Infected: Freefall

by Andrea Speed

  “It’s a wedding ring.”

  “Seriously? How long have you been married?”

  “I’m not married anymore. I’m a widower.” It was such a weird thing to say: widower. He was, but when he put it that way, he seemed to realize that Paris was gone and had been gone for so long that it was unbelievable. Part of him still expected to wake up in the morning and find him hogging all the blankets.

  Kyle frowned at him, his falsely tinted eyes betraying confusion. “Yer young for that, ain’t cha? So what’d she die of?”

  “He was infected. Now, can we get back to you? You attended college, right?”

  Kyle sat back and stared at him for a moment, then laughed. “Oh man, I knew you were too good-looking to be straight. So did you run off to Boston or something?”

  Roan gritted his teeth, trying to keep from reaching across and smashing Kyle’s stupid head into the table. He was so sorely tempted it was hard to resist. “He was Canadian. So where did you go? Yale, Harvard?” Roan knew where he’d tried—and failed—to go to college, he just wanted to change the subject.

  It seemed to work. Kyle snorted again and poured the dregs of the wine bottle into his glass. “Oh yeah, right, ’cause I’m so fucking brilliant and my dad wanted me to have the best, right? I went to UCLA for almost two years. Got some bullshit diploma my dad was able to buy, so my getting kicked out wasn’t so bad.”

  “What were you kicked out for?”

  “Well, they had this stupid rule where you actually had to show up for classes. Sometimes even sober.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “I know. I don’t remember that being in any contract I signed.” He swigged back the whole glass of wine in a single gulp, then slammed the glass back down with finality. He motioned the waitress over and ordered another bottle of red. She looked nervously at both of them but scuttled off without a word, aware that Kyle Newberry was the drunken customer asking, putting him in the special category of guys who could be served no matter how drunkenly obnoxious they got.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Roan said, holding back his observation that Kyle didn’t seem all that broken up about his death.

  Kyle shrugged, rubbing his leg against his again under the table. Motherfucker. He was asking to get punched. “That’s what happens to old guys. They die.”

  “You sound so broken up.”

  “We weren’t close. I mean, he bought me my diploma, yeah, but that was only to save face. He didn’t need to spell out what a disappointment I was to him. I got it.” The waitress brought over the new bottle of wine, and Kyle obviously checked out her ass as she walked away, although he was still playing footsie with him under the table. “It sucks that he died, but hey, I ain’t gonna miss him. I hardly ever saw him anyways.”

  “So your relationship was distant?”

  Kyle opened the new bottle and splashed a good amount into his empty glass. “More like nonexistent. We had an occasional photo op, but that was it. Why do I give a shit? Guy was kind of a douche bag anyways.” Kyle leaned forward, propping his head on his hands, and gazed at him with a lascivious, drunken smile. “I have to admit I’m kinda curious about you gay guys. Why don’t we get out of here and see how curious we can get?”

  Was he always this crass, or was it the booze talking? Truth be told, Roan didn’t give a shit which—he was physically repulsed by this asshole. “Stop the shit, Kyle. I know you’re one of those closet queens who won’t come out. Does your fiancée know she’s a beard, or is she going to find out when she comes home early and finds you getting fucked by the gardener?”

  This made Kyle burst into a hearty laugh, almost spitting out his wine. He smacked the table with his open palm, making it shake. “Damn, you’re hilarious. You’re a top, aren’t ya? Gotta be a top. I bet you’re a monster in bed.”

  “I’m a monster in general. What about you?”

  He gulped down his wine and sat forward with a folksy sort of grin on his face. But his eyes were flat and empty. “Listen, little man. I can buy and sell your piece-of-shit detective agency with one phone call. I could own your tight little ass, and the ass of everyone associated with you. You don’t want to fuck with me. Don’t even think of blackmailing me.”

  That was interesting. Why did his mind go straight there? The easy answer to that was because it had happened before. “Someone’s blackmailed you, Kyle? Because you’re gay?”

  “I am not gay,” he spat, lowering his voice to a harsh whisper. “And if you say that again, I’ll do you for slander.”

  “Slander? I thought you just wanted to do me.”

  He slumped back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest. “Play your cards right, be a good boy, and maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  “If I get any luckier, I’ll have to shoot myself in the head.” Roan slid out of his high-backed stool, and said, “I’ll call you if I have any further questions.”

  “Yeah, you do that,” he said coolly, like he’d already started forgetting who he was. Monstrously fickle. Or did he have no genuine feelings, so he faked them at the drop of a hat so people didn’t catch on? Kyle was hard to read in that sense, but Roan had already decided, if this guy was any colder, you’d get freezer burn from mere proximity to him.

  “One thing. Did your dad know you were getting blackmailed?”

  Kyle stared at him, gimlet-eyed, his falsely green contacts insufficient shields for hiding his general contempt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The party line. Roan simply turned and walked out, not even sparing him a parting glance, although he could see Kyle’s reflection in the window, gulping down more wine. He had such a tolerance that Roan was sure he wasn’t even close to drunk. He had just acted that way so he’d have an excuse for his flirty behavior.

  Roan also knew he was lying—he did have an idea of what he was talking about. The problem with his extra-sensory truth-telling sense was that he didn’t know if Joel knew Kyle was being blackmailed. All he knew was someone had blackmailed (or tried to blackmail) Kyle, and someone else in the family probably knew. But who was an open question.

  Roan had pulled out his phone to call Fi, see how she was doing with Cherry, when a sudden pain in his head almost dropped him to his knees. He did drop his phone as he grabbed his head. It felt like a hot drill bit had just burrowed into the soft meat behind his skull. For a moment he heard nothing but blood roaring in his ears, a wave of nausea waxing and waning, and when the pain and the noise started to subside, he was suddenly aware of people standing beside him. “Are you okay?” the man asked. It was a couple, an Asian man and a Caucasian woman, both in their mid- to late forties, with figures so comfortably middle-aged and similar, he guessed that if they weren’t married, they’d been together for years. The woman had picked up his phone, which miraculously hadn’t exploded into pieces on the pavement.

  “Uh, yeah, thank you,” he said, straightening up and taking the proffered phone. Did he have tears in his eyes, or had things gone a bit blurry at the edges? Roan rubbed his eyes, and it seemed to get a little better. Maybe.

  He reassured the kind strangers that he was all right and went to sit in his car for a moment. He worked in such a dark corner of life that he sometimes forgot there were decent people out there. They were few and far between, perhaps, but they were out there.

  Sometimes he’d get sudden sharp head pains as a migraine precursor, but never any that sharp, never any that threatened to drop him to the pavement. What the fuck was that? Did someone have a voodoo doll of him, and had they just shoved a knitting needle through the cranium? It felt like it.

  The pain echoed but was fading rapidly. Still, he reached under the seat and found his emergency bottle of water. He had his emergency pills in the glove compartment, and Roan took a couple, washing them down with the lukewarm, plastic-tasting water. Holy shit. If his migraines kept coming on this bad, he’d have to go to his doctor. No, he supposed he’d have to go to the doctor very soon. Firs
t he’d collapsed, now he’d almost got dropped by a head pain. Something was going on with him, and there was no fucking way it was good.

  His phone hummed in his pocket, and he let it go for a couple of rings before pulling it out. It was Dylan, so he answered it. He let Dylan talk, because he still felt winded. “Hey, Ro, I forgot to tell you last night I may have discovered your drug dealer named Mikey.”

  “Really?” That was about Grant’s case, right?

  “Yeah. Josh, one of the circuit boys, says the big source of Ecstasy and other club drugs was known solely as MDMA, or Mike for short.” MDMA was the acronym for the chemical name of Ecstasy. “You want Sunshine or any variant, he’s the main man you go to. Supposedly he does nightclub-hopping on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, hitting all the party places, straight, gay, and mixed. That’s where he does most of his selling.”

  “He hit Panic?”

  “Well, of course. I already asked Josh to point him out to me if he comes in.”

  “Good. Call me the second he shows, and keep him there until I show up. I need to talk to this guy.”

  “Sure.” Dylan paused briefly. “Um, did you ask me to move in with you this morning?”

  “I did.” Roan dug out his notebook and started flipping through it. He really wanted to check out the Kyle blackmail angle while he could still function. But where did he start there? “Does it freak you out now that you’re fully awake?”

  “I don’t know. It kinda feels like we’re living together already.”

  “My feeling exactly.”

  “It’s just… are you sure? Living with a moody, self-absorbed artist is a total pain in the ass.”

  “Living with me is a total pain in the ass. No difference.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to say that….”

  “I know. You’re Buddhist, and so much nicer than me. See, that’s why I need you. You can patch up all the gaping holes I punch in people’s emotional walls.”

  He paused briefly. “Was that a mixed metaphor?”

  “Fuck if I know. I think after the interview I just had, I’m just gonna start saying “I am a fish” for the next hour or so.”

  “It was that bad?”

  “The closet queen son of Joel looks like my best bet for killer at the moment, and fuck if I don’t hate nailing my own kind.”

  “Well, gay people are just as capable of committing crimes as straight people. More so, if you believe James Dobson.”

  “As a rule, I don’t believe a goddamn thing Dobson shits out of his mouth.”

  “See? We agree on that.”

  “We’re a perfect couple,” Roan concurred, finding a note he’d almost overlooked. Kyle, John, and Joel shared a law firm: Cooper, Weiss, and Cooper. Interestingly enough, he knew they were very expensive, and a whiff of rottenness lingered over everything they touched. Most cops knew these fuckers were helping launder money for drug dealers and anyone wealthy enough to afford their services, but they were slick enough to never get caught. They’d probably have no problem arranging a blackmail payoff—or whatever else might be deemed necessary to get rid of the problem. That was a good place to start.

  “So why do you think the closet queen did it?”

  “I have nothing tangible. He’s simply a sociopath with all the emotional empathy of a desk drawer, and I think he may have been blackmailed, but I’m not sure where or if that fits into this.”

  “I’m gonna go out on a limb here: he pissed you off.”

  “Oh fuck yeah. Smarmy little prick. He pretended to get drunk at lunch and kept hitting on me with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the crotch. He also threatened me, but fuck that. He has money and power, but I can turn into a lion at any time—I win.” All the money and power in the world couldn’t keep a hungry, angry lion from eating you. It was a strange comfort, but a comfort all the same.

  “He was hitting on you? Should I be jealous?” There was a hint of teasing in Dylan’s voice.

  “Since when am I attracted to conceited dickheads? Oily closet-queen conceited dickheads?”

  “Well, if you put it that way, I sound like an idiot.”

  “No, you don’t. Actually, it’s cute that you’re jealous.”

  “Cute?”

  “Sexy cute.”

  “Damn right.”

  Roan’s mind had already started wandering as he considered how to approach Cooper, Weiss, and Cooper. If they knew he was an ex-cop, they’d shut him out instantly, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing he could do about it.

  But didn’t he know someone who could help him get a foot in the door?

  11

  Beware

  DENNIS CALDERA was perhaps the most dapper lawyer Roan had ever encountered. He always wore tailored suits, never too expensive, but cut so exquisitely it didn’t matter that they were far from Prada. He had prematurely silver hair that was cut and styled just so, adding to the air of dignity he seemed to naturally exude. If Roan thought about it, he couldn’t recall Dennis ever cursing, either in his office or at the courthouse. He was always aware of the image he was presenting. He was a class act, no ambulance chaser him; if you were represented by Dennis, you were being represented by the best. Judges generally liked him, and juries liked him even more, seeing a knowledgeable charmer with good taste and genteel manners.

  So it always baffled Roan why Dennis decided to use him as his primary PI. He could have found someone more professional, someone who didn’t look like he’d just rolled out of bed half the time, someone who actually liked wearing a suit and tie, someone who could testify in court without the opposing attorney pointing out he was infected and snickering at his “special powers.” But this was where being the only openly gay private detective in the city helped him for once. Dennis liked to keep business within the “community” whenever possible, so Dennis either had to hire him or be a hypocrite. He could have been a hypocrite—most people were—but he decided to live by his code, and Roan’s bank account could thank him for that. He had to worry when another gay detective hung out his shingle.

  Because he was such a class act, most other lawyers liked Dennis, at least in a professional capacity. He seemed to know people everywhere, which was why Roan called him. As soon as he said Cooper, Weiss, and Cooper, Dennis made a “hmm” noise, the kind of hmm noise he made when he really didn’t like something and didn’t know how to politely tell you you were a fucking idiot for even thinking about it. He then had to assure Dennis that he wasn’t in debt to the mob or something. He just needed some inside information on a client. That made Dennis “hmm” some more and then put him on hold. Roan was on hold long enough for him to take another pain pill. The pain wasn’t fading fast enough.

  Roan was starting to feel slightly disconnected from his body when Dennis got back on. He said he knew a paralegal who worked for CWC, Taylor Sanchez, who was rather dissatisfied with his job. He’d probably be very happy to spill on any of CWC’s clients, although Dennis specifically asked him to not ask Taylor for anything illegal, as he was young, naïve, and bitter. Roan appreciated the warning. Too bad he intended to use it.

  Roan called Taylor, got him, and told him that Dennis Caldera had recommended he talk to him. He put him on hold—Roan took that moment to scream in frustration and slam his phone down on the steering wheel—but when he came back, Taylor just told him he got off work at five and to meet him at the Wendy’s on Larson Street. Taylor had rung off before he could ask why.

  Killing time, he got in contact with Fiona, only to discover her attempts to get in contact with Cherry had met a dead end. Cherry made regular visits to a very upscale spa and salon, but it turned out she hadn’t made an appointment for this week and hadn’t been in for a while. She was lying low since the death of Joel, presumably.

  Holden had better luck. He said he was in at John’s office as a temp. This was a surprise to Roan, because he was pretty sure Holden didn’t know how to do any office chore and didn’t want to know, but Holden told him h
e had an “in” that would allow him to fake it, as long as he actually didn’t have to sit down at a desk and do actual work. The “in” was apparently an employee he knew “very well.” (Holy fuck, how many closet gays were there?) He said he was hoping to get something “incriminating” by the end of the day. Roan didn’t think it was possible to grab something so fast, but okay.

  By the time he found the Wendy’s on Larson, he felt like he was floating. It was weird, but nice. He ordered a shake and waited at a front table for someone who looked like a paralegal to come in.

  Taylor was one of those type-A guys who were so full of energy they seemed to vibrate even while standing still. You imagined if you gave him cocaine, he’d explode. He was a bland-looking guy in a bland suit-and-tie type of outfit, with a plain white button-down shirt and a dark tie that was a type of navy blue Roan, for some reason, always associated with airline pilots. His haircut was short and neat, probably a Supercuts special, and he was trying very hard to corral the type of pimples that could often plague a person well into their late twenties. His eyes were such a pale hazel they were almost a suggestion of a color rather than an actual color, and his wire-framed glasses made them look smaller, exacerbating the problem. He was all nerves as he came over to the table, but Roan couldn’t help but note that didn’t stop him from ordering a “Baconator.” And in spite of everything, Roan had to assure him he wasn’t a cop, and lifted up his shirt to prove he wasn’t wearing a wire. (Although with the perfection of directional mikes, you hardly needed to wear a body mike nowadays, but he wasn’t going to tell him that.) The funny thing was, no one seemed to notice or care. Considering the neighborhood, one man showing another man his nipples was probably one of the least strange things that had ever been done here.