But that could've been explained just as easily by a sweet coupon in a neighborhood circular as a connection to a killer.
The alderman's nephew had been running errands that day one week earlier, and a video surveillance camera had captured him getting off the El station, heading toward his dentist's office where he never showed up for his three-thirty cleaning and semiannual checkup.
There was a park between the station and the dentist's office, so we decided to start there. Not that I was a big fan of parks. I'd stumbled onto the site of an Indian massacre the last time I combed a park. But this was a different park, and I was no longer on secret experimental drugs that amped up my ability to the level of Marie Saint Savon. So I let "Zig" establish a search grid and march along beside me, pen and paper at the ready, as we walked it.
Zig was professional, I'd give him that. He really knew his shit. Moreso than me. Not that that's saying much. Willing to do all the work, too, without seeming to expect much input from me. All in all, maybe a good match—if it wasn't for the whole "I'm gay" thing. I couldn't imagine that such a confession would be greeted with any amount of enthusiasm.
Or even civility.
"All clear?" Zig asked as we moved to the next row. I realized I'd been trying to figure out if there was any way at all I could get the damn confession out there, on the table, before I built up any kind of relationship with him. Best to let him be disappointed right off the bat, before he had any preconceived ideas about me.
I glanced back over my shoulder and gave the area we'd just walked a quick scan. "All clear."
We pivoted and started doubling back. I didn't want to challenge Zig's work methods by telling him that I didn't actually need a grid to spot ghosts. After all, maybe he'd find something that the first investigators had overlooked. But once I realized he was focused on me rather than the grid, like any good Stiff would be, I knew that I was just wasting time.
In so many ways.
"You married, Zig?" I asked him.
"Yeah, twenty-one years." He actually glanced at his wedding ring as he said it. "You?"
I looked down at my bare left hand. I'd never had the compulsion to do that before. How lame. "I'm, uh.... "Great. I couldn't say it.
But I had to. The longer I waited, the worse my anxiety would be. And I couldn't imagine it feeling any worse than it did already. "I'm moving in with someone. Just as soon as we find a place that's not haunted." Say it, Vic. Damn it. Tell him.
"That a common problem, spirit activity in a...?"
"Jacob Marks. From the Twelfth. You know him? I'm moving in with him."
Zig almost did a spit take. The color drained from his ruddy cheeks, leaving him a strange shade of gray. His already-bulging eyes bulged even more. And then a barrier slammed down somewhere behind them and he pressed his lips together hard.
Shit. I'd thought I was up for the conversation, but evidently I was a much bigger pussy than I realized. My stomach clenched up and I fought back the urge to tell Zig that I was just kidding, and laugh, and give him a hearty, heterosexual clap on the back.
God, I hate confrontation.
I steeled myself for the tirade that was sure to come. The one where I was a drug addict, a shitty cop, and a miserable excuse for a human being.
Zig blinked. He cleared his throat. "Marks," he said. "Sure.
We've met." And then he looked back at his notepad with every ounce of attention he had.
Even though he was on vacation, Jacob hadn't been relaxing. My hole-in-the-wall apartment smelled like lemons, or more likely Pledge aerosol furniture polish, and Jacob was dressed in black and charcoal designer casual.
"Got a date?" I asked him. My sport coat slid off the hook on the back of the door. It seemed like too much effort to pick it up. It settled into the space where my door met the worn linoleum tile of my kitchen floor. There was a cigarette burn there from the previous tenant. A gouge where the new refrigerator had cornered badly. I was accustomed to my apartment. It wasn't very demanding.
"Condos on Irving Park, Western, and Ravenswood. I made the first appointment for eight. Figured you could get a power nap in if you needed to."
We'd been awake since five and it was six-thirty at night.
If my head hit the pillow, I'd power nap all the way through to the next day.
Of course, I didn't need as much sleep as I had in my big pill-popping days. I tried to get into the Internet to fill those sleepless hours with some good healthy porn, but it seemed to me that all my old fifty pound laptop was capable of doing was downloading antivirus definitions and firmware updates.
I'd turned to Sudoku to fill the spare hours. Seven or eight out of the nine boxes usually added up for me. I thought that was pretty good
I loosened my tie and found Jacob had been watching me from his post in the doorway. He crossed the minuscule kitchen in about a step and a half and backed me into the formica countertop beside the sink. A spot that used to house an old coffeemaker and a can opener had been packed tight with all kinds of contraptions that Jacob needed to make dinner from scratch: a crock pot; a tabletop grill; four different bottles of oil and half a dozen vinegars. And an even bigger coffeemaker, which I wholeheartedly endorsed.
Jacob's mouth pressed against mine while the handle of the tabletop grill jabbed me in the low back. I was tired. I'd woken up early and been clenched up tight all day with the stress of coming out to Zig, but the day's fatigue melted away the second Jacob's tongue pushed between my lips.
There was probably a time for lazy, tender lovemaking on a white down comforter with a bottle of champagne chilling beside the bed and a bowl of ripe strawberries at the ready—but Jacob and I never seemed to synch up with it. One of us was either at work, or had just returned from it, carrying around an image in our heads of a crime so sickening that it made fluffy boas and hearts and flowers feel pretty useless.
Jacob deepened the kiss as he straddled my leg, his quads clamping onto my thigh. He drove me into the countertop even harder, and the grill handle drilled me from behind like it was impatient to get going with our ménage a trois.
I pulled my lips from Jacob's and gasped out, "Grill." He trailed kisses down my jaw, my neck, ending with a bite that was hard enough to hurt—in that wow-what-a-turn-on way, not the ow-get-a-bandaid way. He always let up before he left a mark. It was hard enough for me to function as a cop, what with the drugs (or the longing for them) and the gay and the half-seen corpses floating around all the time. I didn't need hickeys that I was struggling to hide on top of everything else.
Jacob got that. And yet, when his teeth pressed into my vulnerable neck and a rumble of pleasure started building up low in his throat, I sensed a quivering restraint that told me he'd love to just let loose, sink his teeth in until he tasted just the faintest hint of copper ... and of course that idea made me insanely hard.
Jacob tossed the grill into the sink with one hand—that really loud cracking noise didn't bode well—and wedged his other hand between my legs. He cupped his palm over my balls and rolled them together, wringing a desperate noise out of my throat that I hadn't realized I'd been holding back. His thigh drove his hand into me harder, and I felt a serious rush to my balls as he sent me soaring up the precipice even through my lousy work pants.
"I want to fuck you," he purred behind my ear as he nuzzled my hair. "You want it?"
"Y-yeah." Okay, so I hadn't mastered the dirty talk yet. It didn't mean I didn't totally get off on Jacob saying all that hot, nasty stuff. He flipped me around and dropped my pants around my ankles while I nudged a glass bottle back into the mass of stuff on the countertop before it could tip into the sink and shatter.
Jacob grabbed the bottle away from me. Olive oil. Okay. At least it wasn't the one with a bunch of garlic cloves at the bottom, or the big sprig of something in the middle that looked like part of last year's Christmas tree.
Clothes-rustling noises, bottle-opening noises, and then his fingers were inside me while I tried to figure out where to put my elbows without punctuating our evening with broken glass. My cock got even stiffer at the feel of his fingers, the sound of his voice mumbling its disjointed stream of dirty talk: "Sweet, sweet ass, God, you're so tight. Oh, fuck, yeah...."
I stared at the crowded electrical outlet above the counter while his cockhead nudged my hole. Slippery. I shivered and relaxed into the countertop, doing my best to enjoy the anticipation. We'd never done it in the kitchen before. Every other room but. It was too cluttered, with nowhere comfortable to sit. Not even a table, just a couple of barstools and a little ledge. Maybe I could do something on the ledge if I was feeling acrobatic.
"Oh, fuck. Yeah," Jacob said. My brain shut off as he shoved in. It burned. It was amazing. I wanted to grab my cock and bring myself off fast, but I didn't. I stared at that electrical outlet and focused outside myself, so Jacob had time to give me the reach-around. Clock. Microwave. Coffee maker. Coffee grinder.
What if one of 'em fell into the sink while he was pile-driving me and I ended up electrocuted? Not that there was any water present. But the lethalness of the combination of electricity and sinks is hard-wired into our primordial lizard brains, so that just seeing the two of them at the same time is enough to leave me thinking about biology class and twitching frogs....
"Uhn, God, Vic. So good. Fuck."
Jacob took a fistful of my hair and shoved my face into the coffee maker while he jammed his cock in deep, setting a rhythm of slow, steady thrusts. Good. Yes. I should be focusing on him, and not the macabre dance of electricity through dead limbs. So why couldn't I stop thinking about it?
"That feel good? Huh? You feel that?"
I walked my feet out as far as the pants around my ankles would let me and shuddered as a hot bead of oil rolled down the back of my thigh. "Fucking hot," I mumbled into my forearm. "Fuck me harder."
Jacob went ballistic because I'd managed to string together more than two words while he was fucking me. He grabbed my cock with an oil slick palm and pumped it hard—cripes, harder than usual, and the pain was sparkly white around the edges of my vision and everything, my cock, my balls, my ass, clenched up rock-hard while I started peaking.
Jacob's cock hammered at my ass while he chanted something like, "Nn, yeah, nn, yeah..." and his whole body folded over my back, touching me everywhere he could possibly touch. I wouldn't have thought I'd like it, since I'm so twitchy about being restrained. But when Jacob wraps his body around mine, I feel more like he's shielding me than engulfing me.
I made another crazy noise—I'm not sure if I was going for a word or not—and my cock throbbed in his greasy, tight fist.
I shot into the cabinet door and, fuck, so good, like I'd come and come and come, and he was bearing all my weight, him and the countertop, and there I was bucking like an electrocuted frog corpse.
"God," he gasped against the back of my neck. "I love you."
Oh.
I breathed carefully.
He'd said it. First.
"Yeah," I managed. "You, too." And it sounded so fucking stupid as it came out of my mouth, off guard and reactionary, and I wondered how he could possibly be satisfied with something like that. Sure, it's all about my ass when he's talking dirty, but obviously it can't be all that special.
Everyone's got one, after all. It's the whole package he was after. The weird shit I said, and did, and saw.
I didn't know why he wanted that. Just thinking about it made my brain hurt.
I craned my head around and he met me with a kiss that barely reached, his hand still moving gently over my cock, which was settling down after its big fireworks. His come was hot and tacky on the backs of my thighs. I brushed his lips with mine and tried again. "I love you, too," I whispered.
Better.
I'd seen Jacob stand up to various frightening people, from Sergeant Warwick to Roger Burke—police officer turned criminal—to his unflinching and perpetually sour Grandma Marks. But I hadn't been prepared for watching him tear a new one into his realtor. In a very quiet and controlled voice, of course, that got scarier and scarier the lower it went.
"Did you even look at this place before you wasted both my time and my partner's by bringing us out here?"
The realtor was a fiftyish guy named Stan, with washed-out blue eyes and a hairline that was both receding in the front and balding on the crown. He dressed well and kept himself in reasonable shape; if I was that hair-challenged, I might have been tempted to let myself go entirely. "I did,"
Stan said, doing his best to stand up to Jacob, "and it must have been clean at the time...."
"Roaches leave carcasses. They leave droppings." Jacob snapped the door to the kitchen cabinet and it shut with such a bang that both Stan and I jumped. "We will not buy an infested unit. Understood?"
I stared at the crevice between the baseboard and the tile where the small family of roaches had wiggled away when Stan turned on the overhead light. Roaches happen; that's what exterminators are for. But with a condo in a multi-family unit, you couldn't keep on top of it like you could in your own house. You had to rely on the homeowners association to organize that, and given the fact that we saw roaches now, it was unlikely that they had their shit together.
I suspected that Jacob wouldn't be nearly as angry if the first place we looked at hadn't been a total bust. It was a good building with fancy woodwork, and a street-level train line about a block away that went elevated the closer you got to downtown. I hadn't ridden the El in years, but it might be a fun way to go shopping on State Street or maybe visit a museum and see if there were any ghouls hanging around that the curators didn't know about.
Yeah, the train would be pretty fun. Except for the bells.
They started ringing at eight forty-five and kept on clanging for about four minutes straight. "It does this
every
time a train pulls in?" Jacob demanded. Well, of course it would. It had to keep the traffic off the tracks. How many trains came by every day—that would be the question. At least four or five an hour, I'd imagine. "Who the hell can live around here?"