The Haunted Air

  "One of your competitors, isn't it. Jealous because you're stealing their clients, am I right?"

  The silence on the other end was answer enough.

  Gia said, "You're probably thinking, 'Hey, I'm the psychic here,' right? But it's nothing like that."

  "If you have anything to do with—"

  "Oh, no. Please don't think that. I never heard of you before last night. But maybe I can help."

  "This is not your concern. And even if it were, I do not see how you—"

  "Oh, no. Not me." She laughed; it sounded high and nervous just like she felt. "I'd be no help at all. But I know someone who's very good at this sort of thing. I'll have him give you a call."

  Ifasen hemmed and hawed, obviously not wanting to admit that someone with his connections to the Other Side needed help, but once he learned that the matter would be handled with the utmost discretion with no connection to the police, he relented. But he wanted to make the call, so Gia gave him Jack's voice mail number.

  What did I just do? Gia thought after she hung up. Me, the one who keeps wanting Jack to find another line of work, I just got him a job. Maybe.

  What on earth had possessed her to do such a thing?

  Because as much as she hated Jack's work, she wanted to see him back to his old self. That meant getting off his butt and taking on fix-it jobs again. And this one sounded kind of safe. A couple of competing psychics duking it out over clients. Jack could handle them with his eyes closed.

  But then, Ifasen had been worried about a bomb last night, hadn't he. She'd forgot about that. How could she be so stupid?

  Call him back. Right. Tell him to forget the number she'd given him. Lose it. But why would he listen to her? If he was going to call, he'd call. But maybe he wouldn't call. Maybe he'd figure he could handle this on his own.

  She could only hope.

  7

  Wondering at the damn funky turns life can take, Jack strolled through the dusk up the front walk of Menelaus Manor for the second time in twenty-four hours.

  The first shock was hearing a message from Ifasen on his voice mail. The second was learning that Gia had given him the number. She'd explained the how and why of it between bouts of lovemaking late this afternoon and into the evening. He still didn't quite understand it. She seemed fixated on the two-children bit. Why? He sensed she wasn't telling him everything, but that was unlike her. Usually he was the one with the secrets.

  Like the bullet hole in Ifasen's picture window, for instance. He'd spotted it on their way out last night. If he'd seen it going in he'd have turned her around and headed home immediately. Didn't want Gia anywhere near a house someone was using for target practice.

  Ifasen's voice mail message had played it coy, saying he was being harassed but giving no specifics. When Jack had called him back the man had said he wanted to try to handle the matter without the police because of the risk of adverse publicity. Did Jack think he could help?

  The idea of doing a fix-it job for Ifasen appealed to Jack. Psychics operated in the sort of quasi-legal demimonde he was comfortable in. Plus it offered the possibility of running a con on some scammers, and that was always fun.

  So now he was back. A lot more lights on tonight—the front porch and most of the windows were aglow. As Jack stepped up on the porch he noticed that the windows running off to his right were covered in heavy black cloth. The "channeling room," if he remembered, and they hadn't been like that last night. Something must have happened since then. Something bad enough to prompt a call for help.

  Jack reached for the bell, but the door opened before he rang.

  Ifasen—or the guy who called himself Ifasen—stood in the doorway, staring at him. "You?"

  "Hello, Lyle."

  The dark eyes widened in the dark face. "Lyle? I don't know who—?"

  "You're Lyle Kenton, and I'm the one you called."

  "But… you were here…"

  "Last night. I know. Can I come in?"

  Lyle stepped aside and Jack slipped past him into the waiting room. His brother stood inside, a few feet behind.

  Jack extended his hand. "I'm Jack. You must be Charles."

  Charles shook his hand, but his eyes were on his older brother. "How…?"

  "Simple, really. All you need is a computer. It's a matter of public record that Lyle and Charles Kenton own this house."

  Jack made it sound as if he'd done the search. But Abe had been the one. He was better at that sort of thing.

  Jack wandered over to the picture window and examined the bullet hole, noticed how it had been plugged with some sort of glue.

  "Looks like a .32." He turned to Lyle. "You have the slug?"

  Lyle nodded. "Want to see it?"

  "Maybe later."

  "Did some checking up on you too," Lyle said. "Or tried to."

  "Really." Jack would have been surprised if he hadn't. "Find my website?"

  Another nod. "Charlie did."

  "Repairmanjack.com," Charlie said with a hint of disdain. "Pretty beat site. Nothin' but a box to send you email."

  "Serves my purposes."

  Lyle fingered the end of one of his dreadlocks, twisting it back and forth. "I asked around some. Found someone who's heard of you, but he didn't think you were real. He heard you mentioned by someone who knows somebody whose sister's uncle hired you once. Something along those lines. Like you're some kind of urban legend."

  "That's me. Urban legend." Jack hoped to keep it that way. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the pierced window. "Just one shot?"

  "One's enough, don't you think? Tried to burn us out last night but I chased them off before they could get the fire started."

  "Guns, fire…heavy stuff. You've really pissed someone off."

  "I guess so."

  "Makes the Chick pamphlets look like a joke."

  Lyle frowned. "Chick? What're you…?"

  Jack picked up one of the Menelaus Manor brochures and shook out another of the Christian fundamentalist tracts he'd found last night.

  He saw Charlie grimace and gaze at the ceiling, so he handed it to Lyle, saying, "Got to be careful who you let into your waiting room."

  Lyle frowned as he flipped through the pamphlet. "Yeah, I do." Then he flung it against his brother's chest. "How many times have I—?" He cut himself off and glared. "Later, bro."

  Jack took a mental step back and watched the pair, trying to get an angle on what was going on. A little tension between the Kenton brothers. Then he noticed the WWJD pin on Charlie's shirt.

  A Born Again? Part of a spiritualist con? Crazy. It explained the Chick pamphlets, but nothing else.

  He wondered how or if that played into why he was here.

  Jack cleared his throat. "Any idea which of your competitors might be behind your troubles?"

  Lyle shook his head, setting his dreads in motion. "I don't recall saying it was a competitor."

  Is this the way we're going to play it? Jack thought as he glanced around. He needed to break through the My-name-is-Ifasen-and-I-am-a-true-psychic facade if this was going to work.

  "Okay, then… what else have these mysterious bad guys hit you with?"

  "Tried to spook us out this morning by playing games with the doors and windows, then they wrecked the Channeling Room."

  "That's why the windows are draped outside?"

  Lyle nodded. "They're trying to scare off my clients."

  "Clients?" Here was a chance to see if he could get a rise out of Ifasen. "That's probably how they think of themselves. But let's call them what you call them: sitters… marks… fish." As Lyle stared at him, Jack smiled and shrugged. "I used to be in the game."

  "Game?" Lyle said, his expression going stony. "This is no game. This is my life."

  "And your livelihood—a good one, most likely. But you probably already knew I was onto you. I figure you saw me notch my billet last night."

  No reaction. The Kenton brothers might as well have been statues.

  Time t
o push a little harder.

  "By the way, which one of you sneaked into Junie Moon's apartment and hid her bracelet?" Jack pointed to the younger brother. "I'm betting it was Charlie here. Am I right?"

  Charlie's gaze flicked to his brother and back, telling Jack he'd scored a bull's-eye.

  "You're accusing us of a crime," Lyle said. His lips had thinned, eyes had narrowed to slits.

  "One I've committed myself. The medium I worked for used to send me on errands like that." It was SOP: rifle the sitter's purse while the lights are out, cut a duplicate house key, then pay a visit when nobody's home. "When it works, it's a beaut, isn't it."

  "I wouldn't know," Lyle said, still not giving an inch.

  Jack tried again. He stepped back and checked out the overhead light fixture.

  "That where you stashed the bug? Lady I worked for bugged her waiting room and listened to the sitters as they hung out. Pulled all sorts of inside info from their chatter."

  The brothers went into statue mode again.

  "Look, guys," Jack said, "if we're going to be working together, we've got to be straight with each other."

  "We're not working together yet."

  "Fair enough. How about I take a look at what they did to your Channeling Room?"

  Lyle stared at him, obviously wary.

  "Maybe this is a bad idea," Jack said, only partially faking annoyance as he turned toward the door. "You've already wasted some of my time. Don't see much point in letting you waste more."

  "Wait," Lyle said. He hesitated again, then sighed. "Okay, but nothing you see here goes past these walls, agreed?"

  "Consider me a priest. With Alzheimer's."

  This pulled a grin from Charlie, which he hid behind a cough. Even Lyle's lips twisted a little.

  "All right." He moved toward the door to the Channeling Room. "Take a look."

  Jack stepped through ahead of the brothers and strode to the middle of the room. He could see that some of the statues had been damaged, and spotted a couple of gaps where mirrors had hung, but on the whole the room didn't look so bad.

  "You have to understand that we spent the whole afternoon cleaning up," Lyle said. "Every piece of glass in this room was shattered."

  "A bazillion pieces," Charlie said.

  "How? Shotgun?"

  Lyle shook his head. "We haven't figured that out yet."

  "Mind if I take a look around?"

  "Be our guest. You get any ideas, we'd love to hear them."

  Jack wandered to the oak séance table. He bent and examined the thick legs and paw feet.

  "That area fine," Charlie said. "You wanna check out the windows and mirrors that—"

  "I'll get to them."

  He found the levers in one of the legs. He seated himself and worked them with his feet, tilting the table this way and that. He nodded his appreciation.

  "Smooth."

  He checked the chairs and found the tip of a steel rod in one leg of each.

  "How's this work? A little motor in the seat that pushes the rod down, right? Activate it with a remote and it tilts the sitter's chair. Sweet. You guys design this stuff yourself?"

  Charlie glanced at Lyle, who sighed again. "Charlie's the mechanical guru."

  Well, well, well, Jack thought. They've finally opened up. Let's hope it's smoother going from here on in.

  "How do you handle vibrations from the motor?" he asked Charlie.

  "Padding," he said. "Loads of it."

  "Nice work," he said, giving him a sincere thumbs up. "Very nice."

  Charlie's grin told Jack he'd made a friend.

  He moved to the windows, pulled the drapes aside. Every pane was broken, blown into the room, not out. But the old-fashioned wooden mullions that had held them in place remained untouched.

  He went from one window to the next; whether facing front, side or rear, the story was the same.

  How the hell…?

  He turned to the brothers and shrugged. "I've got no answer for you."

  "You can't help us?" Charlie said.

  "Didn't say that. Can't tell you how this was done, but I can help see it doesn't happen again."

  "How?" Lyle said.

  "Keep an eye on the place. I'm a one-man operation. I'll put in some personal watch time outside when I can, and set up some motion-triggered cameras for when I can't."

  "Why not motion-triggered alarms?" Charlie said.

  Lyle grunted. "How about motion-triggered machine guns?"

  "Scaring them off isn't as important as finding out who they are. Once we know that, I track them down, and then you tell them to lay off."

  "Oh, that'll work," Charlie said with a derisive snort. "Suppose they don't wanna lay off?"

  "Then I convince them."

  "How?" Lyle asked.

  "That's my department. That's why you'll be paying me the big bucks. I can make life miserable for them. When I'm through they'll wish they'd never messed with, or even heard of the Kenton brothers."

  Charlie grinned. "I'm down with that."

  Lyle frowned, then turned to Jack. "Let's talk about these 'big bucks' you mentioned."

  8

  After they'd adjourned to the kitchen, where Lyle and Jack drank beers and Charlie sipped a Pepsi, Lyle tried to angle for a low-ball price, pleading financial straits after the major renovations to the old place, and now the repairs they'd need. Jack wasn't buying, but he did allow for three payments instead of the usual two: he'd take half down, a quarter when he identified the culprits, and the final quarter when he got them to stop.

  Lyle still held out, saying he and Charlie would have to discuss it, go over the books, blah-blah-blah before making a final decision. But Jack sensed the decision had been made. He was on.

  Damn, it felt good to be working again.

  "Let's talk about possible bad guys," Jack said as Lyle handed him a fresh Heineken. "Could anyone local be behind this?"

  Lyle shook his head. "There's an old gypsy on Steinway who reads palms and such, and that's about it. Astoria's got a lot of Muslims, you know, and if you believe in Islam, you can't believe in spiritualism."

  Jack was thinking things must have been pretty tense around here after the World Trade disaster, but all that had gone down before the Kentons' arrival.

  Which brought Jack to a question that had been niggling him since last night. "Then why Astoria?"

  "Manhattan's too expensive. All the real estate agents told me rents had dropped after the Trade Center attack, but even so, they were still too high for the amount of space we need."

  "For your eventual church."

  From Charlie's uneasy expression and the way he started fingering his wwjd pin, Jack figured he'd hit a sore spot.

  "When do you figure you'll get yours going?"

  "Never, I hope," Charlie said, glaring at Lyle. "Because that's the day I walk out."

  "Let's not get into that now, okay?"

  Jack tried to break the sudden tension by gesturing at this house around them. "So you went out and found this place in the wilds of Queens."

  "Yes. I wanted it because of its history. And because of its history, the price was right."

  "All those murders in your brochure are for real?"

  Charlie nodded. "Absolutely. This place got some evil history."

  "Fine. But the real money's either in Manhattan or in Nassau County, and you're in the great nowhere between. How do you get the money people to make the trip?"

  Jack sensed a combination of pride and pleasure in Lyle's grin.

  "First off, it's not such a trip. We're handy to the Triboro Bridge, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the 59th Street Bridge, the BQE, and the LIE. But the main spur to get them coming here was by having someone tell them to stay away."

  "Enlighten me," Jack said.

  "My previous mediumship," Lyle said, leaning back, "was in a town—don't ask which because I won't say—that was also home to a fair-size population of Seventh Day Adventists."

  "Who've go
t to believe that spiritualism is a sin."

  "Worse. It's the work of Satan, a direct link to the Horned One. They'd post signs around town warning people away, even went so far as to picket my storefront one Sunday. I was pretty scared and worried at first—"

  "For about ten minutes," Charlie said.

  "Right. Until I realized this could be the best thing that ever happened to me. I called the local papers and TV stations—at the time I wished they'd chosen a Saturday for their protest, but Saturday is their Sabbath—but the media showed up anyway and the result was amazing publicity. People started asking, 'What is it about this Ifasen that has the Adventists so worked up? He must really be onto something.' Let me tell you: business boomed."

  Jack nodded. "So, in a sense, you were banned in Boston. Works almost every time."

  "Not Boston," Charlie said. "Dearborn." He looked at Lyle and found his brother glaring at him. "What?"

  Jack leaned back, hiding a smile. So the Kenton brothers were from Michigan. In the psychic trade you tried to hide as much of your past as possible, especially if you were operating under a phony name. But also because lots of mediums had an arrest history—usually for other bunko scams—and a fair number had had careers as magicians and mentalists before discovering that, unless you were a superstar like Copperfield or Henning, conjuring tricks paid off far better in the séance room than in cocktail lounges and at kids' birthday parties.

  He wondered what the Kentons' histories might be.

  "Okay that's all fine for Dearborn," Jack said, "but I don't remember any stories about Astoria Adventists acting up."

  "Because there aren't any," Lyle said, turning away from his brother, "or at least no group big enough to suit my needs. But I'd planned for that. Before leaving Dearborn"—another scathing look at Charlie—"I laid some groundwork by taking out an ad in the News-Herald to announce my departure. I said I was leaving because the local Adventists had turned so many people against me that I could no longer continue my mediumship in such an atmosphere. I was beaten. They'd won. They wouldn't have Ifasen to kick around anymore. Or words to that effect."

  "But I thought you said business was booming."

  "It was. Especially 1999. Man, the six months leading up to the millennium had been incredibly good. Best ever." Lyle's voice softened to a reminiscing tone. "I wish '99 could've gone on forever."