The tension was thick enough to cut with a spork, but then, as if nothing had just happened, Clayton suddenly brightened, turned to Jacob and said, “If we can’t go on King Chaos, can we ride the Scrambler again?”
Chapter 2
“Always remember—your most effective tool is your mind. Safety and liability can go hand in hand, but it’s critical that you assess the situation and determine the correct amount of force.” I did my best not to roll my eyes at the trainer, a brick wall of a guy named Sando. I don’t know if the name was Greek, Hispanic, or what—or even if it was supposed to be his first or his last name. Or neither, or both. Like Cher.
Well, probably not much like Cher.
Evidently some meth head was suing the Sixteenth Precinct because he’d broken one of the small bones in his wrist by flailing around while he was cuffed—the fact that he’d been caught in the act of robbing a Stop ’n’ Go convenience store armed with a baseball bat wrapped in a rusty bike chain notwithstanding—and so now we all needed to learn how to use nylon restraints.
My neck was sore from too many log flumes the day before, but I resisted the urge to rub it. I’ve always found that staying very, very still tends to keep trainers’ focus off me.
“When you size up a situation, first thing, determine your tactical advantage. For instance…” Sando scanned the room.
I held my breath, but unfortunately, he spotted me. I glanced at my partner, Bob Zigler, who gave me a subtle shrug. Damn. I should’ve stood in front of a darker wall. Or maybe the unfortunate sunburn I’d scored at the amusement park was to blame. Nothing like a big, pink target.
“Detective?” Sando motioned me to the center of the room. I tried to pretend I didn’t see that smug jackass Raleigh from down the hall smirking at my discomfort.
I sighed and stepped forward. “Now, in your case, you take advantage of your reach.” Did he know I almost never arrested anyone? That I was there to wander through crime scenes after the fact? Really, I had more in common with the forensics techs than the beat cops. He took me by the wrist—I hate being touched—and furled my arm up toward my chest. “Defensive stance. Now. Say I take a swing at you.” He did a slow-mo swing. “Put your hand on my shoulder and push. I don’t connect. See?”
Right. Are we through yet?
“Grab the arm, twist, and pop the elbow.”
I fumbled with Sando’s arm. He was pretty muscular. Not like Jacob, but still. A beefy guy.
“Plant your foot next to the perp’s—make a fulcrum—throw him off-balance. Now twist the arm, pivot, and slide the loop.” I went through all the motions. The chance of me ever getting my foot in the right place at the right time in real life were slim to none, but the sooner I got the nylon cuffs on Sando, the sooner I could get back to standing against the wall and trying to be invisible. I pulled the tab, then tried to wrangle his other hand into the second nylon loop.
This time, he actually resisted me—which was a lot more like real life.
And I was so not up for real life at that particular moment.
“Use your reach. Pop and twist.”
I tried to figure out where to “pop” the elbow. His bulging biceps was distracting.
“Tactics. Think smart. Training wins out over size, so even if you’re at a disadvantage with upper-body strength—moving fast, knowing where to hit, that’ll be the difference that makes the apprehension.” Nice of him to point out my upper-body strength…or lack thereof.
Maybe he’d always pictured the Fifth Precinct with someone more athletic. I wrangled the second loop onto his other hand and pulled the tab, and turned back toward the place where I’d been standing, minding my own business.
Sando’s hand closed over my wrist. “Again.”
Oh, fuck me.
• • •
The only good thing about the nylon handcuff training was that we’d started at six and wrapped up at ten, so it was almost like having another day off. I went back home and changed out of my suit, then turned on the TV. It showed about two and a half commercials, and then the screen turned to snow when the cable went out—which it seemed to do every two days, and which left me with nothing to do but ruminate over the faggot remark. And the athletic remark. And the lack of upper-body strength remark.
Sticks and Stones opened at eleven. I found myself on the landing in front of the store at five ’til. I knocked.
There was movement behind the door, shuffling and footsteps, and then the door opened a couple of inches before a security chain stopped it. One of Crash’s eyes appeared in the space, and his single-eyed gaze raked me up and down. “Where’s your polyester suit?”
“I’m done for the day.”
He closed the door, undid the chain, and opened it again. “Good. I need a hand with this display. And you brought lunch. The day’s looking better and better. Set it on the counter for a sec.”
When I stepped into the store, the incense smell was mellow, like Crash hadn’t burned any copal since the night before. The store’s vibe, its island of calm in the static of life, sank in right away—and when I thought about it in that safe haven, the trip to the theme park felt more like some kind of life lesson than a reason to hate all children forever more.
I set the McDonald’s bag on the counter and had a look around, but I didn’t see Miss Mattie. I even lingered briefly, but she wasn’t there.
She could’ve been invisible, I suppose, but I had the feeling that she wasn’t exactly the type to stand around eavesdropping—and if she was, doing that with Crash around would probably result in a hell of an earful. What she did while she wasn’t there, I’d never been able to figure out. Did she have places to go, people to see? Could she appear anywhere she wanted, anytime? Did she have a job? No idea.
I hurried back to the front of the store since I didn’t want to seem too obvious. Crash gets annoyed when I’m more excited to see his dead neighbor than him.
I joined him beside the front door. We were both in jeans—his were rattier. Both in T-shirts—his cooler, with a mostly washed-off Black Flag logo and the sleeves cut off to showcase his ink. To top it off, he had on a pyramid-studded belt with a skull and crossbones belt buckle. He could pull it off. I couldn’t. Not anymore.
He looked me up and down again. He was chewing gum, and somehow he managed to do it critically. “Don’t tell me you tried a tanning bed.”
“No. I went outside.”
“Uh huh. You’ve got that milky white, blue-eyed Irish thing going on.
There is such a thing as sunscreen, you know.” Did I have Irish blood in me? I’d never given it any thought. “I was wearing sunscreen.” I snuck a quick glance at the counter to see if Miss Mattie was there yet. She wasn’t.
“How long did you stay out of your cave?”
“I dunno. All day.”
Crash blew a small bubble, then cracked it loudly. “Right. Live and learn. Here, hold this chair so I can reach the ceiling.” The chair in question was so rickety it would have made a better tripod. “Don’t you have a stepladder?”
“Yeah, I have a whole stepladder collection, I just dig standing on chairs ’cos I like to live dangerously. What do you think?” He probably didn’t want to know what I thought. I decided to cut my losses on that particular portion of the conversation and hold his damn chair for him. He climbed up and started sticking pushpins into the ceiling. I kept my eyes on his hands, because it was safer than letting on that I noticed his belt buckle in my face. Dollar bills—or drawings of dollar bills in his weird, cramped hand—were tethered to the pushpins on clear fishing line. A few well-placed pushpins, and suddenly it was raining money inside Sticks and Stones. Pretty cool.
“What’s the, uh…concept?”
“The fucking economy. People who’re trapped in a bad mortgage, who lost a job they thought was secure to outsourcing, all of ’em are desperate to patch up their wallets.”
“With occult supplies?”
“Sure.” Crash hopped down, put h
is hands on his hips and looked up at his handiwork. “My top three sellers, in order, used to be love spells, money charms, and revenge hexes. Now the love and money are flip-flopped.”
I glanced down at a few boxes of merchandise Crash had pulled.
Soaps, incenses and even aerosol sprays with names like Fast Luck Money Drawing, Horn of Plenty and Luck in a Hurry. I knew that if Crash sold it, it must have been legit in some sense of the word—and if I could exorcise ghosts with salt from the Stop ’n’ Go where they sold lottery tickets and Freezee drinks, someone could increase their cash flow with Nine Lucky Mixture bath and floor wash. I wasn’t sure who. But someone.
“What should I call it? I was thinking it might be amusing to make a poster that says Golden Shower of Wealth and see if anyone notices.”
“Serious?”
“Eh, maybe not. Most of my customers are either too old, too religious or too foreign to fully appreciate my sense of humor.” I wasn’t sure a pee joke was the best moneymaking idea, but Crash seemed to enjoy it. “It’s your store. Why be your own boss if you can’t please yourself?”
“Pleasing myself—is that a double entendre?”
“No.”
He stuck an arm through the slats on the back of the chair and slung it over his shoulder, then batted his eyelashes at me, turned, and sashayed back toward the counter. “You sure? Maybe you know who I was thinking about the last time I jerked off.” I sighed, and said, “Miss Mattie? Is that you?”
“Nice try, but she’s not here. Your aura would’ve spiked if you were really talking to her.” He dropped the chair in front of the counter and opened the McDonald’s bag. “What’d you get?”
“Two combo meals.”
“What about me?”
“One is for you.”
“I’m a vegetarian, you knucklehead.”
“What?”
“You’re seriously that oblivious—how long have we known each other?”
“Uh, I dunno. You can have my fries.”
“Good. I’m starving.” He flicked his gum into the trash and stuffed a good dozen fries into his mouth. “These used to taste better when I was a kid, but I think they were fried in lard back then.”
“So how long have you been a, uh….”
“Five years. It’s a religious thing.”
Crap. I’d always figured Crash had some sort of nonspecific New Age belief system. I didn’t know he considered himself a member of an actual religion. Maybe he was Hindu or something—he seemed to know an awful lot about chakras and meditation. Did Hindus eat meat? And if they didn’t, how come the Indian restaurant down the street had such amazing Chicken Tikka Masala? Once upon a time, back when my training had been less about snap-and-pop and more about esoteric concepts, I probably could’ve told you what religions made which demands, especially the more arcane ones. But I’d probably killed the brain cells that held that knowledge with one too many hits of nitrous.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You can eat meat in front of me. I’ll deal.” I hunkered down over the counter and chowed down half a burger.
Maybe I’d been hungry too. Aside from the hunger, the other thing that had been gnawing at me—underneath the litany of criticism I’d been subjected to lately—was the idea that the amusement park hadn’t been riddled with ghosts. Because even through the Auracel, I can usually sense their presence. The drugs just allow me to tune it out.
“D’you think ghosts take up space?” I asked.
Crash took a long, thoughtful pull on the massive soda. “Don’t know. You can see ’em. What do you think?”
“They don’t stand inside other people. Living people. They don’t stand inside each other. But they walk through walls and furniture and stuff like it’s not even there.”
He nodded as he finished the rest of one super sized fry and continued on to the next. “Subtle bodies.”
Was he serious, or was that another Crash-joke along the lines of golden showers? “What’s that?”
“Astral. Etheric.”
Those, I knew about—enough that maybe I could figure out his religion without having to resort to actually asking. “What discipline talks about that?”
“Oh, you name it. Subtle bodies pop up in everything from Tantric to Crowley. Spiritualists, too—the Victorian table-rappers who said ghosts shot ectoplasm, the ones who staged fake photos of garden fairies.” Super.
“So it’s bullshit.”
“You’re pretty quick to get defensive, for someone who’s seen it all in action.” Crash crumpled up the greasy cardboard sleeve, threw it back in the bag, then took the top bun off my second burger and stole the tomato slice. I ignored his tongue stud as he licked off the mayo. “I think a few of the table rappers were probably real mediums. Plenty of shysters along with ’em, but you figure one or two had to be legit.”
“Hard to say.” At least without tracking down their graves, seeing if any were still lingering around, and then trying to figure out if they’d be willing to level with me or not.
“I thought you could see people going astral. Why the second-guessing?”
“No. I can’t, usually. I need to be on psyactives.” Or drunk. “I was just trying to figure out why crowded places don’t tend to be haunted, but isolated places do.”
“Or what if it’s the other way around?” Crash sucked grease and salt off his fingers like he was giving his own hand a blowjob. I didn’t notice. Not at all. “What if places get deserted because on some sub-sensory level, the mundanes of the world know there’s something spooky about an area and they start avoiding it? It’s like the chicken and the egg. Maybe you’ll never know.”
I picked the second burger off the bun, ate the meat and cheese in few bites, wadded the soggy bun into a ball and shoved it back in the bag. Miss Mattie was still nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t fair. I was playing nice with her little Curtis and everything—hadn’t I even brought him fries? Regardless, she remained indifferent to my thirst for arcane knowledge. I took a long swallow of Coke instead.
Crash folded a piece of gum into his mouth. “So…I can’t help but ask…what’s with your hair?”
“I got it cut.”
“Where? At the Moe Howard school of cosmetology?” I could tell Jacob wasn’t too keen on my hair lately either, but it had grown way over the dress code length, and I kept missing my appointment at the real salon because I’d been scouring the scene of a domestic stabbing all week to see if the spirit might know where her loverboy took off to. Unfortunately, it seemed she’d moved on before I had a chance to chat. “Just one of those places where you don’t need an appointment.”
I ducked when Crash grabbed for my head, but he was just as fast as me. I felt his fingers slide through my hair, watched him peer down his nose at whatever he was seeing. “This angle’s all wrong. Sit.”
I’d been kind-of kneeling in the tripod chair so I could hover over the counter while I ate. It creaked when I turned and tucked my leg beneath me. Crash pulled a comb out from under the cash register, rounded the counter and started pulling up hanks of hair from random parts of my head, measuring them between his fingers, and scowling. “I can save this cut. Lemme get my shears.” I’d be stuck with it a while. Then it would start all over again, the awkward haircut that grew out some and had a few decent weeks, then was suddenly too long for the dress code. A never-ending cycle.
“Yeah, sure.”
“You not too proud to let him help you. Almost—it still be hard for you. But you got trust built up between the two of you now.” I whipped around. Crash was gone, and there was Miss Mattie, big and glossy-skinned mahogany, fanning herself with her paper St.
Anthony fan.
“I’m so glad to see you. Listen, don’t go. I need to ask you—”
“I done told you, I’m not here for you. You got to find your own path.” In one of the cramped rooms behind the store, drawers and doors squalled open and banged shut.
I sighed. “Fine. Do you have something y
ou want to say to Curtis? I’ll tell him. I’ll even write it down so I get it right.”
“He do want the best for you. He need to be needed—we all need to be needed. He be a good friend to you if you let him.” I knew that.
Suddenly, that seemed pretty profound. I’d known that for a long time—and it wasn’t one of those things I took for granted. The people I considered to be my friends were few and far between. Really far between. “Okay. Yeah.”
Miss Mattie scowled down at a handmade sign propped on the counter. It was cobbled together from the glossy Sunday Tribune ads, where a hastily cut out male underwear model with a really prominent package had been pasted over the world’s cleanest stovetop.
A comic book style dialog balloon that read, Did you sign up for the Sticks and Stones newsletter? hovered beside him.
She couldn’t seem to make heads or tails of the sign. Neither could I, really, but maybe that was the point. To make you look, even if you didn’t quite get it. “It don’t make you no less of a man to ask for help.” She pronounced it axe. “You got to ask yourself what’s more important—to try to do everything your own way and lose it all, or to ask for help so you can get what you need, when you need it. Always remember, you not here in this world alone. You got friends.”
“It’s just a haircut—but him and me, we’re cool. I know it might not always sound like it, but that’s just the way we ta—”
“Sometimes the only place you find help is the last place you look.
Remember that.”
Then she was gone, without even bothering to exit through the closet door.
Chapter 3
I stared at the last place I’d seen Miss Mattie, then dropped my gaze to the underwear model. The hodgepodge sign was vaguely disturbing. That was probably intentional, too.
“I gotta unlock the door.” Crash swept back into the store and set a pair of scissors, a bottle of Windex—or probably what used to be Windex and was now water, judging by the fact that it was clear and not bright blue—and a jar of some trendy hair paste on the counter.
PsyCop 6: GhosTV Page 2