PsyCop: GhosTV Part 33

Karen Frugali's story, once we put it all together, was rough for me to contemplate-because it seemed that while she and I'd had different timing and different circ.u.mstances, some parts of our history ran uncomfortably parallel to one another. She'd been a waitress in Kentucky who married her high school sweetheart and tried for nearly nine years to have a kid. When she finally did, one day she found the baby boy in its crib, motionless and blue.

The students and teachers who'd known her all described her personality in general as being extreme-and apparently she'd been as extreme in her grief over her son's sudden death as she was about every other aspect of her life. So extreme that not only did her husband file for divorce once he'd checked her into the psychiatric ward of the local hospital for observation, but extreme enough to trigger her latent psychic talent: astral projection. She spent her days shuffling from counselor to counselor, and her nights wandering in search of the spirit of her baby boy.

In this day and age, I would've thought the medical profession wouldn't be so quick to lock someone up in the nuthouse-then again, I've seen what pa.s.ses for a modern Psych testing kit, so maybe I shouldn't be so shocked. Karen was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, evidenced by elaborate fantasies of grandeur and exacer-bated by the tragic loss of a child. And since she came from a "good" family where people didn't talk about things like mental illness, she was mortified.

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Although her only resource consisted of half an hour of recreational computer time per day, Karen used that time to research astral projection, lucid dreaming and remote viewing online, until she was able to not only think clearly enough during her OBEs to stop aimlessly searching for her son, but also to remember the projections clearly when she woke back up.

Once she'd mastered projecting, a graphic description she provided of the chief psychiatrist listening to Mozart and conducting an imagi-nary orchestra with an emery board-all while he took a lengthy and explosive c.r.a.p-was enough to merit a new volley of Psych screening, and then, a reversal of the schizophrenia diagnosis.

Which wasn't to say Karen Frugali was emotionally healthy. Just that she really could travel without her body holding her back, and then remember what she'd seen.

She'd been the first one to disappear. Everyone else who vanished after she did was part of the Bert Chekotah Fan Club-including the star of the show, Chekotah himself. Circ.u.mstances pointed to Faun Windsong flying into a jealous rage, eliminating her compet.i.tion, then finishing off her straying man as the icing on the cake. Except...that didn't jibe with her genuine distress, and the whole "No TV" writing marathon I'd caught the tail end of.

"Our best bet," Jacob said, "is to try and see if Karen might be able to help us out. Find her spirit. Talk to it. Figure out where her body is, and maybe...." he looked away without finishing that thought. Maybe we'd find the others. Debbie. Lisa.

Although, that didn't seem quite right, either. Maybe Karen had been butchered, but Chekotah had simply disappeared...or dissolved. There were piles of clothes in Debbie's and Lisa's rooms, too. Hard to say if they'd been full of ectoplasm at any point or not. But they might have been.

I walked the halls and grounds for hours searching for a glimpse 295.

of Karen Frugali's ghost, but no dice. Dreyfuss pulled everything he could find on Karen, from her high school transcripts to her Mys.p.a.ce page to her dental records. Jacob interviewed students, instructors, janitors, guards. The sun set, and PsyTrain residents ate their dinner-which I skipped, as I was still packed with burritos-although, disturbingly enough, it was tempting to try to cram a little more in.

It neared midnight-I no longer bothered converting things to "my time" since I'd been so sore, exhausted and sleep-deprived since I'd arrived that my subjective time seemed irrelevant-and I took a quick shower and fell into bed. Jacob was busy jabbing keys on his laptop and scowling at it. "Come to bed," I told him. "Maybe sleeping on it will help."

"In a minute."

He sounded snippy. Since there was no arguing with him even on the best of days, I rolled over and faced the wall, and ignored that little itch in my throat that told me a Valium would be really, really nice, or maybe an Auracel. Deadening my Psych sensitivity for the sake of the floaty feeling the Auracel would give me was no kind of option, plus I'd sacrificed my Valium to Faun. Enough Mexican food had moved along that my stomach didn't hurt quite as much, that was a bonus. I focused on that, and on my breathing, and how good it felt to finally lie down and rest my eyes.

That seemed to do the trick, relaxing and breathing, because my aches and pains fell away, and eventually I realized I felt pretty d.a.m.n good. I gave a stretch and prodded something with my hand, something that resisted, and then gave.

I opened my eyes. My hand was inside the wall.

I sat up. Jacob was down on one knee in front of the GhosTV, frown-ing at his notes. He tweaked one of the dials, and my head started to buzz a little bit. He checked his watch and jotted down a few more 296.

notes, while I rolled my astral eyes. I had nothing against testing the d.a.m.n GhosTV, but it would have been nice of him to consult me first.

I'd be hungry as h.e.l.l come morning, but I supposed I should be grate-ful for the opportunity to carry on with the investigation even in my sleep-plus, there was always the chance I'd get someone to really open up and tell me all the things their internal censors wouldn't let them say while they were physical, the way Jacob had admitted he was worried I wasn't attracted to him while he was pounding my astral a.s.s. I attempted to float out into the hall, and found that I didn't need to. I was just there. I took a good look around. Yep. It looked like the hall. Pretty spiffy. I dropped through the floor toward Karen's and Lisa's rooms. The ball-pit sensation was fleeting. I found myself downstairs in a split second. The hall looked the same-but the people in it...those were new.

I recognized both of them from Faun Windsong's astral projection cla.s.s. A middle-aged woman who'd had a bad perm in real life was standing by the elevators with her eyes closed, groping along the wall. She had astral hair like Lady G.o.diva, long and blonde, hanging down to her thighs in heavy, luxurious waves. Thankfully, unlike Lady G.o.diva, she wasn't naked. And the Asian guy who'd asked the insuf-ferable question about the silver cord-he was floating by the ceiling like a big, guy-shaped helium balloon, and he was dressed like the Matrix. "Hey, Leather Boy," I called. "You're astral."

"Am I out?" he said. He floundered and bobbed against the ceiling.

"I feel like I'm out."

"You're astral. C'mere a minute. I want to ask you a few questions." He floundered some more, elbowed the ceiling, then floated in a slow rotation until his back was to me and his nose was against the textured stucco. His long, black duster didn't look particularly cool dangling like that as he struggled to control his astral body. "Am I out? My head is buzzing. What do I do?"

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I sighed, left him to find his footing, and went to chat with perm-lady instead. "Hey...you're astral," I told her.

"Maybe I'm dreaming. It feels the same."

Did it? Not to me. Dreaming had weird time-lurches and jumps of logic in it, and people who were really composites of two other people, and usually I was naked but I only realized it at the most embarra.s.sing time. At the moment, I was still in my jeans, my black high-tops and my favorite T-shirt. "Nope, you're not dreaming. Definitely astral."

"It's so hard to see."

"Your eyes are closed."

"But if I open them, I'll wake up. I've been trying to do this all year and I can't screw it up now-I don't want to wake up." Given the range of the GhosTV and the frequency it was playing at, I was guessing she'd be pretty safe opening her eyes. "You won't know 'til you try. Give it a shot."

"I can't. I'll wake up."

"I promise," I said-which was a lie, since for all I knew she really would snap awake if she opened her eyes, "you're totally astral and you won't wake up."

She groped the wall some more, then ran her hands down the front of her body, through the silver cord that snaked out of her solar plexus, then back up where she touched her own face. I waited expectantly for her to open her eyes, but instead she found the wall again and started working her way away from me. "Where're you going?"

"I don't want to wake up."

Behind me, the Asian guy said, "Am I out?"

I sighed. Astral witnesses were nowhere near as helpful as I thought they would be.

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Jacob had been so rational while he was astral. Weirdly vulnerable, and he didn't remember a lick of it after he woke up, but still rational. And Faun Windsong-she'd made plenty of sense, too. Faun had experience, while Jacob had proximity to the GhosTV, and, it would seem, a pretty highly developed talent. Not light worker talent...but maybe the type of talent didn't matter. Just the strength. He'd be pretty stoked to hear that theory, though I'd probably need to think of a better name than "the red veiny talent."

I thought about Jacob, and found myself back in our room. My physical body was in bed with its face to the wall. Jacob was sitting at the piled-high desk, stroking his beard and staring at the GhosTV. He looked tired-but he also looked stubborn enough to stay up all night, if that was what it took.

So I couldn't expect him to go astral anytime soon, but Jacob wasn't the one I needed to talk to, anyway. He didn't know any more about the case than I knew. Faun Windsong, though...maybe she hadn't been entirely truthful with me after Chekotah dissolved. Or maybe she remembered something that was so horrible her conscious mind blocked it out, but her astral body would be able to fill me in on the details. Either way, I figured she'd be my best bet.

I thought about the Quiet Room where I'd last seen her swaddled in an afghan, felt a sense of rapid motion, and then, there I was. The lights were low, but it was the Quiet Room all right, all recliners and bland artwork and philodendrons. Faun was still bundled up on the couch, zonked out with her burnt hand wrapped in gauze sticking out from a fold in the afghan, but there was someone else with her now-a guy sitting in one of the recliners with his upper body leaning forward and his hands clasped between his knees, watching her anxiously.

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 299.

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 300.

know I'm astral. You think I can't tell when I'm astral? Newsflash-I'm in charge of the whole f.u.c.king Midwest. Including you." Oh. My. G.o.d.

"So I think I'm quick enough to figure out I'm having a projection." h.e.l.lo, Constantine Dreyfuss.

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Chapter 34.

I tried not to look too surprised to see him, and especially, not to let on that he looked a whole h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.t you shovel."

"I never thought you were stupid. Ever." Where had that come from?

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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 d.a.m.n 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 G.o.d, when was I going to shut up? Meeting a dead medium in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Camp h.e.l.l was my secret-mine-and Dreyfuss was the last guy I wanted to share it with. And he was watching me now with 303.

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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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, "f.u.c.k 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 ba.s.s 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."

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"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 d.a.m.n 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? s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, 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 d.a.m.n 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.

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"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 s.h.i.ts and f.u.c.ks and sleeps, too. The things about you that're even marginally interesting, no one else can see. So get over yourself."