Chapter 9

I’d seen a lot of death in my time, but I’d never witnessed a fresh electrocution. It had been quick, at least. But in a way, that was even worse. No one saw it coming, so no one could prepare. And now there was yet another repeater in the FPMP collection.

“Somebody help him,” Alisha said, voice quavering. She looked from me to Jacob, and even spared a glance at Jibben. “Somebody gotta help him.”

“I’m sorry,” Jacob told her simply.

“But you don’t know—”

Jacob cut his eyes to me, figuring that I probably did indeed know whether Darnell was alive or dead, and I said, “You saw what the strike did to the lightbulbs.”

Alisha approached the safety glass, but didn’t touch anything. She had more sense than that. “Are you sure he’s not breathing?”

Darnell’s mag light had landed beside him, throwing his face in shadow, but illuminating his body just fine. The palm of his hand was charred. And even though I saw his repeater flickering there, just on the other side of the door, I dutifully stepped up beside Alisha to make sure his chest didn’t rise and fall. Jacob, who does comfort much better than I do, flanked her on her other side and put a consoling arm around her. “It was quick,” he said. “And it happened while he was being a hero.”

Alisha did a slow blink and teardrops trembled on her eyelashes. “It doesn’t seem right. I was so awful to him—and it’s the last thing he’ll ever hear from me.” She sniffled. “Why was I so mean?”

Jacob said, “I don’t think that’s how the people who’ve passed on remember us. They remember all of it, the bad times, but the good too. And I don’t think they hold a grudge.”

Says the guy who was stalked by the Criss Cross killer…but, thankfully, instances like that are few and far between, and all that was left of Darnell Thompson was the occasional flicker of a guy trying to free us with a crowbar. We were all staring at his body somberly, trying to make sense of what had just happened, trying to take it all in, when from his spot on the floor, Jibben piped up, “What about the delivery?”

“What about the delivery?” I repeated.

“Leaving it out here to be contaminated won’t bring Agent Thompson back, will it? Is that what he would have wanted?”

It was a cheap ploy. But I had to admit, I had no clue what Darnell would have wanted. We were seven when we’d known each other, and back then, wants were as simple as Hot Wheels cars and chocolate milk.

If Jacob didn’t have access to the ghost-litmus test he’d married—if there were any chance at all Darnell might still be alive—he would have forced the location of the emergency exit from Jibben by any means necessary to go get help. But since Darnell was clearly well beyond that, Jacob grit his teeth and said, “If you’re inventing an emergency exit to get what you want—”

“I guarantee, Agent Marks, I want to get out of here just as much as you do.”

Given the whole Clayton situation, I highly doubted it. But not only would moving those boxes satisfy that weirdo, Jibben—it would give Alisha something to look at other than her ex’s dead body. Or, it would have given her something to look at…had the whole place not been darker than my stiffest pot of coffee. And I brew ’em pretty thick.

Jacob held up his phone to shine the flashlight app down the hall, then cursed under his breath. “Low power.”

“There’s a charger in your suitcase,” Alisha offered.

Jacob pinched the bridge of his nose.

From the floor, Jibben said, “There’s an emergency kit in the lab. Power bank, flashlight, plenty of things we can use.”

Unfortunately, the only one likely to locate this kit in the dark was him. Even though I’d been sweeping through the lab a couple times a week for the past two years, that thing was so full of cabinets, I’d be pawing through them all ’till the cavalry finally showed up.

“I’m not that dizzy anymore,” Jibben said. “If you could just bring me to the lab….”

And that’s how I ended up pushing around the least popular FPMP Lab Manager on an office chair by the light of my pocket flashlight while Jacob and Alisha started shifting boxes.

Luckily her phone still had enough charge…though the way the flashlight app ate through batteries, we shouldn’t expect it to last long.

Once Jibben and I were alone, I said, “Given the circumstances, you know you’re not making any friends by insisting on dealing with your delivery. Right?”

“Friends,” he said with a sniff, as if I’d just said something utterly ridiculous.

Guess the whole “Heebie Jeebie” thing was no big secret. But at some point, you’ve gotta get over the name-calling and pull up your big boy pants. I’d never dream of hijacking someone during a massive emergency to cater to my agenda. Even a neanderthal cop who insisted on calling me “Spook Squad” to my face.

“I do care about Agent Thompson,” Jibben hastened to add. “Of course I do. I’ve known him for a while now—he’s been posted down here in the lab for months. Respectful. Efficient. And, don’t forget, he died trying to save us. But there was no saving him.”

Jibben guided me into one of the many labs with locked cabinets lining the walls—mechanical locks, thankfully, not key cards. When he pulled on a thick pair of rubber-coated gloves to fit the key in the lock, I might have accused him of being unduly cautious. But after what just went down in the lobby, I figured he knew what he was doing.

The cabinet doors swung open to reveal wall-to-wall supplies, everything boxed up neatly and Tetrised in solid. It was packed so tight that when Jibben grabbed the box labeled “emergency lamp”, nothing else so much as quivered.

The lamp was a square about the size of a lunchbox, a nifty thing with an LED front panel and some charging ports on the side. “It’s charged regularly,” Jibben said. “But we’ll use the lowest light level to conserve battery.”

I’d been pushing him back toward the entryway, but I stopped so fast he nearly toppled off the chair. “Why would we need to conserve battery if there’s an emergency exit?”

Jibben twitched. “I don’t know. Just in case.”

I leaned in and pitched my voice low. “If you dreamed up this so-called exit just for the sake of getting your boxes moved—”

“What kind of man do you take me for?”

At this point, I highly doubted he’d like me to answer that.

By the time I shoved Jibben and his chair back into the lobby, all the crates had been taken care of—all but the one that had split open. Jacob and Alisha were staring at it by the light of her phone. “Is this safe to touch?” She shone the light at the weird fluff spilled out onto the floor.

Jibben said, “I’m more worried about you contaminating the contents.” Alisha gave him a glare, and he said, “But that’s just anti-static packing material. It’s perfectly safe.”

Alisha gave the crate an experimental shove toward the moving cart. As it moved, Jacob squeezed the back of his neck, while at the same time, Jibben shuddered. Taken separately, neither of these gestures meant anything. Jacob did the neck-squeeze whenever he was stressed out, and good old Heebie Jeebie was always twitching around. But the way they’d happened at the very same time….

I glanced out into the elevator bay.

The only thing worse than seeing a ghost? Not seeing it. So I was actually relieved when a few moments later, the flicker of Darnell’s repeater buried an invisible crowbar in the doorframe, got blown back, and disappeared.

But repeaters and ghosts weren’t technically the same. Back in Hicksville, I’d even spoken to a deputy’s ghost while his nearby repeater repeatedly blew his brains out.

So it was entirely possible there was a spirit on the loose.

Or…there might be a reason why Jibben was so hell-bent on getting this delivery into containment. One he’d conveniently neglected to tell us.

“Back away from the box,” I told Jacob.

But Alisha’d had enough. She stepped forward, undeterred, to get this nonsense over with and load the final crate onto the trolley. Since pushing did no good, she decided to pull. Once she looped a nylon strap around the box, she planted her feet and threw her whole body weight onto it, and lo and behold, the crate heaved up onto the handcart so she could drag it toward containment. Jacob pushed, and I followed with Jibben in his office chair, eager to get this thing over and done with.

Finally, things were going right. Or so I thought. But in the containment room, the moment Alisha’s strap went slack, the side of the crate creaked open. Something rolled out—a head, a fucking head—and our light beams turned into a laser show as we all backpedaled like crazy in the dark.

Until my flashlight beam steadied, the head rolled to a stop, and I realized it was nothing scarier than styrofoam.

“I do not get paid enough for this shit,” Alisha muttered.

You and me both, sister.

You and me both.