Freefall, Part 18
18 - The Bones of You
“I don’t suppose it was suicide?” Roan asked, collapsing on his sofa.
“It’s a little strange to shoot yourself in the back of the head, so I’m gonna say no,” Murphy said.
Roan made a noise of strangled disappointment, pressing his hand hard into his forehead. It didn’t change a thing. “Fuck.”
“If it makes you feel better, we have a suspect.”
“Who?”
“A minor player of a thug named Marco Lewis. He’s a small time drug dealer, but it seems Mr. Faraday owed him money. And Mrs. Faraday’s murder has some of the hallmarks of a robbery gone bad, so what we think happened here was genius - a/k/a Marco - tried to extort money the hubby owed him from the missus, and something went wrong. Mr. Faraday was probably then killed, for more than one reason.”
“So she was right to be concerned about his debts, she just wasn’t concerned enough in time.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Shit,” he sighed wearily. He felt terrible for Holly. If he’d been faster, better, would she still alive? No, he couldn’t think about that, mainly because it wouldn’t change anything. His client was dead, and while if he’d gotten the case a few days earlier he might have been able to do something to prevent it, it was all a moot point now.
Murphy promised to call him as soon as she heard anything about the Chesney house, and he went upstairs and took a quick shower that failed to make him feel any better. After getting dressed, he got together some books for Dylan as well as his MP3 player and went back to the hospital to drop them off. There he encountered Dylan’s sister Sheba and her husband.
That was always awkward. Roan got the feeling that Sheba was humoring him most of the time, and was not so secretly freaked out by his infected status (although he couldn’t blame her there - she was probably afraid he might accidentally infect her brother), and it didn’t help that her well meaning husband usually gave off that odd straight guy vibe that said, ‘I want to be cool around gay guys, but damn, they creep me out‘. Everything was civil and fine, but Roan still got the impression that Sheba would have been happier if he had absolutely nothing more to do with her brother.
Dylan was happy to see him, though, and gave him a kiss even before he gave him the books and his MP3 player. He was as bored as hell and wanted to go, but he’d just gotten some “damn scan or something” and they weren’t letting him go just yet. Only later did Roan find out that Dylan had gotten a head CT, and figured Dylan dismissed it so he didn’t freak out about it. Dee would later tell him that it was fine, they were just checking something. What he didn’t say.
Dylan scooted over and patted the mattress beside him, so Roan ended up sitting on his bed with him as they talked, Dylan leaning his head against his shoulder as Roan idly caressed his thigh, and they talked about very mundane things. But it was strangely nice; Roan felt oddly settled and didn’t notice his drug cravings in this moment of chaste intimacy. Dylan just had a calming influence on him; he made him feel Human, although not in a bad way. He enjoyed his warmth and his comforting scent, although it was diluted with the awful medical scent of the hospital.
He admitted that he hadn’t taken a pill all day, and save for tiredness and minor cravings, he really didn’t miss them. What he didn’t tell him was he feared he had acquired his own internal numbness, which was better than any narcotic. And he was going to have to learn to use it, because if he didn’t get his lion episodes under control, he was going to be in real trouble.
A nurse came in and chased him off, which seemed par for the course, but she gave him and Dylan specially dirty looks and even though they were just sitting talking, she warned them stridently that there wasn’t “any of that kind of thing” allowed in the hospital. That kind of thing? What? Buttfucking? Did she think they were on the verge of having wild and perverted gay sex before she heroically burst through the door? He and Dylan exchanged a look - they seemed to be thinking the same thing - and before he left they shared a long, overly passionate kiss that they played up a bit, just to disgust and annoy her. Which it did. But she deserved it - they weren’t shy, acquiescent gays, and if she was going to indulge in jackassery, so were they. Although, to be totally honest, that was one hot kiss. Goddamn, they needed to kiss like that more often.
Just before he left Dylan’s floor he remembered Ponyboy, and went up a couple of floors. He hadn’t checked in on the kid forever, and no, he didn’t know him, but it was a decent thing just to check up on him. When he stepped out of the elevator, he saw Holden slumped in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs that lined segments of the hallway, his tall frame almost folded in half. The posture looked more sad than painful. “Holden, everything okay?” he asked, belatedly realizing that he forgot to call him Fox. Oh well, hopefully no one noticed, and those that did didn’t care.
He sat back and looked up at him, a strange blankness in his eyes. “You here to see Ponyboy? You’re too late.”
“Oh shit.” He sat on the chair beside him. “What happened?”
“They think it was blood clot in his brain.” Holden shrugged and looked away, tears making his eyes look glassy. “Christ, what am I supposed to do now? Track down the parents he ran away from in the first place and say, ‘Hey, your little faggot is dead. Do you want his body or should I just throw him in the trash like you did?’ “ He sniffed and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Fuck.”
“I’ll do it.”
“What?”
“I’m a detective; I’ll track the parents down. And when I was a cop, I used to hafta do the dead calls, contact relatives and next of kin to come down and identify a body.” He sighed at the memory. “People’s responses always surprised you. You expected the ones that reacted in horror or burst into sobs, but the ones who had no reaction, or the ones who said “I don’t care” or had some profane or pedestrian response to it were always the most startling. There were people who said they were watching something and they’d be over as soon as it was done; others who said simply, “Let ‘em rot” and hung up. You don’t know how people really feel about you until you die … and then you’re dead, so why would you give a fuck?”
Holden looked at him askance. “That was a philosophical abortion.”
“Hey, at least I tried.”
They just sat in silence for a moment, staring at the white wall before them, the noises of the hospital floor sounding like the background of a television show, minus the ubiquitous syrupy power ballad. “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” Holden finally admitted. “I didn’t know him at all. He was just a friend of a friend.”
“He was a kid, whose crime was essentially being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have been any of us.”
He nodded and sniffed, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “Well, it couldn’t have been you. You’d have ripped them to pieces and beaten them to death with their own limbs.”
Roan opened his mouth to object to that classification, but of course Holden had just been kind to him. He had seen him in a more transformed state than anyone had since Paris; he could have said “eaten them” and left it at that. It would be true. So he decided to simply say, “I think you’d have fucked them up pretty well too.”
Holden scoffed. “They wouldn’t have fucked with me either. I may sound like a twink, but I’m built like a jock. Those fucking scumbags only pick on easy targets.”
“True.” They sat together for a moment, staring at the wall. Sometimes there was just nothing that could be said or done. Sometimes all you could do was sit in the silence, and wait to see if the world ever noticed. Even though Roan knew from experience that it never did.
Poor Ponyboy. He wondered if his parents would care, and then feared the answer.
****
By the time Roan got home, there was a message waiting for him on his answering machine, one he had both longed for and feared. A body had been unearthed at the Chesney place. As had a piece of another one.
The next couple of days, it would be splattered all over the local news. In total, three bodies were found, all women, only one identified (by dental records - a woman named Jamie Lynn Anderton, Chesney’s youngest victim at age nineteen), although a concerted effort was under way to identify the other two. The disappointing thing was clearly none of these victims were Keith Turner, but it did prove that Roland Chesney was a more disturbed and violent man than many had believed. Murphy told him it sounded like the DA was going to try and cut a deal with him, get him to confess to other victims and point out other dumping places in exchange for slightly lesser charges. (A joke, as he was going to be in jail for the rest of his life no matter how this played out.) He must have known that, because Chesney was denying that he murdered the women. Although the dry desert conditions had basically jerked the bodies, some evidence was found that proved Chesney was lying his ass off. He’d probably have no choice but to deal.
Roan had Chris Spencer meet him at his office before the full week was up, and admitted to him that Chesney had been his best lead, and while Keith’s body hadn’t turned up, it was his opinion that Chesney was most likely to have grabbed Keith from the park that day. If it wasn’t Chesney, he honestly didn’t know who could have done the crime. It was a pathetic answer, one hardly worth voicing, but Chris cried a bit, both in relief and disappointment, and thanked him. He accepted that as all the answers he was probably going to get about Keith, and thanked him for it, even though Roan felt that Chris should probably be cursing him out. He found the killer of others, not necessarily his son, although Roan understood that even a pathetic scrap of a potential answer probably looked good to someone who had gone without even a hint all these many years. He just wished he could have given him a more concrete and satisfying answer.
Dylan was still bruised up by the time his gallery show came around, although Roan managed to convince him it looked butch and dangerous. Since Dylan was hoping to “integrate” more into his life, Holden and Fiona were invited to the show and came together, as Fiona wasn’t dating anyone, and Holden - as far as Roan could tell - never dated anyone who didn’t pay for his time. They seemed to like pretending they were a couple, as Fiona liked having “arm candy”, and Holden loved role playing. Holden turned on the charm and schmoozed everyone, including the art snobs whom Roan heard talking to Dylan and referring to him as his “blue collar boyfriend” (what?) which was supposedly “very trendy”. Roan felt the urge to go and punch them, but Dylan told him they were assholes and he should ignore them, while Holden went over and got them caught up in his charm, identifying himself as an “entertainment facilitator”, so they could all have a quiet laugh over these people in their Prada and Versace fawning over and kissing up to a gay prostitute. But Holden was far more honest than they were: he was a whore and gladly admitted it. These people were whores too, but pretended they weren’t. So Holden won that contest.
Dylan was pretty surprised to see his lion painting on the wall. Some people did a double take upon seeing Roan, and when they recognized him they moved away quickly. He considered growling just to see if he could make them piss themselves, but decided that was taking things a step too far.
Ultimately, the show was a good thing. Dylan sold a couple of paintings, and some of the art snobs seemed impressed with him. It got his name out there, and positive exposure was always a good thing.
Roan was doing okay without the pills for the most part, but he knew he had to work on his temper to keep the lion from coming out. How he was going to do that he had no idea, although he was considering a variety of methods. And while the Church of the Divine Transformation was quiet, before he and Dylan left on vacation, he found an anonymous note in his mailbox that said, “We haven’t forgotten”. He knew it was from them, but since it didn’t constitute harassment, he didn’t report it. But he hadn’t forgotten either.
They were away on a brief weekend vacation in Vancouver (which had started to feel like home away from home) when Roan had another dream about Paris.
He figured it was because he was in Canada, which he always associated with Paris. He and Paris were on a pier in the Bay, looking out at water as blue and still as glass. It was dusk, so the sky was very nearly the same color, leaving lights on the water and in the city skyline to define the horizon, where the water began and where the city ended. Roan was laying on the dock, his back on the sun warmed boards, his head on Paris’s thigh. Paris was sitting on the edge, legs dangling over the side of the pier, stroking his hair as he looked out on a Vancouver Island ferry in the distance. Roan was pretty sure this was only a slightly dream altered memory. “How am I doing?” he asked.
Paris looked down at him, playing with his bangs as he smirked. “That’s a question for you, not me.”
God, he was too handsome. It still hurt his heart to look at him. “Do you think I can hold it together?”
Paris clicked his tongue and shook his head. “ What is that? Do you think so little of yourself? Everyone’s a little crazy. You’re not so bad. I’ve met guys who argued with their shoes. And I’m talking knock down drag outs, back and forth cussing. Well, forth. The shoes never did talk on their own.”
Roan reached up and tweaked his chin, making Paris look down at him and smile. “Will you be serious? I’d like you to tell me something. And don’t say “something”, got it?”
He sighed. “Fine. On a scale of one ten, you’re fourteen.”
Roan pondered that. “Wait - is that a sanity scale in ascending order or descending order?”
“Yes.”
It was Roan’s turn to roll his eyes and look off towards the peaceful bay. “How can you be a smart ass in my own head?”
“Hey, you’re the person having a conversation with a dead man. Judge your sanity accordingly.”
But that was why he asked him, because he didn’t want to think about it too much. How was he going to deal with the lion in him when he knew very well that he was basically an angry type of guy? Could he even get mad without the lion coming out? And did he just assume that Dylan knew he was still in love with Paris and would always have to split his affections with him?
His sleeping brain had brought him here for a reason, and Roan suspected he knew what it was. He stopped worrying about it and just relaxed, letting the wind and Paris’s ghostly fingers stroke his hair as the sky slowly darkened, and night fell softly enough to be comforting.
He refused to worry about the real world until he was back in it again.
____________
The End (For now)