Carolina Connections

But the tattoos that held the two of us together were the special ops tattoos on our biceps--mine a green beret, with crossed arrows, and his a Navy Seal trident--both gotten honestly, of course, after we'd mustered out of our respective services. That was the glue that held us together--comrades in service even if in different branches.

At the gym he'd parked in the shadows in a back corner of the lot, which was in total darkness by the time we got out of the building. We left the gym shirtless and entered the truck that way. We were both in heat and both of us knew the other one was. It was an established ritual that we both knew we wouldn't wait to get to more comfortable and less-risky surroundings.

Swede was a man of habit, and, like he'd done before when I visited him, he put one arm around my shoulders in the truck and used his other hand to trace the lines on my tattoos, which fascinated him. We both kept our eyes out for movement in the parking lot. The threat of discovery was a big part of the arousal that was building. We kissed when his fingers had descended to my belly. I scooted down a bit on the seat, widened my stance, and rolled my pelvis up in invitation to his attentions.

I was usually the aggressive dominant in sex. Swede knew I was, and that I was being the submissive to him now, heightened his sense of power and arousal. I didn't often let men take control of me, but this was all for DaJon, or at least it had started out that way. Now, I had to admit that it was for me too, realizing that in consciously giving up nominal control to big, dumb Swede, I still was very much in control--and handling a fragile male ego.

Coming out of the kiss, his fingers were toying with the waistband of my athletic shorts. "And where does the tail of this thing go under here?" he asked.

"You know where it goes, Swede," I said. He'd been there before. There was some light getting into the truck but not enough to pretend that it was the tattoo design he really was interested in. We got to this point every time I visited. I'd maneuvered into this sort of hookup with him to give DaJon added protection, but it wasn't a chore. He was a muscular grunt like me who liked to both give it and take it and who was very proud of his body, as I was, both of us for every good reason. I was hung and he wasn't but we didn't dwell on those comparisons. We got each other off nicely, and he was such a loner that he lived for this--my visits.

"You know I'm going to fuck you," he growled the obvious.

"Anything you want," I answered, not pointing out that I was going to fuck him too and that he would moan to have me inside him.

He was worrying my waistband with his fingers and came in for another kiss after looking around to see if anyone could see us.

"Go ahead, Swede," I said. "Give me head and then I'll do the same for you."

"What? Here?" he asked. "In a public parking lot, where anyone can see us? We shouldn't just go back to my place?"

We'd done it here before. This was all part of the arousal foreplay Swede delighted in--the noting the risk of doing it here and then doing it here anyway.

"Blow jobs here. Fucking at your place," I said. This was all part of the scene we played each time. Swede liked the thrill of sucking and being sucked on the edge of public exposure. I knew that's what we were doing here and he knew it as well. I grasped the waistband of my shorts at the sides and pulled them and my jock down off my legs. He went right with me as I took his head in my hands then and brought his face down to my crotch. I was in erection. We both knew I would be. We knew he already was too. I gave him head there, in the dark, in the back of the parking lot at Gold's Gym, after he sucked me off. He took extra pleasure in blowing me. I was a lot bigger than he was. He liked to see how big he could get me when he gave me head, as if he could get that big too--he liked thinking of himself as playing in the big leagues. He'd edge me to enjoy me begging for it. I begged for it to make him feel he was in control.

Then he drove us back to his small apartment three flights up on top of a pizza carryout on a side street in "beautiful" downtown Lenoir, North Carolina. We settled on a broken-down couch facing a humongous TV set and watched the end of an Atlanta Braves--Miami Marlins baseball game while drinking beer, sporadically sharing snippets of our individual special ops stories, and smoking joints Swede provided.

While the game was on--it was "on" more than that we were watching it--we fooled around with getting each other undressed, licking each other's tattoos and pits, testing each other's muscle bulges, and working each other up with hand jobs. Swede was a nasty pig, and I went with it. When the heat went way up in the room, we moved to the bedroom and rough fucked each other, me doing him first in a doggy on the floor en route to the bed and then him doing me in various positions on the month-old sheets on his bed. Even when I was fucking him, though, it was on his schedule. I let him have the thrill of calling the shots on what we were doing. If anyone had asked me what the final score was of the baseball game, I would have had to look it up on the computer.

Neither one of us was lonely that night. I spent it in his beefy arms, waking up to the sound of Swede in the shower and with the bunched sheets having fallen off on the floor as intense as our going after each other had been. I counted four spent condoms on the floor en route to the bathroom to join him in the shower. I picked up a packet from the top of the nightstand, slit it, and rolled the rubber on my morning wood as I moved to the bathroom. I took another packet with me, just in case he'd need one too. He did. We had time to have breakfast at Waffle House and for him to return me to my truck before he went into work that day.

"You take care of my boy today, you hear?" I said as Swede strode to the guard shack. He just waved a hand over his head without turning around, but neither one of us misunderstood that protecting DaJon was a key part of this sporadic relationship no matter how much each of us enjoyed the rough flip-flop sex.

"And you be sure you wear a rubber when you do him," I said, breaking the tension there to let him know I knew he fucked DaJon and that I was OK with it. It would be futile not to be OK with it. It had been DaJon's profession when he was on the outside; I couldn't fault him or anyone else for using it to his advantage on the inside. I got another wave of the hand over Swede's head as he reached the guard station.

Odd Man In: Office Work

I hadn't just fallen out of a tree into a job as a private investigator. I'd had training in special ops. I still had connections, based both on loyalty in some cases and on a past of carnal knowledge in other cases. I'd had foreign tours in hot spots and dangerous situations with the Green Berets. There were guys I could still touch for information. That Ty Thanawat and Patrick Thornton had worked at the U-Tapao Airbase in Thailand long after the U.S. Air Force had left that installation kept bugging me. I knew guys who knew guys who might help me figure out what had been what with that. I had a feeling that it was involved in this case somehow. DaJon had lit up a lightbulb above my head by saying Patrick was his source for Southeast Asian drugs. Matching this with Kevin noting that the furniture they shipped in from Thailand often had secret compartments in it was beginning the process of matching up.

I put out some feelers when I got back to Asheville from Lenoir in the morning on what Americans were doing at U-Tapao Airbase when Ty and Patrick were there. Then I showered and shaved and put on my nice-nice clothes--and a bit of cologne to make Megan and Haley happy--and hauled my ass back to the furniture store on College Street.

A black SUV with tinted windows--but not so tinted that I couldn't see that someone was in the driver's seat--was still pulled up at the curb across the street from the store. The guy in there must be melting from the summer heat, I thought. I pitied him for about a nanosecond--well, OK, half a nanosecond.

I paused long enough to write down the car's license plate number. It was a New Jersey plate. I didn't really give a shit whether whoever was in the SUV saw me do it or not. Then I boldly walked over to the store and entered. It had just opened. Haley came to see who rang the bell over the shop's door and her eyes lit up when she saw it was me. She also stuck her chest out, and it was a very nice chest. She sent me up to the office with a "Maybe you'll come down and visit with us later" invitation when I said I'd come to see Kevin.

"You want to see the books again?" Kevin asked when I went upstairs. I'll have to say that his eyes lit up and he stuck his chest out too when he saw it was me. I already knew he had a very nice chest. He'd let me have whatever part of him I wanted already, and I must say that he aroused me more than Haley did, even though she was a lovely lady.

"I saw that there were two desks in the study up in your office. One yours and one Patrick's?" I asked.

"That's right."

"Is it OK if I go through Patrick's desk to see if there are any clues to where he might be?"

"Sure, I'll take you up. But I'll leave you on your own there, if you don't mind. I'm expecting some business calls down in the office."

"That's fine," I said. Actually, it was perfect.

I didn't find much of help in Patrick's desk until it struck me that these desks were out of the teak furniture collection from Thailand. After that, it was a piece of cake. I found both the secret compartment, behind the center drawer, and the key that went to it in under five minutes.

The contents of the compartment sent me zooming ahead in the case on several fronts. His records of the drug shipments, concealed in the furniture, no doubt in special wrapping that negated the use of sniffer dogs, were there. A confirmation of what DaJon had told me. There too was an assortment of casino chips from the Tropicana, Bally's Atlantic City, and Bogata, all in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Kaching. A puzzle piece falling into place. Hadn't one or both of the women told me that Patrick spent a lot of time at casinos? No, that was Kevin who told me that. I was surprised Patrick went as far as New Jersey to find them. There was a handgun. That was a relief if he only had one. It meant he wouldn't shoot me if--no, when--I found him. And last, and certainly not least, there was a deed for some property. This was a clue I should have thought of beforehand.

I'd found enough to move ahead. I went down to the office. The whole gang, minus Patrick and Ty, were there.

"Have you heard from Ty yet?" I asked.

"Yes," Kevin answered. "He called to say that everything for the next shipment is fine on the Bangkok side. He'd taken care of the financials from there."

"He could do that from Bangkok?" I asked.

"It's set up so he can do it from anywhere," Kevin said. "So, we're all set for now."

And probably no longer that anxious to know where Patrick is, I thought. I'd gotten the impression that they were more worried about meeting their shipment schedule, and that Patrick was necessary for that as long as Ty was out of contact, than they were in having Patrick home.

The women sort of confirmed that.

"When you're finished in the men's study, maybe you'd like to come upstairs to Haley's and my apartment for a drink or two," Megan said, showing she could stick her chest out as well as Haley had--and her chest was even more impressive than Megan's had been. My mind went to the photos I'd seen of the women with Ty, and I was more sure than ever that Ty Thanawat had been maintaining control in this business partnership by fucking them all. Rather than the assumed odd man out, he'd was definitely in--with all of them. The women fucked each other, I'm sure, but they were owned by Ty Thanawat, and they both were going out of their way to throw themselves at me.

"Maybe another day," I said. "Unfortunately, I have some calls I need to be in my office to take this afternoon." I silently thanked Kevin for having come up with that excuse.

"Any time, handsome," Megan said.

I eased my way out of the store and went to my own office. There were, in fact, calls to make, but it was me checking up on my special ops friends rather than them calling me--although when I got to my office I saw there was voicemail from a couple of them, so that part of the investigation was rolling along.

And, yep, the New Jersey SUV was still doing surveillance on the furniture shop when I left. I wasn't so much in the dark now what that was all about, though.

My friends could give me all the information on American operations at U-Tapao and where Ty Thanawat and Patrick Thornton fit into those, but what they couldn't tell me actually told me something, and what I knew from another angle or two cast light on it all. Yes, there had been something going on at U-Tapao by Americans, but not military Americans. Civilian Americans who had the strong scent of CIA. What could be said was something vague about hilltribes on the Cambodian border growing poppies and running drug refining operations and the Americans trying to turn them to food crops and handicrafts. The hilltribes, though, had shown the resilience of doing both, so the operation was ended.

Or was it? Or did it just revert to private hands?

There being no trace of a Ty Thanawat or Patrick Thornton ever being there just told me that someone didn't want to acknowledge what they'd done there--and perhaps were still connected to from there. The drugs coming into the States inside their furniture had to come from somewhere.

That didn't tell me why Patrick Thornton was missing, though, and that's what I was being contracted to find out. I thought I was zeroing in on that, however.

I called a "friend" and set up a date, and then I went and took a nap on the studio couch in the back room at my office and contemplated whether it would be Chinese or Mexican for dinner.

* * * *

Now, although it was true that I much preferred having sex with men over women, I was a sex is sex is sex kind of guy. I didn't turn all women away, especially when they were blatant about wanting it from me. And when I dozed off in my nap I had no control over my dreaming going to Megan and Haley at the furniture store, drifting into a "what if" scene of what could be if I followed up on their blatant invitation of a romp in the hay. And I needed the nap.

So, I think I can be forgiven for still thinking--until it was too late and I was fucking her--that I was in my dreams when I opened my eyes to the vision of Haley Thornton, standing in the doorway between my office and my back room, her top already off, her tits proudly sticking out, and her fiddling with the zipper on the side of her skirt. I sure did waken more when the slip slid to the floor and she was naked, the reddish blond of her V standing out like a lighthouse beacon at night and her labia were puffing and signaling "Come and get me."

I wasn't into the world of reality enough, though, to not go with the program when she knelt beside me where I was lying on the studio couch, unzipped me, pulled my shaft out, and took it in her mouth. Of course, since I did occasionally indulge in women, I was totally lost at this point.

She lost command to me and went to burbling Jell-O, proclaiming how big and thick I was--which I am, thank you very much--when I turned her on the couch, got on top of her and between her legs, and had my cock inside her. For the next eighteen minutes we worked in perfect harmony as nature intended a man and woman to fuck, with her clinging to me, moaning, and moving her hips in the rhythm to my thrusts. She cried out and collapsed under me as my ejaculations started. I was a rolling shoot-off kind of guy, and it was her fault for launching a sneak attack that she took my cum shots without protection.

Lying there in a close embrace, me still inside her, her sighing and moaning as I sucked and teethed the nipples of her very nice pair, and both of us focused on me going soft but gauging how soon I could start going hard again, she got to the real, scheming point, which was why she had come here and given herself to me.

"How much is Kevin paying you to find Patrick?" she asked, sandwiching the question in the middle of dirty sex talk as if I didn't get the import of the subject she was raising.

"Two thou plus expenses," I answered. I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't tell her. She was one of the owners of the account the investigation fee would be coming out of. And it was, after all, her husband we were looking for.

"Just a thought," she whispered so that only I could hear, but like I wasn't the only other one on top of this studio couch, "but I think you could earn five thousand if you do find Patrick but if he stayed missing."

It was clear the woman was bidding to be a widow--for her own reasons, whatever they were. But she was being a bit cagey about it. If I'd bridled at the idea, I'm sure she had it figured out to be able to claim that I hadn't understood her offer right. I had no intention of offing him, of course, but there was no reason not to spin this out to maybe see where she was going with it.

"Of course, I'd be a free woman then, able to go with any man I wanted." I hadn't balked at the hint of an offer so she sweetened the pot. So, that was what this fuck was about. She wanted to ensnare me to do her dirty work.

"It's something to think about. We'll see what comes up." Yeah, it was a purposeful transition line.

"Speaking of what's coming up," she cooed. She got the smooth change of subject. And I indeed was hardening again. She protested when I pulled out of her, which told me it wasn't all acting on her part, but she gave me a lusty laugh when she realized that I had only done so so that I could kiss and nibble down her torso and belly and into her thatch. The laugh changed to a low moan as my tongue and teeth found her clit and latched onto it as I parted her labia with a finger and moved it inside her. She wasn't laughing when I went into a full attack of her cunt with my mouth. She thrashed about and screamed and clutched my head into her core. She exploded and flowed and exploded again. I had a notion to ask her if I was doing it as well as Ty or Megan did it, but I didn't want to break the spell. I wanted her to think she had me.

When she'd collapsed under me in whimpering surrender, I moved my hand to her inner thighs and gently stroked her there until, with low moans, she spread her legs for me. I came up onto my knees between her thighs, got an arm under her waist, and raised her pelvis to me, reared my ass back and snapped it forward, thrusting up deep inside her. She arched her back, cried out, and dug her fingernails into my shoulder blades. And, with that, we were fucking again.

I didn't care if she took that as a "yes" in answer to her proposal to see that her husband didn't ever surface again. That she had that goal certainly was something to think about, though. Was it Ty Thanawat she wanted, a bigger slice of the business, or shedding a partner who had become a liability to the business?

I'm fairly certain she left not knowing--or caring--that I preferred men and thinking she had woven a spell of want in me for her that would encourage me to make her an available widow.

Odd Man In: Bowling Alley Work

It was Police Department League night at the AMF Star Lanes ten-pin bowling alley on Kenilworth that night. Bowling started at 8:00 p.m. I showed up at 9:00, got myself a beer plus an extra at the bar, and sat at a table within sight of lanes 12 and 14. That's where Asheville Police Department major crimes unit detective Eduardo Vargas, two years older than I was and in just as good a shape as I was--and a handsome Hispanic stud to boot--was bowling his second game. When I settled at the table, he had started his second game with strikes through the seventh frame. Eduardo had bowled a couple of perfect 300 games in the past. He was good at just about everything he put his mind too. He was fully capable of finishing this one out with strikes, as well.