Shift: Infected #5 Read online

  Grey shrugged. “Whatever gets you through the night, y’know? Besides, when I thought about it... it kinda made sense. You know? I could see him wanting to be a girl. First time we went trick-or-treating as kids, he was Sleeping Beauty.”

  It was probably Roan’s own prejudice, but he would have thought a big macho jock like this would be the first to beat up or disparage a transsexual. But maybe not when it was your best friend’s brother (sister—he was using the right pronoun too). “I’d be the first to admit this case sounds as suspicious as hell. The timing of the murder is also incredibly suspect.”

  “No shit. To me, they’re being pretty blatant about it. I’ve talked to some other cops in the department, to see how the investigation’s going, and one told me, off the record, that the case is ice cold and has been given to a homicide detective with too many cases, with the instruction that it was low priority. He hasn’t looked into it once since he got the case. They ain’t doing shit.”

  “Who’s the investigating officer?”

  Grey sat back and slumped in the chair, legs spread wide and shoulders thrown back. It was a man’s man pose, but also the body language of someone with nothing to hide. Roan wondered if that was true, although he had no reason to think he was lying. “Don’t remember the name.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “I said I wouldn’t rat ’em out.”

  “If I’m even going to attempt to look into this, I need a place to start inside the department. I’d say they’re my best shot. Otherwise I shouldn’t bother.”

  Grey scowled, glancing down at his own calloused hands, then said, “Fine. The name’s Sid Fisher.”

  Roan scribbled that down on a sticky note and attached it to the top of the arrest report. “Okay, here are the ground rules, and they are nonnegotiable. I will look into this, but the legal admissibility of most of it will make much of it useless. I can’t directly muscle into the case without jeopardizing my license, but I will rattle a few cages and see if anything falls out. I can make a few phone calls now, but I might have to put off any direct investigation until next week.”

  That made Grey’s heavy brows dip into a sort of V. “Why?”

  “If you saw that footage of me and the neo-Nazis, you probably know I’m infected. I’m about to enter my cycle.”

  “Y’mean turn into a cat? Cool,” Grey said, with something approaching enthusiasm. “So what are ya?”

  Roan gave him an evil look, but Grey didn’t seem to realize he was being rude. “Lion.”

  “Oh, awesome! One of the big ones. I kinda feel bad for the people who turn into cougars. I mean, I know they’re deadly and all, but they don’t seem that impressive, do they? Not when compared to other cats. If I was a cat, I’d wanna be one of the big ones.” It seemed to be intended as a genuine compliment, but once again, Roan wondered how many shots to the head Grey had taken in his lifetime. It also made him wonder how old he was. So he asked.

  “Twenty-two,” Grey said without blinking. He reached for his wallet, and as he pulled it out, he added, “I stopped at the cash machine before I got here. You don’t mind bein’ paid in cash, do ya?”

  “Don’t want to leave a paper trail?”

  He paused, that confused look scudding over his face again. “Huh?”

  Roan shook his head. “Nothing.” Was he a bit naïve, or just, as the British said, gormless? Safe to say he got into college on a sports scholarship, or perhaps his parents footed the bill. At least, daft or not, he seemed an amiable and unbiased sort.

  Still, he managed to fill out the paperwork without printing anything and only glancing at his Social Security card to confirm the number. (He said he had a bad head for numbers, and Roan could sympathize.) He’d gotten up to leave, but at the door he turned back and asked, “You wanna spar sometime?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, box? I think’d be awesome to face a guy as strong as you, as long as you promise not to break somethin’. I’m usually at 24 Hour Fitness in the afternoon, if I don’t have a road game or an afternoon skate.” He then gave him another goofy smile, and Roan got a strange feeling. It was almost like he—in a very odd way—was flirting with him.

  Nah. Just some straight guy, macho bullshit bonding. It was an easy mistake to make, though.

  As soon as the man left, Roan started to look up information on Grey Williams.

  Lexis-Nexis had a surprising amount on him. He might have been a self-professed low scorer, but he’d made it into the World Junior Hockey Championship three years ago on the U.S. side. There’d also been a feature on his parents in a Minnesota paper around that time. Apparently his dad was Merritt Williams, who briefly held some kind of college football record, although injuries kept him out of the NFL. He was the uber-jock dad who had five sons and pushed at least four of them into sports: oldest son Jensen had followed his dad into a football career but blew out his knee while in college and now owned and ran a sports bar in Syracuse; second son Lorne played college basketball but was apparently not that great at it and now coached junior high school basketball in Florida; third son Alden played minor league baseball with a team called the Reading Phillies; Grey was the fourth son. Interestingly enough, the fifth son was almost never mentioned, although one article gave his name, Rayne. He didn’t follow the family dictate of going into sports? Bad show. Didn’t he know that would make him a pariah?

  A separate search on Rayne Williams did eventually turn up something: he was the lead in his high school’s musical production of Little Shop of Horrors. Oh dear. Could you say “big flamer”? Okay, maybe that was a stereotype, and an unjust one—Roan, for example, was no fan of musicals, possibly because the only science fiction musical he knew of was The Simpsons’ wonderful “Stop The Planet of The Apes, I Want To Get Off!”—but it might explain why Grey was accepting of Jamie’s/Jasmine’s proclivities if he had a gay younger brother.

  Fiona briefly knocked on the door before coming in. “So, was he a Mafia hit man?”

  “Close. Hockey player.”

  “Really? Huh. Guess that explains the haircut.”

  That made him chuckle. “So mean.”

  “What? Come on, you were thinking the same thing.”

  “Actually, I’m glad you’re here ’cause I need you to hit up your sex worker pals.”

  “For money?”

  “For information. I need to know if Jasmine Hawley really was working the streets and how unfriendly the Eastgate PD is to anyone they decide they don’t like.”

  “Jasmine Hawley?” She repeated the name like it meant something, and then apparently recalled it. “Holy shit, he was asking about Hawley?”

  “The younger sister of his friend. There’s no rush on this. I’m off to the hospital tomorrow.”

  She looked briefly concerned. “Are you—”

  “Rosenberg wants to put me in a coma. She thinks that’ll keep me alive another month.”

  She considered that, shrugging. “Might work. Worth a shot. Dylan know?”

  “Not yet. I suppose I should go tell him, huh?”

  She gave him a sympathetic smile. “You’ve had how many relationships?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, Ms. Dominatrix, give me relationship advice.”

  “That’s Mistress, Slave, and don’t you forget it,” she said crisply, before giving him a big, cheesy grin.

  Weird friends and weird cases. At least his life had a recognizable pattern.

  Roan stopped on the way home and got a pizza, as he felt like a pizza. He made sure it was vegetarian, even though he was dying for pepperoni, and he then had to figure out how to take it home on the bike. (Okay, that was a detail he should have worked out in advance.)

  Dylan was up when he got home, but he was still in his underwear, drinking his morning (afternoon) tea. But since he hadn’t eaten yet, he was willing to have pizza with Roan while they discussed what Rosenberg had in mind for him.

  Dylan was thrilled, or as thrilled with the idea of someone putting Roan in a coma as one could get. He honestly thought Rosenberg was trying to save him, and Roan was sure she was trying, but he also knew there was a lot of guesswork involved. It was desperation, pure and simple, and there were no guarantees whatsoever. But he let Dylan have his enthusiasm, because he owed him that much.

  Dylan volunteered to go to the hospital with him tomorrow afternoon, and Roan agreed, although he didn’t know why Dylan would even want to come. They were just going to drug him until he was unconscious (which now, in retrospect, sounded like fun), and what was Dyl going to do, hold his hand? Of course, if it didn’t work, it might be the last time Dylan saw him alive, so okay, he supposed he understood.

  Dylan called Ty, one of the other bartenders at Panic, and got him to cover his shift so he could take the night off. Again, he was acting like this was Roan’s last night on earth... but you know, fuck it. Roan decided he didn’t care. It was or it wasn’t; Dylan had a fifty-fifty chance of being right or wrong. Let him do what he wanted. Roan had already found his peace with all of this.

  They had dinner, watched TV, and went to bed—nothing really remarkable, except the possibility he might actually be dead this time tomorrow night. Apparently someone else called, suggesting his life story might make fascinating viewing (ha!), and that led to him and Dylan discussing who they’d like to play them in a film. Dylan seemed horrified by Roan’s initial choice to play himself: Robert Carlyle, whom Dylan insisted looked nothing like him. Roan knew that. He’d just always liked him as an actor since Trainspotting, and of course, he was a Scot, which Roan kind of was (look at his mysteriously hard-to-pronounce surname).

  Dylan picked John Barrowman to play Roan (Captain Jack? Flattering, but no, he couldn’t see it....), and Gael Garcia Bernal to play him. Now, Roan agreed Gael was kind of cute, but nowhere near cute enough to play Dylan, in his opinion, and also way too short. Roan figured if they could somehow lump Gael together with a younger Javier Bardem, they’d have the perfect Dylan.

  They both agreed Taye Diggs would have to play Diego. Not that Dee actually looked like Taye, it was just that Dee would die if anyone else played him. They figured Fi would want Meryl Streep. Again, no physical resemblance, but Fi would insist on quality over resemblance. Holden could go either way on that—he’d either want a porn star or a British stage thespian playing him (one who wasn’t afraid of nudity in either case, and he’d probably insist the guy would have to at least be bi; straights would be kicked off by Holden personally). Roan was sad Jerry Orbach was dead, because he’d have made a perfect Gordo. Judi Dench with an American accent, a wig, and a foul mouth could probably carry off Doctor Rosenberg.

  It was fun. They were amusing themselves immensely, until he idly wondered who would play Paris and all the fun went out of it. Just like that. Dylan initially chided him for being “no fun anymore.” Then he must have guessed why Roan went all quiet, and he began talking about the strange people who wanted to buy any art relating to Roan that he had. Dylan had lied to them all and said he had none because none of them were pieces he wanted to sell, especially not to bizarro fetishists. Fame was a weird thing, especially when it was “freak of the week” fame. Roan just sort of hoped the new freak would hurry up and appear already, because he was getting tired of all the bullshit.

  But then again, if he didn’t survive the procedure tomorrow, he’d have nothing to worry about, would he?

  4

  Halo

  HOLDEN was a little surprised when Dylan answered the door in his boxer shorts, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Having stopped by Panic last night, he knew Dylan hadn’t been up late working. “Is something wrong?” he wondered, looking beyond him to try and see the living room.

  Dylan shook his head, yawning. “Roan’s in the hospital. I stayed there as long as I could, but eventually I got kicked out.”

  Holden stared at him. “He’s in the hospital? Did he have another aneurysm?”

  “No. Oh, you don’t know.” Dylan then made a sort of scoffing noise as he said, “Right, yeah, he barely told me. Come in, I’ll explain.”

  Well, it couldn’t have been a huge emergency if Dylan wasn’t freaking out about it. Holden followed him inside, noting from a purely clinical perspective that he had a nice ass and a nice back. (It was long and lean, a little dimple near the small of the back, no overt hair.) If he wanted to do the high-class prostitute thing, he could probably make a mint. “Have a seat,” Dylan said, gesturing to the sofas as he disappeared into another room.

  Holden sat, trying to decide what things were Roan’s and what things belonged to Dylan. The only things that seemed like Dylan were the painting now hanging up over the stereo—one of those bizarre ones, of a wall with a huge hole in it that appeared to be bleeding, like a crime scene detail with only the body missing—and the Bloc Party CD currently playing softly. Roan just never struck him as a Bloc Party kind of guy.

  Dylan came back wearing sweatpants and pulling on a T-shirt of a Roy Lichtenstein-type woman crying and firing a machine gun while saying “It’s not you, it’s me....” He had a feeling Roan had bought that for him, or it was one of Roan’s T-shirts; he was the wacky T-shirt master around here.

  “Want something to drink?” Dylan asked, crossing to the kitchen. “I’m just getting myself some green tea.”

  Green tea—oh boy! What a hedonist. But he was the Buddhist vegetarian around here. You’d think an artist/shirtless bartender at a gay nightclub would have a much wilder life, but he seemed to work hard to cultivate a lifestyle more suited to an ascetic. “No thanks, maybe later. So what’s up with Roan?”

  “Doctor Rosenberg put him in a coma ahead of his transformation. She’s fairly certain it’ll keep him alive.”

  “Oh.” There was a phrase you didn’t hear every day. How were you supposed to react to that? “It went okay?”

  “Fine. When I was finally kicked out, he was sleeping... well, comatose. But his vitals were good, and there were no problems. He takes to drugs like a duck to water.”

  Holden smirked at this, aware there was a bit of hollow anger in that last statement. “Sadly, yes. How are you doing?”

  Dylan returned, curling up on the sofa across from him, legs tucked under him as he cradled the mug in his lap. It wasn’t straight green tea; there was a fruity scent to it, citrus and berry. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. “Honestly? I’m fucking pissed off.”

  Now that he hadn’t expected. Dylan was such a mild guy that, in spite of being as gorgeous as he was, he was easily forgettable. In Holden’s mind, he just sort of blurred into the wallpaper. While his calm peacefulness was surely beneficial to Roan, who probably needed all the peace he could get, Dylan’s somewhat introverted nature left him an afterthought to many of Roan’s friends. He was the polar opposite of the bright explosion that was Paris. That was probably deliberate. “About what?”

  “About Roan and his attitude. He’s acting like he wants to die.”

  “He was put into the coma, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, but only because Doctor Rosenberg didn’t give him a choice. He’s been acting like he wants to die since he found out about the aneurysm. He denies it, but... it’s just been freaky. It’s so irritating. I can’t even get properly mad at him, because I honestly believe he doesn’t know it. He’s living in denial or a Vicodin haze. One of the two.”

  See, this was why Holden was so glad he didn’t do relationships. These little wars, these little deaths... was a regular fuck buddy and shared rent worth it? Didn’t seem like it. Give him solitude, a cold bottle of gin, a decent piece of Internet porn, and he was good. “Is this because he went after the neo-Nazis?”

  “No, but that was one of the more flashy bits.”

  “Tell me about it. And people don’t know he’s gay? My God, he was wearing a gun. Just pull it and tell ’em to freeze, don’t jump on ’em like a big flaming drama queen. Jesus.”

  Dylan snickered at that, enjoying the joke. But his good humor faded fast, and he ended up looking kind of sad. “He’s never been a quitter. He’s not a man who quits easily or quietly. So why has he consciously or unconsciously decided to die?”

  Paris. That was Holden’s first thought, and he knew Dylan was thinking the same thing and didn’t want to think it. He wanted some other reason than his boyfriend still being in love with a dead man. So Holden thought of another reason to give him, which sounded very plausible. “He’s burned out. He’s been told he’s going to die most of his life, and he hasn’t yet. So fuck it. He probably feels close to invincible as it is. He’s the closest thing to a superhero I’ve ever met.”

  “Yeah. And there’s Paris.”

  So Dylan said it. Good for him. “Roan pretends he’s not haunted by his ghost, but clearly he is.”

  “Yeah. I really can’t compete with a dead man,” Dylan admitted, and it sounded like admitting defeat, which it was. He sighed and idly stirred his tea, the spoon softly ringing off the sides of the mug. The mug had a smiling cartoon bear on it hugging a heart, with the words I Don’t Understand Your Hostility Towards Me encircling it. Holden knew that was Roan’s mug. Dylan made the decision to change the subject, and then he did. “So why the house call? You could have phoned.”

  “Yeah, except my cell phone battery’s dead, and I just got in from Sea Tac late last night. I’ve spent the last few days in Vegas with my pilot client.”

  “Really? Did he pay you, or—”

  “Oh hell yeah he paid me. He also gave me a free ticket. Get this—he told the flight staff I was his nephew.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “He did, and they seemed to buy it. Except for this queeny air steward who seemed to know instinctively I was a hustler and gave me the cold shoulder.”

  Dylan squirmed uncomfortably, shifting on the couch and taking a sip of his tea before asking hesitantly, “Isn’t he the one who, um—”