Infected: Lesser Evils (16 page)

“I’m flattered. Sort of.” He was glad he’d been too tired last night (this morning) to rip off his no longer needed bandages, as all he needed to do was raise Seb’s suspicions about him even more.

Seb shrugged and looked away, probably so he didn’t see how defeated he was. Was he hoping he’d confess and solve the puzzle for him? “With everything that’s going on, a neat solution would have been great.”

“They’re usually hard to find.”

“Tell me about it. Oh, yeah.” He now fixed him with a stern look. “Stay out of the burn investigation. I know, it’s your people, all that, but it’s a police investigation, and when we need your help, we’ll let you know.” He let that sink in, and as Dylan came back, carrying the gun butt first, aimed at the ground and held out like he was afraid it might come alive and bite him, Seb asked Roan, “Find out anything?”

“Not really. I’d just gotten started.”

Dylan gave Seb the gun, which he took with a grateful nod, and as he checked that the safety was on, Dylan shot him a quizzical and accusatory look. He knew Roan had lied to Seb about not finding anything out, but he wasn’t going to rat him out. He was probably going to lecture him, though.

As soon as all the cops left and they went back in, Dylan said, “You’re still investigating this, aren’t you?”

“I just want to hear Bolt’s excuse before I throw him over to the cops.” Roan finished tearing off his bandages, and then went through his closet hastily and chose the T-shirt that said “When I Die, I Am Going To Haunt The Fuck Out Of You People.” That summed up his feelings pretty well.

Wearily, Dylan sat on the end of the bed. “No good can come of this.”

“I know. But that applies to everything.”

“Let me come with you.”

“No.”

“Hon—”

“There’s bound to be crazy protesters out in front of the Church. They probably know me by now, especially if they’re really into the anticat shit, but there’s some odds they have no idea what you look like, and I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.” He changed into black jeans that were baggy enough to accommodate a small gun. He wasn’t going to wear one, mainly because Dylan was watching everything he did, and if he went for a gun he’d insist on coming with him. But there was also the truth that he didn’t honestly need one. What was he scared of? What could take him now? In some perverse way, Roan wanted to find out—he wanted to stand on a bombing range and find out what it would take to kill him and the damn beast inside him. According to what little Holden had bothered to tell him about the showdown at the snuff house, the ones who ran escaped (generally), while the ones who stayed to fight probably wouldn’t be turning up any time soon. Which indicated they never got a decent head shot. But getting a head shot on a rapidly moving target was a specialized skill, even if you were expecting it to happen.

“I’m not afraid of being seen with you. Why do I care what those intolerant idiots think?”

“Because they could target you. You’ve been hurt enough by fuckheads after me. They want me, they can come after me alone.”

“Just because they see me doesn’t mean they’ll know me. I doubt they’re the type that come to Silver. I don’t even have a Facebook page—how would they ever identify me?”

“Your friends have pictures of you with them on their Facebook pages, yeah? It wouldn’t be hard to figure you out. If they can find me, they can find you.”

Dylan considered this with a grimace. He wanted to argue it, but the freaks had found Roan, which the graffiti obviously proved. “You know, I made my choice. I knew what I was getting into. I knew the risks.”

“Yeah, but can you blame me for wanting to shield you from that?”

He stood up with a sigh. “No, I suppose not.” He then put his arms around Roan and hugged his back as he removed a jacket from the closet. Dylan slipped his arms beneath his shirt so he could touch his skin, a gesture both comforting and sensual. He kissed his neck, and said, “If you cause trouble or get yourself hurt, I will kick your ass.”

“Some Buddhist you are.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t get mad.”

True enough. And really, he knew better than to push it. Dylan was Buddhist, but he wasn’t perfect.

He drove to the Church wondering which scenario was worse: Bolt had no idea anyone was selling drugs at his church; he knew but he didn’t care; he knew but he was getting a cut; he was selling it. He was either an idiot (well intentioned or born that way) or a completely evil bastard. You’d think idiot would be better, but hadn’t politics proved that wasn’t always the case? The best-case scenario here was drugs weren’t being sold at the church on a regular basis, that there were floaters who would crash their little infected meet and greets, but Hardy seemed to imply the territory was taken, full stop. Hardy had absolutely no reason to lie about such a thing.

Roan had to stop to get some gas, so he bought a soda and a packaged pastry with indefinable goo (but Homer Simpson said purple was a fruit, so he was going to have to take that as a given), and he got a glimpse of the newspaper headlines as the cashier was ringing him up. The cashier was big and doughy, and could have been any washed-up high school football player that ever existed, but he kept looking at Roan funny, and finally said, “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

As he scooped his change off the counter, he said, “Doubt it. I get that a lot.”

That didn’t satisfy him. “Are you an actor or something? I swear I’ve seen you on TV.”

Roan shook his head as he left the claustrophobic mini-mart. “Sorry, can’t help you.”
Oy gevalt
—there were definite downsides to sticking out in a crowd. Maybe he should dye his hair. He always thought he’d look good with purple hair; dark, blue-purple as opposed to red-purple. Maybe next time he should say he was on
To Catch A Predator
and leave it at that, but that was a smartass strategy that could backfire. Say he was on
Cops
once?

He ate half the pastry before washing it down with soda and a couple of codeine, and wondered where they could stay for now. Although bunking with any of the Falcons was a funny idea, they generally lived in apartments, and usually together, as there really wasn’t a lot of money in minor league athletics. If you got a ride to the majors, sure, but until then, not so much. Scott and Grey would probably still let them bunk over in spite of the close quarters, even Tank (he had no idea who he lived with, if anyone), but he really didn’t want that much togetherness.

He could ask Dylan to stay with one of his pretentious art friends, but Dyl had already made it clear they were a package deal, and he wasn’t going to let Roan dance with danger all by himself. So… where did that leave them?

A motel was out. They could afford a cheap-shit one for a while, but security wasn’t just nil, but deep into negative numbers. This was where you saw America’s class divide: fancy, expensive hotels usually had security comparable to their costs. A very expensive hotel would be ideal for safety, but there was no way in hell they could afford it. What they could afford would have them killed within five minutes of arrival.

So who did they know that might have room, and wouldn’t have some kind of objection to a couple of gay dudes sharing a bed under their roof? Until now, he hadn’t realized that most of their friends lived in apartments or condos. What about Dropkick and Kim? Didn’t they have a place near Queen Anne? Of course he didn’t know how big their place was, and a couple of gays and a couple of lesbians sharing a house sounded like a bad sitcom waiting to happen.

Hey—Kevin. He had an inherited house that he freely admitted was way too big for him, and sometimes when Roan talked to him he would drop hints on how lonely he was. And not only did he live in a sort of hard-to-find area, but he was a cop, and how was that for protective custody? He probably had more than enough room for him and Dylan. Okay, he had a buttload of animals at his place, and animals had a tendency to freak out around Roan, but maybe they could work something out. He put in a call to Kevin to ask him, and got his voice mail, which was fine, as it made it easier to ask. Kevin could just respond with a yes or no, and they could move on from there.

He parked in a commercial lot down from the church and walked in, mainly because he didn’t want any of these idiots seeing his car and deciding they wanted to vandalize it too.

There were under two dozen protesters outside the church, carrying signs (he looked for misspellings, and wasn’t surprised to see they all knew how to spell “fuck” perfectly) and shouting, and there were three rent-a-cops standing at the edge of the church’s property, ostensibly to keep the crowd under control, but if the crowd got any bolder these guys wouldn’t have much of a chance. Perhaps the obvious security cameras trained on them were keeping the protesters from getting any stupider.

Roan was hoping to walk up unnoticed, he even hid as much of his hair as he could under an Archie McPhee baseball hat, but someone recognized him and shouted, “Hey, he’s one of ’em!”

He glared at the crowd as they turned his way. “Isn’t there a Planned Parenthood you could be annoying?”

They started shouting something at him, more or less in unison, and it could have been “Page the brats” or possibly “Cage the cats,” which made more sense, but he amused himself by thinking they just wanted to page their children and didn’t know how.

A couple of the bigger men and a pushy woman tried to block his path on the sidewalk, and while he was aware one of the rent-a-cops was coming his way, he didn’t feel like humoring these people who hated him for a disease. As if they were somehow immune, as if they were safe from a virus, as if good straight white Christian people never came down with it.

He roared at them, a half shout that morphed into the lion sound, not a full-bore one but only because he wasn’t sufficiently mad enough (the codeine had kicked in too, and that sometimes helped keep his anger from slipping the leash so easily). But it was enough to visibly stun them, make the man with the more impressive beer gut stumble off the sidewalk. He kept walking forward, glaring at them in turn, like he was trying to decide which of them would make the best snack (and was he growling a little? Oh, maybe…) and they moved out of his way. They weren’t chanting anymore either. Wasn’t so easy to be an angry mob of villagers when the monster actually decided to bare his fangs, huh?

But as soon as he was past, someone from the back of the crowd, emboldened by his distance, shouted, “You’re a monster! You shouldn’t be around people!”

“Monster” and “Freak” began to randomly generate from the crowd, and Roan flashed them the bird over his shoulder as he walked up the porch to the church’s front door. As it turned out, he didn’t even have to knock, as the door opened almost immediately, and a trim blonde woman who looked like she could have been knocked over by an errant breeze (most likely Bolt’s assistant) gestured him on. “Please come in.”

He didn’t have to be asked twice.

Once inside, she escorted him to Bolt’s office, which was Eli’s old office. In fact, it was still Eli’s old office. The make of the computer on the desk had changed (probably because Roan had inherited the incriminating hard drives), but otherwise it was exactly the same, from the heavy, almost baroque curtains to the needlessly self-indulgent widescreen TV. Bolt was standing up behind his desk, reading something. “You know, you should have called ahead. We could have arranged an escort for you.”

“I don’t need an escort.” The woman had already left, closing the door behind her. Holy shit, was she from a temp agency? She was so efficient he wondered if Eli had invested in androids.

Bolt held up what he had been reading, and to Roan’s well-concealed horror, he saw it was that damned magazine article; he got to see his own feral face staring out at him from a two-dimensional world before Bolt tossed it back down on his desk. “You know, this is superimpressive. I mean, I knew you probably had to face a lot of hurdles, but until it was all spelled out for me I didn’t really realize it, you know? And being gay on top of it? Wow. When they were handing out attributes, you got all the short straws, didn’t you?”

The worst part was he said it in a jovial manner, like it was a joke, like he meant it in a good way. Roan glared at him. “I was wondering if you were as much of a dick as I thought you were. Thanks for confirming it.”

Now Bolt looked genuinely surprised. “What? I—it was a joke. I wasn’t trying to offend you—”

“Tainted burn is making the infected transform out of sequence and go crazy,” he interrupted. “I know it’s being sold in your church. Not only does it have to stop, you need to point me toward the dealer who’s supplying you.”

Bolt’s shock was permanently etching itself onto his face. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly, then he paused, teeth clicking as he shut his jaw, and tried again. “We don’t sell drugs here—”

“I have it on some authority that this is the territory of some minor-league dope slinger who goes by the street name Spaz. Ring any bells?”

He let out the slightest of laughs as he shook his head. “No. Spaz? Are you shitting me? Who would call himself Spaz?”

He didn’t smell a lie, or at least not a total one. “Someone here is selling it. Apparently it leaves you painless, or at least has that reputation, so I can see why the infected are flocking to it. But it’s a weapon meant to kill us. It’s being sold here, Bolt, and it’s killing your people. Are you going to help stop it or not?”

Here was a man never cut out for true leadership. He seemed to be mentally flailing, his eyes betraying his thoughts—Bolt was wondering who was doing this, who was screwing him behind his back. After a moment, he said, “Of course I’ll help. If that’s going on, it has to stop. But I assure you, I don’t kn—”

And that’s when they both heard the first burst of gunfire.

Stiff Kittens

B
OLT
immediately ducked down under his desk, and for a moment Roan wondered if he’d been shot. But he hadn’t heard the bullet, smelled it, or smelled blood—all he smelled was fear.