Finally - and as politely as he could - he asked for Ashley’s key. Matt gulped down his third glass of Coke (no wonder he was so jazzed) and stood up, digging in his pants pocket. “Sure, let’s go.”

Roan glared at him, but he seemed oblivious to it. “I’m going alone. By trespassing on a closed crime scene, we’re committing a crime.”

Matt found the key and pulled it out. It was alone on a key chain that doubled as a bottle opener. “Not if you’re with me. I have her key, and I’ll just say I’m like checking on her plants or something. You’re simply with me.”

He almost admired his gall. “No way in hell they’ll buy that.”

Matt made a “tsk” noise and rolled his eyes. “Yeah they will. If we get caught, let me do the talking. I’ll so annoy the shit out of them they’ll agree to anything to make me shut up and go away.”

Now Roan did briefly admire his gall. “You know?”

“What, that I talk too much? I have ears, sweetie, how could I not know? Sometimes even I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about; it just comes gushing out, y’know? I call it diarrhea of the mouth.” He jingled the key, and pulled his black motocross style leather jacket off the back of his chair. “We goin’?”

Roan paid the bill even though he‘d hardly had anything, simply because he figured baristas just couldn’t make that much. Matt had walked here - he lived with a roommate in an apartment four blocks away - so they took the Mustang by default.

It was unlikely they’d get caught, it was just as excuse to try and escape Chatty Cathy in the passenger seat (and yes, he kept rattling on, although Roan tuned him out). But just venturing into the Wildwood seemed like a risky proposition, and he wondered how Ashley had managed it on a daily basis. She was either very brave or very desperate.

The Wildwood looked exactly the same as it has the last time he’d been here, two years ago on a domestic violence call. It was a square six story apartment block with brick facing that had faded to a sickly brownish grey and was crumbling like rotted teeth. Gang tags were the only true spots of color, warped letters and numerals as bloated as water logged corpses, their meaning cryptically elusive to most people. All the first floor windows either had bars or were simply boarded over.

If defeat looked like anything, it looked like the Wildwood.

“Wow, this looks like a crack house I once went to,” Matt commented, following Roan into the piss soaked ”lobby” of the building. He didn’t ask, because he really didn’t want to know.

Inside the Wildwood it was murky dark, like they were submerged beneath a polluted lake, and the smell of urine, cooked food, spilled beer, and the sickly sweet and sharply chemical smell of crack rendered the hallways a pungent, unpleasant stew. Roan had cinnamon gum in his coat pocket and popped a stick in his mouth, using its overwhelming smell and taste to block out everything else. It was mostly successful.

Ashley lived on the third floor, third apartment on the left. Yellow crime scene tape still crisscrossed the whitewashed door, although someone had scrawled on it in thick black ink Kitty fucker. That warning was probably the only reason the tape hadn’t been broken - who was going to touch anything a kitty fucker had touched and possibly contaminated with their infected blood?

Matt - who had been blessedly silent since they entered the building - carefully unlocked the door, and they both went in, ducking under the tape and being careful not to break it. Inside, Ashley’s apartment was even darker than the hallway, and the smell of blood and death was so overpowering that Roan rocked back on his heels. Son of a bitch, no one had cleaned it up yet had they?

Matt must have smelled a bit of it, as he cupped his hand over his nose and mouth, but his eyes widened as he saw the metal shutters that blocked out every scrap of light. “Whoa.”

“She was infected,” he explained. “If you’re going into your transformational phase, you have to block the windows, otherwise you’re liable to jump through them or die trying.”

“Oh. I didn’t think she was kinky. She never struck me that way, y’know? She actually seemed kinda lonely.”

Roan’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, although he pulled out the small Maglite he always carried with him. (Essential P.I. tools: cell phone, digital camera, flashlight, notebook, a laptop if you could carry it and had a wi-fi connection, and maybe a gun, but only if you were really paranoid.) He could have turned on a light - no one was going to see it from the street as long as they kept the shutters down - but he didn’t want to lose what he had of his “night vision” right now. Also, if he could keep Matt from seeing the huge rusty brown stain on the cheap yellowish industrial carpet, he felt things would go better. “No friends, no boyfriend and/or girlfriend? Sounds lonely.”

“Yeah.” Matt fumbled something out of his coat pocket, and Roan didn’t really see what until he snapped it, and a bright but icy blue glow emanated from it. It actually lit up the area around Matt quite well.

“Do you always carry a glow stick?” he wondered, kind of amused. Somehow it figured a party guy like Matt would just happen to have a glow stick handy.

“Naw, I just remembered the last time I wore this coat, I was at Panic. Hey, if you’re gay, how come I’ve never seen you there?”

Panic was the hot gay nightclub in town, and he was sure the little bit of black script at the base of the glow stick identified it as coming from there. “I’m not into the nightclub scene. It’s too … techno for me.”

“Oh man, you’re missing out. You need to come down if only to see this guy who shows up like every other coupla weeks. Don’t know his name, but we call him the Hottie down there, ‘cause he is. I mean he’s fucking gorgeous; you’d cut off your left nut to be with this guy. He has guys lining up three deep to dance with him, and ten deep to buy him drinks. He always comes with this fag hag, she looks like a young Margaret Cho, and he’s just the world’s biggest cock tease, y’know? He’s got great moves, he’s cute, he looks like he’s got a rippin’ bod, but he always says he only comes to dance and ain’t interested in hooking up, y’know? It’s as frustrating as hell, but god, it’s worth the sexual frustration just to watch him for a couple of hours.”

Hearing this description, he suddenly wondered how small a gay subculture it was. “Is he about six foot three, two ten, with black hair and blue eyes?”

He nodded eagerly, eyes showing his happy surprise. “Hey, you’ve seen him? Isn’t he just to die for? You wouldn’t think such a solid slab of man meat could be as graceful as he is, but wow, he’s just all kinds of lust bait. And that ass! God, I just want to grab him and -”

“That’s my boyfriend.”

He stared at him levelly, the blue light casting bruised shadows on his face. “You’re shitting me.”

“No. I sort of doubt there’s two gay guys in town that match that description.” And he couldn’t imagine Randi being thrilled with that “Margaret Cho” comment. In fact, he could imagine her “Oh, I bet you think all Asians look alike” rant, as he’d heard her give it to a clearly embarrassed man in the parking lot at work once. A shrinking violet she wasn’t.

Matt held his gaze for a long moment, attempting to judge his veracity. “Holy shit. I always wondered who could land him, and now I know: another hottie. Makes sense, y’know. Uh, does that mean I have to stop talking about him?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Damn, he was distracting me from the smell.” He moved the glow stick around, lighting up spots of the small, austere apartment as well as leaving brief blue trails in the air, and asked, “So what are we looking for exactly?”

“We?”

“I’m not totally useless. I got a great head for, uh … remembering things. In fact, I can remember this one time when -” he froze, looking down at something that had been caught in the narrow scope of his light. As he bent down for a better look, Roan already knew what he’d just discovered - that huge, dark stain. “Is that, uh …”

“Yep.”

He looked down at it a moment, transfixed, then slapped his hand over his mouth, the color draining from his face with a frightening rapidity, and he dropped his glow stick as he turned and bolted into the small bathroom. Since he didn’t have time to close the door, he could hear him vomiting quite clearly. See, this is why he preferred doing things on his own.

The apartment was tiny, enough so that Roan figured Ashley must have been a small cat, perhaps a cougar, to keep from breaking out of here. The living room and kitchenette were separated only by their floors - the living room had the carpet, while the thin strip of floor that marked off the kitchen was cheap, peeling linoleum with an alternating square pattern. The walk in closet sized room on the right was the bedroom, and the tinier spare closet sized room straight ahead was the bathroom where Matt was puking up his lunch. He figured it was a good thing the lights were off, as the apartment would probably be more depressing if he could see it clearly.

He crouched down to pick up Matt’s glow stick, which had rolled towards the base of the avocado green refrigerator, a relic from the ‘80’s if not the ‘70’s. It was close up that he noticed a thin magnet advertising a pizza place was stuck to the fridge’s bottom metal grill, and he caught a glimpse of an edge of white paper on the floor, wedged between the fridge and the kitchen cabinet. The magnet must have been holding up the paper and both had slipped down.

He pulled out the paper and wasn’t surprised to find it was a business card with the logo “New Horizons” on the front, and on the back there was a handwritten note about an appointment with Doctor Johnson, which was at three thirty next Wednesday. There was an appointment she was never going to make.

He’d heard of New Horizons; it was a hodgepodge of services for the infected, one of those liberal social policy compromises that made this city so attractive to the infected. They probably had a ton of Doctor Johnsons that worked out of there, but he thought it would be worth checking out. It was just a shame that it didn’t say what kind of doctor Johnson was - a dentist, a G.P., a psychiatrist, hell, maybe even a nutritionist (they had a whole bunch of odd services available, some very questionable).

Matt had finally stopped retching, and turned on the taps to rinse out his mouth before he came out. Roan had tucked the appointment card in his pocket and picked up the glow stick, which he handed to Matt as soon as he rejoined him. “I’m sorry about that,” he said sheepishly. He still looked quite pale.

“It’s okay. But you see why I didn’t want you to come here? She was your friend; this has to hurt.”

“She wasn’t my friend. I wanted to be friends, but she so was scared. I didn’t get it at all.”

“What was she scared of?”

He shrugged, grimacing slightly. “I dunno. Being infected? Trusting people? She musta got screwed over pretty badly.”

So he wasn’t talking about a specific person. Too bad; that would have made his job easier.

A cursory search turned up nothing of note, nothing as interesting as the card from the New Horizons center. Matt remained oddly quiet and trailed behind him, embarrassed about barfing and afraid of what he might find if he wasn’t careful. The kid really shouldn’t have been here; he felt kind of bad for him.

They left, and Matt remained strangely cowed. By the time they left the building, the sky remained gunmetal grey but the rain was no more than a cool mist, the kind that drenched you even better than a downpour. They had to walk over to the next block, as there was no way he was parking the Mustang around here, and it was then that Matt asked, “What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“Your boyfriend, the Hottie.”

“I thought we weren’t talking about that anymore.”

“Oh c’mon, I’m dying of curiosity over here. Also it’ll take my mind off things.”

He weighed precisely how much he should care with the possibility that it didn’t really matter. He was honestly surprised that everyone at Panic didn’t know Paris by his first name by now. Then again, maybe he never said so he never got stalked. “I’ll have to check in with him first. He might go out with a pseudonym.”

“Come on, dude! That’s so not fair. But hey, why don’t you ever go out with him, y’know? Why is he always out with the fag hag?”

“She’s his best friend. Also, he usually goes out with her when I’m busy.” There was no point in telling him when he was in the transitional phase of his virus. Matt could know he was “in the tribe”, but he didn’t need to know he was infected. He didn’t need the sympathy. “And as I said, I hate the club scene.”

“Why? You’d be a hit.”

“You’d be surprised how little I care about that.”

He grinned broadly, an expression that lit up his face and seemed to bring some color back to his cheeks. “I bet I wouldn’t.”

Yeah, perhaps not.

The next block over had lots of sad little shops: a corner store, a barbershop, one of those cheap teriyaki places that just seemed to spring up out of nowhere, a liquor store with extravagantly barred windows, that kind of thing. A downtown neighborhood too poor to qualify for strip mall status, but still losing a monumental amount of business to the strip malls and big box stores in the neighboring outskirts and suburbs. Almost anyone who had the ability to shop elsewhere did, so these shops were dying a slow, crumbling death, usually reflected in their dirty windows and scabby facades. Only the liquor store would probably survive.

He’d parked the Mustang beside the curb in front of the teriyaki place, the only open slot when they drove up, but as they came up the street he realized the car was sitting kind of funny in the back. He stepped out onto the curb as they approached, and checked out the side of the car that faced the street. Just as he feared, the back tire had been slashed; there was a deep, long gash he could put his fingers in.

He felt the shadow of Matt behind him, and he whistled low. “I’d say you ran over a nail, but I don’t think so.”

“Slashed with a knife. Somebody really hated this tire.” Or him; hating him was clearly more likely. But that raised a couple of troubling questions.

Okay, now he was being paranoid again. It was probably just a bored kid who got a kick out of vandalizing other people’s rides; he should probably consider himself lucky that the asshole didn’t key the car - that really would have pissed Paris off.

“Gonna call triple A?”

He shook his head, standing up and attempting to brush the grime on his hands off on his pant legs. “I got a spare in the trunk.”

Matt stared at him in wide eyed shock. “You can change a tire? Really? I can barely pump my own gas.”

Roan stared at him in open disbelief. “I’m sorry, but no one is that femme.”

He let out a breathless laugh. “I am, seriously. I only had a car for a year before I sold it for coke, and at that time I’d had my license suspended anyways, so I didn’t think losing it would be a big deal, y’know. I haven’t had a car since.”

Roan dug out his car keys and sifted out the trunk key. “You’re saving yourself a lot of money.”

“Probably, but I’ve saved more being off the coke, y’know. It’s kinda expensive … well, the good stuff is. I mean there’s a lot of shit stuff on the market, people who put in too much filler, y’know, shit that doesn’t do anything -”

Roan had pretty much tuned him out at this point - he really didn’t want to know how you quality shopped for cocaine - but he’d just moved around to the trunk when he heard a loud but well tuned engine, purring like a panther. Why the hell did it strike him as odd?

Roan didn’t know, and wasn’t sure he would ever know. Something made him turn and look, and he saw a dark green Jeep Grand Cherokee speeding down the street, so clean it almost shined, and he glanced down at the license plate to see that something had been inserted into the frame - Paper? Masking tape? - something that totally obscured the plate. Its windows were also tinted not so much dark as complete ebony.

That was his only warning.

He was already moving up to the sidewalk, glad he decided to wear his Sig Sauer for the walk to the Wildwood, when the person in the passenger seat opened fire. Roan had already shoved Matt brutally aside, throwing him down behind the Mustang, as he pulled his gun and took aim even as he threw himself behind the car.

Time slowed to a crawl, and he could see everything with crystal clarity, even though he didn’t think he should have been able to. The gun barrel was sticking out of the open passenger window, and the person behind the gun was a dark blur. Were they wearing a ski mask? He saw the flashes from the muzzle, heard the shots (which were always less than impressive; they were loud, but not quite the cannon blasts you usually heard in films) and heard glass breaking as the gunmen sprayed bullets wildly, shattering some of the windows of the Mustang and a window of the teriyaki joint. He also felt something hit him in the upper left side of his chest, but he didn’t know if it was shrapnel or what; it was more force than pain. He squeezed off two shots of his own before the Mustang obscured his view, and he knew they hit. He saw one shatter the passenger window and another disappeared in a dull thunk of impact, and he was sure it’d hit the door.

By the time he hit the pavement, the impact jarring his body, he heard the squeal of acceleration, the skid of tires on a wet road, and the Jeep tore around the corner, causing a car at the intersection to blare its horn at him. His shoulder hurt, and his left arm felt numb.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Matt shouted, on his hands and knees on the sidewalk, eyes wide and wild with fear. “Who the fuck was that?!”

“No idea,” he admitted, rolling up to a sitting position. Just moving made it feel like some muscles tore in his chest, and his back felt damp from the pavement. Did he land in a puddle? That would figure.

“God,” Matt panted, sitting back on his haunches and putting his hand on his chest, like he was having a heart attack. “You saved my life.”

He put the gun back in his belt holster, hidden beneath his jacket. They could come back for a second pass, but he was fairly certain he‘d hit the gunman, or at least scared the fucking shit out of him. “No I didn’t. They were shooting at me.”

“What? Why? And how fast can you move? How’d you get your gun out that - oh shit.” Matt had suddenly stopped talking, looking horrified and staring at him.

“What?” He looked down at where he was staring just as Matt suddenly grabbed his trench coat and threw it open.

Okay, now it was easy to see why. He had a neat little hole in his shirt just above his left pectoral muscle, and pouring from it was an interesting amount of blood, which had already soaked through the left side of his shirt. No wonder he felt damp. Shouldn’t it hurt more? It just felt a bit bruised. The first time he was shot it hurt a lot more, but he was a younger then. Maybe age desensitized you in some fashion.

Matt exhaled like he’d been holding his breath, and said, “Okay, good, completely missed the heart. But the trajectory might’ve -”

He grabbed Matt’s hand as he reached for his shirt. “Get away from my blood. I’m infected.”

He stared at him, the shock still naked on his face. “Huh? You mean …”

“Yeah, I’m one of those kitty fuckers too.” He’d unconsciously grabbed his cell phone, and had already punched up 911. It was strangely automatic, almost like when he was a cop and you always reached for your radio. Same difference really. As soon as the 911 dispatcher picked up, he said, almost cheerfully, “Hi. There was just a shoot out on Brazil Street, and apparently I was shot in the process. The gunmen are gone, so don’t worry about sending out the tactical squad. I’m on the sidewalk in front of the teriyaki place.” The woman tried to get a word in edgewise, but he knew exactly the kind of information she needed, so she didn’t need to go through her script. “I’m Roan McKichan, a private detective - you might want to pass this on to the cops, as several of them will get a good laugh out of it. The wound’s not serious, I don’t feel that bad, but there’s a lot of blood, and I’m infected, so warn the EMTs coming in. The gunmen were in a dark green Jeep Grand Cherokee heading northwest down Elmore, and no, I didn’t get a plate, it was covered, and I have no idea who they were, except they didn’t like me very much. I may have hit one of them with return fire; I definitely hit the Jeep. I think that about covers it, so let the EMTs know they should check behind the Mustang that’s had the shit shot out of it.” As he cut the connection and dropped the phone back in his pocket, it occurred to him that what happened to the car would break Paris’s heart. He could probably fix it, but it would take a while, and glass was always a motherfucker to replace.

“How can you be so calm? You must have balls of steel,” Matt said, shucking off his coat, and before Roan could comment on that, Matt pulled off his own shirt. He quickly wadded it up and pressed it up against the bullet wound. He took a breath to say something, but Matt cut him off with, “I don’t have any open cuts on my hands, I’ll be fine. You need to keep pressure on it to slow the bleeding.”

There were so many things he wanted to ask, but he settled on, “How do you know so much about bullet wounds?”

“I don’t. I mean, I know about wounds in general. My mother’s a doctor over at County.” He grimaced sheepishly. “So as you might imagine, my coke habit was pretty embarrassing for her.”

“Teenage rebellion is embarrassing for everyone.”

He shrugged his naked shoulders, which were surprisingly bony, and now his skin was pimpling with gooseflesh since he was exposed to the cold drizzle. But now he could see the tattoo on his chest, the one that had been peeking up slightly beneath his collar. It was a spectacular Chinese phoenix design, a stylized bird with a swan neck and broadly spread wings, its tail almost dragon like, the feathers reproduced with such loving detail that they almost looked like they would be soft to the touch. It was a riot of color - red, blue, green, yellow, and black - and covered most of the center of his upper chest as it sprawled out in flight, its long, slender, feathered tail curving around his pierced left nipple.

“That’s gorgeous,” he blurted. It was; it was one of the most beautiful, detailed tattoos he’d ever seen.

Matt glanced down, as if he wasn’t sure what he was referring to, and again shrugged as Roan finally heard sirens screaming off in the distance. “I was really into body modification there for a while. This was the first part of a sequence of tattoos that was going to cover my entire torso like a shirt, y’know. But I found out that, once you’re sober, tattoos kinda hurt. Also, without downers, I didn’t have the patience to just lay there and get stuck by needles for hours on end.”

“I bet.”

Matt studied him closely for a moment, and said, “You’re a lion, aren’t you?”

This kid was just full of surprises, wasn’t he? “How do you know that?”

He smiled warmly at him, proud he guessed it right. “Like I said, you’re regal.”

“Lions aren’t regal. From what I understand, they’re lazy, sexist bastards.”

“You can’t believe everything you hear on Animal Planet, y’know.”

A very familiar ambulance screamed to a stop next to the curb one car removed from them, and it had barely stopped before the back doors of the rig burst open and a familiar EMT jumped down, holding a medical kit as big as a pro fisherman’s tackle box. “I just knew it was you,” Diego exclaimed, bustling over. “We hear about an infected who’s been shot in a firefight, and I said to Steve, “Holy shit, Ro has finally snapped.“” He was crouched down next to him before he even noticed Matt, and at Dee’s slightly stern look, Matt withdrew his shirt and backed away from them, giving Dee room to work. He ripped open his shirt for a better look at the wound, and scowled at it, like he could frighten the bullet out of his chest. “Oh man, what are we gonna do with you?”

“Buy me body armor?” He offered. Dee’s harsh glance suggested he didn’t find that funny.

The first cop car finally pulled up, and he asked Dee quietly, “Call Paris for me, would you?”

Dee’s expression softened as he nodded. “Of course.”

And he thought Paris was going to be heartbroken about the Mustang. Oy vey, he didn’t even want to imagine how he was going to react to this.