6 – Cattle and the Creeping Things

All the pictures Grant had on his MySpace page seemed to involve him drinking or getting high, in various states of undress. Roan wasn’t sure if he was trying to say “I’m a sexy good time guy” or “I’m a complete fucking moron”. He even had a tramp stamp, a tattoo on the small of his back (it was some sort of black pseudo-tribal design, which had probably been hip for five minutes when Grant was in high school). Randi hadn’t mentioned it, leading him to think she didn’t know about it. Did she never visit his MySpace page?

“Is this any help at all?” Dylan wondered.

Roan was forced to shrug. “Grant went to a party Friday night with some guy named Mikey, and probably dropped some E. How that leads to this morning’s bloodbath I have no idea. I mean I can search for all parties on Friday night, but that will give me, what? Three or four dozen leads? Not a help.”

He frowned in thought, staring through the picture of Grant pretending to drink the water out of a blue glass bong. “You know, I can ask at the bar, see if anyone knows of a guy named Mike who may peddle ecstasy. I know a couple of circuit boys, and if anyone’s going to know the dealers, it’s going to be them.”

“This really isn’t your investigation.”

“I know, but if I can help, let me.”

He wasn’t going to argue with him. Gordo wouldn’t like it, but he didn’t need to know about it. He told him to go ahead, but not to worry about it if it went nowhere. Not that he needed to tell him that, Mr. Daily Meditation, he went out of his way trying not to worry. How successful he was at it was up to Dylan to say, not him.

Eventually Dylan showed him what he called him here for: the perfected version of his tiger sketch. It was beautiful, slinky and somewhat Asian in style, with simple curving lines suggesting a muscular tiger stalking its prey. It was just a quick sketch Dylan did while bored, something he did quite often (if he had to wait anywhere, from Starbucks to the DMV, he killed time drawing), but when Roan saw it he knew he had to get it as a tattoo. He had his Paris one on his right arm, so why not get one on his left? Balance himself out. The funny thing was, he’d never been much for tattoos, and yet he felt compelled to add this, to burn it on his skin. The fact that it was a tiger didn’t escape his notice, and he wondered if it was yet another tribute to Paris. He’d probably cover his body with tributes to Paris if he could. No one should forget him, least of all him.

Dylan was surprised he wanted it as a tattoo, but was good with it. He asked for a chance to perfect it, make it more tattoo like in size, and Roan had no problem with that. He knew that Jade, one of the artists over at Damaged Ink, where he got his Paris tattoo, would copy it, so the idea was Dylan was going to draw the finished version on Roan’s arm, leaving Jade to basically trace it. But she got paid whether she did it freehand or traced someone else’s work, so she didn’t mind. Did Dylan mind? If he did, he never said or indicated it in any other way. The decision was made for Dylan to do the drawing tonight, before he went to work if there was time. Right now Dylan was off to bikram yoga (Roan teased him about this, but the end result was Dylan had a body you could break concrete slabs on, and he didn’t have to partially morph into a cat to get it either), and Roan supposed he should pretend to do some work, although he wasn’t sure where to go next. He didn’t have leads per se, just a collection of observations that suggested Randi was probably embarrassed by her brother.

He went to the snack shop, run by a couple of nice middle aged ladies, and picked up both some fresh popcorn and some hand dipped chocolates, as the migraine medication had left him ravenous (or so he thought; otherwise he had no idea why he just wanted to sit in his car and shove food in his pie hole). But it occurred to him that he’d missed something. It nagged at him like a word just on the tip of his tongue that he just couldn’t remember. What had he missed?

He went back to the office and looked at Grant Kim’s MySpace page again. What the fuck had he missed? Only scanning the pictures did he see it: it was in Grant’s ignominious photo galley. It was a picture posted last Wednesday, and it showed him tapping a pony keg. He was in front of a neon pink flamingo in a blue circle next to a big fake Tiki head and a framed Don Ho album on the wall. The only place he knew with tacky décor like that was the Oasis, a little split room bar and nightclub near the campus of the university. He found Curtis’s page, but it was set to private, so all he could see was the bland picture on the front of his page. He printed it out along with the least embarrassing one of Grant’s he could find. He was unable to find Tiffany’s page.

The Oasis was so empty it may as well have been closed, but from the way the wait staff were fussing with decorations on the wall, Roan figured things were dead until the students were out of class. The bartender was a gym bunny, a true steroid monstrosity, with arms as big as most people’s thighs, and a neck as thick as a tree trunk. He was wearing a maroon t-shirt so tight it looked like any movement on his part would cause Hulk like ripping. Since the guy wasn’t doing anything, Roan showed him the printed out pics of Grant and Curtis, and told him that these men were currently missing and he had reason to believe they came here quite a bit.

The guy only vaguely recognized Grant, calling him “that skinny Asian kid who seemed almost always drunk”. According to the bartender, he seemed to always be with a bunch of people and always drinking on their dime; he couldn’t remember him ever paying for his own drink. As for Curtis, he had no idea; he just shook his head and summed up Curtis wonderfully well: “He’s got one of those faces you always forget.” He did. Roan wondered if he was going to be one of those guys who was unremarkable in life, but remembered in death if only because his passing was so brutal.

The kid (the bartender constantly called Grant “the kid”) was in a lot, maybe every other weekend, although he said he hadn’t been in that Friday or Saturday, not that he could recall. He did confirm he was in Wednesday, but only because he remembered he was with a “hot blonde” that he wasn’t sure was legal. (Tiffany? His mysterious girlfriend? Someone else entirely?) She apparently had a “sweet rack”, and this told Roan that the bartender thought he was a fellow straight guy, and would appreciate his ogling of a woman’s breasts. Roan just stared at him and moved on to the next question.

There hadn’t been a party here Friday night, but he was sure there were a “million” in the area, since they were near a college campus. And as far as knowing any drug dealers named Mike, he told him, chuckling slightly, that about every other guy around here was named Mike; you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Mike.

Roan left him one of his business cards, and asked him to call if Grant or the blonde turned up, or if he just remembered something that might be helpful. He studied his card for a very long time, then looked up at him with a furrowed brow. “You’re really looking for this guy? Shit, I thought maybe he owed you money or something.”

“No. I’m working with the police department on this investigation.” Not technically a lie.

“He’s really missing?”

He nodded, wondering if he was sitting on some information. “I wasn’t lying. I imagine it’ll be on the local news tonight.”

“Shit.” He looked down at his business card again, like it might tell him something new. “I’ve never known anyone who’s gone missing before.”

“First time for everything,” Roan replied lamely, mainly because he didn’t know what to say. What did you say to that? Congratulations? Aren’t you glad it wasn’t you? Nothing fit.

When he was leaving, the bartender said, “Hey … um, I don’t know if it helps, but … for a while he was going out with this girl, um, Marjean, she’s a student at the university. I think she is still.”

“Any last name?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know it.”

It was still a break – how many people were named Marjean?

The campus looked depressing, and Roan imagined that it still would even if it wasn’t down pouring. There was a beautiful large oak tree in front of the campus quad, and he saw a gray squirrel on one of its lower branches, seemingly upset by the constant torrent. The funny thing was, Roan smelled it long before he saw it; wet fur of any animal was very pungent, and it made his stomach do an uncertain twist. Did normal people smell that, or was it just him? When the squirrel sniffed him, it took off running up the tree. Typical. He wondered what he smelled like to animals, if the lion or the human scared them more.

He decided to bring out the whole bullshit offensive in the front office. He told the woman working there that he was with the police and that they were looking into the disappearance of Grant Kim. The woman, a matronly sort who looked like a house mother, struggled to recognize the name but didn’t quite get it until he showed her the picture. Then she didn’t seem all that surprised.

Here came some information. Grant dropped out of college ahead of getting his ass booted, as he had missed so many classes during his first year none of the faculty teachers were sure what he looked like. He had a reputation on campus as a hard partier, a good time guy, and as such was generally popular with the students. Although there was one incident, recorded by the campus police, where he was cited for taking part in a large brawl in the parking lot. As it turned out, he may have been a victim and not an instigator, as the woman told him she could remember how covered in bruises he was. She also said she didn’t think he was much of a fighter.

As soon as he mentioned Marjean, she supplied the rest of the information: Marjean Hardaway, who didn’t live on campus but across the street in an apartment complex called Sunrise Plaza. She even gave her her apartment number: 316. Did he look that much like a cop? Well, he had put on his “cop voice”, the one that seemed to most effectively convey authority and a “don’t fuck with me” vibe. He thanked her and went to look for Marjean.

He didn’t know what he was expecting to find, but it probably wasn’t what he got. Sunrise Plaza was a small four story apartment complex with a shabby air that probably didn’t matter to hard up college students, and on the ground floor he passed a corkboard filled up with kegger notices and homemade flyers for bands. Occasionally there was a notice about a roommate wanted, a lost pet, or something for sale, but not a lot.

He heard rap music coming from Marjean’s place before he got there. He didn’t recognize who it was; somebody in the top twenty. It occurred to him that the only rappers he could name by sound were Public Enemy (great), Sage Francis (great), Outkast (did they even count?), and Eminem (idiot). God, he was so fucking old.

He had to pound on the door, as knocking got no response. The door opened and the thudding repetitive beats washed out all over him, as a young bleach blonde woman leaned against the door drunkenly. “Yer not the pizza guy,” she slurred.

She was probably pretty, but right now it was hard to tell. Her face was swollen and reddish with what Dee had once referred to as the “Irish hangover glaze”, her eyes half-lidded and so bloodshot it was honestly difficult to say what color her eyes were (pale blue or gray; either/or). She had some smears of make up on her face, but none in the spots they were supposed to be in, and she was wearing a man’s extra large Stanford University sweatshirt and nothing else; it ended at mid-thigh, revealing pale legs with a slight inward curve to them and bruised knees, with a cat scratch (?) on her left calf and a pale dark bristle of unshaved legs. Her hair was a tangled rat’s nest, perched atop her head like an askew wig, and he thought he saw dried vomit in a small clumped together strand. She smelled like vomit, malt liquor, body odor, unwashed laundry, cigarettes, and crank, and he had to blink fast to keep his eyes from watering. She was twenty going on forty at a thousand miles an hour.

He identified himself as a private investigator looking into the disappearance of Grant Kim, and she stiffened. “You a cop?”

“No. Private investigator.” Being a cop held cache with the school; clearly it wouldn’t here.

Her posture eased a bit, which was dangerous, as he wasn’t sure she could stand up. She was leaning on the door so heavily he was surprised it hadn’t fallen all the way open. It took a moment, but the penny dropped. “Grant’s missing? Why?”

What an odd question. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Could you tell me something about him?”

She tried to run a hand through her hair, but it was too tangled; her hand hit a clump and stopped dead. “Sure. C’mon in.” She stumbled away from the door, her sweatshirt riding up and showing that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Wow, people all over the place were flashing him their asses today. He wouldn’t tell her, but Holden had the nicer one. Then again, his livelihood depended on it.

The reason the door didn’t fall open all the way was simply because it couldn’t; the place was a pig sty. Now people threw that description around loosely, but he didn’t as his own housekeeping was on the questionable side (his boyfriends, bless them, usually were neater than him). But this place struck even him as sloppy beyond the pale, and if that wasn’t a cry for help, what was? There were dirty clothes heaped on the floor, along with a litter of take out food detritus (pizza boxes, plastic bottles, paper wrappers, napkins, even packets of ketchup and hot sauce) and a scattered assortment of textbooks that looked like dead birds fallen from the sky, covers spread open like wings. The living room consisted of a fold out couch almost as old as he was, covered in fabric that was a hideous cross between fuchsia and Pepto-Bismol and now blotched with stains, a Dell computer on a couple of overturned crates that functioned as a desk, and a stereo system and television that were probably more expensive than his motorcycle. At least he could judge her priorities.

She turned down the stereo, but tellingly didn’t turn it off. She didn’t so much sit down on the couch as collapse on it, folding a leg under her and lighting a cigarette. Where the cigarette had come from he had no idea and didn’t want to know. He decided to just jump in and try to get some answers from her before she passed out again. “His sister told me the last she heard from Grant, he was going to a party Friday night. You don’t know where it was, do you?”

She took a serious drag off her cigarette, and exhaled the smoke slowly; it seemed to waft up from her open mouth like dry ice fog. “Sister? Oh wow, I forgot he even had a sister.” She paused, long enough that he thought he was going to have to prompt her, but she started picking at a scab on her leg as she said, “He was always going to parties. Grant always knew where the best parties were.”

He waited for more, but it wasn’t forthcoming. She stroked her leg idly, like she was trying to soothe a scared pet, and he figured she’d just discovered she hadn’t shaved her legs. “So what party did he go to Friday night?”

She snorted, the cigarette shoved tightly into the corner of her mouth; she was working it like some people worked a toothpick. “I don’t know where I was Friday night. They had two dollar tequila shooters over at the Bull’s Eye and after a coupla those, I don’t really remember anything until I woke up Saturday night in the doorway of that church down the street. Wait a sec, maybe I have somethin’ …” She grabbed up a battered black purse from beside the couch and turned it upside down, spilling out the contents beside her. He saw tissues, condoms, a pack of birth control pills, lip balm, a couple of unknown loose pills (vitamins? Prescription? Other?), keys, pens, a red cell phone, a tampon, green Tic Tacs, a stick of gum, a small glass pipe that she probably used for crank. She sifted through it, heedlessly knocking some of it onto the dirty brown carpet.

She was a Hold Steady song in the flesh. He wanted to tell her that, but resisted the urge.

She picked up a receipt and glanced at it with squinted eyes before holding it out. “Okay, I was there. I’m pretty sure I ran into Grant there too.”

“Was he with someone?“ He studied the receipt, which wasn’t one actually. It was only a receipt on one side, from the Fred Meyer on the corner down the street: beer and toilet paper, also known as the breakfast of champions. The other side, the side she meant, had a hastily scrawled address on it in black ballpoint ink. He could barely make out the address, which was 175 Vickery Avenue.

“I dunno; it was an awesome blow out,” she said, and struggled to get up from the couch. “Or so I’m told. I was kinda out of it. Wanna beer?”

Definitely a Hold Steady song. “No thanks. You know of anyone who was there that night that might have memories of the party?”

That got a genuine chuckle out of her. “Not that I know, man. It was a wicked party.”

So maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t much of a partier. He thanked her, restraining the urge to say “Thank you, Ms. Winehouse”, and left her his business card, wondering what would kill her first: the drugs or just her lifestyle.

And then he wondered how many people thought the same thing about him.

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.

10 – Ephemera

This time the meeting place was at a café downtown, near the art museum. It was a sunny day, but the wind off the water gave everything a slight chill. Still, Frost was sitting at one of the round outdoor tables, in the shade of a multicolored umbrella. He wore sunglasses and a gray fedora along with a heavy dark coat, the kind that might be worn by an old man … or a hit man. It was sometimes a strangely fine line.

Z sat down in the chair across from him, suppressing the grimace that her broken rib had threatened to cause, and tried to guess what he was drinking by smell alone. Earl Grey? Frost folded up his newspaper, and said, “You were right about your American. He’s excellent. How much have you coached him?”

“Very little. Some people are just born fighters.”

“Such as you.”

“I wasn’t going to say that. I don’t want to seem conceited.”

“You’ve been a lot of things. Never conceited, though.”

“Thanks. I think.”

The waitress came over, a perky little brunette who was too cheerful not to be high on something or thinking about something much better than her job. Z ordered a sugary soda and sent her off. “You were always intending to permanently neutralize Oswald, weren’t you?” he asked. It almost wasn’t a question.

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I can’t help but notice you didn’t deny it.”

“I’m more curious in why you said that.”

He shifted in his seat and took his sunglasses off, so he could fix her with his scrutinizing blue eyes. “He didn’t have much in the way of fight injuries, in spite of the mess in the room. Just that single paralyzing wound. It was almost surgical.”

“Almost my ass. It was perfectly surgical. A work of art, if I don’t say so myself.”

The waitress arrived with the soda, so he scowled at her until she left, then slipped his glasses back on. “You gave up the game. Canadian Intelligence knows when they encounter an assassin. They’re not happy.”

“They wanted Oswald out of their country. He is, so they shouldn’t be complaining. Karma’s a bitch and so am I.”

He grimaced as if in pain. “I know what you’re doing.”

She took a drink of her cola, which was iced near to death, and the cold combined with so much sugar made her teeth ache. “Getting my caffeine fix?”

“You think you’re going to get out of this by being trouble. Deary, we at MI-6 knew you were trouble the first moment we saw your psych profile. It’s not going to be that simple.”

“I know. I figured I’d have to die again and take up shop elsewhere. I hear Argentina needs more sheep farmers.”

“It’s a good thing you’re joking.”

“Am I?” She grinned at him in a humorless and honestly annoying way.

He sighed and stood up, putting the folded newspaper on the table. “You did good, so you’re off the hook … for now. But don’t press your luck. They’re so humorless at MI-6 nowadays.”

She wondered if they ever actually had a sense of humor, but didn’t say it. Frost knew it better than anybody.

She was torn. She was getting older, and she couldn’t keep doing this forever, and Shan, as tough as he was, couldn’t do this forever either. Not only did his seizures continue to get worse, he was still a little shaken up over the levels of violence employed on this assignment. He sometimes looked at her sidelong when he didn’t think she was looking. He didn’t ask about Oswald, so she figured he knew he was dead. She guessed it bothered him that she’d killed the guy and didn’t seem bothered by it. He was hardly the first man she’d killed, and besides that, he was a mad dog that deserved putting down. But Shan didn’t know that, and probably never would.

Z picked up the newspaper Frost had left behind, and wasn’t surprised to see a phone number scribbled in the margin of the front page. It was a British number, probably his. But did he give it to her in case she decided to pack up and disappear again, so she could keep him in the loop? Or did he want to talk her out of it?

That was what most sucked about the spy game, and what she missed the least. You never knew quite who you could trust, and how far you could trust them. Absolutely everyone could be bought, but prices varied.

Z sat at the outdoor table, in the shade of the parasol, and tried to figure out her next move.

*****

The End