“Well, I wouldn’t want to deprive you of a big television set. Maybe we’ll do this again.”
“All right. Can I stay here tonight? All my stuff’s here, and I’m kind of tired.”
“You may stay here tonight.”
“Thanks, Mom. Guess I’ll go to bed now. I’ve got school tomorrow.”
Jade merely nodded, then kissed her son goodnight. She waited until he left the room, and then turned to Roy and pointed to the can in his hand. “Have you got any real beer in the house?”
“Of course. All cops have to have real beer in the house at all times for their friends, or they’d lose their badges. Union rules.”
“Prove it.”
“Let’s go into the kitchen.”
Still keeping his now-empty can strategically placed in front of his bulging crotch, Roy led Jade into the kitchen, and then motioned for her to sit at the round oak table in the center of the room. He placed a stein in front of her, then took a beer from the refrigerator, opened it and filled her glass. He took another O’Doole’s for himself, and then sat down at the table across from her. He thought Jade looked distant, and the anxiety and tension he knew she must be feeling had become evident in her face as she stared down into the amber depths of the beer in the glass before her.
“Want to talk about it?” Roy continued quietly.
“Not just yet, Roy.”
“All right.”
They sat in silence, with Roy watching Jade as he sipped at his non-alcoholic beer. Jade stared at the tabletop, virtually unmoving except when she raised her glass to drink. She finished her first Budweiser, then rose and went to the refrigerator to get two more bottles. A half hour passed before she drained off the last beer, and then she looked up at Roy and said, “Max Jr. likes you.”
“I like him too.”
“He’s holding his hands too high.”
“What?”
“The boxing stance you taught him; he’s holding his hands too high. He’ll just get poked in the gut.”
Roy raised his eyebrows in mock outrage. “Well, thank you very much, Muhammad Ali. Right now I understand that he’s getting punched around a lot in the face.”
“Max Jr. told you that?”
“Yes. I wanted to teach him to protect his eyes, nose and teeth first, and then we’ll worry about his gut. Besides, all he has to do is get up the nerve to pull the trigger once on one of the little bastards who are pushing him around, and then he won’t have to worry about his gut or his head. He’s big, but big isn’t always enough. Sometimes, like in Max Jr.’s case, big just makes you a tempting target. He’s got good coordination. He could be a good fighter, if he wants to be.”
“My son isn’t a coward, Roy.”
“Nobody said he was,” Roy replied tersely, tensing slightly as he felt anger rising in him. “If you thought that was what I was implying, then I damn well resent it. Max Jr. is a gentle soul, and God knows we need more of them in the world. He just has to learn that gentle souls also have the right to defend themselves. He has to learn to give himself permission to do that, because now he’s afraid he’s going to seriously hurt somebody if he loses his temper and fights back. I’m trying to teach him how to defend himself with a measured response, without losing control. You treat him like a baby, for Christ’s sake, and so he acts like a baby. Then you worry and fuss because he’s acting the way you encouraged him to act.”
“Did Max Jr. tell you that too?”
“He didn’t have to tell me that. I know you don’t want to hear this, but sometimes it’s easier for a man to sense that kind of thing than it is for a woman. Give the kid a break and stop acting like such a mother.”
“Would you check on him for me, please?”
Roy flushed and shook his head in frustration. “See? That’s what I mean. The kid’s seventeen years old, Jade. He’s not going to smother in his blankets. If you’re so worried, go check on him yourself.”
“Would you do it for me? Please, Roy.”
Roy started to reply sharply, but cut himself off. There was something in the woman’s soft voice and the faint smile playing around the corners of her mouth that puzzled him. He was already sorry he had displayed anger, and he knew that how Jahli Aden raised her son was none of his business in any case. Rather than argue more, he rose and walked to the guest bedroom where Max Jr. was sleeping, then returned to the kitchen and sat down again at the table.
“Your boy is sleeping like a baby, if you’ll pardon the expression,” Roy said evenly as he stared down at the empty bottle in front of him. “Just what was the point of that exercise?”
“How big is your house?”
“What do you mean, how big is my house? You’ve seen it; you’re sitting in it.”
“Let me rephrase the question. Where’s your bedroom?”
“The end of the other wing,” Roy answered absently, waving his hand in the direction of a corridor opposite the area where Max Jr. was sleeping. “Why?”
“I want you to take me there.”
Roy wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. He looked into her face, and suddenly his mouth felt very dry. “Uh … what?”
“You heard me.”
“But I don’t … you told me …”
Jade smiled as she reached across the table and stroked Roy’s cheek with the back of her hand. Then she rose, leaned across the table and ran the tip of her tongue across and between his lips. “I’m not asking you for a date, Roy. I just want you to come to bed with me so we can do something about that bulge in your pants you keep trying to hide.”
Roy licked his lips and swallowed hard, and then finally found his voice. “Well, I’m glad we’re clear on that point,” he said as he rose, took Jade’s hand and led her toward the bedroom. “I was afraid you were going to ask me to take you to dinner and a movie, or something like that.”
iii
Her passion and physicality as well as her stamina and lovemaking skills astounded him, as did his own newly discovered lovemaking skills. He had never before been so patient, so attentive, or so calculating in his sex play. He wanted desperately to please this woman, and in fact could not remember ever wanting anything more than now simply to have Jade find him an adequate lover.
When they had closed the bedroom door and begun to kiss and explore each other, Roy was afraid that he would explode in premature ejaculation, but he didn’t. They continued their slow, extended dance of foreplay, first standing and maneuvering each other into various positions, and then finally moving onto the bed. There Jade became the aggressor. Totally unselfconscious in her manner and actions, she pushed Roy onto his back, and then, kneeling over him, slowly worked her way up and down his body, exploring his flesh with her hands, lips and tongue, at the same time gripping his throbbing penis tightly at its base to prevent ejaculation.
Feeling about to burst, Roy abruptly gripped Jade’s head and shoulders and pushed her away from him, this physical action easing him back from the cusp of orgasm. Focusing now on the pleasure he hoped to give, he rolled Jade over on her back, spread her legs apart and flexed her knees. Then he buried his face between her thighs, alternately sucking her swollen labia and thrusting his tongue as deep as he could inside her, searching for and finding her erect clitoris. Jade moaned and writhed beneath him, coming again and again, but he continued to hold her firmly by the hips, digging his fingers into her buttocks to keep her positioned, occasionally reaching up with one hand or the other to caress her full breasts, touching her large, hard nipples with the tips of his fingers. She tasted like the sea, and he burrowed with his mouth in the triangular nest of the soaked, bristling hair between her legs, savoring the sweet, salty waters that seeped from her onto the shores of his lips and tongue. Finally, with the muscles in Jade’s belly and vagina twitching spasmodically, she grabbed him by the hair and pulled his sweating body up onto hers. He dove for her open mouth even as his stiff penis pierced her body like an arrow to the heart of everything and more he had ev
er dreamed of having. Jade’s legs were spread wide, and for a moment Roy felt as if he were staring into the sun. Three quick thrusts and he emptied into her in a series of explosive spasms that he felt ripple from the base of his spine to his throat.
As the last spasm passed and he started to push himself off her, Roy felt Jade’s ankles lock tightly in the small of his back. Sweat ran down his face and dripped off his chin as he stared down into the woman’s blazing emerald eyes. Jade abruptly raised her head and stuck her tongue into his mouth. He could feel Jade’s vaginal walls spasmodically contracting around his trapped penis, which, to Roy’s amazement, began to get hard again. Jade unlocked her ankles and again spread her legs as she thrust her hips up against him. Roy began to pump once more, this time not in a frenzy of lust but in a slow, measured plumbing of Jade’s liquid center.
This second phase lasted almost twenty minutes as, locked together, they moved as one around the bed, over, beside, and on top of one another. Finally the muscles in Roy’s legs and back began to cramp. He was still hard, and would have liked to continue sliding in and out of Jade until he passed out from exhaustion, but he was drained of semen, and he was totally satisfied despite his seemingly insatiable craving for Jade’s body. He pulled out of her, rolled on his side and pulled Jade close to him, gently stroking her sweat-matted, raven-black hair with one hand and her stomach, thighs and buttocks with the other. When he had finally caught his breath, he sighed, “Not too trashy.”
“Mmm,” Jade murmured, shifting position so that her head rested on Roy’s chest. Her tongue flicked out and licked his wet flesh, which quivered at its touch. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”
“Actually, I was also thinking something along the lines of golly gee whiz bang.”
“Mmm. You were pretty golly gee whiz bang yourself.”
Roy gently gripped Jade’s shoulders as he brought her face back up close to his. Then he licked her earlobe and whispered, “Please don’t misunderstand me, but this ticket to heaven of mine that you just punched leaves me with the sneaking suspicion that you may have had a bad day.”
Jade kissed his forehead, then put her head back down on his chest, facing away from him. “I don’t misunderstand,” she said in a dreamy tone of voice. “You’re good at seeing into my heart.”
“I don’t understand everything I see there.”
“I did have a very bad day. Thanks for being here.”
Roy granted. “Oh, you’re welcome, I’m sure. This has been a tremendous sacrifice on my part, a reckless spilling of precious bodily fluids, but I’m tough and I can take it. Your guy in Washington wouldn’t talk to you?”
“Oh, he talked to me.”
“But he wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to know.”
“Nope.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I want us all safe, and I want my life back, but I can’t have either as long as Henry Bolo is out there and knows where to find me. I still have to get to him before he pays me a return visit, and if I have to sort through and mow down a lot of other bad guys to find him, then so be it. I just haven’t figured out yet how I’m going to do it.”
Roy waited for her to say more, but she didn’t, and he was reluctant to break the silence. He lay with his eyes closed and his hand resting on Jade’s rib cage, savoring the exquisite sensation of sharing a bed with this woman, feeling her breathe, smelling her musk mingled with his own, feeling the weight of her head on his chest and her breasts pressing against his flesh. He found himself growing hard once again.
“Something happened to me today that upset me,” Jade continued at last in the same breathy, distant tone. “It was something I felt.”
“Christ, Jade. That’s perfectly understandable.”
“No. You don’t understand.”
Roy opened his eyes and lifted his head to look down at Jade, but she was still facing away from him and he could not see her face. “Help me to understand,” he said softly. “I want to.”
“I think we’re dealing with a large conspiracy that involves a number of powerful ex-military officers who sit on the boards of arms manufacturing companies. I suspected that after I talked with somebody in the Coast Guard, and now I’m even more convinced of it after my visit to Washington.”
“I read somewhere that, with the USSR gone, the arms manufacturing business is way down.”
“All the more reason for some of these executives and board members in this old boy network to band together to make sure some markets stay in business, or new ones open up, even if selling weapons in these markets is illegal.”
“Okay. It wouldn’t be the first time some manufacturer did that.”
“No, but the actual companies may not be involved, which makes the situation even more dangerous. What are being peddled aren’t currently manufactured goods. I think the conspirators may be lining their own pockets by secretly selling off what’s already in inventory, much if not most of it obsolete and just sitting in huge depots or warehouses around the world.”
“If nobody will talk to you, where’s all this coming from?”
“The dead Jolly Roger.”
Roy thought about it for a few moments, and then said, “I think I’m almost there. Take me one more step. You’ve been insisting almost from the beginning that none of the services are involved in this operation, whatever it is. But aren’t they responsible for safeguarding their own munitions?”
“Not if those munitions have been declared obsolete or in surplus and turned over to private companies to disarm and dismantle. That’s been happening a lot lately, and some of those weapons include rockets, poison gas, and even nuclear warheads. A number of defunct arms manufacturing companies haven’t gone out of business; they’ve been recycled, hired by the government to dispose of a large portion of the very stockpile of arms they spent decades helping to build up. There may not be the same safeguards that were in place when the military had possession. A rocket here or a tank of nerve gas there might slip through the cracks. The same retired generals and admirals who ran these companies or sat on their boards when the weapons were being made are still there now that the weapons are supposed to be destroyed. Whether operating from their own political agenda or out of simple greed, some of them might think that was a waste. There would certainly be a market. Countries like Iraq wouldn’t have to be bothered building their own poison gas factories.”
“If it’s true, these people would be guilty of treason.”
“For sure. But those men aren’t my problem. It’s just that I’m going to have to go on their property and dig through their garbage to find Henry Bolo, because he’s the one soldier they can’t control when it comes to me.”
“Just to play devil’s advocate, that’s a pretty complicated scenario to build around one dead sea lion.”
“One mined dead sea lion. But the Jolly Roger by itself was insignificant, almost a joke. Maybe it was intended to be a cute gift for one of the group’s better customers, or the training and testing could have been done on special order for people who wanted a Jolly Roger for a specific mission. We’re not talking Sea World here. This outfit has its own private army, complete with its own heavy helicopter, and you don’t make the profits needed to support an army by peddling trained sea lions. Whatever their reason for training the animal, the carcass posed a problem because if it was identified for what it was, and the information made public, a lot of questions were going to be asked and there would be a lot of pressure for answers from both civilian and military authorities. That’s why they had to blow up Jack’s boat, with one or more people in the Navy freezing things in place to give them time to do it. They figured that would be the end of it, with the police and F.B.I. running around in circles looking for a band of foreign terrorists. But then I turned up on television, and I was recognized by these people as somebody who would know exactly what had been netted. That concerned them. They waited to see what I would do. What I did
was to make a phone call to a Navy VIP demanding that Jack be reimbursed for his boat, and then I tried to increase the pressure by having you make a call. That’s when the three assassins were sent after me.”
“This VIP dropped the dime on you?”
“In a sense, the answer is probably yes. He wouldn’t have been looking to have me harmed, but he does have lines to these people and he may have contacted them to give them a heads up after I contacted him. If he did send a message, it was probably to warn them off, or even suggest that I would go away if they came up with the money for Jack’s boat. They decided it was a better idea to just kill me. They tried and failed, and they saw their whole damned enterprise going down the crapper when you put their soldiers in a Cairn jail cell. You saw how desperate they were to free those men. They started having serious second thoughts about their original approach, so they may have come up with the money; the man I talked to today claimed that it came out of a Navy slush fund, but he could have been lying rather than admit he had passed the idea on to the others. In any case, just as you suggested, the money was apparently meant as a truce offering. But Bolo is a member of this private army; he knew where to find me, and there was no way he was going to honor any truce. So he came after me on his own.”
“You said this guy in Washington isn’t involved, but everything you’re saying now suggests that he is. He’s not keeping an eye on them, he’s working with them.”
“Not directly. But he certainly knows some of the people involved. He doesn’t know where to find Bolo, but he could have steered me to people who do know. He wouldn’t. He knows Bolo will come after me again, but he refused to help. Now I think I understand why.”
“He wants to be invited to join the outfit when he retires.”
“Maybe, but it’s more complicated than that. It has to do with a military culture and code. Military careers can seriously stunt some people both emotionally and intellectually.”
“You’re going to teach me about closed societies? I’m a cop, remember?”
The Keeper Page 17