Boy Crucified (13 page)

I was glancing at him when he glanced at me. I took my eyes away quickly.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“About what?”

“About you.”

Oh.

The general down below throbbed to life.

“The other night,” he went on, “I did what I did because I wanted to. I wanted you to know that. I wasn’t just playing.”

Oh.

“You liked it, yeah?”

I could not bring myself to admit it.

“You old queens are such prudes.”

“It was different when we grew up,” I said in my defense.

“
The love that dare not speak its name
,” he said. “Get married, have some kids, stop at a public bathroom and stick your tallywacker in a glory hole. The good old days!”

“It was different,” I said. “We didn’t just go around advertising. Besides, I’m not that old. I grew up in the seventies, and the sexual revolution was well underway.”

“This is the nineties, baby. Things have changed.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“So… what do you think? Should we do it again?”

“Do what?” I asked rather needlessly.

“You know,” he said.

I said nothing.

We drove in silence. Daniel grinned to himself and fiddled with the radio. A mile down the road, he pulled into a rest stop and parked some distance away from the other cars.

“I’m horny,” he said, switching off the ignition.

“And?”

He smiled.

“Here?” I asked. “In a parking lot?”

“No time like the present.”

There were three other cars in the parking lot next to the restrooms. In the darkness and shadows, no one would see us unless they came right up to the car.

“We could go inside,” Daniel suggested.

I had never had sex in a public restroom. The thought of it first offended me, then intrigued me. It was risky. It was a little scary. It was… exciting.

“You’re not serious,” I said, frowning at him.

“Live a little,” he replied with a smile.

He got out of the car. I followed him to the bathroom, stood next to him at the urinals while we waited for the man inside to leave. When he did, Daniel took me into one of the stalls. He sat himself on the toilet, facing me, pulled at my belt and undid my pants.

I was nervous, but also highly aroused. It was so unlike me to be doing such a thing.

He pulled my underwear down and grasped my cock in his hand while smiling up at me. Without a word, he began to lick at it.

“You brought condoms?” I asked.

He nodded. The breath caught in my throat. I was being reckless, foolish. I could be fired for such activity. I wanted to pull away, zip up my pants, but instead I moaned and pushed my cock deeper into his mouth.

Oh Christ!

He undid his shirt, removed it hastily, then pulled off his undershirt and piled his clothes in his lap. He was such a gorgeous man: Beautiful, strong, lightly muscled. His jet-black hair had a silky feeling to it. I buried my hands in it while thrusting my hips forward.

Why did this guy make me so horny?

He put a hand on my belly, which made me even hornier. He rubbed at it, let his finger draw circles around my belly button. I buried myself in his warm mouth, trying not to groan too loudly as ripples of pleasure drifted up my belly and into my chest.

God, but he was good.

My pants began to fall down around my knees. I didn’t care. Didn’t care at all. Let them fall to the floor and be visible to anyone who might walk in. All I wanted, at that moment, was the feeling of my sperm squirting inside his mouth while he drank it down like a good boy. With a practiced hand, he slipped a condom on my cock. He then put his hands on my hips, encouraging me, pulling me close so my dick could penetrate increasingly deeper into his open jaws. As I started to cum, I grabbed his head and held it fast.

Afterward, I stood there for long moments, breathing heavily. I became aware, suddenly, of where I was, of what we were doing. I bent down to pull my pants up. He kissed me. Then I was kneeling on the floor, kissing him, holding him.

He stood, pulling me with him.

“Don’t get too crazy,” he cautioned.

I pulled my pants up. I put my arms around him, pulling that warm body close to my own. He sniffed at my neck, wrapped his arms around me. He suddenly seemed small, fragile, vulnerable, reminding me that I was the older one, the “man,” the one in charge.

I shuffled us around so I could sit on the toilet while he stood in front of me. I fumbled with the belt to his pants. He helped. A delicious golden-brown surprise popped out of his shorts.

Cock. God, I had missed it. There was nothing I liked more than cock, especially fat, generous ones like this one. I looked at it for a long moment, mesmerized by its primal, primordial beauty. It was like a talisman, a totem pole, a summing up of my whole life in one symbol: cock. Glorious cock. Maleness, manhood, muscles, moist mouths, the spurting of semen, the drinking it down, the joy of gay sex.

I stuck my tongue out, tasting that dick. I put my lips around it, then used my tongue to rub against the lower tip. He waited patiently for me, standing at attention like a private before his sergeant.

I went down on him slowly, taking his whole length into my mouth, opening wide. Like riding a bicycle—you never forget. Open wide, watch the teeth, breathe through your nose.

It was wonderful. He pushed his hips forward slightly. I took all of him. I reached my right hand around behind him to feel at the smooth, silky skin of his ass. That would be next, I thought—that plump, brown ass. I’d dribble a little K-Y between those ass cheeks and go to town. But that was for another day.

At the moment, I had my hands—and my mouth—full.

Daniel let himself be serviced. This was obviously not his first time. He knew how to stand, how to hold himself, how to steady himself, how to keep his dick in my mouth while thrusting his hips back and forth. His fingers eased themselves into my hair, gripping it, holding my head in just the right place as his hips moved in a hypnotic rhythm. Then one of his hands slipped underneath the back of my shirt and down my back. He curved his body over me, reaching down as far as he could.

His cock was a good six inches, very fat, very hearty. It was ramrod straight and tasted like autumn. He pushed until it was at the back of my throat, then pushed some more. I swallowed it down. He pulled back, letting me suck at the entire length of it before renewing his thrust.

I wanted to taste his cum. Crude, but the truth. I wanted to feel that hot assault on the back of my throat as the jizz sprang from his cock. There’s nothing quite like that feeling—to know you’ve been successful, you’ve pleased your partner, you’ve swallowed down his essence, that he’s completely at your mercy, that you could, if you wanted, bite down and chew his dick off. It’s a level of trust that’s hard to duplicate in the real world. It requires you to stick your most intimate parts into the jaws of another man and hope for the best.

“Do you want me to wear a condom?” he asked. “I’ve just been tested. I’m negative.”

I ignored him. I wanted cock. I wanted cum. I wanted all the messiness of sex.

He became suddenly more intent, more insistent, thrusting himself forward, caught up in the stirrings of an orgasm about to burst loose. I responded by opening my mouth wider to accommodate him and his rapid, urgent thrusts. He groaned rather too loudly. He rubbed at his belly with his free hand. His other was on the back of my head, holding me in place.

Come on,
I thought.
Come to papa!

And, with a gasp and a shudder, he did. I fought the gag reflex as semen suddenly shot out of his pecker. It was warm, gooey, delightful, a little salty, a little tangy. Both his hands were now gripping my head. His body was trembling. I squeezed his balls gently—I wanted him to empty them completely and let me drink down every last drop.

Reluctantly, I allowed him to pull himself away.

He stood there, completely unembarrassed.

“God, you’re good,” I said.

“I know.”

VII

I
TOOK
a shower that evening and went straight to bed. I was not hungry, certainly not hungry for conversation or interaction with my mother. I locked the door to my bedroom and put my service revolver under my pillow. Just in case.

I tossed and turned for a long time, thinking about my mother, about Daniel Qo, about the taste of his semen in my mouth, the taste of his skin, his cock, the smell of his pubic hair. It made me horny and randy all over again.

No good would come of it, I thought. Homicide detectives having sex, working the same cases—no, no good would come of it. It was too distracting. And if the relationship went south….

What relationship?
I asked myself. Sex is not a relationship. Sex is sex. But, being the romantic, old-fashioned kind of guy I was, sex always meant love was possible too. I had never been able to divorce myself from that way of thinking. It was hard for me to have sex with someone I didn’t love, or didn’t believe I could come to love, in time. Sex for its own sake had never been of much interest to me, certainly not the way it was to my gay compadres out there in the bathhouses of the world. Sex with someone you loved—that was magic. Sex with someone you hardly knew—that was animal. It felt good, but afterward it felt bad, as if it punctuated your loneliness and aloneness.

Sex, sex, sex. Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. What was I getting myself into now?

It seemed I had only just fallen asleep when the phone rang and Daniel Qo said he was standing outside my house.

“There’s been another murder,” Qo said excitedly.

“What?”

“Come on, man. Get a move on. I’m parked in front of your house. We’re going back to Chillicothe.”

CHAPTER FOUR
Soldiers for Christ

I

J
OSHUA
S
MALLEY
was a farmer. His rough, callused hands said as much, and so too did the overalls he wore, the Farm Bureau hat on his head, the simple, unpretentious way he had about himself. Despite his name, he was not small: he was well built, thick around the middle but in a way that suggested muscle and strength, not a man gone to seed. He looked like he’d brought in more than a few harvests over the years.

We were standing in the woods at the murder scene, not far from his farm. Like Frankie Peters, his boy had been nailed to a cross and left to die.

His boy’s name was Eli—they’d chosen it from the Bible, Mr. Smalley said, he and his wife. They’d named all their kids that way. Eli Smalley was fourteen, a student at St. Konrad’s. The family was part of “the community,” had been for years.

“When was the last time you saw Eli?” I asked.

He shrugged. Sighed. Rubbed at his face. “Last night, I reckon.”

He was not given to providing long answers, so I prodded him. “About when was that, sir?”

“Just after 9:00 p.m. or so. I was on my way to bed. Eli said he was going to check on Nellie Number Nine. That’s what we call her. One of the cows. Caught her leg in the fence last week, tore open the skin, it got infected. He’s been cleaning that leg every day, and she’s doing better. Nellie Number Nine. She’s out in the barn. We’re keeping her separate from the others, till she heals up.”

“And then what?”

“I went to bed. My wife was already sleeping. We’s early to bed, early to rise folks. My other kids were in bed too. Eli said he was going to check on her one more time and he’d be back in, he’d lock up, I wasn’t to worry.”

He fell silent.

“So you went to bed?”

He nodded. It was a sad, self-recriminating nod, as if he should have known better.

“Anything strange happen during the night?” Daniel asked.

He shrugged. “Sir, no. Lefebvre barked, just after I went to bed. I thought that was a little strange.”

“Lefebvre?” I asked.

“Yup. She’s the dog. That St. Bernard. Eli loved her, I’ll tell you that.”

I did not want him to ask if “Lefebvre” had been named after Archbishop Lefebvre—obviously she had been. Perhaps it was a joke, a little dig at their fellow religionists.

“So she was barking?”

“Just a little bit. I heard Eli tell her to hush, and she did. She’s like that. She’ll bark at a butterfly. She’s an awful guard dog, I tell you. Most of it false alarms. But if she smells someone she don’t know, she’ll go to town, you can count on it.”

“So, did Eli come back into the house?”

He shrugged. “I went to sleep. I guess I don’t rightly know. I didn’t think about it. He’s my oldest, Eli is. I can trust him to lock up, go to bed when he likes. He’s always real good about that.”

“Then what happened?”

He sighed and wiped at his eyes with a large, callused hand. “This morning I got up. I don’t know, something wasn’t right. Lefebvre was in the woods, barking at something. I called Eli, told him to see what his dog was up to, but he didn’t answer me, so I checked on him, and he wasn’t in his room. Bed hadn’t been slept in.”

“So you went out looking for him?”

“I thought he might have had an accident in the barn, fell over, busted his head open or something. It happens. Couldn’t find him nowhere, and Lefebvre kept barking, so I went into the woods and found him, well, like you see him.”

“Do you have any idea who might have done this, who might have wanted to do such a thing?” Daniel asked.

He shook his head back and forth. “Eli was a good kid. ’Course, all parents say that, but for Eli it was true. Never had no trouble with him. Wasn’t very bright with his schoolwork, but he wanted to farm and didn’t care about ’rithmatic and all that. He loved animals. He loved his dog. He went everywhere with that dog. They went swimming together, hunting together, camping together, and he even let that dog sleep in his bed. He loved the cows, too, was always real good with them, real gentle. Everybody liked Eli.”

Apparently not everybody.

“Just don’t know what I’m going to tell his mother,” Mr. Smalley said.