Prey (8 page)

Paris sighed in an obviously amused way. “You’re like the gay Mike Hammer, aren’t you?”

“I preferred Sam Spade,” he deadpanned, moving his shoulders just enough so that Paris knew to let him go. He did and stepped back, looking at him with that wonderfully endearing, lopsided half smile of his, the one that made everyone want to ruffle his hair before throwing him down and ripping his clothes off. Paris knew he was sexy, as he used to be quite a player back in his college days, but that’s how he got himself infected (by a woman, actually—oh, the irony). He claimed he was arrogant about his looks then, but that wasn’t true anymore; having a bit of a mental Infected: Prey

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breakdown seemed to bring humility with it, as well as monogamy. Well, so far, anyway.

Roan looked at him and raised his eyebrow, the question tacit. Paris had changed into worn, tight jeans and a sleeveless apple green T-shirt that was so tight it looked painted on; you could see every muscle in his chest, how flat his stomach was. He still kept himself in good shape, although he wasn’t one of those grotesque gym rats who spent ten hours a day working out. He had regained some sense of vanity, but he hadn’t gone crazy with it. (No pun intended.) “What? I said I was going along to distract Rainbow.”

“Distract, not drive into a frenzy of lust.”

That made Paris grin. “I think someone’s projecting.”

The fact that he was probably right didn’t make it any more tolerable. “Get in the fucking car.”

“Yes sir, Mister Crabby,” he replied, with a sarcastic little smirk. On their way out the door, he added, “Paging Doctor Freud. Doctor Freud to the white courtesy telephone, please.” Smart-ass.

The drive to the church was relatively quiet, with Paris simply fiddling with the radio, sometimes every three minutes. The drawback with these older muscle cars was, if you wanted a proper stereo, you had to sink a lot of money into it, and they had sunk enough money into rebuilding these cars as it was. The additional problem was that radio pretty much sucked.

Paris was being kind by giving him room and quiet to think, but after about ten minutes, he stared at the side of Roan’s face, brow furrowing in concentration. “This Sikorski thing is really bugging you, isn’t it?”

He shrugged, faintly shaking his head, trying to deny it to himself more than Paris. “I’m not a cop anymore, and I can’t interfere in a police investigation. Whatever he wants to pursue he’s free to do so. Why the fuck do I care?”

Paris reached across and lightly stroked the nape of his neck. Roan knew it was a weird erogenous zone to have, but Paris had found it immediately, and knew how to make him weak in the knees without even trying. He knew he was doing it right now to make him relax—and it was working—but he wished he wouldn’t. He felt like being tense right now.

“Because you think he’s overlooking something. Maybe I didn’t know you 38

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back then, but I think you must have been one hell of a cop, Ro.”

“I wasn’t. I was the freak no one wanted to patrol with, and I got in trouble for cursing out a redneck idiot who couldn’t quite grasp the concept that you don’t hit your wife and kids with a coffee table, so I quit.

I have no idea what I was thinking, joining the force. Me, dealing with the public? Can you imagine it?”

“You were—and still are—one of the best investigators I’ve ever seen. Okay, so your people skills are—”

“Shitty?”

“I was going to say lacking. But that’s what I’m here for, right?” He flashed him a smile that could have blinded the entire block, and in spite of himself, Roan smiled. Yes that was what he was here for: he had the ability to charm and schmooze, to flatter and network, skills that Roan had neither acquired nor cultivated. Paris could play the game, and the irony was Roan knew that he’d never been invited to play. Essentially, Paris was everything he wasn’t.

After a moment, Paris asked, “You just cursed him out?”

Reluctantly, he shrugged. “Guy was drunk. Kinda clumsy.”

Paris stopped massaging the back of his neck, and gave him a mock-stern look. “Clumsy how?”

“He may have walked into a wall while I was trying to handcuff him.”

“Just the once?”

“Repeatedly. But he honestly did fall down the stairs all by himself.”

“Repeatedly walking into walls can do that to a person.”

“So I hear.”

Well, he never claimed to be a saint, did he? He’d never been a crooked cop, but he’d be the first to admit he’d been a poor one. The more he thought about the DeSilvo case, the more he wondered if it did actually take one to know one.

The “church” was actually at the end of a residential block, as Eli had started it in a Victorian-style home he’d inherited from a great-aunt.

This was a nice neighborhood, and people grew uneasy at sharing their space with a cult, so Eli generously bought up the surrounding houses and Infected: Prey

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tore them down so he could build additions to the church on the new land.

You could see the ghost of the old Victorian house at the front of the church—the peaked roof, the wide porch with the ornate but useless pillars at either end—but now it was a sprawling affair covering three parcels of land where homes used to be, all of it painted a calming blue-gray color that Paris informed him was “slate.” Part of one parcel had been paved to become a parking lot, which was oddly full; in fact, there were cars parked all up and down the street, so much so that they had to park at the end of the opposite block and walk in. What was going on?

The closer they got to the church, the more they could hear the faint but obvious pounding of a bass line, music coming from the complex. An elderly woman with a nimbus of curly white hair and wearing a totally unseasonable turtleneck was walking a Pomeranian on a bright pink leash, and as they approached her, the dog started yipping and growling in a high-pitched, annoying way. “You know what’s going on?” Roan asked her, nodding his head toward the church. She smelled of bad perfume and talcum powder.

Her pale blue eyes took him and Paris in warily, then she glanced toward the church and sniffed, her expression hardening into disgust. “I never know what those freaks do.”

Although he agreed that those church people were freaky, he had a sense she was referring to cats, not just the cultists. The dog continued to snarl and yip, and finally Roan looked down at the pathetic little fur ball with a pink ribbon clipped to the top of its head and growled at it. It came from deep in his throat, and while it was unintentional, it wasn’t precisely a human noise. He could feel it in his throat, vibrating his vocal chords, and the dog’s ears rotated briefly in as much alarm as a dog could express, and then it whimpered and cringed, pissing on the sidewalk in submission.

The woman took a couple steps backward, eyes wide and horrified, and dragged her dog past them as she hurried off, the Pom more than happy to leave.

Paris looked at him, an eyebrow raised and the corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile. “I love it when you get defensive.”

“I’m the king of the jungle. I’m not taking any shit from a living dust mop.” He glanced both ways down the otherwise quiet residential street before crossing it and approaching the weird church, scanning the cars parked in the lot up the way and the ones on the street, noting that many of 40

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the cars had stickers for bands and local radio stations the likes of which Danny Nakamura probably listened to. These were kids’ cars, or at least the cars of people young enough not to be as cynical as he was. They were headed down the stone path to the porch when he stopped in horror.

Paris had gone ahead a couple of steps, but paused and turned back.

“Something wrong?”

Roan took a deep breath, parsing the scents, and his initial impression was correct. He was smelling normals all right, probably all those kids with all those cars, but he was also smelling infecteds mixed in with them… several of them. That tightness in his stomach, the one he’d felt when he discovered the kitty porn in Danny’s room, came back, more savage than before. What the
fuck
was going on here? If it was what he thought it was, he might as well go back and get his tire iron now.

Paris came up to him, all the humor in his expression gone and replaced with concern. “Ro, you’re growling again.”

Was he? Amazingly enough, he really didn’t give a shit.

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6

Like Eating Glass

ROAN wanted to charge into the house, and since it did advertise itself as a church, there was no need for knocking, but Paris wasn’t inclined to let him do that. At the base of the porch steps, Paris deliberately stepped in front of him and held up his hands to stop him. “Ro, don’t.”

He stopped and glared at him. “Don’t what?”

“Go in there and beat the shit out of Eli. He shares lawyers with Microsoft. He can have you sued back to the Stone Age.”

“I don’t care. It’d be worth it if I put him in a body cast for six months.”

“No it won’t. I know you want to get this guy, but this isn’t the way you do it.”

He scowled at him, feeling the rage building up inside, desperately wanting out. And the horrible shame of it was he wasn’t really angry at Paris, but Eli… and yet Paris was here, blocking his way, straight in the path of his pent-up rage. “There
isn’t
a way to do it, Par. I can never get him—he has lawyers, power, and money on his side. I bet he could stab his girlfriend to death in front of a bus full of nuns, and I wouldn’t be able to get him convicted. He’s fucking bulletproof.”

“No he’s not. Even Ken Lay eventually got arrested.”

“When it seemed like the public needed a sacrifice to take the heat off of bigger people. Eli’s the top dog of his circle. I don’t see him going down like that. Now would you get out of my fucking way?”

Paris crossed his arms over his chest, unconsciously flexing his impressive muscles, and looked down at him almost imperiously, which he could do easily since he had almost six inches on him. “No. I’m not going to let you throw away your career and your life because of this prick.

We’ll figure out something—”

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“No we won’t. This fucker is gonna keep exploiting kids and hiding behind his wealth, and we’re all totally fucked until he screws with the kid of someone richer and more powerful than him. Now get out of my fucking way.”

Paris didn’t move, and his eyes narrowed dangerously. “What if I don’t? Are you willing to hurt me?”

Paris was certainly more fit than he was, more muscular, but Roan knew he had it on him in both experience and technique. Paris hadn’t been in many fights in his life—in fact, to Roan’s knowledge, he’d never been in one—because he never needed to be. He was always the attractive, popular jock, charming as hell, and no one would have dared challenge him about anything. But Roan had grown up the diseased freak, and he had learned to fight early and fight hard even before he joined the police force. He knew he could take down guys bigger and stronger than him, because he had before; hell, the redneck he’d roughed up was almost Paris’s size. Paris had to know that in a straight fight, Roan would have no trouble winning, no matter how much stronger he was.

And that was probably the point—he was trying to shock him out of it. It only partially worked; he knew what Paris was doing, so he wasn’t shocked. In fact, he was a bit resentful over the manipulation, but he wrestled the black beast of his anger back. He didn’t like being manipulated, but he would never consciously hurt anyone he didn’t feel deserved it, and Paris didn’t. (Eli still did; oh hell, yeah.) “How the hell can you ask that? Better yet, how can you not want to beat the shit out of him?”

“Because I don’t see violence as an answer. Now, what you said about the public needing a sacrifice… that has me intrigued. Maybe we can work that angle.”

Whatever residual anger was festering in his gut started draining away as he studied Paris in confusion. “What?” Paris might not have believed in physical violence, but he could be frighteningly cunning, enough so that Roan sometimes thought he’d missed his calling as a lawyer or a super-villain.

But before Paris could tell him, they both heard the front door open and turned toward the noise. “I thought I heard voices out here,” a woman’s voice said, and even though they couldn’t see her until she stepped out on the porch, Roan knew by the almost overwhelming Infected: Prey

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sandalwood scent that it was Rainbow.

As soon as she saw Paris, her cornflower eyes widened and she gasped. “Paris! It’s been so long! I thought you’d forgotten us!”

“Forget you? Never!” He replied, giving her a thousand-watt smile and cranking up the charm.

Witnessing Paris turn on his charm and its subsequent effects on people was a scary thing. Rainbow had already forgotten Roan was there; she was focused solely on Paris as he came up the steps, his voice light but pitched low and vaguely mesmerizing, and he took her hand as soon as possible, pretty much cementing her captive status. Sometimes it was like watching a cobra hypnotize a bird.

Rainbow was Rainbow Grunwalt (yes, her actual name, the poor thing), a woman in her mid-thirties who was the oldest and most senior among the church’s female residents. She was a plain woman with the soft, slightly empty eyes of a rabbit, her chin almost absent and her cheeks puffed out to make up for it. Her hair was long and curly, so much so that if it was short she’d have had a natural perm, but as it was, she kept it so long it fell to the center of her back, and she usually kept it in a long ponytail held together by an ornate clip or ribbon. (Today it was a rhinestone butterfly clip that glimmered like fool’s gold in the curly dun-brown waves of her hair.) She wore an ankle-length, gauzy skirt striped like the colors of the rainbow (this somehow reinforced her status as a sad human being—dressing to fit her name), and a tie-dyed peasant blouse that was mostly pink, white, and blue. She looked a bit like a hippie, and often acted like one too, but when it came down to it, she was simply a pathetic true believer: she honestly believed all the religious shit she spouted, with all her heart. Eli was mostly a con artist, spouting shit to ream other people, but Rainbow was one of those who honestly believed this all somehow made sense. Roan actually felt bad for her, and he hated feeling bad for anyone involved in this shit, but Rainbow was as much an innocent as the kids Eli was suckering. She was one of those who would willingly drink the Kool-Aid.