Crash sprawled over it, grinning from ear to ear. Without his shirt on.
Fuck.
It was October when I’d met Crash, so I’d never had a reason to see him shirtless. His ink went all the way up, his left arm a full sleeve of fitted-together tattoo flash, his right an abstract design that seemed more planned, less piecemeal. His stomach had the word
“Mattie” arched over it prison-style in heavy gothic lettering, and above that, smack-dab on his sternum, was a black Virgin of Guadalupe, hands folded in prayer. I doubted he’d ever actually been in prison, but he wore the bad-boy look with the confidence of someone who didn’t give a fuck whether the tattoos had been inked in a modern tattoo parlor with sterile equipment, or a dark cell with a sharpened ballpoint pen.
“Say something for posterity,” said Jacob’s voice through the tinny playback on the camera.
Crash’s grin widened. “Let’s make our own porno.”
Okay, it’d been the first thing I’d thought of, too. So why did it feel like I’d just been sucker-punched?
“So you can sell it online? Not a chance.” Just great. Jacob was using his “I’m obliged to disagree on moral grounds, but you’re really hot and I sound like I’m smiling” voice.
“I gotta make money somehow since you refuse to be my sugar daddy.”
“Maybe you should stop buying me such expensive presents.”
“I traded a full-building sage smudge for it. It wasn’t even stolen. The guy just upgraded before he’d had a chance to use this one.” Crash’s grin got even wider, like it could split his face. “Besides, you only turn fifty once.” Then he ducked as the camera lurched and a throw pillow sailed past the spot where his head had just been. Jacob turned forty-five the summer before—not fifty. “Okay, okay. You’re the hottest middle-aged man I know.”
“That’s it, pal. You asked for it.” Jacob set the camera down on its side. It kept on going, recording a vertigo-inspiring shot of the upper corner of his entertainment center. Sounds of a scuffle with lots of squeaking leather ensued, with Crash yelling, “Help, police brutal-ity!” and Jacob telling him, “I’ll show you brutal.” And lots of laughing. And breathing. And something wet that couldn’t be anything other than kissing with plenty of tongue.
“Hey, it’s still going,” said Crash, eventually. “See the red light?”
“You’re railroading me into the porno.”
“Like you need any help, horndog.”
I felt queasy. Physically ill. I liked it a lot better when Crash called Jacob “PsyPig.” And didn’t tongue-kiss him.
The couch squeaked loud, I heard a couple of footsteps, and a pair of hands straightened the camera. Crash’s tattoos loomed large and blurry, then came into focus as he backed away toward the couch, now with Jacob on it, barefoot in jeans and a black T-shirt. His feet seemed so naked.
Jacob’s hair was a lot longer than I’d ever seen it. Enough to grab—and for my own mental health, I really didn’t need to follow that line of thinking any farther. He owned that couch, sprawling over it, one arm along the back. Crash flung himself down into the crook of Jacob’s arm. Both of them were smiling.
“Happy birthday, baby,” said Crash. “This is gonna be your year.” Baby? I couldn’t breathe.
They started kissing again, on-camera this time, and I told myself to turn the thing off.
Now. But for some reason, my hand wouldn’t obey my brain. I reasoned that it was better to see what happened next then to imagine it. At least, I hoped so.
There was kissing, yeah. But they smiled the whole time they did it, and touched each other, too. Crash pulled the hem of Jacob’s T-shirt out of his waistband and slipped his hands underneath; Jacob slid his palms up and down Crash’s arms, and traced his tattoos.
They stopped kissing and kept on looking at each other. They seemed comfortable like that, just looking. Neither one of them filled the silence with words. Jacob looked away first. He reached into a box on the coffee table—the coffee table I’d eaten dinner on the night before—and pulled out a remote. He aimed it at the camera.
There was a half-second of blackness, then snow, then a shot of Jacob’s monster-nephew Clayton in the back seat of a car, green trees with a few gold leaves rushing past the window. Jacob’s voice: “You know who your teacher is going to be this year?”
“I get a different teacher every period,” he said, making the whole phrase sound like,
“duh”.
“What do you think your favorite subject is going to be?”
“I don’t know.” Clayton was trying to act cool, but Jacob’s attention was pulling a reluctant smile from him.
“Clayton is very good at math.” A woman’s voice. Probably Jacob’s sister, Barbara. Control freak.
“How about gym?” Jacob asked.
“I dunno.” Clayton said it long and drawn out, with a goofy smile on his face.
“How about recess. You still get recess?”
Clayton nodded.
“How about lunch?”
I turned off the camera. My own lunch wanted to repeat at the thought of Crash calling Jacob “baby.”
I snapped the camera shut, put it back in its box, and buried the box in the back of the lowest desk drawer. If Jacob ever asked, I could claim I didn’t even open it since I thought it would be too complicated to use. That’s what I could say if Carolyn wasn’t around, anyway.
I pressed my face into the computer keyboard and sighed. When Jacob had shot that tape, the two of us hadn’t even met. So it was stupid of me to feel like I’d just caught my boyfriend kissing another man. Not that stupidity ever deterred me.
My phone rang in my pocket. It was the generic ring tone that meant it wasn’t one of the half-dozen people who called me with any regularity. I considered letting it go to voice mail, but the keys trying to cram themselves up my nostrils weren’t all that comfortable, and besides, it could have been Jacob calling me from a land line. Even though I felt like smacking him, answering the phone seemed like the thing to do. That way, I could assure him I wasn’t rifling through his stuff and getting pissed off over him having the nerve to kiss the guy he’d been dating last summer.
I glanced at the caller ID—pay phone—and hit the talk button. “Hello?” My first impression was noise, the kind of hollow wall of sound you get when someone’s in a big, crowded room. Second thing: crying.
Even I’m not a big enough heel to blurt out, “Who is this?” when someone calls me up sobbing. I sat there for a minute and tried to see if I could figure out who it was by the sound of the voice. Female, probably. Unless it was Clayton. But he was too young to be using a pay phone, wasn’t he? Did kids these days even know what pay phones were?
“Um…hello?” I said again.
“V-V-Victor….” More crying.
Okay. A woman. It couldn’t be that difficult to narrow it down. There were the women at work who never cried because they were cops and they had to keep up their tough facades, unless you count Betty, who probably could get away with crying since she was only a receptionist….
“I c-c-can’t do this….”
So familiar. “Do what?”
“I can’t know everything.” A fresh volley of tears.
It took me a second, but then I placed the voice, the slight Hispanic accent to the vowels.
“Lisa? Oh my God, what happened? Where are you?”
Lisa snuffled. “I’m at O’Hare.” Her voice was very small, nearly drowned out by the sound of the concourse.
I pried her flight number and airline out of her. “Sit tight. Have a drink. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Okay. And Victor?”
“Yeah?”
“Bring your pills with you.”
Huh. So it was a cop, after all. I wondered where I’d been standing when they’d been passing out the deductive reasoning talent. Most likely in the “show me the dead people” line. I’m guessing it must have looked a hell of a lot shorter.
-SEVEN-
I pulled up to the slushy curb at the arrivals area and spotted Lisa. Her hair was in a single long braid and her nose was red. She looked shorter than I’d remembered, and more Hispanic, as if my mind’s eye had been Caucasianizing her in the months since I’d last seen her. She got into the car, wedged a purse that was big enough to carry a sledgehammer into the front seat with her, and snapped her seatbelt on with excessive force. She wore a heather-gray tracksuit with cropped pants, and her ankles were turning blue from the cold. She had no winter coat, and to make things extra weird, she was wearing big, dark, Paris Hilton-style sunglasses.
I stared at her. It was hard to tell where she was looking. “Are you okay?”
“Let’s just go,” she said. She sounded tired.
I wondered if I had a Camp Hell flashback coming on. Please, no. I was driving. “Did somebody hurt you?”
“Why would you say that?”
“You’re answering my question with a question…what’s with the sunglasses? Do you have a black eye?”
She pulled the sunglasses down her nose and glared at me over the top. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but no bruising. “I just don’t want everyone to see me crying. Can we go now?”
Oh. Right. Maybe I hadn’t been so far off the mark about women cops and tears.
I almost wished she did have a few contusions to show for her time at PsyTrain, because I was edging close to full-panic mode from the thought that they’d done something even worse to her that I couldn’t see. I did my best to stop stealing glances at her and keep my eyes on the road. It had snowed all night so traffic was shitty, and Lisa didn’t seem to want me staring at her. I turned up the car heater to full blast and picked my way through traffic to the Tollway. I merged on and got stuck in an afternoon rush hour gridlock. Or maybe there was an accident up ahead. Either way, we weren’t moving.
I waited for Lisa to talk. She didn’t. We crept forward a few yards, then stopped again. I glanced over at her. She was unreadable in her dark sunglasses.
“Look, the fact that you haven’t spoken to me for months? That pisses me off. But forget about that for a second. Right now, you’re freaking me out big time. Why are you here, and what’s the deal with PsyTrain?”
“I just need some Auracel.”
“You shouldn’t take it in a moving vehicle.” Total bullshit. “Don’t worry. I promise I’ll only ask you questions outside the realm of si-no. Are they letting you sleep? Do they have some kind of empath digging around in your head? What other meds are you on?”
“You serious?” Lisa glanced at me, but I couldn’t see her eyes. “Nothing like that. It’s not about PsyTrain, it’s about me.” Lisa stretched her feet out under the heater vent and pushed her shoulders back into the seat. She shifted and wiggled, and adjusted the tilt until she was so far down she’d need to strain to look out the window. “It’s really messed up to be a Psych.”
“There’s a newsflash.”
“I never understood why you took drugs all the time. I figured it was better to be able to see where the ghosts were so you could avoid them.” She sighed and pointed the dashboard vent at her face. “Now I see why sometimes you just get sick of all the knowing.”
“I don’t think you can compare our talents. They’re too different.” And besides, I don’t know shit. I mean, crap.
“It’s just a different way of interpreting information. But we both see stuff that other people can’t.” She turned to look at me, finally, but I left her in my peripheral vision and kept my eyes on the road. “Maybe no one’s meant to see it.”
“But we do. Lots of people do.” I tried to remember the statistic Crash liked to quote. “It’s like three or, uh, fifteen people out of a hundred.” I eased up behind a minivan with a kid at each back window pressing his mouth against the glass and blowing so that their little faces blew up. They looked like those carnival games where you have to aim the squirt gun at a clown’s open mouth. I thought of Clayton. And the camcorder. You don’t have to be psychic to end up knowing things you were a lot happier not knowing.
I pulled off the highway and onto the surface streets, which were packed even more tightly with cars, trucks, vans and busses. I got stuck under the traffic light waiting to make a left turn, and the dead guy wearing the sandwich board that said “Repent your sins” was ranting and raving so close to my car that my side view mirror protruded through his thigh. I hate getting trapped right next to that guy. A bunch of idiots beeped at me as if I could go anywhere, and the doomsday-guy’s hand started waving through the driver’s side window.
I flinched away. “Go toward the light,” I said automatically. I learned that from the movie Poltergeist. It never helped, but it seemed like the thing to say.
“You’re kidding,” said Lisa.
“Huh? Why would I…?” I spotted a hole in traffic and fishtailed out of the turn lane. “The streets are full of ‘em. Or maybe those are just the ones I usually see, since I never went door-to-door to take a census.”
“Nobody at PsyTrain could do that.”
“Do what?”
“Just see them. Just like that. Do they stand in the middle of the road?”
“Sometimes. Why do you think I swerve a lot? It’s not all just avoiding the potholes—
sometimes they look alive, until I get pretty close.” I glanced over at Lisa. She was staring at me. “So what could the mediums do at PsyTrain?”
“They’d say things like: ‘I sense a presence. It’s female. Older. A mother or a grandmother.’”
Yikes. I hoped I never had to face anyone whose grandmother gave me a visual. “They didn’t actually see things?”
“Maybe. But not much.”
I thought of the GhosTV that my good buddies Roger Burke and Doctor Chance had pieced together out of transistors and duct tape…and a bunch of other stuff I’d never been able to identify. Whatever that thing was made of, it had a definite effect on ghosts, to the point where I could turn the volume down and tune the spirits out completely if I didn’t want to see them. Maybe a tuner like that could amplify the ghosts and help low-level mediums get more than just fleeting impressions. And then after work was done, they could turn off their fancy electronics and go home to a nice, normal life. How pleasant for them.
“Where are you going?” said Lisa.
“Surprise. I moved.” During the three months in which you weren’t speaking to me. I somehow kept myself from saying that out loud, too.
She must’ve been able to tell I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the tone of my voice. “I’m sorry, Vic. Okay? If anyone knows it’s hard to be like this, it’s you.” I glanced at her. I really, really wanted to say, Hard? You don’t know what hard is, missy.
But that was way too melodramatic for me. I settled on, “Hm.” I pulled into the parking spot I’d shoveled out earlier, which was still unoccupied. The cannery’s reputation for being haunted had its perks.
I took long strides up the sidewalk that Lisa couldn’t match without running to keep up.
But then I felt like an ass and glanced back at her. She looked small. And sad.
I suck at holding a grudge. By the time she got to the front door, I was holding it open for her like she was Queen for a Day. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll make you some coffee.” I slung my coat over a peg. Lisa held on to the jacket of her tracksuit like she’d try to bite me if I took it. “Leave your shoes on,” I said. “We’re not…uh…weird about the floors.”
“We?”
She could figure it out by asking herself a si-no. Maybe she was even being frugal with the si-no s she asked herself. “Jacob and me. We bought this place together.”
“That’s so fast,” she said. “I mean, congratulations.” I shrugged and led the way to the kitchenette. “I guess it’s fast. It just kinda happened.”
“When did you move?”
“Monday.”
“You haven’t unpacked?”
“Jacob’s been working.”
I rinsed out the coffee pot and filled it with water.
“You got a…um….” Lisa pointed to the side of her neck.
Damn. The bite mark. I pretended not to care and got really busy making the coffee. I flicked the on button and turned back toward her. “So, not that it isn’t great to see you, but do you wanna tell me why you dropped everything and flew back here on the spur of the moment?”
“I told you. I want to try Auracel. They won’t give it to me at PsyTrain.”
“You already tried Auracel, remember? And it made you incredibly sick.” Auracel made everybody incredibly sick until they got used to it. But that was beside the point. “Why don’t you try explaining to me what’s turned you into such a head case about the si-no?
If you don’t want to do si-no, then just stop.” Lisa perched on one of the barstools and tucked her feet behind the rung. She clutched at her knees and rocked back and forth, eyes hidden behind the Paris Hilton sunglasses. I thought maybe she wasn’t going to answer me—and that maybe she really had turned into a whacked-out head case—but then she said, “Vic, do you believe in God?” Cripes. Could the conversation get any more broad or irrelevant? “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”
“Nobody’s supposed to be infallible but God. The Pope, too, according to the Church. So what does that make the si-no? What does that make me?”
“The si-no isn’t infallible. It only works if something can be answered with a definite yes or no, right? I mean, sure, not everyone can do it. But it’s still just a…a skill. It’s like being able to tell if something’s big or small, red or blue. You happen to be able to see a lot more than most people.”
Lisa’s shoulders slumped. “What if the si-no were just like regular sight, like vision? If you can see a kid’s running into the street, don’t you have a responsibility to tell his mother?”
“Not necessarily.”
“How can you say that?”
“I’m not responsible for anyone else’s snot-nosed brat—people need to watch their own damn kids. And you’re not responsible for every hardship in the world. You’re responsible for you. Just you. That’s it.”
PsyCop 4: Secrets Page 6