by Andrea Speed
Dylan didn’t reply, just turned and left, and Roan followed. Andrew showed them out, at least in theory, but neither he nor Dylan actually noticed him.
Once outside, Dylan erupted. “That fucking asshole! Why didn’t you beat the shit out of him?”
Roan grabbed him by the shoulders, and said, “Focus, honey. You’re the Buddhist, remember? Take a deep breath.” Dylan did, clearly trying to focus and wipe out the negative emotions. “Namaste. You okay now?”
He closed his eyes and took another deep breath in through his nose, and then nodded. “Okay, I’m okay. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now, what was his offer?”
“A thousand dollars for a bleeding hardware painting.”
Roan almost stumbled on his way back to the car. “What the fuck…? And you said no?” He then shook his head and admitted, “Yeah, I would too, just to piss him off.”
“I really don’t want to give anything that means something to me to that obnoxious jackass, no matter how much he offers me.” As soon as they were in the car, Dylan admitted, “I would probably have sold him my entire catalog for five thousand.”
Again, he could understand that. Pride was one thing, but a buttload of money was another.
They got the food back at the house and then went off to visit Holden. At least now, Roan had a job for him that wouldn’t require him leaving his place.
Holden looked pretty good, considering, and joked that he now had a sexy scar. Roan countered that his scars weren’t sexy, and Dylan begged to differ, giving him a coy look. Was he being kind, or was he serious? Kind of hard to tell when he couldn’t pin him to the bed and tickle him until he told the truth. (Wow, that sounded like fun right now.)
They ate the vegetarian tamale pie—which was quite good—and Roan caught Holden up on the case before giving him the URL of the website in question. “Taboo triple x? Oh yeah, that’s porn.” He scowled at the printout. “But spelled with a U? The Taboo site I know is spelled correctly and touts barely legal girls who are really in their early twenties, but you’re not supposed to notice.”
“Porn is a tricky thing.”
“It is. More than you know.” Holden went ahead and got on his computer, looking up the site.
“You might need a card—” Roan began.
But Holden cut him off. “Don’t worry about it, I got it covered.” Roan didn’t ask, but he had a feeling that Holden wasn’t using one of his own cards. Holden had many shady connections from his years on the street, and he was never afraid to use them when it benefited him. He was a hooker, not a fool.
He and Dylan were cleaning up the plates, carrying them to the sink and putting them in (the least they could do), when Holden exclaimed, “Holy shit.”
Roan went over and joined him. “What is it?”
He looked over his shoulder, but Holden had already closed the window. “Shit. It’s snuff.”
Roan gave him a suspicious look. “Fake snuff porn? Who cares?” Most supposedly “snuff” films were, in fact, fakes. Good fakes sometimes, but fakes all the same. There was no—or very little—profit in actual murder. There was also the problem of getting caught, which was made infinitely easier when you actually filmed yourself killing someone.
“This is pretty realistic snuff,” Holden said and opened the window. “Well, I’ll look around. Maybe I’ll see someone I know. Thor’s into all kinds of kink.”
“Thor?” Dylan repeated, raising an eyebrow at him. “The god of thunder?”
“It’s a nickname,” Roan told him, returning to Holden’s cramped kitchen.
“How do you get that nickname?”
“Long blond hair?” Roan guessed.
“You got it,” Holden confirmed.
While some street names were creative, others were so easy to guess you hardly needed to be conscious to guess them. He helped Dylan continue to clear up and put leftovers away, a delicate dance in such a small space, but it also made it strangely intimate. It also made Roan realize something that he’d probably unconsciously known but only thought of now, which was how much the thought of Dylan leaving him had scared him. If Dylan had wanted to put fear in him, he had succeeded. And why? Because it was the boyfriends that kept him human.
It was an awful thought, but he had never quite gotten the knack of being human, had he? He was always a freak, a lab rat, a leper, and a virus; he even saw himself as a thing. It was the men who accepted him as what he was who allowed him a window into normalcy, into what it was like to actually be human. He really didn’t know, and on his own, he could lose the plot a bit.
Roan slipped his arms around Dylan’s waist and rested his head on his shoulder, making him pause and put his hand over his. “You okay?” Dylan wondered.
“Yeah. I’m just sorry.”
“About what?”
“Everything.”
“You should be,” he replied, but with kindness softening his voice. He leaned back against him briefly and whispered, “I’m trying to be strong enough to live in your world, Ro. Give me time.”
“You’re strong enough. I just may be too weird.” He kissed Dylan’s neck, tasting the soap on his skin, something scented supposedly of blood oranges, but it just seemed vaguely citrusy to him. Still, not bad, and yards better than most soaps aimed at men, which often smelled of cheap cologne. His warmth and wiry strength were comforting, and his hair smelled of ginger and apples. There was probably a joke here, him smelling so fruity, but Roan wasn’t about to make it.
“Speaking of weird, we were invited out tomorrow night.” Dylan said.
“Were we? By who?”
“Hockey players. Seems after tomorrow night’s game they have a couple days off, so Scott called today and said he and some of the guys were going bar hopping, since a day off pretty much gives them a license to drink. He said the guys would love it if we came along. I should add I know he meant just you solo, but I was included to be polite.”
“You know he’s the gay guy, right? Well, bi. But still.”
Dylan snorted. “Oh yeah, I knew.”
Roan looked at him sidelong. “How’d you know?”
“Are you kidding? When we first met, he sized me up as competition. It wasn’t competitive jock sizing, it was ‘what’s he got that I haven’t’ sizing. I know when a guy wants my man.” After a brief pause, he asked, “He hit on you?”
“Oh yeah, full throttle.”
Dylan was quiet for a moment, and Roan was pretty sure he was going to ask how far that attempt had gone. But then suddenly, he seemed to let it go. It was all mental, although Roan was pretty sure he could feel it in his posture, the tightening of muscles and a sudden smoothing out.
“You almost have to feel sorry for him, don’t you? Lying to everyone.”
Just like that. Dylan had decided to trust him. He could be so very kind. “It is a pity, but he may be playing for the Bruins next year, so I can’t feel that sorry for him.”
“Hockey players don’t have long careers, do they?”
“Now that you mention it, no, I guess they generally don’t.”
“So he makes his money now, and it has to last him through the rest of his life, including replacement teeth, bad knees, and concussion problems. Good luck to him.”
That was a hell of a point. “Does this mean you don’t want to go bar hopping with a bunch of straight—or quasi-straight—hockey players tomorrow night?”
“Hell yeah I wanna go. Maybe we can take ’em to Panic, show ’em how the other half lives.”
That made Roan laugh. “Oh God. We might cause a riot.”
“Or they might like it.”
“That idea is slightly worse.” He could actually see Grey—who may or may not have had sex with a transsexual—enjoying it. Again, could be good or bad, depending on a variety of circumstances.
“Roan!” Holden suddenly exclaimed from the living room, sounding equally angry and horrified. Roan immediately let Dylan go and went to see what the problem w
as. Holden, his face a grim mask of rage and disgust, just pointed at the computer screen.
A small film, clearly shot on home video, was playing—a group sex sequence that ended in a couple of the guys killing another. Gay snuff? There was a menu on the side that seemed to offer all sorts of couplings: opposite sex, same sex, mixed, group and couples, with animals and without. It looked like they really wrapped a garrote around the guy’s neck, a skinny guy with a few obvious track marks and a flaming skull tattoo on his right bicep, and he was certainly putting up a good fight, but they couldn’t really see a face until the cameraman got closer. That’s when Holden said, “That’s Coyote.”
“What?”
“The kid—that’s Coyote. I know him. He used to work the strip….” He put a hand to his mouth and closed the window again, his eyes squeezing tightly shut.
“Holden?”
“Roan, he’s dead,” he told him, struggling with tears. “He was found dead two weeks ago.” He paused briefly before saying, “He was strangled.”
Son of a bitch. A real snuff film?
This was a bit more ugly than he had ever anticipated.
5
Misfits and Mistakes
Holden looked around a bit more, trying to see if he recognized anyone else in any of the clips. The problem was there were hundreds of hours of film to see. Still, before they left, Holden thought he got another hit: a female hooker this time, a woman who went by the street name Lacey, but Holden said her real name was Karen. (He had no last name for her.)
It looked like the footage was assembled from different places and involved different assailants, although it appeared that Coyote and Lacey were both killed in a similar basement, probably the same one. Was Lacey actually dead, though? Holden kept in better touch with his boys than any of the girls working the strip, and the female hookers he knew now mainly worked out of the same escort company as him, putting them in a higher echelon. Higher whore echelon? Okay, pseudo-alliteration was among the lowest form of humor, but this was pretty bleak shit here.
Holden said he’d ask around, see if he could find out where Coyote might have picked up his last john—they probably wouldn’t talk to a cop or an investigator, but they’d talk to one of their own—and find out if anyone had seen Lacey lately. Roan had his own sources and would try and work them (okay, Kevin and Dropkick, but they were still sources), but he was sure Holden would probably get more usable information.
Admittedly, this had nothing to do with the Hatcher case, but he’d be completely fucked if he let wholesale murder go.
He called Hatcher and thankfully got his machine. He left a message saying he needed him to find out who owned the Tabu-xxx site, and that he’d explain the attachment to Jordan’s case later. Roan had no idea what he’d say. He figured he’d burn that bridge when he came to it.
While Dylan was getting ready for bed, Roan checked his e-mail, and saw that Hatcher had sent him one, saying “Rutherford.” Opening the e-mail, he saw there was nothing but a link. He clicked it, and after a very strange moment where something briefly flashed on his screen and died (had the bastard sent him a virus?), he suddenly found himself at what looked like a root directory.
Hatcher had sent him a hack. He was inside the Academy’s computer database.
It was as illegal as all hell, and while he was sure software “genius” Hatcher had a way of protecting him from a back trace, he still knew he had to get out of there as quickly as possible. He had broken into an occupied house, and he was just lucky they were heavy sleepers.
He sifted through the Brittneys, and when he found photos, he started comparing the most likely suspects to the girls he'd found in photos with Jordan on his Facebook page. Eventually he found her: Brittney Selfridge, a seventeen year old from Bellevue, a bottle blonde who wore way too much makeup with way too much glitter, and her face was so slender and narrow it seemed like her cheekbones were razorblades that could cut you on casual contact. She was trying very hard to look like a divorcee in her early thirties for some reason, and Roan couldn’t imagine that was popular among kids now.
He decided he’d try and bother the Selfridges tomorrow. He called Kevin and Murphy, but he got both their answering machines. Could they both be out on a call? Still, he asked them both about Coyote (aka Roman Smith) and Lacey (aka Karen). He assumed they’d be intrigued enough by his vague message to call back as soon as possible.
He searched for information about Coyote’s murder, but there was almost nothing to find. He got one of those one-and-a-half inch brief columns inside the local section of the newspaper, and all it described was a “transient” killed by “homicidal violence,” which could have been anything from a stabbing to a beating. The fact that Holden knew he had been strangled meant that he'd either heard about it from some of the boulevard boys (most likely) or he’d read or heard an account that he just couldn’t dig up online. Most likely it was the boys. Street people had their own network, a way of talking between themselves that usually wasn’t open to outsiders. This is why Holden was such a good point man for this info. He wasn’t a part of them anymore, but he used to be and was thought of fondly, and that was enough.
Once they were in bed, Dylan asked him why anyone would be into snuff, whether fake or real. That was a good question that Roan couldn’t answer, except some people just liked the idea of fucking a corpse and/or having the ultimate power of taking someone else’s life got their rocks off. Having actually killed people, Roan couldn’t imagine taking such pleasure in it. It wasn’t fun; it was an awful feeling. (Although—and he’d never admit it to anyone—there were times when it was a relief. Killing Switzer had felt like something that should have been done a long time ago, if not by him then by someone else. He had been the human equivalent of a mad dog.) But then again, Roan wasn’t a psychopath. Oh, he flirted with sociopath at times, but at least he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t see it.
He slept well, except for the time he woke up and found his heart racing around his chest like it was being chased by a bunch of skinheads. It actually left him panting and sweating, and he lay there in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if this was a precursor to a heart attack. Was it a heart attack? He didn’t think so, because he wasn’t in pain. He was just a little short of breath, and waking up due to a racing heart was always a bit disconcerting. He was just glad he hadn’t woken up Dylan, because he might freak about it.
He got up, went into the bathroom, and after taking a piss, dug out the hidden stash of downers he had inside an old anticlotting agent bottle, and took a Valium to bring his heart rate down. Was this confirmation of what he’d already guessed? The rules of infecteds had stopped applying to him, and that meant he probably wasn’t going to die like one. Oh, maybe he might die midtransition, but he wasn’t going to slowly waste away like Paris. No, he might just die suddenly in his sleep, which should have been a relief but wasn’t. Because how fair was that to Dylan? To wake up one morning next to a corpse. He should have left him and stayed gone, for his sake. Roan just knew he was never going to be anything but a temporary bit of respite before the huge disappointment.
When he felt the drugs settle in and envelop him like a warm cloak, he went back to bed and snuggled next to Dylan, who smelled good (he almost always smelled good, and Roan had no idea how he did that), and wondered if there was any way he could make this, if not right, better. How did you prepare someone for your own eventual death? Paris had managed to do it pretty well, but it was long established that he wasn’t Paris. Paris had probably decided Dylan was perfect for him and set it all in motion, matchmaking after death. Again, terribly creepy, but also kind because Paris knew how lousy he was when he had no one to force him to go out in the world and interact with people. Dylan didn’t need help with that—he wasn’t that fucked up.
Roan must have fallen asleep, because before he had anything approaching a course of action, he found himself waking up to a ringing phone. He felt a great impulse to p
ick up the phone, say “I didn’t do it,” and hang up, but he should probably find out who it was before he did that. The call might be for Dylan.
As it turned out, it was Dropkick. With no preamble, she asked, “How did I know you’d get involved in the dead hookers case?”
“I’m very predictable.” He rubbed his eyes, and suddenly realized what she’d said. “Hookers? Plural? So Lacey is dead.”
“You mean Karen Ramirez? I thought you knew she was dead.”
“I knew she was missing, and I suspected she was dead, but I didn’t know for sure. How long?”
“How long what?” Now she sounded pissed off. Maybe because she had just accidentally leaked information.
“Has she been dead.”
There was a long silence, in which Roan felt psychic, because he knew she was considering hanging up on him. Finally she sighed, and said, “Do you want the coroner's report? I ain’t givin’ it to you.”
