Victor parked at the far end of the secure lot, taking a moment to breathe deeply after turning off the car. It had been a shit-show of a Friday night in Lawrence, and he was only two hours into his shift. He had just opened the door, bracing himself for a frigid trek to the station and an hour of paperwork once he got there, when dispatch proved they still had it out for him.
"Four Ida Three," the voice on the radio addressed him, "indecent exposure at Holy Innocents Church. Report of two subjects having sex outside of a black, older model sedan parked on the east side."
Victor allowed himself a groan, equal parts self-pity and disbelief, before responding in the affirmative and slamming the door shut again. The chill fall air had already settled into the patrol car, so he cranked up the heat as he pulled through the gate.
The church was just over a mile away. About halfway there, he received an update: the car had left with both suspects inside, traveling away from Victor's approach. The caller would be waiting for him at the main doors. Knowing there was next to no chance of catching the offending vehicle, he turned into the church lot to see if he could get any more information to identify the perverts.
Two women hurried to meet him as soon as he stopped the car; as he got out, they both started talking at once. "Hold on, I need to ask a few questions," he said over them as he pulled out his notebook. He addressed the older woman first: "Ma'am, can you briefly tell me what you saw?"
"Marie and I were just inside, setting up for tomorrow morning's wedding," she told him in a wavering rush. "I happened to look out the window, and there they were! Doing... Well, you know what they were doing. It doesn't bear repeating, particularly on holy ground. It's indecent."
Victor made a vaguely sympathetic noise if agreement and asked Marie, "Did you see them too?" She nodded. "Can you tell me what you saw? Any descriptions would be very helpful."
"Yes, right, um. Like Jenny said, the car was parked just outside one of the windows. It was black, I think? Dark, at least. A classic muscle car sort of thing, I don't know, maybe from the fifties?"
"Okay, that's good. Did you get a look at the license plate? That's all right. What about the people? What they were doing, what they looked like?"
"Oh, uh, there were two of them. Two men, I think—"
"It wasn't!" Jenny interrupted, scandalized. "The girl just had one of those short hairstyles young people fancy these days."
"It was hard to tell," Marie acknowledged diplomatically. "The other one was definitely a man. Very short hair, leather jacket... Couldn't really see anything else. He had the other one, um. Well, bent over the hood." She blushed under the yellow glare of the parking lot's lights. "That one had short hair, dark brown or black. I really couldn't see anything else, they were mostly in the shadows. Then they drove off when Marie went out to yell at them."
"That's okay." This whole endeavor was a complete waste of Victor's time. Even if he found a car matching the vague description he had, he didn't have cause to pull it over without something more specific. Still, he told the ladies, "I'm going to go drive around and see if I can find them. If they come back, don't go outside. Just call nine-one-one, and I'll be on my way. Okay?"
The two women agreed. Back in his car—cooler than it had been, but warmer than the outside air—Victor dutifully drove several blocks in the direction the black muscle car had fled, though he knew it was useless. He updated dispatch with what little information he'd gained, and told them to close out the call.
"Four Ida Three," Victor's radio summoned thirty minutes later as he sat at one of the too-low desks in the office shared by the entire patrol division. He swore he heard laughter in the background. "Suspicious activity at Azure Park. Security's requesting assistance contacting an older black Chevy in the parking lot with fogged windows. They can't see inside and no one's responding to them, but they think it's occupied by at least one."
Grateful to be alone in the room, he dropped his head onto the desk. "En route," he muttered into his microphone. "Can they give us a plate?"
"Said it's obstructed. First two are King Adam."
"Of course it is," Victor muttered, this time not into his microphone. Closing his laptop, he stood and stretched. At least he'd parked closer to the doors this time.
When he reached the park, he found no sign of security or the questionable car. Goddamn Tom on the goddamn radio assured him they should still be there, but promised to call the security office back and see if they had any updates.
Five and a half minutes of circling the lot later, Goddamn Tom said security said the car had driven off a few minutes after their first call. The occupant or occupants had remained unseen. Victor's assistance was no longer requested.
"Copy," he ground out like a curse.
Victor made it two more hours before once more being forced to decide what he would be willing to offer to bribe someone else to take over his district.
"White male in his thirties, six feet, dark hair. Wearing a tan trench coat, open, with nothing underneath." Someone who wasn't Goddamn Tom was snickering while Goddamn Tom read off the description. "Didn't appear intoxicated and left store when the clerk asked him to."
"So he's gone?" Victor confirmed.
"Affirm. Caller doesn't see him anywhere on the property."
Victor won the fight against screaming into his terrible coffee, but just barely. "I'll give the clerk a call."
At least two more people weren't even trying to suppress their giggles as Goddamn Tom gave him the goddamn caller's goddamn number.
"Thank you for calling Gas-n-Sip," a deep voice greeted him. "This is, uh, Steve. How may I be of service?"
"Yeah, this is Officer Henriksen with the Lawrence Police. You called about a mostly naked guy coming into your store, is that right?"
"No, I didn't—oh. Yes, of course, I would call the police about that."
Victor thought he heard a second, muffled voice on the other end of the line, but Tom and his band of no-longer-tittering dispatchers chose that moment to send someone else to deal with a fender-bender, so he couldn't be sure.
"Everything okay there, Steve? The guy's not still there, is he?"
"No," Steve said slowly, drawing out both sounds into their own elongated syllables. "I'm just, you know, uh, rattled. Will you be here soon?"
He sounded more puzzled than evasive, but something was off. Probably stoned and wondering if he had time to try and cover it. Victor really couldn't care less. "I was actually just going to ask you a couple questions. Since the guy's gone, I don't need to bother you in person."
"You're not coming." He heard relief in Steve's overly loud and enunciated voice. Then he moved the phone away from his mouth, but not far enough that Victor couldn't hear him, and repeated, "They're not coming."
There was no radio traffic to cover the sound of someone shushing Steve on the other side of the phone that time.
"Who are you talking to, Steve?"
"Nobody. You had questions?"
Victor did have questions, and was about to start asking them when Steve gasped out, "Oh, fuck."
Victor jumped to his feet, already moving towards the door. "Steve, what's wrong?"
"N...nothing. Just, mm, I'm just upset about the whole situation." He didn't sound upset. The breathy moan and hitch in his voice sounded a lot like the owner of the voice trying to shush him was doing something entirely inappropriate to be doing to a man who was standing in a gas station convenience store, talking to a cop on the phone.
"Steve," he began, but was stopped by a reverberating groan.
"What did I say about keeping quiet?" the other person on Steve's end hissed, louder than before. It was clearly another man.
Steve again failed to move the phone far enough away as he grumbled, "If you wanted me to be quiet, you should have answered the phone so that I could give you a blowjob instead."
Everything snapped into place. "What did you do to Steve?" Victor demanded. He was almost to his car.
'Steve' didn't seem to hear him, because what he said was, "I think I've proven that I'm capable of undoing your pants, Dean. Their presence, and the absence of mine, needn't have dictated our actions."
"HEY!" Victor shouted into his phone. As soon as he could hear the man breathing on the line again, he asked, "What did you to do Steve?"
"I'm fine."
"Not you, jackass. The clerk."
"Oh, I see," the man said after a pause. "Dean, I think you should talk to him now."
"Jesus, Cas, what are you doing? Hang up, no, hang up and we need to—fine. Yes, hi, what?" By the end, the second voice was speaking directly into the phone.
"Listen up, because this is how it's going to go," Victor snarled. "I'm on my way down, and I swear to God that if I find you did anything to that clerk for the sake of your twisted little sex games, I will kick both of your asses into next Thursday before I book you, then I'm going to lose the paperwork and let you sit around in jail until the Thursday after that, when I'll do it all over again."
"Whoa, hey, calm down there buddy," Dean said. "We didn't hurt anyone, Steve was perfectly happy to take a couple twenties and leave us alone for an hour after he got over being startled. He went to the cafe across the street, I swear, I can see him right now. Little pervert's been sneaking looks, actually."
"You've got a lot of fucking nerve, calling anyone else a pervert."
Dean did have a lot of nerve; he laughed. "Yeah, I get why you might think that. I promise we're harmless, though. And just so you know, here's my version of how it's gonna go:
"That's your siren I hear in the background, right? Racing over to bring us to justice? You're not gonna catch us. See, I'm gonna finish blowing Cas, because it's a crime not to have a dick that beautiful in my mouth. Then Cas is gonna finger me over the counter, because it's also a crime not to have hands that beautiful in my ass. Oh—oh, shit."
Dean's breath caught audibly as Victor heard the sound of a zipper, then a thud of movement. "Okay, uh, other way around on that, I guess. Fuck, Cas, you're perfect."
"Oh hell no," Victor yelled as Dean made a noise halfway between a whine and a moan. "I am not listening to this shit. You two assholes are going to stop terrorizing my town with your dicks."
"After this," Dean gasped around a grunt, "promise."
Victor disconnected the call and tossed the phone away in disgust. He was six minutes from the gas station. He didn't exactly look forward to the thought of catching the two men in the middle of their kinky shit, but he couldn't deny the miniature daydreams of rubbing his success in Goddamn Tom's face.
When he reached the Gas-n-Sip, he saw what had to be their car parked around the side. He pulled in behind it, blocking it in with a vicious sense of triumph, then jumped out and approached the front door cautiously, gun drawn. There was no one inside. He cleared every aisle and scowled at the unambiguous splatter of bodily fluids on the counter as he checked behind it. Finally, convinced there was no where they could hide inside the store, he went back outside to wait in his car; surely they wouldn't leave their own vehicle behind.
It was gone.
The goddamn beast of a Chevy was just gone, without his car having moved an inch. He ran out to the road and scowled in both directions as far as the eye could see—which was pretty damn far—and there was no sign of them.
His radio crackled to life. "Four Ida Three—"
"I'm on break!" he shouted over Goddamn Tom and his goddamn bullshit, then turned his radio off for good measure. He wasn't too old for a new career, right?