PsyCop 6: GhosTV (24 page)

What if my hand had drawn that door of its own accord, kind of like the notebook pages full of
no no no?
Or what if I was tweaking so hard on white light—hard enough to start seeping ectoplasm—that I was catching glimpses of ghost doors?

Could buildings have subtle bodies? If they did, it would explain why spirits didn’t sink through floors and keep on falling through everything solid until they reached the molten core of the earth.

Weariness washed over me at the thought of how much I didn’t know, and I almost sagged against the wall—but I thought better of it, seeing as how it was the wall with the not-door on it. I glanced at the bathtub and considered perching on the edge of it, just for a second, while I knuckled grit out my eyes and wished that Calgon really could take me away…and then, on impulse, I pushed the shower curtain open with my pen.

Debbie had at least ten kinds of shampoo and shower gel—why was I not surprised—and one of those nylon puff things dangling from the showerhead. And on top of that…jewelry. Someone had thrown a necklace over the sprayer.

It wasn’t the fact that a necklace was hanging in the shower that was unusual. Who hasn’t stumbled into the shower with a watch on and tossed it onto the nearest convenient surface? Debbie’s rooms were brimming with makeup and accessories, so it wasn’t the presence of the necklace that was puzzling. It was the necklace itself.

The style…totally not her.

I took a quick peek in the direction of the medicine cabinet, where some earrings and necklaces littered the ledge above the sink. Debbie had a specific “look” going on. She wore funky chains and polka-dot-ted, studded things in black and chrome and bubblegum-pink plastic. The necklace in the shower was beaded, but not the big, round, retro-fifties fake pearls I’d expect to see on Debbie. This necklace was turquoise, onyx and sard seed beads. I almost touched it—almost—as if my hand might be able to tell whether the semi-precious stones were real. But of course they were. I could practically feel them sing-ing to my sixth chakra.

Hippy dippy stuff. Not Debbie’s bag at all.

I held my gloved hand about an inch away from the dangling necklace, sucked some white light through my third eye, and tried to see if any impressions came to me. They didn’t, not like the glowing blood spatter on my carpet. What did I expect? I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t a precog.

“Vic? We gotta get going.” Jacob was in the bathroom doorway. I glanced at him. “Did you find something?”

I cut my eyes back to the necklace. “I dunno. Take a picture of this.” He raised his phone and snapped, though he didn’t seem nearly as curious about it as I was. Between him and me, Jacob might be better at picking out a tie, but I’d been the one with the mohawk and the bad attitude, albeit many years before. I knew when something didn’t belong in an alternative chick’s wardrobe.

We waded our way out of there through the sea of wannabe-Psychs.

They were getting a stern lecture from Faun Windsong to not touch anything, even as one of them was groping through Debbie’s desk drawer and another one put his fingerprints all over the windowsill.

“Let’s get back to our room,” I told Jacob. “I think the day is catching up to me.” We passed by the soda machines on our way there, and I managed to slip out of my latex gloves and pitch them into the trash, with the apple cores and granola bar wrappers, without anyone being any the wiser to my most recent ectoplasmic spurt.

“I’m just gonna rest my eyes for a second,” I told Jacob.

A tap sounded on our door as I was taking off my shoes. I ignored it, so Jacob did another cardio-healthy bout of climbing the furniture to answer it. Dreyfuss. “Good thing you processed that scene before the Odd Squad got there,” he said. “You know how it is when the sixth sense is the only sense someone’s using. Common sense goes right out the window. And you weren’t the only ones who totally scored.” He reached behind his back, and for a split second I thought he was reaching for a small-of-the-back concealed holster—but the thing he pulled out, with a very self-satisfied smile, wasn’t even remotely gun-shaped. It was a netbook.

Not just any netbook: a silver netbook covered in stick-on sequins like a twelve-year-old girl’s cell phone. Three guesses as to whose computer it was. And two of those guesses, I didn’t need. “What about you two?” he said. “Find anything juicy?” A door that wasn’t there. Which I didn’t want to volunteer…because it meant nothing? It might mean nothing. Or it might have something to do with my player-piano hand. My brain insisted Dreyfuss was working with us, and while I didn’t need to be his buddy, I did need to share evidence. But I wasn’t sure what the door was evidence of—something to do with PsyTrain, or something to do with me. And I wanted to keep the me-evidence to myself.

But Debbie March was missing now, too. So I couldn’t. I tore the sketch out of my pad and gave it to him. He glanced at it and said,

“Red splatter?”

“Hair dye.”

Thanks to the Miss Clairol, he didn’t notice the extra door.

“I photographed the scene.” Jacob said. “I’ll send you the pictures.” Dreyfuss turned to go and clocked his hip on the GhosTV. “And what about this?”

“I saw the one repeater,” I told him. “That’s it.” Liar, liar, I know. But I told myself that Jacob’s veiny forehead and Dreyfuss’ weird eyeball trick had nothing to do with the case, so it didn’t matter if I told him or not. Same with the astral projection.

“Maybe no news is good news,” Dreyfuss said. “I’d prefer to keep telling myself no one’s gonna turn up dead.” He patted the top of the console, and went back to his room.

Jacob stared at the door for a few seconds after Dreyfuss closed it, then said, “He almost sounded like a human being for a minute there.”

“Tell that to the wire tap.”

“I wish I could run him past Carolyn. She’d know how to separate truth from the bullshit.” Thankfully, that was the extent of what Jacob had to say about Dreyfuss. He started to get undressed and ended up knocking the crate lid on the floor with his elbow. “I’m gonna try to organize some of this stuff,” he told me. “Maybe move one of the dressers into the hall.”

I grunted, and he knew me well enough to take it as, “Knock yourself out.” I was so drained, both from working a case I had a personal stake in, and from the time change that supposedly shouldn’t have affected me at all, that “resting my eyes” went the route it usually does when I’m at home in that recliner of Jacob’s I’ve taken over. The light, the strange bed, the sound of Jacob moving furniture…none of that could prevent me from conking out so hard and fast it felt like one of those rides where the bottom falls out.

Later—maybe much later, given the time warp that happens when sleep hits hard—Jacob pressed into bed behind me. We’ve always fit together well. My last boyfriend was always bitching about my elbows and knees, especially when he was crabby because his pot dealers had run dry, but Jacob probably couldn’t even feel my pesky bones through his solid wall of muscle. I sighed back into him. Falling into bed after a long day is great. Settling in with Jacob wrapped around me, though…that’s amazing.

He snuggled up harder, and the snuggling wasn’t the only thing that was hard. It felt like someone had nestled a salami between the cheeks of my ass for safekeeping. I smiled to myself and enjoyed the warm, stiff length of his heavy cock against me. That was about all we would enjoy, given the fact that if I had even one iota of spare energy, I intended to use it in finding Lisa, and not getting my rocks off. Plus, there was no lube.

Jacob’s mouth pressed into the back of my neck, and an electric thrill shot down my spine. “What do you think you’re you doing?” I said.

He mostly mumbled, but I made out, “I love the way you feel.” The sensation of the words against my skin played along some poorly mapped erogenous zone, and that combined with his sneaky flat-tery—in an arena where I so sorely needed it—made my body start to respond to his subtle grinding. My nuts hitched, and that telltale tingle started at the base of my cock.

Still, it felt like I should be getting some rest, not some jollies. “Here?” I said. “Seriously?”

“Please…don’t say no.”

He sounded awfully forlorn. I figured the investigation must’ve been wearing on him. Hell, if it meant that much to him, I’d give him a quick beej so we could both get some rest. He’d probably sleep better without that huge boner weighing him down, anyway. I started to roll over, but Jacob had fit himself against my back curve for curve so close I couldn’t muster the leverage to move. “Okay,” I said, and pushed back to get him to give me some room. He didn’t. “I’m trying to go down on you, but I can’t do it if I’m facing the other way.”

“Don’t just get me off…that’s not what I want.” He flicked his hips and slid that stiff piece of meat up and down my ass crack again. It felt like skin on skin.

“It’s no big deal,” I said. “C’mon. I want to.” He trailed his fingertips down my arm, and my skin danced like we were rubbing socks on a carpet to create static. “Don’t you want me?” Talk about a conversation I was tempted to deflect with a well-placed sarcastic comment. I couldn’t do it, though. Not the way he sounded.

Raw. Really raw. “Sex just isn’t on the top of my list right now. When this is all over, once we get home—”

“When you were talking to that guy….”

I knew exactly which guy he meant. The little doughy guy with the Grey Flannel cologne. “Right, I’m sure I looked like a big idiot playing sexy-cop for Halloween. Are you giving me shit about that? ’Cos he was just about to tell me something important.”

“I dream about you looking at me like that.”

I shoved against him to try and turn around to get a look at him now, but it was like shoving against the side of a building. “I don’t look at anybody like that in real life, mister, because I look like a huge fake doing it.”

“Really? You weren’t into him?”

“What? No, I wasn’t into him.” If I were single, and itching for some company? I supposed I wouldn’t turn him down. But he wasn’t anyone I’d do a double-take at and think, wow, that guy’s tasty. Not like Jacob.

“I thought…when you were inside me…I didn’t think I could satisfy you.”

Cripes, is that was this whole thing was about? “Jacob, that was like…I dunno, days ago. You’re reading too much into it. It was just different from our usual. That’s all.”

“You might find someone with a sweeter ass….”

“Are you high?” It was just an expression, but once I’d blurted it out, I realized he did actually sound kind of strange. In an attempt to get a look at his eyes and see if maybe he’d been sampling my Valium, I pushed with my shoulder, hard, and he still didn’t budge. “Scoping out a sweeter ass couldn’t be farther from my mind. You have a great ass. Beyond hot.”

He ran his fingers up and down my forearm again, and his touch sent such thrills down my spine he might as well have been stroking my cock. He forced his fingertips between my fingers to clench his palm against the back of my hand, and the way my hips bucked from the feel of his fingers parting mine, I could swear I was getting my legs spread instead. Something was going on. Some byproduct of me sucking white light all day, most likely, some fluke that left me as hypersensitive as a drilled-down tooth.

“Besides,” I added, “who said I wasn’t perfectly happy with the way things were?” Not that I’ve ever thought of myself as a “bottom,” but him pounding me really was my idea of a good time.

“Are you happy?”

“Yeah.” The need to kiss him flooded over me, because he shouldn’t have needed to ask me that. He should have known, and if he couldn’t tell that he was everything to me, it was my fault, not his.

I craned my neck, but couldn’t reach him. “Kiss me,” I said, and the mammoth hard-on that was cozied up to my ass felt gargantuan as I strained to find Jacob’s lips. He kissed me at the hairline with that fine, generous mouth of his, then began working his way forward, kissing around the back of my neck, below my ear, along the corner of my jaw. By the time he fit his lips to mine—not perfectly, but against the corner of my mouth—I was as hard as he was.

His tongue swept over my lower lip, and the taste of his mouth washed over me. I was disappointed when he let go of my hand, with that strangely appealing tingle-touch he had going on…but not for long. He reached between us to line himself up and fit us together even closer. Him inside me.

“You don’t need to change things up to keep me interested,” I said.

“The way you smell, the way you taste, the way you breathe when you’re turned on…the feel of your cock plowing me ’til I’m sore—that’s all I need. Not role-playing. Not games.”

“You’ll get bored.”

“Come on, you know me better than that. Yeah, my attention span isn’t stellar, but I have the same cereal for breakfast every day and watch the same scene of the same porno every time I jerk off. You know that’s the truth.”

He pushed into me, so big I would have sworn he’d decided to add fisting to our repertoire to incorporate the variety I’d just said I didn’t want—except that there wasn’t any pain. Pressure, yeah. Delicious pressure, stretching pressure, everywhere I liked it. Plus he’d wrapped his arm around me so he could tug on my ballsack while he fucked me. Since I’m not double-jointed I couldn’t really touch him anywhere but his arm, so that left me with nothing to do but writhe around on the end of his huge dick while I hurtled toward my peak.

“If anything…” damn, he was nailing me perfectly, each and every thrust, “I would think you’d get sick of doing all the work.”

“I get off on making you come.” He raked his teeth along my spine, then clamped his mouth onto the meaty part between my neck and shoulder and started sucking on me. I felt like I might implode from the sheer goodness of it.

“How can you just say things like that?” I was breathing hard by then, and he stopped diddling my balls and started jacking my cock, instead. “Sometimes I can’t believe the things you say out lou—yeah, right there. Oh God.”

Before I knew it I was shooting, and the orgasm was as hard and sudden as a lightning bolt. I soared, or maybe I floated, and even though it was just for a brief, shining moment, time stretched in that way time does when some small miracle has occurred.