Shift: Infected, #5, page 34
He nodded. “I’m starving. Can we stop somewhere on the way home?”
“Of course. What do you feel like?”
“Good question.” Roan held out his hand toward Tank, and he handed him the bouquet. Roan took the beer out, and handed it to Tank. “Hold on to that for me ’til we’re out of the hospital, okay?”
“Sure.”
Dylan eyed it in shock. “You brought him a beer?”
“He likes beer.”
“I like beer,” Roan echoed with a nod.
Dylan rolled his eyes and shook his head, and as they headed out into the hall, he asked Tank, “Is he a member of the team now? Did I miss a press conference?”
“He’s an honorary member,” Tank told him, struggling with the pronunciation of “honorary” for a moment. That was a hard word for those with pronounced French accents. “We expect him to jump on the ice and participate if there’s ever a bench-clearing brawl.”
They were walking down the hall, more or less shoulder to shoulder, but Roan could tell Dylan wasn’t overly pleased with this. “Do you expect any?”
“No, but it is hockey, so it could happen. And I hope it happens when we’re playing the Wheat Kings. I’d love to unleash Roan on this center, Constantin Bourdin. He thinks he’s Sidney Crosby, but the only thing he has in common with him is whining like a little puss. He needs to be beaten like a piñata full of Krugerrands.”
That made Roan stop to laugh, and it was one of those overwhelming, hard laughs that almost paralyzes you. It took him a moment to get himself under control, to find Dylan and Tank waiting for him, Dylan looking mildly concerned and Tank faintly, absently smiling. “That is the best metaphor I have ever heard. Can I use that?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“Awesome.” He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, and as they started down the hall again, he held out the flowers toward a passing nurse. “Can you give these to someone who needs them?”
The nurse stared at them and then him, but after a moment seemed to recognize him. “Oh, Roan, sure.” She took the flowers and moved on down the hall.
“Who was that?” Dylan wondered.
Roan shrugged. “No idea.” Dee seemed to know so many nurses and paramedics, Roan just assumed they knew him until it was obvious they didn’t.
They said good-bye to Tank in the parking lot, where he gave Roan the beer, and, much to his shock, a slightly clumsy hug. Roan patted him on the back and thanked him, letting him know he could visit him and bring him beer any time.
As soon as he and Dylan were in the car, he opened the beer and took a swig and told Dylan, “I’m not going to drop dead any second, so you don’t have to worry about that. I’ve adapted.”
Dylan gave him a steady gaze that Roan had learned to interpret as “What the fuck are you on about?” It was close enough. “What does that mean?”
“Fuck if I know. Rosenberg told me I most likely had an aneurysm, but it stopped because I continue to adapt.” His mysterious anger returned, and he started to rant like a crazy person on a bus. Tears blurred his vision, but he wasn’t sure if they were sad or angry—probably both. “I’m gonna be the longest living infected ever. I’m gonna outlive them all, maybe as a human, maybe as a cat, maybe as a huge fucking bipedal virus—”
Dylan cupped his cheek with his hand, and that’s all he did, but it startled him into silence. He then leaned over and kissed him softly on the forehead. “I love you, no matter what. You know that.”
Roan rested his forehead against his and put a hand on his chest. Sweet man, one he didn’t deserve. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“The insanity that is my life. Me.”
“Hey, I signed up for this ride. I knew from past experience that sexy men were always trouble, and it wasn’t like your reputation didn’t precede you. I have no one to blame but myself.”
“You think I’m sexy?”
“Don’t fish for compliments.” He gave Roan another kiss, then sat back in the driver’s seat. As he put the keys in the ignition, he asked, “You’re one hundred percent certain that Tank is straight?”
“What are you implying?” He took another swig of the beer. If it was this good warm, it must have been a thousand times better cold. He looked at the label, but alas, it was in French. It had a picture of a sword and shield on it, though. What the hell was it, Gladiator Beer? (Motto: “For Those About To Die, We Beer You.”)
Dylan shrugged a single shoulder and shook his head, but after he started his car he just sat and stared at the windshield for a moment. “He’s fascinated by you. It’s definitely a man crush in one sense or another.”
“At least it’s mutual.” Dylan raised an eyebrow at that. “C’mon, he’s fucking cool. Anyone who can catch a thrown bottle before it smashes me in the face and stop a fight simply by scaring the shit out of the opponents is in my good books.”
The surprised look turned alarmed. “He did what now?”
He patted Dylan on the shoulder. “You should be glad he was there. When he does his intense crazy man act, no one wants to fight. They just want to run away and hide.”
“The fact that he has an intense crazy man act is alarming.”
“He’s a goalie. He’s gotta do something to defend himself.”
“They have big sticks.”
“If they hit someone with it, they’re penalized.”
“Oh. Is it because they could decapitate someone?”
Roan shrugged. “No idea. But you’d think.”
Once they were on the road, Roan turned on the radio, which was on one of the alternative stations (ah, Western Washington—there were a couple of “alternative” stations, but what it was the alternative to he had no idea), and they were playing Modest Mouse. When he heard the line “It coulda been, shoulda been worse than you will ever know—” he almost laughed. That was his medical diagnosis for the day.
They discussed where they’d stop for a bite to eat, and they decided on a nearby bakery, as Roan felt like sugar. He also asked Dylan if he’d found out about all that domestic partnership registry bullshit, and he said he had, which was good, as Roan figured they’d need to get that done before he disappeared into Willow Creek to be scanned within an inch of his life, in case something went wrong or the CDC decided to lock him up as a public menace.
Dylan hadn’t brought Roan's cell phone, but he’d brought his own, so he borrowed it to call Holden. Dylan was off at the glass-topped counter, ordering pastries and a green tea, while Roan sat at one of the tiny corner tables, feeling as gay as he had ever felt. Even when he married Paris, he didn’t feel this gay. It was probably all the lace tablecloths and the delft teapots with flowers on them. He suddenly wanted to camp it up like Pat Robertson was in the room.
He fought back the urge and called Holden (the gay hustler—well, this was a pretty fucking gay thing to do). The phone rang four times, and he thought he was going to get shunted to his call messaging when he finally picked up. “Hey, Roan, I was gonna visit you later,” he said, sounding slightly breathless.
“Did I interrupt something?” He felt intensely weird calling during one of Holden’s “dates.” It seemed like a grotesque invasion of privacy that he wanted no part of, even from a distance.
“No, I was just doing my crunches,” Holden said, audibly taking a drink. “Hundred a day. Can’t get six pack abs, but I still have to work to keep the flab away. It’s fucking unfair.”
Roan grunted an affirmative. As much as he found flat stomachs sexy, he actually felt working toward them was too much bother and not worth it. Which was why he’d probably lucked out in having his wonky metabolism, which sometimes made it difficult to keep weight on (especially when he transformed all the time). But wasn’t he just partially hospitalized for undernourishment, even though he’d eaten a whole pizza? It was a fucked-up world, and he couldn’t see eating like Mr. Creosote just to keep the pounds on. Life was too short (more in some cases than others), and frankly, he probably didn’t have the budget for it. If only being a superhero paid. “I was afraid you’d gone to meet snuff guy without me.”
“Oh hell no. I’m just bait, the sidekick who gets kidnapped and has to be rescued. You’re the macho hero who rides in and kicks ass.”
“Says the guy who stabbed the two asshats who assaulted him.”
“I never said I was completely helpless. I’m just not the demolition man that you are.”
“Ha.”
“So you out?” He could only mean out of the hospital, as he’d been out forever.
“Yeah. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I just pushed myself too hard.”
“Wow, that’s new,” he replied sarcastically.
“Don’t you start.” Dylan came to the table, bearing a tray of pastries and a cup of mango-scented green tea. Roan gave him a nod of thanks and reached for the gooiest pastry, the one coated in what looked like chocolate icing with almost tarlike consistency. Of course, nothing here was a doughnut, everything had a French or Italian name, but damn it, it was a doughnut under an assumed name. He took a bite and enjoyed a minute of sugar-coated bliss. Here were those ten thousand calories that Rosenberg wanted him to eat in a single pastry.
“Snuff guy hasn’t gotten back to me yet,” Holden admitted, with a disappointed sigh. “I don’t know if I’m not the type he was looking for, too professional, or too old.”
“Old? Come on, you’re not old.”
“Yeah, I am. In hooker years, I’m like eighty. So I’m trying to get someone else in on this. I’m thinking Phoenix will be up for it. He’s a tough kid. He did a gig or two with Coyote, so he’s good for the revenge angle, and he’s twenty-three but looks seventeen, so I can’t see them ignoring this bait.”
Roan scowled down at the neat lace tablecloth. He didn’t like exposing someone he didn’t know to a bunch of murderous assholes. He didn’t feel good exposing Holden to them either, but at least he took some consolation in the fact that Holden was a much harder target than he looked. He could play up his lisp and seem super-harmless, but people really had to not be paying attention to the look in his eyes, which were hooker hard and merciless. Everything had a price. “We don’t even have a workable plan. How can you bring someone else into this?” He was careful not to look at Dylan, as he knew the look Dylan would be giving him.
“I don’t like it either, but letting them get away is not an option.”
Well, he had to give him that. They’d killed three people that they knew about—who knew how many more that hadn’t been found? If they’d found one body for every two killed (a low estimate), that still put the body count at six.
“Oh, there was something I wanted to show you. You on your phone?”
“I’m on Dylan’s phone.”
“Web enabled?”
He checked. “Looks like it. Why?”
“I’m gonna send you a screen capture. I’ve been trying to comb through the films, trying to spot any recognizable faces. I’ve heard from a couple of girls working the street that Ebony has just dropped off the map, so I’ve been looking for her, and I noticed this kid and he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I thought you might know him.”
“Send it on.”
He did, although it took a minute, and the screen cap wasn’t the greatest (although he didn’t blame Holden for that; the snuff filmmakers were clearly using bargain basement cameras and often lit things so the faces of the participants weren’t visible). But he could make out what was essentially a profile shot of a kid—teenager, or someone in their early twenties—with close cropped black hair and a pointy sweep of bangs that almost made him look like an anime character. But what gave him away was his strong chin—not square but heavy, strangely rugged on such a young man. Roan felt a shock down to his toes, and the pastry turned to cement in his gut. Why did things always get worse? Was he cursed? That was it, wasn’t it? Some angry anti-cat hetero cursed him to have a life full of drama. If he believed in any sort of god, he’d have happily blamed it. “Was he a participant or a victim?” he finally asked Holden.
“Participant, at least in the film I caught him in. Why? Who is he?”
He rubbed his eyes, wondering what he was going to do with this information. It was probably too late to save him. “It’s Jordan Hatcher, the boy I was hired to find.”
The question was, how did he get mixed up in this? And how much did his father know?
15
Wish
ROAN wouldn’t have minded talking to Hatcher this time, but of course he got the bastard’s answering machine instead. He ended up calling him three times that day, only to get nothing but machine. Was he off on holiday or something? No client technically had to let him know when they were jaunting off to Vegas, but it was common courtesy, especially if you were looking for their son. But he was wondering a lot about Hatcher right now.
When they got home from the bakery, he checked his e-mail, and while almost thoroughly entranced by the spam message with the header “Become a porkmaster general” (there was the new title of his autobiography, displacing Tanning Salon Pervert), he realized Luis had e-mailed him. It was a very simple e-mail, with only a name in the message: Sander Lewis. The man Dylan got into a fight with at Panic, the one who seemed to have baited him for unknown but possibly sinister reasons.
He called Kevin, but got his machine. (Was it his day for machines?) He asked him to run this guy through the system, see if he had a record or if he could in any way be connected to Charles Crosby, the guy who tried to stab him in Panic. It was a long shot in theory, but he was beginning to sense a pattern. He wished whoever was after him would show themselves, make themselves known, but that was the strategy, wasn’t it? They knew they couldn’t take him on directly, so they hid. It was a good strategy, but already it was starting to unravel.
He took phone calls from a concerned Fiona and Dropkick, assured them he was okay, and while he was itching to get out and do a bit more pavement pounding, he backed off for Dylan’s sake. He wanted Roan to take it easy, so, damn it, he supposed he owed him that much.
He shaved off his beard (God, that was a relief), caught up on some backed-up television, and made spaghetti for dinner, as he could make spaghetti without fucking it up too much. By that time, he got a call back from Kevin. He couldn’t officially link him with Crosby, but Lewis was definitely known in the system. He had done time for assault in Idaho and had a handful of arrests for various minor things, from public drunkenness to disturbing the peace to vandalism. He was what Kevin called a “little shit,” a guy who would probably spend his life in and out of the system, but most likely never for anything major unless he escalated. Right now, he just appeared to be a middle-echelon douchebag. Maybe that should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. Hadn’t Crosby done time for assault too? He asked Kevin to double check where they had done time, but no, they’d done time in different states—Crosby in California and Lewis in Idaho. Still, wasn’t that odd? Two men, known for their violence, attack him and Dylan on different days in the same place. There was something off about this, but he couldn’t nail it down, couldn’t name the equation that would make this make sense.
Dylan’s black eye was getting better too; the bruise had mellowed to a reddish color with undertones of green and yellow, which Dylan described as a “fruit salad throwing up on my face.” Roan assured him that all black eyes seemed to go through that phase, as he was intimately familiar with black eyes (and an entire variety of bruises, contusions, and cuts). At least it didn’t hurt as much as it had before.
While Dylan did his yoga, Roan worked the heavy bag in his office, challenging himself with two tasks: not to knock the damn thing off the chain rig, and not to let the lion out the least little bit. Dylan said next time he’d work the heavy bag if Roan did the yoga. He agreed but wasn’t serious.
They had time to discuss over dinner whether or not they should tell anybody about the domestic partnership bullshit. It wasn’t like they were getting married or anything—it was just for legal purposes. It was a business transaction, more or less, a relationship boiled down to its most base form: I have stuff, you may share my stuff, a judge can’t say you can’t have my stuff if I die. That’s all marriage was too, even if the fundies wouldn’t admit it. (Nope, nothing to do with having kids either; marriage was, at its root, a way of inheriting real estate, and no born-again could obliterate its capitalist foundation if they tried.) He didn’t think it mattered one way or another. Dylan figured they could probably tell close friends without making a big deal about it, but then he wondered if anyone would try to get them a gift and how awkward that would be. Although stuff was always nice, neither of them actually wanted to deal with the bullshit of a “fake wedding” present. And although neither intended to dress up for what was basically going to a government office to sign papers, Dylan still made him promise he wouldn’t wear his “Stabby McKnife” T-shirt (the one that had a cartoon knife with feet happily exclaiming, “Hey Kids! Put me in your enemies!”) or his Murder City Devils one. Dylan would have preferred all his rock T-shirts stay at home, but he realized some of those were the least silly ones Roan had.
Oddly enough, while they were watching Doctor Who, Dylan apologized for “freaking out and running off.” Roan tried to stop him, but he insisted he had to say it. He also added he was deeply ashamed that Roan had honestly scared the shit out of him in his partially transformed state. Although it made his heart hurt a little to hear it, he had to give Dylan credit for being brave enough to say it. He got very Buddhist on him by saying, “But it’s you. I don’t care if you’re fully transformed, it’s still you, and I have to be mature enough to see that. You are not the shape of your body. You are you, with or without fur. It’s up to me to ignore the outer shell and just see who you are.”
