Infected Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  “No. These are the shitty cases, the ones involving kids and violence.” As soon as Roan said that, he realized they had that in common: they had both been touched by violence as children. It was a connecting thread between them, raw and terrible, and one they didn’t talk about much. Roan wondered why he was more broken than Dylan was.

  He nodded. “I couldn’t be a cop. Well, for several reasons, but that stuff would just kill me. I noticed you never answered my question.”

  Roan actually had to remember what question had spurred Dylan’s confession of this new, odd connecting thread between them. “Keith’s mother hired me to see if there was anything I could dig up on this case before he gives up on it completely.”

  “You changed the pronoun.”

  “So did he. He’s a man now.”

  “Oh. Sex change?”

  He nodded. “Yep. Still into men, though.”

  “How does he look? Convincing?”

  He shrugged. “Probably needs another hormone shot or two for the voice, but he’s a pretty good-looking guy, so yeah.”

  Dylan smiled faintly. “Should I be jealous?”

  “You should never be jealous.”

  Dylan stared at him for a moment, head canted to the side, and asked, “Why do I sometimes feel like I have no idea where I stand with you?”

  “Because I’m a depressive dickhead and I don’t like talking about my feelings.”

  Dylan straightened up and gave him a funny look, like he had just admitted that he once shot a guy in Reno just to watch him die. “Holy shit. Did Shep slip you some sodium pentothal?”

  “I do have moments of honest introspection. They’re just few and far between.” He neatened the pile of papers, restraining the urge to collapse at Dylan’s feet and ask him to help him because he had no idea what was wrong with him, that he felt he had lost control of himself at some point and was now careening toward a chasm with broken brakes. But he didn’t do that, as he wasn’t sure that was true. Or what Dylan could possibly do to help him even if it was.

  “You’re not always a dickhead,” Dylan said, getting to his feet. He grabbed his bowl and came over and got Roan’s plate without being asked. “Although sometimes I do wonder how I got stuck with such a macho asshole.”

  “I’m dynamite in the sack.”

  “Well, there is that.” He put the dishes in the sink and started putting the rest of the food away. Roan eventually got up and helped him. They functioned in silence, rinsing off the dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher, sealing up leftovers, and it could have almost been a picture of bland domesticity. Roan really wanted a Vicodin, even though his hand was hardly throbbing at all.

  As soon as they were done, Dylan turned off the television and took off his borrowed T-shirt, hastily folding it and putting it on the arm of the loveseat. “I’m going to take a bath and go to bed. Want to join me?”

  Roan looked at him for a moment, feeling the siren call of chemical bliss, as well as the small pang of simple desire for this beautiful man and his emotional comforts. He owed him more than he could ever pay, and he would be kinder to him later on than Vicodin would be. “Yeah, I think I do.”

  Dylan gave him a small, almost heartbreaking smile and headed upstairs. Roan followed, worrying about what Dylan’s reaction might be if he saw his hand without the bandages on it. Well, he’d cross that bridge if he came to it.

  Roan didn’t think he’d fall asleep, but he did drift off for about an hour or so and then just lay there in bed for a while, holding Dylan and listening to him breathe. When he was sure he was in a carbohydrate-and-sex-induced coma, Roan got out of bed carefully, making sure he did nothing that might wake him, and headed downstairs.

  Part of him wanted to grill Dylan about what he may have seen at the park, what might have seemed like nothing then but might be a vital clue now… except that was pointless. He probably could only recall it because it was traumatic, but if pressed for more details he wouldn’t be able to come up with anything, or at least not anything that wouldn’t be automatically suspect, due to the fickle nature of time and memory.

  Besides, he was right: between now and then, Bishop Park had changed. They had torn out one entire area and relandscaped it, put in a new bike path, got rid of most of that tangled undergrowth, installed fancier-looking lights. Time had moved on, as it always did, and altered the landscape. The problem was, Keith Turner hadn’t. Missing people were in a special kind of limbo: they never aged, they never changed, they always remained as they were when you last saw them until they were discovered, if they ever were. He felt bad for everyone left behind, because never knowing for sure seemed like the worst punishment of all.

  He got a microbrew from the fridge, a pale ale whose taste was so fragile that he sometimes questioned whether it was beer at all, and then wandered off to the downstairs bathroom to peel the gauze off his hand and pop a Vicodin from the medicine cabinet. He felt virtuous because he only took one.

  The case, as presented in the files, was by the book. It wasn’t shoddy, it wasn’t half-assed, it wasn’t stained by incompetence. Everyone involved had done the right things. The wonderful, special hell of it was that they’d done everything they could and it didn’t matter a good goddamn. They might as well have done nothing at all.

  He wasn’t sure how to tackle this case. Where did you start when you had nothing? When time had moved on and washed away even the slimmest of hopes? If he thought about it too long it’d drive him crazy. If he was tackling this like any other criminal case, he’d go to the scene of the crime, and that’s what he’d have to do here. It didn’t matter that Bishop Park was nothing like it was eleven years ago. He needed to go back to square one and see if there were any moves from there. When you had nothing, you had no choice but to go back to the beginning and start over again.

  He finished off most of the beer before going back upstairs. He dressed quietly in the dark, both touch and memory allowing him to figure out what he was grabbing before he adjusted to the darkness, and before leaving he grabbed his long leather coat, his Sig Sauer in its belt holster, and his retractable metal baton.

  The area around Bishop Park had changed since Keith was taken. When Chris and Elliot lived there, it had been a blue-collar neighborhood edging toward poverty, but then the downtown corridor changed, the gays taking over some of the run-down area and gentrifying it, bringing in businesses and real estate wheeler-dealers in their wake, and now the area was upper middle class, with a million-dollar condo set up on its northernmost edge. The irony was the gays who had done most of the neighborhood fixing had been priced out of the market and shoved deeper into the interior, along with the Hispanics and the blacks. The area was now mostly white and Asian, and straight enough to be marketable to tourists. But the park was an ironic counterpoint to it all, in that there had been much in the way of gang and drug activity, with a couple of spectacular acts of violence that led to the park being locked up after midnight. The closet-queen cruisers had moved on to Silver Lake Park, from what he’d heard, so Sadowski’s MILF probably would have been pleased by that. But it was probably her kids who were responsible for all the violence in the park, as the “gangs” actually seemed to be made up of bored white kids who enjoyed beating the shit out of random people and filming it on their camera phones for later posting to YouTube, and occasionally killing each other or some poor homeless son of a bitch to prove how tough they were, or some similar bullshit. He didn’t pretend to understand the dynamics of it or the lure of it. He’d been in a ton of fights in his life, but almost none by choice; it was a last resort, a method of protecting yourself or someone else. Although he’d been occasionally tempted, he never hit someone because he just decided he wanted to. (Okay, well, that drunken redneck he beat the shit out of might argue with that.) Going to the park at night, especially late at night, was a remarkably idiotic thing to do. But he’d never claimed to be a genius.

  His eyes had adjusted to the dark long before, so he st
ood beside the bed for a moment, looking down at Dylan as he slept. He looked oddly content and younger than he actually was. Untroubled. Roan genuinely hoped he was; he wished someone had actual, genuine inner peace. He hoped Jason still didn’t haunt him, like Paris haunted him.

  Roan stroked his hair gently and kissed him softly on the forehead before leaving the room. He considered leaving him a note but decided against it. Either he’d be home before he got up or he wouldn’t. Either he’d be here or in a hospital or a jail cell; it didn’t really matter. Dylan would be disappointed with him or he wouldn’t. Flip a coin.

  Roan decided to take the bike, as it was a clear night, and it would give him greater maneuverability on streets that probably had a higher than average ratio of drunk drivers. He felt pretty good, actually, which was either the Vicodin really kicking in or his own sense of self. After all, if a lion couldn’t survive a city, he deserved whatever he got.

  7

  Fighting in Built-Up Areas

  AS IT turned out, night air and driving a motorcycle woke you up a bit, even if you were on Vicodin. Roan wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

  Ultimately he found himself looking around at the streets, which looked somehow more seedy and yet prettier at night. Warm lights in crumbling buildings looked welcoming, while garish neon looked jewel-toned, giving glamour to the shabbiest bar. And of course it was an empty world, full of cars but mostly devoid of people, at least at this time of night and in certain areas. But the bars weren’t out yet, and when they were, humanity would return in a flood, loud and bright and raging. Sometimes he felt like an alien. He’d watch these people and not quite understand why they did what they did on a gut level—on an intellectual level he could break it down most of the time, but that was different than instinctive knowledge. He wondered what it was about him that made him feel that way: being an ex-cop, being infected, being gay, having a bad childhood, all of the above, or maybe none of the above. When you came down to it, it might just be a basic malfunction of personality. Not a shock either way.

  Within a block of Bishop Park, the lights became bright halogens and sodiums, security lights that mercilessly scrubbed the shadows away, and it was like entering an embalmed part of the city, well preserved but rather lifeless. Lights were on in glass and steel condo towers that looked just like office buildings, something he found monumentally depressing. Who’d pay so much money to live in a place that would remind you of a dreary office? Maybe because most of these people didn’t work in dreary offices, or at least not on the lower floors where all the peons were.

  Not that this place was safe—far from it. Most of the cars parked on the street were of the middle to lower end variety—Kias, Hondas, Nissans, Fords. The Lexuses and BMWs and Saabs were in underground or covered garages, somewhere safe from ’jackers and thieves. Even so, Roan drove past one Mitsubishi that had been liberated of its CD player, the glass gone on the driver’s side. The next block over, he heard a car alarm screaming futilely into the night.

  The park looked charming, almost quaint behind its locked funereal gates, old-fashioned style streetlights painting light on a tall old oak that must have been here since the very beginning of the park. Roan took no chances and brought his bike up on the sidewalk with him, killing the engine and getting off, but never far from the bike as it rested on its kickstand. Most people didn’t know what a Buell was, but as soon as they saw the bike, they wanted it, and that was before they even knew about the street-racer qualities it had. If he ever needed to engage in a high-speed chase, he was ready. Paris’s muscle cars were good for ramming things Road Warrior-style, but the bike was better for catching that tanker.

  God, he was such a geek.

  He stood at the gates, hands around the cold metal bars, and took a deep breath. Inside he could smell exhaust and earth, the green scent of foliage and relatively healthy plants, and other things. For instance, someone was or had very recently been smoking in the park—he caught pot as well as crack. Pot, a heavy resinous scent; crack, a sharp scent that made his sinus passages buzz. If he listened very hard, ignoring the thunderous bass of a car on another block and the startled whoop of yet another car alarm, he could hear whispery trails of laughter, mocking and hard. The park looked deserted, but it was far from it.

  Somewhere beyond the buttery pool of light and the stately oak, the bored, affluent teenagers who wanted to rebel but hadn’t quite figured out how were waiting, smoking up and seeing if something would happen to break their boredom. A lot of times they thought they were copying the behavior of “ghetto” kids, people harder than them, but that was an insult to everyone who had been raised in an actual ghetto. They were simply spoiled brats who were mean and hard well before their time. They’d make even meaner and harder CEOs someday, maybe even politicians with “tough-talk” rhetoric who would grow doughy on hefty campaign contributions from companies that wanted the poor kept down at all costs.

  Wow, what a mood he was in tonight. And he’d just got laid! You’d think that would make him nicer.

  Roan leaned against the gates and sighed. As easily as the kids hopped the fence, he could too; maybe even easier, since he had the whole cat thing going on for him. And for that very reason, if they decided to take him on, he would kick their asses. He would hurt them, possibly quite badly, and he would never even need to pull his baton or his gun. If he went in, he’d trigger a fight he didn’t need to have. What did he think, that he was going to teach these kids a “lesson”? You couldn’t teach anyone anything if they never thought they needed to learn. He would just be a story, nothing more, an excuse for a scar or two.

  Worse yet, the playground that Keith had been snatched from was gone. It had been moved to another area, expanded, put in a clearing where everyone could see anyone come and go. He wouldn’t benefit at all from any of this. The place where Keith was taken had been given back to the forest, as if that sacrifice would make the trees give him back. It hadn’t worked.

  Where did he think he was going with this? There were no clues, no leads, no nothing. He was chasing a ghost. Worse yet, a ghost that hadn’t been seen for ages, one that had sunk back into the ether. He wanted to give Chris Spencer some peace, but he wasn’t sure anyone could.

  Standing there, listening to the noises of the night, the chorus of alarms and engines and car stereos, he realized he did have one single avenue left to explore: Roger Jorgenson.

  Sadowski was sure he had been here but hadn’t talked because he didn’t want to put himself at the scene and get in trouble, or maybe because he was protecting a fellow predator. But what if he knew the predator? What if he was a friend?

  That was a huge leap, as Gabe had included some files on Jorgenson in the Turner files, and he was a stereotypical pedophile. Meaning no real friends, or at least no adult ones besides his mother—he wasn’t even attempting to be seen as normal. (Some did; some were married with kids and had a genuine social circle of friends, contrary to most stereotypes. But there was a segment that never even tried to pass.) But what about cellmates? Jorgenson had been arrested and was technically on parole at the time of the incident. Who had Jorgenson shared a cell with?

  Roan looked at his watch, which never failed to amuse him. During office hours, when he was actually in, he wore a relatively nice watch: not expensive, but nice and professional looking. During off hours or stakeouts or days off, he wore things that he found funny, which was why he was wearing a plastic Simpsons watch that had been given away as a fast-food promotion. He’d picked it up at a Goodwill for a dollar. Yes, it was stupid and immature, but it always reminded him to lighten up. How serious could you be, wearing a plastic Simpsons watch? If he pressed a button, Bart and Homer would briefly argue with each other.

  Damn, he was a hopeless geek. Might as well get a big G tattooed on his forehead: it could stand for both gay and geek.

  Besides that, the night shift would be on at the station. Presuming no major changing of the guard, Marcos should be there,
and he’d probably be willing to let him have a look at some old files. Marcos was another long-timer, like Sadowski, who willingly took the thankless night shift because his wife was gone (left him for a fitness instructor), and he had no kids, and he had nothing waiting for him at home except a dog with a bad hip and a cat with one ear. There was always something rather sad and quiet about Marcos’s personality, but that was also what put him in the small category of cops who didn’t give him shit because he was gay. Marcos wasn’t a judgmental type; he seemed too tired to bother.

  Roan got back on the bike and kicked off the kickstand, walking it back out to the street before starting it, revving the engine for a moment just to make the bored teens curious about what they’d missed before driving off into the night, headed toward the station.

  Well, not directly. Soon enough he came across a road blocked off due to a tremendously nasty-looking car crash, one involving a squashed Datsun and a huge semitrailer. Glass littered the road like ice crystals, and emergency flares lit the scene in blood red. Cops and firefighters stood off to one side, discussing the use of the Jaws of Life, and Roan saw no one he recognized, so he did a U-turn and headed toward the main thoroughfare, figuring he’d take the long way around.

  He was back in the middle of the city as some of the clubs started shutting down, and traffic became wild and woolly. As it was, he had to piss, so he stopped at a Taco Bell to take a leak and pick up a soda, just because he wanted to have to take another piss in twenty minutes or so. Also, the caffeine seemed to cut through the Vicodin, but he wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing. With the downtime, he decided to check his messages, which he had ignored earlier so he could have dinner and a romantic interlude with Dylan that should have been more life-affirming, but for some reason he wasn’t shaking his ennui. If great sex couldn’t shake your funk, you were one pathetic bastard.