5 – Psychosomatic

It was day three when Dylan decided the Way of Water was just not going to work for him this week.

It was something to strive for. It was the essence of Taoism basically, to be fluid, essential, give without taking, to be strong without being violent, to be calm and placid.

Yeah. Not this month.

Not that he didn’t want to be. Without Roan here, and with Doctor Rosenberg only letting him stay long enough to see Roan was fine before shooing him out of the hospital, he’d spent a lot of time at the Buddhist temple, working on his meditation techniques. But then he’d get frustrated, his mind wandering all over the place, so he’d come home and paint, but he found himself not wanting to paint, so he’d fill in for someone at work, and find himself too exhausted and distracted to deal with customers. It was a vicious cycle that continued without ceasing. He even slept badly, so he was always tired.

He’d come to the conclusion that living in Roan’s house without Roan here made him feel like a trespasser, or worse, a living ghost, haunting someone else’s house. What would he do without Roan exactly? What if he never came back?

His mind just shied away from it. He couldn’t think it. It seemed impossible that Roan, probably the largest of the larger than life figures he’d ever met in his life, could ever die, disappear, go away. He seemed almost mythical now. Or if he did die, it would be doing something big and splashy, something heroic and needlessly violent. He wasn’t the type to die in his sleep.

So when Doctor Rosenberg called him on day three, his heart lurched, but she said quickly, in her smoke husky voice, that nothing was wrong with him, she just needed Dylan to come down to her office as soon as he could. That happened to be that moment (fuck his laundry; he could do that any time), so he raced there in the rain, finding all the traffic lights working against him as he tried to figure out why she’d want to see him. Was she lying about nothing being wrong? She must have been. She just didn’t want him to freak out. So he tried very hard not to freak out in traffic, and when he parked his car, he made sure no one was around before screaming at the top of his lungs. Sometimes it was cleansing to let out the pain and fear, but today all it did was make his throat hurt.

He was shaking a little when he finally got up to Doctor Rosenberg’s office at the university hospital, but she thought he was just soaked from the rain and chided him in a motherly fashion for not wearing a warmer coat. Her office smelled faintly of cigarettes, although there were no ashtrays in evidence. There was a small explosion of paper covering her desk, little drifts of mail, a flatscreen computer and a complicated looking phone. Her carpet was dark green, her walls an off gold like old ivory, and along with framed degrees was what looked like a picture of a fractal in a metal frame, but was apparently a microscopic photo of a virus. She had a half-dead ficus tucked away near the window, which had a fantastic view of the back quad parking lot.

No family photos? No personal photos of any kind. Did she even have a family? There was something about her intensity that screamed “meddling grandma” to Dylan, but on the other hand, that single minded focus and dedication to her work could have left her alone. Considering the sheer number of degrees and awards on her wall, he had no idea when she would have had time to get married or start a family. That just ate up too much time.

As soon as Dylan sat in the worn padded chair she had in front of her chipped wooden desk, she started typing, her fingers flying over the keyboard, chewing on a pencil like she wanted a cigarette. Just as Dylan was about to break the silence, she took the pencil out, and said, “I’m just gonna give it to you in layman’s terms, okay? Roan doesn’t need to be here. He never needs to be here again.”

Maybe it was sleep deprivation, but that made no sense to him. “Huh?”

“He’s out of viral sequence. Permanently, as far as I can tell.”

She was speaking neither English or Spanish; she wasn’t speaking a language he could understand. “What? Are you saying he’s cured?”

“Oh god no! How would that happen? I’m just saying he isn’t a slave to his viral cycle anymore. I think it’s a slave to him.”

“Again – huh? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying he’s not changing this month, not without conscious thought. There are certain hormones, viral proteins, and neurotransmitters that increase when a change is imminent. Did Roan ever tell you he almost agreed to a clinical trial a few years ago? It was during Paris’s last days. He only came in to test for it ’cause he wanted to see if it would save Paris, but he was too sick to participate, and Roan wasn’t gonna do the trial without him. I took blood samples then, and I compared them with blood samples I took from Roan just an hour before. And his virus has changed shape. In the last couple of years, it’s … mutated. Or been forced to mutate, perhaps by the increase of CD8+ T cells in his system. He can change basically at will, we all know that, right? By doing this he’s disrupted the natural rhythm. There isn’t one anymore, not for him. His viral protein levels, hormones, and neurotransmitter levels are now naturally higher than normal, because he needs to be ready to go at any point. His body and the virus have both adapted to this new reality.”

Dylan decided he was going to be like stone, and the information, like water, would flow over him, and he would make sense of it as it went by. He tried very hard. But the conclusions he reached didn’t make much sense. “You’re saying he doesn’t need to change a few days a month anymore? He doesn’t need the cage?”

“Exactly. No point.”

“But he just changed last month. For four days!”

She nodded, like she expected to hear this. “Yes, because he thought he was going to.”

Being stone was just as hard as being water. There was surely a lesson in that. “What? Are you saying he … he did it to himself?”

“In a sense. Not deliberately. He expected it to happen, and it did, because he was expecting it to. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will. He’s probably been psychosomatically changing for … well, fuck if I know. But for a bit, certainly.”

“This is insane,” he blurted, too confused to worry about offending her.

But she just nodded. “Isn’t it? I don’t get it at all. Medically, this is a first. But then again, Roan has been a medical oddity since I first started seeing him. He’s fairly atypical, unique. If I actually introduced these findings to the world at large, he’d be an instant celebrity in medical circles overnight. But I don’t want to see him as an animal in a freak show any more than he wants to see that happen.”

He was sure there was something unique about that statement, but he couldn’t quite decide what. “You’ve never told anyone about him?”

“Oh, I have. I’ve written papers about Patient X – as I call him – and shared it with a few colleagues, but most think it’s my attempt at fiction. They don’t believe he could exist, that a medical oddity this extreme is even possible. But that’s what they said about the virus when it first appeared, so what the hell?”

Dylan just sat there in the chair, wondering if he was going to wake up at home on the sofa, where he must have fell asleep trying to decide if he should cut his latest canvas in half or set it on fire. This couldn’t actually be happening, could it? “Is, um, there any chance the virus will mutate further?”

She did something you never wanted to see a doctor do: she shrugged. “I wouldn’t think so, but I didn’t think it could mutate further to begin with, so who knows?”

He scratched his head, wondering what the appropriate response was here. Surely throwing a chair through the window was out of bounds, but the fact that he felt like crying made about as much sense. “Why, um, why did you ask me here?”

“Because I’m gonna get him out of his coma tonight, and I want you to lie with me that his cycle came to a sudden end. Then, once he’s had a day to prove that he won’t change, I’m gonna call him back in here and tell him the truth. You don’t have to participate in that, I’m sure it won’t be pretty, but I’ll tell him I set you up for it so he won’t be mad at you.”

He nodded, and found himself blinking tears away from his eyes. “Okay, sure.”

“You’re upset.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I would be upset.” He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. Calmness; he had to think calm thoughts. He was water, he was stone.

“’Cause it’s hard to be the loved one of an infected, especially when you’re normal.”

“I’m normal?” he replied, almost laughing.

“You’re not infected. And the fact that he’s been living under a death sentence must have added nothing but stress.”

“He’s not going to die,” he said, and his voice cracked. He was water, and now it was coming out of his eyes.

“Well, the possibility is still there, aneurysms will always be a threat, and I’m sure he’ll die just like we all die. But we don’t have to worry about it on a month by month basis anymore. Here, have a tissue.”

“I’m okay,” he lied, not sure why he felt curling up in the corner and bawling like a little kid.

Maybe because this should have been good news, extraordinary news, but he was afraid that Roan wouldn’t take it that way.

If he really wanted to die, this actually made it easier to accomplish. He would have to decided between the living and the dead.

And Dylan was pretty certain that was an argument lost before it was even made.

****
Holden wondered if fighting was the only thing that kept people from realizing hockey was kind of gay.

All the skating, all the body contact, guys hugging after a winning goal … kinda gay. But maybe that was his own prejudice talking. Maybe he was seeing everything through a gay glass. But no one could deny there were obvious homoerotic overtones, although not as much as in mixed martial arts fighting – now that was totally, completely fag-tastic. Guys in shorts, sweaty and grappling with each other in a cage as other men cheered them on  … it was like soft core porn at times. You could jerk off to it.

Holden caught the end of a home game between the Falcons and the curiously named Wheat Kings (“All bow before the mighty Wheat King, or I will blight your crops with fungus!”), which the Falcons lost in overtime. Holden didn’t care, as he was just trying to spot the client, which he did when he came off the bench. It helped that he was very nearly the tallest dude on the ice, and that he drew attention to himself by pasting a guy so hard to the boards that he thought the glass – Plexiglas, plastic, whatever it was that surrounded the rink – was going to shatter. His number was twenty two, but Holden thought 666 might be more appropriate since he tried to make that guy a pancake. Did they teach you that in hockey school? Not plastering someone, but continuing to skate and play even though the right side of your rib cage has just collapsed and your lung is deflating? That Wheat Kings guy was amazing for not passing out, although he did go to the bench and seemed to sit there for a bit before he got out on the ice again. Holden noticed the client mostly seemed to be on the ice when that guy was, and when the Falcons were on a penalty kill, or the Wheat Kings (“Bring me your rice! Hear the lamentations of your oats!”) were really trying hard to score.

He ended up loitering for almost two hours behind the arena before the Falcons started to emerge. The weird thing about hockey players was they looked so big and thick in their padded uniforms, their body armor protective gear, that out of it they seemed almost ludicrously skinny. Generally fit as hell and as hard as brick walls, but wispy all the same. You wouldn’t know there was a good chance they could break your jaw in one punch until they actually did it.

Finally he saw the client coming out talking to two other guys, all three with gear bags slung over their shoulders. “Grey Williams?” he asked, coming up. The three men stopped, but Holden only noticed one guy tense, the thinnest of the group and also the shortest, who still had wet hair. Holden hadn’t seen everybody’s faces, not with those helmets and visors and his generally lousy seats, but he didn’t recognize the little brunette guy at all.

“Who wants to know?” Grey asked, casually, but there was a hint of menace in the tone.

“I’m Holden Krause, I work with Roan McKichan. I’m doing some follow up, and I was wondering if I could talk to you?”

Williams’ tense had been very subtle. Holden only realized it now, as his shoulders slumped slightly, and the murderous look in his eye gave way to a slightly goofy grin. “Oh, sure.” He looked at his companions, the wiry little brunette and the crew cut blond with a knife blade of a face, and said, “See you guys tomorrow, okay?”

There were okays and byes – the brunette had a French accent – and as they left, the Frenchy was still giving him a suspicious glare, like he didn’t trust him. Once they were out of sight, Holden asked, “Was that French guy gonna hit me?”

Williams laughed. “Tank? Eh, he knows I’m up to something, so he’s become protective. I protect him on the ice, so he’s decided he’s gonna protect me off. Don’t know how, but I appreciate the thought.”

“Tank? I assume that’s a nickname.”

“Yeah. His name’s Thibault, but we just call him Tank, ’cause he kinda is one.”

“I didn’t see a Thibault on the ice tonight.”

“’Cause that’s his first name. His last name’s Beauvais.”

Holden recalled where he saw that name. “Holy fuck, that guy was the goalie? I thought he was bigger than that.”

Williams genuinely chuckled. “They wear like eighty pounds of gear, man. If they were bigger than that, there’d be no net to shoot at.” After a moment’s pause, Williams asked, “So what d’ya need to know?”

“Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“Sure. There’s a bar down the street.”

And what a vaguely seedy bar it was. There were worse along the way, a strip joint and a sports bar (there was a lot of masculine addendums around the sports arena), but this was a more traditional bar, a tiny dive with lots of dark wood and neon beer signs, and a jukebox playing – oh, classic – a Tom Waits song. There was a tiny TV over the bar, but it was currently mute, and seemed to be showing some kind of local weather report. The bartender, a busty woman with pink and bleach blonde raver kind of hair, greeted Williams as if she knew him, and a guy at the bar who looked like a professional drinker told him he played great Monday night. Williams thanked him politely before they disappeared to a small back table, where they were far from any of the boozy stragglers.

The busty raver came over to take their drink orders, and Holden ordered a scotch and soda, while Williams just ordered a grapefruit juice with extra ice. As soon as she was gone, taking her tremendous tatas with her, Holden asked, “You don’t drink?”

“No, I do, but I’m on a training regimen right now, so I don’t.”

“Ah.” So he had some discipline. Probably a mark in his favor.

“So is Roan, uh -”

“Indisposed. I’ve been looking into Jasmine Hawley while he’s out. I do the street beat, and he handles the cops and all those other official types.”

“So you’re like a junior investigator or something?”

“Assistant investigator. Although I guess if you want to get technical, I’m more like his Huggy Bear.”

Williams gave him a blank look. “Teddy bear?”

“Huggy Bear. Oh, come on, Starsky and Hutch?”

Williams shook his head as the bartender came back, dropped off their drinks, and moved on. Holden sighed. “Thanks for making me feel old, Grey.”

“You don’t look old,” Williams offered, with almost heartbreaking innocence. In his notes, Roan had written in the margin of the case form “Gormless?” Holden now had an inkling what he was getting at.

“Thanks. What I needed to know was if Jasmine had a drug problem. I’ve heard conflicting testimony.”

“Huh. No. I mean, I don’t think so. Jamie didn’t seem the type to go for that shit, y’know?”

Holden nodded, but wasn’t ready to buy it. Although a lot of users were obvious – you could usually smell a serious meth head before you even saw them – not all were. And since Grey was in a different state, he had no way of knowing what Jasmine’s life was really like. “I know Jamie was living in an apartment at the time of her death. Where did her things go? Did her parents take them?”

That made him scoff loudly, it was almost more of a cough than anything else. “Yeah, no. Her parents wanted nothing to do with her after she decided she was a woman. He was a woman. Anyways, I think her roommate put ‘em in storage.”

“Roommate? You didn’t mention a roommate.”

“I didn’t? Oh shit, I guess I forgot. Um, yeah, Jamie was living with this guy, Brandon something or other. I think he might still be there.”

Holden nodded, grimacing, and wrote that down in his notebook. (He didn’t take notes like Roan took notes, but he agreed to at least take some when he had to.) He then had a sip of his scotch, which tasted a bit like off brand mouthwash. He then added the note “Don’t drink scotch in a dive bar”. “This Brandon wasn’t a boyfriend, was he?”

Williams had been taking a sip of his pink juice then, and it looked like he almost choked on it as he hastily put the glass down. “No! I mean, I don’t think so. Jamie never mentioned it. And she complained a lot that she was alone, so if she was, I think she’d have said. Maybe.” He scowled down at the table, which had the echoes of many drink rings and the scars of past cigarettes etched into its top. If you read Braille, there might have been a dirty limerick here. “So does Roan have like a boyfriend or something?”

Weird question out of nowhere. “Yes. So you know he’s gay then?”

“Well, you’d be surprised how often they called him gay before mentioning he worked for the cops.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t. He always assumed he was an affirmative action pick up: gay, infected. A two-fer.”

Williams nodded like that made a lot of sense. “I noticed he had some scars on his face. How’d he get those?”

“Honestly? No fucking idea. That’s not something he talks about. But I know he’s been shot a couple of times, and he once got a beer bottle broken across his face, so maybe he got a scar from that. That’s not even counting the amount of fights he’s been in.”

“Tough guy?”

“Like beef jerky left behind the radiator for weeks.”

Williams smirked and glanced around the bar. Holden sat back, and asked, “What about you?”

Williams’s translucent blue eyes scudded back to him. “Me? Well, I got the one on my forehead from a hockey stick -”

“I’m not talking scars. I’m asking if you’re gay.”

That startled a short, sharp laugh from him. “Hell no. I got nothin’ against ‘em, I mean, you a homo, be a homo, why should I give a shit? I was just curious.”

Holden pinched the bridge of his nose, wondering how he even started to address this. “Homo?”

“Is that a bad word?”

“Unless you yourself are a big ‘mo, yes.”

“Oh. I didn’t know. Sorry.”

“It could have been worse,” he admitted. He was picking up a strange vibe from Grey. Not a “john-is-a-psycho-who will-kill-you” vibe, but one of … dishonestly, maybe? Not overt, just something he wasn’t saying, little pieces of information he was leaving out. Perhaps not even deliberately. Maybe this guy had taken one too many shots to the head, or perhaps he popped steroids or some equivalent. Drugs could fuck you up in funny ways. “Well, thanks, I think that’s all -”

“I got an email,” Williams suddenly said.

Holden raised an eyebrow at that. “And?”

“Somebody threatening me. They seemed to know I went to Roan. How I don’t know, it’s not like I told people. Even Tank isn’t sure what I’m doing. Here, I printed out, and I’ve been keeping it in my wallet ’cause I was afraid I’d lose it otherwise.” He got a battered Velcro wallet partially covered with hockey tape out of his pocket, and opened it to slide out a crumpled piece of paper folded poorly into a rectangle. He tossed it out on the table, and Holden grabbed it, opened it,  and smoothed it out.

It was a brief message, simple and to the point: “the fag can’t help you leave it or you’ll regret it.” The email address it was from was just a bunch of letters and numbers jumbled together randomly, ending in home.nu, suggesting a phony email address, or at least one with a convoluted trace trail. The date indicated he got it yesterday. “You report this to the cops?”

He scoffed again, but this time grapefruit juice didn’t threaten to come out his nose. “No. Why would I?”

On a hunch, Holden asked, “You didn’t respond to this, did you?”

“Course I did. I told him to bring it if he was so fucking tough.”

Gormless. Gormless, gormless, gormless. “Are you fucking serious? A guy sends you what may be a death threat, and you tell him to bring it?”

He shrugged. “If he shows his face, I’ll beat the shit out of him. I’m not afraid.”

“Are you afraid of a gun? You can’t beat the shit out of him, tough guy, if he shoots you from a distance.” He made a noise of exasperation as he folded the note back up and shoved it in his pocket. Of all the nights to not be carrying the “clean” gun he bought from Burn. Not that he would ever grow accustomed to carrying a gun. He had his lucky knife, of course, but you knew what they said about guys who brought knives to gun fights.

“If they’re gonna kill me, they’re gonna kill me. Can’t worry about it.”

“Now I see why you hired Roan. You’re just perfect for him. You gotta car around here? I’ll walk you to it.”

“I don’t need babysitting.”

“Yes you do, if you’re gonna do stupid things like this.”

Williams shrugged again, and finished his grapefruit juice. Holden had to suppress the urge to reach across the table and slug him or just kick him under the table.

They paid and left, and started walking along the sidewalk, back towards the arena. Williams had to walk ahead, he was leading the way, but Holden tried to keep an eye on the street. There weren’t too many cars or people out right now, which bothered him. More people meant more witnesses, and less of an opportunity to try something. Oh god, Roan’s paranoia was rubbing off on him.

“Since the cops killed Jamie, why would they take me on? I got a scout from the Predators checking me out. I die and it could go national if it’s a slow news day.” Williams argued. “National stories usually get solved.”

Before Holden could add some doubts to his reasoning, there was a screech of tires, sudden acceleration on a slightly slick road, and gunshots rang out in a muted, pathetic fashion, like someone was throwing firecrackers at them. Holden grabbed Williams and threw him down to the sidewalk as the car they were now behind had its windows blown out. In the blink of an eye they were covered in safety glass.

“You were saying?” Holden shouted, as he heard the tires scream and the throaty rumble of a car engine as it sped away from the scene.

Gormless indeed.

4 – Halo

Holden was a little surprised when Dylan answered the door in his boxer shorts, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Having stopped by Panic last night, he knew that Dylan hadn’t been up late working. “Is something wrong?” he wondered, looking beyond him to try and see the living room.

He shook his head, yawning, “Roan’s in the hospital. I stayed there as long as I could, but eventually I got kicked out.”

Holden stared at him. “He’s in the hospital? Did he have another aneurysm?”

“No. Oh, you don’t know.” Dylan then made a sort of scoffing noise as he said, “Right, yeah, he barely told me. Come in, I’ll explain.”

Well, it couldn’t have been a huge emergency if Dylan wasn’t freaking out about it. Holden followed him inside, noting from a purely clinical perspective that he had a nice ass and a nice back. (It was long and lean, a little dimple near the small of the back, no overt hair.) If he wanted to do the high class prostitute thing, he could probably make a mint.  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the sofas as he disappeared into another room.

Holden sat, trying to decide what was Roan’s and what was Dylan’s. The only things that seemed like Dylan was the painting now hanging up over the stereo – one of those bizarre ones, of a wall with a huge hole in it that appeared to be bleeding, like a crime scene detail with only the body missing – and the Bloc Party CD currently playing softly. Roan just never struck him as a Bloc Party kind of guy.

Dylan came back wearing sweatpants and pulling on a t-shirt of a Roy Lichtenstein type woman crying and firing a machine gun, while saying “It’s not you,it’s me …” He had a feeling Roan bought that for him, or it was one of Roan’s t-shirts; he was the wacky t-shirt master around here. “Want something to drink? I’m just getting myself some green tea,” Dylan asked, crossing to the kitchen.

Green tea – oh boy! What a hedonist. But he was the Buddhist vegetarian around here.  You’d think an artist/shirtless bartender at a gay nightclub would have a much wilder life, but he seemed to work hard to cultivate a lifestyle more suited to an ascetic. “No thanks, maybe later. So what’s up with Roan?”

“Doctor Rosenberg put him in a coma ahead of his transformation. She’d fairly certain it’ll keep him alive.”

“Oh.” There was a phrase you didn’t here everyday. How were you supposed to react to that? “It went okay?”

“Fine. When I was finally kicked out, he was sleeping … well, comatose. But his vitals were good, and there were no problems. He takes to drugs like a duck to water.”

Holden smirked at this, aware there was a bit of hollow anger in that last statement. “Sadly, yes. How are you doing?”

Dylan returned, curling up on the sofa across from him, legs tucked under him as he cradled the mug in his lap. It wasn’t straight green tea; there was a fruity scent to it, citrus and berry. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. “Honestly? I’m fucking pissed off.”

Now that he hadn’t expected. Dylan was such a mild guy that, in spite of being as gorgeous as he was, he was easily forgettable. In Holden’s mind, he just sort of blurred into the wallpaper. While his calm peacefulness was surely beneficial to Roan, who probably needed all the peace he could get, Dylan’s somewhat introverted nature left him an after thought to many of Roan’s friends. He was the polar opposite of the bright explosion that was Paris. That was probably deliberate. “About what?”

“About Roan and his attitude. He’s acting like he wants to die.”

“He was put into the coma, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, but only because Doctor Rosenberg didn’t give him a choice. He’s been acting like he wants to die since he found out about the aneurysm. He denies it, but … it’s just been freaky. It’s so irritating. I can’t even get properly mad at him, because I honestly believe he doesn’t know it. He’s living in denial or a Vicodin haze. One of the two.”

See, this was why Holden was so glad he didn’t do relationships. These little wars, these little deaths … was a regular fuck buddy and shared rent worth it? Didn’t seem like it. Give him solitude, a cold bottle of gin, a decent piece of internet porn, and he was good. “Is this because he went after the neo-Nazis?”

“No, but that was one of the more flashy bits.”

“Tell me about it. And people don’t know he’s gay? My god, he was wearing a gun. Just pull it and tell ‘em to freeze, don’t jump on ‘em like a big flaming drama queen. Jesus.”

Dylan snickered at that, enjoying the joke. But his good humor faded fast, and he ended up looking kind of sad. “He’s never been a quitter; he’s not a man who quits easily or quietly. So why has he consciously or unconsciously decided to die?”

Paris. That was Holden’s first thought, and he knew Dylan was thinking the same thing, and didn’t want to think it. He wanted some other reason than his boyfriend still being in love with a dead man. So Holden thought of another reason to give him, which sounded very plausible. “He’s burned out. He’s been told he’s going to die most of his life, and he hasn’t yet. So fuck it. He probably feels close to invincible as it is. He’s the closest thing to a superhero I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah. And there’s Paris.”

So Dylan said it. Good for him. “Roan pretends he’s not haunted by his ghost, but clearly he is.”

“Yeah. I really can’t compete with a dead man,” Dylan admitted, and it sounded like admitting defeat, which it was. He sighed and idly stirred his tea, the spoon softly ringing off the sides of the mug. The mug had a smiling cartoon bear on it hugging a heart, with the words “I Don’t Understand Your Hostility Towards Me” encircling it. Holden knew that was Roan’s mug. Dylan made the decision to change the subject, and then he did. “So why the house call? You could have phoned.”

“Yeah, except my cell phone battery’s dead, and I just got in from Sea-Tac late last night. I’ve spent the last few days in Vegas with my pilot client.”

“Really? Did he pay you, or -”

“Oh hell yeah he paid me. He also gave me a free ticket. Get this – he told the flight staff I was his nephew.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did, and they seemed to buy it. Except for this queeny air steward who seemed to know instinctively I was a hustler and gave me the cold shoulder.”

Dylan squirmed uncomfortably, shifting on the couch and taking a sip of his tea before asking hesitantly, “ Isn’t he the one who, um – “

“Pays me to tie him up and humiliate him? Yes. He remains a curious client, but a loyal one. And I can’t say he didn’t show me a decent time, as he gave me free run of his mini-bar and room service.”

“You have a strange life.”

He said it so deadpan and mild Holden almost laughed. “Tell me about it. I did check my messages, and I discovered Fiona had called me and left me a message about Roan’s latest case. I’ve got people out looking for more info, but I had some for him anyways. I also had a gift.”

“Oh boy, did you get him a tacky souvenir?”

“More like a tacky trinket I picked up in a Las Vegas pawn shop. And no, I didn’t pawn anything; I don’t gamble. If I wanted to waste my money, I’d buy lottery tickets like everyone else. I was just doing a bit of window shopping with everyone else’s misery.” He pulled the gift out of the pocket of his jeans and put it on the coffee table.

Dylan sat forward and examined it curiously. “Oh, how ’bout that. It is very tacky.”

“And one hundred percent pewter. If that’s worth anything, and I don’t think it is.” It was a ring shaped like a lion’s head, with a mane large enough to cover the lower half of the finger.

“I’m sure he’ll love it. Which bothers me.”

“You’re not alone.”

“So what information did you have for him?”

“Hawley was no walker. Might have been trans, but not a hooker, not to anyone’s knowledge, and we would know.”

“Would you? I mean, you’re not unionized.”

“No, but there’s always a way to find out who’s working what corner. No hooker is ever alone on a street, and we use a lot of the same motels. It’s a smaller world than you’d think.”

“I’m sure. If the johns knew, they might be a little scared by it.”

“A little? A lot. For good reason.”

Dylan nodded, looking down at his mug, his attention wandering elsewhere. They were silent for a moment, and Holden felt that something was going desperately wrong here. Dylan was depressed and probably sleep deprived, but he wasn’t the type to open up to him. He knew that Dylan really didn’t like him that much, and yet he seemed to be confiding in him. Was he that lonely? Was he feeling that lost?

Dylan sagged back on the sofa, and stared at him almost boldly, his dark brown eyes set like stone. “You love him too. What would you do if you were me?”

Holden stared back at him, but he was so flabbergasted by what he’d said it took him a moment to speak. “Uh, what? I don’t love Roan. I like the guy, but -”

“Oh please, I’ve had enough self-deception from Ro, please don’t you do it too.”

“Dylan, I don’t. I don’t want him and he doesn’t want me. He’s all yours.”

He scoffed faintly. “You’re a gay man. I don’t have to explain the difference between love and desire to you. You can want a person without loving them, but the opposite also holds true. Look, I know you’re not a threat to our relationship, so I’m not gonna go crazy ass jealous on you. I just want to know why you haven’t given up on him yet.”

Holden wasn’t sure if he should be angry, offended, or amused. All three? (And actually, he wouldn’t mind doing Roan. Yeah, it’d be pretty weird considering their relationship now, but he’d always left the invitation of doing him for free open. Well, he was a good looking guy, there was no getting around that, and Holden was always impressed by his humor, which could be incredibly sexy on a guy. And it was probably the lion pheromones or something, but he did have a mysterious kind of magnetism. You kind of wanted to follow him, let him take the lead.)  “Why not get crazy ass jealous? I mean, that’s the least a guy could want.”

“Because Roan isn’t like that. He’s a nester. He grew up without a home, and now all he wants is a nice, stable home.”

“Let me guess – you minored in psychology.”

“I was trying to understand my dad,” he replied, a roundabout way of saying yes. “It didn’t work. And I’m not trying to offend you, although why you’d be offended by me saying you loved someone is a bit puzzling.”

“I’m offended because you couldn’t be more wrong. He’s a friend, that’s all. I’m not capable of much more.”

“Bullshit.” Dylan said, without rancor. His voice was as weary as his posture, as the expression on his face. “You’d kill for him. I saw that when we were trying to solve the Newberry case without him. Even Dee saw it, and he gave me the oddest look. He asked me later if I was worried about that, and I said no, because I’m not. In a strange way, I wish I was.”

Holden felt something settle cold in his gut, a twinge and a twist. This had all suddenly went somewhere he didn’t want it to go, and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure why. It almost felt like the walls were starting to close in. “I’m not explaining myself to you. I like the guy a lot, but that’s the end of it. Full stop. And if you want my opinion, you either get used to him or pack your bags now. Is he a moody son of a bitch? Hell yeah. Either he’ll snap out of this on his own or he’ll need a shock to snap him out of it, but he’s been a morose leaning bastard since I’ve known him.” Holden stood up, feeling angry, and not completely sure why. Maybe because he always hated being told how he felt about something. It seemed presumptuous, insulting, and arrogant to tell him how he felt. He hated it when his parents did it, and he had grown no fonder of it in the meantime.

Dylan looked up at him with something like surprise, eyebrows raising slightly. “Holden, I didn’t -”

“Save it. I’m not the person you should be talking to anyways. You want Roan to get over himself? Tell him. He won’t be happy, but he’s not an idiot. Spell out your terms, and if he can’t live with them, leave.”

He made a noise of disbelief, and put his mug down heavily on the coffee table. “Oh yeah, he could only be dead in a month. I should walk out on him.”

“Oh please. He’s been dying since you met him. If you stay with him out of pity he will resent the shit out of you. If you don’t like things, do something about it, or just sit down, shut up, and live with it.” He headed for the door, hoping he wasn’t storming out like a big drama queen, but … yeah, there was probably no avoiding that. Still, he had to leave, because he was so angry he was sure he’d say something they’d both regret.

Dylan said something, but he just ignored him. He hadn’t even told him he knew the name Carey Switzer; in fact, he knew Switzer very well.

And he could easily imagine him being a killer.

3 – Killer In The World

“You think the police killed her?” Roan repeated, wondering how many shots to the head Grey had had in his life.

He must have heard the doubt in his voice, because he sat forward with a grim look on his beaten face. “I know it. She’d just filed a million dollar lawsuit against them.”

That sounded vaguely familiar. Who’d had a million dollar lawsuit filed against them in the last couple of years? “Are we talking about the Eastgate PD?” He nodded, lips thinned so much that Roan could see a secret scar, a tiny cut to his lower lip that only appeared when bloodless. “Is this the Jasmine Hawley case?”

Now that was a hard to miss case a couple years back. Jasmine – nee James Hudson – was a pre-op transsexual in her late teens who was arrested by the Eastgate PD supposedly for solicitation, but Hawley claimed not only to not be a prostitute, but that two police officers beat her while in custody. The police department claimed she’d resisted arrest and got most of her bruises from fighting with other prisoners, which didn’t quite ring true with Roan, because if they put a pre-op in with your regular perps, they’d get the shit raped out of them. Pre-ops were usually thrown in a special “whore pen” (the holding cell where all prostitutes were stashed) with the women, because otherwise there was no end to the abuse they’d suffer. Would female prostitutes beat someone that badly? Maybe, but it’s unlikely the cops wouldn’t break it up. Still, there were some cops who had a special revulsion saved for transsexuals – oh sure, they hated fags, but they hated men who wanted to be women (or women who wanted to be men) more than anything on Earth.

Rumors had it there was a piece of videotape that caught part of the beating on film. A gay rights group helped Jasmine file a million dollar lawsuit against the police department and two officers in particular whom she said beat her down. Less than two weeks after this, Jasmine was killed. The lawsuit continued.

He opened the overstuffed folder and looked. Yep, news clippings, an arrest report, statements Jasmine made for the lawsuit, photos of Jasmine’s beaten face and body.

“I was born in Bellingham,” Grey said. “The Hudsons lived across the street. I went to school with Ben Hudson, Jamie’s older brother. We moved when I was ten, packed up to Saint Paul, but we always kept in touch. This was before the internet too, so it was kinda weird I guess. What I remembered about Jamie was he was kinda a goofy kid, a class clown without a class. I was in college, at the University of Minnesota – I was a Gopher – when Ben was killed in a car accident. Ben had always asked me to keep an eye out for Jamie ’cause I was always a kinda big freak, and I guess I still felt kinda responsible for him. But this whole mess happened before I ended up with the Falcons and I came back to Washington, so I was no fucking good at all. I guess I’m tryin’ to make up for it now.”

Roan found what he was looking for: the names of the accused officers. Michael Brand and Carey Switzer. Neither rang any particular bells, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know anyone at the Eastgate PD. “You have no problem with Jamie’s switch of gender?”

Grey shrugged. “Whatever gets you through the night, y’know? Besides, when I thought about it … it kinda made sense. You know? I could see him wanting to be a girl. First time we went trick or treating as kids, he was Sleeping Beauty.”

It was probably his own prejudice, but he would think a big macho jock like this would be the first to beat up or disparage a transsexual. But maybe not when it was your best friend’s brother (sister – he was using the right pronoun too). “I’d be the first to admit this case sounds as suspicious as hell. The timing of the murder is also incredibly suspect.”

“No shit. To me, they’re being pretty blatant about it. I’ve talked to some other cops in the department, to see how the investigation’s going, and one told me, off the record, that the case is ice cold and has been given to a homicide detective with too many cases, with the instruction that it was low priority. He hasn’t looked into it once since he got the case. They ain’t doing shit.”

“Who’s the investigative officer?”

He sat back and slumped in the chair, legs spread wide and shoulders thrown back. It was a man’s man pose, but also the body language of someone with nothing to hide. Roan wondered if that was true, although he had no reason to think he was lying. “Don’t remember the name.”

“Who told you this?”

“I said I wouldn’t rat ‘em out.”

“If I’m even going to attempt to look into this, I need a place to start inside the department. I’d say they’re my best shot. Otherwise I shouldn’t bother.”

He scowled, glancing down at his own calloused hands, then said, “Fine. The name’s Sid Fisher.”

Roan scribbled that down on a sticky note, and attached it to the top of the arrest report. “Okay, here are the ground rules, and they are non-negotiable. I will look into this, but the legal admissibility of most of it will make much of it useless. I can’t directly muscle into the case without jeopardizing my license, but I will rattle a few cages and see if anything falls out. I can make a few phone calls now, but I might have to put off any direct investigation until next week.”

That made his heavy brows dip into a sort of V. “Why?”

“If you saw that footage of me and the neo-Nazis, you probably know I’m infected. I’m about to enter my cycle.”

“Y’mean turn into a cat? Cool,” Grey said, with something approaching enthusiasm. “So what are ya?”

He gave him an evil look, but he didn’t seem to realize he was being rude. “Lion.”

“Oh, awesome! One of the big ones. I kinda feel bad for the people who turn into cougars. I mean, I know they’re deadly and all, but they don’t seem that impressive do they? Not when compared to other cats. If I was a cat, I’d wanna be one of the big ones.” It seemed to be intended as a genuine compliment, but once again, he wondered how many shots to the head Grey had taken in his lifetime. It also made him wonder how old he was. So he asked.

“Twenty two,” he said without blinking. He reached for his wallet, and as he pulled it out, he added, “I stopped at the cash machine before I got here. You don’t mind bein’ paid in cash, do ya?”

“Don’t want to leave a paper trail?”

He paused, that confused look scudding over his face again. “Huh?”

Roan shook his head. “Nothing.” Was he a bit naïve, or just, as the British said, gormless? Safe to say he got into college on a sports scholarship, or perhaps his parents footed the bill. At least, daft or not, he seemed an amiable and unbiased sort.

Still, he managed to fill out the paperwork without printing anything, and only glancing at his Social Security card to confirm the number (he said he had a bad head for numbers, and Roan could sympathize). He’d gotten up to leave, but at the door he turned back and asked, “You wanna spar sometime?”

“Huh?”

“You know, box? I think’d be awesome to face a guy as strong as you, as long as you promise not to break somethin’. I’m usually at 24 Hour Fitness in the afternoon, if I don’t have a road game or an afternoon skate.” He then gave him another goofy smile, and Roan got a strange feeling. It was almost like he – in a very odd way – was flirting with him.

Nah. Just some straight guy macho bullshit bonding. It was an easy mistake to make, though.

As soon as he left, he started to look up information on Grey Williams.

Lexis-Nexis had a surprising amount on him. He might have been a self-professed low scorer, but he’d made it into the World Junior Hockey Championship three years ago on the U.S. Side. There’d also been a feature on his parents in a Minnesota paper around that time. Apparently his dad was Merritt Williams, who briefly held some kind of college football record, but injuries kept him out of the NFL. He was the uber-jock dad who had five sons, and pushed at least four of them into sports: oldest son Jensen followed in his dad’s football career, but blew out his knee while in college, and now owned and ran a sports bar in Syracuse; second son Lorne played college basketball, but was apparently not that great at it, and now coached junior high school basketball in Florida; third son Alden played minor league baseball with a team called the Reading Phillies; Grey was the fourth son. Interestingly enough, the fifth son was almost never mentioned, although one article gave his name, Rayne. He didn’t follow the family dictate of going into sports? Bad show. Didn’t he know that would make him a pariah?

A separate search on Rayne Williams did eventually turn up something: he was the lead in his high school’s musical production of “Little Shop Of Horrors”. Oh dear. Could you say “big flamer”? Okay, maybe that was a stereotype, and an unjust one – Roan, for example, was no fan of musicals, possibly because the only science fiction musical he knew of was The Simpson’s wonderful “Stop The Planet of The Apes, I Want To Get Off!” – but that might explain why Grey was accepting of Jamie’s/Jasmine proclivities if he had a gay younger brother.

Fiona briefly knocked on the door before coming in. “So, was he a mafia hit man?”

“Close. Hockey player.”

“Really? Huh. Guess that explains the haircut.”

That made him chuckle. “So mean.”

“What? Come on, you were thinking the same thing.”

“Actually, I’m glad you’re here, ’cause I need you to hit up your sex worker pals.”

“For money?”

“For information. I need to know if Jasmine Hawley really was working the streets, and how unfriendly the Eastgate PD is to anyone they decide they don’t like.”

“Jasmine Hawley?” she repeated the name like it meant something, and then recalled it. “Holy shit, he was asking about Hawley?”

“The younger sister of his friend. There’s no rush on this, I’m off to the hospital tomorrow.”

She looked briefly concerned. “Are you -”

“Rosenberg wants to put me in a coma. She thinks that’ll keep me alive another month.”

She considered that, shrugging. “Might work. Worth a shot. Dylan know?”

“Not yet. I suppose I should go tell him, huh?”

She gave him a sympathetic smile. “You’ve had how many relationships?”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, Ms. Dominatrix, give me relationship advice.”

“That’s Mistress, Slave, and don’t you forget it,” she said crisply, before giving him a big, cheesy grin.

Weird friends and weird cases. At least his life had a recognizable pattern.

****

Roan stopped on the way home and got a pizza, as he felt like a pizza. He made sure it was vegetarian, even though he was dying for pepperoni, and he then had to figure out how to take it home on the bike. (Okay, that was a detail he should have worked out in advance.)

Dylan was up when he got home, but he was still in his underwear, drinking his morning (afternoon) tea. But since he hadn’t eaten yet, he was willing to have pizza with him while they discussed what Rosenberg had in mind for him.

Dylan was thrilled, or as thrilled with the idea of someone putting him in a coma as one could get. He honestly thought Rosenberg was trying to save him, and Roan was sure she was trying, but he also knew there was so much guesswork involved. It was desperation, pure and simple, and there were no guarantees whatsoever. But he let Dylan have his enthusiasm, because he owed him that much.

Dylan volunteered to go to the hospital with him tomorrow afternoon, and Roan agreed, although he didn’t know why he’d even want to come. They were just going to drug him until he was unconscious (which now, in retrospect, sounded like fun), and what was Dyl going to do, hold his hand? Of course, if it didn’t work, it might be the last time he saw him alive, so okay, he supposed he understood.

Dylan called Ty, one of the other bartenders at Panic, and got him to cover his shift, so he took the night off. Again, he was acting like this was his last night on earth … but you know, fuck it. Roan decided he didn’t care. It was or it wasn’t; Dylan had a fifty-fifty chance of being right or wrong. Let him do what he wanted. Roan had already found his peace with all of this.

They had dinner, watched TV, and went to bed, nothing really remarkable, except the possibility he might actually be dead this time tomorrow night. Apparently someone else called, suggesting his life story might make fascinating viewing (ha!), and that led to him and Dylan discussing who they’d like to play them in a film. Dylan seemed horrified by Roan’s initial choice, Robert Carlyle, whom Dylan insisted looked nothing like him. Roan knew that, he’d just always liked him as an actor since Trainspotting, and of course he was a Scot, which Roan kind of was (look at his mysteriously hard to pronounce surname). Dylan picked John Barrowman to play Roan (Captain Jack? Flattering, but no, he couldn’t see it …), and Gael Garcia Bernal to play him. Now Roan agreed Gael was kind of cute, but nowhere near cute enough to play Dylan in his opinion, and also way too short. Roan figured if they could somehow lump Gael together with a younger Javier Bardem, they’d have the perfect Dylan.

They both agreed Taye Diggs would have to play Diego. Not that Dee actually looked like Taye, it’s just that Dee would die if anyone else played him. They figured Fi would want Meryl Streep. Again, no physical resemblance, but Fi would insist on quality over resemblance. Holden could go either way on that – he’d either want a porn star or a British stage thespian playing him (one who wasn’t afraid of nudity in either case, and he’d probably insist the guy would have to at least be bi; straights would be kicked off by Holden personally). Roan was sad Jerry Orbach was dead, because he’d have made a perfect Gordo. Judi Dench with an American accent, a wig, and a foul mouth could probably carry off Doctor Rosenberg.

It was fun, they were amusing themselves immensely, until he idly wondered who would play Paris, and all the fun went out of it. Just like that. Dylan initially chided him for being “no fun anymore”, then he must have guessed why he went all quiet, and he began talking about the strange people who wanted to buy any art relating to Roan that he had. Dylan had lied to them all and said he had none, because none of that were pieces he wanted to sell, especially not to bizarro fetishists. Fame was a weird thing, especially when it was “freak of the week” fame. Roan just sort of hoped the new freak hurried up and appeared already, because he was getting tired of all the bullshit.

But then again, if he didn’t survive the procedure tomorrow, he’d have nothing to worry about, would he?