Nowadays they test you first to see if you're psychic.
The PsyCop series by Jordan Castillo Price features frazzled psychic medium Victor Bayne and his smokin'-hot boyfriend, Jacob Marks. Fifteen years ago, Victor studied at Heliotrope Station, one of the original residential psychic training programs in the U.S. The only thing he learned in that facility was how to be a better liar.
Now he's part of an elite PsyCop unit. Solving murders should be a snap when you can talk to the deceased. But since no one's ever given him a lucky break when they were alive, why would they start now ?
Summary:
Victor Bayne, the psychic half of a PsyCop team, is a gay medium who’s more concerned with flying under the radar than in making waves.
He hooks up with handsome Jacob Marks, a non-psychic (or “Stiff”) from an adjacent precinct at his ex-partner’s retirement party and it seems like his dubious luck has taken a turn for the better. But then a serial killer surfaces who can change his appearance to match any witness’ idea of the world’s hottest guy.
Solving murders is a snap when you can ask the victims whodunit, but this killer’s not leaving any spirits behind.
Summary:
Criss Cross finds the ghosts surrounding Victor getting awfully pushy. The medications that Victor usually takes to control his abilities are threatening to destroy his liver, and his new meds aren't any more effective than sugar pills.
Vic is also adjusting to a new PsyCop partner, a mild-mannered guy named Roger with all the personality of white bread. At least he's willing to spring for the Starbucks.
Jacob’s ex-boyfriend, Crash, is an empathic healer who might be able to help Victor pull his powers into balance, but he seems more interested in getting into Victor’s pants than in providing any actual assistance.
Summary:
Thanksgiving can't end too soon for Victor Bayne, who's finding Jacob's family hard to swallow. Luckily, he's called back to work to track down a high-profile missing person.
Meanwhile, Jacob tries to find a home they can move into that's not infested1with either cockroaches, or ghosts. As if the house-hunting isn't stressful enough, Vic's new partner Bob Zigler doesn't seem to think he can do anything right. A deceased junkie with a bone to pick leads Vic and Zig on a wild chase that ends in a basement full of horrors.
Original Review October 2019:
First off, I have NO IDEA why it took it me so long to read this! Normally when I start an already established series I tend to devour the whole thing immediately but as its October I have others I have to read first but trust me I will be returning to the world of Victor Bayne, Jacob Marks, and the whole PsyCop series because . . . WOW!
Among the Living may be a short novella introduction to the world of PsyCop where psychic and non-psychic(Stiffs as they are often referred to) police work hand-in-hand to solve crimes but don't let the shortness fool you, it is long on character development and world building. I won't go into details but let me tell you, if you love supernatural, crime-busting, romantic bickering, friendly banter, and plenty of lusftul chemistry then this is definitely a series for you(technically I shouldn't speak for the whole series but considering some of the author's works I have also read I'm going out on a limb and saying "series"😉). Frankly, if you only love one of those elements then Among the Living is still for you.
I can't wait to read the rest of the series to see what kind of trouble Victor and Jacob get into and I have a feeling "trouble" might be the perfect word. When an author can mesh together romance, heat, and humor with paranormal, supernatural, and mayhem then I know I found a winning combo of author and storytelling.
Criss Cross #2
I want to jump out of the gate and say just how deliciously creepy this entry in the author's PsyCop series is. I can certainly understand Vic's need to medicate to help him deal with the things he sees, I can't imagine seeing dead people everywhere. Most of us have read ghost stories or watched haunted house films where there is one ghost or one place with many ghosts but the whole idea of driving down the street and seeing them or not being able to go into a hospital without being bombarded by spirits never entered my mind so I completely understand and sympathize with the character.
As for Jacob? Some might think: "He's too perfect, too accepting, too understanding there just has to be something wrong with him, something underhanded, something lurking underneath all that willingness to understand" but not me. Don't get me wrong, he's no pushover or Vic's "lapdog", when he gets riled up about something he is definitely a force to be reckoned with and I don't think we've even begun to see that side of him but you know he'll never turn that force against Vic.
I'm not going to give away any spoilers to the plot because even though this is far from a new release, it was new to me and I'm sure there are others like me who were late to the party and I don't want to spoil it for them. I'll just reiterate what I started with and say Criss Cross is deliciously creepy with a well balanced diet of love, friendship, humor, mystery, and heat. Not a single character, main, secondary, or cameo is extra page filler, they each play a part that makes this a wonderful follow-up to the series opener, Among the Living. I for one can't wait to read more.
Body and Soul #3
Another new partner for Victor Bayne and let's hope this one is a keeper. I think this one is even creepier than the previous entries. Where the case leads Vic and Zig(his new partner Bob Zigler) is so not what I was expecting but HOLY HANNAH BATMAN! I couldn't put Body & Soul down. That's it, that's all you're getting from me about the mystery side of PsyCop #3.
As for Vic and Jacob? Who knew there was so much to think about when it came to househunting when you see dead people? Another element of ghost & spirit stories that I've never thought about before, and Jordan Castillo Price's world building and character development is pretty amazing when it comes to Vic's "talent". Jacob is still incredibly supportive especially about finding properties that didn't have any kind of history that could lead to spirit roommates. The scene where he rips into their estate agent over just such a thing, well if I didn't already believe in his love for Vic and his passion for standing up for his love than that scene cemented it for me.
I don't think I'll say much more because I'm off to start book 4, Secrets. I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those series that if the author chooses to write only a 5 sentence coda or 100 full length novels, I'll be first in line(once I get caught up) to gobble it up. Victor Bayne, Jacob Marks, and the whole PsyCop universe is incredible storytelling at it's finest that leaves me smiling, cringing, laughing, "awwing", and a dozen other emotions on the feelings spectrum. A definite keeper from start to finish.
Among the Living #1
Criss Cross #2
It was a pretty good day, for October in Chicago. The weather was warm enough that I could get away with wearing just jeans, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt, and my threadbare jean jacket. I could see my breath as we set the rowboat in the water, Maurice in his knee-high rubber boots, steadying the small aluminum boat so I could climb in. Water squished through my black Converse. Not the best shoes to wear fishing, I gathered.
But I’d never been fishing before, so how the hell would I know?
Maurice heaved himself over the side, thrust an oar into the slimy green water on the bank of the Calumet, and shoved off. And he did it with an ease that reminded me that even though he was graying, he was still in reasonably good shape.
Maurice Taylor had been my partner in the PsyCop Unit for a dozen years, and now he was retired. We’d been quintessential opposites when the force had matched us up: him, a mature black man without a lick of psychic ability, who’d inched his way up to detective with years of hard, honest police work. And me, an impulsive white kid with no friends, whose sixth sense was always tuned to eleven unless I was on an anti-psyactive drug cocktail.
Maurice was still old. And he still had his common sense, far as I could tell. Me? I wasn’t a kid anymore, but at least I’d managed to make a few friends. Other than that, I couldn’t really vouch for myself.
“Give that oar over here,” Maurice said, stretching his hand out to me. “We be goin’ in circles all day, if I let you just splash it all over the place like that.”
I didn’t argue. Maurice is more stubborn than I am. I know this.
Maurice took several deep breaths as he rowed us farther from shore. The Calumet’s current wasn’t particularly fast in the fall. It had pockets of reedy marsh along the banks that seemed like ideal places to just sit in your boat and while away the day. A train clanged by to the north of us and the scream of a siren drifted by from a stretch of elevated highway. Nature.
“Smell that fine air,” Maurice said.
I grunted. It smelled like algae and exhaust fumes to me.
Maurice pulled a few more strokes with the oars and then eased our anchor—a hunk of metal that’d been part of a barbell in another existence—over the side.
“Shouldn’t I have, uh...a lifejacket on?”
Maurice smiled and started fiddling with his rod. Or reel. Or whatever the fishing pole thing is called. “S’okay, Victor. Water ain’t but waist high.”
I glanced over the side of the boat. The water was opaque green. Hard to tell if Maurice was exaggerating.
He put the fishing pole in my hand and pulled out another. “Just set there and wait until I show you how to cast. Else you’ll tear your eye out with the hook.”
I looked down at the hook. Maurice had squished a worm onto it. A worm spirit didn’t appear and immediately start telling me about the moment of its death, so I presumed I was safe from the spirits of bugs. But then it moved and I realized it was still alive. Gross.
Maurice cast his own line with a fairly straightforward explanation of what he was doing, then exchanged it with me for the first fishing pole, which he also cast.
I stared out at the little red floaty things that marked where our hooks had sunk and waited for more instructions.
Maurice wedged his fishing pole into a groove on the floor of the boat and unzipped his duffel bag. He pulled out a thermos and a battered plastic travel mug.
“What next?” I asked him.
Maurice poured some coffee into the mug and handed it to me. The early morning sunlight filtered through the steam that curled up from the surface of the coffee, and I felt like the two of us were in a Folgers commercial. Maurice poured another cup for himself, screwed the stopper back onto the thermos, and sighed. “We wait,” he said.
I noticed he was smiling, a soft, kind of distant smile as he gazed out over the water, conveniently ignoring the beer cans and plastic shopping bags that floated around us. Retirement suited him.
We drank our coffees together in silence, and we stared at the water while I tried to control the shivering, me sitting there in wet canvas sneakers in October. It was warm for October, but not that warm. I wedged my fishing pole into the groove in the floor as I’d seen Maurice do and poured myself another coffee. I contemplated pouring out the rest of the contents of the thermos onto my freezing cold feet, but I figured it would only feel good for about a minute, and then the coffee would cool and pretty soon my feet would just be wet again. I saved the coffee for drinking, instead.
“So,” Maurice said, after he finished his coffee. “Warwick find you a new partner yet?
“Yeah, a couple days ago. Some guy. His name’s Roger Burke.”
I really couldn’t think of much to say about Detective “please, call me Roger,” Burke. He was kinda like white bread. When I was a teenager, I would have been pretty eager to get him down my throat. But now that I was looking at forty, I found him a little bland.
Don’t get me wrong, Roger was cute. He had a ready smile that he lavished on me at the drop of a hat. His thick hair was naturally blond, cut short and smart. His eyebrows and eyelashes were a darker blond, framing greenish hazel eyes.
I’d never seen him in anything less than a sport coat, but judging by the way it sat on his shoulders and buttoned smoothly over his nipped waist, I was guessing he probably exercised regularly, and was hiding a set of washboard abs under his perfectly pressed dress shirt.
It was difficult to say if he’d pitch for my team or not. Once upon a time I assumed that all the other cops except for me were straight. That was before Detective Jacob Marks cornered me in the bathroom at Maurice’s retirement party.
I was still too fixated on Jacob to really give a damn if Roger Burke slept with men, women, or inflatable farm animals, for that matter.
“What’s this Burke guy like?” Maurice asked.
I decided it would be far too gay to tell Maurice what color Roger Burke’s eyes were. And besides, Maurice wouldn’t give a shit. “He always buys the coffee. Seems decent enough. He was a detective for five years in Buffalo.”
“New York?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” The plastic floaty on Maurice’s line dipped beneath the water. He reeled the line in carefully but all that was on the hook was a drowned worm. He cast it back out. “What about that Mexican girl?”
“That Mexican girl” was Lisa Gutierrez. She’d been selected to be my non-psychic partner, or Stiff, after Maurice retired. Things had worked well between us, until our sergeant figured out that she was a psychic herself. She’d rigged her test scores to get the job.
“She’s in California at some place called PsyTrain. Even if she decides to come back here once she’s done, they’d never pair us up. They’d have to put her with a Stiff.”
“Too bad. Heard the two of you hit it off.”
I froze, and not just because ice crystals were forming on my sneakers. I’d been wondering if we’d have this conversation, just me, Maurice and a bunch of garbage floating around in the Calumet River. The little talk where I told him I liked men.
“We, uh.... She’s nice.”
Maurice reeled his line in a couple of turns and gazed out over the river. He didn’t say anything more. I let my breath out slowly, relieved that I’d dodged the bullet, but maybe a little disappointed, too. A few moments of really, really awkward conversation, and then he’d probably never mention it again.
Heck, according to Jacob, Maurice probably already knew. Or at least suspected. Twelve years and no girlfriend? That might be significant if we were talking about an average guy—but it was me under the microscope. For all Maurice knew, I was just too messed up to have a woman in my life. I was probably too messed up to have a man in my life too, come to think of it. But since Jacob was a big, strong man with a gun, a cop who knew how to kick ass and take names, I figured he could hold his own.
The two cups of coffee I’d just sucked down roiled around in my stomach, and I hung my head over the side of the boat and tried to talk myself out of being sick. I’d swallowed a donut in three bites on my way out the door, but it wasn’t doing a very good job of soaking anything up. Acid licked at the back of my throat and I swallowed hard.
“Don’t tell me you’re seasick,” Maurice said, his eyes still focused on the floaties a few dozen yards away as if I wasn’t turning green and gulping air.
I seized on the chance to blame my nausea on anything other than my own internal freak-out. “Maybe,” I said. “Haven’t been on a boat since I went on that horrible cruise when I turned thirty.”
I stared down at the soupy green water sloshing against the side of the rowboat, and picked out tiny round shapes that were plants, or snails, or some other mysterious bits of life in the murk.
“Just set there,” Maurice said. “It’ll pass.”
A larger pale, round shape floated beneath the murky water, probably a shopping bag, or maybe a milk jug. I tried to distract myself by imagining a homie out drinking milk with his posse and chucking the plastic bottle into the river, but I didn’t find my own humor particularly entertaining.
It bothered me, not being able to tell what the thing was, and I leaned my face closer to the water and squinted at it. I noticed there was another one, about the same size and shape but maybe a little farther down, to my right. And another to my left. My vision seemed to open up and I realized these pale shapes were all around us, like cloud formations beneath the river’s surface.
Some kind of algae, then. Or maybe even pale, sandy mounds, with the Calumet’s bottom as close as Maurice had said it was, even closer, us bobbing in a couple of feet of water where we just could have waded instead, if I were dressed appropriately.
I pushed myself up on the side of the boat as my nausea receded. I was just about to ask Maurice about his trip to Fort Lauderdale when the underwater shape surged up toward me and coalesced into a pale, dead face.
I snapped up tall and the fishing pole leapt out of my grip. I managed to grab it before it fell into the water, but maybe I should’ve just let it drop. Maybe I wouldn’t have looked like I was shaking so hard if I didn’t have a big, telltale fishing line visibly quivering between me and the water.
The water that was full of dead people.
Maurice stared at me for a beat, glanced over the side, then took the fishing pole from my hands and wedged it into the bottom of the boat. “What you see?” he said calmly.
I knew what I must look like, whites of my eyes showing all around, face paler than usual. The Look. The one that said I’d just seen something. Maurice knew The Look.
I closed my eyes and images of pallid, distended faces bobbing to the surface filled my memory. Hundreds of them, eyes open and unseeing, a landscape of them stretching to the horizon—or at least the highway.
There wouldn’t be that many there. Not in real life. It was just my own mind fucking with me.
“It bad?” Maurice said gently.
I opened my eyes and stared hard at his brown, gray-whiskered face. I took another breath. It wasn’t that bad, I told myself. I’d just seen a handful of revenants and let my imagination run wild. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen dead people before, I told myself. It wasn’t like I’d never seen a ghost.
I peeked over the side.
A face peered back at me, rubbery mouth opening and closing like it was trying to talk—but the water didn’t move and no bubbles came out. The face next to it blinked. A hand moved toward the surface of the water like a pale, bloated spider, reaching for me. And beyond it, another hand. And another beyond that.
“Jesus,” I said. I jerked myself upright and started chafing my arms. “The water’s full of them.”
Maurice reeled in his drowned worm, and my empty hook, and then the anchor. I felt him shove the oar into the riverbed and give us a push toward shore.
“Should I make some phone calls, have ‘em drag it?” Maurice asked.
“I don’t know.” Was anybody missing? Yeah, probably. But dozens of somebodies? Maybe hundreds? “I just....” I sighed and made a “whatever” gesture. “I don’t know.”
Body and Soul #3
"Uncle Jacob? Did you get to shoot anybody since last summer?"
Jacob’s nephew, Clayton, asked this with the eagerness and joy of a kid who’d just learned that school was cancelled. Clayton was in fifth grade. I have no idea how old that would make him.
"You shot someone last summer?" I muttered, smoothing my napkin on my lap to the point where I probably looked like I was playing with myself. Not exactly the impression I’d wanted to make on Jacob’s family on our first Thanksgiving together.
The muttering? Not usually my style, but I was feeling uncharacteristically mouthy. It seemed like the moment I had a thought, it made its way through my vocal cords and out my mouth before I had a chance to pat it down and make sure it wasn’t going to jab anyone. I’d been this way since I’d stopped taking Auracel and Seconal over a month ago. Here I thought I’d been mellowing all these years, when really, it had just been the drugs.
"No," Jacob answered patiently. "I try to avoid shooting people." And then he looked at me. "Carolyn and I walked in on an armed robbery in progress at the convenience store on California and Irving. It was a clean shot to the leg."
Departmental policy allows us cops to decide whether to go for a lethal or a non-lethal shot when a criminal’s got an unarmed civilian at gunpoint. If Jacob had shot someone’s leg, I had no doubt it was exactly where he’d been aiming. Jacob is a Stiff, the non-psychic half of a PsyCop team, and not only are Stiffs impossible to influence by sixth-sensory means and impervious to possession, but they’re usually crack shots. The Stiffs who I know, anyway.
I’m the other half of a PsyCop team, the Psych half. Not Jacob’s team; Carolyn Brinkman was Jacob’s better half, on the job at least. I didn’t currently have a Stiff of my very own. Maurice, my first partner, retired, although I still lean on him way too much. Lisa, my second partner, was kicked off the force when they discovered that she was as psychic as Jean Dixon. She’s off being trained for the psy end of the whole PsyCop business now, out in California. Technically she's just a phone call away, and yet sometimes it feels like she’s on an entirely different planet. Even when she gets back, I won’t get to partner with her, since they only pair up Psychs with Stiffs.
And then there was my third partner, Roger. The bastard kidnapped me for some under-the-table drug testing, and I’d been so gullible I’d practically given him a key to my apartment. Roger was rotting in a jail cell, last I’d heard. The whole affair was pretty hush-hush. Maybe I could’ve gleaned a few more details, if I was the type to obsess about the little things, like where one’s arch-enemy is incarcerated, and whether or not he’s shown up for roll call recently. But, frankly, I’ve never found details very comforting. I think about them, and I just get overwhelmed. Roger went bye-bye, and I came out of our encounter intact. That’s all I really need to know.
Six weeks later and I was still on medical leave. I felt fine, probably due to the amount of actual blood cells coursing through my system in lieu of the drug cocktail I was accustomed to.
"Did you ever shoot anyone?" Clayton asked me, eyes sparkling.
"Sure."
"Wow. Did you kill ‘em?"
Clayton had Jacob’s phenomenal dark eyes. Or Jacob’s younger sister Barbara’s eyes. Which were Jacob’s father’s eyes, as well as the eyes of the wizened old lady at the head of the table who was about a hundred and five. She’d been giving me a look that could probably kill an elephant ever since we’d gotten there and Jacob had introduced me as his boyfriend.
I think he’d primed his family over the phone. But still. He had to go and say it out loud and rub it in. Because that’s the way Jacob is. Not that he’d be bringing a man home for Thanksgiving for any other reason. But that’s beside the point.
"Clayton Joseph," snapped Barbara. She might have had Jacob’s eyes, but she certainly couldn’t hold a candle to his cool composure. "That is not an appropriate question for the dinner table."
Grandma Marks glowered at me from the head of the table, her dark eyes, half-hidden in folds of wrinkled skin, threatening to pierce me right through. I’d figured she hated me because I was doing the nasty with her grandson. Maybe she had a thing against psychics. Hell, maybe both. I’m usually just lucky that way.
"Bob Martinez retired down at the mill," Jacob’s father, Jerry, announced in a blatant attempt to change the subject. If we’d been in Chicago, where I grew up, Jerry would have been talking about a steel mill. But we were in Wisconsin, an alien land of rolling hills and cows with signs advertising something called "fresh cheese curds" every few miles. I gathered that the mills made paper in this alien, wholesome land where Jacob had been born and bred.
"And when are you going to think about retiring, dad?" Barbara asked. She had a trace of an accent that sounded Minnesotan to my untrained ear. I wondered if Jacob had ever had that same funny lilt. Probably once, but it’d been erased by him living over half his life in Chicago.
"Your father’s got another ten years in him, at least," said Jacob’s mom, Shirley. Shirley wore her hair in a white, poofy halo. I suspected she’d been a blonde in her younger days. "What’s he going to do around here but get in my way?"
"Your mother plays Euchre on Tuesdays and Thursdays," said Jerry, as if his retirement hinged around a card game.
"You have hobbies," said Barbara. "You could fix up your woodshop and actually finish a few things."
"Ah, I’d rather earn an honest wage than stay home and make birdhouses."
"And you could teach Clayton all about woodworking."
"He’s too young," said Jerry. "He’d cut his finger off."
"Wood is stupid," Clayton added.
I wondered if calling wood stupid was heresy in this land of trees and paper. But Grandma didn’t fall out of her chair clutching her heart, so I figured that kids were allowed to say the first thing that popped into their minds these days. Or maybe they always had been. I must have been on my third foster home by the time I was Clayton’s age. I was probably in fourth grade, held back for being thick, stubborn, and socially retarded. But that would’ve put me at just about the age where I’d learned that my opinion was neither desired nor appreciated.
Jingle bells announced the opening of the front door -- that and a massive blast of arctic air, complete with a whorl of snowflakes.
"Uncle Leon!" Clayton leapt up from the table and thundered toward the door.
I looked at the empty place setting across from me and heaved an inward sigh of relief. I’d been hoping that an actual person would fill it, that it wasn’t left open as a tribute to Grandpa Marks, or some other long lost family member.
Leon rounded the corner of the dining room and Shirley stood up to greet him. I glanced around at the rest of the table to see if I was supposed to stand up, too. But Jacob and Jerry were still sitting. Jerry was even packing away mashed potatoes like he was trying to beat everyone else to the punch.
Uncle Leon was in his mid to late sixties and had the same white hair and rounded snub nose as Jacob’s mom. Shirley kissed him on the cheek and unbuttoned his thick corduroy jacket. "Jacob brought his friend with him," she said, gesturing toward me. "This is Victor."
She peeled Leon’s coat off him and whisked away with it just as Leon turned to shake my hand. He led with his left hand, which confused me. His bare right arm flapped at his side, with his right sleeve rolled up to his shoulder.
I shook his left hand in a daze.
Leon nodded his head toward his right shoulder. "Lost it at the mill in seventy-eight. Damn thing still hurts."
I blinked. Leon’s right sleeve wasn’t rolled up. It was pinned to the shoulder of his shirt. He didn’t have a right arm -- not one made out of real flesh and blood, anyway. And I could still see his missing arm. The party’d finally gotten started. Hooray.
"Oh," I said. "That sucks."
"Shirley tells me you’re a PsyCop."
I nodded. "Yeah."
"That’s some kind of program they got going on down there," he said. His ghost arm joined his corporeal arm in pulling out the chair across from mine. "What kind of talent you got?"
I sank back into my seat and swallowed a mouthful of dryish turkey meat I’d been talking around for the last several minutes. "Medium."
"No shit?"
Grandma frowned harder, but Leon didn’t seem to notice. "Can I get you anything to drink?" Shirley asked me, but I mumbled that I was okay.
"That girl Jacob works with, she’s a telepath, isn’t she? Wow, a medium. How ‘bout that?" Leon’s ghost hand caressed the silverware as he spoke. I wondered if I looked like a freak for staring at his salad fork while he talked to me. "So how strong are they, your impressions?"
I drained my glass of soda to wash down the turkey and wished I’d taken Shirley up on her offer of a refill. "Pretty strong."
"What, do you hear ‘em talking to you? In their own words?"
"Uh huh."
"Holy cow, now that’s what you call a psychic. We got ourselves a Marie Saint Savon right here at the table."
Good old Marie had died right around the time I’d been shoehorned into the police academy. She’d been the world’s most powerful medium, and no one could touch her talent. Not that I could figure why anyone would want to. I was surprised that Leon actually knew her name. Maybe it was a generational thing. She’d been big news maybe fifteen years ago, and then was quickly forgotten by almost everyone but the psychic community.
"That’s got to make your police work a little easier," said Leon. "Huh?"
I nodded and swallowed some mashed potatoes. They were salty enough to stimulate my flagging salivary glands. A little.
"Only if you work homicide," Jerry piped in. The whole family had been skirting around my psychic ability, but since Leon had started the ball rolling and I didn’t seem too tender about the topic, it’d become fair game.
"I do."
"Holy shit. I didn’t know they used mediums in homicide."
Grandma glared at Leon.
"You mean medium, like a psychic medium?" Clayton asked.
"Uh huh."
"Wow, you see dead people?"
"That’s just in the movies," Barbara said. "Like the telekinetics who can shoot bullets with their minds." Metal was incredibly resistant to telekinesis, but I’d trained with one guy who could fling a mean stone. He got these splitting headaches afterward, though, so he was never one to show off with party tricks.
"I can see them," I said.
The table went quiet. "Whoa," said Clayton. "Like, right now?"
I avoided looking at the spot where Leon’s arm was flopping around on the table. "There aren’t any spirits here for Victor to see," Jacob explained. We knew that to be the case because we’d called Lisa Gutierrez in Santa Barbara and asked her if there were any ghosts in Jerry and Shirley’s house, and she’d said no. Lisa’s precognitive, and if she says no, the answer is unequivocally no.
I guess she couldn’t have known about Leon’s arm. Not without us asking specifically.
"And when you see ‘em," Clayton went on, "are they all scary and gross?"
"Sometimes."
Everyone at the table seemed to lean forward just a little. Even Jacob.
"Can you see right through them?"
"Sometimes. Or sometimes they look like regular people."
Leon’s facial expression was open and eager, but his phantom limb was clenching and unclenching its fist, and bright red droplets had appeared all over it as if it was sweating blood. I buried my face in my glass, tilting a final droplet of soda onto my tongue.
"Can you touch ‘em?" Clayton asked, his voice dropping down into a reverential whisper.
I swallowed around a hunk of turkey that’d lodged in my esophagus. Jacob slid his glass over to me, and I took it and drank it down. He’d been drinking milk. I just barely kept myself from gagging.
"You don’t want to touch ghosts," I said.
The house around us, the very air, went quiet. Everyone strained forward to catch whatever crumbs of information I might care to scatter. Because we’re a nation that grew up on Lovecraft and Sleepy Hollow and Friday the Thirteenth, and people are dying to know if all that shit’s really real.
"They’re creepy," I added. And I swallowed some more milk.
"Why don’t you tell Uncle Jacob and Uncle Leon about the report you did on salamanders?" Barbara suggested to Clayton.
"Creepy how?" Clayton asked.
"Clayton got an A minus," said Barbara.
"Creepy how?"
"I don’t know," I said. I’d started spreading my food around my plate, mixing my corn and my potatoes, ruining both. "The way they look in scary movies? Pretty much like that."
"How can you say that?" Barbara demanded, suddenly so vehement that I wondered how I’d ever pegged her as a sheepish single mom in her pale yellow cardigan and perfectly creased khaki pants. "When people die, they go to heaven."
Oh. Christian. Or had Jacob said Catholic -- or was that the same difference? I didn’t remember, must not have been paying close enough attention when Jacob had tried to prepare me.
"Barbara," said Jerry. Her father didn’t have a follow up ready. Just her name, sounding like a warning.
"If he says he sees spirits, then he does," Leon said, hopping to my defense despite the fact that he made me squirm in my seat. Or, more accurately, his right arm did. "They have tests." He looked to me for affirmation. "Don’t they have tests?"
"All kinds of tests," I said, burying the last of my corn.
"And being able to see them, you’re what, a level three? Four?"
"Five," I said. Level five was a couple of steps down from good old Marie. But Marie was only a step lower than God. Or maybe Satan.
The table went quiet again.
"Are you a millionaire?" asked Clayton.
"It is not polite to ask people how much money they make," said Barbara. She was the same age as me, thirty-eight. She had Jacob’s flashing dark eyes and high cheekbones, but she looked just as worn out as I always felt. Even more so, now that we were attempting civil dinner conversation.
"It’s okay," I said. "No, I’m not a millionaire. I make more money than a regular detective, but not as much as my supervisor."
"And you spend as much money as someone who’s lived through the Great Depression," Jacob added, sotto voice.
Clayton scrunched his face up. I saw mashed potatoes lurking behind his teeth. "You should find Al Capone and make him tell you where his vault is."
Jerry and Leon laughed, but the way they kept their eyes trained on me, I could tell they were hoping that maybe I’d think that dredging up Al Capone was a grand idea. And I just so happened to need a couple of assistants over the age of sixty-five.
"He’s probably not around," I said. "He’d be a little old by now."
Everyone chuckled, except for Barbara, who evidently thought I was a devil-worshipper. And Grandma, who was possibly giving me the evil eye. And Clayton, who couldn’t make sense out of my lack of financial savvy.
Leon smacked the table with his left hand as he laughed. His spectral right hand followed suit, only it pummeled the table with much greater force than its counterpart. Spectral blood flew, spattering the white tablecloth covered in cross-stitched cornucopia, doe-eyed pilgrims, and smiling Indians.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a protective white bubble around Leon’s arm.
"Are you warm, honey?" asked Shirley. "You want me to open a window?"
I was about to tell her not to bother, when I realized that I felt the prickle of sweat along the back of my neck. "Yeah, okay," I said, as I shrugged out of my flannel shirt and let it bunch on the seat of my chair. I was glad I’d taken the time to find a T-shirt without any holes or stains on it.
I took a deep breath and looked at Leon’s ghost hand. It quivered like it was hooked up to an electrical wire. Like that frog in the biology class whose legs kick when you give it a shock. No, I hadn’t been absent that day. And yeah, I’d puked. Me and Janet Neiderman.
"I’ll be right back," I said, knocking my chair into Jacob’s as I scrambled to make my way toward the upstairs bathroom. There was a half-bath on the first floor, but I figured that everyone at the dinner table really didn’t need to hear me retching if I couldn’t bring my gag reflex under control.
Why did I have to go and think of that goddamn frog?
I dodged past Jacob’s old bedroom--now Shirley’s very own sewing room--and nearly skateboarded down the upstairs hallway on a pink and blue rag rug. Darting into the bathroom, I slammed the door shut behind me. It had a hook and eye lock on it, which might keep Grandma out, or maybe Clayton, if he didn’t lean on the door too hard.
I breathed, and I looked around. It was a normal enough bathroom, more colorful than mine, with blue and yellow sunflowers on the shower curtain that kind of matched a border going around the top of the painted walls, but not quite. I pulled open the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet in hopes of finding a nice bottle of cold medicine, or maybe some valium. Neither one would make Leon’s nasty ghost arm go away completely, but they’d sure make me care about it a whole lot less.
The right side of the cabinet was filled entirely with old lady perfume, facial cream, nail polish, and hair mousse. The left held cheap plastic razors like I use, aspirin, foot spray, a stick of green deodorant, cotton swabs, and antihistamines.
Of every drug that had ever been invented, Jacob’s parents owned the only two types that affected my talent less than antibiotics.
I pawed through their drawers in hopes of finding a stray muscle relaxant or even an expired tube of motion-sickness pills. I found a bunch of washcloths and some sunblock. Sunblock. In a small rural Wisconsin town on the border of Minnesota that saw the sun maybe two hours each winter if it peered closely enough between the snowflakes.
I looked underneath the sink and found a pair of rubber gloves and a bunch of cleaning supplies. Damn it.
I tore the medicine cabinet doors open again, hoping to find something that I’d missed before. And then my eyes fell on the nail polish remover.
I turned the bottle around and read the back. Acetone was the first ingredient. And the seminar I’d attended fourteen years ago called Inhalants, the Silent Killer was as fresh in my mind as if I’d just taken it yesterday.
And here I thought I hadn’t gotten much out of the Police Academy.
I wasn’t a habitual huffer, not like the anorexic girl at the Cook County Mental Health Center -- the institution that’d housed me from seventeen to twenty-three -- who’d shown me how to get the most bang for my buck with a can of cooking spray or a plastic baggie and a jar of rubber cement. No, I didn’t enjoy killing my brain cells randomly, but I was a pragmatist. The arm wasn’t going to go away all by itself. And I really needed it to stop waving at me if I wanted to make it through dinner.
I could saturate a wad of toilet paper and hold it over my mouth and nose, but acetone’s a stinky chemical, and I’d end up reeking of it. Instead, I set the bottle on the rim of the sink and plugged one of my nostrils, sniffing it carefully in hopes of zapping the specific neurons that enabled me to see Leon’s damn spastic missing arm without leaving me stinking like a Chinese nail salon.
I felt a little floaty and had developed a sharp headache over the top of my skull by the time anyone came to check on me.
Luckily, it was Jacob.
Since he didn’t need to know I was huffing his mother’s nail polish remover, I put it away and washed my face before I answered the door.
He leaned in the doorjamb, looking incredibly sexy in a long-sleeved, chocolate brown silk knit that clung to every muscle like it’d been painted on him. He crossed his arms and gave me his most earnest you-can-trust-me face, pouty and a little doe-eyed.
"Everything all right?"
"It’s...um. I dunno."
"You went a little pale at the table."
It wasn’t so surprising that Jacob noticed it when I saw something. Maurice Taylor, my first partner, used to tell me sometimes that I’d disappear if I got any whiter, and he hadn’t been joking about my ethnicity.
My eyes stung from the acetone I’d just sniffed, and I pressed my fingertips into my tear ducts to try to relieve the itch. If I knuckled my eyes like I really wanted to, they’d get all red and I’d look totally high. "Your uncle Leon seems like a cool guy."
"He is."
"But...I can see his arm."
Jacob stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He sat down on the rim of the tub and took one of my hands between both of his, and he waited.
I avoided his eyes and stared at a tile on the floor that was set a little crooked. "I’m trying really hard to be a decent boyfriend," I said. "But I think I might not be cut out for it."
"Stop it."
"No, it’s true. I don’t know how to have a family. And evidently, I can’t function without having a buzz on."
"What are we talking about?" Jacob asked. "Are you breaking up with me or telling me you want to start going to Narcotics Anonymous?"
My heartbeat, already racing a little from the acetone, did an unpleasant stutter when Jacob said the words "breaking up" aloud.
"I mean, you know. Come on."
"No, I don’t. What’s going on?"
God damn. I’d started hugging myself without realizing I was doing it. Ugly habit. Ugly, ugly habit. I forced myself to try to stand normally, but I felt like my arms and legs weren’t screwed on right. "I just wanted to...you know...be with you and your family for the holiday."
Jacob nodded slowly. "Okay. And that’s what we’re doing. If you need to leave, I’m trusting you to tell me so."
"I don’t want to leave in the middle of dinner." I stared up into a painted-on sunflower. "I thought the house was clean," I said.
"And I had no idea that Leon’s arm would qualify as a ghost. If you don’t want to go, we can move you, say that you need to sit by the window."
"I’d rather sit across from Leon than Barbara, arm or no arm."
Jacob smirked. "Can’t say I blame you."
I thought about that damn bloody limb performing acrobatics that were totally out of synch with what Leon’s face and body language were telling me. "This is gonna sound stupid," I said. Which I can pretty much use to preface anything that comes out of my mouth. "But I wonder if it knew I could see it and it was showing off."
Stupid or not, Jacob considered the idea. "Maybe it’s got a spiritual equivalent to a cellular intelligence. Who knows? But if amputated limbs can be present in the spirit world, it explains why they still cause pain for some people and not others just as much as the idea of a bunch of neurons misfiring."
Could people have their phantom limbs exorcised? It was possible -- or at least they could have them scrambled with electrical interference, once the technology of Psych science caught up with the psychology and biology of it.
"If I just had some Auracel, everything would be okay." I take prescription Auracel to block out the visions. Or I used to take it...until I stopped. Which was fine, inside my apartment. I guess I’d conveniently forgotten about the real world outside it. Only certain pharmacies in big metropolitan areas carried the drug, so even if I could call The Clinic and have them fax a prescription, chances were we’d have to go to Minneapolis to have it filled.
Jacob stood and pulled a little paper cup from a cutesy holder mounted on the wall beside the medicine cabinet, and filled it with tap water. "How many?"
"How many what?"
"How many Auracel?"
I realized he was digging in his pocket, and it was as if the clouds broke open and a beam of sunshine landed right on him.
"You have some?"
He smiled at me. He’s got a special grin that’s all mine. It somehow manages to be reassuring and to promise that he’ll fuck me halfway through the mattress later, all at once. "I’ve got to tell you: I’m relieved this is only about Auracel." He handed me the paper cup.
"How many do you have?"
"Ten."
"Wow. You’re prepared."
"I was a boy scout."
"That’s creepy. And hot. At the same time."
Jacob pressed a tablet of Auracel into my mouth, running his thumb back and forth over my lips after he did. I turned away to swallow some water. In fifteen minutes or so, the pill would start kicking in. My relief was greater than my disappointment, but just barely. "I really wanted to do this without the meds."
"Which was your idea, not mine."
That was so not fair. My life was perfectly fine until suddenly I had this live-in boyfriend who wanted to interact with me, and I realized that I was almost always high. Maybe it had been my idea to go cold turkey, but I’d done it because of Jacob.
"Talk to me," Jacob said.
"You’re gonna decide I’m too much trouble, someday."
"Uh huh," he said with absolutely zero conviction, flipping my hand over to press a kiss into my clammy palm. His goatee tickled at the base of my thumb.
I felt the first effects of the Auracel kicking in, a little dryness to my tongue, and a tingle in my fingertips that was only intensified by the feeling of Jacob’s hot mouth grazing my skin.
"Stop it," I said. "I’m not going back downstairs with a hard-on."
I felt Jacob grinning into my hand, and then his tongue traced my life line.
"I mean it."
"So you want me to suck you off in my parents’ bathroom?"
Dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Jacob talks dirty so well, and I always love it. My cock stirred a little. The promise of the Auracel high made me sluggish, though, and I had enough self-control, even with a sexy hunk of manmeat going down on my thumb, to save it for later. "After dinner."
Jacob let go of my hand and pulled my T-shirt up over my stomach. He pressed a kiss into my solar plexus. "Dessert," he said, breathing the word against my bare skin and pulling a long shiver up my spine. "I’m looking forward to it."
And here I’d been expecting pumpkin pie.
Jacob went downstairs first, promising to tell his family that I reacted to my medications sometimes. Which was technically true. He wasn’t saying that I’d had such a reaction at the table, after all. Jacob knows all about being technically truthful. His partner, Carolyn, is a telepathic lie detector.
All eyes landed on me as I tried to low-key it back to the table. Jacob refilled my glass with orange soda and his mother pulled my plate out of the microwave and set it back down in front of me. "Everything all right?" asked Jerry.
"It’s fine," I said. "I’m good."
"Nothing wrong with taking a pill when you need one. Y’know, I need to take pain pills for this arm," said Leon. "Crazy, isn’t it? Arm’s not even there, and it hurts."
"You never told me that," said Shirley.
"It’s true." Leon dug a capsule out of his pocket with his corporeal hand, while his ghostly hand twitched on the tablecloth. "Arm’s acting up today," he said. "I think I’ll take one right now."
"You don’t need to do that to make me feel better," I said.
The ghost arm waved a "pshaw" at me.
"Bob down the street lost a foot in Korea," said Jerry. "He still feels it, too."
"What about skeletons?" Clayton asked me. Do you see skeletons?"
"Skeletons are nothing supernatural," Barbara told him. "They’re inside everyone’s body. Everybody has one."
"But I seen this movie."
"Saw," Barbara corrected him.
"Or zombies," said Clayton, ignoring her. "Are zombies real?"
"No," I said. "When bodies die, they’re dead."
"But what about in the hospital, when they take that electrical shock thing with the paddles, and they yell, ‘Clear!’ and they shock you...." he jumped in his seat as if he’d been hit with a thousand volts. "And you were a flatline, and then your heart starts beating again?"
I thought about it. Not that I was worried about giving a fifth-grader a scientifically accurate answer; I was thinking about electricity, and how the most knowledgeable paranormal expert I knew said that ghosts were made of electrons. "I don’t know," I said. "Maybe those people aren’t all the way dead, and the machines aren’t accurate enough to tell."
"You should see how it works the next time you’re at a hospital," said Clayton. "Then you’d know."
"I don’t go to hospitals," I said.
"Never? What if someone shot you while you were being a cop? Then where would you go?"
"I have a special...um, doctor."
Everyone had craned to the edges of their seats again. You could hear a pin drop.
I sighed to myself and decided I might as well talk about it, since everyone seemed so eager to know. Even Grandma. "Actually, now I see this panel of two doctors and a psychiatrist, and they all have to be in the room at the same time to make sure that nobody’s doing anything they shouldn’t be doing...."
Once upon a time if you told doctors you heard voices, they’d diagnose you as schizophrenic, put you on heavy drugs, and lock you away in a cozy state institution to keep you from hurting yourself or others.
Nowadays they test you first to see if you’re psychic.
_____
Maurice was a sixty-two year old black man who had a lot more gray in his hair at his retirement party than he’d had when I first met him. We’d never been close in a way that some partners at the Fifth Precinct are. We didn’t hit sports bars after our shift for a shot and a beer. We didn’t watch the game at each others’ houses. We didn’t invite each other to family functions—not that I have any family to speak of.
Maybe it was the race difference. Or the age difference. But despite the fact that we didn’t connect on any sort of deep, soul-searching level, I was gonna miss working with the guy.
I stood behind the kitchen island and watched through the glass doors that led to the deck as Maurice ambled by. He laughed as he tried to balance a Coors Light, a styrofoam tray of bratwurst and a small stack of CDs. He looked genuinely happy. I supposed he was ready to retire—not like those guys you hear about that are forced out, along with all of their years of honed experience, in favor of some young buck who’ll work for half the salary.
Maurice set the CDs in a sloppy, listing pile next to a tinny boom box and drained his beer in one pull. I wondered if being retired would entice him into a long slide down the neck of a bottle, but then I felt a little guilty for even thinking it. Because Maurice never, ever made comments about my Auracel—whether I had taken any, or was out, or was rebounding after a weekend of “accidentally” doubling or tripling my dosage. Nothing.
Maybe that was the actual reason I was gonna miss him so much.
I turned away from the deck and made my way back down the hall, and tried to remember where the bathroom was. I veered accidentally into the rec room and a bunch of black kids, mostly teenagers, all fell silent. I nodded at them and wondered if I’d managed to look friendly or if I just came off as some creepy, white asshole, then headed toward the basement where I remembered there was a half bath off Maurice’s seldom-used woodshop.
“That’s him, Victor Bayne,” one of the kids whispered, so loud that it was audible to my physical ears. Not that my sixth sense would’ve picked it up, given that I was pretty far into a nice Auracel haze, and besides, I wasn’t particularly clairaudient. “He was my dad’s partner on the Spook Squad.”
I quelled the urge to go back into the rec room and tell Maurice’s kid that his dad would probably shit a brick if he heard that expression in his home. But that’d lead to a long-winded discussion of civil rights, yadda yadda yadda. Plus I’d be absolutely certain to come off as a creepy, white asshole then, in case there was any doubt at all.
I groped around the cellar wall at the top of the stairs for several long moments for a light until I realized the lights downstairs were already on. I made a mental note to rib Maurice about the availability of light bulbs greater than 40 watts come Monday. Except Maurice wasn’t gonna be there on Monday. Damn.
My eyes adjusted and I took the cellar steps two by two. I imagined what Maurice’s kid was probably saying about me to his cousins and friends. It was pretty plain that I was the psychic half of the Maurice/Victor team, since Maurice was about as psychic as a brick wall, and damn proud of it.
A pair of opposites forms a Paranormal Investigation Unit. The Psychs—psychic cops—do the psychic stuff, just like you’d expect. And the Stiffs—look, I didn’t name ’em—are oblivious to any psychic interference a sixth-sensory gifted criminal might throw out there. It was rough at first getting used to riding around with a guy who put out about as many vibes as a day-old ham sandwich. But I got used to it, and eventually I grew to see the practicality of pairing us with each other.
Halfway down the steps I reached into my jeans pocket and found a tab of Auracel among the old gum wrappers and lint. I felt around some more, but only managed to locate the one. I’d brought three with me. Had I taken two earlier? I only remembered taking one in the car. Oh, and there was the one I took when Sergeant Warwick came in. The irony. Popping pills within spitting distance of someone capable of cutting off my precious supply.
I swallowed the Auracel, grabbed hold of the bathroom door and barely caught myself from slamming face first into Detective Jacob Marks, the golden child of the Twelfth Precinct Sex Crimes Unit.
He was a big, dark-eyed, dark-haired hunk of a guy with a neatly clipped goatee and short hair that looked like he had it trimmed every single week. He’d always looked beefy to me from afar, standing in the background, tall and proud, as his sergeant praised his work on high profile cases during press releases while the cameras flashed and the video rolled. But up close it was obvious that he was as wide as two of me put together, and it was all solid muscle.
I think I excused myself and staggered back a step or two. The Auracel I’d taken on the stairs was stuck to the roof of my mouth and I swallowed hard, worried that its innocuous gelatin coating would dissolve and give me a big jolt of something bitter and nasty. The Auracel didn’t budge.
“So,” Marks said, deftly swerving his bulging pecs around my shoulder as he maneuvered past me. I stood there gaping and trying not to choke. “Lost your Stiff.”
A comment about the crassness of calling Maurice a Stiff stuck somewhere around the last Auracel, as I realized that Marks not only knew who I was and what I did, but that he seemed to be flirting with me. Detective Marks—queer? Who knew? And besides, he was a Stiff, too.
Or maybe he was just a jerk and the flirting notion was merely something that my mind constructed from the high it’d gleaned from two Auracels and a few fumes.
I shrugged and raised my eyebrow. Nothing like being noncommittal. Especially when I only had access to five senses, and even those were pretty fuzzy around the edges.
Marks leaned back against Maurice’s workbench and crossed his arms over his chest. That pose made him triple my diameter, and his tight black T-shirt was stretched so taut over his biceps that it probably wanted to surrender. “New partner lined up yet?”
I wondered if “partner” was also supposed to be flirtatious, as in “sexual partner.” But even my Auracel-addled mind figured that’d be a pretty far stretch. I had nowhere to lean, so I stuffed my hands in my jeans pockets and hunched a little, as kids who are taller than their classmates tend to do. Marks was as tall as I was. I like that in a man. “It’s all hush-hush,” I said, belatedly thankful that I didn’t make a tongue twister out of those last couple of words. “I think they had like a hundred applicants.”
Marks cocked his head to one side, considering me. The bitterness of Auracel spread over the back of my tongue and I swallowed convulsively—smooth move. “Probably more like a thousand,” Marks said, “but they screen ninety percent of them out before the interviews start.”
A thousand people wanted to be the Stiff half of a Paranormal Investigation Unit—homicide, no less? I imagined I’d be flattered, if I weren’t choking.
I stifled a cough and dry-swallowed three, four more times. My eyelashes felt damp.
And Jacob Marks had pushed off from the workbench and pressed right up against me. “What’s in your mouth?” he said, and his voice was a sexy, low purr. He pulled my face up against his, pried my mouth open with his and skimmed his tongue across the inside of my upper lip. “Auracel? Isn’t that the strongest anti-psyactive they make?”
How would he know what Auracel tastes like? I probably would’ve asked him myself, except I wasn’t quite fit for speaking. Or even breathing, for that matter. I squeezed my hand up between us and managed to push back from Marks before I hurled all over him. The bathroom sink was only a yard away, and I turned both taps on, scooped up tepid water with both hands, and struggled to dislodge the pill from my soft palate.
Finally, the foul thing tore free and made its way down my throat. It felt like it’d left behind a chemical burn on the roof of my mouth and the back of my tongue. I cupped a few more handfuls of water from the tap, drank them, and then splashed one on my face for good measure.
I stared down at the sink as the water dripped from my hairline. Cripes. Jacob Marks kissed me, sorta, and I was too busy choking on a pill to get into it. I assumed I’d just blown a perfectly good shot at some hot, nearly-anonymous sex when I heard Marks’ voice again coming from the doorway. Apparently I hadn’t succeeded in scaring him off. His reflection met my eye in the medicine cabinet mirror.
“One in every five hundred people is certifiably psychic, and they’re all clamoring for something to shut their talent off. What kind of sense does that make?” he asked. There was a friendly lilt to his tone of voice, but the look in his eye made his words feel like more of a challenge.
Well, didn’t he know his facts and figures? I ran my hand up through my half-wet hair. The mirror reflected it back at me. It stood up in a crazy, black thatch. I needed a haircut.
I flipped open the door to see if maybe there was some Listerine in there to wash away the taste of the Auracel, but found nothing but a bottle of Jergen’s lotion and a few yellowed aspirin left over from the Reagan Era.
“You’re a PsyCop.” I turned to face Marks. “Why don’t you ask your partner?”
“Carolyn’s all natural,” he said. And I wondered if they were fucking each other, though I guessed it was really none of my business.
I think his prying would normally have pissed me off. But I’m not normally three Auracel to the wind, so I played along. “Good for Carolyn,” I said. “Do dead people like to talk with Carolyn? All day, all night? Describe how they died? In excruciating detail?”
“Carolyn can tell if people are lying.”
“A human polygraph,” I said, and I supposed it was clever. You didn’t need someone’s consent to use your psychic ability, not if you had a federal license. But you did need a court order to hook someone up to a lie detector. “No wonder you collar so many perverts.”
Marks broke into a smile that was almost more of a leer, and I realized he was probably a lot more fun than I’d ever imagined he’d be. “It helps,” he said. “But Carolyn’s only a level two, and criminals can be incredibly evasive.” He pushed the bathroom door shut with his foot and locked it behind us. The tiny doorknob twist lock seemed pathetically inadequate, considering that any cop upstairs could kick the door in without even breaking a sweat, but maybe the sanctity of the bathroom would protect us from discovery.
Marks eased up to me and then stopped, that infuriating—yet sexy—grin plastered on his face, framed by his impossibly neat goatee. I wondered what he wanted. More witty repartee? The third Auracel was kicking in and I hardly had two brain cells to rub together, so I closed the distance between us, slipped my arms around his neck and initiated a kiss of my own.
His tongue tasted beery, but pleasantly so, like he’d just had a drink or two at the party. I wished I could drink, but while alcohol loosens me up just like anyone else, it also amps up the voices. I don’t drink.
He got a hand around my waist and slipped the other around the back of my jeans, kneading my ass hard, showing me his strength. I grazed his lower lip with my teeth and he grunted a little into my mouth, ground his fly against mine.
Marks backed me into the towel rack, which settled right beneath my shoulder blades, and started kissing me hard, rubbing up against me while his sweet tongue swept over my bitter one.
I was the one to fumble with buttons and zippers, to expose our stiff cocks to the ambient light of my ex-partner’s bathroom. Marks seemed pleased enough to let our experience take him where it would and to have me call the shots. But then again, Marks could probably pick people up whenever he was horny. I had to jump on any chance that presented itself to me and hope I was on Auracel—or at least able to get my hands on some. I really hate threesomes when one of the participants is dead.
Marks had a thick, fat cock, rock hard and ruddy. Mine had a certain delicacy and grace beside his as he took them both in his hands and pumped them, hard, even strokes, while I cupped his jaw between my palms and languidly tongued his mouth.
He knows, I thought, and though his grip was harder than I might have liked, my body still responded to it, thighs clenching and warmth building at the base of my spine. He knows who I am. And he knows what I do. And he’s willing to jack me off anyway.
I trailed my fingertips over his scalp, through his closely-shorn hair, and he groaned into my mouth, his hands moving faster on us. My breath hissed in and I caressed the tips of his ears and the curve of his jaw with a feathery touch. I sucked on his tongue.
He pulled back to watch himself as he came, his jiz rolling down over his knuckles as he clenched his cock hard, and I suddenly liked his face a whole lot better. Open like that, and vulnerable. Not the handsome, self-assured detective who always got his man, but just a guy jacking off with me. His mouth was so pretty—a little swollen now, from kissing me. I imagined it closing around the head of my cock, taking me into its soft, wet warmth, and then my hips gave a twitch and I was coming. It was a pretty energetic spurt, given the amount of drugs in my system, and the first rope of come managed to paint itself down the front of Marks’ T-shirt and across the leg of his black jeans.
I sniggered a little as I shot again, more weakly though, just over his bare forearm, and again. Marks stared at me, our sticky cocks loose in his grip, and then he broke into a big grin, too. My vision was going all starry around the edges and I was glad of the towel rack behind me, and the big cop in front of me. I still had my arms draped over his shoulders, and couldn’t think of any good reason to let go.
Someone banged on the door. “Bayne? You in there?”
I pressed my forehead into Marks’ shoulder and exhaled carefully. I could’ve ignored it, if it was anyone else but Sergeant Warwick. But that voice, in that tone, would need to be answered. “Yeah, Sarge.”
Marks gave my cock a slow, teasing stroke. It gave up a final bead of semen.
“I need you at the station. Now.”
On a Sunday? When we were all at a party, some of us drunk, some of us pill-buffered, and some of us getting lucky? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pretty. “Okay,” I said. I considered dropping something into the toilet to make it sound like I was taking a big dump, but then I’d either have to fish the object back out or leave it in there to screw up Maurice’s plumbing. Instead, I tugged at the toilet paper roll and tried to make it rattle. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
We both listened to Warwick’s footsteps as he headed back upstairs. Marks’ face had shifted back into cop-mode, his shrewd, dark eyes scanning the empty air in front of him as he analyzed whatever theories he was assembling inside his head. “Something big just went down.” He pulled a yard of toilet paper from the roll and wiped my jiz off his leg.
Criss Cross #2
It was a pretty good day, for October in Chicago. The weather was warm enough that I could get away with wearing just jeans, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt, and my threadbare jean jacket. I could see my breath as we set the rowboat in the water, Maurice in his knee-high rubber boots, steadying the small aluminum boat so I could climb in. Water squished through my black Converse. Not the best shoes to wear fishing, I gathered.
But I’d never been fishing before, so how the hell would I know?
Maurice heaved himself over the side, thrust an oar into the slimy green water on the bank of the Calumet, and shoved off. And he did it with an ease that reminded me that even though he was graying, he was still in reasonably good shape.
Maurice Taylor had been my partner in the PsyCop Unit for a dozen years, and now he was retired. We’d been quintessential opposites when the force had matched us up: him, a mature black man without a lick of psychic ability, who’d inched his way up to detective with years of hard, honest police work. And me, an impulsive white kid with no friends, whose sixth sense was always tuned to eleven unless I was on an anti-psyactive drug cocktail.
Maurice was still old. And he still had his common sense, far as I could tell. Me? I wasn’t a kid anymore, but at least I’d managed to make a few friends. Other than that, I couldn’t really vouch for myself.
“Give that oar over here,” Maurice said, stretching his hand out to me. “We be goin’ in circles all day, if I let you just splash it all over the place like that.”
I didn’t argue. Maurice is more stubborn than I am. I know this.
Maurice took several deep breaths as he rowed us farther from shore. The Calumet’s current wasn’t particularly fast in the fall. It had pockets of reedy marsh along the banks that seemed like ideal places to just sit in your boat and while away the day. A train clanged by to the north of us and the scream of a siren drifted by from a stretch of elevated highway. Nature.
“Smell that fine air,” Maurice said.
I grunted. It smelled like algae and exhaust fumes to me.
Maurice pulled a few more strokes with the oars and then eased our anchor—a hunk of metal that’d been part of a barbell in another existence—over the side.
“Shouldn’t I have, uh...a lifejacket on?”
Maurice smiled and started fiddling with his rod. Or reel. Or whatever the fishing pole thing is called. “S’okay, Victor. Water ain’t but waist high.”
I glanced over the side of the boat. The water was opaque green. Hard to tell if Maurice was exaggerating.
He put the fishing pole in my hand and pulled out another. “Just set there and wait until I show you how to cast. Else you’ll tear your eye out with the hook.”
I looked down at the hook. Maurice had squished a worm onto it. A worm spirit didn’t appear and immediately start telling me about the moment of its death, so I presumed I was safe from the spirits of bugs. But then it moved and I realized it was still alive. Gross.
Maurice cast his own line with a fairly straightforward explanation of what he was doing, then exchanged it with me for the first fishing pole, which he also cast.
I stared out at the little red floaty things that marked where our hooks had sunk and waited for more instructions.
Maurice wedged his fishing pole into a groove on the floor of the boat and unzipped his duffel bag. He pulled out a thermos and a battered plastic travel mug.
“What next?” I asked him.
Maurice poured some coffee into the mug and handed it to me. The early morning sunlight filtered through the steam that curled up from the surface of the coffee, and I felt like the two of us were in a Folgers commercial. Maurice poured another cup for himself, screwed the stopper back onto the thermos, and sighed. “We wait,” he said.
I noticed he was smiling, a soft, kind of distant smile as he gazed out over the water, conveniently ignoring the beer cans and plastic shopping bags that floated around us. Retirement suited him.
We drank our coffees together in silence, and we stared at the water while I tried to control the shivering, me sitting there in wet canvas sneakers in October. It was warm for October, but not that warm. I wedged my fishing pole into the groove in the floor as I’d seen Maurice do and poured myself another coffee. I contemplated pouring out the rest of the contents of the thermos onto my freezing cold feet, but I figured it would only feel good for about a minute, and then the coffee would cool and pretty soon my feet would just be wet again. I saved the coffee for drinking, instead.
“So,” Maurice said, after he finished his coffee. “Warwick find you a new partner yet?
“Yeah, a couple days ago. Some guy. His name’s Roger Burke.”
I really couldn’t think of much to say about Detective “please, call me Roger,” Burke. He was kinda like white bread. When I was a teenager, I would have been pretty eager to get him down my throat. But now that I was looking at forty, I found him a little bland.
Don’t get me wrong, Roger was cute. He had a ready smile that he lavished on me at the drop of a hat. His thick hair was naturally blond, cut short and smart. His eyebrows and eyelashes were a darker blond, framing greenish hazel eyes.
I’d never seen him in anything less than a sport coat, but judging by the way it sat on his shoulders and buttoned smoothly over his nipped waist, I was guessing he probably exercised regularly, and was hiding a set of washboard abs under his perfectly pressed dress shirt.
It was difficult to say if he’d pitch for my team or not. Once upon a time I assumed that all the other cops except for me were straight. That was before Detective Jacob Marks cornered me in the bathroom at Maurice’s retirement party.
I was still too fixated on Jacob to really give a damn if Roger Burke slept with men, women, or inflatable farm animals, for that matter.
“What’s this Burke guy like?” Maurice asked.
I decided it would be far too gay to tell Maurice what color Roger Burke’s eyes were. And besides, Maurice wouldn’t give a shit. “He always buys the coffee. Seems decent enough. He was a detective for five years in Buffalo.”
“New York?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” The plastic floaty on Maurice’s line dipped beneath the water. He reeled the line in carefully but all that was on the hook was a drowned worm. He cast it back out. “What about that Mexican girl?”
“That Mexican girl” was Lisa Gutierrez. She’d been selected to be my non-psychic partner, or Stiff, after Maurice retired. Things had worked well between us, until our sergeant figured out that she was a psychic herself. She’d rigged her test scores to get the job.
“She’s in California at some place called PsyTrain. Even if she decides to come back here once she’s done, they’d never pair us up. They’d have to put her with a Stiff.”
“Too bad. Heard the two of you hit it off.”
I froze, and not just because ice crystals were forming on my sneakers. I’d been wondering if we’d have this conversation, just me, Maurice and a bunch of garbage floating around in the Calumet River. The little talk where I told him I liked men.
“We, uh.... She’s nice.”
Maurice reeled his line in a couple of turns and gazed out over the river. He didn’t say anything more. I let my breath out slowly, relieved that I’d dodged the bullet, but maybe a little disappointed, too. A few moments of really, really awkward conversation, and then he’d probably never mention it again.
Heck, according to Jacob, Maurice probably already knew. Or at least suspected. Twelve years and no girlfriend? That might be significant if we were talking about an average guy—but it was me under the microscope. For all Maurice knew, I was just too messed up to have a woman in my life. I was probably too messed up to have a man in my life too, come to think of it. But since Jacob was a big, strong man with a gun, a cop who knew how to kick ass and take names, I figured he could hold his own.
The two cups of coffee I’d just sucked down roiled around in my stomach, and I hung my head over the side of the boat and tried to talk myself out of being sick. I’d swallowed a donut in three bites on my way out the door, but it wasn’t doing a very good job of soaking anything up. Acid licked at the back of my throat and I swallowed hard.
“Don’t tell me you’re seasick,” Maurice said, his eyes still focused on the floaties a few dozen yards away as if I wasn’t turning green and gulping air.
I seized on the chance to blame my nausea on anything other than my own internal freak-out. “Maybe,” I said. “Haven’t been on a boat since I went on that horrible cruise when I turned thirty.”
I stared down at the soupy green water sloshing against the side of the rowboat, and picked out tiny round shapes that were plants, or snails, or some other mysterious bits of life in the murk.
“Just set there,” Maurice said. “It’ll pass.”
A larger pale, round shape floated beneath the murky water, probably a shopping bag, or maybe a milk jug. I tried to distract myself by imagining a homie out drinking milk with his posse and chucking the plastic bottle into the river, but I didn’t find my own humor particularly entertaining.
It bothered me, not being able to tell what the thing was, and I leaned my face closer to the water and squinted at it. I noticed there was another one, about the same size and shape but maybe a little farther down, to my right. And another to my left. My vision seemed to open up and I realized these pale shapes were all around us, like cloud formations beneath the river’s surface.
Some kind of algae, then. Or maybe even pale, sandy mounds, with the Calumet’s bottom as close as Maurice had said it was, even closer, us bobbing in a couple of feet of water where we just could have waded instead, if I were dressed appropriately.
I pushed myself up on the side of the boat as my nausea receded. I was just about to ask Maurice about his trip to Fort Lauderdale when the underwater shape surged up toward me and coalesced into a pale, dead face.
I snapped up tall and the fishing pole leapt out of my grip. I managed to grab it before it fell into the water, but maybe I should’ve just let it drop. Maybe I wouldn’t have looked like I was shaking so hard if I didn’t have a big, telltale fishing line visibly quivering between me and the water.
The water that was full of dead people.
Maurice stared at me for a beat, glanced over the side, then took the fishing pole from my hands and wedged it into the bottom of the boat. “What you see?” he said calmly.
I knew what I must look like, whites of my eyes showing all around, face paler than usual. The Look. The one that said I’d just seen something. Maurice knew The Look.
I closed my eyes and images of pallid, distended faces bobbing to the surface filled my memory. Hundreds of them, eyes open and unseeing, a landscape of them stretching to the horizon—or at least the highway.
There wouldn’t be that many there. Not in real life. It was just my own mind fucking with me.
“It bad?” Maurice said gently.
I opened my eyes and stared hard at his brown, gray-whiskered face. I took another breath. It wasn’t that bad, I told myself. I’d just seen a handful of revenants and let my imagination run wild. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen dead people before, I told myself. It wasn’t like I’d never seen a ghost.
I peeked over the side.
A face peered back at me, rubbery mouth opening and closing like it was trying to talk—but the water didn’t move and no bubbles came out. The face next to it blinked. A hand moved toward the surface of the water like a pale, bloated spider, reaching for me. And beyond it, another hand. And another beyond that.
“Jesus,” I said. I jerked myself upright and started chafing my arms. “The water’s full of them.”
Maurice reeled in his drowned worm, and my empty hook, and then the anchor. I felt him shove the oar into the riverbed and give us a push toward shore.
“Should I make some phone calls, have ‘em drag it?” Maurice asked.
“I don’t know.” Was anybody missing? Yeah, probably. But dozens of somebodies? Maybe hundreds? “I just....” I sighed and made a “whatever” gesture. “I don’t know.”
Body and Soul #3
"Uncle Jacob? Did you get to shoot anybody since last summer?"
Jacob’s nephew, Clayton, asked this with the eagerness and joy of a kid who’d just learned that school was cancelled. Clayton was in fifth grade. I have no idea how old that would make him.
"You shot someone last summer?" I muttered, smoothing my napkin on my lap to the point where I probably looked like I was playing with myself. Not exactly the impression I’d wanted to make on Jacob’s family on our first Thanksgiving together.
The muttering? Not usually my style, but I was feeling uncharacteristically mouthy. It seemed like the moment I had a thought, it made its way through my vocal cords and out my mouth before I had a chance to pat it down and make sure it wasn’t going to jab anyone. I’d been this way since I’d stopped taking Auracel and Seconal over a month ago. Here I thought I’d been mellowing all these years, when really, it had just been the drugs.
"No," Jacob answered patiently. "I try to avoid shooting people." And then he looked at me. "Carolyn and I walked in on an armed robbery in progress at the convenience store on California and Irving. It was a clean shot to the leg."
Departmental policy allows us cops to decide whether to go for a lethal or a non-lethal shot when a criminal’s got an unarmed civilian at gunpoint. If Jacob had shot someone’s leg, I had no doubt it was exactly where he’d been aiming. Jacob is a Stiff, the non-psychic half of a PsyCop team, and not only are Stiffs impossible to influence by sixth-sensory means and impervious to possession, but they’re usually crack shots. The Stiffs who I know, anyway.
I’m the other half of a PsyCop team, the Psych half. Not Jacob’s team; Carolyn Brinkman was Jacob’s better half, on the job at least. I didn’t currently have a Stiff of my very own. Maurice, my first partner, retired, although I still lean on him way too much. Lisa, my second partner, was kicked off the force when they discovered that she was as psychic as Jean Dixon. She’s off being trained for the psy end of the whole PsyCop business now, out in California. Technically she's just a phone call away, and yet sometimes it feels like she’s on an entirely different planet. Even when she gets back, I won’t get to partner with her, since they only pair up Psychs with Stiffs.
And then there was my third partner, Roger. The bastard kidnapped me for some under-the-table drug testing, and I’d been so gullible I’d practically given him a key to my apartment. Roger was rotting in a jail cell, last I’d heard. The whole affair was pretty hush-hush. Maybe I could’ve gleaned a few more details, if I was the type to obsess about the little things, like where one’s arch-enemy is incarcerated, and whether or not he’s shown up for roll call recently. But, frankly, I’ve never found details very comforting. I think about them, and I just get overwhelmed. Roger went bye-bye, and I came out of our encounter intact. That’s all I really need to know.
Six weeks later and I was still on medical leave. I felt fine, probably due to the amount of actual blood cells coursing through my system in lieu of the drug cocktail I was accustomed to.
"Did you ever shoot anyone?" Clayton asked me, eyes sparkling.
"Sure."
"Wow. Did you kill ‘em?"
Clayton had Jacob’s phenomenal dark eyes. Or Jacob’s younger sister Barbara’s eyes. Which were Jacob’s father’s eyes, as well as the eyes of the wizened old lady at the head of the table who was about a hundred and five. She’d been giving me a look that could probably kill an elephant ever since we’d gotten there and Jacob had introduced me as his boyfriend.
I think he’d primed his family over the phone. But still. He had to go and say it out loud and rub it in. Because that’s the way Jacob is. Not that he’d be bringing a man home for Thanksgiving for any other reason. But that’s beside the point.
"Clayton Joseph," snapped Barbara. She might have had Jacob’s eyes, but she certainly couldn’t hold a candle to his cool composure. "That is not an appropriate question for the dinner table."
Grandma Marks glowered at me from the head of the table, her dark eyes, half-hidden in folds of wrinkled skin, threatening to pierce me right through. I’d figured she hated me because I was doing the nasty with her grandson. Maybe she had a thing against psychics. Hell, maybe both. I’m usually just lucky that way.
"Bob Martinez retired down at the mill," Jacob’s father, Jerry, announced in a blatant attempt to change the subject. If we’d been in Chicago, where I grew up, Jerry would have been talking about a steel mill. But we were in Wisconsin, an alien land of rolling hills and cows with signs advertising something called "fresh cheese curds" every few miles. I gathered that the mills made paper in this alien, wholesome land where Jacob had been born and bred.
"And when are you going to think about retiring, dad?" Barbara asked. She had a trace of an accent that sounded Minnesotan to my untrained ear. I wondered if Jacob had ever had that same funny lilt. Probably once, but it’d been erased by him living over half his life in Chicago.
"Your father’s got another ten years in him, at least," said Jacob’s mom, Shirley. Shirley wore her hair in a white, poofy halo. I suspected she’d been a blonde in her younger days. "What’s he going to do around here but get in my way?"
"Your mother plays Euchre on Tuesdays and Thursdays," said Jerry, as if his retirement hinged around a card game.
"You have hobbies," said Barbara. "You could fix up your woodshop and actually finish a few things."
"Ah, I’d rather earn an honest wage than stay home and make birdhouses."
"And you could teach Clayton all about woodworking."
"He’s too young," said Jerry. "He’d cut his finger off."
"Wood is stupid," Clayton added.
I wondered if calling wood stupid was heresy in this land of trees and paper. But Grandma didn’t fall out of her chair clutching her heart, so I figured that kids were allowed to say the first thing that popped into their minds these days. Or maybe they always had been. I must have been on my third foster home by the time I was Clayton’s age. I was probably in fourth grade, held back for being thick, stubborn, and socially retarded. But that would’ve put me at just about the age where I’d learned that my opinion was neither desired nor appreciated.
Jingle bells announced the opening of the front door -- that and a massive blast of arctic air, complete with a whorl of snowflakes.
"Uncle Leon!" Clayton leapt up from the table and thundered toward the door.
I looked at the empty place setting across from me and heaved an inward sigh of relief. I’d been hoping that an actual person would fill it, that it wasn’t left open as a tribute to Grandpa Marks, or some other long lost family member.
Leon rounded the corner of the dining room and Shirley stood up to greet him. I glanced around at the rest of the table to see if I was supposed to stand up, too. But Jacob and Jerry were still sitting. Jerry was even packing away mashed potatoes like he was trying to beat everyone else to the punch.
Uncle Leon was in his mid to late sixties and had the same white hair and rounded snub nose as Jacob’s mom. Shirley kissed him on the cheek and unbuttoned his thick corduroy jacket. "Jacob brought his friend with him," she said, gesturing toward me. "This is Victor."
She peeled Leon’s coat off him and whisked away with it just as Leon turned to shake my hand. He led with his left hand, which confused me. His bare right arm flapped at his side, with his right sleeve rolled up to his shoulder.
I shook his left hand in a daze.
Leon nodded his head toward his right shoulder. "Lost it at the mill in seventy-eight. Damn thing still hurts."
I blinked. Leon’s right sleeve wasn’t rolled up. It was pinned to the shoulder of his shirt. He didn’t have a right arm -- not one made out of real flesh and blood, anyway. And I could still see his missing arm. The party’d finally gotten started. Hooray.
"Oh," I said. "That sucks."
"Shirley tells me you’re a PsyCop."
I nodded. "Yeah."
"That’s some kind of program they got going on down there," he said. His ghost arm joined his corporeal arm in pulling out the chair across from mine. "What kind of talent you got?"
I sank back into my seat and swallowed a mouthful of dryish turkey meat I’d been talking around for the last several minutes. "Medium."
"No shit?"
Grandma frowned harder, but Leon didn’t seem to notice. "Can I get you anything to drink?" Shirley asked me, but I mumbled that I was okay.
"That girl Jacob works with, she’s a telepath, isn’t she? Wow, a medium. How ‘bout that?" Leon’s ghost hand caressed the silverware as he spoke. I wondered if I looked like a freak for staring at his salad fork while he talked to me. "So how strong are they, your impressions?"
I drained my glass of soda to wash down the turkey and wished I’d taken Shirley up on her offer of a refill. "Pretty strong."
"What, do you hear ‘em talking to you? In their own words?"
"Uh huh."
"Holy cow, now that’s what you call a psychic. We got ourselves a Marie Saint Savon right here at the table."
Good old Marie had died right around the time I’d been shoehorned into the police academy. She’d been the world’s most powerful medium, and no one could touch her talent. Not that I could figure why anyone would want to. I was surprised that Leon actually knew her name. Maybe it was a generational thing. She’d been big news maybe fifteen years ago, and then was quickly forgotten by almost everyone but the psychic community.
"That’s got to make your police work a little easier," said Leon. "Huh?"
I nodded and swallowed some mashed potatoes. They were salty enough to stimulate my flagging salivary glands. A little.
"Only if you work homicide," Jerry piped in. The whole family had been skirting around my psychic ability, but since Leon had started the ball rolling and I didn’t seem too tender about the topic, it’d become fair game.
"I do."
"Holy shit. I didn’t know they used mediums in homicide."
Grandma glared at Leon.
"You mean medium, like a psychic medium?" Clayton asked.
"Uh huh."
"Wow, you see dead people?"
"That’s just in the movies," Barbara said. "Like the telekinetics who can shoot bullets with their minds." Metal was incredibly resistant to telekinesis, but I’d trained with one guy who could fling a mean stone. He got these splitting headaches afterward, though, so he was never one to show off with party tricks.
"I can see them," I said.
The table went quiet. "Whoa," said Clayton. "Like, right now?"
I avoided looking at the spot where Leon’s arm was flopping around on the table. "There aren’t any spirits here for Victor to see," Jacob explained. We knew that to be the case because we’d called Lisa Gutierrez in Santa Barbara and asked her if there were any ghosts in Jerry and Shirley’s house, and she’d said no. Lisa’s precognitive, and if she says no, the answer is unequivocally no.
I guess she couldn’t have known about Leon’s arm. Not without us asking specifically.
"And when you see ‘em," Clayton went on, "are they all scary and gross?"
"Sometimes."
Everyone at the table seemed to lean forward just a little. Even Jacob.
"Can you see right through them?"
"Sometimes. Or sometimes they look like regular people."
Leon’s facial expression was open and eager, but his phantom limb was clenching and unclenching its fist, and bright red droplets had appeared all over it as if it was sweating blood. I buried my face in my glass, tilting a final droplet of soda onto my tongue.
"Can you touch ‘em?" Clayton asked, his voice dropping down into a reverential whisper.
I swallowed around a hunk of turkey that’d lodged in my esophagus. Jacob slid his glass over to me, and I took it and drank it down. He’d been drinking milk. I just barely kept myself from gagging.
"You don’t want to touch ghosts," I said.
The house around us, the very air, went quiet. Everyone strained forward to catch whatever crumbs of information I might care to scatter. Because we’re a nation that grew up on Lovecraft and Sleepy Hollow and Friday the Thirteenth, and people are dying to know if all that shit’s really real.
"They’re creepy," I added. And I swallowed some more milk.
"Why don’t you tell Uncle Jacob and Uncle Leon about the report you did on salamanders?" Barbara suggested to Clayton.
"Creepy how?" Clayton asked.
"Clayton got an A minus," said Barbara.
"Creepy how?"
"I don’t know," I said. I’d started spreading my food around my plate, mixing my corn and my potatoes, ruining both. "The way they look in scary movies? Pretty much like that."
"How can you say that?" Barbara demanded, suddenly so vehement that I wondered how I’d ever pegged her as a sheepish single mom in her pale yellow cardigan and perfectly creased khaki pants. "When people die, they go to heaven."
Oh. Christian. Or had Jacob said Catholic -- or was that the same difference? I didn’t remember, must not have been paying close enough attention when Jacob had tried to prepare me.
"Barbara," said Jerry. Her father didn’t have a follow up ready. Just her name, sounding like a warning.
"If he says he sees spirits, then he does," Leon said, hopping to my defense despite the fact that he made me squirm in my seat. Or, more accurately, his right arm did. "They have tests." He looked to me for affirmation. "Don’t they have tests?"
"All kinds of tests," I said, burying the last of my corn.
"And being able to see them, you’re what, a level three? Four?"
"Five," I said. Level five was a couple of steps down from good old Marie. But Marie was only a step lower than God. Or maybe Satan.
The table went quiet again.
"Are you a millionaire?" asked Clayton.
"It is not polite to ask people how much money they make," said Barbara. She was the same age as me, thirty-eight. She had Jacob’s flashing dark eyes and high cheekbones, but she looked just as worn out as I always felt. Even more so, now that we were attempting civil dinner conversation.
"It’s okay," I said. "No, I’m not a millionaire. I make more money than a regular detective, but not as much as my supervisor."
"And you spend as much money as someone who’s lived through the Great Depression," Jacob added, sotto voice.
Clayton scrunched his face up. I saw mashed potatoes lurking behind his teeth. "You should find Al Capone and make him tell you where his vault is."
Jerry and Leon laughed, but the way they kept their eyes trained on me, I could tell they were hoping that maybe I’d think that dredging up Al Capone was a grand idea. And I just so happened to need a couple of assistants over the age of sixty-five.
"He’s probably not around," I said. "He’d be a little old by now."
Everyone chuckled, except for Barbara, who evidently thought I was a devil-worshipper. And Grandma, who was possibly giving me the evil eye. And Clayton, who couldn’t make sense out of my lack of financial savvy.
Leon smacked the table with his left hand as he laughed. His spectral right hand followed suit, only it pummeled the table with much greater force than its counterpart. Spectral blood flew, spattering the white tablecloth covered in cross-stitched cornucopia, doe-eyed pilgrims, and smiling Indians.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a protective white bubble around Leon’s arm.
"Are you warm, honey?" asked Shirley. "You want me to open a window?"
I was about to tell her not to bother, when I realized that I felt the prickle of sweat along the back of my neck. "Yeah, okay," I said, as I shrugged out of my flannel shirt and let it bunch on the seat of my chair. I was glad I’d taken the time to find a T-shirt without any holes or stains on it.
I took a deep breath and looked at Leon’s ghost hand. It quivered like it was hooked up to an electrical wire. Like that frog in the biology class whose legs kick when you give it a shock. No, I hadn’t been absent that day. And yeah, I’d puked. Me and Janet Neiderman.
"I’ll be right back," I said, knocking my chair into Jacob’s as I scrambled to make my way toward the upstairs bathroom. There was a half-bath on the first floor, but I figured that everyone at the dinner table really didn’t need to hear me retching if I couldn’t bring my gag reflex under control.
Why did I have to go and think of that goddamn frog?
I dodged past Jacob’s old bedroom--now Shirley’s very own sewing room--and nearly skateboarded down the upstairs hallway on a pink and blue rag rug. Darting into the bathroom, I slammed the door shut behind me. It had a hook and eye lock on it, which might keep Grandma out, or maybe Clayton, if he didn’t lean on the door too hard.
I breathed, and I looked around. It was a normal enough bathroom, more colorful than mine, with blue and yellow sunflowers on the shower curtain that kind of matched a border going around the top of the painted walls, but not quite. I pulled open the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet in hopes of finding a nice bottle of cold medicine, or maybe some valium. Neither one would make Leon’s nasty ghost arm go away completely, but they’d sure make me care about it a whole lot less.
The right side of the cabinet was filled entirely with old lady perfume, facial cream, nail polish, and hair mousse. The left held cheap plastic razors like I use, aspirin, foot spray, a stick of green deodorant, cotton swabs, and antihistamines.
Of every drug that had ever been invented, Jacob’s parents owned the only two types that affected my talent less than antibiotics.
I pawed through their drawers in hopes of finding a stray muscle relaxant or even an expired tube of motion-sickness pills. I found a bunch of washcloths and some sunblock. Sunblock. In a small rural Wisconsin town on the border of Minnesota that saw the sun maybe two hours each winter if it peered closely enough between the snowflakes.
I looked underneath the sink and found a pair of rubber gloves and a bunch of cleaning supplies. Damn it.
I tore the medicine cabinet doors open again, hoping to find something that I’d missed before. And then my eyes fell on the nail polish remover.
I turned the bottle around and read the back. Acetone was the first ingredient. And the seminar I’d attended fourteen years ago called Inhalants, the Silent Killer was as fresh in my mind as if I’d just taken it yesterday.
And here I thought I hadn’t gotten much out of the Police Academy.
I wasn’t a habitual huffer, not like the anorexic girl at the Cook County Mental Health Center -- the institution that’d housed me from seventeen to twenty-three -- who’d shown me how to get the most bang for my buck with a can of cooking spray or a plastic baggie and a jar of rubber cement. No, I didn’t enjoy killing my brain cells randomly, but I was a pragmatist. The arm wasn’t going to go away all by itself. And I really needed it to stop waving at me if I wanted to make it through dinner.
I could saturate a wad of toilet paper and hold it over my mouth and nose, but acetone’s a stinky chemical, and I’d end up reeking of it. Instead, I set the bottle on the rim of the sink and plugged one of my nostrils, sniffing it carefully in hopes of zapping the specific neurons that enabled me to see Leon’s damn spastic missing arm without leaving me stinking like a Chinese nail salon.
I felt a little floaty and had developed a sharp headache over the top of my skull by the time anyone came to check on me.
Luckily, it was Jacob.
Since he didn’t need to know I was huffing his mother’s nail polish remover, I put it away and washed my face before I answered the door.
He leaned in the doorjamb, looking incredibly sexy in a long-sleeved, chocolate brown silk knit that clung to every muscle like it’d been painted on him. He crossed his arms and gave me his most earnest you-can-trust-me face, pouty and a little doe-eyed.
"Everything all right?"
"It’s...um. I dunno."
"You went a little pale at the table."
It wasn’t so surprising that Jacob noticed it when I saw something. Maurice Taylor, my first partner, used to tell me sometimes that I’d disappear if I got any whiter, and he hadn’t been joking about my ethnicity.
My eyes stung from the acetone I’d just sniffed, and I pressed my fingertips into my tear ducts to try to relieve the itch. If I knuckled my eyes like I really wanted to, they’d get all red and I’d look totally high. "Your uncle Leon seems like a cool guy."
"He is."
"But...I can see his arm."
Jacob stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He sat down on the rim of the tub and took one of my hands between both of his, and he waited.
I avoided his eyes and stared at a tile on the floor that was set a little crooked. "I’m trying really hard to be a decent boyfriend," I said. "But I think I might not be cut out for it."
"Stop it."
"No, it’s true. I don’t know how to have a family. And evidently, I can’t function without having a buzz on."
"What are we talking about?" Jacob asked. "Are you breaking up with me or telling me you want to start going to Narcotics Anonymous?"
My heartbeat, already racing a little from the acetone, did an unpleasant stutter when Jacob said the words "breaking up" aloud.
"I mean, you know. Come on."
"No, I don’t. What’s going on?"
God damn. I’d started hugging myself without realizing I was doing it. Ugly habit. Ugly, ugly habit. I forced myself to try to stand normally, but I felt like my arms and legs weren’t screwed on right. "I just wanted to...you know...be with you and your family for the holiday."
Jacob nodded slowly. "Okay. And that’s what we’re doing. If you need to leave, I’m trusting you to tell me so."
"I don’t want to leave in the middle of dinner." I stared up into a painted-on sunflower. "I thought the house was clean," I said.
"And I had no idea that Leon’s arm would qualify as a ghost. If you don’t want to go, we can move you, say that you need to sit by the window."
"I’d rather sit across from Leon than Barbara, arm or no arm."
Jacob smirked. "Can’t say I blame you."
I thought about that damn bloody limb performing acrobatics that were totally out of synch with what Leon’s face and body language were telling me. "This is gonna sound stupid," I said. Which I can pretty much use to preface anything that comes out of my mouth. "But I wonder if it knew I could see it and it was showing off."
Stupid or not, Jacob considered the idea. "Maybe it’s got a spiritual equivalent to a cellular intelligence. Who knows? But if amputated limbs can be present in the spirit world, it explains why they still cause pain for some people and not others just as much as the idea of a bunch of neurons misfiring."
Could people have their phantom limbs exorcised? It was possible -- or at least they could have them scrambled with electrical interference, once the technology of Psych science caught up with the psychology and biology of it.
"If I just had some Auracel, everything would be okay." I take prescription Auracel to block out the visions. Or I used to take it...until I stopped. Which was fine, inside my apartment. I guess I’d conveniently forgotten about the real world outside it. Only certain pharmacies in big metropolitan areas carried the drug, so even if I could call The Clinic and have them fax a prescription, chances were we’d have to go to Minneapolis to have it filled.
Jacob stood and pulled a little paper cup from a cutesy holder mounted on the wall beside the medicine cabinet, and filled it with tap water. "How many?"
"How many what?"
"How many Auracel?"
I realized he was digging in his pocket, and it was as if the clouds broke open and a beam of sunshine landed right on him.
"You have some?"
He smiled at me. He’s got a special grin that’s all mine. It somehow manages to be reassuring and to promise that he’ll fuck me halfway through the mattress later, all at once. "I’ve got to tell you: I’m relieved this is only about Auracel." He handed me the paper cup.
"How many do you have?"
"Ten."
"Wow. You’re prepared."
"I was a boy scout."
"That’s creepy. And hot. At the same time."
Jacob pressed a tablet of Auracel into my mouth, running his thumb back and forth over my lips after he did. I turned away to swallow some water. In fifteen minutes or so, the pill would start kicking in. My relief was greater than my disappointment, but just barely. "I really wanted to do this without the meds."
"Which was your idea, not mine."
That was so not fair. My life was perfectly fine until suddenly I had this live-in boyfriend who wanted to interact with me, and I realized that I was almost always high. Maybe it had been my idea to go cold turkey, but I’d done it because of Jacob.
"Talk to me," Jacob said.
"You’re gonna decide I’m too much trouble, someday."
"Uh huh," he said with absolutely zero conviction, flipping my hand over to press a kiss into my clammy palm. His goatee tickled at the base of my thumb.
I felt the first effects of the Auracel kicking in, a little dryness to my tongue, and a tingle in my fingertips that was only intensified by the feeling of Jacob’s hot mouth grazing my skin.
"Stop it," I said. "I’m not going back downstairs with a hard-on."
I felt Jacob grinning into my hand, and then his tongue traced my life line.
"I mean it."
"So you want me to suck you off in my parents’ bathroom?"
Dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Jacob talks dirty so well, and I always love it. My cock stirred a little. The promise of the Auracel high made me sluggish, though, and I had enough self-control, even with a sexy hunk of manmeat going down on my thumb, to save it for later. "After dinner."
Jacob let go of my hand and pulled my T-shirt up over my stomach. He pressed a kiss into my solar plexus. "Dessert," he said, breathing the word against my bare skin and pulling a long shiver up my spine. "I’m looking forward to it."
And here I’d been expecting pumpkin pie.
Jacob went downstairs first, promising to tell his family that I reacted to my medications sometimes. Which was technically true. He wasn’t saying that I’d had such a reaction at the table, after all. Jacob knows all about being technically truthful. His partner, Carolyn, is a telepathic lie detector.
All eyes landed on me as I tried to low-key it back to the table. Jacob refilled my glass with orange soda and his mother pulled my plate out of the microwave and set it back down in front of me. "Everything all right?" asked Jerry.
"It’s fine," I said. "I’m good."
"Nothing wrong with taking a pill when you need one. Y’know, I need to take pain pills for this arm," said Leon. "Crazy, isn’t it? Arm’s not even there, and it hurts."
"You never told me that," said Shirley.
"It’s true." Leon dug a capsule out of his pocket with his corporeal hand, while his ghostly hand twitched on the tablecloth. "Arm’s acting up today," he said. "I think I’ll take one right now."
"You don’t need to do that to make me feel better," I said.
The ghost arm waved a "pshaw" at me.
"Bob down the street lost a foot in Korea," said Jerry. "He still feels it, too."
"What about skeletons?" Clayton asked me. Do you see skeletons?"
"Skeletons are nothing supernatural," Barbara told him. "They’re inside everyone’s body. Everybody has one."
"But I seen this movie."
"Saw," Barbara corrected him.
"Or zombies," said Clayton, ignoring her. "Are zombies real?"
"No," I said. "When bodies die, they’re dead."
"But what about in the hospital, when they take that electrical shock thing with the paddles, and they yell, ‘Clear!’ and they shock you...." he jumped in his seat as if he’d been hit with a thousand volts. "And you were a flatline, and then your heart starts beating again?"
I thought about it. Not that I was worried about giving a fifth-grader a scientifically accurate answer; I was thinking about electricity, and how the most knowledgeable paranormal expert I knew said that ghosts were made of electrons. "I don’t know," I said. "Maybe those people aren’t all the way dead, and the machines aren’t accurate enough to tell."
"You should see how it works the next time you’re at a hospital," said Clayton. "Then you’d know."
"I don’t go to hospitals," I said.
"Never? What if someone shot you while you were being a cop? Then where would you go?"
"I have a special...um, doctor."
Everyone had craned to the edges of their seats again. You could hear a pin drop.
I sighed to myself and decided I might as well talk about it, since everyone seemed so eager to know. Even Grandma. "Actually, now I see this panel of two doctors and a psychiatrist, and they all have to be in the room at the same time to make sure that nobody’s doing anything they shouldn’t be doing...."
Author and artist Jordan Castillo Price is the owner of JCP Books LLC. Her paranormal thrillers are colored by her time in the midwest, from inner city Chicago, to small town Wisconsin, to liberal Madison.
Jordan is best known as the author of the PsyCop series, an unfolding tale of paranormal mystery and suspense starring Victor Bayne, a gay medium who's plagued by ghostly visitations. Also check out her new series, Mnevermind, where memories are made...one client at a time.
With her education in fine arts and practical experience as a graphic designer, Jordan set out to create high quality ebooks with lavish cover art, quality editing and gripping content. The result is JCP Books, offering stories you'll want to read again and again.
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Among the Living #1
Criss Cross #2
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