PsyCop 1: Among the Living (7 page)

He shook his head from side to side like I’d said something funny. “Wine?”

“Wine? Um, no.” I pointed to my head. “Doesn’t agree with me.”

“Really?”

I sensed that he wanted me to give him some kind of Psych story to gnaw on, but I just wasn’t up for it. “Warwick laid into me for having contact with Gutierrez.”

I thought he would ask me how Warwick knew, but instead he just shrugged and drained his glass. “And you’re so worried about what Warwick thinks.”

“He is my boss.”

“How many years?”

I counted back, just to be sure. “Twelve.”

“You were in one of the original three PsyCop units when the whole thing was hardly more than a crazy experiment. Your hit rate was the only thing that kept the program alive, especially after that witchhunt exposé on the psychic gambling ring that Channel 2 aired. You think he doesn’t remember that?”

I sipped my ice water and thought back. Those things had all happened. But I didn’t recall anyone ever acting like they were anything special.

Marks leaned forward and his casual demeanor fell away. Intensity blazed in his dark eyes, and he grasped my forearm from across the table. “We’re gonna nail this bastard. Me and you. Carolyn and Lisa. And then see what kind of respect you command.”

I considered Marks. It was easy enough for him to be confident. This case was like any other to him: get evidence, put evidence together, solve case. But me? My evidence collection was on the fritz and it was really starting to piss me off.

Over dinner I managed to get marinara sauce on my new blazer, though it left less of a telltale mark than the mayonnaise had on my old one. But at least I found Marks to be pretty good company—a lot easier to talk to than other men I’d attempted to date. There’d been the record store clerk who got squeamish when he found out I carried a gun. And the hairdresser who couldn’t stop making wisecracks about my handcuffs. But Marks just commented on the food and gave me sultry looks between every bite he took. I could handle that.

I followed him back to his place, a small second-floor condo on the lake. It looked more lived-in than the architect’s duplex, but just about as expensive. A phantom cat sat on his radiator, tail lashing back and forth, but other than that we were alone.

“It’s good,” I said, happy to get out of that new sportcoat. I threw it over the arm of his burgundy leather couch. “No one here but us.”

Marks grinned as if he’d been waiting for me to say something spooky all night. He loosened his tie like he was doing a striptease, then pulled it off and let it fall in a silk heap on top of my jacket. I was relieved that he wasn’t compulsively neat. “C’mere,” he said. He put his arm around me, led me to a floor-to-ceiling window and pulled open a set of vertical blinds.

The lake spread out before us, tiny lights flashing here or there where a boat floated at anchor, and the yellow grids of high rise windows glowing in my peripheral vision. I’m not usually one to go out of my way to see the sights, but the view from Marks’ window was pretty nice. “Wow.”

His hands slipped around my middle as I said it, and my breath hitched as he pulled my shirt from my waistband. I felt his palms glide over my bare stomach and I shivered as he fit himself to the curve of my back, his breath warm on my neck.

I tried to turn around and face him, but he had me spread up against the plate glass window and there was no way I’d be able to move unless he let me. He pressed into me harder, grazing the nape of my neck with his teeth as his hands slid higher. His fingers closed over my nipples and he took them gently, just rolling them, rolling, rolling, as his teeth combed my neck and the bulge of his cock rubbed against the back of my pants.

I reached back over my shoulder with one hand to see if I could touch him, stroke him, anywhere. But I was splayed like a bug on the glass and couldn’t do anything but writhe while Marks’ hands played over my chest and his mouth seared tingling trails over my neck. Eventually I stopped trying and just pressed my cheek into the window, my breath fogging the lake skyline until it took on the spectral look of the dead world that dogged my existence.

Marks teased my nipples until they were stiff and then squeezed them harder—just a little—until I groaned aloud and pushed my ass back against him. He pressed his teeth into me and held me there by my neck while his hands slid downward and made short work of my fly. My slacks pooled around my ankles and my cock stood out in my boxer briefs, the tip butting against the cool glass through the thin fabric.

Once my pants were off, Marks’ hands slid up my sides, along my ribs. They crossed themselves over my chest as he pressed himself into my back from chin to thigh. “Just stay there,” he said, his voice low and rough. “I want to get you off.”

Had he actually said that? Had anyone ever said that to me before? Ever? Another of my breaths bloomed against the window as Marks dropped to his knees behind me and took the waistband of my underwear between his teeth. My damp fingertips squeaked at the glass, searching for something to grasp, while Marks’ goatee whispered across the skin of my bare ass as he tugged my underwear down. The briefs got caught over my hard-on, which was now sticking up at an angle, and he nibbled around the plane of my hip and the bony crest of my pelvis as he worked at undressing me. My cock snapped free and the glass was colder than I thought it would be, though maybe the smear of precome I was painting there was giving me a chill.

His head dipped low as he wedged it under my butt and pressed his lips against my inner thigh, trailing his hot tongue in slow swashes that inched higher and higher. My legs trembled as I stepped out of the underwear and spread my feet, the length of my cock now forced vertically between my belly and the glass that was no longer cold; the heat of my body had warmed it.

Marks’ warm, damp breath enveloped the back of my balls as he sighed, and then his tongue was there, teasing at them as they shifted inside my scrotum, which wrinkled at the touch of his mouth. He kissed them and laved them and bathed them with his tongue, and all the while I jammed my cock against his window, squeaking it up, then down, and wishing there was something warm or wet or fleshy against it instead of a pane of hard, smooth glass.

“Please,” I mumbled against the window while his tongue traced the divot between my balls.

“Please what?” he said, his mustache tickling me right below the asshole while his hot breath had me squirming.

Damn him for making me say it. “Suck me,” I said, and it hardly even sounded like my own voice saying something so porno. He reached a hand around the front of me just enough to press my stiff cock downward and aim it between my thighs, toward his mouth. He led with his chin and could hardly reach me, but my whole body bucked against the glass when he dragged his lower lip over my cockhead, swirled at it with his tongue, and teased my slit between long, leisurely sucks of the tip.

“Please, oh God. Please do it deep.”

He slid his hot mouth from me and then flipped me around, one strong hand keeping me from tripping over the wad of clothing at my feet. “That’s right,” he said, caressing the side of my cock with his cheek. “I want to look up into your face while you come.”

And then my awkwardness increased exponentially as I realized Jacob Marks was gonna stare at me while my cock sank into his throat. He was gorgeous—simply beautiful. The most handsome man I’d ever been with, that I ever even dreamed I’d be with. And yet it was easier to spread myself wide open and half naked on that damn window than it was to look into his eyes.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on the rhythm he set, on the exquisite suction he maintained and the way he opened his throat every few strokes to take me all the way in. But then I heard a murmur of distant laughter—maybe just some tourists on the lake, but maybe not—and I opened my eyes again to keep myself with Marks, anchored in the present, among the living.

I grabbed his short hair, struggling to find something to hold on to, and he grasped me by the hips and sucked hard. My whole body tensed, poised on a painful brink, and then everything crashed open, my hips bucking as Marks rode out my orgasm. His fingers sank deep into my hipbones with a force that’d leave bruises.

Marks pulled off slowly and gave my wet, red cockhead a lingering lick while I stared down at him, dazed. He looked up at me for a long moment, and then kissed it again. And licked it. I pulled back from him, quelling the need to giggle at the sensitivity. “Stop it, Marks. You’re killing me.”

He sat back on his heels, still fully clothed, and licked his lips. “Why don’t you call me Jacob?” he suggested.

Chapter 10

Marks—Jacob, I mean—snores a little. I think I was relieved to learn it. If he was absolutely perfect, I’d have to be suspicious.

I woke around six, and while it would’ve been nice to get a few more hours in, I was surprised to have slept as soundly as I had. I hadn’t spent a night in another man’s bed since…I thought back. Maybe eight years earlier. That college professor who was always high—on weed, not Auracel. That was back before they even made Auracel and I’d needed to take Neurozamine with a Benadryl chaser to shut out the voices.

Eight years. I felt old. Jacob mumbled a little, as if my stirring had bothered him, and then rolled onto his back and settled into the long, slow breaths of deep sleep.

I stared at his gorgeous profile and told myself, yet again, that I was actually sleeping with him and that he’d been the one to initiate it. Maybe I’d just been poised for a little good luck. It was about time.

I’d showered and made a pot of coffee by the time Jacob shuffled out of his bedroom in nothing but a pair of blue paisley boxers. “It’s seven o’clock,” he said, squinting. “Are you crazy?”

“They did treat me for schizophrenia for a couple of years before they figured out I was talking to real dead people,” I replied. I’d meant it as a joke, but it’d come out kind of edgy.

Jacob looked me in the eye for a long moment before he sighed and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Well, you’re not a kid in an institution anymore,” he said. He took a sip of the coffee and winced, then scooped a few spoonfuls of sugar into it. “You’re a cop. You can speed. You can carry a gun. You can tell other people what to do and they’d damn well better do it.”

Maybe in his world. He was a big, strapping guy with a deep voice and a piercing gaze that could nail you to the wall. I just talked to dead people.

But Jacob didn’t see me that way. Psychs were like shiny new toys to him, endlessly fascinating and inspiring. If he felt cheated that he only had access to five senses, he didn’t let it slow him down much. And why should it if he could demand the services of two federally licensed Psychs and a suspended cop with the elusive gift of
sí-no
?

“Someone told Warwick I was talking to Gutierrez,” I reminded him as he speed-dialed Carolyn.

“And?”

“And he said he’d suspend me if….”

“Carolyn? Hey. Let’s get together at my place today for some brainstorming. No, you don’t have to bring anything. Mmm hm. Yeah, I do have some ideas, but it’ll be easier to just show you when you get here. Right. Bye bye.”

I got Lisa’s number from the Fifth Precinct and convinced her to take a cab over to Jacob’s. She insisted that there wasn’t much she could do without her gun and badge, but I reminded her that she’d been at the Blakewood scene and seen the victim with her own eyes. We’d just bat some ideas around, I told her. I hung up and looked at Jacob. He had that grin on. Okay, and maybe I was also a little curious about how far
sí-no
could actually be taken.

The girls arrived at Jacob’s around noon and we convened around a table full of salty Chinese take-out. “So you’ve played the
sí-no
game most of your life,” Carolyn said, “but haven’t had any formal training.”

Lisa nodded. I think Carolyn intimidated her. Heck, Carolyn intimidated me a little.

“We’ll need to be careful how we phrase our reports,” Carolyn said. “You’re not officially part of this investigation at this time.” She looked at me. “Unless you think you can convince Sergeant Warwick…?”

“Not a chance. I thought he was gonna have an aneurysm.”

“Fine. Then we’ll just need to be aware that anything Lisa says is unofficial. Nothing appears in the report. If her talents lead us to the murderer, fine. But we’ll have to scrape together some kind of evidence that could’ve plausibly led us there besides the
sí-no
game. Got it?”

“Carolyn can’t simply lie,” Jacob winked at her. “The downside to her talent.”

Carolyn ignored him and consulted her notepad. “Let’s establish some boundaries first.” She fired off a series of questions about current events and other factual things to establish a baseline.

“Does Lawrence Avenue run North-South?”

“No.”

“Do I have an aunt named Mabel?”

“Yes.”

“Has Jacob ever owned a dog?”

“No.”

Carolyn looked to Jacob, and he nodded. “Poor baby,” she said, the corner of her mouth twitching. He smiled. Carolyn turned her attention back to Lisa. “Am I happy?”

Lisa stared.

“Well?”

“I—I dunno.”

“Too broad,” Carolyn said, scribbling notes. “Do I like my job?”

“Y-yes.”

“You just let me unnerve you—don’t worry about it. Not everything can be answered yes or no. Sometimes it’s both. Sometimes it’s neither. And sometimes the question is just too vague.”

It occurred to me that Carolyn would make a good Psych Coach. She was just so nonchalant about it all, and yet you could see she had all eight cylinders firing. Plus, she knew if you were lying. Okay, maybe that part was a little bit scary.

“All right. Let’s look at the case. You understand you are here in an unofficial capacity.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s focus on the killer. Is the killer male?”

“Yes.”

I thought about the anal penetration and blushed. Lisa knew I was with Jacob. And Carolyn? Jacob said he was out to her. So she probably knew, too, because if the subject had come up at all, it wasn’t as if he could hedge. I blushed harder and drank some soda, tilting the huge cup back to hide my face.