GHOSTV

Jordan Castillo Price

Sunshine, fresh air and junk food. I told myself I could enjoy those things— or
that’s the line I was feeding myself, anyway. This was the reality: my underwear
was soaking wet and my head was ringing; I’d taken one too many Auracel and
spun around a few too many times. If I was careful, really careful, the best I could
hope for was keeping the chimichanga and the fried Snickers bar from making a
reappearance.

I wasn’t obligated to talk to any dead people. I supposed that was something to be
thankful for.

I did, however, feel somewhat obligated to talk to Jacob’s sister, Barbara. But only
somewhat.

“…scored two goals during the first half of the game. You’d think the coach would
have been proud, right? Instead, he said Clayton wasn’t a team player. That he
didn’t pass the ball.”

“Must run in the family.”

Normal sounds, like screaming children, screaming adults, and the general wall of
screaming humanity, continued on. But the conversation Barbara and I were dili-
gently attempting to have fell down dead between us.

It belatedly occurred to me that I’d spoken aloud.

“I mean, uh, that’s what I like about Jacob. If he’s good at something, he doesn’t
stand around waiting for someone else to take a turn at it. That’s fine for little-
league soccer, maybe, but when it’s life or death, you want the best guy on your
team to step up to the plate.” Okay, I was mixing baseball metaphors with my soc-
cer, but I really didn’t know shit about soccer.

I risked a glance around the side of my cheap plastic sunglasses toward Barbara.
She was watching me, which made me want to squirm—despite my damp under-
wear. Over at the Gut Scrambler, or whatever they were calling the latest ride that
neither Barbara nor I were willing to be strapped into, Jacob and Clayton disem-
barked. They were quite the pair, all flushed cheeks and smiles. They stopped to
peer at a bank of monitors that snapped shots of all the scream-laughing riders get-
ting scrambled like a bunch of eggs.

“Aw, jees, he’s gonna talk Jacob into…” Barbara stood and cupped her hands
around her mouth. “Clayton. You do not need a ten-dollar picture of yourself on
that ride. I took plenty of pictures today with the phone.”

Clayton set his jaw, and holy shit, I hadn’t really seen it when I’d met him last
November—but now that he was half a year older, I totally did. That was Jacob’s
stubborn-look. In spades.

Genetics can be kinda creepy.

“Tell ’im he’ll wreck it on the log flume,” I muttered.

“You’ll get it wet on the log ride, and then what? You want to be stuck carrying
that thing around all day?”

A tinge of bewilderment touched Clayton’s mulish expression. Jacob said some-
thing, maybe a promise to stand in line another half hour, ride again and get a
photo on the way out. He probably didn’t want to be stuck carrying the thing
around all day either—but he also had only one nephew, and as far as he was con-
cerned, kids were made for spoiling.

Jacob and Clayton approached without the photo. One small success. Although I
wouldn’t have minded being the photo carrier; it would’ve excused me from riding
rides.

“I wanna go on King Chaos,” Clayton whined. He had exactly two modes of
speech: whining, and bragging.

Our small group milled for position, and before I could drop to the rear, Jacob
looped an arm through mine and pulled me against his side. “What do you say,
Vic? You choose the next one after that.”

“I’ll, uh, keep my eyes open.” The list of rides I could actually stomach was pathet-
ically small. Fast spinning and Auracel didn’t mix well. The act of getting strapped
into anything and my own demons didn’t mix well, either. Even thoroughly potted
on Auracel, I had no desire to ride through long, dark tunnels where God-knows-
what might pop out. And my legs were too long for those teacup things. That left
log rides. I tried to tell myself they were fun, but it seemed like every time my un-
derwear finally dried off, I ended up sitting on one of those wet seats again—plus,
as the tallest guy there, I was always the one to get nailed in the face with the
funky, chemical-laced water. But at least it didn’t look like I was too wussy to ride
anything.

The contraption Clayton was angling for was some mad scientist experiment that
took a row of people and whipped them upside down like they were riding around
inside a big bicycle pedal —though in addition to the “you must be this tall” sign,
there was also a maximum height.

Yes.

“Gee, sorry,” I said. I was a good two inches taller than the sign, and even Jacob
would need to seriously slouch to fake his way through it.

Clayton turned plaintive eyes toward his mother, who said, “Not in your wildest
dreams.”

A train pulled up beside us with lots of fake steam and recorded clanging, and Jac-
ob looked at it, and then at me, and raised his eyebrow.

Clayton whined, “I don’t wanna go on that stupid—“

Barbara said, “Give Uncle Jacob and Vic a break for ten minutes, okay? We’ll get
some popcorn.”

“I dunno why they wanna go on that stupid….”

I climbed onto the emptiest train car, with only one other rider in it who was star-
ing out at the amusement park and keeping to himself. “Thanks, Barb,” Jacob said.
He gave his sister and nephew a little wave. Clayton gave me the evil eye in return.
I hoped psychic ability didn’t run in Jacob’s family like stubbornness did.

Without much thinking about it, I sucked white light and put up a barrier between
myself and Clayton’s scowling face. I didn’t really feel the power—not like I
would have if I weren’t on antipsyactives—but psychically shielding myself was
second nature to me by now, like blowing on my coffee to lessen the scald factor or
positioning myself upwind of a rotting corpse.

Jacob eased an arm around me and said, “I’m really glad you came.”

I didn’t see why, but I did my best not to sigh or roll my eyes. I’d figured it
wouldn’t kill me to sit there for a day and zone out on meds if this family time
meant that much to him. “Long as you don’t mind me being a spectator.” I hadn’t
realized the buckles and straps would trigger a restraint-reaction from me. I told
myself it was just a seatbelt, but my subconscious didn’t buy it, and I ended up
bowing out before the spiral flingy upside-down coaster got going.

It was easiest to say the Auracel wasn’t sitting right. In theory, sharing your bur-
dens should make them lighter. But in practice, I hate watching it register on
Jacob’s face when he catches me in a Camp Hell flashback.

The train chugged through some Mardi Gras section that looked like a cartoonist’s
vision of pre-Katrina New Orleans, and then a stand of palm-looking trees that had
absolutely no business growing in the suburbs of Chicago. Jacob pulled me closer
and nuzzled my hair. “Next time we both get a day off at the same time, you pick.
Anything you want to do.”

I leaned into him. It felt risky, like someone might pop out of the fake woodwork
screaming for his autograph, the famous Jacob Marks, darling of the local media—
and there he’d be, rubbing up against some guy. But people you see on TV look
different in person. Over the airwaves, they’re taller, tanner, younger, and more
coiffed. And people were accustomed to seeing Jacob in a suit instead of a sloppy,
faded T-shirt and cargo shorts. He’d grown his hair out maybe an inch, and while it
had started its day immaculately combed, the whirling and scrambling and whip-
ping around and splashing had left it no better off than mine—and given the relat-
ive failure of my most recent haircut, that was saying a lot. For today, at least, Jac-
ob was just a regular guy.

A hot as hell regular guy who was breathing in my ear, but a regular guy, nonethe-
less.

“You can be my slave for the day,” I suggested.

“Really?” he purred, directly into my ear. I’d been kidding—but maybe it wasn’t
such a bad idea. “What’ll that entail? Feeding you?” His breath was warm on my
cheek. “Bathing you? With my tongue?”

“I don’t know yet. Gotta keep you on your toes.” No doubt about it—between Jac-
ob and me, he’s got all the testosterone. And yet, maybe he really would get off on
the idea of waiting on me hand and foot—and tongue—like that. Problem was, ex-
perimenting in bed was kind of like riding amusement park rides. Sure, they were
fun, but sometimes you rued the day you ever got in that line.

A big-kid ride roared past us and the wall of scream trailed along in the wake of the
metal cage full of freshly flung people. Jacob and I watched. Horror and delight, all
mingled together.

I wondered if I would’ve liked rides—if my life hadn’t been…my life.

“So how’re you hanging in there—really?”

“It’s uh…I dunno. It’s fine.”

“You had a look.”

I shook my head. Sometimes I got really sick of myself. “I’ve always got a look.
Never mind. I’m having fun.”

We chugged through a really artificial-looking garden, with flowers in colors you
never see in nature planted in rows with military precision. Popcorn bags and paper
cups drifted against the planter and mounded around the bases of the garbage cans
that were set in every few feet, with yellowjackets swarming their swinging lids.

“It’s too bad about the Auracel. Remember those swings?” Jacob nodded at an
older strip of rides with much shorter lines than the new, popular attractions. The
swing riders were achieving liftoff as they spun in a big circle. “They had those
back when we were kids.”

“Did they?”

“Sure. Those, and slides, and bumper cars, and wooden coasters.”

“And funhouses.” I couldn’t be sure if I actually remembered being in a funhouse
or if I’d just seen one on TV. My patchwork brain likes to keep me guessing.

“Now it’s all how fast and how far you can fall.” Jacob pulled me against him
tighter. “Don’t let me say that in front of Clayton. I probably sound as old as my
dad.”

I gave his knee a squeeze. King Chaos loomed up ahead of us. Cripes. I was glad I
was too tall to ride. It looked like a stiff neck with Valium written all over it, even
from the ground. The train tooted and chugged and pulled up to the spot we’d first
climbed on. Jacob turned to give me a hand down, and then didn’t bother letting go
of my hand. This was unusual for him. He’s not really into public displays of affec-
tion. But he was having a sentimental kind of day.

Barbara and Clayton both stood and walked over. Clayton said, as if we were all
talking about whether the clouds would turn to rain, or if we’d prefer pizza to bur-
gers, “This kid Tyler at school says that faggots are perverts and they should all be
put in jail.”

Barbara went white. I let go of Jacob’s hand not because I gave a rat’s ass what an
eleven-year-old snotnosed punk thought of me touching his uncle, but because I
wanted to attempt to catch his mother if she fainted.

“Clayton Joseph,” Barbara barked. She sounded like Jacob telling a crackhead to
drop his weapon. “You apologize this very second.”

“But that’s what he said.” Clayton’s whine cut through my head like a dentist’s
drill. “I’m not making it up.”

Barbara put her face directly in her kid’s. “You are old enough to know when
you’re repeating something that will hurt somebody’s feelings.”

“Barb.” Jacob sounded…I couldn’t quite place it. Maybe he sounded like I did
when things went south—not like I’d been expecting anything better, but maybe
I’d held out a glimmer of hope that it didn’t necessarily need to be all that bad. He
sounded weary. “Clayton’s going to hear things. I’d rather he heard them from
me.”

He put his arm around Clayton, and what a relief, the kid didn’t flinch. I suspected
he might not be at the point where he really got what sex was even about, not deep
down in his balls.

I might’ve noticed other boys “that way” when I was his age, but come on. Back
then Teen Beat was full of boy cheesecake, and I was assailed by images of smooth
chests, long, feathered hair and limpid, dreamy-eyed smiles at the checkout line
every time I grabbed a pack of gum. And maybe I was just ahead of the curve in
that department—or maybe you’d have to be dead not to notice.

Jacob walked Clayton toward the snow cone stand while I jammed my hands in my
pockets and wandered in a holding pattern, and Barbara dug around in her purse as
if she might unearth the answer to all our problems there, if only she looked hard
enough. Instead she found some clear lip gloss, the kind with the sponge tip applic-
ator, which she applied with a vengeance.

“It’s not like it’s news to him that Jacob is gay,” she said. “We’ve always been up-
front about it.”

My wet underwear clung to me like a trick who’d worn out his welcome. “Uh-
huh.”

“I don’t know who this ‘Tyler at school’ person is.”

“Does it matter? I mean, if it’s not him, it’ll be someone else. Right?”

Barbara spotted a bench covered in cartoon characters and sat down hard. I
hovered behind her. Ten yards away, Jacob handed Clayton a green snow cone. The
kid took it and gave it a lick, all the while looking daggers at us. At me. The snow
cone vendor handed Jacob another one. Red. Jacob caught my eye and pointed at
his blindingly red snow cone as if to ask me if I wanted one. I shook my head.

“It’s nice of you to sit out all the rides so that Clayton can be with Jacob. He idol-
izes my brother, you know. It probably doesn’t seem like it, what with that out-
burst.”

“No, I um…” I perched on the back of the bench and my wet underwear rode up
my ass. “He’s probably, uh, y’know.” Damn it. Words were so useless sometimes. I
did my best to figure out a way to say he was just being especially bratty because
some fag was monopolizing his uncle—without coming out and using those exact
words. “He probably feels…things…more intensely. Because they’re so close.”

She gave me a sideways look, one of those zingers where I totally saw Jacob
around the eyes, the type of look he’d give me when he knew I wasn’t being poly-
graph-level truthful with him. Then she sighed and re-settled her purse in her lap.
“Yeah. Probably.”

“I’m not so big on rides anyway.”

Another Jacob-ish look, a notch or two more analytical. “Is there some medical
reason…?”

“No, uh…not exactly.” Was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder medical? No doubt.
But I’d been diagnosed by my backstabbing ex, and not a real doctor—although
Stephan was technically a health care professional nowadays. The whole thing
made me want to break out in a cold sweat. “Maybe.”

“Huh.” She found a pair of sunglasses in her purse, blew the lint off the lenses, and
put them on. “I always pictured Jacob with someone a little more athletic.”

What was that supposed to mean?

Jacob and Clayton had taken the long way around the food court, and they ap-
proached the bench, Clayton with green-tinged lips, Jacob with a wicked red
mouth. Jacob stopped a couple of steps back and Clayton shuffled forward. I’d

figured he was going to ask his mother for something, but then I realized he was
aimed, more or less, at me. Neither one of us cared to initiate eye contact.

“I’m sorry I said something rude about gay people,” he said. There was no inflec-
tion in the sentence, as if he’d read it, poorly, from a teleprompter.

“Yeah, uh…” what was I supposed to say? Apology accepted? You’re forgiven?
How queer. “That’s okay.”

The tension was thick enough to cut with a spork, but then, as if nothing had just
happened, Clayton suddenly brightened, turned to Jacob and said, “If we can’t go
on King Chaos, can we ride the Scrambler again?”

Maurice was a sixty-two year old black man who had a lot more gray in his hair at
his retirement party than he'd had when I first met him. We'd never been close in a
way that some partners at the Fifth Precinct are. We didn't hit sports bars after our
shift for a shot and a beer. We didn't watch the game at each others' houses. We
didn't invite each other to family functions—not that I have any family to speak of.

Maybe it was the race difference. Or the age difference. But despite the fact that we
didn't connect on any sort of deep, soul-searching level, I was gonna miss working
with the guy.
I stood behind the kitchen island and watched through the glass doors that led to
the deck as Maurice ambled by. He laughed as he tried to balance a Coors Light, a
styrofoam tray of bratwurst and a small stack of CDs. He looked genuinely happy.
I supposed he was ready to retire—not like those guys you hear about that are
forced out, along with all of their years of honed experience, in favor of some
young buck who'll work for half the salary. I groped around the cellar wall at the
top of the stairs for several long moments for a light until I realized the lights
downstairs were already on. I made a mental note to rib Maurice about the availab-
ility of light bulbs greater than 40 watts come Monday. Except Maurice wasn't
gonna be there on Monday. Damn. My eyes adjusted and I took the cellar steps two
by two. I imagined what Maurice's kid was probably saying about me to his cous-
ins and friends. It was pretty plain that I was the psychic half of the Maurice/Vin-
cent team, since Maurice was about as psychic as a brick wall, and damn proud of
it.

A pair of opposites forms a Paranormal Investigation Unit. The Psychs—psychic
cops—do the psychic stuff, just like you'd expect. And the Stiffs—look, I didn't
name 'em—are oblivious to any psychic interference a sixth-sensory gifted crimin-

al might throw out there. It was rough at first getting used to riding around with a
guy who put out about as many vibes as a day-old ham sandwich. But I got used to
it, and eventually I grew to see the practicality of pairing us with each other.
Halfway down the steps I reached into my jeans pocket and found a tab of Auracel
among the old gum wrappers and lint. I felt around some more, but only managed
to locate the one. I'd brought three with me. Had I taken two earlier? I only re-
membered taking one in the car. Oh, and there was the one I took when Sergeant
Warwick came in. The irony. Popping pills within spitting distance of someone
capable of cutting off my precious supply.
I swallowed the Auracel, grabbed hold of the bathroom door and barely caught my-
self from slamming face first into Detective Jacob Marks, the golden child of the
Twelfth Precinct Sex Crimes Unit.
He was a big, dark-eyed, dark-haired hunk of a guy with a neatly clipped goatee
and short hair that looked like he had it trimmed every single week. He'd always
looked beefy to me from afar, standing in the background, tall and proud, as his
sergeant praised his work on high profile cases during press releases while the
cameras flashed and the video rolled. But up close it was obvious that he was as
wide as two of me put together, and it was all solid muscle. I think I excused my-
self and staggered back a step or two. The Auracel I'd taken on the stairs was stuck
to the roof of my mouth and I swallowed hard, worried that its innocuous gelatin
coating would dissolve and give me a big jolt of something bitter and nasty. The
Auracel didn't budge. "So," Marks said, deftly swerving his bulging pecs around
my shoulder as he maneuvered past me. I stood there gaping and trying not to
choke. "Lost your Stiff."

A comment about the crassness of calling Maurice a Stiff stuck somewhere around
the last Auracel, as I realized that Marks not only knew who I was and what I did,
but that he seemed to be flirting with me. Detective Marks—queer? Who knew?
And besides, he was a Stiff, too.
Or maybe he was just a jerk and the flirting notion was merely something that my
mind constructed from the high it'd gleaned from two Auracels and a few fumes. I
shrugged and raised my eyebrow. Nothing like being noncommittal. Especially
when I only had access to five senses, and even those were pretty fuzzy around the
edges. Marks leaned back against Maurice's workbench and crossed his arms over
his chest. That pose made him triple my diameter, and his tight black T-shirt was
stretched so taut over his biceps that it probably wanted to surrender. "New partner
lined up yet?"
I wondered if "partner" was also supposed to be flirtatious, as in "sexual partner."
But even my Auracel-addled mind figured that'd be a pretty far stretch. I had
nowhere to lean, so I stuffed my hands in my jeans pockets and hunched a little, as

kids who are taller than their classmates tend to do. Marks was as tall as I was. I
like that in a man. "It's all hush- hush," I said, belatedly thankful that I didn't make
a tongue twister out of those last couple of words. "I think they had like a hundred
applicants."
Marks cocked his head to one side, considering me. The bitterness of Auracel
spread over the back of my tongue and I swallowed convulsively—smooth move.
"Probably more like a thousand," Marks said, "but they screen ninety percent of
them out before the interviews start."
A thousand people wanted to be the Stiff half of a Paranormal Investigation Unit—
homicide, no less? I imagined I'd be flattered, if I weren't choking.
I stifled a cough and dry-swallowed three, four more times. My eyelashes felt
damp. And Jacob Marks had pushed off from the workbench and pressed right up
against me. "What's in your mouth?" he said, and his voice was a sexy, low purr.
He pulled my face up against his, pried my mouth open with his and skimmed his
tongue across the inside of my upper lip. "Auracel? Isn't that the strongest anti-psy-
active they make?"
How would he know what Auracel tastes like? I'd probably have asked him myself,
except I wasn't quite fit for speaking. Or even breathing, for that matter. I squeezed
my hand up between us and managed to push back from Marks before I hurled all
over him. The bathroom sink was only a yard away, and I turned both taps on,
scooped up tepid water with both hands, and struggled to dislodge the pill from my
soft palate.
Finally, the foul thing tore free and made its way down my throat. It felt like it'd
left behind a chemical burn on the roof of my mouth and the back of my tongue. I
cupped a few more handfuls of water from the tap, drank them, and then splashed
one on my face for good measure.
I stared down at the sink as the water dripped from the my hairline. Cripes. Jacob
Marks kissed me, sorta, and I was too busy choking on a pill to get into it. I as-
sumed I'd just blown a perfectly good shot at some hot, nearly-anonymous sex
when I heard Marks' voice again coming from the doorway. Apparently I hadn't
succeeded in scaring him off. His reflection met my eye in the medicine cabinet
mirror.
"One in every five hundred people is certifiably psychic, and they're all clamoring
for something to shut their talent off. What kind of sense does that make?" he
asked. There was a friendly lilt to his tone of voice, but the look in his eye made
his words feel like more of a challenge.

Oh well, why not? If anyone wanted to be a prick about the two of us skating to-
gether, I was sure Jacob would be happy to subdue them with a withering look.
And if things turned physical, I could always skate away really fast while Jacob

taught them some manners. But other than the transparent cabbie with a crushed
face who stood half-in, half-out of a light pole, no one even made eye contact with
me. Jacob and I skated together under the Christmas lights for a good hour until I
started to shiver, and Jacob steered me off the ice. He seemed to enjoy watching
me remove my skates just as much as he had staring at me as I laced up.
It’s nowhere near as much fun to slide across the ice without skates on, especially
if you aren’t doing it on purpose. On our way back to the El I hit a slippery patch,
shot forward a few feet, arms flailing, then caught myself and staggered upright.
“We can go back if you’re not done,” said Jacob.
I ignored the remark, even though he was grinning at me, trying to goad me on. “I
was way faster than you,” I said.
“Uh huh.” “With better moves.”
I waited for a zinger, but there was none. We both stopped and looked at each oth-
er. He was still staring, still grinning.
“Wha—?”
Jacob grabbed me before I even finished the word and dragged me into the re-
cessed doorway of a deli that was closed for the night. He spun me around, backed
me into the door handle, and covered my body with his.
His lips tasted like winter. His face was cold, even his mouth, but his tongue was
hot as he pressed it against mine. My hands in their thick gloves fumbled around
his neck, pulling him against me. Jacob blotted out the rest of the world—other
than the door handle, which could be ignored, at least in the short term. The whole
night with him felt like something stolen out of a much simpler, much happier life.
Only it was actually mine. I sighed into his kiss while he drew back reluctantly,
lingering over my mouth until the unmistakable sound of people crunching through
frozen slush drew near.
“Do you know how happy you make me?” he said.
Good thing it was too dark in that alcove to get a good look at his eyes. That
would’ve been way too much. I swallowed hard, the metallic taste at the back of
my throat from skating hard mixing with the cool flavor of Jacob’s kiss. “Same
here,” I said.
I pushed Jacob back onto the street and fell into step beside him as I did my best
not to go all head-case on him, though the realization that I was actually happy had
hit me pretty hard. I moved a little closer to Jacob, and slipped my awkward gloved
hand into his. He gave my hand a squeeze. I rolled over, pulled a pillow against my
face and spoke
into it. "I have this hangup about the laundry room," I said. Good thing the pillow
was there. It sounded even dumber aloud than it had in my head. No wonder I wor-
ried about talking dirty; talking in general seemed to escape me.

Jacob pressed himself into my back. His body was much warmer than mine, tacky
with sweat, and his chest hair tickled against my shoulder blades. "Okay," he said,
and kissed the nape of my neck. I woke to a slender ray of sunshine streaming
through the miniblinds and nailing me directly in the eye. A sharp twinge of pain
flared behind my eyeball, somewhere in my brain. "Fuck."
I sat up and looked at the clock. Eight thirty-eight, and my shift started at nine. Not
good. I vaulted over Jacob while the pain, apparently fueled by my movement,
flared again. I staggered a little as I went into the kitchen and retrieved my cell
phone from my jacket pocket. I'd be late, and I was in no shape to drive. I hit
memory dial seven, the last programmed number on my phone. Roger Burke.
"Burke here."
I squeezed my eyelids together. Couldn't he just answer with his last name like
every other cop? I chalked up my annoyance about the word "here" to my Auracel
hangover. "Hi, Roger. It's Vic."
"Oh, hi, Vic!" He was way too happy for a Wednesday. "What's up?"
"Listen, I uh.... "I realized I probably should have rehearsed the way I was going to
say it. Damn. And then I remembered his phone message from the day before. "I
wanted to take you up on your offer and get a ride from you today."
He didn't miss a beat. "Sure, no problem."
As I searched for a way to end the conversation without explaining any further
why I couldn't just drive myself like a regular person, I realized I heard the ambient
noise of the Fifth Precinct behind him—the peculiar phone ring and the sound of
male laughter as the uniformed cops joked around the water cooler. Christ. Roger
was at work already and he'd leave to come back and get me? I shook my head.
"Gimme, like half an hour," I said, and hung up.
I figured I should at least take a shower so I didn't smell like sex. I washed a couple
of aspirin down with a slug of orange juice from the carton and turned the shower
on. The room filled with steam. I got under the scalding spray and the pain in my
head seemed to lessen a little as my capillaries all opened up.
The shower curtain rustled as Jacob slid in behind me. His chest pressed into my
back and he wrapped his arms around my middle. "Morning," he purred.
My cock stirred a little at the feel of a big, hot body behind me, but the pain in my
head was more insistent than my groin was. "Hey," I said, and clapped my soapy
hands over his to keep them north of the border.
He seemed to pick up on my body language, the way he picks up on everything; he
massaged my shoulders, not my cock, as the hot water tumbled over me. "I'm look-
ing at a condo on the lake today," he said. "Why don't you come with me?"
"To make sure it's clean?"
"Clean is good," he said, and his soapy hands slid down my back, grazed my ass,
then slipped back up to work the knots out of my shoulders again. His voice was

light and teasing, and I wondered if he was angling to move in together—for real,
and not just a temporary, stopgap arrangement. Jacob nuzzled my wet hair aside
and dragged his lips along the back of my neck. My cock started swelling. "Roger's
picking me up," I said.
Jacob's lips lingered for a moment, then his hands gave my shoulders a squeeze
and he pulled away, reaching for the shampoo. "I could've given you a ride.".
I felt guilty for not having asked him, but it was just far too gay to have my boy-
friend dropping me off at the precinct. "It's your day off." I turned to face him,
since it felt too weaselly to lie with my back to him. He seemed fine, concentrating
on soaping up his hair.
I rinsed off and slipped out of the shower, and found a week-old towel in the
hamper. I left the clean one for Jacob. He climbed out a minute later, water beaded
on his olive skin, muscles rippling ... with red scratches criss-crossing his thighs.
"What's that?"
He glanced down. "Don't you remember your own handiwork?"
I squinted at the marks. They looked almost as if they'd been made deliberately,
like Xs. "Um. No."
He grinned and dried himself off lazily, flexing for me all the while. "Right before
you jerked off last night, you got a little rough."
I did? I stared at his thighs. They were just scratches. But still. It really didn't seem
like something I'd do, even buzzed. I considered kissing them as some sort of pen-
ance, but if I knelt down in front of him on the bathroom floor I'd be asking for a
big naked porno scene for Roger to stumble into. I shuddered at the thought.
Which was weird. Roger wasn't bad looking, and a threesome should have been in-
teresting fantasy fodder. I watched Jacob watching me as he dried off. Maybe I was
falling in love. I shrugged and finger-combed my hair, dropped my towel on the
floor, and went to find a clean shirt.

Kenneth shot a plastic tab through the seam of a hideous sweater. He wasn’t sure
why he bothered. It wasn’t as if the sweater hadn’t been returned at least three
times. Not that it was defective, per se. It was just so ugly that no one would ever
actually want it.

But Kenneth was only there to earn enough money to buy a new computer. Part-
time, seasonal work seemed harmless enough, or at least it had, the day he’d accep-
ted the job of staffing the most obscure return desk in the least-known subbasement
of SaverPlus.

He shot a plastic tag through a baseball cap, and wondered what type of person
would return a hat. Someone with a very big, or very small head? He decided that
he thought too much. Always had.

The clock clunked. It was a round, industrial clock, circa 1953, and it was far too
retro to simply tick. Eight fifty-nine. He turned around and looked at the piles of
clothes that had accumulated during his shift. Time to fold up the ugly returns and
punch his timecard.

Forty-two years old and punching a time clock. Kenneth tried not to spiral down
into a haze of self-pity by distracting himself with another thought, since his brain
was so insistent on thinking.

Flat screen monitor. Bluetooth keyboard. Relax. Breathe.

The sharp ring of a call bell sent images of new computer systems scattering to the
edges of Kenneth’s mind. He looked up at the return desk, startled, and found a
man in a leather jacket with spiked blond hair leaning over the counter on both el-
bows, chewing gum. He smiled at Kenneth. More of a devilish smile than an ex-
pression of actual happiness.

“We’re closed,” Kenneth said. “They’ve shut the lights off.”

The customer peeked back over his shoulder, as if something had snuck up on him
while he was trying to get Kenneth’s attention.

“Sure,” he said. “But look, maybe you can do me a favor.”

Kenneth resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He couldn’t imagine what would prompt
him to do a favor for a total stranger, particularly at this purgatory of a job, and es-
pecially at 9:01 pm.

“This shirt,” the customer said, swinging a plastic bag onto the counter. “I need a
large.”

Kenneth sighed through his nose and reached into the bag. He had a big enough
pile of returns. If he had the shirt in a large, he could scan them, swap them, and
send the gum-chewer on his way.

He pulled the shirt onto the counter. It was, in Kenneth’s opinion, the only decent
shirt that SaverPlus carried. He owned three, himself.

“Whoa,” said the customer, pointing. “You’re wearing the same one.” He levered
himself up onto his palms, leaning over the countertop, into Kenneth’s personal
space. “That’s pretty wild. Don’t you think?”

“We haven’t got this in a large,” Kenneth said. “Not in black, anyway.”

“But I need black,” he said. “The shirt’s from my mom. And she’ll get all weird if I
don’t wear it the next time I see her.”

“I’m sorry, sir....”

The customer snorted. “Call me Crash.” He squinted at Kenneth’s name tag.
“Kenny.”

Kenneth composed himself. Bluetooth. DVD-RW. Two hundred fifty gig hard
drive.

“These shirts are sold out in black. They have been since November. If you’d like
the shirt in mocha, I can do the exchange, but....”

“Gimme yours.”

Kenneth blinked. “What?”

Crash leaned farther still over the counter. He was tall and slim, and he had a very
long reach. He stared hard into Kenneth’s eyes and then reached up, fingering the
collar of Kenneth’s shirt. He had amazing eyes, pale, pale green. “Your shirt,” he
said. “It looks like a large. I would make it worth your while.”

“You can’t have my shirt.”

Crash cocked his head to one side, and ran a tongue stud back and forth over the
top edge of his lower teeth. “Everyone’s got a price, Kenny. What’s yours?”

Kenneth swallowed hard and got ready to tell Crash to go to hell--not a very festive
SaverPlus farewell, but Kenneth was just a seasonal temp who was only there for
the money--when Crash got a knee up onto the counter and started clambering over
it toward Kenneth.

“Are you crazy?” said Kenneth.

Crash grinned wide, and flashed his tongue stud.

Kenneth almost called security. Almost. Except Crash wasn’t particularly threaten-
ing. He crawled across the return desk like a stripper, his pale green eyes fastened
on Kenneth’s face the whole time. And when he oozed over the far edge of the
counter, he kept on going down, sinking to his knees right between Kenneth’s feet.

“What’s that shirt worth to you?” he said, unbuckling Kenneth’s belt.

Kenneth grabbed the edge of the counter and tried to will his knees to stop shaking.
Before he could even register what was happening, his slacks pooled around his
ankles.

“I can’t believe you’re just going to....”

Crash ran his palms up Kenneth’s thighs. He had silver rings on every finger, and
the metal felt smooth gliding over Kenneth’s skin, hot from its contact with Crash’s
fingers. “What, no one ever ambushed you before? You’re a good-looking guy.”

Objectively, maybe. But Kenneth had always managed to put a “don’t bother me”
vibe out there that resulted in him being left alone more often than not.

Crash tugged Kenneth’s boxers down to his knees.

“And you’re totally hung,” he said, face so close that Kenneth felt the warmth of
Crash’s breath ghosting along his balls.

Kenneth meant to get another hand on the countertop to help hold himself up be-
fore his legs gave out from under him, but instead he found himself cupping the
side of Crash’s face, running his fingers over the crunchy spikes of hair and tracing
the line of silver studs and hoops in Crash’s ear.

Crash had a hand on each of Kenneth’s thighs. He leaned in and pressed his face
into the crease of Kenneth’s groin, and Kenneth felt his cock throb, getting hard,
fast. It brushed Crash’s cheek, standing away from Kenneth’s body in no time flat.

He gasped at the touch of Crash’s hot, wet tongue. He swore that he felt that tiny
metal stud playing along the veins on the underside of his shaft. Kenneth’s fingers
fanned over the side of Crash’s face, tracing the sinew of Crash’s jaw as that hot,
wet tongue wended up and down the length of his cock.

“You wanna feel the inside of my throat?” Crash asked teasingly, looking up from
his crouch with his face nuzzled alongside Kenneth’s hard-on.

Kenneth had a hard time forming a reply. Even a single-syllable word.

“You gonna give me your shirt?”

Kenneth nodded.

Crash raised one eyebrow. “Then take it off.”

Kenneth looked out over the counter. The return desk faced a hallway, mostly. A
dingy hallway that hadn’t been painted in years, or redecorated in decades. He
could see some of the sales floor if he craned his neck. And the guards had never
bothered him in the past as they made their closing rounds, other than to yell, “See
you later,” as they passed the hallway entrance.

Crash’s tongue darted between Kenneth’s balls, and Kenneth had to clench his jaw
shut to keep from yelping. “Your shirt,” Crash said, forming the words against
Kenneth’s scrotum.

Kenneth peered out over the counter again, toward the darkened sales floor.

“What do you care if anyone sees?” said Crash. “It’ll be totally hot if they do.” He
tilted his head back and fit his lips around one of Kenneth’s balls, cradling it with
his mouth and teasing at it with the tip of his tongue.

Kenneth squirmed. His cock was so stiff now it almost hurt, and his balls were
tight. If he was so turned on already, how amazing would it feel if he were buried
deep in that wicked mouth?

Kenneth pulled his shirt off with one quick tug, and let it fall to the floor beside his
foot.

Crash smiled up at him, then reached into his mouth and pulled out the wad of
chewing gum. He twisted around and stuck the gum beneath the counter. “Good
choice,” he said, and turning back to meet Kenneth’s gaze again, he wet his lips
with a long, slow swipe of his tongue.

Crash’s hands slid up the backs of Kenneth’s thighs, grabbing his ass, squeezing it,
pushing Kenneth’s hips forward so his cock sank deep, deep into Crash’s hot, slick
mouth.

Crash just held him there for a moment. Good thing, Kenneth thought, both hands
clutching the counter so hard that his knuckles went white. He was in the midst of
a giant headrush that threatened to leave him sprawled on a pile of ugly, poorly
sized, or just plain unwanted holiday gifts.

Crash’s tongue moved, an unhurried slither that dragged the smooth ball of his
tongue stud tantalizingly over the bottom of Kenneth’s stiff dick.

“Oh, God.”

Crash grunted a reply. Kenneth thought he sounded pleased with himself.

Crash began to suck, and Kenneth’s world tipped on its axis. His legs started to
quiver, at first just a slight trembling, and then a full-on shake. Crash held his ass
more tightly, sinking his fingers deep into the flesh, driving Kenneth’s dick deeper
still into his throat. Kenneth felt the softness at the back with his sensitive cock-
head, felt Crash hum, and swallow, and use every trick in the book to make him ex-
plode.

Kenneth’s hips started flexing, rocking his dick in and out of Crash’s mouth, the
root sinking deep and then revealing itself again, over and over, shining with spit.

Kenneth took a deep breath, and even though he wanted to just grab the back of
Crash’s head, feel a handful of that stiff, spiky hair as he crammed himself in as far
as he could, to fuck Crash’s face until that dam burst and he was coming straight
down that talented throat--even though he wanted that more than anything else,
Kenneth stopped. He held himself very still.

Crash pulled off of Kenneth’s cock with a slurp so loud it practically rang through
the subbasement. He poked his head up above the edge of the counter to see if
somebody was watching. “What?” he whispered.

Kenneth’s eyes darted back toward the entrance to the sales floor to make sure
there wasn’t a guard listening in. “Show me your dick.”

The sly grin spread over Crash’s face again. He grabbed Kenneth hard by the waist
and pulled him down onto the floor behind the counter. The carpet was threadbare
and dirty, but there were enough piles of clothing there to cushion them.

Crash’s jeans were so old and tight that they hugged his long legs and slim hips
perfectly, with no need for a belt. He faced Kenneth, kneeling, as he yanked the fly
open.

Crash grabbed Kenneth’s hand and stuffed it down the front of his pants. It was too
tight in there to feel anything specific, and yet just the thought of it, having his
hand on some total stranger’s hot, hard cock, made Kenneth’s breath catch.

Crash eased his tight jeans down over his hips and his dick fell free, perfectly stiff.
He wove his fingers through Kenneth’s, and they stroked it together as Crash
stared into Kenneth’s eyes.

It was too intense for Kenneth. He needed to look away. He stared down at his own
hard-on and took it in his other hand, stroking it alongside Crash’s.

Crash pulled his hand free, leaving Kenneth with a stiff dick in each fist, one wet,
one dry, stroking them both. A bottle of cheap hand lotion was tucked beneath the
return counter. Crash grabbed it and shot a generous squirt of lotion along both of
them.

The sensation changed from good to incredible as the lotion oozed through Ken-
neth’s fingers. Crash draped both of his arms around Kenneth’s shoulders and
pressed their foreheads together. “That’s right,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Jack
me off.”

Somewhere on the sales floor, a guard’s keys jingled as he made his first rounds of
the night. The lights were still on over Kenneth’s desk, which wasn’t so uncom-
mon. Sometimes he had a little trouble shutting down his register.

“Have a good one,” the guard called out on his way past the hallway.

Kenneth’s eyes peeked over the top of the counter. He’d stopped stroking, mo-
mentarily, though of course the situation would be compromising enough if he
were to be caught, whether or not his slippery hands were moving up and down.

He blanked out what he’d normally say, and then shouted, “You too,” thinking that
his own voice sounded alien.

He looked back at Crash’s face, eyes almost too close to properly see. Crash’s grin
was a mile wide. He tilted his head to the side and fit his lips to Kenneth’s. “Get
me off,” he said against Kenneth’s mouth.

Crash’s closeness was overwhelming. Kenneth wanted to back up but there was
nowhere to go. And the feel of Crash’s mouth on Kenneth’s lips made his dick
even harder. Kenneth’s hands moved faster and Crash gasped. It felt good to wrest
control from him, even in that small way. Kenneth concentrated on his strokes,
making them even and regular, focusing on the way Crash breathed against his
face. He wanted to make that breathing go ragged. He wanted to make Crash
moan.

Kenneth gripped Crash’s cock just a little harder, and Crash seemed to melt into
him. Their mouths crushed together, and Crash’s pierced tongue parted Kenneth’s
lips. Crash sighed a spearmint breath into Kenneth’s mouth as the muscles in his
thighs tensed.

Crash pulled his mouth free and buried his face in the crook of Kenneth’s neck. His
breath was hot on Kenneth’s collarbone as he squeezed their bodies together, mur-
muring, “Yeah, oh yeah, mmmm, yeah,” into Kenneth’s shoulder.

Crash gasped and his hips jerked. Kenneth felt the wetness of come, hot and sticky
on his belly. Kenneth slowed his strokes on his own dick, concentrating on making
them perfect, and basking in the feel of this man draped against him, breathing
hard and making satisfied noises against his shoulder.

“Don’t bogart,” the smoker teased as Andrew took a drag. He was a few years
older than Andrew, maybe thirty, if that. Andrew held the burning smoke in his
lungs for a moment and then turned his face to one side to exhale. He felt naus-
eated within seconds.
“If you need a cup of coffee to go with it, I can scrape one up for you. Name’s
Crash, by the way.”
Andrew suddenly felt incredibly stupid and out of his element, standing there on
the sidewalk and smoking with a total stranger who called himself Crash. “No, I,
uh...here you go.” He tried to give the cigarette back, but “Crash” was tapping a
new one out of the pack for himself.
“Don’t worry about it. New pack—just bought it. Plenty for both of us. You’ve got
a name, right?”
”Andrew.”
Crash stepped aside and gestured toward the door. “So, about that coffee. You do
drink coffee, Andrew, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Good. ‘Cos if you were gonna say, ‘No, but I like coffee flavored ice cream,’ I’d
have to push you into traffic. Just so you know.”
“But...that’s the palm reader’s door.”
“No, that’s the door to the building. It leads to her shop, and my shop, and the
apartments above us where a bunch of illegals from El Salvador stack themselves
ten to a bedroom and three in the closet. But who’s counting?”
Andrew took a deeper drag from the cigarette as Crash pulled open the door and
mo- tioned him inside. The vestibule was a small, cramped space. All four walls
and even the mailboxes had been painted a deep, glossy red. Two of the mailboxes
had been smashed open, and small pitchforks and crowns, gang-style, had been
carved into the paint. But other markings decorated the paint job too, less sinister

than the gang symbols. Lavender dots that looked like they’d been dabbed on with
someone’s fingertips decorated the second mailbox, trailed off the edge, and poin-
ted in an undulating dotted line toward the narrow stairs.
The stairwell smelled of incense and cigarettes.
Andrew followed Crash and the dots up to an old wooden door on the second floor.
It was painted in blue and yellow stripes. A chalkboard hung over a hand-lettered
sign with rocks and twigs glued to the border. The sign read “Sticks and Stones”
and the chalkboard said “Back in 5.” Beneath that, the store’s hours were scrawled
on the door in marker. Crash reached around Andrew, grabbed a piece of chalk that
had been perched on top of the doorjamb, erased the old message with the side of
his hand, and scrawled, “CLOSED.” The store was supposed to be open until sev-
en.
Crash unlocked the door and held it open. “Abandon hope,” he said, “all ye who
enter here.”
It was a reference to something, but Andrew couldn’t recall exactly what. It wasn’t
very surprising, the feeling of disconnectedness. His own hand felt foreign, holding
the ciga- rette just so, as if it were someone else’s hand, someone else’s body.
Crash flipped on the light, and rows of things—strange and intimidating things—
candles and herbs, statuettes and brightly labeled bottles, appeared all around them.
“I take it they don’t have too many botanicas in Arlington Heights,” said Crash. He
took a deep drag off his cigarette and blew the smoke towards the ceiling.
“This is real magic?” said Andrew.
“As opposed to what? Fake magic? Like parlor tricks?”
Andrew didn’t know what he’d meant. He’d heard of the various psychic discip-
lines, but he hadn’t even realized that he thought some might be superior to others,
that some might be more useful, more tangible, while others might simply be
smoke and mirrors.
“The palm reader—I heard she was real.” “She’s not an actress or a cardboard
cutout, if that’s what you mean.” “That she can really tell the future.”
Crash went around the counter and pulled a lime-encrusted carafe from a coffee
maker behind the cash register. “Do you think she’d be here if she was really pre-
cognizant? Wait. Hold that thought. I’ve got beer if you’d rather have beer.”
“I can’t. I’m driving.”
“Then coffee it is.” He disappeared through a beaded curtain behind the counter,
and a moment later Andrew heard water running. He put the cigarette Crash had
given him be- tween his lips and held it there, feeling even less like himself than he
had in the hallway. His heart was pounding from the nicotine. The smoke drifted
upward and burned his eyes. He inhaled, removed the cigarette, looked at it, and
blew out a stream of smoke.

Six weeks later and I was still on medical leave. I felt fine, probably due to the
amount of actual blood cells coursing through my system in lieu of the drug cock-
tail I was accustomed to.
"Did you ever shoot anyone?" Clayton asked me, eyes sparkling.
"Sure." "Wow. Did you kill 'em?" Clayton had Jacob's phenomenal dark eyes. Or
Jacob's
younger sister Barbara's eyes. Which were Jacob's father's eyes, as well as the eyes
of the wizened old lady at the head of the table who was about a hundred and five.
She'd been giving me a look that could probably kill an elephant ever since we'd
gotten there and Jacob had introduced me as his boyfriend.
I think he'd primed his family over the phone. But still. He had to go and say it out
loud and rub it in. Because that's the way Jacob is. Not that he'd be bringing a man
home for Thanksgiving for any other reason. But that's beside the point.
"Clayton Joseph," snapped Barbara. She might have had Jacob's eyes, but she cer-
tainly couldn't hold a candle to his cool composure. "That is not an appropriate
question for the dinner table."
Grandma Marks glowered at me from the head of the table, her dark eyes, half-hid-
den in folds of wrinkled skin, threatening to pierce me right through. I'd figured
she hated me because I was doing the nasty with her grandson. Maybe she had a
thing against psychics. Hell, maybe both. I'm usually just lucky that way.
"Bob Martinez retired down at the mill," Jacob's father, Jerry, announced in a
blatant attempt to change the subject. If we'd been in Chicago, where I grew up,
Jerry would have been talking about a steel mill. But we were in Wisconsin, an ali-
en land of rolling hills and cows with signs advertising something called "fresh
cheese curds" every few miles. I gathered that the mills made paper in this alien,
wholesome land where Jacob had been born and bred.
"And when are you going to think about retiring, dad?" Barbara asked. She had a
trace of an accent that sounded Minnesotan to my untrained ear. I wondered if Jac-
ob had ever had that same funny lilt. Probably once, but it'd been erased by him
living over half his life in Chicago.
"Your father's got another ten years in him, at least," said Jacob's mom, Shirley.
Shirley wore her hair in a white, poofy halo. I suspected she'd been a blonde in her
younger days. "What's he going to do around here but get in my way?"
"Your mother plays Euchre on Tuesdays and Thursdays," said Jerry, as if his retire-
ment hinged around a card game.
"You have hobbies," said Barbara. "You could fix up your woodshop and actually
finish a few things."
"Ah, I'd rather earn an honest wage than stay home and make birdhouses."
"And you could teach Clayton all about woodworking." "He's too young," said
Jerry. "He'd cut his finger off." "Wood is stupid," Clayton added. I wondered if

calling wood stupid was heresy in this land of trees and paper. But Grandma didn't
fall out of her chair clutching her heart, so I figured that kids were allowed to say
the first thing that popped into their minds these days. Or maybe they always had
been. I must have been on my third foster home by the time I was Clayton's age. I
was probably in fourth grade, held back for being thick, stubborn, and socially re-
tarded. But that would've put me at just about the age where I'd learned that my
opinion was neither desired nor appreciated.
Jingle bells announced the opening of the front door—that and a massive blast of
arctic air, complete with a whorl of snowflakes.
"Uncle Leon!" Clayton leapt up from the table and thundered toward the door.
I looked at the empty place setting across from me and heaved an inward sigh of
relief. I'd been hoping that an actual person would fill it, that it wasn't left open as a
tribute to Grandpa Marks, or some other long lost family member.
Leon rounded the corner of the dining room and Shirley stood up to greet him. I
glanced around at the rest of the table to see if I was supposed to stand up, too. But
Jacob and Jerry were still sitting. Jerry was even packing away mashed potatoes
like he was trying to beat everyone else to the punch.
Uncle Leon was in his mid to late sixties and had the same white hair and rounded
snub nose as Jacob's mom. Shirley kissed him on the cheek and unbuttoned his
thick corduroy jacket. "Jacob brought his friend with him," she said, gesturing to-
ward me. "This is Victor."
She peeled Leon's coat off him and whisked away with it just as Leon turned to
shake my hand. He led with his left hand, which confused me. His bare right arm
flapped at his side, with his right sleeve rolled up to his shoulder.
I shook his left hand in a daze.
Leon nodded his head toward his right shoulder. "Lost it at the mill in sev-
enty-eight. Damn thing still hurts."
I blinked. Leon's right sleeve wasn't rolled up. It was pinned to the shoulder of his
shirt. He didn't have a right arm—not one made out of real flesh and blood, any-
way. And I could still see his missing arm. The party'd finally gotten started. Hoo-
ray.
"Oh," I said. "That sucks." "Shirley tells me you're a PsyCop." I nodded. "Yeah."
"That's some kind of program they got going on down
there," he said. His ghost arm joined his corporeal arm in pulling out the chair
across from mine. "What kind of talent you got?"
I sank back into my seat and swallowed a mouthful of dryish turkey meat I'd been
talking around for the last several minutes. "Medium."
"No shit?"
Grandma frowned harder, but Leon didn't seem to notice. "Can I get you anything
to drink?" Shirley asked me, but I mumbled that I was okay.

I leaned over the display case and stared down through the glass.
“Pretty messed up,” Crash said.
I thought for a second that he was reading my mind, but then I realized he was
talking about the display. I shrugged. The mummified babies were just some
brown, withered husks. I’d seen worse, lots worse.
“What does it say about a culture, that they’re so obsessed with their dead that they
go through all this preparation and ritual to preserve the body?”
I glanced up at a small sign on the wall I’d noticed that said something about it.
“They, uh, thought they’d need this stuff in the afterlife. Just being thorough, I
guess.”
A female security guard watched us with the same expression she probably wore
while she was waiting for a load of laundry to dry. Crash petted the pocket of his
leather jacket as if he was jonesing to have a smoke right then and there. “I take it
you can’t find any Egyptian ghosts to talk to.”
“Nope. They’re probably in Egypt, not in a museum in Hyde Park. And they prob-
ably didn’t stick around more than a few dozen years after they died. I hardly ever
see ghosts that are more than a century or two old.” Then again, there weren’t
many white people in the Midwest before that, and maybe all the Native Americ-
ans were smart enough not to stick around once they’d died.
“If you can’t see mummy ghosts, then there aren’t any to be seen.” “I didn’t say
that.”
“But it’s true. I can’t wait to blow a hole in ScienceFiend’s theory that the whole
mummification process ties the spirits to the physical realm.”
“ScienceFiend.”
“It’s an online nickname.”
I knew that. It just sounded stupid when Crash said it out loud, especially because
he said it like he cared about what someone thought about him even though they’d
never actually met in person. “You never know,” I told him. “Mummification
might keep a spirit around a lot longer than normal. Say a ghost was going to stick
around for ten years, and instead it stayed here for fifty.” I shrugged. “You’d need
some newer mummies to test that out.”

Zigler led me through an archway into an open-plan living room/dining room,
where a chunky, teenaged version of him was sprawled on his stomach in front of
the biggest TV I’d ever seen in my life, playing a video game where he was some
kind of ninja. Or maybe he was the other guy, the one with the blue hair. Either the
kid was completely engrossed in his game, or he was pointedly ignoring us. Prob-
ably a little of both.

Zig spoke to his back without waiting for him to acknowledge us. “Vic, this is my
son, Robbie. Robbie, this is Victor Bayne. The medium.”
In a move I might have expected from one of the characters onscreen, Robbie
dropped his controller and leapt to his feet so quickly I actually took a couple steps
back. On the gigantic TV, the ninja stood there in a light squat, bouncing on the
balls of his feet, while the blue-haired guy beat the shit out of him. I mean, the
crap.
“Whoa. Can I, like, shake your hand? Or will that mess up your psychic field?”
I shrugged and held out my hand. He shook it with a look on his face that bordered
on reverence. “Nancy?” called Zig. “Caitlin! We’ve got company.”
Damn it. I’d wanted to give Zig the third degree about what he knew or didn’t
know about the burying of Camp Hell, and here he was introducing me to his fam-
ily. A gong sounded as the ninja’s head was torn off and slammed to the floor. Zig’s
wife came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a tiny towel. “Honey, this is my
partner, Victor. Vic, my wife, Nancy.”
Nancy Zigler was short. I guess women call it “petite”. She wore jeans that looked
like they’d been starched and ironed, and a spotless white sweater. Her brown hair
was long in the front and short in back, flipped up and sprayed stiff. She had lip-
stick on. At home. “Detective,” she said warmly. “It’s great to finally meet you.
Have you eaten breakfast? Can I get you some coffee?”
“Just coffee, uh...thanks.” I gestured toward the front of the house. “If you need to
go to that thing at the school....”
“The conference? That’s not until two. Come on in the kitchen and sit down.”
Young Robbie bounded back toward the vestibule, then up a flight of stairs with
the force of a herd of buffalo. The house muffled whatever it was he said up there,
but it couldn’t mask his excited tone. Two pairs of feet thundered back downstairs
as Nancy set me up in the kitchen with a mug so huge I had to hold it with both
hands. I guess everything was done big at the Ziglers’.
“Vic,” said Zig, “my daughter, Caitlin.”
Caitlin was nearly as tall as Zig. I’m bad with kids’ ages, but I’d say she was
maybe a junior or senior in high school, a year or so older than Robbie, with long,
sandy hair with white-blond streaks in front. She was slim, in that carefree way
that kids are slim before they either put on weight like Zig or turn bony like me,
and the oversized Cubs sweatshirt she was wearing drooped over one shoulder.
Caitlin didn’t request to shake my hand. She stared at me, round-eyed and flushed.
I stared back. I searched for something to say. I finally settled on, “Hi.” I held my
hand out to Caitlin and she gripped it and pumped my arm up and down.
“Ohmigod. This. is. so. cool. Is it true you can talk to spirits without having, like, a
séance or anything?”

I clutched my jumbo mug of coffee hard, wondering how long my left hand alone
could support it. “No. No séance necessary.”
“And you totally see them.” “Y-yeah.”
“Caitlin,” said Nancy, “let Detective Bayne enjoy his coffee. He came here to talk
to your father.”
Caitlin backed into the doorway and stopped beside her brother. They kept on star-
ing at me like I’d grown a second head.
Zig pulled out the chair beside mine and sat. He ignored his gawking teenagers.
“We went to a psychic fair down at Covered Bridge in Indiana last summer.” He
sighed and scooped three sugars into his conventionally-sized mug. “They’ve been
interested in psychics ever since. Well, and then I got the job.” His voice had
dwindled and he focused on stirring his coffee. He glanced toward the sink, where
Nancy, wearing a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves, washed out a coffee cup.
“But anyway. I’m thinking you might’ve wanted to talk shop a little?”
“Yeah. Work stuff.”
Nancy took the hint. She peeled off her yellow gloves and draped them over the
edge of the sink. “Let me know if you need anything,” she said. Her hand brushed
over Zig’s shoulder as she walked by. “I’m happy to make you some eggs.”
“No thanks. I’m good.”
“If you change your mind, just holler.” Nancy herded the kids away from the door
and left Zig and me alone. We watched the doorway until the footfalls receded, dis-
persing throughout the house.
I drank some coffee. Damn Zig and his accommodating family. I’d been all geared
up to accuse Zigler of holding out on me about Camp Hell. But he was such a
softie at home I just couldn’t raise my voice to him.
“So. Why can’t I find Heliotrope Station on the Internet?” I said, much more
calmly than I’d rehearsed.

Zig stared into his cup so intently that he could’ve been reading tea leaves. “It nev-
er oc- curred to you to look it up until now?”
“Don’t answer my question with a question,” I snapped. Though as questions went,
it was a good one.
Zigler hunkered down closer to his coffee cup. “It’s all classified,” he said. His
voice was so low I had to lean over the table to hear it. “I’m not supposed to talk
about you to anyone other than my immediate family. Except for this therapist at
The Clinic. You know, the one I started seeing after we found the reanimated bod-
ies in the basement...?”
“I’ve never found anything good in a basement. Ever.”
“If I say a word to the media—TV reporters, newspaper, anything—I could get
fired on the spot.”

“What’re you saying? That I’m some kind of big secret?” Zig turned his cup
handle one way, then the other. “I thought you knew.” “No. I didn’t.”
Zig’s eyes were fixed on the cup. “What if you weren’t? What if every time you
solved a murder, your name showed up in the Tribune? Wouldn’t you be mobbed
all the time by people who wanted to talk to their dead family members?”
Whoa. I sat back and drained my gigantic mug just to buy myself a little time to let
the idea of myself as some sort of high-demand commodity sink in. I never con-
sidered that my talent would have any appeal in the private sector. After they were
done poking and prodding me at Heliotrope Station, the Chicago PD scooped me
right up. I’d never been a psychic civilian.
“And then there’s the security,” said Zig. “The religious right gets pretty paranoid
about precogs and mediums.”
“Huh?”
“Come on, Victor. You don’t think that level-four in Miami was killed by a stray
bullet, do you?”
“That’s what I heard.” He wouldn’t be the first innocent bystander to buy it in a
sloppy gang-related shooting.
“I’d bet the Impala that he was assassinated.”
“Assassinated? Cripes, you make it sound like a Ninja video game.”
I looked back at my mug, and when I looked up again, I caught Zig staring at me,
but just for a second. He dropped his gaze back down to his coffee. “Look, maybe
it would help if I knew what you were looking for in regards to Heliotrope Sta-
tion.”

“So. You’re here to gloat over how you’ll nail me with your civil suit.” Roger
Burke nailed me with the world’s smuggest grin, and when I didn’t accommodate
him by being lured into some sort of argument, he added, “I’d just like to see you
try.”

My civil suit. I checked that phrase against the known phrases in my admittedly
limited catalog of things-I-knew-about, and came up blank. I was coasting on the
sweet spot of my Auracel and I didn’t feel the immediate need to tell Burke that I
had no idea what he was talking about, so I stared at him instead.

He’d been grinning at me. His smile faltered. “Don’t give me that look.”

I attempted to look even more like I currently did.

“Go ahead and sue me. I’ve got less than five thousand dollars in the bank. And be-
lieve me, I’ve got my countersuit all planned out. You could’ve given me a stroke

by shooting me up in the neck. I’m prepared to testify that a long-time drug user
like you would know that.”

It had never even occurred to me to sue him. I pressed the heel of my hand into my
right eye. It felt great, and then it hurt, and then I saw a flash of pretty colors.
“Would you shut up for half a second?”

“Think you’d win over a jury? Maybe they’d sympathize with you on the drug
angle if you did your ‘boo-hoo, I’m a medium’ routine. But once my attorneys
parade in that big, smug, steroid-pumped gorilla you play house with….”

“I was planning on talking about a way we could avoid the courtroom, but keep
running your mouth, and my next phone call is my lawyer.”

Burke crossed his arms over his chest as far as his handcuffs would allow, and he
glared. He had a hell of a glare. I’d never seen him use it during the time he’d been
my partner at the Fifth Precinct. He’d spent over a month projecting a wholesome,
helpful, non-threatening persona as the Stiff half of our PsyCop team, and I’d been
totally sold on his good-cop act.

Now that I knew him for what he was, I had no idea how I ever could have seen
him as harmless. His eyes, which once seemed unguarded and approachable—at
least, for a homicide investigator—now looked so cold and calculating that I
wondered why I’d ever thought it was safe to get into a car with him, let alone ac-
cept a drink he’d bought without my surveillance.

He sat across the plastic table from me in the visiting room, with his pale, reptilian
eyes trained on me so hard that I felt like I needed to go take a shower under a wa-
ter cannon to wash off the evil. There was a repeater in the corner, the ghost of a
former inmate who’d died pounding on the two-way mirror, who continued to slam
his fists into the glass long into the afterlife. I’d been spooked by him when I first
came into the room and discovered I hadn’t taken enough Auracel to block him.
Now I found his presence almost comforting. It meant I wasn’t alone with Roger
Burke.

I controlled my revulsion toward him enough to plant my elbows on the table and
lean forward. I’d been hoping to buy his information with Marlboros, but the
guards wouldn’t let me bring cigarettes into the visiting area. His hissy fit had giv-
en me an idea, though. “Here’s the deal. I promise not to sue you, if you tell me
what you know about Camp Hell.”

I did my best not to look too full of myself, but I had to admit: a promise to refrain
from any future lawsuits seemed a lot more valuable than a few packs of smokes.

Roger eased back into his chair. I wouldn’t say he looked exactly comfortable, but
he was interested enough to stay awhile, if only to taunt me about things that he
knew, and I didn’t. It was a start.

“I assume that you’re not talking about the new Heliotrope Station. You want to
know about the real deal. Where you trained.”

In name only, Heliotrope Station lived on. It was now a series of night-school
classes they held over at the Junior College. None of it was even remotely like the
original Camp Hell—not the administration, not the staff, not the location. Hell,
not even the textbooks. Still, even the old name made me start to sweat, and swal-
low convulsively.

Roger’s smug grin was back. “You’d need to talk to me ‘til my release date to find
out everything I know about Camp Hell. And given that they haven’t even set my
sentence, who knows when that’ll be?”

Posturing. That was good. It meant that he wanted to seem like he had something
valuable to dangle over my head. Unfortunately, I already knew that he did. Lisa’s
si-no talent had told me that Roger could not only tell us why stories about Camp
Hell had never made it to the Internet, but who’d managed to bury them.

“I’ll be checking out what you say to make sure it’s true,” I warned him. “I smell
bullshit, and I’ll see you in court.”

Roger smiled. There was some genuine pleasure in that smile, along with all the
malice. My creeped-out meter ratcheted up to eleven. “April eighteenth,” he said.
“It’s a mild fifty-five degrees outside. The subway tunnels are being drained from a
freakish flood incident that occurred when an old access tunnel collapsed and the
Chicago River poured in. And twenty-three-year-old Victor Bayne was transferred
from the Cook County Mental Health Center to Heliotrope Station at approxim-
ately fourteen hundred hours. In a straightjacket.”

My right eye throbbed. I jammed my thumb into the corner of it at the bridge of
my nose, and reminded myself to breathe. “Big deal.”

“Could anyone else have told you that story? Your co-workers? Your lover?”

He said the word lover like it was something rotten he’d found stuck between his
teeth. “You know things about me,” I said. I think my voice sounded normal.
Maybe. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t, since you and Doctor Chance schemed to
kidnap me for, what, a year? Maybe two? That doesn’t mean you know Camp
Hell.”

“West Fifty-Third Place, behind an industrial park that housed a small factory that
manufactured dental posts and implants. No address. No signs. But a big, electri-
fied, razor wire fence covered the whole perimeter. Been there lately? Seems like
the whole building, all sixty five hundred square feet of it, has just…disappeared.
Kind of like the residents.”

The front doors were black tinted glass. I blinked. Roger hadn’t told me that. The
fried remnants of my brain had cheerfully offered up the long-forgotten detail.

The gag reflex fluttered, deep down in my throat. How did I ever think I could hear
about Camp Hell without shoving my keys into my ears and punching out my
eardrums?

I stood. My cheap plastic chair tipped over.

“Am I wrong, Detective?”

“This was a dumb idea. Go back to your cafeteria food and your group showers.”

“They didn’t kill them all. Maybe half, give or take. But the ones who didn’t pose
any threat, or the ones they could use….” He spread his hands. His handcuffs
clicked as the chain in the center hit its limit. “Well. They crop up every now and
again. They might even be leading fairly normal lives. As long as they don’t travel
anywhere suspicious, like Afghanistan or Cuba, the FPMP is happy to let them go
on thinking they’re just plain, old, ordinary American citizens, just like you and
me.” He blinked in mock sincerity. “Although…come to think of it, neither one of
us really does fit that description. I’m up on felony charges, and you’re a class five
medium—as far as they know, anyway.”

“I tested at five a dozen times. That’s no big secret. What’s FPMP?”

Roger smiled.

Our little chat wasn’t going anything like I’d planned. I was supposed to give him
some smokes, and he would thank me for my present by telling me a name or an

address, and that would be that. That’s how it’d gone down inside my head, any-
how.

“A bunch of butch guys running around with letters sewn onto their windbreakers,”
I said, “right? Whatever. Look, I’ve got somewhere to be.”

I went to the door and knocked. The guard opened it.

“You could always recant your statement, you know. Tell them it wasn’t me hold-
ing you captive. I was just along for the ride.”

Coffee I’d drank a couple of hours before burned at the back of my throat. I needed
to get to a bathroom before I hurled. “Yeah. They’ll believe that.”

“Why wouldn’t they? When you gave your testimony, you had traces of Amytal,
psyactives and muscle relaxants in your system. You were confused.” He stared me
in the eye, and he’d finally stopped grinning. “C’mon, Bayne. I’d make it worth
your while.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I can tell you about Camp Hell, but what’s the point? You were there. A second
point of view isn’t going to change anything that happened. But the FPMP? The
people who made it disappear? They’re still around. Think about it. Can you really
afford not to know?”

I was standing half-in, half-out of the room. The guard gave me an “are you
through yet?” look. I took another step out the door.

“And…Detective?” He sounded so mild, so matter-of-fact, that I should have
known a zinger was coming. But I couldn’t stop myself from turning back around
and taking one more look at Roger Burke’s cold, pale eyes.

“What?”

Roger’s grin reappeared, and spread like blood welling out of a deep papercut.
“Happy birthday.”

• • •

I lay in bed staring up at the tin ceiling, racking my brain and trying to figure out
which was worse: knowing that Roger Burke would walk sooner, maybe even im-
mediately, if I recanted my statement—or knowing that he could tell me everything
I wanted to know about Camp Hell and then some, but that I was too gutless to pay
the price he wanted for the information.

I heard Jacob come in and bound up the stairs. He’s got energy to do things like
that, because he eats right, exercises, and doesn’t take questionable pills.

“Are you mad?” he said.

I glanced down from the ceiling. He stood in the bedroom doorway, loosening his
tie.

“No. Why?”

“Me. Forgetting your birthday.” He slipped out of his suitcoat and hung it in the
closet. “Do you want to go out? It’s not that late. I’ll bet I can get us in at Villa
Prego.”

Villa Prego was fancy enough that I didn’t think the staff would ruin my dinner by
trooping out and singing me a half-hearted, cheesy birthday song. But they served
fussy little portions of things that once crawled around on the bottoms of ponds.
“Nah. Let’s just get a pizza. I’m really not big into birthdays.”

Jacob took off his holster and put it in a drawer. “How hungry are you?”

Thanks to my cozy alone-time with Roger Burke, my stomach felt like it’d been
ripped out, switched with a giant wad of rotting trash, then stuffed back into my
abdominal cavity. I shrugged.

Jacob flashed some skin while he pulled on a T-shirt and sweats, and even his unin-
tentional strip tease wasn’t enough to cheer me up. I was too busy mulling over just
how much I hated Burke, and wishing that he wasn’t the one who had the informa-
tion I needed.

Jacob shut the closet door and looked at me hard enough to make him squint.
“Something’s wrong. Is it Lisa?”

“Lisa’s fine. She sent me her e-mail address. Maybe one of these days she’ll trust
me with her phone number again.”

He planted his hands on his hips and kept on staring. I felt myself scowl even
harder. I know he was accustomed to teaming up with the Human Polygraph, but
didn’t he understand that sometimes people lied and minimized because they were
wrestling with something too ugly to lay out there for everyone to see?

“You’re mad that I borrowed your Auracel,” he said, finally.

There—something I could hang my mood on. Thank you, Jacob. “Don’t go
through my pockets.”

“I’m sorry.”

Like I gave a damn that he’d slipped some of my meds to an astral rapist. It wasn’t
as if it was my last pill or anything. And it’d gone to a good cause. I did my best to
scowl harder.

Jacob sat on the edge of the bed, pulled my foot into his lap and dug his thumb into
the sole. I turned all to jelly inside, but I think my scowl didn’t slip, much. “I’m
truly sorry. I did what I thought was right at the time.”

The nerves at the bottom of my foot seemed to be connected directly to my spine. I
sagged into the mattress, and my eyes rolled up to stare at the ceiling again. Jacob
swept his thumb over the ball of my foot, and I made a noise that I usually reserve
for sex.

“Please don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad,” I said. “It’s just been a rough couple of days.”

-TWO-

A gunshot woke me.

Not inside the cannery or anything. Not as if someone was standing at the foot of
my bed aiming a semi-automatic at us. A faraway gunshot, a few blocks away, at
least. There weren’t any followup shots, or screams, or sirens, either.

Typical noise. I’d been sleeping through it for years.

I looked at the alarm clock. Glowing green digits read 4:08. Jacob lay on his side
with his hand nestled under his cheek, breathing deeply. He hadn’t woken. Why
had I?

I stared up at the ceiling and listened, but there was nothing more to hear. I
struggled to remember which day it was, and almost had myself convinced that it
was Friday. But then I remembered the guard escorting Roger Burke into the meet-
ing room at Metropolitan Correctional Center, and I realized it was Monday, and I
was faced with at least five days of work before I’d get to take it easy. I closed my
eyes and told myself to go back to sleep and get two and a half more hours in. I’d
be foggy and sore if I got up now. I needed to stay alert to see if I could determine
who at the Fifth Precinct knew about the MP something something—whatever the
fuck Burke had called it—and who were just the same old people I always thought
they were.

I sighed. I’d need my wits about me to field a phone call from Stefan without
sounding like a complete dumbass. He’d probably pick the least opportune time to
call back, like when I was in the car with Zigler. I always suspected his talent told
him when he could make someone squirm just for the fun of it, and he usually did,
because that’s how he is. Or was. It’d been over fourteen years. Maybe he’d out-
grown his small sadistic pleasures.

I wondered what number I’d given. My cell, I would assume, since I didn’t even
know my new land line. And then it dawned on me. I hadn’t left him any number at
all. I’d totally forgotten to call him.

My eyes shot open and my adrenaline surged. What were his office hours? Nine to
five? What if he came in early on a Monday morning to do some sort of clerical
thing? It seemed unlikely, but it seemed even less likely that he’d carve out time on
a Friday afternoon to do it.

Chances were one in eight million that if Stefan did come in early on Monday
mornings to do his paperwork, he’d be doing it at four a.m. But I wasn’t exactly
thinking rationally.

I slipped out of bed, cracked my knee on the massive slab of furniture that served
as a bedside table, and crept out of the room barefoot, praying that I wasn’t going
to discover a stray tack or chisel-edged staple the hard way.

I paused at the foot of the stairs. A streetlight shining through glass block windows
provided enough illumination to see where the furniture was. I could make out the
shapes of the doorways on the second floor, all three with their doors open. And

even though Jacob could sleep through a hurricane or a gunshot, I decided that if I
left the message now, he’d hear me and wake up.

I thought about locking myself in the downstairs bathroom, but then it occurred to
me that Stefan would know. He always knew all kinds of weird things like that.

I decided it wouldn’t be abnormal in any way to call from the kitchen. And also,
that Jacob wouldn’t be able to hear me if I did. I stubbed every toe on my right foot
on the coffee table, swallowed down the word, “Fuckgoddamn,” and slipped into
the kitchenette.

I could see the room, kind of, by the glow of the microwave clock. There was a
flashlight in my overcoat, but that was hanging in the entryway, and I figured I’d
lose a limb if I tried to retrieve it. I could just turn on the light, but I was positive
that Jacob would feel it shining through the bedroom floor, then come downstairs
and demand to know what I was doing.

In a sudden burst of inspiration, I pulled open the refrigerator door…and was
struck blind by the light thrown by the minuscule appliance bulb. I blinked away
door-shaped afterimages as the coolness that’d been trapped inside the fridge
settled around my bare toes, and I figured out what I was going to say to Stefan.

And then I checked the number on the sticky note that was plastered to my phone,
flipped the phone open, and dialed.

I guess I’d expected Stefan’s voice. He’s got a deep baritone that would’ve made
him the perfect host of a campy horror flick matinee. But it wasn’t Stefan on the
voice mail. It was a woman, maybe even a professional voice artist, by the sound
of her.

“You’ve reached the office of Russeau and Kline, and we’re pleased that with
among all the empathic behavior-modification therapists available, you’ve selected
us.”

I forgot whatever it was I’d meant to say.

“We specialize in weight loss, smoking cessation, drug and alcohol counseling, and
productivity in the workplace. If you have a goal, we can help you obtain it.”

Did I have a goal? Shit. I drew a blank. A total blank.

“Office hours are Tuesday through Friday, ten to six. For a nominal convenience
fee, limited after-hours sessions are available.”

So it was possible Stefan was there now. Right now. If someone who needed ther-
apy in the middle of the night had slipped him a big enough incentive. Think, I told
myself, think. Be cool. It’s just Stefan.

“Press one to make an appointment. Press two to leave a message for Lorraine
Kline. Press three to leave a message for Steven Russeau. Press zero for more op-
tions. When you’re finished, press pound for more options, or just hang up.”

I pressed three. Three was Stefan’s favorite number. I used to mock him relent-
lessly for having a favorite number. And then we’d steal a can of whipped cream
from the cafeteria and inhale the propellant. And have sex.

A computer voice said, “Please leave a message for,” and Stefan’s deep voice, just
the same as I remembered it, said, “Steven Russeau.” Which wasn’t his name. His
name was Stefan Russell. Who’d convinced him to change his name, and how?

There was a beep. No time to wonder. “Uh, hey, Stefan. Steven. Uh, right, Steven
now. It’s Vic…Victor Bayne. I never changed my name. So, right, anyway…I was
wondering if you want to meet. Just to talk. I mean, yeah. For coffee. Sometime.” I
said my phone number, probably too fast, and snapped my phone shut.

I told myself there was no reason to panic. It was just Stefan. If our younger selves
could have seen me now, freaking out over leaving him a stupid message, we
would’ve both laughed.

“Vic?”

The refrigerator door rattled as I gave it a spastic jerk. I threw my phone in the
crisper and peeked over the top of the door. Jacob stood a few feet away from me,
silhouetted in the archway that led to the cannery’s main room.

“Are you looking for something?”

How long had I been standing there staring into the refrigerator—and how long
had Jacob been watching me do it? I grabbed the first thing I saw, one of Jacob’s
protein shakes, and closed the door. “I was just, uh…hungry.”

“Oh. You had such a strange look on your face, I was worried there were spirits in
the leftovers.” He came up beside me, pulled me against him with one arm, and re-
opened the refrigerator door with the other. I stopped breathing as I wondered if he
had a taste for lettuce, and if so, whether he’d wonder why the romaine was check-
ing its messages.

Jacob pulled a half-empty quart of orange juice toward the edge of the shelf,
coaxed open the top of the carton with one hand, then picked it up and drained it in
one long, sensual swallow. He pitched the empty carton into the trash. “That’s what
you get for falling asleep without eating.” He glanced down at the shake. “You like
those? I’ll buy more.”

It had never occurred to me to drink one. I popped open the tab and took a swal-
low. It tasted like half & half spiked with kiddie vitamins, but mostly like the can. I
shuddered. “I guess not.”

Jacob took the shake out of my hand and put it back in the fridge. He shut the door,
and then backed me into it. “I can think of something that tastes a whole lot better.”

Magnets dug into my back as he went for my throat. His teeth grazed the marks left
over from the previous week’s encounters that had just healed.

“No biting,” I said, and I tried to shrug him away, but there was probably fifty
pounds more of him than there was of me, and he didn’t budge. I struggled more,
and his tongue touched my neck and moved lower, licks punctuated by small nips
of his teeth. Enough to sting, but not enough to mark. I let my breath out carefully.
The thought of him biting down on my collarbone made the slug of protein shake
I’d just taken do an anticipatory cartwheel inside my stomach.

“I’ve been dying to get you alone, and awake. We’ve got a whole building to
christen.”

I’d never considered against-the-fridge to be one of the more appealing sexual pos-
itions, but it looked like Jacob was out to prove me wrong. He grabbed my hips,
and even through my sweats, shocks of pain-tinged pleasure shot straight to my
balls.

He let go of my hip to stretch the neck of my T-shirt. I heard thread snapping. His
teeth closed on my shoulder, and my cock started to perk up. He followed with a
long lick that led back to my throat, hinting at where he’d really like to bite down.

“You’ve been really hard on my clothes lately,” I said. I pushed him away just
enough to slip out of my T-shirt and drop it on the floor before he turned it into a
stretched-out rag.

“I’ve been really hard…and your clothes are in my way.” He raked his fingertips
up my sides, my ribs, and I could feel the strength and the power in his hands. I got
off on the thought that he’d tear through anything to get to me.

I cupped his face in my hands and pulled him up for a kiss. His tongue tasted
sharp, like orange juice, and he stabbed it into my mouth. My cock twitched and
nudged his leg. He groaned into my mouth and pressed his crotch against me. He
really was hard. I let go of his face and crammed my hands down the waistband of
his boxers. I squeezed a hand between us and grabbed his cock. Hot. Thick. Stiff. I
grabbed his ass with my other hand.

Jacob broke the kiss and shoved my sweatpants down. While he was bent over, he
clamped his mouth around my nipple and sucked hard. A shock ripped down my
spine, and my cock gave another twitch. Jacob wrapped his hand around my balls
and pressed his thumb between them. He tugged them as if he could draw the sen-
sations right through my body.

“Fuck my ass,” I said, because he loves it when I ask for it. He squeezed my balls
together and slipped his other hand deeper between my legs so he could pet my
hole with his fingertips. I had my arms wrapped around his head, and I breathed
into his short, short hair. Deep, shuddering breaths. Breaths that wet his scalp. He
pushed a finger into me and I gasped.

He let go of my nipple and latched onto the other one. He sucked so hard it stung,
and his finger drilled higher. “Do it now,” I said, because I was going to finish dur-
ing the foreplay if he didn’t.

He straightened up and continued to stroke his thumb over the cleft of my balls
while he looked around. “Anything we can use? I don’t want you getting bored
while I go all the way upstairs to get the lube.”

Lisa had unpacked the kitchen, not me. I had no idea where anything was, and I
didn’t feel like stopping to rifle through the cupboards. “Margarine?”

I regretted it the minute I said it. If the last thing I wanted Jacob to do was open the
refrigerator, why’d I go and tell him to fuck me with the margarine?

He pressed his mouth against my ear. “I like the way you think.” His voice was
low and rough, more of a breath.

Damn. I couldn’t take it back now. I shoved his chest to make enough room for me
to turn around. “I’ll get it.” I opened the refrigerator door and was blinded again by
the light bulb. I found the small yellow tub easily enough, on the door where we al-
ways keep it. I glanced down toward the crisper. I could make out the black shape
of my cell phone through the glass of the lowest shelf. I moved a jar of pickles
over to cover it and closed the door.

My eyes took a second to readjust to the nearly-dark kitchen. Jacob had stripped
naked. He toyed with his nipple with one hand, stroked his thick, hard cock with
the other—slowly, just watching me, and waiting. “You do it,” he said.

I peeled off the lid and stuck my fingers in. Cold, but it would warm up soon
enough. The fake-butter smell wafted up around me. I’d never noticed it before,
not while I was making my toast. I scooped out two fingers’ worth and sniffed it.

I figured I wouldn’t feel so ridiculous if I wasn’t facing him. I turned around and
stepped the rest of the way out of my sweats so we were both naked, and I bent at
the waist and pressed my forearm into the refrigerator door. I widened my stance
and reached down between my legs.

I smeared the margarine over my hole. It was only cold for a second, and then I
shoved two fingers in. I suspected I’d never look at the word spread on the label
again without smirking. The buttery smell hit me again, strong. I could hear Jacob’-
s hand working his cock.

I felt encouraged by the sound of him jerking off. I fucked myself deep with my
own fingers, and he gave a low growl and dropped to his knees behind me.

Jacob grabbed my wrist, pulled my fingers out of my ass, and sucked them into his
mouth, first one, then the other. My free hand clenched and unclenched next to my
face as I pressed my forehead against my arm harder. I’d fallen on that arm and
sprained it a few days ago, and the pain that throbbed in my elbow intensified
everything else I was feeling. I closed my eyes, and lost myself to the slippery
headiness of Jacob’s tongue.

He went down on my fingers until he’d sucked all the margarine off, and then he
took my ass in both of his big, strong hands and spread it wide open.

He sighed as he buried his face in my ass. His tongue slithered into my hole.
“Damn, that’s hot,” I said.

Jacob grunted and kept fucking my buttery hole with his tongue. His lower teeth
raked my taint, and my cock bobbed. I ran my hand over the shaft. Hard. I could
bring myself off fast, if I wanted to. But I didn’t. I wanted it to last.

Jacob trailed his tongue lower, and used his hand to push my balls into his mouth.
He sucked one, then the other. I bit down on my lower lip. He kissed the inside of
my thigh and stood, and I let out a breath I’d been holding. It shook.

I felt his cockhead slide over my hole. I spread my feet apart even more, tilted my
ass up. He took my hip in one hand and his cock in the other, and he pushed in.

“Fuck, yeah.” I arched my back, tried to get a feel for the angle. Jacob took the first
few thrusts slowly. I wished we had a light. I wished we had a mirror. I would’ve
loved to have seen him there, knees slightly bent, burying his cock deep inside my
ass. I could hear it, though, squelching through the margarine I’d shoved inside
myself.

He reached around, and I put my hand over his. “Not yet. Draw it out.”

The fingers of his other hand dug deep into my hip, and he thrust hard. “Feels
dirty,” he said, and yeah, I knew what he meant. There was something a little too
greasy about it. And then there was the smell. He pulled out and jammed his cock
home again. “Real dirty.”

Oh. He meant in a good way.

He let go of my cock and took my hips in both hands, pressing new fingermarks
over my old, faded green ones. He started pounding me.

Pain jolted from my elbow and shot down toward my hips, and my ass felt like it
was being split open. My breath huffed out of me, and I felt the warm slide of a
bead of precome that rolled down my shaft. “Harder,” I said.

He didn’t just fuck me harder, he grabbed me harder too. I clenched up all over just
trying to keep upright, and that made my ass tighten around his cock.

“I’m not gonna last,” he said under his breath, so softly that the sound of our balls
slapping and his cock squelching into me nearly drowned out the words.

“Do it,” I said, and I took hold of my cock and stroked it. “Fuck my ass. Come in-
side me. Come hard.”

I peaked in just a few strokes, and his cock slammed into me while I shot. My or-
gasm forced a wordless noise up from my throat, and Jacob fucked me harder still,
grunting every time his cock slammed home.

I was reeling by the time he finished, so limp that his grasp on my hips was the
only thing keeping me up off the floor. He slung an arm around my stomach and
hugged me against his chest. He was sweating. His jiz crawled over the backside of
my balls and ran down one leg. An aftershock rolled through him, and drew an an-
swering shiver from me.

He kissed me gently between the shoulder blades, and his goatee tickled my spine.
“I love you so much,” he whispered. I felt his lips move against my back.

I made a noise in reply, something like “Mm,” and I hugged his arm against me.
My elbow ached, and my hips smarted, and now that I was no longer climbing to-
ward the Big O, it felt less like kinky fun, and more like garden-variety pain. I
turned so that we were facing each other and gave Jacob a slow, easy kiss.

The light beyond the glass block windows had paled, and I could see a little more
of the kitchen now, and of Jacob. He held me against the fridge with his body and
took his time trailing kisses over my jaw. “That wasn’t too hard, was it?”

My ass felt like it was on fire. I’d be feeling it for days. “It was good.”

“Maybe we need a code word—”

“No we don’t. That’s for serious kinkhounds in nipple clamps and horse
costumes.”

Jacob laughed—silently, but I felt his chest move against mine. “It doesn’t have to
be something silly. It’s just…I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

When we were in the thick of things, I loved the idea that Jacob had the strength to
snap me in half. But talking about it afterward was a big wet blanket. “How about
‘ow’?”

“You seem to enjoy it while it’s happening.”

“I do, okay? Do we really need to discuss it?”

Jacob didn’t answer. He pressed his lips against my neck and stroked my hair. My
bare foot touched something slimy on the floor, margarine or jiz, or maybe both. I
wondered if Jacob was going to stand there and kiss me until we had to leave for
work. I wanted him to leave so I could grab my cell phone. But the longer things
coagulated on me, the more my attention wandered, and guarding the fridge took a
back seat to parking myself under a hot shower.

-THREE-

I passed Betty’s desk on the way to Sergeant Warwick’s office. Betty kept about
nine hundred pictures of her grandkids on her desk, and several of her cat, too. She
had on a Pepto-Bismol pink sweater, as if she could make spring come early just
by dressing brightly enough. Her smile was as bright as her sweater.

“Good morning, Detective!”

Betty had been distributing the confidentiality paperwork that everyone I knew had
been strongly encouraged to sign. She’d never mentioned it to me. And yet, there
she was, with her chirpy voice and her great big smile, and I couldn’t bring myself
to be a dick to her about it. She was just the middleman, after all. It wasn’t as if she
was a member of the F… what was it? The FPMP.

Bob Zigler cleared his throat behind me. I guess I’d been staring. “Hey, Betty,
how’s it going,” I mumbled, and I squeezed my way into Warwick’s office.

Now, Warwick? I could be mad at him.

I sat in one of the two chairs that faced his beat-up metal desk, and Zig sat in the
other. I slouched a little, since I was feeling like a surly teenager, and I squinted at
him.

Warwick didn’t notice, but my attitude made me feel better.

Zigler covertly kicked the side of my shoe. Warwick was typing something on his
computer, and since he hadn’t bothered to look at either of us, he didn’t notice that,
either.

“I got a call from Sergeant Owens last night.”

Jacob’s sergeant. I squared my shoulders and eased out of my slouch.

“Seems his PsyCop team over at Rosewood was a little heavy on the Psy.” He
glanced up from his laptop and met my eye. “Good work. But you take it upon
yourself to do something like that again, you clear it with me.”

“Why? So you can arrange for my babysitters to be there?”

Zig made a weird noise in his throat. I could tell he wanted to give me another
good kick, but since Warwick was now looking right at me, it wouldn’t have been
much of a warning. He probably would have enjoyed it, though.

Warwick didn’t miss a beat. He must have been expecting me to figure it out for,
what, years now. “I’ve got security on you. Is there a problem?”

Warwick was bigger, and older, and meaner than me, and he was accustomed to
bossing hot-headed cops around. I swallowed. “I want to know. If it has to do with
me, I want to know.”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

“So you’re not really the one calling in the guards. It’s someone else.”

Zigler stomped on my foot.

Warwick’s suitcoat strained around his broad back as he planted his elbows on his
desk. He laced his fingers together, he looked at me over the tops of his bifocals,
and he said, “I can’t say.”

All these years, I thought I’d been answering to Ted Warwick. I was sideswiped by
the realization that I hadn’t.

“Since you seemed comfortable enough to carry out an investigation at Rosewood
Court,” Warwick went on, as if nothing had just happened, “I’ve got some deaths at
LaSalle Memorial Hospital that I’d like you to look into, see if we’ve got a Ke-
vorkian on our hands, or if certain shifts are just really unlucky. Go down and take
a look at the building, see if you’re up to working in it.”

Zig stood up and headed for the door. I stayed put and stared at Warwick. He’d
already dismissed us by looking back down at his computer and starting to type.
He had to know we were still there. How could he not?

Lisa had told me that he didn’t actually know all that much, that Roger Burke was
the one who could point fingers and name names. I wanted something more from
Warwick, but it didn’t seem like I would get it. Not now, not today.

“C’mon, Vic,” said Zig. “They’ve got a pretty mean cherry turnover in the cafeteria
at LaSalle.”

Zig drove us over to the hospital. I was quiet and moody, and he was just quiet.
The police scanner crackled with distorted words buried in a rise and fall of static.
He parked as close as he could to the entrance without blocking an ambulance.

“Who d’you suppose is watching us?” I asked as Zigler killed the ignition.

Zig sighed, deflated, and slouched into his seat. “I don’t know. I think we’ll spot
them eventually if we keep our eyes open.”

“Back there in Warwick’s office—why’d you keep trying to shut me up, anyway?
What do you care if I ask him about all the extra security? Or did you sign some-
thing else that said you’d pretend nothing weird was happening?”

He cut his eyes to me. “Don’t be a prick. Something weird’s always happening.”
He stroked his cop-mustache for strength. “You looked too mad to get what you
wanted out of it, that’s all. Do I want you to know what’s going on, who’s authoriz-
ing which men, who’s cranking out the next stack of papers to sign? Sure, if it’ll
give you some peace of mind. But I don’t think you’ll find anything out by going
off half-cocked in Warwick’s office.”

I could’ve lightened the mood by asking him if he realized how many penis refer-
ences were contained in his little tirade, but I decided against it. Mostly because
he’d stopped me from acting pissy at Warwick because I was mad—and he’d prob-
ably been right in doing it. Also, Zigler and I don’t joke about penises. Not with
each other, anyway.

In the course of my day-to-day life, I’d driven by LaSalle General, but I’d never
had any reason to go inside. Where the last medical institution I’d spent time at,
Rosewood Court, was squared-off and horizontal in a sixties kind of way, LaSalle
seemed to tower over us, five stories, huge and solid. The bricks were dark. The
windows were small. And anywhere something had been added, changed or re-
paired, there was a patch of masonry that almost matched, but not quite.

The exterior doors and fittings were all brand new, huge sheets of plate glass that
whisked open while we were still several steps away. Zigler went to the front desk
and talked in low tones to the nurse on duty, who wore brightly colored scrubs that
looked more like pajamas. When I was an inpatient at the Cook County Mental
Health Center, the scrubs were all blue. Medium blue, navy, or sometimes teal, but
always blue.

Times change.

I vaguely wondered what the staff wore at Camp Hell, and then I wondered why I
didn’t remember. My CCMHC memories were older, and soaked in Thorazine. So
why couldn’t I picture the wardrobe at Camp Hell?

Zigler handed me a plastic holder with an alligator clip and a piece of tagboard in-
side that read, “Security Level 2.”

“Visitors have security levels?”

Zigler clipped an identical badge onto his lapel. “Looks that way. We can get into
any of the public areas right now, and the guards will let us in to the pharmacy and
admin sections whenever, but they’ll need to assign a guide to us for Emergency
and the ICU so that we don’t get in their way.”

I wasn’t really looking forward to visiting any area of the building where people
were wheeled around on creaky metal gurneys, anyhow. Although maybe things
were done differently now. Maybe gurneys were made of plastic, and you couldn’t
hear them coming.

“You see something?”

Only in my own mind. I shook my head.

“So the lobby’s clean.”

I nodded.

“Are you…up for going in any farther?”

I blinked a few times. “Hm? Oh. Uh, yeah. How about the gift shop?”

We poked around for a few hours. There was a repeater in the gift shop, a repair-
man who kept spackling the same spot on the wall. He seemed old, and I kept los-
ing parts of him in the balloon bouquet that framed him in a riot of color. The wait-
ing room had a couple of ghosts sitting around looking spectral, some in physical
chairs, and some floating around sitting positions without any furniture to prop
them up. A transparent kid with a burnt face lingered by the elevator, her mouth
wide open as if she was crying, or maybe screaming, but no sound came out. And a
nasal voice near the information desk was threatening a medical malpractice suit.

“So, where do you want to grab lunch? I meant what I said about the cafeteria. It’s
not bad.”

I could always trust Zig to make sure we didn’t work through lunch. “Let’s sweep
it first. This whole building’s thick with ghosts.”

Zigler turned gray. “Sure. Or we could hit that pizzeria on Kedzie. They have a
lunch buffet.”

We climbed into an elevator with a guy carrying a potted plant that had a Mylar
“get well” balloon sticking up of the center of it on a foot-long plastic straw, and a
couple of nurses in wildly colored scrubs: flowers on one, starfish on the other.
Zig’s eyes darted from the doors to the numbers as we sank to the hospital’s lowest
level. That’s what it was called—LL. I was pleased that they didn’t call it the
“basement.”

“Y’know, I think I have a taste for pizza,” he said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll tell you if there’s anything in the cafeteria that would ruin your
lunch—if you could see it.”

The nurses strode out of the elevator with purpose—the balloon-guy, Zig and me,
not so much. I looked around for ghosts, Zig watched me in case I was holding out
on him, and the other guy rotated around to try to get his bearings.

Once the lost guy wandered away, Zig pulled out his cell phone and touched base
with his wife, Nancy. He calls her without fail twice a day, at lunch and at five. I
guess it reassures Nancy that nobody’s shot him yet.

I’m not a big phone talker, so I don’t usually bug Jacob unless I’ve got a question.
And I trust him to do his best to not get shot at. I know that I do.

The sight of Zig on his phone did lead me to wonder whether Stefan had gotten my
message yet, or if he didn’t check his work messages on his day off. He was a ther-
apist or something, right? He’d have to check his messages in case one of his alco-
holic patients was on the verge of hitting the sauce. Wouldn’t he? Or was that what
the “other options” on his voice mail were for?

He probably checked his messages, I decided, because he never liked letting things
build up. When I wanted to ignore something, a test or a paper or a big, nasty pill,
he’d always tell me to stop agonizing over it and just get it over with as quickly as
possible. So if he was going to return my call at all, I figured he’d do it sooner
rather than later.

I patted my pocket to check and see if maybe he’d called me but my phone wasn’t
on, or the battery was run down. My phone wasn’t there.

It was still in the fridge.

“Zig.”

“Hold on, Nance.” He looked at me.

“I need to stop at my house.”

His eyebrows bunched up. He knew something was going on, but couldn’t pinpoint
exactly what.

“Then we’ll hit that pizza place.”

Zigler stared for a moment, and then nodded. If I was willing to entertain his con-
trived yen for pizza, then he’d need to be willing to drive me home for no good
reason—none that I was willing to detail for him, at any rate.

He parked the Impala in the only empty spot on the block, the one by my walkway.
“That’s…different,” he said. He was staring at the lotus shapes that bordered the
slightly flared roofline.

“Yeah. It used to be a cannery.” I could have invited him in. He might have even
been hinting that he wanted to see the inside. But I was too worried about whether
or not Jacob had found my phone on ice to remember if there was anything particu-
larly gay laying around—anything that would put a strain on my relationship with
Zigler if he ran into it. “I’ll just be a second,” I told him.

Some intrepid soul, or someone who didn’t know the haunted history of the can-
nery, had left a plastic bag of Avon catalogs hanging on the front doorknob. Every
time I got my key in the lock, it swung down and knocked the key away. I snapped
it off, opened the door, and went in.

My phone was exactly where I’d left it. Which didn’t really prove whether Jacob
had seen it there or not. After all, he was probably wily enough to just leave it in
the crisper and give me all the rope I needed to hang myself.

I could feel my pulse pounding in my temples as I flicked open the phone and
checked my messages. The viewscreen fogged up, and I buffed it on my sleeve.
Caller I.D. told me I’d only gotten a single message that morning. Russeau and
Kline. I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. I hit play and placed the phone to my
ear. It was really cold.

“Victor Bayne,” Stefan began. His already-deep voice dropped half an octave when
he said, “Bayne.” Not good. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a year or two.
Or fourteen. My schedule’s not quite as forgiving as it was back in the day, but I
suppose I can fit you in tomorrow at three if you want to talk. Meet me at my of-
fice. You know where that is, don’t you? I’m sure you’ll be able to find it; accord-
ing to the little ‘I’m not here’ message on your cell phone, you’re working for the

police now. Fifth Precinct? Detective. I’m sure the story behind that is simply fas-
cinating.”

I realized I hadn’t been breathing. I took a few breaths and told myself to calm
down. He said he’d see me. But the tone of his voice told me I shouldn’t be expect-
ing a balloon bouquet to be waiting for me when I did.