Bloodbath, Part 8
8 – Falling Sky
Roan let Darren know that bringing the cops in on this was against his best interests, and that surely his daddy’s people knew how to take care of everything without official involvement. Darren seemed to get that, but it was hard to tell, as he was so fucking terrified of Tank that he would have agreed to anything. This was doubly funny because Darren was taller than Tank by at least six inches, but it was attitude, and Tank was just exuding it at near toxic levels. Who on earth would mess with this guy? Even if it was just a front, it was a good one.
They left just as the big Samoan and several other security guys of similar builds (like large appliances) arrived, and Grey put himself forward, as if daring them to grab him. He was a sports guy, not as big as them but semi-famous locally, giving him an edge, and it made them pause. “There was a misunderstanding, but it’s settled,” Roan said, walking down the hall. Tank followed, saying something in French. Tank would tell him in the car that he said, “Suck my jock, assheads.”
“Shame if the club lost its license,” Grey said casually. “Him being underage and all. If someone called the cops, this could go real bad, don’t you think?”
“You’re barred,” the Samoan said darkly. “Don’t come back.”
“Wouldn’t if you paid me,” Grey replied, with a small, contemptuous smile.
Darren had told Roan little, but enough. Jordan found compromising photos of Darren and Brittney on Brittney’s cell, and after a brief scuffle, Jordan stormed off. Darren and Brittney (supposedly) hadn’t seen him since. Roan had already decided he needed to talk to Brittney, he just needed to decide on a plan of action. If she was staying at the Brewsters, it wouldn’t be easy.
In the car, Grey asked him, “Learn what you wanted to know?”
“Pretty much. Are you guys afraid of anything?”
“Root canals,” Grey offered.
“Being eaten by sharks.” Tank said, settling in the back seat.
Roan glanced back at him to make sure he was serious. He was. “I saw Jaws when I was six,” he explained. “I never got over it.”
Well, okay, that might do it.
“Wow, sharks are a huge problem in Quebec,” Grey noted sarcastically. “You musta been terrified all the time.”
Tank leaned forward and flicked Grey on the back of the head, which only made him chuckle as he started the car. For a moment, Roan was almost jealous of their friendship. He wasn’t sure he’d ever met two straight guys who were so close.
They were on the road, driving towards his house, when Tank said, “It’s okay, you know. Everybody loses control now and then. It’s hard to ride the line of being passionate about what you do and being mental about it.”
It took Roan a moment to understand what he was talking about, and then he got he was referring to him breaking the arm and leg of that bodyguard. He rubbed his eyes, trying not to let on how embarrassed he was, and admitted, “I don’t know what happened. I shouldn’t have been that strong.”
“You forget your own strength,” Grey said, with the kind of casualness that suggested he’d experienced it many times. “You overestimate the other guy’s strength and you just paste him. I’ve been in that boat, believe me.”
“Rhody’s concussion,” Tank replied.
He nodded. “Rhody’’s concussion. I felt so shitty about that. You never want to see a guy carried out on a stretcher.”
They didn’t understand. He really shouldn’t have been that strong. It wasn’t the same – Grey just hit a guy far too hard. Roan hadn’t realized his muscles had started shifting, that he was beyond Human strength. But he wasn’t about to explain it, mainly because he wasn’t sure how. “Isn’t that your job, though? Enforcing?”
“To a degree. But you never want to hospitalize someone. That’s just thuggery.”
Hockey was subtler than he thought.
After a moment, Tank noted, “For ex-military, they were kinda crap.”
“They underestimated us,” Grey explained. “You do that, you’re just asking to get your ass kicked.”
They dropped him off at his house, and he walked in to find the lights on and the rich smell of Italian cooking coming from the kitchen. “Oh, you’re back,” Dylan said. He was putting things away in the kitchen. “I didn’t know if you would be home for dinner, so I ate already. But I made enough for you.”
“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.” He was actually, but he didn’t feel like eating right now. How could he have started a change and not felt it? Changing hurt; it also hurt made his mouth bleed, neither of which happened. He hadn’t taken that many pills, and besides that, the painkillers never really did much more than take the slightest edge off. Only really pure opiate derivatives numbed the pain, and not that well and not for long.
Something new was happening to him. He woke up out of breath the other night, now he was changing with no warning. Was this it? He was going to die in some freak ass way.
He noticed Dylan looking at him with a raised eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just trying to figure out where to go from here.” He knew Dylan would be dubious, so he told him what he’d discovered, that Jordan had been two timed by his best friend and girlfriend, and that’s why he ran off. But with Brittney probably hunkering down in the Brewster compound, he wasn’t sure how to contact her.
Dylan kept working, cleaning up the kitchen diligently. He wasn’t a slob like him; he always cleaned up his work area. “Well, there’s school.”
“She’s been skipping.”
“Oh. Crap.” But after a moment, he said, “She’s a trendy rich girl, isn’t she? She’s gonna shop, go out with her boyfriend.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Wonder if I can narrow that down to specific areas.” She had a Facebook page, she probably had a Twitter feed, maybe she’d tell him where she’d be. That would be insanely helpful of her. “Yeah, maybe I can.” He went to the kitchen to get a drink, and put a hand on Dylan’s shoulder as he put dishes in the sink.
“Where were you anyways?” Dylan wondered.
“Questioning Darren. I get any phone calls?”
“Nope. Expecting any?”
“Nope.” He’d hoped Holden would have called by now, but he was definitely up to something. He was going to have to pay him a visit. He wrapped his arms around Dylan and rested his head on his shoulder, pressing his body against his, wondering if he should apologize. Dylan wasn’t even thirty, and here he was saddled with a dying freak.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me things?”
“Because I’m a secretive bastard.” He kissed the side of his neck, enjoying the taste and scent of his skin, and he could feel the heat and pulse of his blood beneath the flesh. The urge to tear into it with his teeth was still strong, but it was amazing how he could ignore it now and the urge no longer bothered him. He knew it should have, but somewhere along the way it had ceased.
He had to feel his skin, so he slipped his hands beneath his shirt, running his hands over Dylan’s flat stomach, and he felt so warm and good. He missed him, and he would miss him, if he was at all capable of missing things when he was dead (which he wasn’t, but he was feeling generous at the moment). “How long ”til you’re due at work?” He wondered, kissing the curve of Dylan’s jaw, working his way up to his earlobe.
He groaned, reaching behind him to run a hand down his back, and said, “A couple of hours, you dirty old man.”
“Who’s old?”
Dylan shrugged him off, just enough to turn his head and kiss him, a strong, hungry kiss that surprised him with its intensity. Dylan had missed him too, huh?
Less than an hour later, they were laying on their bed, trying to catch their breath, sweat cooling on their skin. Roan saw a sliver of light painting the ceiling, as the bedroom curtains weren’t totally closed and the porch lights were on light sensors and came on immediately at night. “You ever gonna tell me what’s wrong?” Dylan asked. He had his head on his chest, arm draped over his abdomen, leg crooked over his. Roan stroked his hair by habit, wondering how his hair always felt so soft.
“What? I thought that went well.”
“Don’t you dare make a joke of this.”
Okay, so the sex was only a temporary distraction. He should have known it wouldn’t last forever. Roan knew he was in a bit of a bind here, as he had promised Dylan if he came back he’d be totally honest with him. Fuck. He considered what he would say, he didn’t honestly know, so he was a little surprised when he heard himself say, “I’m scared.”
Dylan propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at him in concern. “Of what?”
“Disappearing. Of the lion coming out and never going away.”
He frowned, gently brushing hair off his forehead, his dark eyes full of touching concern. “That’s not going to happen.”
“I’m beginning to think it could.”
“Why?”
Yes, great question. Could he tell him the truth? That he meant to just beat a guy senseless and he ended up mauling him, crushing his arm and snapping his leg like it was made of pretzel sticks? That the change seemed to seize him suddenly and he hardly felt it? “The rules no longer apply to me, Dyl. I could -”
The phone rang then, making them both start. By the second ring, Dylan said, “I bet it’s for you.”
“Probably. I wish it was good news for once.” Reluctantly he reached over to the nightstand and snagged the phone by the fourth ring. “Yeah?”
“I need you at 725 154th Street, off Hill Road,” Gordo said, with no preamble. “The faster you get here the better, ’cause it seems the press has already got wind of this.”
“Hey, you’re back on the job,” Roan replied, honestly surprised. As far as he knew, there were two kinds of cops, those that couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, and those that wanted to stay on the job until they died. Gordo was one of the latter, those crazy son of a bitches who became their job. He was on medical leave under protest, and must have finally convinced everyone he was fine to return to the cat crime squad. “How you doing, Gordo?”
At the sound of the name, Dylan kissed his chest, sighed, and rolled off the bed. He knew a call from Sikorski was never good. Roan watched him walk to the shower with envy. “Don’t you ask me that,” Gordo snapped. “I’m tired of answering that question. Now move your ass. Time’s wasting here.”
“How bad is it?” There was something in his voice that told him it wasn’t just people worrying about him that was pissing him off.
“Probably the worst scene of the year. Now stop stalling and move it.” He hung up abruptly, but Roan was sort of expecting it by then.
He rolled off the bed himself, stopped in the bathroom to have a piss and throw the condom away, and tell Dylan he was off. Dylan told him to be careful, which struck Roan as funny. The crime was over; all that was left was the clean up of the bodies and the identification of the cat that did it. But he appreciated the sentiment.
He got dressed hastily, careful to not grab a t-shirt that was in any way silly (no need to be disrespectful at a murder scene), and didn’t care that he probably smelled like sex and sweat. They expect him to show up any time of day or night, they were going to have to live with him as is.
He was starving, though, so he stopped in the kitchen to wolf down a croissant and wash it down with a Diet Pepsi, which he also took his Percocet with. He went out to the garage, grabbed his motorcycle helmet off the workbench, and wheeled the bike out.
It was drizzling now, a piddly sort of rain that did no good at all except fuck up traffic. Luckily, since it was now past ten, traffic wasn’t bad enough to be really fucked. It took him ten minutes to reach the site, and down the street from it he saw the cherry red lights that indicated a police presence that was never good. Even at this time of night, in this weather, there were rubberneckers, people trying to get a glimpse of death and misery over the police tape and shoulders of beat cops roped into playing guards. There were some people he vaguely recognized from the twenty four hour local news channel, and as he parked his bike across the street and crossed to the scene, the reporter shouted at him, “So it is a cat crime scene.”
“No, it’s a gay one,” he shouted back, wearily crossing a cracked parking strip and sodden lawn. “Disco balls all over the place.”
Another guy close to the reporter, one he didn’t recognize, stage whispered, “Is that true?”
He must have worked for Fox News.
You knew when you approached a doorway and found a rookie blowing chunks in the rosebushes that you were in for a fun scene. Of course the smell had already hit him, the meaty smell of spilled blood, coppery and hot, the shit smell of death, and it made his gorge rise and his stomach growl simultaneously, the lion making itself known in the hair rising on the back of his neck and the growl welling in his throat. He felt muscles tensing all up and down his body, ready to feast or fight, whatever presented itself first.
Sikorski met him at the door, with a snarky, “Took you long enough.” Technically he looked better than he had when he last saw him, but the heart attack had taken a toll on Gordo. He was never really fat, so now he looked gaunt, his cheeks hollow, giving his face an unintentional ghoulish look. He looked his age now too, which was saying something. He stepped back, and said, “Welcome to Blood Castle.”
Easy to see what he meant. Blood slathered the living room of this single level manufactured home like someone decided to paint with it, but then decided to just throw the stuff around instead. Arterial blood had arced up the side wall, splattering the television, while a blackish red puddle pooled around the coffee table tipped over on its side, almost obscuring a severed hand from view. Great crimson skidmarks seemed to extend out into the next room, while dribbles of brighter, redder blood smeared the kitchen tile. Seb was standing with one of the forensic techs in the far corner, discussing something in an evidence bag. It looked like a chunk of random flesh.
Amongst all this blood and death, it was hard to determine nuance, but he could if he focused, and oddly enough the Percocet helped there. It not only calmed and numbed him, but it kept his brain from racing around, trying too hard. “Why do you think this is a cat killing?” he asked.
Gordo raised his snowy white eyebrows at him. Pre-heart attack, they were silver. “We found a paw print in the back bedroom and in the kitchen. We’ve got it tentatively identified as a cougar, but we wanted confirmation.”
Roan shook his head, and advanced carefully towards the kitchen, staying on a plastic runner someone had put down to keep people from tracking blood out on their shoes. “How many victims?”
“We found two in the bedroom, but all this blood seems to indicate a third -”
“Four victims,” Roan told him. Blood was blood, but everyone’s smelled just a little different. In the kitchen, he caught a whiff of something new. “Make that five.”
“Five?” Gordo’s exclamation was one of horror, not disbelief. Roan had come through too many times to be disbelieved on these kind of things. “Where the fuck are the bodies? No way a single cougar could have eaten that many people.”
“No way indeed. This is a frame job.”
“What?”
Roan looked at him and shook his head again. “It’s all uninfected blood I’m smelling, all pure Human.” And one of them had sweetish smelling blood, indicating diabetes, but he felt that level of detail was far too fucking creepy to ever admit. “No cat has ever been here.”
Some of the techs still working paused and looked at him, with the same kind of bewilderment that was on Gordo’s face. “Bullshit. We found paw prints.”
“Two. Planted. Shit, Gord, look at the way the blood’s splattered. If a cat did this, it had to hit a major artery every time it bit someone. This is a set up. Someone slaughtered this family and wanted people to think a cat did it.”
Gordo’s look was stark and hot with doubt and anger, but he wasn’t really angry with him. He was just angry at the idea that someone would conceive of such a thing, and that he didn’t grasp it immediately. “Who the hell would do that? And why?”
Excellent questions. Roan was wondering about that himself.