Bloodlines: Infected, #2

by Andrea Speed

  Finally Paris looked at him with weary blue eyes, his expression still frighteningly flat. “You really want to do this?”

  He nodded. “Don’t you?”

  Paris rubbed hot water into his face before weakly nodding himself. “Sure. Give me a few minutes, then I’ll get out and get dressed.”

  Was he humoring him, playing along? Maybe. But Roan didn’t care; he hadn’t felt this hopeful in a long time. He kissed Paris on the forehead—his skin seemed feverishly warm—and let him be to soak in the warmth for a few more minutes.

  Roan had decided to change his shirt, to swap the plaid flannel out for a dark green fisherman’s sweater, figuring he didn’t need to see Doctor Rosenberg after a nearly twenty-year absence looking like a gay lumberjack, when the phone rang. He was afraid it was Rosenberg calling back, saying they had decided they didn’t want a tiger strain in their study, but after a couple of rings he forced himself to pick up the receiver.

  It wasn’t Rosenberg, although it took him a moment to identify the voice, it was so broken and small. “Matt?” he asked, taking a guess.

  There was a sniff, and his voice came back, a little stronger but still choked with grief. “Roan, God, I’m sorry. But Hannah just called me, and—” His voice disappeared in a strangled sob.

  “What, Matt? What’s going on?” But even as he asked, even as he suspected the answer, he didn’t really want to know. Paris was the priority here; fuck the case.

  Matt sniffed again, coughed to clear his throat. “She’s dead. The police just found her... Callie’s dead.”

  4

  Cat Like Me

  ROAN sat on the edge of the bed and coaxed details out of Matt, but there weren’t many to be had. Hannah had just called him and said she’d been contacted by the police, who had found a body floating in the water off pier twenty-seven that they suspected was Callie. They’d called her in to identify it, as they were having a hard time contacting Callie’s parents and brothers.

  He tried to calm Matt, but he did a half-assed job and wasn’t good at it at the best of times anyway. So he told Matt he’d call some of his friends in the force and see if he could find out anything. It didn’t exactly calm Matt, but it gave him an easy out. As soon as he hung up, Roan sighed and hung his head, feeling a headache coming on. He opened the nightstand on his side of the bed, pulling a bottle of Excedrin out of the drawer, and dry-swallowed three of them. Sadly, he went through quite a bit of Excedrin, and while he preferred washing them down with liquids, he didn’t always have that option.

  Pier twenty-seven. That was on the rundown side of the waterfront, wasn’t it? A popular spot for a lethal version of the pump and dump, as in “pump a bullet in ’em and dump ’em in the water.” Why would a little rich girl like Callie be anywhere near there? Of course, the obvious answer was that she hadn’t been there; she had simply been dumped there. She’d been killed somewhere else, perhaps somewhere nicer.

  Okay, no—he was jumping to conclusions. Maybe she wasn’t murdered. Maybe it was an accident. (Oh yeah, sure. She got in a car with some strange men and then accidentally died. That was plausible.) He punched up a familiar number, just now starting to hear the water drain from the bathtub.

  After a couple of rings, the phone was answered. “Murphy, homicide,” a clipped voice said.

  “Hey, Dropkick, I’ve got some info for you.”

  She sighed, a reaction only partially exaggerated. “Oh God, here comes trouble. What do you got, Angus?”

  “You just fished a vic off pier twenty-seven? Young Caucasian female. Partial ID as Thora Bishop?”

  She tapped her keyboard for a few seconds. “We don’t even have a partial on that one, just speculation until we get a confirm from the relative. Don’t tell me she’s one of yours.”

  “Yeah. If it is Bishop, she went missing the night before last, pulled into a car on North Avenue. I’ve got an eyewitness.”

  Murphy made a noise of disappointment as she did a computer search. “I’m not pulling up a missing persons report.”

  “Because it wasn’t reported. The family was afraid it would leak to the press. A friend of Thora’s hired me to look into it.”

  Her reply was a disgusted groan this time. “So these are the Thorp Chemical Bishops then?”

  “Yep.”

  “Seriously, who gives a fuck? If the girl went missing under suspicious circumstances, why didn’t they report it, regardless of whether the press would get it or not?”

  “I was wondering that myself. Can you tell me anything about the body? Method of death?”

  “It’s not really a homicide case, it’s just suspicious due to its location, and the coroner probably only got the body within the hour. You know damn well autopsies don’t move that fast.”

  “But initial impressions were made, yes? Did the body appear to have been in the water a while? Was she dressed? Was the body visibly injured? Come on, Dropkick. And don’t tell me you didn’t see it—you know who in the station did.”

  An impatient sigh was followed by a “Hold on a sec.” After several long seconds, the bathroom door opened and Paris came out, hair partially wet, clad only in black silk boxers that clung sexily to his damp skin. Yes, he was too skinny, had lost a lot of muscle tone, but he was still a good-looking man, still broad across the chest and shoulders, his legs long and strong. So what if he had inexplicable bruises and skin so unnaturally pale it almost looked translucent sometimes? He was still beautiful to Roan; he’d always be beautiful to him.

  Paris gave him a questioning look as he searched for clothes, and Roan quietly signaled that he’d tell him once he was done. Par just nodded. It was nice having this kind of wordless communion with someone. He tried not to dwell on it.

  Finally Murphy came back on the line. “She was in the water long enough to discolor and bloat a bit but not long enough to be significantly nibbled by fish. She was dressed, and there were no obvious wounds or blood. She didn’t appear to be harmed. That do ya?”

  “Call me once the autopsy report’s in, okay?”

  “That is so against S-O-P.”

  “But you will?”

  She grumbled. “Yeah, yeah. You’re lucky I owe you one.”

  As soon as he hung up, he told Paris what had become of Callie as Paris stepped into his jeans, and Par frowned sadly, pausing as he pulled a thermal undershirt out of the drawer. “God, that’s terrible. Are we headed to the crime scene?”

  That startled him. Why would Paris think that? “No. There hasn’t even been a positive ident of the body yet. If it’s not her, we’d look like idiots, wouldn’t we?”

  Paris just stared at him for a moment, as if not sure what to say, then pulled a dark blue sweater on, using that as an excuse to turn away. Just by the set of his shoulders he knew Paris wanted to say something, that he had said something wrong, but Roan couldn’t imagine what, and Paris had clearly decided to let it go. Roan almost asked but decided he didn’t want to know. The way the sweater hung off of Paris made Roan, for a single moment, feel like crying, but it passed. It was a feeling Roan lived with more often than not these days.

  On the drive to the university medical center, they talked about the case and what might have happened to Callie, what it could mean if it was her, then talked about whether it would snow or not, if those dark clouds on the fringe of the horizon were snow clouds. Paris insisted that, being Canadian, he’d know better than Roan. The music filled the rest of the silence, and Par eventually leaned against him, resting his head on Roan’s shoulder as he drove. Roan put an arm around Paris’s shoulders and wondered how a cynic like himself had come to this, come to have his heart break in eight thousand little pieces a day at a time.

  The medical center was a sprawling collection of buildings amidst lawns as sculpted and green as a golf course. Inside the Kesselman Wing, after talking with a painfully cheerful young receptionist, they waited in thinly padded chairs in a lobby with large windows, letting in lots of cold winter light; a t
elevision they both ignored sat in a far corner in a wooden entertainment center, flashing pictures and lights that meant nothing.

  They were escorted into separate exam rooms at different times; Paris first, him about five minutes later. The doctor who took Roan’s blood pressure and all the other routine shit was a young Indian man who was already starting to lose his hair; his black hair was thinning enough in the front that he was already brushing it forward over his forehead. He’d probably be totally bald by thirty-five.

  After giving a blood sample, Roan was sent back out to the lobby, where he expected to see Paris waiting for him. Paris wasn’t. He talked with the receptionist, whose name was Sarah, an attractive young woman with skin the color of coffee and a dazzling smile that seemed brighter than the muted light of the lobby. She smelled of some vanilla perfume, but it wasn’t so strong that it was overpowering. She told him that sometimes the doctors around here worked at their own pace, and she’d check to make sure everything was okay. It was then that he felt his cell phone hum in his coat pocket, and the vibration actually startled him for a moment, as he’d forgotten he’d left it on in any capacity. Well, at least he’d remembered to turn off the ring; the latest ringtone Par had inflicted on him was David Bowie’s “Cat People” theme.

  Roan had no intention of answering it, but as he returned to one of the lobby chairs, he took it out to see who was calling. There was no way it was Murphy with an autopsy report, but maybe someone else at the pier had seen something she hadn’t mentioned. But it wasn’t Murphy calling; it was Gordo. Roan hadn’t heard from him in a while, so he was almost surprised to see his number. He answered out of curiosity.

  Gordo didn’t even give him any foreplay. “You busy right now?” His voice sounded drawn, tense.

  “Not particularly. What’s up?”

  “We have a really weird situation developing here at the base of Washburn Road. If you can beat the SWAT team here, I’d appreciate it. I’m not sure I want to see a human/cat bloodbath on the six o’clock news tonight.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “A homeowner seems to have a nest of cats in his abandoned barn, that’s what. We can’t even get close to it, hence the wait for the SWAT team.”

  “A nest? Cats don’t nest.”

  “Tell these cats that. I think they’re mostly cougars, but I haven’t seen them all. It’s... you have to see this, McKichan; you have to tell us what the fuck this means.”

  He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had the option of actually saying no, but his curiosity was getting the better of him, as well as a vague sense of guilt—the SWAT team probably wouldn’t even try and tranq them first. They’d just shoot them because it was more expedient. But he couldn’t leave Paris here. “What’s the ETA on the SWAT team?”

  “Twenty minutes. As it happens, there’s a nut holding his ex-wife and her boyfriend hostage downtown, so they’re occupied.”

  “Okay. I’ll... see if I can beat them.” He hung up and instantly called Diego. It was Wednesday, right? That was one of Diego’s days off. He worked nights and weekends and generally had afternoons and a couple weekdays off; he was deliberately odd and enjoyed it, which was how the two of them had hooked up in the first place. Being weird was almost the only thing they had in common. When he picked up, Roan asked him right off if he could come down to the university medical center and pick up Paris. Because this was Paris and he’d mentioned “medical,” Dee stowed his usual attitude.

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine; we’re trying to get into these medical trials.” He hastily scribbled a note for Par, apologizing for his sudden absence, but he knew all he really needed to write was “Gordo” and Par would understand. “Gordo is having a cat emergency; I have to go. How soon can you get here?”

  He heard the odd noise of a video game being paused in the background. “Uh... six minutes, if traffic is good.”

  He added that to the note and held the phone away as he thanked Sarah for holding on to the note until Par came out. He talked to Dee on his way out to the car, still worried that Par hadn’t come out yet. He almost asked Dee what it might mean, but he already knew, didn’t he?

  What if Par was too sick to be in the trials? What then?

  He wasn’t going to think about it, mainly because he couldn’t. He’d deal with it if and when it occurred. In fact, even though he couldn’t get a decent station out here, he turned up the radio just so the music would drown out the possibility of thinking.

  The head of Washburn Road was cut off by a hastily erected police cordon and manned by a couple of bored-looking blues, but once he got out of the car and flashed his card, the female cop, who looked a bit more butch than her male companion, obviously had been briefed by Gordo, as she almost automatically waved him through without a glance at it.

  He walked up the poorly maintained road, enjoying the rural space for its temporary existence. Already all this former farm and grazing land was being bought up by developers for “exurban” housing developments, and while he smelled a strong scent of cow shit, he wondered when was the last time there were cows here—a year ago? More?

  He walked past a long, low-slung ranch house at the end of a gravel drive—the mailbox read “Thurman”—and past a split-rail fence, until he found the assault-weapon-armed cops and two members of the kitty crimes unit, Gordo and Seb, standing with them beyond the fence, looking at an old barn, whose red paint had faded to a hint of fleshy pink. The big door was ajar, although everything beyond it was swathed in shadows.

  But he smelled them, didn’t he? A fierce stink of cats who had marked their territory; it made the hair rise on the back of his neck, and he had to suppress the instinctive urge to growl. Definitely cougars; maybe one or two others—it was hard to tell.

  As he came up to them, both Gordo and Seb glanced at him, while the cops in body armor, holding their assault rifles as uncomfortably as UN peacekeepers, gave him strange, sidelong glances and stepped back. “You smell ’em?” Gordo asked, apparently catching the flare of his nostrils.

  “Yeah. What’s the approximate number? I think I’m smelling about a half dozen.”

  Far behind him, he heard one cop mutter, “Did he say smell?”

  Gordo shrugged expansively. “Your guess is probably better than ours. We were called by the homeowner, who had moved from this property several weeks ago. When he approached the barn, he suddenly found himself confronted by several cats, including a cougar, who mauled his arm pretty badly before he was able to get in his car and call 911 on his cell. We thought it was possible we were dealing with wild cats as much as infecteds, but this grouping behavior... that’s not normal.”

  “And the cougar I saw had an odd build for a wild one,” Seb interjected coolly. When did he not say something coolly? “Also the coloring was off.”

  “They’re definitely infecteds. I take it you haven’t approached?”

  “We did try initially,” Gordo told him. “But as soon as we were within fifty feet of the place, they all started comin’ out, growling and snarling. We retreated, and they seemed to do the same thing.”

  “More odd behavior,” Seb noted.

  “Not necessarily—they may have smelled the gunpowder on you. God knows I do. They may not be human right now, but they haven’t totally taken leave of their senses.” He looked at the barn and sighed, fairly certain he could see the chatoyant glimmer of eyes in the dark. “I’ll go in, calm them down. Hold off the SWATs.”

  “You got your piece?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not armed, but I don’t want to be. They’ll smell it and freak. I need to confront them as just me. That’s enough.”

  Gordo stared at him with great dubiousness. “Look, I know you got something on all of us, but—”

  “I will dominate the pack or I won’t, but I have no need to shoot them,” Roan reassured him. “If worse comes to worst, I’m a lion—I’m bigger than a cougar.”

  Gordo snorted as Seb han
ded Roan what looked like a flare gun but was actually a form of modified tranquilizer gun that the kitty crimes unit carried in their cars. He did take that with a grateful nod and stuck it behind his back, in the waistband of his pants. It only had three “shots,” so its usefulness was limited, but if you took down key members, three could be all you needed.

  “You can’t turn the lion on and off, Roan.”

  Okay, that confirmed that Gordo and Dropkick hadn’t exchanged notes and no one had sent Gordo the video of him and Paris... or they had, and Gordo just assumed it occurred in the correct part of his viral cycle. “It won’t let me die at the fangs of cougars,” he told him, easily climbing over the waist-high split-rail fence. “That’d be too fucking humiliating.”

  The body-armored cops either didn’t know who he was, or had never heard of “Big Gay Roan, the kitty fag” back at the station, because there was quite a murmuring coming from them. They mostly thought he was an idiot, approaching the barn alone without a weapon, which made him want to turn around and shout that he was the weapon, but he couldn’t be concerned with them. There was a pride of cats in there, and he already got the sense they wanted him nowhere near them.

  This was good, though. Ever since he grew out of preadolescence, he was never afraid of a fight. If anything, he prided himself on his instinct to fight, no matter how hopeless or pointless it was; he always wanted to go down swinging. Going quietly was something other people did. He didn’t win every fight, not back then, but at least he left scars, little reminders that fucking with him was a mistake. Now that he had learned to manipulate the virus, the lion in him, he had no concerns at all about winning a fight—he would, one way or another. But he’d also come up against an enemy he couldn’t fight, one he couldn’t beat, and the sheer helplessness of it all made him furious, terrified. His lover was dying, and all he could do was watch. He hated it, he hated himself for his uselessness, and he wished that death was a physical presence, a guy in a black robe holding a scythe. He’d kick that fucking bastard’s ass right up into its shoulder blades and take great pleasure in ripping its head from its body with his bare hands.