14  – Lost Weekend

“You know, you’re not a detective,” Diego said.

Dylan sighed, sitting back on the couch, balancing his cup of tea on the arm of the sofa. He’d been going through both Roan’s laptop and the notes he’d found, hoping to find something that jumped out at him, something that said, “Yes, I’m the bastard that tried to kill him.” So far, that elusive clue wasn’t jumping forward and revealing itself. “Obviously Dee, or this would make more sense to me than it does.”

“Hardly. Ro may keep a lot of notes, but they’re not always linear,” he replied, between swallows of his beer. “They’re stream of consciousness half the time. I’m not sure if he does that to keep people from reading them and making sense of them, or if he really thinks like that. You know, he might think that way. I dated him, but I still can’t say I’ve ever totally understood him. How are you doing on that front?”

Was he trying to distract him? Could he blame him if he was? “I’d never claim to understand completely how he thinks, but I think I know where he’s coming from most of the time. And his notes aren’t that bad. They’re kind of like he’s having a conversation with himself, trying to figure out where one piece slots into the bigger picture, if it does. He generally assumes everyone’s lying about something and tries to figure out what they’d be most likely to lie about. It’s a chess game where you can only guess what and where the pieces are.”

Dee gave him a funny look. “I think you just gave me a headache.”

“I never said it was easy.”

“Obviously.” He paused briefly, pondering his next statement with care. “How do you think we should approach his continuing pill problem? I’d suggest an intervention, but knowing Roan, he’d pull a gun and open fire on us.”

Dylan shook his head, looking at the notes on screen so he didn’t have to meet his gaze. “I think that’s not even on the table right now. He needs to recover, and then we’ll deal with it.”

There was a very telling pause. “Wow. You’re writing it off? Really? You think you can live with that, Dylan?”

“I think it doesn’t matter right now. If he dies, none of this bullshit is going to matter.” He could feel his anger rising, and along with that, tears. He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose like he had a bad case of eyestrain. Now was not the time. In fact, despite Holden’s warning that he shouldn’t be alone, he really wanted to be alone. If the killer wanted to get him, fine, he could come and have a go. It would allow Dylan to see if he still had the will to kill inside of him.

Luckily, there was a knock on the door. Dee sighed and levered himself out of his chair. “Finally. I was wondering if Holden had stopped for a trick or something.”

He had been gone for a long time. But Dylan wasn’t that surprised, mainly because he had a sneaking suspicion he had somewhere else to go. It was just the way he left in a hurry; he looked like a man on a mission.

But when Dee opened the door, it wasn’t Holden that came in. It was Fiona, greeting Dee with surprise before breezing past him and making a beeline for the sofa. Dylan was barely on his feet before Fi engulfed him in a hug.

“How are you, sweetie?” she asked. She was wearing a vanilla scented perfume that was very soothing. Or maybe it was just vanilla; it was hard to pick up anything perfumey about it.

“Okay, considering,” he said, as Fi finally let him go. She had her long red hair back in a ponytail, but otherwise looked very much the same as before, in a t-shirt, jeans, and a red leather jacket. Her eyes were a bit tired, like she’d been up too long. (Hadn’t they all been?) “How are you?”

She shrugged and grimaced. “I’m getting used to people trying to kill my boss. Isn’t that sad? Anyways, how is he?”

“No change from before,” Dee said, returning to his chair. “In the case of an animal tranquilizer overdose, we can take that as good news.”

Dylan sat back down on the sofa, and he moved the laptop so Fi could sit down beside him. “That’s good, I guess.” She glanced at what was on the laptop screen. “Case notes?”

Dylan nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure out if the answer was here, if Roan was so close to the guy he decided to kill him.”

“Well, I have something that isn’t in the case notes,” she said, almost excitedly. “Something that may alter the case a bit.”

Now that was intriguing. “What?”

She shifted on the couch, turning to face him more, getting comfortable. “Okay, you know I have friends in the sex industry, right?”

“I’ve seen your dominatrix ad in the back of The Stranger,” he replied. He had, but only after Roan found it and pointed it out. Still, no need to tell her that.

That made her grin in a slightly sheepish way. “It’s only part-time. I don’t have time for many clients anymore. Anyways, I was talking to Gunther, down at the sex dungeon -”

“There’s a sex dungeon?” Dylan exclaimed. He wasn’t sure if being frightened or appalled was the proper response.

“Oh yeah,” Dee said, surprising him further. “Me and Shep got called there once. A guy forgot the safe word and got choked to unconsciousness.”

“I heard about that,” Fi said.

“Weirdest thing? He was that guy who runs all those used car lots on the west side. Shep recognized him from his TV commercials.”

Fi shook her head as if the guy should have known better than to forget the safe word, and shifted her gaze back to Dylan, moving on. “Anyways, Gunther told me about something involving Kyle Newberry.”

“He’s a closet ‘mo,” Dylan interrupted. “Yeah, Ro included that in his case notes.”

“No, not that. There’s a sex tape.”

Dylan and Dee shared a surprised look, and both sat forward. “A sex tape?” Dylan repeated. “Kyle having sex with a man?”

Fi grinned in a savage way. “Two guys; they were having a Newberry sandwich. And one of them was a regional porn star. Gunther recognized his dick and the tattoo on his stomach.”

Dylan didn’t even know where to start with this one. So he tried to pretend he was Roan, and ask questions Roan would ask. “Who’s the guy, and where’s the tape?”

“The porn star goes by the name of Colt Brixton.” She rolled her eyes. “Shitty name, I know, but hey, most of the good names were probably taken.”

“That’s almost familiar,” Dee said, frowning in thought. Watched a lot of porn, did he? “What’d he do?”

“Besides everyone?” She grinned at her own joke. “He works mostly for Champion Studios out of Portland.”

Dylan opened a search engine browser and entered the name Champion Studios. What he came up with were a page of links to its website and to various adult films it had for sale. Their home page, which you had to give a credit card number to venture further into, had its heading as Champion STUDios. Cute. Fi looked over his shoulder, and said, “Here.” She turned the keyboard towards herself, entered a username and password, and got him into the site. He looked at her in surprise. She gave him a lopsided grin, coloring slightly. “What can I say? If I’m gonna watch a porn, it’s gonna be a gay porn. Straight porn just makes me ill.”

He so didn’t need to know that about her. He turned to the web page, amazed at the sheer amount of dicks and balls everywhere, and searched for Colt Brixton. Dee came over and sat on the other side of him, so he could peruse the website as well. “You’re not an internet porn guy, are you?” Dee guessed.

Dylan shook his head. “Not a porn guy period. Seriously, how does anyone get turned on by that acting?”

“See, you’re not supposed to be paying attention to the acting.”

“Yeah, hon, although sometimes it’s hilarious,” Fi admitted.

He shook his head. “No, I’m too distracted by it. It’s too painful. I used to date a theater major, and I have a low tolerance for hideous acting.”

Dee gave him a disbelieving look. “But, hot naked guys, Dyl.”

He snorted derisively. “I work in a gay nightclub. I’ve seen lots of hot naked guys. After a while, it’s just wallpaper. Besides, I’m not a big fan of the gym bunny look, and look at these guys. You could grate cheese on their stomach.”

“There is such a thing as overboard,” Fi agreed. “But you know, you can probably say this because you’re hot, and your boyfriend’s hot. It might be different if you weren’t.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, although he supposed she had a point. It was an easy thing to say when you had a boyfriend who was really incredibly sexy. But she thought he was sexy? He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Yeah, he had to look relatively good for the day job, but beyond that he didn’t think a lot about it. Maybe that made him luckier than most.

He found Colt Brixton, and kind of wished he hadn’t. The guy had a lean, hard body, all muscles defined and heightened, and he had a hard hawk featured face, not at all appealing, although he cultivated a type of tough boy sneer that was popular amongst insecure adolescents. He had a type of tribal sun black tattoo ringing his navel, seemingly highlighting it, although why you’d want to accentuate your belly button Dylan had no idea. Maybe it was a porn actor thing. “Eww,” Dylan said. Absolutely not his type. He was trying to look like street tough jailbait, one of those gay bashing teens whom every gay suspected was just fighting his own sexuality, and it was almost a stereotype. Fetishizing the enemy is what Roan called it.  Dylan imaged he was trying to look eighteen, but he looked twenty six at the youngest.

“Yeah, I don’t usually go for that kind either,” Dee agreed.

“He’s one of those guys who looks like he’s constantly smelling something bad,” Fi said. “Put a bag over his head, and he might be okay.”

All the titles this guy was in were hilariously bad – The Postman Cums Twice, really? – but nothing screamed Newberry sex tape. “What about this tape, Fi?”

“Oh. Gunther and this other guy, Declan, had seen it, but they said it had barely been leaked when it disappeared. The word through the underground is someone with deep pockets bought up every copy, even digital ones. Gunther’s interested in purchasing a copy, though. If we can get it, he’s willing to pay for it. He thinks it’ll be huge.”

Dylan sighed. So why did he have to look up this guy? Again, think like Roan. “When was it bought up?”

She shrugged, her eyes still glued to the laptop screen. “Gunther thinks it was about a month ago, more or less. He said it disappeared too fast for anyone to upload it.”

Dylan considered that, wishing he was Roan. He had a feeling he’d know exactly what this meant. “Okay, so how does this help us?”

“Umm,” Fiona said, considering it. “Well, my thought was we could talk to Colt. Maybe he knows who paid to scoop up the tape.”

“Or maybe he still has a copy,” Dee suggested. “Porn guys can be pretty narcissistic.”

“So how do we contact him?”

“I was figuring Holden would know,” she admitted. “He knows the hustlers.”

“But he’s a porn star, not a hustler.”

Dee clicked his tongue and shook his head. “He’s a very minor porn star, regional as opposed to national. A lot of these guys hustle on the side. There might even be a web page for him, if we knew where to look. Can I see that?”

Dylan gave him the laptop. “Help yourself.”

Dee’s fingers got busy on the keyboard, searching for the link where you could rent Colt for a while.  He felt like Dee and Fi were so much better at this than he was; he felt lost. Dylan grabbed the phone, and punched in Holden’s cell number. They were right – you needed a hustler to deal with another hustler. It was their milieu, a secret world with its own rules and protocols. Or maybe he was being too dramatic. After all, anyone could be a hustler; you just had to sell yourself for money. It just got complicated when you decided to make a living out of it, whether by necessity or impulse.

His phone rang five times before he picked up. “What is it, Dylan?”  Holden asked curtly.

Considering how friendly he had been earlier, that threw him a bit. Moody, was he? “There’s been an interesting development in the case. It seems there’s a Kyle Newberry sex tape that appeared for five minutes and disappeared after lots of money got thrown around.”

“What kind of sex tape?”

“Kyle and two men, one of whom has been identified as Colt Brixton, a regional porn star.”

Holden’s pause seemed portentous. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“No idea. Dee seems to think he’s probably a hustler, and may have a copy.”

“Where’s he work out of?”

“Umm, Portland, and a place called Champion Studios.”

A pause, but this time, Holden held the phone aside and said to someone else, “Pull over.” Another pause,  and Holden said to his mysterious friend, “Did I stutter? Pull the fuck over. Now.”

“What’s going on?” he asked. Dylan had a sudden bad feeling about this. What was Holden up to?

“I’m investigating a lead. I think they may connect.”

“How?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I do. Gotta go. I’ll call back in a few minutes.” And with that, Holden hung up before Dylan could even take a breath.

“Well, fuck you too,” Dylan muttered, hanging up the receiver.

“Holden recognize him?” Dee wondered.

Dylan could only shrug. “He seemed to think it was familiar. Guys, he’s doing something. I don’t think it’s good.”

Fi made a noise of disbelief. “He’s not tricking, is he?”

“No. I think it’s … I dunno.” The anger in his voice when he told his mystery guest to “pull the fuck over” was palpable over the phone. It left a bitter taste in Dylan’s mouth. Investigating a lead? He had a sudden, fearful feeling he had a member of the Newberry family in his company, and it wasn’t willing company. “He doesn’t own a gun, does he?”

They both gave him surprised looks. “Did you hear a gunshot?” Dee wondered.

“No.” Dylan wasn’t actually sure if he could explain it to them. All he knew was that after Jason’s death, he was so angry he wanted to murder the man who’d driven the car that hit them. And after stewing on it for a while, he got that gun, and resolved to shoot that motherfucker before he could be released on an unsuspecting populace. Dylan knew the sound of someone deciding to do something irrevocable; the cold anger that wasn’t so much rage as surrender. You were giving up to your darkest impulses, and no longer cared what happened to you. In a strange way, you were begging to be killed, obliterated, only if you got to take the object of your hatred with you.

But maybe he was being a drama queen. Maybe Holden was just pissed off. Could he be blamed? This was all so deeply fucked up. Still, he thought Holden was currently doing something very stupid, something that could get him killed.

Maybe this had been enough to call him off, to make him refocus his energy. Maybe. He would never claim to know how Holden thought.

But he hoped it worked. They’d need to put all their heads together to figure this one out if Roan wasn’t here to guide them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13- Cosmopolitan

 

Although the rich and powerful always had it much easier, in this day and age, it was hard to hide.

 

This was doubly true of local celebrities, a phenomenon that continued to strike Holden as incredibly weird. Was that something to be proud of? You were famous in a two thousand mile radius, and then, after that, progressively less so, until you were just another schlub again at the state line. It made you an egotistical asshole and an emotionally needy asshole at the same time.

 

Holden knew something about John that most people didn’t. He visited the Pacific Queen Casino (oh, the jokes he could have made …) almost every night. He had many luxury cars, but when he came to the casino, he always drove an old Mercedes, black with a dented fender. He didn’t want everyone to know he was a high roller up front; he tried to keep his true wealth a secret. Considering how much he blew in the casino, Holden had no idea how he thought he kept that all a secret. But at some point, someone was humoring him.

 

A security guard, an overweight guy with a polyester uniform and a posture that suggested he’d been broken long ago, desultorily prowled the lot in a marked sedan, but the parking lot was fucking huge, so he only had to wait for him to go on by, continuing his rounds further on, before working on the lock of John’s passenger door. It was incredibly easy.

 

All he had to do was wait. He came late enough that he didn’t have to wait long, although he was regretting not having his iPod with him. Finally John came walking through the parking lot, talking on a cell phone, completely oblivious to everything around him. Why did Holden even hide? He didn’t need to. He could have been following him and he’d have never noticed.

 

John was busy lying. He was telling someone – his wife, presumably – that the meeting finally got over and he was on his way home. He talked about someone named Dan going on and on about boring shit, an attempt to give the lie some realistic detail. Holden had heard this done a million times, by men he had just fucked, men calling their wives and family – and, in one notable case, congress – and assuring them they were having a boring, awful trip and couldn’t wait to get home. Sometimes they’d glance at Holden and roll their eyes, sometimes they’d pretend he was already gone. So was the way of men – men, by nature, lied. Did women? Maybe. Maybe it was just a Human condition, a compulsion that couldn’t be resisted. But from what Holden knew and experienced, men were generally pieces of shit. That’s why he didn’t feel bad about what he had to do.

 

He waited until John had gotten in his car and finished his call before he came up and opened the passenger side door, sliding into the seat before John had realized he had an unwanted hitchhiker.

 

“Hey,” John said, and Holden pulled out the gun and pressed it against his forehead, shoving him back until his head was pushed up against the window.

 

“You know who I am,” Holden told him. “Just like I know who you are. But if I blow your fucking brains out right now, it’ll never be connected to me. You’ll be a mystery, much like the death of your brother. The curse of the Newberrys. Although considering your gambling debts, they’ll probably think that finally caught up with you.”

 

“Wh-what … who are -”

 

Holden shoved the barrel even harder into John’s head, and the back of his head thunked against the glass. “Not this shit. I want to kill you enough as it is. Don’t make me lose my temper.”

 

“I- I have money.”

 

“I know you do. That’s your problem. Now tell me why you’ve had me followed and who tried to kill Roan McKichan before I just start breaking things.”’

 

John swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in an unstable manner, as his eyes nervously studied his face. Maybe he was serious about not knowing him at first, because Holden could see recognition click into place now. His wariness was tempered by fear, and a modicum of sneering contempt. Holden could read his mind in this second – he was thinking “Filthy whore”. Maybe because he was gay, there was an extra fear of cooties, or worse yet, contagious gayness. Maybe if they shared air too long, he’d get the gay too. “I had nothing -”

 

Holden hit him with the gun barrel. Just drew his wrist back sharply and turned the gun just slightly, so when he made contact with his skin the sight hit him first. Skin ripped along his forehead, making John yelp, and a small seam of blood opened, trickling down his face. “I’ve already decided to kill you,” he told him. “You know, I’m as liberal as anyone else in the sex trade, although we love you conservative repressed guys. If not for you, we’d be out of a job. But I’ve been studying people long enough to know that there are some who are a waste of flesh; they do nothing but steal oxygen and cause misery for everyone else. They have no reason to exist, and really shouldn’t, for the greater good of us all. You’re one of those people, John. You’re a cold blooded fuck who extorted his own brother for money. Did you kill him too? Not personally; you’re a ball-less wonder if I’ve ever seen one. But did you pay someone to do it for you? Or is making sure your brother gets an overdose of potassium an easy thing? I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child. Well, I wasn’t really, but I was raised one, so I missed out on all the sibling bonding. Tell me why Joel had to die, John.”

 

John grimaced in pain, bringing a hand up to his forehead. When he saw the blood that came away on his hand, he looked ashen, slightly ill. Did the sight of blood make him sick? No wonder he took to poisoning people instead: no blood, no icky bodily fluids, just a corpse. “I didn’t kill him,” he said, more a plea than anything else, his voice cracking with fear and confusion. “I wouldn’t do that. Why would I do that?”

 

“Because you’re up to your ass in debt, John, and you need the buy out to take place, so you can have a fresh hard cash infusion. That’s a hell of a murder motive. According to a detective friend of mine, money is usually the number one reason for death.” Or maybe it was number two – he couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter anyways.

 

John was cracking, easily and quickly. He believed Holden was serious about killing him, or guilt was eating away at him, or he noticed the safety was off. Maybe all of the above. “I didn’t do it. Okay, yeah, I need the money, but Joel’s estate is all going to his bitch of a current wife and his spoiled brat kids. How do I benefit from his death?”

 

“The buy out.”

 

He let out a scoff of a laugh, breathless and mirthless. “I have to split it with the rest of the family. It wouldn’t be much. I’d get more if Joel was alive to negotiate the deal. He could get blood from a stone.”

 

That felt like truth. Joel had an appealing charm when he turned it on. “Why did he oppose the buy out?”

 

“I dunno. He said some shit about our legacy and local media, and a whole bunch of grade A bullshit that never made any sense to me. I think he was just being a fuckhead, opposing it because the rest of us were all for it. It was his way of reminding all of us he was in control.”

 

That too had a ring of truth. The men who hired him did so because they were trying to control the scenario. An anonymous trick might discover who you are; a boyfriend might become bitter. But a prostitute was engaged in a simple business transaction, and had much to lose if they decided to expose you. It was mutually assured destruction if the secret leaked out. Or so the johns thought, and that was fine with Holden if they honestly believed that to be true. It wasn’t, though. A whore might have been just a whore, but a man who paid another man for sex never seemed to live it down in this country. Paying a woman was almost understandable, and seemed to earn sympathy in some corners, but a man? Never. You were the eternal butt of a joke. But desire often outweighed logic, thankfully for his bank account. “What exactly did you pay Duane Malloy for? And consider your answer carefully.”

 

“How-” he paused, deciding that the question was irrelevant, because Holden wouldn’t answer it. The guy with the gun didn’t have to answer a single fucking thing. “We needed a new security -”

 

Holden punched John right in the balls. He convulsively knifed forward, slamming into his own steering wheel, a high pitched keening noise escaping him. “I said I was gonna start breaking things, John. Do you think I’m fucking around? Do you want me to prove how much I want to hurt you?”

 

“No,” he wheezed, still in pain. When he sat back, his eyes were red rimmed from tears, and a string of saliva dangled from his wet lower lip. Had he almost barfed? Probably. “Did Joel mean that much to you?”

 

“He didn’t mean anything to me,” Holden snapped, and was mildly surprised to discover that was true. There was familiarity and routine, but nothing else. Perhaps that was what marriage was like. “I was curious what happened to him, especially after what he told me. No, the reason you’re gonna die is because a good man is dying in a fucking hospital because of your family and your shit.” There it was: he was furious that they had hurt Roan. Part of him thought it should have been him that was the target, the killer should have come after him, but didn’t for an obvious reason – who cared? He was a fucking whore, a hooker, and his word would mean nothing. The cops would roll their eyes, a judge would dismiss him, a jury of wonderful straight people would regard him as a leper and every word out of his mouth as contagious garbage. He could witness a murder, and any attorney worth their ambulance chasing shoes could rip him apart. He could find the poisoner standing over Joel’s body with a container marked “potassium”, and no one would believe him or care. No lawbreaker ever had to worry about him, because he was an Untouchable, and no one would listen to him.

 

But Roan … Oh, poor Roan. He would be believed. Infected, gay, but an ex-cop, and a police adviser on kitty cases; he had a patina of legitimacy that no amount of boyfriends, cat jokes, and suspicions of pill popping could erase. Then there was a vague sense of unease around him since he seemed to have super human abilities, one of which – his supernatural sense of smell – was considered admissible in a court of law. On the one hand, people mocked him; on the other hand, they were terrified of him. He should have been a flaming queen, he should have been a sickly virus child, he should have been gone by now. He almost seemed to be karmic retribution, but whose was in question. The only thing everybody could agree on about him was he was dangerous, much more dangerous than you would initially think, much more than he should have been. When Malloy told the killer who was visiting Holden’s place, he must have panicked. To be fair, Holden didn’t think he’d want Roan after him either, even if he got the guarantee that he wouldn’t turn into a lion at some point.

 

How did he feel about Roan? He wasn’t really sure. He’d come to believe he was a genuinely good person when he first encountered him as a cop. Holden didn’t like cops as a matter of course – tiny little tyrants, many with homosexual impulses they fought by becoming extremely homophobic – but Roan always seemed a little off. He seemed to treat everyone like a Human being, whether they were a hooker or a junkie. Holden figured then there was no fucking way he was going to last in the job, and he was right. He was strangely attractive, not a pretty boy but weirdly alluring all the same, with intense, haunted eyes. And god, was he trouble: not just infected, but an obvious depressive, too smart for his own good, a romantic turned cynic, battered by the world and not sure how to handle it. He raged at dying light, or whatever was handy, and had taken to numbing himself with chemicals. He was stubborn and moody, a total pain the ass. Holden didn’t envy Dylan, putting up with him. But that was the weird thing – he didn’t envy him, but wasn’t he still a bit jealous anyways? Yeah, he was trouble, but Holden suspected that he was rarely ever boring. The true outcasts rarely were. Nothing could ever work between him and Roan, but Holden bet it would have been a fun disaster.

 

“I had nothing to do with that,” John insisted, his voice still raspy with pain. Holden hoped he burst a testicle. “I wanted nothing to do with that guy. Malloy warned me off; he told me we had to shut this down before he got wind of it. He didn’t wanna follow him.”

 

That too was believable. He couldn’t imagine that one private detective wanted to follow another. If you knew the tricks of the trade, you could spot a tail pretty easy. “What did you hire Malloy for in the first place?”

 

He sniffed, wiped snot from his face with the back of one hand, and rubbed his crotch with the other. “Fuck, I think you did some real damage.”

 

“I warned you not to lie to me. Stop trying to change the subject.”

 

“I’m not. I hired him to … fuck. I hired him to dig up dirt on Joel. I needed leverage.”

 

“Leverage for what?”

 

“For what else? Convincing him to take the fucking deal. We all wanted to sell; he was the lone hold out, and for no good reason. He just wanted to remind us who was in control. So I thought I’d show him he wasn’t as the hot shit he thought he was. Of course, I didn’t know he was a fag.”

 

“He wasn’t; he was bi.”

 

John glared at him. “What’s the fucking difference?”

 

“The difference is gay guys really don’t want to fuck women. Joel would fuck anything.”

 

John winced at this and looked out the windshield. “That’s more than I ever wanted to know about him.”

 

“Then why hire a private detective?”

 

He shrugged a single shoulder. “I figured he was fucking around. No guy with money and power is actually gonna stick with just one woman. They know that, right? You’re gonna fuck around. You can have anyone you want, so why stay in and have reheated leftovers when you can go get something fresh, you know? I figured he had a mistress, probably more than one. I didn’t expect him to have … you. But he probably coulda had a guy for free – you fags’ll fuck anybody, right? You hook up in bathrooms and shit. Why didn’t he just do that?”

 

Holden restrained the urge to start pistol whipping him. Mainly because the gun could accidentally discharge in any direction, and he didn’t want to accidentally shoot himself. “Use the word fag again, and I’ll break your other ball. Get me?”

 

John looked like he wanted to say something, maybe belittle him for being so PC, but then he remembered he was holding the gun and had already done some testicular damage to him, and he managed to swallow it down. But Holden saw it in his eyes, the continued, endless contempt. He didn’t know him, but he disgusted him. “Yeah.”

 

“Let me get this straight: you still employed Malloy to follow me after Joel’s death. What the fuck for? Wanted my number, John?”

 

Holden got the reaction he wanted, the sudden, reflex revulsion. “No! I ain’t a f – that way. I thought maybe you had something to do with it.”

 

This was unbelievable. “With his death?”

 

“Yeah. I mean you’re … you’re a criminal, right? You do shit like that.”

 

As infuriating as that statement was, it didn’t quite fit. Why? Because of one very important thing. “I’d be perfect to frame for the crime if something went wrong. It sort of begs the question how you knew Joel had been murdered when everyone assumed he’d died of a heart attack.”

 

His mouth open and closed soundlessly, as he almost said something and then thought better of it. He tried again, more successfully this time. “That’s not – Joel was in too good of shape to just drop dead like that. I didn’t know he was killed, but it didn’t feel right.”

 

“Umm, no. You’ve told enough truth that a lie could slip through, but I lie for a living, asshole. Did you really think you could bullshit me?” He pressed the barrel of the gun against his temple with renewed ferocity. “Drive.”

 

There was a smell coming from John now. Not piss, not exactly, just fear sweat, a rank smell of failed deodorant and desperation. Holden wondered if people smelled like this to Roan most of the time, and if so, how did he stand them. “Drive where?”

 

“We’re gonna pay Duane Malloy a visit,” Holden told him. “And then we’re gonna find out if any of us are gonna live through the night.”

 

Oddly enough, Holden wasn’t bothered by this prospect. Maybe he’d finally found a new occupation.

 

 

12 – Can’t Exist

Dylan wondered how often he had been in emergency rooms since he had been dating Roan. More than he had before he started seeing Roan? Yeah, he was pretty sure this pushed it over the amount he’d been in a hospital his entire life before Roan. Maybe this was the price you paid for hooking up with the hot, mysterious, dangerous guy. Was this agony worth it?

He answered questions for the cops while they worked on Roan somewhere behind the emergency room doors. Luckily the cops seemed to know Roan, and didn’t consider him a suspect (well, at least not yet). Before he passed out, Dylan got some information from Roan: he’d taken three pills (he held up three fingers), and the pill bottle was in the glove compartment (he nodded an affirmative to that). He then passed out while Dylan was on the phone with the 9-1-1 operator. He tried to wake him up – the only thing he was sure about was he had to keep him conscious – but save for getting his eyelids to briefly flicker, he couldn’t wake him up. His heart rate had dropped absurdly low by the time the paramedics showed up (he’d been hoping Dee was one of the paramedics, but he wasn’t). The cops arrived to take the pill bottle into custody and check out the car, but the couple now questioning him – Walker, the somewhat good looking, lanky black man and Shale, the more compact, slightly masculine brunette woman – had given him a lift to the hospital. He knew they at least knew of Roan, because as soon as Walker asked him if he knew of anyone who might want to hurt Roan, he rolled his eyes and admitted it might be easier to start listing the people who didn’t want to kill him. Shale snorted humorously at that. As far as Dylan could tell, it wasn’t meant in a mean way, just an ironic one.

He had no answers for them, but they didn’t seem to hold it against him. All he could say was what little Roan had told him when he got home. As far as he knew, no one had access to his car (although clearly someone did), and he was off on a case, so he had no idea where in town he might have been. He couldn’t even tell them about the case. He said Roan hadn’t told him, which was a lie; he knew he was working the Newberry case. But until that was relevant, he was going to play the dumb, clueless boyfriend. Being a bartender at Panic helped. As soon as he told them where he worked, they exchanged this look that Dylan recognized as “himbo”. They’d already written him off as a vacuous boy toy. Again, fine; he didn’t give a shit – they could think of him as Paris Hilton for all he fucking cared. He just wanted to know if Roan was going to pull through or not.

He thought he’d held himself together well. He’d wanted to cry, but he didn’t. He’d been swallowing back the tears since he saw Roan slumped on the couch, his eyes glassy and his lips perfectly bloodless. There was a time and a place for emotional displays, and he preferred to lose his shit when no one was around to see it.

Dylan tried to empty his mind, use a Zen meditation technique to take himself out of himself and let the time go by faster, but that was hard to do when all you could think was your lover was dying in the next room.

Didn’t he know this could happen? The problem with Roan was he thought he was indestructible. He wasn’t, although he arguably had a decent case for it, what with being able to turn into a lion and all. But that wasn’t indestructibility, it just made him riskier to hurt. Roan didn’t seem to care about that difference at all. Incredible bravery or a suicidal tendency? It was a fine line, and kind of hard to say. He didn’t know, and he was sure Roan didn’t either. The suicidal aspect could just be his pill habit, but maybe not; maybe that was just for the numbing effect. For all his tough guy exterior, he knew Roan felt things a little too deeply for his own good. The pills were just back up for his armor, an inner framework that he leaned on more and more. Dylan wondered what it said about him that he decided to accept Roan as a drug addict, just like he accepted that he was always going to love Paris more. It was sad. He always had more self-esteem than that, and yet he decided if he wanted to be in Roan’s life, he’d have to compromise.  Sometimes loving someone just sucked.

Dylan sensed a person near him, and a vaguely familiar voice said, “I took a guess and figured you were a tea drinker.”

He looked up to see Fox a/k/a Holden Krause, Roan’s male prostitute friend. Or acquaintance; Roan was never able to explain what he was exactly. He’d actually seen him in Panic once or twice, back when he bleached his hair, but he hadn’t seen him lately. Tall, broad shouldered, he was more masculine than you would expect (save for his voice, which did give the game up a bit), and he wasn’t a pretty boy. He was one of those guys who, if they didn’t have a transcendent sort of charm, would be forgettable. Not ugly, not anonymous, just not special enough to warrant noticing. It also helped that a sort of furtive intelligence burned in his sea blue eyes; it came and went, depending on how much of himself he decided to show to you, but it made Dylan distrust him the first time he saw him. If he wasn’t a hustler, he was a guy on the make, someone calculating and predatory, and the fact that he actually was a hustler made him think of him in a tiny bit better light. He had a reason to calculating then, a reason to be hunting.

Holden wasn’t in costume; he was wearing very ordinary jeans and a promotional t-shirt for 30 Days of Night that was a size too large for him, the fabric slouching on him like it was damp and fresh out of the washer. His brown hair was messy in a way that suggested he’d gotten dressed in a hurry and came right over. He was holding out a paper cup of steaming liquid – some awful tea or another – and Dylan remembered to take it with a small nod of thanks. How long had he been sitting here staring at the cup? “I am, yeah. Thanks.”

Holden sighed as he sat in the empty plastic chair beside him. “How is he doing?”

“I have no idea. They haven’t told me anything.”

“Is this a gay thing? You’re not family so you don’t count?”

“I think it’s more they’re trying to figure out what he took and how they can counteract it.”

“What was happening to him, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Odd question. He gave Holden a sidelong glance, but he sensed he was trying to figure something out; he had a strange, focused look in his eyes. “He was slipping into a coma. His heartbeat and breathing were dropping lower and lower. I kept trying to wake him up, but nothing happened. He was slipping away from me and I got to see it -” Dylan had to stop, as his voice caught and he could feel those treacherous tears surging back. He closed his eyes and focused on stomping them down. He was not losing it, especially not in front of a man he didn’t fully trust. And he didn’t mean it in a sexual sense; there was nothing going on between him and Roan, it wasn’t even a question he had to ask. There was something so calculating about Holden he knew he’d never appeal to Roan. Ro had trust issues, and something about Holden made you wary about trusting him.

Dylan almost jumped when he felt Holden’s hand on his back, giving him a reassuring pat. “I’m so sorry, Dylan. Roan’s a tough motherfucker. The lion would never let him go without a fight.”

That was probably true, but for some reason, he resented him for saying it. He mentally wiped it away, and opened his eyes, no longer afraid that he’d start crying. “Why are you here?” He hoped that didn’t sound accusatory, but fuck it if it did. He didn’t feel like being polite right now.

“Dee called me,” he said, surprising him again. “He’s stuck at the scene of a huge pile up on I-5 near the Silverdale exit and couldn’t get here. He called me and asked me to come check on you and Roan for him.”

“Oh.” Diego called him?! That meant Dee must have trusted him on some level. Dylan wasn’t sure if that was comforting or not. “I was wondering why he wasn’t here. The paramedic news network is formidable.”

“So I’m learning.”

Finally a short Indian woman in a white doctor coat approached them. Dylan stood, and so did Holden. “How is he?”

“Alive,” she said. She had the brusque but not unkind manner of every hurried ER doctor everywhere. “As far as we can tell, he took an animal tranquilizer.”

“What?” Dylan replied. He wasn’t sure what he expected her to say, but it wasn’t that.

“Like ketamine?” Holden asked.

The doctor shook her head. “Heavier. This is stuff used to sedate elephants in a zoo. Two should have killed him, three pills should have been a nail banged into the coffin. But he’s not a normal human by far; he has the constitution of an angry musk ox, and we got to him in time.” She sighed wearily and rubbed her forehead, as if she was even more tired than she looked and trying hard to keep focus. “He’s lucky he’s a hybrid, although I doubt anyone can convince him of that.”

“Hybrid?” Dylan asked. He’d heard Roan say something about that before, something about his rarity in catching colds.

She grimaced, as if she realized she’d said something wrong. “I simply meant his virus child status was a help in this case.”

“Can I see him?”

“Not now. He’s in the ICU on a respirator. Come back tomorrow at -”

“He’s on a respirator?” Dylan interrupted impatiently. She hadn’t mentioned that.

“It’s mostly a precaution. Respiratory depression is common in these kinds of things, and he may need some help breathing until it’s mostly out of his system. We don’t foresee any lasting problems. In fact, if you’d let me finish my sentence, I was going to say you should come by tomorrow, when we’ll probably be removing him from the respirator.” She patted him on the arm, a clumsy attempt at comfort. But Dylan vaguely recognized her, so she must have worked on Roan before. It certainly explained some of the implied familiarity. “He’ll be okay. It’s just the other guy I’m worried about.”

“What other guy?”

“Whoever slipped him the mickey,” she said, as her pager went off. She picked it up and glanced at it frowning as she turned away. “Roan isn’t a forgive and forget type.”

“No,” Dylan agreed, the syllable lost in a sigh. He dry washed his face, and wondered what he was supposed to do with himself tonight. Somebody had tried to kill Roan, and now a machine was doing his breathing for him. How did you sleep? How did you spend all those agonizing hours waiting for the sun to come up and a new day to start? He’d done such things in his life, but he never wanted to do them again.

“This is all my fault,” Holden said suddenly.

Dylan glanced at him, a little surprised by the certainty in his voice. “What do you mean? You didn’t give him the drugs, did you?”

Anger flashed through Holden’s eyes, and he scowled. “You think that little of me? No, I didn’t slip him the elephant tranqs. It’s just my fault it happened.”

“How?”

He huffed a sigh through his nose and crossed his arms over his chest. “I hired him to look into Joel Newberry’s murder. Someone slipped him a lethal amount of potassium, and now they tried to get Roan with tranqs. This shitty bastard likes deaths that can be written off as accidents, no matter how weird they are.”

“But he just started the investigation. This person would have had to have known Roan was investigating this right from the start. That’s not possible, is it?”

Holden looked away as he considered it, muscles going taut in his jaw. “I don’t know. At this rate, we can’t discount anything.”

Great. He sounded like Roan there for a moment.

Dylan started walking away, wondering what he was going to do with himself, when Holden grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Look, stay with me tonight, or let me stay over.”

“What?”

“This guy, whoever he is, attacks with stealth. He doesn’t like confrontation, he doesn’t want a fight, and he won’t risk taking on two guys at once. There’s safety in numbers.”

Was this some bizarre come on, or was he serious? Dylan’s head was still spinning from the fact that someone had tried to kill Roan. He didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with this right now. “You think he’s going to come after me?”

Holden shrugged. “It depends on how concerned he is about loose ends. But if anything happens to you, Roan will kill me. I’ve already seen what he does when someone hurts you; I don’t want to be on the other side of that.”

Dylan considered that, but still felt as if he didn’t have a grip of things. “Are you making fun of him?”

“Absolutely not. He just loves you enough that he will kill for you. Literally – he will kill. He will let the lion out and rip people to pieces. I don’t want to end my life as a bit of food in his colon. “ He paused a moment. “I bet there’s a dirty joke in that, but I’m too angry to make it right now.”

This sort of went in one ear and out the other. He couldn’t take much more tonight. He used to have a rather sedate life. Oh sure, he had his weird art friends, and the interesting employees at the gay club, but he had a very normal routine: work, painting, watching TV, meditating. That was pretty much it. Pretty normal, much like everyone else’s with a couple of variations. But then he met an unusually attractive man named Paris, who was the only tiger strain infected he had ever met, and seemed to talk all the time about his boyfriend, Roan. And somehow, his life took a weird sideways turn from then on. Suddenly his life was full of death, iron cages, books, guns, dominatrixes, paramedics, and male prostitutes. While he was baffled much of the time, you’d think he’d been more miserable than he actually was. Oh sure, he was miserable right now, but for the most part he was perversely happy with Roan. In spite of the hard exterior, he was one of sweetest men he’d ever known; he seemed genuinely interested in helping people. Merging that with the man who could turn into a lion and eat people was a brain twisting dichotomy. “He … what? Are you saying you saw him do this?”

Holden got this look on his face that suggested he suddenly realized that he had made a mistake. “And he didn’t tell you about it at all. Right. I should have guessed that really. Forget it. You know he has a temper; that’s all it is.”

“He tried to kill someone because of me?”

“No. If he wanted someone dead, they’d be dead. He just scared the living shit out of them.”

“But you said -”

“I’m full of shit, Dylan. Now, are we headed to your place or are you coming back to mine?”

How weird: he was lying and telling the truth at the same time. Dylan hadn’t known that was physically possible. But, again, he couldn’t deal with that now.

It was disappointing to think that maybe he wasn’t strong enough to be in Roan’s world, but he was starting to wonder.

****

Holden knew he was many things, but a decent detective wasn’t one of them. Under normal circumstances. But circumstances were far from normal; circumstances were pretty well fucked.

It was bad enough the doctor obviously lied to them: no one on a respirator was “okay”. That was like saying the guy on the iron lung only had a “mild cough”. But he figured Roan would recover eventually, because he generally did. He was a bad penny, and he kept turning up.

Poor Dylan. Not only did he look shell shocked by all of this, but he asked him in the car, “You think Roan really loves me?” Oh, it was so weird. He told him that obviously he did, and obviously he didn’t admit it because the idea of it freaked him out. Lingering Paris guilt? Maybe. Holden really had no idea. The one time he thought he was in love, his heart was so thoroughly crushed that he was no longer sure he ever was in love. He thought love was a sham used to sell greeting cards and heterosexual conformity, even though he generally recognized the delusion when it popped up in others. Roan had it bad for Dylan, although he supposed he could understand. Dylan was a good looking guy, but not vain, and he was as mellow as a heavily stoned person without being actually stoned or completely fucking stupid. He’d be an easy target for anybody who wanted to kill him.

Holden knew he wasn’t an easy target. He looked like he was, but he wasn’t. He learned long ago you did what you had to do to survive, and sometimes your survival meant hurting someone else. It happened. You just tried not to hurt anyone without necessity or good reason if you had any shred of a conscience. Holden had a shred, but only just. He figured it would serve him well.

Today, while “working” at John Newberry’s office, he found a very queeny assistant to befriend. It wasn’t difficult; a bit of flirting, a bit of flattery, and this poor guy was following him around like a puppy. The scary thing? This guy couldn’t have been more than twenty two, making Holden feel vaguely like a dirty old man. Okay, he was only thirty, but in hustler years that was ancient. The guy – Spencer – might have been shiny young, but he wasn’t very attractive, and had a bit of a belly. Not much of one, but in the perfectionist world of the gay dating scene, that made him little more than a drunk desperation fuck at best. Attention from Holden meant a lot to him. He felt really bad for stringing him along.

He got access to some of John’s emails and line item budget items for the past couple months. What he discovered was that only yesterday, John sent a rather large payment to a Duane Malloy. A bit of Googling and use of less widely known search engines turned up that he was a private investigator for a firm working out of Lakeview. John Newberry had hired a private investigator and just paid him off in a way that suggested their business was done. He wanted to ask Roan what that could possibly mean, if it was sinister as he felt it might have been, but Roan wasn’t conscious enough to ask.

Holden had to drop Dylan off at his place anyways, and luckily Dee was there to meet them. Holden whispered to him to not leave Dylan alone, which earned him a quizzical look, but then he told Dee and Dylan he’d be back as soon as he got some things from his place. Holden then headed off to find Burn.

Burn was one of those guys you met when you lived on the streets or very close to the gutter. He was a wheeler dealer, a vulture living off the corpses of other people’s misery and actively encouraging the misery for money. He was a heroin addict who derided methheads until he got addicted to meth himself. When Holden tracked him down, he was shocked at how rapid his decline had been. His skin looked grey, like he was already dead, and his cheeks had sunken in, giving him a look akin to the embodiment of Famine. When he talked, Holden saw his gums were an odd color, his teeth the color of candy corn and occasionally similarly shaped, and his breath smelled like someone had just taken a shit in a vat of nail polish remover.

They sat in the dark corner of a dive bar where you could buy a hit of meth or a girl in the piss reeking bathroom, and Holden passed over a wad of cash for one of Burn’s “specials”. They were guns with their serial numbers filed off and their barrels often altered; they were usually stolen from out of state or bought at gun shows, untraceable and anonymous, a gun without a country. They were made to be used for one gig and then tossed, guns altered specifically for evil things.  Holden got a semi-automatic with six bullets in it. It was in good shape; Holden’s only objection was that it had flashy silver plating, which was important to those who wanted to show the gun off but had no use otherwise. Still, it would do.  The bullets were hollow points. Holden wondered if the hit of meth he’d just paid for would be the death of Burn, and if that would really be a bad thing considering the shape he was in.

Holden could shoot. He was raised in a good Christian American household; he could use a gun before he knew how to use long division. Pastor Krause had his priorities in order. But Holden had never shot a Human. Yet. There was a first time for everything.

He’d already Google mapped the location of Duane Malloy’s private detective agency. It wasn’t his own, he worked for an agency called Security Solutions, which sounded like a burglar alarm company. It did have an alarm, but a cheap one; it was easy to disable. The locks were also easy to pick. He’d learned that skill from a fellow street kid, Trips, that he had a huge crush on for a while. Shame he was straight. Holden wondered what happened to him. One night he decided to hitchhike to Vegas, and Holden never saw him again. He hoped he found himself a life.

Holden went through Malloy’s files, looking for something on Newberry. Sadly, Duane wasn’t as meticulous a record keeper as Roan was. The computers were locked down with passwords they hadn’t written down on Post-It notes, which Holden had been surprised to find they did in Newberry’s office. (You were just asking for people to fuck around with your shit. Holden was glad it was that easy.) Holden picked the locked drawers of his desk and a nearby file cabinet,  and looked through the folders and papers he found there. That’s where he found the pictures of Joel.

Big glossies of Joel entering an expensive hotel, and in a short sequence of shots, Holden saw himself entering the same hotel, eyes hidden behind sunglasses but still vaguely recognizable. There were other photographs of  Joel and him entering other expensive hotels. Never together, there were no pictures of them engaging in any sort of act, but there was something circumstantial about it all. There was a copy of a hotel bill, Joel’s, which showed that Joel, alone on a business trip, had ordered two different dinners and an expensive bottle of gin. (Holden remembered that; the gin was okay, but weirdly enough, he knew a cheaper brand that tasted so much better.) Then Holden found a copy of an old arrest report, when he was a juvenile and had been brought in for solicitation of prostitution, as well as a print out of his recent profile on the escort company’s website. There was no fucking way they should have had that arrest report, but then again, how did they get a copy of the hotel bill?

So he had been made. Malloy discovered that Joel was most likely associating with a known male prostitute. And this information was given to his brother John. Blackmail? But who was doing the blackmailing? Did Malloy blackmail John, or did John simply pay him to dig up dirt on his own brother? At least Joel was right to feel paranoid.

Holden suddenly realized something. The last photo taken was on the last day he saw Joel. Duane and John knew he had seen him. Was he still being shadowed? If so, they’d have seen Roan come to his apartment, and Duane would most likely recognize a PI as unique as Roan. It wouldn’t be hard to figure out why Holden might want to see him, hire him.

And that’s how they swapped out Roan’s pills. He didn’t know it, but he had been under surveillance since he left Holden’s apartment. That’s how the killer knew that Roan was looking for him by day one.

This was his fault. Holy shit, was someone going to pay for this.

He closed the drawers, locking them again, and shoved one combined folder full of pictures and case notes down the front of his shirt, keeping his hands free. He locked the office up again but didn’t bother to reconnect the alarm system, because fuck it – let them wonder who the hell hit them. Let them wonder why.

Once he was in his car, he tucked them under the front seat, wedged inside a copy of Scientific American. He then made sure the safety was off the gun, and it was ready to go.

Time to pay someone a visit. Time to see if he was angry enough to shoot someone in the face.