Infected: Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  While waiting for the doctor to show, he dozed lightly in one of the chairs, the sick throbbing of his head not allowing him anything but the lightest stage of pre-sleep. Sometimes, with the bad attacks, there were few medications he could take to shut the pain off, even if he took a handful of heavy-duty shit. It was like his brain was an infected wound, swollen and near bursting with pus. Which was a disgusting idea, but it felt even worse.

  The doctor turned out to be one of the newer ones, a petite woman younger than him, who also had shorter hair than him. She was exceedingly kind, noting that his chart was full of references to migraines and cluster headaches and filled with medications used and discarded. Like most, she asked when he had his last head CT. They kept looking for brain tumors, and they had yet to find one, although it was once noted aneurysm could also be a possibility. Fun.

  There were new meds out, which didn’t surprise him considering the sheer amount of pharmaceutical ads, and she gave him a shot of the meds in his hip. Then he had to loiter in the room for a good fifteen minutes, just to make sure he didn’t have any side-effect reactions (he’d had a bad reaction to one of the first migraine meds he was ever given, and this was a chemical cousin). His head hurt so much he didn’t even feel the needle. He had considered trying to overwhelm the pain in his head, distract his pain receptors by, say, slamming his hand in a car door, but that didn’t work. He’d tried, though; he tried almost everything you could name, short of a brain transplant.

  He was okay. The pain was starting to ebb, and while he felt slightly dizzy and hollow, that was how migraine meds usually left him feeling. It was preferable to the alternative. The doctor gave him some samples of the medication in pill form, mainly because his health insurance didn’t cover this particular medication (Ha! Road trip to Canada was in order, it seemed….) and she advised him to see his GP as soon as possible. She didn’t like that his migraine attacks seemed to be increasing in frequency, and he hadn’t had a brain scan in over a year. The fact that he was an infected seemed to make this more dire in her opinion, and he knew why: as infecteds went, he was elderly. He’d lived too long with the disease without physically breaking down. She probably thought this was a sign, the first sign of his rapid decline that would end with his death within six months. Sometimes he wished that was true.

  He knew the meds were really working when he became ravenously hungry while driving to the office. Because he had an insane craving—the meds, or just him?—Roan pulled into the lot of the first Baskin Robbins he came to and got a Jamoca Almond Fudge ice cream cone. The kid working behind the counter gave him a funny look, but Roan didn’t care. It was the breakfast of champions, damn it. He felt light-headed and giddy, not really high on meds so much as high on the lack of pain. You forgot how nice it was to live without it sometimes.

  He arrived at the office just as Fiona was hanging up the phone. “Where you been, bitch?” she asked. It was a running joke between them now, the pointless addition of the word “bitch” at the end of sentences and questions. They didn’t do it around clients, as someone might take them seriously, but they thought it was hilarious.

  “Stopped at the doctor’s, bitch.”

  She sighed heavily and fixed him with a stern look. Today Fiona was wearing her crimson dominatrix hair extensions, but she combined them with her honey-colored contact lenses that made her eyes look almost yellow, like a wolf’s. It was startling, especially when combined with a black pleather vest worn as a shirt, such as now. She looked like she got lost on her way to the biker bar. But Roan imposed no dress code, except she at least look semi-professional and never wore her dominatrix gear during work hours (which was cool with her, because she didn’t like to wear it except when she was on a “gig”). “Is it your migraines again? Man, you need to see a specialist.”

  “There are migraine specialists?”

  “I assume. Isn’t there a specialist for everything? They got butt doctors. Why not head doctors?”

  “I don’t need a brain surgeon. Yet. Give me a minute.”

  “Don’t smart-ass me, mister.”

  He decided not to remind her who was the boss around here, and simply asked, “Any messages?”

  She gave him a look that suggested he was going to pay for this and let out a martyr’s sigh before consulting a piece of paper on her desk. “Detective Sikorksi called and said he wanted you to call him back. Dylan called and said he’d be at the Serrano Gallery this afternoon and would love it if you stopped by, and James Bellamy called with another excuse about why he’s been late on payment.”

  “Bellamy,” Roan sighed, waving his hand in a dismissing manner. He was a weasel who wanted him to get “dirt” on his soon-to-be-ex-wife but was unwilling to pay for it. So until he coughed up the dough, Roan wasn’t giving him shit. Then he asked, “Serrano Gallery? Like the peppers?”

  Fiona nodded, her crimson hair moving up and down. “Yeah, it’s a place that specifically focuses on Latino artists, but I always thought it sounded more like a restaurant. And I keep forgetting Dylan’s Latino. I don’t know why. He has that total hot Latino guy look going on.”

  “Back off, sister—he doesn’t bat for your team.”

  “Don’t I know it, bitch. You hot guys all seem to be gay. Where’s my hot straight guy, damn it?”

  “Did you include me in the hot guys statement?”

  She glared at him. “Well, duh. You are a hot guy. Don’t fish for compliments.”

  “I wasn’t!” He wasn’t. He wasn’t sure how he looked. When he looked in the mirror, he either saw his scars or he saw too much of the cat in his face and had to look away quickly. He tried not to glance in mirrors too often. Only when he absolutely had to.

  “Oh sure,” she replied teasingly, but before she could dig the hole deeper, he was saved by the phone. Once she answered it, he ducked into his office and closed the door. There was a bowl of fresh gorp on his desk, indicating Doctor Braunbeck had stopped by at some point. He was glad he had missed him.

  Once he’d settled and shoved the gorp into his garbage can—sorry, but he really didn’t like the stuff, and Roan had no idea why Braunbeck could never accept that some people didn’t like it—he called Gordo back but got routed straight to his call messaging system, which told him he had his cell phone switched off: he was either at a scene or at a meeting. So Roan left a terse message to call him back. Damn it, if he had more on the crime scene, he wanted to hear it.

  So, with time on his hands, he called a person he hadn’t talked to in a while, Jay Bhaskar. He was a medical examiner—read coroner—for the county office, and while very straight (he had three kids and two pissed-off ex-wives to prove it), he was the most gossipy, nosy person Roan had ever met outside of a hair salon. He’d been known to flash Polaroids of particularly grisly or inexplicable finds in corpses at Christmas parties, which Roan knew could get him fired if anyone higher up ever found out about it. But Jay had on his side a very self-deprecating sense of humor (he described himself as the “dumpy Gandhi—you know, the one who found nirvana in a double cheeseburger”) and a very generous nature. If you needed ten bucks, help moving, or a kidney, he was the guy you called. Roan didn’t need anything so dramatic.

  When Jay answered, Roan heard the hollow echo of a speaker phone. “Bhaskar.”

  “Hey, Jay, it’s Roan McKichan.”

  “Roan! You old gay bastard! How ya doin’, Batman?”

  He sighed wearily and slumped back in his chair. “Don’t you start.”

  “Oh come on! I saw those security tapes, man. Ain’t no way a normal human without years of training could pull off those stunts.”

  “How do you know I haven’t been training?”

  Jay snorted a laugh that trailed off into a snicker. “Training as which, a gymnast or a long jumper? Hey, I know—ninja training. You’re a ninja now, aren’t you?”

  It was nice to have friends, but it also could be a tremendous pain in the ass. He decided to get right to the point. “Jay
, I need you to look into something for me.”

  “I assume it’s a corpse.”

  Roan heard a faint metallic clink, like something being tossed onto a metal tray. “Are you doing an autopsy right now?”

  “Yeah, but a very basic one. I’m just confirming a death by natural causes, and boy, was it ever. Your body’s probably a temple, ninja Batman, but this guy used his as a garbage dump. His arteries are so clogged I couldn’t get a needle through them.”

  Roan winced at both the mental image and the possibility that ninja would now be added to his name-calling list. “Do you know if Joel Newberry is on the docket?”

  “Newberry? Holy shit, now there’s one guy I’d love to slice and dice. The stories I’ve heard about him….”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, the usual decadent rich guy stuff: sex parties, orgies, all-night coke binges and losing half a million dollars at the blackjack table in Vegas. You know, the routine.”

  “Stuff that someone could have pulled from a Jackie Collins novel.”

  “Right. But I bet at least some of it is true.”

  “Can you find out? I mean, at least through his autopsy report—”

  “Are you fucking kidding me, man? That stuff’s locked down tighter than a nun’s snatch. The Newberrys are trying to keep this stuff as hush-hush as possible.”

  Roan wished he was surprised, but he wasn’t. “Why?”

  “Because… well, he’s rich, they’re rich, they’re local celebrities. That’s all the reason they need.”

  “Is that good enough for you?”

  There was a long pause and another clink of a metal instrument hitting a metal tray. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? You’re trying to manipulate me into breaking the law and giving you details that maybe three people in the world could possibly be interested in. Why the interest in Newberry, Ro?”

  “I’ve been hired to look into his death by a close friend of his, who doesn’t believe his death was accidental.”

  Another pause, but shorter than the first. “Really?” Jay now sounded interested. That was all he needed to do, pique his curiosity. Once, when he was very drunk at one of those Christmas parties, Jay had admitted to him that he’d always had this secret fantasy about being Quincy, a mystery-solving coroner. He ate this mystery stuff up on a plate. “I’ll sniff around, but… I can’t promise anything. And if I find anything, it stays between us and my name never comes up, got it?”

  “You can count on me, Jay.”

  “I’d hope so, you being Batman and all.”

  If Jay wasn’t doing a favor for him, Roan would have slammed the receiver down repeatedly on the desk. But when someone was doing you a favor, you couldn’t pull shit like that, not without being seen as the world’s biggest asshole. But the next time someone called him Batman, he was going to scream.

  After ending the phone call with Jay, it struck him that he felt too light-headed—dizzy almost. The world seemed to have a slight tilt to its axis, and he thought he might start floating if he didn’t hang on to the edge of the desk. Okay, the absence of pain was nice, but sometimes these side effects could be a real bitch.

  He pushed his chair away and lay down on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Which needed cleaning, something he hadn’t realized before. There was a big-ass cobweb in the near corner, which he had never seen before. Some detective he was. Also, his carpet was pretty flat. He probably needed to get it replaced before it became threadbare. Well, assuming he got the money to do such a thing; the economic downturn was hitting him as well as other people. Only Holden seemed immune, but then again, when you sold sex, you were probably bulletproof.

  He was wondering if he was falling asleep when his phone rang, and rather than get up to answer it, he grabbed the phone cord and yanked it down to the floor. The receiver tumbled off the cradle when landing, so Roan scooped it up and answered, “MK Investigations.”

  “Hey, you know someone named Miranda Kim, don’t you?” Gordo said, with no preamble. He had his gruff “just the facts ma’am” voice on, which set off alarm bells in his head.

  “Randi? Yeah, she’s a friend. Why?”

  “We got the IDs of the three people last known to be living at the house on Madison Court,” he reported. “Curtis Bowles, Tiffany Jones, and Grant Kim.”

  Roan felt his gut twist, although the meds he was on were so good it registered as little more than a twinge. Grant Kim? Wasn’t that the name of Randi’s brother?

  Oh fuck no. He hoped it was another Grant Kim, but somehow he doubted it.

  4

  Cycle of Agony

  ROAN really didn’t want to do this. But he had no choice.

  He walked out into the downpour and crossed the parking lot of the office park, coming to the all-female CPA office where Randi worked. Admittedly, this seemed to be a strange office park. Yes, they had the dentist and the chiropractor and the lawyer that all office parks of this ilk seemed to have, but the dentist was a German woman who had a tendency to curse in Yiddish and walked with a limp due to a prosthetic leg; the chiropractor was a gorp-obsessed weirdo who looked like a real-life version of Bunsen Honeydew; and the lawyer was a very brusque professional woman who took the bar exam when she was a man about ten years ago (her employees generally didn’t know she used to be a man, but Roan did, because she’d told him once in an attempt at bonding). And then there was the infected gay detective and his dominatrix assistant, who probably took the entire weirdo cake. Roan would have worried he was a weirdo magnet, except Braunbeck had been here when he’d started renting office space, so Braunbeck was the weirdo magnet. That figured.

  Roan walked into the office, and the receptionist was a perky if slightly plain and slightly heavy woman named Patsy. “Hey, Roan. You here to see Randi?”

  “Yeah, but I can wait.” The layout here was different than most offices. The boss of the place had torn out the physical cubical walls and replaced them with glass and translucent plastic ones, so it was more open and had more light. In other words, it seemed less dreary. It also allowed you to see who was busy and who wasn’t, and Randi was dealing with a client right now, so he hated to barge in on an appointment and say, “Randi, your brother’s either dead or a fugitive, and oh yeah, did you know he was infected?” That was something best shared in private.

  Actually, he relished sitting in the waiting room chairs and composing a script in his head, which he rewrote every thirty seconds. He could think of no good way to say this, no comforting way, no way to soften the blow. He watched rain drip from his hair and splash on his leg, disappearing quickly into the dark color of his pants. He usually wore dark-colored pants, because they hid bloodstains so well, and it was a horrible revelation about himself. He was all ready for violence, even if the situation didn’t warrant it. But he was always locked and loaded, ready to go. What had he once said? Oh yes, that he was a battle queen: Boadicea. He was nearly forty—shouldn’t he have grown out of that by now? After all, if he was a “normal” infected, he’d have been long dead by now. Maybe when you knew you shouldn’t be alive, it made you more combative, ready to fight for the space you somehow had but shouldn’t have had. Every minute, you waited for the repo man.

  He felt a shadow looming over him and looked up to see Patsy standing there with a paper cup of coffee. “Randi can see you now. And here, I brought you this,” she said, handing him the coffee. “You looked cold.”

  Cold. Roan thanked her, but wondered if that was code for something: miserable, depressed, like a drowned rat. He took the cup of coffee, but only for warmth, although to be fair it smelled strong and possibly gourmet. He wished he liked coffee.

  As he approached her “office,” she looked up from her computer and asked, “What can I do you for?”

  He liked Randi, even though she had always had a not-so-secret crush on Paris and only tolerated him as a Paris accessory. He couldn’t blame her for any of it, as Paris was always the better of the two of them. Who d
idn’t love him? He didn’t want to hurt her like this. But it was either hear it from him or from some cop who didn’t know her from any relative of a crime victim.

  “Does the address 212 Madison Court mean anything to you?” Roan asked, grasping at the final straw. Maybe it was another guy named Grant Kim. There was a growing Asian population in the region, and Kim was an incredibly popular last name, the Korean equivalent of Smith. This could be mistaken identity.

  For a moment, Roan clung to that hope. The fact that Randi appeared momentarily puzzled fed his relief. But then she said, “I think that’s where my brother lives. Why?” Then horror overtook her expression, like a cloud moving across the face of the sun. She knew then that there was only one reason he’d come in here and ask such a question. “Oh shit. What happened to Grant?”

  “I think we should probably discuss this in privacy,” he said, glancing around at the surrounding cubicles. He noticed a couple of employees pretending to work while they tried to eavesdrop on the conversation. It was natural curiosity, and that’s why an open office floor plan like this sometimes sucked.

  She must have agreed, because she stood up, but she then grabbed his arm and demanded, “Is he dead or in jail?”

  “Neither,” he answered, and as far as he knew, it was most likely true.

  She frowned, but then she signaled someone and said, “Ally, I’m taking my break now.” Randi grabbed her coat off the back of her chair and then headed out, still holding his arm and dragging him along. He let her, and at the surprised look of what he assumed to be the office supervisor, he said, “Family emergency. Sorry, it’s urgent.” He left the cup of coffee on the windowsill before Randi yanked him out the door.

  Just beyond the doorway of the office, near the dripping eave of the roof, Randi faced him and said, “Neither isn’t an answer. What’s going on?”

  He had no choice but to tell her he had been called to a crime scene at the house this morning, a cat killing that had turned out to be pretty bizarre. A dead man in the kitchen, so badly mutilated that identification was going to be difficult, and the scent of two cats but three people in the house: two infected males, including the dead man, and a woman, not infected but wearing perfume.