by Andrea Speed
Chai sat back, shaking his head. “Holy shit, the stuff you get up to. You should really write a book, you know?”
“What, Secrets of a Hooker Vigilante?”
“Tell me people wouldn’t drop everything to read that.”
Holden shrugged, because he couldn’t, and reached over and snagged Chai’s mug. They liked their coffee different, but Holden was still too lazy to get his own.
“Hey,” Chai protested.
“You know the rules: if it’s unattended, it’s mine.” That was actually a joke, dating back to their escort days. Holden took a sip, grimacing at the amount of sugar Chai put in his coffee, and asked, “How many RSVPs you got?”
“Oh. Right now I’ve got E, Trix, Hotshot, and Bear coming in.”
“E? Oh shit, you mentioned free pizza, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Chai admitted, hanging his head in mock shame.
“Mark my words, E will be more of a hindrance than a help.” This afternoon was Chai’s big “moving in” party, so called so nobody would run away at the notion of helping him move, but that was exactly what was going on.
Holden sipped the coffee warily, feeling the sugar rush to his head. Yeah, his big plan for today was going to Goodwill with Chai and helping him move. Now it apparently included riding herd over a bunch of former escorts, most of whom he hadn’t seen in ages. He knew Hotshot and Bear had settled down in a literal sense: they lived together and owned a coffee shop near Bellevue. They’d sent him Facebook friend requests and such, but Holden wasn’t on Facebook, mainly out of principle. Trix was the macrobiotic yoga instructor, and E was…. He wasn’t exactly sure what E did for a living. He still got really high a lot, and Holden had occasionally run into him on the weekends, downtown where E could be found staggering, blissed out, from one club to another. Maybe he was a DJ or party planner, or maybe he’d made the transition to legal weed. He’d have to ask him when he saw him.
Holden returned to his bedroom and took a moment to call Dahlia back but only got her voicemail. He left her a message, saying he’d be willing to meet her at Grounds For Divorce at seven. He added his schedule was pretty open from six thirty to nine if she wanted to pick another time. Then Holden had a shower, his head buzzing from the sugar and caffeine overload, and by that time Chai had left, probably to do a little supplementary shopping. Chai was weirdly excited about getting his own place, even if it was in this building. Hell, it was two doors down from Holden’s place. Not that having a ground-floor apartment was necessary, but Chai hated stairs, and the ones to the upper level were metal and not the easiest for an amputee to maneuver. Yes, he had a prosthetic, but not the best on the market. Most people didn’t know that. They just assumed he had a limp, and Chai was happy to let them think that was all it was. It seemed to still hurt him to talk about his missing leg, so they didn’t. Holden had no idea if E, Trix, Hotshot, and Bear knew about it or not.
His stomach was churning from the coffee, so he went ahead and made himself some toast before he got dressed. Yeah, carbs were supposed to be the enemy, but fuck that. You’d pry his bread out of his cold, dead hands.
Holden had finally chosen his jacket for the afternoon—a brown leather one that looked as rugged and old as shit—when his phone buzzed. Since he had personalized ringtones for most of his friends, that told him it wasn’t someone on his list, and a quick glance at the screen offered nothing. He had no idea who was calling him. He decided to answer it, if only to quell the mystery. “Yeah?”
“Holden? It’s Kevin Robinson.”
Holden had to swallow back calling him Karo, his street nickname, because Kevin didn’t appreciate it. And why would he? It implied he was sticky sweet, and that was hardly reputation-building stuff, especially for a cop. “Ah. Am I in trouble?”
“If you were, I wouldn’t tell you by phone,” Kevin replied. Fair enough. “I was wondering how well you knew a man named Anthony Moretti. Also known by the street name Burn.”
“Um, that sorta depends on why you need to know.”
Kevin sighed heavily. Was Holden the first person he’d called about Burn? Maybe not. “Do you know him well enough to identify his body?”
Oh. So it was going to be that kind of day.
5—City of Exploded Children
BURN WAS one of those people Holden liked to think of as liminal: everybody knew him, and at the same time, nobody knew him. He was a ghost of a man who hadn’t yet died.
And that was the way he liked it. Hard to catch a ghost. It seemed like someone finally had, though.
As far as Holden knew, Burn had no family, here or anywhere. He was a man without a country, a home, a basic understanding of dental hygiene. All that was generally known about him was that his appetite for drugs was bottomless, and if you needed something questionable fast—untraceable gun, pharmaceuticals, car of dubious provenance—he was the guy to see. He’d been around since Holden had started his life on the streets. Burn could be found at the dirtiest bar in town, swilling cut-rate hooch at a back booth, dealing drugs in the filthy men’s room. He was the man your parents warned you about, no matter who your parents were. He was a tragedy and a warning at the same time.
That was about all Holden really knew about him. He knew Burn’d done time, but he didn’t know what for. He knew he’d taken to meth recently, but only because of the chemical smell he gave off and the sad state of his teeth. Holden knew he went missing for days, sometimes weeks or even months, but he always popped back up, and nothing was ever said about it. Except for this time. This time, his disappearance was a prelude to his death.
Kevin told him where to find the morgue, and Holden didn’t have the heart to tell him that he already knew where it was. He was quite familiar with it. It wouldn’t be his first time visiting the place, and given the circles he ran in, not the last either. Holden was now glad he’d quoted Dahlia such a late time, as this probably wouldn’t be a quick jaunt.
The morgue was an unobtrusive building downtown, so desperately anonymous you knew it was trying to hide something. Some wag had spray-painted on a neighboring building Don’t Open, Dead Inside. They deserved points for general humor, but some had to be deducted for the obvious cultural reference.
Inside, it was air conditioned to death—no pun intended—sterile, and smelled mostly of toner and coffee, like any other office. The hallways were long and bland, purely industrial, clinging to normalcy as a counterbalance to its grim reality. A receptionist along the way pointed him in the right direction, and Holden knew he was in the right place when he saw Kevin Robinson.
Kevin was a chunky cop in his dress blues, with the same hangdog expression he always seemed to wear. Holden was reasonably certain he was born with that expression on his face. He also had the bone-deep weariness that suggested he was halfway done with the world and all its shittiness, which was a state Holden had reached roughly fifteen years ago. You didn’t become the gay Punisher because you thought people and the world were ever going to get better.
Kevin nodded upon seeing him and gave a high sign to a medical technician, who apparently unlocked a door for them before Holden followed Kevin into a room full of body drawers. Holden wondered briefly at the security for an area devoted to corpses, but what was that about people being shitty? Hell, they stole some of Roan’s and Paris’s blood samples from a lab, all to infect new people. For the millionth year in a row, humans proved themselves to be the absolute worst.
Kevin walked over to one of the lower drawers and pulled it open as white fluorescents buzzed overheard and threw stark, unflattering light on everything. “Do I even need to warn you about looking at a dead body?” Kevin wondered.
“I worked with Roan, so no,” Holden replied. There were quiet layers here, ones concerning his gay Punisher status and the fact that Kevin had heard those rumors but had no proof of anything. Holden knew if Kevin found that proof, he’d nail him to the wall with it. No matter that Roan was a mutual friend and that they were both gay men—
although Kevin was still closeted. They were essentially cop and hustler, and they’d always be adversaries. They were just more polite than most.
“Speaking of which, heard from him lately?” Kevin was trying to act like it was a casual, spur-of-the-moment thing, but for a police officer, he was a terrible liar.
Luckily, Holden knew he was a great liar. He shrugged a single shoulder. “Got an email from him a couple days ago. Hard at work on his book.”
“That’s good,” Kevin replied. He didn’t sound all that mollified, and Holden didn’t blame him. But what was going on with Roan right now was not his news to tell. If Dylan wanted to share it, he would. Besides, he could see it causing Kevin nothing but pain. Sometimes the fear was better than the knowledge.
“Don’t they identify bodies by fingerprints nowadays?” Holden asked.
“Usually. But his fingerprints are all scarred up. Looks like he tried to obliterate them several times before. Can’t get a clean read.”
Kevin had pulled the drawer all the way out, and inside was a partially zipped body bag. The head and upper chest were exposed, and Holden looked down at a ghastly pale man with bloodless lips, messy, greasy black hair, and a clean gash in his torso right where the heart was. His eyes were closed, but he had the same angular cheekbones and pointed nose of the hood rat Holden knew in passing.
“Yeah, that’s Burn. Holy shit, someone killed him?”
Kevin nodded, zipping up the bag. There was a smell, but considering how Burn usually smelled, it wasn’t that bad. It was probably the cleanest Burn had been in some time. “His body was found just outside the Jungle last night. We don’t know if he was killed there or just dumped there. The residents aren’t exactly being cooperative.”
“What, homeless people being scared and suspicious of cops? Who’d have thunk it?”
Kevin closed the drawer and turned to him with a nasty look, which was semiwarranted, but then his expression changed. It lightened as if he’d just realized something. “Do you know if he was living there?”
“In the Jungle?” Holden shrugged. “I have no idea. He could have a condo in Queen Anne. Everything I know about Burn could fill a bottle cap.”
“Do you know people in the Jungle?”
Holden realized what Kevin had just twigged to. “Is this where you ask me to ask around in the Jungle about Burn’s death?”
Kevin held his hands out briefly, a folksy kind of shrug. “You could, right? They trust you.”
Holden arched an eyebrow at him. “They? Who is that? The great unwashed? The peasants?”
Kevin rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean. Street people. You have a reputation among them. Some of them say you ‘take care’ of things.”
Holden smiled but made sure it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Is this that whole vigilante bullshit again? You know how things get exaggerated.”
Kevin frowned and shook his head. “I know it’s not bullshit, Holden, but if I could prove it, you’d already be in cuffs. So let’s not do this again. What I’m asking you to do is actually help the law for once and find out if there were any witnesses to Burn’s murder, anyone willing to speak on the record. Considering this is the second murder to occur near the Jungle in a week… we need something fast.”
“For once?” he replied, trying and failing to keep the indignance out of his voice. He was about to start ranting about how he worked with Roan, and Roan—as far as they all knew—stayed on the right side of the law, when what Kevin said really hit him. “Wait. Are you saying the cops are gonna move on the Jungle?”
“City hall is already making noises. People who live nearby are complaining, are worried about their property values, and a couple of dropped bodies will force some hands.”
“Sure it will. And it’s gonna lead to a shit-ton of more violence,” Holden snapped. “Fuck property values! We’re talking about people who have nowhere to go and have been treated like shit by the cops of this city. I don’t care how many guys you dress up in riot gear, this is going to go all World Trade Organization on your ass.”
Kevin’s frown deepened until it looked carved into his face. “I know that, and you know that. But we aren’t the men giving the orders, are we? Get me something actionable, something that we can start building a case on, and we can hold them back.”
“How?”
“Simple. We say that our suspect might be a flight risk, but will definitely be one if we close in on the Jungle en masse.”
Holden shook his head. “How is that gonna convince anyone?”
“Even if it buys us only a little time, it’ll be enough.”
Holden continued shaking his head. It was so thin as to be pitiable and almost an insult. Except deep within Kevin’s hangdog eyes, he saw genuine desperation. Yes, he was grasping at tiny straws, but he might be the only sane man at the SPD right now. He knew this was going to be a disaster, and his ability to stop it was severely limited. Holden would have pitied him if he wasn’t a cop. “Aren’t you Vice? How are you caught up in this?”
He heaved a weary sigh. “Chang and Farrar caught this case, but I owed Chang a favor, and I agreed to help her out on this. Burn was more in my circle than theirs.”
“And you want me to pony up your side of the favor?”
Kevin stared at him levelly. “I was hoping your sense of decency, and the fact that one of your friends just got murdered, might make you want to help.”
“He wasn’t my friend,” Holden snapped before he realized what he’d said. It was sad but true. They were simply lowlife denizens at the bottom of the same aquarium. Their paths crossed enough that they knew of each other, did business once or twice, but that was about it. “And I don’t appreciate you trying to use emotional blackmail on me. I am not Roan.”
“No shit you’re not.” Now Kevin looked pissed off, which was a genuine rarity for him. He was so even-tempered and low-key, any kind of emotion from him was a surprise. “If he was here, I wouldn’t have had to come to you. But he’s not here, and beggars can’t be choosers, now can they?”
“Wow.” Holden kind of admired him for the honesty. He was so milquetoast and closeted, Holden kind of expected him to always fold, cop or not. Kevin, like a lot of people, was a lot more complicated than he thought. “You know you catch more flies with honey.” Kevin’s only response to that was a dark look, and Holden figured that was fair. He sighed and threw up his hands. “Fine, I’ll ask around. I can’t believe someone wasn’t patient enough for cirrhosis to kill him, but whatever. Can I at least get a favor out of it?”
“My favor is I’m not arresting you.”
“I thought that was because you had nothing on me.” He got the dark look again. “Take a joke, man. You got what you wanted.”
“A man is dead. Don’t you care?”
Holden scoffed, mainly at Kevin’s holier-than-thou tone. “You are aware that the only two people in the world who give a shit that he’s dead are in this room? We’re it. Burn may have been street, but he was a bottom feeder, and you’re not gonna find a lot of people mourning him. There’s probably already a line forming to take his place.”
Kevin’s dark glare continued, but he looked away after a moment and ran a hand over his face, the only acknowledgment from Kevin that Holden was correct. It was merciless, but that’s how life was for most people.
When Kevin finally looked at him again, he gestured to the door. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“We’re not done?”
“Not yet. Let’s grab a cup of coffee.”
Holden considered it and made sure Kevin saw him do it. “Being seen with a cop might not be great for the enterprise.”
“Even if it’s just Karo?”
Okay, he had him there. Karo almost didn’t count as a “real” cop, as he wasn’t beating the shit out of minorities for shits and giggles. That was the general problem: cops either seemed to be swaggering bullies or ineffectual. There were very few in between, or at least that seemed to
be the experience in Holden’s world. Roan was an anomaly, but bless him, Roan was an anomaly no matter where he was. He was a species of one, and it was a good thing he was stronger, cannier, and scarier than humans, because humans would have ripped him apart by now if he wasn’t.
Holden followed Kevin out of the morgue and across the street to a coffee shop. Of course there was one across the street. It was Seattle, and you couldn’t legally be two hundred and fifty feet away from a coffee shop at any time. Kevin got a black coffee with no bells or whistles, which seemed to startle the barista, and just because he felt like surprising her more, Holden got a passion-fruit iced tea. She looked at them like they were the biggest freaks she’d ever served, and it made Holden inexpressibly happy.
But when he turned away, he discovered the barista wasn’t the only one giving him an odd look. “Since when do you order tea?”
“I’ve already had near lethal levels of caffeine today. You really don’t want to see me when I go over the limit. Now is this where you give me the warning speech, coupled with the ‘I will disavow all knowledge of you if cornered’ addendum?”
Kevin moved in closer, possibly so no one could overhear, but Holden thought he was giving the crowd in here way too much credit. Most were on their phones, doing anything but interacting with the people physically around them. The one couple paying attention to each other were having a fight. “You need to watch yourself, okay? I’m not saying this as a friend. I’m saying this as a person who can imagine the kind of shitstorm that happens in the void you’ll leave behind. So don’t do anything that’ll make me regret asking you or make me shut you down. Clear?”
“Got it, chief.”
“You’d better.” He was continuing to give Holden the look of a man who regretted still being alive, but Kevin should have known what he was getting into doing any kind of deal with him. The time for regret was long past.
“You know, it’s funny,” Kevin said, stepping back. “That guy who was assaulting transgender people just stopped.”
