Roan rubbed the sleep from his eyes, still feeling a bit logy from the Demerol. But at least the head burst pain was gone. “I’m sorry, Dylan. It wasn’t a big deal, really. Just got a little bruised.”

He pointedly looked down at the cast on his left hand. “And broken. I thought you were the big time bad ass. How’d this happen?”

He looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Big time bad ass? You’ve been talking to Holden, haven’t you?”

Dylan grinned in a sheepish, appealing way that made Roan desperately want to tear his clothes off. “Wasn’t much else to do.“

“How much did he tell you?”

“Just enough to really freak me out.”

“Ah.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes, and much to his surprise, Dylan hugged him. “What’s that for?”

“For being the craziest person I know. And not dying.”

“You’re welcome.” He hugged him back and enjoyed the clean smell of his skin. He was still sick, but less so now, his body temperature almost down to normal. He was over the worst part of his cold. Roan almost envied him that, since the bruises on his face were still aching, and his hand was both throbbing and itching beneath the cast. He really wanted to push himself, make himself transform part way and make the bones in his hand heal up, but he knew he had to at least give it a couple of days, as it would look pretty funny otherwise. And he wasn’t sure he could do it with the cast on.

Dylan gently held his face in his hands, careful to avoid the bruises, and gave him a soft kiss that was very sweet and kind. “I brought you a change of clothes,” he said, nodding at a gym bag on the floor. “I heard yours got bloody.”

“Occasional hazard of the job,” he admitted. “Thanks.” He was actually proud of the fact that he managed to keep his pants and didn’t have to wear a fucking hospital gown, possibly because everyone involved just didn’t want to waste their precious time arguing with him. He lost his shirt, though, but that was no big loss.

He grabbed the bag and disappeared into the attached bathroom, not out of any sense of modesty but because he had to pee like a racehorse, Also he still had some dried blood on his torso that was kind of itchy, and he washed it off in the sink. Under the florescent lighting, his bruises looked startling Technicolor: purple, red, slightly yellow with a bit of blue. If he just had some pink and green, he could have had a gay pride flag tattooed on his face in bruises. Which would probably be appropriate if he thought about it. He wondered if he had any on his chin, cheeks, or jaw line, as he couldn’t see them clearly, mainly because he had about three days’ growth of beard. He always forgot that part about the partial transformation. It also looked like his hair had grown about two inches overnight too. It was kind of Dylan not to mention it, but he had probably grown accustomed to his weirdo infected boyfriend at this point.

As if to prove how awesome a guy he was, Dylan had brought him his “Allow Me To Explain Through Interpretive Dance” t-shirt. Kind of dangerous for an openly gay man to wear, but the smart ass sentiment of it all was just too good to pass up. It also helped that he couldn’t actually dance, but if pressed, he could make a variety of obscene gestures in a rhythmic manner.

Once he finished changing and shoved his dirty clothes in the bag, he came out to find Dylan offering him a Diet Coke fresh from the vending machine. “I assumed you’d want some caffeine, and what passes for coffee here could strip the paint off a boat.”

“You know me too well.” He took the can and pretty much chugged it, not a big fan of Diet Coke, but the Demerol had left him with cotton mouth. He crumpled up the can and gave Dylan a kiss, as he more than deserved it. He slipped his arms around him and rested his forehead against his, and Dylan smiled. He really liked him.

Did he love him though? He honestly didn’t think so, but it wasn’t personal; he wasn’t sure he was capable of loving anyone after Paris. It was too much, it hurt too much to even contemplate. He wondered if this was what would inevitably break them up.

“Do you want to stop on the way and get something to eat, or just go home?” Dylan asked, sliding his hand down to the small of his back. “I make a mean huevos rancheros.”

“I’m so glad you’re not a vegan.”

“Are you kidding? And give up cake and ice cream? Please.”

“Since when do you have cake and ice cream, Mr. Six Pack Abs?”

“Hey, since I’ve been with you, I’ve slacked off. When you’re in a relationship, you let yourself go.”

Roan snickered. “Your idea of letting go is me being in the best shape of my life. Shut the fuck up.”

Dylan grinned sheepishly, showing glimmers of being a smart ass. “You know, you’d make a cute bear.”

Roan pushed him away in a joking manner. “Okay, that’s it. Give me the car keys, ‘cause you’re walking home.”

There was a brief knock at the door, and then Matt poked his head in. “Umm, could I … umm, come in?”

Roan shot a surprised look at Dylan. Had Matt turned into a crazed stalker? Dylan guessed what he was thinking, because he grimaced, and admitted quietly, “He was at the house when Diego called me.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I wanted to apologize,” Matt said, coming fully into the room. He was twisting his hands nervously before him and casting his eyes down, like a child who knows he did wrong and expects a severe punishment. “I mean … that scene at the store, that was fucked up. I didn’t want to leave things like that.”

Roan cast a sidelong glance at Dylan, just to see how he was reacting. He wasn’t, he was simply waiting. Matt must have told him about the store thing, but did Matt mention it was basically over him? He didn’t know if Matt would dare, or how Dylan would feel about it if it was brought up. “Things could have gone better.”

Dylan shouldered the gym bag, and said, “I’ll leave you two alone for a minute, shall I?”

“That’s not necessary,” Roan told him, sending “stay” messages with his eyes.

But in his serene way, he replied, “Oh, I think it is.” He leaned in and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before walking out of the recovery room. Buddhist bastard.

After he left, Matt seemed to twitch nervously, as if he expected Roan to lose his temper and punch him. But Matt was quickly distracted by other things. “How’d you grow a beard so fast? And what did you do to your hair? Wasn’t it shorter -”

“Matt,” Roan interrupted, not wanting to have that conversation. “I’m sorry about the store thing, okay? But your boyfriend struck me as a dick.”

Matt shrugged. “He is, kinda. But he takes good care of me.”

What an interesting way to put it. “You don’t love him?”

He scoffed. “Fuck no. Sometimes I don’t even like him. But it’s better than being alone.”

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Matt, you could do better.”

Again he shrugged, uncomfortable with this entire conversation. “Maybe. But right now I don’t care; I’m good where I am.”

Roan shook his head in disgust. “You shouldn’t settle for crap. I don’t care how loaded this guy is.”

“Why d’ya think he’s loaded?”

“Isn’t he?”

Matt looked away, towards the wall where the window might be if one existed, and then he scrutinized the gurney where Roan had spent the night. He was looking at anything and everything but him. “He’s not poor.”

“So you’re the boy toy of some obnoxious sugar daddy? Where’s your self-respect?”

Matt snickered humorlessly. “I think I lost that when I first did meth.”

“I don’t accept that. You’re clean now, right? Stop living in the fucking basement.”

Finally Matt looked at him, and his eyes were shining with anger. “Why the fuck should I? All the guys I fall in love with don’t love me. So it’s better to get some stupid fuck to fall in love with me even though I think he’s a dickhead. At least then I’m the one in control.”

Roan knew he was referring to him as the man he fell in love with and frowned, not wanting to have this discussion yet again. He actually imagined Matt didn’t want to either, but he wanted to make his point. “Matt, I’m sorry I couldn’t be the man you wanted me to be.”

“Me too.”

“I am grateful for all you did for me while I was …” How did he put it? He didn’t know. “Mourning.”

He shrugged uncomfortably one more time, looking away again. It looked like the light of rage in his eyes was giving way slowly to tears. “I did that for me, not for you. I thought being a private detective would be a cool thing, y’know?”

“It’s dull as shit, enlivened with a few moments of sheer terror.”

“Yeah, I know. I guess I wasn’t cut out for it.”

“You still working for that spa?”

Matt nodded, rubbing his eyes and wiping out any tears before they could fall. “Yeah. It’s funny how many women hit on me. I get phone numbers from my clients all the time, and I think, what, aren’t I obviously gay enough? Do I need to pronounce my lisp more, perhaps skip, start calling everyone girlfriend? Maybe I should just paint my nails.”

“Then they’d think you’re emo.”

“Oh, yeah. Fuck.” He finally looked at him, but very briefly, his eyes still scudding around the room like they were desperate for escape. “Toby - Dylan - seems nice.”

“He is.”

“I didn’t want him to be.” He smirked sheepishly at the idea. “It’d be easier if I hated his fucking guts, y’know?”

“Yeah, I understand.” And he did too, which was the bizarre thing. But even though they were never involved, he got the odd feeling Matt considered him an ex, and therefore things shook out that way accordingly.

Dylan knocked on the door and peeked in. “The nurses keep giving me evil looks. I think it’s time to go.”

Roan nodded, and even Matt looked grateful for the interruption. “Is it me, or are they very mean at this hospital?”

“No, it’s just due to me,” Roan admitted. “They’re tired of all the chaos I drag in my wake.”

“You can’t be a trailblazer without causing some chaos,” Dylan said philosophically.

Matt looked at him in open confusion. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Roan couldn’t have put it better himself.

****

He and Dylan had been home for barely ten minutes when Randi called him. She’d been poring over the Winters’ files - she even took a day off sick to do it - and she found what he needed. So he told her he’d meet her at the office in an hour - there was no way he was missing the huevos rancheros. They were quite excellent, but Roan barely had time to properly shower and change afterwards. Shaving would have to wait until later.

Roan arrived at his office to find Fiona and Randi talking, sharing cups of coffee while Randi admired the riding crop Fiona had brought into the office. Randi looked at him and said, with genuine enthusiasm, “You now have the second best assistant ever.”

“Damn right,” Fiona agreed, taking the riding crop back and snapping it on the edge of the desk. Roan assumed that Randi had told her about Paris, who was presumably the “first best” assistant. But then Randi had loved him too, in her own way. “And by the way, congrats on nailing that safe word ignoring motherfucker. I called Velvet as soon as I heard, and she was so relieved.”

“It is a relief to get the bastards off the street,” he admitted, glad no one had mentioned the bruises on his face or the cast. The nice thing about women was sometimes they had more tact. (Well, Randi usually didn’t, but she was probably on her best behavior for Fiona.)

He ushered Randi into his private office, and she showed him what she had discovered. She was saying words in English and using what sounded like complete sentences, but as soon as she mentioned math, he automatically tuned out. He tried his best to tune back in, though.

The basics: yes, Eli’s brother and the family lawyer had been embezzling money from his share of his parents’ estate for some time, in ways small and sneaky, ways that a “civilian” (in Randi speak, a non-accountant) probably wouldn’t notice. They also concocted a phony tax and slapped it on there, but probably overstepped their bounds when they invented two. She was sure if the IRS heard about this, they’d be curious, and equally greedy. She’d put together a seven page print out detailing every instance of fraud and on what date. It was perfect fodder for a lawsuit. He cut Randi a check for her services, and put in a call to Eli. He got his machine, so he left a vague message that only Eli would understand, indicating he’d got what he wanted and he could come pick it up.

Once Randi left, he finally got to checking his email, and found that some of his state office contacts got back to him. It looked like Zoë Williams ended up much like him - she got passed from foster home to foster home, never settling for long in one place, unless you counted state group homes. He’d gotten to her teen years when Fiona knocked on the door and came in, asking what he wanted for lunch.

He looked at the clock on his computer - it was barely past eleven. “Isn’t it early for lunch?”

She shrugged. Today she was wearing jeans, biker books, a blue leather jacket, and a very old Evil Dead t-shirt, with the cracked image of a bloodied Bruce Campbell holding a chainsaw over his head. Her hair was back in a ponytail again, but it was looser than when she was “Bellatrix”, and she wasn’t wearing her extensions either. She didn’t look like a secretary more than she looked like a bouncer, and he actually found that appealing. “Yeah, but I have no idea where anything is around here, so I figured I needed to factor in finding the place, and possibly getting lost.”

“There’s a pizza place down the street, along with a deli. There’s a Chinese place a couple blocks away. They all deliver.”

She looked at him expectantly. “You couldn’t have told me that to begin with? Maybe left a Post-It?”

“Check the top drawer of your desk. The menus should be there.”

“Oh.” She paused, giving him a slightly reproving frown. “Don’t I feel like a dumbass.”

“It’s your second day on the job. You’re free to make mistakes for the first two weeks. Then I start worrying about your exposure to lead paint.”

Before she could give him a smart ass reply, the phone on Fiona’s desk rang. She sighed and rolled her eyes, as if she’d been answering the phone all day, and went to answer it. After she did, she pressed the “hold” button, and asked, “Are you in for a woman calling herself Chief Matthews?”

That made him sink down lower in his chair. Oh shit. Was she going to chew him out for the Hakes collar? Oy gevalt, he really wasn’t in the mood for this. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said, giving in to a minor sense of defeat. As Fiona transferred the call to his phone, he got up and closed the door, as he didn’t want her to hear any part of him getting chewed out. And to think, if he was smart, he’d have taken the day off, and could have been home in bed with Dylan right now. But if he was smart, would he be living his life? He’d be somebody else entirely.

He sat back behind his desk, took a deep breath, then picked up the receiver. “If I apologized now, could we skip the lecture?”

Chief Julia Matthews paused before she even replied. He heard her suddenly still a breath. “What? Oh … no, Roan, I’m not calling to lecture you. Although I suppose I should.”

“He got that Explorer from the impound lot, didn’t he?”

“Hakes? It seems he did. But I need remind you you’re a civilian?”

“I can still perform citizen arrests. I even have my own handcuffs.”

“That’s too much information, Roan.”

“I meant police standard ones. Jeeze, you have a filthy mind.”

She made an amused noise as she audibly sipped her coffee, but didn’t actually laugh. That told him there was some very serious shit going down. Maybe she was going to ask him to turn himself in. “Can I be brutally honest, Roan?”

“Please.”

“We’re fucked,” she said, and it was really shocking, because Matthews almost never cursed, and he couldn’t remember when she ever dropped the F bomb. “It didn’t happen in time to hit the morning papers, but it’ll be on the evening news. Hakes is bad enough; this will be so much worse. Do you remember Chief Riley Goodman?”

Roan had to think about that for a moment. “That was way before my time.”

“But you know who he is.” It wasn’t actually a question.

“Yeah. He used to run the cop shop, and he was part of that PR thing with schools, wasn’t he? That whole outreach thing was his baby.”

She sighed like a deflating balloon, the air gushing out of her in a rush. “Yes. A woman - his niece, in fact - came in and leveled some charges against him. We checked it out … and oh my god, Roan, it’s a nightmare. He’s a serial child molester.”

Roan was so surprised by that he almost fell out of his chair. “What?”

“He had a room full of boxes and boxes of tapes, and had some converted to digital files on his computer. He abused his niece and two other children for certain, and we’re not quite sure how many others yet. But some of these tapes go back twenty five years.”

It wasn’t hard to do the math. “When he was on the force. When he was going to elementary schools as part of the outreach program. Oh holy shit.”

She groaned as if in pain. “Could this fucker have gotten away with it without some complicity somewhere? Did someone know and help him cover it up? You’d think there must have been.”

“He was a police chief. He could have simply frightened all his victims into submission.”

“Perhaps. No, probably, but I’m just sitting here getting angry and disgusted in turn.” He heard a thud, which he assumed was her hitting her fist on her desk. “If I didn’t think it would look bad, I’d quit, you know? I’d turn in my badge now.”

“You can’t quit. You’re a good cop. Don’t let some asshole fill your seat.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

There was a long, drawn out pause, which made Roan wonder why she had called him. “Is there some way I can help?”

“Yes. That’s why I called you. This is going to be a nightmare. What little community trust we have will be gone. One of our active cops turns out to be a sadist who enjoys beating young gay men half to death, and a generally respected former Chief turns out to have been a child molester. Along with the infected woman who’s decided to sue us for unlawful imprisonment, things just couldn’t be more shitty. I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking we’re corrupt and incompetent. That’s why I want to try and get ahead of this disaster as much as I can. We need to start building new bridges now with the community.”

“Wow, those PR classes are paying off.”

“Be serious, Roan.”

“I was. Look, Chief, I’d like to help, but I don’t see what I can do.”