Infected: Freefall (26 page)

“Sounds like justification from a weasel.”

Holden shot him a harsh look as he came out into his living room and collapsed on his loveseat, somehow not spilling a drop of coffee. “Be that as it may, he told me himself the last time we met up that he thought someone was trying to kill him.”

“And this wasn’t role-playing?”

Holden gave him a surprisingly nasty look. “Are you going to let me tell my story, or would you rather be a wise-ass?”

“I get a choice?” Before Holden could throw his coffee on him, he said, “Okay, I’m listening.”

“Right. He told me last time we met—Thursday—that he thought someone was trying to kill him, and he thought it was someone in his family. There was some kind of business deal and he was holding out, mainly ’cause he didn’t like it. He was getting nervous, though. He said the family was freezing him out, and then something happened, although he didn’t specify what. He just said it was something that made him think he might be in real danger. He told me who he was, Roan, he gave me his real name—not that I hadn’t already figured it out, but hey, part of the hooker gig is playing dumb—and the number to his private line. He told me if I hadn’t heard from him in a week, to call the number. Three days later, he’s dead. Coincidence?”

Oh, he could talk now? “Possibly. Guys, especially in their fifties, drop dead of heart attacks all the time. If he was paranoid, tension could have predisposed him to a cardiac incident.”

“Don’t give me the party line. He was as healthy as an ox; he said he got his insurance-mandated physical a month ago and he was as healthy as I am. They said he had the heart of a twenty-five-year-old.”

“Occasionally they get heart attacks too.”

Holden glared at him.

Roan threw up his hands. “Okay, fine, I’m just saying that he could have actually died of a heart attack, and it might be unconnected to what he told you. Isn’t it possible that he was indeed paranoid?”

“No. I’ve known him for almost two years, Roan, and I knew what he was like. He wasn’t paranoid. Irresponsible, egotistical? Sure. Not paranoid and jumping at shadows. C’mon, Roan, how desperate does a guy have to be to trust his rent boy? Even you have to admit that’s an extreme level of desperation.”

It was, but he wasn’t ready to acknowledge the point. “Two years? And his wife never caught on?”

“Which one?”

“Oh, right.” Joel seemed to swap trophy wives like they were last year’s Jaguars. “What number was he on?”

“Of wives? Five. He only married Cherry four and a half months ago.”

“Cherry,” Roan repeated, rolling his eyes. Now, it wasn’t anyone’s fault what their parents named them—look at him, he was Roan, a reddish-brown hue mainly associated with horses—but people who named their kids after fruit were just asking for a punch in the mouth. Add to that her name was now Cherry Newberry, and she sounded like she was a character in a children’s cartoon—or a porno. Funny how that worked. “How old is she?”

“According to the paper, twenty four.”

“Jesus.” Joel was old enough to have been her dad. That was just fucking creepy. He didn’t care if it was a straight relationship or a gay one: if you dated someone young enough to have been your child, you gave him a serious case of the heebie-jeebies. “You don’t think balancing a hot young wife and a studly male prostitute wasn’t too much for his ticker?”

“Are you going to stop being an asshole?”

“I don’t see that there’s much of a case here, Holden. I’d be lucky to get any access anywhere, and it seems rather pointless. A heart attack seems reasonable to his age and lifestyle. Doctors miss things. They’re human. Just because he was paranoid only meant he sensed there was something wrong. He just wasn’t looking in the right place.”

Holden took a sip of his espresso and sighed heavily. “Would you please look into it for me?”

“Is this gonna be a guilt thing?”

“You bet your sweet ass it’s gonna be.”

“Fuck. Fine. But if I get nowhere in five working days, you’ll have to find another chump.”

“Oh come on. If I can get your lion sense tingling, you won’t let this go.”

“If I hear one more superhero reference, I’m going to go on a shooting spree.”

Holden levered himself up from the sofa, and this time he hitched up his shorts as he walked back to the kitchen. “The cops are still calling you Batman?”

“All the fucking time. If someone else asks me how Robin is, I’m going to break their jaw.”

Holden went to his fridge and rooted around in it for a minute. “Oh, come now. You can have fun with it. Besides, at least they’re not calling you Batgirl.”

“I’ve gotten that too, thank you very much. But not to my face.”

“Of course not to your face. You’re Batman.” When he turned around, Holden gave him his patented shit-eating grin. Roan gave him the finger in response.

He returned to the loveseat, but before plopping down, he tossed Roan a small stack of money held together by a rubber band. It was rather cold. “You keep cash in your fridge?” He looked at the stack, rifled the edge, did a bit of math. A thousand dollars? Goddamn, he really should become a whore.

“In a South Beach Diet sandwich box,” he acknowledged. “Have you ever had one of those damn things? They’re clearly made of recycled cardboard. Nobody is idiotic enough to want one, so I figured it was as theft-proof as a safe.”

“You’re on the South Beach Diet? Isn’t that very three years ago?”

“I don’t diet. I unfortunately had one at a friend’s place. But if you were a thief, would you grab it?”

“God, no. Your secret’s safe with me.” He held up the stack of money and asked, “Are you sure you want to waste your money this way?”

“It’s not a waste. Something’s rotten in Denmark, Yorick. I need you to find out what.”

“I don’t want to be Yorick. He died.”

Holden rolled his eyes. “It was Hamlet. Everybody died.”

He had a point. Roan wondered who else was going to die before the intermission break.

3

Gravity Rides Everything

E
VEN
through the codeine, Roan’s head was starting to throb again, and he was starting to see small dark flashes, pinpricks of negative light floating somewhere behind his eyeballs. Full-blown migraine. Even codeine and alcohol were sometimes helpless in the tide of pain.

Roan went straight from Holden’s apartment to the emergency health care clinic he went to when he absolutely had to go somewhere. He knew a good deal of the staff from his cop days, and as a general rule of experience, he liked the emergency clinic doctors much better than other doctors. They never seemed to get freaked out by anything, and they were models of kind efficiency: they got you in, assessed you, got you out. The check-in nurse, a stout, middle-aged woman with sensibly cut silver hair and a brightly flowered scrub top, looked over her desk and said, “Hello, Roan. Migraine?”

“I’m too predictable,” he admitted. “How are you doing, Kelly?”

“Can’t complain. Take a seat, I’ll get you in as soon as I can.”

It wasn’t crowded, maybe because it was still fairly early yet and the weather was so shitty. He slumped in one of the lobby chairs, head back and eyes closed, until a perky, young Japanese nurse he’d never seen before summoned him back. At the weigh-in station, she asked if he’d had any “symptoms”—she was referring to his infection status, not his migraines. He was able to tell her no, because the ability to transform out of viral sequence wasn’t a symptom of a health decline in any medical journal.

He wasn’t surprised his blood pressure was low and told her he’d taken some painkillers in a fruitless attempt to circumvent the migraine. When she asked what, he fudged, telling her Tylenol codeine. Close enough.

While waiting for the doctor to show, he dozed lightly in one of the chairs, the sick throbbing of his head not allowing him anything but the lightest stage of pre-sleep. Sometimes, with the bad attacks, there were few medications he could take to shut the pain off, even if he took a handful of heavy-duty shit. It was like his brain was an infected wound, swollen and near bursting with pus. Which was a disgusting idea, but it felt even worse.

The doctor turned out to be one of the newer ones, a petite woman younger than him, who also had shorter hair than him. She was exceedingly kind, noting that his chart was full of references to migraines and cluster headaches and filled with medications used and discarded. Like most, she asked when he had his last head CT. They kept looking for brain tumors, and they had yet to find one, although it was once noted aneurysm could also be a possibility. Fun.

There were new meds out, which didn’t surprise him considering the sheer amount of pharmaceutical ads, and she gave him a shot of the meds in his hip. Then he had to loiter in the room for a good fifteen minutes, just to make sure he didn’t have any side-effect reactions (he’d had a bad reaction to one of the first migraine meds he was ever given, and this was a chemical cousin). His head hurt so much he didn’t even feel the needle. He had considered trying to overwhelm the pain in his head, distract his pain receptors by, say, slamming his hand in a car door, but that didn’t work. He’d tried, though; he tried almost everything you could name, short of a brain transplant.

He was okay. The pain was starting to ebb, and while he felt slightly dizzy and hollow, that was how migraine meds usually left him feeling. It was preferable to the alternative. The doctor gave him some samples of the medication in pill form, mainly because his health insurance didn’t cover this particular medication (Ha! Road trip to Canada was in order, it seemed….) and she advised him to see his GP as soon as possible. She didn’t like that his migraine attacks seemed to be increasing in frequency, and he hadn’t had a brain scan in over a year. The fact that he was an infected seemed to make this more dire in her opinion, and he knew why: as infecteds went, he was elderly. He’d lived too long with the disease without physically breaking down. She probably thought this was a sign, the first sign of his rapid decline that would end with his death within six months. Sometimes he wished that was true.

He knew the meds were really working when he became ravenously hungry while driving to the office. Because he had an insane craving—the meds, or just him?—Roan pulled into the lot of the first Baskin Robbins he came to and got a Jamoca Almond Fudge ice cream cone. The kid working behind the counter gave him a funny look, but Roan didn’t care. It was the breakfast of champions, damn it. He felt light-headed and giddy, not really high on meds so much as high on the lack of pain. You forgot how nice it was to live without it sometimes.

He arrived at the office just as Fiona was hanging up the phone. “Where you been, bitch?” she asked. It was a running joke between them now, the pointless addition of the word “bitch” at the end of sentences and questions. They didn’t do it around clients, as someone might take them seriously, but they thought it was hilarious.

“Stopped at the doctor’s, bitch.”

She sighed heavily and fixed him with a stern look. Today Fiona was wearing her crimson dominatrix hair extensions, but she combined them with her honey-colored contact lenses that made her eyes look almost yellow, like a wolf’s. It was startling, especially when combined with a black pleather vest worn as a shirt, such as now. She looked like she got lost on her way to the biker bar. But Roan imposed no dress code, except she at least look semi-professional and never wore her dominatrix gear during work hours (which was cool with her, because she didn’t like to wear it except when she was on a “gig”). “Is it your migraines again? Man, you need to see a specialist.”

“There are migraine specialists?”

“I assume. Isn’t there a specialist for everything? They got butt doctors. Why not head doctors?”

“I don’t need a brain surgeon. Yet. Give me a minute.”

“Don’t smart-ass me, mister.”

He decided not to remind her who was the boss around here, and simply asked, “Any messages?”

She gave him a look that suggested he was going to pay for this and let out a martyr’s sigh before consulting a piece of paper on her desk. “Detective Sikorksi called and said he wanted you to call him back. Dylan called and said he’d be at the Serrano Gallery this afternoon and would love it if you stopped by, and James Bellamy called with another excuse about why he’s been late on payment.”

“Bellamy,” Roan sighed, waving his hand in a dismissing manner. He was a weasel who wanted him to get “dirt” on his soon-to-be-ex-wife but was unwilling to pay for it. So until he coughed up the dough, Roan wasn’t giving him shit. Then he asked, “Serrano Gallery? Like the peppers?”

Fiona nodded, her crimson hair moving up and down. “Yeah, it’s a place that specifically focuses on Latino artists, but I always thought it sounded more like a restaurant. And I keep forgetting Dylan’s Latino. I don’t know why. He has that total hot Latino guy look going on.”

“Back off, sister—he doesn’t bat for your team.”

“Don’t I know it, bitch. You hot guys all seem to be gay. Where’s my hot straight guy, damn it?”

“Did you include me in the hot guys statement?”

She glared at him. “Well, duh. You are a hot guy. Don’t fish for compliments.”

“I wasn’t!” He wasn’t. He wasn’t sure how he looked. When he looked in the mirror, he either saw his scars or he saw too much of the cat in his face and had to look away quickly. He tried not to glance in mirrors too often. Only when he absolutely had to.

“Oh sure,” she replied teasingly, but before she could dig the hole deeper, he was saved by the phone. Once she answered it, he ducked into his office and closed the door. There was a bowl of fresh gorp on his desk, indicating Doctor Braunbeck had stopped by at some point. He was glad he had missed him.

Once he’d settled and shoved the gorp into his garbage can—sorry, but he really didn’t like the stuff, and Roan had no idea why Braunbeck could never accept that some people didn’t like it—he called Gordo back but got routed straight to his call messaging system, which told him he had his cell phone switched off: he was either at a scene or at a meeting. So Roan left a terse message to call him back. Damn it, if he had more on the crime scene, he wanted to hear it.