PsyCop 5: Camp Hell

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “How should I know? Chug some cranberry juice and sit in a sauna.”

  I got this idea. It wasn’t like a flashback or anything, just something that I remembered. Something from Camp Hell. What I remembered was that props help me focus, but I didn’t necessarily require them, not like a level two might. I don’t need incense. I don’t need prayers or affirmations or mantras. All I needed was a mental picture. I just had to visualize.

  Probably from growing up in front of the TV set. But who cares? It was easier than having to rely on a bunch of meaningless words and sounds, or bizarre, hard-to-find ingredients. All I needed was to be able to picture something in my mind’s eye.

  I closed my eyes, and tried to shut out my immediate environment. That was easier said then done. Maybe I couldn’t see the store, but I could smell the cigarettes and incense. And I could feel it, too. The middle-aged woman, shopping for Buddhas. The suburban couple who were so uncomfortable I could almost taste it.

  Or maybe the problem was all the drugs in my system. Maybe I couldn’t visualize because I was so fucking high.

  “What have you got that’s a psyactive?”

  “I don’t stock prescription drugs. Too risky. If I was raided….”

  “No, not a prescription psyactive. I mean something like the High John the Conqueror bath salt. Do you have any more of that?”

  “No offense, but I don’t want you in my tub. Not right this second, anyway. I haven’t cleaned it in months.”

  Normally, I would just sprinkle at all over myself. But it was working against Auracel. I figured that I should probably at least get it wet. “Can’t I do it in the sink? How dirty can it be? I’ll clean it out myself.”

  “If you’re not a purist or anything, I can give you some High John soap. I think there are actual herbs and oils in it. At least, it smells that way to me.”

  It came in soap form? I was all for it. “Sure.”

  Crash brought me of bar of soap in a black and pink wrapper with a guy on the front that looked like the King of Diamonds. I sniffed it. It smelled pungent and strong, like herbs, but then again, so did everything else in the store. And all of that smelled like the incense that was smoldering on a bookshelf right next to my head. I gestured to the door behind his counter.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  I went in back. I had only been in Crash’s apartment a few times before. I figured I was tempting fate if I got myself too close to his bed, which was in plain view from the bathroom. I decided to wash up in the kitchen sink instead. I hoped Crash didn’t care if his dishes tasted like High John.

  There were a few coffee cups and spoons in the kitchen sink, and some crumbs. I took the dishes out and put them on the countertop, among a bunch of big, red utility bills with “past due” stamped on them, which I pretended not to notice. I ran the water. He had no water pressure. He also had no spray nozzle. I splashed the water around until it got warm, and then I unwrapped the soap.

  I scrubbed my hands and my face. The more I used the soap, the stronger it smelled. And not in a good way. I figured that meant it was working. When I was done, I turned off the water. I tried to visualize a protective wall around myself. I got nothing.

  Stupid Auracel.

  I ran the water again and took off my coat and shirt. I figured that I needed more contact with the High John if I expected it to do any good. I soaped up my neck and my chest, under my arms, my ribs and my stomach. I cupped water in my hand and tried to splash that off, but I didn’t feel like it was getting clean. It was all slimy. Maybe that was OK. There would be more High John left on me to counteract the Auracel.

  And then my eyes started to burn.

  I couldn’t find a towel. I pulled a pot holder off the wall instead, but a family of roaches, three big and a dozen small, scurried out from behind it and disappeared behind the stove.

  I dropped the pot holder.

  “What the hell are you doing in here? I thought you were just going to wash up. Fuckin-A! What the fuck happened to you?”

  “My eyes—get me a towel!”

  Crash pushed by me to get to the bathroom. He jammed a rough towel into my hands. I wiped soap out of my eyes.

  “You look like you lost a fight with a lamprey. Hickey, hickey…bruise, bruise, bruise…bite. I thought that thing on your neck the other day was just a fluke. I guess not—looks like you get off on picking up a few souvenirs when you…get off.”

  I ran the towel over myself fast and pulled my shirt on, and did my best not to imagine what my pale, bony body must have looked like at the height of winter, fishbelly white and covered with marks in varying shades of pink, purple and red.

  Crash was already gone by the time I crammed my head through the neckhole. He had his store to run.

  I stood there, wet and uncomfortable, and stinking like High John the Conqueror soap, and tried again to visualize a protective sphere around myself. I even imagined a stream of light shining down into my pineal gland.

  And felt a glimmer. Maybe.

  There had to be some kind of tea I could drink, or some herb I could swallow—something that would attack the Auracel where it swam, in my bloodstream.

  Common: mint, jasmine, cinnamon, roses. Specialized: mugwort, skullcap. Usable only in small amounts: wormwood.

  I stared at my hand where it rested on Crash’s cupboard door handle. Camp Hell. All that stuff had been on a test. Herbalism in theory and practice—that was the course. They didn’t call them psyactives, not back then. Enhancements. That sounded so much more benign, less clinical.

  I could see the test. It was a cinch, even though I’d been sneaking around with Stefan, and the night before was a blur of whippits, blow jobs, and less than two hours of sleep. They’d brought this stuff in the day before. I’d smelled it, touched it, sifted it through my fingers. I’d have to be as stupid as Einstein not to remember what it was.

  Even now. Fourteen years later.

  I swayed. My hand on the cupboard kept me upright. I could see the test paper as if it were right there in front of me, with the crumbs and the chipped coffee cups and the overdue notices and the roaches. And I saw what I’d written. Where I was supposed to fill in salt across a doorstep for protection, I’d written flour. According to me, cinnamon was poisonous.

  I’d fucked it all up. On purpose.

  I staggered out into the store to see if Crash had any mugwort. He was talking to the suburban couple, and he held his hand as if he were holding a cigarette, though he wasn’t. But I’ll bet he wished he was. The woman was trying to tell him that the statue she was holding had to be from China.

  “It says it’s from Thailand, right there….”

  I grabbed him by the arm. “Where’s your mugwort?”

  “In a second.”

  I let go of him and turned away. I’d find it myself. Or maybe Miss Mattie would help me. Where was she? I was dying for some Valium. I didn’t have any. I didn’t have any Seconal, either. I hadn’t brought any, only the single tab of Auracel, because there’d been a prison outing on my agenda that day, and I hadn’t wanted to risk being strip-searched because the drug-sniffing K-9 caught wind of me. My weapon wasn’t on me, either. Damn it. “I don’t have my gun.”

  Crash’s eyes cut to me. “Go lay down or something, okay? I’ll close the store.” Beside him, the suburban woman was looking at me funny. So was her husband.

  “It’s got to be here somewhere.” I focused on the shelves, scanned them. I recognized some herbs, but others hadn’t been in my Camp Hell herbal, and they were new to me. Cinquefoil. Tonka beans. Yarrow.

  “What, your gun? I doubt it. Seriously, chill out. I’ve got some Stoli in the freezer. Have a shot, or five.”

  Stoli? As in vodka? Bingo—a psyactive.

  I went in back and pulled open the cupboards. I found a coffee cup that looked relatively clean, but I rinsed it out anyway. The vodka was just about the only thing in the freezer, aside from a half-empty tray of ice cubes, a few bean
burritos, and a bag of frozen peas. The bottle was frosty. It stuck to my fingertips. It was so cold that mist wafted up from its surface.

  I poured some into the coffee cup and chugged it. Revolting. I shuddered and poured some more.

  I heard some voices in the shop—raised, annoyed—and I had another few swallows. My throat burned. Warmth spread through my stomach.

  I visualized the white light again, streaming down from the sky, or heaven, or wherever. Entering me through my fifth chakra.

  Warmth zinged up my spine. My fingers and toes tingled. I felt like I was vibrating. I staggered.

  I considered sitting on the floor, but it was so filthy I worried I might stick to the linoleum. I made my way through the bathroom, tripped over an enormous pile of combat boots, and fell into Crash’s bed. I righted the vodka bottle before any more booze could spill out.

  My cup was still in the kitchen. Fuck it. I took a long, cold pull right from the bottle, shuddered, and swallowed down the urge to puke.

  White light. Blam. Take that, Auracel. I surrounded myself with an elastic skin of protection, like a big, psychic condom, and I wondered if maybe that was where the whole “white balloon” analogy started, an alternate word for someone too squeamish to talk about prophylactics. I didn’t need a sphere with legroom; my protection could move with me, and that economy of space, that good, close proximity to my physical, astral and ethereal bodies, seemed to suck a whole lot less energy than keeping this big round ball floating around. I told myself to keep it going, and pictured a little faucet somewhere inside myself, set to a thin stream that would keep on flowing until I shut it off. I’d originally thought of that faucet all those years ago at Camp Hell, too—me and my incredibly literal visual brain. I’d never told a soul.

  Another slug of vodka. I should probably stop, I knew, but I wondered if there was a permanent way to sever ties with the remote viewer, a way to drop off his radar so that he couldn’t pick me back up the minute I was sober.

  Black and White candle, Bat’s Eye, Reversible. That was all Hoodoo lingo—I’d learned that, too. And gris-gris and vèvès and all the shit I’d seen in the zombie basement, I’d recognized that stuff right away. Voudoun. Even the silver Santeria charms. I just hadn’t known it at the time.

  I turned up my mental tap a little higher, channeled more mojo into the protective field, and coated the outside with a gleaming molten silver shell. Silver. Take that.

  I sloshed more vodka onto my shirt, and wedged the bottle onto Crash’s bedside table next to an ashtray that was about ready to erupt in a shower of butts and burnt matches. The vodka was half-gone. A lot of that was probably from spilling it. Though I’d drunk a good amount, too. Now I owed Crash a bottle of Stoli. It seemed like I always owed him something.

  I flopped down on my back with my legs hanging over the side of the bed and looked up at the ceiling. Even the sheets smelled like cigarettes and incense. And maleness. Fuck, that was hot.

  All I needed was for Crash to walk in and find me sniffing his sheets. Some things you can’t downplay. But maybe if I wasn’t obvious….

  The room was spinny from the Auracel and the liquor. I rolled onto my side and pressed my cheek against the blankets, and sighed. Oh, yeah. A really hot smell.

  Time lurched, as time tends to do when I’ve got too many pharmaceuticals warring in my system. I heard a laugh track and realized a TV was playing somewhere. The not-my-bed sensation was jarring. The mattress sagged beneath me, lumpy, soft and narrow. I whacked my hand against a stucco-plastered wall that took the skin off my knuckles. The smell hit me again, incense, cigarettes and musk. I hesitated with my eyes shut, afraid of what I’d see. At least my clothes were on, so whatever I’d gotten myself into, it couldn’t be all that bad. I opened my eyes.

  The sun was down, and a small, yellow reading lamp lit the room—barely. Jacob sat at the foot of Crash’s bed with his elbows resting on his knees—watching me. When he saw me open my eyes, he looked away.

  I sat up fast, as if I was guilty of something from the mere contact of my face with another man’s sheets. Pain flared hot-white behind my eye like someone had stabbed it with an ice pick. Or maybe like something had burst. For real. I clapped my hands to my eye and keeled over. “Fuck.”

  “So. You’re taking up drinking.”

  “It’s not funny. God damn.”

  “Am I laughing?”

  I peeked out from behind my hand. Jacob’s gaze was focused on the wall. Not a good sign. “Listen. I know this probably looks bad. But there’s a logical explanation.”

  “There always is.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, looking incredibly fatigued, and sighed. “You could have left me a note this morning. I waited all day for you to touch base, and finally it’s Crash who calls me and tells me to come pick up my wasted boyfriend.”

  Crash tattled on me? That was totally not fair.

  I checked my internal faucet. Still on. I extended the silver condom to include Jacob. I don’t know if it really did or not, since it was all just a prop that my visual cortex was creating. “I came here because I needed a psyactive. I found out the FPMP’s tracking me with a remote viewer.”

  Hard to say if that bombshell broke through Jacob’s hurt feelings. His face stayed the same.

  “So, y’know, your P.I. friends from the gym wouldn’t really be able to find that with a metal detector.”

  His gaze slid from the wall, to me. He looked distinctly not happy. “How strong is this remote viewer?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But you know they’re watching you.”

  Did I? Did I know for a fact? Or was Roger Burke playing on my hard-earned paranoia to get me to recant my testimony? Jacob’s eyes narrowed the second I thought of Roger. He’d figure it out, someday, somehow. Because that’s what Jacob did. So I might as well tell him. “Roger Burke says they are.”

  Jacob swung around and faced the wall again. Muscles leapt in his jaw. The back of his neck flushed, and a vein throbbed at his temple. “Think, Vic. Just think. Why would Roger Burke give you information? Out of the kindness of his heart? No. He wants something.”

  “Well, I know, but….”

  “And when were you planning on bringing me into the loop?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  Jacob rubbed his face with both hands, then clasped his fingers behind his head and turned it into a stretch. His long-sleeved black T-shirt looked like it was about to split a seam. “All right.” His voice was calm, very calm. It didn’t fool me. “Tell me. And if you leave anything out, you might as well sleep here tonight.”

  -SIXTEEN-

  It wasn’t that Jacob wasn’t talking to me. Not exactly. He’d answer a direct question if I asked him, for instance. But I didn’t trust myself to try and bring him around with chit-chat, not with the killer Auracel/vodka hangover and acid stomach from hell I was currently nursing.

  We’d slept in the same bed after all, but none too close—and he’d left for work without saying goodbye. I considered calling in sick, but decided that if I ended up hurling, there’d be plenty of those green plastic kidney-shaped puke trays at LaSalle for me to aim at.

  I ate a piece of toast in hopes of sopping up some stomach acid, but I passed on the coffee. Which was probably the cause of the caffeine-withdrawal headache that had spread over the top of my skull by the time I got to work.

  I pulled into my usual parking spot at the Fifth, slid through a frozen puddle of God-knows-what, and scraped the bottom of my shoe against the threshold of the front door in an attempt to get the slime off the treads. I turned toward the stairwell that led to my second-floor office, and nearly collided with a uniformed officer, my height, and maybe thirty pounds beefier.

  The FPMP guy.

  “Agent Dreyfuss would like to speak to you,” he said.

  “Okay. I’ll see what my schedule is and give him a….”

  He held up a cell phone. “His secretary’s on the line.”


  I took the phone. It was a different brand than mine, and it felt strange in my hand. I noticed that it was warm, and had to quell the urge to wipe my fingers against my pant leg. I turned away from the FPMP cop, as if that gave me any privacy at all, and headed toward the drinking fountain. “Bayne,” I said into the strange cell phone.

  “I’ll connect you to Agent Dreyfuss.” It was a woman’s voice, cool and even. I’d spoken to her once before. Maybe. Hard to say for sure. She had the voice of a Midwestern newscaster. “Please hold.”

  I tried to imagine what Dreyfuss’ secretary would look like and came up flat. He might be a super-secret federal agent, but I couldn’t shake the image of him as a long-haired, neo-hippy pot dealer. Who’d then, in all seriousness, offered me reds. Even after he’d outed himself as the FPMP.

  “Hello, Detective. Let’s pretend I’ve inserted some obligatory friendly banter about the weather here. Frankly, I didn’t notice what it was doing outside. I was too busy wondering if you’d finally decided to take me up on my offer.”

  “Not…really.”

  “Because I’m guessing it can’t be much fun trudging through ghosts at LaSalle General. Am I right, or am I right?”

  He had a direct line to my day job. Great.

  “Of course it’s full of ghosts,” he said. “People die there every day. I mean, what do they expect you to find? It’s like Warwick’s got you searching for hay in a haystack.”

  “Thanks for your concern. I’m all misty-eyed over it.”

  “I guess I can’t fault you for your attitude. The Police Academy teaches rookies to embrace their inner asshats, doesn’t it? You never see many timid cops.”

  “If you’re through with the lovefest, I’ve got a job to do.”

  “No you don’t. A bunch of old ghosts? Zigler’s got about a million files to pull and ponder. I told Warwick I could use you today.”

  “So we’ve stopped pretending that I’ve got a choice about this. Is that it?”

  Dreyfuss laughed like he really enjoyed sparring with me. “You’ve always got a choice, Detective. You could tell me to go and soak my head, and troop over to LaSalle with Detective Zigler like we never had this conversation. You could pop in for a little afternoon delight at that psychic shop in Wicker Park you’re always hovering around. Heck, you could even drain your savings account and jaunt off to Mexico City with Detective Marks, and pretend the FPMP never existed.