Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 08:46:07 -0400
From: Jake Preston <jemtling@gmail.com>
Subject: Psychic Detective 34

Psychic Detective 34
By: Jake Preston

This is a work of erotic gay fiction, intended for readers who enjoy a
murder mystery in which fully developed characters interact sexually and in
other ways. Their sexual encounters are sometimes romantic, sometimes
recreational, sometimes spiritual, and almost always described
explicitly. My attention is equally divided between narrative, character
development, and sex scenes. If you don't care for this combination, there
are many other excellent "nifty" stories to choose from. And remember that
while nifty stories are free, maintaining a website is not. Please think
about donating at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html

Writing is usually a solitary avocation, but not necessarily so on
nifty.org, where a longer story appears in installments. If my characters
and my story grab your attention, you can always intervene with suggestions
for improvements. All sincere comments will get a response!

Jake, at jemtling@gmail.com


       *  *  *  *  *  *


Chapter 34
The Mérida Detective


	Back in Mérida, Göran moved into Seńora Dorothea's
bed-and-breakfast where the Papantla acrobats were residing. He shared
Pablo Rivera's bed. Jack kept the room in Juan Carlos Hotel, along with
Jésus and Xiu Seven-Macaw.

	When they returned to the hotel before dusk on Tuesday, a sign in
the lobby announced that the bar was closed. Jésus asked why, and was
told that there was a staffing problem. The head bartender had either quit
or disappeared, and two assistant bartenders called in sick. Jésus
suspected a labor dispute. Maybe the proprietor wouldn't give them raises,
so they punished him by closing the bar during Holy Week, the busiest time
of the year.

	"It would be a shame to close the bar during Holy Week, quite
damaging to the reputation of Juan Carlos Hotel," Jésus told the man in
charge. "You're the proprietor. There must be some way you can make peace
with your bartenders." He offered to tend bar for two or three evenings,
time enough for him to reconcile with the bartenders, or hire new ones. He
didn't discuss compensation— he just offered to help out. Jésus had
his reasons. First, he wanted to test the moral fiber of the proprietor. If
he worked without pay, that would be a sign that he should find a way to
help his fellow bartenders in their labor dispute. He suspected, in fact,
that he wouldn't get paid, but never mind about that. His second, more
important reason was that he wanted to make friends with a group of cops
who hung out in the bar with beer or tequila on weeknights around eight
o'clock. He was especially interested in the oldest officer, a man in his
fifties, a detective.

	Jésus knew he had to tread carefully. On his first evening in
the bar, when he was there with Göran and Jack, two feminish
maricónes approached the bartender and three of the cops dropped their
beer bottles to the floor. Homophobic slurs accompanied the clash of brown
breaking glass. While the bartender swept up shards with a broom and a
dustpan, the two mariposas beat a retreat from the bar. Jésus did not
fail to notice that the oldest officer, the detective, did not participate
in his colleagues symbolic gay-bashing, nor did he laugh at their
jokes. Jésus and Göran stood mute, but Jack remarked, in the safety
of English, "the sun also rises and sets, and glides back to where it
rises."

	Jésus knew what to do on this occasion. He brought a bottle of
Patrón tequila plata to their table, and four shot-glasses. —Etas
noche, caballeros, beber en la casa, he said, "Tonight, gentlemen, you
drink on the house." —Pero si rompes las grafas, no voy a limpiar el
desastre.  "But if you break the glasses, I won't clean up the mess."

	Patrón plata was the most expensive tequila in the bar, so the
cops were in no position to take exception to Jésus's impertinence,
unwilling (as they were) to reject such a generous gift.  The detective and
Jésus exchanged gaydarish glances, unnoticed by the others, who asked if
he was from Sonora or one of the other northern states. —Yo vivo en
Minnesota y trabajo en Wisconsin, Jésus said.

	—Americano?

	 The detective seemed relieved that as an American, Jésus was
out of bounds for gratuitous taunting by the other cops. Besides, he had
heard a rumor that Jésus's two companions were lawmen, and one of them
was a sheriff— secrets that had leaked from the registration desk.  The
youngest cop asked— rather indiscreetly— if Jésus was working
under cover. "Oh, no," he replied in Spanish, "I really am a bartender. The
hotel's barmen went on strike, so I'm volunteering as a favor to the owner,
and to all of us, to keep the bar open through Holy Week."

	"In that case, no one will criticize you for your generosity with
the proprietor's tequila," one of the cops said.

	"I'll cover the cost with my tips," Jésus retorted. "I'm not
working here to make money. I own half-interest in the saloon where I tend
bar in Wisconsin."

	The bar was busy that evening, but Jésus chatted up his new
friends whenever there was a lull. When the tequila bottle was empty, the
three younger cops went home in high spirits. The detective moved to a
stool at the counter, where Jésus served him Italian coffee. "I don't
want you drunk, I want you sober," he said. "Do coppers in Mérida have
names? I won't spend the night with you if I don't know your name."

	"Salvador Marcos Gutierez."

	"Wow, Jésus Salvador, what a pair for Holy
Week... Jésusalvadorus," Jésus said, running the names together in a
suggestively infixed ungrammatical dvandva compound.

      Salvador was flattered to be propositioned brazenly by a good-looking
twenty-something who, for his part, thought it unnecessary to mention that
he had sharpened his wit tending bar in a gay saloon. The bar in Juan
Carlos quietened around 11:00 PM, so Jésus closed early and led Salvador
to his suite. From the balcony they watched Pablo and the other Paplanta
acrobats engage in mock-battle on twelve-foot stilts. "After all these
years, I've never been in the rooms of Juan Carlos," Salvador said. "I
hadn't realized that the balcony gives such an excellent view of the
Square."

      Jésus waved to Göran, Jack, and Xiu in the crowd below. "The
blond guy is Göran, my boyfriend, though this week he's making it with
one of the Paplantas," he explained when Salvador asked. "You'll be meeting
Jack and Xiu later, since they'll be sharing the other bed."  Salvador eyed
Jack with erotic interest.

      Courtship began in earnest under the showerhead, with Salvador's
sudsy lavishment of Jésus's wiry hard body. He calculated his partner's
physical strength (an occupational habit); it was less than his own, but
Jésus possessed an inner feistiness that would make him a formidable foe
in a fight— not forgetting that they were paired for romance, not
combat.

      As a fellow Latino, Jésus knew that Salvador wouldn't consent to
be a maricón— a fairy.  He could fuck and keep his machismo, but
getting fucked was another matter. Still, he could make Salvador work for
it.  Jésus let Salvador's hands roam freely, forbidding nothing, but he
gave what he got, a prelude to foreplay in bed, which seemed a prolonged
wrestling for dominance, except for rest periods when they kissed
romantically. "I get it that you're macho," Salvador said at last, "but
Jésus, we can't have sex until one of us donates his culo to the cause.
How about it, Jésus? Take one for the team!"

      "Why don't you take one for the team?" Jesus retorted, in a voice
less emphatic than Salvador's, for he was thinking about his ultimate goal,
to win a Mexican cop as an ally in their manhunt for Albino.

      "You're the one with the cute ass," Salvador said. "If Cupid were in
charge, he's say it was your duty to give it up."

      They wrestled some more in a lovers' embrace. Salvador pinned
Jésus on his back and lept between his legs. Suddenly he felt Jésus
relax; he frog-legged, resting his ankles on Salvador's shoulders. Salvador
gave him his policeman-gaze and a finger lubed for greasing the
skids. Jésus's groans were music to Salvador's ears when he nailed him,
nailed him. It was, after all, Holy Week. Salvador fucked triumphantly and
said that Jésus had the snuggliest culo in Mérida; not that he'd
tried them all, or many, but without superlatives, the praise of a lover is
faint.

      Salvador had two strengths in bed. One was endurance, as Jésus
discovered to his dismay, and then to his delight. He fucked long enough to
retrofit Jésus's culo to suit the contours of his cock, such that
Jésus experienced Salvador as an extension of his own being.  Salvador's
second strength was psychology. In this he was a natural: "You're uglissimo
as a caterpillar, Jésus, but together we're a cocoon from which you will
metamorphose into a beautiful butterfly." His whispered words of endearment
were all about transformation into Mericopa. "A body like yours was meant
to be shared with other men. The inside is even sexier than the
outside. It's a waste of nature to keep it to yourself. Make the
metamorphosis, Jésus.  Become Meriposa, and think about me when other
men fuck you."

      Jésus said he'd make the change.

      "And when you do, tell your partners they have me to thank for their
pleasure," Salvador said whispered in Jésus's ear.

      "Fuck me," Jésus replied.

      "When I breed you, you'll fly from your cocoon as Meriposa," Salvador
said. He extracted from Jésus some promises that would not have been
made had Jésus been less eroticized.

      I leave it to the reader to surmise what else transpired between
Jésus and Salvador that night, and what transpired between Jack and Xiu
in the neighboring bed. At dawn, Jésus awoke to the sound of sheets
rustling and bedsprings squeaking in the next bed. He lay half-asleep on
his side, with his back to his bedmate, who clasped him in a one-arm
embrace while his warm erect cock frotted his cleft. Jésus parted his
legs and admitted the probing cock. His shagmate guided him face-down and
fucked. They got a romantic rhythm going. Only then did Jésus look to
his left and to see Salvador fucking Jack in the same position. That's when
he realized that he was getting fucked by Xiu. Salvador and Xiu had changed
places in the night. Jésus scuttled away, to Xiu's dismay, but then he
lay on his back and invited Xiu to mission him. The lightweight Maya


      * * * * * *


      Breakfast in México is the same as dinner in America. One reason
why Mexicans are physically fit compared to Americans is that they eat
their big meal in the morning and work off the calories during the day. The
Juan Carlos Hotel offered their guests a lavish mexicano breakfast: black
bean chilaquiles, burritos, huevos rancheros (eggs sunny-side up) with
chorizo and chile sauce, migas tepitana, pasta incaciata, sausage-and-egg
tostades, chicken mole, guacamole garnished with the flavor of the day
(today's mix was cranberries and raisins), blackberry sticky buns, café
italiano and café americano, and peach cobbler for desert. For American
guests there were pancakes and waffles, but by this time Jack had gone
native, as Göran would have done had he not been roiling the sheets with
Pablo and two other Papantla acrobats at Seńora Dorothea's
bed-and-breakfast.

 	During breakfast, Jésus announced that he had worked out the
problem of the missing bartenders. It was a two-part mystery. First, the
`proprietor' demanded that all staff members surrender their tips so that
the money could be distributed equally, but in fact he kept sixty percent
of the money himself and distributed forty percent to the staff. Second,
the man who called himself the `proprietor' wasn't really the hotel
owner. He was hired to be the manager three months earlier, and started his
scam during his first week on the job. "With a manager like that, Juan
Carlos is bound to go downhill," Jésus said. "I wouldn't want to see
that happen to the finest hotel in Mérida."

	Salvador asked Jésus if he wanted to speak to the owner.

	"You're the detective, Salvador," Jésus said. "It's your case
now, if you want it. It would put you in good grace with one of Mérida's
leading businessmen. He's a victim in this scam, too, just as much as his
staff. Keep my name out of it, if you can. Or if you can't, you can that
you put me in the bar as an undercover informant."

	"You guys aren't here on vacation, are you?— you two and
Göran," Salvador said.

	"We're on a `working' vacation," Jack replied. "We're on the trail
of a serial killer who was seen in Uxmal two days ago. He's killed twenty
men that we know of, in three states— Minnesota, South Dakota, and
Oregon. There might be other victims in Wyoming and Idaho.  I've prepared a
flash-drive that gives all our information. The killings go back to 2009,
maybe earlier. We call the killer `Albino', but we've identified him as a
failed anthropologist named Howard Coleman. Originally there were two
killers, but we caught one of them. Much of the information is
confidential, but I'll give it to you if you'll follow up on the
case. Naturally we have no authority in México."

	"We get our fair share of murders in Yucatán," Salvador said.

	"Have there been any killings that look like imitations of Aztec or
Maya sacrifice?  Bodies with a heart torn out, or skin flayed off, or a
head stuck on a pole, that sort of thing?"  Jack asked.

	"We thought they were the work of a new gang of drug dealers,"
Salvador said. "They've been filtering into Yucatán from the border
states up north. It's a nightmare for the tourist industry here, so we've
tried to keep it confidential."

	"It's a complex case," Jack said. "It will take all day to go over
my computer files. We can pick up Göran at Seńora Dorothea's, and
review it at the police station. Jésus and Xiu are witnesses,
too. Perhaps we can call them in later, if we need them, but for now we
should consider it confidential police business."

	Salvador was pleased with Jack's discretion and deference. He
valued competence in a fellow detective who was handing him a
career-building case on a silver platter. Salvador and the Mérida police
chief spent the day with Jack and Göran, going over the `Albino' files
and deciding on strategies hunt him down. The Mexican lawmen appreciated
that the FBI would never have shared this information.

	"We're planning to visit Chichen Itza on Easter Sunday," Jack
said. "We think that Albino might be there, too."

	"Ah, yes, to seen the serpent of El Castillo," the Police Chief
said. "That makes sense.  This year Holy Week coincides with spring
equinox. There will be thousands of people at Chichen Itza. You might want
to get there early."

	Jack was inclined to agree, but Göran prevented him. "Pablo
wants us to stay for the Papantla acrobatics on Good Friday," he said.
That's when they're performing the Aztec creation myth, their most
important pageant. Pablo's playing the part of Ometéotl-Omecíhuatl,
the father- mother of the Cosmos. They'll be doing it again at Chichen
Itza, on Easter, but I promised him we'd watch both performances."