Bloodletting, Part 14
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.