Contents
Book Info
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Two
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Part Three
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
About This Story
About The Author
The PsyCop Series
Skin After Skin
A PsyCop Novel
PsyCop #8
Jordan Castillo Price
Find more titles at
www.JCPbooks.com
Cover art by Jordan Castillo Price
Skin After Skin: A PsyCop Novel © 2017 Jordan Castillo Price. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
ISBN 978-1-935540-93-9
Electronic edition 1.0
Part One
The One Who Got Away
Chapter 1
Psychics were once viewed with as much skepticism as Nigerian email scams and the Bermuda Triangle. But at the tender age of ten, I was assailed by scientific proof of psychic ability from every media outlet.
By the time I was thirty, I owned a metaphysical emporium of my very own, but I wasn’t always this evolved. Convincing me all the drama was more than just an elaborate fraud? It took a few years….
Do you believe in Santa Claus? The Tooth Fairy? The email claiming you won a humongous jackpot in some lottery you never actually played? Of course not. Our culture is built on fables and fairy tales, and we’re bright enough to understand that they’re allegories and metaphors…usually. So why everyone gets behind this whole “psychic” hoopla is beyond me.
“I had another dream last night,” Pilar was saying. “God, Crash, I hate it when you roll your eyes.”
Don’t get me wrong, Pilar is my best gal-pal. But if she was psychic, then I was the poster boy for chastity. Even though she’d helped me keep the primo parking space at my apartment by carpooling, I couldn’t simply sit back and pretend she wasn’t being ridiculous. “I’m doing you a favor. The eye-roll means you sound like a dumbass.”
“Nice.”
“I’d point it out if you had spinach in your teeth, too. That’s what friends are for.”
She turned down the stereo I’d turned up mere moments before. “Anyway. It was at Luscious. The salon seemed pretty much like it really is, the chairs, the lighting. I don’t remember if you were there, but you must’ve been. Mostly I remember Ralph. So, I was trying to work, but Ralph kept moving me around to different chairs. My client had long, thick hair, and the color was taking forever to come out at the shampoo bowl. It just kept swirling down the sink, blood-red, running down the sink, like something out of Psycho.”
“Psycho was shot in black and white.”
She ignored me. “And just when I thought I was making some headway, Ralph would come along and say, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t right at all. I need you in chair three,’ and he’d make me leave my client at the sink and move my station. Every time, he moved me to a worse chair, until I was practically at the back door—there was this huge back door that led out to the alley, you know, where the client consultation room actually is, only it was sort of like this door that led out to the gym in my grammar school.”
“Further evidence that dreams are basically the backwash in the dregs of your psyche.”
“This door was huge. Big and rusty and old—not just distressed to look old, like the rest of the shop. It was actually really beat up and scary. And I knew that if I couldn’t get this red dye out, Ralph was gonna come along and move my station again. Only the next time, he’d move it right out the door.”
I lifted up my sunglasses and slid her a sideways look, and was surprised to see actual distress in her eyes. “What’re you saying, you think Ralph’s angling to get rid of you? Based on what, a dream you had last night? A dream? Come on, we both know you’re way smarter than that.”
“Gee, that’s really comforting.” She turned up the stereo and muttered, “I have no idea why I ever tell you anything.”
“Because I won’t feed you a load of crap just to make you feel better…and when I say Ralph would be crazy to mess with you, I totally mean it.”
“Aw.”
“It’s true. Ralph might be a prima donna, but he’s no idiot. You’re the Updo Queen. Nobody else has an eye like you—nobody. Your bridal parties look like a million bucks and they all love you for it. No one’s getting edged out the door. We have an oddball staff meeting and you had a stupid stress dream because you set your alarm half an hour early and it disrupted your sleep cycle, end of story.”
“I dunno what you’ve got against Psych, anyway,” Pilar said. She parked at the far end of the lot and killed the engine. “Maybe you’re jealous.”
“I don’t waste my jealousy on products of pop culture’s imagination. Besides, if Big Bad Boss-Man needed to edge someone out, don’t you think he’d go for one of the Juniors?” Half the lowest ranking stylists wouldn’t last out the year. It was easier to keep from getting too attached by thinking of them en masse.
“Yeah,” she said wistfully. “Hopefully not Matthew. He’s cute.”
“Gay,” I said.
“No kidding,” she replied with a huge undercurrent of duh. “I dunno. Maybe I’m just spooked because I’ve been looking at want ads lately. Like seriously.”
“Can’t hurt to look—just make sure you don’t get caught. If Ralph decides you’re disloyal, well…that’s another story.” I hopped out of the car while Pilar was busy rocking herself out of the front seat.
There are all kinds of euphemisms for fat. Voluptuous, pleasingly plump, Rubenesque…more to love. In the beauty industry, some people try to celebrate fat with body-positive images of slightly larger models and chic plus-size clothing lines, while others are offended by the mere notion of extra weight. I don’t take a personal stance on the matter. I also knew better than to offer any advice, since I could live on burgers and fries without gaining an ounce. Keeping my mouth shut wasn’t easy. It pained me to see someone as cool as Pilar struggle with tasks other people took for granted…and it was a good thing her dreams were nothing more than a release valve for her worries. As fantastic as she was at her job, unfortunately it wouldn�
��t surprise me if Ralph thought the Luscious image suffered from the fact that she wasn’t stick thin and conventionally gorgeous. Plus, I’d bet if anyone was jealous, it was Ralph—subconsciously jealous that Pilar could style circles around him, even though his job was running the salon, not cutting hair. And while her expertise made the salon look good, her personal struggle with weight did not.
We gathered in the consultation room, Pilar, me and the other stylists, and we dished dirt about who looked crappiest in the latest issue of Coif. Ralph was conspicuously absent—and Luscious was his salon—but none of us were surprised. To be honest, I enjoyed studying Ralph to figure out what made him tick. Keeping to his own internal schedule was a perk of being the boss, but during the year and a half I’d been in his employ, not once had I seen him keep a client waiting. The waiting game was only played with employees. It might have been a demonstration of power, or maybe it was something more nuanced than that. A way to keep us on our toes, off-balance. He wasn’t consistently late; he could just as easily have been crazy-early, sitting there by himself for an hour, taking mental note of who showed up when. But there was no way of knowing without being on time…unless you had a pal on staff willing to shoot you a quick “get your ass in here” text. As far as I knew, other than Pilar and me, at Luscious it was every stylist for himself.
“I heard Ralph’s gonna give us a big surprise,” one of the Juniors announced dramatically. While Pilar’s backdoor dream niggled at me, another Junior turned to the window that overlooked the salon floor and said, “Ooh, I wonder if that’s it.”
One thing I’d give Ralph Maldonado: he knew how to make an entrance. He swept like royalty across the dimmed salon floor with a towering stack of boxes in his arms. He appeared to be hurrying…but I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him tucked out of sight waiting for the moment in which his hurrying would have the greatest impact.
“Look alive, people, look alive,” he said as he burst into the room. Two of the Juniors hurried over to relieve him of his burden of boxes, while another actually pulled out a chair for him. Maybe that kid would be the next to go…the art of brown-nosing is more subtle than you’d think, and taken too far, it only embarrassed us all. Ralph shuffled a box pile toward the nearest Junior with exacting carelessness, then planted his hands on the back of the proffered chair. “Take one, pass ’em around. There’s plenty of goodies for everybody.”
Pilar shifted forward in her seat. We often discussed whether or not we should eat on staff meeting morning. Have breakfast, and chances were you’d be greeted by a catered brunch. Abstain, and sit down to nothing but a bottle of tepid vitamin water. I didn’t care—I could eat or not eat, and it was all the same to me—but if Pilar skipped a meal, she got woozy. Apparently today we were being fed, so hopefully she hadn’t stopped for an Egg McMuffin on her way to my place.
Ralph beamed as the pristine flecky off-white boxes made their way around the table. I only stole the quickest glance, since it would ruin everything if he knew I was totally onto the man behind the curtain, and that I enjoyed watching him perform. Ralph’s dark hair was still wet, as if he’d just dashed out of the shower. It was overlong and careless, though he trimmed it every week, and a few threads of gray had been allowed to peek through at the temples. His teeth were bleached to perfection, but one of his eyeteeth was too prominent. And though his beard was a precise three-day growth, his neck was flawlessly smooth. Very handsome. Very rugged, too—at least if you weren’t looking terribly hard at all the details. A less attentive observer might think he was rumpled, and even fairly butch. I saw a gay morning routine that must’ve taken hours.
“Iris Moon doesn’t open until dinner on weeknights,” Ralph said dramatically, “but as a personal favor to me, Chef Sable came in special this morning and whipped up something just for us.”
Pilar was holding very still in an attempt to keep from devouring the box, sustainably-sourced cardboard and all. I had to admit, my curiosity was piqued. Iris Moon was one of those places where it took half a year to get a reservation, and then you ate what the chef put in front of you and pretended you understood it. That sort of food intrigued me, since it was more about social currency than sustenance.
Once everyone had a fussy origami box in front of them, Ralph gazed around the table, surveyed his kingdom, and said with an expansive sigh, “Enjoy.”
I hefted my box. It was the size of a small Chinese takeout container, and it felt like there was something substantial inside. A giant scone, or maybe a tart. It didn’t smell like anything—but between the ionizers and organic oils strategically daubed throughout the salon to mask the lingering whiff of perm, normal food smells didn’t stand a chance. The room filled with the sound of paper as we all pried at the origami. One of the Juniors breached it first and gasped in delight. I quelled a smirk, found a fold in the cardboard, and attempted to pry it open. Not too quickly. I like to play it cool. But as the box confounded me yet again, I did find myself picking up steam so as not to be the last one to get to my treat. Especially once I felt Pilar go still beside me as her box yielded to her skilled fingers.
And there it was, the magical seam. I thumbed it open, peeled apart the cardboard, and looked inside. I had to press the side of my tongue between my molars to keep from laughing.
The last Junior to get his box open was the one to voice the question we were all wondering. “What is it?”
“That,” Ralph explained with great showmanship, “is an absinthe gel reduction with nitrogen-seared bergamot.”
We each gazed at the leaf-topped gumdrop sitting at the bottom of our box, nestled there on its heavy cooling pad. I was amused. Pilar was probably pissed. The Juniors were suitably impressed, though. They lifted their jellies out of the boxes with hushed murmurs of reverence and awe, held them to the light, and inhaled their bouquet.
“Hopefully it’s concentrated enough to pack a buzz,” I said. I popped mine into my mouth whole and gave it a good chew. It tasted like unsweetened licorice had a gummy baby with rubbing alcohol then covered it in menthol. Tears sprang to my eyes. I took a deep breath and said, “Clears the sinuses.”
“There’s a kick to them,” Ralph agreed. I noted he didn’t touch his.
Pilar didn’t either, though she did try to be diplomatic by saying, “I’ll save mine for later.”
The rest of the Juniors oohed and ahhed as they ingested their jellies with tiny, precise nibbles—just like they minced words around him. On one hand, Ralph enjoyed safety. There was a comforting predictability in knowing your minions would never dream of an uprising. The other hand? It was busy toying at the inseam of my jeans under the table. Devotion is flattering, no doubt, but it doesn’t tickle the testes like a hint of rebellion.
Ralph was easy on the eyes and fun in bed, and I liked to think I was too, but both of us knew our occasional ejaculatory dalliance would never go anywhere. He was the boss, after all, and I was the insubordinate subordinate. Ralph was nothing if not savvy, and he was way too canny to get seriously involved with an employee.
“Oh my God, this is so good,” one of the Juniors enthused over the gumdrop, batting his dark eyelashes at Ralph. Matthew was fresh out of school and only a few years younger than me, half Portugese and half sultry Puerto Rican, dewy-eyed with innocence. Ralph had taken a tumble with him, too. Then again, Ralph regularly did everyone else there with a dick, and the dykey goth receptionist, too. Hopefully Matthew’s breathless enthusiasm was only schmoozing, and the kid knew better than to fall in love. And if he didn’t, well…life would chafe a thicker skin onto him soon enough.
“And now that I’ve plied you all with candy,” Ralph said, “It’s time to get down to business.” Ralph Maldonado is melodramatic and gloriously queer, but in the end, he’s also a shrewd businessman.
He started, as always, by reiterating the salon’s mission statement: We delight our clients by making them feel comfortable and welcome. Through technical excellence and cutting-edge technique, we
establish ourselves as industry leaders. Although the words were hand-lettered in broken calligraphy around the consultation room’s chicly distressed crown molding, he didn’t so much as glance up at them. He’d written the spiel, and whether it had come from his idea of what a salon should be or the depths of his heart, I think he’d repeated it enough by now to actually believe it himself.
He ran through some typical things, an awesome mention in the Reader, a reminder to keep f-bombs to a minimum, and a scolding to desist from wearing tank tops as some clients don’t appreciate a man’s hairy armpit in their face. “And next on the agenda,” he said, “Square Days.”
Pilar and I groaned. The Juniors joined in, once Ralph’s body language indicated that bitchery was permitted.
“Do we have to?” Pilar asked. “Last year we lost a whole Saturday’s worth of business, and for what? The raffle sucked, and we ended up cutting for a bunch of cheapos who didn’t even appreciate it. No return clients, not one. Do you know what I made for tips that day? Eight dollars…and twenty-three cents.”
Picking up a tip envelope and hearing it jingle is never a good sign. I added, “If you sign us up for Square Days again, I’m gonna have to call in sick. Just sayin’.”
Ralph raised a hand in placation. “Look, no one’s overjoyed about Square Days, but the Lincoln Square Chamber of Commerce is counting on us, and I already told them we’re in. It’s just a matter of ironing out the details. Swing by my office if you want a say in how our participation will look, Mr. Ash…since calling in sick is most definitely not an option.”
I scanned his eyes to see whether a fellow Chamber member had threatened, cajoled or flattered him into a commitment, but I couldn’t quite tell which. I supposed the “why” of it all didn’t make much difference. He was the boss. And when he said jump, I might hem and haw about it, but in the end, I would grudgingly hop.
Maybe Ralph was in the same boat and he was answering to a higher power, too. I wasn’t entirely clear on what the Chamber did, but I did know Chicago was an Old Boys’ Club. If Ralph wanted Luscious to thrive, playing by their rules would make it a heck of a lot easier.
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