by Andrea Speed
Holden stood in the doorway, holding a T-shirt (he still had yet to put one on), and Roan was telling him what had happened with Hatcher and how he thought it had become much more dangerous now because the man who was supposed to have control no longer had it, and if the snuff film guys were tipped off that they had Jordan, it could be incredibly dangerous for Jordan. He then took off his shirt, and Holden, who had been listening with an air of bemused detachment, suddenly exclaimed, “Holy shit!”
Roan glanced at his reflection, at Holden standing in the doorway, and realized he was staring at his back. Oh shit, how could he forget it? It was odd what you got used to, what you forgot, even though it seemed so monstrous you’d think it would be impossible to forget. But he’d already had this conversation with Dylan about the scars on his back, and that was bad enough. He didn’t want to have it again.
“Was it a belt or an electrical cord?” Holden asked. “How old were you?”
Roan turned and yanked the shirt out of his hand. “Let’s stick to the topic at hand, okay?” How’d he guess electrical cord? He must have seen a lot of abused kids in his time on the street, heard a hundred horror stories. Nearly everyone had at least one.
He shrugged the shirt on and went back to Hatcher and the fact that Maddux would probably remain forever untouchable to them, although he could still reach out and get them (apparently). Holden flashed him a dirty look, probably because he knew he was deliberately ducking the question of who had abused him as a kid and all the subsequent questions that would fall out from that, but that was all; he magnanimously let the topic go. “We always knew it would be dangerous, Roan. This hasn’t changed anything.”
Roan noticed that the T-shirt Holden had given him said, emblazoned in black print across the chest, Hookers Do It For Money. Well, you couldn’t argue with that logic. “Yes, but things have gotten much uglier, and I didn’t even know that was possible. Sixty/forty Jordan isn’t alive anymore.” Hatcher’s phone call could have pushed that to seventy.
“I didn’t think we were going in to rescue him,” Holden said, and gave him a look that was slightly sly and slightly sinister. It was a look that seemed to say he either wanted to seduce him or kill him, possibly both, and he hated Holden giving him that look. He thought they were beyond that now in their odd relationship. But far be it from him to ever completely understand Holden and his motivations.
“We are going to rescue anyone at that place who’s not a voluntary participant, or who’s under the impression that there’s just a bit of S&M going on.”
He picked up on the unspoken “But…” like Roan figured he would. “And then?”
“If I give you a gun, will you not hesitate to use it if you have to?”
A sly and deeply disturbing smile crept across his face. Another little reminder of how fucking dangerous Holden could actually be; beyond the striking face was a mind that could kill you the second he decided that you weren’t worth the bother. “Absolutely. If it’s us or them, they don’t have a chance.”
“I have a Glock that’s pretty compact. Hide it in a boot and practice pulling it out and thumbing the safety off at the same time. You may need to use it in a hurry.”
He nodded, his brown hair hardly moving. “Got it. I’ll bring a knife too. I’m good with those.”
“I know. Can I see your phone?”
Holden raised an eyebrow at that. “Why?”
“Your cell. Your personal one, not the one you use for clients.”
He wanted to ask why again, but he just shrugged and turned away, allowing Roan to finally escape from his bathroom. Holden probably wasn’t trying to make him feel cornered, but for a moment there he kind of did. That man and his head games. No pun intended.
Out in the living room, Holden tossed him his phone, and he glanced through the menu before tossing it back to him. “Good. Charge it up. Thursday, when you go to meet the guy, have it in a pocket, with an open line to me. That way I can hear a lot of what’s going on, and in case Seattle traffic fucks up the tail, I can still get a GPS location on your phone.”
“Look at you, all high tech and shit. Absolutely.” He went to the kitchen and got a cell phone charger out of one of the drawers by the refrigerator. As he was plugging it in, he said, “Dylan isn’t gonna know about this, is he?” It almost sounded like a question, but it wasn’t.
“If he knew, he might leave me for good. And maybe he should. I’m a horrible person at heart.”
“Bullshit.” He fixed him with an intense stare. “You know me, Roan. You know any belief I might have had in a higher power was bludgeoned out of me by my hypocritical douchebag of a father. But I believe some people are nothing but evil, human vampires who live to do nothing but cause misery to others. I saw them when I was out on the street. They were more ubiquitous than rats. There’s good out there, yeah, but there are people who are nothing but poison, and getting rid of them is doing the human race a major favor. These fuckers are murdering people, and then charging other people money to watch so they can beat off to it. You’re offering me the gun because you know as well as I do that one more death—one or a dozen, two dozen—is gonna mean jackshit to them. Everyone is expendable. We need to teach them that karma is a bitch.”
“We’re not going in with the intent to kill.”
Holden nodded. “I know. But do you really think this is gonna be bloodless?”
Put it that way, he just seemed like a naïve idiot.
Roan left Holden’s wondering if he was making a mistake. No, he had to shut these guys down. They could just pick up and move elsewhere, especially overseas, where life was seemingly cheaper, at least to the guy in charge of this fiasco. He could alert the Feds to this, honestly he should, but a police investigation moved at a snail’s pace, and by the time they tracked them down, they’d probably have pulled up stakes again. They should nail Maddux, as long as he didn’t flee to somewhere without an extradition treaty—which he should be doing right now if he had any brains at all.
He had to make this right. Evidence would find its way into the hands of the Feds, anonymously… and after they took care of the problem. He couldn’t walk away. He should, if he had any part of his soul left, anything worth saving, he damn well should. But he just couldn’t. Damn him. God, he hated himself sometimes.
On the way home, all he could think of was Dylan. He had to make sure he was safe—
(he had to make sure he never found out)
—and maybe he could get some protection for Fiona too. She’d resent it even more than Dylan, but she’d understand. He hoped. He hoped a lot of things, he realized. He felt like an idiot, like the biggest fool imaginable. He never thought of himself as a bad man, but now he was beginning to wonder if he was.
When he got home, he was shaking and he didn’t know why. He sat in his car and watched his hand shake for a good minute or so, then he managed to suck it up and go inside, where he was greeted by the noise and boisterous good humor of half of the Falcons first line, and Dylan was just watching it all with tolerant amusement. It was infectious in its way, but Roan still felt outside it all.
The guys took off eventually, leaving him and Dylan alone. Dylan smirked at him and asked, “Do I even want to know what’s behind that shirt?”
Roan got a green tea from the fridge, sat on the couch, and told him everything that had happened that day, leaving out the confrontation with Hatcher and the actual substance of the conversation with Holden. Dylan hadn’t heard about the shooting at the church—the Falcons had been manipulating the TV, watching DVDs—and when he told Dylan about it, he came over, sat beside him, and then took him in his arms and held him. Roan buried his head in the side of his neck and just breathed in the scent of him. It was calming and deeply sad, and yet also kind of arousing. He knew it was a combination of grief and fear that he was going to lose him for good, but it wasn’t enough to throw cold water on his ardor. He nibbled Dylan’s neck, and Dylan made a noise in the back of his throat, stroki
ng Roan’s hair. “Are you kidding me? I have to go to yoga soon. I have résumés to circulate and paintings to agonize over.”
“Don’t wanna fool around?”
He sighed wearily, and said, “Are you kidding me? Of course I do, you sexy beast.” Dylan pushed him down onto the couch and kissed him, pinning him down with the weight of his body. Of course, Roan could have easily shoved him off, but he didn’t want to. He sank his arms beneath his shirt, needing the friction of skin on skin, the lovely little death.
The sex was great, so it should have made him felt better, but oddly enough, it didn’t. Afterwards, the melancholia came slamming back full force. They both went upstairs, Dylan to take a quick shower and get dressed for yoga—which Roan tried to talk him out of due to the skinhead thing, but Dylan refused to be a prisoner to those dickheads, which was fair enough. Roan just pulled on some boxer shorts and lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling as Dylan talked to him from the bathroom. He wasn’t actually listening to much of what he was saying; he was just lulled by the sound of his voice.
Too lulled. Dylan came out, drying his hair with a towel, and as he opened the dresser drawer to pull out his underwear and pants, he looked back at him curiously. “Have you totally zoned out on me?”
“No, I was just thinking.” Which was half true. “You know I love you, yeah?”
Dylan had tossed the towel on the end of the bed and stepped into his underwear. “Yeah. Are you now going to confess to something terrible?”
“No. I just wanted you to know that.”
He didn’t look convinced. After stepping into his pants, he asked, “Are you ever gonna tell me what’s going on, Ro?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Bullshit.”
He glanced at him, and wasn’t surprised to see Dylan giving him what he could only call a boyfriend look, one that was skeptical and worried and mildly pissed off. “You love me?”
He scoffed, now looking even more annoyed. “Of course I do.”
“Why?”
That seemed to catch Dylan short. “What?”
“You’re normal, Dyl. You’re not infected. You could have a life free from all of this. You could meet a nice uninfected guy who’s never been in a fight in his life, an art history major from the UW. You could settle down with him and an annoying little dog and have a happy, normal life. I love you, hon, but I’m thinking it would be better for you if you just walked away.” Before I break your heart, before you hate me, before I get you killed.
Now he did look pissed. “Fuck you. I want to be with you. I’ve accepted all that comes with it.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
Dylan angrily yanked on a T-shirt, unaware that he had just pulled on one of Roan’s Pansy Division shirts. (Not that he cared, it just seemed funny at the moment.) “Are you picking a fight? Do you want to leave me, is that it?”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“That something’s going to happen to you because of me. If it did, I’d hate myself for the rest of my life. There wouldn’t be enough drugs to make it go away.”
Dylan’s annoyed expression collapsed into one of bruised sympathy. “Oh honey, nothing’s going to happen to me. And if it does, it’s not your fault.” He leaned over him, cupped his face in his hands, and kissed him softly, on the forehead, the lips, trying to soothe him. It was very sweet of him. Too bad it wouldn’t work. Dylan then stared him straight in the eyes, as if trying to will his certainty into him, and said, “Okay?”
“Okay,” he agreed, pretending to mean it. Well, he did mean it, he just didn’t believe it.
That was the problem with caring. It left you vulnerable, open on one side to the most hideous pain imaginable, and the only antidote was to stop giving a shit, but how did you do that? How did you turn it all off? He thought if he numbed himself with enough meds he could fake it, but that turned out to be wrong. He always thought he was more cynical than this, more inured to it all. Obviously, that was just something he wanted to believe.
After Dylan left, he forced himself to get up and went to the bathroom to dig a couple of pills out of his hidden stash. He took them without knowing what they were, but he guessed codeine from the shape. He then went to the closet and felt around for a box on the upper shelf until he brushed it with his fingertips. He pulled down the cherrywood case with the simple locking mechanism, and opened it to make sure it was all there. It was: the Glock 26 Subcompact handgun, which had great advantages in being small enough to easily conceal and yet had a ten-round magazine, as well as not being a piece of shit like your usual Saturday night special. Holden already told him he’d be dropping by after his “gig,” so Roan put the case and a spare ammo clip aside, figuring he’d be here long before Dylan came back.
He got his own HK P2000 SK out of the drawer he kept it in, and because he hadn’t used it for a while, he got the cleaning kit out of the back of the closet and got to work on it. He spread an old towel on the floor so he didn’t get any oil on the carpet.
As he cleaned the gun, feeling oddly phallic doing it in nothing but boxers (but hey, it was probably appropriate), he wondered why he was bothering. If he went through with this, would he ever even pull the gun out? If he unleashed the lion, clawing back to his own humanity would be difficult if not impossible. And the lion should be able to get things done. Well, in theory.
He found himself thinking of that Jane Doe Dropkick had told him about, the seventeen-year-old girl found in a ditch in Spokane, possibly tied to this case. Her family was never going to know her fate, never going to know she was rotting in a Potter’s field in another country, and his resolve hardened, turning his shaky nerves to concrete. She was found but never identified; what about those who had never even been found? What about all of them? Someone had to do something on their behalf. No one said it had to be him, but who else was there?
He just hoped that, if Dylan ever found out about it, he would forgive him.
20
Red Line Season
The next couple of days were purely devoted to getting ready for the sting on the snuff guy’s place. It felt like a sting operation, only he wasn’t a cop anymore; he was going in alone. Yes, Holden would be there, but he was bait, the undercover guy in the room. It was all on him alone to ingress, to get in without getting Holden killed. He still had no idea how many people he’d be dealing with, or what manner of security precautions. It was all guesswork, therefore inherently impossible to plan for, and yet here he was trying. Was this another definition of insanity?
He arranged many things. He made sure Tank and Grey knew he needed Dylan and Fiona protected on that day (night) especially and arranged a car. He couldn’t use either muscle car for the tail—they were too noticeable—but renting a car might not be a great idea. Some of them could be traced and mileage would be noted. But he still knew the guys at the auto yards that Paris had known, and he managed to arrange to pick up a car from them, a fairly anonymous ’02 Honda that was due to get torn up for parts once he was done with it. As soon as he returned it, it would be reduced to scrap. This guy in particular, Jorge, didn’t ask why he wanted the car, nor what he planned to do with it; he knew Roan was a detective and figured it was a “detective thing.” All Jorge asked was that he pay for the car if he couldn’t return it, which seemed fair enough.
Roan realized he was taking way too many pills, but he felt it was probably insurance. He would be on a minimum of pills during the tail because he wanted to be as sharp as possible. That still meant a couple of pills because he was remarkably functional on pills, but not the really heavy ones. Tylenol codeine, maybe. Of course, he’d have a bottle of Percocet standing by for after, because he already guessed he’d be in so much pain he’d be moving like he was full of broken bones and acidic blood.
Gordo told him the white supremacist link was confirmed, at least between the guys that had come after him and the shooter at the church. They were a little fringe grou
p, and they had some kind of online hate page where they preached the usual bullshit about the Bible coming out against the children of Satan (which supposedly infecteds were), with the added tinge of racism (the infecteds would “dilute” the snowy white Aryan bloodline—like that was a bad thing with these particular inbred morons). Roan couldn’t help but ask how they could think he would pollute anyone’s bloodline, as he was one hundred percent gay and had no intention of being a breeder, but Gordo couldn’t answer that one. He admitted this had occurred to him as well and just assumed they meant viral infection or something along those lines, but again, that didn’t make a lot of sense, unless they expected him to buttfuck their members any time soon. (And while he was flattered they would think of him, he had no interest in their flabby, spotty behinds.)
Dylan knew something was going on, but of course Roan couldn’t tell him what, and they fought a bit, although not as much as he'd honestly anticipated. So that’s why he decided to entertain Dylan’s suggestion that he actually do an interview with this guy who had both called and e-mailed him. His name was Aidan Lambert, and apparently, he wrote for some magazine Roan had never heard of. He was doing an article on ten people whom he felt were changing the world but were as of yet relatively obscure, and he wanted to throw Roan in the mix. He thought he was trying to be funny (sarcastic?), but then the guy reeled off facts Roan already knew, but were still surprising to hear. Roan was the first (known) fully functional virus child, the first openly infected police officer in the United States (really? The entire country?), was the oldest living infected to date (tell him about it), and was the only person recognized legally as a bloodhound (okay, he didn’t say “bloodhound,” but that was the gist) due to his superior and measurable sense of smell. Aidan explained that he knew the infecteds didn’t have an actual organized group, but if they did, he was pretty sure he’d be their leader, because who better?