Prey (9 page)

Paris continued to schmooze Rainbow, and she looked at him with slightly glassy eyes, head cocked to one side like a parakeet, and Roan wondered if he could step on the porch without stepping in the brains that must have oozed out of Rainbow’s ears. Did everyone Paris charmed look that goofy? Did
he
ever look that goofy? If he did, he hoped there were no witnesses.

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He waited for a pause in the conversation, and then held up the photo of Danny that he’d gotten from his parents. “Rainbow, it’s vital that we find this boy. Do you recognize him?”

She didn’t immediately look at the photo, even though he was holding it up into her line of sight. (Paris’s charisma was a potentially lethal drug; it was shit like this that convinced him of that.) Finally her eyes tracked over to the photo, and she studied it for a moment, her brow furrowing and making her look very much her age. “I… don’t think so, no.”

“You don’t know?” Roan repeated flatly. He didn’t think she was lying—she was a bit of a ditz—he just didn’t like how tentative she sounded.

She smiled faintly, although it collapsed into a grimace. “I’m not very good with faces.”

“You remember me,” Paris offered, smiling.

She gave him a playful slap on the shoulder. “Well, of course I remember you! Who wouldn’t?”

Indeed; Paris was one of those super memorable types, but then again, people generally remembered people they were attracted to, their desires given form and faces. At least it spoke well of Rainbow that she wasn’t into kids.

Paris caught her attention again, hypnotizing her with his flashing eyes and sexy voice, and she paid no attention to Roan as he slipped behind her and entered the church.

The interior was just a bland corridor, a house like any and all others, with blond wood paneling and the occasional knickknack on small side tables. The differences began to kick in once you passed through the

“waiting area” (living room), where framed art depicting various cats—all big; no domestic housecats here—hung on all the stucco walls, over velvet sofas and a fireplace too clean to have ever in its life been used. Someone was burning incense, a cloying, perfumey dirt scent, like patchouli, and he couldn’t help but sneeze. The bass of the music throbbed through his feet, made him feel like an open wound, and he knew he could track it by vibrations alone.

“I don’t recall inviting any fags,” a familiar male voice said archly, trying hard to offend and wound.

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When he was done sneezing (the incense totally fucked up his sense of smell, and somehow he didn’t think it was coincidence), he wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and looked at the man with a nasty little grin.

“Hello, Smithers. I see the surgery to dislodge your lips from Eli’s ass went well.”

Stovak just stared at him, confused by Roan calling him Smithers.

Guy Stovak was an odious little man, a whippet-thin, almost sepulchral human being with gaunt, pasty flesh stretched over a skeleton a little too close to the surface, like it was trying to burst through his skin and run away. Everything about him seemed narrow and excessively angular, from his thinning sandy blond hair to his knife blade of a face to the pipe cleaners that other people might call legs. His eyes seemed porcine, too small and too close, glittering like wet glass beneath the shadow of his brows. He was the church’s main lawyer, Eli’s faithful “lieutenant,” and a fairly rancid homophobe who seemed to have a special hatred for him, although Roan had never figured out why. Paris had suggested “Maybe he’s secretly attracted to you,”
which was a thought so nauseating it could make him wake up in a cold, dry heaving sweat.

Finally the Smithers reference clicked—Roan saw it behind his tiny little eyes—and he sneered, his thin upper lip curling enough that Roan thought for one crazy moment he was about to bust out an Elvis impersonation. “Very funny. What the hell are you doing here, McKitchen?” A deliberate mispronunciation of his last name, delivered with such catty venom Roan briefly felt like responding, as camp as possible, “Girlfriend, pul-lease!”
He was not a flaming gay stereotype; he was not feminine, nor did he lisp. But something about Stovak’s obvious revulsion to Roan having the temerity to be gay made him want to camp it up, becoming a flaming stereotype nightmare, just so he’d run screaming from the room.

But for the moment Roan managed to squelch the urge, and showed Stovak the picture of Danny. “I have reason to believe this minor may be on the premises. I don’t need to tell you what a shit-storm of trouble your boss could be in if he’s sheltering runaway minors. Or worse.”

Stovak barely even glanced at the picture, his face seemingly puckering in his distaste. He had one of those kinds of faces that looked like he was always smelling something bad anyway, so now he looked really disgusted. “I don’t like your implication,
detective
. We are law-abiding citizens, and as a place of worship, we are open to all, regardless 46

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of age.”

Slimy little uptight weasel. But at least he’d said something Roan could use. “You’re right. Excuse me while I go worship.” He spun on his heels and went deeper inside the “church,” following the thudding bass down a couple of hallways, until it lead to the double doors leading into the “auditorium.” Really it was just a large room with a high roof, but hey, close enough.

Stovak followed him all the way, blustering and spluttering, saying something about “invasion of privacy,” but if he wanted to try and sue him for something, he was free to. After all, what the fuck did he have? A toaster named Terry, an obsolete computer, and a house with a shattered back door. Fuck yeah, he was rolling in shit! Eli would certainly want it.

He shoved open the auditorium doors, and found himself looking at a seething mass of dancing kids, as gel lights swirled and gothic-industrial dance music pounded and thrummed from an undeniably expensive sound system he couldn’t see in this unevenly lit, cavernous room. It didn’t matter that raves were passé; this was probably very close to one, and it had an almost full capacity.

And while the participants were mostly young, some were older than you’d think a crowd like this would attract.

“What the fuck is this?” he growled at Stovak, turning to face him so sharply that the skeletal lawyer actually backed up a couple steps. What, was he afraid of getting some gay on his Prada suit? “Some kind of infected mixer?”

Skeletor’s look was equal parts scolding and arrogant. “I have no idea what you’re implying—”

“Yes, you do. You can light all the fucking incense you want, but I smelled infecteds on my way in here, and I still smell them all over this crowd. If one kid gets infected in this pedophile mash-up of yours—”

“That’s slander!” Stovak snapped, recovering his tattered dignity in indignation. Roan had been aware that Paris had been standing in the auditorium doorway for the last thirty seconds, not so much watching the crowd as watching them. Stovak was unaware of him, or he would have freaked out at having been roughly between two gay men. “And if you persist in bad-mouthing my client, you will find yourself served with a restraining order—”

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“Yeah, bring this to court, asshole! I can’t wait to talk to a judge about this place.”

Paris suddenly let out an exuberant whoop on his way to the dance floor, grabbing the arm of a pretty girl standing near the wall and pulling her out with him onto the floor. Stovak jumped slightly, in spite of the fact that Front Line Assembly had almost completely drowned Paris out. And in spite of the generally crowded floor, Paris was an instant star within less than a minute.

Paris wasn’t the world’s best dancer, but he was graceful, physical, and fearless—in other words, he made up for what he lacked in actual technique with raw passion, and that was more than enough. A small circle of women began forming around him, with him as the eye of the hurricane, and some of the less confident or gifted dancers started to drift off to the sidelines, including men who had been abandoned in favor of Paris. Many teenage boys suddenly remembered to be totally self-conscious.

Stovak sneered at the spectacle. “Your… friend’s the equal opportunity whore, isn’t he?”

One girl snaked her arms under Paris’s shirt as she grabbed him tight enough to mimic his moves as he made them, and he didn’t automatically discourage her. Roan felt the slightest twinge of jealousy, and remembered what they said about the pheromone load being at its peak when the virus was in its transitional phase: the virus wanted so badly to propagate itself it made you more sexually appealing than ever.

And then the genius of what Paris was doing suddenly dawned on him. Paris had come to distract, and that was what he was doing… and there were loads of teenage boys now off the dance floor, looking on from the sidelines in a wide swath of emotions ranging from relief to open, seething hate as Paris danced with and captivated their girlfriends. Roan smiled, almost laughing. He had to remember to give Paris a big kiss for this later.

Roan faced Stovak, and said, with just a hint of a lisp, “He’s just flamboyant. You know how we are.” Stovak recoiled in disgust, and this time Roan did allow himself to laugh at this petty little man.

Leaving a horrified Stovak behind, he headed for the crowd now ringing the side walls, searching for Danny.

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7

Black Swan

IT WOULD have been too easy, and he knew it, but it didn’t keep him from hoping that he’d find Danny here. On his search, he came across an obviously infected man (no amount of Axe body spray could hide it), a man in his early twenties who was clearly trying to pass for sixteen. He leaned in close so the man could hear him over the pounding music, and said, “Get out of here before I arrest you for whatever charges I care to make up, and don’t come back.”

The man stared at him, eyes narrowing in hatred. “You can’t do that.”

“Yeah, I can. You know how much cops like us infected too.” He held up his hand, and pointed out the Leo tattoo on his wrist as the man opened his mouth to protest. Although his eyes locked on it, it seemed to take him a moment to put two and two together. “Now scat before I get nasty.”

He continued to glare molten death at him, but he must have figured that this was a battle he couldn’t win, so he turned and flipped him the bird as he walked out of the auditorium. One down, probably about forty to go.

He was just too old for this shit.

Roan gave up on finding Danny here, and decided to start showing the kids his picture and asking if they’d seen him. He’d made up a fairy story about him being a private detective hired by the Nakamura family lawyer to find Danny, as he’d just come into a large inheritance from an aunt. If he said he was looking for him because his parents wanted him home, the kids wouldn’t help, but money was the magic word. It was a good thing, and there was a possibility that Danny would be grateful to them for ratting him out. It was a very slim possibility, but hope sprung eternal when it came to easy money—how else did you explain lottery ticket sales? No one ever went broke betting on people’s greed, laziness, selfishness, or stupidity; Paris would call him jaded, but it was true. Those Infected: Prey

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were the easiest bets in the whole goddamn world.

Eventually he hit pay dirt in the form of a pimply fifteen-year-old with pink, spiky hair and a nose ring, making Roan wonder what kind of idiot parent let a kid this young get a nose ring. “I think I’ve seen that kid, like, hangin’ around Tweaks.”

“Tweaks?”

The kid scratched his face and looked around, as if making sure no one was seeing him talk to the narc. Light glinted off gold nose ring, and Roan had to suppress the urge to just rip it out of his nose. “Yeah, he’s like this guy who lives near the, um, tracks, y’know, down in the East End.

Like everybody crashes at Tweaks’s when they’ve got no place else to go.”

Oh, so he was one of those… a guy with a crap house where he let teens he didn’t know stay over. Obviously a druggie—tweak indicated a

“tweaker,” someone into the meth or Ecstasy scene—who was trying to fit in with a crowd he had either outgrown or simply wanted to take advantage of. Either way, he probably had a sheet of minor crimes as long as his forearm; not a major-league bad guy, just a loser that teenagers would think was “cool” for about three years, then they’d wake up and see the crabs and smell the spilled bong water.

“Can you give me something more to go on? Address, phone number, guy’s real name?”

Nose Ring just shrugged, looking past him as if he was already bored with the conversation. “I dunno, never really thought about it. It’s like at the end of Noble and Westerly.”

He was vaguely certain of the location. The East End was actually relatively rural, and the only Westerly Road he knew of was a couple miles down from his place, so that would have put Tweak at the butt end of the East End, closer to him than to the church. But that part of the East End was—no shock—a haven for meth houses. “Like, thanks,” he said, with a sarcasm that seemed to miss Nose Ring entirely. If he had said

“like” one more time, Roan would have punched that kid in the stomach.

Paris was still hogging the dance floor with his harem of admirers, but Roan shoved his way into the inner circle and simply stood there, enduring death looks from teen girls in too much lip gloss, until he finally caught Paris’s eye. He simply jerked his head toward the door, then turned and fought his way through the crowd, leaving the auditorium. Roan went 50

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out a side door, so he didn’t have to run into Rainbow or Smithers again.

He realized he hadn’t gone to see Eli, but fuck it; he could always come back and kick his ass later.

He was out in the car, using his laptop to figure out exactly where Noble and Westerly met (there were so many people using Wi-Fi connections in their own homes, you could just borrow anyone’s connection for Web surfing), when Paris finally got out to the car, slipping into the passenger seat, panting and breathless. “Damn,” he gasped, lifting up the hem of his T-shirt and using it to wipe his sweaty face. “I forgot what a workout that is. Got a lead?”