The inbetween, p.24
The InBetween, page 24
part #1 of Painter Mann Series
“He’s not going to kill a congressman.”
“Why not?”
“Too many people around. Wait a minute, look!”
We both tensed as Jorgensen strode up to the food truck as one of the homeless walked away with the night’s dinner. Lee looked up, wiping his hands on his apron, as this new customer approached. From this distance, we couldn’t hear their words, but what started as a practiced smile from Lee changed. The tone of their conversation turned aggressive very quickly.
“He can’t do anything now,” Brenda said then relaxed slightly. “As long as all those people are around, no way he tries anything. And Lee’s up in the food truck, out of reach anyhow.”
After an exchange that lasted nearly a minute, another hungry person stepped up. Lee’s partner in the truck went to help, but then the congressman waved him off. An excuse to get away from the confrontation.
Jorgensen took a few steps back and turned, shouting something as he walked toward the nearby park.
“Okay,” the reporter said. “Whew. Wonder what that was about?”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to follow Jorgensen and see what he’s up to, what his plans are. From the little bit I saw in the power station, it ain’t go—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
I turned back to look, feeling my heart begin to thump as if it were slamming a big wooden door at the top of my esophagus, making it hard to catch my breath.
Congressman Lee slipped out the side door of the curry truck, rolled down the short staircase, and began walking into the dimly lit park. He was walking right toward Jorgensen. Also, strangely, it looked like something was coming through the tops of the trees downward. A very, very faint discoloration. It wobbled a bit, and I could see that it was… long? Hard to tell. Like some incredibly long glass flagpole, sticking out of the treetops at an angle. Not glass. There was a very subtle shimmer to it. Not a pole either, more like—
“Okay, I was afraid of that," Brenda said as Lee was swallowed by the darkness of the park. “Looks like he is planning to kill the congressman.”
If I’d had a stomach, any meal I’d had that day would have been spewed all across the grass. Brenda glided through the darkened park a few paces behind me, watching our backs, because while livies could sneak through the dark clandestinely, for the dead, lit up by our sole possession—energy—it’s not clandestine but Saturday night, neon-strapped, downtown-porn-shop style.
We walked past a homeless guy eating the dregs of what may have been a couple tacos at one point. Sitting on a wooden bench bowed with rot, he was pinching bits of white lettuce—red sauce dripping down his wrist, which he slurped with his tongue—and dropping them into his mouth six inches above his face. Like he was sprinkling fairy dust. But you know, instead of magical power, cascading into his mouth was wilted lettuce, wax-like cheese, and strips of onion that had likely been frozen so long they had all the taste of unseasoned wheat noodles.
But hell, I’d been there on a few occasions when I’d tried my hand at screenwriting in Los Angeles many years earlier. When all your dough is going into just not getting kicked out of your apartment, there’s not a lot left over for luxuries like food. At that point, a shitty burrito can taste like ambrosia.
We slipped past the happy, less-hungry hobo unnoticed because, of course, to the living, we’d have nothing to worry about. Brenda could have done a lap dance on the guy, and he would have just sat there, picking taco bits out of his teeth.
Not trying to be sexist. I suppose yours truly also could have performed said lap dance, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that some ethereal revulsion would have passed over both me and the hobo. And, you know, he’d just eaten, so…
Whatever Jorgensen was—livie, spook, or some combo of both—it seemed that he was in partnership with folks in the InBetween. For what still wasn’t clear.
But if he had any ghostly hooligans around, they might spot us in an instant.
So Brenda and I hung near the streetlamps, bathing in the bright spotlights.
If Ringman Jorgensen was somehow part of the Ghost Mob, he could have others nearby. Still, if we were going to save Lee, we couldn’t hide in the light all night.
Stealth-mode stalking prevents really swift reconnaissance, I’ve learned, and it took us a bit too long to find them. Still, had we come upon Jorgensen throttling the guy or jamming a letter opener into his ribs, I wasn’t entirely sure what we could have done.
It turned out that wasn’t Jorgensen’s plan.
“… -king lunatic, I’m going back,” the congressman said but made no move away from Jorgensen.
The two men were sitting on a bench between two tall streetlights. Just behind them was a large fountain with strips of UNDER MAINTENANCE KEEP OFF tape to explain why there wasn’t any water in it.
Brenda and I slid around the back of it and tried to listen in. To my left, I could see their long shadows cast in the amber glow of the park’s tall lamps.
“You made a promise to me, remember?” Jorgensen said, a shadow finger pointing at the congressman. Strangely, the homicidal killer looked… sad. Emotionally wrecked. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Lee stood, spun around the bench, and briefly walked in our direction. Then he returned, arms in the air.
“Nope, no way! I’m not buying this. This is not how the world works!”
“Stephen, there’s a lot you don’t know.” Jorgensen stood. He took a few steps closer. “We don’t have to be over. We can pick up where we left off! But I need you to tell me—”
“No, no. It’s not possible,” the congressman said. “What you’re doing is cruel. My Chandra is dead!”
“I died waiting to get back to you, Stephen.” Jorgensen reached out to Lee. When the congressman flinched, the Ringman pulled his arm back. “But I’m back. I just need her address—”
The congressman’s hands went to his head, and he began tugging at his hair in two fistfuls. “This is crazy.”
Jorgensen leaned in and smiled, but there was no smile in his voice. “I know a secret that’s about to change this world. For now, I’m inside this man, but we can fix that. We can be together again. You pick out any pretty girl you see. Anyone you want. Model. Movie star. I’ll break her will, and she won’t even know it. Takes a bit of time, but… I’ll enter her, and I will be her.”
“What?” I said reflexively, which was a bad move, actually, because then the serial killer turned his head toward us.
Busted! We jumped up and made a beeline out of the park.
Only once did I look back over my shoulder. Jorgensen was still trying to convince the congressman, but his eyes burned into us, locked on me and Brenda as we sprinted out of the park.
The one thing we had going for us was that if he had anyone from the Mob around, he wasn’t in a place to call out and tell them to chase down two ghosts in the park. It seemed he was already having a tough job of convincing the congressman of his sanity, and shouting “Get those ghosts” would not have helped him make his case.
The two of us whipped through the park, ignoring the paths and instead making a beeline for the bright city lights. My vision filled with stone monuments, metal casings, leaves, bark, and, at one point, maybe a nest of baby birds, innards and all, very blechy, until we finally reached the park’s skirting.
Brenda didn’t even slow, crossing the street and launching down the first alley. She then made another four or five turns in quick succession—I was losing count—until she slowed and we glided to a halt near an empty bus stop. She went to sit down and, naturally, fell right through the bench, landing on her ass.
“Ow! Mothershitting dammit!”
When I offered to help her up, she shot me a scowl. In truth, she wouldn’t need my assistance—her body no longer had any weight—but sometimes, you know, it’s just the gesture that can help make a woman not so mad at you.
“Goddamn, Painter.”
Sometimes.
“You know, for a private investigator, you don’t really have that coy-in-the-shadows thing nailed down.”
“I’m working on it,” I said.
Brenda kept an eye on the street. “Jorgensen’s real name must be Chandra. Somehow stole his identity. That could be how, with all the blood on his hands, he’s been able to stay under the police’s radar.”
“That explanation might have made more sense to you a few days ago, when you were alive, but not anymore,” I said. “The congressman said whoever this Chandra is, they’re dead.”
She nodded. “Which explains why when you yelped like a little girl, Jorgensen, a livie, could hear the dead. Us. Or you. I was completely quiet.”
“You’re going to hang onto that for a while, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely,” she said and finally smiled. “So you’re saying there’s a dead Chandra inside a live Jorgensen. That’s certainly in line with your livie–spook theory.”
“Right,” I said. “But why didn’t the congressman just split when this weird dude started talking about running away and making ghost babies?”
The reporter leaped in place and punched the air. “Booyah! The congressman’s fiancé was killed in prison. Murdered. The killer, unknown.”
I nodded. “Damn. Chandra is the ‘dead loved one’ that the clerk at the capitol building told us about.”
“She wants to find her killer.”
For a moment, I mulled that over. “I don’t think so. If she exposed her killer, she’d clear. But Chandra is looking for someone.”
“She said, ‘I need her address.’”
“Exactly. She plans on staying. She even told Stephen to pick a girl for her to overtake.”
“Hell, I can’t even grab a bench,” Brenda said, giving the ground a swipe with her foot. “How much juice would you have to put into grabbing a body? Moving it, controlling it?”
“For a little while, maybe. But you would drain so fast.” I shrugged, frustrated. “Even at one hundred percent, you wouldn’t have energy to…”
“What?”
I spotted another clearing and waved for her to follow me as I headed toward it. As I did, I traced my eyes up to the sky. Searching.
Brenda looked at me strangely, then her face lit up. She reached for my arm but didn’t grab it, which would have tapped a bit of juice out of me. Looking up, she said, “There was that shimmer above Jorgensen. Do you think we can track him by that?”
“Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe. Harder to see under the city lights, but in the park, it looked like really long rope.”
“Right. It’s like a rail-thin cloud or something. It moves and twists a little. Really hard to see from where we were.”
Brenda shrugged. “Maybe that’s part of Chandra. Like a part of her, uh, spook body.”
“Maybe.”
She whispered hoarsely, “Where are we going?”
“Up to this clearing. Need to see something.”
“What?”
“Come on.”
We were moving quickly but being cautious. If Chandra had a line to the Mob, they’d be on us fast. I was already on their radar.
“Everything Jorgensen-Chandra has done up to this point—”
“Let’s just go with Chandra.”
“Fine,” I said. “She’s got some bad spooks on her side. And right now…” I said, craning my neck up to better see the sky, “their full-time job seems to be getting ghosts for their two power stations.”
Once we hit the middle of the park, I lay down on the grass and looked up to the heavens. It gave me a clear panoramic view of the sky, with the city buildings just at the edges. A moment later, Brenda did the same.
“Whatever Chandra’s grand plan is, her endgame is to be with Stephen. She can only do that with a body, and any sort of permanent plan would require enormous amounts of energy. So that cloud or rope or whatever we saw above her? I think that’s more like a cable. An electric feed.”
“The power plants. They’re giving her a shit-ton of juice. Enough to hold onto a living body.”
The ice lightning pulsed and flowed in the night sky, but every now and then the surges would leave a dark spot. It was in those spots that I searched. After a few minutes, I saw what I was looking for.
“There,” I said. “When the luminous sheets move to where it goes dark in that area over there—watch.”
She did, and it took nearly a minute, but eventually she saw what I did. Against the backdrop of the dark sky was a pulsing, slowly twitching filament of energy. Tracing it patiently, we both saw that it arced down toward the park where we’d seen Chandra and the congressman.
Brenda went into reporter mode. “Wait, we still don’t know why Chandra is on this killing spree.”
“She’s angry, I suppose.”
“She’s a chick with a plan, though. How does killing people fit into the plan?”
“It fits into the Ghost Mob’s plan,” I said slowly. “They want spooks to power their machines. Maybe it’s like some sort of payment to them for all that juice they give to her.” Looking over at Brenda, I saw she was slowly twisting a ring on her finger. A habit from when she was alive. Maybe it helped her concentrate. Then I remembered something the Professor had said to me. “You said Jorgensen had taken your ring.”
“Douche.”
“Right. My lady on the mountain told me something physical like that, something special, will have a link to you even now. Like a very thin wire.”
“Yeah, along with your inter-spook magnetism thing, that could be how I tracked the guy in Chicago. He still had my mom’s ring, so I was picking up on that, too.”
“Sure, but if you were supposed to be in the machine like the mailman, that link, that very thin wire, could be like a conduit. That hooks her back to the power station, and she gets plugged into the juice of maybe sixty or eighty ghosts. Once that link is established, anyone who’s thrown in, they’re feeding her.”
I convulsed in a brief shiver, remembering what that had been like, even just the short time I’d been plugged in.
“But if this is a trade with the Mob, what do they get? Bass and Marmite, right?” the reporter asked. “They’ve got plans for those power stations, and I don’t think it’s just so Chandra can make ghost babies with Stephen.”
“I don’t know.”
Brenda shifted in the grass, turning toward me. “How could you torture all those spooks and not care at all? What drives someone to put innocent people through that kind of hell? Love? Love doesn’t do that.”
I said, “Only one reason someone goes through all of that to come back from the dead. Only one reason some spook is that driven. The Professor once called it the most powerful force in the InBetween.”
Brenda looked at me, the mascara marks streaking from her eyes glittering in the dark. She said, “What?”
I shrugged. “Revenge.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I moved through the city with Brenda close behind me. This was her town, something she’d made clear several times in the previous minutes, but I knew where I needed to go.
However, that didn’t mean I knew the streets I needed to take.
But looking at the sky like some ancient mariner guided by the stars, I headed toward my destination. For as much as it terrified me, I knew it was the only way forward.
“Okay, where are we going?”
I said, “We’re playing catch-up but too slowly. We know Chandra will kill again. And remember she said there’s something coming. Something that will change the world. I don’t think she means everyone will be getting free glitter nails.”
“But you said being in that power thing was tortuous. Soul crushing.”
I shrugged. “I exaggerate. Part of my charm.”
“Not buying that,” she said. “We can track Chandra now. Let’s just go do that!”
“She’s way too powerful for us. But if we can find out her plan, maybe we can get ahead of her. Work out a way to pull the plug. Some of the images I saw when I was plugged into the power station didn’t belong to me. I think they belonged to her. But to get a glimpse at that…” I said and pointed toward the sky. “I gotta ride the lightning.”
“Don’t do this.”
“It’s the fastest way,” I said. “And we’re running out of time.”
Brenda looked at me with watery eyes, which complemented the mascara streaks down her face. She shook her head but knew I was right.
We snaked through Chicago, ending up just southeast of the city.
And we found what we were looking for.
Brenda had helped me get plugged into the power station on the outskirts of Chicago, which was in the gymnasium of a high school that had been shuttered, all the doors chained and the windows that hadn’t been reinforced with security wire boarded up. At first, it seemed as if the school had likely lost funding in some redistricting scheme or there just weren’t enough students in the area to necessitate it.
There were still remnants of student life on the walls. The random display of some themed homework project for all the world to see (that is, if the world could get through the chained doors). A trophy case with most trophies now gone. A few photos. And folded bits of masking tape that suggested items too personal to leave behind in the dying school.
We moved slowly through the dark halls, because if we were seen by one of the Mobsters, we’d both end up in the power station with no way out. We took each corner after first looking through the masonry to the other side.
It was sensible to take that precaution, but admittedly, I felt like a bit of a pussy. We were the good guys. We should be able to confidently stride through enemy territory and, if we saw some bad spook, take them out.
Me? Not so much a take-them-out kinda guy. I’d love to be, just never really developed that skill. Brenda told me the closest she’d come to combat training was cardio-boxing class.
“You sure you really want to do this?”
