PsyCop Briefs: Volume 1

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “This eight-inch chef’s knife is finished with a long taper rather than a short bevel so the edge stays sharp longer…”

  A hundred bucks, on sale. Not a set of knives, mind you. Just the big, stabby one. Jacob wanted it. If there was one Jacob-expression I was confident I had a handle on, it’s the “I want that” look. The clerk was flirting up a storm, too, which really didn’t hurt his chances of scoring a sale.

  Combining two households worth of crap should have left us with extras, and yet lately, we constantly came up missing various items we couldn’t live without. Maybe if someone wasn’t so eager to toss things out, we wouldn’t be stuck shopping in our precious spare time, but I’m not one for unnecessary conflict, so I’d chosen to pick my battles and tag along.

  Besides, a spiffy new chef’s knife that cost more than our outrageous cable bill would probably net me some fine eating as Jacob put it through its paces. Visions of homemade guacamole and stir fry and sushi danced in my head. So tasty I was tempted to ignore the oily, cold slither of deadness creeping down my spine. Even to pretend the whuff-whuff rasp was a quirk of the radiator. But a passing headlight shone through the storefront’s plate glass, lighting a figure in the aisle for a fraction of a second. Long enough for me to see the bloated face with its poached salmon eyes trained right on me.

  Telling Jacob why. That would be the hard part.

  “…though we do recommend you bring it back for sharpening every six months…”

  Right. How many gay guys bought one just for an excuse to come back and have another try at picking up Mr. Totally Fake Highlights? I cleared my throat, and Jacob woke from the salesman’s spell and shifted his attention to me.

  “If you had your heart set on a spatula, maybe a colander, I would tell you to knock yourself out.” My eyes went to the spot where I now saw half-formed movement, a flickering outline streaked black with old blood. “But a knife?” I shook my head, dropped my voice, and muttered, “Not from this place.”

  Jacob shifted smoothly into high alert—one minute calm, affable, relaxed, and the next tensed like a predator. His gaze went right to the spot, but it was a faraway look on his face. Not like he’d actually seen anything, not like me. Only that he’d gleaned that I had.

  That was enough for him. Jacob put down the knife and allowed me to steer us away from the bad juju he couldn’t actually see. It was encouraging to think that he trusted my lead, even if it was only in the matter of picking the next store. I refrained from giving the salesman a smug look as we filed out the door. His fancy cutlery was no match for my secret weapon. Jacob liked expensive things, but all the pricy kitchen gadgets in the world didn’t trump my second sight.

  Most Likely To...

  It should come as no surprise that in the eighties, Jacob had a mullet.

  If you’re forty-something now, back then your hair could’ve only gone a few different ways. A nerdy side-part. Long and feathered for the stoners and short and feathered for the preps. If your parents were particularly cruel, a bowl cut. But for the non-preppy jocks, it was business in the front and party in the back. Jacob has always liked to present a conservative exterior, so his mulleted hair wasn’t too extreme. But it was bad enough that I could tease him about it whenever his mother dragged out the yearbooks.

  “I notice you’ve never coughed up any photographic evidence of your awkward years,” he said.

  After that I went quiet, which he must have noticed too, because he never brought it up again. My pensiveness wasn’t due to the fact that I’ve never grown out of my awkward years—hell, eventually a guy gets used to being all elbows and ribs. No, it was because pictures from my high school days didn’t exist.

  Believe me, I was nothing to look at back then. Six-four and a buck thirty. My skin didn’t have many good days, either. So I wore my jeans torn, my hair in my eyes, and my expression in a perpetual fuck-you.

  I suppose it didn’t really matter that I had no documentation of teenage me, but I was surprised to feel nostalgic over it. I wouldn’t mind a point of reference, something where I could acknowledge that my skin’s okay these days and my hairline hasn’t shifted too dramatically. It might be reassuring to concede that I made it through all the bullshit and came out in one piece.

  I’m still here. That would need to be enough.

  The yearbook incident was long past, or so I’d thought, when I looked up from a magazine I’d been half-reading to find Jacob with a hardback clutched against his stomach, a green and yellow hardback with a telltale arrowhead emblazoned on the front. The “go, Lane, go,” school song came flooding back like it was yesterday, and me giving Adam Sherhauer a hand job under the pep rally bleachers—not to completion, of course, but far enough that afterwards he would pointedly french his current girlfriend whenever I was in visual range.

  “eBay,” Jacob said. “Junior year. I found your senior year too, but….”

  “I wasn’t in that one.” Did I need to spell out that I’d finished out high school in the psych ward, back when “psych” was short for psychiatric? Nah, why ruin the moment…I had my GED, anyway. “I don’t remember this one either. I take it by the look on your face that I am actually in it.”

  He nodded carefully.

  “C’mon.” I patted the couch cushion. “Let’s get it over with.”

  We spread the yearbook open with one side on my lap and the other on his. He started thumbing through to the juniors, but I stopped him as I recognized a few faces. A sophomore kid I sat with at lunch who could repeat lines from a TV show after seeing it just once. A Filipino girl who refused to wear her glasses even though she was half blind without them. Her sister, who was a sudden knockout after she had her braces off sophomore year. Where were they now? Married? Settled?

  Jacob’s knee pressed mine. Yeah, hopefully they were all settled by now.

  Weirdly enough, I spotted Patty Barnes first. Her locker was next to mine and she sat beside me in homeroom. She told me about how far she went with her dates, in excruciating detail. At the time I figured she was trying to get me to admit that I’d hit all those bases too, and more. With boys. Now, she looked painfully young to my jaded eyes. Even innocent. And it occurred to me—nearly a quarter century later—that she’d probably been flirting.

  And there, next to her, was me. Scowling. My hair was gelled into a sort of drooping Sid Vicious. I looked just as painfully young as Patty. Just as innocent too.

  “I would’ve been too intimidated to approach you,” Jacob said.

  Like he knows the meaning of the word. “Especially given that you were looking at grad schools at the time….”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I flipped forward to Adam Sherhauer. His short feathered hair looked unnaturally stiff, but at least his skin was clear. Decent smile. Not a bad looking kid, but nothing special. Hopefully he’d given up frenching girls in an attempt to force himself to be straight, or at least seem that way. Or maybe he’d just been curious back then, under the bleachers. Who was I to judge?

  Jacob leafed forward and pointed to a lunchroom candid of three popular cheerleaders mugging for the camera. He tapped the background and said, “That’s you too, right?”

  I looked harder.

  There I was, regaling the lunch gang with a very dramatic-looking story. My arms were spread wide like I’d just come to the punch line of a big joke, and everyone was watching me in rapt fascination. Who the heck knows what I’d been recounting—I recall that our most pressing topics were sitcoms, music, and the stupidity of jocks.

  “I had you figured for a loner,” Jacob said.

  Funny, I thought I’d been a loner too.

  Who knows what I feared I might find in my old yearbook. That maybe my name wasn’t really my name, and it had been changed at some point and implanted by Camp Hell scientists? Or maybe that it wasn’t actually possible to capture me on film. Instead, I found a kid. Not your most motivated or well-adjusted kid, but not a total mess either. Strong enough t
o stand up against the ugliness of the next several years. I had to give it to that seventeen year-old Victor Bayne—he was pretty damn sturdy.

  Jock Straps On Sale

  “Going through my mail, are you?”

  I tore my eyes away from a dog-eared envelope on Crash’s countertop I hadn’t exactly been staring at, though it probably looked that way to the untrained eye. Or any eye. Mostly I’d just had a wretched, long day at a non-haunted crime scene and my feet really hurt. “Uh. No.”

  Smooth.

  “You’re the detective, Detective Bayne. What is it you detect?”

  That no matter what I said, I’d be sorry. “I wasn’t really thinking about…never mind.”

  Crash batted his eyelashes, clicked his tongue stud against his front teeth, draped himself over the counter and began to rifle dramatically through the massive pile of letters and papers. Jacob and I combined don’t get that much mail. Probably comes with the territory of owning a business. Either that or it had been accumulating for a week. “Bill. Ad. Bill. Junk. Junk. Bill. Ooh, and here’s the latest circular for SaverPlus.”

  Great. Now I’d have to endure some wisecrack about my wardrobe. “Look, I just need to know if you have any Florida Water, and if you don’t—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I heard you before. Nothing on the shelf. Some tattooed witchy chick cleaned me out a couple days ago—hot damn…would you look at these prices?”

  A remark about the polyester blazer was coming for sure. “Is there a good substitute, then? Something similar with a different name?”

  “So low. How do they do it?” He licked his thumb pointedly, smiled to himself and turned the page with his spit. “Their margins must be paper-thin.”

  “Maybe another ritual herb with the same properties?”

  His eyebrows shot up toward his hairline as he bolted upright and snatched up the circular in disbelief. “Jock straps?” He flipped the paper around and stretched it across his crotch, and the tiny picture of a plastic mannequin torso in a cup landed right over the fly of his jeans in glorious, bulging 3-D. “And they’re on sale!”

  “Never mind. I can hit the botanica in Uptown on the way to work tomorrow….”

  “Let you leave empty handed? I wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll give you my own personal bottle, gratis…if you’ll just do me a solid.”

  When people ask for a favor, my usual reaction is to pretend I didn’t hear them and hope they go ask someone else. But Crash? I owe him nine ways ’til Sunday, so I couldn’t just blow him off. He dropped the paper and whisked through the beaded curtain to his inner sanctum before I could agree or disagree, and came back with a slightly used bottle of Florida water, which dangled from his hand where he held it by the narrow neck between his first two fingers like a cigarette. He was also now wearing his vintage wool double-breasted officer’s coat.

  Great. The favor involved going somewhere.

  “I have this friend at SaverPlus,” he said.

  I was liking it even less. “Uh huh.”

  “Howsabout we pay him a little visit. Me. You. A bunch of loss-leader jock straps. Him and his massive love muscle.”

  “No.”

  “But you haven’t even met—”

  “No.”

  Crash came around the counter, and with a long, put-upon sigh, pressed his temple into my shoulder. “What would entice you to join in our reindeer games?”

  “I’m not a joiner. Just ask the Homeowner’s Association and the Fantasy Football League.” He did some more eyelash batting and I shoved him off my shoulder. “You know I’d never take you up on the offer. What’s really going on?”

  “I saw on Facebook that he just got stood up—spent last night sitting there alone at Blue Man Group—and so I figured he could use a little cheer.”

  “Who?”

  “My friend at SaverPlus.”

  And here I’d presumed Mr. Big was just a figment of Crash’s overactive imagination. “I can drop you off on my way home, but I’m not going in.”

  “Coolness.” Crash pressed the Florida water into my hands then twirled away, coattails flaring, and hit the lights. Sticks and Stones went dim. “Let’s motor.”

  When he strapped in to my passenger seat, it occurred to me to refrain from pointing out that it wasn’t much of a favor. SaverPlus was on my way home, after all. “If you needed a ride, all you had to do was ask.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He clicked his tongue stud against his teeth a few times. “But it’s so much fun to see you squirm.”

  Piece of Cake

  Grease and flour a 13 by 9 inch pan.

  Ash Man: what r u doing?

  I stared at the chat popup with a mixture of dread and relief. Would he believe me if I told him? I was trying to bake a cake…and the instructions on the box were worthless.

  Lets69: is that mexican bakery across from you still open Ash Man: nope, they lock their doors at 3 - lucky saps Lets69: what happens if you grease & flour a pan wrong cuz im trying to watch a video on it & i think my flash player is out of date & how do you update that Ash Man: this can’t be good

  Lets69: forget it

  Ash Man: calm down, clearly you’re eager to channel your inner betty crocker Ash Man: u don’t need a video - wipe down the pan with some shortening, then put in a tbsp of flour and tap it all around so it sticks. easy peasy.

  Lets69: we dont have shortening…can I use olive oil Ash Man: only if ur making cornbread Cornbread did sound tasty, but it didn’t have the same sort of panache as a cake. Plus, I’d already opened the box.

  Ash Man: what about butter?

  Lets69: will margarine work

  Ash Man: that processed stuff will kill you Ash Man: but yeah it will do

  I’m fairly sure butter is way worse for your health than margarine, but I know better than to argue with Crash.

  Getting the grease on the pan was easy enough. It actually took longer to smooth the finger-marks out of the margarine afterward. I double-checked the box to see if it specified white or brown flour, and then I saw that not only did the cake take 45 minutes to bake, it was supposed to cool for another two hours before I could frost it. This whole cake thing was a bust—no way would Jacob be Skyping with Clayton for three more hours, no matter how exciting the first few weeks of school had been. I was considering if I could get away with hauling both the opened cake mix and the greasy floured pan out to the alley without getting caught when the chat window bleeped.

  Ash Man: i just realized what the momentous occasion is If we were face to face, I’d be able to judge which end of the sarcasm scale his comment was hitting: the chummy ribbing, or the scathing venom. I figured I should give him the benefit of the doubt. And be as vague and neutral as possible in reply.

  Lets69: yep one year

  Damn it, I was covered in flour. I’d have to ditch my clothes, too. And I really liked that T-shirt.

  Ash Man: one year from the first date, or one year since you moved in together?

  Ash Man: same difference, I guess

  The last thing I needed was him mouthing off to me when I was in the middle of a cake crisis.

  Lets69: jealous much?

  The moment I hit the enter key, I regretted it. If I’d been thinking—which obviously I hadn’t—I would’ve realized that my knee-jerk comeback opened up a whole can of worms that really shouldn’t be allowed to slither out. What if I’d just led him to believe that I thought I’d won Jacob away from him?

  Lets69: not jealous of me

  Or worse, that I was conceited enough to think he was hot for me.

  Lets69: or Jacob

  Cripes, the whole remark was so ill-considered I wished I could unremark it, because he wasn’t firing back with anything—and he’s a really fast typist.

  Lets69: its just an expression…i didn’t mean anything by it Lets69: really

  On his end, only silence. Or the chat-equivalent of silence, anyway. He was determined to make me squirm. I probably deserved it. What did I care if he made
comments about how quickly I’d fallen into a serious committed relationship? It’s not as if I could deny it. We’d stood the test of time, though, Jacob and me. The anniversary proved it. That’s what mattered.

  Lets69: come on…call me an asshole and get it over with Surely that would get a rise out of him. I watched the chat box, and I waited.

  Nothing.

  He might be with a customer, at least that’s what I wanted to believe. But he might also be seriously ticked off. I pulled out my phone, which left me with a trio of white finger-marks on my jeans. My phone seemed to magnetically attract the flour, too. The black plastic was holding onto it more tightly than the greased pan. I stood there for a moment, wavering between cleaning up all my evidence, and following through with a phone call in which I’d get reamed out. Since both prospects were equally daunting, the decision wouldn’t form. Given that it was a Saturday and Crash had chosen to chat rather than call, I figured Sticks and Stones was seeing some business. That meant the phone call would be short and sweet, and the sooner I got it over with, the better I’d come off. My thumb was hovering over the call button when Jacob shouted from the office, “My connection died. Can you get on?”

  I glanced at the laptop perched on the counter and called back, “I’ll check.”

  Lets69: are you there?

  Nothing. And then I noticed the cursor up in the corner of the screen was shaped like a little clock…and when I backed over the last thing I’d typed, it disappeared. I pulled up a browser and tried to connect to the weather page. Nothing.

  Talk about dodging a bullet.

  “Nope,” I yelled, “no internet.” I closed down the chat program. Hopefully it would whisk the awkward jealousy remark into the realm of lost data, the magical place where so many of my projects end up when the computer freezes and shuts itself off for no good reason.

  Jacob said, “I’m going to restart the modem.”

  The last time the internet went out, Jacob wrestled with it for nearly half a day before giving in and calling the cable company. He’s the poster child for the word persistence, which would definitely work to my advantage. If I got cooking right away, the cake might even be able to cool before I frosted it. Eager to get that sucker in the oven, I grabbed the box and read the next line in the instructions.