She looked at him and frowned. “How do you know my name?”
“Shouldn’t I? It’s in your dossier.” Ray sat down in the chair opposite her. There wasn’t much else in Cameo’s private back room. The table that they sat at was small and round, well suited for intimate conversation. Atop it were Cameo’s beaded clutch purse, a cordless phone, and a crystal-stemmed goblet that she toyed with as Ray sat opposite her.
“If you’ve read my dossier,” Cameo said, “you must be from Battle.”
“That’s right. My name is Ray.” He flashed his lopsided smile. “You can call me Billy.”
“Well, Mr. Ray, what exactly do you want?”
All business, no banter, Ray thought sourly. “I have something for you.”
For the first time eagerness showed on Cameo’s face. “Did you bring the jacket?”
“Which jacket is that?” Ray asked with a frown.
“The jacket that was my price for going on this expedition of Battle’s. The leather jacket that once belonged to the ace called Black Eagle.”
Ray frowned. “What, you collect clothes from dead aces? Weird hobby.”
Cameo frowned back. On her, it looked pretty. “I thought you read my dossier.”
Ray shrugged. “I did. It said you were a psychosomatic trance channeler.”
Cameo rolled her eyes. “A psychometric trance channeler, Mr. Ray.”
“Oh. Okay. What’s that?”
“I didn’t know that my discussion with Mr. Battle would lead to my secrets becoming common knowledge,” Cameo said frostily.
“Hey, you can trust me to keep my mouth shut. Besides, we’re both on the team. I’ll see you in action tomorrow. It won’t hurt to tell me what you can do tonight.”
Cameo nodded. “All right. I read psychic impressions from objects and then channel the psyche of the dead from the things they once owned.”
“Wow,” Ray said. “Sounds like fun.”
Cameo shrugged.
“Exactly how would that help us take Ellis Island?”
"Well… this is not something that’s widely known, but if the deceased is an ace —”
Ray snapped his fingers. “Then you can channel his powers!”
“If,” Cameo said, “the powers were mental in nature. I couldn’t channel, say, the Harlem Hammer’s strength, but I could channel Dr. Tachyon’s telepathy.”
“If,” Ray said, “Tachyon was dead and you had a pair of his socks or something.”
Cameo pursed her lips. “Yes. Interesting example.”
Ray reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring they’d taken from the graveyard earlier that night. He put it on the table between them. “That explains this, then.”
“Whose is it?”
“It belonged to a guy named Brian Boyd, an ace also known as Blockhead. He’s dead now.”
Cameo reached out, not quite touching the ring.
“I guess Battle wanted you to have it so you could do your mumbo-jumbo and be ready first thing tomorrow.”
Cameo nodded abstractedly, still looking closely at the ring.
“I guess he has the jacket and he’ll give it to you tomorrow.”
Cameo looked up at him. For the first time there was uncertainty in her liquid eyes. “That when everything starts?” she asked. “Tomorrow morning.”
“Well,” Ray said, leaning close, “if you want we could have some real action tonight. Just the two of us.”
Cameo looked back at him steadily. “Tomorrow will be quite soon enough, Mr. Ray, thank you very much.”
“It’s another cunt,” the bodysnatcher said. “Someone’s cut it with a straight razor. You can see where it’s bleeding.”
The psychologist sighed and put down the Rorschach card. “We’ve looked at fourteen cards now. You’ve seen images of sexual mutilation in every one of them.”
The bodysnatcher tilted back his chair. “I’m a twisted motherfucker, what can I say? Too bad you gave me amnesty.”
“I don’t think there’s any point in continuing with this test,” the psychologist said.
“Don’t give up,” the bodysnatcher told him. “Come on, show me the rest of the inkblots. I promise, I won’t see anything but butterflies and puppy dogs.”
The psychologist opened a drawer and put the cards away. “Why don’t we just talk instead.”
The bodysnatcher yawned, like he could care less. Or maybe the meat was just tired. Pulse was an old fuck, after all. The bus had delivered them to a low cinderblock building behind an electrified fence somewhere in Jersey. Inside, the place was bigger than it looked, with at least four levels hidden under the surface. It had airlocks instead of regular doors, and closed-circuit TV cameras everywhere. The jumpers had been fingerprinted, photographed, run through a physical, then split up for a battery of tests that reminded the bodysnatcher of college entrance exams. After that he was given to this shrink.
“You look to be much older than the other jumpers,” the psychologist said.
“I’m young at heart. And this isn’t my original body.”
“I see,” the psychologist replied. He didn’t let any reaction show on his face. “Where is your real body?”
“Worms are eating it,” the bodysnatcher said. “It was a great body. I kept myself in shape. Not like you. When’s the last time you did a sit-up?”
The shrink ignored that. “What happened to your body?”
“An ace threw oven cleaner in my eyes,” the bodysnatcher told him. “Then some weights fell on me and broke my back. The ace left me there and killed the man I was supposed to be protecting.”
“I see.” He made a steeple of his fingers. “How did that make you feel about aces?”
“I want to kill every last one,” the bodysnatcher said.
The psychologist made a notation.
“I’d like to kill all the nats and jokers too,” the bodysnatcher added. The shrink wrote faster.
“They finally found me,” the bodysnatcher said. “They took me to some hospital. It was too late to save my eyes. Being crippled, that didn’t matter, but I needed my eyes. You can’t jump what you can’t see. All I could do was lay there and wait to die. You know what saved me? My cunt.”
The psychologist stopped writing and looked up. “Are you telling me you used to be a woman?” He licked his lip, like the idea got him excited.
“What do you think, Doctor?” the bodysnatcher said. “I’d been in that hospital maybe a week. One night I was lying in my own shit, waiting for someone to come clean me up. Finally an orderly shows up. He wiped me off, changed the sheets. Then he spread my legs and raped me.” The bodysnatcher gave a savage smile. “I jumped while he was in me. No one had ever done a blind jump before, but he was close enough for government work.”
“I see,” said the shrink. “So this body originally belonged to the orderly.”
“Fuck no,” the bodysnatcher said. “That jelly-belly? His feet always hurt, I couldn’t stand it. I used him for a few days. Then I filled a tub, opened his wrists with a razor blade, and phoned 911. I jumped the first paramedic through the door. The meat arrived DOA.”
The psychologist sat very still after he had finished, then gave a nod. “I see. Very well. I think we’re just about through here.” He stood up. “If you’ll come with me.”
The bodysnatcher followed him downstairs, where the shrink turned him over to a nasty-looking old fuck who said his name was George Battle. Battle looked over his file, then escorted him to a small bare room in the lowest subbasement. There was nothing in it but a large glass window opening on another small room. On the far side of the glass an old man in a flannel shirt sat at a table, working a crossword.
“One final test,” Battle told him. “We’d like to see if you can jump that gentleman over there.”