Under other circumstances, Dean wouldn't have bothered with this at all. Real legit psychics were few and far between. The odds on cold readers and fast talkers were much higher, so normally he would have argued that this whole thing was a waste of time. It sure had proven to be so far. He'd already been through a "gypsy" who's fake accent had been so bad that he figured anybody who fell for it deserved to get conned, and a professed trance medium who really needed to dial back the special effects if he wanted to come across as believable. Real spirits only expended that kind of energy when something was at stake.
He wasn't able to come up with a better idea, however. Something he didn't understand was happening, and the harsh reality was, he couldn't even be sure whether was happening in the real world, or just in his head. Until he could know for sure or at least have a good reason to lean one way or the other, anything else he tried would be pretty pointless. How the hell was he supposed to investigate when he didn't know what evidence to trust, couldn't tell actual events from his imaginings or hallucinations, or whatever the hell they were? He needed somebody that could get inside his head and hopefully sort it out, with any luck, give him some clue as to a way to keep it straight himself.
Missouri, predictably, hadn't been any more reachable than Sam or Bobby had been. He hoped against hope that somehow her impressive abilities would tip her off that he was trying to reach her and that she would contact him. Slim hope, but he was running short on options, which is what had led him to be desperate enough to be standing at this door in a poorly maintained building on the low rent side of town. He raised his hand to knock.
The door jerked open before he had the chance.
The kid was pretty unimpressive, maybe 19 or 20, skinny enough to make Dean wonder how his baggy shorts stayed up, dark hair, nearly but not quite black, pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. A tattered Avril Lavine T-shirt hung loosely on his frame, giving him the appearance of an under stuffed scarecrow.
"Giovanni D'Marco?" Dean asked uncertainly, pretty sure there'd been some sort of mistake.
"Maybe, who wants to know?" the kid responded.
Dean wasn't in the mood for games. "Is this your ad?" he held up a page ripped from a local directory.
"You mean the one that says, 'by appointment only'?" the boy pointed out dryly.
"Five minutes," Dean quipped. With a flick of his wrist, he was holding up a folded twenty dollar bill between two fingers.
The kid looked Dean over curiously, seemingly uninterested in the money. "You'd better come in." he said, stepping back to make way. "You can call me Gi, by the way. Everybody does."
Dean stepped through the door into what turned out to be a tiny studio apartment that made his own usual housing options seem glamorous by comparison. "Have a seat." his host invited as he headed off towards a sectioned off corner that served as a makeshift kitchenette. "Sorry about the mess. I usually straighten up if I know a client's coming by."
"Yeah, sorry about that," Dean said sheepishly, claiming a spot on the threadbare lumpy sofa, "I was in the neighborhood."
"Forget it," Gi waved it off. "You want coffee?" he offered as he poured himself a cup from a coffee maker that sputtered its way through the struggle to complete its cycle without shaking apart. Despite it being well past noon, it was obvious that Dean had arrived during what Gi personally considered to be early morning.
"I'm good, thanks," Dean answered, trying to find a comfortable spot where he wasn't being stabbed by a spring.
Gi was shoveling heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his own mug. He took a sip, grimaced, and added another overflowing spoonful before deeming the coffee drinkable. "I think there's some pizza left from the other day." he offered indicating a box that sat on a wooden spool that served as a coffee table.
"Thanks, I'm fine." Dean answered, casting a suspicious eye towards the grease spotted box. Gi still hadn't made any mention of the money, so Dean just dropped it on the spool. He was already pretty sure it would have done him just as much good to have just set it on fire.
Gi exited the kitchenette, mug in hand, and grabbed ahold of a folded lawn chair that leaned up against the wall. He flipped it open with one hand and settled down across the spool. "So what can I do for you, De...ude?" he asked.
Probably nothing, Dean figured, but he was just desperate enough to let this play out. "I've been having, I guess you could call them visions."
"Can't help you." Gi concluded quickly, "I don't do dream interp. I can give you the number of a friend of mine. She's a total scam artist, but she hits more than she misses." He made a dreamy face, "Looks good doing it, too, so if it goes bust, you can just consider it a date. It'll cost you about the same."
"Yeah, um, no," Dean rejected the offer. "I'm actually more interested in the source, what's causing them."
"Now that I can do." Gi said nodding. "It's a process though, sort of like therapy, takes time."
Of course it does, Dean thought cynically, lot's of billable visits, "OK, forget that." Dean looked at the ad, "It says here, 'I'll find what you need.' Does that mean missing persons?"
"I ain't a GPS, Dude. I'm more like a, whadaya call it, a compass. I can point you in the right direction."
So far, this had been a whole lot of nothing, but as lame as it was, it was still more promising than the two earlier attempts. "Cool, how's that work?" he asked, figuring he might as well follow through since he was already here and out the twenty bucks.
"If you mean, 'why can I do it', no clue. Some people are just born extra, you know, DaVinci, Mozart, my girl Avril. If you mean my process," he rose and crossed the room to the single window the room could boast and dragged the heavy curtain that graced it closed. "I'm not a performance artist, so if you're looking for a lot of 'oh spirit' chanting and freaky foreign babble, there's this gypsy lady…"
"No thanks," Dean saved him the trouble, "been there, done that, wasn't impressed."
"Cool," Gi dropped the subject, retrieving a large candle from a cinder block and scrap wood bookshelf. He returned to drop back into the lawn chair and pushed the pizza box to one side to make room for the candle. "Low light helps you relax." he explained striking a match and touching it to the wick, "so does the sandalwood. The more relaxed you are, the less likely I am to sprain something."
Dean wasn't sure how to take all this. The guy definitely wasn't trying to con him with some bogus window dressing, but it all seemed a little bit underwhelming.
Gi settled back into his chair, his eyes fixed unblinking in Dean's direction, but seeming to look past him at something off in the distance. "Dude, seriously" he groaned as he broke the stare and pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut, "work with me and chill out a little. You're like, radiating stress."
Oh yeah, I wonder why, Dean thought to himself. He took a deep breath and slumped back onto the sofa, feeling like an idiot.
"No, Dude," Gi tried to explain, "OK, try this. When was the last time you felt really calm, really at peace with yourself? Start by thinking about that."
Was this guy serious? Dean thought back, more out of cynicism than obedience to the instructions. There hadn't been a whole lot of calm lately. His day had been all photo IDs, and library cards, and false memories about vanished salvage yards. Not calming. And last night, last night had been…
I am Dean Winchester.
I am a hunter.
"That's it, Dude. Go with that." Gi encouraged him. Dean allowed himself to dwell in the memory, the words at the top of the page creating a conduit that stretched through the years, connecting him to his father, his family, his past, and everything he was, everything he'd drawn his strength from for his whole life. He drifted in a sort of timeless, dreamlike state and allowed himself to enjoy reliving the memory of the cleansing he'd inadvertently given himself. Somewhere beyond it he vaguely heard Gi's voice murmuring things he couldn't make out, just background noise.
When he came out of it Gi was jotting something on the greasy receipt salvaged from the pizza box. "There you go," he said, pushing the paper across the spool towards Dean.
"That's it?" Dean observed, "That's a little anti-climactic."
"You want flash, or you want results?" Gi asked, "because I know a guy that'll do a whole epileptic melodrama for you, really cuts himself and everything."
"Results, definitely," Dean picked up the paper and examined it skeptically. It was an address. "What's here?" he asked.
"No clue, Dude," Gi responded, "It's not my reality. Go, don't go, write your own story, my man."
"What do I owe you?" Dean asked, not caring that his disappointment was apparent.
"This'll do it," Gi snatched up the twenty from the spool table, seemingly aware of it for the first time since Dean pulled it out.
XXXXX
Dean had to wonder how the little owner-op drugstore was still in business. It was a lousy location where a few stubborn businesses clung to life outnumbered heavily by dark windows baring faded 'for rent' signs. Weaving his way through tightly packed displays of various housewares and summer clearance, Dean's irritation grew as he wondered just what it was he was supposed to find here. Nothing would have surprised him at that point, whether finding Sammy in the back, behind the counter filling prescriptions, or Gi popping out of one of the large boxes to yell "gotchya!"
He was pretty sure he'd just been rooked out of twenty bucks, but he might as well get his money's worth and explore the whole place before admitting it. It wasn't like any other leads were promising any better use of his time.
He almost couldn't believe his eyes when he rounded a corner around a display of tacky beach towels and saw it. "Son of a bitch," he muttered in disbelief, not wasting thought on whether Gi had been legit or just lucky. He hadn't even known these cheesy, four for a dollar photo booths were still around, thought they'd become a relic of the past like lead paint and disco.
Ten dollars later he was stocked up on head shots for the foreseeable future. It was such a small thing to have taken up an entire day, and yet, successes had been so few and far between on this uphill battle Dean almost felt as if been thrown a lifeline. Legit or not, he owed Gi a nice fruit basket.