Read PsyCop 5: Camp Hell for Free Online Page A

the smoke on the pavement and ground it out.
    “Now that that’s over, maybe we can go somewhere warm.” I’d left my gloves in my car. My hands were jammed deep into my pockets, and the tips of my ears were freezing.
    “No, I don’t think so. Why don’t you tell me whatever it is that you’ve been dying to say—after fourteen years?”
    “Geez, would you cut me some slack? How was I supposed to find you? You changed your name.”
    He raised one eyebrow higher than the other and tilted his head. He shrugged.
    “Can we start again? Hey, uh, Stef…Steven. You look great.”
    “No I don’t. I’m retaining fluid.”
    I sighed. My breath streamed into the cold air in a big, white cloud, as if I’d been smoking one of those cigarettes from the fancy black pack.
    “Okay, okay. How about this? I can’t remember Camp Hell, and it’s starting to freak me out. And now I can’t find anything about it on the Internet, and nothing about me, or anyone else who’s ever been inside.”
    “I can get you the number for Heliotrope Station. They’re still training municipal Psychs there.”
    “Those pencil pushers at the community college? No, not them. They’re not the real Camp Hell. They adopted the name, but none of the same people are running that program. I mean the real Camp Hell.”
    Stefan pulled out a red pack of smokes, picked it open, and lit one up. “Better,” he said. He stared at it as it burned down, and I waited. When it was about half gone, he said, “I looked for you when I got out. I couldn’t find you. I thought maybe you were dead.” Stefan took another drag. He scrutinized the cigarette. Smoke curled from his nostrils. “Remember when you talked the nurses’ aide into giving you half a pack of Newports so that you’d have something to give me for Kwanzaa?”
    Kwanzaa rang a bell. I remembered Stefan’s voice saying it seemed like a much cooler holiday than Christmas, and that he’d never read anything that said that white people couldn’t celebrate it, too. But I didn’t remember the Newports. “I just told you, I don’t remember Camp Hell.”
    He stared at me so hard I thought I might wilt. His cigarette burned down some more. “Repressed memories are out of my league. But I might be able to help you out if, for instance, you want to gain some weight. I’m a licensed empathic hypnotherapist.”
    I shrugged. So few of my clothes fit me anyway. If I put on ten pounds, my favorite jeans would be too tight. “‘S’okay.”
    “What about work? Job productivity, that’s the ‘big thing’ right now. I can charge lawyers and stockbrokers insane amounts of money to give them a business edge.”
    “I sense dead people. I don’t want an edge. If anything, I’d want to dumb it down.”
    He frowned at his cigarette, which dangled from his fingers and continued to burn down. He fished the pack out of his pocket and offered it to me, but I shook my head. He shrugged and pocketed the smokes. Then he turned his hand to look at the lit end of his cigarette. “Remember that time we smoked a banana peel?”
    “No.”
    “What do you mean, no?” He scowled even harder, and glared at me a little. “That fat slob of a janitor, A.J. or T.J. or B.J. or whatever he called himself…. He told us we could get high if we dried a banana peel and smoked it.”
    I shrugged.
    “And so you snuck one out of the cafeteria in your pants, and I hid it in my room. I tried to dry it on the radiator, but it stuck there, and the whole room smelled like rotten bananas.”
    “I really don’t….”
    He talked over me, getting louder as he went on. “And then finally after about a week it was dry, all black and leathery and dry, and we made a bong out of a toilet paper roll and a piece of tin foil, and we hid in the corner of the smoking lounge.”
    I could hear the hurt in his voice, that he had this memory of something we’d done, together—and my half of it, the portion that I was supposed to cherish and