PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (24 page)

He tilted up in a half-crunch and the veins in his neck and shoulders bulged even more prominently. The reading lamp cast a roadmap of shadows over the landscape of his arms and chest. He ran his fingertips along a dusting of bruises on my thighs. “These probably shouldn’t turn me on….”

“Why not?” I ground my body all the way down, clutched his hips, and pushed myself back up so I could repeat the move, feel it over and over again. “We both get off on it. What does it matter?”

He laid himself back down and gave over to being ridden. I leaned in only enough to reach his nipples, and I squeezed them in time with the motions of my hips. Up, a hard pinch…down, release. So that something was always peaking, and something else was always ebbing.

Jacob clutched my thighs and flexed his body, adding a little thrust each time I came down. Eventually, the constant in and out—and the breathing and the noises and the half-coherent dirty talk—brought on that old familiar ache. I let up on Jacob’s nipples and touched myself two-handed, stroking my cock with one hand and my balls with the other.

“Yes,” he said, and the word wavered, like maybe he would’ve added something, but he was too far gone to have more than a three-letter vocabulary.

I stared down at him, left off my balls, and let that hand trail up my body, pinch a nipple out for him. Stiff. I glanced down at it. Pink, too. A dusting of hair around it, and bruises, and bites. I smiled at him, and tweaked it harder. His breathing picked up and his body tensed. Veins bulged everywhere.

Just him, and just me. I thought we were pretty good together when that was all we had to worry about. I thought about the bugs and the cell phones and the remote viewer, and I opened up the allegorical tap inside me, let the white light flow down and cover Jacob and me in silver. So it was just us, no one but us.

Jacob grunted, and his stomach did that amazing rolling twitch that it did when he was just on the verge. I beat my own cock hard and fucked myself on him even harder. His back arched, and he came. A couple of strokes and I felt it, slick and hot, and I tightened up my ass to see if I could actually feel the throb of him shooting that load in me.

Jacob made a strangled sound and his grip on my thighs heightened to the point of pain. That’s what tipped me. I tensed, and I shot, and I closed my eyes and laughed, ‘cos it felt like I was coming white light.

-TWENTY THREE-

Normally, I’d swing off and hit the shower. But I needed a second to gather myself up. I was sprawled with my face in Jacob’s chest hair and I felt like I’d just come back from an out-of-body experience. Jacob was breathing so hard that I rose and fell on his ribcage as if he was wearing me.

He let go of my thighs and I flinched. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Are you kidding? Why do you think I shot so hard? Damn.”

He folded his arms around me and I breathed in the tang of new sweat and sex, and to a lesser extent, the smell of hotel soap.

“When you look for those faxes, I wish I could come with you,” Jacob said.

“Where? The FPMP?” I don’t know what he thought he could accomplish there. Maybe getting between me and whoever might do to me what they did to Doctor Chance. Unless, of course, they had a telepath or an empath squinting at me from behind a peephole. Maybe then I’d agree to use him as a human shield. I peeled myself off Jacob’s torso and sat up on his thighs. “Say…does Carolyn ever have trouble reading you?”

“Sometimes. She has her off-days.”

“What about Crash? Could you ever decide not to share your mood with him?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever understood in any great detail what Crash can and can’t do…with his talent.” A smirk. I imagined that aside from his talent, Crash did plenty. Good thing we could joke about it. “So I couldn’t say.”

“It’s just that I’ve got this idea…and I dunno, it doesn’t jibe with any kind of Psych research I’ve ever heard of.”

Jacob got his elbows under him and pushed up from the bed. He was alert. Me? I managed to not topple off onto the floor. “Go on.”

“I think you do something to block people. Psychs. But not just in the run-of-the-mill way that the Department made it out to be when they thought up the Psych and Stiff teams. I mean, I think you can control it and choose who to let in, and who to keep out.”

“I scored average, completely average, on every test there is. A lack of talent isn’t a talent itself.”

“But what if you’re looking at it wrong, because it can’t be measured—because who’s gonna measure it, and with what? I took a Psych test today, and you know what? It sucked.”

And then it occurred to me, if he administered a card-flipping exercises to a bona fide telepath, a high-level, super-accurate seer, he could theoretically block the transmission, and then his ability—if you could call it that—could be measured and recorded. Even more accurately than mine.

Jacob swung his feet over the side of the bed and headed for the bathroom. “I think you just want to shore up my ego.”

Oh, like that was necessary. I refrained from saying it out loud. “Jacob, do you know how strong Stefan is?”

Water ran in the bathroom. Jacob came out mopping his stomach with a hand towel. “How strong?”

“He’s so empathic that not only can he tell what you’re feeling, but he can twist your feelings around into anything else he wants.”

Jacob stared down at the wad of damp towel in his hand, weighing it like he was probably weighing his words. “Pretty ballsy of you to date someone who can force you to love him. If he’s as good as you say he is.”

“He wouldn’t have needed to do anything like that—he just happened to be my type. At the time. When I was twenty-three.”

“And so he uses this talent of his, and he helps you with your panic when you’re doing regressions, right?” He glanced down at my sweat-stained clothes. “Or am I missing something?”

“What you’re missing is my point. What I’m trying to tell you—if you would stop being jealous for ten seconds—is that Stefan couldn’t read you.”

He glanced up at me. His eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“He just couldn’t. He says he’s met other people that way, too. Psych-resistant.”

Jacob stared at me, hard.

“They don’t have a test for that,” I said. “I know—I’ve taken every test in existence a dozen times or more. The tests haven’t changed in the last fifteen years—or if anything, they’ve gotten sloppier. They can’t test you for blocking.”

Jacob stared for another several seconds. Then the corner of his mouth twitched. “Are you calling me a block?”

I shouldered my way past him, went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Fine, don’t believe me. I never know what I’m talking about. Why should I start now?”

“It’s a pretty big concept you’re asking me to wrap my head around. Cut me some slack.” Jacob stepped into the shower and pulled me against him, back to front. His wet hands moved over chest and stomach, up and down, brushing my hips, my groin—more to touch me than to wash away the stickiness.

I leaned back against him. His stroking hands had me half-hard, but I’d just had a pretty sweet orgasm, so there was no sense of urgency there. “Not a block. That’s a lousy choice of words. A shield—how about that?”

“You’re serious.”

“Cripes, why else would I bring it up?”

Jacob pulled away and stepped out of the shower. He left a trail of water across the floor.

“Where’d you go?” I turned off the tap and wrapped a towel around my waist. I found Jacob naked and dripping by the bed with his cell phone in his hand. “Who are you calling?”

“Lisa.”

“Hold on.”

Jacob paused with his wet thumb hovering over one of the buttons.

“We both promised her we’d lay off the
si-no
,” I said. “And even though you want to verify the existence of some mysterious seventh talent so bad you can taste it, just remember. Anything we say on a cell phone, we might as well go announce it to the FPMP.”

The sinews in his jaw leapt as he ground his molars.

I realized that at some point we’d started yelling. I lowered my voice to talking-level. “I know it would be a big deal.”

“If it were true,” he added. Which was what I’d been thinking, but it sounded pretty harsh.

“If I’m right.”

Stefan had seemed pretty damn sure there was something up with Jacob. He had no reason to lie to me. What would be the point? He could reach into my head and tweak my reactions if he didn’t like the way things were going. So there was no reason for him to make it up.

I’d always assumed that Stefan never used his talent on me, other than obvious stuff that he couldn’t block—tasting my willingness to do something risqué, or getting hit with my anxiety.

I would like to think that he never went into my head and rearranged things to his liking. But unless I asked him—in front of Carolyn—I’d never be sure he hadn’t.

My stomach prickled. Drying semen and a High John the Conqueror rash weren’t a very pleasant combination. “Leave Lisa out of it,” I said. “Play Q & A with Carolyn tomorrow and see if you can block her. She’s a sturdy level two. If you can shut out Stefan, you should be able to turn it on and off for her, no problem.”

I went back into the bathroom and started the shower again. I wished I had something a little higher quality than the cheap sliver of soap that had come with the room, but I’d have to make do. I soaped myself up.

Jacob cast a massive shadow on the shower curtain. “If I was able to block Carolyn, don’t you think it would’ve happened by now?”

“How should I know? Maybe you never really tried.” Or maybe he needed to be giving off his “don’t fuck with me” vibe while the poor, unsuspecting Psych was trying to read him. “That thing you do, I’ll bet that’s you, flexing your shield muscles.”

Jacob stepped back into the shower and took the soap from me. He ran it over my back, and I leaned into the touch of his strong hands. “What thing?”

“You know. Laser-beam eyes.”

Jacob cupped water in his palm, and smoothed his hands over my shoulder blades until our wet skin squeaked together. He kissed me at the top of the spine, and the hairs on my forearms stood at attention. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “I want to test it out, first. Make sure I’m not getting my hopes up for nothing.”

-TWENTY FOUR-

Doctor Gillmore glanced down at the new red badge that dangled from my lapel. Full access to anywhere in the hospital I cared to go, thanks to the judge who’d pushed the paperwork through. Even a magnetic strip to swipe through electronic door locks. “Barring unusual weather,” she said, “the ER activity usually follows a bell curve. The middle of the week is fairly calm.”

Someone in one of the partitions was howling in pain, and someone else was crying. I’d hardly call it calm.

“It might have been helpful for me to know the nature of your investigation before you obtained your subpoena.” She gave Zig a withering look.

Even though I wasn’t normally the talkative one, I said, “We need to keep an eye on partition number eight.”

“I trust you’ll stay out of my way?”

I gave her a hard look. She gave it right back, then looked down at her clipboard and went back to work. Zig and I stood outside the eighth partition. Inside, a preschooler cried a blue streak while his mother murmured to him in Spanish.

“What do we do?” Zigler asked. “Do we wait for it to empty out, or do we go in while there are patients inside?”

I opened the curtain a couple of inches and peeked inside. The mother couldn’t have even been twenty years old. The baby was red-faced and covered in snot.
“Habla usted inglés?”
I asked her. I had to raise my voice to be heard over her wailing kid.

She gave me a hard look and nodded. I wondered if I looked like a Child Welfare agent in my blue polyester sportcoat. Probably. I slipped my badge out of my pocket halfway. “Listen, I’m a cop, and my partner and me, we’re taking a look at this hospital. Do you mind if I look around this…room?” If you could even call it that, with its gray fabric walls that allowed every last scream and moan to carry straight through. There was room enough for an exam table, a small desk, a crash cart and an IV stand.

The girl must’ve taken me at my word—I’m told I come off pretty honest when I do actually engage someone in conversation—and she shrugged. “Whatever.”

It didn’t seem like there was really enough room in the partition for anything that nasty to be inside. That thing following the homeless lady around, though? That didn’t look like anything I’d want hovering around when my resistance was low.

I looked at the single chair, and the howling kid, and the glaring mom. “Um…thanks.”

Doctor Gillmore was busy stitching up a guy who’d dropped a circular saw on himself at a construction site. I stood with my hands in my pockets and stared at the wall, and Zigler jotted down the fact that I’d seen nothing in partition number eight in his notepad.

“So, you’re still here,” Gillmore said. She snapped off her latex-free gloves just like I did when I was glad to leave a crime scene. “I take it you haven’t found what you’re looking for.”

“Your patient yesterday…any chance I could talk to her?” Not that I really wanted to see that thing that was hovering around behind her, but I didn’t have any other bright ideas.

“That’s up to you. You’ll have to find her, first.”

“She was released,” Zigler said, more of statement than a question.

“Her blood alcohol content was nearly .18 when she was admitted. Once she’d slept it off, there was nothing I could do to hold her.”

Crap.

“Well, what’s her name?” I asked. “Where can I find her?”

Doctor Gillmore looped her arm though mine and pulled me down to speak to me close. “Your warrant says you can search the ER—not the patient records. I can’t give you her name, not without a warrant.”

“Seriously? I mean, you can’t just happen to say it to yourself….you know, in passing?”

She gave me a hard look.

“I’m trying to help her,” I said.

“And I’m making sure that I give her the same respect that I’d give someone with top-notch health insurance. Patient information is confidential unless your warrant says otherwise.”