Authors: Andrea Speed
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Paris, with no preamble, about the scar on his chest.
He hadn’t been in a lot of abusive foster homes; most foster parents were do-gooders who meant well. The problems were the people who actually thought this was an easy way to get money from the state (it wasn’t), or one person who wanted to be a foster parent in a couple and the other who didn’t but went along with it anyway. They were usually quite bitter and resentful, and they usually took it out on the kids.
Such was the case with the Swansons. Phyllis was a church-happy do-gooder who saw helping these kids as “God’s work”—Roan found her overbearing, but he appreciated that she never tried to convert him. Henry was different; Henry was an extremely angry, controlling man who, in a clinch, got intimidated by Phyllis. Roan suspected that he had an Oedipus complex that he’d never got over, and he saw Phyllis as much as his mother as his wife (Henry’s mother was a scary, creepy old Bible-thumper, so the through line between her and Phyllis was pretty obvious). Henry had a tendency to smack him around when Phyllis was at one of her many church functions, which was often.
Sometimes he wondered if being exposed to so many dysfunctional heterosexual relationships was why he so happily embraced being gay, but honestly he had no idea. It was fun to think about, though.
His memories of childhood were very fuzzy things; he only remembered scraps, most of them bad. He could remember being in the Swansons’ garage, for example, but he could no longer remember why he was there. Henry was mad at him for something again—and again he couldn’t remember why, but that wasn’t his bad memory; that was because he rarely knew why Henry was mad at him beyond the fact that he simply existed—and Henry made to smack him, but Roan saw it coming and was big enough at this stage to catch his arm and shove it back. He was ten, after all. This infuriated Henry more, so he grabbed something blindly off his workbench (which was actually little used, as Henry had no patience for anything), and hit Roan with it. He jumped back, avoiding most of it, but what Henry had picked up and hit him with was a saw, and the tip of the saw caught him, the teeth sharp enough to rip open his shirt and the skin beneath. Blood was everywhere before Roan even realized he’d been cut, and it even seemed to take Henry a moment to grasp it. He could still remember the naked terror on his face, making him look a thousand years old as he held the bloody saw, and then his eyes drifted toward it, and when he saw the blood running down the blade he threw it across the 332
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garage, like the metal was so hot it was burning his skin. He started shouting for Roan to get away from him, so horrified his skin had turned the color of old oatmeal, and fled the garage like he had the devil on his ass. It took him a moment to work out why, it wasn’t like Roan had hit him with the saw, but then he figured it out as blood continued pouring down his chest, turning his shirt red, dribbling down his jeans and pooling on the oil-stained cement floor.
It took him a moment to understand why Henry was so freaked-out, but then he tried to staunch the blood with his hand, and that was when he got it: his blood. His diseased, pestilent blood. He was suddenly full of rage, just furious, and he began splattering his blood all over the garage, collecting it in his hands and flinging it all over the room, smearing it on the walls, the workbench and tools, even Henry’s car. He wanted to bleed to death, he hoped he did, as his disease would taint this fucking place and everything in it. He wanted them to live with it, to live with this. He was so angry he knew he was acting like a fucking crazy person, but he couldn’t stop; his rage was bigger than he was. He thought he was screaming, but he didn’t know for sure; he remembered nothing but red-hot rage.
An ambulance team arrived—Henry had said that Roan had
“accidentally” cut himself—and he still remembered the laconic, sleepy-eyed EMT who knew immediately that Henry’s story made no sense with the wound involved, and that he’d lost an awful lot of blood for someone who’d “just” done it. Roan could remember that the patch on his jacket said O’Neil, and he had hair the color of driftwood, and his touch on the cut was very gentle; he suspected O’Neil was his very first crush.
Although his partner, a wiry guy who seemed more comfortable around Henry than around the kid with the diseased blood, seemed nervous, O’Neil was too much of a pro to care. He looked him square in the eyes (he could barely remember the color of O’Neil’s eyes, but he was pretty sure they were as brown as his hair) and said, “You didn’t do this to yourself, did you?” Roan shook his head, and glared over O’Neil’s broad shoulder at the cringing, terrified figure of Henry in the garage doorway.
He didn’t need to say it—out of the four of them in the garage, three of them knew what had happened. The EMTs took him to the hospital, and he never went back to the Swansons again. He ended up back at a state foster-care group home, and they said he’d probably be left with a nasty scar, but it had faded pretty well over time. Oh sure, it was still there, a ghost scar that seemed to trace the contour of his collarbone where the tip of the saw Infected: Prey
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had gotten caught in his skin, but it had healed a lot more cleanly than anyone had ever expected.
While he told the story he’d kept looking down at his curry, moving the vegetables and chicken pieces around the Styrofoam container, rearranging rice that was the color of saffron. He didn’t want to see what was on Par’s face, because he was afraid he wouldn’t like it. But after he told his story, Par reached across the breakfast bar and put his hand over his. “Oh God, sweetheart, that’s horrible. I hope they threw his ass in jail.”
He shook his head, sparing a quick glance at Paris. His eyes were shining with empathetic tears, but none of them had fallen, and he was glad about that. “No, nothing really happened to him; the laws were a bit looser then, you understand, a little abuse here and there was tolerated more. I just hope it took him eighty years to decontaminate his fucking garage.”
Paris squeezed his hand, and he looked indignant as well as sad. “If I ever find the guy, I don’t care if he’s a multiple amputee in an old people’s home, I’m kicking his fucking ass. Hitting a kid with a saw? Jesus.”
He leaned over the bar and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”
That seemed to startle Paris, or at least deeply confuse him. “What for?”
“For caring, for putting up with me. I can barely stand myself at the best of times.”
Paris reached across, burying his hand in Roan’s hair, and pulled his head over the bar, meeting him halfway and kissing him full on the mouth.
He tasted like sweet green tea and bo kho. After the kiss, he leaned his forehead against his for a moment, and Roan felt a surprising surge of relief. He hadn’t fucked this up too much; this wasn’t beyond fixing. “You are a wonderful, amazing man,” Paris told him. “And if you don’t give yourself a break, I’m gonna kick your ass too.”
That made him smile. He probably meant it, too, but it was still oddly touching.
He called Phil after their combo lunch-dinner (he was on a stakeout tonight and Paris was meeting Barlow in a seedy bar, this was probably their last chance to eat for a while), and luckily he was able to dispatch Jamal, who didn’t have any open cases at the moment. He knew Jamal; he was ex-military intelligence, like Phil himself, but he had a better sense of 334
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humor in general. He was on the short side but built like a fireplug, and he had no doubt at all that if things went really horrible, Jamal could kick the ass of the entire population of the bar and not even break a sweat, which was exactly the type of person he wanted shadowing Par tonight. Paris and Jamal decided to meet in the parking lot of a Wendy’s just over from the Road House and work out the cues in case something went wrong.
(Unlikely, but it was always vital to have them.)
Roan left in the rental first, feeling a bit better about things in general. Admittedly, the records search on Jordan turned up nothing that connected him in any way to Barlow or Reese or Noah, it just reinforced Eli’s view that he was a “fuck-up.” Clearly he had problems with alcohol, as he had a few DUIs on his record, and a couple of arrests for public drunkenness and urinating in public (classy again), although none since last year. He seemed like the type you didn’t want in on an intricate assassination plan, so Roan couldn’t imagine they used him for anything really important. He was close to Eli, though—did he tell them how best to frame him?
He parked down the street from Sun Hill, in front of an abandoned building whose broken windows were covered with wooden planks and gang tags, and was once again glad he’d insisted on tinted windows on the Taurus. Since he assumed he was in for a long stakeout, he brought a thermos full of hot, sweet black tea (full of caffeine and sugar, a one-two punch that should keep him hyper-alert), a sizable empty plastic bottle to pee in (disgusting, but necessary when you couldn’t leave your post to piss), and an audio book that he slipped into the CD player. It was a Stephen King one, so it’d last all night, and possibly into next morning. At least audio books made these long, dull stakeouts a bit more tolerable.
He tried to focus on the front of Sun Hill and ignore all the drug deals going on around him, as well as the johns picking up the occasional prostitute (mostly female, but a couple male; in fact, he recognized two of the women, DeeDee and Cherry, and one of the boys, Justin, from his time on the police beat). He’d been there for a bit over an hour, sunset making the sky cycle through the spectacular crimson shades that you could only see in polluted areas, a red explosion like neon blood painted across the bottom of the clouds, when a car far too nice for the area pulled up to the curb outside Sun Hill. It was a silver ’04 Audi A8 with some minor denting in the back, but still a lot newer and classier than any car that ever parked around here (some of the johns’ cars were extremely expensive, Infected: Prey
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making you wonder why they were trolling for cheap tail down here). As he took a photo of the plate, he saw a woman get out, and she instantly struck him as familiar.
She was petite with a very slender, willowy frame, her black hair styled in a short pixie cut that just reinforced the youthfulness of her elfin face; she looked barely legal, but she carried herself like a much older woman, making her true age a crapshoot. She looked around nervously, giving him a good look and shot of her profile as she drew her leather jacket around her anxiously and walked into the plain brick building that was the Sun Hill Apartments.
Holy shit. It was Mia DeSoto.
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Collision
PART of him was almost hoping that the Road House would resemble that cheesy Patrick Swayze film, but no such luck. It was just a random cheap dive, noisy with pool players, a jukebox playing classic rock tunes (he came in to strains of “Don’t Fear The Reaper”—foreshadowing?), and people talking. The clientele was almost all male, but the place was too dreary, the lights so dim it was like suddenly submerging into a algae-filled pond, to ever consider it a “gay” bar. It was just a depressed bar, the kind perfect for career drinkers who wished to wallow in their own rampant misery. If they’d had neon Molson and Moosehead ads on the wall instead of buzzing Budweiser and Miller ads, this easily could have been a saloon somewhere in the dreary plains of Alberta. And was there a single mullet-sporting bouncer? No there wasn’t. That was about eighty different kinds of suck.
This time he beat Barlow here, so he got one of the round wooden tables in the back, near the pool players, and he ordered a tonic on the rocks with a lemon slice, which made the burly Hispanic bartender look at him funny, but it would look quite a bit like a vodka and tonic to Barlow.
He couldn’t actually drink tonight. After Roan left, he’d gone into the bathroom and taken half a Valium, as his heart was starting to race again, an uneven lope that seemed more like a spastic gallop, and he knew half a Valium should take down his heart rate without compromising him. But drinking a beer on top of it would threaten to put him to sleep, so he couldn’t risk it.
He was watching the pool players—one guy with a beer gut so massive he probably hadn’t seen his feet since 1985, and a skinnier, seedier-looking guy wearing a “No Fat Chicks” T-shirt (Paris had no idea those existed outside of
The Simpsons
)—and trying to discern if they actually knew what they were doing by the time Barlow showed up, apologizing profusely for his lateness. He said there was a wreck that was holding up traffic, but Paris honestly didn’t know if he was lying or not. It Infected: Prey
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was times like this that he wished he could smell a lie.
Barlow ordered a beer and got to business pretty shortly afterward, and it wasn’t quite what Paris expected. Barlow was asking him to go to a meeting tomorrow night and pretend he was a newcomer. He said they did that because people were often reluctant to be the first one to share their story, and they had plants as a way of getting the ball rolling. Paris was glad about the Valium, as it helped him not react to things, but his gut twisted in sudden anxiety. “Was that woman there the night I went a plant?”
“Karen? Yeah, she’s been with us for a couple of months now. But she can’t do the meeting tomorrow night, and I was thinking since your story was so dynamic, you might want to give it a try. I know how it sounds, but it actually helps people open up.”
So Roan’s instincts paid off again. It wasn’t that Karen was homicidal as much as that she was lying—while telling the truth. Roan knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what, so he’d tagged her. It was creepy how he did that.
And if Karen had been active in Humanity First for a couple of months, it probably meant that Noah had been too. There was the connection between Noah and Barlow. The circle had been close … but was that enough?
He was thinking of when to make an excuse to leave when Tim’s cell phone buzzed and, after apologizing, he answered it. But it wasn’t a phone call or even a text message; he had a web-enabled phone, and it was an e-mail. He learned this after Tim grunted in what seemed to be muted disgust, and asked, “Have you seen a man like this around?”