by Jessie Cooke
37
“You’re killing me.” David had been hovering over Kat for hours since she got home from the hospital. Two days in ICU and three days on a surgical floor was enough torture for one person. They wouldn’t let her see Dillon either until the fifth day and by that time, he had no idea what was going on except that he was in excruciating pain and he hadn’t seen his daughter in almost a week. He had told her as soon as he saw her that she was a terrible daughter and he wished he had a sweet, kind, soft-hearted child like other fathers. It was the closest Kat came to crying through the whole ordeal. She hadn’t told him about the liver graft. She’d just turned on her heel and left the room. She felt guilty about that later, but not guilty enough to go back for more abuse before she was discharged. Now that she was home…in David’s home…she just wanted five minutes alone so that she could process it all and recoup. “Go to work, please.”
David chuckled. “I’m not going to work the first day you’re home from the hospital. Knowing you, you’ll slip out the second I’m gone and ride your bike cross-country.”
“Seriously, David, I love you…but five more minutes of you staring down at me like I’m a china doll with a crack in its head, and I am going to kill you.”
“Okay, babe. I’ll leave you alone in here and watch the game or something.”
She sighed. “Why don’t you go to a bar and watch it like a normal man?”
He laughed. “I love you.”
“You said that already, now get the fuck out.” He shook his head at her, but was still smiling as he left the room. Kat closed her eyes as soon as he was gone. Blissful silence settled down over her and she felt like she could breathe for the first time in almost a week. Her incision was healing, and she didn’t need much medication to control the pain anymore. She was ready to start planning how to get her life back together. She’d have to start by working on advertising for her business as soon as she was up and around. She owed her first payment to Tucci in four weeks and she wasn’t about to be late with it. That old gangster would never get his hands on her bike, or the bar.
“You want some soup?” David’s voice came from the doorway of the bedroom. Without opening her eyes Kat picked up the pillow next to her and threw it at the door. She heard him laugh as he walked down the hallway and she couldn’t help but smile. Why he put up with her was anyone’s guess…but she was glad that he did. She waited long enough so she knew he was back in the living room before yelling out,
“Panera!” It was only seconds before he appeared back in the doorway.
“Excuse me?”
“I want broccoli cheese soup from Panera, and a baguette.”
“The girls from the club brought over chicken noodle.”
“I don’t want club girl soup. And when were ‘the girls’ here? You entertained them before I got out of the hospital?”
He laughed again. “No, babe, they dropped off some food about an hour ago when you were sleeping.”
“I want Panera.”
He sighed. “I’ll get it for you later when Angel gets here…”
“Angel? Your sister is coming over here? Why?”
“She’s going to stay with you while I run some errands.”
“Jesus H. Christ. I don’t need a babysitter, especially not your sister.”
“I thought you two worked things out.”
“She apologized for being a bitch and I accepted. That doesn’t mean we like each other. But it doesn’t matter who you’re having come over here. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You’re not supposed to be up moving around. Someone needs to be here in case you need anything.”
“The physical therapist at the hospital gave me the all clear. I’ve been walking around the unit for two days. I can make it down the hallway if I have to. Please stop hovering, and please stop accepting food from the Bunnies at the ranch and please, oh, please do not ask Cecelia Brady to babysit me.”
“Cecelia,” he chuckled. “It would piss her off to hear you call her that. No one calls her that anymore.”
“I know, that’s why I decided I would. Please get me Panera. I promise not to get out of bed while you’re gone.” Kat could tell by the look on David’s face that he didn’t trust her, but she knew that if she tried hard enough, he would eventually give in. As it turned out, she didn’t have to try hard at all.
“Okay, I’ll go get the soup. Angel’s not supposed to be here for an hour, I’ll be back by then. As for the ‘Bunnies’ at the ranch…I really don’t want to hurt their feelings, so can I keep taking the food? You don’t have to eat it.” Kat laughed.
“Coward.” He nodded and smiled. Kat crooked her finger at him and David went over closer to the bed. “Kiss me.”
He bent down and tried to just plant a soft kiss on her lips, but Kat didn’t let him get away with it. She put her arm up around his neck and pulled him down into a hot, passionate kiss that made her wish she had panties on so that she didn’t leave a wet spot on the sheets. When she let him go, he was breathless and his cheeks were flushed. It had been exactly a week since they’d had any sexual contact and Kat was horny as hell. Judging by the look on David’s face and the bulge in his jeans, he was too. She reached for the front of his pants and he took a step back.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t have sex yet…but there are lots of ways to skin a cat.”
He rolled his eyes and laughed. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Whatever, Mr. Fancy Words. Come here, let me fix that bulge before I send you out in the world…or one of those fucking Bunnies shows up.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “And how do you plan on fixing it?”
“Unbutton and unzip those pants and step closer, and I’ll show you.”
“Won’t that just make you hornier?”
“Hell yes, but nobody at that hospital said anything about masturbation being off the table. Damn, I should have brought the Rabbit over.”
David was still shaking his head at her, but his hands went to the waistband of his jeans. Kat smiled and watched as he unbuttoned and unzipped them. “You sure about this?” he asked before pushing them down.
“Positive,” she said. “Push those down and come a little closer.”
David pushed his jeans down to his ankles and then did the same with his shorts. Kat reached for his erection, and he groaned when she wrapped her hand around it. She started to stroke it slowly, loving the way it felt in her hand. He let his head drop back and closed his eyes, and Kat sat up further in the bed, leaning forward to lick the tip of it. “Jesus, Kat…”
“Slide your hand under the sheet.” David did as she asked, making sure he didn’t come into contact with the bulky bandage that covered her surgical site. Kat wiggled her hips and opened her thighs so that his hand could fit between them. He groaned again when he contacted her wet pussy. Kat whimpered as his fingers stroked her swollen clit. She’d been imagining him touching her for five days, and one stroke of his finger along her wet slit made her almost ready to come. She stroked him faster and squeezed his shaft harder, and David began to match her pace with his own fingers as they probed up inside of her. She didn’t mean to wince when she felt the stab of pain in her side, it just happened—and of course as soon as it happened, David pulled back.
“It’s okay,” she said, breathlessly. “I’m okay.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.” She looked at his cock. It was softening already just from the thought of hurting her.
“Okay, but do me a favor, please?”
He smiled. “Besides going to Panera?”
“I’ll eat the damned soup the Bunnies brought and I’ll let your sister babysit me while you run your errands if you do me this one favor.”
“Wow, must be a hell of a favor. Okay, shoot.”
“Put your hand on your cock.” Kat and David had a lot of fun with sex when they were together, but David had never stroked himself for her. She nee
ded to come and if she had to do it for herself, she wanted to watch him get off at the same time. David reached down and wrapped his hand around the thick shaft of his cock. “Stroke it for me. Close your eyes and imagine that we’re on a beach somewhere…I’m walking down the beach without shoes on…in a bikini…” David groaned. “You like that? You want to see me in a bikini?” David shuddered and Kat wondered if he was picturing that one she wore up at the cabin.
“Yeah,” he breathed out, his hand falling into rhythmic movement up and down the shaft of his cock. His eyes were closed and his head was dropped back just slightly. Kat slipped her own hand down underneath the covers and began touching herself.
“Imagine me in that bikini, barefoot and walking along the edge of the beach where the water washes up and covers my ankles and splashes at my calves. I’m the only one on the beach…me and you. I don’t know you’re there. You’re watching me from a distance.” David began to stroke himself faster, running his palm across the smooth head of his cock with each stroke now. “You watch as I get closer to the water, wading in so that it covers me up to my knees and the force of the waves splashes the rest of my body, wetting my bikini top and letting you see how hard my nipples are.” David groaned again and Kat used her free hand to push back the sheet and pull up the nightshirt she was wearing. She didn’t have anything on underneath, just the ugly, bulky bandage. “Open your eyes, David.” He opened them and looked down at her. She had her fingers in her pussy, rubbing her clit in circles while he watched and taking one of her breasts in her other hand. “I’m standing there on the beach, the water wetting my body and while you watch, I slip a hand down in the front of those little bikini bottoms. You can see my fingers moving, but you can’t see what I’m doing. Is it making your cock hard, David?” Kat could see that it was as hard as a rock once again and he was stroking even faster as the sound of his ragged breaths filled the room.
“Yes,” he croaked out in a raspy, breathless voice.
“Mm…good. Now, I reach up and put my other hand under that little bikini top and start pinching and twisting my own nipples while I rub my clit. You want to get closer…but you’re afraid it will scare me and I’ll stop. I’m rubbing harder and faster and I push the top up so that you can see my hand on my tits. You can’t stand it any longer and you have to come out of hiding.”
“Oh, baby…” he whispered. Kat smiled.
“When you get close enough, we look into each other’s eyes and without saying a word, you reach up and untie my swimsuit top. When if falls free, you move my hand and take over, pinching and twisting and flicking my nipples.” He groaned again and Kat arched her back. David used his free hand to take one of her nipples between his fingers. The other hand was stroking furiously. Kat was still rubbing her pussy and she could feel herself getting close to climax.
“It’s getting dark outside, and no one is on the beach but us, so I slide down to my knees and I take that hard cock in my hand…” As she spoke, she moved her hand from her pussy to his cock, taking it out of his hand and beginning to stroke it with hers. “Come closer,” she whispered. David took a step toward the bed and Kat said, “Once I have it in my hand, I let my tongue come out and lick around the tip of it, making you moan.” She demonstrated and as expected, David moaned. Kat was finished talking, especially when she felt David bend down slightly and put his fingers in her soaking-wet pussy. He began manipulating her hard clit, pressing and pulling on it. She was moving her hips, only slightly aware of the pain in her belly as she did. David was moving his hips too, thrusting his hard cock in and out of her mouth. He was grunting and moaning and just when Kat felt herself lose control and let the orgasm wash over her, David grunted out:
“I’m going to come, baby.” Kat didn’t stop what she was doing, and neither did David. They came together explosively, crying out each other’s names. Kat felt the pain in her abdomen as soon as she came down from her high, but she didn’t care…it was worth it.
38
An hour after Kat made him come, David sat across from Detective Munroe at the coffee shop down the street from his apartment. He had gotten Kat her soup from Panera first, and when Angel arrived and he made sure they weren’t going to kill each other while he was gone, he’d gone to meet the detective.
“So, this is what I found,” David told him, taking out the paperwork he’d brought with him. He had taken the list the detective emailed him and ran it through his new program at work, the day before. The tattoo artist, Olden Tanis, had taken a blood-borne pathogen course in New Orleans Parish only a year earlier. The address and phone number listed on the application for the class wasn’t still current, but it had been up until only a month prior. David let the detective look over the paperwork. When he finished, Munroe looked up and said:
“When I get back to New Orleans, I’ll go to that apartment building and ask around, see if anyone knows him or knows where he might have gone. D.O.J. sent me his fingerprints, but unfortunately they don’t match anything in CODIS. If this guy is a serial killer, he’s a damned good one. He hasn’t been arrested for so much as a traffic violation.”
That was disappointing; it would make it that much harder for them to track him down. “So what brings you back to Massachusetts?” David asked.
“I came to talk to the artist that did Miss Brown’s tattoo.”
“Kat’s tattoo? Why?”
“Because I have the time and I’m grasping at straws. I spent ten years not knowing what happened to my wife, Mr. Brady. I was told by one person after the other that she probably just left me…and our son. I alternated between hating her and hating myself. Now, I know for a fact that she didn’t leave on her own. Someone took her from us, violently. I have nightmares about how frightened she must have been. She was a wonderful mother even if sometimes she struggled at being a wife. I can only imagine what went through her head when she knew she was going to die and never see her son again.” The man’s voice broke, and David’s heart hurt for him. He thought about the five years he’d been separated from Kat and how badly it hurt him, thinking that she’d made a decision to not only leave him, but to not be the mother to his child.
“I’m sorry. I can only imagine what you’ve been through.”
“I know it seems like I’m wasting my time and probably everyone else’s. Maybe I am. But, I can’t just sit still and wait any longer. I have to have some answers, and if the man that took my wife and my son’s mother is still alive…I won’t rest until I find him. I did call the tattoo parlor before I came back out here…more than once. I can’t get the man on the phone.”
“Did you tell whoever you spoke to that you were a cop?” David knew that the parlor where Kat got her tattoo was the same one that most of the Skulls used. Kat also told him once years earlier that the Skulls had some kind of financial stake in the business. He wasn’t surprised that they wouldn’t be anxious to talk to a cop, about anything.
“Yes. I did make it clear that I only wanted to talk to him, but he still hasn’t called me back. I go back to work in a couple of weeks, so I wanted to do this while I had the time. I made an appointment for a tattoo. It’s in forty-five minutes. I gave Miss Brown’s name as a reference.”
David smiled. He had to give the detective props for ingenuity. They went over what they had so far for the next fifteen minutes or so and when the detective was ready to go, David went with him. David had passed the tattoo parlor hundreds of times, but he’d never been inside. He was the only one in his family that didn’t have any tattoos. It was like riding the Harley, though, something he’d been thinking about more often lately.
The parlor was small, with a waiting room in front that only had two chairs. The walls were covered with sample art and a glass case held custom-designed glass pipes, lighters, and t-shirts. Albums of photos lined the coffee table in front of the two chairs and while Munroe spoke to the skinny girl covered in ink and piercings about his appointment, David picked up one of the albums and flipped thro
ugh it. There were a lot of skull designs and a lot of Harley designs. When he realized the album was arranged by the artist’s work, he flipped to the second artist in the book, a guy named “Izzy.” David never met him, but he knew that he was the one who had done all of Kat’s work. The first page was mostly skull designs interspersed with some major baseball, hockey, and football team logos. The next two pages were car and motorcycle designs. It was on the fourth page that a tattoo caught David’s interest. He felt Munroe take the chair next to him, but he didn’t look up. The picture he was looking at wasn’t the same tattoo that Victoria, Kat, and Munroe’s wife had. This one was a skeleton wearing a black top hat, and tailcoat and carrying a cane. He was wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigar. Underneath the photo it said “Baron La Croix.” That was the name of the loa that the women’s symbols represented. He slid the album over to Munroe and pointed at it. Before Munroe said anything, the skinny girl called out his name. The detective picked up the book and when he stood up, David followed him. On the way past the girl David said, “I’m going to just watch. I’m thinking about getting one myself.”
She shrugged like she didn’t care and then led them down a long hallway past at least half a dozen black privacy curtains before coming to one that was open. A man with long, greasy black hair and a pockmarked face was opening new bottles of ink. Every visible part of the man’s body was covered in a tattoo, except for his face. He looked up at them and said, “Which one of you is Munroe?”
“That would be me.”
“Have a seat here in the recliner. You can sit over there,” he told David, pointing at a folding chair in the corner. “Do you know what you want?”
The detective pointed at the picture of Baron La Croix. David watched the artist’s face for any signs of familiarity with the tattoo or any other changes. He didn’t see any, and the artist told Munroe, “Cool. That’s a lot of black. You want me to add in a rose or something for color?”
