This alley had several bright lights shining down on it, but even so, large portions of it were in shadow. I’d need to watch out for more than just ghosts. If I ended up getting rolled for my wallet while I was busy staring off into Deadland, I’d never hear the end of it. A few steps forward. A few more. Look. Listen.
Nothing.
The tension in my shoulders was just starting to ebb when I caught a flash of motion. Fast. Crazy fast. My head snapped around, and even though she was soaring at me way too quick to be natural, that brief impression coalesced in a single moment. Wild hair. Wide eyes. Torn clothes. And blood, blue-black in the street lights, running down her legs.
And then she was gone.
I stood perfectly still, suddenly aware of the noise of Halloween revelers out on the street, car doors slamming, traffic, people talking, people laughing. Living people. Eventually it seemed like maybe the show was over and I’d seen all there was to see…and then I saw the flash of movement again. The bleeding woman, running too fast. She disappeared in the same spot as before, a few yards before alley met side street. I allowed myself to exhale: repeater. Creepy. Tragic. But as far as I knew, nothing I needed to do much about, other than flick some salt its way and urge it out of its perpetual death loop.
A flicker, and the bloody woman ran by again and disappeared. How often did it happen, once every minute or so? Multiplied by however many minutes it had been since she screamed her last scream…well, doing the math wouldn’t help either of us. I’d end up depressed, and she’d still be perpetually screaming down the alley. I didn’t happen to have any salt on me. However, I could easily go around the block, hope I didn’t earn too many weird looks by arriving at the same party twice, pony up to the bar and order a frozen margarita with a nice salty rim.
Except….
The likelihood of her death having been an accident or a suicide were pretty damn slim. I don’t think back alley coat hanger abortions actually take place in back alleys, so shady medical procedures were an unlikely cause. It didn’t look like a case of pedestrian vs. vehicle, either, like I see at so many intersections. Judging by the bloody thighs, my new repeater had been sexually assaulted. But had the crime been solved, or was it rotting in a cold case file? Hard to say. Not my precinct. Not to mention that I couldn’t really tell how fresh the repeater was. Could’ve been two years. Could’ve been twenty.
If the case was still open, chances of me getting called in to help with it were minuscule. And chances of another medium picking up the level of detail that I could were nearly nil. Even so, if I salted her now and it turned out they needed more evidence later, I didn’t want to be the one who’d scrubbed the traces clean.
“So both of my choices here suck,” I told her as she flashed by me. “I’m sorry.”
The repeater darted to the end of the alley and disappeared.
I straightened my tie, picked up my empty champagne glass and followed. As I neared the side street, someone cleared their throat. I cataloged all the ways I might use my empty glass as a weapon. But muggers don’t usually clear their throats to let you know they’re in your path—and the guy leaning on the building had the silhouette of a bald guy in a suit. Maybe one of the guests, but more likely one of the hosts. He tipped his chin up and the alleyway lights caught his brow, nose and cheekbones.
Not the nice one. The one Jacob used to “date.” Keith.
He didn’t move to take his hands out of his pockets, which excused me from a handshake. But we could hardly pretend we didn’t see each other. “Cigarette break?” he said.
“Just getting some air.”
He grunted, eyes on the pavement beyond me as if the asphalt was more interesting than I was, and he’d only asked because it seemed it was expected of him.
Awkward pause, and then, since he didn’t seem to be smoking either, I said, “You?”
“Same.”
It’s your party, I thought. You picked out your guest list and your hors d’oeuvres bar and your incredibly persistent DJ. Why should you need to escape? I stuffed my free hand in my pocket and rocked on my feet for a moment since I didn’t want anyone reporting back to Jacob that I hadn’t been willing to chat. But when it didn’t seem as if Keith wanted me there any more than I wanted to be there, I shifted my weight to take a step toward the bar. Once I’d made my decision to walk, of course, he began to speak.
“Manny picked this place.”
A chill raced down the back of my neck. Was this guy a telepath? ’Cos it sounded like a response to the very thing I’d just thought. Given Jacob and his hard-on for psychs, I shouldn’t be surprised. “Oh. It’s, uh…nice. Upscale. Logan Square cleaned up pretty good in the past ten, fifteen years.” The gentrified parts, anyway.
“Twenty-third precinct,” he supplied.
It was a cop thing to say. Keith is a private investigator now, but he used to be a cop. He hadn’t quite shed the cop part yet. If I looked at him as a cop, his lack of niceness felt a hell of a lot less personal. The things we see every day don’t exactly leave us cracking jokes. Not unless the punch lines are dark.
The silence between us grew less oppressively weird. Then he said, “I was a rookie. Canvassed the neighborhood after an ugly rape left a girl dead, a twenty-year-old Loyola student. Survived the assault, laid here and screamed for an hour while all the residents turned a deaf ear, bled out…where you’re standing.”
A flash of ghostly non-color to my right told me that Keith’s memory of the logistics might be a foot or two off, but I shifted away from the spot anyway.
“Did you bag the guy?”
He nodded without any enthusiasm, still staring hard at the patch of asphalt I’d just been standing on. “He’d been in and out of prison since he was sixteen, in tight with whatever prison gang tattooed his neck. Fuckhead hardly blinked when he was sentenced.”
I leave the court duties to my partner, Zigler. It’s in my contract. Probably the only favorable thing I’d ever managed to agree to.
“You work Homicide,” he said. “How many years?”
“Twelve.” More like thirteen now, probably. It starts to blend after a while. A sick slideshow of things no one should ever have to see.
“Well,” he turned to head back toward the bar, “someone’s gotta do it.”
The chill prickling along the back of my neck intensified, because every time I decided I’d had enough of being a PsyCop, that particular reason was the excuse I gave myself. Someone did have to do it. And the tasks I could accomplish, seeing the repeaters, chatting with the lingering dead, were jobs that would go undone if I didn’t step up to the plate and do them. Keith’s victim flashed past me and disappeared. “I’m sorry,” I repeated. Though it didn’t make either one of us feel better.
3
Luckily the guy at the door remembered me from the first time around, so I didn’t need to come off like a party crasher by explaining I’d already been crossed off the guest list as Jacob’s “+1.” The party vibe had intensified while I was outside and the alcohol had been doing its work. People were standing closer, laughing louder. Their gregariousness didn’t rub off on me at all. No matter how hard I tried to get back in the swing of the party, I found I had no appetite for spicy meat rolls anymore. The champagne wasn’t calling to me either. I couldn’t even think of a smartass song to request from the DJ.
The business of death leaves a sour taste in your mouth. There’s no expiration date on it, either. A crime doesn’t need to be fresh to leave you wishing you’d never known about it, and then wondering what kind of world you live in that things like that can happen.
When I sought out Jacob, it wasn’t exactly for comfort. Him and me, we’re not the type to kiss each other’s boo-boos, cradle each other’s heads, or murmur “there, there” in each other’s ears. Despite that, he did manage to exude reassurance in a subtle but very concrete way. His posture. His direct gaze. His utter certainty, which usually made me want to scream. At times, though, that certainty
washed over me as persistent and soothing as a Seconal on a Friday night.
He spotted me feeling my way through the crowd and disengaged from his conversation by the time I caught up with him, and zeroed in close to me in a way we couldn’t usually do out in public, given our jobs. Our thighs brushed. He rested his hand on my hip. “There you are. I thought one of your admirers made off with you.”
“Uh huh,” I said blandly. Because either I’d heard him wrong, or I’d heard him perfectly fine…and simply had no idea what he was talking about. Most likely he was just yanking my chain.
“Do you need a drink?”
I shook my head, then angled my mouth to his ear to ask him a question over the club beats du jour. “When did Keith retire?”
Jacob gave me a once-over and narrowed his eyes. It was a simple enough question, but that look must’ve meant the answer was nowhere near as easy. He thought about it, chose his words to be concise enough to penetrate the music, then leaned into me and said, “He didn’t. He quit.”
“Really?” Yeah, I’d pegged him for a guy who’d seen a lot of things that rubbed him wrong. But also as someone who’d managed to build up a callus against them. “He doesn’t…strike me that way. As a quitter.”
The music chose that particular moment to end, and my last word seemed to reverberate in the brief silence. …itter, itter, itter, itter. But before I could figure out who’d heard me and how embarrassed I needed to be, a big blat of disco nearly knocked me on my ass, and the crowd of fifty-something queers and their glittery underfed female friends all whooped and started to bump or hustle or whatever John Travolta move they were attempting. Me? I cringed.
The feathered hair, satin jackets and polyester shirts had been bad enough in the seventies. Did it make me less gay to continue to viscerally despise the music?
Jacob, who never misses a trick, steered me toward the door. Though he and I didn’t see eye to eye on music overall, he’d never been a Dancing Queen either. He’d aced all his college classes to the artsier, more cerebral indie bands of the early eighties, his cassette tapes spooling out thin from wear as he crammed for his criminal justice exams. College rock wasn’t exactly my thing, but it wasn’t awful. In fact, when R.E.M. finally broke up, I was the epitome of tact. I didn’t point out that Jacob’s eyes looked a little swollen and he was sniffling after he’d absorbed the news.
We angled our way through the middle-aged disco flailing and slipped out the front door. Some parties spill out into the street, but this one was contained. It was cold on the sidewalk, while inside the bar the music was loud, the champagne was fizzy, and the meat rolls were periodically topped off. Despite the cold and the damp, I found I could breathe easier without worrying about someone boogieing into me. Jacob gazed up past the streetlights into the night sky, leaned against the building, and said, “Technically, he quit.”
“Okay.”
“And technically, if he’d been reprimanded because of his orientation, he could’ve fought back with a major discrimination suit.”
I sighed, getting a good idea where the story was going already. I might not fit in with most gay guys in my general demographic, but I understood how police business worked.
“The thing is, technically the Twelfth Precinct hadn’t officially reprimanded him in any way. But after a year of getting the shittiest assignments with the most asinine partners during the most ungodly shifts, after being passed up for two promotions in favor of guys with half the seniority and a quarter the brains…he’d had enough.”
“Wait a minute. The Twelfth Precinct? Your precinct? He told me he worked in the Twenty-Third.”
“He used to.”
“So when he got outed at work, were the two of you…?”
Jacob nodded.
“I thought Sergeant Owens was okay with it.”
“Eventually, more or less, he came around. But at first—with two guys on the same squad dating—that was a different story.”
“And you stayed, while Keith threw away his pension and his benefits and….” I stopped when I realized I was kind of yelling at him. Because what did I care about Keith? I couldn’t stand the guy. Always glaring at me like…hell, I didn’t know. I used to think it was because I’d ended up with Jacob, but maybe he was pissed off that I was still on the force. And I wasn’t stuck on hooker duty at the crack of dawn.
“I tried to get him to go with the flow, let things calm down before he made any big decisions. But he said I didn’t know what it was like, being unofficially demoted.” He straightened his cuffs, though his jacket was already sitting on him just fine. “I think I might have gotten the same treatment, if they’d been able to find anyone else who could deal with Carolyn.”
And now she’d been left behind too while Jacob networked with the Feds. He didn’t look guilty, exactly. Maybe regretful.
Way back when, he’d had the choice between making a stand with Keith or staying on the force. He chose the force. I turned that around in my mind a couple of times, and realized that I might not have done the same. Most likely I would have done whatever served me the most. I’d left Stefan rotting in Camp Hell without so much as a backward glance, after all. The easier choice would have been for Jacob to resign too, but he stayed. Maybe his job was a discouraging cycle of ferreting out lowlife predators and putting them away, only to have fresh monsters pop up like weeds the minute the ground was cleared. But someone had to do it. And if keeping that job cost him his relationship, so be it.
Maybe I wasn’t angry he hadn’t stood by Keith. Maybe I was mad at myself.
Once I’d been standing there marveling at the parallels for a good long while, he asked, “Do you want to go home?”
Home—where the food comes in big, solid portions and I don’t need to be wary of dropping anything on my best suit. I expected relief to flood me. Instead, though, I felt a gnawing sense of non-completion. The way you feel when someone hums three lines of a song without humming the fourth. At least when that song isn’t disco.
Despite the cannery’s reputation for being haunted, home was a ghost-free zone. This place, not so much. “There’s a repeater in back I need to deal with first.” Because someone had to do it.
“What do you need from me?” Jacob asked. He was so earnest, I couldn’t help but feel the benefit of the doubt creeping up on me. Jacob did what Jacob did because he thought it was the right thing to do. If I couldn’t say the same for myself, that was my problem, I decided. Not his. And definitely not my problem with him.
“I don’t have my Florida Water with me.” Although I did have a few good slugs of champagne in my system. “Maybe I can try it with just the salt.”
“Salt. Check.” He slipped back inside and returned a few minutes later with a salt shaker. “I said our goodbyes, too.”
Good old reliable Jacob. Not only had he rescued my eardrums from the disco, he’d saved me from having to figure out what my face should look like while I signed off with Keith.
Rather than just blundering around back and waiting for the bleedout repeater to barrel past me, I took another moment to center myself first. Centering is an overused New Age term, if you ask me. But I’m painfully literal, so the word felt pretty apt. When I quieted my scattered brain long enough to collect myself, when I focused on the salt and started thinking about things like subtle bodies and psychic energies, it really did feel like I’d drawn everything into myself, like I’d packed a fresh magazine into the center of my Glock and my Glock in the center of its holster. All that potential, all that force, concentrated into a small and easily accessible place, ready for action with the squeeze of a trigger.
I opened my eyes. Things weren’t exactly glowy, like they might have been if I’d swallowed a prescription psyactive, or fallen into the range of a GhosTV. Some things looked more soft-edged than others, though. The salt. My hand. Jacob’s face. Maybe it was all in my head. Then again, that’s where psychic ability lives, so probably, it was. I took a deep breath, let the co
ld night air scour my lungs, and said, “Okay. Let’s do this.”
He allowed me to take point and followed close, but he didn’t crowd me—a solid presence, like a sidearm at my hip. “There’s a flashlight in the glove box,” he said. “Want me to go get it?”
“The thing I’m looking for…I might actually see it better without. Can’t speak for the rats, though.” We both gave a short breath of a laugh and headed toward the side street, easy with one another, secure. I circled around to the back of the building with my white light internal faucet cranked all the way up, and when I came to the spot where I’d had my little chat with Keith, I found a hazy mist rising from the ground that I wasn’t seeing with my physical eyes. I planted my feet beside it and held out my arm crossing-guard style to stop Jacob from walking onto the hotspot. He stopped and waited.
A woman-shaped flicker, an impression of screaming and blood, then quiet. Gooseflesh prickled my forearms. I exhaled and saw my breath, but that was probably just from the actual temperature. Still, since my psychic faucet was wide open, lingering on the site of the lethal assault felt like cobwebs wafting against my eyelashes and cheeks. I debated whether I needed to give a verbal confirmation or not. Jacob could probably tell what was going on by the way I was standing or which of my scowls I was wearing. But then I remembered how the repeater kept flickering through the conversation I’d had with Keith, oblivious to the present. “She died here. I see her running, up to about here.” I stretched out a hand toward the spot where she continued to vanish. “Irregular repetitions. Some just a few seconds apart, some more like a minute or two.” I could have added that there was a wrongness to her motions, which was typical of repeaters. Never quite the same wrongness twice, it seemed. Distorted features, excess fluidity, awkward rigidity, or maybe just standing a few inches above or below the ground. Ghosts are as creepily unique as snowflakes.
“An accident?” Jacob asked.
“An assault.”
“Should we call it in?”
“I checked—she’s okay to scrub.”
PsyCop Briefs: Volume 1 Page 6