Infected Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  “How—” John paused, deciding that the question was irrelevant, because Holden wouldn’t answer it. The guy with the gun didn’t have to answer a single fucking thing. “We needed a new security—”

  Holden punched John right in the balls. He convulsively knifed forward, slamming into the steering wheel, a high-pitched, keening noise escaping him. “I said I was gonna start breaking things, John. Do you think I’m fucking around? Do you want me to prove how much I want to hurt you?”

  “No,” he wheezed, still in pain. When he sat back, his eyes were red-rimmed from tears, and a string of saliva dangled from his wet lower lip. Had he almost barfed? Probably. “Did Joel mean that much to you?”

  “He didn’t mean anything to me,” Holden snapped, mildly surprised to discover that was true. There was familiarity and routine, but nothing else. Perhaps that was what marriage was like. “I was curious what happened to him, especially after what he told me. No, the reason you’re gonna die is because a good man is dying in a fucking hospital because of your family and your shit.” There it was: he was furious that they had hurt Roan. Part of him thought it should have been him that was the target. The killer should have come after him but didn’t for an obvious reason—who cared? He was a fucking whore, a hooker, and his word would mean nothing. The cops would roll their eyes, a judge would dismiss him, a jury of wonderful straight people would regard him as a leper and every word out of his mouth as contagious garbage. He could witness a murder, and any attorney worth their ambulance-chasing shoes could rip him apart. He could find the poisoner standing over Joel’s body with a container marked “potassium,” and no one would believe him or care. No lawbreaker ever had to worry about him, because he was an Untouchable, and no one would listen to him.

  But Roan… oh, poor Roan. He would be believed. Infected, gay, but an ex-cop and a police adviser on kitty cases, he had a patina of legitimacy that no amount of boyfriends, cat jokes, and suspicions of pill popping could erase. Then there was a vague sense of unease around him, since he seemed to have superhuman abilities, one of which—his supernatural sense of smell—was considered admissible in a court of law. On the one hand, people mocked him. On the other hand, they were terrified of him. He should have been a flaming queen, he should have been a sickly virus child, he should have been gone by now. Roan almost seemed to be karmic retribution, but whose was in question. The only thing everybody could agree on about him was he was dangerous, much more dangerous than you would initially think, much more than he should have been. When Malloy told the killer who was visiting Holden’s place, he must have panicked. To be fair, Holden didn’t think he’d want Roan after him either, even if he got the guarantee that he wouldn’t turn into a lion at some point.

  How did he feel about Roan? Holden wasn’t really sure. He’d come to believe he was a genuinely good person when he first encountered him as a cop. Holden didn’t like cops as a matter of course—tiny little tyrants, many with homosexual impulses they fought by becoming extremely homophobic—but Roan always seemed a little off. He seemed to treat everyone like a Human being, whether they were a hooker or a junkie. Holden figured then there was no fucking way he was going to last in the job, and he was right. He was strangely attractive, not a pretty boy but weirdly alluring all the same, with intense, haunted eyes. And god, was he trouble: not just infected, but an obvious depressive, too smart for his own good, a romantic turned cynic, battered by the world and not sure how to handle it. He raged at dying light, or whatever was handy, and had taken to numbing himself with chemicals. He was stubborn and moody, a total pain in the ass. Holden didn’t envy Dylan, putting up with him. But that was the weird thing: he didn’t envy him, but wasn’t he still a bit jealous anyways? Yeah, he was trouble, but Holden suspected he was rarely ever boring. The true outcasts rarely were. Nothing could ever work between him and Roan, but Holden bet it would have been a fun disaster.

  “I had nothing to do with that,” John insisted, his voice still raspy with pain. Holden hoped he’d burst a testicle. “I wanted nothing to do with that guy. Malloy warned me off. He told me we had to shut this down before McKichan got wind of it. He didn’t wanna follow him.”

  That, too, was believable. He couldn’t imagine that one private detective wanted to follow another. If you knew the tricks of the trade, you could spot a tail pretty easy. “What did you hire Malloy for in the first place?”

  He sniffed, wiped snot from his face with the back of one hand and rubbed his crotch with the other. “Fuck, I think you did some real damage.”

  “I warned you not to lie to me. Stop trying to change the subject.”

  “I’m not. I hired him to… fuck. I hired him to dig up dirt on Joel. I needed leverage.”

  “Leverage for what?”

  “For what else? Convincing him to take the fucking deal. We all wanted to sell. He was the lone holdout, and for no good reason. He just wanted to remind us who was in control. So I thought I’d show him he wasn’t as hot shit as he thought he was. Of course, I didn’t know he was a fag.”

  “He wasn’t. He was bi.”

  John glared at him. “What’s the fucking difference?”

  “The difference is gay guys really don’t want to fuck women. Joel would fuck anything.”

  John winced at this and looked out the windshield. “That’s more than I ever wanted to know about him.”

  “Then why hire a private detective?”

  He shrugged a single shoulder. “I figured he was fucking around. No guy with money and power is actually gonna stick with just one woman. They know that, right? You’re gonna fuck around. You can have anyone you want, so why stay in and have reheated leftovers when you can go get something fresh, you know? I figured he had a mistress, probably more than one. I didn’t expect him to have… you. But he probably coulda had a guy for free—you fags’ll fuck anybody, right? You hook up in bathrooms and shit. Why didn’t he just do that?”

  Holden restrained the urge to start pistol-whipping him. Mainly because the gun could accidentally discharge in any direction, and he didn’t want to accidentally shoot himself. “Use the word fag again, and I’ll break your other ball. Get me?”

  John looked like he wanted to say something, maybe belittle him for being so PC, but then he remembered he was holding the gun and had already done some testicular damage to him, and he managed to swallow it down. But Holden saw it in his eyes, the continued, endless contempt. He didn’t know him, but Holden disgusted him. “Yeah.”

  “Let me get this straight: you still employed Malloy to follow me after Joel’s death. What the fuck for? Wanted my number, John?”

  Holden got the reaction he wanted, the sudden, reflex revulsion. “No! I ain’t a f—that way. I thought maybe you had something to do with it.”

  This was unbelievable. “With his death?”

  “Yeah. I mean you’re… you’re a criminal, right? You do shit like that.”

  As infuriating as that statement was, it didn’t quite fit. Why? Because of one very important thing. “I’d be perfect to frame for the crime if something went wrong. It sort of begs the question how you knew Joel had been murdered when everyone assumed he’d died of a heart attack.”

  His mouth open and closed soundlessly, as he almost said something and then thought better of it. He tried again, more successfully this time. “That’s not—Joel was in too good of shape to just drop dead like that. I didn’t know he was killed, but it didn’t feel right.”

  “Umm, no. You’ve told enough truth that a lie could slip through, but I lie for a living, asshole. Did you really think you could bullshit me?” He pressed the barrel of the gun against John’s temple with renewed ferocity. “Drive.”

  There was a smell coming from John now. Not piss, not exactly, just fear sweat, a rank smell of failed deodorant and desperation. Holden wondered if people smelled like this to Roan most of the time, and if so, how did he stand them.

  “Drive where?”

  “We’re gonna pa
y Duane Malloy a visit,” Holden told him. “And then we’re gonna find out if any of us are gonna live through the night.”

  Oddly enough, Holden wasn’t bothered by this prospect. Maybe he’d finally found a new occupation.

  14

  Time Won’t Tell

  “YOU know, you’re not a detective,” Diego said.

  Dylan sighed, sitting back on the couch, balancing his cup of tea on the arm of the sofa. He’d been going through both Roan’s laptop and the notes he’d found, hoping to find something that jumped out at him, something that said, “Yes, I’m the bastard that tried to kill Roan.” So far, that elusive clue wasn’t jumping forward and revealing itself. “Obviously, Dee, or this would make more sense to me than it does.”

  “Hardly. Ro may keep a lot of notes, but they’re not always linear,” he replied, between swallows of his beer. “They’re stream of consciousness half the time. I’m not sure if he does that to keep people from reading them and making sense of them, or if he really thinks like that. You know, he might think that way. I dated him, but I still can’t say I’ve ever totally understood him. How are you doing on that front?”

  Was Dee trying to distract him? Could he blame him if he was? “I’d never claim to understand completely how he thinks, but I think I know where he’s coming from most of the time. And his notes aren’t that bad. They’re kind of like he’s having a conversation with himself, trying to figure out where one piece slots into the bigger picture, if it does. He generally assumes everyone’s lying about something and tries to figure out what they’d be most likely to lie about. It’s a chess game where you can only guess what and where the pieces are.”

  Dee gave him a funny look. “I think you just gave me a headache.”

  “I never said it was easy.”

  “Obviously.” Dee paused briefly, pondering his next statement with care. “How do you think we should approach his continuing pill problem? I’d suggest an intervention, but knowing Roan, he’d pull a gun and open fire on us.”

  Dylan shook his head, looking at the notes on screen so he didn’t have to meet his gaze. “I think that’s not even on the table right now. He needs to recover, and then we’ll deal with it.”

  There was a very telling pause. “Wow. You’re writing it off? Really? You think you can live with that, Dylan?”

  “I think it doesn’t matter right now. If he dies, none of this bullshit is going to matter.” He could feel his anger rising, and along with that, tears. Dylan squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose like he had a bad case of eyestrain. Now was not the time. In fact, despite Holden’s warning that he shouldn’t be alone, he really wanted to be alone. If the killer wanted to get him, fine, he could come and have a go. It would allow Dylan to see if he still had the will to kill inside of him.

  Luckily, there was a knock on the door. Dee sighed and levered himself out of his chair. “Finally. I was wondering if Holden had stopped for a trick or something.”

  He had been gone for a long time. But Dylan wasn’t that surprised, mainly because he had a sneaking suspicion Holden had somewhere else to go. It was just the way he’d left in a hurry. He looked like a man on a mission.

  But when Dee opened the door, it wasn’t Holden that came in. It was Fiona, greeting Dee with surprise before breezing past him and making a beeline for the sofa. Dylan was barely on his feet before Fi engulfed him in a hug.

  “How are you, sweetie?” she asked. She was wearing a vanilla-scented perfume that was very soothing. Or maybe it was just vanilla. It was hard to pick up anything perfumey about it.

  “Okay, considering,” he said, as Fi finally let him go. She had her long red hair back in a ponytail but otherwise looked very much the same as before, in a T-shirt, jeans, and a red leather jacket. Her eyes were a bit tired, like she’d been up too long. (Hadn’t they all been?) “How are you?”

  She shrugged and grimaced. “I’m getting used to people trying to kill my boss. Isn’t that sad? Anyways, how is he?”

  “No change from before,” Dee said, returning to his chair. “In the case of an animal tranquilizer overdose, we can take that as good news.”

  Dylan sat back down on the sofa, and he moved the laptop so Fi could sit down beside him.

  “That’s good, I guess.” She glanced at what was on the laptop screen. “Case notes?”

  Dylan nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure out if the answer was here, if Roan was so close to the guy he decided to kill him.”

  “Well, I have something that isn’t in the case notes,” she said, almost excitedly. “Something that may alter the case a bit.”

  Now that was intriguing. “What?”

  She shifted on the couch, turning to face him more, getting comfortable. “Okay, you know I have friends in the sex industry, right?”

  “I’ve seen your dominatrix ad in the back of The Stranger,” Dylan replied. He had, but only after Roan found it and pointed it out. Still, no need to tell her that.

  That made her grin in a slightly sheepish way. “It’s only part-time. I don’t have time for many clients anymore. Anyways, I was talking to Gunther, down at the sex dungeon—”

  “There’s a sex dungeon?” Dylan exclaimed. He wasn’t sure if being frightened or appalled was the proper response.

  “Oh yeah,” Dee said, surprising him further. “Me and Shep got called there once. A guy forgot the safe word and got choked to unconsciousness.”

  “I heard about that,” Fi said.

  “Weirdest thing? He was that guy who runs all those used-car lots on the west side. Shep recognized him from his TV commercials.”

  Fi shook her head as if the guy should have known better than to forget the safe word and shifted her gaze back to Dylan, moving on. “Anyways, Gunther told me about something involving Kyle Newberry.”

  “He’s a closet ’mo,” Dylan interrupted. “Yeah, Ro included that in his case notes.”

  “No, not that. There’s a sex tape.”

  Dylan and Dee shared a surprised look, and both sat forward. “A sex tape?” Dylan repeated. “Kyle having sex with a man?”

  Fi grinned in a savage way. “Two guys. They were having a Newberry sandwich. And one of them was a regional porn star. Gunther recognized his dick and the tattoo on his stomach.”

  Dylan didn’t even know where to start with this one. So he tried to pretend he was Roan and ask questions Roan would ask. “Who’s the guy, and where’s the tape?”

  “The porn star goes by the name of Colt Brixton.” She rolled her eyes. “Shitty name, I know, but hey, most of the good names were probably taken.”

  “That’s almost familiar,” Dee said, frowning in thought. Watched a lot of porn, did he? “What’d he do?”

  “Besides everyone?” She grinned at her own joke. “He works mostly for Champion Studios out of Portland.”

  Dylan opened a search engine browser and entered the name Champion Studios. What he came up with was a page of links to its website and to various adult films it had for sale. Their home page, which you had to give a credit card number to venture further into, had its heading as Champion STUDios. Cute.

  Fi looked over his shoulder and said, “Here.” She turned the keyboard toward herself, entered a username and password, and got him into the site. He looked at her in surprise. She gave him a lopsided grin, coloring slightly. “What can I say? If I’m gonna watch a porn, it’s gonna be a gay porn. Straight porn just makes me ill.”

  He so didn’t need to know that about her. Dylan turned to the web page, amazed at the sheer amount of dicks and balls everywhere, and searched for Colt Brixton. Dee came over and sat on the other side of him so he could peruse the website as well. “You’re not an Internet porn guy, are you?” Dee guessed.

  Dylan shook his head. “Not a porn guy period. Seriously, how does anyone get turned on by that acting?”

  “See, you’re not supposed to be paying attention to the acting.”

  “Yeah, hon, although sometimes i
t’s hilarious,” Fi admitted.

  He shook his head. “No, I’m too distracted by it. It’s too painful. I used to date a theater major, and I have a low tolerance for hideous acting.”

  Dee gave him a disbelieving look. “But hot naked guys, Dyl.”

  He snorted derisively. “I work in a gay nightclub. I’ve seen lots of hot naked guys. After a while, it’s just wallpaper. Besides, I’m not a big fan of the gym-bunny look, and look at these guys. You could grate cheese on their stomachs.”

  “There is such a thing as overboard,” Fi agreed. “But you know, you can probably say this because you’re hot, and your boyfriend’s hot. It might be different if you weren’t.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Dylan said, although he supposed she had a point. It was an easy thing to say when you had a boyfriend who was really incredibly sexy. But she thought he was sexy? He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Yeah, he had to look relatively good for the day job, but beyond that he didn’t think a lot about it. Maybe that made him luckier than most.

  He found Colt Brixton, and kind of wished he hadn’t. The guy had a lean, hard body, all muscles defined and heightened, and he had a hard hawk-featured face, not at all appealing, although he cultivated a type of tough-boy sneer that was popular amongst insecure adolescents. He had a type of tribal-sun black tattoo ringing his navel, seemingly highlighting it, although why you’d want to accentuate your belly button Dylan had no idea. Maybe it was a porn-actor thing. “Eww,” Dylan said. Absolutely not his type. He was trying to look like street-tough jailbait, one of those gay-bashing teens whom every gay suspected was just fighting his own sexuality, and it was almost a stereotype. Fetishizing the enemy is what Roan called it. Dylan imaged he was trying to look eighteen, but he looked twenty-six at the youngest.

  “Yeah, I don’t usually go for that kind either,” Dee agreed.