3 - Waiting For The End of the World

Roan thought that it would eventually make sense. So far, that theory was not only unfounded, but seemed like strangely naïve optimism for him.

The scene was a clear cut murder, as there was no gun and his clothes looked “disturbed”, and he had a bloody nose. Of course, after Roan told Murphy what Dallas had been up to the night before, she wondered if the nosebleed was simply due to too much cocaine. There was no time of death yet - the beach was extremely cold, and that could fuck up the lividity a bit - but the best guess was somewhere between seven and eleven thirty, which was when the body was discovered by a man with a metal detector, looking for whatever the hell he hoped to find (coins, beer bottle caps, the hubcap off a ‘73 Chevelle) on a rather remote stretch of beach.

He told her of Dallas’s itinerary the night before, including the cocaine dealer’s place, and the college kegger where he last saw Dallas. Could he have been one of the last people to have seen him alive, besides the killer? It was a creepy feeling. Not entirely new.

Just out of habit, she asked him what he was doing between the hours of Dallas’s death, and he told her he was sleeping at home, although Dylan could corroborate his story. She said that wouldn’t be necessary, which wasn’t a surprise. They both knew if he was going to kill a guy, he wouldn’t be following him around and documenting it with a camera the night before. That was just asking to get caught.

Once again, he tried to call Holly, and once again he got nothing but machines. He dug out her cell phone number from the paperwork she’d filled out for him, but when he called it he got yet another voice mail system. She worked for an advertising agency, Messner Klein, so he imagined she was busy, but this was verging on nuts.

Roan wondered if Dallas really pissed someone off last night. Did he hit on a girl with a jealous boyfriend? He’d heard of people getting killed for much less. But why take him out to Townsend Beach? Were they hoping his body would be washed away by the tide? And where in the fuck did his business card come from? Holly wouldn’t have given it to him. Did he find it? Was he suspicious? But if he was suspicious that his wife had hired a PI to tail him, why go out on a binge? It didn’t make sense.

He decided to stop thinking about it and get back to the case he was currently being paid for. He called Sadowski, and miracles of miracles, he was actually in and picked up his phone. He told him he wanted to discuss the Turner case, which led to him saying that he couldn’t talk about any of his cases, and then he mentioned that Chris Spencer had hired him to look into it. He was quiet for a moment, and then asked him to meet him at a coffee shop a couple blocks away from the station house in twenty minutes. Roan agreed.

The coffee shop, despite its proximity to the police station, was not a cop haunt, mainly because most cops still favored the mud variety of coffee, the non-pretentious, non five dollar cup of joe. It made it an excellent place to talk about police stuff.

Once Roan had closed up his office and took the bike out there, Sadowski was waiting for him. He was a solid guy, six foot even and about twenty five pounds overweight, most of which he wore in his gut, and the way his rumpled white dress shirt fit him, it looked like he was trying unsuccessfully to smuggle a watermelon through customs. Despite his age he had a relatively full head of brown hair, greying at the temples and sides, although his close cropped beard and mustache combo remained a youthful light brown. His eyes were the color of coffee, and while they were heavy lidded and sleepy - much like his personality - he knew that was slightly deceptive. Gabe Sadowski was always alert, always knew what was going on around him. He requested the transfer to the cold case section when regular homicide started to burn him out.

Gabe sat at a corner table, nursing a small cup of coffee that both looked and smelled very plain - the closest to mud this shop had. He eyed Roan as he sat down, and said, “Look at you. Is it me, or are you agin’ backwards?”

“It’s you.”

“Aww, fuck. I guess I have to break down and get those fuckin’ bifocals.” He fiddled nervously with the lid of his cup, and then asked, “So how’s life outside the force treatin’ you? I heard about last night.”

Oh shit, he should have anticipated that. He shrugged, glanced out the window at the people walking by. Was everybody talking on a cell phone? “It was just bad timing. Guy caught me in a mood to scrap.”

“They’ve been playing the security video at the station all day. There’s a general consensus that Matthews oughta hire you back, ’cause you’re probably the closest thing to a superhero any of us are ever gonna see.”

He groaned and rubbed his eyes, just to avoid looking at Gabe. “I don’t know what happened. I’ve never done that before. It was weird and I’d rather just drop it.”

“Okay, Batman. Or should that be Catman. Is there a Catman? Or is it just Catwoman?”

He fixed him with a harsh stare, mainly because Gabe was grinning about it. “I’m surprised the guys aren’t calling me Catwoman.”

“Now that you mention it, some of them are.”

“That figures.”

“If it’s anything at all, you’re a better actor than Halle Berry. You also do your own stunts, so that’s cool.”

He narrowed his eyes to deadly slits. “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

He chuckled like a drunk Uncle at Christmas, but then shook his head even as he tried to suppress a smile. “Roan, I ain’t makin’ fun of you. If anything, I wish I could do shit like that. Looks like fun.”

“The price you pay for it isn’t, trust me. So how is life at the shop anyways?”

That seemed to sober him up a bit. “Same old shit. You haven’t missed much. People seem to get fuck crazier every goddamn day. I don’t even recognize the world anymore.”

“You’ve been on the job too long.”

He rolled his eyes and slumped back in his chair. “Tell me about it. As soon as I hit the big six-oh, I’m out of there. I’m takin’ my gold watch and goin’ home to drive Ellie nuts.”

“How is Ellie?” That was Gabe’s wife of twenty eight years, one of the longest marriages that Roan personally knew about, besides Gordo’s and Connie’s.

“Still humoring me. For some goddamn reason, she’s taken up cake decorating. And I don’t mean a frosting rose or baking cakes in the shape of a clown, I mean making these three tiered things that look like Victorian mansions or some such shit. I asked her what’s the point of this, especially since it takes people three seconds to destroy what you’ve worked on all day, but she said that’s not the point. She’s startin’ to sell the cakes out of Cammy’s and Lani’s bakery.”

“Lani’s in the bakery business?”

“Oh yeah. Didn’t I tell ya before? She’s opened a place called Hey Cupcake about a mile or so away from here, in the … y’know, “rainbow district”.”

The rather obvious - and G rated - nickname for the gay ghetto part of town, where Panic was. Gabe’s daughter Alanna (Lani) was a lesbian, which was probably why he was more decent to him than most of the older cops. “Do cops get a discount?”

“Only me. Maybe she’ll give you one, ‘cause … well, you know.”

“Gay unity?”

Gabe gave him a caustic look, mainly because he knew he was being teased. “Actually, ‘cause you left the force. But bein’ a queer duck couldn’t hurt.”

“Queer cat, actually.”

He looked out the window and shook his head, trying to hide the fact that he was smirking. “Don’t ruin a good phrase with literalism. Jesus.”

This was nice and all, chummy, but Roan knew time was starting to get away from them. Gabe’s lunch hour was rarely that long. “So what can you tell me about the Keith Turner case?”

Gabe seemed to shrink in his seat as if deflating, his head hanging down for a moment as if in genuflection. He seemed to steel himself before saying, “I fucking hate these cases. Logically, I know that people can live their lives and just disappear without anyone noticing; I know it’s gotta happen all the time, and maybe two out of three people who actually go missing ever get reported to police. I got that. But I still fucking hate these cases. The kids that go missing and the bodies that never get a name. I asked to be transferred to cold cases so I could put some of these suckers to bed, y’know, but it’s never enough. There’s always some that’ll do nothin’ but break your heart. For me it’s the Turner kid, the Paulin kid, and Eden that’re just gonna haunt me.”

The Paulin kid was a reference to a six year old girl, Tiffany Paulin, who went missing nearly a decade ago, while Eden was just a name slapped on a skull and a few random bones churned up at a construction site nearly twenty years ago. The skull and intact bones were identified as a probably Caucasian female, somewhere in her twenties, but she was never identified by anyone. A “facial reconstruction”, an attempt to give her a face that someone might recognize, turned out to be a waste of money. She had never been identified, and the more the years passed, the more likely it was she’d never be recognized. Damage to the bones unrelated to crumbling and natural damage suggested she was murdered, but without an identity, no one knew where to look for her killer. She was on the list for their local serial killer, but after they caught him and he cut a plea bargain, he claimed to have never buried any victim in that area (Eden Creek) in his entire life. And it would be farther out than his identified range, so it was always a long shot.

Roan pulled out his tiny notebook, the one he usually carried in his pocket and made notes on, as he had quickly jotted down some things he wanted to ask Gabe about. “Why did you consider the one eyewitness unreliable? Do you remember?”

Gabe made a show of looking at his notebook, his smirk almost hidden by his facial hair. “You don’t got a PDA or a Crackberry?”

“I can throw this across the room when I get frustrated and not have it shatter into a million pieces.”

“Smart.”

“So, the witness?”

“Right. Shit, I’d never forget her - I remember all the non-assuming crazies. She was this little blonde thing with a baby in a stroller, totally a MILF, and she seemed like a helpful, concerned mother. Except she thought the Turner boy was Mexican, not mixed race, and she started talking about how the park had been in decline since all the Mexicans started moving in - I shit you not; it came out of nowhere - and all the fags started taking over the park. She said she figure a fag had grabbed the boy ‘cause they like to fuck ‘em, and then she went on to tell me how in high school this boyfriend of hers told her that fags sometimes fucked dogs when they couldn‘t find a kid.”

Roan winced and shook his head. “Jesus.”

“She told me how I should just lock all the fags up, and what was wrong with society when it allowed them to roam unchecked and grab kids and rape them. I mean once she got this spiel going she sounded like a weird cross between Pat Buchanan and Anita Bryant.”

“Sounds fun.”

“I just remember staring at her and feeling eighty different kinds of sorry for that kid. What’s he gonna be like growin’ up with a mother like that?”

“Probably a Larry Craig in the making.”

He snorted a laugh as he reached down beside his chair. “That’s prob’ly a best case scenario. I was thinkin’ he’d be more like those skinhead fuckos they pulled in last month for stompin’ that homeless guy to death. The shit comin’ out of those kids’ mouth - and the girl was pregnant! A fuck crazy world.” Gabe pulled a PBS tote bag into his lap and opened it.

“Nice bag,” Roan said, unable to suppress a smile.

He gave him a frown and a dirty look before pulling out papers and slapping them on the table. “I couldn’t walk out of the station with a buncha files crammed under my arm, could I? Levin had this bag in her desk and she let me borrow it.”

Roan grabbed some of the papers and looked at them. They were Xerox copies, but he recognized what they were immediately. “Is this the rest of the case file?”

He nodded almost spasmodically, emptying the tote bag. “I couldn’t give ‘em to the mother, but you’re an ex-cop. I know you’ll dispose of this properly.”

“Shred it and pretend I never saw it in the first place.”

“Correctomundo.”

Cold case or not, the case was technically still open, never closed. These files should have been totally off limits to him. Gabe was risking his job by giving him this. “Wow, I had no idea you’d give me the keys to the kingdom. Thank you.”

“If you can find anything new about this case, I will kiss you in front of the squad room. On the lips. Hell, find something actionable and I just may give you a hand job.”

“Not a blow job?”

“Don’t push it.” He sighed wearily and balled the tote bag up in his meaty hands. “Give me somethin’ new, man. Get this out of my nightmares.” He sifted through the papers until he found one specific one, and held it out to him. “Here’s the other reason I felt the crazy MILF was unreliable. There was a guy - what d’ya call it, busking? - busking at the main entrance where the MILF claimed to see the long haired fag - her words - leaving with the boy. The guy was a burnout type, playing an acoustic guitar, and he said he’d been there since eleven in the morning and saw the Turners enter the park. Mainly ‘cause he noticed Elliot Turner; he thought he was one of the best looking men he‘d seen that day.”

“Warn the MILF to guard her baby.”

“Exactly. Anyways, he said he saw everyone who passed by him, and he didn’t see any long haired guy with the Turner’s boy. He didn’t see the Turner boy pass his way at all after entering the park. He didn’t seem crazy or stoned, and he actually had a pretty decent reputation in the neighborhood - he was a park afternoon staple. A lot of the joggers knew him by name, and he them. His record was clean. He seemed saner and more reasonable than the MILF.”

“But you circulated the sketch anyways.”

“We had less than zero. We were hoping that maybe this would make someone come forward, remember that they saw something … but no. Leads evaporated, and it was like the kid just stopped existing. Everything we tried to jump start this investigation just fizzled out. We searched every inch of that park with search and rescue volunteers, we shook down all the known preds in the area, and we got a fuckload of nothing.”

“You investigated the parents?”

He shrugged. “S.O.P.” Standard operating procedure. “Their story played. They took Keith to the park to play on the swings, and they sat on a bench across from the children’s playground, where they started arguing. The marriage was tanking, and they were fighting over money, the usual. We got three eyewitnesses who remembered them arguing, just the two of them, for perhaps ten minutes. It was about then that Chris - female at the time, as you know - decided that she was going to go home, so she went to collect Keith from the swings. But he wasn’t on the swings. Both parents started searching for Keith - two eyewitnesses on that one - but couldn’t find him. The 911 call was made about ten minutes later.”

“What about the families?”

Gabe started sifting through the copies, picking out the ones he wanted. “Stickier, but no reason to suspect that one of them grabbed the kid. Turner’s parents weren’t thrilled that he married a white gal - a white Presbyterian gal; that mother was a full on Baptist - and Spencer’s mother - her father was dead - was even less thrilled by her daughter hooking up with a black guy. The siblings of both didn’t really give a damn; the hang up seemed generational.”

Roan glanced at his notes. “You were suspicious about Roger Jorgenson?”

“Uh, was he the sex predator?” At Roan’s nod, Gabe nodded back. “Yeah, yeah, slimy creep. Like all of ‘em, really, but there was something kinda … slippery about his answers. Nervous - beyond the usual. I don’t think he took Keith, but I think he was at the park that day, watchin’ the kids, and I think he might have seen something. But he didn’t want to say anything ‘cause he wasn’t supposed to be there, and who knows, maybe he didn’t want to squeal on a fellow kiddie fiddler.”

“You tried to deal with him?”

Gabe gave him an evil look both before and after taking a gulp of his coffee. A tiny bead of liquid was suspended in his mustache. “Of course. Deal, cajole, appeal to his better side - ha! - threaten, sweet talk. Nothin’. He just didn’t like cops and didn’t have a better nature.”

Roan glanced at the papers as he gathered them up. Eleven years of notes. Good thing he liked to read. “He still live around here?”

Gabe wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, catching that drop of coffee. “Nope, he’s dead, died a few years ago. Had a heart attack. His mother sued the ER, claiming malpractice, then she dies of a heart attack. It made the papers. Didn’t catch it?”

“If it was a few years ago, I did then, but I have no memory of it now.” He arranged the papers in a loose pile, with no logic to them whatsoever. He just had to hope he could pull them into some kind of proper order later. “Are any of the witnesses listed here still alive?”

Gabe shrugged. “As far as I know, Jorgenson and Elliot Turner are the only dead people involved with this case, but I never did keep up with MILF or the burnout or the guy walking his wiener dog.” He looked at his watch, an old Timex that was nearly covered by his arm hair, and said, “Gotta go. I got to go talk to a lawyer, and you know how it is with them. You know the drill with this stuff, right?”

“You didn’t give me these, I’ve never seen them before, I never saw the file, I’m just an incredible investigator.”

“You got it.” Gabe levered himself out of the chair, rising to his feet, grabbing the tote bag before it hit the floor. “Good luck, Batman, you’re gonna need it.”

“Give my best to Commissioner Gordon,” he said, as Gabe made for the door. He got nothing but an amused snort in reply.

He started reading the first few pages, and wondered what the fuck he could do. So far, it looked like the investigation was pretty solid. Was he really prepared for failure? Could he take it? Roan knew he could get too personally involved in these cases, and he told himself to back off, but it was never that simple was it? He already felt he had to turn up something, but he also knew he probably wouldn’t. If he was smart he’d quit now … but he wasn’t renown for his genius.

His cell phone went off, and he dug it out of his pocket by the third ring. It was Dylan. “Hi, uh … are you busy right now?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“Do you think you could drop by my place this afternoon? There’s something I wanted to show you.”

“If it’s what I think it is, I’ve seen it. It’s very nice though. Wouldn’t mind seeing it again.”

“Very funny. I’m serious, Ro.”

“Me too.”

Dylan sighed, and Roan grinned, wondering if Dylan knew he had just become a pleasant distraction from an unpleasant reality. “Enough with the double entendres. It’s for the gallery showing; I need your opinion on it because … well, you are the picture. I want your consent before I submit it.”

“Is this the sketch you drew of me sleeping?”

“No, this is a painting. You haven’t seen it.”

For some reason that sounded slightly ominous. But how could it be? The sketch he’d done of him was very nice; he hadn’t even been drooling on a pillow or anything. “It’s your painting, Dyl. I’m not gonna tell you not to use it.”

He hesitated. “You might. Please come see it.”

He really didn’t like Dylan’s sudden squeamishness - this was making him nervous. Did he paint him killing a bus full of nuns or something? Fucking Robert Mapplethorpe? Dylan should have known better than to be so vague, because now he was getting paranoid. “What did you do to me?”

“It’s nothing bad … or at least, I don’t think it’s bad. You still might not like it.”

Oh, this didn’t sound good. “Am I naked?”

“No.”

“Shooting Dick Cheney in the face?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Every time I try and draw Dick Cheney, he ends up looking like the Penguin from the old Batman TV series. I have nothing against Burgess Meredith.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I don’t either.” He sighed, wondering exactly what Dylan had done to him on canvas. “I’m in the area, so I’ll be over in a few minutes. Is a quickie off the table?”

“Yes, mainly because the table’s too flimsy to take it. We’ll have to move it to the couch.”

“Fine by me. See you soon.” He ended the call and started gathering up his papers, wondering how unflattering Dylan’s picture of him could possibly be, when his phone rang again. He thought Dylan was calling to rescind the invitation - maybe he decided to hide the painting rather than show it to him. “Yeah?”

“You have Elijah Prophet’s computer,” a voice said. It was being processed through a voice changer, which you could buy at a spy store or a toy store. It was a cheap one; the guy sounded like Darth Vader with a severe case of asthma. “Return it, or we will take it by force.”

“Whatever. Get a better voice changer and call me back.”

“You ignore us at your peril.”

“Do I? What d’ya got, boy? Whip it out and show me, or fuck the hell off before I rip off your face and eat it.” He flipped the phone shut and dropped it in his pocket, picking up the piles of paper. Once he’d gathered them up, he noticed a female barista who had been walking by had stopped and was staring at him, looking shocked, probably due to his threat. He flashed her a friendly smile and headed for the door.

What? He never said he was Miss Congeniality.

2 - Exodus Damage

Roan dreamed that he was pleading to someone that he was trying. He didn’t know who, or what it was about, but with jumbled dream logic he was sure it was the most important thing in the world. He was desperate to convince this person he was trying, and he could feel his heart pounding even in his dream, anxiety spiking and punching through the dream state.

So when his alarm went off, he felt like he lurched out of sleep, the beeping so annoying he wanted to slap it across the room and almost did, but decided he didn’t want to spend any more money on replacing broken alarm clocks. He turned it off and just laid there for a moment, aware he was sweating and his heart rate was just starting to slow. Birds were chirping loudly outside his window, but it was a gloomy day, so light was filtered as if through a dirty aquarium.

He heard soft footsteps in the hall, so he wasn’t surprised when he heard the bedroom door open. (He really needed to oil that hinge.) Dylan padded in, and asked, “You awake?”

“Sadly.”

Roan heard a rustle of paper and smelled that curious soy ink newspapers used now, and Dylan asked, “Were you ever going to tell me about this?”

Roan opened his eyes and saw that he was holding out a folded square of the paper, opened to the inside of the “Local” section, where they had these tiny articles about the crime beat. There was an article titled “Robbery Thwarted By Customer”. Oh terrific. Hadn’t it happened too late to make the morning paper? How fast was their turn around time? The small article - and it was printed in small font - was only two paragraphs long, identified him and the would be robber by name, but they couldn’t just leave it at names. Oh no. He was identified as “Roan McKichan, a private investigator with ties to the police department”. That would come as a shocker to most of the police department.

He looked up to see Dylan looking down at him with his dark eyebrows raise curiously. He wasn’t quite angry, but he was clearly wondering if he should go there. Roan sighed and rubbed his eyes, buying time. “It wasn’t a big deal. It happened on my way home. I just didn’t feel like talking about it last night. Or this morning. Whatever.”

Dylan sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. He looked only slightly more awake than he did, dressed in sweatpants and an old “Ski Mojave” t-shirt. Roan could smell eggs and toast, and hoped he made huevos rancheros. “Technically, it’s afternoon, but I made breakfast anyways. Wanna join me, hero?”

That last bit was weary, not sarcastic, so he took that as a good sign. He assured him once he joined him downstairs he’d tell him everything, which would give him time to edit his story. He took a quick shower, washing away the sweat and letting his adrenaline levels even out. He didn’t know why fragments of such a banal dream could disturb him so much, but it did. An anxiety dream? Who was he failing? Dylan? He knew that one already. If he was going to be troubled by dreams, they could have the decency to tell him something new.

He really wanted a codeine. He briefly considered even just popping half a Tylenol codeine, which was the equivalent of scarfing a baby aspirin, but ultimately he decided not to. He could at least try for Dylan, even if he didn’t know it. He tossed on some old jeans and a tank top, mainly because they were the first items he pulled blindly out of the drawer.

He was greeted by the sharp scent of dark espresso and the mellow sounds of Sun Kil Moon on the stereo, as Dylan usually liked to listen to music when he cooked, and he had gotten the espresso maker out of the closet, unaware that it had been a wedding present from Paris’s parents to the both of them. Roan was sure if he told him he’d put it away, but Roan had never told him.

Dylan had made a kind of tofu scramble that was better than it sounded, and Roan told him an abbreviated version of what happened at the convenience store last night. He stopped it at the throwing of the tea, implying that stunned the robber enough that he was able to subdue him then until the cops arrived. He didn’t see it as lying more as just simply not admitting he was getting more freaky as he got older.

Dylan did have some good news, although he didn’t seem very thrilled about it. He got a showing at a downtown art gallery, but not one of those smaller avant-garde places where he often had showings. It seemed the “big” city gallery decided to highlight local artists, and he was chosen … after someone else fell through, and one of the artists actually in the show recommended him. It’d be in two weeks, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. He was sure that no one in the gallery actually knew who he was, save for Reiko, who recommended him. He felt like he was being tossed scraps, and on top of that, he had no idea what he’d show. Roan encouraged him to pick out his most “meaningful” pieces (Dylan said he didn’t have favorites, as he just couldn’t judge his own work that way) , and include at least one of his “bleeding hardware” series if only for him. He was promising he’d go with him to the debut showing, and Roan had no idea what he’d wear to an art gallery soiree (in fact, he was relatively sure that none of his clothes were nice enough), when the phone rang and probably saved him from sinking into even deeper trouble.

It was a man who identified himself as Chris Spencer, and wanted to make an appointment today, as he had a case for him. Roan was going to fob him off on Fiona to set up an appointment, but he sounded desperate, and Roan couldn’t kid himself - he needed the money. So he said he’d meet him at the office within the hour. He didn’t need to tell Dylan, as he heard what he said, but thankfully he didn’t blame him at all. He totally understood needing the money.

Once he changed into slightly more presentable clothes and checked the weather, he decided to take his motorcycle anyways, as he felt he needed to get some better adrenaline going. He had a black leather trench coat that Paris used to tease him was de rigeur for the “stylish gay Nazi”, and wore it, in hopes it would keep some of the sputtering rain off. The results were mixed

The office was supposed to be closed today, so Fiona wasn‘t here (he hadn‘t expected to get through with the Faraday case so quickly), and as he opened the place he realized he missed her. It was nice to have someone bright and sarcastic hanging around the office, keeping him on his toes. Also, keeping him mostly sober.

He had time to put on a pot of coffee and call Holly Faraday. Accidentally, he called her home number and got her and Dallas’s machine, so he quickly hung up and called her work number. There he got her voice mail system. Did no one answer their phone anymore? He left a bland message, identifying himself and asking her to call him as soon as she could. It was unlikely anyone would intercept her work voice mail, but he still had to keep client confidentiality.

He was finished with that when a man came through the door. He was a bit on the short to average size, about five five and one hundred and forty pounds, wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt and heavy work jeans, with scuffed brown work boots to match. He was blandly handsome, not a bad looking guy, with nut brown hair and piercing blue eyes in a pleasantly round, open face. He was also carrying a Jack Bauer style man purse, but Roan tried not to hold that against him. He had a strong grip when he shook his hand.

Although no one else was here, he invited him back into his office just out of habit. Roan took his seat behind his desk, where he felt most comfortable anyways, and Spencer took the seat in front. Roan had barely gotten settled when Spencer blurted out nervously, “Will you hear me out before turning me down?”

Oh, that was never a good sign.

Spencer told him his five year old son went missing from Bishop Park eleven years ago, and the whole thing had become a “cold” case at the police department several years ago. There was a sketch of a possible suspect, but it was so vague it could have applied to almost any white male, and no evidence was ever found. It was like his son, Keith, just stopped existing, dropped off the face of the earth.

“If it’s a cold case, and eleven years old, I don’t see how I could help you,’ Roan told him honestly. “Any evidence that may have existed is long gone, and if the cops couldn’t find anything back then, I can’t believe I’d find anything now.”

Spencer nodded through this, his eyes occasionally moist but tears never falling. “I know. I know it’s more than likely you won’t find anything, but I want to make one last effort at it to tell myself I tried. I don’t want to be haunted to my grave by it like Elliot, although I can’t see how I wouldn’t be.”

“Elliot?”

“Keith’s father.” Roan stared at Spencer curiously, until he added, “I was Keith’s mother back then.”

Okay. He loved it when things got complicated for no reason at all. “Female to male?”

Spencer nodded. “I transitioned four years ago. I was in therapy before Keith’s disappearance - I was a depressive, an alcoholic, just so miserable. I got married impulsively at a young age and got pregnant, hoping that that would make me feel more feminine, because I never did feel like a woman, and tried so hard because I got tired of being taunted as a “dyke”. But it didn’t work, I felt even more like a failure, and I know some of the guilt I feel about Keith’s disappearance is that I was a horrible mother and didn’t deserve him in the first place.” He paused briefly, closing his eyes, forcing back the tears. Then he continued. “After his disappearance, my marriage to Elliot, which was dicey anyways, just fell to pieces. We blamed each other and both crawled into separate bottles. I ended up in the hospital, and it was there that I first met someone who was transitioning, male to female in that case, but I realized that maybe I would be happier if I actually was a man. I saw a therapist about it for three years, because I didn’t want to do it just because I hated myself so much after Keith’s disappearance, and then there was the thought that if he reappeared miraculously after all these years, he wouldn’t recognize me as a man. But I lost all hope after the police made it a cold case; I did research, and I knew that - any television shows aside - cold cases usually ended up permanently buried. One or two might get solved, tied to another murder or rape case, but it was the police equivalent of the dead letter office. Once a case ended up there, it was lucky to be heard from again. It was funny, but Elliot wasn’t really surprised at my sex change; he said he always figured I’d have made a better guy.” He smirked in a bittersweet way. “My family didn’t feel that way - my mother still won’t talk to me. My sister does, though, she and her husband are pretty cool about it and my partner, Fletcher.”

“You’re gay?” Well, why not? The funny thing about switching gender was it didn’t mean your sexual preferences changed. If you liked women before, you would after; if you liked men before, you would after. Gender really wasn’t tied to sexual identity, although some frightening people insisted the opposite.

He smiled. “I like men. I like being a man; I’ve never been happier. Well, within reason.” Spencer’s smile faded, and he rubbed his eyes. “Every year, Keith’s birthday rolls around, and I find myself staring at birthday cakes in bakeries, wondering if he’d be into sports or cars, or be the total opposite of me and be into musicals and fine arts. Maybe all of the above; maybe he would have been a renaissance man. Is a renaissance man.” The accidental shift in tense made something in his jaw twitch, throat muscles briefly spasming, and he took another moment to get his emotions under control, hands knotting anxiously in his lap. “I guess I rediscovered hope when I heard that story of that kidnapped boy who was found living with a sex offender several years after he disappeared. Do you remember that?”

“I do, I read that in the paper. But you do know that -”

“- such discoveries are rare? That most kidnapped children are killed shortly after their abduction? Yes, I know. But after Elliot died - two months ago, in a drunken driving accident - I started talking to the detective who had the case. He told me they really hated cases of missing children going into the cold case files, and he was trying everything he could, but nothing new had come up. He told me he was talking to a friend of his at the local paper, hoping to get an article published about it, but so far nothing’s come of it.”

“Who’s the officer?”

“Sadowski. Umm … Gabriel Sadowski, I think.”

Roan nodded. “He’s a good one.” And he was. He was one of the last old fashioned cops, although not old fashioned in the “let’s beat up some black guys and queers” way. He was one of those nose to the grindstone detectives, one who followed any lead, no matter how slim, and really worked the snitch angle by being kind to his street contacts. He had to be nearing sixty though, on the verge of retirement.

Spencer opened his man purse and started pulling out Manila envelopes, putting them on his desk. “I have copies of all the files I was able to get. He couldn’t allow me access to all the case files, but he let me see some.”

Roan inwardly groaned. He didn’t want to take this case. All he could do was take his money - there’s no way he could find anything that Sadowski didn’t. The boy was gone, probably having already rotted away to bones in a shallow grave somewhere, and he’d only be found by chance. But … maybe he could talk to Sadowski. Maybe he could point him in directions he wasn’t able to follow. Spencer really did seem genuinely miserable, and how awful would that be, to have your child disappear one day and then never be seen again? They may as well have never existed at all. Maybe it would have been kinder for everyone if they hadn’t.

Roan slid papers out of the envelopes. Initial police reports, transcripts of the original 911 call and anonymous tips (all of which were disproven), the initial sketch as described by a woman at the park that day who saw a boy who may have been Keith leaving with a man (a man who looked a bit like ‘80’s era Tom Petty, or every other white guy arrested on Cops), pictures of Chris (then Christine) and her husband Elliot - a true study in contrasts; she was a slightly hippie-ish looking woman, somewhat plain, with long brown hair and a troubled gaze, while Elliot was a handsome black man who’d made an unfortunate choice in eyeglasses, or was just a really big Elvis Costello fan - and pictures of Keith (whose last name, like Chris‘s at the time, was Turner), a chubby faced boy with café au lait colored skin, doe eyes, and a frizzy nimbus of fine black hair.

Roan mentally ordered himself not to get sucked into this. He could be no help at all, and this would make him feel horrible for not being able to help him. But as he was sliding the papers back in their envelopes, he said, “You know you’re probably paying me for doing nothing.” Oh goddammit.

Spencer nodded. “I know. Money isn’t an issue for me. I work for the Sanitation department, and Fletcher works for the D.O.T.; we’re not poor.”

That must have been nice. Sanitation department? He wasn’t a garbage man, was he? Well, what if he was? It was a good, solid job, just a tad on the stinky and unsung side. “I’ll do this job for one week. In that time, if I can’t find anything new or promising, we’ll put a stop to it. Okay?”

Spencer gave him a heartbreakingly sad smile. “Okay.”

They got the formalities out of the way, and Spencer paid his up front part of his fee in cash, as he didn’t carry any checks with him. Once he was gone, Roan started poring over Sadowski’s case notes, which were austere but always straight to the point. He was very much a “just the facts, ma’am” type, and he appreciated that. Some cops got purple prose-y, imagining that they would eventually become Joseph Wambaugh, or most likely nowadays go into TV scripting, but there was a very good reason there weren’t a plethora of cops turned writers. If they could’ve written their way out of a wet paper bag, would they have become cops in the first place?

Apparently Sadowski had been very interested in a known child molester who lived within two blocks of Bishop Park at the time, a man named Roger Jorgenson, but at one hundred and eighty pounds he didn’t at all resemble the thin, weedy guy described by the witness. Still, Sadowski thought the eyewitness was “unreliable”, although he didn’t say why (that was the drawback to his austerity). But his mother had given him an alibi at the time, and while he was able to get a search warrant, all he turned up was some child pornography magazines in the house (which was a parole violation). Nothing that could tie him to Keith. But Sadowski seemed to think he knew more than he was saying. Why? He didn’t say in any of the notes … or at least none of the notes he gave Spencer.

Roan was reaching for the phone when it rang, nearly making him jump. Man, that was creepy when that happened. He picked up the receiver, and the coincidence of it all got creepier still - it was Murphy. “Hey Roan. You know a guy named Dallas Brian Faraday?”

“Hello to you too,” he replied sarcastically. Dropkick just wasn’t much for foreplay. Poor Kim. “And I don’t know him per se, but I know of him, yes. Why?”

She sighed. “He’s a client?”

“No. His wife is, if you must know. She hired me to find out if he was cheating on her or not. Why?”

“Because he was just found dead on Townsend Beach with a bullet through his brain and your business card in his pocket. Was he cheating on her? Did you tell his wife?”

Roan held the receiver away for a moment, staring at it, waiting for it to become something else. But it didn’t, because he wasn’t asleep and he wasn’t dreaming.

What fresh hell was this?

1 - What Would Wolves Do?

The loneliest time in the world was 2:45 am.

It was long enough after the bars closed that everyone who had a place to go (or thought they did) and were physically able to leave were gone, so all that were left were the chronically homeless or the blind drunk, who had a tendency to drift into shadows or cars or parks, effectively disappearing. You could wander entire blocks and feel like the last man on earth.

Then you wandered into a convenience store, a last glowing beacon of humanity, and the feeling fled under florescent lights highlighting aisles and aisles of unnaturally colored snack food. It made you want to be the last man on earth.

Maybe that, or it was his latest case, which was just one fucking depressing surprise after another. He nodded at the Pakistani clerk, a sad eyed man slumped at the counter, idly watching a portable TV that sounded like it was tuned to a Law and Order repeat (sure, why not? They could play that fucking show twenty four hours a day for a month and never run out of different episodes), and then went to the back where the cooler cases were. Roan had already decided this case was over, prematurely ended due to unexpected weirdness. He was hired by his client, one Holly Faraday, to tail her husband, Dallas Faraday. Over the past couple of months, he was working later and later, and she discovered by finding a bill he’d thrown away that he had maxed out his personal credit card - the one with the hundred thousand dollar limit. She confronted him about it, and he made up some phony story about outstanding student loans and a bad bet, but it made no sense to her. Then he drained their bank account, seemed to always have an excuse not to sleep with her, and one of her favorite coats - some ludicrously expensive Prada thing - disappeared. She figured he was having an affair (in spite of his denials), and that maybe he was being blackmailed, which would explain why his money was being spent so freely and mysteriously.

Roan doubted it was blackmail, as shows and mystery fiction had overstated its use. Dallas was in the higher echelon of the middle class - he was an upper management drone at Columbia Mutual - but he was hardly someone worthy of blackmail, unless it was a family member extorting him for money (when blackmail was involved, it was never complete strangers who had lucked into dirty secrets). So he’d started following him - of course he wasn’t working late like he’d told her; Roan discovered he’d actually been fired from his job at the beginning of the week - and uncovered Dallas’s secret life.

First of all, he had herpes. Roan caught him buying Valtrex, and he also caught him taking some in the front seat of his Lexus, washing it down with his latte. He didn’t take pictures of that, although it did explain his lack of sexual interest in his wife. Why wouldn’t he tell his wife about it, though? He may have exposed her to it already; she may already have it. It wasn’t fair to keep that information from her.

Dallas drove around for a bit, withdrawing money from two different ATMs, which was suspicious. Roan began to wonder if he was a sex addict, “addicted” to prostitutes (which would explain the venereal disease). He then drove down towards a formerly seedy but now gentrifying part of the city, and visited a woman who lived in a ground floor apartment. He got telephoto pictures of a not so subtle cocaine deal - he was buying himself some nose candy from a frizzy haired blonde woman who looked like the perfect stereotype of a soccer mom, save for that tattoo (he wasn‘t sure what it was, but guessed it was probably a cactus). His new camera had such high resolution that he was able to see it was purely powered stuff, not crack or crystal. Very old school. The woman didn’t look like Tony Montana; her place wasn’t that posh either. A very small time dealer.

Dallas ended the night at a kegger taking place at an off campus house outside the local college, where there was no way in hell he was invited (he was about fifteen years older than everyone else) but they were all too drunk to give a crap about the skeevy cokehead cruising the coeds. He abandoned his stake out there, as there was no way to watch for long without being noticed himself.

But that explained the money, and possibly the herpes. Dallas had a major drug habit. How he’d suddenly found nose candy about ten years after it became antiquated he had no idea, but it was still an addictive motherfucker. But none of this was the moral quandary that had haunted him the rest of the night. Should he turn the photos over to the cops?

If she had been a small time pot dealer, it wouldn’t have even occurred to him. Hypocritical, but there it was. Most potheads were harmless, simply because doing harm would have meant getting off the couch. And dealers who did their business in dime bags were generally rank amateurs, usually high school or college kids, no one very hardcore. But once you vaulted into the harder stuff - be it the crack dealers or the pot growing operations that took up an acre or two - things got exponentially more dangerous, mainly because the amount of money involved also increased. Money was the key; not too many people got worked up over twenty dollars worth of pot. But make that twenty five thousand dollars worth of pot (or whatever), and yeah, people cared very much. That’s when guns and violence entered the equation.

Potheads generally didn’t do anything but act stupid and eat Twinkies. Cokeheads could go fucking nuts. Staying up twenty hours in a row and eating nothing but coke could do that to anyone. Amphetamines made you feel invincible, and stupid enough to believe it. A small time coke dealer still might be trouble.

At what point in his life had he decided he didn’t want to seem like a narc? It was too late - he’d already been a cop once. That stained you as a “narc” for life. He eyed all the sodas through the glass doors of the cold case, and decided he wanted something else. He just didn’t know what. He was tired and thirsty and hungry, and it was a long drive home. He told Dylan he was on stake out duty, but he may have showed up after work anyways, as he had his own key to his place. Sometimes he made him dinner, and even though they were vegetarian things, they were usually pretty good. Dylan’s job made him a night owl by default, so at least they had that in common.

He’d know if Dylan was addicted to coke; he had to be really careful about when and how many pain pills he took and when, as Dylan was suspicious enough about his relationship with pills anyways. And they didn’t even live together. So how did Dallas get away with being a cokehead and Holly never suspecting a thing? That didn’t make sense. He’d be nervous and shaky, probably more high strung than he was before, possibly losing weight or at least his appetite. And that’s not to mention the other side effects that could result, such as spontaneous nosebleeds. She noticed the changes in money and some behavior, but not all? Why not? Oh sure, some people seemed to miss a lot, but Holly had struck him as sharper than that. Perhaps he was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.

He’d just decided on a bottled green tea when he heard the chime of the door’s bells, followed shortly after by a rough male voice shouting, “Empty the fucking cash register, now!”

Roan turned, and had to take a couple of steps back to the end of the candy aisle to see what was going on. A guy with a nine millimeter, black hoodie wearer with the hood pulled tight around his face, so agitated that he seemed to be rocking back and forth even as he stood still. Speak of the devil - it was probably a methhead; they could become a serious of twitches, tics, and shivers. Coke was bad enough, but meth was hell, a quick trip to the grave. He heard the high was spectacular, and it must have been for people to deteriorate so fast.

Roan had actually decided to let the robbery go, as it was too dangerous to the clerk to go after him here and now. He could follow him outside and confront him there - he knew the streets were fairly deserted, and the chance of collateral damage was almost zero. But the guy thought the clerk wasn’t moving fast enough, and smashed him in the head with the gun. “Don’t fuckin’ try anythin’ with me, towelhead!” the guy snapped, reaching over the counter.

“Stupid shit,” Roan muttered under his breath. This could have went smoothly; no one could have been hurt. But he decided to be even more of a fuckhead than he already was. Roan knew if he started running he’d hear him and turn, so he had to buy himself some time. He stepped into the candy aisle and tossed the bottle of tea.

It was a dead shot - it hit him square on the back of the skull, and even though the glass bottle didn’t break, he heard the terrible thunk of impact and the guy pitched forward across the counter, although he didn’t drop the gun. “Fuck!” he roared. The bottle shattered when it hit the floor.

Roan had started running, but he could tell from the smell the robber was giving off that he was amped up, and probably relatively impervious to pain. He started turning, gun out, and Roan realized he’d started running too late. The guy would have time to shoot him before he reached him.

So he lunged for him. He didn’t ram into him - somehow he landed with his feet on the edge of the counter, bracketing the man’s chest, putting him in a good position to grab the man’s gun hand and punch him in the face with his other hand. He felt a tooth give under his knuckle.

“Motherf -” the guy began struggling, and Roan snapped his wrist like it was made of plywood. He let out a horrified yelp, and Roan slammed his forehead down on the man’s face. It hurt like a motherfucker, and he saw stars, but the robber got it worse. Roan let his arm go so he could slide to the floor, and Roan instantly grabbed the edge of the counter where he had planted his feet. Was this defying gravity? He supposed not, but it was pretty close. He was balancing - easily - on the very edge of the counter. He could see the clerk behind the counter, crouched down with a thin trickle of blood dripping down from his scalp. His eyes were wide and definitely startled, like he wasn’t sure if he should be more afraid of Roan or the guy with the gun. “You call the cops? He asked, finally feeling the strain on the back of his legs.

For a second he just stared at him like he couldn’t believe he was for real, then gestured to something under the counter. “Got a button back here.”

“Good.” Roan dropped back down to the floor, careful to avoid the robber, who was already coming around. Roan kicked him over on his face and put a foot on the back of his head to keep him down, leaning back against the counter to wait. “Don’t struggle. I have your gun now.” Actually, it was still on the counter where it had fallen, and Roan had no interest in it. He didn’t need it.

The clerk stood up at some point, turning the set’s volume down to almost nothing, and eventually asked, “How did you do that?”

Oh no. “Do what?”

“That - that jump. I’ve never seen anyone do something like that outside of movies. Are you a gymnast or something?”

The jump? The jump. Staring down the aisle, he realized his lunge was done about what, twenty feet from the robber? More or less? He should go for the long jump competition. Roan wanted to say “No, I’m a cat,” but managed to fight the urge. It was for the best. “Not exactly.” He didn’t know he could do that. But if he could jump from a third floor and manage to land on his feet (and not break every bone in his legs), why couldn’t he do this? It was a minor variation on a theme.

He wasn’t sure if he wanted the cops that showed up to know him or not, but as it turned out the different was split. It was Thompson and Bragg, two cops he saw involved with the crowd control at one of the protests - they all knew of each other, but didn‘t really know each other at all. Thompson was a rock solid six foot three, two hundred pound guy who bore a very minor resemblance to a young Jim Brown, a reference that Thompson totally didn’t get when he mentioned it. It made Roan feel so very old. Bragg was an attractive, slightly heavyset woman ten inches shorter than her partner, who seemed to show no emotion whatsoever no matter the situation. Thompson was a bit more jovial, but in a way that suggested that he and Bragg had worked out their whole “good cop/bad cop” routine in advance.

Bragg took his statement while the EMTs bundled the suspect off to the emergency room (broken wrist, possible concussion), and Thompson interviewed the clerk, who was actually the owner of the shop - it seemed he had a hard time getting people to cover the night shift. (No, really?) He gave Thompson an earful on shitty police coverage and response time, but Thompson took it all with the same good humor he took everything.

Roan got his tea. As soon as the cops arrived and took over, he got another bottle from the cold case. He offered money, but the clerk/owner waved it away. Maybe a free drink was the least he could expect. Maybe he should have tried to get a frozen burrito thrown in as well.

Bragg asked him if he carried a gun, and he opened his jacket and showed her the Sig Sauer in his belt holster. That made her raise a painted eyebrow at him. “You didn’t pull it?”

“Why? Get in a gun fight with a civilian right there?”

“When you hit him with the bottle, you could have just as well have shot him. There’d have been no fight at all.”

Roan scoffed. “Kill a guy for trying to rob a store? I don’t think so.”

She kept giving him that stare, like she couldn’t believe he was for real. It was then, inside the store, that Thompson let out a startled laugh, and said, “Lisha, you gotta see this! This is fucking awesome.” Thompson was watching security camera footage of the incident. He looked up and met his eyes. “How’d you fuckin’ do that, man?”

“Pilates,” Roan replied, deadpan.

Thompson thought about it for a moment, thinking he was serious, but then he realized he was being sarcastic and laughed, shaking his head. “You’re crazy.”

He felt like it, but he knew he meant it in a humorously complimentary way. Roan hoped that footage didn’t end up on YouTube too.

He drove home, listening to the Deftones and trying to stay awake. You’d think that his adrenaline would be high, but it wore off very quickly. He was tired and kind of drained. It was a shitty tail, and it had been a shitty couple of weeks. It was one of those times when he wondered if he should quit this job entirely, and then he’d wonder what he could do instead, and reconsidered it. He was only qualified to be a smartass, and amazingly, no one paid for that. Well, very few at any rate.

The house was dark when he got home, but Dylan’s beater car was in the driveway, and he’d left the porchlight on for him. He unlocked the doors to a quiet house that still had the smells of recent cooking lingering in it. From the scent alone, he guessed it was something Moroccan, as he could smell peppers and cumin and couscous. Other things too - was that raisins? - but those were the dominant notes. There was a note on the breakfast bar that he read while listening to the messages on his answering machine. Dylan’s note was short, saying he’d tried to stay up and wait for him but he was tired, so he ate dinner and went to bed, but he’d left him dinner in the fridge. Fair enough. The messages were nothing remarkable. Unless Dylan had erased it, this was day number two without a death threat. He should mark it on the calendar.

But while it seemed good on the surface, it could be terrible. Maybe the guy got bored. Or maybe he decided that the time for talking was done, and the time for action was nigh. Fuck it - he’d find out soon enough.

There was a brief tug of war between hungry and tired, but tired won, so he simply went upstairs, letting the dim moonlight illuminate his path. He didn’t really need to see anyways; he knew this house, how everything was laid out. He didn’t need to see to know what was where.

Once he made it to the bedroom, he quietly stripped, piling his clothes on the chair before slipping into bed beside Dylan. Roan had bought new sheets and blankets, an attempt to move on even in a merely cosmetic sense, and he still wasn’t used to the feel of them against his skin. It was weird what you got used to without realizing it.

He didn’t want to wake Dylan up, but the shifting mattress seemed to do it, and he turned towards him and opened his sleepy eyes. “Hey there.” He must have glanced at the clock on the nightstand behind him, as he quickly added, “Wow, that was one long tail.”

“Yeah.”

Dylan cupped his face in his hand as he brushed one of his legs against his. This was still nice; he still missed the warmth of another Human being when it wasn’t there. “Anything happen?”

He wanted to say, “I’m a hostage situation away from superherodom. Do you think I have an ass for spandex?” But instead he said, “Nope, not really. How’d your night go?”

“Oh, dull. It was a really slow night for some reason.”

“Cock ring show in town?”

He smirked, too tired to laugh. “I think I’d have been informed if there was. I’m glad I grabbed one of your Hard Case Crime books before I left, ‘cause I ended up reading most of it. Not that the boss was happy about me reading on the job, but there was no one to serve drinks to for long stretches.”

“Tell him reading makes you look smart, and smart guys are hot.”

“Only to some.”

“I don’t like himbos.”

He kissed him softly on the bottom lip, letting his hand trail down his chest. “I know. It’s very sweet of you.”

“I’m a weirdo.”

“Stop that,” Dylan said mildly. He snuggled closer, and Roan put his arms around him as Dylan nestled his head into his neck. He must have washed his hair before he went to bed, because Dylan’s hair smelled faintly of green tea conditioner.

Roan could hear birds start chirping outside, as it was just about four in the morning, and out here some of the songbirds beat the sun by a good hour. Not many, though, so it wasn’t too distracting. He concentrated on Dylan’s breathing as it slowed and deepened as he fell back to sleep, and tried to copy him. He was tired, and yet not quite tired enough to fall asleep.

Maybe because somewhere, in the back of his mind, he had this awful feeling that something bad was going to happen, that he had dodged so many bullets that his luck was bound to turn. You could fight a lot of things, but odds and entropy always got you in the end.

Roan just wondered who was out there looking for him, and what they would do when they finally decided to pull the trigger.