18 – Woolen Heirs

Roan stormed out of Fiona’s place with a full head of steam (not just a cliché – it actually felt like it, like his head was a tea kettle, and steam was just going to erupt through his ears at any moment). He called Hatcher’s number and got his machine again, so he simply said, “Either get back to me immediately, or this is all over the web. Hope you’ve had a colonoscopy recently, ’cause the Feds will be crawling up your ass by the end of the day. Close your eyes and think of England, you sick fuck.” He felt like throwing the phone, but he would have broken it. He made himself remember that this was his cell and not Hatcher himself. He just had to wait, then he could pick up Hatcher and throw him, hopefully from a very tall building.

What if his own money grabbing exercise had killed his own son? Would that convince him that maybe, just maybe, this was all a big fucking mistake? Hard to say with raving capitalists sometimes.

He just got in the car when his phone went off, and checking he saw it was home calling. In a way, he hoped it was trouble, because then he could vent some steam on some assholes. “Yeah.”

“Honey,” Dylan said, in a quiet, lilting voice. “I don’t want to alarm you, but our home has been infested by hockey players.”

“Not the entire team, I hope.”

“No. Actually, Tank is a hell of a cook.”

That was a surprise. “Really?”

“Oh yeah! He made these buttery, cheesy omelets that were so good I swear, if he was gay, I’d have left you for him.”

“That’s it. Pack your shit and get out, you disloyal bastard.”

Dylan snickered. “He claims he can only cook breakfasts, though. Omelets, pancakes, crepes.”

“He makes crepes? Hot damn, I’ll leave you for him first.”

“I’ll try and save you some eggs, but hockey players eat like pigs. Scott already had to take off on an egg run.” He paused briefly. “Tank has an interesting story.”

“He’s been talking?”

“No, but he doesn’t have to. There’s a surprising amount of depth in his eyes; he always seems to be thinking. I bet he’s a hell of a lot smarter than he seems to be, probably – no offense to the rest of the Falcons – the smartest guy on the team. He’s also surprisingly good natured for a man I wouldn’t trust around a loaded firearm. Speaking of which, I called my therapist.”

Dylan used to see a therapist on a regular basis, but had quit about two years ago. Roan scoured his brain, trying to dig up the name. “Savage, right?”

“Yes, Doctor Savage. She has an opening on Thursday and can squeeze me in.”

“The problem is me, not you.”

“Bullshit. I learned how to manage my anger effectively, and I back slid. I don’t want to keep falling backwards.”

“Then you probably need to get away from me.”

“None of that. My wanting to protect you isn’t a failing on your part. It’s me needing to deal with my issues.”

“You know, it’s very sweet you want to protect me. Most people figure I’m on my own.” He leaned back in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes. For some reason, anger often exhausted him.

“Well, you are a super macho dude.”

“And inhuman. Don’t forget that.”

He sighed dramatically. “Don’t take this the wrong way, sweetie, but fuck you to hell.”

That made Roan chuckle. Really, he deserved no less. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just a little tired. I still can’t believe someone did that. Also, I can’t believe I’m entertaining a bunch of jocks from Canada.”

“Grey’s American.”

“Which explains so much about him. Of course he’s the team enforcer. Can we sue the Falcons for stereotyping?”

“You know, you’d think we should be able to. But it’s a fair cop, and society is to blame.” It was stuffy in the car, so he rolled down the window, and noted how much better he was feeling. When he first got in here, he was ready to kill someone (Hatcher). Talking to Dylan had pulled him back to sanity, which was probably the best thing for everyone involved.

“You can’t go to the Monty Python well forever.”

“You’ll pry Monty Python from my cold, dead hand.”

“Wow. There’s so many things wrong with that sentence.”

“Yes, well, there’s so many things wrong with me.”

“Knock off the self-pity shit. But does that explain why you sounded so pissed off when you answered the phone?”

“Yeah, I was expecting another call. In fact, I’d better get off. And you’d better buckle up, ’cause there might be a shitstorm after this.”

“Another?” He sounded genuinely exasperated. “I know money is tight, but can we go somewhere and get you away from all this trouble you seem to be causing? Drive to California or something? What about Canada? We can go back to Canada.”

There was almost a plea in Dylan’s voice that made Roan feel bad. He was putting him through the ringer, hurting the only person he really didn’t want to hurt. He had to make this right with him, but he didn’t know how, or even if he should. If Dylan was a friend, describing a relationship with someone else, he’d have advised him to pack up his shit and run, put as much distance between him and this drama magnet boyfriend as possible. It was what he should tell Dylan now, only he wasn’t that noble. “Once we get through this, we can go wherever you want. You pick the place.”

Dylan thought about it a moment. “Atlantis.”

He smiled weakly at his attempt at a joke. “The place has to actually exist.”

“Damn it. What is it with you and these picky loopholes?”

“I’m an asshole. Now I know it’s a pain in the ass, but stick with the rough boys ’til you hear from me again.” The rough boys were, of course, Grey, Tank, and Scott (and any secondary Falcons they may have roped into this baffling guard duty).

He sighed heavily and seriously. He probably hadn’t been thrilled to wake up and find everyone else but Roan in the living room. “And when will that be?”

“I don’t know, honey. Soon, I promise.” He paused, looking out the windshield, finally noticing it needed to be cleaned. If these Aryan fucks weren’t amateurs, he knew leaving Grey, Tank, and Scott to protect Dylan wouldn’t be enough, would just get them all killed, but they were amateurs, and Grey alone would be enough to take them out. But the others were just insurance, a guarantee that no matter what, Dylan would get through this okay. Physically okay, at any rate. “I love you.”

“You’d better,” he replied, in mock anger. “And remember, you’re not indestructible. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“You know damn well it’s too late for that.”

Roan waited for Hatcher to call him back, but he didn’t, and by the time he was driving along the lake, headed for his extravagantly expensive house, his anger had swelled to a nearly unmanageable size. He called Fiona to let her know he was going in, and if she hadn’t heard from him within in an hour, to go ahead and let it run. She was ready to post at some hardcore tech sites, giving them the breakdown of Hatcher’s connections to the website. Not only would it then spiral, as web gossip was wont to do, but she was convinced there’d be some quality Hatcher hating crackers (not hackers – that was apparently a gauche term) who’d infiltrate anything of Hatcher’s they could get their hands on. She was sure, illegal or not, they’d dig up even more dirt.

He drove up to the gate and gunned the engine. As soon as the speaker clicked on, he said, “Either let me in or I bring this gate down. There’s enough steel in this car to do it.” There was. Oh, how he loved Paris and his love of Road Warrior cars even more now. He could drive this puppy through the gate and straight into his living room, and with its huge windows, it wouldn’t even be remotely difficult. He could probably keep the GTO going until the kitchen before he met sufficient resistance.

He was starting to judge how far he’d have to back up before getting sufficient momentum (Paris also made sure the engine could go from zero to sixty in almost no time at all) when there was a buzz, and the gates started automatically opening. Believed him, did they? Good; they should, because he was more than ready to do it. Oh sure, Hatcher could sue him for property damage, but fuck it – he was too poor to ever be able to pay him a cent. He probably knew that.

He screamed up the drive, ignoring the pristine view of the water, and barely stopped before he collided with the ornamental fountain. He launched himself out of the GTO like a bullet, stomping up to the door and almost colliding with it before officious Andrew opened it and stationed his narrow, angular form in the entryway. “Mr. Hatcher does not -” he began, his voice cold and sharp.

Roan snarled. Not a Human approximation, but the real thing; he let enough of the lion out that it was happy to make itself known. Andrew jumped, and Roan continued growling while he forced himself to spit out words, which sounded like he was trying to talk through a mouthful of broken glass. “Get out of my way, or pay for it.”

Roan pushed through the doorway, and Andrew was backing up in horror, mouth opening and closing dumbly, a pale hand fluttering to the base of his throat. Had he started changing? Roan honestly didn’t know. He knew his jaw hurt, he knew his vision was a little blurry, but that often happened when he was this angry. It didn’t mean he’d changed; it just meant he was on the verge of losing his shit. But the way Andrew was acting, the way the fear reek came off of him like bad intentions, maybe there was some change occurring, something (even if it was only anger) was transforming his face.

They were in the sterile, expensively appointed front room before Roan was even aware of it, bathed in so much light it was like being in heaven’s waiting room. Hatcher appeared in the archway of his study, and said, “Would you stop terrorizing -” Hatcher’s sentence petered off as he stared at Roan, and his expression was a studious blank, a wonderful poker face that actually told him all he needed to know. Hatcher was scared too.

Roan walked around Andrew and headed straight for Hatcher. “You motherfucker …”

“I don’t know what you think you’ve found -”

“Fuck you!” Roan roared, a genuine roar, and he had no idea if the words were even recognizable to anyone else. He gave Hatcher a flat palmed shove in the chest, and he seemed to fly across the room, hitting the window wall hard enough to have all his breath knocked out of him. It was probably double paned or maybe bulletproof glass, otherwise Hatcher might have sailed right through it, although Roan thought he’d barely touched him. “Visionics Limited,” he rasped, trying to get his growling under control. “Tabu triple x. Your site, you own it.”

Now Hatcher looked baffled as he gasped in breaths like a newly surfaced drowning man. “What? What the hell is this, McKichan? Why -”

“People are dead because of you. They died because of you. You’ve probably killed your own son. You should join them.”

Something new and genuine blossomed on Hatcher’s face, and it was enough to make Roan pause. Confusion, fear, despair, all warring for supremacy. “What? What are you talking about? Where’s Jordan, what’s happened to him?”

Roan studied him carefully, head cocked to the side, looking for the tell, for the twitch that would let him know this was a bluff, Hatcher busting out his acting skills in an attempt to escape justice. But no, his sudden anxiety seemed genuine. Roan decided to interrogate him and make his next move accordingly. “Visionics Limited. You own it.”

“No!” He exclaimed it out of reflex, and he looked like a man who had suddenly lost his footing climbing a mountain. He scrambled for a new verbal foothold. “I – I own it with Conrad Maddux. Why?”

A new name. Not what he needed right now, as he always found it difficult to think like a Human when the lion was out. “Who’s he?”

“A business partner. He takes care of …” Hatcher paused, trailing off.

“He owns the porn sites,” Roan finished for him. “He takes care of that side of the business.”

He looked like he wanted to deny it, but Hatcher glanced at Roan’s face and looked away, down at the floor. It wasn’t a tell; he was too scared to look at him. Why he didn’t look at the flatscreen turned to some British financial news program he didn’t know, but Roan could see the stock readouts scrolling out of the corner of his eye, see the blandly handsome newsreader talking to a man who looked like an animate scarecrow. “Yeah.”

“The site is killing people.”

“No.” He began shaking his head. “It’s fake. It’s all fake. You couldn’t -”

“There’s bodies. It’s stopped being fake.”

Hatcher froze, his posture stiff, his hands clenching at his sides. “What? You can’t have … it’s not here …”

Wow. Maddux had fucked Hatcher; he’d changed the rules of the game and not even told him. “It is now. Where would it be?”

Hatcher was shaking his head again, and it seemed pathetic, like a child trying to refuse his punishment by rejecting reality. “He wouldn’t dare. You don’t shit where you eat. You don’t bring it into America …”

“He did. And Jordan’s there, Hatcher. Now tell me, where would he put it?”

“Jordan?” Now he looked at him, too shell shocked to be scared. “Why would he -”

“He found the site. You went over his computer, you must’ve seen it.”

“Yeah, but so? It’s a porn site! It doesn’t mean -”

A snarl of anger escaped him before Roan reined it in. “It’s not just a porn site. It’s fake death, it’s people fucking and killing each other; pretend or not it’s sick. I think he may have wanted to get into the business himself, but decided in the end to go hands on.”

Hatcher started shaking his head again, but his eyes had the sudden shine of sickening knowledge. “No. He wouldn’t be that stupid. He wouldn’t -”

“I saw him.” Roan remembered the screen cap Holden had sent him, and made his hands work, made them come out of fists and search his pockets for Dylan’s phone, which he still had. He found it, but he needed to focus to get back into Human mode, to use his fingers and read words. With it, his anger faded, but it didn’t disappear; it remained in the background, as loud as the BBC, brighter than the late afternoon sunlight. Roan found the photo still, and  tossed the phone at Hatcher. It bounced off his chest before he caught it in his hands clumsily, and when he looked at the phone’s screen, he didn’t seem to get what he was seeing. Finally, he said, “What -”

“Friend of mine started going through the film clips, looking for recognizable victims. Jordan was taking part in one of the movies.”

Hatcher didn’t react at first. Then his expression fell, and his hands started shaking. “No,” he said, his voice a stunned whisper.

“He was a fucker not a fuckee, if that makes it -”

“Noooooooo,” Hatcher said louder, drawing out the syllable to a near wail, tears welling in his eyes, his hands shaking so badly it looked like he was going to throw the phone himself. He sank down the window slowly, as if melting, finally sitting on the floor, back starting to curve like he was about to become an O. He was watching Hatcher break, and Roan wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It should have been triumphant, but it was just sad. He was the world’s biggest fuckhead and his son was clearly trying to follow in his footsteps, but they were still as depressingly human as all the rest of them.

He got a chokehold on the lion inside of him and pulled it back as he asked Hatcher, “Did you send someone after me? Skinheads?”

He was shaking his head vehemently, but he wasn’t sure if it was at the realization his son had joined the death circus or if it was aimed at his question. “No.”

Roan was a bit disappointed, mainly because he wasn’t lying. So if Hatcher hadn’t sent the white trash army after him, who did? Well, easy answer: Conrad Maddux, the silent partner. “Where do I find Maddux?”

Hatcher almost seemed to be in a trance of despair, but after several long seconds, he said, “Osaka.”

“Japan?” Okay, it wasn’t really a question – was there an Osaka, Texas? - he was just shocked. He expected Hatcher’s hands on guy to be within arm’s reach. He probably should have known better. Thanks to the internet, you didn’t need to be on the same continent as your immediate employees. “Does he have an employee, a manager doing his bidding? Who’s he? I need names.”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? A man like you, a paranoid despot, you should know what your workers do in their free time -”

“I don’t know!” Hatcher shouted angrily, despair slamming against his resolve and coming out as fury. “We keep enough distance between us that he can’t be tied to me! I don’t fucking know who works for him!”

And that made sense. He was a “silent partner” after all. If he got caught up legally, he couldn’t be officially tied to Hatcher; Maddux would go down alone, and keep his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him. How much money did you have to spend to get that kind of loyalty? How much of your soul did you have to sell to make money off what was essentially necrophilia porn? There was so much here he didn’t and couldn’t understand. He needed to find Dennis Cooper some day and ask him if he could explain any of this stuff to him.

Hatcher bolted up to his feet and lunged for his desk, anger making him move faster than he probably had in years. He clipped a Bluetooth onto his ear and called Conrad, but did he talk? No, he was leaning on the desk like it was the only thing keeping him on his feet, and he began screaming, “You fucking bastard, give me back my son! If you’ve hurt him I swear to god I will have you killed! Do you hear -”

Roan ripped the Bluetooth off his ear, and exclaimed, “Idiot! You’ve just given him fair warning to pack his shit and run.” Roan held the device up to his ear, to see what Maddux had to say to his angry boss, but there was just a mechanical voice asking if he was satisfied with his message. Hatcher had gotten the man’s machine.

Hatcher glared at him, the look in his eyes wild and mad. Insane mad and angry mad; he was covering the spread. “He can’t run from me.”

Hatcher certainly believed that. Roan wasn’t sure he did.

Roan tossed his Bluetooth on the desk, having no further use for it, but Hatcher didn’t seem to notice. He was in some ugly place inside his own head, only marginally aware of the outer world. “Find him,” he said, his a low croak. “Find Jordan. And burn that fucking place to the ground.”

Hadn’t Hatcher noticed that was exactly what he was trying to do?

17 - Spark

Before Gordo and Seb were given their walking papers to leave the scene, Roan heard a familiar voice arguing at the barricades, and went to find Rainbow trying to get in. Roan got the cop to let her past, but he knew that was a mistake almost instantly, as he had to stop her from rushing up to the door. No one could go in right now.

So Rainbow ended up clinging to him and sobbing until his shirt was soaked with snot and tears. He still felt bad for her, as he always felt bad for Rainbow. There was just something about her, about her naive sense of belief and peace, that made his cynical side shrink back and take a seat. She wasn’t a cynical opportunist or a teenager looking for a thrill, or a spoiled brat looking to shock her parents by joining a religion they would disapprove of. She honestly believed this bullshit, she wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself, and as much as he wanted to begrudge her that, he couldn’t. It’s not something he would have chosen for himself, it wasn’t something he could completely understand, but there was no malice in this, no judgment of others; she just wanted to belong to something. And he had to give her that.

Eventually a female paramedic came over – he didn’t recognize her, but Roan got the sense she knew him – and led Rainbow away from him, giving her a sedative and sitting with her on the back bumper of an ambulance, extending as much comfort as a sympathetic ear could give. He wrung out his shirt as much as possible while still wearing it, and Gordo and Seb agreed to keep him in the loop. They also agreed to check out his white supremacist angle.

When he got back to his car, he just sat there a few minutes, staring at nothing, wondering what bothered him the most about this. He wasn’t sure, to be brutally honest. He hated the church and all it stood for, but did he want some psychopath to murder them? No, of course not. But he did hate them. This was the very textbook definition of mixed feelings.

He checked his phone, in case Grey called to report they were under siege (or, more likely, Tank had beaten someone half to death with the coat rack), but it was only Fiona who had called him in the hour (had it really been that long?) he’d been at the church. She told him he might want to stop by, as she found something he might like to see.

With Hatcher not answering his phone calls, he asked Fi, when she called to ask if he was okay, to look into the site for him. He sometimes forgot, but dominatrix wasn’t her first career. She used to work at Microsoft; she had some serious computer skills, only recently displaced by her whip handling skills.

She lived downtown, in a shabby chic apartment block known as Sunrise Terrace. She was on the third floor, in apartment 318, and as he knocked on the green painted door, he realized this was the first time he’d ever seen where Fiona lived. That seemed like an awful oversight on his part.

He heard a couple of locks being thrown before she opened the door and said, “Come in you – what the hell happened to your shirt?”

“I got sobbed on.”

She blinked at him for a moment. “Well, that’s not the worst thing I thought of.”

He didn’t dare ask what that was.

Fiona was dressed in a loose navy t-shirt advertising Aero Leather, black sweatpants, and orange Crocs, suggesting she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Her apartment was only a three room one, but not too small, and over the scent of recently heated up cinnamon rolls, he smelled a cat. “Um -” he began, but he didn’t have time to finish.

“Don’t worry, I shut Mandy in the bedroom.”

“Mandy’s your cat?”

“She is indeed. I didn’t know if she’d freak out on you or what, so I thought it best we didn’t find out. Now who sobbed on you?”

“Rainbow.” At her look, he was forced to explain. At least he got a chance to look around her place while talking. The combined living room kitchen area wasn’t overly neat, it had a lived in look, but the clutter was just low level enough to be homey. She had your typical good quality thrift store couch and coffee table, a TV on a stand (that was supposed to be a nightstand, but what difference did it make), and a bare bones Ikea desk where an Alienware computer set up dominated the surface, with an extra (?) hard drive stack on the floor beside the desk, and small neon lights of red and blue flashing inside the rectangular metal tower. What appeared to be a Bose style CD/MP3 player sitting on the kitchen counter was softly playing Tori Amos. A dominatrix who listened to Tori Amos? Oddly enough, that sounded about right. “You a gamer?” Alienware was mostly a gamer’s computer, or at least that was his impression.

“Used to be. Rather than kill my ex, I killed trolls. But lately I haven’t had the time to game, and besides, I couldn’t give a shit about my ex anymore.” He assumed she meant her ex-husband, a person she didn’t talk about at any great length, she simply said “the ex” like he was a near fatal disease she once caught. “Can I get you something? I have diet soda and tap water; pick your poison.”

“I’m okay. Thanks, though.”

“What about another shirt?”

“Better not. Dylan smells a woman on me, he’ll get crazy jealous.”

That startled a short, sharp laugh out of her as she sat at her desk in front of the computer. She had a really nice desk chair there, high backed padded leather, and that alone told him how much time she spent on the computer. “How are you doing, by the way,” she asks, as her fingers flew over her sleek, ergonomically designed keyboard. “I felt bad about calling you, but after I found this out I felt you’d wanna know.”

“I’m fine. It wasn’t the first time someone’s tried to kill me.”

“He tried to burn down your house.”

“He scorched my porch. Which almost sounds like a Doctor Seuss title.”

“How’s Dylan?”

“He was a little shaken up, but I think he’ll be okay. So what did you find?”

She looked up, her tight red ponytail swishing back with authority. “Well, I looked around for the owner of the domain name of that snuff site, and I eventually discovered – through means that might not be legal – that it was bought by Visionics Limited.”

He chewed that over for a moment. No, time wasn’t improving it. “What the fuck kind of name is that?”

“I know. But it’s a shell company, a phony thing made up by Dermot Cook.” She paused and looked up at him dramatically, like that was supposed to mean something.

“Who the hell’s Dermot Cook?”

“Robert Hatcher’s original business partner. The two had a big falling out, and Hatcher bought out his share of the business a couple years ago.”

“So the porn site is Cook’s new business?”

“No, he’s dead.”

“What?”

She turned back to her computer and called up a Wikipedia page. “He died last year. Dropped dead of a heart attack on a treadmill. Can you imagine that? Dying in a gym while exercising? Fuck that. I’d rather die face first in a pie.”

He was down with that, although he wasn’t a huge fan of pie. (Unless it was Shepard’s pie, then maybe.) “This is Wikipedia. You can’t trust -”

She jumped ahead to the Seattle Times’s webpage, and the huge obituary they ran for Cook. Okay, now he believed it. “He bought the domain name when?”

“For the snuff site? Six months ago.”

“From before he died?”

“No, hon, six months ago.”

Yeah, okay, that didn’t make sense. “Who’s the head of Visionics Limited now?”

“No one. It’s a dummy corporation.”

He knew Fiona wasn’t trying to be irritating, but this kind of was. Would it kill her to just spit it out? “Who’s in charge of Cook’s estate?”

“No one.” Her blue eyes gazed back up at him expectantly, as if she was hoping he would make sense of all of this. “His family was gone, he was an only child, he never married or seemingly had a serious girlfriend. I think he was closeted gay or asexual. Anyways, his will stipulated that all his money be shared between six different charities.”

“So the Visi-whatever the hell name is up for grabs.”

“Technically. Although not a lot of people know about it.”

Roan considered this all carefully, feeling he was getting closer to something big and ugly. “Hatcher had to know about the shell corp.”

She bit her lower lip in thought. She wasn’t wearing make up right now, but she was still attractive in a warm, open way that you really wouldn’t anticipate from someone with a foot locker full of whips and nipple clamps. “You’d think so. But you don’t think the snuff site is his, do you? Why would he hire you if it was? He wouldn’t want this coming out.”

“How would it? He hired me to look for Jordan, not for the owner of a snuff site.” A couple of things seemed to suddenly pop up in his mind, like corpses finally rising to the surface of a stagnant pond. “That’s why he’s been ducking my calls. He can’t find the owner of the site ’cause it’s him and he doesn’t want me to know. Bet the server isn’t in Romania either. Son of a bitch.”

“But if Jordan’s run off to find the snuff film location, wouldn’t he know?”

“Hatcher’s a busy guy. I bet he’s not hands on with the site; in fact, he may just profit from the fucking thing, and someone else runs it. Someone who wouldn’t know Jordan on sight, especially if he gave them a phony name.” Did that sound right? No, none of this would ever sound right, but it felt sickeningly plausible. Was that how Jordan found the site in the first place? He found the name somewhere amongst his dad’s stuff and checked it out, and discovered he liked it. But he never let his father know he was in on his dirty secret. It allowed him to hide in plain sight from his father, and who would look for him on a porn site? Certainly not Hatcher.

“Then …” she began, turning back to the computer screen. She sounded like she didn’t know what to say. “Are we dead? Is he gonna have us killed ’cause we know his dirty little secret?”

“You watch too many bad movies. Killing us would just bring more attention to the problem he’s trying to sweep under the rug.”

“So how would he sweep us under the rug?”

She locked eyes with him, and he felt something loosen in the pit of his stomach. A man like him would delegate, would get someone – someones – with no connection to him whatsoever to take care of the problem.

Like white supremacists? He suddenly wondered how you went about hiring a gang of them, and how much it cost.

If Hatcher got this ball rolling, he didn’t care how much money and power he had. He was going to kill the bastard.

16 – Bride of the Elephant Man

It was probably a good thing he wasn’t tired, as there was no sleep that night.

They gave their statements to the cops, and the firemen made sure  the fire was indeed out. Roan saw for himself that the damage to the porch was slightly worse than he thought. The entire door was charred, the paint blistered on the jamb where it wasn’t burned, and the pine near the front door had several branches burned to black stumps, needles curled in on themselves. He told Dylan they’d have to hit Lowes in the morning and get themselves a new door. He was trying to distract Dylan, who was still miserable, and now shivering in spite of the blanket a kind fireman gave him to drape over his shoulders. Roan sat with him against the side of his car, arm around his shoulders, occasionally whispering encouragement to him or just giving him a quick, surreptitious kiss. He wasn’t a fan of public displays of affection (straight or gay – he’d been tailing cheating spouses too long to have any romantic notions left), but he sensed that Dylan needed it right now, the reassurance and the comfort. He was cold too, but didn’t care.

The cops, as he guessed (especially since it was Thompson and Bragg as the arresting officers), ignored everything the guy ranted about before shoving him in the back of the prowler. It was an open and shut case of asshattery, what with the rifle and the gasoline can in the front cab of the truck, and his constant ranting references to “faggots” and “freaks” and “abominations” (all guaranteed to get you viewed as the crazy asshole they arrested about seven times a day), and Thompson just ignored him until suddenly he told him to call Fox News and walked away from the patrol car, shaking his head in disgust. “I know I can’t treat ‘em differently, but I hate that shit.”

“What shit?” He didn’t think it was anything the perp said, as he hadn’t changed his tune (second verse, same as the first), but he doubted the basic injustice of this harassment was getting to Thompson now (especially since he still insisted on calling him Batman).

“He’s got a swastika tat,” he said, and slapped his upper arm, where the tattoo presumably was.

And that little bit of information sent his synapses firing. Swastika tattoo? And Sander Lewis did time in Idaho, home of the Aryan Nation compound? “Oh holy fuck,” he exclaimed. “They’re white supremacists.”

Thompson snorted. “Nazis? Yeah.”

“No. These guys who have been harassing me? That’s the connecting thread. They’re white supremacists.” And he hoped the fact that two black police officers had arrested that bastard was making him choke on his own bile.

Thompson smirked faintly. “They know you’re white, right?”

“I’m gay and infected. Both of those things – infected edging out gay – make me a pariah to them. I’m honorarily not white.”

“Lucky you.” Thompson then edged closer, and indicated Dylan without pointing at him. “Ain’t he Mexican?” he whispered.

“Mixed.”

“Could they be after him?”

He shook his head, and filled Thompson in on everything, starting from the attempted stabbing incident in Panic to getting in a fight with Dylan to now. Thompson listened with an ever deepening frown, and finally said, “Maybe you should talk to Chief Matthews. If you’re really being targeted, you might be able to get some protection.”

He meant police protection, which ran the gamut from random prowler patrols to a marked car sitting outside his house for several hours each day. He honestly didn’t like either idea, but said, “Yeah, maybe I should talk to her.” He didn’t need protection. But Dylan? He was worried about Dylan. He’d resent being tailed by the cops, though, being protected. He may have been a cop’s son, but his father did murder his mother – he had no great love of cops.

He decided not to worry about it at the moment. As Thompson and Bragg drove off with the offending Neo-Nazi and the fire truck following in short order, he wondered why a bunch of racist fuckheads would suddenly take up a campaign of arms against him. Hate him, sure, but actively try and hurt him? Why after all this time?

He asked Dylan if he wanted to go somewhere else and spend the night, go to a hotel, and he angrily refused, saying those fucks weren’t scaring them out of their home. Which was good, as that was the response Roan was hoping to hear.

Dylan was still in a kind of shell shocked mood, stunned by his own rage, so Roan just talked to him, trying to reassure him, and held him. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying half the time, but he was pretty sure Dylan wasn’t paying attention either. Eventually Dylan fell asleep, as the sky was starting to shade to a paler violet, and he just stared at the ceiling and wondered. He was accustomed to someone out there – some person, unknown to him or known – wanting to kill him at all times. He knew the hate was out there, he knew it occasionally manifested, and he knew some of that hate wasn’t even personal. He became a symbol, a representative of every single infected who walked the earth, everything that was wrong with the world and his kind, his sub-human kind. Some people who might consider killing him or might actually try and kill him didn’t know him at all; he was just a handy target. He accepted that when he first joined the police force and would get anonymous phoned in death threats, find notes shoved in his locker promising to skin him alive. He long ago made peace with it, with the fact that his death could be sudden and at the hands of a stranger, and now more than ever was confident in his ability to beat them back (because the haters were ironically kind of right – no, he wasn’t totally Human, and yes, that should really bother them). But was it fair to drag a civilian into this? At least Paris hadn’t been a civilian; he’d been an infected too, knew all about the fear, revulsion, and weirdly homicidal hatred that a medical condition (as alien as it was) could cause. But Dylan? This kind of hatred was new to him, and he didn’t deserve to be subjected to it. But how did he send him away?

When he was sure he wouldn’t wake him up, he slid out from beneath him and went downstairs to check out the damage the fuck had done with his rifle. Glass would have to be replaced and he’d have to spackle and repaint a couple of walls, but he’d probably be able to get money for the windows from the crime victims fund, and it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The Modest Mouse song came and went through his brain again, and he realized he was starting to acquire a skill for dodging bullets, both literal and metaphorical.

He had some toast, popped a codeine, and checked his phone messages, glad he’d turned the ringer off when they went to bed, because his call messaging box was full. He deleted all the messages from reporters wanting statements, and saved messages of concern from Gordo, Seb, and Dropkick, all of which were recent. Dropkick probably put it best when she asked, “Fuck Angus, whose corn flakes did you piss in?” He wished he knew. He might take it back.

He considered going out to the hardware store and getting what he needed to sheet up the windows (temporarily), fix the walls, maybe buy another small tree to put near the door, but he realized he didn’t want to leave Dylan alone. After thinking about it for a few minutes – would he really opt for police protection? Even though Dylan would loathe it? - he called another number. With a yawn, Scott answered, “You do know what time it is, don’t cha?”

“Need a favor.”

“More tough guy work?”

“Yeah.” He then told Scott what transpired late last night, and soon he heard him covering the mouthpiece of the phone and repeating parts of it to Grey in the background, who went from sounding barely conscious to deeply unhappy in the space of a couple of minutes. He told him he needed some guys here to just kick back and keep an ear out for trouble while he was gone – and it might be work he needed on and off for the next couple of days. “Good thing for you we’re out of the playoffs,” Scott replied, and said they’d be there as soon as they got dressed.

That turned out to be in about ten minutes. Grey and Scott both came over and marveled at the damage done to the front of the house, which looked even worse in daylight. “Tell me you killed him,” Grey said.

“No. But Dylan almost did, so maybe that counts.”

They said Tank was on his way – it seemed he got laid last night (good for him) and nobody knew where he was, but he finally answered his cell phone – and while Richie was too hung over to be of much good, he left Jeff a message on his cell. Grey and Scott were discussing whether to bring Troy in on this, a “benchwarmer”, a guy who was on the team but played so little Roan couldn’t remember ever having seen him,  but they described him as an “old school bruiser” which was presumably good for guard duty. Roan wasn’t sure they needed so many guys (at least not yet), but Scott, acting in full captain mode, said it was good to have enough guys so anyone could fill in at a moment’s notice.

Seemed weird, but wasn’t it weird to have a hockey team protecting your boyfriend? So he agreed the idea was sound. He asked them to be quiet and not wake up Dylan, and then asked that they call Gordon instantly (he gave them his cell number) if any trouble started. They agreed, but Grey did so with a kind of unsettling smirk, a kind that said ‘I’ll call the police as soon as I’ve beaten them into a chunky red smear‘. Which was fine with him; Grey had already beaten one of the Aryan Moronhood before, and round two was unlikely to have a different outcome.

He left them going through his DVD library, and arguing over what they wanted to watch (Scott wanted to see Slap Shot, Grey wanted to see The Venture Brothers, and both volunteered disappointment at not finding gay porn, but Scott joked you always kept your “porn drawer” out of the living room – making him wonder if Scott had just given away where his porn was, and if his porn was all straight, which he doubted). Although you’d think watching TV would keep them distracted from guard duty, Roan didn’t see the problem – these guys loved to fight. They wouldn’t give up an opportunity through inattention. As he was leaving, he wondered why he should trust them, as really they were just acquaintances (and Scott had come on to him pretty hard – in fact, kissing him probably went over the “come on” line), but he did have the oddest feeling that at some point they’d all become good friends without realizing it. He still wasn’t sure how. Why a bunch of young (mostly) straight boy jocks wanted to be friends with him was still utterly baffling. (Except, of course, he was a “superhero”, wasn’t he? Some people may have seen that as pretty cool.)

At the home improvement behemoth he picked up all the stuff he needed, and in the paint section (just aisles and aisles of cans – did anyone need this many varieties of paint?) he found some paint on its own stand alone shelving, apparently color “mis-mixed” paint being sold for five or ten dollars a can. He noticed one had a daub of paint on the lid (signifying the color inside) that was a kind of warm reddish-brown with a hint of orange. It looked almost exactly like that “Autumn Spice” color Paris had wanted to paint his office. He bet Dylan would like this color, and how would it look in the living room?  So he grabbed it and added it to his cart. Why not? Try and use the disaster to make some improvements.

He had just finished loading up his car when his cell went off. Checking it, he saw it was Gordo before he answered it. “Yeah?”

“You need to come down to the church,” he said, his voice sounding strained. “Divine Transformation. You need to see this. We may need you for crowd control.”

Roan could hear sirens in the background, people talking in raised, stern voices. “What’s going on?”

“You weren’t the only person targeted,” he said cryptically, and broke the connection. Not a single bit of that sounded good.

On his way to the scene he put in a quick call to the house. Everything was fine, they were all watching the Venture Brothers (Tank had apparently arrived), and they were being careful to keep it down so they didn’t wake Dylan. He wondered if it was okay if Tank made some toast, and he told him to go ahead and help themselves to whatever, although he’d appreciate it if they left Dylan’s vegetarian stuff alone. As Roan expected, that got a big chuckle from Grey. (Yeah, like those big jock boys were vegetarians.) They were not so much bodyguards right now but babysitters, but he didn’t care. They would keep Dylan safe. One attacker might be able to get past one of them, but all three, including enforcer Grey and crazy ass Tank? Never. Not unless they brought sub-machine guns, and that was more unlikely than someone bringing a rocket launcher to a knife fight.

It turned out police cars blocked off the street down to the Church of the Divine Transformation, so he had to double park in front of someone’s house on the next block and walk in, and even then he had to weave his way through clots of rubberneckers and reporters. Some of the reporters recognized him, and asked if he knew what was going on, if he had any comment, if he knew anything about the shooter. That confirmed his worst fear before he got to the front line of the cordon. One of the cops on the other side of the sawhorse recognized him and waved him through, as he slowly but surely saw the scene for himself.

Crime scene tape blocked off most of the front yard, although an ambulance had backed up on the main lawn, blocking most of the view from the front end of the street. Roan could smell blood, death, and cordite, hear the buzz of bees and flies periodically drowned out by the crackle of police radios and the low discussions of paramedics and evidence technicians. Camera flashes burst through the open door of the house turned church, and in their brief light he could spot liquid dark splashes of what could only be blood in the foyer. Gordo and Seb were loitering near the side of the stairs leading up to the wrap around porch, and from the sheer number of other cops walking around, he assumed homicide was in charge of the investigation, and while Gordo and Seb may have been the initially responding officers, when it became clear this wasn’t a “kitty crime” they got shoved off.

He walked up to them, and didn’t even have to ask. Gordo started telling him. “A gunman came up to the door of the church at seven thirty eight this morning and started firing. He killed three and injured five before he was shot by the church’s part time security guard. He’s en route to the hospital, but he was critical, he’s probably not gonna make it. There’s a possibility he’s a disgruntled cat or something, but after what we found in the front seat of his car, we don’t think so.”

Seb had it, sealed in a see through plastic evidence envelope. Even from here, he could see written in blocky, almost elementary level letters on a scrap of white notepaper ALL ABOMINATIONS MUST DIE.

“I hate to say it, but you got lucky last night,” Gordo went on. “Or maybe you’re just so damn scary, that asshole couldn’t commit to trying to kill you face to face.”

“You’d have ripped his face off,” Seb noted. “Maybe he was a smarter breed of idiot.”

Roan nodded, slightly distracted. It could have been purely a coincidence, but he didn’t think so. He’d bet everything he had this guy would turn out to be a white supremacist too.

So why had they declared war on infecteds? And why now?