PsyCop: GhosTV Part 14

102.

I was glad it wasn't me prying the console out of its protective foam packing. It looked heavy.

"Do something with that crate," Jacob said, struggling to maneuver a TV set as big as him with nowhere to put it.

I slung the crate onto my bed, and hoped I hadn't just pulled a groin muscle.

"It was sideways in the box," Jacob said. "Is that how it's supposed to sit?"

"I doubt it. They're supposed to blend in with their surroundings."

"Then grab the top. I don't want to drop it when we're getting it into position."

I did what he said, and then immediately wished I'd placed my feet in a better stance. Lift with your legs, that's what they say, right? That's all fine and good-but how are you supposed to lower something? The set was at a thirty-degree angle. One false move and it'd crush me.

"Got it?" Jacob said. He didn't even sound like he was exerting effort.

"I'm at an awkward angle."

He huffed, bearing the weight with one arm so he could reposition his hand. His fingers appeared, wrapped around the edge of one of the console's feet a few inches away from my face. I experienced a surge of grat.i.tude for those big, strong hands. "How's that?" I planted my feet a bit better. "Can you pull the bottom back so it's got somewhere to swing down?"

He walked the set back carefully. "You sure you got it? We could switch."

Could we? Not unless I was able to walk through him. "Yeah, it's good. Let's do this."

Just when I thought I didn't have any left...me and my f.u.c.king pride.

103.

We should have switched, me steering, him bearing the weight. But no. I chose to be the one easing the behemoth to the floor-and while I had nothing to gauge its weight by, since it wasn't the size, shape or density of a human being, it had to be a few hundred pounds, minimum.

The console was at 4 o'clock, I had nowhere to back up, Jacob was grasping at wood trim, and my hands felt like someone was trying to tear them off with a big pair of pliers.

"Flex your knees," he told me. "Breathe."

I let my breath out in a loud gasp.

"Easy," he said. "Keep telling yourself, a couple more inches. That's it."

"I...can't."

"You got it, just a few more."

My hands burned, really burned-and my back and my knees and my arms and everything else on me was a blinding, red wall of pain. But I couldn't drop it-could not drop it-no matter what. I'd dreamt about it every time I faced the one-eyed headache I got from swallowing too much Auracel. The sickening meds I took just covered up the spirits, but the GhosTV did something else. What if it scrambled the signal?

What if it actually affected them instead of just making it so that I didn't need to see?

"Almost there," Jacob said. Calm. Velvety smooth.

Yes. I could do it. I'd set that monster TV down without dropping it.

A few more inches, for real this time. The floor was near. I could feel it. Almost there, just like Jacob said. Almost.

But then the console smashed my hand into the corner of the dresser...and pain? The pain I'd been in was nothing compared to the agony of my hand being crushed.

104.

The console slipped.

Blind panic. I could practically feel the delicate wiring tearing from its sockets, the tubes shattering-the GhosTV, dead before I'd even turned it on.

It took me a heartbeat to realize that the pressure on my hand had eased. Jacob's shoulder brushed my arm. He'd shifted around the console. He'd caught it. "Easy," he said. "All the way down." When the cabinet's feet touched down, I barely felt it over the throbbing in my knuckles. Jacob took my hand-so gently, for such a big hulk of a guy-and brought my skinned knuckles to his lips. "That's gonna swell."

I wiggled my fingers, one at a time. They moved. Probably not broken-just pulped. The knuckles looked white and gristly. Blood started to bead up from the sc.r.a.pes, belatedly, as if it had been too busy pounding through my panic centers to notice something as unexcep-tional as a friction wound.

Jacob turned to the console once it was apparent that my hand still worked. "How do you know if it's really...what you think it is?"

"There'll be stuff inside, controls that aren't original to the set." He crouched, and shone his pocket flashlight through the vents in the back of the cabinet. "When I was a kid, Uncle Leon and I took an old set apart to tinker with, so I might be able to spot anything unusual...

but from here it's hard to tell what's what."

I leaned over the console as well as I could without putting my weight on it. The back panel was screwed on. I tried tugging on the top of the cabinet. Nothing. Felt around the tube to see if it hinged out like the original GhosTV. Nope. It was in there pretty good. I slipped my hands underneath. Nothing strange there, either.

105.

Jacob straightened up, pocketed his flashlight, and said, "The original-was it plugged in?"

"Uh. It must've been."

Jacob held up the two-p.r.o.nged power cord and raised his eyebrows at me. I nodded. He plugged it in, looked to see if I was going to turn it on. When I made no move to do it, he flipped the switch.

Snow.

We watched my favorite channel for a minute, and then he said, "Is this how the other one-"

"No, there was a game on. But it was just a recording. It had a DVD player mounted inside the cabinet. And something else, a thing with a digital readout and some k.n.o.bs."

Jacob changed the channel. They were all snow. "Even if there was reception, we'd need an antenna and a digital converter." I didn't think reception was the point. At least, not the reception of TV broadcast.

He switched from UHF to VHF and looked at me expectantly. "Anything?" I didn't think so, but unless there was a ghost in the room, would I even know? The only evidence I'd had that the original GhosTV was doing anything at all was the fade-in, fade-out of the local spirit population. "It might work, it might not. But if this place has been cleaned out-even by mediums who don't think they need to rate their talent with numbers-we're never gonna know, because there's nothing to see."

"We could ask Dreyfuss..." Jacob began.

"I'm not asking him." Not until I had no other choice.

With my flashlight, I searched for telltale wear, excessive smudging, breaks in the patina, or other clues that might hint at a spot 106.

that'd been messed with, but other than the areas where Jacob and I had manhandled it out of the crate and searched it ourselves, there wasn't even so much as a fingerprint on it.

Jacob pulled his keys out of his pocket and unfolded a little Phillips-head screwdriver from the keyring. "Should I?" It'd be stupid to go this far and not go all the way. I nodded. Jacob turned off the set, unplugged it, and got to work on the screws in back.

"Bring your flashlight over here," he said as he tipped the back panel off. I wedged myself as close as I could, and we both shone our lights in.

The first thing I noticed was that the inside of the console was as squeaky clean as the outside. No dust, no cobwebs, no crud. Other than the pristine state of the old wires and electrical parts, there was nothing special about this TV set. I sat down hard on one of the beds as the strain of the day washed over me.

"On the St. Louis TV-how big were the extra parts?" Jacob asked.

"Pretty big." And pretty f.u.c.king obvious, too.

In a move worthy of a contortionist, Jacob pressed his ear to the floor so he could look underneath the cabinet. He straightened into a crouch, sighed-and then caught the look on my face, which I'm guessing was the look of a kid who just figured out that Santa's nothing more than a drunk in a red suit. "Don't jump to any conclusions.

Someone went through a lot of effort to ship this here."

"Did they? Or did they find it at a local swap meet and put it here to f.u.c.k with my head?"

"I'm sure Dreyfuss knows how it-"

"That a.s.shole next door scares the c.r.a.p out of me. Okay?"

107.

"Babe." He never calls me babe. He tried to reach for me, but there was a big, honkin' TV console in his way. "I think you're feeling the plane ride, and you're worn out and dehydrated." And jonesing for a Valium. He didn't say as much, but I'll bet we were both thinking it.

"This thing's got to work," he said. "And I'll bet there's some way we can use it, right here, right now." He crammed his way between the TV and the dresser until he squeezed through to the pocket of s.p.a.ce in front of the bathroom door. "You don't even need to ask him yourself. I'll do it."

"So he can start f.u.c.king with your head, too? No way."

"Then what do you want? Do you want to risk messing this thing up by turning the wrong k.n.o.b? Do you think you'll be able to sleep knowing that it's here, right here, and you haven't got any idea how to use it?" He turned his darkest, most forbidding laser-eyed look on me. "What about Lisa? Isn't she what really matters?"

"Oh, sonofa...." I stood up from the bed with the intention of giving the console a final once-over, when something in my low back that'd been irritated by the heavy lifting sent a spasm from my a.s.s cheek all the way down to the back of my knee. Before I could catch myself I pitched forward. In our loft, I would've ended up sprawled on the floor. But there's a little thing called "elbow room" in our loft. In that puny room crammed with beds and dressers and crates and furniture, I found myself hurtling straight for the old TV.

I tried to course-correct, as much as anyone can do that while they're falling. Maybe I'd end up splitting my head on the crate on the opposite bed, but at least heads can theoretically heal. Everything happened so fast, though, that all I really did was tilt a bit to one side.

I put a hand out, hoping to rappel off the side of the TV rather than land on it full-force, and my skinned knuckles rasped over something surprisingly rough. I bounced off the cabinet, smacked the empty crate, and hit the floor with my shoulder. The snow channel cut out 108.

as the power cord popped from the wall socket. The crate lid fell on top of me.

"Stay still," Jacob said. He pulled the lid off me-which, since it was lined with that spongy egg-carton foam, hadn't hurt anything but that dumb pride of mine. "Are you all right? What happened?" I chose to answer the least embarra.s.sing of those two questions.

"I'm fine." My hand had landed in something wet. And red. The knuckles looked like hamburger.

"You're bleeding."

"Only my hand." I pushed myself up off the floor and cast around for whatever had just flayed me. A brown fabric panel lay half-under the bed. The sparkly fibers weren't as visible on the back side of the fabric, though tiny pinp.r.i.c.k glints showed through enough for me to recognize the speaker cover, and its sandpaper-like synthetic fabric, face down on the floor. Great. Now I probably had microscopic traces of fibergla.s.s coursing through my veins.

Leave it to me to be laid low by a piece of material.

I snagged the corner of the cover and pulled it out from under the bed. Hopefully nothing was broken, and it'd just pop right back on, no harm, no foul. The framework beneath the fabric felt like it was still in one piece. I knee-walked to the console, hoping I hadn't broken off whatever tabs or grooves held the cover in place, when something inside the speaker well caught my eye.

It was shadowy in the recess of the cabinetry, but then I spotted it, something that wasn't original to the set, protruding from the shadows-a thread-fringed corner of duct tape.

109.

Chapter 13.

"You're really bleeding. We need to wrap that up."

"Jacob." A juvenile fear of "jinxing" myself stole over me, and I couldn't even bring myself to say, thisisit. "Give me your flashlight." Jacob handed it over and I shone the beam into the speaker well. A device was taped to the side-four dials. No LCD readout like the TV in Missouri. No instruction manual, either. But I knew, with a cold certainty, this was the real deal.

Carefully, Jacob climbed over a bed, rounded the TV, and crouched so he could peer over my shoulder. He admired the machinery for a long moment, then said, "How do you work it?"

I didn't know.

Jacob said, "I'm getting Dreyfuss."

That was about as close as he'd come to asking my permission. I didn't like it-but I didn't stop him, either. He ducked into the bathroom and crammed himself back into the room with Dreyfuss two minutes later. "What's on tonight's lineup?" Con said. "I don't suppose this thing gets HBO."

"How do you work it?" I said.

He stepped over the corner of the bed and into the gap between the beds and the GhosTV with me, but thankfully he'd managed not to touch me. "Plug it in, for starters."

110.

Jacob plugged it back into the outlet he'd used before. "Okay."

"Okay," Dreyfuss echoed.

"Now what?" I said.

He looked at me with raised eyebrows. "Are you s.h.i.tting me? I thought you knew."

"This is not the time to get cute."

He held his hands up beside his head in mock surrender. "Cross my heart, we all figured you'd snuck a peek at Roger Burke manning the helm and you picked up a few pointers."

"Maybe you should've thought it through better than that before you had him killed."

The tube crackling inside the TV console was conspicuously loud over the sudden silence of the three of us holding our breath.

"Sounds like you've got your mind made up, but I promise you this, Detective. You might think you know everything. But you don't." Funny. I'd expected Dreyfuss to deny the FPMP's part in killing Burke.

Did he realize I knew about them offing Dr. Chance, too?