Infected: Lesser Evils

by Andrea Speed

  Bolt looked utterly bewildered and slightly scared. Fiona cut the tension by interjecting, “Excellent Simpsons reference.”

  “Thank you. At least someone knows the classics.” Roan threw up his hand dismissively and said, “You made your offer. Please go now.”

  “I didn’t expect an answer right away. Please think about it, don’t dismiss it out of hand,” Bolt said, almost pleading. “Call me when you’ve made up your mind.”

  “I’ve made it up now,” Roan pointed out, but Bolt and Lurch were already on their way out the door.

  As soon as they were gone, he asked Fiona, “Would it have made any difference if I’d said it in a Groundskeeper Willie accent?”

  “Probably not. It was totally over their heads.” She paused briefly, clearly thinking something over. “You know, maybe you should do it.”

  He stared at her. “Pardon?”

  “Come on! There’s no better way to destroy a system than from the inside.”

  “So you think I should join them just to bring them down?”

  “There’s no better reason. Eli would die a second time if he knew you were heading up his church. It sounds like fun.”

  Wow. Vengeance, thy name is dominatrix.

  “What, I just join something I know nothing about to run it straight into the ground?”

  “Why not? George Bush did it, why can’t you?”

  That was an excellent point.

  He told Fiona he was closing down early for the day since he’d already had his quota of crazy, which was fine with her since she had a lunch date with Tank anyways (wow, they’d been together almost three weeks—that seemed semi-serious), and while she invited him along, he declined. As it was, he called Dylan to see if he could meet him for lunch. They arranged to meet at Pho Pacific, a Vietnamese restaurant that both was good and had a decent selection of vegetarian food, and was also almost perfectly situated between his office and where Dylan was currently job hunting.

  Lunch was good, they talked about everything but his new physical reality as some kind of freakazoid Human/lion creature. Dylan was astonished at Bolt’s offer, but being Buddhist, didn’t think joining just to destroy them would be a good idea. (He’d make a shitty dominatrix.)

  After lunch, Dylan went off to a bar that was hiring, and Roan was going to go home and sleep, except it was then the cops called and asked him to come in and make an official statement. He hoped they weren’t going to quietly arrest him, but it might have been a mercy.

  It turned out to be an hour and a half of sheer boredom as he repeated his story three different times, and it didn’t change one iota from the night of the incident. As the poor son of a bitch cop took his statement (so new he pretty much squeaked), he found himself wondering if anything Bolt said was true. Did they actually respect him? They didn’t much when he was a cop. But that was before they knew he had superpowers. Perhaps respect varied depending on how much you could do for—and to—a person. In fact, that made perfect sense.

  He was able to discover that it looked like Oliver was going to live, and pressing charges would be unlikely, because Nadia’s official statement backed up his (what a shock) and it appeared to be self-defense, and Oliver was violating a restraining order anyways. As for the skull fracture, it seemed to be written off as a “freak accident.” Roan wanted to say Emphasis on freak, but kept it to himself.

  He found himself sitting in his car, staring out the windshield at nothing, wondering why he felt numb and empty. Oh, right, he was full of Vicodin. That could do that to a person. Or whatever he was.

  He supposed he should give up the pills before he got really addicted, but he was afraid the pills were the only thing helping keep his lion at bay. He was terrified that if he completely sobered up, he’d be a full lion in a week. Maybe it wasn’t true, but did he know that for sure? He knew nothing. He didn’t even know what was happening to him anymore.

  Roan stared at his eyes in the rearview mirror, trying to see if his eyes had changed, but he could no longer tell.

  He had the keys in the ignition when his cell rang, and he almost didn’t answer it, but figured what the fuck. It turned out to be Holden.

  “You busy right now?”

  “Not at the moment. Why?”

  “I could use a lift. Can you pick me up? I’m at a bar, Cooper’s, down the street from the Red Lion.”

  Roan puzzled over this for a moment, before he realized that Holden’s voice sounded funny. Kind of congested. “Is everything all right?”

  “No. Client got violent on me, I had to beat the shit out of him—look, I don’t wanna discuss it on the phone. Can you give me a ride? I don’t wanna deal with a cabbie right now.”

  “What do you mean, a client got violent on you?” He shook his head, and asked, “Are you all right?”

  “A little bruised, but I’ve had worse.”

  That wasn’t reassuring, as being a street kid and a prostitute pretty much guaranteed you had gotten the shit beaten out of you at some point. “Were you—”

  “I really don’t wanna talk about this right now,” Holden interrupted. “I just wanna get home.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He sighed. Holden sounded oddly fragile, like he was one good push away from either crying or screaming in rage. He wasn’t sure which would be worse. “I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll be here,” Holden replied, and hung up.

  Given that he was now considered a high-class prostitute, Holden was less likely to be treated badly by his clients, but it didn’t make him perfectly safe. Even people who paid the big bucks could still be unfathomable dicks, basically paying a thousand dollars to slap a trick around. The weird part of this was Holden was so solid. He was a big guy, not a twink, not someone anorexia thin and waifish; he had a broad-shouldered build and still looked a bit like the high school athlete he had been before his life took its sudden turn. You’d never look at him and think “easy mark”… unless you knew he was a hooker, and then you might automatically discount him. That’s what had happened at the snuff filmmakers’ compound, and look what that got them. Just because you allowed other people to use you didn’t mean that you were a complete pushover doormat. Roan just hoped Holden hadn’t killed the client.

  Cooper’s was a bar like any other bar—poorly lit, reeking of beer and despair, classic rock playing faintly in a background slightly overwhelmed by SportsCenter coming from a small TV over the bar, which almost no one was paying attention to. Holden was sitting slumped at the end of the bar nearest the door, working on what Roan guessed was a gin and tonic (Holden liked gin—it seemed to be the only alcohol he really liked). Roan sat on the empty stool beside him and asked, “Ready to go?”

  “Yeah.” He swigged down the rest of his drink, and Roan saw some of the damage done.

  “Holy shit.” He turned Holden’s face toward him. He had a bloodied lower lip, with a slight tear in the corner of his mouth, and his left eye was bruised and starting to blacken. It wasn’t bad right now, but in a few hours it’d be a good-sized shiner.

  Holden twisted his head away and said, “Don’t worry about it. Guy surprised me, got a couple of good licks in, but then I recovered and got him. If you think I look bad, you should see him.”

  “You should report him to police. I’ll come with you.”

  He shook his head as he swiveled off his stool. “No need.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause I did worse to him, and I let him know if he went to the cops about me, I’d destroy him. I meant it.” Holden headed out, shoulders hunched, hands dug in the pockets of his leather jacket. He was in his jeans/white T-shirt outfit that might as well have been the male hustler uniform. Roan followed, but waited to speak until they were in the car.

  “Politician or preacher?”

  “Circuit court judge.”

  Roan hadn’t expected that. “Really?”

  “You haven’t heard the best bit. He was in town to speak at a prayer breakfas
t this morning, and he was probably drunk by the afternoon. He’s a fucking mean drunk.”

  Roan shook his head as he started the car. “Superconservative? Married?”

  “Oh yeah. The perfectly average wife and two point five kids, and a record of decisions that makes the Christian Right oh so very happy. Unbeknownst to them, he has a thing for cock and a raging form of alcoholism that makes him an insufferable bastard. If you told me he beat his oh so perfect wife and kids, I wouldn’t be surprised.” After a brief pause, Holden added, “I have pictures.”

  “What?”

  “It’s my insurance when I get hired by a guy who is powerful enough to have me railroaded if he gets caught or things otherwise go south. I take pictures of them. If we end our relationship without fuss, the pictures are destroyed and they know nothing about them. If things go wrong, they’re my ace in the hole. I won’t go down alone. They think they can bury me, they’re fucking going with me. And he has lots to lose—not just the wife and kids and support of Rick Santorum, but his entire career. Hiring a prostitute is against the law, you know. The law he’s supposed to be enforcing.” Holden was looking out the passenger window, a muscle in his jaw clenching and unclenching, like he was chewing something hard and unpleasant.

  “How many power people do you have on your client list?” Mostly Roan was just curious.

  Holden glanced down at his hand, and his fingers twitched like he was silently counting. Holy shit, he was. “Four at the moment, counting him. But he’s now an ex-client—nobody fucking hits me.”

  “There’s a politician and a preacher, right?” Holden simply nodded. “So who’s the third?”

  Holden was so silent for so long, Roan assumed he wasn’t going to tell him. But finally he said, “Army brass.”

  Considering the sheer amount of military bases in the state, he shouldn’t have been surprised. “Brass, as in…?”

  “Near the top, decorated, a shitload of guys under his command, career almost as old as I am.”

  “Shit.”

  “He’s my oldest client, agewise, but he’s in better shape than most of ’em. And he’s good with discretion, but then he’d have to be.”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  “Yep.”

  “He married?”

  “Divorced. That way he can say he’s dedicated his life to his job ’cause he never got over his wife leaving him. Although she left because he stopped having sex with her, but hey, why spoil a good story with details?”

  “You are aware how risky this is, don’t you? If they catch you taking pictures—”

  “They haven’t and they won’t. Give me some credit, I’m not an idiot.”

  “I know, but you’ve been hurt enough.”

  “Well, if I didn’t wanna get hurt, I shoulda never become a hooker,” he said in an offhand, derisory manner. There was almost always truth in the awful, but it seemed cruel to say that about himself. But Holden seemed to be in a very black mood right now, so Roan didn’t say it out loud.

  Once they got back to Holden’s place, Roan went to see if he had any ice packs in his freezer while Holden went off to his bathroom. Maybe to retrieve painkillers, maybe to punch a hole in the wall, he didn’t know and decided not to ask, giving him that much respect and privacy.

  He found an ice pack in an otherwise almost empty freezer (he had a couple of frozen dinners, that was it), and had found a bottle of aspirin in the cupboard when Holden came back out, stripped to his black boxer briefs. Somehow he looked slightly more intimidating half naked than dressed, although Roan had no idea how that worked. Holden had a reddish mark on his knee that might ripen to a bruise—he’d either taken a kick to the shins or kneed the judge in a place where he hit bone pretty hard. Holden sat on the couch, as always unashamed, and asked, “Know any retired hookers?”

  Roan brought him the ice pack, which he took with a slight nod of thanks, but he declined the aspirin with a wave of his hand. Roan put it back on the counter. “Can’t say I do.”

  “That’s because we don’t retire. We get dead or we drift away, but little good ever comes of us.”

  “So be the first.”

  That seemed to surprise him. “What?”

  “You’ve been many firsts, Holden. This will be just one more for you.”

  Holden remained one of the strangest men Roan had ever met, mainly because he could never quite get a bead on him. Other people he could figure out, know what their reaction would be in certain situations, but Holden? By nature an unpredictable creature, and he probably liked it that way. All Roan really knew about him was, if things went tits up, you wanted him on your side. If there was a zombie apocalypse, you definitely wanted Holden on your mall-occupying crew. If there was a way to survive, he would find it.

  Roan slumped in a chair parallel to Holden’s sofa as Holden held the ice pack to his bruised eye and asked, “Why do you make it sound so easy? I’m a dropout, I’ve done porn, all my skills seem to be illegal in nature. It’s not like I can hand over a CV with S&M Boys on it and be taken seriously by anyone.”

  “S&M Boys?”

  “I’m not Fiona, but I’ll do light dom. It’s on my web page.”

  “Fiona’s harder than you?”

  “Much. I’m really very vanilla at heart. I’ll only get a little weird before it starts getting too silly for me to take seriously. Fiona has a better poker face than I do.” He paused a moment. “There’s probably a better way to put that.”

  “Probably.” It actually took Roan a moment to find the slightest entendre about that.

  “Maybe I should take Paul up on his offer.”

  “Paul?”

  “A guy who’s a semiregular. He’s told me he’s willing to pay me to be an exclusive.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’d be his houseboy. He’d pay me to live with him and be his boy toy. He’s rich too, has a nice place on Orcas Island. There’s little downside to it.”

  He stared at him in disbelief. “Except you’d be property.”

  “What am I now? Little better. Besides, isn’t that what relationships are? You’re someone’s property. It’s just that in this case the rules are firmly established going in.”

  “No, that’s not what relationships are supposed to be. Honestly Holden, the idea is kind of pathetic. This guy can’t date without money being involved?”

  “No. All he got was gold diggers after his money. He figured if he paid me and worked out a payment schedule in advance, it would be the most honest relationship he’s ever had. And to be honest, to get those good-looking boys, he’d have to have money. He’s not ugly, but he’s plain, and about forty pounds overweight, with the muscle tone of a blanket. At least he’s aware of his limitations.”

  Roan just glared at him. He was at least half serious, and that was a half too much. “You can do better. You don’t have to keep selling yourself.”

  “Maybe not, but it’d be easier.”

  “Since when do you take the easy way?”

  That made him smile, but it was bittersweet, sad, and almost mocking. “Haven’t you been paying attention, Roan? The easy way is the only way I take.” He put the ice pack down on his coffee table and sat forward, shoulders rounded with exhaustion. “I had some Tylenol Three left over from my last dentist visit, and now I’m thinking I shouldn’t have combined them with gin.”

  “How many did you take?”

  “Two.”

  “How much gin?”

  “Also two, at the bar.”

  Roan shook his head. “You should be fine. You’ll sleep like a log for about ten hours, but you’ll be fine.”

  He nodded. “Sleep sounds good.” He stood up, but hesitated. “Umm… I don’t mean this in any other way, okay? I just mean what I ask.”

  “Okay,” Roan agreed hesitantly. Did anything good ever get prefaced that way?

  He seemed unnaturally embarrassed, rubbing his own arms as if suddenly cold, looking in Roan’s direction
but not at him. “Would you, um, would you stay with me? I mean, just until I fall asleep. I don’t really feel like being alone right now, but when I’m unconscious, I won’t care.”

  So here was where Holden’s shame laid—in human weakness. Anything that made him seem less like the self-sufficient hardass he liked to present himself as (and oh, didn’t that sound familiar). He nodded, and said, “Sure.” To make the mood slightly less awkward, Roan added, “I’ve always wanted to look through your CD collection.”

  Holden rolled his eyes. “CDs? Shit, you should go to bed, old man. Who has CDs anymore?”

  “Don’t you mock your elders. I’ll club you with my walker.”

  “Yeah yeah, don’t break a hip.” He went back toward his bedroom, but he stopped at the doorway and gave him a look that was surprisingly kind and almost grateful. “Thanks.” There was something in his look that suggested he wouldn’t have minded if Roan had joined him, but he pretended not to see it.

  “It’s not a problem.” And it wasn’t. He owed Holden a lot, but it wasn’t something they talked about. It was an almost impossible conversation to start: Thank you for not killing me when I was a lion, thanks for not freaking out, thanks for making sure I didn’t kill you too. Besides, there was almost no good place that could go.

  Roan sat in the relative quiet of Holden’s still surprisingly neat living room, and wondered for the millionth time how his life had got so fucked up, and where you went to request a do-over.

  4

  Eyes Spliced Open

  ROAN wondered if he had fallen asleep before Holden did.

  Holden had just gone back to his bedroom when Roan stared up at his ceiling and yawned, wondering if the upstairs neighbor really was rollerblading (that’s what it sounded like), and it seemed like no time at all had passed when he suddenly woke up in the chair where he had dozed off. Holy shit—he’d taken too many pills. He checked his watch, and was relieved to see he’d lost only an hour.