PsyCop 2: Criss Cross (9 page)

Jacob climbed into the driver’s seat, shut his door, and pulled away from the curb. Roger was still parked, drinking his coffee, and he waved at us as we passed him.

“So that’s the guy who’s wooing you with coffee,” Jacob remarked.

I was about to snap back that I certainly wasn’t being wooed when I noticed he was grinning. I calmed down. “Yeah, that’s Roger.”

Jacob glanced at Carolyn in the rearview. “You’ll have to talk to him and ask if he’s maneuvering to steal Vic away from me.”

“That’s really ethical,” she said.

I rolled my eyes and concentrated on my coffee. It was good, really good, a bitter, earthy taste that spread through my mouth despite the liberal helping of half & half Roger had added. If I could be bought with coffee, that’d be the right kind.

“I think we should stop by Crash’s,” Carolyn said, and the smile on Jacob’s face died.

“We need to talk about it first,” he said.

“We are talking about it -- right now. Vic, I have a friend who’s an empathic healer. Maybe you’ll get better results from him than from Western, pharmaceutical-based medicine. I think you’re trying to treat the metaphysical with the physical.”

And the physical wasn’t even available to me anymore. Not the physical Auracel, at least. I only had a few pills left and my prescription was history, so I’d have to give it up whether I agreed with Doctor Chance or not.

“I dunno,” I said. Jacob didn’t seem too keen on the faith healer, and I trusted his judgment. “It’s kinda physical, too.” Jacob looked at me sharply, and I wondered how to avoid talking about what the Auracel was doing to my liver without actually lying, since Carolyn would know. “My meds aren’t working out.”

“His techniques work on the physical, too. It’s just a different approach.”

Typically I’d scoff at anyone calling themselves a healer. If they had real talent, they’d have been scooped up by the pharmaceutical companies, or the government, or some big TV star like Oprah. And if they didn’t have real talent, why would I get my hopes up?

But Carolyn was real, and this guy was a friend of hers. And maybe if he could get my liver set right, Chance would let me have my Auracel again. “I guess,” I said.

Jacob pulled onto the highway and said nothing, but the way he glared at the car in front of us, I thought laser beams were gonna shoot out of his eyes.

I didn’t feel like getting into an argument in front of the Human Polygraph so I concentrated on my coffee. Still good. I sipped and sipped until it was gone, and then I mourned the fact that I had to wait until tomorrow to have any more.

Jacob exited the highway in a neighborhood that had once been Mexican, had then been infiltrated by art school students, and now held an uneasy mixture of poor people and yuppies. We passed a crowded grocery store, a packed arcade, and a tire shop whose entire front was covered in shiny hubcaps.

“There’s nowhere to park,” Jacob said, and I jumped at the sound of his voice.

We were in front of a Laundromat marked “Lavanderia” when the traffic started to creep. The figure of a Hispanic man coalesced in front of the business, arms crossed over his chest in a defiant stance. He uncrossed his arms and reached toward the car, and I could see the outline of the bricks behind him through his body. Another Hispanic guy with a scraggly mustache appeared beside him, same posture. And another beside him, barely a teenager. And then a big, round Mexican woman with gigantic permed hair. All of their hands grasped at me like they were doing the wave.

“Never anywhere to park,” Jacob muttered.

Another group of reaching ghosts waited for us at the intersection. The only time I’d ever seen so many at once was at a blind turn where a whole van load of tourists had bought it. Jacob’s head snapped around as he looked at me, still glaring. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, and then wondered if Carolyn would be morally obliged to pipe in and say that I was lying. Although maybe I was so transparent she didn’t need to. “There’s a lot of activity around here,” I admitted.

“You keep flinching,” Jacob said, turning a corner to begin the old no-parking-spot shuffle.

I held myself very still as a guy with half a face ran toward the car, the wreck of his mouth open and his twisted hands extended. Not only had my reality become more
Dawn of the Dead
than I was accustomed to, but suddenly all the nasty spirits were totally focused on me.

And what was with the grabbiness? I was used to ghosts complaining a lot and being insufferably redundant. But the whole touchy-feely thing was fucking creepy.

I knuckled my eyes. “It’s kinda bad,” I said. I wondered how Carolyn’s talents responded to my excessive minimizing.

Jacob rounded another corner with a big mob of ghosts clustered on it and pretty soon we neared the Lavanderia again. “I’ll drop you off,” he said, pulling over a block down from the Lavanderia crowd of specters. “Maybe Crash
can
help you.” The laugh lines at the corners of his eyes looked deep, as if the sleepless night he’d had with me was really catching up with him. “Just be careful.”

Carolyn and I hopped out during a break in traffic and she steered me onto the sidewalk. Jacob drove away in search of a spot before I could ask him exactly why I needed to be careful. First Lisa, now him. Nonspecific warnings that told me absolutely nothing.

The block we were on had a couple of decrepit storefronts interspersed between a row of sagging three-flats. Latin music floated out of one window mingling with rap from another. And the storefront we stood in front of had a cracked plate glass widow dominated by “Tarot - Palm Reader” in flashing blue and pink neon with a big blinking neon hand beneath it.

“You’re kidding me,” I said.

Carolyn pulled the door open and motioned to a tiny vestibule inside. Its ancient paneling had been painted glossy red and dotted with lavender thumbprints all around. Since there was nobody there, corporeal or otherwise, I went in and headed for the palmist’s, telling myself to keep an open mind.

“Not there,” Carolyn said, closing the outer door behind her. “The shop’s upstairs.”

I looked up the narrow staircase and saw the thumbprints wended their way up. I climbed the creaky stairs with Carolyn right behind me. As we neared the top, I saw a haze of smoke around the single bare bulb. It smelled of burnt sage, incense and cigarettes.

On the second floor landing, the stairs turned and went on to a third floor, but the thumbprints stopped at a frame and panel door. It was painted yellow with blue stripes, and a sign hung in the center that read “Sticks and Stones” with the words formed out of twigs and semi-precious tumbled gems.

“Here,” Carolyn said, but I’d figured that from the stink of burnt herbs that lingered there. Did the sage keep the ghosts at bay? If so, I wondered if I could manage to use it without burning my house down.

I opened the door into a small shop packed with exotic stuff. A threadbare Oriental carpet covered a hardwood floor that was scratched and dull with age. Racks of scarves and other gypsy-like clothing ran along one wall. Shelves covered with devotional candles -- from Saint Agnes to XX Double Cross -- covered another. Plexiglas cases full of herbs, trinkets and stones blocked a bead-hung doorway from the rest of the one-room store.

Despite the onslaught of colors, textures, and smells coming from the shop, I turned my focus inward. The little hairs on my arms had stopped standing on end, and my heart was pounding hard more from climbing a flight of stairs than from panicking at the sight of the grasping dead. My panic started to ebb, a little.

Carolyn came in behind me and closed the door. “Crash?” she called.

Latin brass band music drifted up from the street, but a more pleasant a cappella number played from somewhere behind that doorway; bluesey and soulful, like a woman with a knockout voice humming to herself while she worked in her kitchen.

The soul music quieted as a hand parted the beaded curtain. A man’s hand, wrist stacked with black rubber bracelets and silver on every finger.

“Carolyn!” he cried, and the rest of him (which was equally as decked out as the hand he’d led with) burst through the curtain. Crash was maybe thirty, with spiked-up, bleached white hair and a ring through his nose. He wasn’t what I’d imagined one of Carolyn’s friends would look like. He was hot. Not that I thought anything would happen between the two of us. Cheating is the top entry on my “no” list, and I was in a relationship. “I had a premonition that I’d see you today,” he said.

“No you didn’t,” said Carolyn dryly.

Crash clucked his tongue, then looked at me, crossed his tribal-tattooed arms over his chest, and raised an eyebrow. “Hey,” I said, doing my best to seem like I wasn’t in a ghost-panic.

“Hey, yourself.”

“This is my friend, Victor,” said Carolyn. “We came to see you about healing.”

Crash pulled a rough, handmade-looking bowl out from under the counter and placed it on top. It was full of sand. I tried to imagine what he’d use it for: some kind of ritualistic cleansing? And then he lit up a cigarette and flicked the spent match into the sand. “No ‘Hi, how are you, I haven’t seen you in, what, a month? What’ve you been up to?’ That’s so cold.”

“I’m sure you’re devastated,” Carolyn said.

I wondered if all of their friendly banter was this chipper. If so, I hoped I’d never get either of them mad at me.

Crash crooked his finger at me. “I take it you’re the volunteer from the audience?”

The humming resumed from beyond the curtain, loud and clear, and although I’ve never been much for R&B gospel type music, I really liked it. I stepped forward, just as much to catch more of that music as to let Crash have a look at me.

Crash held up a hand. “That’s close enough,” he said quietly.

I stopped, and wondered if I was so contaminated that even a guy named “Crash” couldn’t deal with my proximity.

“What is it?” Carolyn demanded. “Do you see something?”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, Little Miss PsyCop. I’m not in high gear all the time like you are.”

I tried to settle myself. If he thought Carolyn was in high gear, then I was practically in orbit.

“Vic is psychic,” Carolyn said.

“Do you mind?” asked Crash. He held his hand palm-out toward her, instead. “I can do it myself.”

“I’m just trying to help,” Carolyn said, a trace of poutiness in her voice. Crash stared at me, alternatingly gnawing at his thumbnail and taking drags off his Camel Light. I stood there like a lump. Carolyn watched Crash watching me.

“He’s a medium,” she muttered, like she just couldn’t keep it in.

“A big overblown TV antenna. Yeah. I get it.”

Well. It was the first time anyone’d ever called me
that
.

“Something’s unusual about his reception,” Carolyn told him. “That’s why we came to see you.”

“Maybe you should’ve taken him to Radio Shack.” He squinted at me, considering.

“If you’re not up to it, just say so,” Carolyn said. “It’s not like you’ve got the only metaphysical store in Chicago.”

Crash huffed a little and then looked at me. “Only the best one,” he said, his eyes boring into mine. “Okay, c’mere.”

I shuffled forward another step and he grabbed me by the sleeve of my jean jacket, dragging me halfway across the plexiglassPlexiglas countertop. “Hold still,” he said. “It’s not like I can see the problem written on your forehead.”

I was close enough to see his eyes, pale green, like jade. The bluesy humming seemed to intensify as I stared into them. He flashed a tongue stud at me, grazing it across the ridge of his lower teeth. I couldn’t tell whether he’d done it on purpose or if it was just a habit.