Rock N Soul (24 page)

“What did he look like?” My voice was a little breathless, but I decided that it wasn’t enough to tip Chris off, so I sped up my strokes and ignored the part of my brain that was telling me not to think about Chris’s o-face while I beat one out.

“Shortish,” he answered. “Really dark hair, but I think it was dyed because I saw the drapes, if you know what I mean. Green eyes like yours.” There was a pause. “Well, not exactly like yours. Yours are brighter. More spring-y.”

I couldn’t have him talking about my eyes while I had my hand on my cock, so I asked another question. “Who was the best girl?” A good question. Good job, Tyler. Get this thing back on the heterosexual track.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, probably Evie, I guess. The spinning move was cool.”

“And the body butter,” I said, because thinking about tits was the sort of thing I was used to doing while I jerked off.

“Yeah. Tori wasn’t any good. If you’re curious.”

I hadn’t been, but that didn’t matter. “Why not?” I got my other hand in on the action to try to speed things up, stroking with both hands and fighting to keep my breathing under control.

“She used me like a sex toy,” he said. “She didn’t want me to do anything, just lie there while she bounced up and down on my dick.”

Fuck
. Don’t think about bouncing up and down on Chris’s dick. I didn’t even know what that would feel like, so it shouldn’t have turned me on so much. But then Chris’s money shot from the Gabriel video flashed across my mind and combined with a vivid fantasy of me riding Chris hard and slow, with my face tilted up toward the ceiling. That really didn’t need to be the image I ended everything on, but my cock had other ideas, and I bit my lip hard to keep from moaning out loud while I shuddered a few times and fought to keep my legs underneath me.

“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath, because I couldn’t keep
totally
quiet, and now that the lust haze had cleared from my eyes, I was a little weirded out that Chris had taken over my sex fantasies so completely. I didn’t want him like that in real life. Did I?

Goddamn it, I probably did. Fuck.

But whatever, jerking off had released a lot of tension and so I would count the shower session as a win. I let go of myself and concentrated on finishing up with washing as quickly as I could.

“You okay?” Chris asked.

“Yeah, fine, why?” My voice was almost back to normal, which was nice.

“I just expected you to have follow-up questions or something.”

I shook my head hard like that would clear it. “No, I got a pretty good mental image of Tori using you like a dildo, thanks.”

He chuckled again, which still did weird things to my skin even when I wasn’t harder than a calculus final, and fuck if I knew what to do with that, so I rinsed the last of the soap off of my body and turned off the water.

I stuck my head around the curtain and looked over to where he was perched on the closed toilet lid. “Okay, I’m done. Out.”

“Can’t I just close my eyes again?” He gave me a look that I couldn’t quite translate. Probably for the best.

“No, you can’t. Come on, man, give me five minutes of privacy. Then you’ll have me to bother for the rest of the day.”

“Promise?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I promise.”

“Deal.” He stood up, then hesitated for a second before he shook his head and walked through the wall and back out into the hotel room.

I finished drying off and getting ready, then checked myself one last time in the mirror to make sure that he wouldn’t be able to read “I just jizzed in the shower thinking about you fucking me” all over my face. None of the girls I’d dated had ever been able to read that sort of expression, but I got the feeling that Chris was going to be the exception to this rule too. The bastard was becoming way too much of an exception these days.

When I was finally satisfied that my poker face was firmly in place, I walked out of the bathroom. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll find us a coffee shop and I’ll eat whatever you want to watch me eat.”

“I want to see you eat something
you
like,” he said. “That’s what I miss. I mean, you eat scones for me and you drink the drinks I like and you make your spaghetti the way my mom used to make it just so I can watch you eat it, but that’s not what I miss. I miss the
pleasure
of eating. I miss . . . having something on my tongue that makes my eyes roll back in my head.” He slid his gaze over and locked it on me. “Is there anything that does that to you?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Caramel cake,” I said, nodding decisively.

“Can I watch you eat caramel cake?” He licked his lips, and I hated that I traced the motion with my eyes.

“I don’t know, dude,” I said, my mouth dry all of the sudden. “That sounds really intimate.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, but didn’t elaborate.

“If we find caramel cake in Los Angeles,” I promised him, “I’ll eat it for you.”

He scoffed and waved his hand dismissively. “This is one of the biggest cities in the country. We can find you some caramel cake.”

“Hey, I’ve only got a few days here,” I pointed out. “And we need to find Jerri and Eric and let you talk to them. That’s priority one. And then after
that
, we can look for caramel cake if we still have time.”

He smiled. “Deal. Okay, so, Jerri first. Text her.”

I pulled out my phone and typed in the number he told me. “What do I say?”

“Say ‘Meet you at the store at one thirty.’”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “What store?”

“It’s a florist’s shop. Neutral meeting place,” Chris said. “Jerri’s very careful about who she meets up with.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, pouring all of my distrustfulness into the sounds. “Who’s Jerri?”

“You’ll see,” he said. “And if you could just stand back and let me talk to her while you plug your ears, that would be great.”

“You keep saying that,” I told him, “but you keep forgetting that you
can’t talk to her
. You need me to relay for you.”

Chris paused with his mouth open like he’d already begun to rebut my argument. “Damn.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So just man up and tell me who she is.”

“Not yet.” He grinned at me and motioned at my laptop case. “Now pull up a map, and I’ll show you where to go.”

An hour later, I found myself standing in an abandoned florist shop staring into the barrel of a shiny silver handgun that managed to look both delicate and badass at the same time. For several seconds I just stood there staring blankly at the gun. My blood rushed in my ears and for a moment the whole thing seemed so fucking surreal that I almost laughed at it instead of reacting appropriately. To a gun. In my face.

“Dude, don’t shoot.” I’d never really expected to say that phrase for real. It was the kind of thing people said in the movies but not in real life.

Jerri glared at me, an unlit cigarette hanging out of her mouth. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m nobody. Don’t shoot.” I put my hands in the air. Surely she could already see that I wasn’t armed, but it seemed like the sort of goodwill gesture that you should perform when on the wrong side of a gun. I swallowed hard and tried to exude
I’m not worth shooting
vibes by shrinking into myself and looking as small as possible.

“Your
name
, motherfucker.”

“Tyler Lindsey,” I said, quickly before she could get any angrier. I was, after all, pretty motivated to
not die
. “I’m nobody, I’m just . . . I just came here to talk.”

“Honestly, I don’t give a damn what you came here for. But I don’t like being contacted without a reference, you understand?” She took a step closer to me, and I flinched backward. “I want to know who told you to send me that text.”

“Um . . .” I looked at Chris, who was standing a couple of feet away. “Little help here, Chris?”

Jerri swung her gun around toward the door, then turned it back to me. “Who’s Chris? Your backup?”

“No,” I squeaked. “He’s a friend. He’s your friend too.”

Jerri glared for a few more seconds, then slowly lowered her gun. “No sudden moves or I’ll shoot you. I swear to God I will. But fine. Talk.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath. It was amazing how much better it felt to not have a Glock in my face. But still, I probably ought to put out a disclaimer before I hopped right into the ghost thing. “Just, um, let me finish before you start shooting or whatever, okay?”

She narrowed her eyes. “No promises.”

“Well, I’m here because Christopher Raiden wanted me to come talk to you. I was, um, the one who found his body.” That much seemed . . . well, not
normal
, but not outside of the realm of possibility. Maybe I’d gotten some message from Chris before he died that he’d wanted me to pass on. That sounded reasonable.

Jerri didn’t seem particularly convinced, but she nodded. “Fine. Okay. What did he want to say?”

“Look, this is going to sound really crazy.” Yet another phrase I never thought I’d actually say. “But, um, I’m sort of a psychic or something and I’m being haunted by his ghost—” Her gun came back up to point at me, and I sped up “—and I know that sounds like I’m fucking with you but I can prove it.”

“Ten seconds, motherfucker.”

“Talk fast, Chris,” I said, a little squeakily.

Chris, to his credit, looked incredibly freaked by this development. “Tell her that I told you that she’s sexually obsessed with Abraham Lincoln and this one time she made out with this guy at a party because she totally thought he was Abe reincarnated.”

I stared at Chris. “Are you fucking kidding me?
That’s
what you want me to say?”

Jerri waved the gun a little, and I sighed. “He says you have a sexual thing for Abe Lincoln and once you fooled around with a dude at a party because you thought it was him?”

Jerri’s eyes narrowed even more, and I wondered briefly if she could even see through them at this point. “I need more than that.”

Chris ran a hand through his hair. “Tell her I never told anybody about the pot brownies she donated to that nursing home.”

I closed my eyes. I was going to get shot for sure. “And you took pot brownies to a nursing home but he never told anybody.”

Jerri just stood there.

“We’re convincing her,” Chris said. “Now tell her that her sister has a birthmark on her bikini line, and she’s always felt weird knowing about it but she does.”

“I am
not
telling her that,” I snapped at him.

Jerri waved the gun again. “About what?”

I let out a huff of breath and tried to prepare for the afterlife as best I could in just a few seconds. “About the birthmark on your sister’s bikini line.”

Jerri lowered the gun. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said doubtfully.

A rush of dizzy relief washed over me, and I took a deep breath to settle my nerves. “Yeah. Neither did I, until this one got attached to me.”

“So . . . why does the spirit of Chris Raiden want to talk to me?”

“Fuck if I know,” I said. “He’s being very secretive about the whole thing.”

Chris made a face in my direction. “Tell her she’s my friend.”

“He says you’re his friend,” I repeated dutifully.

Jerri frowned again, but this time it was a saddish frown. “I told him a million times that we weren’t friends.”

“Really?” I said. “Well, he thinks you were. He made me come all the way here from Boston to talk to you.”

“To talk to
me
?”

“Well . . . you and Eric Painter,” I clarified. “But you first, yeah.”

Chris stepped forward. “Tell her to shut up about us not being friends, because she knows that’s bullshit. She’s been like my sister and I want her to know that she meant a lot to me and that I’m glad I knew her.”

I looked between them. “He says you mean a lot to him and you’re like a sister to him and you should stop saying that you weren’t friends.”

“You can’t be friends with your customers,” Jerri said. “It’s the rule.”

“Yeah, well— Wait.” I gave her an up-and-down appraisal.
Customers
implied one of two things here. She was slender and pretty enough, but Chris hadn’t seemed to be lying when he said it was platonic and it wasn’t like he was the sort of guy who would have needed to pay for sex anyway, so that ruled out prostitute. Which only left one possibility.

Chris groaned. “Here we go.”

“Is Jerri your
dealer
?” I stared at him, incredulous.

Jerri twitched the gun. “Yeah, I’m going to need you to keep your voice down. Narcs are everywhere.”

I dutifully lowered my voice, but kept my tone the same and kept staring at Chris. “You made me fly to Los Angeles to have a tearful good-bye scene with your
drug dealer
?”

Chris shifted on his feet. “Um, yeah. But she’s really more of a friend? I mean, really, we’ve been buddies for years now.”

“You are the biggest douche I’ve ever met,” I said to Chris. “And
you
,” I pointed at Jerri. “It’s your fault he’s dead.”

Jerri frowned again. “No, it’s not. If I wasn’t selling, he would have found someone else. And besides, I’m very up front with my dosages, man. I tell ’em how much to take and if they do more than that, it’s their own asses.”