PsyCop 2: Criss Cross by Jordan Castillo Price Read Free Book Online

was gone for the night. We were alone -- except for the surveillance camera that was trained on us. They don’t take any chances at modern psych facilities.
     
    I shook my head. “I dunno. They’re doing some tests.” I took Jacob by the elbow and steered him toward the door. Despite the fact that there were no faces swarming in the popcorn texture of the walls, no spirits popping out of the philodendrons, I really, really wanted to be home.
     
    Jacob’s car was parked in a handicapped slot next to the front door. He opened the passenger door for me and it felt like we were going to the prom. I wondered if anyone was watching. “How’d you end up here?” I asked him. “Did Roger call you?”
     
    Jacob closed my door and got in the driver’s side. “Maurice did.”
     
    My struggle to figure out how Maurice figured into everything must have shown on my face. “Maurice is your emergency contact,” Jacob told me.
     
    “Oh,” I said, because that was true. I wondered how Maurice knew to tell Jacob -- and then I realized the whole “I’m gay” conversation wasn't going to be necessary at all. “Oh.”
     

Chapter Five
     
    “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?” Jacob asked me for the third time. He was driving with both hands on the wheel and he looked like he’d be happy to run down anyone unlucky enough to get in his way.
     
    “I don’t go to hospitals,” I said. “I can’t. Not without something to block out the ghosts.”
     
    Jacob pressed his lips together in a grim line and glared through the windshield.
     
    “This is the same clinic I go to for everything except dental and vision, Jacob. It’s fine. It’s...it’s more than fine. It’s the only place qualified to deal with Psychs, and besides that, it’s state of the art.”
     
    He didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride home, and I was worried he was pissed off at me. I almost apologized to him, except that he was the type of guy who’d probably ask me what I was sorry about, and I wouldn’t be able to answer him.
     
    I left Jacob in the kitchen while I flipped on all the lights in the apartment and checked the closet for spectral heads. All clear.
     
    I turned around and found Jacob blocking my way out of the closet. I wondered if he’d appreciate the irony. He stood with his arms crossed, biceps bulging. It was a pose he’d struck when I’d first met him, in which he’d looked all buff and sexy. Now he looked mostly mad.
     
    “Any idea why Lisa called me from Santa Barbara and told me to leave?”
     
    I eased forward, and Jacob reluctantly allowed me into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to remember if the message I’d left for Lisa was anything that should’ve sent her into a tailspin, but I didn’t think it had been, even if I had just seen a bunch of submerged heads right before I’d called her.
     
    “No.”
     
    Jacob sat down beside me and the bed creaked. He let his breath out slowly. And when he spoke his voice was soft, as if he’d just let all the anger out of himself, too. “I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to tell me, and on top of that she was whispering so that I could barely hear. She said you were in danger. From the living and the dead.”
     
    Lisa. Did she know how to leave a melodramatic message, or what? Not that I didn’t believe her -- which is saying a lot, since she was off consorting with the Moonies of her own free will. But until she could give me some specifics, there really wasn’t much I could do.
     
    I could feel Jacob staring at me from the side. “That’s why I’m worried about that clinic,” he said. “What if they don’t have your best interests at heart?”
     
    I laughed before I could even control it, an ugly little bark that was too loud and sudden in my stark bedroom. “Christ, Jacob. I’d lay money on it that they don’t. The force, the government, whoever...they want a medium. A class five. Can