While it might run the risk of sending the guy screaming in the opposite direction, I opted for the truth. Not only was it easier than coming up with a plausible lie on the spot (since I knew diddly squat about real estate contract litigation). But Boswell might already be aware of the FPMP—which really was the only federal organization that would dig deeper into a haunting.
I held up my I.D. and gave the eyeballs a chance to read it.
When he did…the window powered down. Not all the way. But enough for me to get a good look at him.
“I thought the FPMP was just a myth,” Boswell admitted.
“Well…up till a couple of years ago, so did I.”
Noah Boswell was a big, stocky doofus of a Caucasian guy in his mid-forties. For someone living out of a van, he didn’t look half bad. His hair was combed, his shave was recent, and his clothes were reasonably clean.
If I didn’t know better, I’d take him for a normal person….
If his van weren’t stacked floor to ceiling with 2-liter cola bottles. And all of ’em full of…pee? Yeah. The contents weren’t brown, but yellow. And there had to be at least a hundred bottles. Maybe more.
That must be hell on the van’s mileage.
I tried my best not to stare at the bottles so as not to destroy the tentative rapport.
“So, how much of a refund are we talking?” Boswell asked me. “Because the fire in the bathtub was most definitely not my fault.”
Uh-huh. “Hard to say. The most critical piece of evidence in your favor is obviously gonna be the psychic aspect.”
“Well, right. Sure. I get it. The bathtub, though—that’s where they really dinged me. That, and my moving out partway through the second month. But I wouldn’t have had to cook dinner in the bathtub if the oven wasn’t full of asbestos.”
I’m no expert on large appliances, but the stove had looked like a normal oven to me. And all those bottles in the van were not exactly helping the guy’s credibility.
“I’ll see what I can do about the tub charge,” I lied. “But what can you tell me about—”
“And the windowsills?” he interrupted. “What about those?”
Dare I ask? “What about them?”
“I was reassured that the windows formed an airtight barrier—the amount of outgassing that comes off the city buses is ridiculous. They claim they’re electric powered, but they don’t fool me—they’re obviously radioactive. Ten, twenty years from now there’s gonna be a huge cancer outbreak, and it’ll follow all the bus routes to a T. So the windows were decent enough—but where the windowsills met the wall, you could feel the breeze coming through, plain as day. It’s not my fault the rubber roof sealant only came in black.”
Maybe the place had struck me as a dump…but after five minutes talking with Boswell, I was ready to nominate the landlord for canonization.
“I’ll see what I can do. Now, back to the nonphysical disturbance. What can you tell me about that?”
Boswell’s car door swung open, and Jacob stepped back a pace—not startled, just reflexively creating distance.
Evelyn shifted her weight beside him. She didn’t say a word, but her lips were pressed together tight, and she was blinking too often.
I managed a hasty sidestep just as the soda bottles came rolling out, all of them some obscure cut-rate cola brand called Blast. Empty, thankfully, judging by the way they bounced and the hollow plastic thunks they made as they hit the asphalt.
Though that didn’t make them any less weird. There were just so many.
Boswell slammed the door, grabbed the runaway bottles, and pitched them back through his open window.
I tried not to stare, really, I did. But there was nowhere else to look.
“You can only find this pop in certain stores.” Boswell snagged an empty bottle doing its best to roll away. “I need to be strategic about where I turn in the empties for deposit. Otherwise the soda algorithm goes wonky, and next thing you know, no more Blast.”
I didn’t sound too sarcastic when I said, “You learn something new every day.”
Jacob didn’t react beyond a single raised brow. Evelyn glanced away quickly, like she couldn’t quite stop herself from feeling everything Boswell felt, and needed a second to recalibrate.
Boswell straightened. He was big—as tall as me, as broad as Jacob, and all of it pure flab. “And obviously, I can’t just dump my urine out anywhere. All those vans driving around supposedly taking photos for street maps have trackers installed that big pharma doesn’t want you to know about.”
