PsyCop 2: Criss Cross (13 page)

While I tried to look anywhere but at Roger, the vanishing point of the universe seemed to center on his hazel eyes. “Hi, Victor,” he said, and he stretched his far arm out over the hood and held out a Starbucks’ cup toward me. “Would you like some coffee?”

My knees buckled and there was a roar. My first thought was that I’d been shot. But then I realized I was in my bed, and the room was dark except for the illumination that leaked in from a streetlight outside. And Jacob was shaking me, hard.

“What?” I said, trying to piece together what was real and what wasn’t.

Jacob stopped rattling me, but he held me at arm’s length, his fingers digging into the meat of my upper arms.

“What?” I asked him again.

“Are you awake?” Jacob growled.

“I’m awake,” I said, wishing I didn’t need to know the reason for him waking me but supposing there wouldn’t be any way out of it.

Jacob let go of me and my arms throbbed where he’d grabbed them. We both knelt in the center of the bed, and as he sat back on his heels, I made out a big black “X” through the hair in the center of his chest. I squinted at it and saw a dark trickle ooze down from the corner of the X and spread along the waistband of his immaculate white boxer briefs.

“Holy shit, you’re bleeding!” I lunged for the reading lamp on the bedside table and realized I was clutching a cheap plastic ballpoint pen so tightly that my nails had dug into my palm hard enough to break skin.

I stopped and stared at my hand in the dark, unable to grasp the significance of the pen.

Jacob reached past me and turned the light on. The pen tip shone dark red with his blood.

“What the fuck?” I threw the pen in disgust. It picked up no momentum at all and just clattered to the hardwood floor. I glanced wildly at the digital clock. 3:05 a. m. I looked at Jacob, who was poking through his chest hair at the red X I’d gouged into him.

“Were you having a nightmare?” he asked, inscrutably calm.

Images of Crash’s tattoos and Roger’s earnest face and firm, rounded ass spewed into the forefront of my memory. “Yeah. I mean, no. Just fucked-up dreams.”

Jacob grabbed a tissue and blotted his stomach. The tissue turned red.

“I’m sorry,” I said stupidly. “I’m so sorry.”

He seemed exhausted when he finally stopped smearing the blood around and met my eyes. “How much do you know about the execution I witnessed the other night?”

“What?” I tried performing some sort of check to see if I really was awake this time without doing anything too obvious like pinching myself. “Um, I dunno. Lethal injection, you said.”

Jacob held the wet, red glob of tissue to a spot on his ribs where the blood soaked it through. I grabbed another handful of tissues and handed them to him. “Hugo Cooper,” he said. “What do you know about him?”

“The murderer?” I would’ve felt like an ass if I admitted that sometimes the cases start blending together. It wasn’t a crime I’d personally worked, it wasn’t in my precinct, and it had happened so long ago that I was still trying to figure out how to act like a cop when it was all going down. “He kidnapped three women and he killed them.”

“Details,” Jacob prompted.

“I dunno. One got away. I guess that means he killed two, right? Or were there four to start with?”

Jacob stared at me hard, but I could only shake my head; I had no clue what he was getting at.

“We had a nickname for him down at the Twelfth. I was thinking maybe you’d heard it.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said, wishing he’d get up and see to the seeping gashes in his middle. “I really don’t remember.”

Jacob sighed. “It never went to the press. We’re careful things like that don’t leak out, otherwise there’d be melodramatic headlines, copycats, the works. But just among ourselves, we called him the Criss-Cross Killer.”

I looked at the giant bleeding X on him and my stomach sank.

“Oh.”

Jacob stood and made his way toward the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and did my best not to puke.

Chapter Eleven

Jacob and whatever few clothes he kept at my place were out of the apartment by five. He didn’t seem mad, exactly, but he had his cop-face on and my nonexistent interpersonal skills were no help in figuring out if he was leaving for now, or leaving for good. He said he was just going to go figure some things out. But how many guys have gone out for a pack of smokes and just kept on going?

Telling Jacob I was sorry didn’t do any good. And begging him to stay didn’t help. Punching the wall didn’t solve anything, either. So I took the handful of stones Crash had sold me and flung them out the living room window.

That felt good for about two seconds, but afterwards I was still me, and my life still sucked.

I wandered from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom and back about a dozen times, and then it occurred to me that Lisa could help me figure out what was going on. In fact, when you think about it, Lisa owed it to me to help me sort this shit out. It was her half-assed warnings that had made Jacob leave.

I called Lisa’s cell phone and left her about twenty “call me” messages. Okay, maybe thirty. I texted her. “NEED HELP,” and “CALL ME BACK,” and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say that I had any chance of typing successfully with my thumb.

I called the operator in Santa Barbara and found there was no listing for PsyTrain, the illustrious program that evidently didn’t let its participants have a shred of contact with the outside world. Convinced that they were turning Lisa into the next Patty Hearst, I called the night detective at the Fifth, a tough, nicotine-stained broad named Alice, who you don’t want to rub the wrong way. I talked her into tracking down PsyTrain’s phone number with a promise of a case of Diet Coke and a raspberry twist coffee cake.

I called PsyTrain.

Apparently they weren’t impressed enough with my credentials to put me through to Lisa. I realized that I probably should have lied and said I was Sergeant Warwick, or maybe even the Police Commissioner, but now it was too late.

I stared at my phone. I put on a pot of coffee and paced through my apartment. In the bedroom, my sheets were rumpled and splattered with Jacob’s blood. I wadded them up and stuffed them under the bed. I swallowed a scalding cup of black coffee in one long gulp and then poured myself another cup. Compared to the Starbucks I’d been drinking, it tasted thin and sour, even though I’d brewed it up strong.

I admitted to myself that I had no idea what to do next.

I had to know why I was cutting up Jacob. And I had to know why ghosts were on me like flies on shit. It seemed like Crash might be able to help me, but for every reason I could think of to call him, there another why I shouldn’t. He was legitimate -- both Jacob and Carolyn vouched for that. But he never seemed to get a handle on the way my sixth sense actually worked, since it was obviously different from his. And did I really think I could get Jacob back by turning to his ex-lover for yet another favor? Oh, and to top it off, Crash hated me.

There was always Carolyn. She seemed...smart. And blunt. Mostly blunt. It might be good to have the Lie Detector in my corner, but then she’d pipe up whenever I let one loose. Which was probably more often than even I realized.

The only one who could tell me was Lisa. I had to see Lisa.

The idea of driving to Santa Barbara alone was ludicrous -- I couldn’t read a map to save my life and I’d probably end up in Canada. But finding someone who can drive is a lot easier than figuring out why psychics do the fucked-up things they do.

Maurice. I trusted him enough to help me out. Sure, he’d ask questions. You don’t just drive someone across the country without asking questions. I paced back and forth in front of my bay window, the glaring overhead light bouncing my reflection back at me through the slats of my miniblinds as I tried to figure out how to approach him. I’d have to tell him that I was playing tic-tac-toe on Jacob in my sleep. He’d already figured out Jacob and I were together, but I’d have to come right out and say it. Awkward. But who else could I turn to?

My cell phone buzzed and I nearly tripped over a Camp Hell textbook trying to get to it. It was Lisa, it had to be. She knew how badly I needed to talk to her. She’d tell me what to do.

I flipped open the phone and my heart sank. It was Roger. “Hey,” he said. “I hope I’m not bothering you. But I was out jogging and I saw your lights on. Are you up for Starbucks?”

I nudged the blinds aside and looked out past the courtyard. A reversed image of my living room overlaid the gray, pre-dawn street below, but if I shifted my focus, I could pick out details. Traffic was sparse but regular, commuters who had to be downtown by seven. Roger stood on the far sidewalk in sweats and a T-shirt, waving.

Roger -- stupid Roger. I didn’t want Roger, I wanted Lisa. And yet, there Roger was, always willing to lend a hand. Or give me a ride.

I wondered if Roger was so eager to please that he’d take his midnight blue Crown Vic on a little spin to California. Then I wouldn’t have to burden Maurice with the gruesome details of my sex life.

“Coffee sounds great,” I said. “I’ll be down in five.”

***

Roger did his best not to look surprised when I asked him to drive me to California. He suggested flying, but commercial airlines were out of the question. All it would take was one airplane-bound ghost to turn me into an air-rage psycho.

“Driving it is,” he said, toasting me with his espresso. “I’ll need half an hour to get my things together. Bring a suit. We’ll want to look official when we get to the PsyTrain facility.”

I had a jacket that didn’t look like it’d be slept in, I thought.

“And your prescriptions -- have you got a couple of weeks’ worth?”

“I dunno. I’ll just have to make whatever I’ve got last. I’m not going back to the clinic and announcing that I’m going out of town.
 
I’ll just have to call them and reschedule my fasting bloodwork. I don’t want them involved. Warwick, either.”

“Warwick’s easy. You’re on medical leave. Just check in with him on your cell phone and act like you’re still in town.”

Hooray for the cell phone. If Maurice was looking for me, he’d try that number, too. I could just tell him I was on a lot of meds and he wouldn’t ask any questions. If Jacob was looking for me....

I didn’t know if Jacob would be looking for me or running as fast as he could in the opposite direction. He’d told me he just needed to get some rest so he could think clearly. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

Roger and I were packed up and on the road by noon. He went over the route to Santa Barbara with me and I glazed over somewhere in Oklahoma. I hadn’t taken one of my new pills since the night before. I figured I’d better save them in case things got ugly in the motel and I needed to knock myself out.

City traffic was spotty, as city traffic tends to be, but in another hour we’d hit the highway, passed through the suburbs, and were driving through cornfields and skirting small, rural towns and the occasional strip mall. Rural Illinois: corn country.

“I don’t want to pry,” Roger said, reaching to turn down the top-forty station that played more ads than music, “but why didn’t you ask Detective Marks to go to PsyTrain with you? He’s a lot more intimidating than I am. And if they’re being stubborn about letting you see Detective Gutierrez....”

Miss Mattie was more intimidating than Roger was. But I doubted he was fishing for a validation of his manliness. He wanted to know what was up with me and Jacob. “He’d probably want to go through the proper channels,” I said. “And I don’t have the time.”

“Really?” We passed a field dotted with cows. “I heard he wasn’t above bending the rules. Take that case with the shapeshifter where you used Detective Gutierrez’ abilities even after you were specifically told not to.”