I murmured, “Yeah,” and he echoed it, and I realized I’d begun rocking against him, promising him how good it’d feel once he actually did take the plunge. My throat was raspy and my jaw hurt, and pretty soon my ass was gonna sting. That thought sent another jolt straight to my balls.
“Now what’re you thinking?” he asked.
“How good it’s gonna feel.”
“That’s right.” A blunt prod—again, not hard enough to penetrate. But a taste of what was to come. “And that’s all you need to know. Me. Buried in you.”
He rocked against me, cock poised, pressing, pressing, and then…the thrust. I actually cried out into the mattress when he shoved in. He lost hold of my wrists, but I kept my arms up over my head and grasped the blankets instead. I reveled in the stretch while he grappled with my hips, trailing lube across the crest of my pelvis, angling me so that he’d butt up against my sweet spot with every deliberate thrust. He shoved in deep. “There?”
“Down a little…fuck, there. There.”
He’d come only a few minutes before, so he’d be able to go for a good long while. Since I was rubbing off against the blankets, I could aim for the long, slow burn, too. His bunching abs skimmed the curve of my low back. His pecs brushed my shoulder blades. All down my back and thighs his fur tickled my bare skin, at least until we’d been at it long enough to work up a good sweat that slicked his body hair down. He shifted his angle, still pummeling my sweet spot, but now driving my hips into the mattress even harder. The friction against my dick intensified, and suddenly all the stroking and sucking and fucking was just about to pay off. I clenched around him as I hurtled toward my orgasm, with thoughts of nothing now but the tightness in my nuts and his fat cock pounding me. He felt me start the climb. His breathing changed, stuttered, and his whole body tensed. I hadn’t realized how steady, how precise his movements had been, until that control started to give. The chink in the armor always does it for me. I love that small moment when he breaks, when he lets loose long enough to give over to the release, even if it’s just for a second. I tried to slip a hand beneath me to finish myself at the same time, but he knocked my hand aside to do the reacharound himself, fucking me, jacking me, gasping my name wetly into my hair.
The moment stretched, a long slow peak that was less like a crashing wave and more like the flood tide coming in. We both made some noises that didn’t sound like they’d come from human throats. And we both came, hard.
The build had been slow, and now the ebb was just as slow, flowing seamlessly into sleep.
Chapter 11
I dreamed.
I was in a vast white room. Two rows of black-suited agents stood at attention facing one another to form a long aisle. They were all the same guy. Agent Bly, maybe, but more generic, like someone had made a crappy mold of him and pushed out a few dozen almost-Blys. At the far end of the row, a single figure galumph-walked into place at the head of the line, the position of power. He faced me with his whole body and said, “Your car sucks. Heh-heh.”
The generic agent closest to me leaned in and said, “Are you gonna let him talk to you like that?” I realized it was Jacob. “He’s not half the Psych you are.”
How could I answer? Poor Einstein had come through Camp Hell, same as me. Then, once he was through being tortured by the orderlies, poked and prodded and drugged by the mad scientists, Stefan and I were eager to pile on more abuse. I owed him now. Respect. Or at the very least, patience.
I was about to tell Jacob I had my reasons when the shooting started.
The two rows of black-suited agents drew their weapons, all in synch. One row turned to face the gunfire, and the other row stepped up to interweave with them and form a single unbroken line of men in black leveling their semi-automatics. All except one, Jacob, who broke rank to get between me and the gunfire.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and said, “Get down!” Confidence is one thing, but let’s be realistic. He’s not really a man of steel.
Bam-bam-bam…I couldn’t see the shooter in the field of white, but I curled up tight to present the smallest possible target. The shooting stopped, and then an alarm went off, followed by a woman’s voice. Probably one of those automated computer voices that count down the seconds to self-destruct. Except I could swear it just said my name. And that it had a hint of a Spanish accent.
Lisa? At the FPMP?
I shuddered awake to the phone ringing in Jacob’s office. The answering machine beeped.
“Okay, I’m gonna go sit in my car now. I hate to keep pestering you guys, but one of you needs to get up and let me in.”
“Oh fuck,” I groaned. Jacob’s head snapped up from my pillow, not exactly awake, but startled, ready to dive for his sidearm if need be. “It’s okay,” I told him, “go back to sleep. I locked Lisa out with the safety chain, that’s all.” He said something unintelligible and rolled so that all the covers wrapped around him, leaving about a foot of comforter for me.
There was a hooded sweatshirt hanging off the doorknob, but aside from that, the only handy clothes were from the suit I’d stripped out of earlier. I pulled on my dress slacks without underwear, jammed on my shoes with no socks, topped off the look with the old gray sweatshirt and ran downstairs by the light of a few strategically placed nightlights.
I was halfway down the front walk when the cold hit me—fucking hell. A light dusting of snow had settled, and it kicked up onto my bare ankles as I jogged toward Lisa’s Volkswagen. I planted my palms on the frame of the passenger door, and the window powered down. “You didn’t need to come running out here, Vic. You could’ve just called and told me the chain was off.”
Well…maybe I would have, if I hadn’t been in the midst of a creepy FPMP dream that incorporated her message. As more waking parts of my brain lit up, it occurred to me that she hadn’t sounded particularly alarmed on the answering machine. Of course not, the sight of our cars must have told her we were home, and a few simple sí-nos that we’d nodded off. Though it was below freezing, her car was right there to keep her from getting frostbite while one of us struggled toward wakefulness. A simple mistake. No reason to panic. Embarrassed that I’d just wigged out over a phone call, I dropped my gaze to her passenger seat.
A giant bouquet took up the whole surface. While I couldn’t name any of the flowers, I was guessing it was pricy. Not a cheap carnation in the bunch. As I tried to come up with something amusing to say about it, something to break the pause in conversation that was growing awkward, I realized there were more flowers on the floor. And more in the back seat.
“You’re dating a florist?”
She gave me a look.
“Why are you leaving the flowers in your car? They’re all frozen. Bring them in the house so you can, I dunno, stare at ’em or something.”
She clicked the lock open and said, “Grab that one, it’s still fresh.”
I hauled it off the seat while she slung her purse over her shoulder and collected a doggie bag from the back seat. I caught a whiff of spice as the bag shifted. The food smelled better than the flowers, which smelled like a funeral home. I wondered how smart I’d been in telling her to bring them inside, after all.
* * *
A couple of vases had managed to make their way into the cannery after Jacob’s retirement party. I’d been shifting them farther and farther out of sight every couple weeks with hopes of sneaking them into the trash by Christmas. I pulled the biggest vase out of the cupboard, cracked a big chunk out of it on the kitchen faucet, then pitched it into the trash with a surprising amount of regret. I filled the second-largest vase halfway with water and set it on the countertop uneventfully. Lisa tried to jam in the bouquet all at once, but it was too big. I grabbed a random handful of stems and pulled about a quarter of the flowers and fronds out of the batch, and said, “Try that.” A card fell out. Without being too obvious, I had a look at it while she hoisted the rest of the bouquet into the vase. It landed face up, which was good. I could be smooth about reading it.
However, it was in Spanish, which was bad. It read Para la rosa más hermosa in quirky, back-slanted cursive.
Once she stuffed all the flowers in the overflowing vase, she said, “I don’t think they’ll fit inside the tent with me.”
As floral arrangements went, it was very large. I wondered if she’d bothered telling her mystery man that she wasn’t really a hearts-and-flowers type of girl. That she was an ex-cop who’d gone over to the New Age side when she couldn’t hide her abilities anymore, that she was more interested in goofball comedies than sweeping romances, and that she preferred french fries to caviar. But other than her unfortunate liaison with a slimy Casanova of a shaman at PsyTrain, she’d been single the whole time I’d known her. She probably exclaimed over the flowers like they were the best damn thing in the world, so as not to rock the boat. I’d been single plenty of years myself—in her situation, it’s what I would have done. “We can put them on the coffee table,” I suggested.
“Then we won’t be able to see the TV.”
True. I shifted a cutting board out of the way and hauled the vase over to a part of the kitchen counter that could be seen from the main room—though if there wasn’t a roof in the way, you’d be able to see the damn thing from orbit. “There. Whaddaya think?”
After a pause, she said, “Victor….” in a tone that conveyed she was about to say something I didn’t want to hear. Something about leaving.
“I’m really sorry.” I focused at the flowers and not on her, so as not to spook the conversation. “Locking you out was just a dumb…it was totally a mistake. It won’t happen again.”
“I know. It’s fine. I’m not mad.”
“Okay, good. Because we love having you here—it was just a dumb mistake and you totally shouldn’t read anything into it.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
I risked a sidelong glance at her, sensing that whatever we were trying to talk about was nowhere near resolved. Now she was staring fixedly at the vase. I decided to shift tactics. “So does flower guy have a name?”
She did look at me then, up and down, taking my measure. Then she said, “It’s after midnight, and you get up early for work. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Why did a simple first name require a lengthy discussion? “I’m not gonna jinx it.”
“We’ll have dinner tomorrow, okay? You and me. We’ll talk. And you can ask me anything you want to ask.” She gave me a quick hug, retreated to her tent and zipped up the flap behind her.
If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if some of our gay had rubbed off on her and she hadn’t quite figured out how to introduce her new girlfriend. Because uncharted gender territory was the only reason I could dredge up for her not letting me in on her secret valentine. That didn’t make any sense, though. Of anyone, I would be the first person she would confide in (other than the lucky lady) if she started pitching for my team…right?
The card I’d spotted didn’t offer much by way of clues. I went back and looked at it again. It was in Spanish, but I already knew her paramour was Hispanic. It was in cursive, which you don’t usually get nowadays from the under-thirty crowd. I’m pushing forty and I print everything in block lettering myself. Maybe she was seeing an older guy (or gal). But I couldn’t really infer it from the card. For all I knew, it had been written by the florist.
She wanted to tell me about her new thing in her own time and her own way. Fine. But maybe she’d be willing to tide me over with a quick sí-no to help me determine whether Dr. Chance was still lurking around the FPMP, or whether I’d be shit outta luck in getting “set up” with a good supply of drugs. But then her silhouette assumed the phone position and murmured something in Spanish, and I realized my question should probably wait until morning. Especially given that I’d become vividly aware that my pants felt like three kinds of wrong—freezing and wet on the hem, stiff at the pocket and slimy in the seat. Since I was already downstairs, I treated myself to a quick blast in the shower before I headed back up in a towel to wrest some blankets and bedspace back from Jacob and fall into a deep, thankfully dreamless sleep.
The sex must’ve done me good. I slept straight through to the alarm—something I rarely do. When I dragged my bleary ass downstairs, Lisa was gone.
“Where the hell would she be at six-thirty in the morning?” I complained. I was talking loudly to make sure my bitching could be heard over the hum of my electric razor. Then I saw I’d somehow missed a strip of hair on my jaw, even after three fucking passes.
Jacob knotted his tie. “Yoga.”
“This early? If I didn’t have a day job, I’d go for the later yoga. The one that takes place after sunrise. After rush hour, for that matter.”
“I gather she likes the teacher.”
Chapter 12
Likes, as in likes? Hm. I could see Lisa going for a yoga instructor. But would a yogi have the financial wherewithal to shower her with all those massive floral testaments of their devotion? And would she really need to be so secretive about seeing this person? Given all the esoteric stuff I’ve been exposed to, I’d hardly scoff at a little yoga. I tried to imagine the yoga instructor. He’d be limber, naturally. If he was a hippie-type, he might have a beard. Not a manicured beard like Jacob, either, but one of those natural beards that go all the way down the neck. Heck, his face might even be mostly concealed by a nest of hair. If he had a saving grace, it would be the eyes. They’d be sparkly eyes, a lighter color. Blue, or maybe green.
Or gray. Pale gray, the type of eyes you really don’t see on anybody…unless they’re wearing special contact lenses. “What’s with Bly’s colored contacts?”
Thankfully, Jacob didn’t suggest anything dumb, like maybe the guy had always wanted gray eyes. “Don’t know.”
“Maybe I could get Dreyfuss to put us all together, and you could have another look at—”
“Vic, wait. I can’t look at Bly. Now that you’ve pointed me at Laura Kim, I feel like I’m right on the verge of something. Yesterday I spent the day in archives. According to the paperwork, Laura claimed she was sick the morning Burke was shot. She left the FPMP before noon. I’m tracking down video surveillance from her apartment building now. It’s slow going, but I found some footage that might tell me if she went straight home or not.”
It seemed like a shame to waste a bunch of time trying to determine something the sí-no could tell us in five seconds. Yeah, it was being flaky about whether Laura was the shooter, but maybe we could get it to verify her location and save Jacob a lot of tedious work. I figured I’d send Lisa a vague text that she could answer at her leisure once she’d rolled up her yoga mat and put on her shoes. I was halfway to my phone when our ridiculously loud doorbell nearly blew out my eardrums. I checked the clock. Still early—twenty to seven.
I doubted that anyone who’d show up on my doorstep at twenty to seven was someone I’d be eager to see.
My sidearm was upstairs, so I palmed a kitchen knife before I answered. Because Jehovah’s Witnesses and Avon Ladies don’t just pop over at twenty to seven—and installing a peephole was one of those household chores that Jacob hadn’t yet gotten around to (and I didn’t dare attempt for fear of destroying the door.) I crept up, knife in hand, and considered kneeling down and peering out through the mail slot. That would just give me a view of someone’s knees, though. Then I saw the security chain, the one that had been the cause of my screwed up FPMP dream last night, and I slipped it on before I answered.
I opened the door, then did a double-take. The early morning visitor framed by the two-inch gap was Sergeant Warwick. I slammed the door and yanked the chain off, then re-opened it. Though not all the way.
“Uh…hi.” Was I supposed to invite him in?
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
While I’m pretty sure any government surveillance around the cannery is confined to the building’s perimeter—and therefore, his visit would already be duly noted—I decided whatever he wanted to say to
me would probably be less awkward without the presence of the male stripper jigsaw puzzle and the tent in the living room.
Warwick’s gaze flickered over my shoulder, and I felt Jacob’s presence at my back as a subtle creak in the floor, or maybe a shift in the air pressure. Warwick greeted him curtly with, “Detective.”
“Sergeant.” Jacob didn’t bother mentioning it was “Agent” now. But he did slip the kitchen knife out of my hand and tuck it behind the bag of sidewalk salt without Warwick being any the wiser. “Would you like some coffee?”
Warwick scowled. He wasn’t accustomed to politeness—he was more in the habit of being direct. Which, I realized, I didn’t actually mind. “We were just going for a walk,” I said. Jacob had the grace to act as if it was a perfectly normal thing for me to do, despite it being painfully early and unpleasantly cold.
I stepped into some shoes, threw on a coat and joined Warwick on the front stoop. Ted Warwick is a solid tank of a guy, with a neck as big around as his head. I’ve seen photos of him in his military days. His short thinning hair had been darkish blond once, but had gone tarnished platinum with age. At the best of times, he was ruddy. Now, in the cold, he was practically fluorescent.
He walked. Fast. I struggled to keep up without taking a header and landing on the frozen garbage in the gutter. Once we’d gone three unrelenting blocks, he said, “Your absence…is it voluntary?”
My first impulse was to defend my choice to report to the FPMP offices rather than the Fifth Precinct, at least until I realized what he was actually asking. The Sarge—worried, about me? I hardly knew what to make of it. “Yeah, it’s…yeah.”
He paused and gave me a sharp look, a look that had been honed over the decades to cut straight through bullshit. “You’re sure you’re not in over your head.”
I shrugged. I probably was—but at least my eyes were open.
“If you needed to take a last-minute trip…I know a guy who can sell you a used car and hold the title, keep it hard to track….”
Spook Squad Page 10