PsyCop 4: Secrets (7 page)

I’d never known Jacob to get snippy, but I suspected I’d come close to seeing it when I asked too many questions about his case. It was smart of me to put off the Internet discussion, I decided, especially when Jacob was running on a few hours’ sleep and I’d already pushed my luck earlier.

I pressed my head into the crook of his neck and settled my cheek against his collarbone. Jacob hooked his heel behind my calf and pulled my leg between his, tangling us together.

Furniture groupings were starting to spontaneously develop within the maze of boxes and clutter. There was a sofa/coffee table area, and a book and media area, and then there were stacks upon stacks of boxes.

I stared down at the chaos from the lofted hallway that connected the bedroom, the office, and the teeny-tiny upstairs half-bath. Light filtered in through glass-block windows and Jacob had left for work hours ago. The cannery was pretty peaceful, in its own industrial way. Even if it wasn’t painted white.

I went downstairs and squeezed past some boxes. My hip brushed a box marked
TV
. That would be mine. Jacob’s TV couldn’t be contained by a regular cardboard box. My 13” set would fit in the bedroom. I was pretty sure there was some porn in that box, too. I decided to set up the DVD player so we could turn in early. There. I felt a sense of accomplishment from the mere planning of it.

In the kitchen, I found the to-do list I’d asked for lying on top of the closed laptop. Damn.

Jacob had actually written one down. Well, I had asked for it. I figured I should see what he thought I was capable of handling.

Hang up clothes, find the bedside lamps, more snow shoveling and a stop at the grocery store. Okay. It was doable. In fact, I should be able to have it completed by noon. Filled with a new determination to make the cannery more of a home, I was a list-crossing fiend.

Not only did I hang up our clothes, but I put each of our wardrobes on opposite sides of the closet so they weren’t all mixed up. I found Jacob’s shoe boxes and stacked them under his suits. I even put the winter stuff towards the front.

I shoveled the walk before I went grocery shopping. How’s that for organization? I did have to go back out and hit a hardware store to buy a power strip and plug in the bedside lamps and the little TV, but I’d finished up the list by early afternoon. With just a little bit of guidance, I was capable of impressive feats.

The newly hooked-up television set and its stack of well-watched DVDs beckoned to me, but I decided to wait until Jacob was home to break out the porn. Call me a romantic. As far as I knew, we had no cable service and no antenna, so unless I wanted to zone out to a snow channel or dig up a movie where everyone kept his clothes on, I’d gone as far as I could with the TV.

As I went toward the stairs I caught a glimpse of Jacob’s computer, stately and impressive with its big, flat monitor and wireless keyboard. Although I knew it connected to the same Internet as my crappy laptop, it seemed that maybe with this impressive machine, I could actually find Stefan.

Hadn’t Jacob said there were more pieces of equipment to be hooked in to this electronic work of art? A dozen boxes labeled “office” were stacked beneath the window. This would be Jacob’s stuff, since I’d never had an office, myself.

I spread out the boxes and started peeling off tape. I found a printer. A scanner. Those wire baskets where you leave your paperwork to die, and a phone that looked way too complicated for its own good. I even found a box marked “Misc.” I know it doesn’t seem like it should be a personal triumph to discover that Jacob had stuff he couldn’t quantify—but living with him and his steel-trap mind, I couldn’t help but feel just a little bit satisfied.

So what was it that stumped super-PsyCop Jacob Marks? A small fan. A few black and white photos of boring cityscapes in black lacquer frames. A bundle of hangers. A video camera, still in its box.

We could tape ourselves having sex.

Wait, no. I only wanted to see that video if Jacob took up the whole frame. Or maybe if it was really dark, and the only thing I could make out clearly was the talking, all that nasty, dirty stuff he liked to say to me.

I opened the box and pulled out the camcorder. It was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. I flipped open the viewscreen. The controls looked pretty straightforward: play, record, forward and back. I was just about to hit record when I realized that I’d probably better make sure that I wasn’t taping over somebody’s wedding. I hit play, and a strange room filled the screen, a room full of windows and light—Jacob’s old condo, which neither of us could think of anymore without imagining an incubus exploding at the foot of his bed.

The bed I’d been sleeping in all week. Gross.

The frame traveled across the room, revealing a bunch of details that I only vaguely remembered, and then settled on the gigantic leather sofa.

Crash sprawled over it, grinning from ear to ear. Without his shirt on.

Fuck.

It was October when I’d met Crash, so I’d never had a reason to see him shirtless. His ink went all the way up, his left arm a full sleeve of fitted-together tattoo flash, his right an abstract design that seemed more planned, less piecemeal. His stomach had the word

“Mattie” arched over it prison-style in heavy gothic lettering, and above that, smack-dab on his sternum, was a black Virgin of Guadalupe, hands folded in prayer. I doubted he’d ever actually been in prison, but he wore the bad-boy look with the confidence of someone who didn’t give a fuck whether the tattoos had been inked in a modern tattoo parlor with sterile equipment, or a dark cell with a sharpened ballpoint pen.

“Say something for posterity,” said Jacob’s voice through the tinny playback on the camera.

Crash’s grin widened. “Let’s make our own porno.”

Okay, it’d been the first thing I’d thought of, too. So why did it feel like I’d just been sucker-punched?

“So you can sell it online? Not a chance.” Just great. Jacob was using his “I’m obliged to disagree on moral grounds, but you’re really hot and I sound like I’m smiling” voice.

“I gotta make money somehow since you refuse to be my sugar daddy.”

“Maybe you should stop buying me such expensive presents.”

“I traded a full-building sage smudge for it. It wasn’t even stolen. The guy just upgraded before he’d had a chance to use this one.” Crash’s grin got even wider, like it could split his face. “Besides, you only turn fifty once.” Then he ducked as the camera lurched and a throw pillow sailed past the spot where his head had just been. Jacob turned forty-five the summer before—not fifty. “Okay, okay. You’re the hottest middle-aged man I know.”

“That’s it, pal. You asked for it.” Jacob set the camera down on its side. It kept on going, recording a vertigo-inspiring shot of the upper corner of his entertainment center. Sounds of a scuffle with lots of squeaking leather ensued, with Crash yelling, “Help, police brutal-ity!” and Jacob telling him, “I’ll show you brutal.” And lots of laughing. And breathing. And something wet that couldn’t be anything other than kissing with plenty of tongue.

“Hey, it’s still going,” said Crash, eventually. “See the red light?”

“You’re railroading me into the porno.”

“Like you need any help, horndog.”

I felt queasy. Physically ill. I liked it a lot better when Crash called Jacob “PsyPig.” And didn’t tongue-kiss him.

The couch squeaked loud, I heard a couple of footsteps, and a pair of hands straightened the camera. Crash’s tattoos loomed large and blurry, then came into focus as he backed away toward the couch, now with Jacob on it, barefoot in jeans and a black T-shirt. His feet seemed so naked.

Jacob’s hair was a lot longer than I’d ever seen it. Enough to grab—and for my own mental health, I really didn’t need to follow that line of thinking any farther. He owned that couch, sprawling over it, one arm along the back. Crash flung himself down into the crook of Jacob’s arm. Both of them were smiling.

“Happy birthday, baby,” said Crash. “This is gonna be your year.” Baby? I couldn’t breathe.

They started kissing again, on-camera this time, and I told myself to turn the thing off.

Now. But for some reason, my hand wouldn’t obey my brain. I reasoned that it was better to see what happened next then to imagine it. At least, I hoped so.

There was kissing, yeah. But they smiled the whole time they did it, and touched each other, too. Crash pulled the hem of Jacob’s T-shirt out of his waistband and slipped his hands underneath; Jacob slid his palms up and down Crash’s arms, and traced his tattoos.

They stopped kissing and kept on looking at each other. They seemed comfortable like that, just looking. Neither one of them filled the silence with words. Jacob looked away first. He reached into a box on the coffee table—the coffee table I’d eaten dinner on the night before—and pulled out a remote. He aimed it at the camera.

There was a half-second of blackness, then snow, then a shot of Jacob’s monster-nephew Clayton in the back seat of a car, green trees with a few gold leaves rushing past the window. Jacob’s voice: “You know who your teacher is going to be this year?”

“I get a different teacher every period,” he said, making the whole phrase sound like,

“duh”.

“What do you think your favorite subject is going to be?”

“I don’t know.” Clayton was trying to act cool, but Jacob’s attention was pulling a reluctant smile from him.

“Clayton is very good at math.” A woman’s voice. Probably Jacob’s sister, Barbara. Control freak.

“How about gym?” Jacob asked.

“I dunno.” Clayton said it long and drawn out, with a goofy smile on his face.

“How about recess. You still get recess?”

Clayton nodded.

“How about lunch?”

I turned off the camera. My own lunch wanted to repeat at the thought of Crash calling Jacob “baby.”

I snapped the camera shut, put it back in its box, and buried the box in the back of the lowest desk drawer. If Jacob ever asked, I could claim I didn’t even open it since I thought it would be too complicated to use. That’s what I could say if Carolyn wasn’t around, anyway.

I pressed my face into the computer keyboard and sighed. When Jacob had shot that tape, the two of us hadn’t even met. So it was stupid of me to feel like I’d just caught my boyfriend kissing another man. Not that stupidity ever deterred me.

My phone rang in my pocket. It was the generic ring tone that meant it wasn’t one of the half-dozen people who called me with any regularity. I considered letting it go to voice mail, but the keys trying to cram themselves up my nostrils weren’t all that comfortable, and besides, it could have been Jacob calling me from a land line. Even though I felt like smacking him, answering the phone seemed like the thing to do. That way, I could assure him I wasn’t rifling through his stuff and getting pissed off over him having the nerve to kiss the guy he’d been dating last summer.

I glanced at the caller ID—pay phone—and hit the talk button. “Hello?” My first impression was noise, the kind of hollow wall of sound you get when someone’s in a big, crowded room. Second thing: crying.

Even I’m not a big enough heel to blurt out, “Who is this?” when someone calls me up sobbing. I sat there for a minute and tried to see if I could figure out who it was by the sound of the voice. Female, probably. Unless it was Clayton. But he was too young to be using a pay phone, wasn’t he? Did kids these days even know what pay phones were?

“Um…hello?” I said again.

“V-V-Victor….” More crying.

Okay. A woman. It couldn’t be that difficult to narrow it down. There were the women at work who never cried because they were cops and they had to keep up their tough facades, unless you count Betty, who probably could get away with crying since she was only a receptionist….

“I c-c-can’t do this….”

So familiar. “Do what?”

“I can’t know everything.” A fresh volley of tears.

It took me a second, but then I placed the voice, the slight Hispanic accent to the vowels.

“Lisa? Oh my God, what happened? Where are you?”

Lisa snuffled. “I’m at O’Hare.” Her voice was very small, nearly drowned out by the sound of the concourse.

I pried her flight number and airline out of her. “Sit tight. Have a drink. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“Okay. And Victor?”

“Yeah?”

“Bring your pills with you.”

Huh. So it was a cop, after all. I wondered where I’d been standing when they’d been passing out the deductive reasoning talent. Most likely in the “show me the dead people” line. I’m guessing it must have looked a hell of a lot shorter.

I pulled up to the slushy curb at the arrivals area and spotted Lisa. Her hair was in a single long braid and her nose was red. She looked shorter than I’d remembered, and more Hispanic, as if my mind’s eye had been Caucasianizing her in the months since I’d last seen her. She got into the car, wedged a purse that was big enough to carry a sledgehammer into the front seat with her, and snapped her seatbelt on with excessive force. She wore a heather-gray tracksuit with cropped pants, and her ankles were turning blue from the cold. She had no winter coat, and to make things extra weird, she was wearing big, dark, Paris Hilton-style sunglasses.

I stared at her. It was hard to tell where she was looking. “Are you okay?”

“Let’s just go,” she said. She sounded tired.

I wondered if I had a Camp Hell flashback coming on. Please, no. I was driving. “Did somebody hurt you?”

“Why would you say that?”

“You’re answering my question with a question…what’s with the sunglasses? Do you have a black eye?”

She pulled the sunglasses down her nose and glared at me over the top. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but no bruising. “I just don’t want everyone to see me crying. Can we go now?”

Oh. Right. Maybe I hadn’t been so far off the mark about women cops and tears.

I almost wished she did have a few contusions to show for her time at PsyTrain, because I was edging close to full-panic mode from the thought that they’d done something even worse to her that I couldn’t see. I did my best to stop stealing glances at her and keep my eyes on the road. It had snowed all night so traffic was shitty, and Lisa didn’t seem to want me staring at her. I turned up the car heater to full blast and picked my way through traffic to the Tollway. I merged on and got stuck in an afternoon rush hour gridlock. Or maybe there was an accident up ahead. Either way, we weren’t moving.