Bloodlines

by Andrea Speed

  There were a few cars in the lot, most battered, and one water company truck. The office was at the very end of the lot and, quite tellingly, the motel desk was hidden behind bulletproof glass, like this was a bank and not a cheap fly-by-night motel.

  As soon as Kevin came in, the man in the bulletproof booth said, “We want no trouble here. You go away now.” The man looked like a mad scientist from a Troma film, with a messy shock of silver hair that stood up as if he’d been recently electrocuted, a weathered, long face with a prominent chin, and thick eyebrows that were still the deep brown color that his hair used to be, his eyes a filmy, corrupted blue beneath thick lenses. His accent was dense and Eastern European.

  “I need to find Park—Colt. Is he here?” Kevin asked, undeterred by the man’s free-floating hostility.

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he barked, waving a hand at Kevin. “Go away.” He glanced behind Kevin’s shoulder at Roan and Paris, and gave them a dirty look. This made Roan flash him an insincere, toothy grin. As expected, that visibly unnerved him.

  Kevin took out his cell phone and held it up. “Tell me or I call in a raid. I heard gunshots here. Didn’t you guys hear gunshots?”

  “Oh yeah,” Roan agreed.

  “Seven or eight, I think,” Paris added.

  The mad scientist scowled evilly, bringing out new lines in his face. Roan had judged him to be in his forties, but now he adjusted that to his fifties. “Fine,” he spat, with a surprising amount of venom. “You cops always harassing the small businessman. He is in… one of the rooms. I don’t remember which one. One of the Western units. I want no trouble here.”

  “You won’t get any,” Kevin assured him. “Thank you.”

  As they left the small hotbox of the office, Roan heard the man cursing them under his breath in what sounded like Russian.

  “Where the hell did they get that dude?” Paris wondered, almost laughing.

  “Yegevny?” Kevin replied, walking toward what must have been the “Western” units—they were on the left side, the ones closest to the road. “He immigrated here from Estonia in ’96.”

  “Estonia?” Roan repeated, impressed. He’d never met anyone from Estonia before.

  “Yeah, I know. There are rumors he was a low-level Russian mobster who fucked something up so bad he had to run for his life and get lost in the States, leading to him running this shitbag motel.”

  “Fun rumor,” Roan said. “Probably not true, though.”

  “Probably not, but isn’t it neat?” Kevin agreed, flashing an unaccustomed smile.

  “He’s not a pimp, is he?” Paris wondered.

  Kevin shook his head. “Naw, not that we know of, but he does get kickbacks from the hookers who are regulars here. They pay him to keep his eye off the clock, mostly. There are also rumors there are webcams in some of the rooms, and Yegevny makes extra money on the side through online porn, which gets kickbacks to the hookers, but again, prove it.”

  Close up, the motel units looked even worse, with their white paint nearly brown from road grime and peeling off in big, flaky strips, like the skin of a bad sunburn victim. There used to be trim around the small, postage-stamp windows, but they had worn away to where you could see the naked wood beneath. Kevin pounded on the first door with a meaty fist, and bellowed, “Colt! We need to talk!”

  An annoyed woman’s voice shouted, “He ain’t here, you dumb motherfucker! Try number three!”

  So they walked down two doors, and Kevin did the pounding routine again. “Colt! Get out here! It’s urgent!”

  Roan was pretty sure he heard a faint “What the fuck…?” inside the room, and it looked like the industrial blue-flower-patterned curtains rustled, although he saw no one look out. After almost a minute, Colt came out, shirtless and sweaty and reeking of sex and drugs.

  In person he looked more youthful than his mug shot would have lead you to believe. He had fine bone structure, which made him look even younger, although his pale blue eyes were wide and wild with drugs, the artificial euphoria making them look almost lively. His neck tattoo, a tribal mishmash of jagged triangles like shark fins and swirls like the wake they left behind them in the water, started on the left side of his throat and spilled down in a black cascade to just above his left pectoral, where a gold-plated nipple ring occasionally caught a passing headlight and glinted at them. His chest was smooth and hairless, and he was so skinny his stomach was almost concave, the black board shorts he pulled on barely hanging on to the bony points of his narrow hips. “What the hell’s going on, Kevin?” His eyes then scudded toward Roan and Paris, and he studied them for quite a few moments, lingering on Paris especially. “Look, I’m busy right now, but if you wanna party, fine. I just need cash up front. Although wow, you got some cute ones here. Why d’ya need me?”

  Because Kevin was a darker-skinned black man, it was basically impossible to see him blush, but the set of his shoulders and the way he stared almost aggressively down at the asphalt told Roan he would have been blushing had he been able to see it. This exchange confirmed a suspicion he’d had since Kevin had recognized Parker right away, and he didn’t know what to do with the feeling. He was just glad the Vicodin was giving him distance, or he suspected he would have punched Kevin in the arm. “Colt, were you at Panic earlier this evening?” Kevin asked, finally looking up at the hustler.

  The boy was flying. Roan could smell meth in his sweat, but he thought he picked up something else too, maybe Ecstasy. His skater shorts weren’t quite baggy enough to hide a continuing chemically induced erection. “Why would I go to a fag club?”

  That was the thing about male hustlers: not all of them were gay. Yeah, their clients were men—women hiring a man for sex was just wishful thinking on the man’s part—but they were generally junkies and street kids looking to survive any way they could. The younger a guy looked, the more he usually made in the hustling game. He just had to be able to fake desire for a man and fuck them or tolerate getting fucked, however it went. And again, the better you were, the more you made. Parker looked like a classic twink, a seventeen-year-old who should probably be at home working a Playstation or behind the counter at The Gap rather than servicing a desperate man, so Roan was mildly surprised he was working such a shit place; you’d have thought a guy with his looks could work somewhere better.

  Kevin looked deeply disappointed, and his voice took on a rare harsh edge. “You were spotted there. Don’t lie. Things will be a hell of a lot worse for you if you lie.”

  Parker was clearly stoned out of his fucking mind; he was swaying, standing on his feet, and his hands were twitching like he was sculpting something in the air. He rolled his eyes and his hands rose briefly, like birds struggling for flight. “I was paid not to talk, ’kay? It was a special job, and the guy had some E, so I was cool, okay? What’s the BFD?”

  “This guy—can you describe him?”

  Parker stared at Kevin as if he was very far away, a dark blot in the distance, still wavering like he was on the deck of a storm-tossed boat. “I dunno. He was just a guy. What the fuck’s this about?”

  Kevin grabbed Parker by his shoulders, attempting to steady him. “Tell me what this man hired you for.”

  Parker broke free of Kevin’s hold, but in the process stumbled and almost fell. “Whatever, man. The dude said his buddy hadn’t gotten laid in a long time and he wanted to give him a birthday present, but he didn’t want him to know I was bought. So I was to pick him up at the club and go back to his place, fuck him, and get out once he showed up.”

  “The man who hired you showed up?”

  Parker attempted to nod, but stopped, as he seemed to be making himself dizzy. “Yeah. I’d barely blown the guy by the time he did. He showed up sooner than I thought. But why did I give a fuck? Easiest hundred bucks I ever made. And free E. I saved most of it for myself.”

  That statement finally made Roan speak up. “What do you mean, you saved most of it for yourself? He wanted you to dos
e Eric with Ecstasy?”

  Parker stared at him belligerently, but seemed to get distracted. “Your hair’s a funny color, isn’t it? Do you dye it? I hate guys with red pubic hair.”

  Here was the downside of drugs: Vicodin had lulled him into a false sense of security. “Parker, st—”

  “My name’s Colt!” he suddenly shouted, with a surprising amount of vehemence. “When I’m working, I’m Colt! Don’t call me that.”

  Roan mentally chided himself for such a stupid mistake. It was actually relatively common for hookers to have a “working” identity and a real one, and to separate the two, as if they were two different people. It was almost like they could put all the degradation and humiliation of their lives on the “working” identity and remain otherwise untouched. As far as he knew, that had never actually worked. “I’m sorry. I forgot, Colt. No offense intended. Did he want you to dose Eric with Ecstasy before you seduced him?”

  Parker’s head twitched to the side, either a nervous tic or a drug-induced spasm. Either way, it only happened once, and Parker acted like it hadn’t happened at all. “Eric…? Oh, wait, the Asian guy? Yeah, the guy said he was uptight, that’s why he hadn’t gotten his rocks off lately.”

  And it had compromised Eric entirely, made him let his guard down, and left him vulnerable to the attack that took his life. The fact that Eric had still attempted to fight back was a credit to him. It was possible that Colt was lying, making this vague story up, but right now he seemed too stoned to be capable of a decent deception; he was naked in his honesty, only because he didn’t have the sense to realize he should cover his ass.

  Kevin seemed to understand that too. In his gentlest voice, he told Parker, “You need to get dressed and come with me. I need you to identify the man who hired you.”

  Colt stared at him, barely seeing through the haze of his high. “Why? What the fuck’s this about, Kevin?”

  He kept addressing Kevin in a familiar, casual manner, and it made Roan’s stomach twinge. It could have been just the casual relationship between a sympathetic cop and the hustler who saw him as a rare friendly face, but there was something in their tone of voice and their body language that said that wasn’t it. Roan just had too much on his plate to deal with this right now. “He’s trying to set you up, Colt,” Kevin told him, in that same casual manner. “We need to stop him before he’s successful.”

  Parker just kept staring at him, like he was having trouble focusing on Kevin’s face. “Set me up for what?”

  Kevin dodged the question. “I’ll tell you on the way. Okay?”

  Parker looked uncertain, but was too tweaked to hold on to the thought for long. What it came down to was he trusted Kevin, cop or not. Finally he shrugged, and said, “I’m done with this guy anyway. His time’s up. Gimme a minute.” He staggered back to his room, and left the door slightly ajar.

  Roan turned to Kevin and fixed him with a caustic look. “We’re going to talk about this later, right?”

  Kevin met his eyes briefly, but quickly looked down at the parking lot, trying hard to pretend he wasn’t ashamed and failing miserably. “It’s not what you think.”

  “God, I hope not,” he said, and then turned and stalked off back to the GTO.

  Paris remained quiet until they got back on the road. “He’s a very lonely guy,” he said, sounding both sympathetic and apologetic.

  Roan looked at him askance. “He doesn’t have to be; he made the choice. He’s in a prison of his own design.”

  “Maybe, but not all of us are as brave as you.”

  He snorted derisively. “Like bravery has anything to do with it. Are straights vaunted for their bravery at being so aggressively hetero? It’s who I am, and it’s who he is. I don’t know who he’s pretending for.”

  “He has his reasons. Just like I have my reasons for not telling my parents I’m infected.”

  He frowned, really not liking the comparison—which he honestly felt was spurious anyway—but he let it go. If Paris wanted to feel some sympathetic kinship with Kevin, he could, but there was a huge difference in not telling your parents you were dying of a bizarre, vicious disease and paying for sex from hustlers on the down low because you couldn’t be honest and admit you were gay.

  But maybe one form of denial was just as good as another.

  BACK at home, Roan called Matt after ordering them a pizza (he still hadn’t gone shopping yet), and asked Matt who he’d told about Eric witnessing Thora being grabbed off the street. Matt sounded tired, as if totally exhausted and unable to muster being upset, or perhaps it was just the antidepressants he was on, wringing all the strong feelings out of him.

  Roan remembered his own brief flirtation with antidepressants. After Con had killed himself, Roan’s depression had been clearly visible to others, as someone reported him to the sergeant and he got sent to the department therapist. He didn’t mention Con to her, mainly because he couldn’t; just contemplating saying his name aloud made it feel like someone was twisting a knife made of ice deep inside him. He also wouldn’t talk about his troubled childhood, and talking about being infected didn’t thrill him either. So she decided he was probably a “burnout” depressive, and prescribed him Prozac. Out of curiosity, he tried some, and found it left him emotionally flat, like nothing was all that bad—or that good either. And it triggered a migraine later on, so he flushed all the pills down the toilet and never saw the therapist again. But he still remembered that curious feeling of having all his emotions drained of heft. Nowadays it was almost a tempting thought.

  Matt said he told Hannah (of course), and a few of their mutual friends in group, but he was fairly sure he didn’t mention Eric’s name. Still, Roan got the names of those he’d talked to: Nikki Bartolonis, Trang “Trey” Phan, Drake Stein, and Danae Willis. Roan recognized all those last names from the financial pages, save for Stein.

  He had a slice of pizza before heading out, hoping Matt was right about Thora’s apartment having a faulty bathroom window. It turned out to be true, as he was easily able to force the window open and slip inside, careful to wear gloves so he didn’t leave prints, and carrying a flashlight with a red filter. It would be difficult to see from outside, and if it was, most people would think it was reflected brake lights or something. Beyond that, it preserved his night vision. He might not need it, but you never knew.

  Matt’s idea of “trashed” and his were obviously quite different, as a thrown-over coffee table really didn’t meet his definition. Okay, if she was as OCD as Matt had implied, it was a shocking sight, but to him it almost indicated the aftermath of a snit rather than evidence of a search.

  What struck Roan was how devoid this place was of true personalization. Eric didn’t have much space or money, but he still managed to give some indication of his personality in his place; Thora’s apartment was a tasteful blank slate, like a model apartment for Martha Stewart magazine or something. Somebody extremely clean with a vague idea of current trends had furnished the place, but it seemed like it was for show, not something to be lived in. The fact that she did disturbed him, although he couldn’t say why. Maybe it just seemed wrong for someone to live in such a sterile, pseudoinstitutional setting when they had a choice to live differently. Was her mind so disordered she felt a genuine pressure to keep everything on the outside as orderly and controlled as possible? Then he remembered she was anorexic, and wondered if that was it. Anorexia at its core was all about control—you felt so out of control or lacking control in your life that you had to control yourself, to the point where you’d almost kill yourself declaring total dominion over your own body. Had she done that in her own home as well? He really needed to know more about Thora.

  Her computer was in her functional, tasteful, and otherwise unappealing bedroom, but even though it looked just fine, he couldn’t boot it up, and it was easy to see why once he futzed with the case: the hard drive had been removed. This was discouraging, although he noticed there was a wireless Internet connection, despi
te this computer appearing to be DSL. A second computer? A laptop? If so, the searchers had probably snagged it.

  Still, he dutifully searched the apartment for it, on the off chance they had missed it. He searched under the bed (no dust bunnies under there—that was almost creepy), through the closet of overly expensive clothes and shoes, through drawers of even more flimsy and expensive lingerie (he was so relieved to find schlep clothes, mainly inexpensive Joe Boxer sweats, in the bottom drawer; he’d been fearing for this girl’s sanity), through kitchen cupboards of little-used china plates and sparkling glassware, and never-used pots and pans so squeaky clean he could have eaten off them right now. There was little food in her cupboards, just some Crystal Light drink mix and a box of Celestial Seasonings’ Sleepytime tea, and her refrigerator was equally bare, with a pitcher of iced tea, a huge bottle of Evian, and a bagged salad mix that was slowly starting to go limp and brown scattered about the otherwise empty shelves. He found ice cubes and a bottle of Absolut in her freezer, but the seal on the vodka bottle hadn’t been broken.

  There were few places to search in the living room; she had few DVDs and CDs, and all looked quite genuine, not good hiding places. (She liked romantic comedies and contemporary pop music, with little deviation.) He searched the bathroom last, and found a whole host of prescription drug bottles in the mirrored cabinet over the sink. She had several varieties of antidepressants, antianxiety meds, sleep aids, and a sizable stockpile of Valium—she could have opened her own pharmacy. She also had a ton of vitamins and laxatives.

  In the cupboard under the sink, he found toilet paper, a bottle of liquid soap, and a huge Costco size box of maxi pads. He was attempting to move the box just to get a better look at the back of the cupboard when he realized it was way too heavy for a box of pads. Looking inside, he found her laptop.