PsyCop 1: Among the Living (5 page)

I was parking-challenged yet again and found Carolyn and Marks already there, questioning a barista. The girl was college-aged and chunky, and intent on battering a piece of chewing gum into submission with her molars. Carolyn made little squiggles and ticks on Marks’ notepad while they talked.

“I’m sure you see hundreds of people every day,” Marks was saying, “but just think back to last night and see if this man is familiar.”

I flashed my badge and mumbled my name as I fell into place beside Carolyn. The employee gave me the briefest once-over and then focused on Marks’ photo of Ryan.

“Oh, I dunno. Working in Boystown, they all start looking the same. Especially these quiet, plain ones.”

I don’t know that I would have called Ryan plain. He’d had a nice build and a sincere, open look about him. But maybe she meant plain compared to the kids with pierced eyebrows, noses and lips talking computer games over their lattes.

“Three nights ago,” Carolyn prompted. “Maybe he lingered a while.”

The barista began to shake her head, but then went still. “Oh yeah. The chai. That’s right.” She pointed toward the window. “He was sitting up there with a Powerbook and he had a croissant special, no meat.”

“Them fucking fags. Maybe they’d get straightened out if they ate a little meat like regular people.”

I swung around but there was no one visible behind me. The gargly, decayed quality of the voice clicked in my head and I felt my mind shift to a different kind of listening. I recalled the idea I’d had earlier about interviewing a dead witness. Whatever I learned wouldn’t be admissible in court since technically it would be hearsay, but I was open to anything that’d help narrow down our search.
 

I reached over Marks’ shoulder for the photo of Ryan and tried to pretend that I didn’t notice the barista looking at me funny. “Could I, um…? Thanks.”

I turned away from Marks and held the photo in front of my chest. “Did you see this man Friday night?” I spoke so softly that your average NP would think I was talking to myself.

“That one? Yeah. He comes in here two, three times a week and has a
chai
.”

“Mmm hm. And was he with anybody?”

Gooseflesh rose on my arms as whomever I was speaking to grew excited. “How could I forget? Some faggot wearing a Halloween costume in June.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “Like a drag queen? A transvestite?”

“You know I had a clean bill of health not three months before I kicked the bucket? Then they cracked me open. Massive coronary, they said. Arteries seventy-eight percent blocked. It’s them HMOs that’s the problem, ya know. Turn people around like short order cooks.”

“What was she dressed as? The female impersonator.”

“Are you stupid? When’d I say there was a Cher with a pecker in here, huh? That’s nothing new. Them faggots do that all year ’round. I’m talking a real costume.”

I imagined a mascot gone astray—maybe someone dressed as a hot dog. “Describe it,” I said. I’d raised my voice a little, but Marks and Carolyn had shifted their bodies to block anyone from disturbing me. Their postures were casual, but their timing was fantastic.

“Scary,” said the disembodied voice. “I dunno. Lots of black, like a big cape with a hood.”

“What was he, a white guy? Hispanic? Young, old?”

“I…I dunno.” The voice wavered and grew softer. “I couldn’t see his face.”

“How to you know it was a man?”

“I dunno. I just do.”

A shiver coursed through me and my relative temperature returned to normal. I guess the dead blowhard couldn’t stand being asked a question that he couldn’t answer with obnoxious certainty.

I turned back to Marks and Carolyn, who were both staring at me, anticipation glittering in their eyes.

“The man who ordered the chai,” I asked quietly. “Was he with somebody in a cloak?”

The barista burst out laughing. “What, like Dracula?”

I felt my cheeks color. “Maybe something
like
a cloak. A rain poncho. A long duster.”

“I think I’d remember someone in a cloak,” she snickered, then turned her attention back to Jacob Marks.

Chapter 7

I made a mental note to reintroduce myself to the bar scene. Even if I’d had a drink or two in me, the music was so loud that I probably wouldn’t be bothered by disembodied sob stories. Unfortunately, no live person at the bar knew Anthony Blakewood well enough to have any idea who he’d gone home with. Any dead bar-hoppers were drowned out by the music, and no one even cruised me. So the trip to the GloryWhole was a total bust.

I split off from Carolyn and Marks around 11:30 and swung by a 7-11 for something to eat. I reached for an avocado wrap, but then I remembered what the dead creep at the coffee house had said about queers and vegetarians, and opted for a roast beef instead. Halfway back to the counter I turned around and exchanged the beef for the avocado again. And I did my best to ignore the mostly-transparent guy with the afro jacking off in the corner, and the voice coming from aisle three that kept repeating, “But he loves me. I can’t leave him.”

I ate as I drove home, wondering how it was that I was queer enough to pick out an avocado wrap, but not queer enough to get cruised at a gay bar. It could’ve been my badge that they were avoiding, sure. But I think the idea of laying a cop gets a lot of guys off. And besides, plenty of ’em were drooling over Marks, not that I blame them. I took a bite of the wrap and mayonnaise squirted out the end and dribbled down my lapel. I steered with my knee while I tried to wipe it off, but only succeeded in getting mayo all over my hand. Maybe it was my wardrobe that was the problem. Not that I had any intention of doing anything about it in the near future, since I think shopping’s about as much fun as going to the dentist.

I finished the wrap before I got home and spent an extra minute trying to get mayo off my sportcoat. I gave up when it became obvious that all I’d accomplished was embedding rolled-up fragments of cheap paper napkin all over myself. I realized that I’d dropped my other coat off at the dry cleaner’s about four months prior. And I wondered if they would give the thing to me without the pickup slip, or if they’d foisted it off on Goodwill by now.

To top things off, the ghost of Jackie the Loudmouthed Prostitute had ranged up from her normal turf about two blocks south to tell me, yet again, about the john who’d shanked her. If I’d known about Jackie, I might have picked a different apartment. But she hadn’t made her first nocturnal appearance until I’d completed my week long stake-out and written a check for the security deposit. Sometimes I thought about moving, but I reminded myself that she only harassed me a couple of times a month. The spirits around my old place had managed to waylay me every single week.

“So I said, ‘You got a place, baby?’ And he said, ‘Come on over here, sugar, no one can see us back in this here alley.’”

Though they were infrequent, her tirades tended to get on my very last nerve. “Go find someone who gives a shit,” I said, pushing open the gate to my walkway.

“Are you disrespecting me?” I felt a small chill, like Jackie might be gearing up for a temper tantrum, but it was weak enough that I was able to blow it off. “You hear me, white boy? I said, are you disrespecting me?”

There’s a technique Camp Hell taught people like me—spirit mediums, to use the technical term—for when we were done talking. We’re supposed to surround the entity with a bubble of light, white on the inside to draw them toward the light, and blue on the outside, to protect us from any potential malevolence. I thought real hard about putting one of those bubbles around Jackie. I formed it in my mind and I pushed until my ears popped, imagining my power coursing out to surround her and get her the fuck away from me.

But that was apparently all in my head.
 

“No one talks to Jackie that way,” her voice continued. “You know what I’m sayin’? White boy—do you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Talk to the hand,” I said, and waved her off as I went into my vestibule. She’d never yet followed me into the building. I think it might’ve been too far away from the spot where she’d died. At least, I hoped it was.

About a foot of free newspapers and sales fliers were piled up on the floor. They’d drifted back against the security door, preventing it from shutting completely. One of these days I was going to fling all that crap out onto the lawn. But not while I was covered in mayonnaise and had a pissed off hooker ghost railing at me from the courtyard.

I stuck my mail key into the bank of mailboxes on the wall, wiggled it to get it to that precise depth where it would turn, and opened my mailbox. Sales fliers slipped out and I let them join the rest of the paper on the floor. I studied what was left. A phone bill. A free sample of shampoo and conditioner all in one.

The outer door swung open, startling me, and I half-turned as a bulky figure pressed me into the open mailbox. “You know how hot you look when you talk to yourself in coffee shops?” Marks said. The cellophane-wrapped plastic packet of shampoo crinkled between us while he leaned in for a kiss. The after-work stubble around his goatee scraped my cheek, and he tasted like cinnamon gum.

I pulled back from the kiss, though, wanting to make sure that I had things straight. “You’re not pissed off that you got stuck with me for this case?”

Marks tilted his head. His features were harsh in the yellow buglight. “I’ve got two Psychs on my team. Why should I be pissed?” He leaned forward again and his lips were softer on mine, gently caressing my mouth and parting my lips for a slow, tender sweep of his tongue. My knees went all rubbery.

Evidently, he wasn’t worried about us getting caught fraternizing—and if he wasn’t concerned, then I sure wasn’t gonna make a stink. I’d always thought that rules were just for people who tended to get caught.

“Look,” I said when he let me come up for air. I was just about to tell him that I could hear Jackie screaming about her no-good pimp and it was a total buzzkill, but I decided it would be better to take the paranormal things slowly since my talents were probably much freakier than Carolyn’s. “Let’s go upstairs.”

We sprinted up to the third floor like we hadn’t just spent ten hours combing for witnesses. I had my key in my hand, poised at lock-level, when I rounded the top of my stairs and saw that some long-haired woman was slumped against my front door. I was fairly sure she was alive, too.

The girl sniffled. Marks stopped behind me on the second stair to the top. I stared at her and tried to place her, and then recognized the oxford-blue blouse that had once been hidden by an ill-fitting suitcoat. “Gutierrez?” I said.

She peered at me through the zig-zag waves of her unbraided hair.

I tried to act like it wasn’t all that unusual to find someone sprawled at my front door. “Marks, this is my partner, Lisa Gutierrez.”

Marks stepped up beside me and peered down at her. Gutierrez made no move to stand. She seemed kind of distant. I wondered if she’d been drinking. Or maybe if she’d slit her wrists and I just couldn’t see the puddle of blood due the lousy hall lighting.

She squinted at me and then nodded, as if she’d only just placed me. “Good, you’re here. Ask me a question.”

“Huh?”

“Just ask me,” she said. She seemed to have a Spanish accent that I hadn’t noticed before. “Something with a yes or no answer.”

I shook my head. “What, trivia?”

“Anything,” she said, drawing the word long and pronouncing the end like “theeng.”

“Am I married?” Marks asked.

Gutierrez swung her head around to peer at him. Her brow furrowed. I waited for steam to come out of her ears. “I don’ know. Ask something else.”

Marks glanced at me and raised his eyebrow. I shrugged. “Am I Jewish?” he said.

Gutierrez thought hard, and then nodded with a satisfied smile. “I don’ know.”

Marks pulled a pen light out of his suitcoat, crouched down in front of Gutierrez and shined the beam in her face. “She’s the one with the gift they just discovered, right?”

I nodded.

Gutierrez just sat there while Marks looked her over. “You give her any of your Auracel?”

“What, are you crazy? That’s way too strong for someone without any tolerance.” And then I took in her wooziness and her general ennui and I had to wonder. Where would she get ahold of something so tightly controlled—something for which I just happened to have a prescription? And then I remembered. The pill in my glove box.

Good thing it was only a halfsie or we’d probably be on our way to the emergency room.

I reached over Gutierrez’ head to unlock my front door with the goal of getting Gutierrez inside and getting rid of Marks. “I can…uh…take it from here,” I said.

Marks looked at me like I was nuts. “What, you just remembered you’re not single or something? I thought you invited me up two minutes ago.” He’d started helping Gutierrez to her feet as if caring for a massively stoned partner was all in a day’s work.

“I hadn’t planned on….” I gestured toward Lisa.

Marks managed to support Gutierrez with one arm and reach over me to push open my front door with the other. “But you know what to do, right? There’s some kind of hangover cure for anti-psyactives, isn’t there?”

“No,” I said, mostly to myself. “Not really.”

I hurried inside before them to flip on the light and made sure there wasn’t a kitchen stool in the middle of the floor waiting for someone to trip over it. Marks looked around as he pulled Lisa inside. “Postmodern Institutional. Nice.”

I bristled at the “institutional” remark, and did my best not to have a Camp Hell flashback. I supposed Marks thought he was being witty. Just because he was turning out to be a Psych groupie didn’t mean that a psychic had ever told him a Heliotrope story. Most of us did our best to forget them.
 

“Put her on the futon,” I said, figuring I could just buy another plain canvas cover if Lisa ended up puking on it. Marks steered her into the living room. I ran the tap until the water was as cold as it was going to get and then looked in the freezer for some ice. Both ice cube trays were empty. I wondered why I’d just left them there like that.