7 - Fighting In Built Up Areas

As it turned out, night air and driving a motorcycle woke you up a bit, even if you were on Vicodin. Roan wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

Ultimately he found himself looking around at the streets, which looked somehow more seedy and yet prettier at night. Warm lights in crumbling buildings looked welcoming, while garish neon looked jewel toned, giving glamour to the shabbiest bar. And of course it was an empty world, full of cars but mostly devoid of people, at least at this time of night and in certain areas. But the bars weren’t out yet, and when they were humanity would return in a flood, loud and bright and raging. Sometimes he felt like an alien. He’d watch these people and not quite understand why they did what they did on a gut level - on an intellectual level he could break it down most of the time, but that was different than instinctive knowledge. He wondered what it was about him that made him feel that way: being an ex-cop, being infected, being gay, having a bad childhood, all of the above, or maybe none of the above. When you came down to it, it might just be a basic malfunction of personality. Not a shock either way.

Within a block of Bishop Park, the lights became bright halogens and sodiums, security lights that mercilessly scrubbed the shadows away, and it was like entering an embalmed part of the city, well preserved but rather lifeless. Lights were on in glass and steel condo towers that looked just like office buildings, something he found monumentally depressing. Who’d pay so much money to live in a place that would remind you of a dreary office? Maybe because most of these people didn’t work in dreary offices, or at least not the lower floors where all the peons were.

Not that this place was safe - far from it. Most of the cars parked on the street were of the middle to lower end variety - Kias, Hondas, Nissans, Fords. The Lexuses and BMWs and Saabs were in underground or covered garages, somewhere safe from ‘jackers and thieves. Even so, Roan drove past one Mitsubishi that had been liberated of its CD player, the glass gone on the driver’s side. The next block over, he heard a car alarm screaming futilely into the night.

The park looked charming, almost quaint behind its locked funereal gates, old fashioned style streetlights painting light on a tall old oak that must have been here since the very beginning of the park. Roan took no chances and brought his bike up on the sidewalk with him, killing the engine and getting off, but never far from the bike as it rested on its kickstand. Most people didn’t know what a Buell was, but as soon as they saw the bike they wanted it, and that was before they even knew about the street racer qualities it had. If he ever needed to engage in a high speed chase, he was ready. Paris’s muscle cars were good for ramming things Road Warrior style, but the bike was better for catching that tanker.

God, he was such a geek.

He stood at the gates, hands around the cold metal bars, and took a deep breath. Inside he could smell exhaust and earth, the green scent of foliage and relatively healthy plants, and other things. For instance, someone was or had very recently been smoking in the park - he caught pot as well as crack, pot a heavy resinous scent, crack a sharp scent that made his sinus passages buzz. If he listened very hard, ignoring the thunderous bass of a car on another block and the startled whoop of yet another car alarm, he could hear whispery trails of laughter, mocking and hard. The park looked deserted, but it was far from it.

Somewhere beyond the buttery pool of light and the stately oak, the bored, affluent teenagers who wanted to rebel but hadn’t quite figured out how were waiting, smoking up and seeing if something would happen to break their boredom. A lot of times they thought they were copying the behavior of “ghetto” kids, people harder than them, but that was an insult to everyone who had been raised in an actual ghetto. They were simply spoiled brats who were mean and hard well before their time; they’d make even meaner and harder CEOs someday, maybe even politicians with “tough talk” rhetoric who would grow doughy on hefty campaign contributions from companies that wanted the poor kept down at all cost.

Wow, what a mood he was in tonight. And he just got laid! You’d think that would make him nicer.

Roan leaned against the gates and sighed. As easily as the kids hopped the fence, he could too; maybe even easier, since he had the whole cat thing going on for him. And for that very reason, if they decided to take him on, he would kick their asses. He would hurt them, possibly quite badly, and he never even needed to pull his baton or his gun. If he went in, he’d trigger a fight he didn’t need to have. What did he think, that he was going to teach these kids a “lesson”? You couldn’t teach anyone anything if they never thought they needed to learn. He would just be a story, nothing more, an excuse for a scar or two.

Worse yet, the playground that Keith was snatched from was gone. It had been moved to another area, expanded, put in a clearing where everyone could see anyone come and go. He wouldn’t benefit at all from any of this. The place where Keith was taken had been given back to the forest, as if that sacrifice would make the trees give him back. It hadn’t worked.

Where did he think he was going with this? There were no clues, no leads, no nothing. He was chasing a ghost. Worse yet, a ghost that hadn’t been seen for ages, one that had sunken back into the ether. He wanted to give Chris Spencer some peace, but he wasn’t sure anyone could.

Standing there, listening to the noises of the night, the chorus of alarms and engines and car stereos, he realized he did have one single avenue left to explore: Roger Jorgenson.

Sadowski was sure he had been here but hadn’t talked because he didn’t want to put himself at the scene and get in trouble, or maybe because he was protecting a fellow predator. But what if he knew the predator? What if he was a friend?

That was a huge leap, as Gabe had included some files on Jorgenson in the Turner files, and he was a stereotypical pedophile. Meaning no real friends, or at least no adult ones besides his mother - he wasn’t even attempting to be seen as normal. (Some did; some were married with kids, and had a genuine social circle of friends, contrary to most stereotypes. But there was a segment that never even tried to pass.) But what about cell mates? Jorgenson had been arrested and was technically on parole at the time of the incident. Who did Jorgenson share a cell with?

He looked at his watch, which never failed to amuse him. During office hours, when he was actually in, he wore a relatively nice watch; not expensive, but nice and professional looking. During off hours or stake outs or days off, he wore things that he found funny, which was why he was wearing a plastic Simpsons watch that had been given away as a fast food promotion; he picked it up at a Goodwill for a dollar. Yes it was stupid and immature, but it always reminded him to lighten up, as how serious could you be wearing a plastic Simpsons watch? If he pressed a button, Bart and Homer would briefly argue with each other.

Damn, he was a hopeless geek. Might as well get a big G tattooed on his forehead: it could stand for both gay and geek.

Besides that, the night shift would be on at the station. Presuming no major changing of the guard, Marcos should be there, and he’d probably be willing to let him have a look at some old files. Marcos was another long timer, like Sadowski, who willingly took the thankless night shift because his wife was gone (left him for a fitness instructor) and he had no kids, and he had nothing waiting for him at home except a dog with a bad hip and a cat with one ear. There was always something rather sad and quiet about Marcos’s personality, but that was also what put him in the small category of cops who didn’t give him shit because he was gay. Marcos wasn’t a judgmental type; he seemed too tired to bother.

Roan got back on the bike and kicked off the kickstand, walking it back out to the street before starting it, revving the engine for a moment just to make the bored teens curious about what they missed before driving off into the night, headed towards the station.

Well, not directly. Soon enough he came across a road blocked off due to a tremendously nasty looking car crash, one involving a squashed Datsun and a huge semi-trailer. Glass littered the road like ice crystals, and emergency flares lit the scene in blood red. Cops and firefighters stood off to one side, discussing the use of the jaws of life, and Roan saw no one he recognized, so he did a u-turn and headed towards the main thoroughfare, figuring he’d take the long way around.

He was back in the middle of the city as some of the clubs started shutting down, and traffic became wild and woolly. As it was, he had to piss, so he stopped at a Taco Bell to take a leak and pick up a soda, just because he wanted to have to take another piss in twenty minutes or so. Also, the caffeine seemed to cut through the Vicodin, but he wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing. With the downtime, he decided to check his messages, which he had ignored earlier so he could have dinner and a romantic interlude with Dylan that should have been more life affirming, but for some reason he wasn’t shaking his ennui. If great sex couldn’t shake your funk, you were one pathetic bastard.

There was the predictable cussing out from a stuffy sounding Dee, although after dressing him down and letting him know that when he came to visit him - and he made it known he would damn well be visiting him - he was bringing him a Godfather’s pizza “humble pie”, and he was going to bring it soon, as Dee had news for him. Roan wondered what the news was, as Dee didn’t hint. Nothing in his voice indicated it was bad news, so he assumed it was good. Or at least he hoped so.

Rainbow was on there as well. She’d heard he’d been shot and was worried about him, although she knew he’d walked away, leading to this odd statement on her part: “Of course he wasn’t going to kill you like that. You’re hardly an ordinary lion, are you?” He’d have laughed if her simple, earnest statement hadn’t made him want to burst into tears. She then told him who Nolan seemed to have sided with. He couldn’t say he was surprised. At least he knew who he was paying a visit to tomorrow.

He watched from the windows looking out onto the streets, and ventured out as soon as the traffic thinned out once more. It still wasn’t great, but better than before.

He was idling at a light where the main thoroughfare met Weston Boulevard, and heard something that caught his attention. Even through his helmet he could hear an angrily shouted “Fucking faggot!” and saw someone stumble across a parking lot set out around back of the closed down punk CD store (damn, Roan used to love it, but the combined pressures of the economy and downloadable music crushed it). He knew he should just stick to heading towards the cop shop, but he wondered if someone was taking their frustrations out on a Boulevard boy. They weren’t all like Fox and Cowboy; they couldn’t all take care of themselves, as one of the “friendly” local police had shown.

There was nobody behind him, so he pulled off into what passed for an alley (it was actually a never used side street that had originally been built for loading trucks, when there were actual businesses here), and parked the bike as he clearly saw what must have been a fight. There were a couple of guys, a frat boy type with a solid build save for a soft gut and an older guy who had the look of a hard drinking trucker type, and a guy who was somewhere between their ages and wearing more plaid than was probably allowed this side of Canada. As he entered the parking lot, he saw these three were fighting one guy, as another was splayed out on the broken blacktop in an ever increasing pool of blood. He looked really badly hurt, which should have been enough to stop the fight, but he got the sense most of the participants were drunk and angry. The angry drunks were the absolute worst.

“Knock it off!” he shouted in his stern cop voice, but no one was paying any attention to him. The older guy had a metal pipe or a crowbar - it was too poorly lit here to tell which - forcing Roan to intervene. He grabbed the pipe and ripped it out of his hands, saying, “What the fuck’s the matter with you?!”

Roan didn’t get an answer. What he did get was swung at, as the guy turned and took a poke at him, but he telegraphed the move in a way that only the drunk or the sloppy possibly could. Roan tossed the pipe aside so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it, and stepped back, avoiding the clumsy swing and letting the man stumble as his momentum carried him forward. Only then did Roan step in and deliver a short, sharp punch to the solar plexus that dropped him immediately to his knees. “Don’t fuck with me,” Roan warned him belatedly.

“Motherfucker!” the frat guy roared, charging at him. Roan easily sidestepped him, and as he stumbled off into a wall, warned him, “I’m here to stop the fight, asshole. Don’t make me kick your ass.”

“Oh wow,” a strangely familiar voice said, chuckling faintly. It was Holden - he was the standing man in the fight, the one called the “fucking faggot”. He looked really different, so it was hard to see him in the clinging shadows of the claustrophobic parking lot. He was no longer dying his hair a florescent peroxide blond but let it go back to his natural brown-blond color, and he was no longer spiking it like Bart Simpson either. He almost looked normal, which was really weird. “You guys are in trouble. You don’t mess with the toughest homo in the world.”

Was that a reference to him? Roan would have asked, but just then frat boy grabbed him around the throat from behind, trying to get him in a choke hold.

Roan threw his elbow back hard and rapidly, hitting bone several times and sending a numbing shock up his arm, but it was worse for the frat boy, who made several noises of pain before Roan heard bone starting to crack, and with a gagging noise he shoved Roan away, releasing his choke hold and bending over, spitting out blood and grabbing his face. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, but his speech was so mushy and slurred it sounded more like “sumavabish”.

“Fucker!” the guy in plaid screamed as he rushed him, but he shouldn’t have done that, as he gave Roan fair warning. As he spun to face him, he pulled out his metal baton, and with a flick of his wrist he extended it out to its foot and a half length and brought it up to meet the man as he ran in for what was most likely supposed to be a full body tackle. The metal baton smashed into the side of the man’s face, where the jawbone met the skull on the right hand side, and the resulting snap was loud and sickening. On one level.

Roan was kind of surprised to realize he also felt a sick, almost amused triumph as the guy instantly dropped to the cracked asphalt, howling in pain and holding on to his lopsided jaw as if trying to keep it attached to his face. He looked over at the frat boy, oozing blood himself, and the old guy, who was just finishing puking on the lot. “Anybody want some more?” The puking guy was too busy heaving to answer, but the frat boy looked at him evilly, eyes glittering like the glass from a broken taillight, but they flicked between him and his baton, still held at his side, ready for the next attack. He wasn’t going to make a move while he had a weapon and they both knew it. The kid would have shit himself if he knew he was also carrying a gun.

There was an inherent dark thrill in totally controlling a scene. And Roan owned this one. The fight was over.

“What the fuck was this about?” he asked Holden. He could see the hustler out of the corner of his eye, kneeling next to the boy in the pool of blood.

“These motherfuckers jumped Ponyboy,” he snapped, making a violently dismissive gesture towards the fallen drunkards. “I was just coming out of a bar across the street when I heard some guys laughing over some other guys’ beating up a fag in the old parking lot. So I figured I’d join the party and beat me up some rednecks. I didn’t know it was Ponyboy ‘til I got here, though.”

“Who the hell’s Ponyboy?” Roan asked, not recognizing the nickname. Well sure, he recognized it as coming from an S.E. Hinton book, but not in a Boulevard boy context.

“He’s just a kid. Came here last year from Minnesota. He was running from something, but he never said what.”

“Ain’t no way in fucking hell you’re a butt pirate,” the frat boy slurred, still glaring at him in a belligerent manner. If looks could have killed, he would have been an interesting stain on the crumbling brick wall behind him.

Roan matched him glare for glare, resisting the urge to tap the baton against his leg like a riding crop. “Ahoy matey.”

“Told you he was the toughest homo on the planet, fuckwit,” Holden spat.

“Well, thanks for finding my epitaph,” he told Holden sarcastically, although honestly, he could have done much worse. As it was, that wasn’t too bad.

Police sirens cut the night, shredding it to ribbons, and when he was sure that the frat boy had no chance of making a run for it, he compacted the baton again and slipped it into his coat pocket. “What is that?” Holden asked him.

“Retractable metal baton.”

“Really? Where do you get those?”

“I bought it at a security shop, but any place that sells martial arts equipment will probably have them too.”

“Huh. I gotta get me one of those.”

The cop car partially blocked the mouth of the alley, and when the cops joined them, Roan saw that he didn’t know either of them - McKay and Gilberto, respectively - and since they didn’t know him, they instantly considered him a suspect. This got worse when he was thrown up against the wall and frisked, along with Holden, who wanted to stay with Ponyboy, but it was Roan they found with the baton and the gun. He was instantly cuffed, even as he told them - for the thousandth time - that he was a private investigator and was a consultant for the department. When he told them he used to work at the Ninth Precinct and that they should call Chief Matthews to verify his identity, McKay snorted and said, “Yeah pal, we’re gonna wake her up for you.”

He told them he had his P.I. license in his wallet along with his concealed carry permit, and at least they looked at those as the ambulance arrived to block the rest of the alleyway. He didn’t know these paramedics either, which was a bitch since he was cuffed and sitting resigned to a very frustrating night next to an equally cuffed Holden, who was manacled the moment he gave them lip. This close to him, Roan could see Holden had a swollen reddish eye that would be black in a few hours, and a split lower lip that was seeping blood down his chin. Holden was deceptively tough, but taking on three guys seemed a bit much even for him. “You take me to the nicest places,” Holden joked.

He simply glared at him out of the corner of his eye. “Hilarious. What were you thinking?”

“Probably the same thing you were. Putting an end to it.”

“We did a bang up job, didn’t we?”

“You did. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I am the toughest homo in the world.”

Holden smirked at the echoed line, and replied, “Be proud of it, man. I used to think I was. I feel humbled.”

Ponyboy was in really bad shape, suggesting that it wasn’t the first time the metal pipe had come out during the fight, and the paramedics had to call in another unit to take everyone to the hospital. One came over to treat Holden, but he didn’t have to do much. Roan needed no help at all - or at least not the physical kind.

A twitchy Asian kid wearing a stocking cap pulled low over his head, making his hair stick out from beneath it like loose wires, hung around after the ambulances left, and Holden’s gesture with his head brought him slinking up the alley, trying to avoid the eyes of the cops. “A.J., take care of Roan’s bike,” he told him. “I’ll hold you personally responsible if something happens to it. So keep it safe, okay?”

The kid - A.J. - nodded almost spastically, and said in a quiet voice, “I’ll take care of it.” The kid skulked away, pausing only to grab the bike and wheel it away.

“He won’t sell it for crack, will he?” Roan asked.

Holden shook his head. “I told him I’ll hold him personally responsible for it. He’ll probably wash and wax it for you.”

“In that case, thanks.” He wasn’t certain about this, but it was better than leaving the bike out here, where it would probably be stolen within five minutes. Holden still had enough pull on the streets that the kids would want to listen to him and fall into his favor.

Finally the cops decided to run them in, and Roan found himself trying not to laugh, possibly because this was so fucked up.

Well, he’d wanted to go to the cop shop. At least this way he was getting chauffeured.

6 - Something Bad Is Gonna Happen

Roan found himself sitting at a round patio table under a glaring sun, a paper coffee cup in his hand. He looked down to find the cup completely empty, even though he seemed to be in the outdoor section of a coffee shop. He was wondering why he didn’t get a table with an umbrella when he suddenly became aware that the seat across from him was taken.

It was Paris sitting there, his long black hair glossy in the sun, his mirrored sunglasses strangely reflecting nothing at all. “You have to stop,” he said, his Canadian accent oddly pronounced. It was really weird, because as far as he knew, Par had never had an accent at all. Sketch comedy jokes aside, he’d never once said “aboot”. “This is the time to leave, Roan. You can’t do this anymore.”

He looked down at his cup to find it was now full of something red. Punch? “What are you talking about?”

Paris pushed his sunglasses up to the top of his head, and for some reason there was an almost hair thin trail of blood trickling from his right eye. Paris, for his part, didn’t seem to notice. “You. You have to put it away now.”

“Put away what? What are you talking about?” He heard a dull noise, and looked down to see he had somehow dropped his cup of punch on the ground, and the liquid was no longer red but clear, like water. When he bent down to look, he noticed a lion sprawled on the road, seemingly sunning itself, its tail flicking in a lazy yet strangely metronomic fashion. He looked around to see if people were freaking out, but bizarrely, he was all alone.

Roan woke up, suddenly panicked. “Dylan?” he asked, instantly wondering why he was panicked, and why he said that. God, he hated these fucking weird codeine dreams.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes, and realized someone had undressed him and tucked him under the covers. Wow, a couple guesses who that was. It was dark now, no light coming through the open curtains of the window over the bed, and as he stumbled to the bathroom, he wondered why codeine always gave him dry mouth. His hand was throbbing, but it wasn’t so bad.

He thought about taking another pill, but he felt so logy he wasn’t sure the others had completely worn off yet. He heard noise downstairs, a television, and smelled tomatoes and spices. Dylan? But it was dark - shouldn’t he be at work? He threw on a pair of sweatpants and went downstairs to find out.

From the stairs he glanced down at his television, and saw that Dylan was watching Torchwood as he cooked. Roan was nearly at the base of the stairs when he finally noticed him. “Hey, should you be out of bed?”

“I was shot in the hand; I’m not an invalid. If I play my cards right, I won’t even have a limp.”

Dylan gave him a warning frown, tearing a sheet of aluminum foil off the roll. “You must feel better. You’re back to being a smart ass.”

“Hard to keep a good smart ass down.” As he entered the kitchen and went to the fridge, he saw a couple of pans on the stove, steaming away. He almost forgot he had pans like that. “Smells great. What is it?”

“Penne alla puttanesca.”

“Wow, I love puttanesca sauce.”

“I know, that’s why I made it. It’s ready if you’re hungry.”

Roan pulled an old Gatorade bottle from the back of the shelf and gulped it down. It was disgusting, but he had to admit he felt a little less logy afterwards. And as disgusting as it was, he drank it all. He had to get his fluid levels back up; he probably didn’t lose that much blood, but he was bleeding pretty good there for a while. “Yeah, I guess I am, thanks.” he paused for a moment. “Doesn’t puttanesca sauce have anchovies in it?”

“Mine doesn’t.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He got a plate down from the cupboard - at least he remembered where they were - and helped himself to a ladle full of pasta (whole wheat, of course, and probably organic; he was dating a hippie) and sauce, which were in separate pans. The sauce smelled really good, anchovies be damned.

He sat down on the couch with his food and a bottle of pomegranate-blueberry juice, and saw that Dylan had brought in all the papers from his car. The Keith Turner files.

He started reading them while eating, and felt himself getting sucked into the dry recitation of facts, which broke people’s lives down into vanilla facts that made them as flat as the page he was holding in his hand. “Weren’t you supposed to work tonight?”

Dylan scoffed as he collapsed in the love seat across from him, a bowl of pasta in his hands. “Yeah, my boyfriend’s been shot, I sure feel like pouring drinks for horny, lonely men. I called Casey to take my shift for me. We just switched; I’ll cover a Tuesday for him next month.” Casey (bar name: Rod) was the only straight bartender to ever work at Panic. He used to be a bartender at a “regular” bar, but figured he could make more money if he took off his shirt and flirted with guys, so he did. He had a reputation as a cocktease just because he was straight, but it was also because he was that he got huge tips, as some gay guys held on to this fantasy of “converting” (or at least nailing) a good looking straight guy. Roan wasn’t sure how he felt about that - it was dishonest as hell, and the equivalent of being gay for pay, and yet it was refreshing to meet a straight guy so secure in his own sexuality he didn’t feel the need to beat up any guy who dared to make eyes at him.

“This is really good. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad you felt well enough to come down for it. I was going to put it in the fridge and save it for you for when you felt better.”

Roan felt the same free floating guilt that he often felt around Dylan. He was too good for him, and he suspected they both knew it. Dylan was still wearing his worn jeans from earlier, but he noticed he was wearing his Pansy Division tour t-shirt, and wondered if some of his blood had gotten on Dylan’s shirt. It was possible.

They ate in silence for a while, the television giving the illusion of life while he was sucked into the paperwork and savored the sauce on the pasta. Damn, if you poured spicy tomato sauce on a shoe, he’d probably eat it.

But eventually the words began to blur together on the page; it didn’t help that most cops had awful handwriting. He paused reading to give his eyes a rest and finish off his pasta. He was contemplating getting another helping when he noticed Dylan was frowning faintly at the pages he’d just put down on the sofa. It was a distracted frown, one suggesting he was lost in his own thoughts, and the thoughts weren’t pleasant. “Did you look at these?” Roan wondered.

He glanced up at him, making the slightest noise of surprise. “Huh? Oh, no, just the top page. Why do you have a file on the Keith Turner case?”

“You remember it?”

He made a strange noise deep in his throat. “How could I forget? I searched the park.”

Roan put his plate down. “You did?”

“I was a volunteer with Search and Rescue until I went to college and decided to “reinvent” myself. You should have seen me when I was younger, Ro - I was a goody two shoes to make Ned Flanders ill. I was so hurt by people making comments about me being the son of that psycho cop who killed his wife, an abusive monster just waiting to happen - like father, like son - that I decided to become the most perfect, upright person on the planet. I got straight A’s, I was on the Honor Roll, I won a spelling bee, I came in second in the regional science fair, I was a Stepford kid. When I got to my teen years, I worked summers as a lifeguard, and I worked with Search and Rescue as soon as I was old enough to be accepted. We once searched the woods near Pinecrest for a lost hiker, but that was pretty much the biggest thing we did before we got word of the Turner case.” Dylan put his bowl aside, rubbing his temple as if recalling it was giving him a headache. “I was horrified that someone grabbed a kid in broad daylight, so close to his parents. What kind of creep kidnaps kids? But I was also a little terrified of coming across a dead body. Worse yet, a dead kid. I got into it to help people, not shatter them.”

“But you didn’t come across a dead body.”

“Yeah I did. A raccoon.” He grimaced both at the lame joke and the memory. “No, the park was a bust. We searched for anything that could have been a clue, we were trained to notice small things in wooden areas that might give us a direction or some idea if a person had been there or not, but that park was a mess. This was before the “renewal project”, where they remodeled it. There was undergrowth so thick in some of the interior areas that it was like wading through molasses, and all the trash of eons seemed to blow in and get caught. You had your usual stuff - fast food wrappers, cigarette butts, cans, gum - and the stuff the closet queens who’d troll the park late at night looking for an anonymous fuck would leave behind: condoms, tubes of KY jelly, even underwear. I spotted a nipple clamp, but back then - and this is how naïve I was; I was even repressing my own sexuality at the time, as I wasn’t sure how to reconcile that with this good boy image I was trying to project - I had no idea what the fuck it was, and neither did my search partner, Sophie. We decided it was some kind of roach clip, as we occasionally came across drug paraphernalia, but mainly those glass pipes and aluminum cans turned into bongs. The park was so messy and fraught in these undergrowth areas that we had no idea what could be relevant or not; it all looked precisely the same age, none terribly recent. We all wanted to find something so badly, you know? We all wanted to be the one who found something that would lead to that kid being found and returned to his family. We started the day scared we’d find a corpse, and ended the day depressed that we were absolutely useless. I quit Search and Rescue shortly after that, ostensibly because I was preparing to go off to college, but if I’m honest, it was that. I didn’t want to have to go through that again. Selfish of me, wasn’t it?”

“No. These are the shitty cases, the ones involving kids and violence.” As soon as Roan said that, he realized they had that in common: they had both been touched by violence as children. It was a connecting thread between them, raw and terrible, and one they didn’t talk about much. Roan wondered why he was more broken than Dylan was.

He nodded. “I couldn’t be a cop. Well, for several reasons, but that stuff would just kill me. I noticed you never answered my question.”

Roan actually had to remember what question spurred Dylan’s confession of this new odd connecting thread between them. “Keith’s mother hired me to see if there was anything I could dig up on this case before he gives up on it completely.”

“You changed the pronoun.”

“So did he. He’s a man now.”

“Oh. Sex change?”

He nodded. “Yep. Still into men, though.”

“How does he look? Convincing?”

He shrugged. “Probably needs another hormone shot or two for the voice, but he’s a pretty good looking guy, so yeah.”

Dylan smiled faintly. “Should I be jealous?”

“You should never be jealous.”

Dylan stared at him for a moment, head canted to the side, and asked, “Why do I sometimes feel like I have no idea where I stand with you?”

“Because I’m a depressive dickhead and I don’t like talking about my feelings.”

He straightened up and gave him a funny look, like he just admitted that he once shot a guy in Reno just to watch him die. “Holy shit. Did Shep slip you some sodium pentothol?”

“I do have moments of honest introspection. They’re just few and far between.” He neatened the pile of papers, restraining the urge to collapse at Dylan’s feet and ask him to help him because he had no idea what was wrong with him, that he felt he had lost control of himself at some point and was now careening towards a chasm with broken brakes. But he didn’t do that, as he wasn’t sure that was true. Or what Dylan could possibly do to help him even if it was.

“You’re not always a dickhead,” Dylan said, getting to his feet. He grabbed his bowl, and came over and got Roan’s plate without being asked. “Although sometimes I do wonder how I got stuck with such a macho asshole.”

“I’m dynamite in the sack.”

“Well, there is that.” He put the dishes in the sink, and started putting the rest of the food away. Roan eventually got up and helped him. They functioned in silence, rinsing off the dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher, sealing up leftovers, and it could have almost been a picture of bland domesticity. Roan really wanted a Vicodin even though his hand was hardly throbbing at all.

As soon as they were done, Dylan turned off the television, and took off his borrowed t-shirt, hastily folding it and putting it on the arm of the loveseat. “I’m going to take a bath and go to bed. Want to join me?”

He looked at him for a moment, feeling the siren call of chemical bliss, as well as the small pang of simple desire for this beautiful man and his emotional comforts. He owed him more than he could ever pay, and he would be kinder to him later on than Vicodin would be. “Yeah, I think I do.”

He gave him a small, almost heartbreaking smile, and headed upstairs. Roan followed, worrying about what Dylan’s reaction might be if he saw his hand without the bandages on it. Well, he’d cross that bridge if he came to it.

****

He didn’t think he’d fall asleep, but he did drift off for about an hour or so, and then just laid there in bed for a while, holding Dylan and listening to him breathe. When he was sure he was in a carbohydrate induced coma, he got of bed carefully, making sure he did nothing that might wake him, and headed downstairs.

Part of him wanted to grill Dylan about what he may have seen at the park, what might have seemed like nothing then but might be a vital clue now … except that was pointless. He probably could only recall it because it was traumatic, but if pressed for more details he wouldn’t be able to come up with anything, or at least not anything that wouldn’t be automatically suspect due to the fickle nature of time and memory.

Besides, he was right: between now and then, Bishop Park had changed. They tore out one entire area and re-landscaped it, put in a new bike path, got rid of most of that tangled undergrowth, installed fancier looking lights. Time had moved on, as it always did, and altered the landscape. The problem was, Keith Turner hadn’t. Missing people were in a special kind of limbo: they never aged, they never changed, they always remained as they were when you last saw them until they were discovered, if they ever were. He felt bad for everyone left behind, because never knowing for sure seemed like the worst punishment of all.

He got a microbrew from the fridge, a pale ale whose taste was so fragile that he sometimes questioned whether it was beer at all, and then wandered off to the downstairs bathroom to peel the gauze off his hand and pop a Vicodin from the medicine cabinet. He felt virtuous because he only took one.

The case, as presented in the files, was by the book. It wasn’t shoddy, it wasn’t half-assed, it wasn’t stained by incompetence. Everyone involved did the right things. The wonderful, special hell of it was that they did everything they could and it didn’t matter a good goddamn. They might as well have done nothing at all.

He wasn’t sure how to tackle this case. Where did you start when you had nothing? When time had moved on and washed away even the slimmest of hopes? If he thought about it too long it’d drive him crazy. If he was tackling this like any other criminal case, he’d go to the scene of the crime, and that’s what he’d have to do here. It didn’t matter that Bishop Park was nothing like it was eleven years ago; he needed to go back to square one, and see if there was any moves from there. When you had nothing, you had no choice but to go back to the beginning and start over again.

He finished off most of the beer before going back upstairs. He dressed quietly in the dark, both touch and memory allowing him to figure out what he was grabbing before he adjusted to the darkness, and before leaving he grabbed his long leather coat, his Sig Sauer in its belt holster, and his retractable metal baton.

The area around Bishop Park had changed since Keith was taken. When Chris and Elliot lived there, it was a blue collar neighborhood edging towards poverty, but then the downtown corridor changed, the gays taking over some of the run down area and gentrifying it, bringing in businesses and real estate wheeler dealers in their wake, and now the area was upper middle class, with a million dollar condo set up on its northernmost edge. The irony was the gays who had done most of the neighborhood fixing had been priced out of the market and shoved deeper into the interior, along with the Hispanics and the blacks. The area was now mostly white and Asian, and straight enough to be marketable to tourists. But the park was an ironic counterpoint to it all in that there had been much in the way of gang and drug activity, with a couple of spectacular acts of violence that led to the park being locked up after midnight. The closet queen cruisers had moved on to Silver Lake Park from what he’d heard, so Sadowski’s MILF probably would have been pleased by that. But it was probably her kids responsible for all the violence in the park, as the “gangs” actually seemed to be made up of bored white kids who enjoyed beating the shit out of random people and filming it on their camera phones for later posting to YouTube, and occasionally killing each other or some poor homeless son of a bitch to prove how tough they were, or some similar bullshit. He didn’t pretend to understand the dynamics of it, or the lure of it. He’d been in a ton of fights in his life, but almost none by choice; it was a last resort, a method of protecting yourself or someone else. Although he’d been occasionally tempted, he never hit someone because he just decided he wanted to. (Okay, well, that drunk redneck he beat the shit out of might argue with that.) Going to the park at night, especially late at night, was a remarkably idiotic thing to do. But he’d never claimed to be a genius.

His eyes had adjusted to the dark long before, so he stood beside the bed for a moment, looking down at Dylan as he slept. He looked oddly content, and younger than he actually was. Untroubled. He genuinely hoped he was; he wished someone had actual, genuine inner peace. He hoped Jason still didn’t haunt him like Paris haunted him.

He stroked his hair gently and kissed him softly on the forehead before leaving the room. He considered leaving him a note, but decided against it. Either he’d be home before he got up or he wouldn’t. Either he’d be here or in a hospital or a jail cell; it didn’t really matter. Dylan would be disappointed with him or he wouldn’t. Flip a coin.

Roan decided to take the bike, as it was a clear night, and it would give him greater maneuverability on streets which probably had a higher than average ratio of drunk drivers. He felt pretty good actually, which was either the Vicodin really kicking in, or his own sense of self. After all, if a lion couldn’t survive a city, he deserved whatever he got.

5 - Bad Sects

Roan had grabbed the gun barrel hidden in the man’s windbreaker pocket, just as the guy pulled the trigger, but the odd thing was he didn’t realize it. It was an unconscious reflex, one that had reacted to the danger faster than he ever could have consciously.

Roan had shoved the barrel aside as the gun went off, and he felt a deep pain in his hand like a wasp sting, hot and sharp, while he heard the sound of glass breaking somehow over the ringing in his ears, as well as the sound of someone’s startled yelp on the sidewalk behind him.

He was within kissing distance of this guy now, and noted he couldn’t have been older than twenty five, his short black hair greasy, as if he hadn’t washed it in a week, his face cratered and pockmarked with old acne scars and angry red bursts of more recent acne still blooming on his cheeks. His eyes were an uncomplicated blue, and as empty as a bar after two in the morning. He was quite plain, and even with some Photoshopping, he’d never be a handsome man. Or a sane one.

The man pulled the trigger again, but by this time Roan had the gun aimed away, and he was vaguely aware of a dull metal noise as the bullet slammed into a parked car by the curb. Roan had dropped his phone, dimly aware that Murphy was still talking, and drove a fist into the kid’s stomach, so hard that he doubled over and all the air seemed to leave him in a rush. He grabbed the kid’s greasy head and drove a knee hard into his face; Roan heard something crack, and then felt warm blood gush down his leg.

He threw the kid on the sidewalk and ripped his hand out of his pocket, pulling out the gun as well. The kid started to move, but Roan kicked him in the stomach, making him gag. “Don’t even think about moving, motherfucker, or I’ll stomp you into a fucking stain.” Roan retrieved his phone, which somehow hadn’t shattered and was still working, and as he brought it up to his ear, Murphy was still talking. “- ere? Roan?”

“I’m here.”

“Did I just hear gunshots?”

“Yeah. One of the cat cultists just tried to kill me.”

“What?”

“Traitor!” the kid screamed hoarsely from the sidewalk. He was still curled up in a fetal position, looking up at him with accusing eyes, but his eyes were fixed on his piece of shit Saturday Night Special, which Roan was now holding on him. “You will die in agony just like your faggot boyf -” That was as far as he got before Roan kicked him in the face. He didn’t know if it knocked him unconscious or just stunned him, but he shut the fuck up.

“Holy shit, I’m calling it in,” Murphy said. “Where are you? Are you hurt?”

He reeled off the address, and only then noticed that his right hand - the one holding the Saturday Night Special - was bleeding like a stuck pig, splattering his blood all over the sidewalk. Now that he was thinking about it, he realized it was numb, but he could move all his fingers and still had a hold of the gun, so he must have been kind of okay. “He needs an ambulance more than me, but I think he nicked my hand.”

“Nicked it? As in with a bullet?”

“Yeah.”

“Roan, oh my god, were those gunshots?” Dylan asked, exploding out of the apartment building. He was still barefoot, but had shrugged on a grey sweatshirt. He just stared at the tableau in front of him for a moment - the guy curled up on the sidewalk in a small puddle of blood, the blood gushing from Roan’s hand and the gun in it - and seemed to understand that yes, he had indeed heard gunshots. “Fuck. Were you shot? Is he shot?”

“No one’s shot,” he assured him. “Except a car. Which doesn’t count.”

A slender, bald black woman wearing wore jeans and a paint splattered t-shirt advertising a Dykes With Bikes rally came out of the apartment building and asked, “Dylan, what the hell was that noise?”

Dylan nodded at them, and Roan smiled at her. “Hi. Sorry, this guy just tried to kill me.”

She stared at him with wide brown eyes. “Are you shitting me?” She glanced at Dylan, and he shook his head no, he wasn’t shitting anyone. Dylan then said, “De’Andra, this is my boyfriend Roan. Roan, De’Andra.”

Roan nodded to her, keeping his phony smile pasted on. “Nice to meet you. I’m not usually beating down a punk ass bitch.”

The kid spit out a mouthful of blood and a tooth, and ground out in a raspy voice, “Traitor. Fucking race traitor.”

“Race traitor?” De’Andra repeated.

“We’re both infected,” Roan explained. “Only he’s a religious nut bag.”

They could all hear police sirens approaching, and presumably an ambulance as well. “This isn’t over,” the kid gurgled, staring up at him balefully with one eye. The other was facing the sidewalk.

“You’re right, it’s not,” Roan agreed.

“You’re gonna die, you arrogant fuckhead -”

“Shut the fuck up, pendejo!” Dylan exclaimed angrily, walking over and kicking him in the back. Of course he was still barefoot so it didn’t have a great deal of impact, but it was more symbolic than anything else. They exchanged a glance over the kid’s body, Dylan’s eyes sad, apologetic, asking for forgiveness. Roan felt bad, not sure why he was angry at him. Oh yeah, that painting. Why did it piss him off so much again? Damn, he still didn’t have a hold of it. Rather than give him much of anything, he crouched down, and asked the kid, “Who do you work for? Heather or David?” Those were the two still fighting for the leadership of the Church of the Divine Transformation: Heather Dow, Eli’s last girlfriend, and David Harvey, a former assistant of Eli’s.

The kid spit blood at him. It mostly missed. “Go fuck yourself.”

Finally a police car screamed up to the curb, just behind the car that got shot (the bullet had taken out the passenger side window), and a couple of cops got out. One of them, a young guy whose brush cut hair was almost totally hidden beneath his cop cap, pulled out his gun and shouted, “Drop the weapon!”

“Holster it, Tim, this is McKichan,” the other cop, Stephen Kwan, snapped. Kwan was a fairly tall, broad shouldered Asian man with a raw boned face and a cynical attitude he wore like a lead cloak. Unlike his young partner “Tim”, he was wearing his bulletproof vest.

Tim seemed reluctant to do it, but had to comply as Kwan wandered into his line of fire. “I take it this is the guy who attacked you?” Kwan asked, although it almost wasn’t a question.

“This is him. This is also his gun. You might want to put on your gloves before you take it from me.”

Kwan looked at his bleeding hand carefully, pulling out latex gloves from a pocket and snapping them on. “Yeah, I see that. He bite you or somethin‘?”

“Nicked it.”

Kwan raised an eyebrow as thick and black as a permanent marker line. “Another slug? Wow, Roan, you swallow a magnet?”

“It’s starting to feel like it.”

“Don’t touch me you fucking pigs!” the kid shouted hoarsely, as Kwan took the gun from Roan’s hand. Kwan snickered. “That’s right, guy, butter us up. That’ll look good on your record.”

“Be careful,” Roan warned them. “He’s infected.”

“Well shit,” Kwan sighed. “Tim, read him his rights, but first … Roan, can you ..?”

“Yeah, sure.” Roan stepped over the kid and turned him over, so he was face down on the sidewalk. Roan knelt on him, putting his knee on the small of his back and pinning him down, dropping his cell phone back in his pocket. He struggled, but Roan grabbed his arms as he cursed and spat, and held them so Tim could slip the plastic ties on him as he mechanically recited the kid’s Miranda rights.

An ambulance pulled up screaming to the curb, and it looked familiar. Indeed, Shep, Dee’s EMT partner, hopped out of the back as the doors opened, but Dee didn’t come out after him. No, this time he was accompanied by a reasonably muscular Latina woman with her hair cut in an unflattering bob. Her face was too round to carry it off. “I knew it,” Shep drawled, his voice still carrying a trace of a Southern accent. “Shooting in broad daylight, you’re involved. I must be psychic.”

As the woman started towards him and the kid, he said warningly, “We’re infected.”

She paused, then shrugged, continuing onward. “That’s what the gloves are for.”

“You make any aggressive moves, and I’ll taser your ass,” Kwan threatened the kid, pulling out his taser and showing it to him. “In fact, I might just do it for fun. Call me a pig again.”

The kid sunk into a sulky silence. Kwan wasn’t bluffing, and they all knew it.

Shep motioned Roan over to the ambulance rig, and he went, dimly aware that Dylan was following him. Roan sat on the back bumper as Shep cleaned off his hand with bottled water to look at the wound. It turned out it wasn’t a nick - there was a hole in the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, about the size and shape of a pencil hole, the flesh around it flash burned by the powder. Dylan, who sat on the bumper beside him, out of Shep’s working area, gasped upon seeing it. “Holy shit! That must hurt.”

He shook his head. “It’s numb.”

“Shock,” Shep said, carefully examining the wound, judging what it needed. “Sometimes after bodily trauma, you feel nothing. For up to an hour. Then it starts hurtin’ like a motherfucker.”

“Where’s Dee? You two not working together anymore?”

Shep looked at him from beneath his bushy blond eyebrows. He was a rangy guy, but solid, not too skinny, and reasonably good looking, with brownish-blond hair and grey-blue eyes, good looking enough that Dee often remarked it was a tragedy he was straight and married. For his part, Shep thought that was funny, which is probably why they’d been able to work together all these years. “You don’t know? He’s on sick leave. Lupe’s filling in for him.”

“Sick leave? I didn’t know. I haven’t talked to him in a while, though. Nothing serious, I hope.”

“Naw, just the flu. We got exposed to it a couple weeks back when we picked up this lady that collapsed in her home. I didn’t get it, but he did. Them’s the breaks, I guess. I think I’m gonna wanna take you in for this, Roan. It’s too small technically for stitches, but there’s no way it’ll close on its own in anything less than a few months. They can use some surgical glue to shut it.”

Taking him in meant taking him to the hospital, but Roan was already shaking his head. “Just pack it with gauze. I’ll be okay.”

Shep raised an eyebrow at this, and Dylan said, “Hon, now’s not the time to be macho. You were shot in the hand.”

“I have surgical glue at home in one of the emergency kits,” he said, and Dylan gave him a look like he knew he was lying. “It’s gonna save me a couple hundred dollars in medical bills if I do it myself. Believe me, I know how to do it. I’ve been infected all my life, and under siege for about half of it.”

Dylan seemed to concede the point, although again it seemed he knew he was lying. Maybe this was his way of asking forgiveness, by forgiving him for being such an asshole. It was a very Buddhist way of thinking … well, as far as Roan understood it. Maybe it was just Dylan being generous.

Shep snorted in disbelief. “I’m gonna hafta record you as leaving against advice. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“You know what Dee’s gonna do to you when he hears about this?”

Roan sighed and nodded. “I’ll batten down my hatches.”

Dylan slipped his hand inside his good hand, fingers entwining with his and giving him an encouraging squeeze. Why was he mad at him again?

“I think this guy needs a dentist more than a hospital,” Lupe, the fill in paramedic, reported. She’d shoved a small twist of gauze up inside each of the boy’s nostrils, and they were already turning red. “Looks like he took a puck in the face.”

“He attacked me,” the boy shouted, blood drooling down his chin.

Shep scoffed. “Sunny Jim, he has a hand wound. Any numb nut who’s seen an episode of CSI knows hand wounds are generally defensive wounds. Try that again.” Shep prepped a needle and injected him in the palm of his hand. Roan knew it was a painkiller and was secretly thrilled, but he also knew it was probably just a localized one akin to Novocain, nothing he’d feel beyond the wrist. Shep then attached sterile cotton balls on both ends of the wound (blood made them stick), and started wrapping his hand with sterile gauze. Blood was starting to seep through already.

Kwan hauled the boy up to his feet by his plastic tie cuffs, and asked, “What’s your name?”

“I wanna lawyer,” the kid replied, still sullen. Kwan was patting down his coat, reaching into his jeans pocket, and the kid tried to squirm away, exclaiming in disgust, “Fuck, you’re a butt pirate too?”

“I’m lookin’ for your wallet, asshole. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I patted him down,” Tim said nervously. “I didn’t feel a wallet.”

“You gonna give me a name, or do I call you Dickwad all the way to the station?” Kwan asked. The funny thing about Kwan was he seemed to be in a perpetually bad mood. He’d been on the force for twelve years, and you’d think maybe he was bitter and burned out by the job, but oh no - he was always like this. He was born a grumpy bastard, and he would probably die a grumpy bastard, outliving them all and dying at the ripe old age of one hundred and twenty two. Everybody knew the grumpy, sour bastards lived longer than anyone. But besides that, he was a remarkably fair cop.

The boy seemed to think about it for a moment, then muttered, “Rollo Tomasi.”

Kwan scowled, and looked at all of them. “Why does that sound familiar?”

“It was a name used in L.A. Confidential,” Roan told him. Another team arrived, this one to secure the scene and collect forensic evidence. Not that there was must to collect - just blood splatters, maybe the bullet that took out the car window.

“Oh hey, so you’re a highbrow punk ass bitch, huh?” Kwan said to the boy, getting uncomfortably close to his face. That was just a favorite interrogation technique of Kwan’s, invading a person’s personal space, and it worked fairly well. No one liked a cop breathing down your neck. “They’re gonna love you in lock up. C’mon dickwad, move your ass.” He started shoving him towards the patrol car, and Tim moved ahead to open the rear door. Kwan shoved the kid’s head down perhaps more brusquely than necessary, and all but threw him in the backseat, Tim slamming the door on him so fast it almost caught the kid’s foot.

“You know what this was about?” Kwan asked, turning towards him. His eyes seemed to catch Dylan holding his hand, but his eyes remained impassive as they flicked back up to his face.

“He works for someone within the Church of Divine Transformation. They’ve been threatening me for a couple weeks now, ever since it got around that Eli left me his computer.”

“It’s a computer. Big fucking deal.”

“The hard drive has dirt on all the members prior to Eli’s death. And I mean quality blackmail material.”

He grunted in dark amusement. “Someone fucks a sheep, and ‘cause you know, you’re a dead man?”

“They want it back. Either to destroy it or keep others in line. Probably the latter more than the former. Knowledge is power.”

He shook his head and looked back at the squad car. “Violent religious fanatics give me the willies. What the fuck is wrong with these people?”

Roan shrugged. He’d been asking himself that ever since his brief stint in the foster home of a devoutly religious couple who saw his infection as demonic possession and tried to have him exorcised. “Everyone needs to believe in something, even if it is totally bugfuck nuts.”

“You don’t believe in that shit?” he asked, referring to the kitty cult.

“Fuck no. I believe in entropy. That makes everything else irrelevant.”

“Wow, that’s really nihilistic. Congrats.” Kwan turned back towards the cop car and told Tim, “Let’s roll.” He paused by the driver’s side door and pointed back at him. “Know the drill?”

“As soon as I’m patched up, I’ll come down to the station and make a statement.”

“There you go.” He got in the squad car and drove away without a second glance.

As soon as he was gone, Dylan turned to him and asked, “Why do I have a feeling that kid was lucky not to have gotten the full Rodney King?”

Shep snorted a laugh as he wrapped medical tape tightly around the gauze, making a semi-tourniquet in an attempt to staunch the blood flow. Roan shrugged his good shoulder. “Eh, Steve’s not that bad. He just seems unpleasant.”

“Seems or actually is?”

“Little of both. Depends on the day.”

As soon as Shep was done, he gave him the spiel about keeping his fluid levels up - oh joy, more Gatorade in his future. People only drank it because they had to; Roan was positive no one drank it because they wanted to - and told him the common sense stuff that no one should have to be told, such as if bleeding continues or his hand goes numb and he can’t move his fingers, he should report to the hospital immediately, yada yada yada. He thanked him and got up, pretending he didn’t get a bit of a head rush just doing that. Dylan stood with him. He let go of his hand, but kept a hand on his arm, in case Roan needed the help. He would have resented it if it wasn’t simply done out of kindness.

He managed to convince Dylan he’d be okay while he went back up to his apartment and got his shoes and coat on, and while Dylan was gone, Roan found his car and dug out the bottle of Tylenol-codeine in the glove compartment, popping three tablets and washing them down with a bottle of water stashed beneath his seat. He knew once he could get home, he could partially transform and heal some of the tissue damage. Maybe not all, but enough to make it a minor thing. He just didn’t know when he’d have the chance.

Dylan insisted on coming to the station with him, and when he saw he was driving, he indignantly shoved him over into the passenger seat and did the driving. Roan was fine with that, mainly because his bandaged hand was as insensate as a frozen hamburger, and the codeine was starting to kick in, a warmth spreading from his gut outward. The good part here was he didn’t have to hide being stoned, as Dylan didn’t know that Shep had only given him a localized painkiller.

Things were chaotic as usual at the station, and as such he was not the star of the freak show, just a minor player, and he was actually grateful for that. During all the formalities of giving his statement, he overheard Kwan talking to a cop he didn’t recognize. The kid who shot him had been identified, as he was in the system - he’d been processed several times as a juvenile for petty shit, mainly vandalism and drunk and disorderly: Nolan Morse. (What a name. He might have decided to become homicidal if that was his name too.)

Now he could figure out who wanted him dead, the Dow sect or the Harvey sect. Whoever Morse was attached to was the motherfucker who’d been phoning in death threats. Now, all he had to do was figure out who Nolan was working for.

Once he was done giving his statement, he excused himself to use the bathroom, and ducked into an empty hallway to make a call. He punched up the number of Rainbow’s Aunt, and left a message for Rainbow, asking her if she knew or could find out whose side a church member named Nolan Morse was on. He didn’t say why, because Rainbow knew better than to ask, and he knew she could find out, because even those in the church who didn’t like her (very few) saw her as completely harmless. She was one of those hippie-ish “earth mother” types who never wanted to hurt anyone. But the world was an awful place, and sometimes bastards - like him - would use that to their advantage.

He then went to the bathroom and discovered that his bandage was starting to soak through. It hadn’t done so all the way, but there was a deep red splotch starting to bloom beneath the snowy white bandages. He knew all he needed to do was go home, but would he be able to convince Dylan of that?

As it was, he managed. The drugs were really kicking in now; he was tired and almost nodding off on the drive home. Dylan was concerned, thought he should take him to the hospital, but he assured him he could take care of it at home. Roan went upstairs, but convinced Dylan he would be willing to drink some of his “special” green tea, which Roan was fairly certain was made from a heretofore undiscovered kind of straw, so Dylan stayed downstairs for the moment. Roan ducked into his bedroom and hid in the bathroom, where he braced himself before punching the bathroom counter with his injured hand.

The drugs Shep had injected into his palm and the codeine conspired to keep the pain from reaching his brain, but he broke the bandages and tape open, causing blood to spurt out, and finally the right synapses started firing. He concentrated on it, focusing on the pain, forcing the change. He watched the bones in his hand shift beneath his skin like it was flimsy paper, the muscles twisting and warping, but it was easy to shut off the change. He thought it was the drugs, but he didn’t know for sure. The hole was no longer all the way through his hand, but the skin was still torn on both sides, suggesting he hadn’t held onto the change long enough, and the pain in his hand was now molten. But it was good enough, so he stripped off the bandages and threw them away, ransacking his own medicine cabinet to find some gauze. He wrapped it around his hand, but couldn’t duplicate what Shep had done. He just had to hope Dylan didn’t notice right away.

Dylan came in as he came out of the bathroom, holding a cup of tea that smelled faintly of fruit and burnt hay. “Is everything okay?”

“Considering,” he lied, stripping off his shirt and only just then noticing he had blood on it. God, he was tired. Was the room starting to spin a bit?

Roan managed to collapse on his bed as Dylan continued to stare at him in concerned disbelief. Roan wondered what he was going to do when Dylan called him on his shit.