by Andrea Speed
“Okay. The thing is, no other infected blood that we’ve tested reacts this way. If we dose a sample, and give a second dose, it reacts with the same intensity.”
“So my virus is smarter?”
“A simplistic way to put it, but yeah. It has an adaptive immune response, basically. Part of what makes you unique is the symbiotic nature of the virus and you.”
“Symbiotic?”
“It gives you things, and you give it things. In this case, it’s learned to mimic an immune response.”
Was that even possible? He wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to hear It is for you, freak-o. “Does this help us at all, or did you just want to clue me in on my freakishness?”
“It opens the door for finding an antidote.”
He felt a brief acid burn in his stomach. “An antidote to what?”
“The weapon, the fake lepidysine. If your virus can tell the difference, the others should be able to with proper tuning. We just need to isolate what your virus creates to negate the pseudo-hormone, and synthesize it for mass production.”
“That’ll take years.”
“Probably. But at least we know we have the option. And that you don’t have to worry about getting exposed to the drug.”
“I wasn’t worried.” He wasn’t; he didn’t know why. Maybe because he loved drugs too much to be afraid of them. “Do you think… do you think there’s a cure? Maybe somewhere in my blood?”
“You mean a cure for the virus?”
“Yeah.”
She was silent for a long time. He could hear static on the line, some kind of electrical interference that was probably in the lab itself. Finally, she said, “It’s doubtful, but now you have me curious. I wonder what would happen if your virus met the standard lion virus.”
“Are we hoping for Thunderdome here? Two viruses enter, one virus leaves?”
That made her snicker. “I don’t think so, although that’d be cool. I think the most we could hope for is full integration.”
“What, you mean like I have?”
“Yes. Rather than a destructive relationship between body and virus, people could live with the virus more harmoniously.”
He considered that, and tasted metal in his mouth, his heart starting to race. “And have a bunch of people who could shatter skulls with one punch? Fuck no. Forget I ever asked.”
“What? What in the sam hill are you talking about? You shattered someone’s skull?”
“Let’s just say there’s probably a good reason I’m one in six million and leave it at that, okay? Thanks for the call.”
“Don’t you dare hang—” she said, but he hung up the phone before she could finish the sentence.
So he was the potential savior of the cats. Was he equally the slaughterer of the Human race? He would be, if somehow Rosenberg could work out how to fully integrate the virus for everyone. Normal Humans would have no chance against people like him.
Did it matter? Where were his loyalties? He’d never actually been purely Human, he’d always been a half-breed. So why did he feel any tug of nostalgia toward the normals? They were the lucky ones. Or were they?
More sleep was impossible, so he got up and started looking through Dylan’s coat pockets, seeking any information he and Holden may have gathered on Hockney.
He was sure it had been Holden’s idea, and he should be mad at him, but Holden was smart enough to know that potentially endangering Dylan would earn his wrath, so he’d look out for Dyl. Roan found a slip of paper with an address hastily scrawled on it, and the initials PH. Who else but Pierce Hockney? He lived in Kent, so it was a drive, but not as bad as it could have been. He changed into more appropriate clothes and took off, leaving Dylan a note on the nightstand, simply telling him, “Thanks.” He’d have to decide what he was thanking him for.
It was a gray and miserable day, and a gray and miserable drive. KEXP wasn’t even playing anything good. He should have known then what he was in for.
Hockney’s house was an unassuming manufactured home at the end of a cul de sac, full of similar-looking homes. The only reason his stood out at all was due to the fact that there weren’t many flowers, and there was no sign of kids. Others had a Big Wheel in the front yard, a basketball hoop off to one side, a wading pool, riots of azaleas or rhododendrons, but he had nothing except the few mugho pines and junipers that the original landscapers must have put in. Not much of a homebody. Being single made things easier, as Roan didn’t have to worry about dealing with someone’s wife or kids.
He was halfway up the muddy lawn when he caught the scent of blood. “No,” he muttered under his breath. The door was shut, so he had to open it, but it was unlocked, and he used the sleeve of his coat to cover his hand so he didn’t leave fingerprints.
The idiot chatter of the television greeted him, stuck on a college basketball game (presumably a repeat, as he didn’t think anyone was playing a game right now). The man he presumed to be Hockney was sitting on his couch in a torn University of South Carolina T-shirt and stained underwear, his legs splayed and his head back as if he’d fallen asleep while watching the tube. Except he had a neat little red hole in the center of his forehead, like an empty third eye, and Roan could see the chunky reddish-brown splatter of blood and brain matter that had soaked into the carpet behind the sofa.
If this was Pierce, he’d been dead for hours, and had been killed in what appeared to be cold-blooded execution style, by someone Pierce obviously wasn’t afraid of, or at least wasn’t when he should have been.
As Roan took out his phone to call 9-1-1, he was willing to bet he’d hit another dead end. No pun intended.
18
Fathom
IT WAS the start of a wonderful day. It always was when you spent an hour at a crime scene in handcuffs.
The Kent cops didn’t seem to like him. The lead detective on the scene, a guy named Guldbrandsen, the one who had the cuffs slapped on him out of what seemed to be pure malice, kept giving him the stinkeye, and kept asking him for the full story of what he’d found and why he’d come here, clearly thinking he was lying.
As Roan sat in the back of a squad car, the door open so he could sit half in and half out of the car, waiting for this idiocy to end, an Asian beat cop so young he barely looked old enough to be served in a bar came over to lean on the car. “You’re McKichan, aren’t you? I read that article about you. Hell of a picture, man.”
“So I noticed. Can you tell them who I am so they can get the cuffs off me?”
The kid, whose name was Park, grimaced painfully. “I think they know who you are, that’s why you have the cuffs on.”
Yeah, that figured. Why’d he ever think differently?
Finally they released him from the cuffs, and he was let go. They no longer thought he was responsible for murdering Hockney, or they did think he was but couldn’t prove it. Guldbrandsen told him not to leave the state, and while Roan wondered who would be stupid enough to murder someone and call the cops, he remembered he might have actually arrested one of those people once.
No one told him anything, although his own perusal of the scene before the cops arrived had told him whoever did this was very professional, and didn’t even try to make it look like a robbery. (Of course, the guy was a slob, so it could have been a subtle robbery.) He hadn’t hidden the drugs in obvious areas, but Roan hadn’t even smelled any. Although, to be fair, over the smell of death, blood, unwashed laundry, and feet, he might not have been able to pick up the scent of the drugs. But he wasn’t picking up that overwhelming chemical smell, which he was sure he would if tainted burn had been here or had been made here. Perhaps the chemicals were so dangerous they made it elsewhere; that would make sense. Clever meth cookers did just that.
Roan needed caffeine, so he drove to a nearby coffee place, and sat in the car in the parking lot and called Holden. He was beginning to think something was wrong—four rings and no response? Weird—but before he could fully panic, Holden picked up and a
nswered with a sleepy, “Yeah?”
“How’d you get Pierce’s address?”
“How’d you know it wasn’t Dylan?”
“’Cause it wasn’t.”
He made an amused noise, and Roan could hear the smile in his voice as he said, “Pierce sent a proxy to meet you, but he didn’t admit to being a proxy. So I took his phone and ID, and used a reverse directory to find him.”
“Just like that?”
“You really want the gory details?” Holden sounded so pleased with himself he was almost purring. That was the thing about Holden: he liked having power over other people. As much as being a hooker took power away from you, Holden managed to maintain a great deal by being smarter than anyone thought. He liked people thinking he was a dumb hooker, so he could revel in his triumph over them. It was a motivating factor in much of what he did. He came off like he didn’t care much of the time, but honestly he was a budding supervillain.
“No, I’ll just imagine and hope I’m wrong. So who was the proxy?”
“Joe Cullen. He lives downtown, in the Pennington apartment complex, 12-C.”
“Is it too much to hope you memorized this?”
“What, I don’t get to keep a little souvenir?”
“Look, this may have turned dangerous. I just paid a visit to Hockney, and I found him dead. He was murdered execution style, and I’d say he’d been dead for a couple of hours.”
“Shit.” Now Holden sounded more sober and less high on his own cleverness. “You don’t think there’s a connection, do you? I mean between me taking Joe’s stuff and Pierce ending up dead?”
“No, but I really don’t like it. I’m gonna go check on Cullen now, and I want you to watch yourself. I can come visit afterward, or you can go hang around with some of your leather friends.”
“Actually Doug’s in town. I was gonna go visit him in a couple hours.”
Ah, the airline pilot who liked being tied up and whipped. “Maybe you should go visit him early.”
“I could hang out in the hotel cafe, get a mimosa. Sounds good. Call me when you find anything out.”
“Will do. If you get a bad feeling about anything, call me.” Not that he had much to worry about with Holden, he could take care of himself. As long as they weren’t cops setting upon him with Tasers and nightsticks.
He sat drinking his frothy mocha, which tasted more like cocoa than anything else, but gave him a good hit of caffeine. What did this all mean? So there was a drug out there, deliberately killing infecteds. Less than twenty-four hours after he got the name of the guy who was distributing the drug on church grounds, the guy was found dead. Was there a mole in the church? Did someone pass the information on to whoever was behind it, and they had the guy killed before Roan could confront him? That might play in a bad crime thriller, but usually no pawn had that much knowledge of the top man to be worth the problem of killing. Usually the good drug ops ran like the NSA, with no lower peon knowing any more than they needed to know.
In that case, was it unrelated and coincidental? He really didn’t like coincidences, especially violent ones. Could it have been a warning for him? A “back off, infected”? Pawns were made to be sacrifices; that’s why they were called pawns.
He went to Cullen’s apartment, a very standard one that was just starting to show signs of going to seed, and Roan caught a glimpse of a man on the ground floor who was starting to step out of his place, but as soon as he saw Roan, he stared, and then suddenly jumped back inside the apartment and slammed the door. Who the hell was that? Somebody he’d arrested once? Actually, maybe. Roan didn’t remember them all, but he’d discovered they generally remembered him. One guy who was actually complacent about it told him he remembered him because of his weird hair color (of course), and the fact that Roan had “the eeriest eyes I have ever seen.” He didn’t know if that was a compliment or an insult, and never asked for clarification. Some things you were better off not knowing.
Cullen wasn’t home, and Roan was careful to sniff, to see if he could pick up a scent of blood, death, or gunpowder. He didn’t, so assumed the guy had a more standard day job or something. Rather than leave a note, he left, determined to return later. If he wasn’t home then, he just might see how good his lock-picking skills were.
Back in the car, he called Dropkick, who picked up on the second ring. “What now, Angus?” she sighed.
“Need a favor,” he admitted, trying to win some honesty points. “I was just at a homicide scene in Kent, victim named Pierce Hockney. I need any kind of info you have on it when you get it, okay? This is important.”
“And illegal as fuck.”
“Granted. But I’m trying to track down the makers of the tainted burn, and he was in the loop. I’m wondering if his death is related.”
She paused long enough that he knew he had piqued her homicide detective interest. “To the burn trade? Or something else?”
“My mind is open at this point.”
“What do you know? Share.”
“I would if I could. All I know is the chemical in the burn is way too sophisticated to have been accidental or a byproduct of production.”
“I’ve heard rumors of that. So it’s confirmed?”
“Very much so.”
She sighed wearily. “How much easier would our lives be if this was all accidental?”
“So much.” After a polite pause, he asked, “How are you doing?”
“Okay. I’d ask you how you are, but I heard what happened at the campus the other day, so I’m not gonna.”
“Coward.”
“I am. And busy. Can I call you back?”
“Chief coming over?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Right. Good luck.”
They all needed some luck right now. Especially infecteds, but that was probably a given.
He was looking up what he could on Joe Cullen on his laptop when he got a call. He was hoping it was Dropkick, but it was a caller he hadn’t expected. “Hey, Roan, what’re you doing right now?”
It was Scott. He looked at his phone doubtfully, even though Scott couldn’t see him, and said, “Working on something. Why?”
“Join us for lunch. We’re at the Tiki Hut, and Grey is determined to get you into the gym and teach some of the younger defensemen how to fight properly.”
He sighed heavily. “I can’t. I’ll say it a million times: I can’t spar with Humans anymore. I fractured someone’s skull with one punch, and I was trying to go easy on him. I can’t judge my strength anymore.” He didn’t say that when he meant to go hard, he put his fist right through a skull. It wasn’t something he liked to think about.
“I’ll grant you, that’s pretty bad.”
“No shit.”
“But you can still join us for lunch.”
“It’s a nice offer, but—”
“You owe me. Come by.”
Okay, yes, he did, but he never thought he’d call him on it, or at least not in such a meager way. As it was, his trolling for Joe wasn’t turning up anything useful, so he had little to do but wait for Cullen to show up, or go grill Bolt again, but he had a feeling that was less than useless. If there was a mole in the church, then he had to think of a way to play him (or her), make them expose themselves. He was just going to have to think of a way to make that happen.
The Tiki Hut was one of those deliberately cheesy restaurants that wanted to seem fun and camp, but tried way too damn hard. There was lots of fake dried-grass fringe, little figures of hula girls and boys, small tiki head decorations mimicking the larger one that sat in the corner of the dining room, wearing oversized novelty sunglasses and a multicolored lei around its nonexistent neck. The staff all wore Hawaiian shirts, and half looked mortified by it.
At a large table near the back of the room, Grey, Scott, Tank, and Jeff were sharing what looked like a platter of pineapple chicken and some kind of salad, and while Roan kind of expected it, no one was drinking beer. There seemed to be a preponderan
ce of water, tea, and soda. Must have been a game tonight, or just a practice skate.
As he neared the table, Scott stood up, and said, “Hey, just in time to help me get a new pitcher from the bar.”
“They don’t have waiters for that?” Roan replied, but he knew that this was a ruse for some reason.
“You make a guest work? That’s just rude,” Tank said.
Roan gave them a sarcastic wave as he walked past, and the guys all waved back, except for Jeff, who for some reason gave him the black power salute. Maybe he meant it as just a power salute, or it was a gesture he just wasn’t familiar with.
At the bar, which was covered with the faux bamboo that the rest of the place was lousy with, the attractive dark-haired, dark-eyed bartender instantly appeared, eying Scott like a tasty snack. He asked for another pitcher of ice tea with lemon and lime slices, and while she agreed readily, she added, “You could have asked your server, you know.”
“Yeah, but I wanted to stretch my legs a bit,” he said, as a new customer appeared at the end of the bar, and the woman had to wander away.
Roan looked at him. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
Scott gave him a look he could only describe as melancholy. “I wanted to make sure you were all right. Last time we saw you, you were in pretty shitty shape.”
He nodded in agreement. “It wasn’t a shining moment for me. But I’m trying to hold it together.”
“Look, I’m not gonna preach at you, ’cause I’m the last person that should, but you need to get some help.”
Roan gave him a modified stinkeye. “Help for what?”
“Whatever’s going on with you. I’m guessing depression, which I know all about. I spent most of my teen years splitting my time between hockey and therapy.”
Roan studied him warily. Scott was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt (not hockey related, unless you considered Molson beer a vital part of hockey), and looked more normal than he’d ever seen him, and it was almost weird. The same was true of Grey, who was wearing an Under Armour shirt as opposed to a T-shirt, and since it was essentially sleeveless, it showed off not only how well muscled his arms were, like limbs of sculpted concrete, but a new tattoo on his right bicep (it looked like a rose). Tank was wearing a mustard yellow T-shirt that had on it, in big white letters, “I Kick Ass For Free,” which Roan was willing to bet team members had bought him. Tank always looked odd—again, like the French Canadian jock Lane Staley—but he still seemed more at home than almost anyone else, even the poor employees in their Hawaiian shirts. Again, how did he end up with these weirdos? “So you’re a depressive too? Why? You’re a gorgeous bi jock—the world is made for your kind. Minus the bi, but keep that on the down low and you’re golden.”
