PsyCop 5: Camp Hell

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Camp Hell. The showers.” I shook my head. “No chair.”

  “Okay. We don’t need a chair. I’ll hold you up.” He eased my back against the ridiculous tiles and pushed my wet hair out of my eyes. I really needed a haircut. Jacob never mentioned it. Because he never rode me about all the little things, the shit that didn’t really matter.

  He touched my shoulder. I looked down. A pattern of pale hickeys stretched along my collarbone from sternum to shoulder. Giant purple-red love bites covered my stomach where he’d sucked me hard. And my hips were dusted with smudgy green fingermarks. If I didn’t know where all the decorations had come from, I would think I’d picked up leprosy somewhere.

  Jacob pressed his mouth against a hickey, and kissed it. The shower pelted him in the back. He moved to the next mark, and kissed that, too.

  He moved across my chest, and placed a slow, deliberate kiss on each mark he’d made, each place he’d left me a souvenir of the fun we’d had together. He pressed firmly enough to keep it from tickling me, and yet I felt jumpy, as if I’d shove him off any second and chafe gooseflesh off my arms. I even flinched a time or two, but Jacob ignored the motion, until he’d kissed his way across my neck and shoulders, and had to kneel down to press his lips against my belly.

  Water droplets bounced off my chest, and my skin flushed from the heat. I looked down at Jacob’s head. There was no Camp Hell flashback that could overlay what he was doing. It was too different, too new. He thumbed a bruise on my hip, and shook his head. I wondered if he’d be worried about breaking me now that I’d opened myself up to the brittle memories of Camp Hell. “Hey. I was having a good time. Remember?”

  He glanced up. Fine water droplets beaded his hair.

  I touched his brow. “A really good time,” I said, emphasis on the really.

  His mouth closed over the crest of my hipbone. He lavished a slow, wet kiss over one finger-shaped bruise, and then the next, then the next. My nipples stiffened in the shower spray, and my cock started to swell. I decided his tongue and lips weren’t making me feel ticklish after all.

  I leaned into the tile and rested my hands on his shoulders, and watched the top of his head. His hair had a mean swirl at the back, as if the hand that’d made him had finished him off there with a tweak. I touched the cowlick, and he murmured against the skin beneath my belly button. I didn’t have a bruise there. But I guess he wanted to be thorough.

  His beard grazed my shaft, and he worked his way across to my other hip. One by one, he kissed each and every mark on my body. I was hard by the time he finished.

  Jacob coaxed my legs apart, then wedged one of his shoulders between them. I slung a leg over him. I figured I could get away with it; I was stone-cold sober and I had two tiled walls holding me up. The water that ran down the front of me was hot, but his mouth was hotter as it closed over my balls. He wasn’t sucking and tonguing like usual, though. He was kissing.

  My cock pointed toward my navel. I let my breath out slowly and determined that I wouldn’t drown in the shower spray as long as I kept my face tilted down. Better to watch Jacob that way, anyhow.

  Jacob’s whiskers brushed my inner thigh, and then his lips, and the touch of his tongue. No bruises there that I knew of. But that was okay. He swirled his tongue behind my balls. I squeezed his shoulders, made a noise that told him if he wanted to pursue the tongue action, that’d be fine by me.

  He kissed my taint. Sucked it. Kissed it again. I did my best not to breathe water.

  I ran my fingers over the back of Jacob’s head. Water sprayed off his short hair. He burrowed deeper, reached around to spread my ass open with his hands. I slumped against the shower wall, tilted my hips. His lower lip brushed my ass. My breath caught.

  He kissed me there, tender and wet, and then followed with a long lick, and another kiss.

  “Feels good,” I said, which was the understatement of the year, and I think he knew, anyway. He kept on going—kissing, licking, sucking—and the leg that held me up started to tremble, but I just walked it out wide, flexed my hips toward him more so it was easier for him to devour my quivering hole.

  I felt flushed from my knees to my ribs, and everything throbbed in time with the beat of my heart and the slow, steady swipes of Jacob’s lips and tongue. There was a delicious ache in my cock. I touched it, and his tongue fluttered on my ass. I groaned, and stroked myself. Jacob layered kisses over kisses, and between them, slipped his tongue inside me. I started beating off, hard.

  My leg shook, and he held my ass firmly. No bruises, not tonight, just enough to steady me against the shower wall. I made a sex noise, swallowed water, remembered to tuck my chin. My wet hair tickled the bridge of my nose. The spray had gone tepid. I didn’t care. The peak was in sight.

  Jacob drove his tongue in deeper, and I grabbed his head to steady myself, jerked off against the short, wet bristle of his hair. He sucked at my ass, tongue-fucked it. The water was cold now, sharp on my nipples. Jacob groaned—I felt it rumble behind my balls, and then I stiffened up all over, squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath. I shot my load, hot over my fist, then cold again as the water rinsed it away. The tip of Jacob’s tongue traced my ass, and his hot breath made me shiver. I milked another bead of come from myself, and my stomach twitched.

  I opened one eye and looked at the top of Jacob’s head. He had to be freezing.

  I got my leg under me again and Jacob turned off the shower. I was going to make a remark about the capacity of our hot water heater, but Jacob flattened me against the shower wall, chest to chest, and pressed his face into my neck. More tender kisses, as if he couldn’t find enough places on me to put them.

  -EIGHT-

  I signed off on a stack of reports that Zig had typed up. Ghost count at LaSalle was up to seventeen, none of them willing to talk, most of them probably repeaters. I was supposed to be checking Zig’s work for accuracy, but hell. I could tell after the first two or three that he’d written down everything I’d said, exactly how I’d said it. I stared at the paper and let the words blur until I figured enough time had passed that I’d look like I had actually read it, and I penned my forgettable signature on the bottom. And then I moved on to the next page.

  Zig sat across from me, busy at work transcribing even more notes. We’d been at LaSalle for the better part of the week, and had zero to show for it. I don’t think I’d ever had that many ghosts give me so little information.

  My cell phone rang. Caller ID said Metro Cor Cen. Crap. I didn’t want to talk to Roger Burke, but I was worried that I’d miss something and regret it later if I didn’t. “Bayne. Hold on a second.” I muted the phone. “I’ll take this outside,” I told Zigler. He nodded without looking up from his computer screen.

  Outside was about five below. I headed toward my car, and then realized that it was possible that my car was bugged. Probable? Maybe not. But possible? Yeah. After everything I’d seen lately, yeah.

  And, for that matter, my cell phone could have been monitored, too. “I don’t think you should be calling me,” I told him.

  “I talked to my lawyer. He hasn’t heard from you yet.”

  “It’s only been a few days.”

  “I’m an ex-cop in prison. Every day is Russian roulette.”

  Shit. Probably so. I tried another excuse. “I think I can get the same information out of Warwick if I catch him on the right day.”

  “Hardly. He thinks he knows, but the FPMP only shows him what they want him to see. Now, me? How do you think I know so much?”

  I sighed into the phone, hard. “I’m sure you can’t wait to tell me.”

  “Because I was one of them.”

  I felt a cold jab somewhere behind my sternum. It would explain how he knew all that he knew about Camp Hell. About me. “What’s it stand for?”

  “The Federal Psychic Monitoring Program. They don’t have a website or an ad in the Yellow Pages, but they exist. I’ll even do you one better, since you’re such a skeptic, and I’m d
ying to get out of this fucking metal box. I’ll give you a name.”

  My heart thundered inside my ribcage. I held my breath. I fumbled in my pocket for something to write on. “Hold on.”

  “I’ve got thirty seconds. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight….”

  Damn prison and its fucking rules. I found a silver gum wrapper. I could use the back—if I had a pen. No pen. Fuck. Fuck.

  “Twenty-four….”

  I flashed back to Stefan’s office, all low lights and soporific beige. And then farther, to a blue and blue room that smelled like antiseptic and fear. A light shining in my eye.

  “Stop counting.” The only thing that stopped me from throwing my phone on the ground and grinding it into the road salt and ice was the fact that I’d have to account for it later.

  A pair of patrolmen veered around me on the way to their cruiser. I recognized the senior officer, but not the rookie. “Hey…borrow your pen?”

  The officers stopped, and the older one—Monroe? Montroy—handed his pen to me.

  “Okay, go.”

  “Constantine Dreyfuss. He’s quite a character. He doesn’t know much about Camp Hell, but he’d be able to tell you all about who’s been keeping tabs on you lately.”

  That was probably more important. I could find out more about Camp Hell from talking to Stefan. It would all be stuff I already knew, of course, but at the same time, it’d be news to me. I didn’t mention that to Burke. I couldn’t have him thinking I was grateful or anything.

  I tried to hand the pen back to Montroy, but he was already heading off toward his cruiser. He gave me a, “No, keep it,” kind of wave. I couldn’t tell if he was being friendly, or he didn’t want to touch it once I’d handled it.

  I looked up at the sky. It was gray on gray. Nearly March. Where it’d turn to rain on gray. Which would produce ice, and accidents, and still more ghosts.

  Was the whole world eventually going to end up like LaSalle, thick with repeaters, or ghosts so busy blubbering into their own blood that they wouldn’t communicate with me even though they could?

  I knuckled my eye and wondered if my Valium had come through yet, and then I noticed that the new cop, the rookie, was watching me through his sideview mirror.

  Not the kind of look I get from psych groupies, like that guy in the hospital bed. And not the kind I get from the forensics techs who hate me. This was a really calm stare, like the ones I got from the mystery cops who had doubled and tripled every time I blinked when I was helping Jacob track the astral rapist at the nursing home.

  I found another scrap of paper in my pocket: this one a grocery list on a sticky note that said coffee, milk, dish soap, bread (not white), O.J. in Jacob’s handwriting. I turned it over, pulled out my new pen and jotted down my cell number, then jogged over to the cruiser before it had a chance to pull away.

  The cop who’d been watching me rolled down his window. He looked expectant. Or maybe mildly alarmed. I handed him the note. “Give that to Constantine for me, wouldja?”

  • • •

  I got on the beige elevator and rode to the beige twenty-third floor. I stopped off at the beige bathroom, as usual. Because, as usual, I was sweating buckets.

  Good thing I hadn’t decided to deal with my panic attacks during the summer.

  Stefan’s secretary was gone, and the light in the waiting room was dim. His office door was open a crack. I knocked on the doorjamb and he motioned for me to come in. Today’s vest was black moiré, and he had arm garters on his white shirtsleeves like a Wild West bank teller. His office smelled like incense and pot.

  “You get high in here?”

  “Not during business hours.”

  He held the joint out to me and I shook my head. “All the good drugs act like psyactives for me.”

  “Really?” He took a hit, then licked his finger and tamped out the joint, which he propped in an ash tray. He spoke on the exhale, in that croaky way that pot-smokers do. “So how’s the memory?”

  I looked for somewhere to sit. There was the hypnosis chair. And the couch. And the chair across the desk from Stefan that would make me feel like I’d been sent to the principal’s office again. I went to the window, pried the miniblinds open with my forefinger and looked out. The windows in the skyscraper across the street glowed yellow and white. “Memory’s there. Parts of it, anyway. I was thinking about Movie Mike.”

  Stefan made a Stefan-sound of disgust. The same one he’d made every time they served pork roast for dinner. Which he’d claimed was actually made of dog. “At least what happened to him didn’t happen to someone…nicer.”

  “Or me or you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Since we’re talking about drugs…what do you think it was that did that to him?”

  Stefan stood up and walked toward me with his hands tucked behind his back. He positioned himself so that he could see through the window over my shoulder. “My guess? They pumped him full of heavy psyactives to see how far they could open up his talent, they overtaxed him and he suffered some sort of aneurysm.”

  “God.”

  “It could’ve just as easily happened to one of us while we were doing nitrous. It’s all one big game of Russian roulette.”

  How was it I could go for years without hearing the phrase Russian roulette, and then have it uttered twice in the same day? I reminded myself that he was a high-level empath. Maybe he’d somehow felt the words reverberating in my high-strung brain.

  “I think I had some sort of seizure once when they tried psyactives on me.”

  Gurney.

  Wrist restraints.

  “Didn’t we all? Lord, I remember that I couldn’t tell who I was for days. I was such a mess—crying, laughing, screaming…complete meltdown. I think the orderlies drew straws to see who’d have to deal with the empaths and telepaths. They saved their special hate for us because we could see how dead they were inside.”

  Stefan strolled away, hands still clasped at his back. I turned and watched him pace. He could come right out and talk about what had happened to him. Did it help?

  Then again, so far I could handle all the horrors of Camp Hell that had resurfaced. It was the things I had done—or hadn’t—that really ate away at me.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I should have done something different…back then.”

  “We do the best we can with what we’ve got, Victor. Now stop wallowing.”

  I turned back toward the window and tried to determine if I was wallowing.

  “Do you want to try another hypnotic regression?”

  What I wanted was for someone to tell me what to do about Roger Burke. “No. Not today. I just came by to pick up that Valium.”

  Stefan set a white paper pharmacy bag on the corner of his desk. I picked it up and looked at the prescription sticker. “Who’s Fernando?”

  “A sweet Mexican boy who needs a new pair of shoes.”

  I pulled out my wallet. “What’s that mean in English?”

  “A hundred fifty will do it.”

  It was steep, but I wasn’t one to argue with a month’s supply of ten-milligram tablets. I put a stack of twenties and tens on the desk and pocketed the pills. “Be sure to thank Fernando for me.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  He said it in the tone of voice he normally reserved for brownies.

  My phone rang, and at first I thought it was the FPMP getting back to me. The sick feeling of panic in my gut told me that giving my number to that cop wasn’t the smartest thing I could’ve done. I was just mad. And since Zigler wasn’t in the loop, he couldn’t have stomped me in the foot and told me to cool off before I did something stupid.

  But the phone started to vibrate, too, and I realized it was Jacob. And I felt vaguely guilty that he was calling me while I was scoring pills. But only vaguely. “I’ve got to take this,” I told Stefan. “Hello?”

  “Are you still at work?”

  “No. I�
�m at Stefan’s office. But we’re just finishing up.”

  “Perfect. Carolyn and I are at the courthouse. I can pick you up.”

  How coincidental. Or maybe not. They’d been in and out of court all week. I never went, myself, because “no court, no jail,” had been the only clause I insisted upon when I negotiated my contract. But Jacob and Carolyn were regulars.

  I gave Jacob the address, which I suspected he already knew, and he took it down to be polite. “Be there in ten. Bye.” He used the sexy bye.

  “That was, uh, my boyfriend.”

  “You’re dating?”

  “Yeah, we just bought a building, actually.”

  “You’re dating seriously. Interesting.” Stefan pulled a can of air freshener from his desk drawer and doused the room, then he tucked away his ash tray. “So what’ve you got to be nervous about?”

  Was I nervous? My gut was clenched and my hands felt clammy, but that was nothing new. But Stefan would know. He’d tapped me a million times before.

  “What’s the worst case scenario?” he said.

  I’ve never been very good at making things up, but I closed my eyes, and I thought. “That you see us together, him and me, and you think I’m a sellout for joining the force.”

  “And seeing you with your lover would lead me to that conclusion because…?”

  “He’s a PsyCop, too. It’s more obvious when we’re in a group.” Otherwise, I just look like a used car salesman. So I’ve been told.

  “I promise, I’ll be nice. And I can’t believe you just used the word sellout.”

  Both Jacob and Carolyn came up to get me. I would’ve thought Carolyn would stay in the car to keep it from getting towed by an overzealous truck that didn’t notice the police plates. Was she just curious, or did Jacob invite her up because he thought there’d be some conversation that required her professional opinion?

  We met them out in the reception area of Stefan’s office, which smelled slightly less like air freshener and pot. “Steven Russeau,” I’d almost slipped and called him Stefan Russell, “Detectives Carolyn Brinkman and Jacob Marks.” Everyone shook hands. Jacob and Stefan stared at each other hard.