Chapter Nine
ALTHOUGH I THOUGHT the sheer volume of cheese I’d eaten could surely fuel me for the rest of my days and I’d never need to eat again, by the next morning I was scarfing down my usual breakfast burrito like the day before had never happened.
I was playing Russian roulette with the coffee grounds at the bottom of my cup when the call came in.
So. Noah Boswell knew how to use a phone after all.
When I picked up, he said, “I’ve been thinking.” Oh, I was sure he had. “You’re probably not gonna have much luck getting my security deposit returned. The scorch mark on the bathroom ceiling was pretty obvious, and even when I tried to paint it over, it just bled back through.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But there is something you can help me with that’ll save me a lot more grief than dealing with that ridiculous management company.”
“And that would be?”
“Can’t tell you on the phone.” He lowered his voice. “I’ll have to show you.”
I thought Jacob would jump at the chance at another day in the field, so I was surprised when he said, “You don’t really need me for your followup, do you?”
Not exactly. The only potentially harmful thing about Boswell was the possibility of catching shrapnel from one of his pee bottles—and, frankly, all of Jacob’s “helpful” suggestions when I was scoping out the apartment were more of a distraction.
Still…Carl would’ve never volunteered to stay behind.
“Okay, mister. I see right through you. What’s more interesting at HQ than a crazy guy in a van?”
Jacob had the grace to look marginally chagrinned. “Bethany is supposed to record a baseline with the SPECs today….”
Now it all made sense. Jacob wasn’t auditioning Evelyn for BFFs. He wanted a chance to play with those glasses—and not because he had to read fine-print at arm’s length nowadays, either. “You know that if they ever do put that tech into production, they’ll never issue a pair to a certified NP.”
“I know,” he said patiently.
And we both knew that didn’t much matter when his husband would be one of the first to get his hands on the technology.
“Fine,” I said, “go drool over the glasses. I’ve got a nutcase to crack.”
The location where Boswell had summoned me was outside a nondescript block of office buildings, with accountants on either end and a bunch of “for lease” signs in between.
One of the vacant offices had an old cedar planter out front with a few sun-faded plastic daisies poking up from the gathered litter, and Boswell was perched on the edge, sipping a two-liter bottle of Blast that seemed dwarfed by his huge hands.
What a relief he was too paranoid to invite me into the van. I crossed my arms and scowled down at him. “Well?”
“Don’t look,” he said, “but the guy at the bus stop on the corner is a plant.”
It took a lot of effort to stop myself from checking to see if he meant an agent in disguise or a literal philodendron. And then I reminded myself that I would’ve sounded the same if I tried to explain about Officer “Andy” trailing me through the Fifth.
Boswell patted the rough cedar plank, and I sat myself down beside him. Like a dealer handing off a score, he slid me an envelope. But there was no Seconal inside. Only Polaroids.
Casually, I flipped through. All the shots were of different people sitting at the bus stop. A high school kid. An elderly man with a cane. A woman in a babushka with a half dozen shopping bags.
I shuffled through the stack again, looking for someone in the background I hadn’t noticed before. But, no. There were just random people at various times of day sitting on the bench.
“What am I looking at here?” I asked, doing my best not to steer his response one way or the other.
“You mean to tell me you can’t recognize one of your own?”
I fanned the photos like a hand of cards. Our tradecraft department may be good, but it can’t turn a gangly teenager into a little round grandma. “You think the FPMP is using its resources to spy on you…when I’m right here, knocking on your window and asking you questions point-blank?”
“I’ve considered that. But maybe the best way to keep someone off-balance is to pretend you’re being transparent.
One division says, ‘Don’t worry, we’re just doing research,’ while the other one’s digging through my trash looking for biometrics.
And maybe you think you’re just here to ask questions—but what if the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, and someone else is watching you? ”
People were watching me. I just let them think I was on their side, when in truth, it was Jacob and me against the world.
But I wasn’t about to share that with Boswell.
“If there’s a secret shadow team tracking me, they’re gonna be real disappointed by how often I stare at the wall trying to remember what I walked into the room for. ”
Boswell jutted his chin toward the bus stop.
“Go ahead, be a smartass if it lets you sleep at night. I know the score. I can tell when someone’s watching.
It’s in the microvibrations—the way the hairs on your arms stand up when someone locks onto you.
That’s real. That’s tangible. Like the metallic taste you get on the back of your tongue when you’re being microwaved. ”
You can pry my microwave out of my cold, dead, popcorn-dusted hands. He almost had me going for a second there, because I did know that creeping feeling. But more often than not, it turned out I was standing next to a ventilation duct.
I handed Boswell back his Polaroids. “Look, I’m not gonna sit here and play Spy vs. Spy for the sake of your entertainment. Give me something useful about the apartment, or we’re done here.”
“Between the asbestos and the off-gassing, that whole place was a deathtrap. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a ghost or two in every unit.”
“By that logic, we’d be ass-deep in ghosts pretty much everywhere.” Never mind that on a powerful enough psyactive, that did turn out to be the case. “When most people die, they move along.”
“Is that what your handlers tell you?” He gave me a smug, pitying head shake. “Why even pretend you’re here to help? You’re just another cog in the machine.”
I didn’t stop Boswell when he lumbered back to his van and drove off. Part of me was confident he was nothing but a crackpot. The ghost “watching” him in the bedroom was just another version of the spy at the bus stop.
The Addison bus passed by, picking up our spy and depositing a couple of passengers who immediately headed off to their respective destinations. Because they knew I was watching them, or…?
No. I was not about to start seeing spies everywhere.
All that surveillance just wasn’t in the budget. Not if there was nothing here to watch.
Although…cameras ran pretty cheap. Especially if you bought them in bulk.
I could ask our surveillance team if that particular bench was on the roster, but if they told me it wasn’t, would I believe them? Besides, I’m sure F-Pimp wasn’t the only government agency keeping an eye on John Q Public.
It’s hard to know what to think anymore.
As much as I didn’t put stock in the ravings of a guy who thought his urine was of corporate interest, I couldn’t definitively say he wasn’t psychic.
Maybe even some flavor of psychic we didn’t have a name for.
One who was tuned into electronics and could sense an anomaly through thin air.
I wouldn’t know until I checked.
I jogged across the street during a break in traffic to take a closer look for a device as benign as a traffic cam…
or something a little more insidious. An outdoor bug would need protection from the weather.
And it would need a clear line of sight to the planter where Boswell felt he was being watched.
I winced as I encountered an old wad of chewing gum underneath the bench…but was it really gum? It would be the perfect place to hide a camera.
Cripes. Now I was the one who sounded paranoid.
I supposed I should just write up a report as a false hit and let Boswell fall off the FPMP’s radar. He might be a kook, but he wasn’t violent. And if he was no harm to himself or others, he was free to live his life however he saw fit.
I sat myself down and squinted at the planter where we’d been sitting, and tried to figure out if there was anything nearby worth spying on.
A PI might be watching one of the apartments upstairs, or an insurance company could be conducting a surveillance in hopes of denying someone’s claim.
But without a workup on the property detailing everyone who lived or worked there, I couldn’t know.
Was it really worth all the effort just to satisfy my curiosity?
It’s not like we had a dead body on our hands.
Just a guy with a van full of pee. I sat back and sighed, wondering if it was possible for Mood Blaster to retrain me from treating everything like a homicide investigation…
and that’s when something in my peripheral vision shifted, and a subtle chill raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
I looked. Not square on. Just putting more attention around the edges. That’s when I saw I wasn’t the only one sitting on that bench.
White light came rushing down. I diverted it into two paths—my inner eye, to gauge the threat, and my protective white balloon, to stop any potential trespassers from slipping into my skin.
I didn’t do these things consciously, not anymore.
They were a reflex now, like sniffing the creamer before I ruined a perfectly adequate cup of coffee.
Beside me, the ghost flickered, but didn’t move.
I gave him the side-eye, scoping him out to determine my best course of action. Informative—you’re dead. Helpful—yeah, I’ll make sure your wife gets that insurance money. Or, tough love—time to move along.
And then I spotted the needle in his arm and realized he wasn’t a full-fledged ghost at all. Just a flash of trapped energy…a repeater, with his dying gaze fixed on the very spot where Boswell felt he was being watched.