Infected Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  There was the predictable cussing out from a stuffy-sounding Dee, although after dressing him down and letting him know that when Roan came to visit him—and he made it known Roan would damn well be visiting Dee if he knew what was good for him—he was bringing him a pizza and he was going to bring it soon, as Dee had news for him. Roan wondered what the news was, as Dee didn’t hint. Nothing in his voice indicated it was bad news, so he assumed it was good. Or at least he hoped so.

  Rainbow was on there as well. She’d heard he’d been shot and was worried about him, although she knew he’d walked away, leading to this odd statement on her part: “Of course he wasn’t going to kill you like that. You’re hardly an ordinary lion, are you?” He’d have laughed if her simple, earnest statement hadn’t made him want to burst into tears. She then told him who Nolan seemed to have sided with. He couldn’t say he was surprised. At least he knew who he was paying a visit to tomorrow.

  He watched from the windows looking out onto the streets and ventured out as soon as the traffic thinned out once more. It still wasn’t great, but better than before.

  He was idling at a light where the main thoroughfare met Weston Boulevard and heard something that caught his attention. Even through his helmet he could hear an angrily shouted “Fucking faggot!” and saw someone stumble across a parking lot set out around back of the closed-down punk CD store (damn, Roan used to love it, but the combined pressures of the economy and downloadable music had crushed it). He knew he should just stick to heading toward the cop shop, but he wondered if someone was taking their frustrations out on a Boulevard boy. They weren’t all like Fox and Cowboy. They couldn’t all take care of themselves, as one of the “friendly” local police had shown.

  There was nobody behind him, so he pulled off into what passed for an alley (it was actually a never-used side street that had originally been built for loading trucks, when there were actual businesses here), and parked the bike as he clearly saw what must have been a fight. There were a few guys, a frat-boy type with a solid build save for a soft gut, an older guy who had the look of a hard-drinking trucker type, and a guy who was somewhere between their ages and wearing more plaid than was probably allowed this side of Canada. As he entered the parking lot, he saw these three were fighting one guy, as another was splayed out on the broken blacktop in an ever-increasing pool of blood. He looked badly hurt, which should have been enough to stop the fight, but he got the sense most of the participants were drunk and angry. The angry drunks were the absolute worst.

  “Knock it off!” he shouted in his stern cop voice, but no one was paying any attention to him. The older guy had a metal pipe or a crowbar—it was too poorly lit here to tell which—forcing Roan to intervene. He grabbed the pipe and ripped it out of his hands, saying, “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

  Roan didn’t get an answer. What he did get was swung at, as the guy turned and took a poke at him, but he telegraphed the move in a way that only the drunk or the sloppy possibly could. Roan tossed the pipe aside so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it and stepped back, avoiding the clumsy swing and letting the man stumble as his momentum carried him forward. Only then did Roan step in and deliver a short sharp punch to the solar plexus that dropped him immediately to his knees. “Don’t fuck with me,” Roan warned him belatedly.

  “Motherfucker!” the frat guy roared, charging at him. Roan easily sidestepped him, and as he stumbled off into a wall, warned him, “I’m here to stop the fight, asshole. Don’t make me kick your ass.”

  “Oh wow,” a strangely familiar voice said, chuckling faintly. It was Holden—he was the standing man in the fight, the one called the “fucking faggot.” He looked really different, so it was hard to see him in the clinging shadows of the claustrophobic parking lot. He was no longer dying his hair a florescent peroxide blond but had let it go back to his natural brown-blond color, and he was no longer spiking it like Bart Simpson, either. He almost looked normal, which was really weird. “You guys are in trouble. You don’t mess with the toughest homo in the world.”

  Was that a reference to him? Roan would have asked, but just then frat boy grabbed him around the throat from behind, trying to get him in a choke hold.

  Roan threw his elbow back hard and rapidly, hitting bone several times and sending a numbing shock up his arm, but it was worse for the frat boy, who made noises of pain before Roan heard bone starting to crack. With a gagging noise, he shoved Roan away, releasing his choke hold and bending over, spitting out blood and grabbing his face. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, but his speech was so mushy and slurred it sounded more like “sumavabish.”

  “Fucker!” the guy in plaid screamed as he rushed him, but he shouldn’t have done that, as he gave Roan fair warning. As Roan spun to face him, he pulled out his metal baton, and with a flick of his wrist he extended it out to its foot-and-a-half length and brought it up to meet the man as he ran in for what was most likely supposed to be a full-body tackle. The metal baton smashed into the side of the man’s face, where the jawbone met the skull on the right-hand side, and the resulting snap was loud and sickening. On one level.

  Roan was kind of surprised to realize he also felt a sick, almost amused triumph as the guy instantly dropped to the cracked asphalt, howling in pain and holding onto his lopsided jaw as if trying to keep it attached to his face. Roan looked over at the frat boy, oozing blood himself, and the old guy, who was just finishing puking on the lot. “Anybody want some more?” The puking guy was too busy heaving to answer, but the frat boy looked at him evilly, eyes glittering like the glass from a broken taillight, but they flicked between him and his baton, still held at his side, ready for the next attack. He wasn’t going to make a move while Roan had a weapon, and they both knew it. The kid would have shit himself if he knew he was also carrying a gun.

  There was an inherent dark thrill in totally controlling a scene. And Roan owned this one. The fight was over.

  “What the fuck was this about?” he asked Holden. He could see the hustler out of the corner of his eye, kneeling next to the boy in the pool of blood.

  “These motherfuckers jumped Ponyboy,” he snapped, making a violently dismissive gesture toward the fallen drunkards. “I was just coming out of a bar across the street when I heard some guys laughing over some other guys beating up a fag in the old parking lot. So I figured I’d join the party and beat me up some rednecks. I didn’t know it was Ponyboy ’til I got here, though.”

  “Who the hell’s Ponyboy?” Roan asked, not recognizing the nickname. Well sure, he recognized it as coming from an S.E. Hinton book, but not in a Boulevard-boy context.

  “He’s just a kid. Came here last year from Minnesota. He was running from something, but he never said what.”

  “Ain’t no way in fucking hell you’re a butt pirate,” the frat boy slurred, still glaring at him in a belligerent manner. If looks could have killed, Roan would have been an interesting stain on the crumbling brick wall behind him.

  Roan matched him glare for glare, resisting the urge to tap the baton against his leg like a riding crop. “Ahoy, matey.”

  “Told you he was the toughest homo on the planet, fuckwit,” Holden spat.

  “Well, thanks for finding my epitaph,” he told Holden sarcastically, although honestly, he could have done much worse. As it was, that wasn’t too bad.

  Police sirens cut the night, shredding it to ribbons, and when he was sure that the frat boy had no chance of making a run for it, he compacted the baton again and slipped it into his coat pocket. “What is that?” Holden asked him.

  “Retractable metal baton.”

  “Really? Where do you get those?”

  “I bought it at a security shop, but any place that sells martial arts equipment will probably have them too.”

  “Huh. I gotta get me one of those.”

  The cop car partially blocked the mouth of the alley, and when the cops joined them, Roan saw that he didn’t know either of them—McKay and Gilberto, re
spectively—and since they didn’t know him, they instantly considered him a suspect. This got worse when he was thrown up against the wall and frisked along with Holden, who wanted to stay with Ponyboy, but it was Roan they found with the baton and the gun. He was instantly cuffed, even as he told them—for the thousandth time—that he was a private investigator and was a consultant for the department. When he told them he used to work at the Ninth Precinct and that they should call Chief Matthews to verify his identity, McKay snorted and said, “Yeah pal, we’re gonna wake her up for you.”

  He told them he had his PI license in his wallet along with his concealed carry permit, and at least they looked at those as the ambulance arrived to block the rest of the alleyway. He didn’t know these paramedics either, which was a bitch since he was cuffed and sitting, resigned to a very frustrating night, next to an equally cuffed Holden, who was manacled the moment he gave them lip. This close to him, Roan could see Holden had a swollen, reddish eye that would be black in a few hours and a split lower lip that was seeping blood down his chin. Holden was deceptively tough, but taking on three guys seemed a bit much, even for him. “You take me to the nicest places,” Holden joked.

  He simply glared at him out of the corner of his eye. “Hilarious. What were you thinking?”

  “Probably the same thing you were. Putting an end to it.”

  “We did a bang-up job, didn’t we?”

  “You did. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I am the toughest homo in the world.”

  Holden smirked at the echoed line and replied, “Be proud of it, man. I used to think I was. I feel humbled.”

  Ponyboy was in really bad shape, suggesting that it wasn’t the first time the metal pipe had come out during the fight, and the paramedics had to call in another unit to take everyone to the hospital. One came over to treat Holden, but he didn’t have to do much. Roan needed no help at all—or at least not the physical kind.

  A twitchy Asian kid wearing a stocking cap pulled low over his head, making his hair stick out from beneath it like loose wires, hung around after the ambulances left, and Holden’s gesture with his head brought him slinking up the alley, trying to avoid the eyes of the cops. “A.J., take care of Roan’s bike,” he told him. “I’ll hold you personally responsible if something happens to it. So keep it safe, okay?”

  The kid—A.J.—nodded almost spastically and said in a quiet voice, “I’ll take care of it.” The kid stalked away, pausing only to grab the bike and wheel it away.

  “He won’t sell it for crack, will he?” Roan asked.

  Holden shook his head. “I told him I’ll hold him personally responsible for it. He’ll probably wash and wax it for you.”

  “In that case, thanks.” He wasn’t certain about this, but it was better than leaving the bike out here, where it would probably be stolen within five minutes. Holden still had enough pull on the streets that the kids would want to listen to him and fall into his favor.

  Finally the cops decided to run them in, and Roan found himself trying not to laugh, possibly because this was so fucked up.

  Well, he’d wanted to go to the cop shop. At least this way he was getting chauffeured.

  8

  Bliss

  LUCKILY, he wasn’t treated as a prisoner for long. Back at the station, not only was Marcos on duty but so was a desk sergeant named Jefferson, who really didn’t seem to give a shit about him one way or another but at least recognized him. They got Gilberto to take the cuffs off him. Even though they were across the room, he heard Jefferson whisper to McKay, “Are you fuckin’ crazy, man? Matthews likes him; he’s her pet. She’ll chew you a new one if she finds out you did this.”

  Pet? Pet? He’d have gotten furious if it wasn’t for the fact that he shouldn’t have been able to hear a whispered aside across the room. But the self-loathing and general loathing was back, settling in his chest like a stone.

  He eventually convinced Gilberto to take the cuffs off Holden, taking personal responsibility for him. As he got the cuffs off, Holden told Gilberto, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “I prefer the fur-lined cuffs. Keep that in mind for next time.”

  Gilberto gave him a flinty look and walked away muttering, “Maricón,” under his breath, Spanish for fag. From the face Holden made, he knew what it meant. But that was the fun thing about being a gay man in a straight world—you quickly learned the slurs, no matter what language they were delivered in.

  Holden then turned to him with a sigh. “If I get charged, will you bail me out? I can pay you back. I have the money back at my apartment, I just don’t carry it with me.”

  “It won’t go that far. You were trying to protect Ponyboy. If anyone will be charged, it’ll be me, for excessive use of force.”

  “It was self-defense.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s our word against the other guys’. I have a feeling they’ll tell a different story.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a former cop, and you’re sober. Your word will go farther.”

  Roan wanted to tell him that wasn’t true on both counts. Many of the cops didn’t like him, and he was currently on Vicodin. But nobody was going to drug test him. He could pass a Breathalyzer if it came down to that.

  “What’s his name, anyways? I hate to keep referring to him as Ponyboy.”

  “Cooper Reese.”

  “Seriously?”

  Holden nodded. “Kids have funny names today.” He paused briefly. “Roan.”

  He scowled at him, which Holden met with a dazzling smile. “I’m gonna get my baton back, you know.”

  “Hey now, what did I say? Absolutely nothing.” He gave him a wink, still grinning as he watched a couple other cops wrestle in a combative drunk man and a combative drunk woman, both bearing fresh contusions and scratches, who continued screaming and cursing at each other even while the cops attempted to book them. Ah, marriage. What a wonderful institution. No wonder the straights wanted to keep it all for themselves.

  They were separated to give their accounts of the incident, and Roan suspected from some of the questions he was asked that Holden had exaggerated the amount of trouble he was in when he’d walked in on the fight. That was kind of him, and he knew the cops would believe it, because McKay, the one taking his statement, asked, “He can really fight?”

  “Holden?”

  McKay nodded.

  “Yeah, he can.”

  The cop, a corn-fed-looking guy with a thick neck and a soft face like cookie dough, shook his head in disbelief. “But the way he talks… you’d think he couldn’t.”

  The way he talks? Oh yes, his slight lisp. That pretty much meant you were a pansy ass, right? Forget that the guy was over six feet and had the broad shoulders and chest of the athlete he used to be and the hard temper of the street kid he used to be. An extra S or two indicated you were a sissy-slap fight queen. Roan quietly despaired at such dumb-ass shit coming from a guy who should really know better, but maybe he didn’t know better. Maybe he hadn’t been on the beat long enough to realize that being gay or being female didn’t mean you couldn’t be as vicious and as tough as shit. He’d learn, possibly the hard way.

  As predicted, Holden wasn’t charged with anything. He was issued a warning for disorderly conduct, but that was it. Roan wasn’t charged with anything either. They warned him not to leave the state but admitted that the case had all the earmarks of a gay bashing. Interviewed at the hospital, the two guys who could speak told two different stories, neither of which was compatible with the few facts that were known, and the fact that they were surprised when the cops originally found Roan’s gun and then later claimed that he had pulled it on them proved they were liars. And bad liars, at that.

  Before leaving, they gave him back his baton and his gun. Holden said he’d call a friend to pick them up and reunite Roan with his bike (hopefully A.J. hadn’t hocked it for a trailer full of meth yet), and while he went off to do that, Roan took the time to talk to Marcos.

 
; In spite of detective-client privilege, he told Marcos who had hired him and why. What Chris Spencer didn’t know—or maybe he did—was that nearly all cops hated these unsolved kid cases. Even the most jaded and cynical among them would pause. Missing people you never found, especially young women who were more than likely victims of foul play, you hated too, but there was something special about the kids that disappeared. Everyone felt like they’d failed them. That, as the most vulnerable of citizens, you’d fucked up the most basic tenet of your job. Roan knew this would allow him information he really shouldn’t have.

  Sleepy-eyed Marcos, who probably hadn’t shown a flicker of emotion in his weathered face in years, briefly looked flinty and cold as he stared at his computer screen. In a little bit, his fingers clicking over the keys like a master pianist, he had the information for him. Jorgenson had had two cellmates in his time in the joint: a guy named Peter Tucker and another guy named Roland Chesney. Chesney was back in the stir, having been convicted of murder less than a year after he got out (he killed his ex-girlfriend), but records indicated that Tucker’s last known location was Boise, Idaho. Marcos gave him all the information he had on both on a computer printout.

  Records indicated both men had done time for sex crimes—Chesney went up on a rape charge initially, and Tucker was convicted of fondling a niece he’d been babysitting and intimidating a witness—but they also had other things in their records less violent: check fraud, loitering, obstruction, drunk driving. Chesney, being an obviously violent person, was in the lead as suspects went. He’d never gone for kids, but he showed a propensity for going after people weaker than himself. He probably got off on it. Yeah, he really needed to speak to Chesney.