Then again, if I’d done that, I could’ve avoided talking about my liver. Or Crash. Or Lisa’s weird text message.
The light on my answering machine was solid. “Anyone leave a message while I was out?” I called in the direction of the living room doorway. I opened the fridge to see if food had appeared inside, and lo and behold, it had. The crisper was full of leafy green stuff and there was milk in the milk compartment of the refrigerator door. Also, beer. You know there’s a man in my life when there’s beer in my fridge, since I can’t drink it myself.
Jacob walked to the threshold of the room and stood there framed in the doorway. His black hair was damp, and his olive skin glistened. The gray T-shirt he wore had a vee of sweat at the collar. His expression was neutral, a cop-stare that could mean anything.
“Exercising to PBS?” I asked him. “If someone’s gotta do it, I’m glad it’s not me.”
He broke into a smile that lit up his face. “How are you?” he asked. His tone said, how are you, really?
I shrugged. “Something’s up,” I said. “I don’t know what. But my talent’s in overdrive.” And I’m not supposed to take Auracel anymore. I didn’t say that part out loud, because if Jacob knew why, I could see him enforcing it. I just wasn’t in the mood for tough love.
“I saw the stones from Crash in the living room,” he said. “Did they help?”
“I dunno. I don’t think I did it right.” I wondered if I was obligated to tell Jacob I’d just been at Sticks and Stones. If I asked about Miss Mattie, I’d obviously have to get into it.
Jacob had crossed the kitchen and backed me into the refrigerator door before I had a chance to decide whether to talk about my second visit with Crash or not. He seemed to loom over me, broad and hard and radiating heat. Maybe he’d make a move on me and I’d be excused from a conversation I didn’t even want to have.
He stopped just in front of me, his body filling my whole field of vision, strangely comforting. I leaned into him for a kiss, but he turned his head just enough to nuzzle his cheek against mine instead. The salty new-sweat scent of him was dizzying up close and I felt my breathing pick up speed.
“I probably should have mentioned Crash before now,” he said in my ear, and my rising anticipation flagged.
“Do we have to talk about it right this second?” I asked. I found a vein in his forearm and traced it as it wound around a thick, ropy muscle. I wondered if he’d been bench-pressing the futon.
“I don’t want you to think I’m keeping secrets,” he said.
“What secrets? I haven’t given you a laundry list of the guys I’ve been with.” And then I wondered if he was actually fishing for just that -- my history.
“I can count the guys I’ve been serious about on one hand,” I told him. “The last one was Ben and he worked in a record store. We were together four months. Before then....” I cast my mind back through a string of one-night stands and then settled on the boy with the blue hair who’d seemed like he’d be fun. “Mike. He was a hair stylist.”
It seemed inadequate to compartmentalize Mike simply by mentioning his job. He’d also had a wicked sense of humor and made a mean omelet. But in the end, I felt like my ghosts brought him down.
“So was Crash,” Jacob said. “Before his store. That’s how he met Carolyn.”
All roads seemed to lead to Crash that night. Did he try to get all of his customers to bleach their hair, or was that look reserved especially for him? And did he spin out conspiracy theories while he waxed women’s eyebrows? Plant seeds of anarchy while setting permanent waves?
I couldn’t picture it.
“Unless you have kids or anything, I really don’t need to know,” I said.
“He’s an empath,” Jacob said, veering the conversation yet again towards Crash. “I’m guessing a strong level one. Didn’t test high enough for government certification.”
I tried to imagine being with a lover who always knew how I was feeling. Maybe most people possess empathy of a sort, even if it's just an interpretation of their standard five senses. And then I tried to imagine Crash taking a test that could land him an actual job where he might have to take the ring out of his nose and cover up his tattoos with long sleeves, and I didn’t doubt that he’d bombed the test. I had no idea what’d possessed him to take it to begin with, since he must’ve loathed the entire process and everything associated with it.
My own test had been a cinch, at least the medium section. I was high as a kite and the dead guy they brought me to wouldn’t shut up. The other parts -- clairvoyance, precognition, empathy, telekinesis? Zip. Zilch. Nada.
“I’m gonna work on this crystal cleanse thing,” I told Jacob, slipping out from under his massive gravitational pull. My apartment felt too small, like there wasn’t enough space in there for the two of us unless we were having sex.
As a Stiff, Jacob’s about as empathic as I am. But he read me well enough anyway. He showered while I set myself up in the bedroom with the diagram and the gemstones, and stayed out of my way for a good couple of hours.
The smell of food brought me out of my cave. I’d cleansed each of the stones and done my best to envision God’s love shining on down. It felt stupid, but I figured I didn’t have anything to lose by trying.
Jacob had been busy putting my kitchen through paces it’d never seen before. There was a big salad, broiled chicken, and even warm bread waiting for me on the countertop. “Wow.”
He motioned to one of the tall stools. “I miss my dining room table just now,” he said.
“I never had a reason to own one. But look at it this way. You get to sit next to me.”
We pulled up to the kitchen counter and ate. I imagined the world’s gayest food pyramid would’ve been proud of me for getting so many real food groups in.
When we were done, I took the plates and headed for the sink. “I hope you don’t mind cleanup detail,” Jacob said. His eyelids looked heavy.
“Fair’s fair,” I said. “You cooked, I’ll do the dishes.”
He gave me a small smile and headed for the bedroom. By the time I joined him, he was fast asleep, sprawled over most of the bed.
I stripped down to my boxers and reached for the light switch, taking one last look at the man in my bed. He wore only spotless white boxer briefs, the stretchy material molded to his impeccable body. The shallow scratches I’d made on his thighs the night before were still visible, though not serious. The T-shaped welt on his upper arm was red and scabbed. I wondered if I should sleep on the futon to make sure I didn’t scratch my initials into his chest while we slept. I wondered if maybe he should lock the bedroom door.
That scratching thing had to be some sort of fluke. It probably had something to do with all those needy ghosts I’d been seeing. A stress reaction.
I went back into the kitchen and got another sedative out of my jacket pocket. I’d only taken two so far, and Doctor Chance had said I could take three a day. I wondered if maybe I should take two more; it was nighttime, after all. And maybe the second one would count toward my next day’s allotment.
The liver business had me spooked, though, so I took just one, turned off the lights, and squeezed into bed beside Jacob.
As I stared up at the ceiling and waited for the drug to kick in, I considered taking one of my remaining Seconals along with it, worried some more about my liver, mentally smacked myself for not taking the damn Seconal instead, and then wondered if I could make myself throw the new pill up so I could take a Seconal.
Somewhere in there I guess I fell asleep.
I woke up alone in a darkened room, dead center of my bed with my arms and legs splayed wide. My head was fuzzy and my vision blurred. I forced myself upright while the room tilted around me.
I staggered to the door and threw it open, and was dazzled by the blinding whiteness of the room beyond. Roger’s midnight blue Crown Vic was there, with him thrown over the hood. His dress shirt and suitcoat were scrunched up around his ribs and his bar
e ass showed off its pretty curve where it tilted up to meet Crash’s hipbones.
Crash wore a stretched-out old wife-beater with a cracked band logo on the front, the tribal tattoos covering both arms standing out in stark contrast to his skin. A battered pair of jeans pooled around his ankles.
Crash leered at me like my arrival was just what he’d been waiting for. He grabbed either side of Roger’s ass and slammed in hard. “Hey, PsyCop,” he said. “How’s this for sticking it to the man?”
While I tried to look anywhere but at Roger, the vanishing point of the universe seemed to center on his hazel eyes. “Hi, Victor,” he said, and he stretched his far arm out over the hood and held out a Starbucks’ cup toward me. “Would you like some coffee?”
My knees buckled and there was a roar. My first thought was that I’d been shot. But then I realized I was in my bed, and the room was dark except for the illumination that leaked in from a streetlight outside. And Jacob was shaking me, hard.
“What?” I said, trying to piece together what was real and what wasn’t.
Jacob stopped rattling me, but he held me at arm’s length, his fingers digging into the meat of my upper arms.
“What?” I asked him again.
“Are you awake?” Jacob growled.
“I’m awake,” I said, wishing I didn’t need to know the reason for him waking me but supposing there wouldn’t be any way out of it.
Jacob let go of me and my arms throbbed where he’d grabbed them. We both knelt in the center of the bed, and as he sat back on his heels, I made out a big black “X” through the hair in the center of his chest. I squinted at it and saw a dark trickle ooze down from the corner of the X and spread along the waistband of his immaculate white boxer briefs.
“Holy shit, you’re bleeding!” I lunged for the reading lamp on the bedside table and realized I was clutching a cheap plastic ballpoint pen so tightly that my nails had dug into my palm hard enough to break skin.
I stopped and stared at my hand in the dark, unable to grasp the significance of the pen.
Jacob reached past me and turned the light on. The pen tip shone dark red with his blood.
“What the fuck?” I threw the pen in disgust. It picked up no momentum at all and just clattered to the hardwood floor. I glanced wildly at the digital clock. 3:05 a. m. I looked at Jacob, who was poking through his chest hair at the red X I’d gouged into him.
“Were you having a nightmare?” he asked, inscrutably calm.
Images of Crash’s tattoos and Roger’s earnest face and firm, rounded ass spewed into the forefront of my memory. “Yeah. I mean, no. Just fucked-up dreams.”
Jacob grabbed a tissue and blotted his stomach. The tissue turned red.
“I’m sorry,” I said stupidly. “I’m so sorry.”
He seemed exhausted when he finally stopped smearing the blood around and met my eyes. “How much do you know about the execution I witnessed the other night?”
“What?” I tried performing some sort of check to see if I really was awake this time without doing anything too obvious like pinching myself. “Um, I dunno. Lethal injection, you said.”
Jacob held the wet, red glob of tissue to a spot on his ribs where the blood soaked it through. I grabbed another handful of tissues and handed them to him. “Hugo Cooper,” he said. “What do you know about him?”
“The murderer?” I would’ve felt like an ass if I admitted that sometimes the cases start blending together. It wasn’t a crime I’d personally worked, it wasn’t in my precinct, and it had happened so long ago that I was still trying to figure out how to act like a cop when it was all going down. “He kidnapped three women and he killed them.”
“Details,” Jacob prompted.
“I dunno. One got away. I guess that means he killed two, right? Or were there four to start with?”
Jacob stared at me hard, but I could only shake my head; I had no clue what he was getting at.
“We had a nickname for him down at the Twelfth. I was thinking maybe you’d heard it.”
“It was a long time ago,” I said, wishing he’d get up and see to the seeping gashes in his middle. “I really don’t remember.”
Jacob sighed. “It never went to the press. We’re careful things like that don’t leak out, otherwise there’d be melodramatic headlines, copycats, the works. But just among ourselves, we called him the Criss-Cross Killer.”
I looked at the giant bleeding X on him and my stomach sank.
“Oh.”
Jacob stood and made his way toward the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and did my best not to puke.
Chapter Eleven
Jacob and whatever few clothes he kept at my place were out of the apartment by five. He didn’t seem mad, exactly, but he had his cop-face on and my nonexistent interpersonal skills were no help in figuring out if he was leaving for now, or leaving for good. He said he was just going to go figure some things out. But how many guys have gone out for a pack of smokes and just kept on going?
Telling Jacob I was sorry didn’t do any good. And begging him to stay didn’t help. Punching the wall didn’t solve anything, either. So I took the handful of stones Crash had sold me and flung them out the living room window.
That felt good for about two seconds, but afterwards I was still me, and my life still sucked.
I wandered from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom and back about a dozen times, and then it occurred to me that Lisa could help me figure out what was going on. In fact, when you think about it, Lisa owed it to me to help me sort this shit out. It was her half-assed warnings that had made Jacob leave.
I called Lisa’s cell phone and left her about twenty “call me” messages. Okay, maybe thirty. I texted her. “NEED HELP,” and “CALL ME BACK,” and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say that I had any chance of typing successfully with my thumb.
I called the operator in Santa Barbara and found there was no listing for PsyTrain, the illustrious program that evidently didn’t let its participants have a shred of contact with the outside world. Convinced that they were turning Lisa into the next Patty Hearst, I called the night detective at the Fifth, a tough, nicotine-stained broad named Alice, who you don’t want to rub the wrong way. I talked her into tracking down PsyTrain’s phone number with a promise of a case of Diet Coke and a raspberry twist coffee cake.
I called PsyTrain.
Apparently they weren’t impressed enough with my credentials to put me through to Lisa. I realized that I probably should have lied and said I was Sergeant Warwick, or maybe even the Police Commissioner, but now it was too late.
I stared at my phone. I put on a pot of coffee and paced through my apartment. In the bedroom, my sheets were rumpled and splattered with Jacob’s blood. I wadded them up and stuffed them under the bed. I swallowed a scalding cup of black coffee in one long gulp and then poured myself another cup. Compared to the Starbucks I’d been drinking, it tasted thin and sour, even though I’d brewed it up strong.
I admitted to myself that I had no idea what to do next.
I had to know why I was cutting up Jacob. And I had to know why ghosts were on me like flies on shit. It seemed like Crash might be able to help me, but for every reason I could think of to call him, there another why I shouldn’t. He was legitimate -- both Jacob and Carolyn vouched for that. But he never seemed to get a handle on the way my sixth sense actually worked, since it was obviously different from his. And did I really think I could get Jacob back by turning to his ex-lover for yet another favor? Oh, and to top it off, Crash hated me.
There was always Carolyn. She seemed...smart. And blunt. Mostly blunt. It might be good to have the Lie Detector in my corner, but then she’d pipe up whenever I let one loose. Which was probably more often than even I realized.
The only one who could tell me was Lisa. I had to see Lisa.
The idea of driving to Santa Barbara alone was ludicrous -- I couldn’t read a map to save my life and I’d probably e
nd up in Canada. But finding someone who can drive is a lot easier than figuring out why psychics do the fucked-up things they do.
Maurice. I trusted him enough to help me out. Sure, he’d ask questions. You don’t just drive someone across the country without asking questions. I paced back and forth in front of my bay window, the glaring overhead light bouncing my reflection back at me through the slats of my miniblinds as I tried to figure out how to approach him. I’d have to tell him that I was playing tic-tac-toe on Jacob in my sleep. He’d already figured out Jacob and I were together, but I’d have to come right out and say it. Awkward. But who else could I turn to?
My cell phone buzzed and I nearly tripped over a Camp Hell textbook trying to get to it. It was Lisa, it had to be. She knew how badly I needed to talk to her. She’d tell me what to do.
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