PsyCop Briefs: Volume 1

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Bad idea. It’s not like he’s even gay.

  But his bad-boy scowl had ignited all sorts of urges within Jacob, where the jazz flautist’s tepid half-smile had definitely not.

  A few more questions, then a mandatory evaluation form which nobody filled out with many details, and the PsyCops began filing out in twos and fours. Jacob stood to intercept Valdez as he passed the remains of the donuts. “Jacob Marks,” he said, offering his hand. They’d been introduced before, maybe two years ago, so he figured it couldn’t hurt to remind him. “Twelfth Precinct.”

  “Oscar Valdez.” He shook Jacob’s hand, but released it quickly. He looked Jacob in the eye, then looked up at the ceiling, then down at a spot on Jacob’s chest.

  Jacob glanced down to see if maybe he’d been jellied and hadn’t realized it. Nope. “Carolyn’s the telepath of our team.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve seen her before. Must be…interesting…spending so much time with someone who can read your mind. A partner like that, they’d know you inside out.”

  What an odd thing to say. Especially coming from a precog. “It’s not exactly—”

  “Anyway, gotta run. Good to meet you.”

  Carolyn approached, holding a green banana she looked none too thrilled with. “He just took off like I insulted his mother,” Jacob told her. “Doesn’t anyone network at these things?”

  She steered him toward the door with a subtle shift of her shoulder. “Of course not. We’re Psychs. We’re too awkward to mingle. Especially with each other.”

  Jacob held the door for her, and she slipped through and walked briskly toward his car. While Psychs did tend to be incredibly awkward, Jacob was an NP, so he didn’t count; someone should want to talk to him. They got in the car. Jacob fit the key into the ignition, but instead of starting the engine, he said, “I think Valdez saw something…about me. And I think it spooked him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He wouldn’t look me in the eye. If he saw me winning the lottery or something, I don’t think he’d be acting so funny. What if he saw me…getting hurt…in the line of duty? What if he saw me getting killed?”

  Carolyn thought about it. Most partners would have blithely insisted that everything would be perfectly fine. But instead she said, “I can track him down and ask him. But before I do, you’ll need to decide. If he saw something bad, and there was no way to prevent it—do you really want to know?”

  Jacob considered. If Valdez had seen him meet his maker, chances were he didn’t know exactly when the dire deed would occur. A month. A week. A year? It seemed like an awfully inexact amount of time to sustain a high level of panic. Ideally, Jacob would envision himself living every day as if it were his last day on earth. He’d write a big check to the local food bank. He’d skip the gym for just a night and sit on his roof to watch the sunset. And he’d tell all his loved ones how much they meant to him.

  But those were things you couldn’t really do every single day, or else you’d end up broke and flabby. And your family would think you’d finally started to crack under the pressure of the job.

  “How accurate is Valdez?” he asked.

  “Hit or miss. I think he’s level three.”

  Jacob started the car and stared down at the steering wheel, working his jaw.

  Carolyn went on. “Don’t you think he would have said something if he’d seen you getting injured? Seems to me he would have, as a courtesy. I’ll bet it’s something else that he wouldn’t feel professionally obligated to disclose.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something personal, maybe. What was going through your mind during the meeting? Did you think about Neil? Because maybe you’re right, and Neil’s not really a good match for you. And maybe Valdez picked up on something as simple as that.”

  Jacob frowned. “How…specific do you think his precog skills are? Like, vague feeling? Or full-on homoerotic imagery?”

  “Please tell me you weren’t thinking gay thoughts at work in a room full of certified Psychs.”

  “Gay thoughts?”

  “Jacob….”

  “Should I have borrowed a straight brain before I showed up at the meeting?”

  “That sounded a lot worse than I meant it. You know what I mean.”

  Unfortunately, he did. The middle aged guys who’d been ogling Carolyn’s glutes were probably fine thinking whatever it was they thought, even in the company of precogs and empaths, because people thought things like that about the opposite gender all the time. But given the way Keith had been railroaded out of their precinct…Jacob probably would have been better off not entertaining an extended analysis of the reason Detective Bayne hadn’t snuck a peek down Carolyn’s blouse while he had the chance.

  “It wasn’t racy. I was just wondering if maybe Victor Bayne—”

  “The skinny guy who just doused himself in jelly?”

  Jacob pulled out of the lot and headed back toward the Seventh. “That was pretty wild. It was like…a dozen donuts’ worth of jelly inside.”

  He gave an amused sniff, and Carolyn echoed it, then said, “He never says anything at those meetings. That’s the first time he’s ever spoken to me. I don’t think he’s married or anything…but he doesn’t seem….”

  “What?”

  “Well…I just think that if he was gay, he wouldn’t have been wearing that awful sportcoat.”

  Cliché. But true.

  “Besides,” she went on, “I thought we established that it was a very bad idea for you to date guys at work.”

  “He’s in a totally different precinct.”

  “Jacob. Remember Keith.”

  He sighed. “Okay. You’re right. And he’s probably straight anyway.”

  “You’re dangerous when you’re single,” Carolyn said as she held up her phone and snapped a quick photo of his profile. “I’ll see if Crash wants me to give you his number.”

  Witness

  1

  I’ll say one thing for the Fifth Precinct: at least I knew where everything was in relationship to everything else. No matter how many times I tried to get the lay of the land at my new job, I always managed to take an unscheduled detour and show up five minutes late. Laura Kim looked up from her desk and greeted me with, “Oh good, you’re here.” She’d ensconced herself in an office as far away from the FPMP’s resident repeaters as she could possibly get, and I wondered if she’d also had some kind of aversion whammy placed on the door. Because I always found myself checking out the records room or the cafeteria in response to one of her summonings.

  Apparently that Friday afternoon I wasn’t the only one at the Federal Psychic Monitoring Program who’d been summoned. Super-buff empath agent Jack Bly stood at the window, hands in pockets, daylight gleaming over his severe buzz cut as he gazed out over the railyard. And the Super Stiff who’d shamelessly bribed me into eating quinoa for dinner last night by shoving his hand down my pants? He was ever so casually checking out Laura’s bookshelf, doing his best not to look smug, and failing miserably.

  Laura stood, planted her hands on her desk, and said, “Since Agent Bly has wrapped up his current investigation and Agent Marks has completed his verbal de-escalation course, you’re all available to take part in a technical workshop this weekend.”

  What? Now that I’d graduated from the Chicago PD I was supposed to have weekends off. I’d been building up my Netflix queue all week, and a new pizza place down the block just slipped a drool-worthy menu through our mail slot. I was about to say thanks, but no thanks when a quick look from Jacob informed me that Laura wasn’t asking me to give up my weekend, she was telling me. And any protest on my part would just make me look like the dumb FPMP rookie I was.

  Fine. I didn’t complain. But I might have sighed. Quietly. To myself.

  Laura fanned three sheets of paper across the desk and said, “Due to the particular nature of this training, we’ll require a signature on this waiver form.” Each of us picked up a form and read. Or at
least tried to, in my case. The legalese was so thick, they’d lost me after Waiver Release and Assumption of Risk. My eyes defocused as I thought about the Carnivore Special. Ground beef, Italian sausage, Buffalo chicken…was that it?

  “Question about item four,” Bly said. “Is it absolutely necessary?”

  Four, that’s right. Four toppings. And what was that fourth topping?

  Laura said, “Think about it. You’ll get more out of the training.”

  Bacon. Yes. I might as well run the pizza through a blender and inject it directly into my arteries—and I could barely wait. Between the quinoa and the working weekend, Jacob totally owed me whatever indulgence I could possibly dream up. Sunday night would be greasy food, TV, sweatpants, and—

  “Drugs?” Jacob said. “It’s a lot to ask.”

  Wait, when did we start talking drugs? Because scoring random pills from the friend of a friend in a shadowy gin mill was one thing. Having a governmental agency medicate me? That was a flat-out no.

  I scanned the consent form in a panic. Four, four…where the hell was four? Bad enough I couldn’t find section four, I started doubting I even remembered what the number itself looked like. I was too busy imagining a bunch of musclebound apes strapping me down to a gurney while someone shoved an IV into my arm….

  “There.” Bly reached across and pointed out a paragraph. The paper was trembling. I took a deep breath and somehow managed to quell the impending freakout. Barely. I found number four on my consent form and read it more closely. I understand there are general risks with any medication, including: sedation, dizziness, nausea, vomiting…fucking hell, was it too late to go crawling back to Sergeant Warwick with my tail between my legs? Cold hands and feet, suicidal thoughts and behavior, memory loss and death.

  I’d never had any illusions my stint as a federal agent would be a walk in the park. But death? I preferred the threat of dying to come from the barrel of a gun or a few decades of questionable diet, not some dangerous and untested drug that had no business coursing through my system. I was just about to slap my consent form down and make a big stink when I saw a word I knew all too well: Auracel. One tab, twice daily.

  Well, fuck. I could do that standing on my head. In fact, when I went grocery shopping, I’d take that dose anyway to spare myself the sight of the intersection repeaters.

  Bly penned his signature. Jacob was watching me. I gave in with a shrug, and the two of us signed away our weekend. Laura co-signed the forms, tucked them away in a locked drawer, then pulled out bottled waters and dosage cups, each cup containing a single pill. As I scowled down at the Auracel, I realized I wasn’t the only one who’d hesitated. The other two official psychs were eyeballing their pills with dread.

  “Wait a minute,” I said to Jacob. “You’ll be sick as a dog if you swallow that.”

  “It’s Neurozamine,” Laura said calmly. Neurozamine was Auracel’s wimpy cousin—and it didn’t do squat for me. “You’re the only one cleared for Auracel.”

  Jacob said, “If one psych is forced to take a stronger medication, it invalidates the entire experiment.”

  Laura assured us, “That might be a consideration, if this were an experiment. However, it is not.”

  “But you are sending us off with our talents compromised,” Jacob insisted.

  “It’s a training exercise in witness interview techniques.”

  A single Auracel—essentially, no big deal. It might be strong enough to knock most psychs on their ass, but I’d built up so much resistance I could stomach three or four. A normal dose wouldn’t even leave me with its signature behind-the-eyeball headache hangover. Did I trust Laura Kim? As much as I trusted anyone, I supposed. And in law enforcement, training was as ubiquitous as paperwork.

  I did my very best to staunch the Camp Hell panic as I tipped back the pill—what if it only looked like Auracel, but was something worse, a new psyactive, maybe. Or a tracking chip disguised to look like a pill. But my tongue recognized its old frienemy immediately, the shape of it, the smooth coating—and as I paused just a moment too long before I swallowed, the pervasive, eye watering bitterness.

  I swallowed. And if Bly felt me panicking, he wouldn’t get to revel in that sensation much longer. He and Jacob both downed their pills too.

  “Agent Powell will see you to your transport,” Laura pressed a button on her phone and a forgettable Caucasian guy in a black suit opened the door, then stood beside it, hands folded, waiting blandly. But as I turned to follow Jacob and Bly, she added, “Agent Bayne, a quick word?”

  Now what?

  Once we were alone, she said, “Obviously I’m not sending you into a haunted training facility.”

  “Okay.”

  “But it would look bad if I made an exception for you. Understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “Even though there wouldn’t be any natural reason to compete among you—I mean, your talents are so completely different that they complement each other—I think that an ability as strong as yours is bound to spur some rivalry. And what I want you to focus on here is gleaning as much as you can from the workshop. So, the Auracel.”

  “Right. Got it.”

  “Good.”

  As I rejoined Jacob and Bly, I puzzled over the fact that Laura was attempting to mitigate jealousy. Over my mediumship. Laura Kim might be one of the smartest people I’d ever met, and I had no problem taking an Auracel for the sake of humoring her. But this idea that anyone found me threatening was patently lame. After the horrific exorcism the three of us had done together—formaldehyde, plastic sheeting and a thrashing corpse—I’d bet money that neither of my colleagues envied my abilities. Plus, it didn’t sound like we’d be training our psychic abilities this weekend, only our mundane skills. And no fellow officer has ever found me threatening.

  Creepy? Sure. But never a threat.

  2

  By the time we reached the parking garage, I felt a gentle buzz. Maybe it was all in my head. Auracel is pretty fast-acting, but I doubted there’d been much chance for it to hit my bloodstream quite yet. The chemical cocktail in my brain knew what it could look forward to, though, so I was already approaching that floaty wave as the generic agent led us out to our transportation—not a gleaming Lexus sedan like every other car in the lot, but a van. Not a soccer mom Lexus van, either. An armored van.

  A look shot through the group as we climbed in. Armored vans might look cool on TV with SWAT teams pouring out the back doors, but in real life it was dark and claustrophobic, all metal and no windows. Luckily I didn’t suffer from motion sickness. Hopefully neither of my fellow agents did either.

  The van turned left out of the parking ramp, and within a block I was completely lost. We endured the ride in silence. The van was probably bugged. Besides, what was there to say? There was city driving, then highway driving, then something that felt suspiciously like the hypnotic two-lanes we take to visit Jacob’s family up in Wisconsin. But only an hour had elapsed when they cut the engine and opened the doors, so wherever we were, it was unlikely anyone in a Packers jersey would try to lure us into a dull conversation about the weather, hunting, or sports.

  When we offloaded from the close darkness of the van, the sun felt too bright. We were in a parking lot surrounded by trees and a few plain cabins. The sky was crystalline, and the nip in the air smelled sweet. Normal city sounds like traffic and gunfire were absent, and birdsong filled the empty spaces. It was the perfect place to murder us all and hide our bodies under a snowdrift.

  A bearded guy in a parka strode out from the biggest cabin, checked a clipboard he was carrying, and said, “Welcome, you must be the Chicago group.”

  What gave it away, the fact that we were all glaring at the scenery like we were waiting for the trees to attack us? Maybe, since his talent was so subtle, Jacob felt more like himself under the influence of antipsyactives than the rest of us. He was the first to shift back into pro-mode, put on his calmest voice and take point. “We are. And this is�
��?”

  “Integrated Dynamics, where Tactics Become Habit.” He handed Jacob a manilla envelope. “We do things a little differently here—no names, please. It’s all part of the program—impartial treatment for egalitarian learning. You’ll find more detailed instructions with your room assignments. Once you’re settled and changed, join us in the Convergence Hall for your debriefing.”

  He turned on his heel with a jaunty half-wave and strode off, leaving us to stand there looking bemused. It was so weird when adult civilians played Secret Agent.

  A few yards away, the idling van ground into gear, and Agent Whatsisname rolled away, leaving us stranded, out in the middle of nowhere.

  Jacob opened the envelope. Inside, smaller packets were labeled with our names—first initial only and no titles, with a two-digit number below it. I took the V. Bayne envelope and tipped out a key.

  “Cabin numbers,” Bly said. Automatically, Jacob and I glanced at our numbers, then checked each other’s. Same cabin. What a stunning relief. We trooped over and located our accommodations, 8x12 shacks covered in snow. Bly was across the way. He headed in with a look of resignation. Jacob unlocked our door, though I suspect if he leaned on it hard enough it would have fallen right in.

  I stepped in behind Jacob and my eyes adjusted to the gloom. What the heck? The armored van had felt one step shy of sending us out with bags over our heads and duct taped wrists. But instead of Guantanamo, we’d ended up at a family campground. The interior was rustic, with log walls and a pair of antlers hanging over the electric space heater. Entertainment consisted of a weather radio and a few battered board games. The Auracel had definitely kicked in, because my innards swam with relief. There was a table and two chairs in plasticky indoor-outdoor resin, and…I stifled a laugh. Because, seriously? Bunk beds?

  I poked at one of the pillows. “Top…or bottom?”