by Andrea Speed
Well, Roan was feeling like shit, so he went ahead and took a nibble. Holden was right—it really wasn’t bad. It tasted like an actual brownie, just with a thicker texture and a slight aftertaste. It didn’t make him feel like vomiting, which was a minor triumph. “Hmm.”
“See, what did I tell you?” Holden came back from the kitchen, carrying a blue ice pack and a plate containing a sandwich, with a bottle of mint green tea clamped firmly under his arm. As Roan continued to eat the brownie, Holden put the plate, tea, and ice bag on the coffee table in front of him. “Mint’s good for your stomach, so drink up.”
He eyed him warily. “You have mother hen aspects about you, you know.”
“Father hen,” Holden corrected, flinging himself down on the other end of the couch, and picking up his half-empty bag of microwave popcorn. His television was on, the sound down to levels that Roan could hear, but he was pretty sure Holden couldn’t. “It’s a hard habit to break.”
That was what Holden meant when he referred to “his boys”—when he was just your average street whore, he had still looked after a bunch of younger, smaller, or greener street kids (they weren’t all hookers, but most). Street kids often glommed together simply due to safety in numbers, but there was always a leader, someone who looked after the others, be they tougher, smarter, or more experienced than the rest. Holden fit all aspects of the bill, and seemed to have taken his job quite seriously. Even now, he was trying to protect kids he didn’t even know.
“You watch The Soup?”
Holden glanced at the set, as if double checking, as he grabbed his remote and hit the pause button. The fucker had a DVR. “Yep. It’s funny, and allows me to keep vaguely up to date on reality shows that some of my clients seem to love, don’t ask me why. But I must admit some do have a horrific train-wreck quality about them.”
“I don’t know about other people, but I have enough horrific train wrecks in my life.” Roan popped the rest of the brownie segment in his mouth before reaching for the ice pack and holding it to his head.
“Oh hon, I know. I’m a spectator. Which leads me to think we have another train wreck to discuss.”
He couldn’t deny that. He explained what he’d discovered in Jefferson Heights, and how he was afraid the cops wouldn’t treat it as much of anything. “Do you have any contacts in that part of the city?”
Holden considered that with the barest hint of a smile on his face. “I have friends all over, especially in low places. What do you want?”
“I want to know who might be bragging about cat killing. He was using an abandoned building as a tannery, which tells me he can’t do it where he lives for some reason.”
“Or he knows better than to shit where he eats.”
“Yeah, could be. But I find it hard to believe a man who appeared to be making them into skins would keep quiet about his hobby.”
“Isn’t that rule number one for a serial killer?”
“Typically. But since he’s not, in his mind or the mind of the legal system, killing people, he may not think of himself in that way. Hell, he may think he’s doing the community a service.”
“Well, according to Pat Robertson, infecteds are destroying America.” He paused briefly. “Or was it gays? Foreigners? Women? Hell if I can remember. What month is it?”
“Let’s just say all of the above and move on. Do you think you can help me?”
Holden nodded, now all business. “No problem. I’ll get the word out I’m looking for a cat killer, someone good at his job. I assume you want him alive?”
He wasn’t kidding. That was one of the most disturbing things about Holden. No, he didn’t judge, and that was refreshing, but he didn’t judge at all, and that could also at times be very unsettling. Not that he didn’t have a code, but it was a very limited one: no kids, no innocents, no one who wasn’t there by choice. Everyone else was fair game. Although, to be honest, that was a pretty good code, especially if you believed in karma.
“Yes.” Roan wanted to make sure they had the right guy, and Roan knew he would know the man if he met him. He would smell him, smell the trace of a scent he’d left at the murder scene, smell a scent of death on him that no amount of soap or time could wash away. Predators knew other predators.
Holden simply nodded again, looking in his microwave popcorn bag, probably for some remaining popped kernels. “You know, I took today off as a mental health day. I figured I’d just watch TV all day and maybe sleep for twelve hours. Best-laid plans, huh?”
“I thought I’d be trolling Capitol Hill, looking for a missing man.” His stomach had settled, the pain in his head fading to a dull roar, so Roan reached for the sandwich.
“Oh, a case? Can I help?”
“Only if you want to pass a photo around, ask if anyone’s seen him.”
“Goddamn, I hardly have to get off my ass for that. Can do.”
Roan took a bite of the sandwich, and marveled. He was expecting a simple tuna on wheat, even though his nose had told him to expect a sharp tang of vinegar, but what Holden had made him was a tuna sandwich with fresh vinaigrette, pickles, lettuce, and pepperoncinis for crunch and zest. “Holy shit,” he said impolitely, through a mouthful of food. “This is the best tuna sandwich I’ve ever had.”
“I don’t do normal,” Holden said, reaching for his can of Coke Zero. “Either I’m spectacular or I’m horrendous, but I never settle for the middle. Anyone can be average.” He said it with a little irony, but very little. And having seen him in action, it was easy to believe.
Since Roan was busy eating, Holden turned The Soup back on, and they both ended up watching it as Roan realized how surreal things had become, and the pot was kicking in, big-time.
The funny thing about massive pain was the sudden absence of pain was almost orgasmic. Both the Percocet and the pot finally got together for a conference, and decided to make the hurt go away. Relief prickled along his scalp, giving him goose bumps as the ice pack made him shiver, and he still felt a calming warmth in his arms, hands, and legs. Suddenly Holden’s couch seemed like the most comfortable thing in the world.
Holden caught the shiver, and asked, “You okay?”
“I’m fucking brilliant. How strong was that pot?”
“Mavis only uses the best ingredients. She says that’s the key to a great dish; great ingredients trump a sloppy execution.” He balled up the empty popcorn bag and tossed it toward his kitchenette. It bounced off the countertop and hit the floor. Holden shrugged at his failure, although it wasn’t clear where he was aiming.
“You know, I never ask how you are,” Roan said. It finally occurred to him, possibly because a secession of pain always made him chatty. He wasn’t sure why, but he was pretty sure this was how Dylan knew when he’d been hitting the pills.
Holden looked at him with genuine surprise. It was so rare to see a genuine emotion on Holden’s face he hardly knew how to react to it. “Why would you? If it was worth mentioning, I’d say something.”
“Would you?”
“If it was important.”
He frowned at him. “You’re lying. You don’t give any of yourself away.”
Holden looked at him with what may have been a genuine small smile. “There’s nothing to give away. I get so exhausted being what people want me to be that when I’m on my own, I enjoy being nothing to no one. You have no idea how tiring it is always being someone else.”
“I think I might,” Roan said. He was thinking mainly of how hard it was to walk the line sometimes, between being a Human and being the expression of a virus that ruled his life. The cop and the lawbreaker, the Human and the animal, the outsider and the… pariah. Okay, no, that last one didn’t work. At least he knew what he meant.
“Yeah, maybe,” Holden reached over and grabbed the ice pack, leaning in enough that Roan thought he might try and kiss him. But he behaved himself, and didn’t. “You went ahead and took some pills, didn’t you?”
“My skull felt like it was going
to split open from the pressure.”
He grimaced as he stood, returning to the kitchen with the ice pack. “Go ahead and stretch out, sleep it off, I’ll call Dylan and let him know you’re here.”
Roan laughed. “Like hell. I feel great now.”
“You’re way too fucked-up to drive.”
“No I’m not.”
“This isn’t an argument,” Holden said, and held up some keys. It took Roan a moment to realize they were his keys.
Roan instantly reached into his coat pockets, only to find that yes, his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him—his keys were gone. And he’d never felt them being lifted. Hell, when did Holden even have the chance to do that? “Motherfucker! How’d you get my keys?”
“Oh please, hon, I’m a professional hooker. I could take your wallet, fill it full of junk mail, and replace it without you being any wiser.” He palmed the keys and dropped them in the pocket of his sweatpants. “You sleep this off. I don’t know if it was the crime scene or what, but you look like motherfucking hell. Take five before you drop.”
It was the drugs, they made him feel good, and that seemed to switch off his internal filter, because he blurted, “I might have a brain tumor.” He didn’t mean to say it, it just came out.
Holden had been coming back into the living room, but he froze where he was, and the look on his face was once again genuine, one of naked surprise that made him look oddly Human. Not that he wasn’t, but Holden had such a slick awareness that he always seemed better than Human. Now he was just a man, and a startled one at that. Maybe if Roan wasn’t so wasted, he could appreciate that he was getting a rare glimpse of the real Holden, a person almost no one ever saw.
“Are you serious?”
“I hafta tell Dylan, but I don’t know how. All I do is disappoint or scare him, and here I am, doing it again. Why doesn’t he leave me? I’m only gonna kill him, one way or another, and I don’t want to hurt him anymore.”
Holden looked genuinely stunned, and Roan suddenly wished he had a camera. Holden then dry washed his face, giving himself a moment to process what had been said and get over his shock, and came at it again. “Okay, first of all, he loves you, and I suspect he’s kind of a low-level masochist, ’cause he hasn’t walked away from your drama. Second, hurt him? Who has the fucking brain tumor? It ain’t him. So stop being a macho asshole and just tell him.”
“Like it’s that easy.”
“Fine. Get wasted and tell him. Everything’s easier when you’re wasted.”
“Apparently.”
After another moment, where Holden briefly paced in a circle, he said, “Try Valium. I’ve noticed Valium has a tendency to make people say things they normally wouldn’t say.”
Roan was going to ask him how he knew this, but decided not to. Also, was Holden genuinely rattled? He seemed to be, kind of, as much as Holden could get rattled. Had he upset him? Why was he upset? Well, maybe it was kind of a big deal, announcing you might have a brain tumor. To Roan, it was just one more damned thing in a life full of damned things. “I might not have one,” he offered, aware that seemed like too little too late now.
Holden gave him a hollow-eyed look, like he was staring at Roan from the bottom of a well. Or maybe that was just the drugs kicking in big-time. “Maybe, but you know it would explain a lot.”
Roan shrugged, as he could only shrug for the moment. He was so tired. Oh, he felt better than he had in ages, but he was still ludicrously weary, and his arms and legs felt like they’d been replaced with lead replicas. Maybe Holden was right about him needing to sleep this off.
Maybe he could sleep it all off, the day, the week, the year. Rip Van Winkle probably had the right idea.
31
Diggers of Ditches Everywhere
CONSIDERING the day he was having, the phone call from Holden wasn’t really surprising.
Dylan had already intercepted a phone call from Seb, who said Roan wasn’t answering his cell, and he figured Roan was pissed off at him. Seb didn’t say what had gone on, but he asked Dylan to pass on a message, that the Chief wanted to see him as soon as humanly possible. As soon as Dylan hung up, he asked the air, “What did you do now, Ro?” He might as well ask the air, as he was just as likely to get an answer.
He’d come home—well, their temporary home—to change and catch a quick shower before reporting early for work. Alex had a sick kid and couldn’t work her shift, so he’d agreed to cover it. It was to be nice to her; he really wasn’t crazy about Silver or its clientele, but he knew he had to be there, to avoid those assholes after Roan.
Dylan couldn’t deny that, every now and then, he resented being the partner of such a lightning-rod figure, but he resented the people who hated Roan even more. Yes, he was controversial, outspoken, and sometimes went out of his way to offend and challenge people, but his heart was in a good place. He wasn’t trying to harm anyone; Roan only wanted to help or, at his worst, hit back for someone unable or unwilling to do so. Although sometimes Dylan worried that he was becoming a vigilante, especially when teamed up with the morally dubious Holden. Still, that was Roan’s decision to make, if he wanted to go that path, and he had no right to judge him on that. Although he was kind of dying to.
But Dylan couldn’t help but worry more about Roan than get mad at him, as much as he might have deserved it. Roan just didn’t look well, and he’d been hitting the painkillers pretty hard. Dylan was fairly sure he was taking them because he was in actual pain, not because he was an addict who needed to keep his levels up to keep from getting the shakes. He hated the idea that he was in that much pain constantly, and he hated it even more that Roan wouldn’t tell him about it. But Roan was one of those macho types, and he seemed to need to get to the breaking point before admitting anything like that. Dylan felt lucky. He had his art, his yoga, his family, his temple, his slightly bizarre friends. Roan had his pills, his punching bag, and his extremely bizarre friends, which didn’t seem like an equitable distribution of helpful resources.
He was on his way out the door when he got Holden’s call. Holden told him Roan had come from a pretty bad crime scene with a migraine attack, and had taken some pills and zonked out on his couch. “Gonna let him sleep it off here,” Holden said. “He’s in no shape to drive.”
Dylan almost said, You could drive him home, but didn’t. This was probably innocent, and he knew very well Roan’s migraine attacks could be violent, ugly things. But Holden could have brought him home; he just didn’t want to.
Still, nothing was going to happen, not while Roan had a migraine. If Holden wanted to be near him, fine, Dylan knew it wasn’t a contest. (And if it was, he’d won. So, too bad for Holden.) He told him to have Roan call him when he woke up, because Dylan wasn’t going to pass on Seb’s message secondhand. Also, he wanted to know exactly what Ro had done to get himself in shit with the Chief.
Since it wasn’t quite the evening shift, when things swung into high gear, Silver was kind of slow, leaving Dylan lots of time to think. Hadn’t Doctor Rosenberg left a lot of messages? And saying nothing, which was fairly unusual for her. She’d basically just asked for Roan to call her, and when Dylan picked up the phone, she said the same thing to him. Have that bastard call me. This wasn’t good. Something was wrong with him, wasn’t it? And Roan wasn’t telling him, probably because he was a macho asshole. Fuck! You know, getting involved with an infected, you should expect health problems above all, but somehow, being with Roan, he’d learn to expect death threats above everything else.
There was a middle-aged man, doughy in that typical way (probably thirty pounds overweight), in a fairly cheap-looking charcoal suit and navy tie sitting at the end of the bar, who’d been there since Dylan had started his shift. At first he’d shot Dylan surreptitious glances, but now he was openly glaring at him from beneath dark eyebrows salted with dandruff, his thin lips curling faintly into a sneer. Angry drunk? Dylan was sure the next time he ordered a drink, he’d cut him off. Angry drunks were worse
than sloppy drunks, but frankly all drunks were pretty bad.
When the guy waved him over, Dylan went down to him to quietly and politely tell him there were no more drinks for him here, hoping to avoid a scene. But the man’s pudgy hand whipped out, snake fast, and grabbed his wrist, revealing he wasn’t drunk at all, just seething. “I know you,” he grated in a voice like his lungs were full of gravel. “You were with that freak, that infected asshole who wants to infect everyone.”
His sausage fingers were digging into Dylan’s wrist with surprising strength, enough that he couldn’t pull his hand away. He instantly thought about reaching under the bar with his free hand and pulling out the ice pick. “Let go of my arm.”
“Fuck you, you infected piece of shit.” the man snarled, keeping his voice low but full of a surprising amount of hate. “You spittin’ in our drinks, huh? Trying to infect us?”
The worst part was this guy actually believed the shit he was spewing. Dylan could see it, and wasn’t even sure how you responded to this kind of insanity. And he should be an expert, considering everything he put up with due to his brother’s schizophrenia.
The man was grabbed by the back of his neck, but instead of it being Julio, the huge busboy who often passed for security, it was a totally unexpected figure: Tank. He sat on the stool next to the man and got uncomfortably close to his ear. “You feel that? You don’t want me to sever your spinal cord and leave you a vegetable, do you?”
The man was now sitting stiffly, his brown eyes bulging out of his head. Tank had something in his hand that he was pressing up against the nape of the man’s neck, but Dylan couldn’t see anything. “N-no.”
“Okay then. Let him go.” The man did, and Dylan yanked his arm away. “Good boy. Now you’re gonna take out your wallet, leave a tip, and get the fuck outta here before my buddies show up and help me rip you to pieces, you pig-fucking piece of shit.”
