Chapter 43 - Spirits

Lupe and Detective Pierce divided their time between exchanging glances at each other and staring at Richard. Richard, although his eyes were open (and much wider than normal), was not interacting or seeing the small interview room the four of them were in. Instead, his eyes were fixed on something else entirely – something invisible to Lupe and Detective Pierce.

"How's he doing this?" Detective Pierce. "Now I don't understand what he's doing but…saints be, how is he doing this?"

Lupe was reluctant to tell the truth. Honestly was a liability and she was still scared of the threat Richard had received in the mail. "He doesn't like to talk about it, but Richard's got medium powers. He doesn't like to tell people as it's so very much against his profession, that he's a man of mathematics and chemical formulas and mechanics, but he's been able to talk to the spirit world ever since he nearly died in the war."

Detective Pierce snorted a laugh. "The spirit world," he muttered to himself. "Three years ago I'd say you're off your nut, but now?" He sat back in his chair and lit a cigarette. "Do you believe in the spirit world?"

She enthusiastically nodded. Lupe had always believed strongly in the mysterious beyond and knew her way around an Ouija board. "But that's appropriate for me, not for him. He'd get laughed out of business if the public knew, so I'll ask you to kindly keep it under your hat."

"Well I ain't laughing, I'll tell you that much." He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and then exhaled a flume of smoke that wafted up to the ceiling. "Spirit world or not, I got one hell of a case here."

It was undeniable that Richard was indeed having some form of interaction with 'the spirit world' to some degree. Occasionally his lips would flex or jitter, but not in a way that looked like normal speaking – it just wasn't right, but Lupe couldn't put her finger on what was wrong with his completely silent lip movement. Unnatural. That word kept coming up in Rapture. Everything here is so unnatural.

Lupe crouched down next to Richard and Helena. She gently stroked Helena's free arm, and as she did so a flash of images came to her – books, a desk, Richard, but Richard was far away, speaking to someone else who she couldn't see. Figuring that was a window into their conversation, Lupe let go of Helena's arm and the images faded away.

"And you? Can you speak to the spirits?" Detective Pierce wasn't mocking. He also had his own experiences with Helena's presence and he was looking for answers.

Lupe sighed sadly. "No. I always wanted to, but they don't want to talk to me. I just got a feeling with her, that was all. Like you did."

Detective Pierce thoughtfully puffed on his cigarette. "What do you think happened to her? You're her friend, you've got to have an idea."

Avoiding eye contact means you are lying, Lupe recalled from reading somewhere and thus she made eye contact with Detective Pierce to convince him of her honesty. "She was working as a lady of the evening. You meet all kinds of men like that, pleasant and unpleasant. Criminals, smugglers, gangsters. She had a bad client. You need someone to…experiment on? Why not get a whore, huh?"

"She stole money," Detective Pierce reminded her. "That's more than a bad john for the night."

"Then a bad john for a week. Talked her into it."

"Do you have someone in mind?"

I'm selling him on this. "No. She didn't talk about the specific men she saw as clients. It would have been unprofessional."

"If what you are suggesting happened, then well…" Detective Pierce trailed off and gazed at Helena's monstrous new fish body. "There's a lot of dead ends when it comes to investigating smugglers. Brick walls and lead pipes, you get my meaning?"

She nodded. It was public knowledge that Ryan didn't have the control over the smugglers he wanted. "May I ask you a personal question, Detective Pierce?"

"Shoot."

"Why did you come here? Were you a detective topside?" Every person she looked at in Rapture she wondered this. What failed you on the surface? What was so awful you would sacrifice the sun and the sky, the moon and the stars, the very air itself?

"Were you a dildo slinger topside?" Detective Pierce asked with an air of amusement.

His attempt to make her blush failed. "Goodness no," she frankly answered. "I didn't even know things existed. For my answer, I came here because I thought my artistic ability was being unfairly stifled on the surface. Turns out I was just one of, well, probably millions of people with above middling ability to draw. But I suppose I found my niche here."

Detective Pierce must have found her answer amusing as he gave a chuckle before replying. "I wasn't a detective. I worked as a police officer for a few years after the war. I quit. Too much corruption."

If he's trying to butter me up to get me to talk about Helena it isn't going to work. She nodded sympathetically but said nothing.

"And I thought…I didn't think." Detective Pierce trailed off and his gaze settled upon Helena. "Saints help us."

Lupe had nothing to say to this. Saints help us indeed.

Their awkward silence was interrupted by Richard suddenly returning to their plane existence. He gasped as if resurfacing from a deep dive, then blinked several times. He looked around the room before speaking, and there was a fresh sadness on his face Lupe had never seen before as he beheld the inherent dankness of everything in Rapture.

"I spoke to her," he announced slowly, carefully choosing his words. "And she told me what she wants."

"And? Did you get a confession from her?" Detective Pierce asked.

Lupe snorted a laugh. "Does that really matter anymore?"

Richard held his free hand up to stop Lupe's sentiment. "Yes, I did. She said she stole the money and that she was going to lie low for a while until the heat went down. She went to a client for help hiding, but he stole the money and turned her over as a test subject to…Detective Pierce, you know. She knows you know. She knows everything you know because you touched her while moving her around. The small yellow house in Omaha, your daughter you left behind in Tulsa, that man in The Philippines, all of it."

Richard's words sank into Detective Pierce and he sat up straight as an arrow. "Impossible. It's a trick, a scam, a parlor trick!"

"I can go back," Richard shortly said. "I can ask her for more details if you want."

Detective Pierce frowned. "What does she want?"

"Helena is of the opinion, which I agree with, that she has been punished enough for her crime," Richard answered, still speaking rather slowly for him.

"That's not my decision to make," Detective Pierce pointed out.

"She thinks you agree though. You're a decent person. She doesn't belong here among us anymore. You know where she belongs." Richard's voice was oddly hypnotic, as if he had absorbed some of Helena's strange new powers. Lupe was also enraptured by his mesmerizing tenor and any questions she had for him died on her lips. Oh, how lucky I am to sleep with him.

Detective Pierce nodded slowly, seemingly swayed by his argument. "I cannot have a suspect in custody disappear."

"Aside from the smugglers, the only people who have positively identified her are in this room," Richard pointed out. "You didn't tell anyone yet." He gestured at Helena. "She hears everything that comes in and out of here."

"The spirit world," Detective Pierce muttered to himself. "Now it seems to me that if she's as mighty powerful as she is, I'd be giving up a very powerful investigative tool."

"Seems to me that if you kept her against her will she'd be the opposite of helpful, don't you think? And just so you don't get any ideas in your head, she's pretty much unkillable. Her captures tried pretty much everything they could think of and it bounced off like water off a duck."

This broke Lupe's spell. She gasped. "Oh my Lord!"

Richard tilted his head to her, evidently remembering that she was in the room as well. "It didn't hurt," he assured her. He almost robotically turned his attention back to Detective Pierce. "The best solution for you is to let me get her out of here."

Lupe suddenly noticed that Richard was still holding Helena's hand. Helena is talking through him, it dawned on her. Maybe not all the way, but she's influencing his words and his manner of speaking. Were this situation not her doing to begin with Lupe would be very upset at this development. Regardless, it was still alarming.

"And how do you propose I do that? How are you going to get…her out into the open ocean? We can't just open the screen door like she's a wayward bee," Detective Pierce pointed out.

"I will come over with a crate. A large crate. It's for a strut replacement. A critical strut replacement. You and I put her in that crate. There's a testing facility in Triton Place that has access to open water bays. Every now and then I send over a batch of pipes and struts and whatnot to see how they react to the pressure and salt," Richard explained, almost robotically.

She's making sure he follows through. She doesn't trust him, Lupe reckoned as he watched Richard's lips form the words in an unusually taut way.

"And then what? She just swims off and lives in a coral castle happily ever after?"

"She's thinking more like a cave, but yes, that's the general idea," Richard answered flatly.

Detective Pierce sighed. "This has to happen fast."

"It will." Richard stood up and in doing so he let go of Helena's hand. His muscles relaxed and he exhaled slightly. "It's important that we go about our business as usual. The men watching the police station aren't suspicious yet, but Helena isn't confident that she can permanently keep them distracted. I'm going to the warehouse to find a suitable crate and Lupe, you should go back to work."

Lupe hadn't given a second thought to her shop since yesterday. She glanced at her watch. It was nearly ten, an hour or so after she usually opened but if she hustled she shouldn't lose much traffic, she usually didn't get many customers until around lunchtime anyway. She stood to go and Richard joined her as they left the security station.

"She's very pleased with your shop," Richard mentioned as they left the security station. "I showed it to her. She thinks the little dirty drawings you made on the walls are adorable and very clever."

"How?" Lupe asked, bewildered.

"I'll tell you all about it at home tonight. I need to go get that crate though and make some telephone calls. I'll handle this, the fewer people involved the better and it's not normal for you to visit my office and workshop." The hypnotic timbre of his voice had disappeared and he sounded like himself again.

They didn't speak again until they reached the train platform. Lupe was awash with a sickening mess of confusing sentiments she didn't know how to label. A hellish blend of guilt, fear, uncertainty, and disgust was percolating inside and it was hard to keep it from boiling over. She barely registered Richard's hand on hers as they stood on the platform.

"Another delay. Lazy bastards," Richard muttered as he glared at the large overhead clock. "Probably having an early lunch."

Lupe turned to him suddenly. "Why are you doing this? You're really sticking your neck out for someone you've never met." It wasn't exactly suspicion that made her ask, not really, just an inkling and a reminder that no one in Rapture came here to help others.

"For you. You were so torn up when she disappeared. If I can take a load off your mind I will leap at that chance." Richard smiled to himself. "Also, it makes me something of a hero, doesn't it? That's what you told me once, a long time ago, that I was a hero for getting shot, remember?"

"Not so much for getting shot, any idiot can get shot, it was for fighting Nazis, but yes, I remember."

"I spent years thinking I was just any idiot." Richard gave her hand a squeeze. "You make me feel like a hero. And I like that."

Lupe considered his words. I wonder if there is such a thing as selfless love, where you don't get anything out of it for yourself. That was a question for philosophers though. "Thank you," she softly said. "I wouldn't say anything about this makes me happy, but knowing that she's free, at least that's better than alternatives." She kissed him on the cheek.

He promised to call her once the rescue was completed. And what if it isn't completed? Lupe mused at the shop that day. Would Richard be arrested? For what? And by whom? Lupe was extra happy to see her customers as coyly assisting them in picking out sensual oils was a welcome distraction.

She stared at the black telephone behind the counter, willing it to ring and for Richard to tell her everything was okay and she could unclench every muscle in her body. A watched pot never boils. May as well get around to finding an assistant. Lupe swiftly dialed Mimi's number. Her new assistant had to be comfortable with false members larger than their own forearms and Lupe didn't want to wade through a sea of women like herself from a year ago.

"Do you know of any working women who are looking for another line of work?" Lupe asked once the pleasantries were dismissed. "I'm looking for some help around here and I don't want someone who's going to blush when she's ringing up the customers."

"I have the gal for you. Trudy. Not cut out for being a working girl. Come around my shop later around seven or so and I'll introduce you," Mimi answered. "I've got a batch of rubber johnnies for you."

"Oh good, I was running low." Lupe repackaged the prophylactics into luxury packaging and charged three times as much as Mimi did. "You're the best."

"And yet I'm rotting away here in the slums and you're living high and mighty," Mimi jibed.

"Eden Plaza isn't high nor mighty, I've got a nest of rats chewing on the floorboards and there isn't enough poison in the city to kill them. Can you believe that nonsense?" Lupe leaned forward on her elbows onto the counter. "I'll see you tonight then."

No one came in between four and five. Lupe considered calling Richard's office, but she didn't want to risk distracting him from his task. At five she flipped her sign and began to count out the day's take. Poor Helena, she thought as she tallied up the till. Each dollar seemed to accuse her. Here you are, they said to her, counting up your money as your friend is in a crate getting dumped in the ice-cold ocean.

The phone suddenly rang, startling her out of her guilty hallucinations. Lupe picked it up eagerly. "Yes?"

"Hi sweetheart. Everything is taken care of," Richard quietly said. From the background noise, she surmised he was using a pay phone. "It went off without a hitch."

Lupe exhaled happily. "Oh Richard, that's such a relief. I can't tell you how much this means to me."

"You don't have to. I'll see you at home tonight."

I'm glad I make him feel like a hero, she thought as she set the handset back in the cradle. He certainly is one.