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

“Tweaks?”

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

Oh, so he was one of those - a guy with a crap house where he let teens he didn’t know stay over. Obviously a druggie - Tweak indicated a “tweaker”, someone into the meth or ecstasy scene - who was either trying to fit in with a crowd he had outgrown, or simply wanted to take advantage of. Either way, he probably had a sheet of minor crimes as long as his forearm; not a major league bad guy, just a loser that teenagers would think was “cool” for about three years, then they’d wake up and see the crabs and smell the spilled bong water.

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

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

He was vaguely certain of the location. The East Side was actually relatively rural, and the only Westerly Road he knew of was a couple miles’ down from his place, so that would have put Tweaks at the butt end of the East Side, closer to him than to the Church. But that part of the East End was - no shock - a haven for meth houses. “Like, thanks,” he said, with sarcasm that seemed to miss Nose Ring entirely. If he had said “like” one more time, he was going to punch that kid in the stomach.

Paris was still hogging the dance floor with his harem of admirers, but Roan shoved his way into the inner circle, and simply stood there, enduring death looks from teen girls in too much lip gloss, until he finally caught Paris’s eye. He simply jerked his head towards the door, then turned and fought his way through the crowd, leaving the auditorium. Roan went out a side door, so he didn’t have to run into Rainbow or Smithers again. He realized he hadn’t gone to see Eli, but fuck it; he could always come back and kick his ass later.

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

“Yeah, a kid thought he recognized Danny as one of the kid’s hanging around a crash pad.

owned by a burn out named Tweaks. I’m just confirming the address.” After a moment - and a peek at Paris’s wonderfully flat stomach out of the corner of his eye as he continued to use his t-shirt to mop up sweat - he asked, “You didn’t brush off your jeans, did you?”

Paris’s wry look didn’t go away; in fact, it was starting to get really annoying. “It’s kind of cute, you know. To know you actually have some kind of insecurity somewhere.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He tossed the laptop in back seat, and suddenly regretted asking. “No, forget it, we have to - “

Paris reached over and grabbed his chin, turning his face towards his. He scooted closer on the seat too - boy, these Mustangs had more seat room than you’d think. “You are so funny. You do know I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone, right? Well, admittedly, I never really loved anyone before, but saying that blunts the impact. I know you’ve got the whole had boiled detective thing going on, but I know what you’re really like. I know that under all that armor you’re the most decent man I’ve ever met. You’re my hero.”

He slid Paris’s hand off his face, and looked out the windshield. All this “relationship talk” made him feel deeply uncomfortable. Showing emotion was a weakness, and he really didn’t like showing it in any place that might be considered public. It was hard enough in private. “Why don’t we talk about this later, okay?”

Paris sighed, but was still smiling. “Your way of avoiding it. But it’s true, you know. Everybody in the world had given up on me, myself included, and who comes along and gives a damn? A complete stranger; you. And I know the game, you know. People want something from me, I want something from them, it’s a fair exchange. So when you didn’t want anything from me I couldn’t figure it out. You know how hard it was for me to believe you didn’t have an angle? God, you weren’t even trying to get into my pants - I had to make the first move. For all your misanthropic bluster, you just want to help people, to keep them from getting hurt. You’re the bravest, sweetest man I’ve ever known. And you’re cute when you blush.”

“I am not blushing,” he protested, but before he could get really mad, Paris kissed him. Paris was a born manipulator - and he didn’t mean that in a bad way, he just was; to some people, it came as easily as breathing - and this was probably more of that, but he was one of the greatest kissers he’d ever encountered. His lips were soft, and he tasted of those wintergreen mints he popped like candy, even though they were strong enough to make Roan’s eyes water.

Roan tangled his hand in Paris’s downy hair, and became aware that he didn’t want to stop. His mind was sliding off towards realms that had nothing to do with the case at hand - either case - and that was bad because he was still on the clock. It was Paris’s increased pheromone load - or at least that’s what he wanted to believe. Normally he wasn’t this unprofessional.

He pushed Paris away gently and caught his breath. “We have a case here,” he said, by way of explanation.

He gave him a sensuous smile, full of promise, and quirked an eyebrow. “You know what they say: all work and no play …”

“Pays the bills.” He dry washed his face, and tried to fight down his own desire. What was an immediate turn off? He imagined Stovak, and that did it; he was better than a shower in liquid nitrogen. “God, did I just sound like someone’s Dad there?”

Paris sat back in the passenger seat, apparently conceding his point. “A bit, yeah. Throw in a “You goddamn kids, get offa my lawn!” and you’d sound like my grandpa.”

He mock shuddered. “Shit. I need to get a life before I start pulling my pants up to my armpits.”

“What I’m looking forward to is seeing you in black socks and sandals.”

“If I ever do that, you have my permission to shoot me in the head.”

Paris saluted, grinning brightly. “Aye aye, ese.”

Roan started the car and drove off, heading to the side of town that wasn’t so much bad as just pathetic. But since Danny was a rich kid from one of the best neighborhoods, the East End would probably seem exotic, like walking into a Diane Arbus photo. (If he even knew what that was.)

Paris turned on the radio, fiddling with it until he settled on a Franz Ferdinand song, and Roan found himself glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, watching the sun make his hair shine.

He was envious of Paris’s innate brazenness at times; he honestly didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about him. Once they started dating he’d told him the whole sordid details of his life, which would have made a fabulous memoir. He was a good kid with good parents, growing up in a wholesome suburb of Vancouver, and a star player on the football team as a teenager, dating the hottest girl in school, Darcy, a cheerleader (of course). Publicly. Privately, he was also dating his best friend’s older brother, a closeted homosexual named Brent, who was the lead singer and guitar player of a garage band that honestly thought he liked girls. He juggled Darcy and Brent for two years - from sixteen to eighteen - and no one ever found out; no one even had an inkling, including Brent’s younger brother, Paris’s best friend. (He said they made an excuse for him being at their house so much by claiming Brent was giving him “guitar lessons”; and Paris actually did learn a chord or two, but inadvertently). In his senior year he switched from football to basketball, because all the football players were using steroids and he refused to use anything that “shrunk his junk”, but he was good enough at it that he got a scholarship to college based on his athletic prowess. In the meantime, he said the sex was much hotter with Brent, but then again, he was a musician (Paris seemed to think that made a difference, but Roan wasn’t sure why). He was pretty sure that they were both in love with him, but Paris said he never loved either of them, and he really didn’t know why.

He broke up with both of them by the time he got to college, and he continued his juggling ways, going out openly with women, fooling around privately with men. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of it - or so he claimed - he just felt it wasn’t his place to break a perfectly good womanizing athlete stereotype. Of course, when his loose ways caught up with him - when he was deliberately infected by a woman with the tiger strain and a grudge against slightly whorish men (one of whom apparently infected her) - his “perfect” life completely fell apart. But since he went “a bit nuts”, he never did discover what the actual fallout was; he dropped out of college and out of life, and hadn’t spoken to his family since before his infection. That was Paris’s one weakness, the thing that made him balk, become inexplicably afraid - his parents. Roan had tried to get him to call them, drop them a letter or an e-mail, let them know he was okay, but he wouldn’t. He never got him to tell him why he wouldn’t; he claimed he had a happy childhood, that his parents and his sister were not the type to be cruel, but he just “wasn’t ready” to talk to them. Roan got the sense that he was afraid of facing their scorn and shame, that they’d kick him out officially and Paris wasn’t ready to face it. But if they were as kind as Paris claimed, they wouldn’t do that. So was Paris needlessly afraid, or was he lying about his relationship with his parents?

Roan knew precious little about family relationships. His mother died shortly after his birth, he had no idea who his father was, and he spent his life in and out of state homes and foster homes, although the latter was rare - who wanted to raise some freak child, even temporarily? Those that did take him in briefly were only in it for the money, and were usually pretty nasty towards him. One couple reinforced a broom closet as a type of jail cell and kept him in it all the time, even when it wasn’t his time of the month. They also once burned him with an iron; he still had the ghost of a scar on the back of his right hand, a two and a half inch diagonal line thicker than your average scar. He couldn’t remember what he had supposedly done to deserve that.

What a pair to draw to they were, huh? Neither of them really had a template for a healthy relationship, so how they’d managed so far was a bit of a mystery. Part of him expected something to go wrong eventually, but he tried not to concentrate on it for some stupid, superstitious fear of causing it to happen. After all, look what happened to him and Connor.

It was a twenty five minute drive to the East End, and you could see the transition from afar, as buildings became fewer and farther between, broken up by weedy vacant lots, trailer parks with names like “Ponderosa Glen”, and sad little strip malls, all of which looked like they’d been covered with a thin layer of yellowish grime from the nearby factories. Even the sky began to take on an odd, faintly yellow tinge, like an old urine stain on a discarded mattress, and Roan wanted to just turn the car around now. No good could come from a place like this; this was a Bruce Springsteen song kind of place, the kind of place you ran from and never looked back.

Eventually he found the house that must have been Tweaks’, and Nose Ring hadn’t been kidding about it being just beyond the railroad tracks; they were so close to the house it might as well have been in his front yard. Tweaks’ house was the type of pre-fab split level that was popular twenty five years ago, and whatever color it used to be, it was now the grimly color of curdled cream. The paint was peeling, the windows so dirty they could have been soaped, and in the wide, dusty patch of dirt that made up the front yard was a very battered looking Toyota Corolla, and a Mazda with a busted out windshield and a missing left rear tire. The house sat alone on an acre of weedy, overgrown meadow, separated from a paper processing plant by a scraggly copse of pines about two acres to the northwest. Getting out of the car, Roan thought he could smell dioxin on the wind.

“Wow, this place looks fucking depressing,” Paris said, getting out of the car and joining him in gazing at the house. “I want to slit my wrists right now.”

“Crash pads rarely make Architectural Digest, “ he said, walking up to the water stained front door.

He was about five feet from it when he smelled the blood.

Roan stopped and held out his arm to stop Paris. “What is it?” Paris asked.

“Call 911,” he told him, resuming his approach to the house. He was taking deep breaths, parsing the smells, and beyond the heat baked earth and smells of mildew, the smell of leaking motor oil, there was the sickly sweet, unbearably meaty scent of rotting flesh.

Paris stiffened, all humor gone from his expression and his voice. “What? Why? What do I tell them?”

Roan had to make a decision, and do it now. Possibly taint physical evidence by busting in and searching for possible survivors, or wait for the meat wagon when someone could be inside, alive but barely hanging on? There really wasn’t much of a choice. “Tell them we have a possible homicide here, and maybe some injured as well. Do it now - the cops always take their fucking time coming to this part of town.”

“What do you smell?”

“Blood. Death.”

“Death?”

“Don’t ask, just do it,” he ordered, then backed up and ran at the front door, turning his shoulder towards it before he hit. If the door was unlocked, he’d feel like a right asshole.

As it was, it wasn’t. There was a crack of wood as he hit the door, as the jamb inside splintered and gave way, the door swinging open with some reluctance. As soon as he was inside the messy house, he was almost overwhelmed with the smell of blood, rot, and shit, and heard a loud, constant buzz. Roan tried not to touch anything with his fingers as he wandered through the house, tasting death in the back of his throat. He found the first body in the hall, half way inside the bathroom doorway, their lower half severed messily from their top half, although it was hard to tell beneath the undulating blanket of black flies covering the body, the source of the loud hum. The body looked like that of a young Caucasian female, and her visible flesh was discolored enough that he knew she’d been dead for some time.

The next bodies were in what was probably a bedroom, although there was no bed per se, just sleeping bags spread over a floor peppered with crumpled fast food wrappers. One of the bodies was that of a lanky black teen, his guts spilling out like someone had turned him into a Human piñata, and the second body was that of a young Asian female, her head connected to her body by only the slenderest ribbon of sinew. Her blood was splattered all over the walls and the boarded up window, dried to a dark, dung colored brown. Flies swarmed on them as well, ignoring him as they feasted on this banquet of flesh. If he was correct about the body positions, the boy had tried to protect the girl, and both had died anyways.

The fourth body was in the kitchen, propped up in a sitting position against the refrigerator, a fallen gallon jug of milk adding a sour stink to the general miasma of death. This was an older Caucasian man with brittle, thinning hair the color and texture of wire, most of his throat and the top of his chest reduced to bloody shreds of meat currently covered by flies and a couple of wasps. As he walked past what must have been the body of Tweaks, he saw a wasp crawl over one of his milky, open eyes.

The kitchen window was broken out, which was how all the flies and the wasps got in. But Roan looked out to confirm a suspicion, and he got it. There was no broken glass in the house at all; it sparkled in the overgrown grass of the backyard like ice.

Whatever had killed them had been locked inside with them, and had gotten out the only way it could, by breaking through the window. And he was afraid of just who it might have been. But he couldn’t think that; he had no proof.

Just because Danny was tentatively identified as being here didn’t mean he ever was, it didn’t mean he’d been infected and already transformed. It could just be a terrible coincidence.

But Roan had never trusted coincidences, and the more there were, the harder they were to believe.