Infected
by Andrea Speed

Fifteen - Bloodshift

Curiously, as bad as vomiting felt, he always seemed to feel better afterwards.

Well, perhaps that was an overstatement. It was just after the violent spasms of his stomach, the feeling of emptiness was a strange relief. Unless he got the dry heaves, then it was another form of misery.

Roan leaned over the toilet for a full minute after the last stomach spasm, watching a thin line of saliva dangle from his bottom lip to the very surface of the water, but his stomach finally seemed hollow and quiet, so he figured he was safe to move.

He flushed the last of his vomit away and stood up with the help of the sink, rinsing his mouth out with water and mouthwash to try and get the burning taste of bile out of the back of his throat. It kind of worked, but his head continued to pound like his thoughts had rebelled and taken up violent revolution against the confines of his skull.

Paris knocked softly on the bathroom door before gently pushing it open. “Didn’t drown in the toilet, did you?”

“Only wish I had,” he admitted, looking at Paris in the bathroom mirror. He looked far too awake and happy, in khaki walking shorts and a maroon t-shirt with a drawing of a piñata on it, and the phrase “I’d Hit That” written beneath. (He recognized that as a gift from Randi, which Paris of course absolutely loved.) “I feel like a complete asshole.”

“Don’t. If you didn’t break down now and again, I’d worry about you.” He came in and put the bottle of ginger pills and a bottled water on the counter beside the sink, then put his arms around him and pressed up against his back. “Excedrin’s in the medicine cabinet.”

“So’s vicodin. I think I’d rather have that.” He leaned back against Paris, who was warm and comforting, and made him feel a bit better (at least physically - he still felt bad in every other respect). “You’re being far too nice to me. I’m getting suspicious.”

“Why? If I was pissed off at you, I’d be a total hypocrite. You do know I probably had three sober days in college, and those three days were total flukes. The ‘shrooms weren’t magic, and the pot was mostly stems.”

He grimaced, as he still hurt too much to smile. “Exaggerating much?”

Paris rested his chin on his shoulder, still looking at him in the bathroom mirror, his hair tickling the side of his neck. “Hardly. I can’t even remember what my bullshit major was supposed to be. Drama or film studies or some shit like that. Thanks to my athletic scholarship, I had access to the hot chicks, but I had to go into the arts to get the hot, sensitive guys confused about their sexuality and unable to hold their liquor.” He grinned at him and raised his eyebrows in a mock suggestive manner.

It hurt to laugh, but Roan chuckled weakly anyways. “I can’t quite totally believe that, you know.”

“You really should. I was a pleasure addicted man whore, a complete and utter slut. I was just there for the sex and drugs. Isn’t that what college is for?”

Roan smiled as he popped a couple of ginger pills and washed it down with the bottled water, which was clean and icy cold. Paris really was too nice to him sometimes.

(That made him wonder if he was a total bastard to Con.)

“I’m sorry I missed out.” He opened the medicine cabinet and found the bottle of Excedrin, popping off the cap and pouring three bitter tasting pills directly into his mouth. He never went to college; in fact, he dropped out of high school and got a GED instead, because it wasn’t like he could hack it at a normal high school anyways: he was a fucking lion five days out of every month. And if normal teens thought high school was hell, they should have tried it being both infected and gay. At least it taught him how to fight and how to take a beating, which was almost as important as the former.

Besides, he felt like he learned more on his own, spending so many long days and evenings reading (there often wasn’t much else to do in the temporary group and state homes he was sent to), plowing through entire libraries until he could read so fast that people began to think he was a speed reader.

He closed the mirrored medicine cabinet to find Paris grinning at him in an openly lecherous way. “I’m still a man whore at heart, you know. I can help you make up for lost time.”

It hurt to smile, but he continued to do so anyways. Okay, maybe Paris was a man whore, but he was his man whore, damn it. “Maybe when I’m not hung over.”

“Excellent choice. It’s more fun when you’re not half dead.” His smile faded slightly, although he continued to stare at him in the mirror. “So, you gonna volunteer the info, or do I have to pull it out of you?”

Roan sighed, weighing his options. He didn’t have many that he could see, and Paris did deserve an answer. He glanced down at the sink, busying himself finding the shaving cream among all the bottles at the back of the countertop, and told him, not meeting his eyes in the mirror. He only glanced at him when he was done, and Paris’s expression was unreadable, save for surprise in his eyes. “Feeling you can bring it on and actually being able to bring it on are two different things,” he finally said.

“I know. But … there was a moment there when I was sure I could do it if I just let go.”

“No change happens that fast.”

“I know. But …” he closed his eyes and shook his head. “Something’s happening to me, and I’m not sure I like it.”

“You shouldn’t worry. I know you, and I know you’ll always do the right thing. That’s the kind of guy you are. Unlike me, Slutty McWhore over here.” He kissed him on the cheek and added, “When you’re ready, I’ve got lunch and news for you downstairs.”

“I really don’t think I could eat right now.”

“Give it a minute.” He gave him a final squeeze before letting him go and leaving the bathroom.

Slutty McWhore? Oh, he was definitely writing him up a nametag with that on it. And knowing Paris, he’d wear it proudly.

****

Paris apparently did know what he was talking about when it came to hangovers, because as soon as the smell of eggs and sausage hit his nose, his empty stomach rumbled hungrily. Perverse little thing.

Paris had made what he called his “kitchen sink omelets”, which was basically anything he found in the fridge or cupboards thrown into a bunch of eggs and cooked together in a pan. He sat down at the breakfast bar and Par slid a plate full of eggs in front him, along with a vanilla frappuchino (he told him he’d need the sugar and caffeine). As far as he could tell, the eggs were full of salsa, olives, vegetarian sausage, red peppers, and pepper jack cheese, and it was incredibly good; he had to close his eyes for a moment just to savor it. Why couldn’t he cook like this? Everything he tried to cook inevitably tasted like the processed food it started as.

Paris sat on the opposite side of the breakfast bar from him, eating his own lunch, and filled him in on what he’d missed. He’d covered for him in meeting Susan Heffernan (he deserved some kind of boyfriend medal), and handed him the relevant paperwork, the meager fact sheet and the photo of Ryan and Cooper. Looking at the photo, he felt like he’d been smacked in the face. “Is Ryan the one in the blue t-shirt?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Why?”

“Just trying to keep it straight in my head,” he lied, turning the photo face down and setting it aside. How did this happen to him? Was it because he hadn’t ever moved out of this state? Maybe he should have moved to San Francisco or New York City or something; maybe these things wouldn’t happen in such a big place.

The New Year’s Eve after Con had committed suicide - and before he met Paris - he was wandering the streets in the biting cold, trying not to feel depressed and failing miserably. He always hated the holidays, and didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas; they seemed to be holidays invented for people with families and something to be happy about, neither of which applied to him. (Paris insisted on having a Christmas tree, though, and generally made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, and Roan didn’t stop him, mainly because he couldn’t.) He hated gay bars and nightclubs - they were just too damn annoying; geared towards femmes or butch and little in between - but he didn’t feel like being alone, so he ended up in a sports bar, trying new microbrews and munching on barely passable Buffalo wings. He started up a conversation with this guy who said his name was Jeff, and while he wasn’t hitting on him - who cruised a sports bar? - it became clear that Jeff was subtly but obviously hinting that he thought they should go someplace more private. Jeff wasn’t really his type; he wasn’t too bad looking (or that attractive, actually), but it was New Year’s Eve, and he was tired of being so fucking depressed. It was just a one nighter, no biggie, but Jeff was clearly Ryan, unless Ryan had a twin brother. He glanced at the fact sheet to see how long the Heffernans had been married, and saw that it had been eight and a half years. Holy shit, he was married then. He certainly wasn’t wearing his wedding ring that night.

At least he’d already solved the case.

He quickly forgot all about his inadvertent fling with a married man when Paris gave him the envelope Randi had given him earlier. DeSilvo and Henstridge were on someone’s secret payroll? Oh, now that was interesting. Why? Whose? According to the dates, Metropol started shifting little amounts into their bank accounts - a couple hundred here and there; as Randi had noted, dribs and drabs, just small enough not to raise any eyebrows - less than two weeks after the Tweaks arrest at Edgewood. There was no way in hell Tweaks had that kind of money, no way he even knew how to set up a dummy corp in the Cayman Islands (even if it only existed in a post office box and on the internet), and if he ever had that kind of money, it’d all go to ecstasy and meth, not some patrol cops. The last payment to Henstridge alone was sizable, nearly thirteen thousand dollars, but it was like a money dump, somebody emptying the account so they could close it, and Tweaks was dead by then. Still, he called Randi and asked her to do a similar search for Anthony Westmore Andersen, and promised that Paris would make her dessert for that. As soon as he hung up, Paris asked, “I will, will I?”

“I’m hoping begging and pleading will work at this juncture.”

He smiled slyly, and Roan knew he’d just walked into something. “How about a trade?”

He figured he knew exactly what he was alluding to. Man whore. “We’ll haggle when I’m not hung over.”

“Oh joy, your excuse for the day,” he replied, but lightly, with a tolerant smile on his face.

Actually, Roan was feeling a hell of a lot better; the combination of the pills, the food, the caffeine, and something else to think about were doing wonders for him. Paris probably knew that too. He always claimed not to be all that smart, but Paris, being an expert manipulator, always knew how to read people as easily as any decent criminal profiler. He followed people’s subtle emotional shifts, to the point that he could easily extrapolate what they wanted from him, what they expected, and he could tailor his response to get what he wanted from them. That was probably why they worked so well together - they had a whole left brain/right brain dichotomy going on.

Which was why the next thing Paris told him was a little troubling. He recounted the incident with the man he didn’t trust in their driveway, although the description of the guy was just vague enough that he was almost familiar and yet obviously not at the same time. “Maybe you should have taken the check,” Roan suggested. “The name and address might have been something we could’ve traced.”

Paris frowned, making faint furrows appear on his smooth brow. Paris was creeping towards thirty - creeping towards the age where tiger strain victims began to die in large numbers. No tiger strain had ever been documented as living over the age of thirty five. He felt a twinge in his chest just thinking that these might be Paris’s last years on Earth … and he’d obviously chosen to spend them with him. Just another reminder that there was no way in fucking hell he deserved this man, and yet he couldn’t possibly imagine life without him at this point. In fact he wasn’t going to, because the mere thought of it would cripple him. He had to focus on the here and now, and let the future worry about itself. “Oh fuck. I didn’t think of that.”

“Doesn’t matter. If this guy was as phony as you thought he was, that would have been a bogus check, borrowed or stolen. Wouldn’t have panned out.”

He sighed slightly, letting his shoulders sag. He seemed to be relieved at being let off the hook. “Good, I don’t feel like such an incompetent asshole now.”

“You’ve never been that, Par.”

“Oh come on! I can’t even tell you why I didn’t like this guy.”

“Except he had a cheap shit David Beckham-ish haircut,” he replied, parroting part of the description he’d given him earlier.

“And he was driving a fucking Subaru Outback.”

Paris had a pretty amusing and slightly baffling hatred for all SUVs, minivans, and any type of similar bulky, boxy vehicle, with Hummers especially singled out for his acidic scorn. As he liked to say “If your penis is really that small, they have surgery for that now”. Roan couldn’t say he was a fan of any of them, but Paris’s extreme hatred of them always struck him as kind of funny.

Paris sighed, letting his fork drop to his mostly empty plate. “I’m just being stupid. If he was really some kind of bad guy, he’d have attacked me or something.”

He shook his head. “Not at all. If he was planning something, a second person could have screwed up his scenario. And you’re not exactly a limp wristed pansy; you’re a big guy. Maybe he figured that even with the element of surprise, he couldn’t take you.” Paris opened his mouth to speak, but he cut him off. “A man whore joke would be really inappropriate now.”

“Damn it.” Paris got up and took his plate to the sink, rinsing it off before putting it in the dishwater (which they hadn’t named yet: Roan wanted to call it Joe, and Paris wanted to call it George. It was a stalemate). He went ahead and did this to all the pans he’d dirtied while making his omelet, so he didn’t have to face him when he asked, “Do you think someone might be after you?”

He chewed on a forkful of eggs, considering his answer carefully. “He could have just been a process server, you know. They have to deliver those directly to the person named. I wouldn’t worry about it at the moment, although I’ll be careful. Being a P.I. is never a popular job.” Which was true. He knew people sometimes held a grudge against him for “ruining” their marriages by snapping pictures of them with their lovers, and once a guy tried to jump in the parking lot and beat the shit out of him, but he was easily able to put him in an arm lock and slam him onto the hood of a car, letting him know that he’d be willing not to press charges if he got the fuck out of here and never crossed his path ever again. He was still belligerent and cursing him until he told him he was gay, and damn if he didn’t have a really nice ass, especially from this vantage point. That made him shut up and leave.

Sexual threatening was as low as you could go, but it did work with a surprising alacrity on a number of straight men. All he could figure was they assumed gay men were all sexual predators, treating men like they’d like to treat women: all as potential (if unwilling) fucks, whether they were attractive or not, as long as they had the appropriate holes.

By the time he was nearly done with his eggs, Paris asked, “So are you going to tell me why you looked at that pic of Ryan and Cooper funny?”

Damn it. There was no getting away with anything in this house, was there? He could have lied, but why? No point. “I had a one nighter with Ryan a couple years ago. I didn’t know he was married.”

Paris laughed, wiping down the countertop so he couldn’t see the evil look Roan was now giving him. “Oh shit. That’s going to be an awkward confrontation. So, was he any good?”

Only Paris would have asked that. And the fact that Roan had to think about it pretty much answered the question. All sex was good by nature of its definition, but if you couldn’t recall it instantly, if it was completely lost to you, it couldn’t have been very good. “He was astoundingly average. I wasn’t drunk, but I barely remember it. I only recalled him because I’ve never been picked up in a sports bar before or since.”

Paris finally looked at him, a disbelieving grin lighting up his face. “A sports bar? What the hell were you doing in a sports bar?”

“It was open and had beer.”

He shook his head and went back to stacking the dishwasher. “You think you know a guy, and he does something like that. What’s next, a tractor pull?”

“I’m going now,” he said tartly, swigging down the rest of his frappuchino, hiding his smile.

“Oh, I know,” Paris continued to taunt him. “Monster trucks. Maybe a duck hunt!”

He was saved by the phone, which rang and cut off any further teasing. The fact that caller I.D. identified the caller as Sikorski didn’t discourage him at the moment. “Hey Gordo, what do you got for me?”

“Good news, in a way. Eli’s bite print matched a mauling we had a couple days ago.”

That was good news? “What?”

“A homeless man was mauled in Sprague Park the night before yesterday, he’s still in the hospital but they think he’s going to make it. Anyways, Eli’s bite print matches the bites on his arms and legs, so we can hold him and charge him for assault and being unrestrained. We have a pool going, see how mad we can make Stovak before that vein in his forehead finally explodes.”

“Is he aware of this? He might sue.”

“Not if he’s in a hospital with an aneurysm he won’t.”

Roan smirked at the thought. When Guy got really angry, a little vein did start to pulse in his forehead like it was a second heart. But Roan had gotten him pretty upset, and it had never gotten close to exploding (not for lack of trying). He wished the PD luck. “Got anything on Henstridge for me?”

“Uh, no. He was a decent cop, retired out early ‘cause of his son’s health problems - his wife died a while back, and he was the only one around to take care of him. Last known address we have for him is 1725 Longview.”

That was the address of the little clapboard house that was currently up for sale. Quietly, Paris said, “Super Bowl party,” and Roan flipped him off. “What did his son have?” Was that relevant? Perhaps. Health problems, especially if they were chronic, cost lots of money.

Gordo sighed in disappointment. “Is that really any of your business?”

“It could be relevant.”

“How?”

“Humor me.”

The pause was so long he wasn’t sure if Gordo was going to actually tell him or not. He heard his chair creak, and in the background he could hear someone angrily ranting. Was that Stovak? “Couldn’t you find out yourself? You seem to know everything else.” But that was a rhetorical question, as he heard him shuffling papers, and a moment later, Gordo read, “Polycythemia vera, some kinda rare blood disorder. You owe me.”

He grabbed the pen and p ad by the phone, and asked him to spell that for him. With an angry sigh, he did. After that, Gordo asked something he was hoping he’d forget. “You gonna tell me what the fuck happened last night?”

“As soon as I figure it out. Thanks, Gord.” He hung up before he could press the issue. He’d decided that not thinking about it was the best way to go; denial could be your friend.

“I take it you have another lead,” Paris prompted.

“I have a medical condition to research. I figure I can look it up before I head out to Hatch’s place. Oh, and Eli apparently mauled someone the other night, so he’s being held.”

Paris stared at him in surprise, all traces of humor gone, and he let out a low whistle. “His followers won’t like that.”

“Tell me about it. The cop shop will probably be swamped with angry cultists tonight. Glad I don’t work there anymore.”

But Paris grinned in an unsettling, predatory way, his eyes glittering with malice. “You should take the video camera there tonight. That way if someone does something terminally stupid, you’ll have the footage to prove it. There’s no better way to destroy someone than to let them do it themselves.”

“You know I love you, hon, but sometimes you’re frightening.”

“We man whores are a vicious breed.”

In that case, he was glad he was on his side.

*****

Roan didn’t understand how Henstridge’s son could have polycythemia vera. Was it a lie?

A quick check of his personnel file confirmed his son, Michael, would only be thirteen, but polycythemia vera was an abnormal increase in blood cells caused by excessive production in the bone marrow. It was extremely rare, it was almost never diagnosed in people under forty, and yet if he used Henstridge’s requests for personal time off as a measure, the kid might have been diagnosed as early as eight. Maybe if the kid had had leukemia at some point it could have been the cause, except oddly enough, polycythemia vera could actually lead to a form of leukemia. So was this just a kid doomed with an strange illness, or was his father lying for some unfathomable reason?

He searched on line for what happened to Henstridge’s wife, who was listed on his personnel file as Anita (Havner) Henstridge. He found an old newspaper obituary from ten years ago, saying only that she died after a “long illness” that was never specified. Could it have been something related to polycythemia vera? Another weird thing, though: PV was more likely to affect men than women. This didn’t make too much sense, but what in this case did? Maybe Anita used to be Arnold, pre-surgery.

He made sure Paris was locked in and safe before heading out, and while he wondered briefly if he could make the tiger become as submissive as Eli and the other cats, he decided that he didn’t want to know. He felt it would confirm something about the cat in him, and he was still embracing denial at this point.

He set the Henstridge/DeSilvo case aside for the moment, and drove out to Hatch’s place. The same beat up red Mazda Miata that he’d seen in the driveway when he talked to the acne riddled woman was here, as was a white Ford pick-up with some minor body damage and peeling paint. (He could almost hear Paris giving him an itemized run down on how much it would cost to fix the damage.)

Lights were on in the house, although the curtains were drawn and most of what he could see was bleeding though cracks, places where the drapes weren’t closed all the way. Their closest neighbors weren’t apparently home - there was no car in the drive, no lights on, their gate locked - so he parked just in front of their house, hidden from direct view by a large ponderosa pine. He was in what Par called his “ninja clothes” (black t-shirt, black pants, black hiking boots) and since it was a warm night he didn’t wear his coat. He tucked his HK in a belt holster and pulled out his shirt to cover it, and wore his binoculars around his neck. He had a digital camera small enough to shove in his pocket; he could have just gone with the cell phone camera, but he didn’t like their generally poor definition.

He got out of the car and walked towards the house, sticking to the faint but growing shadows in the blue twilight, and the wind came up against him back, warm and dry, making dead leaves scrape down the road with a sound like claws. It was like he was the only living thing on earth.

The Hatch’s dog caught his scent and began to yip and growl, but as he came across their yard, he started to growl too, a low sound that almost got lost in the wind, but the dog heard it and stopped. Roan approached the chain link fence where the dog waited, reeking as if marinating in its own shit, and his growl grew louder as he looked down and met the dog’s empty brown eyes, feeling his lip pull back and bare one of his sharp canine teeth. The dog whimpered and ran for the back of the yard to hide.

He heard the low murmur of a television inside the house, as well as a woman’s voice slightly raised, yelling at some one to get their ass out here. Did Hatch have a kid?

He was on the verge of moving towards the front when a bright flash of light caught his eye.

It came from the large outbuilding in the backyard, which was shut up completely, but there were some gaps in black paint covering the tiny windows that allowed that light to pulse through. Roan stared at the shed, almost willing it to happen again, but it didn’t. No matter how muffled a gunshot, he’d have heard it from here, so it must have been a picture flash. Now who would be taking pictures in a blacked out, locked shed?

Roan grabbed the top of the fence and easily pulled himself over it, jumping down and landing quietly in the dead grass. The dog was too scared and too busy hiding from him to comment, and the woman was still arguing with someone in the house.

There was only way to find out what that flash had been. He just hoped it was worth risking a trespassing charge for.