Prey (15 page)

Eli wasn’t anywhere near here. He had run off, possibly out toward Tweaks’s place… and could he be responsible for that? It was possible, but frankly, anything was possible there. He would insist to his dying day that that crime scene didn’t make sense, no matter what the medical examiner concluded.

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He knew he could stakeout the church, wait for Eli the cat to come back, and simply shoot him in the head. While it wasn’t legal for police officers to shoot “transformed humans” without attempting humane capture first, civilians could shoot a transformed in an open, public area without any penalties. It was considered a matter of public safety: the public couldn’t be expected to have the major-league tranquilizers and stunning equipment that the cops had access to, and they had a right to defend themselves and other people. It was controversial, especially since rednecks put together posses that did nothing but drive around all night and look for cats to shoot, but Roan knew he could use it to his own advantage: he could murder Eli, and he wouldn’t even get a slap on the wrist. It was a thought he mulled over as he walked back toward his car.

He knew he could kill a person—a cat—if he had to. He had joined the police force, however briefly, and if you couldn’t pull the trigger, you never got through training. It could be boiled down to
Star Trek
crap, mainly “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” He also knew, thanks to his illustrious childhood, that there were simply some people who honestly deserved to die; there were some people who had no raison d’être besides causing misery and pain to others. Oh, he knew the arguments—who was he to judge the worth or life of a person, blah blah blah—but he also knew, from his own experiences, that there were some people that life would simply be better off without. It was cold, cruel, possibly psychopathic, but it was how he felt, what he sensed to be true. If life was made up of many kinds of people, there would be some in this vast ocean who were simply predators or parasites, remoras who existed only to drain the life from others. All they could do was destroy.

Not that he would ever back wholesale murder, or even the death penalty when it came to that, but he knew of at least a couple of people it would have been worth going to jail for. They were probably still alive, unless someone else had got them, but he knew if he ever ran into those people again, they’d better hope he wasn’t armed.

He walked back to his car without being followed or stalked, and as he got in, he took off his holster and tossed it into the passenger seat. He had a free pass to get rid of Eli once and for all, a get out of jail free card plopped in his lap. Would he use it? Would Paris forgive him? That was the big one, the killer. Paris would know it was cold blooded; he’d know he staked him out to exterminate him.

He had some time to think about it; if Eli was new to transforming, 86

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he could have four to six more active days before the virus went back into dormancy. It would give him time to consider whether he wanted to add murderer to his résumé or not.

COMING back from a transformation was akin to regaining consciousness after being hit and dragged by a train. Or at least Paris imagined it to be so; he’d never been hit or dragged by a train. But it seemed appropriate somehow.

He had to lie there for five minutes after he came to, feeling his muscles spasm and tasting coppery blood in his mouth, before he thought he could bear the pain enough to move. He wasn’t strong enough to stand, so he had to crawl to the cage door, and after two tries managed to unlock it. There was no way to describe the pain; he felt like he had been pulverized, tenderized to within an inch of his life by the biggest meat hammer in existence. His muscles were probably as tender as veal.

Ro had left a first aid kit just outside the cage door, out of swiping distance. It was one of their medical kits, though, which meant instead of Band-Aids and gauze it was full of painkillers and hypodermic needles.

Paris liked to call it the Courtney Love edition. He had to rest between opening the case, fishing out a needle, and loading one up, all actions that shouldn’t have been exhausting and yet somehow were, especially when you were in so much pain your hands couldn’t stop shaking and your eyes couldn’t stop tearing up, and your muscles decided to have spasms that made your whole body tremble like you were an unstable fault line.

Paris reflected on the general irony of him being such an expert at shooting up as he stabbed the needle into his thigh and depressed the plunger. He used to hate needles, and he still did really, when he wasn’t in so much pain, but at times like these he loved the needle. The needle was his friend now; the needle made it all stop. He lay on the cool concrete floor of the basement as he waited for the drugs to fully take effect, waited for that slow, warm wave to engulf him and carry him away to a tropical, forgiving sea.

He just laid there, staring up at the ceiling, feeling fantastic—maybe that’s why Courtney was such a big fan of drugs—and finally pulled himself up slowly, using the base of the stairs to help him climb to his feet.

He still felt strangely loose, like all his joints had been dislocated and his Infected: Prey

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bones replaced with rubber, but the good thing about the drugs was he didn’t care.

He went straight to the downstairs bathroom and took a shower. The sense of smell was always strongest for about an hour afterward, and he could never stand the rank, musky smell of himself. Ro always said he didn’t smell that bad, but he was just being kind, because for a little bit Paris had a near-feline sense of smell and he couldn’t believe Ro could stand to be in the same room with him.

He felt lightly buzzed, relaxed, like he could go lie down or maybe just go out drinking, maybe go listen to some singer-songwriter who’s having problems with her boyfriend. But his stomach didn’t so much growl as roar, and he had to go have a bite before it started digesting itself.

Paris turned the TV on for some welcome noise, and he got the
BBC

World News
, which was always infinitely depressing, but that Daljit Dhaliwal was a hottie. If someone had to tell him there was another war in Eritrea, she was the easiest on the eyes, and that voice was like liquid silk.

She could announce the end of the world, and he’d still get a boner.

Ro was home—the Mustang was in the driveway, and his bike was still in the garage—but since he heard nothing upstairs, Paris figured he was sleeping. Sunlight glowed like radiation beyond the curtains, and it was already incredibly warm; it’d probably be in the nineties again. He hated heat waves, but there was nothing he could do about it but whine and turn on the air conditioner.

He ate two frozen croissant breakfast sandwiches he nuked in Chiquita the microwave, a breakfast burrito, an Australian toaster biscuit, and a slice of cold pizza with a can of cold, overly sweet coffee. He reminded himself of a pig in a trough, but it wasn’t his fault he was always left ravenous after a transformation. He did wonder how many preservatives and grams of fat, salt, and sugar he’d just ingested, but did it matter? The virus would kill him long before his arteries would clog.

He went upstairs to get some clothes, and discovered Roan sacked out on the bed, lying on his back with half of the tan, suede-like comforter on the floor, the other half tangled around his legs. He was so deeply asleep that even turning on the AC didn’t wake him up, so Paris figured he must have only gotten to bed a couple of hours ago.

Ro had left a yellow legal pad on the nightstand on his side of the bed, and Paris glanced at it. Sometimes Ro left him notes if there were 88

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developments in a case, and he was hopeful, because maybe if he solved one case, he could concentrate on the other. The note was only partly for him, though; the rest of it was Ro clearly making notes for himself, things to do or keep in mind when he was awake:

Eli’s infected, was out last night, loose. Killer? Haven’t done
anything yet—weighing options.

Marley probably knows where Danny is, but wouldn’t tell me.

Probably with someone they met at the church. Rainbow gave me three
names: Timothy Nelson, John Hatch, Andrew Freeman. Follow up.

Connection: Eli to Tweaks? Eli to DeSilvo? Eli to both?

Follow up: Did DeSilvo steal from drug busts? Is this significant to
his death?

Eli was rumored to have a drug problem in college. Coincidence?

Something else?

Who infected Eli? How much of the church is now infected?

(Rainbow clear—Guy missing. Significant?)

Need: Migraine strength Excedrin, microwave popcorn, AA
batteries, paper towels, pineapple orange juice

There was something a little jarring about finding a shopping list beneath all these names of suspects. Roan could really multitask, he had to give him that.

But the most startling thing was the first item. Not Eli being infected; really, that was only a matter of time if he was at all serious about the

“holiness” of transformation. It was what Ro had written after that:
Haven’t done anything yet—weighing options.
What options were there?

Calling the cops and reporting him as an unrestrained infected in a transformation cycle, or… what? Shooting him?

Oh holy shit.

This was Roan thinking out loud, and as a consequence drawing him into the debate. If Ro had honestly wanted to kill Eli, he could have done it and just claimed that he was menaced or something (although he found it personally a bit hard to believe that there were any cats out there with the balls to menace Roan), and Paris would have believed him simply because he would want to believe him. But the thing he really admired about Ro was his brutal honesty with himself; he could lie as much as the Infected: Prey

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next person, but he never believed his own bullshit for a minute. The fact that he even bothered to mention it pretty much meant he wasn’t going to… probably. Still, Paris now knew what he was going to do today.

He picked up the comforter and draped it over Roan, pausing briefly to look down at his scar. Since he wasn’t wearing a shirt and was lying on his back, it was quite visible. Even though most transformed lost their scars during transformation, Ro still managed to hold on to three, which he called “ghost scars”: they were all so pale they looked white, slightly raised as if in relief. The two most visible were the smallest ones, one on the back of his hand and the other on his face, slightly subsumed by his eyebrow, while the most often hidden scar was the largest, a white line that started at his left shoulder and snaked along beneath his collarbone, tracing an irregular line toward the hollow of his throat. Paris tried to imagine what could cause a scar like that, and all he could think of was a knife, but Ro had denied that was the cause. But he never said what the cause was, and only by precision wheedling had Paris ever got him to admit the one on his hand was due to an iron. He didn’t talk about his scars any more than he talked about his childhood, although Paris had picked up enough bits and pieces to figure out it was hellish. The thought that someone did this to Roan as a child infuriated him. He wanted Ro to name names so he could go and kick their ass, even though Ro was more than capable of doing the ass-kicking now. He pulled the blanket up to the scar, and then kissed him gently on the forehead, trying hard not to wake him up. His eyes didn’t stop moving beneath his eyelids, so he took that as a good sign.

Paris finished getting dressed, grabbed his keys for the Mustang, and left the house, happy to have a mission no matter how grim it was.

He probably shouldn’t have been driving, considering he was on twice the maximum dose of an illegal painkiller, but he felt oddly sober, probably because he was still in an incredible amount of pain. Pain was a great equalizer. He drove carefully anyway.

The thing about Eli—the thing he never told Roan—was that Paris felt that he was his own evil twin. He was a reasonably good-looking guy with lots of charisma (well, Paris knew he was better-looking, but why kick a man when he was down?); but whereas Paris devoted himself to hedonism, Eli had actual ambition and devoted himself to building a cult.

He got people to worship both him and his own beliefs, no matter the fact that his beliefs were quite openly nuts. Perhaps this is what would have 90

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happened to Tom Cruise if he hadn’t gone into acting.

Anyway, Paris knew that his charisma, what his own grandmother called “the charm”—she claimed it ran in the family, although it skipped a person here and there—was a weapon of sorts. He never had problems getting dates, getting laid, and he had no idea what other guys complained about. He could get anyone he set his mind to, and he used to think he was quite special, but then he met Eli, and he realized he was just in a small minority of people who contained enough charm to be dangerous. And the more they believed they were special, the more they bought their own bullshit, the more dangerous they were. Eli had hit a special level, a plateau that few could reach: he was a cult of personality now, insulated in his own greatness, confident in his near-godhood, and now that he had gotten himself infected, his people were probably going to worship him directly and forget about the rest of it. It was all pretty fucked-up; actually, it used to be fucked-up. Now it was
so
fucked-up there was no adequate phrase to cover it. And none of this would be so bad if it was a small thing, even regional, but thanks to the Web he had an Internet empire, and he was head of the biggest kitty cult around. He was power and he was trouble, from several different angles. Even if Ro legally killed Eli in his kitty form, Ro would probably be assassinated by an angry follower.

By the time he reached the church it was pretty quiet, and he found a place to park right out front. Getting out of the car, he noticed he’d accidentally put on one of Ro’s T-shirts, his Clash one. Normally Ro’s shirts were a bit small for him, but his Clash shirt was oversized, so it was just about a perfect fit for Paris. He still couldn’t quite get over that: a cop into punk. It seemed wrong somehow, but he bet he could chalk up some of it to Ro’s contrariness. He never liked to be what anyone would expect.