PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (3 page)

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 inside me. Come hard.”

I peaked in just a few strokes, and his cock slammed into me while I shot. My orgasm 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 answering 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 toward 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 Kevorkian 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 something 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 authorizing 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 references 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 probably 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 repaired, 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 inside 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 repairman who kept spackling the same spot on the wall. He seemed old, and I kept losing parts of him in the balloon bouquet that framed him in a riot of color. The waiting 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.