“It’s me, Mom.”
She opened the door, turning on all the lights, squinting at him as if checking to see it was really him. She smiled at him, but her real interest was in the bananas. She was like a little kid the way she snatched at them, and he relinquished them to her custody.
He followed her down the hallway. The house looked normal until you entered the living room. He followed her into it, helping her move from her Zimmer frame to her favorite chair. Tammie Carmichael was still attractive at sixty. She’d had him when she was thirty after years of trying for a baby. Unbelievably, a month after his birth, she became pregnant with Dina and there were only ten months between him and sister. His father had left the small family a week after Dina’s birth and his mother had devoted her life to her kids and her passion for collecting…weird stuff.
His mother was tall, at five feet nine inches. She had her short, salt-and-pepper hair and nails done once a week. She’d always had pretty hands and in spite of her physical limitations, she prided herself on her appearance. She had been very athletic in her day until a car accident left her going back and forth between crutches and a wheelchair. Her obsession with collecting had morphed into a new and even stranger passion than her previous ones. But it had given her a new perspective and a whole legion of new friends.
She lowered the volume on her flat-screen TV where it was set to the ever-present CNN headline news, as she heaved herself into her La-Z-Boy. Eyes gleaming, she took out the bananas and set them on a tray table in front of her. She put on her metal headband with the illuminated magnifying glass and studied the bananas. With the precise movements of a surgeon, she used forceps to remove the first sticker she found from one of the bananas.
Her face fell. “Aw, nuts.” She peeled off the stickers, placing them onto plastic index cards. He worked hard not to roll his eyes when she said, “I already got these, but I do see a variance in shade in the stickers from Chile.”
He had no clue what to say. He was hungry, but once again he was staring at himself on screen. Cavan moved a couple of boxes and sat in the special red leather La-Z-Boy his mom had bought him. It was very comfortable and he’d been known to fall asleep easily in it, but the past few hours still ran around his mind like toy cars on a speed track.
“They are different. Look.” His mother held out two index cards. He indulged her by looking. He found it hard to muster suitable excitement about the slightly different shade of palm trees on the stickers, however. Why, oh why, did his mother have to have such a weird hobby? In his weariness, he looked around at the endless boxes and shelves that contained eleven thousand banana labels and stickers.
“You look peaked,” his mom said, handing him a banana. “Have one. I think you need the potassium.”
“Just had one, thanks. We got any dinner left?”
“No. I did leave you some, but I ate it all.”
He nodded. Typical. She had once left him stewed carrots. They were horrible and mushy but in his famished state, even those would have been tasty.
“I saw you on TV.” She gestured at the flat screen as she prepared clear plastic viewing envelopes for her new stickers. She had invested thousands of dollars in her bizarre collection and even traded with people she met online.
He couldn’t believe how many wacky people out there thought that collecting useless fruit labels was a worthy use of their time. Her best friend collected dirt from all over the world, so Cavan supposed labels was a clean hobby.
An image of the naked man in the shed flashed on the screen. He couldn’t believe Veo had leaked such sensitive footage. Poor Ludo would be haunted by this for the rest of his life.
Veo popped up on the screen. The moment they’d met, he’d struck Cavan as being ridiculously well-groomed and that opinion hadn’t changed in the last twenty-fours. Not a hair stood out of place, in spite of him being out on the streets late at night. Cavan squinted. Why was Veo wearing a bullet-proof vest?
“He kinda reminds me of that guy from that TV show…NCIS,” his mom said.
Cavan thought she had good instincts. He knew that Veo had a special ops background. But wait…was he wearing lip gloss?
“I’m out of specimen labels,” his mom said.
Never mind that he’d just worked a long day and was starving. Her banana labels needed labels! He wanted to laugh but was too tired. And hungry. He felt very grumpy now. His mother seemed to show no interest in the poor man on the TV. She fussed over her special label box as if examining MRIs for brain surgery.
It was ridiculous how much work and money went into this useless obsession. Not only that, but she and two other women had started annual conventions for label collecting. Cavan and Dina were arguing over which of them would accompany their mother this year to the convention at the Burbank Hilton. As active as she was, she was a little frail physically and had fallen more than once bending over to pick up the morning paper. Now she kept everything at her fingertips and, apart from preparing supper, Cavan and Dina did all the work around the house.
Lucky Dina, however, got to go home every night. To a house devoid of boxes of banana stickers. To amuse himself one night, Cavan had switched two labels around in a box. Dang if his mother hadn’t found it and flipped out about the chaos. He hadn’t tried anything like it since.
Bananas, however, were beginning to drive him bananas.
“How in the world do you think he got hold of those lancets?” his mother suddenly asked.
He was so drowsy and so hungry, Cavan struggled to follow her line of patter.
“Sorry, Mom? What was that?”
“The kidnapper. Where do you suppose he got hold of those spring lancets?”
He stared at her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She let loose a loud tsk and picked up the remote. She clicked on the DVR function and hit enter. His report came up. He was already sick of seeing the damned thing. She fast-forwarded until the camera focused on the strange locks he’d tried to figure out.
“These,” she said, freezing the frame.
“And you said they’re lancets?”
She nodded. “I could tell you thought they were locks, but they’re spring lancets.” At his uncomprehending expression she let out another tsk.
“They’re antique bloodletting instruments. I’ve seen these ones before. They’re from the eighteenth century. Here…I found a listing on Christie’s Auction house online.”
She reached to another table beside her and swung her Apple Air laptop around so he could see the image. He took hold of the laptop and gaped at the screen. They were a match for the lancets he’d been holding in the shack. And yes, he had thought they were locks.
“They have a spring blade that pops out and hits the vein. They used to use these in the old days.”
“How do you know about them?” he asked.
“My friend Alan collects antique medical gadgets. He’s got a similar one in his collection.”
Cavan’s mind began to race even faster. Maybe this lancet was what Luke Masterson had used on poor Ludo.
“These are worth a lot of money,” his mom said. “Whoever this Luke Masterson is, he’s very sick and twisted using these on anybody.”
Cavan retrieved his cell phone from his back pocket. His mother turned up the volume on a report of a mother who had just thrown her baby off a rooftop at children’s hospital. He went to the kitchen for privacy. Suddenly, he was no longer hungry. He put a call through to Cedars-Sinai and left a message for Dr. Samada.
“I think I know what caused those unusual cuts on Ludo’s body,” he said. Next he called his immediate supervisor, Sergeant Veo.
“Sir,” he said, leaving him a message as well, “one of the items I retrieved in the shed was a spring lancet. An antique bloodletting instrument. I’d never seen anything like them before. There might have been two. It was dark and it was hard to tell. I just knew I couldn’t open them.”
He stood against the kitchen sink,
pressed his fingers to his eyes and in his mind saw the cowering, squatting form of Ludo. What terrors this poor man had been subjected to…
Chapter 3
Cavan rifled the fridge. For a woman who was mad about all things banana, his mom never kept the actual items on hand once she had peeled off their stickers. She’d dipped a few bananas in chocolate and frozen them, but he wanted something more substantial.
He found a frozen Lean Cuisine pizza and nuked it, washing down the bland slices with a can of Diet Dr. Pepper. Man, the pizza tasted like cardboard. He glanced at the portion in his hand. Oops, it was cardboard. It had somehow stuck to the pastry. He peeled it off and kept eating in spite of the total absence of flavor. It was better than nothing. He swigged his soda, staring out of the kitchen window as he ate over the sink. There were no free chairs. Since he’d left for work, his mother had piled boxes all over the kitchen. Each day boxes seemed to materialize out of nowhere.
Cavan stared up at the unusual moon. It had an odd shape, almost like a heart. For some reason, it made him feel very sad. No, he knew the reason. He was lonely. His lover, Vince, had made him choose between his mother and their plans to move to Montana to run an organic vegetable farm. Cavan had hoped that Vince would wait for him, until he could sort out his mother’s house move, but he hadn’t.
For months, it had been very stressful when Cavan started making trips to LA to help his sister, who had her own problems. She was married and had a ten year old stepson who loved her one week, hated her the next. Still, Dina was a fabulous woman and tried hard to be a great stepmother to Max.
Dina and her husband, Garrett, got custody visits every other weekend and two nights a week, which meant that she had her hands full. Cavan didn’t mind helping but it hurt that Vince never came with him, claiming that he could never return to LA. And yet, up until the day they’d moved to Klamath Falls together three years before, Vince had been an LA native.
Cavan hadn’t loved the farm they bought as much as Vince did. In hindsight, Cavan realized that he’d done everything he could to accommodate Vince but the favor had not been reciprocated. They had started with a small property in Klamath Falls, but money had been tight and Cavan returned to work as a cop. He’d frankly enjoyed doing both jobs and thought things were fine. The farm was just starting to financially sustain itself when Vince once again grew restless and wanted to move.
In hindsight, Cavan could see now that their problems had begun then. It was too soon to move and Cavan enjoyed having law enforcement and the farm in his life. And then his mother was injured in a bad car accident. Not once did Vince visit her, but his mother never said a negative word about Vince. Instead, she’d urged Cavan to go home and be with his partner.
“Don’t make my mistake,” she’d said. “I put my job and you kids first. Your father felt neglected.”
“No, Mom,” he’d responded. “Dad was an asshole. You were fantastic. I know you loved him.”
And he loved his mother. He had ignored her advice and kept commuting. He did feel very stressed out, but figured it was all temporary until his mom got better. He’d asked Vince more than once, “Wouldn’t you do the same if it were your mother?”
Vince said no, that he would never put anyone above Cavan. But he had. He’d put his own ambitions above them both. When Cavan returned home to Klamath Falls one Sunday evening, he found that Vince had left him. No note, no goodbye, no…nothing. Not only that, but he discovered his lover hadn’t been making the mortgage payments, even though Cavan had given him money each month.
As of now, Cavan still owned the farm. He’d bought out Vince and had kept up payments. But Vince running out on him was like his father all over again.
That had been a few months ago. Cavan didn’t dwell on it too much anymore. He was over Vince, who’d turned out to be the kind of guy Cavan never dreamed he’d be. Selfish and manipulative. He was over the loving feelings he’d had for the guy…not over what Vince had done to him.
Last he’d heard from the sparse gay grapevine stretching from Northern California to Montana, Vince had a new boyfriend.
Cavan had tried calling Vince, who’d changed his cell phone number and blocked Cavan from emailing him. It had been devastating. The only thing that had been keeping Cavan in Klamath Falls was Vince. Once he’d accepted that Vince didn’t want him and had really moved on, Cavan had taken a demotion to be here in LA. He had a weird feeling things were going to change. It was an inexplicable feeling, born perhaps of an unusual moon on a rare night in which he’d helped to save somebody’s life.
The TV went quiet. He dropped his can and pizza box in the trashcan that smelled strongly of bananas. Walking past the living room, he saw that his mother was now online, no doubt working on things involving bananas.
“Cavan,” she said, looking up from her laptop. “A collector in the Philippines is sending me that label I wanted! We’re doing a trade.”
“The label with the monkey on it?”
She nodded happily. He bent and kissed her heavily lacquered hair. She might have been the only woman alive who still had vast quantities of Dippity Doo, and used it. And he might be the only man alive who had such a boring existence he was intimately acquainted with his mother’s label collection.
Somebody shoot me…
He caught himself. No, he was lucky. His mom was doing pretty well and he had his health. His mind returned to Ludo and he called the hospital from his cell phone. “Critical, but guarded condition,” the nurse on duty told him. He wanted to know exactly what that meant, but she wouldn’t give further details.
Cavan finally took a long, hot shower and hit the sheets. Naked in bed, he longed for sexual release. He played lightly with his cock and balls, which hardened instantly as he fired up his laptop. He had a decent collection of gay porn on it. He and Vince had enjoyed watching movies together and indulging their mutual sexual fantasies. One of his favorite models was the Cuban superstar Rafael Carreras. Always threatening retirement, the hot, hung model had just shot a new movie, Backdoor, in the back streets of Montreal. Cavan had a subscription to Lucas Entertainment and downloaded the link to watch the scene.
He was starting to feel good now. His cock hardened, his pubic hair damp to the touch. It always made him feel good to jerk off right after a hot shower. Vince had never liked sex after showering. He said it made him feel dirty again. Whatever.
Don’t think about him. Think about someone else. Think about Rafael.
What he liked about this company’s movies were that the models were hot and there was a plotline and usually beautiful cinematography backing up the man on man action. Rafael stood against the fire stairs of some decrepit apartment building. He smoked a cigarette and gave a panhandling old granny some money. He liked that Rafael did that.
The model had a bad haircut, however, and when his scene partner, Ryan Russell, strolled down the dangerous-looking alley, grabbed him, shoved him up against the wall and kissed him, Cavan immediately got an iffy stiffy. The cop in him bristled at the scene. It got worse. They went into an ugly room and began having uncomfortable looking sex on a table. With dildos. Two no less, shoved up Ryan Russell’s apparently willing ass.
What a waste when the man had one of the finest looking cocks in porn history at his disposal. Cavan considered switching to one of Rafael’s tried and true scenes, but when that, too, failed to hit his ignition, turned the computer off.
He lay in the dark, stroking himself off, willing himself to just enjoy it.
For a hard-up guy I’m acting damned picky.
No, he realized in the next moment that he wasn’t hard up for sex, he was hard up for the connectedness that sex brought. He hadn’t been able to jerk off in weeks and he felt the effects of the abstinence. It made him anxious, yet he couldn’t let go and just enjoy. His cock semi-hard, he gave up. He slept badly, the time feature on his new clock radio too bright for his eyes. He kept having nightmares about Ludo. The sounds the man had made as Cavan
worked to free him would forever haunt him. As exhausted as he was, he couldn’t sleep well and awoke at six, his stomach rumbling.
He threw on sweatpants and T-shirt and called the station house from the kitchen as he made coffee.
Masterson was being held without bail until a court appearance that afternoon and, as was typical in these cases, was being very uncooperative.
Veo called him a few minutes later. “Just got into the office,” he said, chewing on something. “Your fans brought in cupcakes first thing this morning. Maple bacon. Mmmm…”
Great. Even the guys at work were eating better than he was. He rifled the pantry. Half a box of cereal and enough milk in the fridge for a bowl for his mother. There were last night’s bananas. Where the hell was all the food he’d bought two days ago?
Cavan poured himself a cup of coffee. The smell alone put him in a better mood. He watched his next-door neighbor sneaking into his backyard. Literally sneaking, and turning on his sprinklers. Los Angeles had strict watering laws and his neighbor just violated them. He froze when he turned and caught Cavan’s gaze. Cavan gave him a finger wave. He didn’t give a fuck about sprinklers. He wanted maple bacon cupcakes.
“Got your message last night,” Veo said. “I had the watch commander check into the stuff you brought in. Believe it or not, it’s all gone missing.”
“What?” Cavan’s hand jerked and the coffee scalded his lips.
“Yeah. We know you signed it in and we have a record of what you brought. There’s a logbook entry for a change in shift. I’m reviewing the tapes now. I’ll get back to you.”
Cavan went to check on his mother. She’d fallen asleep in her chair, which was not uncommon for her, but he knew her physical therapist would freak out.
“Mom,” he said, shaking her awake. She opened her eyes.
“What is it?”
“I gotta get out of here, gotta go to work. I made coffee. Can I get you a cup?”
“What time is it?”
Tame Page 3