantern stuck with me, I tried to act like I hadn’t seen a thing.
He knew I’d seen
something
, though. Whether he was operating on visual, nonverbal cues like Jacob usually did, or he had some sort of empathic gift himself, I couldn’t say. Obviously, he was on to me. I figured a partial truth would tide him over until I could decide exactly how much I wanted him to know. “We tuned the GhosTV to the repeater station and found a hundred-year-dead TB patient.”
“Did you, now?” Dreyfuss swept the room with his flashlight eyes.
“And here I’d heard this place was so clean you could eat off the floor.” He stepped around me and crouched to look at the GhosTV’s settings. Had Jacob and I just cracked the code that still stumped Dreyfuss’ lab? And if so, what ramifications would it have? If those same settings worked for Richie and another GhosTV was in the FPMP’s
clutches, Dreyfuss would be able to boost Richie up a few classes, maybe to the point where he’d actually see the ghosts. Maybe to the point where he’d be able to exorcise Dr. Chance.
I was about to add some bullshit about the signal going in and out to buy us some wiggle room, but when he walked past me, the light leaking out from behind his jumbled-up eyeball caught his iris and lit it up like the taillight of a car.
I turned away. The spelt would be like sandpaper in my esophagus if I allowed it to come back up. Jacob waved at me behind Dreyfuss’ back and caught my eye, scowling at me like he’d noticed my shifti-ness, too—and he wanted to know what gave. There wasn’t really any way to signal, “His eyes are all fucked up,” to Jacob, so I shrugged instead….
And then I saw the veins.
The effect was subtle at first, like light bending above hot pavement.
Jacob’s veins were bulging. Not like he’d just hit the gym, either. They were bulging like someone was inflating them with a bicycle pump…and they were red. And now that I’d noticed it, I couldn’t see anything
other
than the webwork of bulging, throbbing, ruby-red veins that seemed to hold him together like a mesh shopping bag.
Not only was he veiny, but his forehead…damn, his forehead was huge, and it throbbed in time with his veins. I stood up fast, and ran my fingertips over Jacob’s cheek. It felt the same as it always did.
Maybe a little more stubble than usual. I touched his temple. My fingers told me that was the same, too. But it didn’t look the same. My psychic eyes were telling me another story.
“What?” he mouthed.
“Turn the TV off,” I said. My voice sounded surprisingly calm.
Jacob reached around the crate and did it without me having to ask him twice.
The veins and the spooky eyes didn’t disappear immediately. I looked all over the room so Dreyfuss couldn’t see where I was actually looking, but I kept my eye on them in my peripheral vision. The weird special effects dwindled, the way the screen went from a gray field of static to a softly glowing point that grew smaller, smaller, and smaller, until finally, it disappeared. I looked at Jacob head-on again.
He looked like I remembered him—my big, handsome lug of a guy with a vertical crease in his regular-sized brow. Thank God.
His focus, and Dreyfuss’ focus, were on me, so I needed a plausible explanation for why I was acting so weird, and quickly. (I know, I know—just pick one, right?) Since both psyactive and antipsyactive meds had pesky physical side-effects, I figured it wouldn’t be too far out to claim the GhosTV was making me woozy. “I was starting to feel light-headed from the TV,” I said. If I needed to retract that physical symptom later, I could always blame the hippy food. “Maybe a little headache. But it could be jetlag.”
Dreyfuss said, “You don’t get jetlag from crossing two time zones.” Crap. I should’ve known better than to tell aviation-fibs to a pilot. I touched my temple, hoping it wasn’t too melodramatic of a move, but knowing I didn’t want to analyze my “symptoms” any further, since that would just give Dreyfuss more rope to hang me with. My hand was soaking wet. I jerked it away from my face. Maybe I wasn’t bullshitting. Maybe I really did feel sick. I turned it palm up—both my hands—and the injured hand was wet.
Sticky-wet.
With clear goo.
Jacob and Dreyfuss both noticed, both swooped in to gawk at the freakshow. “My God,” Jacob said under his breath.
What I wanted to do was wipe my spoogey hand off—but I didn’t want that slime on my pants. I only had two pair with me, after all. Instead, I stuck my hands behind my back and glared at both of them, hoping they’d give me some space. Not that they really could, given that we were standing in the three-foot aisle in the middle of the room.
Jacob cut his eyes to Dreyfuss. “Is that…?”
“Ectoplasm. Nothing else it could be.”
“Like Ghostbusters?” I scoffed.
“Like Victorian séances.” Dreyfuss kept his smirking as low-key as possible, though I couldn’t help but notice how amused he was by my distress. “Ectoplasm was supposed to be the outward manifestation of the medium’s connection to the spirit world. I’d always figured it was a fraud—though I gotta say, I’m really getting a kick out of being proved wrong.”
“Vic.” Jacob gave me his biggest, saddest, most soulful, dark-eyed look. “Let me see.”
What I wanted to do was tell Dreyfuss to turn around; it seemed too private to let him ogle. I was just as curious as Jacob was, though, so I brought the sticky hand forward. It looked like I’d been playing with the hair gel. Jacob caught me by the wrist—and did he really need to hold onto me all that tightly?
He gave the slime a sniff, and I nearly tossed my spelt-cookies. “It smells like ozone.”
I had no idea what ozone was supposed to smell like, so I took a whiff, too. I guess it sort of smelled the way electronics smell after they’ve been sitting in the attic too many years and you plug them in to see if they still work.
Dreyfuss pulled a small plastic bag out of his pocket, and said, “May I take a sample?”
“Are you kidding me?” I turned my arm away, and did my best not to imagine myself strapped down to a gurney with a medical team standing by to amputate my right hand.
“You hate the government. I get it. But this is a big deal. And what if it turns out to be our key to finding Lisa?”
“Nope, you don’t get to play the Lisa-card every time you want me to jump through the FPMP’s hoops. This has nothing to do with Lisa.
You just want to suck some stem-cells out of it and do something messed-up with my DNA. And it’s not gonna happen. No way.”
“All right. If that’s how you’re going to be.” He looked me up and down. “How about this? Just let me see it. Unless this happens to you all the time—and judging by your reaction, it doesn’t—it’s ridiculous to lose the opportunity to at least look, all for the sake of being petty.” Frankly, my urge to keep my personal stuff personal was so strong that I was perfectly willing to sacrifice knowing what I could or couldn’t do if it meant that Dreyfuss wouldn’t know, either.
“Vic,” Jacob said quietly. “Don’t worry about him. Let me see.” I show Dreyfuss, then Dreyfuss has one up on me. I keep it to myself, then Jacob gets pissed. Talk about a no-win situation. Dreyfuss had already seen it, though. And when I clenched my hand and gave it a little squish, it didn’t seem to me that it might actually do anything more than what he’d already glimpsed, which was to sit there and be slimy. And so I opted to make Jacob happy, and I pulled my hand out from behind my back and unclenched my fist.
There it was. Still goopy.
Jacob took a few snapshots of it with his cameraphone, which I let him do. If we were alone, I would have asked him if he planned to jerk off to them later. Sarcastically. Sort of. Obviously, though, I was in no mood to let Dreyfuss see the tender pink insides I keep hidden beneath my shell.
Within a couple of minutes, the glop of goo started to shrink. It felt even colder, which I didn’t mention. I could tell Jacob later.
Toward the end, it dissipated so quickly it looked like time-lapse photography, shrinking smaller and smaller, following the lines of my palm, until finally it was gone, and the only difference between my two hands was that the ectoplasm hand still felt cold. And it was covered with scabs, though that was, of course, old news. Ectoplasm topped friction wounds any day, and long after my scabs healed, I’d still think of my right hand as my ectoplasm hand.
Someone knocked on the door, startling the hell out of me, and I actually shielded my hand from view—not that there was anything left to see. Jacob climbed over the corner of the spare bed and spoke in a low voice to whoever was on the other side. And then he started passing stuff over the top of the GhosTV console to Con Dreyfuss. Two more boxes, these made out of corrugated cardboard, roughly the size of suitcases.
“Your laptops made good time,” Dreyfuss said.
And then, a pizza.
The smell of oregano and salty grease filled the overstuffed room.
Suddenly, I was ravenous.
“Don’t mind that,” Dreyfuss said. “It’s just my lunch.” Oh. The pizza was for him. Right. Because I’d already eaten lunch. If you could call it that.
I didn’t want to eat an FPMP pizza anyway.
“I got you different models so you could tell ’em apart.” He handed a laptop box back to Jacob. “Yours is ultra-portable. Detective Bayne’s is built to withstand more punishment, though I don’t recommend you use it to drive nails.”
Jacob balanced his box on top of the garment bag that was resting on the crate lid on the spare bed. “These’ll need to charge.”
“Nope. I had them install fully charged batteries, and set up everything but the passwords.”
I waited to see if Jacob asked for any clarification on the mysterious “them.” He didn’t. He didn’t need to.
I hated the computer.
It was lightning fast. The keyboard felt great. It looked pretty damn cool. No doubt it was recording every keystroke I made and dumping the info to a file on Dreyfuss’ desktop.
After I opened up my e-mail and checked it, it occurred to me that the FPMP now knew my password. Damn it all. The last e-mail I’d read before I left Chicago was the one that had bounced from Lisa’s full inbox. Since then, I’d received a dry cleaning coupon, an invitation to join the League of Hispanic Voters, a work-at-home offer, and interspersed with those, three emails from Crash. I hesitated to open them, but then I figured the FPMP was gonna see them whether I did or not. So I might as well read them too.
E-mail one: just thought of a way u can get some xtra protein in yr diet
Cute.
E-mail two: so did Mr. Perfect dig yr hair or what? feel free to shower me with appreciation & french fries & a chocolate milkshake this time
It seemed like forever ago that I’d been eating french fries at Sticks and Stones. It’d only been the day before yesterday, though.
E-mail three, from right around the time Crash called me after lunch:
jacobs Q-mail just bounced - wtf? i thought u were wrong when u told me about lisas - my bad
If he referred to Jacob by his real name, I knew he was concerned.
As I considered whether I should write him back and give him some sneaky reason to quit e-mailing me so the FPMP couldn’t intercept it, at least until I had the chance to change my password from the safety of my old computer, Jacob started talking to his screen. Which he does at home a lot, although he denies it.
“What the…what is this?”
Dreyfuss put down the piece of pizza he’d been eating, dusted some cornmeal off his fingers, and came over to see for himself. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And that goes on for…how long?”
Jacob scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled. “The whole thing.”
“The whole…bible?” I said.
“King James 1769 version,” Dreyfuss said, “if you wanna be specific.” Right. I was lucky I’d even guessed the “bible” part. It seemed icky that Dreyfuss could name the actual version.
“Do you recognize the sender?” Dreyfuss asked.
“No.”
“Okay. How about the next email? Familiar?”
“No. I don’t know any of these froms.”
“Open this one here, by the bottom.”
I was dying to get a gander at what they were digging up from Jacob’s account, but I was too stubborn to give Dreyfuss the satisfaction. And I also didn’t want him to see me drooling over the smell of the pizza.