Prey (54 page)

Looking at the cell phone screen Tim held out toward him, Paris was once again glad the Valium had numbed his responses. The tiny picture was of a man in a dark blue police uniform, only visible from the shoulders up. He had a narrow, almost vulpine face, with sharp cheekbones and big, deep-set green eyes that had just a hint of an exotic shape, like maybe there was some Eurasian blood in his family, while his normally full lips were pulled slightly flat, as if he was trying hard not to smirk. There was a sparkle in his eyes that suggested he was actually trying not to laugh because he thought this was so stupid.

Of course he knew this man. It was Roan, and that was the photo they took for the newspaper article that came out when he joined the force.

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He looked a bit younger and strangely adorable, with his reddish-brown hair short and combed back; he took a moment to regret the cut, but enjoy how sexy he looked otherwise. There was nothing really classically handsome about him, but he still seemed unbelievably attractive, and Paris had no idea how Roan couldn’t quite see that about himself. He was glad, though, because there was only room for one unbearably vain person in their house, and he had no intention of giving up his throne.

“No, I’ve never seen him before,” Paris replied. “Why?”

Tim pulled the cell phone back toward him, and took a moment to decide what to say. “It seems he may be following some of our people. If you see him, don’t confront him—just call me and let me know where you are, okay?”

“Is he dangerous?”

He shook his head, and flashed him a very anemic attempt at a reassuring smile. “No, don’t worry about that. He’s just… not a person we want around.”

Kevin Stiles would be puzzled about this, so he pretended to be.

“What is he, a stalker?”

“Something like that, yes.”

Paris finished his drink, and excused himself to the men’s room.

There was a guy at the urinal so he ducked into a stall. The bathroom was as dark and dreary as the rest of the bar, but it wasn’t quite the disgusting cesspool he had braced himself for. Under his breath, he said, “Don’t worry, Jamal, I’m just calling Roan. There’s been a troubling development.”

Real troubling. And what made things worse was that Ro was either away from his phone or he had turned it off. After four rings he was shunted directly into his voice mail system. “Damn it, Ro! Look, Tim wants Kevin to be a plant at the next meeting, taking Karen’s place. She’s been with HF for months now, and it’s a good bet that, despite their estrangement, Noah has been as well. Also, Tim just got an e-mail on his phone, I don’t know from who, but it included a photo of you. Hon, get out of there, you’ve been made; they know you’re investigating them. I don’t know what they’ll do if they find you, but if they are the killers…

look, call me as soon as you get this message, let me know you’re okay.

Oh, fuck it, I’m heading to Jefferson Avenue as soon as I’m out of here.

Call me or not, I’ll be there ASAP.” He hung up, not sure what else he Infected: Prey

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could do.

Didn’t it somehow figure? Ro was worried about him, and it should have been himself he was worried about.

MIA was in Sun Hill for almost forty-five minutes. It took him barely a minute to pop the lock on her passenger door, and while he was doing it, Cherry recognized him and called out, “How ya doin’, Officer?” The street immediately cleared of drug dealers, nervous johns, and all her rivals in prostitution. She had to know he wasn’t on the force anymore; she just wanted to get the others off her corner. He gave her a sarcastic little wave, and she blew him a kiss as he ducked into Mia’s car. This behavior didn’t strike her as weird or out of the ordinary, which spoke volumes about the area, and about Cherry herself.

Cherry was actually a woman named Nadine Guest, and she was probably about thirty now, although she looked about forty under all that makeup. She was one of the hookers the cops called the “old guard,” as she was hooked on heroin, whereas most of the hookers nowadays were supporting meth or crack habits, not smack ones. She had at least one kid that he knew of, in state foster care (the father was identified, but couldn’t be found), and lived in one of the crappiest apartments around, one that probably should have been shut down as a health hazard. Her story was as sad as hell, as was her life, and he used to feel horrible running these women—and the boy hustlers—in. What they were doing was illegal, sure, but they were just trying to survive, and most were feeding monstrous habits they couldn’t kick. They needed help, not incarcerations or fines, most of which they couldn’t afford anyway. He wasn’t the only cop who had felt that way, but they were employed to enforce laws, even if those laws struck them as unjust. But he’d only run the hookers and rent boys in if he absolutely had to, and therefore that segment of the street community actually looked kindly on him, or at least more kindly on him than they did other cops. They knew he was a soft touch, good for a burger or a cup of coffee, and they’d tell him things they wouldn’t tell other cops.

That left the Chief torn, as he didn’t like him slacking on the job, but he’d forged some valuable connections that would be hard to replicate. Of course, as soon as he left the force it was a moot point, but he was strangely touched that they still remembered him.

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He hid in the backseat of Mia’s car, which had a nice gray leather interior, and hunkered down on the floor behind the passenger seat. It was a clean car, well looked after, and he thought Paris would have approved, although he did find a stale French fry, straw wrappers, and a loose scattering of change beneath the seat. Also a pill that looked like Prozac, but it was partially melted, its name obscured.

Finally he heard the click of the driver’s side door being unlocked, and she got in, a swirl of a perfume filling the car as she tossed her purse in the passenger seat and slammed the door. Chanel No. 5? He was pretty sure that was it, although he wasn’t always great at perfume recognition.

He waited until she’d started the car and started driving, and then popped up, leaning over the passenger seat. “Hello, Mia,” he said.

She let out a startled shriek and her hands twisted on the steering wheel, nearly making her plow into a parked car before she fought to get back under control. She glared at him out of one dark eye, and he had to admit she did have a very attractive profile. He could also see that the indigo blouse she wore was silk, not satin like he’d first thought, although paired with jeans was an odd choice.

“Who the fuck are you and how did you get in my car?”

“I think you know who I am,” he replied, doffing his baseball cap and pushing his sunglasses up to the top of his head. “You date Eli after all. Surely he’s mentioned me.”

Her eyes narrowed dangerously, and she sneered slightly. “You’re Roan McKichan, that infected detective.”

“Isn’t it neat how that kind of rhymes?”

Apparently she didn’t appreciate his sense of humor. “He has you following me, is that it?”

“Now why would he do that? Just because your brother just got arrested with a gun in his possession.…”

“He’s been framed,” she snapped bitterly. “Probably by your pretty-boy boyfriend. He was there, wasn’t he?”

He sat back in the seat, crossing his arms over his chest and shaking his head as he stared at her in the rearview mirror. “Rookie mistake number one. Just a minute ago you were pretending you didn’t know who I was, and now you’re telling me you know my boyfriend and that he was there when Jordan got popped. So why the act?”

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She looked away in disgust. “I don’t have to say anything to you.”

“I think you’ll want to, Mia, especially since I don’t think Jordan is guilty.”

That really did surprise her. Her head shot back and she stared at him in the rearview mirror. “What?”

“Jordan is a perfect fit for the timeline, but for once, Eli and I agree on something: he’s a fuck up. He might have the will to do this, but I don’t think he has the ability, not with his chronic alcoholism. But you, you fit a hell of a lot better.”

Her face had hardened until it looked like a mask. A pretty mask, but one that still wouldn’t have been out of place on a gargoyle. “What the fuck are you talking about, you smug little faggot?”

“I’m not little.”

Again, she didn’t appreciate his jokes, but he wasn’t surprised. The hate she was radiating was nuclear, and while he’d be the first to admit that what he’d done—breaking into her car, scaring the shit out of her—

was an act deserving of anger, he wasn’t sure he deserved the sheer amount of contempt coming from her. This felt deeper and older, far more personal than could possibly be warranted. “I’d like you to explain something to me, Mia. You’re infected, just like I am, so why would you help kill fellow infecteds? I know some of us can be as self-loathing as gays, but come on—there’s a huge difference between preaching that fags are a scourge that should be wiped from the earth and then picking up a young hustler who’ll beat you with a leather strap before fucking you up the ass, and actually taking out a gun and shooting someone in the head.

Admittedly, it’s a small gulf, but it’s there.”

She grimaced in disgust at the mention of a guy being fucked up the ass, which is what he’d intended; clearly, she wasn’t a fag hag. “You’re disgusting.”

“Says the murderer.”

“I am not a murderer!”

“Then why were you meeting with Noah Hammond?”

“Who?”

He sighed wearily, catching her eyes in the rearview mirror. “You know I can smell lies, right? Eli mentioned that, didn’t he?”

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“He says you claim that.”

“It’s much more than a claim and he knows it. So let’s just can the bullshit, okay? Noah’s in on this. What I don’t get is, was Jordan threatening Eli on his own? He must not have been aware that you were helping Noah frame him. But where did Patrick Farley fit into this? The other victims were women Eli had some interest in—more than interest, in Melissa’s case—but Patrick doesn’t fit. He wasn’t gay, and even if he was, Eli isn’t. So what could Patrick have done to get himself on the hit list?”

Her lips had thinned to a line so tight it looked almost as if they were disappearing, receding into her taut face. “You think you’re so smart,” she growled. “You know nothing about me.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. You were born in Flagstaff, Arizona, raised in the tiny town of Elk’s Grove, Colorado, dropped out of Brown University one year in, probably due to being infected or due to your shockingly low grade point average, whichever came first. Jordan had been bounced from college almost right away, after he got hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and the two of you wandered up here. You’ve been working as a temp in a law firm for the last six months, and dating Eli for two of those. I believe you’ve been taking care of Jordan, even though he lives apart from you, possibly because you’re the only family each of you has. Your father died when you were seven, and your mother died three years ago. What am I leaving out?”

She was shaking her head throughout his recitation. “You’re typical, aren’t you? You’re just like the rest of them.”

“Can you specify the ‘them’? I get tossed in with a lot of groups.

Gays, infecteds, redheads, men, nerds, hummus eaters.…”

“Being infected is not next to godliness, it doesn’t make us special. It makes us diseased. It makes us freaks. And there’s so many stupid people who want to be infected, who think it will make them super-powered or tragic stars of their own Gothic dramas. They have no idea what it’s really like. They have no fucking clue how horrible it is. And people like you and me keep spreading this fucking thing, making the cult bigger, making it worse.”

“I’ve never infected anyone.”

The look she flashed him was sharp as broken glass. “So you say.

But we will if we’re around long enough, if we’re not celibate. We might not even mean to, we might not even have been aware we were sick, and Infected: Prey

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we could have given it to someone.”

“I’ve been sick all my life. I was born this way. I’ve never infected anyone.”

But she wasn’t really listening to him; she had a faraway, almost crazed look in her eye. This was a speech she’d said many times before, at least in her head. “This has to stop. The number of infecteds just keeps growing, no matter our high mortality rate. Eli doesn’t even believe it’s a religious experience, no matter what he claims, but he won’t stop. He’s an attention whore and he won’t stop.”

“He has to be stopped,” he prompted, feeling that he knew where this was going.

“Yes! But it’s for his own good, and the good of everyone. He’s a menace. Every infected is a menace. We were all people, we started off as people, and it’s up to us to protect them from us.”

Oh dear God. Again, he’d encountered this kind of thing, self-loathing turned to near madness, in closeted gay men before. They were the type who made hating fags a religion, who went out on Saturday nights looking for queers to beat up, who showed up at funerals of AIDS patients to harangue their relatives, and all the while, inside, they were really beating themselves up; they were trying to burn out the thing they most hated about themselves, even though they refused to admit it. Mia had taken loathing her disease to a level of madness; she loathed herself and everyone who had the disease, and she wanted them all dead. She was the perfect foil for Humanity First, as there was no traitor like an insider. That meant she was using Eli, didn’t it? She only started dating him to get into his inner circle. Or had Eli’s hypocrisy pushed her over the edge? He wouldn’t blame her if it did. “What’s the limit of those protections, Mia?

We’re infected, but we’re still people too—”

“Fuck you!” she exploded, spittle flying, anger twisting her face into something truly ugly and frightening. The light in her eyes was hard and messianic, so far beyond sanity she couldn’t even see it from here. “You just said you can smell lies, asshole! How normal is that? How
human
is that? It isn’t, is it?! And you were shot! I heard you were shot! And yet here you are, looking just fine to me. You’re worse than most—you weren’t even born human! You’ve been inhuman since day one.”