by Andrea Speed
“What happened?”
Scott had another teaspoon of ice cream, delaying an answer. “He tried to kill himself, ended up in the hospital.”
“He lived?”
“Yeah. But I never saw him again. I tried, but… he didn’t wanna see me.” Scott let out a long exhale that could have been a sigh if he wasn’t so wasted. “And once I started getting into semiprofessional hockey, it just seemed easier to have anonymous hookups once in a while, with guys who didn’t know me or my name, and have relationships with women. It was easier.”
“And better for your career.” Holden wasn’t trying to sound bitchy, but he sort of did.
Scott either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Yeah. But as much as I think I’d like to have a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the same time, having one relationship is hard enough. I don’t know how anyone juggles two. It seems exhausting.”
“My clients manage okay, but I guess I’m not exactly the traditional boyfriend. I don’t demand they remember my birthday or take out the garbage.”
“When is your birthday?”
“Why?”
“I’m curious.”
Why would he tell him that? But why had he told him anything so far? The pot was making him chatty. “November 14. What’s yours?”
“January 28.”
“Ah, I missed it.”
“Nothin’ to miss. I had a black eye from getting a stick in the face, so I just got wasted with the guys. They took me to a strip club, but I found it weirdly depressing.”
“They are weirdly depressing, but usually you have to be sober to notice.”
They finished the joint and then the ice cream, falling silent as they watched the show with halfhearted, stoned attention. In spite of trying to tamp it down, Holden yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Damn it, I need to get going.”
“On what?”
“I’m finishing an open case for Roan. I caught a break, something happened down near the Marriott, and I know a lot of people there.”
“So you’re a detective too.”
“No, I just play one on TV. I don’t have a license, which I know Roan wants me to get. Maybe sometime.” Holden didn’t add that he only intended to get one if Roan died, and he had no idea why he’d decided that. A tribute to Roan? Roan wouldn’t be around to enjoy it, he would be beyond caring, so why the sentimental gesture? But that was just it—it was pure sentiment and nothing more. Still, Holden supposed he owed Roan for something, even if it was just for all the fun and unwelcome glimpses into his own humanity.
“So am I a hobby?”
Maybe it was the drugs, but Holden really didn’t understand the question. “Huh?”
“You said having sex for free was like a plumber unclogging drains for a hobby. So am I a hobby, or can I expect a bill in the mail?”
Oh yeah, he had said that, hadn’t he? His brain felt fuzzy, and he really wanted a nap. He probably ought to take a nap before he headed out anyways. “I’ve told you, if I don’t ask for the money in advance, I’m screwed. You’re not getting a bill.”
“Okay, so then… I am a hobby?”
“No.” Holden paused for a long time, trying to get his sluggish synapses to fire. “I don’t know what you are.” That was true, but didn’t he have his suspicions?
Holden was disappointed in himself, because he knew something was happening to him. He used to go through a bottle of gin maybe once a month or every two months, and now he was replacing it almost every week. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he knew he was on the downward slide. And maybe he was just a little bit… lonely. Oh, he cringed to think of it, he valued his privacy and alone time, which you never got on the street, but… fuck, maybe it was a symptom of getting older. Sometimes he hated being alone, and gin made him forget, or at least not care. Was he really that pathetic? Oh, probably. It was embarrassing, but some people had it a lot worse.
If he had to theorize how he and Scott had ended up here right now, lust would be his first bet, and loneliness would be the second. Oh sure, Scott usually had a girlfriend, but he could never be completely honest with her, or with anyone else. Lying all the time had the side effect of leaving you lonely. Maybe that was Holden’s problem too.
Only too aware of the painful silence between them, Holden added, “You’re not my boyfriend. I don’t want a boyfriend.”
“I don’t want one either. So we’re cool, right?”
He nodded, pretending he hadn’t noticed how quickly Scott had said that, like he was all too eager to go along with whatever he said. Trying to make him happy, or suddenly nervous about all of this? “We’re cool.” He stretched, trying to work the kinks out of his back (Scott was a big believer in a firm mattress), and suddenly felt a kiss on his chest. Holden scowled at him, but almost laughed. “What the hell are you doing?”
Scott gave him a half-grin that was all stony playfulness. “I just felt like doing that.” Scott then crushed his mouth against his, both aggressive and strangely tentative at the same time. He tasted of pot and ice cream, but mostly ice cream. It was kind of nice. “I felt like doing that too,” he said, kissing his chin and his neck.
“I don’t have time for this,” Holden complained, as Scott continued to kiss him, softly and slowly, down his throat and chest. Scott’s hands slid slowly down his sides, while Holden had a hand on Scott’s back, feeling his spine flex as he moved.
“Tell me to stop,” Scott replied, his breath tickling Holden’s stomach in a way that was both uncomfortable and erotic. He then kissed him above the belly button, still working his way down. Scott’s body was warm, his stubble was just barely tactile, and it shouldn’t have felt as good as it did. Holden was stoned or losing his mind, or both. “I’ll stop if you tell me to.”
Holden should have, it would have been better for everyone if he said it, but of course he didn’t.
Holden supposed he never did things the easy way, and why start now?
41
Crazy Woman Dirty Train
THE good thing about being at the university hospital was Rosenberg was the queen bee, so whatever she wanted, she got. This was good for Dylan, because as soon as she dubbed Roan stable enough, she had a cot put in his hospital room, so Dylan could stay with him if he wanted. Since he found himself up at night after Roan had ended up in the hospital, unable to sleep and watching more cable television than was probably healthy, he’d ended up staying here ever since.
The cot wasn’t comfortable, and Roan’s machines bleeped loudly, but Dylan slept better here than at home in the house that wasn’t even his home. Rosenberg encouraged him to bring stuff in, to make it more like home, and while she didn’t say it was for Roan, it was. Just like she didn’t say he was in a coma, but he was.
At first it was deliberate. After Roan’s surgery, they’d induced a coma to reduce pressure on his brain and ease the healing process, according to her. Was it still an induced coma? Dylan doubted it. But it was better perhaps. After all, they’d shaved Roan’s head for the brain surgery, and he was sure Roan would hate it. But the funny thing was he already had dark red fuzz growing in, making a shadow on his scalp, and even one of the nurses had commented that was weird. “I’ve never seen hair growing in so fast,” the nurse, whom he now knew as Leona, had commented when she came in to check Roan’s vitals. But Roan had a fairly impressive beard too, and the last time Dylan had seen him he’d been perfectly clean shaven. It was the partial change of course, the one that had almost killed him. Since he knew Roan would hate it, he’d spent the afternoon carefully shaving his face. Dylan had never shaved someone else’s face before, but he thought he’d done a pretty good job.
Dylan brought Roan’s iPod, the book that Roan had been reading (well, one of them—he usually had more than one going, and you could find them scattered all over the house, with tiny scraps of paper sticking out of them, ad hoc bookmarks), a blanket from their real house, and he sometimes played Roan’s iPod for him, or read aloud from the book. It made Dylan fee
l better, like he was doing something, like he wasn’t completely useless. While Rosenberg encouraged this, said it was good for Roan, he did get complaints about Roan’s iPod. But of course he would. Sometimes Dylan wondered if Roan actually liked this music, or if he only listened to it to piss people off. Seriously, who had all the Mr. Bungle albums on their playlist and genuinely meant it?
One morning, while Dylan was folding up his blanket, Doctor Rosenberg came in and asked him to join her for a cup of coffee. She made it clear it wasn’t a suggestion but an order, so he went with her to the cafeteria. He got a tea while she got a coffee, and she also got a danish. She offered Dylan one, but he didn’t feel hungry right now.
“Are you eating at all?” she asked, dumping a sugar packet into her coffee. “It’s been three days, I don’t think I’ve seen you eat once.”
“I have,” he said, and suddenly wasn’t sure. Surely he must have or he’d be starving by now. “I’m okay.”
“Work?”
“I quit.”
She gave him a mildly scolding look, like his aunt would probably give him. “Is that wise?”
He shrugged, stirring his tea. He contemplated adding sugar to it, but there was probably no way of making it palatable. “Jamie told me I was welcome back at Panic at any time, so I figure I’ll start doing crunches again and I should be okay.”
“Crunches?” She made a negative noise. “Better you than me, kiddo.”
“So how have the tests come out? I assume some must be back by now.”
She nodded, but Dylan sensed some hesitation. He was getting to know her pretty well now, even though she didn’t share much about herself. “The biopsy’s back. I can tell you he doesn’t have cancer.”
Dylan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Oh god, what a relief.” He paused long enough to sip his tea, and found it almost too bad for words. “Should I read something into you not using the word benign?”
“Wow. Are you just that good, or have you been around Roan too long?”
“A bit of both, probably.”
She nodded grimly, gnawing on a chunk of danish like it was a piece of radial tire. “The tumor isn’t cancerous. But I don’t know what it is. It’s full of viral DNA.”
Dylan ran that sentence over again in his mind, to see if it made any sense at all. Was it just him? “Um, what?”
“Yeah, that was my feeling. We didn’t find cancerous cells, but we found the virus, which we couldn’t make sense of. I’ve sent the results to Doctor Pang, this oncologist I know over at Fred Hutchinson, I’m hoping he can tell me what the fuck it means.”
“Is this good news or bad news?”
She shrugged in a way that seemed to suggest she wished someone would take over for her. “Fuck if I know. Again, not cancer, so that’s a positive thing.”
Dylan looked down into his murky cup of tea, which he suddenly realized was the color of diseased urine, and he pushed it aside. “Since when do viruses create tumors?”
“Normally they don’t.”
“So you have no idea what this could mean?”
She sighed heavily. “Honestly no. You hafta understand that no one’s lived with the virus as long as Roan has. Setting aside his virus child start, no one’s lived with this thing for thirty plus years. The only understanding we have of its life cycle is in laboratory animals and computer models, and those are imperfect at best. This is new territory for everyone.”
He’d heard this before, and was certain Roan had heard it all his life. How awful it must be to be a test case, an anomaly, the only living petri dish around. “What does this mean? Can you just guess?”
“I hesitate, ’cause it’s just speculation. I mean, he could turn into a fucking unicorn for all I know.” She exhaled heavily, a kind of sigh, before telling him, “I think this is a secondary stage of the virus.” At his questioning look, she went on. “We don’t know its true life and death cycle. All we know is it kills the host body by eventually overwhelming it, altering it to the point that Human survival is impossible. We’ve never had a case where the body continues to adapt. The virus has a near-perfect home in Roan, but what that will cause it to do we don’t know.”
“You’re implying intelligence here.”
“I know, and I don’t mean to. But this virus seems to thrive on adversity, which is why making any kind of vaccine for it has been a pipe dream at best. It’s not coming up against anything in Roan’s body that it can’t seem to handle, therefore the response will be unpredictable.”
“But the weak spot is his brain.”
Rosenberg grimaced as if her coffee tasted as bad as his tea. “His body has proven to be resilient, almost as resilient as the virus, which may not be coincidence. But his brain just can’t have that kind of bounce back, although it’s trying. Still, can you imagine the toll it must take on him? Well, hell, I guess you can, you live with him. Poor bastard.”
How was he supposed to take that statement? Dylan decided it was probably best just to let it go for now. “So you think the virus has made his body so resilient? I’m taking it that’s what you implied.”
She nodded. “Part of the reason he’s survived so long is that the virus has almost fully incorporated itself into his DNA. He’s the perfect host because it has helped make him the perfect host. But there’re limits. He’s still Human underneath it all, and there will always be a conflict. But what the result of that conflict will be, I can’t say.”
“Except death.”
This time she didn’t really grimace, it was more of a twitch at the corner of her mouth as she looked away, at the entrance to the cafeteria. He didn’t blame her for looking; it sounded like two people were about to come to blows over who was to blame for the accident. (What accident Dylan couldn’t say—they could have had the decency to start their argument in here.) “Eventually.” She looked back at him, her hazel eyes locking on to his like she was trying to will him to believe what she was saying. “But not now. You know Roan, he’s not going without a fight, and last time I checked, he hadn’t ripped out his IVs yet.”
Dylan couldn’t argue with any of this, and yet a certain sense of despair was slowly overwhelming him, creeping through his body and diffusing like ink in water. He was so tired, and it wasn’t just physical. “So why hasn’t he woken up?”
She made a negative noise, a kind of clicking with her tongue. “’Cause the bastard doesn’t want to.”
Yes, that was the truth he’d been dreading all this time.
HOLDEN couldn’t remember the last time he had been in a train station. There wasn’t much call for it, as he was usually sent to the scuzzy well of everyday humanity that was the Greyhound bus station on some case or another. But Oliver wanted to do something different. Maybe he thought it would help him escape.
But Holden found the kid, trying to hide his identity with a dark-blue stocking cap pulled over his head and translucent amber sunglasses over his eyes, but he actually looked like he was trying to conceal his identity. The thing about going incognito was you weren’t supposed to look like you were incognito, or you fucked the whole thing up. Well, Oliver may have been a good actor, but clearly he needed a costumer.
Holden flung himself into the plastic chair beside him and looked over at Oliver with a professional, hard smile. “Hey there, where you headed today?”
Oliver looked nervous behind his tinted glasses, but he didn’t recognize him, mainly because he’d never seen him before. “Umm, Eugene.”
“Oregon? Awesome. Got cold feet, huh?”
Did he finally get it? A fleeting sort of nervousness appeared in his eyes. “What?”
“I’m Holden Krause, I’m an assistant investigator with MK Investigations.” Oliver started to get up, but Holden put a firm hand on his arm to let him know he wasn’t going anywhere. “Don’t. I could have you arrested if I really wanted to, so let’s not make a scene, okay?”
“Arrested?” he replied, his voice pitched to a whispering
hiss. “No you can’t. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I could nail you for identity theft and fraud, and I can make it stick. And that’s if I’m being nice. Do you want to know what I can do if I’m feeling mean?” Holden met his eyes, giving him the deathly cold stare he had perfected on the street. Life in the lower strata of society was very Darwinian—the weak were beaten down, consumed, destroyed. To show weakness was to invite exploitation and death. To be an alpha male, a predator, one who destroyed rather than got destroyed, you had to appear as psychopathic as all the other beasts. Holden could do that so easily, it was frightening.
It worked. Oliver seemed to shrink back in his chair, as if trying to disappear into the plastic. “L-look, you’ve got the wrong idea—”
“Roan, in his notes, seemed to think you were lying about something, but he couldn’t figure out what. You got lucky, ’cause he’s sick and not one hundred percent, but you fucked up by having an argument at the Marriott. See, I have friends in hotels all around Seattle, and someone overheard you. Shall I repeat the key points, or do you want to knock off the bullshit?”
Oliver sighed, deflated, looking away as he muttered, “I didn’t wanna do this, okay? I just needed the money.”
While Holden did indeed have friends at most hotels, including the Marriott, no one had overheard anything of substance. This was a bluff, but he was confident he could sell it, and indeed he had. After all, what little they had heard, combined with Roan’s suspicions, had led Holden to believe Oliver wasn’t Oliver. But who he was and why was up for grabs. “So why the beating? Did you go off script?”
He tried to sink down in his chair, but he could only go so far because Holden refused to let go of his arm. “I figured the guy didn’t trust me. I thought the gig was up and I oughta get outta here before he lioned out on me or something. That’s what it’s called, right, what he does? Lioning out?”
Holden decided not to answer that, because it wasn’t any of his business and didn’t matter anyways. “Abby got wind of your cold feet? How?”
