PsyCop 6: GhosTV

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Don’t worry. It’s usually pretty dead before noon.” Just because he’d said that, people were milling around on the landing waiting for the store to open. One of them was a short, round Hispanic woman who went right for the Santeria supplies. The other one was a white guy with long, greasy hair and a patchy beard. From where I sat, he looked smelly.

  Crash said, “Just a sec,” to me, dug around for his keyring and unlocked his register. Within seconds, the Hispanic woman was at the counter with an armload of prayer candles. Crash wrapped each one in newspaper before he bagged it, gave the customer her total in Spanish, and made quick change for her twenty. She took her bags and left without a word. “One of my regulars,” Crash said. “She doesn’t have a lot to say. I think she feels guilty for shopping at a gringo store.” The grubby guy was still browsing.

  “Sit,” Crash insisted, and shoved at my shoulder. I hadn’t even realized I’d stood up. A cop-thing, most likely. When I thought about it, how rote a majority of my responses were, it felt pretty bleak. Or maybe that was the point. Maybe that’s what training was really all about.

  I sat.

  He spritzed my head with Windex water. It didn’t smell like ammonia.

  Probably just plain water. Then he combed through and parted my hair in a bunch of places. “You want me to go conservative, then?”

  “I uh…” I didn’t. Not deep inside. But I could hardly ask for a mohawk. “Whatever you think is best.”

  “I always knew you could sweet-talk me like crazy. Don’t worry, baby.

  You’re in good hands.” He tilted my head down and snipped at my hairline in back, tiny nips. “I wish the butcher who got to you before had left me some length to work with.”

  Points of wet hair sprinkled the floor beside the chair. Very small, a quarter of an inch, even less. Crash kept working my hair, fingers and comb, comb and fingers, measuring and finessing while the tiniest bits of hair rained down.

  “You cut hair?”

  Crash let go of my head and I looked up. The grubby guy was standing closer to us than I would’ve liked, especially with me sitting down.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “You can’t afford me. Is that all, or do you need some charcoal?”

  “Uh, no. I’m good.”

  Crash rang up the sale, then came back around to the front of the counter and picked up wherever he’d left off. “Another regular?” I asked.

  “I dunno. He’s shopped here a few times, but there’s something in his vibe that rubs me wrong. He’s always buying bouncebacks, curse deflection stuff. Which raises the question—look down, there you go—is he really surrounded by people who continually fling hexes and whammies his way, and if so, what did he do to deserve it? Or is he just paranoid? Either way, I’m not exactly itching to add him on Facebook.”

  Crash grabbed my chin and tilted my face up. I held my breath while he leaned over me and put his face right in mine to check the sides of my hair for length. He gave his gum an annoyed crack and took another quarter inch off one side.

  Had he felt my aura spike when Miss Mattie showed up, or had the creepy guy’s vibes thrown enough interference from out on the landing to cover it? Hard to say—but my guess was, Crash would’ve had a comment or two if he’d known I was just chatting with his long-lost neighbor. Why had she bothered to talk to me just to tell me it wasn’t wussy to ask for help? I was well aware of how much help my hair needed—and I’d already resigned myself to the Crash treatment.

  Overprotective, I guess.

  Crash traded the scissors and comb for the little jar of hair stuff and rubbed some paste between his palms. “I know you can’t be bothered to style it—”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “—but humor me just for today.”

  He worked the paste through my hair and tweaked it. I used to put my ’hawk up with Elmer’s glue and egg whites. I could manage a dab of paste.

  “Yeah, not bad. I wanna give you a trim in a couple of weeks when the front has a chance to recover from the chop shop.”

  “Uh, how much do I owe you?”

  Crash waved it off. “Never mind. It’s enough to know you won’t be scaring my customers away. So what else was on your agenda today?

  Did you need any actual supplies?”

  Bob Zigler had downsized my stealth exorcism kit to a repurposed pocket-sized breath spray and an emptied out Chap Stick tube. I was at the point where I could zap a repeater with a quarter teaspoon of Florida Water and a pinch of herbs, and I had enough sandalwood powder to last me through Christmas. Still, if Crash wasn’t going to accept money for the haircut, I figured I should probably buy something. “I dunno. I’ll look around.”

  What would he stand to make the most off if I bought it? The stat-uettes, probably. They were the biggest ticket items in the whole store. If I bought one, though, he’d probably look for it the next time he came to visit—and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s clutter.

  Throws too many shadows.

  Also, he’d probably ask me why I wanted to buy Ganesh in the first place, given that I’m agnostic. It’d be a lot easier to simply drop a few twenties on his floor when he wasn’t looking, but in all likelihood they’d end up in the pocket of the bearded guy, or someone just like him.

  I turned and scratched my head, wondered when the last time was I’d washed my hair. Then I remembered the paste, and then I laid my eyes on a row of books. Books had a decent markup, right? And I might actually find some use for them. “What do you have that’s recent?”

  “Lucky you’ve got a hot little ass in those jeans or I’d have to smack you for asking such useless questions. Recent what? Ephemerides?

  Meditation guides? Hymnals?”

  I felt my cheeks warm up, so I cranked my internal faucet and pulled down a white balloon between the two of us before he could get off empathically on my embarrassment. “Psych stuff, I guess. General facts. Post-eighties.”

  “Ah. Now, that’s a challenge.” He brushed shoulders with me as he came to stand beside me at the bookshelf. “That’s when the books got bland. Before that, psychic research was actually interesting—but the second they found something real, poof. The writing tanked.”

  “How come?”

  He lowered his voice. “Who was the one who set up a cloak-and-dagger meeting with me in a public toilet to find out more about F-Pimp?

  You know better than anyone that Big Brother is real.” The Federal Psychic Monitoring Program—could I go one single day without being reminded that the FPMP was keeping tabs on me?

  Was that too much to ask? I sidled away from him. He managed to brush up on me some more without even seeming to move. “Maybe Jacob would like…this one.” I scanned the shelf frantically for a title that didn’t look asinine while I pumped white light into the shield between us like I was putting out a flaming house with the energy.

  Psychic Self-Defense. How appropriate. I pulled the book and showed him the cover. “Any good?”

  “Adequate. I wouldn’t stock it if it wasn’t at least moderately informative, not unless it had a tacky cover that fairly screamed For Entertainment Purposes Only.”

  “Okay. I’ll get it for him.”

  The second mention of my lover—Crash’s ex—finally got him to back out of my personal space. “So how is Mister Tall, Dark and Infuriating these days?”

  “The same, I guess.”

  “Doubtful. We’re all evolving.”

  I grabbed a couple more titles— Elemental Magick, and You Too Can be Clairvoyant. The Clairvoyance one was thirty-five bucks. Good. I wouldn’t feel so bad about the free haircut if I bought it.

  Crash rang up my books and swiped my Visa, then did a double take at my hair. “Come here a second.” He motioned me forward and I leaned over the counter, figuring that I had something out of place.

  I felt his fingers against my scalp and a tingle shot down my spine.

  I turned up my internal faucet another few rotation
s. “You’ve got a wicked sunburn right up your part.” Crash snapped a triangular chunk off an aloe plant that was hidden behind a big incense burner and a Seven African Powers prayer candle, then pushed my head down and squeezed the cool juice onto it. I figured that the aloe might add character to the paste—or at least it wouldn’t be terribly noticeable.

  I looked up, and Crash’s fingertips hovered at my eyebrow like he might stroke my cheek. I stepped back and strengthened the white balloon yet again. It had to be as thick as a steel-belted radial by now.

  He was a lot easier to resist when he was acting like an asshole. Time to get out while I still could. I gave him a stilted wave, and I could hardly move my arm through the thick membrane of protection I’d been pouring light into for the past quarter of an hour. He smirked and gave me an ironic finger-wave in return. “Ciao, baby.” I stumbled out onto the street and let my balloon drop. Crash was great, don’t get me wrong, but keeping him from feeding off my emotions felt like drinking three refills of Coke at a restaurant, finding the bathroom out of order, and having to hold it all the way home down a road full of potholes.

  On my way back to the car I glanced at the fortune teller’s window—

  not that you can ever see anything, between the neon and the thick black drape—and got a load of myself reflected back in the glass. Holy crap. My hair looked friggin’ awesome.

  Crash had given me rock star hair. Subtle rock star hair, like a pseudo-intellectual kid on an indie label might have, hair that looked like he didn’t give a shit about it, that he just happened to tousle it the right way and it fell, by chance, in the most flattering way it might have landed. Hair that might not have been washed lately, but it didn’t matter because it only added to the just-rolled-out-of-bed charm.

  It was the hair I’d been born to have—if I were a pseudo-intellectual in an indie rock band, and not a cop.

  Would I have to get an even shorter nerd cut to cover it up? I didn’t want to. Besides, it probably wouldn’t look quite as good without the hair paste. It might even look cop-like, if I didn’t tousle it.

  Though I didn’t know how I’d resist. It was the best hair I’d ever had.

  My phone rang while I was waiting for the light on Damen and Lincoln that I’ve never once made. Crash. “Hello?”

  “So what do you think?”

  “The hair? It’s uh…yeah. It’s good.”

  “Oh, go on. Really. Go on.”

  “It’s really…good…hair.”

  “That’s it? Good? Just good? You look about five years younger and smokin’ hot.”

  “What about…athletic?”

  There was crackling on the line. I realized it was Crash torturing his gum for a good second or two. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You know, more uh…athletic.”

  “I think I have the wrong number. I could swear Victor Bayne just asked me if I thought he looked athletic.”

  “Never mind, I gotta g—”

  “My grandma is more athletic than you.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You break a sweat lifting a coffee cup.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it.”

  “Athletic? I must’ve told you a dozen times today how you well and truly rock my world, and you go fishing around for the one compliment you’d never get in a million years.” I heard a slurp of Coke in a straw, and the muttering of the word, “Athletic….” The light turned and the car behind me beeped. I gave him a “yeah, whatever” all-purpose wave and rolled forward. “So what do you think it would take? I mean, for me to, I dunno, maybe bulk up a little.”

  “Protein and weight training. But I just watched you scarf down half a pound of beef, so I’m guessing your protein is adequate.” We had protein drinks in the fridge. They tasted like the can. But maybe if I held my nose…. “You mean like, uh, barbells and…stuff?”

  “Most guys your age—how old are you, forty?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “They’d kill to have your bod—not an ounce of fat on you and a full head of hair with hardly any grays.”

  What? I had gray hair? Since when?

  “I’m all for physical fitness, but I think you’re pretty much stuck with your basic body type. What the heck’s gotten into you, anyway, that now you suddenly need to be athletic?”

  “I just thought that Jacob might like—”

  “Jacob’s ga-ga over you as it is.”

  “Well, I don’t know about—”

  “I do,” Crash said. “He’s smitten. Lust-addled. Head over heels.” I replied with a long, gusty sigh at the thought of going through all the trouble of diet and exercise only to end up as beanpole-like as ever, and Crash said, “Besides, I can’t believe you’re being this shallow. The body’s only a shell.”

  I considered that logic. “Then why should it matter if I have a good haircut or not?”

  “Go fuck yourself, then…and think of me while you’re doing it.” He made a wet kissy-noise and hung up.

  Chapter 4

  Psychic Self Defense by Muriel S. Sullivan ended up being a lot more interesting than I would’ve imagined. I suspected the author was visual, like me, so I could relate to the way she talked about things.

  My visual representation of protective skins might have looked more like condoms and body bags than hers, but even though she wrote about rings of mystic fire and halos of purifying white light, I could still scrape together some sort of internal reference.

  The book had been written in the sixties, so it was definitely weird.

  Muriel’s instructions would be making perfect sense, but then she’d tell you to grab an iron spike, invoke Thor, force the negative energy into the spike and drive it into the ground. Granted, as Marvel Comics superheroes go, Thor is pretty cool. But I’ve never seen an iron spike just lying around waiting to be planted.

  Despite the weirdness, the book must’ve really been holding my attention, because I didn’t hear Jacob come in until he spoke.

  “Did you do something different with your hair?” I jumped, and the book fluttered out of my hands like a living thing, pages fanned open, hovering in mid-air while I grabbed at it, and then tumbling to the floor, shut.

  I touched my hair. It felt funny. Hair paste. “Yeah, uh, Crash gave me a trim.”

  Jacob turned on the overhead light. I hadn’t even noticed the room getting dim. He hooked a finger through the knot of his tie and loosened it as he approached, all the while nailing me to my seat with his most intense dark-eyed stare. Silk hissed on cotton as he whisked off his tie, and then he leaned over me, eyes level with mine. “Take off your clothes.”

  He said it, and then he didn’t even give me a chance to do it myself.

  He yanked my T-shirt over my head and threw it on top of the book, then went at the fly of my jeans like he’d rip it right out if it didn’t cooperate. I undid the buttons on his tailored dress shirt, then Jacob pulled it off and threw it on the floor beside mine. His undershirt followed. Then it was just him, and me, and everything we were wearing from the waist down—which didn’t stay in place for long.

  All the while we stripped, Jacob didn’t say a word. He just stared. He dug the hair…maybe.

  Or maybe he was wishing I was more athletic.

  “Let’s try something,” I suggested, before I’d even fully formed an idea.

  He nodded, all ears.

  “Something more, uh, active.”

  He gave me a dirty smile. “What did you have in mind?” Something that would make me seem like I wasn’t out of shape—

  though nothing I could picture seemed to fit that bill. “Well, we could….” I trailed off and hoped that, in his enthusiasm, Jacob would come up with something.

  He pulled me against him chest to chest, moved to stroke my hair back and then changed his mind at the last second, as if he was afraid he’d wreck it by touching it. “You want to fuck me?” Um. Oh.

  He looked pretty jazzed, so I made myself nod as if that was exa
ctly what I’d been getting at. It’s not that I didn’t think Jacob’s ass was a damn fine ass, but with our bodies—him massive, me gangly—I felt like a greyhound attempting to mount a mastiff whenever we changed things up.

  “Let’s do it in the bathroom,” he said. “In the mirror.” Oh God. Not only did I have to do the deed, I had to see myself in action. I’d be lucky if I could even get it up.

  At least we kept the primo lube in there—the silicone that lets you hump for hours, even underwater. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice if I kept my eyes shut.

  I followed him in and he turned on me suddenly, and nuzzled my jaw.

  “Tell me what to do.”

  I tried to think athletic, but absolutely nothing came to mind, so I said, “Kiss my neck.” I’m notoriously weak-willed when it comes to my neck. Maybe I’d get into the spirit of things more quickly if he was working on my…yeah.

  Jacob’s mouth was a thing of beauty. I slipped my arms around his shoulders and pressed myself against his body— big and warm, solid, hairy where I liked it, smooth along his back, inside his thighs. I slipped a hand alongside his balls to remind myself how silky smooth he felt down there in the crease of his thigh, and hot and moist, the heat of the day. He moaned against my neck, and I felt a most definite stirring.

  I could do it. No problem. I could be very…athletic. All I needed was the proper motivation.

  “Touch my nipples. Not hard, not yet. But make me feel it.” Jacob mumbled against my neck and slid his hands up my ribs. He took both nipples at the same time, one in each hand, and rolled them between thumb and forefinger. My cock twitched, and he made another pleased sound along the spit-wet skin beside my Adam’s apple.

  “No hickeys, mister. You’re in deep shit if you mark me up.” A rumbly laugh. A gentle bite. My cock rose and made a right angle to the rest of my body. I let the head glide over his hip, and he made another satisfied sound against my throat.