PsyCop Briefs: Volume 1

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Good. I’ve got your back.” So. He didn’t know Keith’s story, not that it surprised me. Keith probably could have told a few dozen stories that ended with the victim dying and the perp getting a slap on the wrist. I’d just heard this particular rendition because I’d been in the right place at the right time.

  Jacob eased away from me and started scanning the area. His days of lugging around candles and carrying my incense were long past. I didn’t need any of those props—all I needed was some Florida Water, a sprinkle of salt, and my own focus. That focus was a lot easier to come by with someone to punt rats out of the way before they scurried across my feet. I breathed deep and pulled in white light, and despite the cold, I felt comfortable. The shift in my focus from physical to non-physical probably had a lot to do with it. My subtle bodies don’t care what the thermostat reads. Now, with my concern shifted away from muggers, vermin or the possibility I’d be expected to get down and get funky—and placed instead on my inner self—I was able to spot the repeater sooner, to follow her motions more precisely as she made her silently screaming final run for the billionth time. Once I really got a bead on her, like most ghosts, she struck me as more pathetic than terrifying.

  The anger at whoever’d done this to her bubbled up inside me—because if there weren’t any bad guys in the world, there’d be no need for Keiths and Jacobs and Victor Baynes to go around seeing all the miserable shit we could never un-see. Finally I had somewhere to channel the moral outrage that had been plaguing me all night and threatening to spill over and ruin a perfectly mediocre evening. But as I shifted into anger, I felt my white light falter, and the repeater grew more scattered and ephemeral. As satisfying and justified as anger might feel, it wasn’t helping me channel my talent. I imagined it as a red syrup draining through my body, drawn as if by gravity, down through my spine, my limbs, my muscles and veins, until it seeped out the bottom of my feet into the ground. The planet was big enough to suck it up without losing too much sleep over it. Even so, I sent the earth a small, wordless apology.

  Once I’d drained sufficient righteous indignation, I turned my attention to the salt shaker. It was one of those typical restaurant types, glass with a small chrome screw-on top. The grains rasped against the screw thread as I twisted the top off. I dumped out as much salt as my palm would hold, and I visualized my white light pouring into it. Jacob had probably snuck a peek over his shoulder—for all that he can’t see these things glowing like I can, he still gets a kick out of it—and on a good night he can feel it, like the vibration of a low sound wave, but without the sound. But I was so certain of Jacob, in particular of his ability to think on his feet and to do what needed doing, that I didn’t give his presence a second thought, except as a comforting knowledge that someone I utterly trusted would handle the outside world while my whole focus was pointed inward.

  Sometimes psychic things happen gradually, like a sunrise. Other times they click into place with the suddenness of a light switch flipping on. This exorcism was one of those light switch moments. One second I was cupping some salt in a cold alley that smelled like beer, grease and the onset of winter, and the next I was all lit up. The world crystallized around me, and the fleeing ghost juddered to a normal-paced run. Or maybe she was still moving way too fast, but now my awareness was keeping up with her. Not only was she no longer a glowing, silently screaming blur, I felt like I could count every hair on her head, every freckle on her cheek—and each and every bruised finger-mark on her neck.

  Fucking hell.

  “Stop running,” I said under my breath. “We caught the creep.”

  I cast the salt at her, though the action didn’t have a damn thing to do with salt. The salt was just the physical thing that carried my intention. And my intention had something to do with the white light. Empathy. Compassion. And while it’s an insanely loaded word, in the purest sense of the meaning, love.

  Some repeaters fade with repeated saltings, some slow and dwindle, but this spirit stopped in its tracks as if it had suddenly gone brittle. It was like the whole world was made from sheets of wafer thin ice, and this stranded ghost was at the center of it, a beautiful, terrible ice sculpture. If I severed the connection now, she’d probably melt away. Eventually. But instead I dug deeper, opened my connection wider, and flooded her with white light—with the compassion I try to pretend I don’t feel, because what if the world is so rotten it uses up all I’ve got and keeps on going ’til it drains me dry?

  My internal faucet was cranked so wide that at the moment the victim’s repeater tore free from the world, I felt it—a painful twinge, hot and cold and maybe even electrical, like a sharp rap to the funny bone.

  And then she was gone.

  I pressed my hand into my solar plexus to soothe away the after-effect of whatever energy had just brushed me…but then I realized, I didn’t need to. My sense of my surroundings was beginning to come back to me. The smell of beer bottles. The muffled throb of disco. A patter of rain against my cheeks. But I didn’t feel singed where I’d brushed up against the energy. I felt fine, actually. Kind of light. Dare I say…I felt good?

  While I dampened down my faucet, I took a deep, cleansing breath and let it out. It wasn’t with any kind of psychic sense I knew Jacob was absolutely bursting to ask me if the exorcism was done. I just know him pretty well by now. I nodded and said, “Yeah, it’s all right. It worked.”

  “And how are you?”

  “Fine.” I checked in with myself yet again, just to be sure. “Good.”

  We headed toward the car, Jacob casting occasional glances behind us even though he wouldn’t be able to see any physical evidence of what we’d just done, me trying to sort out the effect of the bubbly from the positive energetic feedback I’d never expected to absorb. We approached the Crown Vic and he beeped open the locks, and I considered whether or not I wanted more champagne. But mostly I wanted to fling off my suit, toss Jacob onto the bed and rub my naked self all over him to see if we could feel that tingly energy crackling between us.

  As he pulled away from the curb, I glanced back at the bar. There’d been no coffin-shaped cake, no rubber bats hanging from the ceiling. But as Halloweens go, I’d had worse.

  “I don’t hate Keith,” I decided.

  “Good to know.” Jacob gave a half-smile, but opted against exploring that sentiment further, keeping his eyes on the road and the steering wheel pointed toward home.

  Let the Chips Fall

  In the cannery, there’s a certain division of labor. I shovel the snow and Jacob mows the lawn. He cooks the meals and I do the dishes. I pick up the laundry from all the recesses into which he’s strewn it, and he takes it down to the basement and washes it. We’re a well-oiled machine, at least until a task emerges that’s got both of us stumped.

  We stood in the home center a healthy distance from the wall of paint chips where every color known to man was arrayed, square by square, to form an undulating, gradiating rainbow.

  “The countertop is butcher block,” Jacob ventured, “so it should go with anything.”

  “Stupid backsplash. I wish that tile hadn’t broken against the faucet. I could’ve just glued it back on.”

  “It probably would’ve popped back off…look, I’ll paint the thing. I just don’t want you complaining about the color.”

  “Complain? Me?” I eased up to the paint chips, crafty and slow, so they didn’t swarm me and leave me bleeding out on the concrete floor from ten thousand shallow paper cuts. “You’ve obviously confused me with someone who gives a damn about backsplashes.” I grabbed a strip of beiges and glanced at the colors. “Blanched Almond. Summer Muslin.” I snorted back a laugh. “Alpaca.”

  “No. And I don’t even care what it looks like. Just no.”

  “Aren’t you good at this stuff?” I asked. “Your old place looked pretty spiffy.”

  “I hired a decorator.”

  “Oh.” Nowadays we only let a short list of people into our abode, since you neve
r know when a stranger will come bearing a surveillance device. “Here’s something,” I said. “The color of the year. Radiant Orchid.”

  “Shoot me now,” Jacob muttered. “You seriously want a big purple backsplash?”

  Not really. “I just figured the ‘experts’ must know something I don’t.”

  We continued rifling through the varicolored strips, but Jacob glazed over quickly. Once he’d considered and rejected some greens and blues and grays, I said, “Weird that neither of us can pick out a paint. Are you positive we’re gay?”

  He cracked a rueful smile. “We’ll have to give it a test run when we get home. Just to make sure.” Now, there was an idea I could get behind. I trailed my fingertip down the side of his hand, and he shivered. “Just pick something.” His voice sounded a little husky.

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  I grabbed a can from the shelf and did my damnedest to squelch a victory dance. It would be unseemly to gloat.

  “Don’t you need to have it tinted?” Jacob asked.

  “Nope.” I gave his ass a surreptitious pat with my free hand as I angled him toward checkout, gazing fondly at the can. My favorite color: Antique White.

  Memento

  Words blurred and swam. Had I read this book before, or only this page? Hard to tell. As far as authors go, I have a handful of old favorites I follow, and a lot of their stuff reads the same. That’s probably what I like about it. The predictability. Vic was shuffling around the bedroom, and although it wasn’t a conscious decision, I had half my attention on him. My mind tends to wander while I read fiction anyway. That’s a good thing. I enjoy the fact that no one will actually be raped or murdered while I take my time piecing all the clues together. The supernatural villains don’t hurt any real people, either.

  “Weird,” Vic said.

  Another great thing about reading is that it’s supremely interruptible.

  I put down the paperback with its pages spread across my chest to mark my place…though I’d probably end up backtracking a few pages. He hadn’t sounded alarmed, merely curious, so I took my time in answering. He was at the foot of the bed now, crouched by the dresser with a drawer open. I watched him frown at something in his lap for a moment before I lifted my head off the pillow and said, “What’s weird?”

  “This shirt.”

  I dog-eared the page I was on, closed the book, and let it slide to the floor.

  Vic held up the T-shirt. It was a dingy white with yellowed pit-stains, and it had some obnoxious punk rock design on it, a skull with a spiked mohawk, crazed through with cracks where the silkscreen paint had gone brittle. The fabric looked thin. Not thin like it was a clingy knit, but thin like a majority of the fibers had been stripped off by an untold number of washings, then blown out the dryer vent.

  “Okay.” I could name any number of things I thought were weird about it.

  “D’you know how old this is?”

  Rhetorical question. I shrugged and waited for him to tell me.

  “I got this in like…ninety? No, eighty-nine. No, wait….” He scowled. Attempted to pinpoint a year. “High school, anyway.”

  Before Camp Hell. Before the mental ward, too. I stayed quiet, hoping for a rare glimpse into his past. I’ve always had a feeling he was different then, really different. Granted, we all were. Him, though, more than most.

  I watched his eyes. They were unfocused. His scowl deepened. To determine if it was a thinking-scowl or something worse, I asked, “Is that a band on it?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” His focus slowly returned, and his scowl softened. “The Exploited…they played the Metro. I got lucky sometimes, y’know, getting into a club even though I was underage, depending on how secure the bouncer was about his height. I got lucky then.” He smiled, almost. “Not that lucky…but once I was done getting kidney-punched in the mosh pit, I ended up pressed right up against the stage. And it’s a concert, right? So you’d think I would remember the way they sounded. But I don’t.” He stretched the shirt between two fists and ran his thumbs over the peeling ink. “I remember how it smelled. The beer and the Aqua Net and the leather and sweat, it all mixed together into this…this….” He opened his hands and dropped the shirt as words failed him. “It doesn’t sound very appealing, I guess.”

  “No. It does.” Particularly if I imagined him in the scene. He doesn’t wear leather nowadays—says he’s too old and he’d look like a dork. The thought of him jammed into the stage in a battered biker jacket, sinewy and scowling, with a beer-leather-sweat fog roiling around in the heat of the stage lights? Plenty appealing. Plenty.

  He turned back to the drawer and rifled through it, picking out another T-shirt, this one with the logo of a radio station on the chest. Neither of us listened to that particular station, and neither of us ever wore royal blue, not that it mattered. He’d been dredging the bottom of the drawer, so I’d guess he was planning on tackling the rotting mass of leaves we’d recently discovered by the downspout. I should consider myself lucky—he’ll do some pretty horrific chores if they keep him out of the basement—but really, I wanted to hear more about that concert. There probably wasn’t much more to tell. I wished there was, though.

  He pulled the blue shirt over his head, then scavenged a dirty pair of jeans off the floor. I watched him dress. The way his jeans fit his ass, he could still carry off a leather jacket, no problem. If I ever managed to let him get farther than the front steps wearing it, anyhow. He zipped his fly, closed the drawer, then lobbed something into the trash.

  “What was that?”

  “Just the T-shirt.”

  “But…” I scrambled for a reason he shouldn’t toss the thing. Technically, it was an ugly scrap of decaying fabric. But wasn’t it more than that? Wasn’t it a memento from a time in his past he’d actually been happy? “Why?”

  “It’s not like I’m gonna wear it.” He headed out the bedroom door. From the hall, he added, “I’d look like a big stupid middle-aged loser.”

  A few of the stairs creaked as he jogged lightly down. Noises from the kitchen drifted up. Running water. The clink of a spoon in a mug. I’d fished my book from the pile of socks and underwear on the floor, and just like I’d expected, I had absolutely no idea who was talking on the page I’d dog-eared, or really, what all the characters were so worked up about. No concentration. My eyes kept going to the trash can.

  Finally, I dropped the book, rolled across the bed and retrieved the T-shirt from the trash. I didn’t really expect it to smell like that night from Vic’s imagination, the beer and sweat and hair spray, but I held it to my nose anyway. It smelled like the inside of the drawer. Wood, faintly musty. Disappointing. I smoothed it out. The band’s name wasn’t even on it, just the scrawled words Punks not Dead. Downstairs, the microwave beeped, then the TV came on, murmuring the morning news. I traced the ink ridges of the words, and then a cracked anarchy symbol beside them. The bathroom door downstairs opened and shut. I smoothed the shirt again and the mental image of a younger Vic wearing it made me smile. And not just because he was bent over the edge of the stage.

  If the book could wait, the rotting leaves could probably be rescheduled without too much coaxing.

  I headed downstairs with the wad of old shirt in my hand. Vic was perched on the arm of the couch now, triple-tasking in front of the TV. He sipped coffee with one hand while he worked a tied sneaker onto his foot with the other, all the while keeping his eyes glued to the set. He watched as the Saturday morning anchor semi-successfully demonstrated how dental floss could be used for a lightweight travel clothesline, typical weekend fluff. Not that Vic traveled or even particularly cared, but it was better than the murders you usually hear about first thing in the morning. “Is the electric bill on autopay, or is that the gas?” he asked, then took another loud sip from his mug, eyes still on the TV.

  Thinking about the utilities: task number four. I don’t think he knows he does this mega-multitasking, and I’ve never pointed i
t out. It’s either an enviable skill, or a coping mechanism. I haven’t quite decided which. “Both. It’s the sewer bill we keep forgetting.”

  His sneaker popped onto his foot, and a few drops of coffee splashed over the side of the mug and dribbled onto his jeans. He picked up the remote left-handed and punched it a few times, paused at a Gilligan’s Island rerun, then proceeded to a weather channel.

  I glanced down at the old T-shirt in my hands. Maybe he was right. The Vic who belonged to this shirt would have stopped at the inane sixties sitcom. He wouldn’t be gearing up to vanquish a decomposing mass of slimy leaf mold on a perfectly lazy Saturday. In all likelihood, our former selves could have hooked up, but the fling would’ve gone its course by now. Eventually Young Vic would have ditched me for someone with a bunch of piercings and an edgy record collection, if I didn’t take off with a pseudo-intellectual political activist first. And what was I hoping for now, anyway? That this Vic would slip into the T-shirt and spread ’em, so I could pretend I’d managed to vanquish his rebellious side? That would never happen—institutionalization ensured he found subtler ways to rebel, and I doubted I’d ever discover the half of them.

  I didn’t mind trying, though.

  While he gave his coffee another slurp, I eased the T-shirt out of sight beneath a recliner cushion, then joined him on the sofa he wasn’t quite committed to sitting on. I dropped my knees open, canted my hips in invitation, and said, “Kind of cold out there for yard work.”

  “It’s October.” Slurp. “It’ll only get colder.”

  I smiled to myself. Subtlety is lost on him. Ironic, since his come-hither signals require the training of a federal investigator to be perceived. His idea of making a pass involves leaning in my general direction, and on a bold day, maybe clearing his throat. “Before you brave the elements…” I dropped my voice low, which was cheesy, but at least he’d get the gist, “better make sure you’re good and…warmed up.”