Shift: Infected, #5, page 13
Now that had been an oddly nice dive bar. This bar, technically named Chuck’s (Why? No one knew—there’d never been a Chuck associated with it) was a dive bar that gave dive bars a bad name. It was so dark inside it was like walking into a black hole, and everyone in there looked like they’d gladly step over your rotting corpse to get a second beer. You could get drugs, weapons, and a sexually transmitted disease here, often without trying.
Roan took a moment to let his eyes adjust, and he saw a whole bunch of evil death stares coming his way. Either they knew he used to be a cop, or they just didn’t like newcomers around here. He was cruising for a bruising. He recognized someone trying very hard to hide in the shadows, and he wondered if this was proof of karma, because hadn’t they discussed this guy just a couple of days ago?
Roan headed straight for him. “Hey Burn, how’s it going?”
Burn was just his street name, of course, but it was what everybody but arresting officers knew him by. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’,” he said sullenly, trying very hard to become one with his torn vinyl seat.
Roan slid into the booth on the opposite side and felt something sticky on the rickety table between them. It smelled like beer, and he sincerely hoped that’s all it was. Burn looked fucking horrible and smelled even worse—ammonia and rot seemed to waft from his pores, his hair was lank and greasy, splattered on his head like a skinned pelt, and his face looked as pitted as the surface of the moon, his cheeks sinking in as his face slowly collapsed inward. You’d think the amount of meth this guy did would have killed him by now, but somehow he was still hanging on and still acting as an all-around wheeler dealer/weasel. “I’m not here for you, Burn. I’m here because of Fox.”
He sniffed, and Roan wondered how his septum was still intact. “Haven’t seen Fox.”
“He got knifed tonight. He was jumped.”
Burn had been looking down at the table, but now he looked up, his eyes sunken black holes that glittered like pennies at the bottom of a deep well. “By who?”
“The cops have corralled one, but another guy is still on the run. Name’s Sean Brand. He’s got a cop brother, but he won’t protect him. I want you to tell everyone he tried to kill Fox. Tell everyone. Get it out there as fast as possible. He’s out on the streets somewhere, trying to lay low. I want him flushed out.”
Burn gazed at him warily. “You know it don’t work like that. Fox has some friends in low places. If word gets out, there’s no guarantee he survives the night.”
“I know. That’s what I’m counting on.” The streets could be a very funny thing. Gays weren’t really liked there either—were gays liked anywhere?—but everything was a matter of degrees. Holden may have been a hustler, but he looked out for his people on the streets, taking care of them, and no matter his customers, he never ratted on them to their congregations, constituents, or wives. Not being a snitch was a highly valued commodity on the streets. It was a key to grudging respect, and Fox had managed to earn a lot of it. He was smarter than most, he could play the game and people well—hence his street name, Fox. He might have been a fag, but he was a crafty and respectable one. He had a cachet on the streets that few fellow hookers—or fags—had, and Roan intended to cash in on it.
Burn gave him a look that suggested his personal opinion of him just went up a couple notches. “You want him dead?”
“Ideally, I want him to run screaming to the local cop shop. But if he doesn’t, I’m willing to live with the alternative.” Roan stood up, and dug a ten dollar bill out of his pocket, which he tossed on the table. He hoped it didn’t land in the puddle. “Get yourself some food, huh? You look like an Olsen twin.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Burn said, grinning with a mouth full of rotting teeth.
Roan had no plans beyond this, so he walked back to his car, a bit amazed no one tried to mug him, and wondered about his next move. He could go through Brand’s apartment, but it looked like a shithole, and he wasn’t sure it would have any answers for him. Sean had been in prison, and his brother—half brother—was a cop. He knew better than to leave incriminating evidence about.
His brother.
Roan suddenly wondered if Sean would be that stupid—or desperate enough—to seek out his brother’s help. But he’d helped him before, hadn’t he? Now that he’d set the street dogs off on him, he might not have any other place to go.
He sped back to Michael’s house, glad the streets were relatively clear this time of night. Instead of parking in the driveway, he drove up the street and parked in front of someone else’s darkened house. No sense in alerting Sean that someone else was here.
Brand was still asleep in his bedroom, so Roan decided to make himself at home while he waited. He discovered that Brand was just what he'd thought he was: a lonely, sad man. He seemed to eat nothing but TV dinners and cans of chili, which Roan could actually understand, as he was no good at cooking, and when he didn’t have boyfriends, he usually ate out or just nuked something. Connor hadn’t cooked much; he usually drank instead or, while trying to be sober, simply tore his hair out and chewed pack after pack of gum. Dee didn’t cook either, but then again he rarely had time to do so. But there were few signs of takeout food in Brand’s fridge.
His computer wasn’t very interesting either, although Roan eventually discovered, in his history, an interesting porn website. At first he thought it was Asian women (straight men and Asian women—he really had to ask Randi what that was about), but then he realized that what he was looking at were Thai “lady boys”—young men who dressed and lived as women. Some had had surgery (breast implants, mainly), some had not, but all were uniformly persuasive. They looked like women. Lovely women. You couldn’t see Adam’s apples or stubble or any other sign of masculinity. Roan wondered if this meant anything.
He ended up waiting hours—hours in which he found out Michael had a decent cable TV package—before finally he heard a jingle of keys outside the door. He turned off the set and got up, hearing someone cursing under his breath as Roan approached the door. Oh, was Sean having a bad night? It was about to get so much worse.
Roan opened the door and found Sean Brand standing on the doorstep, his keys in his hand. As soon as he saw Roan, fear registered—it spiked in a sharp scent not unlike cider vinegar. Roan grinned at him hard, knowing full well it went nowhere near his eyes. “Just the man I wanted to see.”
Did Sean recognize him? Roan was pretty sure he did. He turned and bolted for his car almost instantly.
Good. He really liked it when his prey ran for it.
Although Sean was closer to his car in the driveway and there was no way, theoretically, Roan could beat him to it, Roan knew there was a way. He started after him at a dead run, then veered off to the side and jumped, springing from the lawn onto the back of Sean’s shitty Nissan, making the car rock on its shocks as he turned to face Sean. He was still in a half crouch, feeling his muscles lengthen and harden, a deep pain radiating through his jaw as a growl welled up in his throat and his eyes aching as he felt his vision shift. “Where you goin’? You just got here.”
Sean stopped awkwardly, his momentum almost carrying him straight into the side of his own car. “How did you—fuck, man, fuck. What are you?”
The pain in his jaw was almost intolerable—ripping off the lower half of his jaw by brute force would be much more comfortable—but he had a strange distance from it. The codeine? Maybe, but it was hard to say. He felt good. He knew his mouth was split into a grin, but he also knew his mouth was bleeding. The pain was too great; he had no idea if his teeth had started changing or not. “You know what I am, Sean. A man you never should have fucked with. You’re gonna talk, and maybe then I’ll just let the cops have you.”
“Fuck you,” Sean snapped, but there was a tremor in his voice, and his eyes seemed riveted to Roan’s face. He wanted to look away but couldn’t.
Sean took a step back and Roan lunged, pouncing on him before he could make a run for the house, and as he brought him down on the lawn, he grabbed Sean’s arms and pinned them down with undue force. “We’re not done here, Sean.”
“Get off me, faggot!” he shouted, trying to squirm and buck him off. Roan dug his knees into Sean’s side and gripped his wrists so tight Roan could feel the bones starting to give. He eased off a little as Sean squirmed and made a noise of pain, but he didn’t let up.
“So, you do know me,” he snarled, and his blood dripped down, splashing Sean’s neck. Sean tried to squirm away as if Roan’s blood was diseased... which it was, now that he thought about it. “Do you have any idea what I’m gonna do to you if you don’t talk?”
From the fear in his eyes, Sean had some idea.
13
Painless
THE sun was just starting to come up when Roan knocked on Grey’s door, and he suddenly wondered if he should be bothering him right now. But he was just so wired he wasn’t sure what else to do.
In spite of the codeine and partial transformation, his heart was thundering in his chest, making it look like his hands were kind of shaking, and he did wonder if he should be worried about having an aneurysm explode in his brain any second. But you know, if he was going to die, he was going to die. No point in worrying about it.
Grey lived in an old house that had been partitioned into apartments, and he lived on the upper floor, so Roan had to use a staircase around the back—it used to be someone’s patio deck, now an oddly spacious landing—and then he knocked on a wooden door that felt kind of flimsy under his hand. Either he was knocking too hard, or it was made for internal as opposed to external use. At least there was a very big hockey enforcer living here—anyone who broke in would be very sorry very quickly.
Roan heard a lock being unlatched before the door opened, and he was surprised to find Scott there. “Roan? Hey man, what’s up?” he asked before yawning extravagantly.
Oh, goddamn straight boys who appeared in their underwear and never realized how hot they were. Scott was wearing nothing but jockey-style red underwear (red?), and he had that long, lean, hard body of the dedicated athlete, muscles slender but strong enough to make him look like he’d be a good blast shield in case of explosion. He didn’t have a six pack of abs but a two pack, his stomach flat as an ironing board, and Roan really wanted to bite his knuckle. His weakness was men with those wonderfully solid, flat stomachs. Six packs were impressive and could be attractive, but not as much as these sandwich board guys. Why, he had no idea, but that was just the way his libido went. He was suspicious of gym bunnies and men built too much like marble statues.
His hair was sleep mussed, and he had a dark stain of stubble along his jaw... crap, crap, crap. He was cute enough to give Dylan a run for his money. “I, uh, didn’t realize you lived here too,” Roan said, aware that if Scott was more awake, he might have noticed Roan had looked at him a bit too long for comfort. (But damn, he was cute. It really caught him by surprise. At least he could console himself with the knowledge that a straight man, confronted with a hot woman in her underwear, probably would have been flustered for much longer.) But Scott had probably been on sports teams most of his life. He probably thought nothing of casual nudity and near nudity, unaware of the fact that he was smoking hot and could have been a model for a gay calendar or underwear ad.
Scott nodded, yawning again and running a hand through his hair. “Yeah, it’s easier to split the rent, and we’re used to rooming together on the road.” After dry washing his face, he honestly opened his eyes, and he squinted at Roan’s shirt. (Did he wear contact lenses?) “Is that blood?”
Roan looked down and checked. “Um, yeah.”
“Yours?”
“Some.”
He didn’t react to that admission at all. “Give it to me. I’ll getcha a clean shirt.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Yeah, I do. You don’t wanna walk around in a bloody shirt. Besides, I got this great stuff that gets out bloodstains.” At Roan’s look, he clicked his tongue in impatience. “I play hockey. I better know how to get bloodstains outta clothes.”
Roan was going to point out he thought the equipment manager did stuff like that, but hell, at the minor league level it might be more DIY. So Roan shrugged off his leather jacket, tossing it on the front room’s homely blue Goodwill couch, and peeled off his shirt, which was a bit more damp than he thought. But the bleeding from his mouth was always much more than he expected, and he had no idea why. Shouldn’t he be used to it by now? He turned the shirt inside out and tried to hand it over on a dry side, but Scott gasped in shock. Roan suddenly and horribly remembered his scars. Oh shit, how did he forget about these things?
“That is fucking awesome,” Scott said, coming over and grabbing his arm. He was, it turned out, looking at the tiger tattoo Dylan had drawn for him. “Oh my God. Where’d you get that done?”
“Actually, it was drawn by my boyfriend. Someone else tattooed it on, but she followed his design.”
“Wow. Could he do one for me?”
“Umm, I don’t know. You could ask.”
“Yeah, I will. That’s beautiful.” He stared at the tiger for a moment, and then unconsciously caressed it with his thumb before letting his arm go. It raised goose bumps on Roan’s skin, and he really wanted to hit him. Damn straight boy—he had no fucking clue, did he?
He walked away, holding Roan’s bloody shirt, and Roan couldn’t help but notice what a great ass Scott had as he called back, “You’re here to see Grey, right?”
“Right.”
Scott headed down a short hall that was parallel to the small, open kitchen. It may have been the apartment of two straight bachelors, but it seemed remarkably tidy, and all the pale stained hardwood suggested a warmth reinforced by the hominess of the mismatched but not inelegant Goodwill furniture. The only thing that really gave this away as a guy’s place was the sheer number of remotes scattered across the coffee table.
Scott pounded on the door, as if trying to bust it down, and shouted, “Grey, get the fuck up! Roan’s here!”
He could have done that from here. Well, not the pounding on the door, but everything else. There might have been a grunt of acknowledgment, but Roan couldn’t tell.
Scott went in the room, and after a moment, there was a thud—like a body hitting the floor—and a startled, “’M up, I’m up.” After a moment, Scott came out, pulling on a pair of loose gray yoga pants, and he tossed Roan a dark shirt.
“Did you shove him onto the floor?”
Scott half grinned, still sleepy and still so thoughtlessly sexy Roan wanted to pound his own head through the wall. “Sometimes it’s the only way to get him up. I gotta warn you, he’s useless until his first Red Bull.”
“He doesn’t do coffee?” Roan finished pulling the shirt on, and probably shouldn’t have been surprised that it had the Seattle Falcons logo emblazoned across the chest.
“Not enough caffeine for him. He likes to start his morning with a heart attack.” He padded off to the kitchen, and Roan felt awkward, so he sat on the arm of a slightly threadbare but oddly elegant dark blue velvet armchair and looked around the apartment, not at all staring at Scott and his long, lean back or the way those yoga pants sat so lightly on his hips it looked like they could fall off at any second. (He probably didn’t know it at all, but he was a total cocktease.)
What was he doing? Why had he come here so early? It could have waited—there was no reason it couldn’t have. Okay, if he was honest, he was so keyed up and wired he probably wasn’t thinking straight. No pun intended.
He heard a toilet flush, and Grey came shuffling out like a zombie, eyes barely open. By the time he reached the living room, Scott shoved a can of Red Bull in his hand and pointed him toward the sofa. “There he is. Now go sit and talk.”
Grey grunted and shuffled forward. Scott stayed by the entrance of the hall and said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna go back to bed.”
“By all means. Sorry I woke you.”
“It’s okay. If we had a skate this morning, we’d have been up.”
“Skate?” Grey said, plopping down on the couch. The way he said it reminded Roan of the decrepit Father Jack in the sitcom Father Ted (although he said “Drink?” not “Skate?”), and he had to bite back a grin.
“No, not today. Today’s a day off. Now drink your Red Bull.” Scott gave him a wave, which Roan returned, and then he disappeared back into his room. Were all team captains like that? He gave orders and Grey followed them without question. Maybe it was just the nature of their relationship irrespective of the team, or Grey was too tired to question anyone’s orders.
Still, Grey popped the top of his Red Bull and took a healthy swallow, which made Roan grimace. He’d only had it once, but he thought it—and most energy drinks of that kind—tasted like piss. But if it got Grey going, he could hardly criticize.
Grey was big enough that he made Scott look svelte. He had a V-shaped torso, a broad chest narrowing to a slim waist, and he wore dark boxer shorts that covered about half of his tree-trunk-thick thighs, although none of the rest of his sinewy legs. He looked a bit more like a boxer than a weight lifter, and that made perfect sense. While he wasn’t overly bulked out with muscles, he still looked like he could stand in for a retaining wall if the need ever arose. How did anyone ever hit by him get up again? Roan was kind of relieved he did nothing for his libido, but maybe that’s because he was a client. Roan was sure never to even mildly entertain the notion that a client was attractive. That was only asking for trouble.
