PsyCop Briefs: Volume 1

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Who would have thought?” Jacob murmured into my hair. He’d been revisiting bathroom memories of his own.

  I love it when we’re on the same page.

  I paced my strokes a little faster so I could enjoy the huff of him breathing against my scalp. Closer now. Me and him both. My free hand had fallen to his shoulder. I cupped his head again and teased the bony ridge at the base of his skull with my fingertips. He jerked me off harder and gnawed my earlobe.

  “It’s good,” I said.

  His breath flickered over my ear and he rooted deeper into the crook of my neck—and oh yeah, there it was. My own personal hotspot. No hickies. I don’t need to say it anymore. He knows there’ll be hell to pay. But he’s figured out exactly how hard he can go at it without leaving much of a mark. Each of his moves built on the other—the hand on my dick, the mouth on my throat, the sound of him grunting encouragement as I jacked him off too. I surged toward orgasm with the confidence of someone who’d been brought there innumerable times before by this hand, this mouth, this man. I came first, shoving him back at the last minute with the realization that against his black sweater, my jiz would stick out like a sore thumb. We both laughed breathlessly as I semi-successfully detoured and shot mostly on his bare thigh, then together we fumbled at his cock, sticky-handed, until he clenched all over, shuddered, and peaked into my fist, jiz oozing out between my fingers. He sagged against me. I couldn’t say who was holding up who. I pressed my lips to his forehead and basked in the moment, and listened to the sound of him breathing into my flannel shirt.

  “It is good,” he sighed. Eventually. When he had his words again. And even though we knew there were a few dozen obvious clues on the kitchen floor just waiting to announce our shenanigans to Jacob’s uncle, we lingered there for one more moment, and held each other, and savored the feeling of wanting and being wanted. Loving, and being loved.

  For all that I wasn’t particularly comfortable jammed up against a door, I wished we could have lingered even longer. But before Leon returned, there were nails and tacks and screws and washers to gather up off the floor, and several magnets that needed re-sticking. He’d probably wonder why we’d moved the magnets, if he was the type to notice that sort of thing. Given that Jacob came from his gene pool, it was a fair bet. And that couldn’t be helped. If the topic came up, I’d let Jacob field it. He’s way better at lying than I am.

  Turned out we hadn’t needed to rush. We got everything back together well before Leon showed up with a couple of pizzas, a baggie of extra screws, and a can of WD40. Lube—like we needed one more thing to make us laugh.

  It’s hard to please a native Chicagoan with pizza made anywhere else, but pizza’s a lot like sex. I’d stop what I’m doing even for mediocre pizza. So we sat down around that kitchen table, pushed the cigar box aside, and enjoyed our okay pizza while Leon spun a tale about Jacob forgetting his tree-lines in a third grade Arbor Day play.

  And eventually we did get back to those shelves, with their perplexing directions and slightly misaligned holes. The world’s dirtiest directions seemed a lot less pornographic now, though occasionally the word shaft would earn me a quick glance and a naughty half-smile from Jacob.

  In the end, it was a good thing we had two sets of hands and three sets of eyes. Otherwise we would’ve missed the importance of the final pegs in back that kept the whole structure from skewing diagonal and wobbly. “That’s it,” Leon announced triumphantly. “Pound it in and show it who’s boss.”

  Jacob made a choking sound, then covered it with a few coughs. Me? I was too busy being distracted by a washer that dropped out of a fold in my flannel, pinged to the floor, and spun around on its edge a few times before settling to a dramatic, clattering stop. Hard to say if it belonged somewhere in the now-complete(ish) bookshelves, or if it was a spare part I’d picked up while Jacob was mashing me into the kitchen table.

  I flipped the washer into the air, caught it, and tucked it away in my pocket. “I wouldn’t worry about it. SaverPlus furniture…” well, it’s a lot like a good relationship. “It might not be fancy, but once you pull it all together, it’s surprisingly solid.”

  Off the Cuff

  Jacob fiddled with the radio until he found a nineties indie rock station playing something I half-recognized. He turned up the volume, then settled back into his heated seat, eyes on the road. I was occupied with trying to work a nasty kink out of my neck. I did notice, though, that as he approached our side street, he coasted right past the turn without even slowing. “Aren’t we going to stop home and change?” I asked.

  “We’ll miss our reservation.”

  Really? He’d picked me up from the Fifth Precinct the second I got off work, and it wasn’t even dark out yet. We never ate before sundown. “Oh. It’s just…I’ve been running around all day. I wouldn’t mind changing my shirt.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “And my work shoes. They’re kinda schleppy.”

  “No one will notice.”

  Says him. He always looks like a million bucks, morning, noon and night. “I could at least drop off my sidearm,” I said. “Nothing says ‘look how classy I am’ like a holster bulge.”

  He dropped his hand to my thigh, grabbed down, and gave my leg’s inside meat a few slow kneads. “Don’t worry about it.”

  I slid a look in the direction of his profile. He was being awfully casual, I realized. Maybe a little too casual. “So we’ve got reservations—freakishly early reservations—that we can’t possibly bend. But it’s okay if I show up in my frumpy work shoes and my holster plastered to my side with sweat.”

  “Your clothes are fine. It’s no big deal.”

  “But—”

  “It’s fine. Really. Besides, we’re already here.” While he pulled into a lot, I scanned the neighborhood and tried to pinpoint the restaurant that was so important. Only I couldn’t find one—not the type of place that took reservations, anyway. There was a diner on the corner and a storefront bodega that sold menudo across the street. That was it.

  I pondered the lack of fancy restaurants briefly, and then pieced that observation together with Jacob’s evasive non-answers. I came to the same logical conclusion anyone else would draw. Clearly, my partner was leading me to a room where a bunch of my friends and a drug counselor would all be sitting in a circle on some flimsy folding chairs, waiting to confront me about my prescription drug use.

  “Hold on a second,” I said. Although Jacob had cut the engine and opened his door, I made no move to get out.

  He looked me in the eye, finally, and said, “Everything’s fine.”

  “Whatever this is, we don’t need to do it.”

  He sighed. “Okay, you’re on to me.” His eyes softened, and he smiled. “It’ll take fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops. And it’s my treat.”

  Either I was still hazy on the definition of the word treat, or I’d read the situation all wrong. My gut was telling me that if he’d been planning an intervention, I’d be able to pick out some telltale tension around his eyes, or maybe some stiffness in the set of his shoulders. Since there was none, I stood down my internal red alert, resigned myself to enduring whatever it was he had planned, and climbed out of the car.

  Jacob rounded the long black hood, buttoning his jacket. As expected, he did indeed look like a million bucks. And maybe slightly chagrined, but not like he was leading me to the chopping block. I played it cool in the hopes that I might deduce how all the cloak-and-dagger would culminate, but I was still in the dark when he marched me to a narrow door I would have otherwise missed, and nudged me up a worn staircase.

  The door at the top read Cecil Matthis, Tailor in chipped gold paint. It looked like it had been lettered somewhere around the Hoover administration. While I gawked, Jacob reached around me, turned the knob and gave the door a push. It opened to a cluttered room stuffed with rows and rows of garments in drab menswear colors, gray, black and navy suits along one wall and pale broadcloth shirts another…and I
realized that I actually had just been roped into an intervention after all. A phenomenally mortifying intervention.

  I’d frozen in my tracks, which I didn’t realize until Jacob nudged me. Twice. “I promise,” he murmured into my hair, “Cecil doesn’t bite.”

  Maybe not. But the thought of some stranger grabbing me by the inseam was a lot creepier than I’d imagined it would be—at least now that it was such a distinct and palpable possibility. As I forced myself over the threshold, a wizened old man with a measuring tape draped across his stooped shoulders shuffled out from the back room. His pate shone through his scanty combover, but his nostril hair was lush and thick. His horn-rimmed glasses were about as antique as the lettering on his door. On a hipster, they would’ve looked obnoxiously retro, but on him they just looked old. He nodded at Jacob, planted his hands on his hips, and peered up at me through the scratched lenses. He smelled like Aqua Velva. “So. This is the one.” He subjected me to a critical once-over with a funny little smile wrinkling his face. “Well. We got our work cut out for us tonight, don’t we? Go ahead, kiddo. Change.”

  He nodded toward a garment bag. My garment bag. Which was already hanging from a rickety changing screen over in the corner. “You owe me, mister,” I muttered to Jacob, who bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.

  The suit waiting for me was an off-the-rack number I’d ordered at the Big & Tall shop. That transaction had been awkward enough, me reeling from sticker shock while they swiped my credit card. And no one there had been fondling my junk, either.

  I suited up and marched out to meet my fate, telling myself I could endure pretty much anything for fifteen minutes, but dreading it nonetheless. The groping started right away, with Cecil drawing chalk marks on me as he pinched my shoulders and tugged my cuffs. Short, businesslike yanks. Regardless, I hate being touched, however briefly or chalkily. He circled behind me, grabbed the hem of my jacket, pulled, and prodded me in the back a few times with the chalk lozenge. “This needs to come in,” he declared. I must have sighed louder than I thought, because he added, “Trust me, it’ll hang better, and you won’t miss having all that extra fabric in your way.”

  He tugged and chalked his way around to the front, and I braced myself for the question I’d been dreading: which way I “dressed.” Because the state of my dick was no one’s business but my own. “You plan on wearing this suit to work?” he asked.

  That made a difference? “Yeah.”

  “Okay. So, which side?”

  I felt my cheeks color. “The right.”

  He plucked at the side seam of the jacket just beneath my ribs. “Shoulder holster, or belt?”

  I processed the question for an awkwardly long moment as it dawned on me that he was talking about my sidearm. “The other right,” I said. “Shoulder.”

  “Maybe you should put it back on,” Jacob suggested.

  “You got your gun with you?” Cecil cried. “Well, go get it.”

  The shop’s phone rang as I handed my jacket to Jacob and went to retrieve my holster from behind the changing screen. Cecil was a loud talker—his hearing was probably starting to go. He set an appointment at such high volume that all his neighbors would know what time his next customer was coming in. Jacob, on the other hand, had a talent for pitching his voice so that only the intended recipient can hear it. “Were you thinking what I think you were thinking?” he asked me while I strapped on my Glock.

  What exactly had I been thinking? Who knows—I was probably baffled by the idea that a guy might reposition his wang based on the day’s agenda…which would bring a whole new meaning to Casual Friday. “I’m getting a suit tailored—it’s a logical enough assumption. If I’d known you had a guy who was experienced at fitting a holster, you probably could’ve talked me into this before now. And with less coercion.” I buckled the strap and shrugged the sidearm into position. “But I gotta say, I’m relieved he didn’t cop a feel.”

  Jacob held up the new jacket and I slid back into it. Across the room at his cluttered desk, Cecil finished jotting his appointment in a yellowed ledger, then threw his arms in the air to indicate his approval of my holster.

  I’d figured I was home free when Jacob leaned in and whispered, “Sorry to break it to you,” his voice dropped even lower, mock-sultry, “but the serious molestation comes later. When he fits your pants.”

  “You totally owe me,” I grumbled. “Big time.”

  Locked and Loaded

  “You forgot your gun,” I murmured.

  Jacob huffed a short sigh through his nose and narrowed his eyes. By this, I took it to mean that he was seriously pissed off, and any disbelief I was voicing would only serve to darken his mood. “Look,” he whispered, “you’re the one who saw something, so you tell me. Would it matter if we both had physical weapons or not?”

  “It was just a glimpse.” I edged sideways down the alleyway and thought about calling in for backup, but let’s face it, I see shit all the time. If I carried on like the sky was falling every time the bloody wreck of a human wandered through my peripheral vision, I’d lose whatever small credibility I still possessed.

  I drew my sidearm, then opened my crown chakra and sucked down a torrent of white light. Power crackled through my subtle bodies, and I felt its echoes in my physical shell—numb lips, tingling fingers and toes, and a metallic buzz in the hinge of my jaw. Locked and loaded. Nowhere to go but forward.

  We crept past a bricked up coal cellar and a line of recycle bins that were clearly stuffed with something far more pungent than sorted glass, plastic and paper. Slipped around the corner, senses prickling on high alert, searching a back alley jumbled with old pallets and crates with my sidearm at high ready. Maybe nothing. Probably nothing. My shoulders relaxed marginally and I was about to drop into a more relaxed stance when Jacob bellowed, “Police—let me see your hands!”

  A scrawny figure shifted in the shadows and a length of electrical conduit clattered to the ground. “I din’ do nothing! I din’ do nothing,” the guy insisted.

  “Hands on your head,” Jacob barked. Once, twice, three times. It took a few tries since the guy was so scared he apparently couldn’t tell his knuckles from his scalp. But eventually, shaking from head to toe, he complied. “Easy, now,” Jacob said. “Step toward the light.”

  The shifting shadows resolved, and our trembling wreck of a guy turned out to be covered not in gore, but paint…unless he bled orange. But judging by the smears of drywall dust that accompanied the colorful wounding—plus the fact that Jacob could see him too—not only was our target alive, but hale and hearty.

  “I was just looking for copper,” he blubbered. “They pay good money for copper at the scrapyard.”

  I lowered my aim while Jacob ran through a few basic questions to determine our trash-picker lived nearby, and appeared to be doing exactly what he said he was doing: saving a little scrap from the landfill. The sidearm was easy enough to holster, though my psychic ammo wasn’t quite so easy to put away. The tingling in my fingertips faded to an unnatural chill, but thankfully, at least there was no goopy leak of ectoplasm. Maybe my psychic sense can discern a paint-streaked dumpster diver from an earthbound spirit faster than my logical brain could process the difference. I was just happy I wouldn’t have to deal with slimehand.

  Shaken, the trash picker went on his way, and Jacob and I resumed our trek toward the movie theater. No doubt the film would be nowhere near as thrilling as our pre-show detour, but at least there’d be popcorn involved, and Good n’ Plenties if I really wanted to punish my teeth. My adrenaline was ebbing, and my tweaky mojo was, too. But Jacob’s annoyance? Hard to say.

  He grabbed our tickets from the kiosk while I stood on the sidewalk and replayed the event in my mind. Between the stance and the voice, he’d nearly made our target soil himself, even without a gun in his hand.

  A loose crowd milled around the entryway, some coming, some going, and it was only the residual heightened alert in me that noticed a moti
on that was slightly too repetitive. Carried out by a guy who was slightly too transparent.

  Bullet wound. I didn’t see the bullet and he blinked out before I could gauge the wound, but people only jerk in that particular way when they’re stopping lead. Plus, now that I was looking right at it, I vaguely remembered the news coverage from a few years back. Whoever pulled the trigger was stamping license plates in Joliet these days, so there was no reason for this guy to keep getting shot. I reached for my weapon—not my sidearm, but the powdery spectral neutralizer that showed up on command when I thought about it hard enough. Whether I created it myself by synthesizing it from white light with my stubbornness and panic, or I simply gathered it from the environment, I didn’t know. But a quick dusting and a mental shove was all it took to send my gunshot repeater on his way.

  By the time Jacob came out to get me, I was holding my slimy, cold hand in a loose fist, and debating whether or not to hide it in my pocket or just sit tight until I could veer into the bathroom and rinse all psychic evidence down the drain. Jacob wasn’t paying any attention to my hand, though. He was busy ruminating on our alleyway encounter.

  “I didn’t forget my weapon. I’m off-duty, and there was no reason to think I’d need it tonight.”

  Heck, mine wouldn’t have been on me either if I hadn’t come straight from work. Now I’d be stuck with a sweaty holster against my side for how long? Two more hours, minimum. “Look at it this way. You stopped a guy by pointing your finger at him. Pretty badass.”

  He grunted. Not ready to joke around about it, not yet. Maybe not ever.

  It was a fluke I’d been carrying, though I don’t have a tendency to go entirely unarmed. By whatever freak of nature spawned my abilities, I was never without my non-physical weapon. No shutoff valve existed, just antipsyactives with more side effects than they were worth.

  But I wasn’t kidding about Jacob stopping someone with a finger. It was his tone, his stance that the guy had reacted to, not the presence or absence of a sidearm. If the mind is our best weapon, then I can guarantee, Jacob is someone you do not want to butt heads with. I slid my hand into his—yeah, that hand—and watched his expression shift into one of startlement, and surprise, and finally wonder, as the ectoplasmic chill seeped into his palm. I pressed my lips to his ear and said, “You’re right. You didn’t need your gun tonight. Between the two of us, whatever this crazy-assed world throws our way…together, we’re ready.”