Chapter 24 #2
There it is again. That tiny glimpse of humor buried under all that seriousness. It makes me feel like I’m levitating a foot off the ground, which is frustrating because I’m supposed to be done caring about what he thinks about me.
But he made me earplugs.
“I know you said you didn’t want to dull anything.” His voice drops, and there’s something in his eyes that makes my pulse kick up. “But I wanted you to have the option. I won’t be there today if anything goes wrong.”
“Why are you doing this?” The question slips out. “I didn’t think you cared whether I lived or died.”
He goes still. “Obviously, I care whether you die.”
“It actually isn’t obvious, since you’ve been trying so hard to get rid of me,” I say.
He braces a hand on the door of his locker. I watch him struggle with something, his face scrunching before he drops his head. It feels like he’s considering telling me, even though he’s not saying anything else. So I keep pushing.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “I thought we got along when we first met.”
“Was that before or after you punched me in the face?” he asks.
“During.”
“It has nothing to do with you,” he admits, turning away from me. “It’s a problem with me. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
Before I can figure out what the hell he means, DJ bounces into the room.
Zoey adds everyone’s phone number to my phone: Daisy Jane Mayfield, Griffin Rourke, Benjamin Ashford, Donald Dellman, Zoey Mercado, and just Nico. Still no last name.
I read Donny’s number until I can recite it from memory. Knowing it by heart feels important in case we get separated from our phones.
Nico will take the van with Benji, Donny will go with DJ in her Jeep, and I’ll be riding with Griffin in his truck. As well as taking fewer suspects, Griffin and I are taking the ones Zoey deemed least likely to be Morrow.
Donny runs his eyes over all of us as we huddle in the driveway. “Questions?”
“If we find the man, what do we do?” I ask.
“Call for backup,” Nico says. The uniform we’re all wearing makes me look like a kid playing dress up, but he looks so professional and capable that I can barely remember how to string words together looking at him. “Under no circumstances do you engage alone.”
“And if backup doesn’t arrive in time?” I ask.
“Run,” he tells me, and I swallow hard to get down the lump in my throat. “Your lives matter more than catching him today.”
Griffin plays the Grease soundtrack on the ride to Pittsburgh, and we sing along.
When he switches to country, I groan but end up knowing more Toby Keith than I expected.
Between songs, Griffin tells me about Montana, about mountains that make Pennsylvania look flat, and about his four younger sisters who still live there and send him care packages with homemade elk jerky that he swears is better than anything you can buy.
“Do they know you hunt ghosts for a living?” I ask during a lull between songs.
“Nah,” he says. “They think I’m with a private investigation company. I tell them it’s mostly paperwork and surveillance, which isn’t totally wrong—we do a lot of both.”
The singing dies out as we hit Pittsburgh, giving way to the kind of silence that presses down like a physical thing. I stare out of the window at the gray buildings sliding past, my hands twisting together in my lap as I mentally prepare to talk to the first man on our list: Michael Jensen.
Michael Jensen turns out to be the human embodiment of a country song so sad it makes you want to kill yourself. He’s recently divorced, lives alone in a house filled with boxes his ex-wife still hasn’t picked up, and is nursing what I’m pretty sure is a mild hangover, but nothing more sinister.
Wearing earplugs is more disorienting than I thought.
Every word sounds like it’s coming through three feet of cotton, and I find myself inching forward, squinting as if that’ll somehow help my ears work better.
I completely miss the first question Jensen asks, and Griffin has to cover for me with some comment about me being new.
I hate that these plugs are cutting me off from the one thing I’m actually good at, but walking into situations without any protection or understanding of my ability is how I ended up feeling someone else’s teeth getting ripped out.
“No energy came up on the readings,” Griffin says, climbing back into the truck. I yank the plugs out of my ears, and his voice goes back to full volume: “Jensen’s not our guy.”
I rub my ears and motion to the scanner jammed into the cup holder between us. “Why can’t we just hold that up to someone from the doorway?”
“We wouldn’t risk going into these people’s homes unless it was necessary.
” He backs out of the driveway while bracing a hand on the back of my seat.
“The scanner won’t get a reading unless it’s very close to whatever surface the energy’s clinging to.
It’s better to make direct contact for an accurate reading.
It’s like trying to smell if milk’s gone bad.
You can’t tell from across the kitchen. Gotta get your nose right up in there. ”
“Thank you for that mental image.”
“Just trying to give you a clear picture,” he says.
“Human bodies are good at hiding ghosts. Something about the organic matter insulating the energy. Makes it hard for the scanners to detect unless we shove the sensor into their mouth or something—which is hard to explain away under the guise of checking for mold.”
The next man on our list is equally sad. We visit a gambling addict who won’t stop talking about his system for beating the slots, a guy on medical leave for a back injury who’s clearly abusing his pain meds, and a man who looks like he hasn’t eaten or slept since his wife died two months ago.
For lunch, we grab burritos, and I shovel mine into my mouth so fast I barely taste it.
Number five on our list is Edward Mathis. Thirty-nine. A taxi driver whose neighbors called police three times in the past two weeks reporting loud banging noises coming from his apartment.
“Says here he just got fired from his job after he stopped showing up,” Griffin says as we pull up to a run-down apartment complex. “He lives alone. Is single. Matches the profile.”
I’m unable to resist. “So do all the people on the list. Them matching the profile is why they’re on the list.”
Griffin gives me the finger.
“Just making sure you’re paying attention,” I joke.