"What's up with this, Nick?" I asked as I entered the barber shop at one end of the college town's most established shopping strip. "Last time I was here you were lamenting that all of your customers were dying out or retiring away and you'd probably have to close." I looked around the seats lining the wall opposite the barber's chairs and saw that there were at least six guys ahead of me—and four of them were young. Probably guys from the college.
"New barber," Nick said, gesturing with the scissors he was using on the hair of one of the town's doctors toward a chair that was currently empty three slots down. I looked up at the nameplate over the mirror behind the chair. It read "Brad."
"Younger guys like him. He's brought in new business. Rejuvenated the place." Nick said this to me, but he wasn't looking at me. He seemed to be avoiding eye contact, which wasn't like him. Nick Parson was an institution in this town. His business, Parson's, had been started here by his father. Everyone who was anyone in the area had gone to this shop for their haircut for decades. Even one governor had insisted on driving the hour over here from the state capitol to have his hair cut.
The trouble was that "everyone who is anyone" was becoming something of the past in this town. Even the younger professors at the college were going to stylists rather than barbershops.
Nick was well into his seventies. I'd assumed he'd somehow ensure the shop lived on after he gave up barbering, but the stylists were putting him out of business. I was just glad that he will have reached a time he can retire before that happened. The same was true of three of his four regular barbers. And the fourth was the one who was keeping the shop going this long. He had the chair in the front window and was more stylist than traditional barber. He'd manage to make the transition. I had expected him to take the shop when Nick retired, but Nick told me Keith wasn't interested in continuing it.
But now they apparently had a new guy. He wasn't there when I walked in and sat down, waiting my turn in the chair, but he came out of the back of the shop soon thereafter and pointed to one of the college-aged guys, who eagerly stood and moved toward the chair under the "Brad" sign. Another of the college guys had sat forward in his seat, in anticipation, but the Brad guy called to him in a deep bass voice, "I'm running behind. It'll be an hour wait. If you want to wait that long."
The young guy looked disappointed, but he sat back in the chair and reached for a magazine. Most be some barber, I thought, for a young college-type guy to be willing to wait an hour for this Brad guy.
Brad himself was a surprise. A big, powerful-looking guy, he was. He was maybe in his late twenties and stood a good six and a half feet tall. I would have taken him more for a professional football player or a hunter more than for a barber. He was heavily muscled, and I thought he must spend all of the time he wasn't in the barber shop in a gym somewhere bulking himself up. He wasn't bad look—in fact he looked pretty good in a rugged sort of way—but he had large hands, meaty fingers, and I wondered why he had chosen barbering. He seemed more like one of the guys in my line of work. I wouldn't be surprised to see him driving a cruiser, maybe even being a state trooper. He seemed to be handling the scissors OK, though.
He and the guy he was working on immediately started talking about bands and the woods and weekend gigs—not sports, which surprised me. The phone in the shop was constantly ringing and most of the time it was for Brad and he either was telling someone when he had openings—which apparently wasn't often—or what was happening at what he called the "Woodsy" this weekend or next. He was citing strange names, some of which I recognized as local rock bands.
But then it was my turn in a chair. I'd drawn the short stick again—I was being beckoned to Nick's own chair. This had been a privileged spot in previous decades, but Nick's hands weren't too steady anymore and he was really too hard of hearing to conduct a conversation with during the haircut. And he was slow as molasses, mostly because people kept coming in off the street and greeting him and jawing for a few minutes. As I'd noted, Nick Parson was an institution in the town, and he was constantly sought out to head or lend his name and photo to a charity drive or to attend some civic banquet somewhere.
I wasn't surprised when I went into his chair that we didn't have much to say to each other. I was more surprised that the conversation from Brad's chair seemed to dry up after Nick had greeted me in a loud voice and asked how "things" were down at the sheriff's office.
Nick was working so slow and was being interrupted so much by people coming off the street that it was a good half hour before I looked up and saw that Brad had finished his haircut and rather than go to the cash register with his young client, was guiding the young man toward the back of the shop and through a door back there. Brad had a hand palmed on the young man's butt as they reached the door, and my antenna shot right up.
An hour appointment for a half hour's haircut—and the next guy willing to wait that long to get into Brad's chair. I was suddenly interested in this. I'd like to say that it was the investigator—the deputy sheriff—in me that was interested. But it wasn't. I was a man's man, and Brad was just the sort of man who turned me on. Just the way he had possessively put his hand on the other guy's butt and the other guy hadn't done anything about that alerted me. And I wanted to check that out.
Nick's shop was at the more deserted end of the shopping strip, and I knew that there were windows into his back area at the side and, again, at the back of the building. Immediately beyond the door from the shop was a restroom to the left, against the outer wall, and a break room for the barbers. But there was another room through yet another door beyond that at the back of the building.
After leaving Nick's shop, with Nick being more open and expressive—and making eye contact with me—as I paid him at the cash register, I looked up and down the parking lot. Seeing that no one was noticing me, I slipped around to the side of the building and walked down to where there were two windows near the back. The first one looked into a restroom and was blocked at its bottom half, but by going up on my toes I could see that the room was empty.
The next window was a "Bingo" window. It looked into sort of a supply room at the back of the shop. I could sort of peep in at the side window and see the two of them, their bodies illuminated by light coming in from two windows on the back wall of the shop. The young college-aged guy was only wearing his T-shirt and was bent over a table top, legs spread. Brad, only in his white, short-sleeved shirt, was standing close behind the younger guy, crotch planted to buttocks, and fucking up into the other guy. From the angle I had and the long strokes Brad was taking, I could tell that he had at least seven thick inches. My butt twitched at the sight. His bulging chest and shoulder muscles as he worked impressed me too. He had one hand gripping the younger guy by the throat and arching the guy's torso back to him, the guy's head pushed into Brad's shoulder. The younger guy's hands were moving from trying to spread his own butt cheeks wider to Brad's clinching and flexing buttocks to the back of Brad's head to the table top to maintain himself steady.
Brad's free hand was moving periodically from the table top to the young man's nostrils. Brad's fingers were coated with something white, and I could see a mound of white powder that Brad was dipping them into and then moving to the young man's nose.
The young man was pretty vocal—and was singing Brad's praises. I could hear the words "fuck," "shit," "yes," "deeper" reaching me through the window pane. Only the fan going in the front of the barber shop, I assumed, kept the whole world from knowing what was going on here.
I reluctantly pulled away from the window and went back to my car. I moved the car in the parking lot to where I could get a bead on both the door into Nick's shop and the alley running beside it. About the end of what I gauged was the young man's scheduled hour with Brad, I saw him emerge from the alley, rather than the shop door. He was walking with a lurch, but there was a smile of complete satisfaction on his face.
While I had waited, I had jacked off inside the car, dreaming of that pile driver I'd seen between Brad's thighs.
* * * *
"What's this all about?"
I was walking by the incident room and saw that there were photos pinned up to the cork board and some writing on the chalk board. One of the other deputies, Terry Jones, and a couple of uniformed policemen were standing, looking at the boards, jawing, and drinking coffee.
