Shift: Infected, #5, page 38
Hatcher didn’t react at first. Then his expression fell, and his hands started shaking. “No,” he said, his voice a stunned whisper.
“He was a fucker, not a fuckee, if that makes it—”
“Noooooooo,” Hatcher said louder, drawing out the syllable to a near wail, tears welling in his eyes, his hands shaking so badly it looked like he was going to throw the phone himself. He sank down the window slowly, as if melting, finally sitting on the floor, back starting to curve like he was about to become an O. He was watching Hatcher break, and Roan wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It should have been triumphant, but it was just sad. He was the world’s biggest fuckhead and his son was clearly trying to follow in his footsteps, but they were still as depressingly human as all the rest of them.
He got a chokehold on the lion inside of him and pulled it back as he asked Hatcher, “Did you send someone after me? Skinheads?”
He was shaking his head vehemently, but he wasn’t sure if it was at the realization his son had joined the death circus or if it was aimed at his question. “No.”
Roan was a bit disappointed, mainly because he wasn’t lying. So if Hatcher hadn’t sent the white trash army after him, who had? Well, easy answer: Conrad Maddux, the silent partner. “Where do I find Maddux?”
Hatcher almost seemed to be in a trance of despair, but after several long seconds, he said, “Osaka.”
“Japan?” Okay, it wasn’t really a question—was there an Osaka, Texas?—he was just shocked. He'd expected Hatcher’s hands-on guy to be within arm’s reach. He probably should have known better. Thanks to the Internet, you didn’t need to be on the same continent as your immediate employees. “Does he have an employee, a manager doing his bidding? Who’s he? I need names.”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? A man like you, a paranoid despot, you should know what your workers do in their free time—”
“I don’t know!” Hatcher shouted angrily, despair slamming against his resolve and coming out as fury. “We keep enough distance between us that he can’t be tied to me! I don’t fucking know who works for him!”
And that made sense. He was a “silent partner” after all. If he got caught up legally, he couldn’t be officially tied to Hatcher; Maddux would go down alone and keep his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him. How much money did you have to spend to get that kind of loyalty? How much of your soul did you have to sell to make money off what was essentially necrophilia porn? There was so much here he didn’t and couldn’t understand. He needed to find Dennis Cooper some day and ask him if he could explain any of this stuff to him.
Hatcher bolted to his feet and lunged for his desk, anger making him move faster than he probably had in years. He clipped a Bluetooth onto his ear and called Conrad, but did he talk? No, he was leaning on the desk like it was the only thing keeping him on his feet, and he began screaming, “You fucking bastard, give me back my son! If you’ve hurt him, I swear to God I will have you killed! Do you hear—”
Roan ripped the Bluetooth off his ear, and exclaimed, “Idiot! You’ve just given him fair warning to pack his shit and run.” Roan held the device up to his ear, to see what Maddux had to say to his angry boss, but there was just a mechanical voice asking if he was satisfied with his message. Hatcher had gotten the man’s machine.
Hatcher glared at him, the look in his eyes wild and mad. Insane mad and angry mad; he was covering the spread. “He can’t run from me.”
Hatcher certainly believed that. Roan wasn’t sure he did.
Roan tossed the Bluetooth on the desk, having no further use for it, but Hatcher didn’t seem to notice. He was in some ugly place inside his own head, only marginally aware of the outer world. “Find him,” he said, his voice a low croak. “Find Jordan. And burn that fucking place to the ground.”
Hadn’t Hatcher noticed that was exactly what he was trying to do?
19
Ulysses
HERE was the problem facing Roan now: Hatcher was a victim of his own design. What did you do in those circumstances? He still wanted to kick his ass very badly, and hey, if Hatcher hadn’t started this ball rolling, the Tabu site wouldn’t even exist. He deserved to get the shit kicked out of him before Roan left. But in the face of his truly anguished grief, it almost seemed like enough bad shit had happened to him. It hadn’t, of course, but he felt he needed to get out of there and think. But before he left, he fixed Hatcher with a stare, and told him, “I may call you, and I may need something. If I do, you don’t ask why, you just make it happen. Understand?”
Hatcher, his face ruddy and slimy with rage and tears, looked like he wanted to argue for a moment, ask questions, but after a moment, he simply nodded. “Find him.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” he said, stalking out of the room. As he crossed the expansive living room, heading toward the foyer, he saw a terrified Andrew loitering on the staircase, his hand on his Bluetooth. “You call the cops, he’ll fire your ass,” Roan said. Was that true? He didn’t know, but he didn’t think Hatcher wanted to speak with the cops right now.
He checked his own phone in the car, and found a message waiting for him. It was Holden. Apparently, snuff guy had finally gotten back to him and taken the bait. He was meeting Holden at six on Thursday, in the Burger King abutting the Greyhound Station downtown. Classy shit that, but in a bizarre way, it was perfect. Yes, it was a high-traffic area, potential witnesses coming and going, but most of those were potential witnesses who wanted nothing to do with your shit and didn’t care either way. If their lives didn’t suck in one way or another, would they be at the Greyhound Station?
He called Fiona and let her know not to post the stuff—or at least not yet. Hatcher was safe for now, but it didn’t mean he always would be. Roan didn’t totally trust him and neither did Fiona.
He didn’t bother to call Holden back. He went straight to his apartment, where luckily he found the man at home. But from the skintight jeans Holden was wearing and the almost overpowering (to him—it was probably faint to most humans) scent of semi-expensive aftershave, he was about to go off on a gig. He answered the door shirtless but wearing his usual tangle of about a half dozen necklaces, so it was kind of like he was wearing a metallic half shirt. “Oh shit, did you lion out again?”
“Why do you ask?”
Holden tapped the corner of his mouth, and Roan reached up and ran a hand over his mouth. Yep, blood. “No, it was partial. I didn’t think it got that bad.” But hadn’t he sent Hatcher flying across the room with a single shove? Again, it was worse than he realized.
He went to Holden’s bathroom and saw the full extent of it: he had blood caking his chin, streaks on his throat, and now his shirt had blood on it along with caked snot. Holden offered him a shirt, and he decided to take it.
Holden’s bathroom was interesting. Very neat, with a variety of grooming products lined up like soldiers at parade rest on either side of the slightly chipped porcelain sink. But the interesting thing was the wallpaper—garishly loud, tie-dye stripes of pink, green, and purple, separated with tiny lines of white. It was unusually gay, even for Holden, and the clear shower curtain dotted with colorful fish almost threatened to clash with it, and yet didn’t quite. He felt it was probably a sign of Holden being rebellious with himself and his otherwise good taste.
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, stroking 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 feel better, but oddly enough, it didn’t. Afterward, 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.”
