Infected Freefall Read online

  Roan glanced at his notes. “You were suspicious about Roger Jorgenson?”

  “Uh, was he the sex predator?” At Roan’s nod, Gabe nodded back. “Yeah, yeah, slimy creep. Like all of ’em, really, but there was something kinda… slippery about his answers. Nervous—beyond the usual. I don’t think he took Keith, but I think he was at the park that day, watchin’ the kids, and I think he might have seen something. But he didn’t want to say anything ’cause he wasn’t supposed to be there, and who knows, maybe he didn’t want to squeal on a fellow kiddie fiddler.”

  “You tried to deal with him?”

  Gabe gave him an evil look both before and after taking a gulp of his coffee. A tiny bead of liquid was suspended in his mustache. “Of course. Deal, cajole, appeal to his better side—ha!—threaten, sweet-talk. Nothin’. He just didn’t like cops and didn’t have a better nature.”

  Roan glanced at the papers as he gathered them up. Eleven years of notes. Good thing he liked to read. “He still live around here?”

  Gabe wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, catching that drop of coffee. “Nope, he’s dead, died a few years ago. Had a heart attack. His mother sued the ER, claiming malpractice, then she died of a heart attack. It made the papers. Didn’t catch it?”

  “If it was a few years ago, I did then, but I have no memory of it now.” Roan arranged the papers in a loose pile, with no logic to them whatsoever. He just had to hope he could pull them into some kind of proper order later. “Are any of the witnesses listed here still alive?”

  Gabe shrugged. “As far as I know, Jorgenson and Elliot Turner are the only dead people involved with this case, but I never did keep up with MILF or the burnout or the guy walking his wiener dog.” He looked at his watch, an old Timex that was nearly covered by his arm hair, and said, “Gotta go. I got to go talk to a lawyer, and you know how it is with them. You know the drill with this stuff, right?”

  “You didn’t give me these, I’ve never seen them before, I never saw the file, I’m just an incredible investigator.”

  “You got it.” Gabe levered himself out of the chair, rising to his feet, grabbing the tote bag before it hit the floor. “Good luck, Batman, you’re gonna need it.”

  “Give my best to Commissioner Gordon,” he said, as Gabe made for the door. He got nothing but an amused snort in reply.

  He started reading the first few pages and wondered what the fuck he could do. So far, it looked like the investigation was pretty solid. Was he really prepared for failure? Could he take it? Roan knew he could get too personally involved in these cases, and he told himself to back off, but it was never that simple, was it? He already felt he had to turn up something, but he also knew he probably wouldn’t. If he was smart he’d quit now… but he wasn’t renowned for his genius.

  His cell phone went off, and he dug it out of his pocket by the third ring. It was Dylan.

  “Hi, uh… are you busy right now?”

  “Not at the moment, no.”

  “Do you think you could drop by my place this afternoon? There’s something I wanted to show you.”

  “If it’s what I think it is, I’ve seen it. It’s very nice though. Wouldn’t mind seeing it again.”

  “Very funny. I’m serious, Ro.”

  “Me too.”

  Dylan sighed, and Roan grinned, wondering if Dylan knew he had just become a pleasant distraction from an unpleasant reality. “Enough with the double entendres. It’s for the gallery showing. I need your opinion on it because… well, you are the picture. I want your consent before I submit it.”

  “Is this the sketch you drew of me sleeping?”

  “No, this is a painting. You haven’t seen it.”

  For some reason that sounded slightly ominous. But how could it be? The sketch he’d done of him was very nice; he hadn’t even been drooling on a pillow or anything. “It’s your painting, Dyl. I’m not gonna tell you not to use it.”

  He hesitated. “You might. Please come see it.”

  He really didn’t like Dylan’s sudden squeamishness—this was making him nervous. Did he paint him killing a bus full of nuns or something? Fucking Robert Mapplethorpe? Dylan should have known better than to be so vague, because now he was getting paranoid. “What did you do to me?”

  “It’s nothing bad… or at least, I don’t think it’s bad. You still might not like it.”

  Oh, this didn’t sound good. “Am I naked?”

  “No.”

  “Shooting Dick Cheney in the face?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Every time I try and draw Dick Cheney, he ends up looking like the Penguin from the old Batman TV series. I have nothing against Burgess Meredith.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I don’t either.” He sighed, wondering exactly what Dylan had done to him on canvas. “I’m in the area, so I’ll be over in a few minutes. Is a quickie off the table?”

  “Yes, mainly because the table’s too flimsy to take it. We’ll have to move it to the couch.”

  “Fine by me. See you soon.” He ended the call and started gathering up his papers, wondering how unflattering Dylan’s picture of him could possibly be, when his phone rang again. He thought Dylan was calling to rescind the invitation—maybe he’d decided to hide the painting rather than show it to him. “Yeah?”

  “You have Elijah Prophet’s computer,” a voice said. It was being processed through a voice changer, which you could buy at a spy store or a toy store. It was a cheap one; the guy sounded like Darth Vader with a severe case of asthma. “Return it, or we will take it by force.”

  “Whatever. Get a better voice changer and call me back.”

  “You ignore us at your peril.”

  “Do I? What d’ya got, boy? Whip it out and show me, or fuck the hell off before I rip off your face and eat it.” He flipped the phone shut and dropped it in his pocket, picking up the piles of paper. Once he’d gathered them up, he noticed a female barista who had been walking by had stopped and was staring at him, looking shocked, probably due to his threat. He flashed her a friendly smile and headed for the door.

  What? He never said he was Miss Congeniality.

  4

  Bitter for Sweet

  IT WASN’T far from the coffee shop to Dylan’s place, but he still sat in the parking lot for a moment, looking over the first pages of the case file. It was better than reading them at the light.

  From what he could tell, in the early stages, this case was solid; everything was done by the book, everything was done right. If it kept up this way throughout—and with Sadowski part of the investigation in the early stages, it was likely—then there’d be nothing to look for. The problem with some cases was that you could do everything perfectly, you could do everything by the book, collect evidence, do everything you’re supposed to do… and still be unable to close the case. It was the hell of it all, proof that life was indeed unfair. Having everything and yet nothing all at once seemed like a violation of some natural law, a slap in the face of physics, but it happened quite a bit. If cop life was exactly like a procedural television show, as soon as you had carpet fibers or blood splatters you’d have enough to slam a case shut—but it wasn’t that way in real life. Sometimes you had almost nothing and could close a case; sometimes you had everything, and it wasn’t enough. It seemed like a grotesque joke.

  But that was life. The first guy you genuinely fall in love with turns out to be a tortured alcoholic who almost but never quite gets his shit together; the guy who you feel is your soul mate, a bullshit term you always dismissed as romantic fantasy, dies too young because his stupid fucking infection eats him from the inside out. And now you were with a beautiful young guy whom you liked an awful lot but just couldn’t love, because your soul felt burnt. He felt a great deal of affection for Dylan. He kind of wished he could love him, but Paris seemed to have taken all the love Roan had with him. He knew he should be fair to Dylan and cut him loose, but Roan was a fucking coward and sure he
couldn’t take being alone at the moment. Dylan had helped save his life, and he wasn’t sure he was strong enough yet to maintain it on his own. Horrible. If Dylan looked back on this one day and hated his fucking guts, he wouldn’t blame him in the slightest.

  He put the papers down and headed in to face Dylan. His apartment building had had several identity crises over its many years of existence, which was probably the only excuse for it having a sort of sprawling H shape, like an old-style hotel, whitewashed exterior walls so bright they seemed to glow, and a red Spanish-tiled roof that would have made more architectural sense in California than here. To add to the overall dissonance, the apartment building was named The Elysian. A lot of artistic types lived here, which was pretty much code for nearly everyone being queerer than a four-dollar bill.

  It explained the mural in the main lobby, which was abstract, swirls and blobs and waves and splatters of colors in patches that almost suggested a more traditional painting seen far too close up. Dylan admitted “helping” a bit with it, but said there were a number of people involved in it, a sort of building-mural party. Roan passed someone’s lovingly tended rubber plant (it was well over six feet tall and still climbing) as he took the staircase up to the second floor and drifted down the red-carpeted hallway like a ghost, hearing Suzanne Vega coming from one apartment on his left and Blaqk Audio coming from one apartment on his right. Nothing quite said gay like that audio battle.

  Dylan’s apartment was at the end of the hall, the one with the best view of the street, and Roan had barely finished knocking when the door swung open and he was greeted by Dylan. “Oh no, it’s the fuzz,” he teased, grabbing him by the front of the shirt and pulling him into a long, sweet kiss. Dylan hadn’t shaved this morning. The stubble lightly scraped his face, and Roan held him by the hip as he gently shoved Dylan back into the apartment and walked in, kicking the door shut behind them. So he didn’t think he was joking about the quickie, huh? That was nice to know.

  But twinges of guilt competing with the lust made him break away from him. “You greet everyone who comes to your door like that?” he teased, smoothing back Dylan’s attractively mussed hair and smiling at him as he rested his forehead against his.

  Dylan had been working with charcoals recently; Roan could smell it on his skin. And it would have to be his skin, as he was shirtless and barefoot, wearing nothing but comfortable old jeans that had several stains and holes in them and just loosely hung on his hips. In other words, he was brain-meltingly sexy in a very uncalculating way, although he must have had some idea of the effect he had, since the sight of him shirtless could make only slightly tipsy men give him a twenty-dollar tip. No matter how Buddhist and Zen he was, he had to know he was a sex bomb.

  Dylan slid a hand under his shirt, up his back. “Only you and the pizza boy.”

  “Very funny. So where’s this painting you were talking about?”

  Dylan groaned dramatically and dropped his head onto his shoulder. “You won’t let me butter you up first, huh?”

  “Literally or figuratively?”

  As Dylan slipped out of his arms, he raised his eyebrows suggestively. “You’ll have to let me do it to find out.”

  “There’s always a catch.” There was little actual doubt where the painting was, as there was an easel set up in front of his television, covered with an old sheet whose spatters of various colors attested to its new life as a drop cloth. Roan took a step toward it, and Dylan matched him, blocking his way.

  “Can I preface this with a few things first?” Dylan asked, hands raised slightly in a gesture that was both placating and meant to stop him. He grimaced slightly, as if embarrassed, and then continued. “Painting sometimes helps me understand things. Sometimes I’m not sure how I feel about certain things until I draw or paint it out. It’s like I have to get out of my own way before I can see things clearly. I wanted to do a portrait of you—not a sketch—because you have the kind of face that an artist dreams of, you know. Sharp angles that aren’t severe, and a face that’s equally feline and vulpine while being undeniably Human. Just very, very striking. But I knew you wouldn’t be crazy about it, so I decided to just do it on my own and keep it to myself. It was cathartic, though, and helped me sort through my feelings for you. You don’t know this, but they were kind of conflicted. I do like you—I love you, even though I know you’re not ready to hear that right now—but sometimes you freak me out a little.”

  “Only a little? Are you paying attention?”

  “You do know you have a death wish, right?”

  Roan scoffed, caught off guard, and studied Dylan’s face to see if this was a joke. But his deep brown eyes reflected a sort of earnest sincerity that was painful to look at. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Roan, if you’re honest with yourself, you know it. I am not trying to pick a fight with you or second-guess you. I’m just saying….” He paused, sighing, running a hand through his hair. “You know I’m not a weak guy. I have to keep in shape because, sadly, right now a good deal of my paycheck depends on my physical appearance. But remember the night you first kissed me, when you were dosed at the rave? You grabbed me so hard I had bruises in the shapes of your fingers on my arms for almost a week. For so long I had wanted you to kiss me, but it seemed like karma was trying to warn me about being wary of what I wish for, because you threw me so hard against the wall I thought I broke a rib. Then you didn’t just kiss me; the whole time you were growling. Not sexy growling like when you get aroused, or a regular person imitating a growl, but big angry thing outside the tent growling, and when you bit me, I was half convinced you were going to rip out my jugular. I wanted you but, god, you scared the living shit out of me. So I found myself dealing with conflicting feelings, and I wasn’t sure how to reconcile them. It was sort of comforting to realize you didn’t know how to do it either, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized you were actually trying to fool yourself. You refer to the lion in you as another, as something you fight and share your body with, but you’d never be afraid of a lion, Roan. Why would it come out if you were on liquid X or vitamin K or whatever you were dosed with? That didn’t make sense. The only thing that did make sense, that made all of this fall together, was the lion was simply you. You liked to think it was its own separate thing, and it is when you transform and the virus takes over, but the rest of the time it’s just a part of you that you ascribe to the lion. It’s all you. You wouldn’t be afraid of a cat, but you’d be afraid of you. The drugs would shut down your inhibitions, bring things forth, but not the cat. It’s like your id, your shadow self, that you’ve channeled into this thing you call the lion, but it’s not that. You’re the detective, Roan—put it together. You know I’m right.”

  Roan couldn’t believe he was hearing this. He couldn’t actually decide how he felt about any of this. Enraged? Disbelieving? Maybe a little bit scared? All of the above? His heart was pounding, blood roaring in his ears, and he settled on anger, because it was easiest. Anger was always easiest, his default setting. “What the fuck do you have under the sheet? A psychology dissertation?”

  Roan must have spit out the words pretty hard, because Dylan seemed to flinch slightly, glancing toward the threadbare carpet. Were there tears in his eyes? If so, he quickly blinked them away, and Roan wasn’t sure he’d seen them. “I just want you to know that I love you. All of you. I wish you could accept yourself as easily.” He reached behind himself blindly and pulled off the sheet, letting it fall to the floor.

  What Roan saw was a portrait of himself from the shoulders up, larger than life in order to fill most of the canvas, which had a black background to highlight the face. He was just staring straight ahead, and Dylan had done an unbelievable job of capturing his face, especially since he hadn’t sat for the portrait. He’d even painted in the scar. Roan could have been looking in a mirror… well, one half of a mirror. Only the right side of his face was Human. There was a subtle blurring and shifting, and the left half of his face
became that of a lion with mostly tawny fur, but its mane was shot through with fur the exact color of his hair. And not only that, but the Human half of the face had a lion’s eye, and the lion half of the face had a Human’s eye. It was so subtle that he almost didn’t realize it at first.

  The morphing was almost computer perfect, really—he looked like the lion; the lion looked like him. It was almost impossible to separate the two… which was undoubtedly the point. But as the shock rippled through him and started to wear off, he became aware of the fact that there was no way Dylan could have painted that mane on speculation. He felt a cold chill that seemed to start in the center of his spine and spread throughout his body, diffusing like a drop of blood in water. “You’ve seen me transformed,” he said, and gave Dylan a sharp look. “I told you never to go into the basement when it’s my time of the month.”

  “I’ve never—I stayed on the stairs. I never went down to—”

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Roan exploded, aware his anger was way out of proportion to what was essentially water under the bridge. But he didn’t care. His heart was racing, and he was vaguely aware that the painting, for whatever reason, scared the shit out of him. “The cage door has been broken before, and so has the basement door! Do you think I want to come to and find that I killed you?”

  Dylan was shaking his head, eyes wide with surprise. He had expected a possibly negative reaction, but probably not this. “Roan, I was very careful. I wasn’t there long, I stayed on the top half of the steps—”

  “I don’t give a shit! That was fucking dangerous, Dylan! I don’t want your blood on my hands.”

  Dylan took a deep, calming breath, and his expression took on that Zen-like look that it always did before he shared wisdom that was far beyond his years. “Roan, this isn’t what you’re really angry about. Let’s—” Dylan put a hand on his shoulder.