Infected: Freefall (30 page)

What an odd question. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Could you tell me something about him?”

She tried to run a hand through her hair, but it was too tangled; her hand hit a clump and stopped dead. “Sure. C’mon in.” She stumbled away from the door, her sweatshirt riding up and showing that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Wow, people all over the place were flashing him their asses today. He wouldn’t tell her, but Holden had the nicer one. Then again, his livelihood depended on it.

The reason the door didn’t fall open all the way was simply because it couldn’t; the place was a pigsty. Now, people threw that description around loosely, but Roan didn’t, as his own housekeeping was on the questionable side (his boyfriends, bless them, usually were neater than him). But this place struck even him as sloppy beyond the pale, and if that wasn’t a cry for help, what was? There were dirty clothes heaped on the floor, along with a litter of takeout food detritus (pizza boxes, plastic bottles, paper wrappers, napkins, even packets of ketchup and hot sauce), and a scattered assortment of textbooks that looked like dead birds fallen from the sky, covers spread open like wings. The living room consisted of a foldout couch almost as old as he was, covered in fabric that was a hideous cross between fuchsia and Pepto-Bismol and now blotched with stains, a Dell computer on a couple of overturned crates that functioned as a desk, and a stereo system and television that were probably more expensive than his motorcycle. At least he could judge her priorities.

She turned down the stereo, but tellingly didn’t turn it off. She didn’t so much sit down on the couch as collapse on it, folding a leg under her and lighting a cigarette. Where the cigarette had come from he had no idea and didn’t want to know. He decided to just jump in and try to get some answers from her before she passed out again. “His sister told me the last she heard from Grant, he was going to a party Friday night. You don’t know where it was, do you?”

She took a serious drag off her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly. It seemed to waft up from her open mouth like dry-ice fog. “Sister? Oh wow, I forgot he even had a sister.” She paused, long enough that he thought he was going to have to prompt her, but she started picking at a scab on her leg as she said, “He was always going to parties. Grant always knew where the best parties were.”

Roan waited for more, but it wasn’t forthcoming. She stroked her leg idly, like she was trying to soothe a scared pet, and he figured she’d just discovered she hadn’t shaved her legs. “So what party did he go to Friday night?”

She snorted, the cigarette shoved tightly into the corner of her mouth. She was working it like some people worked a toothpick. “I don’t know where I was Friday night. They had two-dollar tequila shooters over at the Bull’s Eye, and after a coupla those, I don’t really remember anything until I woke up Saturday night in the doorway of that church down the street. Wait a sec, maybe I have somethin’….” She grabbed up a battered black purse from beside the couch and turned it upside down, spilling out the contents beside her. He saw tissues, condoms, a pack of birth control pills, lip balm, a couple of unknown loose pills (Vitamins? Prescription? Other?), keys, pens, a red cell phone, a tampon, a small glass pipe that she probably used for crank. She sifted through it, heedlessly knocking some of it onto the dirty brown carpet.

She was a Hold Steady song in the flesh. He wanted to tell her that, but resisted the urge.

She picked up a receipt and glanced at it with squinted eyes before holding it out. “Okay, I was there. I’m pretty sure I ran into Grant there too.”

“Was he with someone?” Roan studied the receipt, which wasn’t one actually. It was only a receipt on one side, from the Fred Meyer on the corner down the street: beer and toilet paper, also known as the breakfast of champions. The other side, the side she meant, had a hastily scrawled address on it in black ballpoint ink. He could barely make out the address, which was 175 Vickery Avenue.

“I dunno. It was an awesome blowout,” she said and struggled to get up from the couch. “Or so I’m told. I was kinda out of it. Wanna beer?”

Definitely a Hold Steady song. “No thanks. You know of anyone who was there that night that might have memories of the party?”

That got a genuine chuckle out of her. “Not that I know, man. It was a wicked party.”

So maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t much of a partier. Roan thanked her, restraining the urge to say,
“Thank you, Ms. Winehouse,”
and left her his business card, wondering what would kill her first: the drugs or just her lifestyle.

And then he wondered how many people thought the same thing about him.

7

All Is Ash or The Light Shining Through It

R
OAN
drove through the downpour in search of the party house, getting almost hypnotized by the windshield wipers’ rhythmic slap. Usually after migraine meds he needed a nap, and he knew he’d fought the urge too long. But he’d just check out this one thing and go home.

The address Marjean had given him led to an empty old-style A-frame house, set apart from its neighbor on about an acre of weeds. There was a “For Sale” sign, but the paint was peeling from sun and rain damage, and the lock box the real estate agency had put on the house was broken. He nudged the door open with his foot and was swamped by Human smells: shit, piss, vomit, sex. There was also a terrible lingering stain of alcohol and smoke, mostly pot and cigarette smoke, but some of it was crank and crack, meth and something so completely chemical Roan imagined that something had briefly, unintentionally caught fire.

There was little furniture in the living room—an old couch that was so stained and damp it gave off a strong aroma of mildew was pretty much it—and there was some bird and mouse shit along with the crumpled beer cans and broken crack pipes clotting the corners. An abandoned house used as a party house. Not new, not surprising, and there’d be no clues here.

Well, no, technically there’d be a thousand clues, but none that would point directly to Grant. There was no one to talk to about the party, except for Marjean, who had probably told him all she could clearly remember. He supposed he could grill her, ask her about other people at the party, but what was the point? The cops were most certainly combing through Grant’s stuff by now, putting an APB out on his car. He was probably in custody already. Roan was a dollar short and a day late.

He called Gordo but got routed straight to his call messaging. He didn’t leave a message. When he could call and tell him they had Grant, he would.

By the time Roan reached home, he had that odd hollow-head feeling that wasn’t quite a headache and wasn’t quite a dizzy spell but was some sickening offspring of the two. As soon as he was in the door, he kicked off his boots and dropped his sodden coat in the foyer, figuring he’d pick them up later. He took off his wet shirt on the stairs but kept it with him so he could throw it on the floor of his bedroom. He stripped off his pants, also damp from rain, and just threw them aside, figuring he’d be up before Dylan showed up. He was asleep almost the moment his head hit the pillow; he barely got the covers pulled over him.

He slept hard, but he did have vague memories of a strange dream where he was playing poker with Paris and Grant Kim. Grant had no shirt on and a pony keg on his lap. The whole thing was very weird, and the only thing he remembered Grant saying was, “Only infecteds can play.” Well, duh.

The phone woke him up. Oh, how he was learning to hate the fucking phone. He reached out and snagged it, keeping his face buried in his pillow. “What?”

“What the hell, are you gagged?” Gordo asked, annoyed. “I can barely hear you.”

He ignored that comment. “You got Grant yet?”

“No, and I need you here, in the woods next to Martin Ellis High School.”

For a moment, he thought he was still dreaming. “Did you say you want me at the high school?”

“Near the school. Just follow the cop cars and local TV news van. I’ll probably be telling some blow-dried asshole to fuck off.”

“So, a normal night for you.”

“Very funny.”

“Why am I goin’ to the high school, Gord?”

“We have a body here I need you to check out. I think I know who did it, but I need a confirmation, and you’re faster than waiting for a bite print to come back.”

Roan felt his stomach sink like a stone. “Oh no. Grant?”

“Approximate time of death seems to say the vic died early this morning, around the time the first crime scene was discovered. And we’re about a mile away from it.”

“Fuck me.”

“Yeah, that was my opinion too. It looks real bad. The vic’s a kid, too, or at least from what I can tell. Right now I’m goin’ by his high-tops and the remains of his Seether T-shirt.”

“Christ.” Roan shoved himself up to a sitting position, looking out the window at the rain, which had backed off to a pissing kind of drizzle. But it was still raining. Rivers would be flooding soon, if they weren’t already. Just one more thing to worry about.

Deaths by cat were always bad, and always caused a minor firestorm in the press. But the death of a kid? That sometimes made national news, and brought out all the “we should lock ’em in camps” right-wing assholes in their wake. Not that he was advocating tearing up teenagers should be given a pass, but it wasn’t Grant’s fault. It was the cat who did this, not the person. But some people didn’t give a rat’s ass about the distinction or didn’t even bother to make it in the first place.

He told Gordo he’d be there as soon as possible and hastily got dressed, ignoring the fact that he had perhaps the worst case of bed head he’d ever glimpsed in a bathroom mirror. It’d be wetted down by the rain soon enough.

Since he was going to get drenched regardless, he decided to take the bike. He could use the extra speed right now anyways. It’d help wake him up.

In the end it didn’t, but other people driving like idiots kind of did. It was Washington State—it rained. It rained quite a bit, although not as much as the jokes would lead you to believe. So why did so many people panic and drive like the world was ending when it rained? He would never understand that.

And Gordo was right, it was easy to find the site. The Channel Eight news van was visible several blocks away, thanks to the garish logo painted on the side. But they must have only known it was a killing near the high school and not a kid victim, as it wasn’t their big “action news man” on the scene but one of the minor ones, the cute but ethnically diverse female reporter (Asian), Hannah something or other. Roan couldn’t remember, as he didn’t watch Channel Eight news. He got all his local news from the newspaper, and all other news from the Internet or BBC News. Did that make him a snob? Ah, fuck it, who cared? If he could be a snob in a black vinyl raincoat and a Dalek T-shirt with a sparkly black motorcycle helmet wedged underneath his arm, so be it.

Channel Eight’s team was being held back at a hasty cordon of sawhorses, where Hannah was arguing with a poor beleaguered beat cop roped in to stand guard and protect the crime scene. The team seemed to be Hannah in her ridiculously expensive raincoat, a sound engineer huddled beneath an umbrella being held by the segment producer (?), and the cameraman, who was standing aside and smoking a cigarette like he’d been starving for nicotine.

They were an interesting contrast, and they all glanced at each other as one of the other cops working the line recognized Roan and waved him through the blockade. The sound engineer looked like he was barely out of high school himself, a lanky black guy who had that type of youthful face that would guarantee he’d be carded until he was in his forties. The segment producer was almost a foot shorter than the sound guy and his opposite in almost every way: stocky where he was lanky, doughy where he was lean, pale where he was dark. The cameraman looked like a stereotypical biker, with thinning but shoulder-length steel-gray hair and a salt-and-pepper beard that was neatly trimmed but may as well have been bushy and shaggy. He just gave off a disreputable air, whether that was fair or not.

As Roan started up the slight, muddy incline, he heard Hannah ask, “Who the hell is that?”

One of the men—not the cop, but part of Hannah’s entourage—muttered, “I think that’s their outside cat expert, the kitty fag. His name’s like McKitchen or something.”

Roan sighed and stopped where he was, looking back at them. “You really shouldn’t casually slur the guy who can track you down by scent alone, you know? Just an FYI. And it’s pronounced Mick—kee—an. At least get that much right.”

He saw the surprise register on their faces—all but Hannah’s, as she simply didn’t react to anything (on-air talent rule 101)—but no one said anything, so Roan turned and continued on. He then heard, very faintly, “How the fuck did he hear me?”

There was a throaty chuckle, and the cigarette rasp of the voice led him to think it was the cameraman talking. “The shit I heard about him, he’s damn right—you don’t fuck with him. He can’t turn the cat off, or some shit like that. He’s like superhuman or something.”

Can’t turn the cat off? What a weird way to put it.

The woods were just a thick stand of pine and firs that had yet to be cleared away, a couple hundred yards away from the chain-link boundary of the school’s football field. Some attempt had been made to clear away the undergrowth, but you couldn’t kill blackberry vines with a tactical nuclear strike. Around the clinging, barbed vines were discarded forty-ounce bottles of various kinds, cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, even a used condom and a pill bottle with its label stripped off, and the side of a dark-red-spattered white shoe was visible. Rain and wind diluted the smell of blood, as did the smell of piss, stale beer, and fresh pot smoke. Well, relatively fresh, a few hours old.

“Kid was smoking pot?” Roan asked as he approached Gordo.

Gordo was wearing a brown felt hat that wasn’t a fedora but wanted to be. Rain dripped from its brim, and as he turned, it flung some droplets. “Probably. I ain’t even gonna ask how you knew that.” Many forensic people buzzed around, nearly all of whom Roan recognized. Since they knew who he was and why he was here, he wasn’t acknowledged in any way. “Apparently a lot of kids come here before or after school to smoke up or have a drink, stuff like that.”