PsyCop: GhosTV Part 2

Crash blew a small bubble, then cracked it loudly. "Right. Live and learn. Here, hold this chair so I can reach the ceiling." The chair in question was so rickety it would have made a better tripod. "Don't you have a stepladder?"

"Yeah, I have a whole stepladder collection, I just dig standing on chairs 'cos I like to live dangerously. What do you think?" He probably didn't want to know what I thought. I decided to cut my losses on that particular portion of the conversation and hold his d.a.m.n chair for him. He climbed up and started sticking pushpins into the ceiling. I kept my eyes on his hands, because it was safer than letting on that I noticed his belt buckle in my face. Dollar bills-or drawings of dollar bills in his weird, cramped hand-were tethered to the pushpins on clear fishing line. A few well-placed pushpins, and suddenly it was raining money inside Sticks and Stones. Pretty cool.

"What's the, uh...concept?"

"The f.u.c.king economy. People who're trapped in a bad mortgage, who lost a job they thought was secure to outsourcing, all of 'em are desperate to patch up their wallets."

"With occult supplies?"

"Sure." Crash hopped down, put his hands on his hips and looked up at his handiwork. "My top three sellers, in order, used to be love spells, money charms, and revenge hexes. Now the love and money are flip-flopped."

I glanced down at a few boxes of merchandise Crash had pulled.

Soaps, incenses and even aerosol sprays with names like Fast Luck Money Drawing, Horn of Plenty and Luck in a Hurry. I knew that if Crash sold it, it must have been legit in some sense of the word-and

15.

if I could exorcise ghosts with salt from the Stop 'n' Go where they sold lottery tickets and Freezee drinks, someone could increase their cash flow with Nine Lucky Mixture bath and floor wash. I wasn't sure who. But someone.

"What should I call it? I was thinking it might be amusing to make a poster that says Golden Shower of Wealth and see if anyone notices."

"Serious?"

"Eh, maybe not. Most of my customers are either too old, too religious or too foreign to fully appreciate my sense of humor." I wasn't sure a pee joke was the best moneymaking idea, but Crash seemed to enjoy it. "It's your store. Why be your own boss if you can't please yourself?"

"Pleasing myself-is that a double entendre?"

"No."

He stuck an arm through the slats on the back of the chair and slung it over his shoulder, then batted his eyelashes at me, turned, and sashayed back toward the counter. "You sure? Maybe you know who I was thinking about the last time I jerked off." I sighed, and said, "Miss Mattie? Is that you?"

"Nice try, but she's not here. Your aura would've spiked if you were really talking to her." He dropped the chair in front of the counter and opened the McDonald's bag. "What'd you get?"

"Two combo meals."

"What about me?"

"One is for you."

"I'm a vegetarian, you knucklehead."

"What?"

16.

"You're seriously that oblivious-how long have we known each other?"

"Uh, I dunno. You can have my fries."

"Good. I'm starving." He flicked his gum into the trash and stuffed a good dozen fries into his mouth. "These used to taste better when I was a kid, but I think they were fried in lard back then."

"So how long have you been a, uh...."

"Five years. It's a religious thing."

c.r.a.p. I'd always figured Crash had some sort of nonspecific New Age belief system. I didn't know he considered himself a member of an actual religion. Maybe he was Hindu or something-he seemed to know an awful lot about chakras and meditation. Did Hindus eat meat? And if they didn't, how come the Indian restaurant down the street had such amazing Chicken Tikka Masala? Once upon a time, back when my training had been less about snap-and-pop and more about esoteric concepts, I probably could've told you what religions made which demands, especially the more arcane ones. But I'd probably killed the brain cells that held that knowledge with one too many hits of nitrous.

"It's okay," he said. "You can eat meat in front of me. I'll deal." I hunkered down over the counter and chowed down half a burger.

Maybe I'd been hungry too. Aside from the hunger, the other thing that had been gnawing at me-underneath the litany of criticism I'd been subjected to lately-was the idea that the amus.e.m.e.nt park hadn't been riddled with ghosts. Because even through the Auracel, I can usually sense their presence. The drugs just allow me to tune it out.

"D'you think ghosts take up s.p.a.ce?" I asked.

17.

Crash took a long, thoughtful pull on the ma.s.sive soda. "Don't know.

You can see 'em. What do you think?"

"They don't stand inside other people. Living people. They don't stand inside each other. But they walk through walls and furniture and stuff like it's not even there."

He nodded as he finished the rest of one super sized fry and continued on to the next. "Subtle bodies."

Was he serious, or was that another Crash-joke along the lines of golden showers? "What's that?"

"Astral. Etheric."

Those, I knew about-enough that maybe I could figure out his religion without having to resort to actually asking. "What discipline talks about that?"

"Oh, you name it. Subtle bodies pop up in everything from Tantric to Crowley. Spiritualists, too-the Victorian table-rappers who said ghosts shot ectoplasm, the ones who staged fake photos of garden fairies." Super.

"So it's bulls.h.i.t."

"You're pretty quick to get defensive, for someone who's seen it all in action." Crash crumpled up the greasy cardboard sleeve, threw it back in the bag, then took the top bun off my second burger and stole the tomato slice. I ignored his tongue stud as he licked off the mayo. "I think a few of the table rappers were probably real mediums. Plenty of shysters along with 'em, but you figure one or two had to be legit."

"Hard to say." At least without tracking down their graves, seeing if any were still lingering around, and then trying to figure out if they'd be willing to level with me or not.

18.

"I thought you could see people going astral. Why the second-guessing?"

"No. I can't, usually. I need to be on psyactives." Or drunk. "I was just trying to figure out why crowded places don't tend to be haunted, but isolated places do."

"Or what if it's the other way around?" Crash sucked grease and salt off his fingers like he was giving his own hand a b.l.o.w.j.o.b. I didn't notice. Not at all. "What if places get deserted because on some sub-sensory level, the mundanes of the world know there's something spooky about an area and they start avoiding it? It's like the chicken and the egg. Maybe you'll never know."

I picked the second burger off the bun, ate the meat and cheese in few bites, wadded the soggy bun into a ball and shoved it back in the bag. Miss Mattie was still nowhere to be seen. It wasn't fair. I was playing nice with her little Curtis and everything-hadn't I even brought him fries? Regardless, she remained indifferent to my thirst for arcane knowledge. I took a long swallow of c.o.ke instead.

Crash folded a piece of gum into his mouth. "So...I can't help but ask...what's with your hair?"

"I got it cut."

"Where? At the Moe Howard school of cosmetology?" I could tell Jacob wasn't too keen on my hair lately either, but it had grown way over the dress code length, and I kept missing my appointment at the real salon because I'd been scouring the scene of a domestic stabbing all week to see if the spirit might know where her loverboy took off to. Unfortunately, it seemed she'd moved on before I had a chance to chat. "Just one of those places where you don't need an appointment."

I ducked when Crash grabbed for my head, but he was just as fast as me. I felt his fingers slide through my hair, watched him peer down his nose at whatever he was seeing. "This angle's all wrong. Sit."

19.

I'd been kind-of kneeling in the tripod chair so I could hover over the counter while I ate. It creaked when I turned and tucked my leg beneath me. Crash pulled a comb out from under the cash register, rounded the counter and started pulling up hanks of hair from random parts of my head, measuring them between his fingers, and scowling. "I can save this cut. Lemme get my shears." I'd be stuck with it a while. Then it would start all over again, the awkward haircut that grew out some and had a few decent weeks, then was suddenly too long for the dress code. A never-ending cycle.

"Yeah, sure."

"You not too proud to let him help you. Almost-it still be hard for you. But you got trust built up between the two of you now." I whipped around. Crash was gone, and there was Miss Mattie, big and glossy-skinned mahogany, fanning herself with her paper St.

Anthony fan.

"I'm so glad to see you. Listen, don't go. I need to ask you-"

"I done told you, I'm not here for you. You got to find your own path." In one of the cramped rooms behind the store, drawers and doors squalled open and banged shut.

I sighed. "Fine. Do you have something you want to say to Curtis? I'll tell him. I'll even write it down so I get it right."

"He do want the best for you. He need to be needed-we all need to be needed. He be a good friend to you if you let him." I knew that.

Suddenly, that seemed pretty profound. I'd known that for a long time-and it wasn't one of those things I took for granted. The people I considered to be my friends were few and far between. Really far between. "Okay. Yeah."

20.

Miss Mattie scowled down at a handmade sign propped on the counter. It was cobbled together from the glossy Sunday Tribune ads, where a hastily cut out male underwear model with a really prominent package had been pasted over the world's cleanest stovetop.

A comic book style dialog balloon that read, Didyousignupforthe SticksandStonesnewsletter? hovered beside him.

She couldn't seem to make heads or tails of the sign. Neither could I, really, but maybe that was the point. To make you look, even if you didn't quite get it. "It don't make you no less of a man to ask for help." She p.r.o.nounced it axe. "You got to ask yourself what's more important-to try to do everything your own way and lose it all, or to ask for help so you can get what you need, when you need it. Always remember, you not here in this world alone. You got friends."

"It's just a haircut-but him and me, we're cool. I know it might not always sound like it, but that's just the way we ta-"

"Sometimes the only place you find help is the last place you look.

Remember that."

Then she was gone, without even bothering to exit through the closet door.

21.

Chapter 3.

I stared at the last place I'd seen Miss Mattie, then dropped my gaze to the underwear model. The hodgepodge sign was vaguely disturbing. That was probably intentional, too.

"I gotta unlock the door." Crash swept back into the store and set a pair of scissors, a bottle of Windex-or probably what used to be Windex and was now water, judging by the fact that it was clear and not bright blue-and a jar of some trendy hair paste on the counter.

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