Nowadays they test you first to see if you're psychic.
The PsyCop series by Jordan Castillo Price features frazzled psychic medium Victor Bayne and his smokin'-hot boyfriend, Jacob Marks. Fifteen years ago, Victor studied at Heliotrope Station, one of the original residential psychic training programs in the U.S. The only thing he learned in that facility was how to be a better liar.
Now he's part of an elite PsyCop unit. Solving murders should be a snap when you can talk to the deceased. But since no one's ever given him a lucky break when they were alive, why would they start now ?
Summary:
Victor Bayne’s job as a PsyCop involves tracking down dead people and getting them to spill their guts about their final moments. It's never been fun, per se. But it's not usually this annoying.
Vic has just moved in with his boyfriend Jacob, he can’t figure out where anything’s packed, and his co-worker is pressuring him to have a housewarming party. Can’t a guy catch a break?
On a more sinister note, Vic discovers there’s absolutely no trace of him online. No trace of anyone else who trained at "Camp Hell," either. Everyone Vic knows has signed a mysterious set of papers to ensure his “privacy.” The contracts are so confidential that even Vic has never heard of them. But Jacob might have.
What other secrets has Jacob been keeping?
Summary:
Victor Bayne honed his dubious psychic skills at one of the first psych training facilities in the country, Heliotrope Station, otherwise known as Camp Hell to the psychics who've been guests behind its razorwire fence.
Vic discovered that none of the people he remembers from Camp Hell can be found online, and there’s no mention of Heliotrope Station itself, either. Someone's gone through a lot of trouble to bury the past. But who?
As I said in the previous reviews I'm late to the party with this series, 10+ years late but oh my god it doesn't matter because PsyCop is absolutely brilliant! The world building, creating a world where psychic/paranormal phenomenon is not only an integral part of society but woven so realistically and believably into said society that from all other aspects is pretty much as we know it, well it makes one expect to see a PsyCop badge the next time you're unlucky enough to see a cop at your door. Do I actually want to live in Vic and Jacob's world of psychic danger? I don't know as I'd go that far but I sure am loving tagging along for the ride.
So, Secrets, well the title pretty much says it all, there are secrets everywhere and Vic's need to find them may lead to more than just answers, they may lead to heartbreak. But for all the intricacies of the story you'll have to read it for yourself, because I'm sure there are others like me who are new to the world of PsyCop too and for them I don't want to ruin anything.
The blending of humor, heat, mystery, romance, danger, paranormal, and all around mayhem is incredible making this another great entry in an already superb series.
Camp Hell #5
As the title suggests and continues on from Secrets, Camp Hell is about Vic revisiting his past or trying to find answers. The flashbacks were wonderful and blending in and out of them was spot on. Some times there was confusion but it was confusion on purpose so the reader could fully appreciate Vic trying to understand everything and that it takes time, seconds and/or minutes, to fully grasp the difference between then and now. Just brilliantly written.
Who do you trust? Who do you hate? Who's on the level? Okay so you know what I'm about to say: you have read Camp Hell for yourself for those answers, I won't spoil it for you. I will say that this may be mainly Vic's journey for answers, Jacob stumbles into a new bit of himself along the way and I can't wait to see where that goes, so much potential.
I'll admit that I missed Lisa in this entry but I love the working relationship between Vic and Zig. I think there is plenty of basis there that could turn a respectful working partnership into a full-fledged friendship. As for Crash, well I'm probably not 100% on board with his place in Vic and Jacob's world but I can't deny his contributions are quite entertaining and I'd love to see him finally find happiness of his own.
As a total package and the next entry in PsyCop series, Camp Hell is an all-around blend of mystery, heat, drama, paranormal, humor, danger, and plenty of mayhem, there may be a little less romance but I never doubted that the love and heart was there. Can't wait to see what's next for Vic and Jacob.
Secrets #4
Camp Hell #5
"So. You're here to gloat over how you'll nail me with your civil suit." Roger Burke nailed me with the world's smuggest grin, and when I didn't accommodate him by being lured into some sort of argument, he added, "I'd just like to see you try."
My civil suit. I checked that phrase against the known phrases in my admittedly limited catalog of things-I-knew-about, and came up blank. I was coasting on the sweet spot of my Auracel and I didn't feel the immediate need to tell Burke that I had no idea what he was talking about, so I stared at him instead.
He'd been grinning at me. His smile faltered. "Don't give me that look."
I attempted to look even more like I currently did.
"Go ahead and sue me. I've got less than five thousand dollars in the bank. And believe me, I've got my countersuit all planned out. You could've given me a stroke by shooting me up in the neck. I'm prepared to testify that a long-time drug user like you would know that."
It had never even occurred to me to sue him. I pressed the heel of my hand into my right eye. It felt great, and then it hurt, and then I saw a flash of pretty colors. "Would you shut up for half a second?"
"Think you'd win over a jury? Maybe they'd sympathize with you on the drug angle if you did your 'boo-hoo, I'm a medium' routine. But once my attorneys parade in that big, smug, steroid-pumped gorilla you play house with…."
"I was planning on talking about a way we could avoid the courtroom, but keep running your mouth, and my next phone call is my lawyer."
Burke crossed his arms over his chest as far as his handcuffs would allow, and he glared. He had a hell of a glare. I'd never seen him use it during the time he'd been my partner at the Fifth Precinct. He'd spent over a month projecting a wholesome, helpful, non-threatening persona as the Stiff half of our PsyCop team, and I'd been totally sold on his good-cop act.
Now that I knew him for what he was, I had no idea how I ever could have seen him as harmless. His eyes, which once seemed unguarded and approachable—at least, for a homicide investigator—now looked so cold and calculating that I wondered why I'd ever thought it was safe to get into a car with him, let alone accept a drink he'd bought without my surveillance.
He sat across the plastic table from me in the visiting room, with his pale, reptilian eyes trained on me so hard that I felt like I needed to go take a shower under a water cannon to wash off the evil. There was a repeater in the corner, the ghost of a former inmate who'd died pounding on the two-way mirror, who continued to slam his fists into the glass long into the afterlife. I'd been spooked by him when I first came into the room and discovered I hadn't taken enough Auracel to block him. Now I found his presence almost comforting. It meant I wasn't alone with Roger Burke.
I controlled my revulsion toward him enough to plant my elbows on the table and lean forward. I'd been hoping to buy his information with Marlboros, but the guards wouldn't let me bring cigarettes into the visiting area. His hissy fit had given me an idea, though. "Here's the deal. I promise not to sue you, if you tell me what you know about Camp Hell."
I did my best not to look too full of myself, but I had to admit: a promise to refrain from any future lawsuits seemed a lot more valuable than a few packs of smokes.
Roger eased back into his chair. I wouldn't say he looked exactly comfortable, but he was interested enough to stay awhile, if only to taunt me about things that he knew, and I didn't. It was a start.
"I assume that you're not talking about the new Heliotrope Station. You want to know about the real deal. Where you trained."
In name only, Heliotrope Station lived on. It was now a series of night-school classes they held over at the Junior College. None of it was even remotely like the original Camp Hell—not the administration, not the staff, not the location. Hell, not even the textbooks. Still, even the old name made me start to sweat, and swallow convulsively.
Roger's smug grin was back. "You'd need to talk to me 'til my release date to find out everything I know about Camp Hell. And given that they haven't even set my sentence, who knows when that'll be?"
Posturing. That was good. It meant that he wanted to seem like he had something valuable to dangle over my head. Unfortunately, I already knew that he did. Lisa's si-no talent had told me that Roger could not only tell us why stories about Camp Hell had never made it to the Internet, but who'd managed to bury them.
"I'll be checking out what you say to make sure it's true," I warned him. "I smell bullshit, and I'll see you in court."
Roger smiled. There was some genuine pleasure in that smile, along with all the malice. My creeped-out meter ratcheted up to eleven. "April eighteenth," he said. "It's a mild fifty-five degrees outside. The subway tunnels are being drained from a freakish flood incident that occurred when an old access tunnel collapsed and the Chicago River poured in. And twenty-three-year-old Victor Bayne was transferred from the Cook County Mental Health Center to Heliotrope Station at approximately fourteen hundred hours. In a straightjacket."
My right eye throbbed. I jammed my thumb into the corner of it at the bridge of my nose, and reminded myself to breathe. "Big deal."
"Could anyone else have told you that story? Your co-workers? Your lover?"
He said the word lover like it was something rotten he'd found stuck between his teeth. "You know things about me," I said. I think my voice sounded normal. Maybe. "I'd be surprised if you didn't, since you and Doctor Chance schemed to kidnap me for, what, a year? Maybe two? That doesn't mean you know Camp Hell."
"West Fifty-Third Place, behind an industrial park that housed a small factory that manufactured dental posts and implants. No address. No signs. But a big, electrified, razor wire fence covered the whole perimeter. Been there lately? Seems like the whole building, all sixty five hundred square feet of it, has just…disappeared. Kind of like the residents."
The front doors were black tinted glass. I blinked. Roger hadn't told me that. The fried remnants of my brain had cheerfully offered up the long-forgotten detail.
The gag reflex fluttered, deep down in my throat. How did I ever think I could hear about Camp Hell without shoving my keys into my ears and punching out my eardrums?
I stood. My cheap plastic chair tipped over.
"Am I wrong, Detective?"
"This was a dumb idea. Go back to your cafeteria food and your group showers."
"They didn't kill them all. Maybe half, give or take. But the ones who didn't pose any threat, or the ones they could use…." He spread his hands. His handcuffs clicked as the chain in the center hit its limit. "Well. They crop up every now and again. They might even be leading fairly normal lives. As long as they don't travel anywhere suspicious, like Afghanistan or Cuba, the FPMP is happy to let them go on thinking they're just plain, old, ordinary American citizens, just like you and me." He blinked in mock sincerity. "Although…come to think of it, neither one of us really does fit that description. I'm up on felony charges, and you're a class five medium—as far as they know, anyway."
"I tested at five a dozen times. That's no big secret. What's FPMP?"
Roger smiled.
Our little chat wasn't going anything like I'd planned. I was supposed to give him some smokes, and he would thank me for my present by telling me a name or an address, and that would be that. That's how it'd gone down inside my head, anyhow.
"A bunch of butch guys running around with letters sewn onto their windbreakers," I said, "right? Whatever. Look, I've got somewhere to be."
I went to the door and knocked. The guard opened it.
"You could always recant your statement, you know. Tell them it wasn't me holding you captive. I was just along for the ride."
Coffee I'd drank a couple of hours before burned at the back of my throat. I needed to get to a bathroom before I hurled. "Yeah. They'll believe that."
"Why wouldn't they? When you gave your testimony, you had traces of Amytal, psyactives and muscle relaxants in your system. You were confused." He stared me in the eye, and he'd finally stopped grinning. "C'mon, Bayne. I'd make it worth your while."
"Don't hold your breath."
"I can tell you about Camp Hell, but what's the point? You were there. A second point of view isn't going to change anything that happened. But the FPMP? The people who made it disappear? They're still around. Think about it. Can you really afford not to know?"
I was standing half-in, half-out of the room. The guard gave me an "are you through yet?" look. I took another step out the door.
"And…Detective?" He sounded so mild, so matter-of-fact, that I should have known a zinger was coming. But I couldn't stop myself from turning back around and taking one more look at Roger Burke's cold, pale eyes.
"What?"
Roger's grin reappeared, and spread like blood welling out of a deep papercut. "Happy birthday."
• • •
I lay in bed staring up at the tin ceiling, racking my brain and trying to figure out which was worse: knowing that Roger Burke would walk sooner, maybe even immediately, if I recanted my statement—or knowing that he could tell me everything I wanted to know about Camp Hell and then some, but that I was too gutless to pay the price he wanted for the information.
I heard Jacob come in and bound up the stairs. He's got energy to do things like that, because he eats right, exercises, and doesn't take questionable pills.
"Are you mad?" he said.
I glanced down from the ceiling. He stood in the bedroom doorway, loosening his tie.
"No. Why?"
"Me. Forgetting your birthday." He slipped out of his suitcoat and hung it in the closet. "Do you want to go out? It's not that late. I'll bet I can get us in at Villa Prego."
Villa Prego was fancy enough that I didn't think the staff would ruin my dinner by trooping out and singing me a half-hearted, cheesy birthday song. But they served fussy little portions of things that once crawled around on the bottoms of ponds. "Nah. Let's just get a pizza. I'm really not big into birthdays."
Jacob took off his holster and put it in a drawer. "How hungry are you?"
Thanks to my cozy alone-time with Roger Burke, my stomach felt like it'd been ripped out, switched with a giant wad of rotting trash, then stuffed back into my abdominal cavity. I shrugged.
Jacob flashed some skin while he pulled on a T-shirt and sweats, and even his unintentional strip tease wasn't enough to cheer me up. I was too busy mulling over just how much I hated Burke, and wishing that he wasn't the one who had the information I needed.
Jacob shut the closet door and looked at me hard enough to make him squint. "Something's wrong. Is it Lisa?"
"Lisa's fine. She sent me her e-mail address. Maybe one of these days she'll trust me with her phone number again."
He planted his hands on his hips and kept on staring. I felt myself scowl even harder. I know he was accustomed to teaming up with the Human Polygraph, but didn't he understand that sometimes people lied and minimized because they were wrestling with something too ugly to lay out there for everyone to see?
"You're mad that I borrowed your Auracel," he said, finally.
There—something I could hang my mood on. Thank you, Jacob. "Don't go through my pockets."
"I'm sorry."
Like I gave a damn that he'd slipped some of my meds to an astral rapist. It wasn't as if it was my last pill or anything. And it'd gone to a good cause. I did my best to scowl harder.
Jacob sat on the edge of the bed, pulled my foot into his lap and dug his thumb into the sole. I turned all to jelly inside, but I think my scowl didn't slip, much. "I'm truly sorry. I did what I thought was right at the time."
The nerves at the bottom of my foot seemed to be connected directly to my spine. I sagged into the mattress, and my eyes rolled up to stare at the ceiling again. Jacob swept his thumb over the ball of my foot, and I made a noise that I usually reserve for sex.
"Please don't be mad."
"I'm not mad," I said. "It's just been a rough couple of days."
"You don't need the futon," Jacob called from the living room. My living room. The one he'd been sharing with me since an incubus exploded in his swanky Lakeview condo last fall. I was in the kitchen at the time, trying to determine exactly how attached I was to the corkboard next to the phone, the one where I stick small pieces of paper until I forget what the notes scrawled on them were supposed to mean.
"I have a living room set," he said.
I vaguely remembered Jacob's living room set. I'd seen it at his old condo maybe twice before it'd gone into storage. I'd been too busy ogling his naked body to pay much attention to his décor. When I wasn't busy shooting at the incubus who'd followed him there, anyway.
I worked the yellow sticky note I was holding between my thumb and forefinger, rubbing it, creasing it down the center. It was so damp with sweat, it molded to the shape of my palm. I shook it loose and it landed on the countertop. I scrubbed my palm against the leg of my jeans, and wondered if I'd managed to leach all the sticky out of the note. Stupid of me. I'd made a deal with Jacob that I'd only keep the things I marked with a yellow paper tag. It had seemed like a big stack of stickies, at the time. But my stack had grown awfully thin. There aren't as many sticky notes in a pack as you might think.
It was the week of my thirty-ninth birthday, and there I was, poised to move out of my bright white apartment and into the old brick loft building, a turn of the century cannery, that I now owned with Jacob. I'm not sure which part was weirder—that it had taken me so long to find someone I was that serious about, or that it had even happened to me at all. I'd always figured I was too screwed up to do the whole long-term relationship thing with anybody. Ever.
"Vic? The futon."
I looked down at the soggy paper square on the countertop. Maybe Jacob was right about the futon. Almost-forty-year-olds didn't generally have cheap futons as the focal point of their living rooms. Especially not when there was actual furniture around they could be using. Besides, it would free up that sticky note so I could mark something else I wanted to keep.
I touched the seat of the barstool under the kitchen counter. Vinyl and chrome. I liked my barstools. Did I need to put a sticky on each of them, or was it understood that they were a set?
Jacob appeared in the doorway, flashing his washboard abs. He wasn't trying to seduce me; he was mopping sweat from his face with the hem of his black T-shirt. Still, he was distracting, to say the least. "Bedroom's packed," he said, tugging his shirt back down. "Where are those barstools supposed to go?"
"The…kitchen?"
He frowned. It was more of a thinking-frown than a cull-your-shit-already-frown. I think. "Maybe. Or maybe we can put a bar in the basement."
If we did put a bar in the basement, Jacob would be drinking at it alone. Not because I don't drink, which I don't, but because I don't do basements. They're creepy. Even the ones that've been finished with paneling, indoor-outdoor carpeting and dart boards.
But I didn't argue. I don't do confrontation any better than I do basements, or shots of Jägermeister.
"Why don't we just take it all and sort it out once we get there?" I suggested. Jacob hadn't thought it was a good idea the night before, but it couldn't hurt to try one more time and see if I might wear down his resolve. "There's plenty of room."
Jacob went to the sink and held his hands under the tap. He splashed cold water on his face and performed another ab-flashing maneuver that would bring any card-carrying queer to his knees. "How many times do you want to end up carrying this stuff?" he said. "We don't need two of everything."
And my furniture was all cheap pressboard crap, while his was real. Yeah, I knew that. But still. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that the hundred-year-old cannery, a bizarre student attempt at Egyptian revival, was my new home. I pressed a sticky note onto a narrow white plastic end table in the corner and heard Jacob sigh.
"What?" I said. "That's where I keep my keys."
Jacob stepped back from the sink and eased his way toward me. Sweat made his fitted black T-shirt cling to his body, and his deep olive skin glistened in the greenish light cast by the fluorescent overhead fixture. He kept on coming at me until he'd backed me into the wall, where the plastic table threatened to warp under the weight of my thigh. The smell of new sweat was heady, and it turned my furniture frustration to thoughts of sex. I felt a warmth deep in my belly. No, lower. Damn him. Neither one of us needed to resort to arguing. We each had our ways of trying to get what we wanted.
He took my face in both of his hands. His palms were cool from the water. Jacob's built like a linebacker and I'm more of a goalpost, but at six-foot-something, we at least stood eye to eye. It made it for easy kissing.
Jacob looked at me, hard, and then he closed his eyes and dove in. What do they call 'em, pheromones? He must've been giving them off in clouds. My head shifted gears—from hoarding, to sex—the second his lips touched mine.
He pressed himself into me, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, and he threw heat like a furnace. A big, damp, sexy, man-smelling furnace. He drew his lips away from mine slowly, our breath mingling for a second before he started kissing lower, working his mouth along my jaw toward my neck.
"I'm keeping my table," I said. My voice wobbled a little. I'm such a pushover.
Jacob grunted, and stretched the neck of my baggy T-shirt to scrape his teeth against my collarbone. The sharp rasp sent a jolt of heat down to my cock. I was beginning to feel a lot more than an indistinct warmth down there.
"What do you think you're doing?" I said. It was pretty obvious, but I couldn't resist. "I thought we were on a schedule."
Jacob didn't dignify that with an answer. His hand covered the bulge at the front of my jeans, instead. My breath hissed in and my back arched as my body strained for his touch.
It was humbling to have someone able to press all my buttons that well. Maybe it was a little scary, too. What if Jacob used his superpower for evil, not good? Would it matter? Probably not, as long as he kept me drugged with sex.
I grabbed for his hair, but it was too short to get a handful. Wet with sweat, too. Fuck, that made me hard. He met my eyes. Not as dramatic as me grabbing him by the hair and forcing the eye contact, but that was okay. I just needed to see the look, the one that lets me know that he's got it as bad for me as I do for him.
Jacob stared at me hard while he stroked my cock through my jeans. The importance of what I would take to our new place and what I would leave behind for the Goodwill truck dwindled. Where could we have sex? That was all I cared about.
"When you said the bedroom was packed…?"
Jacob grabbed me by the upper arm and pulled me into the living room. Through the bedroom doorway, I could see my mattress and box spring stacked against the wall behind a barricade of boxes.
The living room was a wreck, but Jacob hadn't started boxing it up quite yet. My cock throbbed impatiently as I shoved a laundry basket and a crate of DVDs and videotapes out of the way and dragged the futon off its frame. I toed off my loosely-tied high tops and stripped down fast. Jacob dropped a gym bag next to the futon and started peeling off his sweaty clothes. I knelt down on the futon, which was only slightly more padded than the floor, and unzipped the bag to see what he thought we'd need from it. I shoved aside rolled-up pairs of socks, a T-shirt and sweatpants. Underneath all that, I felt a plastic bottle with a familiar shape. Lube. "So, you were planning on getting lucky," I said.
"There's always hope."
"I have a living room set," he said.
I vaguely remembered Jacob's living room set. I'd seen it at his old condo maybe twice before it'd gone into storage. I'd been too busy ogling his naked body to pay much attention to his décor. When I wasn't busy shooting at the incubus who'd followed him there, anyway.
I worked the yellow sticky note I was holding between my thumb and forefinger, rubbing it, creasing it down the center. It was so damp with sweat, it molded to the shape of my palm. I shook it loose and it landed on the countertop. I scrubbed my palm against the leg of my jeans, and wondered if I'd managed to leach all the sticky out of the note. Stupid of me. I'd made a deal with Jacob that I'd only keep the things I marked with a yellow paper tag. It had seemed like a big stack of stickies, at the time. But my stack had grown awfully thin. There aren't as many sticky notes in a pack as you might think.
It was the week of my thirty-ninth birthday, and there I was, poised to move out of my bright white apartment and into the old brick loft building, a turn of the century cannery, that I now owned with Jacob. I'm not sure which part was weirder—that it had taken me so long to find someone I was that serious about, or that it had even happened to me at all. I'd always figured I was too screwed up to do the whole long-term relationship thing with anybody. Ever.
"Vic? The futon."
I looked down at the soggy paper square on the countertop. Maybe Jacob was right about the futon. Almost-forty-year-olds didn't generally have cheap futons as the focal point of their living rooms. Especially not when there was actual furniture around they could be using. Besides, it would free up that sticky note so I could mark something else I wanted to keep.
I touched the seat of the barstool under the kitchen counter. Vinyl and chrome. I liked my barstools. Did I need to put a sticky on each of them, or was it understood that they were a set?
Jacob appeared in the doorway, flashing his washboard abs. He wasn't trying to seduce me; he was mopping sweat from his face with the hem of his black T-shirt. Still, he was distracting, to say the least. "Bedroom's packed," he said, tugging his shirt back down. "Where are those barstools supposed to go?"
"The…kitchen?"
He frowned. It was more of a thinking-frown than a cull-your-shit-already-frown. I think. "Maybe. Or maybe we can put a bar in the basement."
If we did put a bar in the basement, Jacob would be drinking at it alone. Not because I don't drink, which I don't, but because I don't do basements. They're creepy. Even the ones that've been finished with paneling, indoor-outdoor carpeting and dart boards.
But I didn't argue. I don't do confrontation any better than I do basements, or shots of Jägermeister.
"Why don't we just take it all and sort it out once we get there?" I suggested. Jacob hadn't thought it was a good idea the night before, but it couldn't hurt to try one more time and see if I might wear down his resolve. "There's plenty of room."
Jacob went to the sink and held his hands under the tap. He splashed cold water on his face and performed another ab-flashing maneuver that would bring any card-carrying queer to his knees. "How many times do you want to end up carrying this stuff?" he said. "We don't need two of everything."
And my furniture was all cheap pressboard crap, while his was real. Yeah, I knew that. But still. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that the hundred-year-old cannery, a bizarre student attempt at Egyptian revival, was my new home. I pressed a sticky note onto a narrow white plastic end table in the corner and heard Jacob sigh.
"What?" I said. "That's where I keep my keys."
Jacob stepped back from the sink and eased his way toward me. Sweat made his fitted black T-shirt cling to his body, and his deep olive skin glistened in the greenish light cast by the fluorescent overhead fixture. He kept on coming at me until he'd backed me into the wall, where the plastic table threatened to warp under the weight of my thigh. The smell of new sweat was heady, and it turned my furniture frustration to thoughts of sex. I felt a warmth deep in my belly. No, lower. Damn him. Neither one of us needed to resort to arguing. We each had our ways of trying to get what we wanted.
He took my face in both of his hands. His palms were cool from the water. Jacob's built like a linebacker and I'm more of a goalpost, but at six-foot-something, we at least stood eye to eye. It made it for easy kissing.
Jacob looked at me, hard, and then he closed his eyes and dove in. What do they call 'em, pheromones? He must've been giving them off in clouds. My head shifted gears—from hoarding, to sex—the second his lips touched mine.
He pressed himself into me, chest to chest, thigh to thigh, and he threw heat like a furnace. A big, damp, sexy, man-smelling furnace. He drew his lips away from mine slowly, our breath mingling for a second before he started kissing lower, working his mouth along my jaw toward my neck.
"I'm keeping my table," I said. My voice wobbled a little. I'm such a pushover.
Jacob grunted, and stretched the neck of my baggy T-shirt to scrape his teeth against my collarbone. The sharp rasp sent a jolt of heat down to my cock. I was beginning to feel a lot more than an indistinct warmth down there.
"What do you think you're doing?" I said. It was pretty obvious, but I couldn't resist. "I thought we were on a schedule."
Jacob didn't dignify that with an answer. His hand covered the bulge at the front of my jeans, instead. My breath hissed in and my back arched as my body strained for his touch.
It was humbling to have someone able to press all my buttons that well. Maybe it was a little scary, too. What if Jacob used his superpower for evil, not good? Would it matter? Probably not, as long as he kept me drugged with sex.
I grabbed for his hair, but it was too short to get a handful. Wet with sweat, too. Fuck, that made me hard. He met my eyes. Not as dramatic as me grabbing him by the hair and forcing the eye contact, but that was okay. I just needed to see the look, the one that lets me know that he's got it as bad for me as I do for him.
Jacob stared at me hard while he stroked my cock through my jeans. The importance of what I would take to our new place and what I would leave behind for the Goodwill truck dwindled. Where could we have sex? That was all I cared about.
"When you said the bedroom was packed…?"
Jacob grabbed me by the upper arm and pulled me into the living room. Through the bedroom doorway, I could see my mattress and box spring stacked against the wall behind a barricade of boxes.
The living room was a wreck, but Jacob hadn't started boxing it up quite yet. My cock throbbed impatiently as I shoved a laundry basket and a crate of DVDs and videotapes out of the way and dragged the futon off its frame. I toed off my loosely-tied high tops and stripped down fast. Jacob dropped a gym bag next to the futon and started peeling off his sweaty clothes. I knelt down on the futon, which was only slightly more padded than the floor, and unzipped the bag to see what he thought we'd need from it. I shoved aside rolled-up pairs of socks, a T-shirt and sweatpants. Underneath all that, I felt a plastic bottle with a familiar shape. Lube. "So, you were planning on getting lucky," I said.
"There's always hope."
Camp Hell #5
"So. You're here to gloat over how you'll nail me with your civil suit." Roger Burke nailed me with the world's smuggest grin, and when I didn't accommodate him by being lured into some sort of argument, he added, "I'd just like to see you try."
My civil suit. I checked that phrase against the known phrases in my admittedly limited catalog of things-I-knew-about, and came up blank. I was coasting on the sweet spot of my Auracel and I didn't feel the immediate need to tell Burke that I had no idea what he was talking about, so I stared at him instead.
He'd been grinning at me. His smile faltered. "Don't give me that look."
I attempted to look even more like I currently did.
"Go ahead and sue me. I've got less than five thousand dollars in the bank. And believe me, I've got my countersuit all planned out. You could've given me a stroke by shooting me up in the neck. I'm prepared to testify that a long-time drug user like you would know that."
It had never even occurred to me to sue him. I pressed the heel of my hand into my right eye. It felt great, and then it hurt, and then I saw a flash of pretty colors. "Would you shut up for half a second?"
"Think you'd win over a jury? Maybe they'd sympathize with you on the drug angle if you did your 'boo-hoo, I'm a medium' routine. But once my attorneys parade in that big, smug, steroid-pumped gorilla you play house with…."
"I was planning on talking about a way we could avoid the courtroom, but keep running your mouth, and my next phone call is my lawyer."
Burke crossed his arms over his chest as far as his handcuffs would allow, and he glared. He had a hell of a glare. I'd never seen him use it during the time he'd been my partner at the Fifth Precinct. He'd spent over a month projecting a wholesome, helpful, non-threatening persona as the Stiff half of our PsyCop team, and I'd been totally sold on his good-cop act.
Now that I knew him for what he was, I had no idea how I ever could have seen him as harmless. His eyes, which once seemed unguarded and approachable—at least, for a homicide investigator—now looked so cold and calculating that I wondered why I'd ever thought it was safe to get into a car with him, let alone accept a drink he'd bought without my surveillance.
He sat across the plastic table from me in the visiting room, with his pale, reptilian eyes trained on me so hard that I felt like I needed to go take a shower under a water cannon to wash off the evil. There was a repeater in the corner, the ghost of a former inmate who'd died pounding on the two-way mirror, who continued to slam his fists into the glass long into the afterlife. I'd been spooked by him when I first came into the room and discovered I hadn't taken enough Auracel to block him. Now I found his presence almost comforting. It meant I wasn't alone with Roger Burke.
I controlled my revulsion toward him enough to plant my elbows on the table and lean forward. I'd been hoping to buy his information with Marlboros, but the guards wouldn't let me bring cigarettes into the visiting area. His hissy fit had given me an idea, though. "Here's the deal. I promise not to sue you, if you tell me what you know about Camp Hell."
I did my best not to look too full of myself, but I had to admit: a promise to refrain from any future lawsuits seemed a lot more valuable than a few packs of smokes.
Roger eased back into his chair. I wouldn't say he looked exactly comfortable, but he was interested enough to stay awhile, if only to taunt me about things that he knew, and I didn't. It was a start.
"I assume that you're not talking about the new Heliotrope Station. You want to know about the real deal. Where you trained."
In name only, Heliotrope Station lived on. It was now a series of night-school classes they held over at the Junior College. None of it was even remotely like the original Camp Hell—not the administration, not the staff, not the location. Hell, not even the textbooks. Still, even the old name made me start to sweat, and swallow convulsively.
Roger's smug grin was back. "You'd need to talk to me 'til my release date to find out everything I know about Camp Hell. And given that they haven't even set my sentence, who knows when that'll be?"
Posturing. That was good. It meant that he wanted to seem like he had something valuable to dangle over my head. Unfortunately, I already knew that he did. Lisa's si-no talent had told me that Roger could not only tell us why stories about Camp Hell had never made it to the Internet, but who'd managed to bury them.
"I'll be checking out what you say to make sure it's true," I warned him. "I smell bullshit, and I'll see you in court."
Roger smiled. There was some genuine pleasure in that smile, along with all the malice. My creeped-out meter ratcheted up to eleven. "April eighteenth," he said. "It's a mild fifty-five degrees outside. The subway tunnels are being drained from a freakish flood incident that occurred when an old access tunnel collapsed and the Chicago River poured in. And twenty-three-year-old Victor Bayne was transferred from the Cook County Mental Health Center to Heliotrope Station at approximately fourteen hundred hours. In a straightjacket."
My right eye throbbed. I jammed my thumb into the corner of it at the bridge of my nose, and reminded myself to breathe. "Big deal."
"Could anyone else have told you that story? Your co-workers? Your lover?"
He said the word lover like it was something rotten he'd found stuck between his teeth. "You know things about me," I said. I think my voice sounded normal. Maybe. "I'd be surprised if you didn't, since you and Doctor Chance schemed to kidnap me for, what, a year? Maybe two? That doesn't mean you know Camp Hell."
"West Fifty-Third Place, behind an industrial park that housed a small factory that manufactured dental posts and implants. No address. No signs. But a big, electrified, razor wire fence covered the whole perimeter. Been there lately? Seems like the whole building, all sixty five hundred square feet of it, has just…disappeared. Kind of like the residents."
The front doors were black tinted glass. I blinked. Roger hadn't told me that. The fried remnants of my brain had cheerfully offered up the long-forgotten detail.
The gag reflex fluttered, deep down in my throat. How did I ever think I could hear about Camp Hell without shoving my keys into my ears and punching out my eardrums?
I stood. My cheap plastic chair tipped over.
"Am I wrong, Detective?"
"This was a dumb idea. Go back to your cafeteria food and your group showers."
"They didn't kill them all. Maybe half, give or take. But the ones who didn't pose any threat, or the ones they could use…." He spread his hands. His handcuffs clicked as the chain in the center hit its limit. "Well. They crop up every now and again. They might even be leading fairly normal lives. As long as they don't travel anywhere suspicious, like Afghanistan or Cuba, the FPMP is happy to let them go on thinking they're just plain, old, ordinary American citizens, just like you and me." He blinked in mock sincerity. "Although…come to think of it, neither one of us really does fit that description. I'm up on felony charges, and you're a class five medium—as far as they know, anyway."
"I tested at five a dozen times. That's no big secret. What's FPMP?"
Roger smiled.
Our little chat wasn't going anything like I'd planned. I was supposed to give him some smokes, and he would thank me for my present by telling me a name or an address, and that would be that. That's how it'd gone down inside my head, anyhow.
"A bunch of butch guys running around with letters sewn onto their windbreakers," I said, "right? Whatever. Look, I've got somewhere to be."
I went to the door and knocked. The guard opened it.
"You could always recant your statement, you know. Tell them it wasn't me holding you captive. I was just along for the ride."
Coffee I'd drank a couple of hours before burned at the back of my throat. I needed to get to a bathroom before I hurled. "Yeah. They'll believe that."
"Why wouldn't they? When you gave your testimony, you had traces of Amytal, psyactives and muscle relaxants in your system. You were confused." He stared me in the eye, and he'd finally stopped grinning. "C'mon, Bayne. I'd make it worth your while."
"Don't hold your breath."
"I can tell you about Camp Hell, but what's the point? You were there. A second point of view isn't going to change anything that happened. But the FPMP? The people who made it disappear? They're still around. Think about it. Can you really afford not to know?"
I was standing half-in, half-out of the room. The guard gave me an "are you through yet?" look. I took another step out the door.
"And…Detective?" He sounded so mild, so matter-of-fact, that I should have known a zinger was coming. But I couldn't stop myself from turning back around and taking one more look at Roger Burke's cold, pale eyes.
"What?"
Roger's grin reappeared, and spread like blood welling out of a deep papercut. "Happy birthday."
• • •
I lay in bed staring up at the tin ceiling, racking my brain and trying to figure out which was worse: knowing that Roger Burke would walk sooner, maybe even immediately, if I recanted my statement—or knowing that he could tell me everything I wanted to know about Camp Hell and then some, but that I was too gutless to pay the price he wanted for the information.
I heard Jacob come in and bound up the stairs. He's got energy to do things like that, because he eats right, exercises, and doesn't take questionable pills.
"Are you mad?" he said.
I glanced down from the ceiling. He stood in the bedroom doorway, loosening his tie.
"No. Why?"
"Me. Forgetting your birthday." He slipped out of his suitcoat and hung it in the closet. "Do you want to go out? It's not that late. I'll bet I can get us in at Villa Prego."
Villa Prego was fancy enough that I didn't think the staff would ruin my dinner by trooping out and singing me a half-hearted, cheesy birthday song. But they served fussy little portions of things that once crawled around on the bottoms of ponds. "Nah. Let's just get a pizza. I'm really not big into birthdays."
Jacob took off his holster and put it in a drawer. "How hungry are you?"
Thanks to my cozy alone-time with Roger Burke, my stomach felt like it'd been ripped out, switched with a giant wad of rotting trash, then stuffed back into my abdominal cavity. I shrugged.
Jacob flashed some skin while he pulled on a T-shirt and sweats, and even his unintentional strip tease wasn't enough to cheer me up. I was too busy mulling over just how much I hated Burke, and wishing that he wasn't the one who had the information I needed.
Jacob shut the closet door and looked at me hard enough to make him squint. "Something's wrong. Is it Lisa?"
"Lisa's fine. She sent me her e-mail address. Maybe one of these days she'll trust me with her phone number again."
He planted his hands on his hips and kept on staring. I felt myself scowl even harder. I know he was accustomed to teaming up with the Human Polygraph, but didn't he understand that sometimes people lied and minimized because they were wrestling with something too ugly to lay out there for everyone to see?
"You're mad that I borrowed your Auracel," he said, finally.
There—something I could hang my mood on. Thank you, Jacob. "Don't go through my pockets."
"I'm sorry."
Like I gave a damn that he'd slipped some of my meds to an astral rapist. It wasn't as if it was my last pill or anything. And it'd gone to a good cause. I did my best to scowl harder.
Jacob sat on the edge of the bed, pulled my foot into his lap and dug his thumb into the sole. I turned all to jelly inside, but I think my scowl didn't slip, much. "I'm truly sorry. I did what I thought was right at the time."
The nerves at the bottom of my foot seemed to be connected directly to my spine. I sagged into the mattress, and my eyes rolled up to stare at the ceiling again. Jacob swept his thumb over the ball of my foot, and I made a noise that I usually reserve for sex.
"Please don't be mad."
"I'm not mad," I said. "It's just been a rough couple of days."
Saturday's Series Spotlight: Part 1
Author and artist Jordan Castillo Price is the owner of JCP Books LLC. Her paranormal thrillers are colored by her time in the midwest, from inner city Chicago, to small town Wisconsin, to liberal Madison.
Jordan is best known as the author of the PsyCop series, an unfolding tale of paranormal mystery and suspense starring Victor Bayne, a gay medium who's plagued by ghostly visitations. Also check out her new series, Mnevermind, where memories are made...one client at a time.
With her education in fine arts and practical experience as a graphic designer, Jordan set out to create high quality ebooks with lavish cover art, quality editing and gripping content. The result is JCP Books, offering stories you'll want to read again and again.
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Secrets #4
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