Book 1: The Insider
Part Fifteen
Meet Ozzy Kincaid. Our Ozzy is a man in his fifties, the body of an athlete six years past retirement and eyes I might call wise if they hadn't watched a teenage girl burn. He's carrying three folding knives, one given to him by his father, a cell phone he bought from a girl with huge fake breasts, and a length of rope with memories on it I don't even want to examine. He has busy hands worming against the ropes; when he's frightened, he thinks about waiting for his parents outside the principal's office. He's also got three murders weighing uranium-heavy on his mind, and a blinding white spear of self-righteousness right through the center of them all.
I know these things because being tied to a chair and flanked by men with baseball bats tends to lower one's defenses. We've got him lashed up in one of the dining room chairs, wad of towels taped into his mouth. I'm pacing, Arabella's stunned, and Barg is managing a calm that would disturb Zen monks. I don't even try to check our resident demons.
"Now, I'm going to take the gag off," the doc says to Kincaid, raw but placid, "and we are going to have a conversation. If you shout about the Inquisition, please remember that they were disbanded, and you are trespassing on my property. Converse, and we might let you go, no cops, fewer bruises. Deal?"
Kincaid nods. There's no way he can possibly believe that, but there he goes, not a muscle out of place when Dr. Barg pulls the towel out. If it weren't for the winter in his aura I'd think we have him beat.
"This won't stand," he hisses between his teeth. "This will not stand, this will never—"
"Yeah," Paul cuts in, "save it." He raps his bat on the carpet by way of punctuation.
Kincaid swings back toward Paul with wild fear tugging at his mouth; I step in front of our captive and wait for his eyes to come my way. His attention is something between pity and revulsion, with a heat to it that spins marbles around the inside of my skull.
"You killed an entire family," I deadpan. I keep my fists wadded up behind my back.
"I killed a demon," he shoots back, cracks in his voice.
"And the woman?" Steady, steady; keep your face empty.
He doesn't blink. "She got in my way."
Pistons fire in my stomach. "That happens when you try to kill her husband."
Dr. Barg steps forward to the tune of my rising temper. "You abducted a little girl." He says it all but monotone.
Kincaid's eyes bulge. "A witch." His face is all angles when he says it. "A mind-reader, a creature against God."
"Cue the debate team," Paul mutters.
Kincaid looks up at him, squints hard. The old man's aura is black spikes: icy, certain, and acutely alone. He turns back to me with a mouth full of confusion; Paul orbits around behind him and stays there, watches Kincaid's shoulders crawl upward with discomfort; I take the opportunity to move in.
"You took the little girl to a motel." I take in a deep breath. "And then you killed her."
"She lived," Kincaid rasps, with the tiniest chink in his certainty. His aura swirls. "She's in pain"—breath tight—"but she's alive. That's what I did." He stares at me, desperate. "That's what." There's a question mark hovering around in there, but we don't give it any fuel.
Arabella gets up, and swoops into the office. Boys follows with her aura boiling over.
Another marble takes a circuit around my head. I eye him sidelong as I set myself down. "Why did you leave her alive?"
Kincaid's face is a tombstone, but the man wants to smile. "So she could tell them what happened."
The marbles all clash together and ring down through the middle of my spine. Phone calls and loose words all click into place, and my world spins until the continents fly off.
"You wanted to get caught," I say. All our careful denials come echoing back at me. "You wanted..." I focus on not looking shocked. "You were your own anonymous tips."
"What?"
Conjecture shatters; my brain puts on the brakes.
"Nothing." I shake my head. "Nothing. Your plan must have worked better than you expected."
Kincaid leans forward in his eagerness to explain. "My plan is working right now."
Dr. Barg fights a brow-furrow. "I'm not sure I understand."
Kincaid's eyes bulge; it's the look of belief you see at the subway, the eyes that want to tell you how the government is making you masturbate.
"The Inquisition will come for me," he seethes. "The Inquisition will come for me, and they will know what you are and what you've done, and we will sweep you off this Earth."
Dr. Barg worries at his canes. "The Inquisition has been disbanded for nine years."
There's the grin. "And one murmur of a real, dead demon will bring them right back."
Dr. Barg puts a hand over his mouth, drums his fingers on his cheek. He nods, murmurs "thank you", and lurches forward, towel and tape in hand.
Kincaid tries to shout an objection, but that ruffles into a soft-lettered maunder as Dr. Barg gags him. There's a few seconds of jerking around before he settles into a glare.
"Come with me," Dr. Barg says, still perfect and unaffected as he leads us around the corner into the office.
Arabella looks up from a half-attended book, and Boys from her defensive LP; Arabella's lost and angry, and Boys is just blank, her eyes fungal green and the snake worming along her vertebrae. Dr. Barg looks at the two of them and settles on Arabella.
"Anything?" he asks, dropping the semblance of impassivity.
I breathe out, letting my anger flow onto my face. I feel like I've been underwater.
"He was fuckin' lost," Paul says, a simper peeling back his lips. "Couldn’t figure out what was happening." He shakes his head. "No way. No way he's got the gift."
"No signal from in here," Arabella says. "And nothing while I was out there either."
"Not a damn thing," I agree. I lean against a card table, dig my palm into my forehead. "If that guy's psychic I'm Raggedy Andy."
Barg frowns, raps a cane against the door. "Could he be faking? Could something be blocking us?"
"No," Arabella says. "There are signals, but they're not from him."
"Up north again," Boys says. "Whoever aimed him stayed put."
Paul cocks his head at the two of them. "Been watchin' for any other surprise guests?" Paul asks.
Arabella just smirks in return. I give Dr. Barg a look that'll become an argument once it has some time to grow, and distract myself by trying not to panic.
"So, no juice in the brain," I say. "Nothing that could've helped him nail those people, and no way he got lucky; and he isn't the one sending in anonymous tips. So big question here: who is it?"
"Bigger question," Paul says. "Is he full of shit?"
"About the Inqusition?" I ask in return. "Can we afford to assume he is?"
Dr. Barg nods to me. Two years ago that would be validating. "No public records, no way for us to disprove a connection. And all those inquisitors had to go somewhere when the bottom fell out."
I sigh, rub my thumb over my forehead. An idea is forming and I wish it weren't forming in me. "He's got us in a fucking dead end. If we send him to the cops and he's the real deal, the Church gets gas for their motor. Cover him up, and the agreement falls apart and we wake up with angle men sodomizing our brains."
Paul shrugs. "We could kill him."
My brain spikes about a second ahead of Arabella's, which is enough to get the revulsion coming back for a second round. I fold my idea up tight inside me, and Arabella stabs me with a dose of disgust; Dr. Barg only looks over so I know he felt it.
"Unacceptable," he says. "More attention than we need, even if he isn't connected. Us getting busted could be enough to put the spotlight on psychics again."
I take a turn with the glaring. "That's your reason not to kill someone?"
"You'd prefer I appeal to Paul's sense of morals?" An eyebrow curls in victory. "We can send him to the police for trespassing, slow him down while we think of something else to do..."
Behind my back, I clench my fists. I feel Kincaid in the other room, winding up tighter every second we're talking. Time for the showdown. "There's another option."
"Mass suicide?" offers Paul.
"Edit his memory."
That dumps all our thoughts in a bucket of ice water. At first Arabella can't even form a sentence, just object in half-words and vowels. The main theme in our thoughts is wheelchairs.
"No one has that right yet," Arabella stammers, "we could paralyze him, we could shut down his lungs—"
"I could," I say, thumb pointed at me. "You could—"
"Oh," Paul says. "Oh, son of a bitch."
I turn on him before he can get up a head of steam. "You're made of thoughts, Paul." I look at him like a steak at a hyena convention. "If anyone's got the—"
"That means thought exchange," Paul says. "That means me going in there. If we fuck it up the wrong way and he remembers contact with a demon—"
"Then it's not that much more of a problem than we already have!"
Everyone's staring at me now, snapshots of how I look when I yell. I'm too wired to care, but I still adjust my volume.
"Look at it worst-case. We've got an inquisitor in our front room, a psychic in the hospital, and two murders and a kidnapping the cops will be wanting to pin on someone; and I'm guessing our man out there has, possibly deliberately, left behind fingerprints, so we can't exactly magic this one away." My brain stops to process that, and the room starts dancing. "Right now, if he's groggy or hurt, we've got a home defense excuse to sell to the cops. Hell," I scoff, "we'll even be telling the truth. And if part of him shuts down, the fucker is like a hundred years old anyway. So explain to me what else we're going to do here." I cross my arms. "Explain it to me."
I watch everyone stare at me, and listen in on the crux of their thoughts. Paul's a mass of cursing, and Dr. Barg's a whisper of stress in a sea of the usual images. At least Arabella actually seems impressed.
Dr Barg squints at me, stroking the handle of his cane, and turns to look at Paul.
"Think you can do it?"
Paul's pupils separate. He shakes his head, projects worry, disgust, that purple aura-light he uses at the bars. But we all know what his answer's going to be before it even comes out; he's just delaying to annoy us.
"Yes."
At least something around here is still normal.
