Infected

by Andrea Speed

  Ugh, Roan again. He was so glad he took the Valium. He needed to focus his mind elsewhere.

  Dahlia was wearing a black-and-white patterned dress, streamlined and chic and probably expensive, with a light overcoat a sort of chalky beige that Holden didn’t find offensive, which was amazing in and of itself. As a rule, he liked no beiges or beige-adjacent colors. She wore sensible flats and no jewelry save for her wedding ring, which Alexei apparently designed himself. Yes, they were that kind of arty couple, but Holden couldn’t hate them. And he’d tried.

  She sat down, her moves economic. There was nothing but worry on her face. “You look good,” Holden said. Worried, sure, but still good.

  She tried to smile and failed. “Not as good as you. You’ve been working out.”

  “I’m pretending I can avoid death if I can just lift my weight in kettle bells.”

  She grimaced, glancing down at the table. She folded her hands on the surface and nervously played with her ring. “I see your sense of humor is the same.”

  “I think it’s gotten more acidic with age. What’s up?”

  “I’ve heard you went into the private detective business. Is that true?” At his nod, she continued. “Alexei left for a conference in Spokane. He hates small planes, so he decided to drive over. He hasn’t called me since he reached Snoqualmie. I think something’s happened to him.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “I haven’t heard from him in over a day, so I’d say two days. I tried to talk to the police about this, but you can imagine how that went.”

  “They said you were jumping the gun on the whole missing thing, right?” And that was before the details of their personal life came into it. He was sure as soon as the cops learned they were polyamorous, they’d write him off as having run off with one of the side pieces, never grasping the nature of their relationship. Cops weren’t big on nuance.

  She nodded. “But I know Alex. He promised Esme he’d call, and he would never lie to her. And I know it sounds crazy, that he’s hardly been gone, but I know Alex, and this is abnormal. I’m afraid something’s happened to him, something terrible.”

  Holden assumed Esme was their daughter, Esmerelda. Yep, they had two kids, Esmerelda and Leonidas—and Holden felt if he was going to hate them over anything, it would be the names they’d foisted on their children—and still had their poly lifestyle. The kids were too young to know about it yet. All they knew was Mommy and Daddy had “friends,” some of whom lived with them for some time. He had no idea how they managed it, but they couldn’t have been the only ones.

  Holden also knew that Dahlia wasn’t the hysterical wife type or the hysterical anything. If she thought something was wrong, something probably was. “I assume you tried his phone, both calling and GPS?”

  “That’s the thing. His phone has no signal at all. Any attempt to call him goes straight to voicemail.”

  Holden sat forward, pushing his cup of tea off to the side. “No signal? You mean the GPS can’t locate the phone?”

  “Yep. So he’s either in an area where it’s simply impossible for the GPS to find it, or it’s broken.”

  It did occur to Holden that if you were going to take off and leave in this day and age, the first thing you had to do was get rid of your phone. Drop it in the nearest toilet, leave it somewhere for a rando to steal, or crush it like a can at the recycling place. It was too easy to trace a phone. Then again, people lost and broke their cells all the time. But wouldn’t he call from a landline or a new phone as soon as possible? Despite being a professor, which didn’t pay all that well, Dahlia had managed to make a living out of her ghostwriting and her art. Holden was pretty sure she also held the patent on something, but again, he wasn’t sure what. The bottom line was, unlike a lot of people in Seattle, they weren’t hurting for cash. Alexei could have afforded to buy another as soon as possible. “What about the car?” he wondered. “The GPS on that? LoJack?”

  “He decided to take his older Chevy on the trip as he didn’t want to risk the hybrid on the passes. It doesn’t have GPS or LoJack.”

  If Alexei wanted to do a runner, he’d picked an excellent way to do it. But Roan came to his thoughts again, this time with his sage investigating advice: “Don’t presume to have the investigation wrapped up right away. Don’t pin your own narrative to it, because you will search for evidence to support it. Keep your mind as open as possible in the beginning and narrow it down as the facts come in, not vice versa.” It was always easy for Roan to say these things. He was a man who liked puzzles and was a natural at investigating. Roan seemed unaware of how hard it was to emulate him. But Holden knew he had to try, and besides, just because he could imagine himself being this shitty, there was no reason to think Alexei would be this shitty. What did he really know about the guy? He only fucked him a few times. He didn’t know him at all.

  “I hate to ask this, but I have to. Have you been in contact with your recent thirds? Could he have run off with any of them?”

  He was afraid he’d upset her with the question, but she must have been expecting it and remained composed. “Our current third, Tyler, is just as worried about Lexi as I am. I skyped with Mia and Hayden before I came here, and neither of them had heard from him since we talked to them at Christmas. And yes, I believe they’re being truthful.”

  Holden nodded, realizing he had no problem with a throuple, but the thought of skyping with the exes on holidays seemed far-fetched and terrible. “Okay. I’m going to need a good photo of him, a full itinerary of where he was going and what route he was taking, if you know it, where he last called you from, workup of the car, everything. And all I can do right now is promise I will do my best to find him, but I can’t promise I will.”

  She nodded, lips tightening as she put her small purse on the table. It was one of those repurposed bags, one that used to be a bag of cat food in Japan or a rice sack in Indonesia. She had some of the things he needed already and took the opportunity to whip out her checkbook and write him a check for his retainer. There wasn’t a lot to go on here, but he bet Chai might have some ideas on how to proceed. Chai seemed to have a natural knack for detecting that Holden couldn’t claim.

  He felt his phone hum in his pocket, but he didn’t answer it, as much as he was dying to. He needed to deal with Dahlia first. He owed her that even if she wasn’t a client. He gave her a business card, and she promised to email him everything she hadn’t brought with her. It wasn’t much because she’d come well prepared. He promised her he and his partner, Chai, would get on this right away, and she leaned over the table and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She’d changed perfumes and now smelled a bit like a cookie. It was nice. Why couldn’t men smell like cookies? Holden made a mental note to try and get that trend rolling.

  She gave him a fierce farewell hug with tears in her eyes and whispered, “Thanks for believing me.” Which was weird for a single second, until he realized he might be the first person not involved in this love triangle who accepted her story. Technically yeah, it was early to declare him missing, but he knew Dahlia, and if she said something was wrong, it was.

  But as soon as she left, Holden sat down and looked over what he had. He really was going to have to turn this over to Chai. He had no idea where to start with this one. Holden knew what he was good at, but it wasn’t this.

  He remembered his phone vibrating and checked it. He didn’t recognize the number, but whoever it was had left him a message. He decided to listen to it and hope it wasn’t even more bad news.

  It wasn’t. It was Hel, calling from one of the rare still-functioning payphones in all of Seattle. “Okay, so, Twitch was in the Jungle the night Burn got killed, and he says there was, like, this thing between dealers? Like one dealer got into an argument with another over territory. He doesn’t know if Burn was involved or how it finished, but you’d think it’d be Burn, right? He really never gave a shit if he poached in someone else’s territory or not. So, uh, I think that’s what happen
ed to him. I still got some feelers out. I’ll see if I can find something else, but for now it seems like he just pissed off the wrong people, which is kinda what Burn always did. Um, see ya.” With that, she hung up. Unlike everyone else nowadays, Hel was unaccustomed to talking on phones.

  He considered it as he texted Chai to see if he was still with the other guys. It did sound like Burn, and it wasn’t his first fight over territory with other dealers. In fact, Holden once had the misfortune of being in a bar when his squabble with another dealer ended in gunfire. No one was actually hurt, but it scared the shit out of everyone and infuriated the bartender, who barred the pair of them.

  But was that it? Dealers were more known for guns, not knives. Could be a rebel, or a guy who actually used his head and realized a quieter killing method wouldn’t draw as much attention as a 45.

  Was it too easy, though? Holden still couldn’t help but be suspicious of things that were too damn easy. Why couldn’t he just shed his cynicism for once? Burn killed in a fight between drug dealers sounded like the most natural thing in the world. Of course, dying in a meth lab explosion or by autoerotic asphyxiation sounded par for the course with Burn too. He was a man of many vices and little self-control.

  But it irked him all the same. It would fit a convenient police narrative of the “poors” and their drug habits, overlooking all the icky bits like facts. Such as virtually the only way to if you’d done time or had a less than stellar academic record, this was pretty much all you could do anyway. Or if you were homeless. It was easy to say “Get a job,” but finding them was a beast, and finding one you could actually live off was like finding the world’s last diamond-encrusted unicorn. Pretty much, drugs and prostitution was your only hope if you wanted to survive. People’s appetites for sex and escape were bottomless.

  Holden gulped down the rest of his tea, trying to shake himself out of this funk he was in. Either he was going to mourn Roan, go to war against the one percent, or ideally both, but that wasn’t helping anything. Right now he had two cases to work on.

  Maybe if he dressed really down, he could infiltrate the Jungle. That was a big if, though. He had great confidence in his acting skills, but it would probably take more than some colored contacts and putting his hair up in a hat to disguise himself. Did he have the budget for it? Or the wherewithal? Both felt inadequate today.

  His phone hummed in his hand. It was Chai texting him back, letting him know the hooker brigade had gone home. Fantastic.

  It was time to turn at least one of these cases over to a professional.

  7—You Need Satan More Than He Needs You

  IT WAS good to see the guys again and see how very different they were from their former escort selves. Except E. As Holden so rightly predicted, E didn’t change and probably wouldn’t, barring some successful intervention.

  But Chai was glad they had split up for the day. Holden’s sudden snappishness had made things awkward, sure, but it also brought home some hard truths. Namely, all the rest of the guys had settled down, and Chai was ready to throw himself in that pile as well. But Holden hadn’t changed. He had, in fact, turned himself up to eleven. He was still the slick hustler, the guy who wasn’t exactly pretty and yet had the burnished aura and confidence of the prettiest man in the world, with an edge that glittered beneath the surface. But now that edge was more visible and deadlier than ever. Life had honed him into something sharper and harder, and in that room, it was more obvious.

  After he left, E mentioned he’d heard rumors that Holden was kind of a fixer, that you went to him if you were having certain kinds of trouble. This led to Hotshot asking if he was like the Equalizer or something, and they all had a nice, nervous chuckle about that. They also all looked at Chai, expecting him to know, and he told them honestly that Holden had never done that kind of stuff to his knowledge. But that was the sticking point, wasn’t it? To his knowledge. Chai was sure, if he was doing something like that, Holden was deliberately keeping him out of it. To save him from legal trouble? He wasn’t sure the cops would see it that way.

  The problem was, Chai had no problem imagining Holden killing someone. To protect someone or himself? Sure. Holden wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet or lacking courage. He would do what he had to do. But would he do it as an occupation?

  Once the guys had cleared out and he had time to think about it, Chai started realizing some ugly truths about himself. If he thought Holden was a serial killer, he’d turn him in. Yes, he was his friend, but that was a line you didn’t cross. But if Holden was a vigilante—like the rumors had it and like he still kind of hoped—Chai knew he should. But he probably wouldn’t.

  Holden couldn’t always know he was targeting the right guy, right? Unless he did something shitty in front of him. And if he was killing people, that was beyond the pale. But there was this small voice in the back of his head, one that still asked, Who fights for us?

  If you were ever poor and/or had skin some shade that wasn’t white, trusting the cops didn’t really enter into things that much. How could you trust them, exactly? Chai, for instance, was not a violent person, or one given to lawless behavior, and yet he’d had more than a couple of run-ins with the cops that were scary and ultimately senseless. He was brown, he was near a scene where they thought a brown guy had done something, and that was good enough for the police. Setting the racial elements aside, class came into it too, and you knew if you were poor, the justice system really wasn’t built for you. To put you away? Sure. But beyond that, it didn’t have much to offer. And that was just accepted as the way of the world. The playing field was always tilted toward the pale and the wealthy, and if a few crumbs slipped through to you, feel grateful for them. It was complete bullshit, and Chai had no idea why it was so widely accepted by everyone.

  So if Holden was out there picking up the slack for the cops who had little to no interest in them, was that really all that bad? Again, Chai’s head said yes, but his heart had a different opinion. It was dangerous and stupid and wrong… and yet, so much of life was.

  Chai knew he was kind of lucky. After his parents kicked him out, he fell in with a group of throwaways and runaways who had banded together for survival, and after a couple of weeks of squatting in various buildings, they’d ended up living in a converted barn on this older guy’s property. One of the kids, who called himself Shredder—was it after the Ninja Turtle character? Chai had never gotten a straight answer about that—claimed the guy who owned the place was his “Uncle Andy.” Chai severely doubted the skeevy guy was actually his uncle, and part of him really never wanted to know what Shredder had to do to make this guy allow so many wayward kids on his property. But maybe it wasn’t that icky. After all, the barn was wired to hold all those computers that allowed most of them to become cam boys (or girls), and Andy certainly got his cut of the profits from that. It was that enterprise that led Chai into escorting and to meeting Holden. As street experiences went, his wasn’t that horrible.

  What was Holden’s like? They never really discussed it, but most former street kids he knew didn’t talk about it. What was there to say? It was cold and scary, and you usually didn’t know where your next meal was coming from or where you could sleep that was safe. A lot of people were abused, and no one was ever punished for it, as far as they knew. You got cynical about law enforcement fast. Some of them could be the abusers too.

  What little he did know about Holden’s life on the street was that he was an adept pickpocket and wasn’t above the occasional five-finger discount in stores, although he didn’t like it as much. Holden said he disliked it because he never knew exactly who he was stealing from. When he pickpocketed, he knew exactly who he was targeting, and he usually went for the richest douchebag he could find. Holden had a sense of justice even then.

  It did make him wonder if something happened to Holden when he was a street kid, something that fueled this vigilante trip. If he was a vigilante. Oh fuck it. Even though Chai hadn’t seen him indulge in it,
he was ready to say it was true. There were too many rumors over too long a span of time. And Chai knew he shouldn’t be okay with it, but he was.

  Chai found himself unconsciously rubbing his leg above his stump. It hurt after sustained physical activity, and while the guys seemed to make sure he moved very little, he’d still done enough to aggravate it. He collapsed on the sofa and put his cold can of ginger ale on his leg to see if it would help. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t, which was why he feared the whole psychosomatic thing. Should he be concerned he was more worried about being mentally ill than physically hurt? Oh good, yet another thing to be anxious about.

  Shouldn’t his therapist have been helping him more with this? Admittedly, he’d just started seeing Doctor Woo, and he’d given her a boatload of shit to deal with. He was just a mess. And clearly he had self-esteem issues on top of it all. And that made him hate himself more. It was a terrible vicious circle.