5 - Quote Unquote

Roan wasn’t in the best of moods and he knew it, but he thought he might cheer up if he saw Dylan. Or maybe he’d just bring him down. But hey, what were boyfriends for?

Finding the Serrano Gallery turned out to be a major pain in the ass. It wasn’t well marked, and was situated in a small shop hidden between a music store and a candy shop in the older part of downtown, in one of those narrow places that had once been referred to as a “boutique” when the place was new. Now it was “quaint”, a virtual kiss of death in these trendier, sexier times. The smell of fresh popcorn wafted from the candy shop - it also sold gourmet popcorn and ice cream, snack multi-tasking - and Roan was tempted to stop in before visiting the gallery. But he decided to visit afterwords, because the gallery owners might object to him shoving pepper popcorn in his face while he dripped rain water on their floors.

As it turned out, he might as well have; he might also have come in pantsless wearing flip flops for the evil look the woman at the front of the gallery gave him. She was probably a Latina, but didn’t really look it. She had gathered her hair up into a sort of ponytail on the top of her head, so her hair looked like an exploding fountain, and she had so many piercing in her face Roan wished he’d brought a large magnet just to annoy her. His favorite piercing was the one in her cheek; it looked like she’d been shot, but stopped the butt end of the bullet with her cheekbone. Her glare seemed to be a challenge to him to talk, so he did. “I’m here for Dylan.”

Her look hardly changed an iota. “Who the hell are you?”

“Who the hell are you?” he replied.

Luckily, Dylan came walking out of the back just then. “Roan! Oh good god, didn’t you even take your hat this morning?”

He was apparently appalled to find him dripping on the dusty floor. “I did, but I left it at the office. Say, who’s this ray of sunshine over here?”

“Fuck you, old man,” the girl sneered.

“Serena, stop that,” Dylan snapped at her, in that very Buddhist way of his. It meant he sounded annoyed, but not actually pissed off. “This is my boyfriend, Roan.”

“Oh.” She said it like it was the most irrelevant aside she had ever been subjected to.

“You must date a ton,” Roan said with sarcastic cheerfulness, which led to Dylan grabbing his arm and quickly dragging him down a corridor so narrow he almost didn’t fit. “Your personality is so sparkling!” he tossed over his shoulder. She probably cussed him out again.

In the doorway of a room that smelled strongly of oil based paints, Dylan turned and faced him with a mild scowl. “Please, don’t pick a fight.”

“Who’s fighting? I’m complementing her on her wonderful people skills.”

Dylan shook his head. “She’s pissy, I know -”

“Pissy? I think you’re giving her too much credit. She’s worse than me.”

“Yes, well … she’s always that way with white guys who don’t look like rich art snobs.”

“You’re mixed race. Has she been informed?”

“Half is better than none,” he said, and rolled his eyes, indicating he was repeating something she said.

“Wow, this is new. I’ve been discriminated against for being gay, and for being infected, but never for being too fucking pale. I think I’m getting a tingle.”

“Would you stop?” Dylan said that in a gently exasperated, mostly humorous way.

“I am, it’s a tingle. No, wait, I think it’s a cold.” He turned aside and sneezed.

Dylan put a warm hand on his arm, which he could feel through his sodden coat. “I don’t have any towels that aren’t smeared with paint, but would you like a smock? I think there’s a smock.”

“Smocks are for pussies, Dyl.”

He giggled, but went to look inside the small, paint reeking room. “I don’t mean to offend you, macho man.”

“I’ll beat every S.O.B. in this place, even the Iron Maiden in the vestibule. Bring it!”

Now Dylan was chuckling, and brought over a clean painter’s smock. He threw it on his head, and then began drying his hair with it. Roan would have protested, but it was so casually intimate it sort of surprised him. Dylan wasn’t even drying his hair hard, whereas if Roan were him, he’d have been tempted to wrench his head off. “Hate to break it to you, tough guy, but I don’t think real bruisers use the word “vestibule”.”

“Too fruity?”

“Tres fruity. But not as fruity as dropping random French words in your conversation.” He slid the smock off his head, and asked, “Feel better?”

“Yeah. But I think I still squish when I walk, but I guess that’s typical of us poofters, right?”

Dylan smirked and rolled up the now damp smock before lobbing it back in the room. “Not a pun, Ro. That’s low.”

“And that rhymed. You know how much fun it is to be gay and have a nickname that rhymes with blow?”

Dylan hid his face in his hands, so he didn’t see him struggling not to laugh. After a moment, he asked, “Have you been in the laughing gas?”

“No. I think it’s all the paint fumes. I’m getting giddy on the stuff.”

Dylan put his arms around his neck, a casual touch as oppose to the full on throttling that Roan imagined he’d do if he was Dylan. “So, are you gonna tell me what pulled you out of bed this morning?”

“Oh, that.” There were privacy issues, but fuck it, Randi was probably going to be over a lot, and he would hear it from either her or him. So he told him, leaving out details of how gruesome the crime scene was, and glossing over how upset Randi really was when he told her about her brother. But Dylan guessed it, as his brown-black eyes went wide in horror, his natural empathy making him adopt the pain as personal.

“Oh my god! Poor Randi, and poor Grant! So he was infected and never told his family?”

“Apparently.”

“And his college pal and current roommate is also infected?” Dylan paused, giving him a skeptical look. He’d made the same instant mental connection Roan had. “So were they both druggies, or were they secretly gay?”

“You forgot the shocking third option.”

Dylan had to think about it for a moment. “Cultists?”

“Yeah - they sought infection. I saw no evidence at the scene to support it, but Gordo hardly let me paw through their files or computers.”

“If they were, does that mean this Tiffany was one of them and just unlucky? Or was she the normal one stuck in the middle of all of this?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. She may be the only person left who can tell us what the fuck actually happened in that house. If she’s still alive.”

Dylan grimaced. “Gods, that terrible. Poor Randi. We should do something for her. What do you do when someone’s brother is infected and ate his best friend?”

“A very good question. Add to that Randi knows more than she’s saying; she was definitely holding out on me.”

Dylan clicked his tongue and gave him a mildly scolding look. “How long were we together before I told you about Tom? There’s just some things you don’t want to tell people about your own family.”

There was perhaps a bitter irony in Tom, Sheba’s and Dylan’s younger brother, the one they spared from seeing the bodies of their parents after their father killed their mother and himself, as he was the one who never seemed to get over it. They shielded him as best they could, and continued to do so, but Tom really struggled growing up, acting out in ways that Sheba and Dylan never did, including cutting, until he made a suicide attempt at fourteen. Shortly afterwards he had something akin to a psychotic episode at school and attacked two kids and a teacher with an X-Acto knife, and that began Tom’s many episodes with both the justice system and the mental health system. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and then as having borderline personality disorder, but he hated taking his meds, and once he was of legal age, he would disappear for weeks at a time. He “self-medicated”, as Dylan called it; he wouldn’t take the drugs prescribed to him, but he’d indulge in alcohol and illegal drugs, leading him to more time in the justice system. It was a vicious, unrelenting cycle, and Tom refused to let either Dylan or Sheba help him. The last time Dylan had heard from Tom, he was homeless and wandering in Idaho. He was still angry at his siblings for having him hospitalized against his will, so his communication with them was sporadic at best.

It suddenly occurred to him that he had overlooked something. “You got your iPhone with you?”

Dylan raised an eyebrow at him. Roan teased him about his iPhone, which even Dylan admitted was an overpriced and for him a rather needless gadget (but Sheba bought it for him, so he wasn’t going to get rid of it). “Yes. Why?”

“Does this place get Wi-Fi?”

“Yeah, the university’s coffee shop is on the corner, and we’re in their range. Again, why?”

“Could you do a search for me on Grant Kim? Specifically for a MySpace or a Facebook page.”

Dylan let him go and pulled the iPhone out of his pocket. As he went to the web browser, he said, “Is that a big part of detective work now?”

“Searching for people’s MySpace pages? You’d be surprised. Nowadays, a lot of people just let it all hang out on the internet, and are shocked when someone uses it against them.”

“The internet feels safe. I mean, you’re alone, in your own home, posting shit. You know other people can read it, but it never seems to sink in that everybody can read it if they know where to look.” Dylan gave him a funny look, and asked, “You don’t have a page like that, do you?”

He scoffed. “Oh yeah, Dylan, you know me, big internet slut.” It was precisely because he knew how such things could be used against you that he never joined a damn social network of any kind on the web. It wasn’t that he was antisocial, it was just that … okay, yeah, being anti-social was a part of it. But a very small part. Smallish.

Dylan squinted at the small rectangular screen before standing shoulder to shoulder with him and sharing the view. “There’s a couple of Grant Kim’s on MySpace, including one who lists themselves as an 83 year old woman.”

“Ignore age and gender, smart asses have fun with those. Let’s narrow it down by location.” He stared at the screen, which actually had great resolution for its size, and saw what he was looking for. “Right there.” He touched the link, and they were taken to the page.

The main picture showed a lanky Asian male shirtless and drinking from a beer bong. The fact that Grant chose that as a picture to represent himself told him a lot about the guy. His last post was late Friday, and it read, in its entirety: “Goin to a party 2-nite!! It’s gonna kick AZZ! Mikey scored some sunshine and we’re gonna par-TAY bitchez! Hit me up if yer in the area, it’s gonna be AWEsome!!!”

“Sunshine?” Dylan asked, thinking about it for a moment. “That’s a type of E, isn’t it?”

“You’re the bartender at the gay club; you should know better than me.”

“You know, call me naïve, but I didn’t think anyone over the age of twelve actually wrote like that.”

“It’s a new age, especially when you’re trying desperately to seem hip and with it.” Roan scrolled down to the part of the page that had personal info, and found Grant had listed his age as twenty three. Roan knew better than to trust that. His birth certificate and driver’s license he’d believe. And who was “Mikey”?

“Roan,” Dylan said, and pointed at a line on the screen. In the info box was a line reading “Orientation”, and for it, Grant had chosen “Undecided”. Under “Interests”, he’d only listed “partying”.

“Huh.” If he was straight, you’d think he’d have just put that. Why choose undecided?

Grant seemed to be a bad candidate for cultist, which was a good thing. But on the other hand, he seemed to be a prime candidate for an accidental infected.

And one of those stupid assholes who unknowingly infected a lot of other people. Son of a bitch.