Infected: Lesser Evils

by Andrea Speed

  He heard Dylan say, “Hey Tank,” before Roan turned around, and Dylan caught him up in a big bear hug. “I should have known that you’d get into trouble.”

  “I’m a trouble magnet,” Roan agreed, enjoying the hug in spite of the bruising pain to the cuts on his torso.

  After a moment, Dylan held him back at arm’s length, looked him up and down, and shook his head. “You’ve already got the IV out. How fast do you do these things?”

  “Tank helped.”

  “I’m sure he did.” He sighed wearily. “Hon, I know most of my friends are pretentious jerks, but most of your friends are fucking weirdos.”

  “I know. You do realize I also consider you one of my friends.”

  “Yes. It’s a cross I have to bear.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Visiting Holden. I thought I ought to pop in, see how he was doing.”

  “How was he? Besides bruised.”

  “A little depressed, but you’d expect that. He hates hospital food so much I was thinking of making a run to Jack In The Box and getting him something to cheer him up.”

  “Ooh, could you pick me up something? I’m starving.”

  He gave him the put-upon sigh, and said, “Fine, I’ll play gofer. Is there any chance at all you’re staying here tonight?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought. Go visit Holden, and try not to start any more fights.”

  “I didn’t start it. I was just here.”

  Dylan patted him on the shoulder. “I know. Just wait until you heal before you go and kick someone else’s ass.”

  He saluted sarcastically, making Dylan frown at him. But he still kissed him before leaving, and Roan made his way to the elevators, figuring if he got an empty one maybe he could do a partial change. But his luck wasn’t good, as he ended up sharing an elevator with a nurse and a guy in a wheelchair with a broken leg. They both looked at him like something the cat dragged in—no pun intended. Oh, well, maybe a little.

  Holden was sitting up on the bed in his room, reading an Entertainment Weekly that someone must have smuggled in for him, the cover displaying the empty-eyed smile of a star Roan didn’t recognize. Holden’s face was less swollen now, reduced to a more reasonable level, and the eye that had swollen shut was almost open again, although it was a grape-y dark purple that looked painful. “Wow, what happened to your face?” Holden asked him. Coming from him, that was kind of funny, but Roan didn’t feel like laughing.

  “Leopard tried to eat it.”

  “So you ate his instead?”

  “No. I didn’t have any mustard handy.” He sat in the plastic chair that was still warm from Dylan, and said, “It’s done. Your friends might be worse off than you.”

  He put the magazine down on his lap, and looked surprisingly pensive. “Thank you. I realize you’re not a weapon for hire, but—”

  “All those fuckers deserved it,” Roan told him, and it even surprised him how much venom was in that statement. But he hated anyone who abused their authority, judges and cops especially. He was aware that, being a former cop who’d lost his job because he’d kicked the shit out of a drunken wife beater, this made him something of a hypocrite, but at least it could be argued that the guy probably deserved worse.

  Although Holden blinked in surprise, he seemed to let it go. “Things have taken a turn for the shit, haven’t they?”

  “I’m sure things are going to get worse.”

  “Before they get better?”

  Roan looked at him, and wondered if he should tell him the truth, or just go for the comforting lie.

  Sometimes there was just no way to win.

  12

  You’re a Target

  AS WEAPONS went, sleep was an odd one, but Roan embraced it anyways.

  After he stuffed his face with fast food, Dylan took him home, and Roan almost instantly crashed, sleeping for about twelve hours straight. When he woke up, after an unsettling dream where someone (he didn’t know who—dreams could be frustrating like that) was shot and fell on him, pinning him to the floor, blood seeping down on him like warm rain, he needed a moment to decompress. It woke him up, mainly because he really had to pee.

  He had just done so, and was getting ready to take a shower when there was a brief knock on the door and Dylan peered inside. “Good. I thought I was gonna have to get you up before the cops arrived.”

  See? This was why sleeping was such a risk.

  Dylan led him outside, where he got to see what the vandals had done. They had splattered the house with fake blood (mostly food coloring, but there was piss mixed in), and written “Your dead freek” and “Fags” on the side of his house in foot-high black letters. Beneath them were three roughly parallel lines, deep knife (?) scratches in the wood about six inches long, probably mimicking a cat scratch mark.

  Roan sighed wearily, and said, “Should I be worried that the spelling errors bother me more than the actual message?”

  “You know, when the shock wore off, that’s what I thought. I thought, “Roan’s going to point out the misspelling and lack of apostrophe. Do I know you or what?”

  “I think you have grounds for divorce right there.”

  “I would, if we were properly married. But we have a half-assed civil partnership thing, which isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

  “Ain’t second-class citizenship grand?”

  He didn’t know the cops who arrived to take a report and pictures, a grim-faced woman who was clearly the superior officer, and her rookie partner, who was so new he might as well have had factory packaging still on him. Roan figured that the vandals had hit last night, when they weren’t yet home from the hospital, and since they got back late at night and had no cause to go around the side of the house, they never saw it. Dylan only saw it when he went out to his car.

  The cops had been there for ten minutes, getting their statements and taking pictures, when an unmarked cop car rolled up, and Seb got out from the driver’s side. He was still rocking the vaguely Columbo-esque rumpled trench coat, although it was over a Law and Order-worthy dark suit. He gave the female cop a friendly nod as he walked up, so Roan knew who sold him out.

  Seb glanced at the slurs and said, “At least this is indisputable proof they’re complete fucking morons. I mean, the 'freek’ might be a white-boy attempt to be ghetto, but there’s no excuse for abusing 'you’re’.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Seb gave Dylan a friendly nod. “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, numb. I think I’m getting used to this kind of shit.”

  Seb clapped a friendly hand on Roan’s shoulder, which he didn’t trust. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Seb, it was just he knew exactly what was coming. “Time to bring you into protective custody.”

  Roan brushed his hand off his shoulder. “Which is jail without the charge. No thanks.”

  “Roan, I warned you, and this shit ain’t getting any better. Your home phone number may be unlisted, but clearly the fundamentalist assholes know where you live. Until things lower from DEFCON four, the Chief wants you protected.”

  He shook his head. “You wanna protect the morons from me.”

  “No, that’s just a twofold reason for doing this.”

  He was going to protest, but Dylan grabbed his arm and gave his bicep a little squeeze, his silent way of saying Shut the fuck up. “Hon, it isn’t safe here, not now. We probably should go.”

  “They are not going to chase me out of my home.”

  “No one’s chasing anyone out. Frankly, I’d like to get you out of here, take you into the mountains and cut off communication with the outside world for a week.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Seb said encouragingly.

  “Except it’s not happening,” Roan told him, giving him a deadly look. The one he turned on Dylan was kinder. “You can’t expect me to do that.”

  “I don’t. Well, we don’t really have the money for it right now anyways. But I thin
k a new base of operations might be a good idea, Bruce.”

  “Bruce?”

  “Bruce Wayne,” Seb said. “Right?” Dylan nodded, and ignored the dirty look Roan was giving him.

  He knew an argument he couldn’t win when he heard it. Still, he made a show of thinking it over, although his contempt for the idea was no act—he really didn’t want to give these fucks the impression they’d won even the most minor of battles. After a moment, he said, “We could move in with Scott and Grey. That would be funny.”

  Dylan rolled his eyes. “You just want Grey to beat the shit out of them, and drag all his fellow enforcers with him.”

  “Yeah! That would be hysterical. Can you imagine those toothless pigfuckers realizing they had to fight Grey? They’d have two seconds to shit their pants before they were punched into next Thursday. It’d be worth the admission.”

  “Grey?” Seb wondered.

  “Grey Williams,” Roan told him. “Chief enforcer of the Seattle Falcons.”

  “The hockey team?” At his nod, Seb snorted a surprised laugh. “I’d heard you’d been hanging around with them, but I couldn’t believe it. What is it with you and big Canadians?”

  “Grey’s American.”

  “Still. How’d you get in with those jock boys?”

  “Long story. But they like me because they’re guaranteed at least one good fight if we all go out on the town.”

  “And their goalie has a huge man crush on him,” Dylan added.

  “Only because we have similar reflexes.”

  Seb looked between them curiously. “Whoa, you guys are serious?”

  Dylan gave him a weary look. “Roan only has weird friends.”

  “And Dyl covers the pretentious ones, so we have a good balance.”

  The look Seb was giving them suggested he was about to pull out his Taser and use it. He managed to suppress the urge (for the moment). “I—You know, I got nothin’. You’re all a buncha weirdos.”

  “Quoting Sam the Eagle gets you bonus points.”

  “Huh?” Dylan wondered.

  “Muppet Show.”

  “How young are you?” Seb asked Dylan. Dylan frowned, looking slightly offended. So Seb shook his head, and went on. “Considering the amount of shit you’re in, Roan, I think you need to avoid as many fights as possible.”

  “What shit am I in now?”

  “Garcia’s been suspended for one week, and is going to have to attend a cultural sensitivity class.”

  “Ha.” So Thompson went ahead and reported what had happened. Good on him.

  “Speaking of which, where’s his service weapon?”

  Roan tried on the most innocent expression he had. “How would I know?”

  Dylan sighed heavily. “It’s in the glove compartment. I’ll go get it.”

  “Aww,” Roan said.

  “You have enough guns,” he scolded.

  “The Chief wants to talk to you, probably to chew you a new one. I realize it was a tense situation last night, but what did you think you’d accomplish by putting Garcia in a chokehold and disarming him?”

  “He’s a fuckhead, and he deserved worse.”

  “That isn’t the point,” Dylan said, turning around and facing them. He wasn’t far enough away that he couldn’t hear them. “Yeah, he’s a macho asshole, but so are you. And none of the other people in that hall deserved to be hurt. What if that gun had gone off, or you couldn’t control your temper? Innocent people would have been hurt, and you couldn’t have lived with that, Roan, don’t tell me you could have. I understand that adrenaline was high and everyone was on edge, but that’s when you need to step back and be the more mature person. Think of others, not yourself. You like protecting people, Roan—protect them.” With that, he turned and walked to the car to get Garcia’s gun.

  After a moment, Seb asked, seriously, “How’d you hook up with the Dalai Lama?”

  He could only shrug. He honestly had no idea. Presumably it was proof of irony in the universe.

  They both watched Dylan get his keys out and unlock the car, and once the door was open, Seb turned to him and asked, in a low voice, “You know a judge named Lloyd Garver?”

  He shook his head. “No. Why?” Technically it wasn’t a lie. He’d broken into his house, beat him half to death, but he didn’t really know him.

  “What about a couple of Staties by the names of Carmody and Muhlfeld?”

  “I don’t know any Staties. What’s this about?”

  Seb studied him for a moment, as if trying to determine whether he was lying to him or not. But he caved with an extended exhale, like by giving him this he was acknowledging he was innocent. “Weird case came in, it’s McCluskey’s and Carey’s baby, but McCluskey was telling me about it. Judge Garver got seriously assaulted in his home—they don’t know if he’ll ever be able to use his right arm again—and he told a story about some guy who blamed him for a case that wasn’t his, but his story doesn’t make sense, and it’s changed several times. And he’s never explained why he didn’t shout and alert anyone else in the house.”

  “So he’s lying.”

  “Of course he is, and not well. You’d expect better from a judge. Oh, and a couple of Staties were viciously assaulted the same night—one in his condo, the other in his truck in front of his house—and some stuff at the scene points back to Garver, but the Staties say they barely know him, and they’re lying too. It’s really weird.”

  “So why ask me about it?”

  “The assailant—whom we assume was the same man—was incredibly strong, and seemed to be smart enough to leave the scenes relatively clean. Superstrong and smart, it makes me instantly think of you.”

  “I’m flattered. Sort of.” He was glad he’d been too tired last night (this morning) to rip off his no longer needed bandages, as all he needed to do was raise Seb’s suspicions about him even more.

  Seb shrugged and looked away, probably so he didn’t see how defeated he was. Was he hoping he’d confess and solve the puzzle for him? “With everything that’s going on, a neat solution would have been great.”

  “They’re usually hard to find.”

  “Tell me about it. Oh, yeah.” He now fixed him with a stern look. “Stay out of the burn investigation. I know, it’s your people, all that, but it’s a police investigation, and when we need your help, we’ll let you know.” He let that sink in, and as Dylan came back, carrying the gun butt first, aimed at the ground and held out like he was afraid it might come alive and bite him, Seb asked Roan, “Find out anything?”

  “Not really. I’d just gotten started.”

  Dylan gave Seb the gun, which he took with a grateful nod, and as he checked that the safety was on, Dylan shot him a quizzical and accusatory look. He knew Roan had lied to Seb about not finding anything out, but he wasn’t going to rat him out. He was probably going to lecture him, though.

  As soon as all the cops left and they went back in, Dylan said, “You’re still investigating this, aren’t you?”

  “I just want to hear Bolt’s excuse before I throw him over to the cops.” Roan finished tearing off his bandages, and then went through his closet hastily and chose the T-shirt that said “When I Die, I Am Going To Haunt The Fuck Out Of You People.” That summed up his feelings pretty well.

  Wearily, Dylan sat on the end of the bed. “No good can come of this.”

  “I know. But that applies to everything.”

  “Let me come with you.”

  “No.”

  “Hon—”

  “There’s bound to be crazy protesters out in front of the Church. They probably know me by now, especially if they’re really into the anticat shit, but there’s some odds they have no idea what you look like, and I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.” He changed into black jeans that were baggy enough to accommodate a small gun. He wasn’t going to wear one, mainly because Dylan was watching everything he did, and if he went for a gun he’d insist on coming with him. But there was
also the truth that he didn’t honestly need one. What was he scared of? What could take him now? In some perverse way, Roan wanted to find out—he wanted to stand on a bombing range and find out what it would take to kill him and the damn beast inside him. According to what little Holden had bothered to tell him about the showdown at the snuff house, the ones who ran escaped (generally), while the ones who stayed to fight probably wouldn’t be turning up any time soon. Which indicated they never got a decent head shot. But getting a head shot on a rapidly moving target was a specialized skill, even if you were expecting it to happen.

  “I’m not afraid of being seen with you. Why do I care what those intolerant idiots think?”

  “Because they could target you. You’ve been hurt enough by fuckheads after me. They want me, they can come after me alone.”

  “Just because they see me doesn’t mean they’ll know me. I doubt they’re the type that come to Silver. I don’t even have a Facebook page—how would they ever identify me?”

  “Your friends have pictures of you with them on their Facebook pages, yeah? It wouldn’t be hard to figure you out. If they can find me, they can find you.”

  Dylan considered this with a grimace. He wanted to argue it, but the freaks had found Roan, which the graffiti obviously proved. “You know, I made my choice. I knew what I was getting into. I knew the risks.”

  “Yeah, but can you blame me for wanting to shield you from that?”

  He stood up with a sigh. “No, I suppose not.” He then put his arms around Roan and hugged his back as he removed a jacket from the closet. Dylan slipped his arms beneath his shirt so he could touch his skin, a gesture both comforting and sensual. He kissed his neck, and said, “If you cause trouble or get yourself hurt, I will kick your ass.”

  “Some Buddhist you are.”

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t get mad.”

  True enough. And really, he knew better than to push it. Dylan was Buddhist, but he wasn’t perfect.

  He drove to the Church wondering which scenario was worse: Bolt had no idea anyone was selling drugs at his church; he knew but he didn’t care; he knew but he was getting a cut; he was selling it. He was either an idiot (well intentioned or born that way) or a completely evil bastard. You’d think idiot would be better, but hadn’t politics proved that wasn’t always the case? The best-case scenario here was drugs weren’t being sold at the church on a regular basis, that there were floaters who would crash their little infected meet and greets, but Hardy seemed to imply the territory was taken, full stop. Hardy had absolutely no reason to lie about such a thing.