An astral guy. He was angled mostly away from me, but the silver cord was a dead giveaway.
He was a skatepunk in sloppy, cutoff camouflage shorts and a ratty flannel shirt, with a wispy beard, stoner tattoos showing above his slouchy gray tube socks, and white-guy dreadlocks tied back from his head in a grungy bandanna. I didn’t recognize him from PsyTrain—but Faun Windsong had told me distance didn’t matter. Maybe he was some long-distance relative who had an emotional connection with Faun. Maybe she had a brother, or a son.
One of us high-level mediums procreating—how’s that for a creepy thought?
Faun was asleep, although she wasn’t astral. In fact, she probably wouldn’t be astral anytime soon, thanks to the Valium. I regretted giving her both tablets, but I’d had no idea I could get out of my body again so soon after the burritos, and there was nothing to be done for it now. I cleared my astral throat so I wouldn’t spook the skatepunk by sneaking up on him.
“What?” he said dismally. He didn’t bother to look up.
“How’s she doing?”
He shrugged. “She’s a wreck. Not very surprising, considering what she saw.”
Not only did he seem to know something about the case, but he was also phenomenally lucid. Jacob-level-lucid. Faun-level-lucid. I collected myself and tried to formulate a strategy for approaching him that wouldn’t send him flying away. “So…you know what happened?” He sighed heavily and knuckled his astral eyes without deigning to answer, like he was sick of me already, before our conversation had even gotten started.
“You know you’re astral?” I ventured.
“Unbelievable.” He leapt to his feet and swung around, and I got that weird feeling again of knowing the face but being unable to place it—a lot like when I’d spotted Karen Frugali on Lyle’s phone. “Of course I know I’m astral. You think I can’t tell when I’m astral? Newsflash—I’m in charge of the whole fucking Midwest. Including you.” Oh. My. God.
“So I think I’m quick enough to figure out I’m having a projection.” Hello, Constantine Dreyfuss.
I tried not to look too surprised to see him, and especially, not to let on that he looked a whole hell of a lot different in the astral than he did in the physical. Why? Well, it seemed to me that it probably meant something. Jacob was younger in the astral. Faun Windsong was thinner in the astral. And my astral body didn’t float around in a cheap suit.
Judging by his apparent astral age and the whole getup, right down to a well-worn Beastie Boys T-Shirt, I’d say I was looking at a Dreyfuss from the early 90’s. The FPMP didn’t exist, not yet, since back then psychic powers were thought to be made up of stage magic and hoaxes, and ghosts were still the stuff of Hollywood B-movies.
And yet, although astral Dreyfuss was a throwback from the first Bush administration, he was well aware of who he was in the present, what he did for a living—and who his friends were. Or weren’t.
He seemed a lot edgier in the astral than he did in waking life, where he was so unflappable that everything just rolled off his back like it’d been greased with Vaseline. Jacob had been vulnerable in the astral, too. No censors. But if I played my cards right, maybe I could exploit this opportunity to talk to the real Dreyfuss, the one hiding behind the nonchalance and the big pretzels.
“I’m not surprised you take me for an idiot,” Dreyfuss said. “You think I’m stupid enough to buy all that shit you shovel.”
“I never thought you were stupid. Ever.” Where had that come from?
I’d need to be more careful—because evidently my censors weren’t in the on-position, either.
“Really? Because you do the polar opposite of everything I want you to do, you lie like a rug, and you put less faith in me than you do in the Cubs winning the World Series.”
“Faith?” My lack of sensors was seriously impeding my ability to steer the conversation the way I wanted it to go. “You’re tapping my phone.”
“And it’s your loss that I’ve never been able to hack into Jacob’s Q-mail—because now someone’s stalking your boyfriend and I’ve got no idea who it is.”
“Oh, so all this invasion of privacy is for my own good.” I waved him off in disgust. “I’m never gonna fall for the line that you’re just looking out for my best interests. Give
me
some credit for having a brain in my head. I’m not Richie.”
“Speaking of whom—for a borderline moron, he seems pretty damn fulfilled, don’t you think?”
“He’s got nothing to worry about,” I said.
“Because he’s slow?”
“Because he’s weak.” Let it go, I told myself. Find out what Dreyfuss knows about Chekotah, about PsyTrain, and then drop it. But I just couldn’t. “The Psychs who’ve gotta watch out for themselves are the high-level talents.”
“Like you?”
“Like Warwick’s nephew.”
My God, when was I going to shut up? Meeting a dead medium in the basement of Camp Hell was my secret—mine—and Dreyfuss was the last guy I wanted to share it with. And he was watching me now with those shrewd eyes of his, the same eyes I’d come to know and hate, set in the face of a guy who was twenty years younger in the astral.
“You, knowing about him?” he said. “That explains a lot. A heck of a lot.”
“Forget it.” As if saying that ever worked. I could only hope that with us being in the astral, it might. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Not so surprising, given that you both trained at Heliotrope Station—but you couldn’t have known each other. You would’ve been there long after he slit his wrists. What happened, you wandered into a records room one day when you were bored and you did a little reading? Or maybe the rumor mill was still grinding out gossip when you showed up, and they couldn’t wait to tell you about the medium who took the bloody way out.” He watched my face for a reaction, and I felt my patented blank look failing me. “Or maybe you had a little chat with him yourself.”
Every fiber of my astral being was straining to say he didn’t kill himself, but I sucked some white light, and I managed to grit out, “Fuck you—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s what you’d like everyone to think, isn’t it?” He held up his hands as if to show me he wasn’t concealing a weapon…or maybe a one-hitter. “I’d tell you that your secret’s safe with me—but I don’t suppose you’d believe me. Alex, Warwick’s nephew, what happened to him…that was before my time. Not only was I not a federal agent yet, but if you’d told me that was what I was gonna be when I grew up, I would’ve figured you were high.”
“So what did you do?”
“I flew my buddy’s Cessna for weekend skydivers…and I played bass in a band. Maybe you’ve heard of ’em?”
Evidently I hadn’t, because he said something slippery that was lost to the astral. I shook my head, no, and said, “Sorry.”
“I wasn’t looking to be any big, psychic so-and-so when I hooked up with the FPMP. I just wanted the cash. Do you know how much it cost back then to cut a record? And I’m not talking about a digital download or even a CD. Back then, you had to press vinyl. And we were dragging our gear from gig to gig in a hatchback. We needed a van.” He gazed down at Faun Windsong sadly, and said, “My kingdom for a horse.”
While I was trying to tell myself I didn’t give a damn about his story, I couldn’t help but wonder how joining the FPMP seemed like a promising way to make a quick buck to a kid with dreadlocks and pot leaf tattoos—especially one with a pilot’s license. “So, what? You regret that you cut off your dreads to grab an entry-level position as a private pilot? Looks like it worked out in the end; you don’t seem to be hurting for money anymore.”
“And that just goes to show how far out of whack you are. I’ve never flown anyone anywhere unless I wanted to fly ’em. And aside from my initial contact, it’s never been about the money—not once I got myself tested.”
Tested? Dreyfuss? Shit, shit, shit, Dreyfuss and his glowing eyes. He wasn’t just the president of Hair Club for Men, he was also a client.
And whatever mojo he was working, it was something rare, something different, like Jacob’s. Something that didn’t blend in to the crowd at PsyTrain.
“It’s not safe out there,” he said. “It’s never been safe, not since Psych went public. And the better you are at what you do, the riskier it is.”
What did Dreyfuss “do”? That’s what I wanted to know. But my head started to buzz when I thought about it too hard, when I got too damn excited, and I started getting scared I’d lose control and float up against the ceiling like the dumb Matrix guy in the hallway. “So you felt safe at the FPMP,” I said, hoping to draw him out—to ask him what his deal was without coming right out and saying it.
“Once we took care of ….” He said a name I didn’t recognize. “Once he was gone, yeah. Once we’d cleaned house, at least I didn’t have to worry about getting plugged by my own team.”
“And so now it’s perfectly safe—one big, happy family. Who just happens to be spying on me.”
“Look—we can watch you, or we can watch the whole entire rest of the world while we keep our eyes discreetly averted from your oh-so-private life and hope to keep you covered in our peripheral vision. You might think you’re fascinating, but lemme break it to you: you’re not all that special. Everyone else eats and shits and fucks and sleeps, too. The things about you that’re even marginally interesting, no one else can see. So get over yourself.”
I was only too happy to oblige. If I was astral and prone to venture into TMI-territory, the last person I wanted to talk about was me. “So, what’s next? You point your snipers at the bible-thumpers and shut them up for good?”
“You’re confusing me with James Bond. I don’t carry out hits. I just crunch the numbers that pick out the targets.”
“Oh.” Not just a river in Egypt. “That’s completely different.”
“It is, actually, because I follow parameters. I check with all my top-level Psychs, and if their collective data confirms that some thug’s living results in my Psychs dying….” He shrugged. “I gather the info and I pass it along to the military.”
“You have people eliminated based on psychic evidence.”
“You didn’t have much of a problem with Detective Marks’ evidence treating the Criss Cross Killer to a lethal injection.”
“There’s no comparison. He had due process. A jury convicted that guy, and a judge sentenced him.”
“I guess Hardcore Vic has officially retired.” Dreyfuss stood up from the physical chair, and an astral skateboard appeared in his hand.
He let it drop to the floor with an astral clatter easily as loud as any physical skateboard would produce, then popped the nose up with his heel and caught it. “And he’s been replaced by Detective ‘Law and Order’ Bayne—who’d rather put his life in the hands of twelve potentially bribeable, ignorant, prejudiced pinheads than trust a team of certified Psychs like him.”
Hardcore Vic had left the building some years ago—though I wouldn’t exactly classify the guy who’d filled his Chuck Taylors as a propo-nent of the straight and narrow. Did I trust a Psych any more than I trusted an NP juror? Maybe, maybe not. But executing someone based
solely
on psychic evidence made me question whether or not I believed in free will, and that, in turn, made me want to swallow a couple Valiums, curl up in bed, and pretend the whole thing was just a crappy TV show I was better off forgetting.
Dreyfuss dropped the board, then popped it up again. “It’s something you saw in my office that’s got you spooked, isn’t it?”
“Duh.” What I’d meant to say was
no
. God damn it.
“There’s a good chance that anyone noncorporeal you see is just some poor schmoe I inherited from the old guard—”
“Jennifer Chance. Did you inherit her?” Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
“I knew it!” He flickered, and then he was right in front of me, young and thrashy and way too fucking smart. “I knew you could see Dr. Crazy-cakes.”
“You had her killed.”
“What I did—and believe me, I ran all kinds of scenarios—was determine that any jury that could possibly be assembled would take one look at her, with her blonde hair, easy smile and an M.D. after her name, then take one look at your surly self, with your history of drug use and mental illness, and let her go scot-free. And if she didn’t come back and find you, which was the predominant possibility, thanks to the trial you’d pop up on some other wacko’s radar and end up full of holes.”
What I’d always assumed was that Roger Burke and Jennifer Chance had been erased because they were hypothetical threats, loose can-nons with potentially FPMP-damaging ammo. Not because they were threats to me, specifically. And normally I would have assumed that Dreyfuss was just making it all up—because he was good at cooking up enough specific-sounding detail to make the things he said seem totally plausible—except that we were astral. And even for the most dishonest of us, every conversation in the astral was so painfully truthful it sounded like the inside of Carolyn’s head.
“If you’re so smart,” I said, “then tell me what you really think happened here.”
He dropped his skateboard again. I steeled myself for the clatter, but this time, it hit the floor with a gentle whumpf like he’d dropped a couch cushion instead, and it broke apart into hundreds of tiny, sparkling astral motes that flickered, then winked out. “Bert Chekotah.”
“But he got slimed, too.”
“I’m not saying he did it. I’m saying his insatiable pit of neediness was what set the vortex spinning.”
“You know this for a fact?”
He flickered, and reappeared right beside the couch where Faun Windsong was zonked out. “I know it in my heart. All those women…and he didn’t deserve any of ’em. Not even close. Chekotah had a dichotomy working for him that sucked in strong women like a gravi-tational pull. Here he was, a physical leader, a spiritual leader, strong and proud—and, of course, dreamier than Lou Diamond Phillips. And yet, at the same time, he was a wounded little boy who just wanted a great, big hug.” His voice was dripping with disgust. “That’s got more pull than an electromagnet for a powerful Psych chick. Especially a woman like her.” He gazed down at Faun sadly. “She wanted to gather him up in her arms, snuggle his darkness away and make it aaaall better.”