Possession

but I believe it was one vehicular accident, one untreated infection of the lungs, and two starvation. Very upsetting that people can starve to death on the streets of a major American city. . . .” He furrowed his brow, but his eyes were more pensive and sad than angry and his aura shifted slightly to a dark blue-green that seemed to run over him like drips of paint. Then it pulled tighter to him, easing back toward its normal yellow color.

I was startled by the list. “One of the latter wouldn’t be a guy named Twitcher, would it?”

Solis shook his head. “I’m not sure of the nickname.”

I stirred my memory for Twitcher’s real name. “Umm . . . Davis Thompson. Had a neurological disorder that caused him to twitch and gesture compulsively. Forties, brown hair, brown eyes, about six feet.”

Solis listened to my description and considered it, but shook his head. “I cannot be sure. That sounds correct, but you may have to look into the death records to confirm it.”

I didn’t really need to; my heart sank with final certainty. “I’ll do that,” I answered.

Solis peered at my face. “I am sorry. You knew him.”

“Yeah, I did. I thought I saw him recently, but apparently not.”

“Is this . . . one of your particular cases?” He asked. Solis is well aware of the nature of my “particular” cases, but since he wants to keep his job with the Seattle PD, he’s been circumspect about it. Especially since he came along on one of my cases last year. Before that, he was suspicious about the frequency with which I seemed to be in the middle of investigations featuring bizarre and inexplicable circumstances. Not so much anymore.

“Yes,” I said. “Quite the woo-woo creep show, complete with mediums, ghosts, and haunted bars.”

“Can I expect to see any of this cross my desk?”

“I hope not. So far, the worst things have been some on-the-job accidents. Nothing criminal, no suspicious deaths—at least not modern ones.”

“A haunted bar, you said.”

“Kells in the market. Lovely place—too bad about the mortuary.”

His eyes lit with understanding. “Ahhh . . . I see. I’ll look into your homeless reports when I get back to the office. Call me later.”

He didn’t have to do that—probably shouldn’t have offered—but I wasn’t one to say no. I smiled and thanked him. “I’ll keep an eye out for Mimms.”

He nodded, a small smile cracking his face. “Thank you.”

I waved and turned away, catching a familiar shape moving at the edge of the crowd. I adjusted my path to keep just behind it and out of sight while I got closer. It was a bit tricky weaving through the vendors and the morning tourists, but while they were an obstacle, they also provided cover. I managed to work my way onto the sidewalk less than half a block behind James Purlis without his seeing me.

FIFTEEN

I’m taller than a lot of people. I’m taller than Quinton and I’m taller than his father, so I could stalk along behind him, able to keep his head in sight at a longer following distance than usual. He must have known I was following him, though I never saw him give any indication. After all, he’d been in the business of following people longer than I had and I would have spotted me by now. Still, he led me up First Street in the thickening crowds of workers and tourists—and then he disappeared.

I was a little startled. He was in front of me and then he just wasn’t. I dropped into the Grey, feeling a bit vertiginous as I slammed through the barriers of the ghost world, looking for signs of his unusual aura. I spotted it sinking through what I knew was the street. I flung myself back into the normal, stepping on toes and body- checking a few people as I regained solidity and shoved my way forward to the spot where he must have vanished.

It was an old street-access elevator used by the utilities people to take equipment from the built-up sidewalks down to the original street level, about thirty feet below. Most of the devices weren’t in use anymore, closed up permanently as unsafe or impractical, but one or two lingered. The diamond-patterned steel plates over the lift clattered as I stepped onto them, settling back into position after being disturbed just minutes ago. He was fast; I had to give him that. I looked around, marking the area in my mind, and thought this was far too close to Quinton’s old bunker under the Seneca Street off-ramp. I had the urge to run and see if Quinton was there, but I wasn’t sure that Purlis wasn’t watching to see if I would do just that. From this vantage, I could no longer track his energy with any ease and I wasn’t sure where he was in the storm of mist and colored light that muddled half my vision while I stood amid the moving crowds on the sidewalk. There were plenty of places where he could have come back up to see what I was going to do. I hoped he hadn’t noticed my sudden vanishing act as I’d slipped into the Grey if that was the case.

To chase or not to chase . . . This had to be a feint to draw me into revealing Quinton’s lair. Quinton would have twigged to something like this elevator and its tactical value or vulnerability fairly early on since he had lived under the streets here for years and knew the buried sidewalks and passages better than anyone—including me. He wouldn’t have let his father get this close without having a way out.

If he’d felt threatened, he would have abandoned the tunnel bunker and—I shook my head at my stupidity —he’d been staying with me since his father had shown up in town. Apparently love is blind, because I’d missed the connection until now. While my condo was an obvious place, it was one that was much harder to approach unseen than Quinton’s subterranean hideout. I might have been miffed at his not saying anything about it, but since I’d just made an ass of myself on that point, I had no cause for complaint. He liked to keep his problems to himself, which was a familiar mode of operation for me, too.

I made a show of looking around and concluding I was out of luck before I turned back, retraced my steps half a block to the corner, and crossed the street. I worked my way down toward the waterfront, checking for a tail, but finding none this time. I paused long enough to send Quinton—who still carries a pager in preference to a more easily tracked cell phone—a numeric message with the code for “call me” before I started back up toward the various hidden doorways and utility accesses that led to the tunnels connecting with his hideout.

None of the doors or manholes looked recently opened but I couldn’t get too close without arousing Purlis’s suspicions if he was still watching me covertly. And I supposed he was, since I couldn’t imagine any other reason for his luring me up near Quinton’s lair. I kept looking for any sign of Quinton but I couldn’t find one. While that annoyed and depressed me in some ways, it at least meant that his father hadn’t found him, either.

I made one more round of the locations where I would expect to catch some indication that Quinton had been there and checked my phone again, but there was still no message. I’d walked all the way up to the southern entrance to Post Alley without any glimpse of him or the little markers he sometimes left.

My stomach made a gurgling sound and I felt a bit queasy, remembering that I’d had nothing to eat except coffee at the bakery since the soup I’d had last night. No matter how worried and off-stride I felt, I still needed to eat. But maybe not this close to Pike Place Market. I turned back and took myself out for lunch at a Chinese deli on Western. The food was mediocre, but the staff was nice and I could look out the windows at Western Avenue and the traffic working its way around the snarls of construction under the slowly eroding viaduct.

I’m not a total klutz with chopsticks, but I’ll certainly never be taken for a native user. Still, I should have had less trouble picking up noodles and conveying them to my mouth. After the fourth missed mouthful, I put the chopsticks aside and sat still for a moment, catching my slightly labored breath and trying to steady the growing quiver in my hands. I felt dizzy and hot and too big for my skin—as if another me were writhing around inside it, pushing and shoving to make it bigger. The vision on my left side blazed up too brightly while my right seemed to fade slowly. My flesh felt as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper and soaked in alcohol while my hands ached and trembled. I sat back in my seat, hoping these sensations would pass quickly and that it wasn’t the first wave of another manifestation like last night’s two episodes. I couldn’t take time to be ill, but I’d have much preferred that this was just a sign that I was coming down with something prosaic—like the flu.

The deli was busy enough that no one was paying me any attention, but not so crowded that anyone was hovering over me, hoping to snag my table the moment I was done. I tried to pick up the chopsticks again, but I fumbled them and one clattered to the floor. As I leaned down to retrieve it, the lights went out and I felt the Formica tabletop press against my cheek just before I lost consciousness.

But I wasn’t unconscious, not really. I had been pushed aside, violently, inside my own body and felt cold,