“Zigler,” he said. “I took the day off.”
“We’re helping Jacob,” Lisa told me.
Good to hear, though according to Jacob, they were playing some sort of power game to stop him from abusing her talent. But I know better than to take anything Jacob says at face value. “That’s some evil shit going down at Rosewood.”
Lisa turned to the counter and started browsing my audio collection. Maybe her appearance didn’t mark her as a high-level Psych, but the way she didn’t think it was weird for Vic to talk to thin air definitely spoke volumes. I pulled out a CD and handed it over for her inspection.
“Chant! How’d you know?”
“I’m good at reading people.” Her, for instance. She felt solid to me. Sincere. I liked her already. I handed her another disc.
“Oh, I have that one. It’s my favorite.”
As we compared the merits of my various recordings, about a million and one yes-or-no questions occurred to me. Would Sticks and Stones ever turn a profit? Should I invest in better shelving? Expand my hours? Would I do better to focus on my online presence, or was my second-floor location dooming me to failure regardless?
And had I blown my one and only chance at happiness when I walked away from Jacob?
Obviously, I couldn’t ask her that. Hell, I wasn’t really entitled to ask her anything. Unless…. I considered the CD she was turning around in her hands. “If you wanna save yourself twenty-five bucks, maybe we can do a little barter.”
I cocked my head toward the beaded curtain and she followed me in back. “I’ll load this whole folder of chant onto your phone if you just avail me of your particular talent.”
She sighed.
“I know, I know,” I said. “Jacob’s been putting you through the wringer and treating you like a psychic ticker tape. But this isn’t the same thing. I don’t even have a question, not right now. It’s a safety net, that’s all. And I won’t cash out unless it’s really important. Heck, maybe I just want the security of knowing that I can.”
“Having you pay for a sí-no doesn’t feel right.”
“Then don’t think of it as a payment. Think of it as a favor. Between friends.” Which really amounted to the same thing, but I could tell by the look in her eye—she wanted that music.
Or maybe she mostly wanted a friend.
“If you really need a sí-no someday,” she said, “you can have it. But there’s no room on my phone for all that music.”
I turned and pawed through my box of random cables and connectors until I found an old off-brand MP3 player I wouldn’t mind giving up, and brandished it triumphantly. “There’s a solution to every problem,” I said. “It’s all just a matter of not giving up too soon.”
Chapter 42
Eventually, Jacob solved his case and his after-hours visits to Sticks and Stones dwindled, but he must’ve figured out how to transfer his apprehensiveness and frustration to Vic. Looking at it that way, I didn’t really envy the two of them their idyllic relationship, active sex life and supercool loft. Not as much, anyway.
“So, how do you stop remote viewers from looking at you?”
If I had a quarter for every time Victor Bayne barged into my shop and asked me something weird…I’d be able to do my laundry with impunity.
With Lisa back in California, Vic was turning to me again. Not as if I had any answers, I supposed, but with the hope that at the very least, I wouldn’t mock him for fielding the questions. “Is this just a vague idea you’ve got, or is someone watching you?”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“You could start with the chakra cleanse—”
“That didn’t work.”
“Hey. You asked me for advice. Don’t bite my head off.” For all that Vic has the self-esteem of a teenage girl at fat camp, the minute he wants something, he becomes the center of the universe. It was a busy afternoon and I had half a dozen customers browsing my wares, and there he was expecting me to drop everything and explain to him, yet again, how the world worked. As if I even knew, myself. “How am I supposed to know what would keep the invisible eyes off you?”
“I need to back off my talent.”
“No—you’re thinking about it all wrong. You want to strengthen your own mojo so that you can bounce their energy back at them.”
“Great. So that means if I’m on antipsyactives, I’m a sitting duck.”
“You mean to say you think someone’s watching you right now? All the time?”
“I’m pretty sure of it.”
“Look, this place isn’t a fortress or anything, but I do take precautions to make sure the less ethical botanicas don’t curse me out of business. I’d be surprised if your Remote Pen Pal could reach you here.”
Vic closed his eyes and drummed his fingers on the countertop as he attempted to get centered, but he was a bundle of nervous energy with nowhere to spend itself. You didn’t need to be an empath to pick up the waves of anxiety rolling off this guy. The customers felt it too. The one who wanted to buy something paid up and split. The one with a habit of stealing small items she was too embarrassed to purchase left empty-handed. And the one who was on the fence about a shrine statue—a sale I really needed to make—was looking like she might choose to take her business elsewhere.
Vic spun around and started combing through a shelf of divination tools. “What have you got that’s a psyactive?”
“I don’t stock prescription drugs. Too risky. If I was raided….”
“No, not a prescription psyactive. I mean something like the High John the Conqueror bath salt. Do you have any more of that?”
It was obvious he had no intention of going home to use it—in fact, that cannery of his didn’t even have a bathtub. I stepped around him, pulled a bar of High John soap off the shelf, and handed it to him. He made a “may I?” gesture toward the beaded curtain and I waved him through.
Once he was out of site, the energy shifted. There was a couple shopping for tarot cards. The woman reminded me of Maxine, though her husband was nothing like my father. Dad wouldn’t have crossed the threshold of Sticks and Stones without a gun to his head. “Don’t take the cards out of the box,” I called over. “You’ll get your energy all over them.” Not to mention the fact that I couldn’t sell something that looked shop-worn. “If you need to see what they look like, I’ve got a chart right here.”
A series of thumps sounded from beyond the beaded curtain. Followed by swearing. My current customers were unlikely to make off with anything big, so I ducked in back to make sure Vic hadn’t somehow managed to maim himself with a bar of soap. I found him in the middle of the galley kitchen—shirtless, covered in hickeys, soapy and soaking wet—groping blindly for who-knows-what. Seriously, you can’t leave the guy alone for even a minute. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom, shoved it into his hands, and went back to my post.
The sour woman over by the statues was now pawing things, too. She wouldn’t leave a trail of bent boxes behind, but her energy was a downer. I’d have to smudge that whole area. “Are these from China?” she asked, though the vibration behind the words was more like an accusation.
“I don’t do Chinese imports—the energy sucks. Those crystal balls are from Brazil, the Ganesh is from India, and the laughing Buddha is from Thailand.”
“I saw something on the Shopping Channel that said all the supposed jade out of China was really green-dyed marble.”
People are so fun to argue with when they think they know what they’re talking about. “It says it’s from Thailand, right there.”
As I attempted to prove my point, Vic burst through the curtain with his shirt buttoned wrong and his hair sticking out sideways, grabbed me by the arm, and blurted out, “Where’s your mugwort?”
“In a second,” I said, but when I didn’t immediately halt my conversation to appease him, he stomped off down the Wiccan aisle. The couple by the tarot cards looked uneasy—the fake jade woman too. And then to add creepiness to the disc
omfort, Vic announced, “I don’t have my gun.”
For fuck’s sake. “Go lay down or something, okay? I’ll close the store.”
“It’s got to be here somewhere.”
“What, your gun? I doubt it. Seriously, chill out. I’ve got some Stoli in the freezer. Have a shot, or five.”
That got his attention. He fled back to my apartment while my customers looked at me like they wondered if they should offer to call the cops. Fat lot of good it would do me. “Don’t worry about him,” I said to the room at large. “He’s…special.”
People do what they do for all kinds of cryptic, deep-seated reasons. Whether it was fascination, sympathy, or the appreciation of a good melodrama, the customers all trooped up to the register with something to buy just as soon as I said I was closing. And then a few more came in, to boot. By the time I bundled everyone out the door with their cards and their Buddhas and their other esoteric supplies, my till was fat.
And my apartment? It was suspiciously quiet.
I expected to find Vic sulking in the kitchen because I hadn’t rushed in to placate him…and instead he was in my bed, curled into the fetal position around the vodka bottle, which was mostly empty. He’d been flying high on antipsyactives, and now this. How dangerous of a combo was alcohol and Auracel? I pulled out my phone and did a quick search to see if I should call an ambulance, but no. According to the web, operation of heavy machinery was contraindicated since drowsiness was likely. Given that Vic was unlikely to climb out of my bed, let alone get behind a wheel, I supposed he didn’t have much to worry about. Medically speaking, anyway.
I plucked the bottle from his inebriated grasp, considered what percentage was probably backwash now, and finished it off. I needed as much fortitude as I could muster to call Jacob, since he’d probably find a way to blame me for whatever had just taken place. Right when the scars from our war wounds had started fading, too.
I went back to my phone, and considered it. Miss Mattie smiled up at me from her photo on the lock screen. “If ever there was a day he could’ve used your advice, it’s today.” I glanced over at Vic. He even scowled in his sleep. “For someone who’s got it all, he’s pretty damn miserable. And now, whatever I do, no doubt I’ll screw things up even worse. Let him sleep it off here, they’ll impugn my virtue. Call in the cavalry and I’ll look like a snitch.”
I shoved Vic’s feet over—he didn’t so much as stir—and sat cross-legged at the foot of my bed with the phone face-up in my lap. “Can something as simple as a pill really keep you from talking him down in his moment of need?” I asked Mattie. “Maybe, in a way, that’s a comfort. Makes it feel less personal that you show up for him, and not me.
“And Jacob…he’ll have a field day with this.” I took another look at Vic. “How long do you give the two of them? Because it can’t be healthy. Jacob with his savior complex and Vic hanging on by a thread. Do their broken places really fit together all that well? Are they stronger together, or is it a brittle façade that’s gonna come crumbling down when something hits it in just the right spot?”
I might not’ve been on Auracel, but even so, Mattie had no answers for me. I tapped the call button on Jacob’s contact and he answered right away. I greeted him with, “Care to come over and collect your drunken boyfriend?”
“What are you talking about? Vic doesn’t drink.”
“Tell that to my very last bottle of Stoli.”
He sighed and said, “I’ll be right over.”
I’ve always teased Jacob about his age. How could I help it? He wore his wear a hell of a lot better than he had any right to. But when I found him on my doorstep with a resigned look about him and the lines of concern etched deep, I refrained from mentioning that he looked every last one of his years, and then some. I spared him the need to play twenty questions by giving him a quick rundown. “So Vic showed up tweaking on Auracel. He was convinced that a remote viewer was watching him, and that I needed to help him detox from the antipsyactive. Then he drove off my customers, drank all my vodka and passed out.”
Jacob simply shook his head.
“Do you want anything—tea? Uh…water?”
He waved my offer away and headed up the aisle. I followed. When he was no longer looking me in the eye, he was able to say, “I just don’t get him. I’m here for him but he never tells me anything.” When I scoffed, he shot me a look over his shoulder and said, “No, the shoe doesn’t feel any better on the other foot.”
“Guess not.”
We filed into my bedroom and took a good long look at Vic. He was in the same position in which I’d left him, curled on his side, knees bent, face scrunched in a scowl. “Must be out cold,” I said. “He hasn’t budged.”
“For him, that’s saying something. He tosses and turns all night long. In the morning, when I wake up, he’s usually up and dressed and on his third cup of coffee. It’s like he sleeps with one eye open and flies out of bed at the crack of dawn. I guess I never appreciated the contentment of watching someone sleep those last few minutes before the alarm goes off.”
Booze isn’t exactly a reliable tranquilizer. Sure, it knocks you out, but not for the duration. No doubt Vic would surface soon enough. “I’ll give you two your privacy,” I said, and went out to count my drawer and straighten my shelves. It didn’t dawn on me until I was armpit deep in jade statuettes that Jacob’s pre-alarm Sleeping Beauty had been me.
Chapter 43
Disturbing PsyCop visitations aside, my week was a pretty average week. I sold stuff, but not enough to pay my bills. I meditated and chanted and contemplated the meaning of my existence, then bit someone’s head off for saying my competitor’s charm selection was better than mine. And I hooked up with a guy who seemed intriguing at first, only for him to ruin it all by bragging about how easy it was to steal tips off the table when the waitstaff’s back is turned. It was a relief to get a call from Carolyn, even if she was after a touch-up and not a pitcher of margaritas.
I bussed it over to her place and tapped on the door. Her twelve-year-old kid, Lexi, answered. I greeted her with, “What’s shaking, Babycakes?”
She scowled. She’s the spitting image of her dad, round-faced and pale, but she’d grown up in a household where even the tiniest of fibs didn’t quite fly, so her facial expression was 100% Carolyn. And since she’d never been able to pussyfoot around a topic, she didn’t bother to mask her disdain. “You’re bleaching mom’s hair again?”
“Indeed I am. It’s important to maintain the blonde. Unless you were hoping I could talk her into something a little racier.” I took off my hat and shook out my hair, which had faded to a delicate shade of minty vanilla. Lexi clucked her tongue and sauntered off into the living room. I poked in my head and said, “Hi, Cora,” to the younger one. She was busy trying to keep Lexi from prying an iPad from her clutches, so she ignored me.
Carolyn’s kids are awesome, a couple of shameless little ids with no superegos to hinder their actions. Heaven help their parents once puberty struck.
Carolyn came downstairs to grab me before I could swing into the kitchen and say hi to the hubster. Unlike the kids, Doug likes me. After all, I’m the reason his wife is so foxy. But interrupt the guy while he’s in the midst of making dinner and the results might be toxic.
The Brinkmans’ place is a typical Chicago bungalow, brick on the outside and hardwood floors throughout, sturdy and a little bit boring—which, I suspected, suited Carolyn and her Mister to a T. I’m not judging. The lack of pretense under their roof was refreshing.
The bungalow’s basement is an odd-smelling, clammy-feeling, partially finished expanse where the family’s various DIY projects crawl off to die. Pottery, painting, quilting and scrapbooking supplies languished under a fine sifting of dust. A decrepit 70’s bathroom adjoined the laundry room, too ugly to really use and too much trouble to update, but with a rubbery sprayer attachment stuck on to the sink’s old faucet, it was a serviceable makeshift salon.
As I
sectioned Carolyn’s hair and clipped it out of my way, her eyes met mine in the pitted vanity mirror. “This reminds me of the way we met,” she said, “with you finishing my hair at home instead of the salon. At Red’s place. Which makes me think about how much I miss him.”
“Well, that makes one of us.”
Our reflections both scowled. Hers, because my reply was patently untrue. Mine, because I was so sick of pining over the ones that got away. I was debating how deep into the Red conversation I really wanted to delve when someone came thundering down the basement stairs—and it sounded a hell of a lot heftier then Doug or the girls. Or even the three of them combined.
Jacob skidded to a halt in the bathroom doorway, flushed and intense. “I want to try again.”
“I told you not to get your hopes up,” Carolyn said. “Though I can’t imagine why I thought you’d listen.”
“This sounds juicy already,” I said.
“Vic has a theory that there’s more to being a Stiff than just a lack of ability,” Jacob said, which Carolyn countered with, “And I don’t think you should hang your hopes on it until we figure out a more accurate way to measure it. You don’t realize what’s involved in testing a Psych. A quick game of true or false in the car isn’t enough to go by.”
“Hold on,” I said. Vic’s paranoia must’ve been rubbing off on me. “I’m never keen on admitting it, but I think Jacob’s got the right idea. It’s smarter to figure out what’s what before he goes running off and getting anything noted in his permanent record that he’d rather keep to himself.”
Jacob said, “I know it’s nowhere near as thorough as official Psych testing, but I don’t care about thorough. You’re certified. I know you, I’ve worked with you for nearly two years. Between the both of us, we can figure this out.” He pulled something from his pocket—the world’s most twisted card game, Puppies and Bugs. “We can even make a spreadsheet.”
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