PsyCop 1: Among the Living (2 page)

His tongue tasted beery, but pleasantly so, like he’d just had a drink or two at the party. I wished I could drink, but while alcohol loosens me up just like anyone else, it also amps up the voices. I don’t drink.

He got a hand around my waist and slipped the other around the back of my jeans, kneading my ass hard, showing me his strength. I grazed his lower lip with my teeth and he grunted a little into my mouth, ground his fly against mine.

Marks backed me into the towel rack, which settled right beneath my shoulder blades, and started kissing me hard, rubbing up against me while his sweet tongue swept over my bitter one.

I was the one to fumble with buttons and zippers, to expose our stiff cocks to the ambient light of my ex-partner’s bathroom. Marks seemed pleased enough to let our experience take him where it would and to have me call the shots. But then again, Marks could probably pick people up whenever he was horny. I had to jump on any chance that presented itself to me and hope I was on Auracel—or at least able to get my hands on some. I really hate threesomes when one of the participants is dead.

Marks had a thick, fat cock, rock hard and ruddy. Mine had a certain delicacy and grace beside his as he took them both in his hands and pumped them, hard, even strokes, while I cupped his jaw between my palms and languidly tongued his mouth.

He knows, I thought, and though his grip was harder than I might have liked, my body still responded to it, thighs clenching and warmth building at the base of my spine. He knows who I am. And he knows what I do. And he’s willing to jack me off anyway.

I trailed my fingertips over his scalp, through his closely-shorn hair, and he groaned into my mouth, his hands moving faster on us. My breath hissed in and I caressed the tips of his ears and the curve of his jaw with a feathery touch. I sucked on his tongue.

He pulled back to watch himself as he came, his jiz rolling down over his knuckles as he clenched his cock hard, and I suddenly liked his face a whole lot better. Open like that, and vulnerable. Not the handsome, self-assured detective who always got his man, but just a guy jacking off with me. His mouth was so pretty—a little swollen now, from kissing me. I imagined it closing around the head of my cock, taking me into its soft, wet warmth, and then my hips gave a twitch and I was coming. It was a pretty energetic spurt, given the amount of drugs in my system, and the first rope of come managed to paint itself down the front of Marks’ T-shirt and across the leg of his black jeans.

I sniggered a little as I shot again, more weakly though, just over his bare forearm, and again. Marks stared at me, our sticky cocks loose in his grip, and then he broke into a big grin, too. My vision was going all starry around the edges and I was glad of the towel rack behind me, and the big cop in front of me. I still had my arms draped over his shoulders, and couldn’t think of any good reason to let go.

Someone banged on the door. “Bayne? You in there?”

I pressed my forehead into Marks’ shoulder and exhaled carefully. I could’ve ignored it, if it was anyone else but Sergeant Warwick. But that voice, in that tone, would need to be answered. “Yeah, Sarge.”

Marks gave my cock a slow, teasing stroke. It gave up a final bead of semen.

“I need you at the station. Now.”

On a Sunday? When we were all at a party, some of us drunk, some of us pill-buffered, and some of us getting lucky? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be pretty. “Okay,” I said. I considered dropping something into the toilet to make it sound like I was taking a big dump, but then I’d either have to fish the object back out or leave it in there to screw up Maurice’s plumbing. Instead, I tugged at the toilet paper roll and tried to make it rattle. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

We both listened to Warwick’s footsteps as he headed back upstairs. Marks’ face had shifted back into cop-mode, his shrewd, dark eyes scanning the empty air in front of him as he analyzed whatever theories he was assembling inside his head. “Something big just went down.” He pulled a yard of toilet paper from the roll and wiped my jiz off his leg.

Chapter 2

Sergeant Warwick was a square, middle-aged man with a thick neck. His graying blond hair was thinning on top, but at least he had the decency not to subject us all to a bad comb-over. He sat behind his clunky metal desk, rolling a pen between his thumb and forefinger like he did every time something really pissed him off. “Bayne, this is your new partner, Lisa Gutierrez. She’s worked homicide four years now, in Las Vegas and Albuquerque. Gutierrez, Victor Bayne.”

Lisa Gutierrez looked as Latina as she sounded, her long, dark hair pulled back from her fresh-scrubbed, no-makeup face so hard it almost made my head hurt to look at it. She was young, mid-twenties, and my guess was that she’d been a uniformed cop in her previous job. She must have done something extraordinarily special to land her current assignment—a job that a thousand other people lost out on, at least according to Marks.
 

I tried to look really focused as I shook her hand, but maybe I was just kinda making my pale blue eyes bug out at her instead. Three frigging Auracels, three, not even counting the one I’d had the night before, and the whole world seemed like it was made out of cotton candy with some interesting sprinkles thrown in for shits and grins. I’d come right over from the party and I hoped to God I didn’t smell like sex. I thought our encounter was brief and furtive enough that I probably didn’t. I considered taking up smoking to cover any inappropriate smells I might someday harbor. I didn’t necessarily have to inhale if I didn’t want to.

“Are you medicated?” Warwick said. Because it’s so professional to accuse someone of being high right as you introduce them to their new partner. It’s some kind of newfangled team-building exercise, all the rage in L.A.

“I was at my partner’s retirement party,” I snapped, deciding I would have to admit to one Auracel, but not three. They couldn’t prove I’d taken three without a really expensive and time-consuming drug test. “What do you think, I wanted that idiot who hung herself in his garage to follow me around the whole afternoon? That’s my idea of a great party, lemme tell you.”

Warwick twirled the pen harder while his jaw worked. “Detective Bayne is authorized, when he’s off duty, for the use of Auracel…” he started to explain.

“An anti-psyactive,” said Gutierrez. “I know what it is. Now tell me what’s so unusual about this case that you’d call Bayne in instead of assigning it to the team on call.”

Warwick blinked, and then pulled out a manila folder, opened it, scanned the contents and began gathering his thoughts. I stuck my hand in my pocket in order to stop myself from giving Gutierrez a high-five, since she seemed so clipped and professional that she’d probably leave me waving in the wind. But damn, I liked her.

* * *

I was happy to let Gutierrez drive since I was legally impaired, although a breathalyzer wouldn’t have been able to pick up on it. She was just in from Albuquerque and didn’t have a car yet, so we took mine. She had to move the seat up three whole clicks.

“That was…um…cool,” I said as I got into the car, wondering if I could possibly sound any more retarded. “The way you got Warwick off my case.”

She glanced at me. “Your pupils are totally dilated. You should put on some sunglasses before you damage your retinas.”

Maybe she was genuinely concerned, or maybe she wasn’t so lax on the whole drug thing after all. She had that deadpan delivery that was kind of hard to read. I rummaged around my glove compartment and found an old pair of shades crusted with mysterious dust. How did things get dusty while they were shut inside a glovebox? I also saw half a tab of Auracel cradled inside the hinge. I took a pen and flicked it out to stop it from being crushed when I closed the door, and then moved my registration over to cover it up. Gutierrez’ eyes were on the tiny GPS navigation screen. Also dusty, I noted.

“It’d be faster if you turned up Clark,” I said.

Gutierrez ignored my directions, preferring instead to trust the Magellan. She’d turned the audio down, but still glanced at the map occasionally.

“Were you a PsyCop at your last job?” I asked.

A little smile played on her lips, and she was actually kinda cute in that moment, like a kid sister. “They don’t even have ’em in New Mexico.” She pronounced Mexico with an “X” in the middle, like I would. I wondered if the “Me-HEE-co” pronunciation was reserved for the country.

We passed Clark again, a diagonal street that defied the grid of the rest of the city, and I sighed. “Then how’d you land this job? Not that I’m complaining, but I heard the competition was pretty…fierce.” I wondered if she thought I was crass enough to say “stiff.”

Gutierrez shrugged and turned on Lawrence. Her jacket didn’t quite fit her in the shoulders. She was petite and a little stocky, would probably need something tailored. I wondered how I knew that, given that I owned only two sportcoats and my sloppy dress shirts were about twenty years out of style. I figured it was the Auracel thinking for me. And then I realized I was still in jeans, a big no-no given the department’s dress code. That’s what they got for calling me away from a party on the opposite side of the city from my apartment.

“My track record’s good,” she said. “Beyond good. And besides,” she gave me a sly look. “I count as two minorities: a woman and a Hispanic. Your boss’s got his quotas to fill, just like everybody.”

I stared through my dusty plastic lenses at a string of Indian grocers and sari shops and noted that I could kind of see over one lens but not the other. Therefore, the shades were probably crooked as well as dusty. Charming. “Our boss.” I tried to straighten out the glasses and failed.

The Magellan beeped as Gutierrez missed a turn onto Artesian and then readjusted itself to plot her a new course to the scene. I figured she must’ve been sightseeing and just passed it by.

“The Auracel,” she said, taking the next right, “it works for you?”

“It makes the dead people shut up,” I told her. And, by golly, the high was just an added bonus. I didn’t tell her that. Oh, and it only muffled the ambient dead people. If I really, really wanted to, I could try real hard, pick one out and make him spill his guts. But I didn’t mention that, either. A guy’s gotta have some boundaries.

She nodded and pulled up behind a pair of squad cars. I glanced down Artesian and saw a pair of orange-striped sawhorses blocking the area and a surly resident getting nasty with the uniformed officers for not letting him park in front of his apartment building. Good thing Gutierrez missed that turn or we would’ve still been struggling to get around that moron to flash our badges and get onto the scene.

Even though it wasn’t my regular shift, I knew the men on duty, and thankfully they weren’t weird around Psychs. I introduced Gutierrez and let the officer in charge walk us through the scene.

“The victim was found by his downstairs neighbor. Says she pounded on the ceiling with her broom handle so long that she put a hole through the plaster trying to get him to turn his music down. Came up to tell him to his face and found him…well, you can see for yourself.”

“The door was unlocked,” Gutierrez said, more than asked, and the officer nodded. She stopped at the door to slip on a pair of latex gloves and plastic booties. I looked at my jeans as I slipped the booties on over my holey Converse All-Stars and wondered if I’d gotten any jiz on them in Maurice’s bathroom. I didn’t bother with gloves since I didn’t plan on touching anything.

Gutierrez paused in the victim’s vestibule and then stepped aside to let me enter. She stared straight ahead of her into a living room where a couple of techs were setting down numbered cards around a sofa-bed and snapping photos. I came in behind her and nearly had to scoop my jaw up off the floor.

The victim was splayed buck naked on his red velvet bedspread like a piece of fucking performance art. Shards of mirror surrounded him, at first making it appear that a disco ball had taken vengeance on an unsuspecting naked guy. But on closer inspection, it was obvious that every piece had been painstakingly placed around the body so that, from the proper angle, the whole thing became a glittering, psychedelic swirl.

It might’ve even been fun to look at, given my current state of medication, if it weren’t for the hot dead guy in the middle of it all. Not a mark on him, but obviously quite dead.

Gutierrez was already getting briefed. The victim was one Anthony Blakewood, twenty-seven, Caucasian, single, worked downtown in the Loop at a brokerage firm, no known enemies.

“Sexual penetration?” Gutierrez asked the Medical Examiner’s tech, a thin girl with a blond ponytail who was still snapping photos.

“We haven’t flipped the body yet, but it’s a good possibility. The Coroner will have the final word on that.”
 

I fixed my gaze on a completely irrelevant nail hole on the wall and pretended they weren’t talking about anything gay. I always figure I’m going to get some kind of telltale look on my face and tip somebody off about my own “lifestyle.” As far as I knew, the only one besides Hotshot Marks who might’ve guessed about me was Maurice, and Maurice just didn’t talk about those kinds of things, period. That was that.

I then noticed that Blakewood had a little collection of miniature furniture with Scotty dogs painted on it, arranged on a semicircular shelf in the corner. Yeah. He was queer.

I wondered what I had in my apartment that would incriminate me to a casual observer. Not much, surprisingly. I tended not to hold onto stuff, because stuff usually held vibes, and vibes are a pain in the ass.

I almost ran my fingers through my hair again, but stopped myself just in time to keep from contaminating the crime scene by shedding. I jammed my hands into my pockets instead. The tech said that judging by the open container of lube nearby she’d just spotted, the victim had likely been penetrated, though the Coroner would have to verify that. A psycho murderer who lubed. How considerate.

Chapter 3

I stared up at my featureless white ceiling as I waited for the Seconal I’d taken to kick in. I’d loaned my car to Gutierrez with the stipulation that she wake me no earlier than noon. The victim hadn’t spoken to me while I was at the apartment, and I’d taken three Auracels I needed to sleep off.