Prey (10 page)

“Yeah, a kid thought he recognized Danny as one of the kids hanging around a crash pad owned by a burn-out named Tweaks. I’m just confirming the address.” After a moment, and a peek at Paris’s wonderfully flat stomach out of the corner of his eye as he continued to use his T-shirt to mop up sweat, Roan asked, “You didn’t brush off your jeans, did you?”

He pulled his shirt down, and looked at him curiously. “No, why?

Should I have?”

“Yeah. That girl who grabbed your ass left glitter all over the back of your pants.”

Paris tried to raise up enough in his seat to look at the back of his jeans, but couldn’t quite manage. Once he’d settled back down, he looked over at him with the slyest of smiles. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

He sighed and shut the laptop. “No, I just don’t like trying to get glitter out of leather seats.”

Paris’s wry look didn’t go away; in fact, it was starting to get really annoying. “It’s kind of cute, you know. To know you actually have some kind of insecurity somewhere.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He tossed the laptop in the backseat, and suddenly regretted asking. “No, forget it, we have to—”

Paris reached over and grabbed his chin, turning Roan’s face toward his. He scooted closer on the seat too—boy, these Mustangs had more seat room than you’d think. “You are so funny. You do know I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone, right? Well, admittedly, I never really loved anyone before, but saying that blunts the impact. I know you’ve got the whole hard-boiled detective thing going on, but I know what you’re really Infected: Prey

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like. I know that under all that armor you’re the most decent man I’ve ever met. You’re my hero.”

He slid Paris’s hand off his face, and looked out the windshield. All this “relationship talk” made him feel deeply uncomfortable. Showing emotion was a weakness, and he really didn’t like showing it in any place that might be considered public. It was hard enough in private. “Why don’t we talk about this later, okay?”

Paris sighed, but was still smiling. “Your way of avoiding it. But it’s true, you know. Everybody in the world had given up on me, myself included, and who comes along and gives a damn? A complete stranger: you. And I know the game, you know. People want something from me, I want something from them, it’s a fair exchange. So when you didn’t want anything from me, I couldn’t figure it out. You know how hard it was for me to believe you didn’t have an angle? God, you weren’t even trying to get into my pants—I had to make the first move. For all your misanthropic bluster, you just want to help people, to keep them from getting hurt.

You’re the bravest, sweetest man I’ve ever known. And you’re cute when you blush.”

“I am not blushing,” he protested, but before he could get really mad, Paris kissed him. Paris was a born manipulator—and he didn’t mean that in a bad way, he just was; to some people, it came as easily as breathing—

and this was probably more of that, but he was one of the greatest kissers he’d ever encountered. His lips were soft, and he tasted of those wintergreen mints he popped constantly, even though they were strong enough to make Roan’s eyes water.

Roan tangled his hand in Paris’s downy hair, and became aware that he didn’t want to stop. His mind was sliding off toward realms that had nothing to do with the case at hand—either case—and that was bad because he was still on the clock. It was Paris’s increased pheromone load, or at least that’s what he wanted to believe. Normally he wasn’t this unprofessional.

He pushed Paris away gently and caught his breath. “We have a case here,” he said, by way of explanation.

Paris gave him a sensuous smile, full of promise, and quirked an eyebrow. “You know what they say: all work and no play…”

“Pays the bills.” He dry-washed his face, and tried to fight down his own desire. What was an immediate turnoff? He imagined Stovak, and 52

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that did it; he was better than a shower in liquid nitrogen. “God, did I just sound like someone’s dad there?”

Paris sat back in the passenger seat, apparently conceding his point.

“A bit, yeah. Throw in a ‘You goddamn kids, get offa my lawn!’
and you’d sound like my grandpa.”

He mock-shuddered. “Shit. I need to get a life before I start pulling my pants up to my armpits.”

“What I’m looking forward to is seeing you in black socks and sandals.”

“If I
ever
do that, you have my permission to shoot me in the head.”

Paris saluted, grinning brightly. “Aye aye.”

Roan started the car and drove off, heading to the side of town that wasn’t so much bad as just pathetic. But since Danny was a rich kid from one of the best neighborhoods, the East End would probably seem exotic, like walking into a Diane Arbus photo. (If he even knew what that was.) Paris turned on the radio, fiddling with it until he settled on a Franz Ferdinand song, and Roan found himself glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, watching the sun make his hair shine.

He was envious of Paris’s innate brazenness at times; he honestly didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about him. Once they’d started dating, Paris had told him the whole sordid details of his life, which would have made a fabulous memoir. He was a good kid with good parents, growing up in a wholesome suburb of Vancouver, and a star player on the football team as a teenager, dating the hottest girl in school—Darcy, a cheerleader (of course). Publicly. Privately, he was also dating his best friend’s older brother, a closeted homosexual named Brent, who was the lead singer and guitar player of a garage band that honestly thought he liked girls. He juggled Darcy and Brent for two years—from sixteen to eighteen—and no one ever found out; no one even had an inkling, including Brent’s younger brother, Paris’s best friend. (Paris said they made an excuse for him being at their house so much by claiming Brent was giving him “guitar lessons,” and Paris actually did learn a chord or two, but inadvertently.) In his senior year he switched from football to basketball, because all the football players were using steroids and he refused to use anything that “shrunk his junk,” but he was good enough at it that he got a scholarship to college based on his athletic prowess. In the Infected: Prey

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meantime, he said the sex was much hotter with Brent, but then again, he was a musician (Paris seemed to think that made a difference, but Roan wasn’t sure why). He was pretty sure that they were both in love with him, but Paris said he never loved either of them, and he really didn’t know why.

He broke up with both of them by the time he got to college, and he continued his juggling ways, going out openly with women, fooling around privately with men. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of it—or so he claimed—he just felt it wasn’t his place to break a perfectly good womanizing athlete stereotype. Of course, when his loose ways caught up with him—when he was deliberately infected by a woman with the tiger strain and a grudge against slightly whorish men (one of whom apparently infected her)—his “perfect” life completely fell apart. But since he went

“a bit nuts,” he never did discover what the actual fallout was; he dropped out of college and out of life, and hadn’t spoken to his family since his infection. That was Paris’s one weakness, the thing that made him balk, become inexplicably afraid: his parents. Roan had tried to get him to call them, drop them a letter or an e-mail, let them know he was okay, but he wouldn’t. He’d never got Paris to tell him why he wouldn’t; he claimed he had a happy childhood, that his parents and his sisters were not the type to be cruel, but he just “wasn’t ready” to talk to them. Roan got the sense that he was afraid of facing their scorn and shame, that they’d kick him out officially, and Paris wasn’t ready to face it. But if they were as kind as Paris claimed, they wouldn’t do that. So was Paris needlessly afraid, or was he lying about his relationship with his parents?

Roan knew precious little about family relationships. His mother died shortly after his birth, he had no idea who his father was, and he had spent his life in and out of state homes and foster homes, although the latter were rare: who wanted to raise some freak child, even temporarily?

Those that did take him in briefly were only in it for the money, and were usually pretty nasty toward him. One couple reinforced a broom closet as a type of jail cell and kept him in it all the time, even when it wasn’t his time of the month. They had also once burned him with an iron; he still had the ghost of a scar on the back of his right hand, a two and a half inch diagonal line thicker than your average scar. He couldn’t remember what he had supposedly done to deserve that.

What a pair to draw to they were, huh? Neither of them really had a template for a healthy relationship, so how they’d managed so far was a bit of a mystery. Part of him expected something to go wrong eventually, 54

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but he tried not to concentrate on it for some stupid, superstitious fear of causing it to happen. After all, look what happened to him and Connor.

It was a twenty-five minute drive to the East End, and you could see the transition from afar, as buildings became fewer and farther between, broken up by weedy vacant lots, trailer parks with names like “Ponderosa Glen,” and sad little strip malls, all of which looked like they’d been covered with a thin layer of yellowish grime from the nearby factories.

Even the sky began to take on an odd, faintly yellow tinge, like an old urine stain on a discarded mattress, and Roan wanted to just turn the car around now. No good could come from a place like this; this was a Bruce Springsteen song kind of place, the kind of place you ran from and never looked back at.

Eventually he found the house that must have been Tweaks’s, and Nose Ring hadn’t been kidding about it being just beyond the railroad tracks; they were so close to the house they might as well have been in his front yard. Tweaks’s house was the type of prefab single level that was popular twenty-five years ago, and whatever color it used to be, it was now the grim color of curdled cream. The paint was peeling, the windows so dirty they could have been soaped, and in the wide, dusty patch of dirt that made up the front yard was a very battered-looking Toyota Corolla, and a Mazda with a busted-out windshield and a missing left rear tire. The house sat alone on an acre of weedy, overgrown meadow, separated from a paper processing plant by a scraggly copse of pines about two acres to the northwest. Getting out of the car, Roan thought he could smell dioxin on the wind.

“Wow, this place looks fucking depressing,” Paris said, getting out of the car and joining him in gazing at the house. “I want to slit my wrists right now.”

“Crash pads rarely make
Architectural Digest
,” he said, walking up to the water-stained front door.

He was about five feet from it when he smelled the blood.

Roan stopped and held out his arm to stop Paris.

“What is it?” Paris asked.

“Call 911,” he told him, resuming his approach to the house. He was taking deep breaths, parsing the smells, and beyond the heat-baked earth and smells of mildew, the smell of leaking motor oil, there was the sickly Infected: Prey

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sweet, unbearably meaty scent of rotting flesh.

Paris stiffened, all humor gone from his expression and his voice.

“What? Why? What do I tell them?”

Roan had to make a decision, and do it now. Possibly taint physical evidence by busting in and searching for possible survivors, or wait for the meat wagon when someone could be inside, alive but barely hanging on?

There really wasn’t much of a choice. “Tell them we have a possible homicide here, and maybe some injured as well. Do it now—the cops always take their fucking time coming to this part of town.”

“What do you smell?”

“Blood. Death.”

“Death?”

“Don’t ask, just do it,” he ordered, then backed up and ran at the front door, turning his shoulder toward it before he hit. If the door was unlocked, he’d feel like a right asshole.

As it was, it wasn’t. There was a crack of wood as he hit the door, as the jamb inside splintered and gave way, the door swinging open with some reluctance. As soon as he was inside the messy house, he was almost overwhelmed with the smell of blood, rot, and shit, and heard a loud, constant buzz. Roan tried not to touch anything with his fingers as he wandered through the house, tasting death in the back of his throat. He found the first body in the hall, halfway inside the bathroom doorway, the lower half severed messily from the top half, although it was hard to tell beneath the undulating blanket of black flies covering the body, the source of the loud hum. The body looked like that of a young Caucasian female, and her visible flesh was discolored enough that he knew she’d been dead for some time.

The next bodies were in what was probably a bedroom, although there was no bed per se, just sleeping bags spread over a floor peppered with crumpled fast-food wrappers. One of the bodies was that of a lanky black teen, his guts spilling out like someone had turned him into a human piñata, and the second body was that of a young Asian female, her head connected to her body by only the slenderest ribbon of sinew. Her blood was splattered all over the walls and the boarded-up window, dried to a dark, dung colored brown. Flies swarmed on them as well, ignoring him as they feasted on this banquet of flesh. If he was correct about the body 56

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positions, the boy had tried to protect the girl, and both had died anyway.

The fourth body was in the kitchen, propped up in a sitting position against the refrigerator, a fallen gallon jug of milk adding a sour stink to the general miasma of death. This was an older Caucasian man with brittle, thinning hair the color and texture of wire; most of his throat and the top of his chest reduced to bloody shreds of meat currently covered by flies and a couple of wasps. As he walked past what must have been the body of Tweaks, he saw a wasp crawl over one of his milky, open eyes.

The kitchen window was broken out, which was how all the flies and the wasps got in. But Roan looked out to confirm a suspicion, and he got it. There was no broken glass in the house at all; it sparkled in the overgrown grass of the backyard like ice.