Free PsyCop 2: Criss Cross by Jordan Castillo Price Page A

“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;