PsyCop 3: Body and Soul (3 page)

"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...."

"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?"

I hadn't. "Uh. Yeah."

"And?"

We passed a ball of whitish fur on the side of the road that had once been an animal, though I didn't see its remnant wandering around nearby. Wild animals were usually cleaner that way. Pets, not so much. And people, forget it. Yack, yack, yack. It'd be easier if we were all animals. If we were all just so much meat.

"Vic?"

"Um." Shit. I couldn't breathe. What was my problem? I loved Jacob. I missed him when he wasn't there. And I hated the idea of crawling back to that crappy little apartment someday and knowing that we weren't going to end up in the same bed that night. I had to stop being such a wuss. "Yeah. Let's do it."

I couldn't make myself look directly at Jacob, but I could tell in my peripheral vision that he was smiling. He turned back to his phone, and the giant invisible hand that had been crushing the breath out of me loosened up just a little. Jacob started keying a message into his number pad. "We'll definitely need a bigger kitchen," he said.

* * * *

I'd managed to throw on a sport coat and present myself in front of Betty's desk just a few minutes shy of noon. Betty was Sergeant Warwick's secretary who predated him at the Fifth Precinct, and today she was immaculate in a double knit polyester pantsuit the exact powder blue of a ChapStick Medicated tube, with a coordinating navy eyeglasses chain dangling from her thin shoulders. "Detective Bayne," she sang out as I rounded the corner. I think she'd always secretly wanted to be my mom. At least, I'd always hoped that was why she was so nice to me.

"Go right in," Betty said. "The Sergeant is waiting for you."

It felt weird to go back to Warwick's office after being off the job for over a month. Things looked the same and felt the same, but it was like I had changed and I fit differently now.

As if to prove that my impression was right, Warwick actually stood up to greet me when I entered his office, him and another guy to his left, a middle-aged bulldog in a suit, just like him.

"How're you feeling, Bayne?" Warwick asked, extending his hand to shake mine.

I did my best not to look suspicious. "Okay," I said, giving his arm a couple of pumps up and down. "Good."

"This is Bob Zigler," he said, gesturing with his hand as I released it. "He'll be your new partner."

Something sank a little inside me even before I took a good look at Zigler. It hadn't happened with Maurice, or Lisa, or even that homophobic bastard, Roger. But a tiny voice in my head went, "Cripes, not him."

Zigler was giving me a fairly neutral handshake, his hand dry and warm and completely unobjectionable. He seemed okay. So I tried to put my dread aside and wait until we'd actually spent some time together before I hated him.

It's just that he was so obviously an old-school cop. I don't just mean age—after all, Maurice was older than Zigler, but Maurice was just so relaxed.

Zigler was a fireplug of a guy. Maybe an inch over six feet, about two hundred fifty pounds, and no neck whatsoever. His brown hair was clipped short and starting to gray around the temples, and he had the obligatory Chicago P.D., Mike Ditka mustache. He looked older than Jacob, but it could've also just been a serious lack of style that made him seem that way. After all, administration wasn't going to pair me with a guy on the verge of retirement, not if they had a thousand applicants to choose from.

"Call me Zig," he said.

"Vic," I offered, hoping beyond hope that he wouldn't turn out to be an ass.

"Zig's a local," said Warwick. "He's been an Evanston detective for the past eight years."

Evanston. It butted up against Lake Michigan to the east and Chicago to the south. Nice buildings. Jacob had been talking about moving there if he couldn't find a decent place in the city, and now I was officially going with him. Jacob and I might call Evanston home in the near future. I could probably announce our future live-in plans and get the whole

"I'm queer" part of the meet and greet over with. But I just wasn't up for it, especially not in front of Warwick.

Zigler and I listened as Warwick gave us the last known locations of the three missing persons, descriptions, and possible commonalities that had already been found. There weren't many; a couple of them used the same dry cleaner.