The right side of the cabinet was filled entirely with old lady perfume, facial cream, nail polish, and hair mousse. The left held cheap plastic razors like I use, aspirin, foot spray, a stick of green deodorant, cotton swabs, and antihistamines.
Of every drug that had ever been invented, Jacob's parents owned the only two types that affected my talent less than antibiotics.
I pawed through their drawers in hopes of finding a stray muscle relaxant or even an expired tube of motion-sickness pills. I found a bunch of washcloths and some sunblock.
Sunblock. In a small rural Wisconsin town on the border of Minnesota that saw the sun maybe two hours each winter if it peered closely enough between the snowflakes.
I looked underneath the sink and found a pair of rubber gloves and a bunch of cleaning supplies. Damn it.
I tore the medicine cabinet doors open again, hoping to find something that I'd missed before. And then my eyes fell on the nail polish remover.
I turned the bottle around and read the back. Acetone was the first ingredient. And the seminar I'd attended fourteen years ago called Inhalants, the Silent Killer was as fresh in my mind as if I'd just taken it yesterday.
And here I thought I hadn't gotten much out of the Police Academy.
I wasn't a habitual huffer, not like the anorexic girl at the Cook County Mental Health Center—the institution that'd housed me from seventeen to twenty-three—who'd shown me how to get the most bang for my buck with a can of cooking spray or a plastic baggie and a jar of rubber cement. No, I didn't enjoy killing my brain cells randomly, but I was a pragmatist. The arm wasn't going to go away all by itself. And I really needed it to stop waving at me if I wanted to make it through dinner.
I could saturate a wad of toilet paper and hold it over my mouth and nose, but acetone's a stinky chemical, and I'd end up reeking of it. Instead, I set the bottle on the rim of the sink and plugged one of my nostrils, sniffing it carefully in hopes of zapping the specific neurons that enabled me to see Leon's damn spastic missing arm without leaving me stinking like a Chinese nail salon.
I felt a little floaty and had developed a sharp headache over the top of my skull by the time anyone came to check on me.
Luckily, it was Jacob.
Since he didn't need to know I was huffing his mother's nail polish remover, I put it away and washed my face before I answered the door.
He leaned in the doorjamb, looking incredibly sexy in a long-sleeved, chocolate brown silk knit that clung to every muscle like it'd been painted on him. He crossed his arms and gave me his most earnest you-can-trust-me face, pouty and a little doe-eyed.
"Everything all right?"
"It's ... um. I dunno."
"You went a little pale at the table."
It wasn't so surprising that Jacob noticed it when I saw something. Maurice Taylor, my first partner, used to tell me sometimes that I'd disappear if I got any whiter, and he hadn't been joking about my ethnicity.
My eyes stung from the acetone I'd just sniffed, and I pressed my fingertips into my tear ducts to try to relieve the itch. If I knuckled my eyes like I really wanted to, they'd get all red and I'd look totally high. "Your uncle Leon seems like a cool guy."
"He is."
"But ... I can see his arm."
Jacob stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He sat down on the rim of the tub and took one of my hands between both of his, and he waited.
I avoided his eyes and stared at a tile on the floor that was set a little crooked. "I'm trying really hard to be a decent boyfriend," I said. "But I think I might not be cut out for it."
"Stop it."
"No, it's true. I don't know how to have a family. And evidently, I can't function without having a buzz on."
"What are we talking about?" Jacob asked. "Are you breaking up with me or telling me you want to start going to Narcotics Anonymous?"
My heartbeat, already racing a little from the acetone, did an unpleasant stutter when Jacob said the words "breaking up" aloud.
"I mean, you know. Come on."
"No, I don't. What's going on?"
God damn. I'd started hugging myself without realizing I was doing it. Ugly habit. Ugly, ugly habit. I forced myself to try to stand normally, but I felt like my arms and legs weren't screwed on right. "I just wanted to ... you know ... be with you and your family for the holiday."
Jacob nodded slowly. "Okay. And that's what we're doing. If you need to leave, I'm trusting you to tell me so."
"I don't want to leave in the middle of dinner." I stared up into a painted-on sunflower. "I thought the house was clean," I said.
"And I had no idea that Leon's arm would qualify as a ghost. If you don't want to go, we can move you, say that you need to sit by the window."
"I'd rather sit across from Leon than Barbara, arm or no arm."
Jacob smirked. "Can't say I blame you."
I thought about that damn bloody limb performing acrobatics that were totally out of synch with what Leon's face and body language were telling me. "This is gonna sound stupid," I said. Which I can pretty much use to preface anything that comes out of my mouth. "But I wonder if it knew I could see it and it was showing off."
Stupid or not, Jacob considered the idea. "Maybe it's got a spiritual equivalent to a cellular intelligence. Who knows? But if amputated limbs can be present in the spirit world, it explains why they still cause pain for some people and not others just as much as the idea of a bunch of neurons misfiring."
Could people have their phantom limbs exorcised? It was possible—or at least they could have them scrambled with electrical interference, once the technology of Psych science caught up with the psychology and biology of it.
"If I just had some Auracel, everything would be okay." I take prescription Auracel to block out the visions. Or I used to take it ... until I stopped. Which was fine, inside my apartment. I guess I'd conveniently forgotten about the real world outside it. Only certain pharmacies in big metropolitan areas carried the drug, so even if I could call The Clinic and have them fax a prescription, chances were we'd have to go to Minneapolis to have it filled.
Jacob stood and pulled a little paper cup from a cutesy holder mounted on the wall beside the medicine cabinet, and filled it with tap water. "How many?"
"How many what?"
"How many Auracel?"
I realized he was digging in his pocket, and it was as if the clouds broke open and a beam of sunshine landed right on him.
"You have some?"
He smiled at me. He's got a special grin that's all mine. It somehow manages to be reassuring and to promise that he'll fuck me halfway through the mattress later, all at once. "I've got to tell you: I'm relieved this is only about Auracel." He handed me the paper cup.
"How many do you have?"
"Ten."
"Wow. You're prepared."
"I was a boy scout."
"That's creepy. And hot. At the same time."
Jacob pressed a tablet of Auracel into my mouth, running his thumb back and forth over my lips after he did. I turned away to swallow some water. In fifteen minutes or so, the pill would start kicking in. My relief was greater than my disappointment, but just barely. "I really wanted to do this without the meds."
"Which was your idea, not mine."
That was so not fair. My life was perfectly fine until suddenly I had this live-in boyfriend who wanted to interact with me, and I realized that I was almost always high. Maybe it had been my idea to go cold turkey, but I'd done it because of Jacob.
"Talk to me," Jacob said.
"You're gonna decide I'm too much trouble, someday."
"Uh huh," he said with absolutely zero conviction, flipping my hand over to press a kiss into my clammy palm. His goatee tickled at the base of my thumb.
I felt the first effects of the Auracel kicking in, a little dryness to my tongue, and a tingle in my fingertips that was only intensified by the feeling of Jacob's hot mouth grazing my skin.
<
br /> "Stop it," I said. "I'm not going back downstairs with a hard-on."
I felt Jacob grinning into my hand, and then his tongue traced my life line.
"I mean it."
"So you want me to suck you off in my parents' bathroom?"
Dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Jacob talks dirty so well, and I always love it. My cock stirred a little. The promise of the Auracel high made me sluggish, though, and I had enough self-control, even with a sexy hunk of manmeat going down on my thumb, to save it for later. "After dinner."
Jacob let go of my hand and pulled my T-shirt up over my stomach. He pressed a kiss into my solar plexus. "Dessert," he said, breathing the word against my bare skin and pulling a long shiver up my spine. "I'm looking forward to it."
And here I'd been expecting pumpkin pie.
Jacob went downstairs first, promising to tell his family that I reacted to my medications sometimes. Which was technically true. He wasn't saying that I'd had such a reaction at the table, after all. Jacob knows all about being technically truthful. His partner, Carolyn, is a telepathic lie detector.
All eyes landed on me as I tried to low-key it back to the table. Jacob refilled my glass with orange soda and his mother pulled my plate out of the microwave and set it back down in front of me. "Everything all right?" asked Jerry.
"It's fine," I said. "I'm good."
"Nothing wrong with taking a pill when you need one. Y'know, I need to take pain pills for this arm," said Leon.
"Crazy, isn't it? Arm's not even there, and it hurts."
"You never told me that," said Shirley.
"It's true." Leon dug a capsule out of his pocket with his corporeal hand, while his ghostly hand twitched on the tablecloth. "Arm's acting up today," he said. "I think I'll take one right now."
"You don't need to do that to make me feel better," I said.
The ghost arm waved a "pshaw" at me.
"Bob down the street lost a foot in Korea," said Jerry. "He still feels it, too."
"What about skeletons?" Clayton asked me. Do you see skeletons?"
"Skeletons are nothing supernatural," Barbara told him.
"They're inside everyone's body. Everybody has one."
"But I seen this movie."
"Saw," Barbara corrected him.
"Or zombies," said Clayton, ignoring her. "Are zombies real?"
"No," I said. "When bodies die, they're dead."
"But what about in the hospital, when they take that electrical shock thing with the paddles, and they yell, 'Clear!' and they shock you.... "he jumped in his seat as if he'd been hit with a thousand volts. "And you were a flatline, and then your heart starts beating again?"
I thought about it. Not that I was worried about giving a fifth-grader a scientifically accurate answer; I was thinking about electricity, and how the most knowledgeable paranormal expert I knew said that ghosts were made of electrons. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe those people aren't all the way dead, and the machines aren't accurate enough to tell."
"You should see how it works the next time you're at a hospital," said Clayton. "Then you'd know."
"I don't go to hospitals," I said.
"Never? What if someone shot you while you were being a cop? Then where would you go?"
"I have a special ... um, doctor."
Everyone had craned to the edges of their seats again. You could hear a pin drop.
I sighed to myself and decided I might as well talk about it, since everyone seemed so eager to know. Even Grandma.
"Actually, now I see this panel of two doctors and a psychiatrist, and they all have to be in the room at the same time to make sure that nobody's doing anything they shouldn't be doing...."
Chapter Two
"You didn't finish your pie," said Shirley. "Can I get you something else? I have some cookies."
She'd given me a slice bigger than my head. "The pie is great," I said. "I'm just stuffed."
"Look at him, Ma," said Jacob. "You can't expect him to eat like I do."
Which was true. I was about as big around as one of Jacob's well-muscled thighs.
Shirley paused halfway to the kitchen, where Grandma and Barbara were making lots of noise clanking pots and pans into the sink. "How about a beer? Do you want some beer?"
"I'll take a beer," said Leon. He and Jerry were sprawled in matching recliners, looking more like mismatched twins than brothers-in-law, while Clayton sat on the couch, engrossed in a Game Boy.
"Not after that pain pill you took with supper," said Shirley, clearing some more half-empty serving dishes from the table.
"You like sports?" Jerry called to me from the living room.
"Not ... really."
"Good. 'Cos we don't watch the Bears in this house unless they're getting their asses handed to them by the Packers."
"Don't go for the obvious gay joke," Jacob whispered, smirking. "Football is sacred here."
"Cripes. I wasn't going to." I was about to offer to help with the dishes when my cell phone rang and vibrated at the same time. I only have it set up to do that for two callers: Jacob, and my boss.
I checked the caller I.D.—Sergeant Ted Warwick.
Obviously, since Jacob was right next to me, still grinning over the word "ass."
"Bayne," I said into the phone.
"We've got a situation here."
How I hate that word. Let me count the ways. "Uh huh."
"You watching the news?"
"Fumble!" someone yelled from the living room. I couldn't tell if it was Jerry or Leon.
"I'm, uh, not home."
"You're what?"
So I never went anywhere, ever. It was no reason to snap at me. I was on medical leave, too, so it was completely within my rights to drive up into Wisconsin and eat cheese curds. Whatever those were.
"I'm in Wisconsin."
Warwick's stunned silence seemed to demand an explanation as to what the hell I was doing in Wisconsin, since I had no friends there, and no family anywhere. But technically, it wasn't Warwick's business, and since he did everything by the book, he didn't ask. "Could you make it back tomorrow?"
"Yeah, sure." It was a five hour drive, maybe six, depending on traffic. We'd planned on spending the whole Thanksgiving weekend. But police work takes precedence over leisure time. It takes precedence over pretty much everything. "Afternoon all right?"
"The earlier the better."
"So, I'm back on duty now?"
"It's a special circumstance. Three people gone missing in the space of a week and we need to figure out if they've been murdered. And the alderman's nephew is one of them."
Nothing like political leverage to set the wheels of justice in motion.
It didn't bother me. If I could help sort out the "situation,"
I'd do it. Sure, I was on medical leave, but I'd felt like my old self again, maybe better, about a week after the whole kidnapping fiasco. The part that gave me pause was the fact I didn't have a partner to work with. I suspected the extended medical leave was a way for the department to try to dredge up a new Stiff for me, and maybe get it right this time.
* * * *
We headed back toward Chicago at five in the morning. It was pitch black out, and evidently streetlights are nonexistent in Wisconsin once you get outside town limits. And not a single road is straight.
Jacob woke up around six thirty. I'd offered to take the first leg of the drive since I'm more of a morning person than he is. My knuckles were white and it would've taken a crowbar to pry my fingers off the steering wheel.
"Where are we?"
"You grew up here," I snapped. "You tell me."
Jacob glanced at the GPS unit. "You can go a little faster, you know. Speed limit's 55 if nothing's posted."
"Easy for you to say."
"Deer season's over."
"Okay." I risked a little glance at him to try to interpret what that was supposed to mean, but he was just rolling a kink out of his neck as if the hairpin turns of death were no big
deal at all. Then he pulled out his phone and started texting. He was able to create actual words with his phone.
Unlike me. Some weird feature had activated itself on my phone so that when you tried to key in a letter, whole words would pop up. I couldn't turn the fucking thing off, and I couldn't find the manual, so I decided it was easier to just leave voice mails anyway.
Unless you wanted to call people at six thirty in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving, as Jacob was so nimbly demonstrating.
"What are you doing?"
"I figured I'd look at some more houses, since I've got the day off."
"Oh." The house thing. I think that finding a house must be difficult enough for normal people. For Jacob, finding a place that didn't come with prior inhabitants was verging on impossible. I was starting to think that maybe he needed to buy out the landlord of my apartment building and renovate the inside, since it seemed to be the only place within a reasonable distance from our precincts that wasn't haunted.
Not counting the basement.
"There's a condo near Ravenswood that's still available,"
Jacob said, talking to me while he squinted at his phone.
"I thought you said the kitchens were too small there."
Jacob shrugged. "I'll make do."
"You shouldn't grab a place with a small kitchen just for the sake of moving." I'd thought his old condo was fine, but he'd sold it anyway. It hadn't been haunted by actual ghosts, but the memories of the incubus I'd killed there still lingered too much for Jacob's comfort.
He did turn to face me then, arching one dark eyebrow and looking devastatingly hot. I did my best not to swerve onto the gravelly shoulder. "You're gonna miss me?" he asked in a low, taunting, sexy voice.
Damn. He wasn't supposed to be psychic. "I just ... you know."
"What?"
I shrugged.
I could feel him staring at the side of my face, waiting for me to have a coherent thought and speak it out loud. He'd gotten eerily adept at not filling in any awkward silences with me over the last couple of months. Damn him.
"I'm used to living with you," I said. Christ. Could I sound any worse?
"So you've given more thought to moving in together?"
PsyCop 3: Body and Soul Page 2