Read Online Double Cross [2] by Carolyn Crane - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t you?”
    He waits.
    “Fine. It was you. In that place. Bodies. It was horrible, Packard.” I look at him sadly. “You were just a kid.”
    “Don’t.”
    “I can’t empathize?”
    “No. You can tell me the facts.”
    “Fine,” I say. “You were in a ruined stairwell upset about a hand embedded in a wall. Like a body was entombed in there.”
    Packard looks pale. “What did you make of the dream?”
    “Why don’t you tell me what I should make of it? Was that the abandoned school? What were those bodies?”
    “Did you have consciousness during it? Thoughts?”
    “I don’t get to ask any questions?”
    “This is important,” he says. “I’m trying to determine how deeply she’s linking.”
    I sigh. “I wouldn’t say I had thoughts exactly. I knew vague things, like more than one body was entombed in there. I felt dread. Vigilance. And like I had this mission to protect the place, cover the bodies, not let them emerge.”
    A tanker truck pulls into the gas station over on the corner. Two men jump out, open a manhole on the ground, and pull out tubes, connecting things in a frantic fashion.
    “That’s it?” Packard asks.
    “The dread was so intense—this sense that, what if the crack widened, and people saw what was in there? And there was also this sense of being under attack, like there were people outside in the night that might try to get in, and I had all this responsibility to handle it … or you did. A sense of guilt. And those bodies in there …” I turn to Packard. “What was going on?”
    He presses his big, rough lips together—proud, exhausted, and clearly distressed.
    “What happened in that place?”
    He frowns. “Thanks to you, a deadly dream invader is parting the folds of our linked minds. Why don’t youconcentrate on getting us out of this mess instead of interrogating me?”
    I flush with shame. “I’m working on it.” A couple of people head into the bar. “Packard, what if we sleep in shifts? So we’re never asleep at the same time?”
    “The dream link is extratemporal. It doesn’t matter when we sleep, only
that
we sleep.”
    “Should we
stop sleeping
maybe?” Curious as I am, I don’t want to go back there.
    “Have you ever stayed awake for more than a day or two?”
    “No.”
    “You don’t want to,” he says simply. “You just need to go at her hard. And don’t let on that you know. She’s going fast, linking our dreams like this.”
    I nod.
    “I’ve got Vesuvius giving her top priority once you’re done. You need to zing the hell out of her. We have to make her release us.”
    I watch the gas station guys wind up the big hoses.
    “You’re not still having problems with that, are you?”
    “As long as she’s not innocent,” I say.
    “Did you enjoy having your consciousness invaded last night? She’ll only go deeper.”
    “Don’t worry—it’s not looking like she’s innocent anyhow.”
    “What do you mean not
looking
?”
    “Simon’s reinterviewing some people, but the stories are holding.”
    “Justine, we don’t have time for this!”
    “Look, I don’t want her in my head, okay? But if she’s innocent of murder …” I hold up a hand. “She’s probably not, but I need to know for sure. It’s bad enough that we’re forcing these people to crash and transform and, you know … if the target’s innocent …”
    “Losing your taste for Otto’s utopia?”
    “Don’t make it into something. I’m talking to you straight here. About disillusionment.”
    He looks at me strangely. “You no longer think it’s right to disillusion criminals?”
    “Do you?” I ask.
    Packard draws his finger over the top of the side mirror. Says nothing.
    “Come on, Packard. If things were different …”
    He eyes me coolly. Something’s there, I can tell.
    “Can’t you level with me about anything?”
    He crosses his arms. “You’re asking
me
about right and wrong? The man who runs thugs and thieves and whose word means