Undertow, Part 17

17 – The Last One Standing

Two Weeks Later

Roan sat at his desk, wondering if he should get it moved to the house. He could put it in his unfinished office, sit behind it, and pretend to take phone calls from suspicious wives and jealous husbands. He could fritter away the remainder of his sanity reenacting the bad old days.

He knew realistically he should just shut the office down, go web only, work more or less exclusively with Dennis, just cut it all off. But it was one more piece of Paris he’d be giving away, and he couldn’t do that yet. He might not ever be able to do that. So this place would have to become a dust gatherer, the most expensive paperweight ever.

While he was sitting there, trying to pretend he wasn’t some miserable nostalgic bastard, the outside door opened, and Holden said, “Saw your bike in the lot. You meeting a client?”

“Nope, just cleaning up some paperwork,” he lied, getting up to meet him in the front office.

Holden was dressed bizarrely normal, in loose black jeans, a plain blue t-shirt, and a weathered leather jacket that looked like it might be owned by someone’s self-described “hip” English teacher. He also wasn’t wearing product, so his hair was a pleasant mess. It made him look softer than usual. “Where have you been?” Roan wondered.

Holden frowned, as if he knew what he was thinking, but after a moment let it go. “Getting this.” Holden pulled a folded piece of paper out of his coat pocket, handing it to him.

Roan looked at it warily, but much to his surprise, it was a private investigator’s license in Holden’s name. “You did it,” Roan said, handing him back the license. “Congratulations.”

“Scott talked me into it,” he replied dismissively, folding it back up and shoving it in his pocket. “I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with it.”

“It gets you ten percent off everything at the liquor store down the street.”

“Cool. Smokes too?”

“Nah, only things that are eighty proof and above.”

“Shit. There’s always a catch.”

“It’s an unfair world.” After what he judged to be a polite pause, Roan asked, “So you and Scott are serious, huh?”

Much like he expected, Holden gave him an annoyed, sour look. “No. I mean .. I don’t know.”

“You should know.” He knew he was being a nosy parker, and Holden would probably hate him for this, but he just had to ask. “Do you love him?”

“No!” Holden gave him an evil look just for suggesting it. “I don’t … that’s not my forte, okay?”

Roan sat on the edge of Fiona’s desk, glad for the distraction. “What does that mean? You’ve had at least one relationship before.”

“As a teenager,” he replied, rolling his eyes. “That’s different.”

“’Cause you’re young and stupid?”

“That’s part of it.” Roan waited, trying to cue him with his eyes. Holden resisted at first, but then he grimaced and just said it. “I don’t have the slightest fucking idea what’s going on.”

“Yep, that’s a relationship all right. Don’t analyze it too much, just enjoy the good parts.”

Holden looked genuinely tortured, which was kind of startling and kind of amusing in equal measure. The unflappable man could indeed be flapped. “But I don’t do this kinda shit. Relationships are a joke. No offense.”

Why would he take offense? Because he preferred them over the alternative? “Does he love you?”

“I hope not.”

“Oh come on, do you expect me to believe you’re this dumb? You must have some inkling how he feels about you.”

“It’s not like we talk about it.” He ran a hand through his hair nervously, and after a moment, he admitted, “He broke up with the girl he was dating ‘cause he said he didn’t have time to juggle two people, and he liked being with me better anyways.”

Roan nodded. “Yeah, okay, it’s serious. He seems like a nice guy, so are there any ugly skeletons in his closet I should know about?” He was just trying to lighten the mood, because Holden seemed so damn anxious about it. He did care about the guy, and it scared him, which Roan could sympathize with. Love was a scary thing.

“He inhales ice cream by the gallon.”

“Shut up. That guy?”

“I know, but it’s hockey metabolism. He could pull up a chair at an all you can eat buffet, clean it out, and still lose two pounds. It’s sickening.” Holden crossed his arms over his chest, disgusted in that slightly affectionate way that you could only be with someone you genuinely cared about, in spite of them being an annoying asshole. He was uncomfortable  with the topic, though, and quickly changed it. “Look, about getting a detective job …”

“It depends on what you’d rather do. I can hook you up with Dennis, which means you’d work cases for court. Usually it’s a mixed bag, but that means there’d be challenges, and enough variety to keep you from getting bored. Although with Phil’s firm, you could work as security as well, and that can break up the monotony of trailing cheating spouses.”

“I don’t know those guys, and frankly I don’t know if I could hack it. I’d rather work with you, see if I can do this or not.”

Roan raised an eyebrow at that. “There’s not even enough jobs for me.”

“That you know of,” Holden countered. “You’re hardly here anymore.”

“Yes, well … I’ve been hospitalized a lot.”

“I’m not saying it’s your fault. But I just think we could help each other.”

“And you’re terrified to do this.”

“Terrified is a strong word … uncertain is a better one.”

He hesitated to do this, because he was sure there wasn’t enough work to sustain both of them. This was his living, and he didn’t have a fall back like Holden. Then again, it was the least he could do. He started Holden on this path, the least he could do was fully mentor him. Besides, maybe he could take over MK Investigations when he died. It might be nice to have something of his carry on into the future, besides YouTube clips and a bad reputation. “We can give it a shot, but no promises.”

That made Holden smile, if only briefly. “Just give it a chance. Besides, we’re a great team, aren’t we?”

“Based on what, body count?”

“That’s one way to measure it. There are others.”

There probably were, but none that made him feel as much like an out of control vigilante. The problem was, he only saw that as a partially bad thing. Somewhere along the way, he lost whatever little moral compass he had. Although, if he thought about it, he probably pinned all the moral compass thing on Paris, which wasn’t fair at all. He was nailing that unfair onus on Dylan now. He needed to take responsibility for his own failures, and his own slippery moral code.

He let Holden know, in no uncertain terms, that if this was going to work he was actually going to have to take orders for once in his life. Holden grudgingly accepted that. While he was going over the various rules they had to abide by as investigators, paperwork included, Roan got a call from Chief Matthews.

“Hey, I’m not in trouble, am I?”

“No, I’m calling in a favor,” she said, her tone of voice grim.

As it turned out, there was an evolving hostage situation downtown. There had been a home invasion at Pacific Pines, a rather sad apartment complex a universe apart from the million dollar condos just five miles away, which ended in the invaders shooting three people at the apartment and then fleeing to a neighboring unit as the police arrived. That apartment they were holed up in happened to belong to a single mother with four children, all under the age of ten. The two home invaders were threatening to start shooting kids unless their demands were met. Which was the big problem. Apparently they were dissatisfied customers of a guy who made bathtub meth, which is why they invaded his apartment initially and shot him up. So they were tweakers who already knew they were going to do a shitload of time for murdering their former dealer, and didn’t have much to lose. Their demands were impossible and erratic – a helicopter, for example, then a bag full of crystal meth – and Chief Matthews and the hostage negotiator on site, a guy named Alan Wong, were convinced it was just a matter of time before they started executing kids and made an attempt to go out in a blaze of glory. They’d been high and now they were coming down, and they were aware of how much they’d fucked everything up. Suicide by cop was the best case scenario.

They were hungry, so they were sending in some pizza, but Alan was able to get a concession, that the guy bringing the pizza would be able to go in and confirm the hostages were okay. Matthews wanted him to show up and be that guy. “Take them down,” she told him. “I don’t care what you do to them, just make sure the hostages don’t get hurt. Can you do that?”

Roan knew exactly what she was asking. Tricky, risky, and a whole bunch of other things, but this sounded like a clusterfuck waiting to happen. She didn’t have much to lose at this point. “Of course I can,” he finally said, with more confidence than he felt. “I’m Batman, aren’t I?”

After hearing that last bit, there was no way Roan was getting away without telling Holden all about it, but that was okay, as he needed a lift to the scene. (There was probably little chance he’d be in a fit state to drive afterward.) He told him on the drive over, and once he was done, Holden remarked, “Well, I guess that answers that question. She knows you’re a superhero.”

Roan didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing, but yes, that was the take away here. Superhero, freak, monster – the terms were interchangeable.

As it turned out, there were surprises waiting for him at the scene. The hostage takers agreed to someone checking the hostages, but to agree to the demand, the person coming in had to be stripped to their underwear, so they could visually confirm they weren’t wearing weapons. Roan wondered why Matthews hadn’t told him of this demand, but that question pretty much answered itself. Would he have shown up if she told him that?

Roan found himself stripping behind the SWAT van, which kept the press from getting any decent shots of the scene. While he was doing that, the cop in charge on the ground, Daniels, briefed him, and Holden took his clothes for safe keeping. Roan was glad he had no shame.

Daniels told him nothing he didn’t know, such as the apartment building having no back entrances and narrow windows with obscured views that didn’t allow for snipers to set up. Also, the apartment was on the third floor of a six story apartment building, so there was no way to reach the windows that wouldn’t be immediately evident to the men inside. In their panicky haste, these two homicidal tweakers had found themselves the most perfect place to hole up.

Roan was glad he wore boxer shorts today, clean ones that didn’t have an embarrassing print on them (oh, Paris loved buying him gag underwear) or holes, and of course tonight it had to be fucking freezing, so he was already compulsively shivering after only taking his shirt off. He also felt underdressed, with body armored SWAT guys standing around him like mechanized soldiers.

As Daniels handed him the Bluetooth that would act in lieu of a police radio, he looked skeptical. He was a beefy, well fed guy who rocked a TV cop ‘stache like the best hipster you could roust out of a bar at three in the morning. “Don’t worry,” Roan told him, clipping on the Bluetooth and feeling like a jackass. (How did anyone wearing a Bluetooth not immediately feel like a jackass?) “They won’t like me when I’m angry.” Holden smirked at the joke and looked away, mainly to avoid drawing attention to his reaction.

Roan turned to the SWAT commander, and said, “No matter what you hear coming from that apartment, don’t come in until I give the all clear. Also, have a medical team right behind you.”

The SWAT guy, who had been openly looking over his tattoos, gave him a funny look. “What’re we gonna hear?”

He didn’t tell him. Roan simply took the three pizza boxes (filled with actual pizza, and delightfully warm) and walked towards the metal staircase while Daniel picked up the phone and let the guys know their pizza was on the way up.

The metal was cold under his bare feet, and Roan found himself trying to dodge shattered glass from dropped beer bottles, as well as the shattered remains of a window that he assumed belonged to the bathtub meth dealer. He wasn’t even on the third floor landing before he smelled the blood, as well as the pungent chemical tang that must have seeped into the walls. He was so cold it actually pissed him off, which was good. He didn’t want to let too much of the lion out, he just needed it to work with him, which is why he bit his own tongue, hard enough to make his eyes tears up. The lion was alerted by pain, even something as minuscule as that, and he could almost feel it stretching beneath his skin. The only problem with a targeted shift like this was it was like riding lightning – it could get out of control very fast. It was an art, one that was impossible to master. He just had to hope the lion was in the mood to humor him.

Despite the fact that the corridors were all open, exposed to air, he could smell fear as soon as he reached the top of the landing, and that perked the lion right up. Of course the fear was from the woman – Amelia Dore – and her kids, but the cat couldn’t help but respond to it. It was lion aphrodisiac.

The door to apartment 310 opened before he was within ten feet of it, and he saw the barrel of the gun before he saw the man holding it. “That’s far enough,” he said. “Put them boxes down, slowly, and turn around so I can see you ain’t hiding somethin’ behind you.”

Roan did as he was instructed, and the lion resented it. He had to swallow a growl that might have given the game up. “We wouldn’t do anything to risk the kids, you know that,” Roan said in his best cop voice, his back to the man. He heard him step out, and Roan could feel his muscles knot. Somehow, the lion seemed to think it knew exactly where the man was, and it wouldn’t take much of anything to spin and leap on him, covering that ten feet in seconds, probably taking him down before he could finish pulling the trigger. Probably. But Roan wasn’t going to act until he knew where the second gunman was.

“I dunno fuck nothin’. The SPD seems to be all about shootin’ people first and askin’ questions later since that guy took out that pig in Longview.”

A reference to a cop killing that had happened fairly recently, as well as incidents of what one might call police overreaction after the fact. But that was a vicious, endless cycle that Roan didn’t see ending any time soon. “Can I turn around now?”

The guy responded with a grunt he took to be an affirmative, so Roan turned around. The gunman had stepped back into the apartment, still mostly hidden behind the door, which was stupid. Despite the open corridor, there was no way for a sniper to get a clear bead on him, not unless they were hanging off the side of the apartment in plain view. It was like someone designed this apartment building to be virtually sniper proof. “Gotta lotta tats for a pig,” the gunman said. He was wearing a grimy navy wool hat, so Roan mentally dubbed him Gumby, as in Monty Python’s deeply stupid, deeply violent Gumby characters.

“I’m not a pig,” Roan said, picking up the pizza boxes. There was a tacit anymore, but he knew Gumby wouldn’t get that.

Gumby wasn’t impressed. “So yer what, the negotiator guy?”

“No. I’m just the pizza guy.”

That made Gumby laugh in a snickering, contemptuous way. He opened the door and stood back as Roan came in the small apartment, which seemed like it would have been cramped for a woman and four kids. With the addition of two sizable men, it was now nearly claustrophobic. It didn’t help that the men were rank with the scent of chemicals bleeding through their pores, a smell akin to death, with an added layer of alcohol to it.

The second gunman was standing near the sofa, where the woman and three of her children were cowering, waiting to be shot. The sharp ammonia scent of piss and the cloying scent of talcum told him child number four was an infant, and most likely in the bedroom, which was separated from the front room by a small curtain.

Roan put the pizza boxes down on the coffee table, and made eye contact with Amelia. “Have you been hurt?”

She shook her head no, even though there was a fairly fresh bruise on the side of her jaw. But there was a man standing over her aiming a Glock down at her head, which would make you inclined to respond however they wanted you to.

A situation like this was pretty impossible. He was going to have to disarm or disable them both virtually simultaneously to make sure they didn’t get a chance to shoot anyone. For a couple of tweakers, they were playing this surprisingly smart. You’d have to be super human to disable them both at once.

Roan wished he could smile, but he knew he couldn’t give the game up just yet.

Gumby poked him in the kidneys with the cold metal barrel of his gun. “You seen ‘em, pig, now get outta here.”

The lion wanted to play, so it was inclined to work with him, which Roan was counting on. Roan reached behind him, grabbing Gumby’s arm, and twisted violently, while he kicked the second gunman, Gumby Junior, in the solar plexus, with greater than average strength. He had to strike him in the solar plexuses, because the result of that was autonomic, pure reflex, a gag for breath that would keep the man from being able to aim and pull the trigger for a second or two. He only needed a second or two.

Gumby Junior was thrown back into a side table, which seemed to dissolve under his weight, and Roan kept twisting Gumby’s arm behind him, even though he was now letting out a high pitched scream that made the kids cringe and close their eyes, and the sounds coming out of his arm were like bubble wrap being crushed under foot.

It was pure sadism, which Roan really wanted to blame on the lion. Gumby’s arm wasn’t broken so much as pulverized; his gun would have been aiming back at him if it hadn’t fallen out of a hand that now had no strength at all. Bone fragments stuck out of his forearm, and he was bleeding on the carpet as his skin ripped and his muscles tore from the incredible, impossible torque. Roan knew he could have actually ripped his arm off, just physically yanked it free from the elbow joint – and the lion kind of wanted to – but he had done what he needed to do. Even if Gumby had another gun on him, he was in no shape or state to pull it. As soon as Roan released him he fell back screaming that impossible scream, high pitched, pained and hysterical, and he was nearly convulsing in agony, staring at his ruined arm in bug eyed disbelief.

Roan then jumped at Gumby Junior, who fought off the reflex enough to raise his gun, and crashed into him, driving him to the floor. He grabbed Gumby Junior’s gun hand and ripped the gun away, grabbing him by the throat with his other hand, which really wanted to curl up like it had claws. He dug his fingers into his throat, placing a thumb right over his larynx, and looked down into his wide, disbelieving eyes. Roan realized now he was not only growling but smiling, a savage ear to ear grin that may have scared Gumby Junior more than his windpipe being slowly closed off. Roan shifted his weight so he was sitting on the man’s chest, and it and his throat were taking all of Roan’s body weight. He kept trying to buck him off, but Roan knew where to put his weight to keep him pinned down, and, oh yeah, he had his gun. Roan tossed the weapon away, and it clattered somewhere behind the television, which was ironically playing a news report about the hostage situation on low volume. “You don’t need a weapon when you are the weapon, dipshit,” Roan said, still grinning and growling. His hand ached as bones and muscles shifted and spasmed, and it actually hurt not to rip his throat out. If he just gave into the impulse, the pain would go away. He pressed a thumb on Gumby Junior’s larynx, and said, “Be a good boy, and I won’t rip out your voice box and feed it to you before you die.” He could throw him off if he absolutely wanted to, but Roan would be taking his neck with him, and Gumby Junior seemed to understand that. Roan tapped his Bluetooth, and hoped his growl wouldn’t be picked up on the audio feed. “Targets neutralized. Clear for go.”

Roan barely got the last syllable out before a battering ram took the door down and the black armored SWAT guys flooded the apartment, surrounding the still howling Gumby while other members grabbed the woman and her kids, quickly hustling them out of the apartment. “Baby in the bedroom,” he called out, before Amelia could even spit it out. She seemed to be in as much shock as either Gumby. The kids were terrified, but being kids, generally took this sudden spate of unbelievably quick violence better.

Gumby Junior was now staring at him in wide eyed wonder. “What the fuck’re you?” he asked, his voice a ghastly whisper.

Roan continued grinning down at him, wondering if the guy knew how lucky he was he still had a face. Despite his disturbingly large pores and pubic looking beard, the lion thought it looked delicious. “I’m a vampire.”

The way the man’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets, he might have actually believed him. What an asshole.

One of the SWATs touched his shoulder, and while Roan’s first impulse was to throw the man or maybe take a bite of his well muscled forearm, he fought it back, and instead just stood up and stepped aside as the SWATs quickly kicked Gumby Junior over onto his face and cuffed him. Roan saw that his handprint was perfectly etched in red on his neck, like a nuclear burn shadow.

“How the hell did this happen?” One of the EMTs exclaimed, looking at Gumby number one’s brutally twisted arm. His partner had given the guy a sedative, so the howling finally wound down from air raid siren pitch to dying car alarm.

The SWAT commander was beside Roan when he stood up, and said, “We were negotiating with these fuckers for an hour. You were in here two minutes. How the fuck did you do that?”

Roan shrugged, not sure he should answer. Perhaps it was best to play dumb until he knew what Matthews had told him.

Since he was no longer needed, he walked outside, glad to get a breath of fresher air, and Holden was there by the head of the staircase, holding his clothes. As he took his t-shirt and pulled it on, Holden said, “You know this is just the beginning of the favors.”

“Yeah, I know,” he agreed, stepping into his jeans. But he wasn’t really bothered by it.

Roan would probably never admit it to anyone, but at this moment, he felt better than he had in a long time.

It was oddly good to be alive.