Chapter 38

The cold outside felt different from the ghostly chill that came down when we channeled. More physical, somehow. Or maybe just more natural. We ditched the car in a tow zone as close as we could get to the rail yard, then power-walked the rest of the way. And with every step, I tried to suck down more white light.

Portions of the massive rail yard were at street level, but great spans of track stretched under the city streets. Snow was coming down in tight pellets, and the train track sound of metal wailing against metal filled the air. Even though we were still within visual range of our normal haunts, being one story down shifted my entire perspective. It always surprised me to glimpse the vast underpinnings of Chicago and see the cogs in motion that ran the great machine.

With each stride, my hand throbbed, but nothing I couldn’t ignore. It was an awkward cut, but not deep enough for stitches, not if I managed to keep from flexing my fingers every time it started to clot. We’d wrapped it tight enough to hopefully remind me to stop clenching my fist. Though given my level of frustration, I’d probably end up doing it anyway.

I strode up to the edge of the first track, then stopped to get my bearings. Jacob caught up to me, then Darla. She said, “It’s a heck of a lot bigger than I thought it would be.” She closed her eyes and held out her arms, in that way she does when she’s trying to pick up a ghost signal. After a moment, she said, “Loud, too. Like, really loud.”

Her ghost hearing didn’t operate through her physical ears. Even so, the ambient noise was bound to be confusing, in the same way that glares and shadows made it harder for my psychic sense to see.

White light. Maybe I could only hold so much, and the extra just spilled over the top. But that didn’t stop me from trying to cram in just a little bit more. I drew it down and scanned the area, but it felt too bright, too big. Darla was searching too, but she wasn’t doing any better than me. Too loud. We stood there a long moment, both of us desperately searching and neither of us finding. And then Jacob posed the question, “If I were to lure a federal agent out here to shoot him, where’s my best chance of not being caught?”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw a busy parking garage in direct line of sight. “Not here. Too exposed.” I set aside my psychic ability and thought with my common sense. “But those viaducts, under there? Perfect spot.”

I jogged toward the overpass, pumped up on white light and anxiety and that special kind of elation that comes from understanding precisely how somebody died. Right off the bat, I could see it was one of those blind niches where people could duck away from the prying eyes of society and get up to no good. The concrete walls were thick with graffiti and the ground crunched with discarded crack vials. Trash had drifted up against the far wall—fast food wrappers and broken bottles and half a naked plastic doll. There’d been a light in the ceiling, once. But it had been shot out long ago.

I closed my eyes and drank in white light. Beside me, Darla did something similar. I opened my eyes. Without psyactives, without a GhosTV, I couldn’t sense the nonphysical to the point where I saw Jacob’s talent manifest as a webwork of red veins, but I knew the look on his face when he was doing his thing well enough to recognize it by now.

All three of us were charged up and searching. But it took a passing freight car blocking the sun for me to catch a glimpse of what I’d come there to see: that ugly pirouette of death.

“There.” I pointed. The train car rolled away as the switchers did their work, and I lost it. “We need to block the light.”

Jacob made a call to try and arrange something a bit more permanent. I found myself wishing Laura Kim was still at her post as The Fixer, but at least Patrick was overachieving enough to be at the office on a weekend. Good thing. I’d have no idea who to contact, but hopefully he’d be able to figure out how to get the railroad cars moved. Darla called him to make the arrangements, and while we waited for that to happen, Jacob attempted to block the light with his overcoat while Darla and I focused all our attention on the spot I’d seen the repeater.

“There’s so much interference,” she said.

And she had to be running on fumes. I didn’t say as much, but every time I caught a look at her peeling lips, I couldn’t help but feel vicariously exhausted. “Let me see your hand,” I told her.

She pulled off her glove and held it out, palm up.

Tentatively, I placed my fingertips in the center of her palm. If it were Jacob and me, brimming with mojo and adrenaline, there would’ve been a spark big enough to practically spill into the physical. But me and Darla? Nothing. “Jacob?” I said. “C’mere a sec. See if you can push some light.”

Jacob does a lot of prep to work with psychic energies. I’m not sure he technically needs to—I’ve seen how fast he can block a speeding ghost—but if he had too much time to consider how to go about it, he was sure to overthink everything. He shook out his hands and planted his feet as if he was going to attempt an overhead press. I yanked off my other glove with my teeth, held it there, and grabbed him with my free hand before he had a chance to convince himself he didn’t know what he was doing.

It was like a power surge. A minor one. The type where your lights brighten for a moment, just before they flicker, and then all your electronics start blinking twelve. It wasn’t quite as showy as a lot of the psychic connections we’ve shared—but the amazing part was that Darla felt it too, through me. She gasped, looked at Jacob with new admiration and grabbed his other hand.

It felt like she’d completed a circuit. It wasn’t power that welled through us, so much as a sense of stability. The physical world still looked like it always did, though when Darla turned her head to seek out the place of Andy’s death, her physical body left a faint tracer behind. “I hear the gunshot,” she said.

And me? When I looked very hard, I saw the briefest flicker of Andy taking that bullet.

It was only a repeater. It couldn’t tell us any more about the incident than the unhelpful long-distance ghost of Andy already had. But it did give us a good idea of where the shooter was standing.

There was no shell casing. I’d be surprised if there had been, given the effort the shooter went through to retrieve the slug. Unless we were in the market for used condoms and dirty needles, there really wasn’t anything to be found on the ground. Nothing that we’d spot without a bank of lights and a forensics team, at least.

I’d been so sure the murder scene would give us something we could use. Damn it. I dropped everyone’s hands and put my gloves back on. “Anything?” Jacob asked me.

“Nothing we don’t already know.”

He pulled out his penlight and scoured the area. “There’s snow on the ground. Maybe we can find boot tracks, tire tracks….”

Given the popularity of the hidey-hole with the local crackhead population, I wouldn’t bank on it.

“Guys,” Darla called over the noise of the rail yard, “I’m freezing and I need to sit down.”

She looked like she’d been through the wringer—not just her physical body, I suspected, but her subtle bodies, too. “Go. Warm up.” Jacob handed her his keys. “Vic and I will do a quick sweep, then get you back to your room.”

Darla crunched off through the crusty refrozen snow toward the car. “Anything in particular you want me to look for?” I asked.

“How is it we can’t figure this out?” he said between the squeals of switching train cars.

“We’ve got a location,” I said. “That’s got to be worth something. There’ll be security footage…somewhere.” Though, again, given the vigorous drug trade, nowhere that close.

Jacob made a looping motion with his hand. “Once around, then we go look for video.”

We split up. He headed off toward the switching station while I went the opposite direction. My light level was still high, but not high enough to see glowing blood spatter. Maybe with a generator and the GhosTV, I could figure out how the shooter managed to drag away Andy’s body and feed it through the mulcher. Unfortunately, given the number of spent hypodermics on the ground, Andy probably wasn’t the only one who’d bled in that sorry little alcove. My talent was wasted, but I still had to try. 

Even though I was pretty sure there was nothing for me to find, I did a final sweep of the scene, placing my feet carefully so as not to step on any potential evidence. Other than Andy’s repeater, there was nothing noncorporeal…hopefully. 

Unless this was the sort of place habit-demons spawned. 

I sucked down more white light.

My phone couldn’t have picked up much charge in the brief time it was in the car, but maybe there’d be enough juice to snap a few pictures to look at later, while I wasn’t freezing my ass off and worrying about blobs attaching themselves to my person. I scowled the lockscreen open…and, wow, I hadn’t realized messages would accumulate like that on the home page. And also that I didn’t quite catch how Darla had toggled off the ringer. Darla and Jodi had all been vying for my scattered attention since the last time I’d checked. But the most recent message was from Patrick, just a few minutes old, and the caption beside it read URGENT.

I swiped the message to read it. I was given the choice to archive or delete, and then it disappeared. “Damn it,” I snapped. “What did Patrick want?”

“Calling Patrick,” my phone said.

I knew damn well that any issues I had with the phone were caused by operator error. Even so, it was still annoying that it managed to understand me well enough over the squeal and screech of the train cars, but couldn’t figure out that I might want to actually see the urgent message before it recycled the pixels. And it wouldn’t do me any good to call Patrick, either. Not unless I found someplace to talk where we could hear each other.

I was attempting to hang up without leaving a cryptic voicemail—fat chance—when, through a gap in the rail yard noise, I heard a ringtone. Just a couple of notes, and then something very big and very hydraulic let out an industrial gasp that buried the rest. I might not be able to name that tune, but I did get a sense of where it was coming from. Less than a dozen yards away, a rusted out boxcar stood with its door jimmied open. A guy was looking at me from the gap. Patrick. We locked eyes and he brightened, and motioned for me to join him.

O…kay.

I crunched across the ground at a light jog, as I wondered how moronic I’d look if I asked him how to hang up. But, hey, if you can’t be inept around your friends, what good are they? I heaved myself up into the car with him, and blinked away the cold winter glare while I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. The outside noise receded. “What possessed you to come down here in person?” I asked. “It’s got to be a heck of a lot easier to run the show from the command center. Did you lock yourself out of something important?”

“Didn’t you get my text?” he said.

“I, uh…no.”

“Found what you were looking for.” He held up a few stapled sheets of paper. “Your old teacher—Jane Maxwell.”

“Oh. Great.” I tried to sound enthused, but sadly, my internal task prioritizer was fixated on a more important and urgent matter. “Thanks—I owe you a drink.” 

I made a grab for the papers, and he yoinked them away.

“Not a good time to dick around,” I said. “We’ve got to track down Andy’s killer before FPMP National steps in.” 

“So you seriously haven’t checked your messages?”

I rolled my eyes. “I let the battery run down and then things got crazy.”

“Then you’re in for a pleasant surprise. You’re a lot closer to cracking this thing than you think.”

“Oh, really? How would you…know…?”

It dawned on me that the awkwardness I’d been feeling around Patrick all this time hadn’t actually originated in me, but in him. And that being a True Stiff didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t a psychopath.

And that his job at The Clinic would be the perfect place for him to keep tabs on every powerful psychic in the city. So he could remove them from the game board if need be.

And that he’d positioned himself between me and the only exit.

And that he was holding a Beretta.

Probably a much better shot than he’d let on, back at the range. But even if he wasn’t, at a dozen paces, there was no possible way he’d miss.