Bloodbath, Part 19
19 – Ulysses
Here was the problem facing Roan now: Hatcher was a victim of his own design. What did you do in those circumstances? He still wanted to kick his ass very badly, and hey, if Hatcher hadn’t started this ball rolling, the Tabu site wouldn’t even exist. He deserved to get the shit kicked out of him before he left. But in the face of his truly anguished grief, it almost seemed like enough bad shit had happened to him. It hadn’t, of course, but he felt he needed to get out of there and think. But before he left, he fixed Hatcher with a stare, and told him, “I may call you, and I may need something. If I do, you don’t ask why, you just make it happen. Understand?”
Hatcher, his face ruddy and slimy with rage and tears, looked like he wanted to argue for a moment, ask questions, but after a moment he simply nodded. “Find him.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” he said, stalking out of the room. As he crossed the expansive living room, heading towards the foyer, he saw a terrified Andrew loitering on the staircase, his hand on his Bluetooth. “You call the cops, he’ll fire your ass,” Roan said. Was that true? He didn’t know, but he didn’t think Hatcher wanted to speak with the cops right now.
He checked his own phone in the car, and found a message waiting for him. It was Holden. Apparently snuff guy had finally gotten back to him, and taken the bait. He was meeting Holden at six on Thursday, in the Burger King abutting the Greyhound Station downtown. Classy shit that, but in a bizarre way, it was perfect. Yes, it was a high traffic area, potential witnesses coming and going, but most of these were potential witnesses who wanted nothing to do with your shit and didn’t care either way. If their lives didn’t suck in one way or another, would they be at the Greyhound Station?
He called Fiona and let her know not to post the stuff – or at least not yet. Hatcher was safe for now, but it didn’t mean he always would be. Roan didn’t totally trust him, and neither did Fiona.
He didn’t bother to call Holden back. He went straight to his apartment, where luckily he was home. But from the skin tight jeans Holden was wearing and the almost overpowering (to him – it was probably faint to most Humans) scent of semi-expensive aftershave, he was about to go off on a gig. He answered the door shirtless, but wearing his usual tangle of about a half dozen necklaces, so it was kind of like he was wearing a metallic half shirt. “Oh shit, did you lion out again?”
“Why do you ask?”
Holden tapped the corner of his mouth, and Roan reached up and ran a hand over his mouth. Yep, blood. “No, it was partial. I didn’t think it got that bad.” But hadn’t he sent Hatcher flying across the room with a single shove? Again, it was worse than he realized.
He went to Holden’s bathroom and saw the full extent of it: he had blood caking his chin, streaks on his throat, and now his shirt had blood on it along with caked snot. Holden offered him a shirt, and he decided to take it.
Holden’s bathroom was interesting. Very neat, with a variety of grooming products lined up like soldiers in parade rest on either side of the slightly chipped porcelain sink. But the interesting thing was the wallpaper – garishly loud, tie dye stripes of pink, green, and purple, separated with tiny lines of white. It was unusually gay, even for Holden, and the clear shower curtain dotted with colorful fish almost threatened to clash with it, and yet didn’t quite. He felt it was probably a sign of Holden being rebellious with himself and his otherwise good taste.
Holden stood in the doorway, holding a t-shirt (he still had yet to put one on), and Roan was telling him what happened with Hatcher and how he thought it had become much more dangerous now, because the man who was supposed to have control no longer had it, and if they were tipped off that they had Jordan, it could be incredibly dangerous for Jordan. He then took off his shirt, and Holden, who had been listening with an air of bemused detachment, suddenly exclaimed, “Holy shit!”
Roan glanced at his reflection, at Holden standing in the doorway, and realized he was staring at his back. Oh shit, why did he forget it? It was odd what you got used to, what you forgot, even though it seemed so monstrous you’d think it would be impossible to forget. But he’d already had this conversation with Dylan about the scars on his back, and it was bad enough. He didn’t want to have it again.
“Was it a belt or an electrical cord?” Holden asked. “How old were you?”
Roan turned and yanked the shirt out of his hand. “Let’s stick to the topic at hand, okay?” How’d he guess electrical cord? He must have seen a lot of abused kids in his time on the street, heard a hundred horror stories. Nearly everyone had at least one.
He shrugged the shirt on and went back to Hatcher and the fact that Maddux would probably remain forever untouchable to them, although he could still reach out and get them (apparently). Holden flashed him a dirty look, probably because he knew he was deliberately ducking the question of who abused him as a kid and all the subsequent questions that would fall out from that, but that was all; he magnanimously let the topic go. “We always knew it would be dangerous, Roan. This hasn’t changed anything.”
Roan noticed that the t-shirt Holden had given him said, emblazoned in black print across the chest, “Hookers Do It For Money”. Well, you couldn’t argue with that logic. “Yes, but things have gotten much uglier, and I didn’t even know that was possible. Sixty/forty Jordan isn’t alive anymore.” Hatcher’s phone call could have pushed that to seventy.
“I didn’t think we were going in to rescue him,” Holden said, and gave him a look that was slightly sly and slightly sinister. It was a look that seemed to say he either wanted to seduce him or kill him, possibly both, and he hated Holden giving him that look. He thought they were beyond that now in their odd relationship. But far be it from him to ever completely understand Holden and his motivations.
“We are going to rescue anyone at that place who’s not a voluntary participant, or who’s under the impression that there’s just a bit of S&M going on.”
He picked up on the unspoken “But …” like Roan figured he would. “And then?”
“If I give you a gun, will you not hesitate to use it if you have to?”
A sly and deeply disturbing smile crept across his face. Another little reminder of how fucking dangerous Holden could actually be; beyond the striking face was a mind that could kill you the second he decided that you weren’t worth the bother. “Absolutely. If it’s us or them, they don’t have a chance.”
“I have a Glock that’s pretty compact. Hide it in a boot, practice pulling it out and thumbing the safety off at the same time, you may need to use it in a hurry.”
He nodded, his brown hair hardly moving. “Got it. I’ll bring a knife too. I’m good with those.”
“I know. Can I see your phone?”
He raised an eyebrow at that. “Why?”
“Your cell, your personal one, not the one you use for clients.”
He wanted to ask why again, but he just shrugged and turned away, allowing Roan to finally escape from his bathroom. Holden probably wasn’t trying to make him feel cornered, but for a moment there he kind of did. That man and his head games. No pun intended.
Out in the living room, Holden tossed him his phone, and he glanced through the menu before tossing it back to him. “Good. Charge it up. Thursday, when you go to meet the guy, have it in a pocket, with an open line to me. That way I can hear a lot of what’s going on, and in case Seattle traffic bollixes up the tail, I can still get a GPS location on your phone.”
“Look at you, all high tech and shit. Absolutely.” He went to the kitchen and got a cell phone charger out of one of the drawers by the refrigerator. As he was plugging it in, he said, “Dylan isn’t gonna know about this, is he?” It almost sounded like a question, but it wasn’t.
“If he knew, he might leave me for good. And maybe he should. I’m a horrible person at heart.”
“Bullshit.” He fixed him with an intense stare. “You know me, Roan, you know any belief I might have had in a higher power was bludgeoned out of me by my hypocritical douchebag of a father. But I believe some people are nothing but evil, human vampires who live to do nothing but cause misery to others. I saw them, when I was out on the street. They were more ubiquitous than rats. There’s good out there, yeah, but there are people who are nothing but poison, and getting rid of them is doing the Human race a major favor. These fuckers are murdering people, and then charging other people money to watch so they can beat off to it. You’re offering me the gun because you know as well as I do that one more death – one or a dozen, two dozen – is gonna mean jack shit to them. Everyone is expendable. We need to teach them that karma is a bitch.”
“We’re not going in with the intent to kill.”
Holden nodded. “I know. But do you really think this is gonna be bloodless?”
Put it that way, he just seemed like a naïve idiot.
He left Holden’s wondering if he was making a mistake. No, he had to shut these guys down. They could just pick up and move elsewhere, especially overseas, where life was seemingly cheaper, at least to the guy in charge of this fiasco. He could alert the feds to this, honestly he should, but a police investigation moved at a snail’s pace, and by the time they tracked them down, they’d probably have pulled up stakes again. They should nail Maddux, as long as he didn’t flee to somewhere without an extradition treaty – which he should be doing right now if he had any brains at all.
He had to make this right. Evidence would find its way into the hands of the Feds, anonymously … and after they took care of the problem. He couldn’t walk away. He should, if he had any part of his soul left, anything worth saving, he damn well should. But he just couldn’t. Damn him. God, he hated himself sometimes.
On the way home, all he could think of was Dylan. He had to make sure he was safe -
– (he had to make sure he never found out) -
and maybe he could get some protection for Fiona too. She’d resent it even more than Dylan, but she’d understand. He hoped. He hoped a lot of things, he realized. He felt like an idiot, like the biggest fool imaginable. He never thought of himself as a bad man, but now he was beginning to wonder if he was.
When he got home he was shaking and he didn’t know why. He sat in his car and watched his hand shake for a good minute or so, then he managed to suck it up and go inside, where he was greeted by the noise and boisterous good humor of half of the Falcons first line, and Dylan was just watching it all with good humor. It was infectious in its way, but Roan still felt outside it all.
The guys took off eventually, leaving him and Dylan alone. Dylan smirked at him, and asked, “Do I even want to know what’s behind that shirt?”
He got a green tea from the fridge, sat on the couch, and told him everything that had happened that day, leaving out the confrontation with Hatcher and the actual substance of the conversation with Holden. Dylan hadn’t heard about the shooting at the Church, the Falcons had been manipulating the TV watching DVDs, and when he told Dylan about it, he came over, sat beside him, and then took him in his arms and held him. Roan buried his head in the side of his neck and just breathed in the scent of him. It was calming and deeply sad, and yet also kind of arousing. He knew it was a combination of grief and fear that he was going to lose him for good, but it wasn’t enough to throw cold water on his ardor. He nibbled his neck, and Dylan made a noise in the back of his throat, stroking his hair. “Are you kidding me? I have to go to yoga soon, I have resumes to circulate and paintings to agonize over.”
“Don’t wanna fool around?”
He sighed wearily, and said, “Are you kidding me? Of course I do you, sexy beast.” Dylan pushed him down onto the couch and kissed him, pinning him down with the weight of his body. Of course Roan could have easily shoved him off, but he didn’t want to. He sank his arms beneath his shirt, needing the friction of skin on skin, the lovely little death.
The sex was great, so it should have made him felt better, but oddly enough, it didn’t. Afterwards, the melancholia came slamming back full force. They both went upstairs, Dylan to take a quick shower and get dressed for yoga, which Roan tried to talk him out of due to the skinhead thing, but Dylan refused to be a prisoner to those dickheads, which was fair enough. Roan just pulled on some boxer shorts and laid on the bed, staring up at the ceiling as Dylan talked to him from the bathroom. He wasn’t actually listening to much of what he was saying; he was just lulled by the sound of his voice.
Too lulled. Dylan came out drying his hair with a towel, and as he opened the dresser drawer to pull out his underwear and pants, he looked back at him curiously. “Have you totally zoned out on me?”
“No, I was just thinking.” Which was half true. “You know I love you, yeah?”
Dylan had tossed the towel on the end of the bed and stepped into his underwear. “Yeah. Are you now going to confess to something terrible?”
“No. I just wanted you to know that.”
He didn’t look convinced. After stepping into his pants, he asked, “Are you ever gonna tell me what’s going on, Ro?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Bullshit.”
He glanced at him, and wasn’t surprised to see Dylan giving him what he could only call a boyfriend look, one that was skeptical and worried and mildly pissed off. “You love me?”
He scoffed, now looking even more annoyed. “Of course I do.”
“Why?”
That seemed to catch Dylan short. “What?”
“You’re normal, Dyl, you’re not infected. You could have a life free from all of this. You could meet a nice uninfected guy who’s never been in a fight in his life, an art history major from the UW, you could settle down with him and an annoying little dog and have a happy, normal life. I love you, hon, but I’m thinking it would be better for you if you just walked away.” Before I break your heart, before you hate me, before I get you killed.
Now he did looked pissed. “Fuck you. I want to be with you; I’ve accepted all that comes with it.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
Dylan angrily yanked on a t-shirt, unaware that he had just pulled on one of Roan’s Pansy Division shirts. (Not that he cared, it just seemed funny at the moment.) “Are you picking a fight? Do you want to leave me, is that it?”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“That something’s going to happen to you because of me. If it did, I’d hate myself for the rest of my life. There wouldn’t be enough drugs to make it go away.”
His annoyed expression collapsed into one of bruised sympathy. “Oh honey, nothing’s going to happen to me. And if it does, it’s not your fault.” He leaned over him, cupped his face in his hands, and kissed him softly, on the forehead, the lips, trying to soothe him. It was very sweet of him. Too bad it wouldn’t work. Dylan then stared him straight in the eyes, as if trying to will his certainty into him, and said, “Okay?”
“Okay,” he agreed, pretending to mean it. Well, he did mean it, he just didn’t believe it.
That was the problem with caring. It left you vulnerable, open on one side to the most hideous pain imaginable, and the only antidote was to stop giving a shit, but how did you do that? How did you turn it all off? He thought if he numbed himself with enough meds he could fake it, but that turned out to be wrong. He always thought he was more cynical than this, more inured to it all. Obviously that was just something he wanted to believe.
After Dylan left, he forced himself to get up, and went to the bathroom to dig a couple of pills out of his hidden stash. He took them without knowing what they were, but he guessed codeine from the shape. He then went to the closet and felt around for a box on the upper shelf until he brushed it with his fingertips. He pulled down the cherrywood case with the simple locking mechanism, and opened it to make sure it was all there. It was, the Glock 26 Subcompact handgun, which had great advantages in being small enough to easily conceal and yet have a ten round magazine, as well as not be a piece of shit like your usual Saturday night special. Holden already told him he’d be dropping by after his “gig”, so Roan put the case and a spare ammo clip aside, figuring he’d be here long before Dylan came back.
He got his own HK P2000 SK out of the drawer he kept it in, and because he hadn’t used it for a while, he got the cleaning kit out of the back of the closet and got to work on it. He spread an old towel on the floor so he didn’t get any oil on the carpet.
As he cleaned the gun, feeling oddly phallic doing it in nothing but boxers (but hey, it was probably appropriate), he wondered why he was bothering. If he went through with this, would he ever even pull the gun out? If he unleashed the lion, clawing back to his own humanity would be difficult if not impossible. And the lion should be able to get things done. Well, in theory.
He found himself thinking of that Jane Doe Dropkick had told him about, the seventeen year old girl found in a ditch in Spokane, possibly tied to this case. Her family was never going to know her fate, never going to know she was rotting in a Potter’s field in another country, and his resolve hardened, turned his shaky nerves to concrete. She was found but never identified; what about those who had never even been found? What about all of them? Someone had to do something on their behalf. No one said it had to be him, but who else was there?
He just hoped that, if Dylan ever found out about it, he would forgive him.