Infected: Shift (37 page)

“How do you get that nickname?”

“Long blond hair?” Roan guessed.

“You got it,” Holden confirmed.

While some street names were creative, others were so easy to guess you hardly needed to be conscious to guess them. He helped Dylan continue to clear up and put leftovers away, a delicate dance in such a small space, but it also made it strangely intimate. It also made Roan realize something that he’d probably unconsciously known but only thought of now, which was how much the thought of Dylan leaving him had scared him. If Dylan had wanted to put fear in him, he had succeeded. And why? Because it was the boyfriends that kept him human.

It was an awful thought, but he had never quite gotten the knack of being human, had he? He was always a freak, a lab rat, a leper, and a virus; he even saw himself as a thing. It was the men who accepted him as what he was who allowed him a window into normalcy, into what it was like to actually be human. He really didn’t know, and on his own, he could lose the plot a bit.

Roan slipped his arms around Dylan’s waist and rested his head on his shoulder, making him pause and put his hand over his. “You okay?” Dylan wondered.

“Yeah. I’m just sorry.”

“About what?”

“Everything.”

“You should be,” he replied, but with kindness softening his voice. He leaned back against him briefly and whispered, “I’m trying to be strong enough to live in your world, Ro. Give me time.”

“You’re strong enough. I just may be too weird.” He kissed Dylan’s neck, tasting the soap on his skin, something scented supposedly of blood oranges, but it just seemed vaguely citrusy to him. Still, not bad, and yards better than most soaps aimed at men, which often smelled of cheap cologne. His warmth and wiry strength were comforting, and his hair smelled of ginger and apples. There was probably a joke here, him smelling so fruity, but Roan wasn’t about to make it.

“Speaking of weird, we were invited out tomorrow night.” Dylan said.

“Were we? By who?”

“Hockey players. Seems after tomorrow night’s game they have a couple days off, so Scott called today and said he and some of the guys were going bar hopping, since a day off pretty much gives them a license to drink. He said the guys would love it if we came along. I should add I know he meant just you solo, but I was included to be polite.”

“You know he’s the gay guy, right? Well, bi. But still.”

Dylan snorted. “Oh yeah, I knew.”

Roan looked at him sidelong. “How’d you know?”

“Are you kidding? When we first met, he sized me up as competition. It wasn’t competitive jock sizing, it was ‘what’s he got that I haven’t’ sizing. I know when a guy wants my man.” After a brief pause, he asked, “He hit on you?”

“Oh yeah, full throttle.”

Dylan was quiet for a moment, and Roan was pretty sure he was going to ask how far that attempt had gone. But then suddenly, he seemed to let it go. It was all mental, although Roan was pretty sure he could feel it in his posture, the tightening of muscles and a sudden smoothing out.

“You almost have to feel sorry for him, don’t you? Lying to everyone.”

Just like that. Dylan had decided to trust him. He could be so very kind. “It is a pity, but he may be playing for the Bruins next year, so I can’t feel that sorry for him.”

“Hockey players don’t have long careers, do they?”

“Now that you mention it, no, I guess they generally don’t.”

“So he makes his money now, and it has to last him through the rest of his life, including replacement teeth, bad knees, and concussion problems. Good luck to him.”

That was a hell of a point. “Does this mean you don’t want to go bar hopping with a bunch of straight—or quasi-straight—hockey players tomorrow night?”

“Hell yeah I wanna go. Maybe we can take ’em to Panic, show ’em how the other half lives.”

That made Roan laugh. “Oh God. We might cause a riot.”

“Or they might like it.”

“That idea is slightly worse.” He could actually see Grey—who may or may not have had sex with a transsexual—enjoying it. Again, could be good or bad, depending on a variety of circumstances.

“Roan!” Holden suddenly exclaimed from the living room, sounding equally angry and horrified. Roan immediately let Dylan go and went to see what the problem was. Holden, his face a grim mask of rage and disgust, just pointed at the computer screen.

A small film, clearly shot on home video, was playing—a group sex sequence that ended in a couple of the guys killing another. Gay snuff? There was a menu on the side that seemed to offer all sorts of couplings: opposite sex, same sex, mixed, group and couples, with animals and without. It looked like they really wrapped a garrote around the guy’s neck, a skinny guy with a few obvious track marks and a flaming skull tattoo on his right bicep, and he was certainly putting up a good fight, but they couldn’t really see a face until the cameraman got closer. That’s when Holden said, “That’s Coyote.”

“What?”

“The kid—that’s Coyote. I know him. He used to work the strip….” He put a hand to his mouth and closed the window again, his eyes squeezing tightly shut.

“Holden?”

“Roan, he’s dead,” he told him, struggling with tears. “He was found dead two weeks ago.” He paused briefly before saying, “He was strangled.”

Son of a bitch. A real snuff film?

This was a bit more ugly than he had ever anticipated.

Holden
looked around a bit more, trying to see if he recognized anyone else in any of the clips. The problem was there were hundreds of hours of film to see. Still, before they left, Holden thought he got another hit: a female hooker this time, a woman who went by the street name Lacey, but Holden said her real name was Karen. (He had no last name for her.)

It looked like the footage was assembled from different places and involved different assailants, although it appeared that Coyote and Lacey were both killed in a similar basement, probably the same one. Was Lacey actually dead, though? Holden kept in better touch with his boys than any of the girls working the strip, and the female hookers he knew now mainly worked out of the same escort company as him, putting them in a higher echelon. Higher whore echelon? Okay, pseudo-alliteration was among the lowest form of humor, but this was pretty bleak shit here.

Holden said he’d ask around, see if he could find out where Coyote might have picked up his last john—they probably wouldn’t talk to a cop or an investigator, but they’d talk to one of their own—and find out if anyone had seen Lacey lately. Roan had his own sources and would try and work them (okay, Kevin and Dropkick, but they were still sources), but he was sure Holden would probably get more usable information.

Admittedly, this had nothing to do with the Hatcher case, but he’d be completely fucked if he let wholesale murder go.

He called Hatcher and thankfully got his machine. He left a message saying he needed him to find out who owned the Tabu-xxx site, and that he’d explain the attachment to Jordan’s case later. Roan had no idea what he’d say. He figured he’d burn that bridge when he came to it.

While Dylan was getting ready for bed, Roan checked his e-mail, and saw that Hatcher had sent him one, saying “Rutherford.” Opening the e-mail, he saw there was nothing but a link. He clicked it, and after a very strange moment where something briefly flashed on his screen and died (had the bastard sent him a virus?), he suddenly found himself at what looked like a root directory.

Hatcher had sent him a hack. He was inside the Academy’s computer database.

It was as illegal as all hell, and while he was sure software “genius” Hatcher had a way of protecting him from a back trace, he still knew he had to get out of there as quickly as possible. He had broken into an occupied house, and he was just lucky they were heavy sleepers.

He sifted through the Brittneys, and when he found photos, he started comparing the most likely suspects to the girls he'd found in photos with Jordan on his Facebook page. Eventually he found her: Brittney Selfridge, a seventeen year old from Bellevue, a bottle blonde who wore way too much makeup with way too much glitter, and her face was so slender and narrow it seemed like her cheekbones were razorblades that could cut you on casual contact. She was trying very hard to look like a divorcee in her early thirties for some reason, and Roan couldn’t imagine that was popular among kids now.

He decided he’d try and bother the Selfridges tomorrow. He called Kevin and Murphy, but he got both their answering machines. Could they both be out on a call? Still, he asked them both about Coyote (aka Roman Smith) and Lacey (aka Karen). He assumed they’d be intrigued enough by his vague message to call back as soon as possible.

He searched for information about Coyote’s murder, but there was almost nothing to find. He got one of those one-and-a-half inch brief columns inside the local section of the newspaper, and all it described was a “transient” killed by “homicidal violence,” which could have been anything from a stabbing to a beating. The fact that Holden knew he had been strangled meant that he'd either heard about it from some of the boulevard boys (most likely) or he’d read or heard an account that he just couldn’t dig up online. Most likely it was the boys. Street people had their own network, a way of talking between themselves that usually wasn’t open to outsiders. This is why Holden was such a good point man for this info. He wasn’t a part of them anymore, but he used to be and was thought of fondly, and that was enough.

Once they were in bed, Dylan asked him why anyone would be into snuff, whether fake or real. That was a good question that Roan couldn’t answer, except some people just liked the idea of fucking a corpse and/or having the ultimate power of taking someone else’s life got their rocks off. Having actually killed people, Roan couldn’t imagine taking such pleasure in it. It wasn’t fun; it was an awful feeling. (Although—and he’d never admit it to anyone—there were times when it was a relief. Killing Switzer had felt like something that should have been done a long time ago, if not by him then by someone else. He had been the human equivalent of a mad dog.) But then again, Roan wasn’t a psychopath. Oh, he flirted with sociopath at times, but at least he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t see it.

He slept well, except for the time he woke up and found his heart racing around his chest like it was being chased by a bunch of skinheads. It actually left him panting and sweating, and he lay there in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if this was a precursor to a heart attack. Was it a heart attack? He didn’t think so, because he wasn’t in pain. He was just a little short of breath, and waking up due to a racing heart was always a bit disconcerting. He was just glad he hadn’t woken up Dylan, because he might freak about it.

He got up, went into the bathroom, and after taking a piss, dug out the hidden stash of downers he had inside an old anticlotting agent bottle, and took a Valium to bring his heart rate down. Was this confirmation of what he’d already guessed? The rules of infecteds had stopped applying to him, and that meant he probably wasn’t going to die like one. Oh, maybe he might die midtransition, but he wasn’t going to slowly waste away like Paris. No, he might just die suddenly in his sleep, which should have been a relief but wasn’t. Because how fair was that to Dylan? To wake up one morning next to a corpse. He should have left him and stayed gone, for his sake. Roan just knew he was never going to be anything but a temporary bit of respite before the huge disappointment.