It hurt as gravity threw him back again and the world seemed to slew violently around, and another impact slammed the car, making gravity jump elsewhere once more.

The problem was he could feel the adrenaline spike through him, and he decided to let it ride, letting the partial transformation take care of whatever injuries he acquired. But he never considered the fact of what might happen if he lost consciousness mid-transformation as his head slammed hard into the door.

****

The Audi hit the Ford Explorer at somewhere near forty miles per hour. The front ends of both vehicles crumpled, but the Audi nearly accordioned while the Explorer lost its fender and headlights, and the Audi was hit from behind by a Civic that was going far too fast, and sent the Audi into a spin that ended with it crashing into a parked car on the opposite side of the road. The Explorer was nudged from behind, but the Nissan behind it had managed to turn away and only gave it a love tap, taking out a brake light and one of the Nissan’s headlights.

It was still a fucking bad wreck, and broken glass was scattered across the middle of the street like rock salt in winter. Darinda Murphy was already calling for paramedics and a black and white for traffic control as she pulled her unmarked sedan off into the parking lot of a fondue restaurant. (Jesus, who went to fondue restaurants?)

Was Roan in the Audi? If she could believe a hooker, he was. And she rather hoped he wasn’t, because if he was actually hurt, she couldn’t beat the shit out of him.

Paris had called her ten minutes ago, clearly worried about Roan, who was staking out someone named Noah Hammond. Paris admitted they were investigating the killings and he was afraid that Roan, since he’d been identified, might be in immediate danger, and he couldn’t get a hold of him. She started to read Paris the riot act, but saved it. He was just following Roan, and Roan knew better than to delve into an open case. What made it so much worse, and so deeply infuriating, was that Roan and his ever tolerate boyfriend had gotten so much farther on the case than they had.

She was glad that she had just finished up at a crime scene at Blair and 43rd, putting her only a few blocks out from Jefferson Avenue. It allowed her to get down here and find the rental car that Roan had hired for the stakeout. She knocked on the tinted windows in increasing frustration, warning him she was going to bust out a window if he didn’t act like a goddamn man right this second. That was when a hooker across the street piped up and shouted, “You lookin’ for Officer Roan? He just left in that silver car down there.” And she pointed at an Audi that was just rounding the corner.

It was possible that the hooker was just fucking with her because her badge was visible on her belt, but calling Roan “Officer Roan” was such an odd thing to do she believed her. Must have been one of Roan’s Skid Row friends from his days on the force. Roan was known as “that” cop, the one who seemed to make friends amongst the junkies and whores, sad sacks and losers that you ran into more often than not on your rounds. Each precinct had at least one, and she couldn’t say she was surprised that the ex-abused foster kid/gay infected guy was a friend of the outcasts. That was kind of a natural fit, wasn’t it? It was a sure winner in the office pool. (Although she lost the bet that he was a fan of musical theater - apparently he “loathed” it. So much for that stereotype. Then again, she didn’t like it either, but no one went around saying lesbians did. But she didn’t like the plaid flannel/she mullet look, so maybe that was an equivalent.)

Paris hadn’t told her much, just given her the bare bones of what they had, and she chewed it over as she followed the car, three cars removed. A group usually wasn’t great at killing unless they were terrorists, but would Humanity First be considered a domestic terror group? Admittedly they simply targeted the infected, which put them in the realm of a hate crime, but when you went around killing people, hate was generally implied. They seemed to be going forward on Roan’s hunches, but Roan’s hunches were another thing that could win you big bucks in the office pool. Maybe it was because he was a virus child - he did have that whole “smelling” thing (a dubious superpower if there ever was one) - but he often picked up on very subtle things that would later break a case. He was scary good at times, which is why it kind of figured that being a beat cop would be the end of him.

But she needed more. If she was going to get warrants and start running people in, she needed something a bit more concrete, something she could put in front of a judge and not have laughed out of court. She wasn’t sure they had anything yet, except for Jordan DeSoto and his gun, and that all depended on how the ballistics tests came out.

But if anyone asked her if she thought Roan was on the right track, she would have said yes. Okay, legally proving it was one thing, but if Roan said the wheel was going to come up twenty six red on the next spin, that’s where she’d put her money. Not that she’d tell him that - he didn’t need a big head. Besides, so far what little she’d dug up on this case made no sense. It had the hallmarks of a random crime while clearly being deliberate, and frankly a specific group working together would make more sense than a single person. It was just so unusual that it was hard to credit.

And didn’t she know, in the back of her mind, that Roan wouldn’t let this die? That if she asked for help finding the connections between the victims, he wouldn’t just do that and pull back. She knew he’d pry, and she was hoping that with his access to the infected community, he’d get something they couldn’t. She set him up, and she did it deliberately. Roan couldn’t fight temptation any more than she could and she knew it.

Then the accident occurred, without warning. The car didn’t swerve, it seemed to lunge across the white lines as if bound on committing suicide. It happened so fast she couldn’t be perfectly sure, but her instinct was that there was no way what she saw was an accident. After calling it in and parking, she quickly went out to the street to try and get some semblance of order imposed before back up arrived.

Already crowds were gathering, because that’s what they did at horrific wrecks, so she began shouting for people to get out of her way and holding out her badge, which allowed her to shove through and be as rude as possible. Of course being a plain clothed homicide cop should have given her no special access to the scene, no actual authority, but people were usually glad to hand over control when people could actually die.

The woman in the Explorer, a bottle blonde who looked like she just stepped out of the Anne Taylor catalog, was already on her cell phone, loudly explaining that she couldn’t be somewhere because some lunatic just hit her, so Darinda dismissed her as okay - if you could bitch and moan like that, you were in great shape - and headed for the Audi.

There was a tall, slender Arab man with a strangely short mustache and a baseball hat by the Audi. He had opened the driver’s side door and was talking to the female driver, who appeared passed out on her airbag. If the sheer violence involved in the crash hadn’t made her pass out, it was possible the explosive release of the airbag did - they could do that, especially in smaller people (and this woman was a petite thing). She appeared to have a trickle of blood coming from one nostril, but it was just a smear.

The man was taking her pulse from her neck when she moved up to him. “Sir, I think it’s best you step back,” she advised.

He looked at her, his brown eyes wide and curious. “Should we move her from the car? In case it, you know, catches on fire or something?”

She glanced up and down the length of the car. The engine wasn’t smoking, and she didn’t smell gas, so she shook her head. “It doesn’t appear she’s in immediate danger, so it’s best to leave her where she is until the paramedics arrive.”

He seemed reluctant, but he was only the good Samaritan and she had the badge, so he nodded and stepped back. Darinda found her eyes drifting back to the woman though, who, save for the blood coming from her nose, could have simply been asleep on a wide white pillow. Didn’t she look familiar somehow? She did, she just couldn’t place her face at the moment.

“Murphy,” a familiar voice asked quizzically. She looked over her shoulder and saw Paris standing at the edge of the gathered crowd, with a short but powerfully built black man in a grey suit and tie. He had a shaved head and a trim goatee, and also looked familiar. Something about him screamed “hired muscle”, but she assumed it was some detective/executive security friend of Roan’s - at least he had contacts outside the police department. Paris looked pale and drawn in the quickly dying light, almost like a ghost. “What the hell’s going on?”

Traffic was stopped on both sides of the wreck, so their car was probably somewhere in the mess beyond the Explorer. He couldn’t have known where Roan was, so she assumed they’d gotten out and went to see what the commotion was about, and saw her. Or at least she hoped, because she suddenly realized she hadn’t seen Roan in the front seat. Where the fuck was he?

She was turning back when she heard the growl.

It was funny how you were never prepared for it. In the back of your mind you expected something from a movie, something deep and ominous, but a big cat’s growl in real life usually didn’t have the same bass notes and wasn’t that loud. Usually. The growl she heard inside the car was faint but definitely deep; it was almost like a well tuned engine in the distance, roaring as the throttle was released and the car tore off into the night. She saw a shadow of movement in the back seat, and instinctively started retreating from the car. “Everyone back!” She shouted, as the lion jumped through the shattered passenger window, and some people screamed and instantly fled the scene. At least it did make the crowd move away.

The lion was as large as Roan was, a bit shorter in vertical height but slightly longer than your average lion, although it had the same tawny coat, large paws, and sleek muscles you would expect from such a thing. But there was a difference here, one she had never seen before, and it almost threw her off for a second.

You could really never tell a real big cat from a transformed infected save for those slight height variations. Otherwise they looked just the same as their wild, more genetically “pure” brethren, and sometimes you didn’t know what you were dealing with until you got the autopsy reports. But this lion had eerie green eyes, ones she had seen before in a red-headed smart ass, and his thick, large mane was shot through with the same, odd reddish-brown hair, fading into black in certain spots as the thick fringe of hair wreathed his neck and face and joined his shoulders. His head and face was that of a lion, his jaw protruding and full of jagged teeth that were by no means human … and yet she could almost see him, couldn’t she? It had to be her mind playing tricks on her, but she knew this was Roan in his transformed form beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the intellect wasn’t there; there was nothing in those slit pupiled eyes but a nameless, shapeless anger. It was bleeding on its side from some shallow scrapes, probably from broken glass, but that could be enough to make it lash out.

She pulled her service revolver and aimed it, using a steady two handed grip, and said to no one but herself, “I don’t want to do this. Don’t make me do this.” But it was a matter of public safety. Here was a lion, and here was a crowd full of people. She was not only within her rights to kill him, it was expected. Public safety trumped the transformed infected’s right of existence.

Could she wound him seriously enough to keep him down until the guys with the tranqs arrived? She knew she was a damn good shot, but there was a thin line between a paralyzing shot and a lethal shot, and she knew human anatomy a lot better than cat anatomy. A couple centimeters or minutes either way could make the difference between immobilization and death.

But the lion was just standing there as if protecting the car, still growling, and she thought that maybe this stalemate, this inaction, would prevent her from having to shoot him. But then the lion’s large head turned back towards the injured woman in the driver’s seat, the black p ad of its nose wrinkling as it smelled the blood. Oh shit.

She had braced herself to fire - she was going to have to give the paralyzing shot a try - when Paris said suddenly, “Roan.” His voice wasn’t questioning or angry; it had just the mildest tone of pleading in it, like insisting gently on his attention.

She spared a glance over her shoulder and saw him walking up beside her. “Get the fuck back!” she snapped. “He can’t hear you!”

But Paris barely glanced at her - his intensely blue eyes were fixed on the lion. “I’m not so sure about that.”

The lion was looking back at the both of them now, and its growl was loud enough to make the crowd that was still here back up another two feet. She and Paris were now the only ones on the street with it. Him.

Paris was talking low to the lion, his tone calm and measured, but there was a certain tension in his shoulders and across his back as he approached it slowly. To stop him she’d have had to have reached out, and such a sudden gesture could have set the lion off. “Roan, I know you’re in there. I know you can hear me somewhere in there. You’re stronger than it, I know you are, and you have to fight it.”

The lion continued its rumbling growl, but it was focused on Paris now. Paris had also now crossed into her line of fire, so she no longer had a clear shot. She just knew he’d done that on purpose. “Get out of my shot,” she snarled.

“If you shoot him, you might as well shoot me,” he replied quietly, sounding strangely resigned to it, as if he expected to die one way or another. But in a moment she got her shot back, as Paris sank to his knees on the asphalt. “What the fuck are you doing?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice to a whisper so as not to startle the cat.

Paris didn’t answer her, so she wasn’t sure if she heard him or not. He kept his hands loose at his side, limp, and he was holding his head at an odd angle, his head tilted to the side and raised slightly up. It took her a moment to realize he was showing his throat to the lion, sending a clear signal of submission; nothing that showed its throat to you could be a threat. But it also meant that if the lion was going to lunge at Paris, it would have a damn easy kill. She probably wouldn’t get a shot off before it killed him, and he probably knew that. Bastard.

“You know me,” Paris insisted quietly to the cat. “You know my voice, you know my smell, you know who I am. And they’re gonna kill you if you don’t stop now. You have to take over, Roan; fight it back.”

A weird hush had fallen over the street, allowing her to hear the distant scream of sirens. What fucking idiot turned on sirens when there was a big cat loose?! That could only make it panic. Her grip was so tight on her gun her palms were starting to sweat, and she felt slightly queasily at the possibility she was going to have to shoot a friend. He wasn’t even doing anything wrong - he just picked a really bad time to be a cat. But wasn’t Roan usually smarter than that? Didn’t he know when he was entering the high point of his viral cycle? It didn’t really make sense.

(Come to think of it … if he’d entered the car as a human, when the hell did he have the time to transform? That was too fast; no one transformed in minutes. It took about an hour or so. So what the hell happened here?)

The lion was slowly approaching Paris, still growling, like he was prey. But Paris didn’t move, and his voice didn’t waver. If he was scared, it wasn’t obvious. “Roan, come back to us. I know you can hear me. You’re running out of time.”

Everyone seemed to be holding their breath as the lion neared Paris, and there was a general unspoken consensus that they were all waiting for the lion to kill him. It seemed inevitable, like waiting for the mirror ball to drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and Darinda felt oddly paralyzed. She knew she should do something, shoot Roan before he got any closer to Paris, but her mind kept stalling on “shoot Roan”. She really didn’t want to do that, but she knew she had to suck it up and do her job, even if it meant killing a friend.

The lion was within a paw’s swipe of Paris, and she knew she’d fucked this up. Oh, the Chief would let it slide because she’d understand the reluctance to shoot a former colleague, but she knew she fucked up. She should have shot the lion as soon as she had an unobstructed view.

Time stretched out to impossible lengths as a few seconds seemed to take hours, and the lion seemed to move slowly towards Paris’s throat, and she tensed to fire, wondering if she really wanted to see the lion ripping his throat out. Paris, for his part, didn’t move at all - she didn’t know if he was absurdly calm or paralyzed with fear.

The lion went for Paris’s throat, but she wasn’t sure she was seeing things correctly, as the lion seemed to rest its head on Paris’s shoulder instead of biting deep into his neck. But then the lion seemed to collapse, one of its rear legs twitching like it was having a type of seizure, and Paris wrapped his arms around its throat, burying his face in its thick mane. He was saying quietly, “Thank you.”

Gasps started running through the crowd, which almost sounded disappointed that it had missed out on a good bit of violence, but there were also small comments like “What the fuck..?” On several levels this didn’t make sense. Cats had no higher consciousness - they were just cats. They couldn’t understand a person, they couldn’t respond to a loved one. (Much like they couldn’t transform in under an hour.) She had no idea what the fuck had just happened here, except it felt impossibly wrong. It was like the world as she knew it had suddenly shifted ever so slightly sideways.

It was coincidence or the cat was hurt or … something. But she couldn’t believe that Paris had actually managed to reach Roan, because that was impossible. A transformed human wasn’t a human at all, and everybody knew that.

(So what if they were wrong?)

The sirens were much louder now, the aid cars only a block or so away, and she reluctantly holstered her weapon, her mind snapping back into containment mode. “Paris, get him off the street. I have an unmarked sedan in the fondue lot, get him in there.” Of course she had no idea how he was supposed to do that, but she figured it was his problem. After all, the lion seemed to respond to him, so …

Jesus Christ, how fucked up was this? She found herself trying to imagine what she’d put on her report about this incident, and realized she had no idea what she was going to say.

This time he beat Barlow here, so he got one of the round wooden tables in the back, near the pool players, and he ordered a tonic on the rocks with a lemon slice, which made the burly Hispanic bartender look at him funny, but it would look quite a bit like a vodka and tonic to Barlow. He couldn’t actually drink tonight. After Roan left, he went into the bathroom and took half a valium, as his heart was starting to race again, an uneven lope that seemed more like a spastic gallop, and he knew half a valium should take down his heart rate without compromising him. But drinking a beer on top of it would threaten to put him to sleep, so he couldn’t risk it.

He was watching the pool players - one guy with a beer gut so massive he probably hadn’t seen his feet since 1985, and a skinnier, seedier looking guy wearing a “No Fat Chicks” t-shirt (he had no idea those existed outside of The Simpsons) - and trying to discern if they actually knew what they were doing by the time Barlow showed up, apologizing profusely for his lateness. He said there was a wreck that was holding up traffic, but Paris honestly didn’t know if he was lying or not. It was times like this that he wished he could smell a lie.

Barlow ordered a beer and got to business pretty shortly afterwards, and it wasn’t quite what he expected. Barlow was asking him to go to a meeting tomorrow night and pretend he was a newcomer. He said they did that because people were often reluctant to be the first one to share their story, and they had plants as a way of getting the ball rolling. Paris was glad about the valium, as it helped him not react to things, but his gut twisted in sudden anxiety. “Was that woman there the night I went a plant?”

“Karen? Yeah, she’s been with us for a couple of months now. But she can’t do the meeting tomorrow night, and I was thinking since your story was so dynamic, you might want to give it a try. I know how it sounds, but it actually helps people open up.”

So Roan’s instincts paid off again. It wasn’t that Karen was homicidal more than she was lying - while telling the truth. Roan knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what, so he tagged her. It was creepy how he did that.

And if Karen had been active in Humanity First for a couple of months, it probably meant that Noah had been too. There was the connection between Noah and Barlow. The circle had been closed … but was that enough?

He was thinking of when to make an excuse to leave when Tim’s cell phone buzzed, and after apologizing he answered it. But it wasn’t a phone call or even a text message; he had a web enabled phone, and it was an email. He learned this after Tim grunted in what seemed to be muted disgust, and asked, “Have you seen a man like this around?”

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

Of course he knew this man. It was Roan, and that was the photo they took for the newspaper article that came out when he joined the force. He looked a bit younger and strangely adorable, with his reddish brown hair short and combed back; he took a moment to regret the cut, but enjoy how sexy he looked otherwise. There was nothing really classically handsome about him, but he still seemed unbelievably attractive, and Paris had no idea how Roan couldn’t quite see that about himself. He was glad, though, because there was only room for one unbearably vain person in their house, and he had no intention of giving up his throne. “No, I’ve never seen him before,” Paris replied. “Why?”

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

“Is he dangerous?”

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

Kevin Stiles would be puzzled about this, so he pretended to be. “What is he, a stalker?”

“Something like that, yes.”

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

Real troubling. And what made things worse was that Ro was either away from his phone or he had turned it off. After four rings he was shunted directly into his voice mail system. “Damn it, Ro! Look, Tim wants Kevin to be a plant at the next meeting - taking Karen’s place. She’s been with HF for months now, and it’s a good bet that, despite their estrangement, Noah has been as well. Also, Tim just got an email on his phone, I don’t know from who, but it included a photo of you. Hon, get out of there, you’ve been made; they know you’re investigating them. I don’t know what they’ll do if they find you, but if they are the killers … look, call me as soon as you get this message, let me know you’re okay. Oh, fuck it, I’m heading to Jefferson Avenue as soon as I’m out of here. Call me or not, I’ll be there ASAP.” He hung up, not sure what else he could do.

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

****

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

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

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

Finally he heard the click of the driver’s side door being unlocked, and she got in, a swirl of a perfume filling the car as she tossed her purse in the passenger seat and slammed the door. Chanel Number Five? He was pretty sure that was it, although he wasn’t always great at perfume recognition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not little.”

Again, she didn’t appreciate his jokes, but he wasn’t surprised. The hate she was radiating was nuclear, and while he’d be the first to admit that what he’d done - breaking into her car, scaring the shit out of her - was an act deserving of anger, he wasn’t sure he deserved the sheer amount of contempt coming from her. This felt deeper and older, far more personal than could possibly be warranted. “I’d like you to explain something to me, Mia. You’re infected, just like I am, so why would you help kill fellow infecteds? I know some of us can be as self-loathing as gays, but come on - there’s a huge difference between preaching that fags are a scourge that should be wiped from the earth and then picking up a young hustler who’ll beat you with a leather strap before fucking you up the ass, and actually taking out a gun and shooting someone in the head. Admittedly, it’s a small gulf, but it’s there.”

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

“Says the murderer.”

“I am not a murderer!”

“Then why were you meeting with Noah Hammond?”

“Who?”

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

“He says you claim that.”

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

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

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

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

“Can you specify the “them”? I get tossed in with a lot of groups. Gays, infecteds, redheads, men, nerds, hummus eaters …”

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

“I’ve never infected anyone.”

The look she flashed him was sharp as broken glass. “So you say. But we will if we’re around long enough, if we’re not celibate. We might not even mean to, we might not even have been aware we were sick, and we could have given it to someone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you infect someone accidentally Mia?” He asked, going back to what she said previously. He’d already searched the car, she didn’t have a weapon, but it was possible she had one in her purse. “Is that why you hate yourself?”

“I never infected anyone!” She roared. Her face was red, flushed with blood, and she was starting to sweat, cords standing out in her neck. She no longer looked barely legal; she looked every single month of her twenty six years. “And I won’t! Not like Patrick, not like that fucking bitch Kelly, and they won’t infect anyone else either.”

“Kelly? Who’s Kelly?” She knew Patrick? Was that why he was on the list? “Did Patrick infect you?”

“That fucking son of a bitch!” She screeched, her voice raw with rage. “You men just can’t keep it in your fucking pants!”

“It’s a genetic flaw,” he replied, trying to calm her down. But he sensed the tipping point had been passed; there was no pulling her back down to earth now. He’d pushed her too hard, too fast; he hadn’t realized how fragile her sanity was. He knew from the profilers that there was an actual term for this, when a killer who had previously been slick and together started to lose it - it was called decompensating. And Mia was decompensating right before his eyes.

Wow. Eli really knew how to pick women, didn’t he?

She kept casting furtive glances at him in the rearview mirror, looking between him and the road. “You have to be stopped. You know that, don’t you?” She had lowered her voice to an almost calm register, which he knew was bad. She was probably totally disconnected from reality now.

He had no choice but to ride this, see where it landed him. He could take her if he had to, but he imagined she‘d go down hard. She was crazy, after all. At least he wasn‘t human. “I know. Are you gonna be the one to do it?”

She didn’t answer that, just swallowed hard, sweat running down her cheeks like tears, flesh colored from her foundation. “You know what I like about this car?”

Yeah, this couldn’t go anywhere good. “What?”

“I know,” he interrupted hastily. “I know, I’m a total pain in the ass. But I got somethin’ for you.”

Save him from the amateur detectives. “What?”

“Noah’s real address. I called around, I know some guys who -”

“I have his address,” he interrupted, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “He lives at the trailer park with his mother.”

“No, he doesn’t. I mean, he gets his check there, he gives that as his official address, but it’s not true. It’s only his mail drop off point, ‘cause he doesn’t want anybody knowin’ where he actually stays, y‘know. But he’s had Elvez over, and he told Trip about it.”

He was positive Matt wasn’t using again or just high on caffeine, wasn’t he? “Trip?”

“Another bike messenger. It’s short for Tripod, which is -”

“I can guess where that came from,” Roan told him, digging his notebook out of his coat pocket. “Where is it that Noah supposedly lives?”

“Over on Jefferson, at a place called Sun Hill. Apartment 32.”

Even as Roan wrote it down, he found himself looking at it in disbelief. “Sun Hill on Jefferson Avenue?”

“That’d be it. You know it?”

“I’m surprised you don’t.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Almost as bad as Wildwood.” It was another tenement, and in fact it was just a mere two blocks down from the Wildwood. It was smaller, and was on a block more known for its bars and convenience stores than its apartments, but if you wanted to live somewhere where no one noticed you engaging in illegal activities - ranging from drugs to prostitution to outright murder - that was the place you went. No one ever saw anything, even if it happened right in front of them. There was a high concentration of high risk parolees there, as the landlord of Sun Hill ironically used to be one himself. (Admittedly it was back in the ‘70’s, but he still seemed a bit too creepy. His fondness for polyester shirts was unnatural.) “I know bike messengers don’t make much, but he’d be better off living in the trailer park than in that shit hole. I don’t suppose Trip knows why Noah would be there.”

“Well, Elvez supposedly asked him about that, and Noah said he didn’t like living with his Mom ‘cause she was a total drunk and a slut and all sorts of shit like that. He said he got his mail there ‘cause he still checks on his brother and sister, and he didn’t want them knowin’ where to find him.”

He wasn’t sure he followed that. “He doesn’t want his family to know where he lives?”

Matt clicked his tongue, like he was being stupid on purpose. “No - them. Y’know, the government and that sorta shit.”

“He’s a conspiracy nut?”

“I dunno, nobody’s quite sure. They think he might be born again, y’know, ‘cause he has this, like, fundamentalist view on things. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he thinks all drug dealers and users should be executed, that sort of thing.”

Now Roan was very glad he stayed. It didn’t matter the religion - all extremism was bad, and most extremists could be convinced to commit violence with the right prompting. It wasn’t a huge leap from being intolerant to being deadly. Of course he was a cynic who believed everyone could become a killer, given the right circumstances, but that just meant he took too much of his work home with him.

Matt continued talking, which was par for the course. “He’s never been seen out on a date either, or ever talks about a girlfriend, y’know. Some think he may be gay but in the closet, but I think he’s just asexual, y’know? ‘Cause he doesn’t set off my gaydar; he just sets off my “creepy straight guy” - dar … which doesn’t exactly sound right, but you know what I mean.”

“Because he seems to have no sex life or social life?”

“Right.”

“Which just supports the religious extremist supposition.” And did you have a lot of time to date when you were planning to murder a large group of people? Getting away with murder usually required some planning.

Matt seemed to pause for an abnormal amount of time. “I have no idea what that word was, but you sound very manly saying it.”

He chuckled, but he shouldn’t have. He didn’t want to encourage him. “Thanks, I try. Is it likely any of these friends of yours will tell Noah you were asking after him?”

He snorted, a partial laugh mixed with a scoff. “No. Even the guys that kinda like him find him creepy.”

“Does that include Elvez?”

“Oh yeah. He’s nice to everybody, y’know, but you can tell he isn’t sure what to make of him. Still, it isn’t like Noah has any other friends.”

At least that his work friends and other peripheral acquaintances knew of. He probably kept his lives separate like a good boy.

He’d been watching Elvez and Noah throughout this conversation, but now he saw Noah grab for his cell phone like it was ringing, but he didn’t talk into it, he just looked at the screen, and his face went astonishingly blank. A text message? Roan guessed that whatever the message was, it didn’t make him happy, and he was struggling not to show it. If he was right, he expected Noah to make an excuse and leave, and it looked like that was exactly what he was doing. “Matt, I have to go. Thanks for your help, but stop it now. I don’t want to have to save your ass again.”

“Yes mom,” he said sarcastically, but he could hear the smile in his voice. “If this bastard killed Ash, nail him to the wall.”

“I intend to.” He flipped his phone shut and dropped it back in his pocket as Noah got up, leaving his coffee cup behind, and retrieved his bike. Roan’s binoculars were also the kind that folded up, so he was able to put those away and leave the bank just as Noah started pedaling North down the main drag. Roan figured he could follow on foot, he knew he had the stamina to run after him no matter how far he went, but then he’d be at the mercy of the traffic, and he’d be pretty conspicuous.

His bike was pretty conspicuous in the sense that it was a motorcycle, and a very nice motorcycle at that, but it gave him the ability to be more mobile than a car in this traffic, especially while on the trail of a bike messenger. The trick was keeping far enough back that Noah - whom he had to assume was a paranoid sort - wouldn’t suspect he was being followed.

He tried to guess where Noah was heading based on his general direction, but he was shocked by where he actually went: the Kinko’s where Reese Campbell was the manager. Wasn’t that a coincidence?

He parked the bike in an alley beside the dollar teriyaki place, hiding it behind the rather smelly dumpster, and strolled into the Kinko’s (it wasn’t like either Reese or Noah knew who he was). The copy place was surprisingly busy, but he recognized Reese right away - Amy Campbell had a chatty MySpace page full of pictures of herself, her husband, and some of her friends (surprisingly, she didn’t mention her politics either) - a bald man whose scalp had a sunburned reddish tinge, and whose gut strained at his button down white shirt. He was talking to Noah on the far side of the shop, a counter between them, their voices so hushed he couldn’t hear them over the noise of copying, faxing, and customers, but he could tell from their body postures that Noah was upset about something, and while Reese wasn’t happy either he was trying to calm the boy down. He watched them from the corner of his eye as he pretended to be fascinated by the amount of papers available, and it suddenly occurred to him what might have upset Noah: Jordan had just been arrested. Could all three men be connected?

He could connect Reese to Barlow, and Noah to Barlow only through his mother, but Jordan was a non-starter as far as they knew. Maybe a little more digging into his background was necessary. But Roan was uncomfortable with the conspiracy he was starting to smell here. The reason why most killers worked solo - beyond the obvious fact that serial murderers usually killed as some grotesque parody of intimacy - was the same reason vast conspiracies rarely existed: the more people involved, the more likely someone was to talk or to fuck up. Yet if there was a group behind the killings, plotting, planning, perhaps sharing gunman duties, it might explain why the cops had absolutely zero to go on. They were looking for a single killer, but in fact there was group that had managed to plan its hits pretty well. But the thing about groups was there was often a fragile dynamic, and it was more than possible that yanking one of the people out could cause the whole thing to collapse.

The best case scenario was they were able to hold Jordan for a while, he wouldn’t lawyer up immediately, and he broke and sang like a drunken American Idol contestant, but Roan knew better than to count on best case scenarios. If he could make a solid connection here between Jordan and Barlow, he could call up Murphy, apologize profusely for running his own investigation on an active case, and turn it all over to her. He honestly didn’t care that he’d get no credit at all, and might in fact get a lot of shit - he just wanted these fuckers stopped.

He was trying to work out how such a cabal might function as Noah finally left, and Reese turned and headed back into his office, looking sweaty and vaguely dyspeptic. It would make the most sense, efficiency wise, if the duties were split: one to hack the New Horizons system and pick out the likely targets, another to scout and confirm target (they had to have some knowledge of when these people were home, when they were alone, when their streets or apartment buildings weren‘t so busy), another to drive, and the last to do the shooting. So a minimum of four people? Noah, Reese, Jordan, and … Barlow? The math tracked, but he wasn’t sure the people did. Who amongst them was a hacker? And who was the most likely triggerman?

He couldn’t follow Noah out instantly, so that pretty much meant he’d lost the tail, but not really. Matt - super annoying puppy that he was - had given him Noah’s real, “secret” address. He had time to go home, trade the bike for the rental car, grab his laptop, and stake out Sun Hill until Noah got home. And where he went after work might be a hell of a lot more illuminating than following him on his rounds through the city.

He felt his cell vibrate in his pocket on the drive home, but there was no way to use a bike and talk on a cell at the same time (well, maybe with one of those hands free models, but he wasn‘t sure how that would fit on his head along with the helmet), so he just let it go, figuring they’d call back if it was important. When it started buzzing a second time less than a minute later, he pulled off into a gas station and answered the phone.

It was Paris. “I just got the weirdest call from Barlow,” he said. Did he sound slightly breathless? He thought he had before. He was okay, wasn’t he?

“Weird how?”

“He wanted to meet me as soon as possible. He said it was really important but he couldn’t talk about it over the phone. I agreed to meet him at the Road House at five thirty. Isn’t that interesting timing?”

It definitely was. Was that who Reese had called? Had he gone back to his office after talking to Noah and called Tim? “Tres suspicious. Was Jordan taken in?”

“Oh yeah. I told Eli what I’d found, and when the cops arrived, Eli gave them permission to search the shed, since it’s his property. They found the gun, Jordan claimed he’d never seen it before and had no idea how it got there, but a routine run on his name turned up a bench warrant. Seems he got a DUI in Fairview last year and never showed up in court.” He paused briefly. “Did you just say tres suspicious ? Could you be more gay? Is that possible?”

He smirked, trying hard not to laugh. “Girlfriend, please.”

“You’re doing the snaps, aren’t you? You can’t say that without the snaps.” Paris let that hang for a moment, just long enough to signal the topic shift. “What do you think’s going on, Ro?”

“I think Reese, Noah, Barlow, and Jordan are all in on this. There’s enough concern about Jordan being taken in that I suspect he was vital to the next hit. Maybe that is the gun that’s been used in his tool kit, or they’re afraid a search of his home or car will turn up something incriminating.”

“Or he’ll talk.”

“All potential disasters.”

“How do you think they’re all connected?”

So Roan explained what he’d just seen, and what Matt had told him about Noah. Paris’s reaction to this was a succinct, “Well, shit.”

“I think we may have kicked over a hornet’s nest here.”

“So why do you think Tim needs to see Kevin so badly?”

That was a good question, and there were a couple of troubling possibilities. “It seems early to slot you into Jordan’s place.”

“Too bad. If they asked me if I wanted to kill someone, we could get them arrested on the spot.”

He rubbed his eyes, trying to work out the timing of staking out Noah and listening in on Paris and Barlow, and he knew almost immediately that he couldn’t do it. He had never been able to bilocate, and it was unlikely he’d learn to do it in the next couple of hours. “Yeah, but I doubt they’ll make it that easy for us. Listen, since I’m going to be tailing Noah, I’m gonna call Phil and see if he has an operative free that can shadow you tonight, okay?” Phil was the fellow private detective who ran a huge operation over in Springfield, and they occasionally helped each other out. Phil owed him, because the last gig they did together it was Par and him working as floaters at that conference Phil was providing security for. That’s where he got all the name tags for their appliances.

Par scoffed. “I don’t need a shadow. I can handle myself.”

“I know you can, but you’re meeting with a guy who may be in a super group of serial killers. Even I wouldn’t go into a situation like that alone.”

“Bullshit.”

“Par, please, don’t do this now.”

“You’re tailing Noah alone, aren’t you? He’s in the same super group if you’re right.”

“Yes, but he’s never going to know I’m tailing him.”

“Ideally.”

“Yes, and if I dumb enough to let him see me, I deserve what I get.” He sighed, aware that this discussion could go nowhere positive. “I don’t want to fight. You don’t send someone into the field alone, and that’s that. I’m not going into the field, I’m loitering on the sidelines. You’re going in, and you’re having back up.”

Par let out an exasperated sigh, and Roan glanced at the traffic gliding by on the road. People honked as risky lane changes almost caused accidents, and that was always the first sign that rush hour was almost here. People’s driving got worse and worse as more cars got on the road, and he wasn’t sure how that worked, but it did. Maybe it was the auto corollary of people being stupider in larger groups than they were on their own. “Is that why you went after your shooter all by yourself?”

Oh, he should have known he was going to trot that out. “I didn’t. I called Gordo and Seb as back up. Ask them if you don‘t believe me.”

“And not me?”

“You’re not police - you couldn’t have arrested this crackhead fucker.” As soon as that escaped his mouth, he regretted it, and rolled his eyes at his own stupidity.

“He was a crackhead?” Paris repeated in angry disbelief. “Jesus Christ, Roan! No wonder you weren’t going to tell me about it.”

“It wasn’t that big a deal, really. It sounds worse than it was …”

“How badly did you get hurt?”

“You saw it for yourself, just some kidney punches.”

“Fuck you. That’s after you partially transformed and healed yourself. What happened before?”

“Nothing. The guy was high and inept, and he didn’t have his gun. Ask Gordo if you don’t believe me.” Okay, that was a partial lie, but not by much. Sam didn’t crush any bones in his neck when he attempted to strangle him, and repeatedly head butting him hadn’t done any harm to his hard head. He glanced at his watch, the cuff one that was covering his Leo tattoo. It just seemed like the best idea on a stake out, just in case. “Look, meet me at home, we can argue there.”

“I don’t want to argue.”

“Neither do I! So what the hell’s this about?”

Again with the exasperated sigh, but at least it didn’t sound as angry this time. “Don’t shut me out, Ro. I’m getting the sense that you are, and I’m not sure what I’ve done to make you do that.”

Oh great, just what he needed: industrial strength guilt. “God, Paris, it’s not you. I just … I don’t know how to handle this. Just be patient with me, okay?”

“I have been, hon, but I can only wait so long before I start to feel like a complete idiot.”

“You’re not; you’ve never been that.”

“My sisters will disagree with you,” he replied, a humorous tinge to his voice. But it faded away long before he added, “I’ll see you at home.”

He hung up after Paris did, wondering if he was fucking this up. He just wasn’t good with relationships; he was used to being on his own, doing things on his own, relying on no one but himself. It made things infinitely easier. Lonely, sure, but easier. He trusted Paris, he knew that he did and could, and yet it was still so hard for him to do so in a meaningful way. He was so accustomed to betrayal and disappointment, and he didn’t even think it was anyone’s fault; the human animal seemed built for betrayal, for the casual meting out of pain, and he almost expected it on some level, even though he never abided it when it happened. There was a difference between expectation and acceptance, and he was proud he hadn’t crossed that line.

He wished he was one of those guys who was good at anonymous, quickie sex, but even that required a level of trust he wasn’t comfortable handing out to just anyone. He probably should have been straight, as he figured he was an awful gay man, but that just wasn’t how he turned out.

Life was full of perversity like that.

****

Once he got home, he changed into another set of anonymous clothes - he did go into the Kinko’s, after all - and did another search on Noah Hammond, but it was much the same as before: he was so squeaky clean he could have been an honorary Mormon. A search on the address Matt provided him showed that that apartment had supposedly been rented out to a “John Smith”. Incredible. Was no one good at thinking up pseudonyms anymore?

Paris came home with some take out Vietnamese food, and for a little while they just pretended that everything was okay, but there was an obvious awkwardness. While he was eating his curry, he decided to tell Paris, with no preamble, about the scar on his chest.

He hadn’t been in a lot of abusive foster homes; most foster parents were do-gooders who meant well. The problems were the people who actually thought this was an easy way to get money from the state (it wasn’t), or one person who wanted to be a foster parent in a couple and the other who didn’t, but went along with it anyways. They were usually quite bitter and resentful, and usually took it out on the kids.

So was the case with the Swansons. Phyllis was a church happy do-gooder who saw helping these kids as “god’s work” - Roan found her overbearing, but he appreciated that she never tried to convert him. Henry was different; Henry was an extremely angry, controlling man who, in a clinch, got intimidated by Phyllis. Roan suspected that he had an Oedipal complex that he never got over, and he saw Phyllis as much as his mother as his wife (Henry’s mother was a scary, creepy old Bible thumper, so the through line between her and Phyllis was pretty obvious). Henry had a tendency to smack him around when Phyllis was at one of her many church functions, which was often.

Sometimes he wondered if being exposed to so many dysfunctional heterosexual relationships was why he so happily embraced being gay, but honestly he had no idea. It was fun to think about, though.

His memories of childhood were very fuzzy things; he only remembered scraps, most of them bad. He could remember being in the Swansons garage, for example, but he could no longer remember why he was there. Henry was mad at him for something again - and again he couldn’t remember why, but that wasn’t his bad memory; that was because he rarely knew why Henry was mad at him beyond the fact that he simply existed - and Henry made to smack him, but Roan saw it coming and was big enough at this stage to catch his arm and shove it back; he was ten, after all. This infuriated Henry more, so he grabbed something blindly off his work bench (which was actually little used, as Henry had no patience for anything), and hit Roan with it. He jumped back, avoiding most of it, but what Henry had picked up and hit him with was a saw, and the tip of the saw caught him, the teeth sharp enough to rip open his shirt and the skin beneath. Blood was everywhere before Roan even realized he’d been cut, and it even seemed to take Henry a moment to grasp it. He could still remember the naked terror on his face, making him look a thousand years old as he held the bloody saw, and then his eyes drifted towards it, and when he saw the blood running down the blade he threw it across the garage like the metal was so hot it was burning his skin. He started shouting for Roan to get away from him, so horrified his skin had turned the color of old oatmeal, and fled the garage like he had the devil on his ass. It took him a moment to work out why, it wasn’t like he’d hit him with the saw, but then he figured it out as blood continued pouring down his chest, turning his shirt red, dribbling down his jeans and pooling on the oil stained cement floor.

It took him a moment to understand why Henry was so freaked out, but then he tried to staunch the blood with his hand, and that was when he got it: his blood. His diseased, pestilent blood. He was suddenly full of rage, just furious, and he began splattering his blood all over the garage, collecting it in his hands and flinging it all over the room, smearing it on the walls, the workbench and tools, even Henry’s car. He wanted to bleed to death, he hoped he did, as his disease would taint this fucking place and everything in it. He wanted them to live with it, to live with this. He was so angry he knew he was acting like a fucking crazy person, but he couldn’t stop; his rage was bigger than he was. He thought he was screaming, but he didn’t know for sure; he remembered nothing but red hot rage.

An ambulance team arrived - Henry had said that Roan had “accidentally” cut himself - and he still remembered the laconic, sleepy eyed EMT who knew immediately that Henry’s story made no sense with the wound involved, and that he’d lost an awful lot of blood for someone who’d “just” done it. He could remember that the patch on his jacket said O’Neil, and he had hair the color of driftwood, and his touch on the cut was very gentle; he suspected O’Neil was his very first crush. Although his partner, a wiry guy who seemed more comfortable around Henry than around the kid with the diseased blood, seemed nervous, O’Neil was too much of a pro to care. He looked him square in the eyes (he could barely remember the color of O’Neil’s eyes, but he was pretty sure they were as brown as his hair) and said, “You didn’t do this to yourself, did you?” Roan shook his head, and glared over O’Neil’s broad shoulder at the cringing, terrified figure of Henry in the garage doorway. He didn’t need to say it - out of the four of them in the garage, three of them knew what had happened. The EMTs took him to the hospital, and he never went back to the Swansons again. He ended up back at a state foster care group home, and they said he’d probably be left with a nasty scar, but it had faded pretty well over time. Oh sure it was still there, a ghost scar that seemed to trace the contour of his collarbone where the tip of the saw had gotten caught in his skin, but it had healed a lot more cleanly than anyone had ever expected.

While he told the story he’d kept looking down at his curry, moving the vegetables and chicken pieces around the Styrofoam container, rearranging rice that was the color of saffron. He didn’t want to see what was on Par’s face, because he was afraid he wouldn’t like it. But after he told his story, Par reached across the breakfast bar and put his hand over his, and gasped, “Oh god, sweetheart, that’s horrible. I hope they threw his ass in jail.”

He shook his head, sparing a quick glance at Paris. His eyes were shining with empathetic tears, but none of them had fallen, and he was glad about that. “No, nothing really happened to him; the laws were a bit looser then, you understand, a little abuse here and there was tolerated more. I just hope it took him eighty years to decontaminate his fucking garage.”

Paris squeezed his hand, and he looked indignant as well as sad. “If I ever find the guy, I don’t care if he’s a multiple amputee in an old people’s home, I’m kicking his fucking ass. Hitting a kid with a saw?! Jesus.”

He leaned over the bar and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

That seemed to startle Paris, or at least deeply confuse him. “What for?”

“For caring, for putting up with me. I can barely stand myself at the best of times.”

Paris reached across, burying his hand in his hair, and pulled his head over the bar, meeting him half way and kissing him full on the mouth. He tasted like sweet green tea and bo kho. After the kiss, he leaned his forehead against his for a moment, and Roan felt a surprising surge of relief. He hadn’t fucked this up too much; this wasn’t beyond fixing. “You are a wonderful, amazing man,” Paris told him. “And if you don’t give yourself a break, I’m gonna kick your ass too.”

That made him smile. He probably meant it too, but it was still oddly touching.

He called Phil after their combo lunch-dinner (well he was on a stake out tonight, and Paris was meeting Barlow in a seedy bar - this was probably their last chance to eat for a while), and luckily he was able to dispatch Jamal, who didn’t have any open cases at the moment. He knew Jamal; he was ex-military intelligence, like Phil himself, but he had a better sense of humor in general. He was on the short side, but built like a fireplug, and he had no doubt at all that if things went really horrible that Jamal could kick the ass of the entire population of the bar and not even break a sweat, which was exactly the type of person he wanted shadowing Par tonight. Paris and Jamal decided to meet in the parking lot of a Wendy’s just over from the Road House and work out the cues in case something went wrong. (Unlikely, but it was always vital to have them.)

Roan left in the rental first, feeling a bit better about things in general. Admittedly the records search on Jordan turned up nothing that connected him in any way to Barlow or Reese or Noah, it just reinforced Eli’s view that he was a “fuck up”. Clearly he had problems with alcohol, as he had a few DUIs on his record, and a couple of arrests for public drunkenness and urinating in public (classy again), although none since last year. He seemed like the type you didn’t want in on an intricate assassination plan, so Roan couldn’t imagine they used him for anything really important. He was close to Eli, though - did he tell them how best to frame him?

He parked down the street from Sun Hill, in front of an abandoned building whose broken windows were covered with wooden planks and gang tags, and was once again glad he insisted on tinted windows on the Taurus. Since he assumed he was in for a long stake out, he brought a thermos full of hot, sweet black tea (full of caffeine and sugar - a one two punch that should keep him hyper alert), a sizable empty plastic bottle to pee in (disgusting, but necessary when you couldn’t leave your post to piss), and an audio book that he slipped into the CD player. It was a Stephen King one, so it’d last all night, and possibly into next morning. At least audio books made these long, dull stake outs a bit more tolerable.

He tried to focus on the front of Sun Hill and ignore all the drug deals going on around him, as well as the johns picking up the occasional prostitute (mostly female, but a couple male; in fact, he recognized two of the women, DeeDee and Cherry, and one of the boys, Justin, from his time on the police beat). He’d been there for a bit over an hour, sunset making the sky cycle through the spectacular crimson shades that you could only see in polluted areas, a red explosion like neon blood painted across the bottom of the clouds, when a car far too nice for the area pulled up to the curb outside Sun Hill. It was a silver ‘04 Audi A8 with some minor denting in the back, but still a lot newer and classier than any car that ever parked around here (some of the johns’ cars were extremely expensive, making you wonder why they were trolling for cheap tail down here). As he took a photo of the plate, he saw a woman get out, and she instantly struck him as familiar.

She was petite with a very slender, willowy frame, her black hair styled in a short pixie cut that just reinforced the youthfulness of her elfin face; she looked barely legal, but she carried herself like a much older woman, making her true age a crapshoot. She looked around nervously, giving him a good look and shot of her profile as she drew her leather jacket around her anxiously and walked into the plain brick building that was the Sun Hill Apartments.

Holy shit. It was Mia DeSoto.