Shift, Part 13
13 – Painless
The sun was just starting to come up when Roan knocked on Scott’s door, and he suddenly wondered if he should be bothering him right now. But he was just so wired he wasn’t sure what else to do.
In spite of the codeine and partial transformation, his heart was thundering in his chest, making it look like his hands were kind of shaking, and he did wonder if he should be worried about having an aneurysm explode in his brain any second. But you know if he was going to die, he was going to die. No point in worrying about it.
Grey lived in an old house that had been partitioned into apartments, and he lived on the upper floor, so Roan had to use a staircase around the back – it used to be someone’s patio deck, now an oddly spacious landing – and then he knocked on a wooden door that felt kind of flimsy under his hand. Either he was knocking too hard, or it was made for internal as opposed to external use. At least there was a very big hockey enforcer living here – anyone who broke in would be very sorry very quickly.
Roan heard a lock being unlatched before the door opened, and he was surprised to find Scott there. “Roan? Hey man, what’s up?” he asked, before yawning extravagantly.
Oh, goddamn straight boys who appeared in their underwear and never realized how hot they were. Scott was wearing nothing but jockey style red underwear (red?), and he had that long, lean, hard body of the dedicated athlete, muscles slender but strong enough to make him look like he’d be a good blast shield in case of explosion. He didn’t have a six pack of abs but a two pack, his stomach flat as a washboard, and Roan really wanted to bite his knuckle. His weakness was men with those wonderfully solid, flat stomachs. Six packs were impressive and could be attractive, but not as much as these sandwich board guys. Why he had no idea, but that was just the way his libido went. He was suspicious of gym bunnies and men built too much like marble statues.
And his hair was sleep mussed, he had a dark stain of stubble along his jaw … crap, crap, crap. He was cute enough to give Dylan a run for his money. “I, uh, didn’t realize you lived here too,” Roan said, aware that if Scott was more awake, he might have noticed he looked at him a bit too long for comfort. (But damn, he was cute. It really caught him by surprise. At least he could console himself with the knowledge that a straight man, confronted with a hot woman in her underwear, probably would have been flustered for much longer.) But Scott had probably been on sports teams most of his life. He probably thought nothing of casual nudity and near nudity, unaware of the fact that he was smoking hot and could have been a model for a gay calender or underwear ad.
Scott nodded, yawning again, and running a hand through his hair. “Yeah, it’s easier to split the rent, and we’re used to rooming together on the road.” After dry washing his face, he honestly opened his eyes, and he squinted at his shirt. (Did he wear contact lenses?) “Is that blood?”
Roan looked down and checked. “Um, yeah.”
“Yours?”
“Some.”
He didn’t react to that admission at all. “Give it to me. I’ll getcha a clean shirt.”
“You don’t have to -”
“Yeah I do. You don’t wanna walk around in a bloody shirt. Besides, I got this great stuff that gets out bloodstains.” At Roan’s look, he clicked his tongue in impatience. “I play hockey. I better know how to get bloodstains outta clothes.”
He was going to point out he thought the equipment manager did stuff like that, but hell, at the minor league level it might be more DIY. So Roan shrugged off his leather jacket, tossing it on the front room’s homely blue Goodwill couch, and peeled off his shirt, which was a bit more damp than he thought. But the bleeding from his mouth was always much more than he expected, and he had no idea why. Shouldn’t he be used to it by now? He turned the shirt inside out and tried to hand the shirt over on a dry side, and Scott gasped in shock. Roan suddenly and horribly remembered his scars. Oh shit, how did he forget about these things?
“That is fucking awesome,” Scott said, coming over and grabbing his arm. He was, it turned out, looking at the tiger tattoo Dylan drew for him. “Oh my god. Where’d you get that done?”
“Actually it was drawn by my boyfriend. Someone else tattooed it on, but she followed his design.”
“Wow. Could he do one for me?”
“Umm, I don’t know. You could ask.”
“Yeah, I will. That’s beautiful.” He stared at the tiger for a moment, and then unconsciously caressed it with his thumb before letting his arm go. It raised goosebumps on Roan’s arm, and he really wanted to hit him. Damn straight boy – he had no fucking clue, did he?
He walked away, holding Roan’s bloody shirt, and he couldn’t help but notice what a great ass Scott had as he called back, “You’re here to see Grey, right?”
“Right.”
Scott headed down a small hall, that was parallel to the small, open kitchen. It may have been the apartment of two straight bachelors, but it seemed remarkably tidy, and all the pale stained hardwood suggested a warmth reinforced by the hominess of the mismatched but not inelegant Goodwill furniture. The only thing that really gave this away as a guy’s place was the sheer number of remotes scattered across the coffee table.
Scott pounded on the door as if trying to bust it down, and shouted, “Grey, get the fuck up! Roan’s here!”
He could have done that from here. Well, not the pounding on the door, but everything else. There might have been a grunt of acknowledgment, but he couldn’t tell.
Scott went in the room, and after a moment, there was a thud – like a body hitting the floor – and a startled, “’M up, I’m up.”After a moment, Scott came out pulling on a pair of loose gray yoga pants, and he tossed Roan a dark shirt.
“Did you shove him onto the floor?”
Scott half grinned, still sleepy and still so thoughtlessly sexy Roan wanted to pound his own head through the wall. “Sometimes it’s the only way to get him up. I gotta warn you, he’s useless until his first Red Bull.”
“He doesn’t do coffee?” Roan finished pulling the shirt on, and probably shouldn’t have been surprised that it had the Seattle Falcons logo emblazoned across the chest.
“Not enough caffeine for him. He likes to start his morning with a heart attack.” He padded off to the kitchen, and Roan felt awkward, so he sat on the arm of a slightly threadbare but oddly elegant dark blue velvet armchair and looked around the apartment, not at all staring at Scott and his long, lean back, or the way those yoga pants sat so lightly on his hips it looked like they could fall off at any second. (He probably didn’t know it at all, but he was a total cocktease.)
What was he doing? Why did he come here so early? It could have waited – there was no reason it couldn’t have. Okay, if he was honest, he was so keyed up and wired he probably wasn’t thinking straight. No pun intended.
He heard a toilet flush, and Grey came shuffling out like a zombie, eyes barely open, and by the time he reached the living room, Scott shoved a can of Red Bull in his hand, and pointed him towards the sofa. “There he is. Now sit and go talk.”
Grey grunted, and shuffled forward. Scott stayed by the entrance of the hall, and said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna go back to bed.”
“By all means. Sorry I woke you.”
“It’s okay. If we had a skate this morning, we’d have been up.”
“Skate?” Grey said, plopping down on the couch. The way he said it reminded Roan of the decrepit Father Jack in the sitcom Father Ted (although he said “Drink?” not “Skate?”), and he had to bite back a grin.
“No, not today. Today’s a day off. Now drink your Red Bull.” Scott gave him a wave, which Roan returned, and then he disappeared back into his room. Were all team captains like that? He gave orders and Grey followed them without question. Maybe it was just the nature of their relationship irrespective of the team, or Grey was too tired to question anyone’s orders.
Still, Grey popped the top of his Red Bull and took a healthy swallow, which made Roan grimace. He’d only had it once, but he thought that it – and most energy drinks of that kind – tasted like piss. But if it got him going, he could hardly criticize.
Grey was big enough that he made Scott look svelte. He had a V shaped torso, a broad chest narrowing to a slim waist, and he wore dark boxer shorts that covered about half of his tree trunk thick thighs, although none of the rest of his sinewy legs. He looked a bit more like a boxer than a weight lifter, and that made perfect sense. While he wasn’t overly bulked out with muscles, he still looked like he could stand in for a retaining wall if the need ever arose. How did anyone ever hit by him get up again? Roan was kind of relieved he did nothing for his libido, but maybe that’s because he was a client; he was sure never to even mildly entertain the notion that a client was attractive. That was only asking for trouble.
Grey cleared his throat, and opened his eyes a bit more. “Okay, I think I’m up now. Wow, you’re wearing our shirt. I can get you a better one …”
“Thank you, but that’s not what I’m here about.”
“Didn’t think so. Just sayin’.”
“What I want to know Grey, is if you just wanted to know who killed Jamie. Aside from getting the guy chucked in prison.”
“Huh?”
“I know who killed her. But I don’t think I can legally prove it.”
Grey just stared at him, and he wondered if he was awake enough for that to really sink in. But he must have been, because he said, “Yeah, I wanna know. It was Switzer, right?”
“Switzer and Sean Brand.”
There was a pause. “The guy’s name was Michael, wasn’t it?”
“The guy Jamie named in the suit, yeah. But he wasn’t the killer.”
Grey stared at him blankly again. He was slowly waking up. “Huh?”
Roan sighed and wondered how to best put this. It took him a bit to understand it to, but Sean was a stammering mess, just terrified of him and his transforming face and diseased blood.“From what I was able to get out of Sean, it seems Jamie had met someone she was seeing but hadn’t told you about yet: Michael Brand. Switzer, his cop partner at the time, found out, and discovered that Jamie was a pre-op transsexual. Switzer knew Sean casually, and passed this on. Sean didn’t want a fag in the family any more than Switzer wanted a fag as a partner, so one night Sean and Switzer beat the shit out of Jamie, and bullied Michael into silence. Jamie turned around and filed a charge of police brutality, but named Michael. Probably because Sean wasn’t a cop, and probably because Jamie wanted to force Michael out, make him fess up about his asshole partner and half-brother. But you know what happened instead: Switzer and Sean killed Jamie, and Michael just gave up.”
Grey listened with his head tilted to one side, listening like a parakeet. The same amount of understanding seemed to be in his sleepy eyes, but it seemed to connect. “So Michael Brand knew.”
“He must have. Suspected is hard to swallow, especially since he must have known that Sean and Switzer beat Jamie.”
“He was dating Jamie? Why didn’t he do anything?”
Roan shook his head. “That I can’t say. But having met him, I’m gonna say he’s been broken. By who and why I don’t know. It’s possible Jamie’s death sent him into a spiral, and he simply didn’t want to – or just couldn’t – rat out a fellow officer.”
Grey’s head straightened up, and his eyes seemed to darken. Is this what his opponents on the ice saw? It was wonderfully intimidating. “Where’s he live?”
“No, Grey, that’s not how we’re doing this.”
“I’m paying you, yeah? I just want his address.”
Roan shook his head. “Hurting him won’t bring Jamie back. It probably won’t even give you any satisfaction – he’s too easy an opponent.”
“Michael or Sean?”
“For you? Both. At the same time, with a head start.”
He seemed to consider that, chew it over like it was a piece of gristly meat. “How come you can’t go to the cops and tell them this?”
“I can, I will. But Sean’s confession to me was under duress; it wouldn’t hold up in court. Also he blames Switzer for everything, which I know is a lie, but it’s his word against my sense of smell. It’s only been legally cleared for identifying people’s scent and blood – I’ve never been legally cleared for smelling lies, although I can. Unless Sean confesses to them – or Michael fingers his brother, which I wouldn’t bet money on – there’s nothing to tie him to the scene, especially since Switzer is now dead. If he was alive, it would be easy to turn them against one another, but Switzer took the easy way out.”
“You shot him.”
“Yes. That was easy.”
He was still rolling this around, and didn’t like the taste of it. “Under duress? Did you torture him?”
“Do I look like Jack Bauer? No, I just scared him so badly that he started talking. He even pissed himself, which is why I may smell a bit like piss.”
Grey gave him a lazy half smile that was somehow very unsettling.“You scared him that badly?”
“I have my moments.”
“We could use you on the team. Stand you at the blue line and have you stare down the opponents.”
“It would be extra comic too, since I can’t skate.”
“We’ll prop you up.” He wiped his fist across his mouth, and the dark shadow had yet to leave his eyes. He was still calculating the odds of finding the Brands and beating them to a pulpy mush. “You telling me they’re gonna get away with murder?”
“Not exactly. Sean is gonna go down for assaulting Holden; I got him arrested for that. And since he’s a repeat offender, most likely any judge will throw the book at him. Also, since I let it be known that he hurt Holden, it’s possible there are friends of his behind bars, friends that will make life very ugly for Sean as soon as he’s in the door.”
“But what about Michael?”
“Michael’s already dead. I’ve never seen such a miserable ruin of a man. Killing him would probably be a mercy; it’s more punishment to keep him alive.”
Grey gave him a dubious look. “I don’t like this, Roan.”
“I’m not crazy about it either. But there’s a couple of other things still in play.”
“What?”
“Best you not know.” Mainly because Roan honestly had no idea what he was talking about. He just had to make up something to keep him from going off and beating the Brands down to a bloody carpet stain. He could point out he had worked so hard to get this far in his hockey career, and he couldn’t just toss it away because of these assholes, but Roan wasn’t sure such a pitch would have worked. Would it have worked on him? “Let’s just let it play out and see what happens, okay?”
His look remained skeptical, but finally he sighed and his shoulders sagged as he sank back into the couch. “Yeah, okay. And thanks for giving me the info. You did in days what the Eastgate PD hasn’t done in over a year.”
“The Eastgate PD are hopelessly corrupt. Luckily it looks like the fallout from the Switzer case is going to take the chief down, and maybe some others. Switzer was rotten to the core, and his rot spread on contact. A housecleaning is what Eastgate needs. Maybe with officers who are actually going to do their jobs because they’re being watched, the case will finally be cracked.”
“Maybe. But I won’t hold my breath, ‘kay?” He rubbed his eyes, and added, “Fuck, I’m tired.”
“Go back to bed. I shouldn’t have come over so early, I was just buzzed.”
“I understand, man. I get that way after a really good game.” He levered himself up, and Roan stood as well, they shook hands, and since he was convinced Grey wasn’t going to run off and do something stupid just yet, he left.
Could he just let it be? Could Roan? The entire drive home, he wondered. Michael really was pathetic; as much as he wanted to beat the shit out of him, he couldn’t shake the persistent, nagging feeling that Michael would probably enjoy it too much.
People got away with murder every day. It was sad but it was true. People fell through the cracks, and murderers escaped, not because they were criminal masterminds but because they got fucking lucky. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, but it was reality in its ugly, stinging glory. It was just a bitter, barbed pill to swallow.
The buzz wore off as he fought the morning traffic home, and by the time he reached the house he was ready to pass out on the floor. He’d been up all night and a headache was blooming deep inside his brain, a dull ache that he knew would become a full blown migraine later on. The sun lightning the sky was making it worse. He popped a couple of Percocet before going up and taking a quick shower to wash the remaining scent of blood and piss and fear off him. Dylan was a lump under the covers, apparently sleeping, and he tried his damnedest not to wake him up.
He dried off hastily and slipped naked into bed, but he woke up Dylan or Dylan was already awake but playing dead, because he had just pulled the covers up to his shoulders when Dylan rolled over and snuggled against him, pressing up against his back and draping an arm around his waist. He was nice and warm. “Do I want to know why you’re coming home just now?” he mumbled.
Roan closed his eyes against the light bleeding in around the fringes of the curtains, and he could feel the painkillers taking hold, wrapping the pain in his head in cotton wool, softly pushing it down. It was a lovely feeling. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I was afraid you were gonna say that.” He sighed, his breath a warm rush on his neck. “How’s Holden?”
“Last time I called still stable. He’s doing better than the guy he stabbed in the leg.”
“Karma in action?”
“Maybe. Or maybe just a vital lesson in being careful who you fuck with.”
“Did you know he carried a knife?”
“Holden? No, but I can’t say I’m surprised. He was a street kid, after all.” He was settled into his soft pillow, and between that and the heat of Dylan’s body, he was drifting off already.
“I thought he was a preacher’s son.”
“That too. He’s been a lot of people.”
“The cops get the other guy, the one who ran?”
“I got him.” Roan knew it was the fact that he was half asleep was why he admitted that; otherwise, he’d have just said the cops grabbed him and left it at that.
“I kinda figured,” Dylan admitted. “You didn’t partially transform, did you?”
“Why would I do that?”
From the way he sighed heavily, he already knew. “I’m too tired to get mad at you right now. But we’re having an argument later.’
“I’ll pencil it in.”
You knew you’d probably been in a relationship too long when you were actually scheduling arguments. But you know, right now he was too damn tired to care.