15 – The Use of A Tourniquet Is Not Advised

Holden tried his best to puzzle this out in his mind, but there was more than one thing going on. There simply had to be.

“You blackmailed your own nephew,” he said aloud.

John stared at him like he was insane. “What?”

“Over Kyle’s sex tape. You blackmailed him, and decided to go after your brother -”

“That’s not what fucking happened!” he roared, his anger genuine. “Joel bought the fucking thing!”

Holden wondered if this was true. Then he wondered why he doubted it. This was so fucked up it was incredible. “He bought up his son’s sex tape?”

“Yes. Someone approached him, said they’d release it on the web if he didn’t pay them. I thought you couldn’t trust the bastard, but Joel wanted the tapes destroyed and the whole thing put behind them, so he paid up.”

“Who was the guy?”

“How the fuck should I know? Supposedly a … participant, but I don’t know. I stayed out of it.”

“’Cause it was icky?”

John grimaced and looked away. “I didn’t need to know this shit, okay? Not my business.”

“Was the participant’s name Colt?”

“What kinda name is Colt?”

“A porn name.”

He shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and kind of hoped he’d never have to hear it again. “I don’t know shit about the tape, except Joel said he took care of it.”

“How soon before his death?”

The question seemed to catch him off guard. “What?”

“What I said.”

He had to  think about it. “A week, maybe? Two?”

“Kyle knew about it?”

He shrugged helplessly. “How the fuck do I know?”

“So Joel paid blackmail money on Kyle’s sex tape, and then you decided to blackmail him too, since he was such an easy mark?”

“What kind of scumbag do you think I am?”

“A huge one.”

“Fuck you.”

“How fucked up is your family?” Holden shot back. “Why would Joel, of anyone, want to help keep his own son in the closet?”

“Because the Ashers have money coming out the ass, and he’s good friends with Evangeline Asher and didn’t want to humiliate her.”

“Good friends.” Holden figured that meant he was fucking her, used to fuck her, or wanted to fuck her. Joel was a predictable horndog. There was also the possibility that if Kyle’s secret came out, some of Joel’s might as well. “This is fucked up.”

“Tell me about it.”

Holden decided that the answer laid – no pun intended – with Colt Brixton. Duane Malloy was probably a skeezy bastard, but he could wait. He needed to talk to Colt now. “You want to live, John?”

He scowled at him. “Is that a trick question? Fuck yeah.”

“Fine. Then this never happened. You report me to the cops, I’ll be sure to tell them all about Joel, and all about you.”

“What d’ya mean all about me?”

“Brothers sharing a hustler. It’ll make the top of the new cycle for weeks. You can’t buy that kind of salaciousness.”

His eyes almost bugged out of his head, and a vein throbbed visibly in his neck. “What the fuck ..? I’m not gay! I’ve never hired you!”

“I know. But who cares about truth when a lie is so good? It’s what you call it … truthiness. You could get the Pope to swear it never happened, but it won’t matter. You’ll forever be known as that guy who hired his brother’s hustler. You will never live it down.” Holden opened  the passenger door, and half in and half out of the car, he looked at the sweating, bleeding John and gave him a deeply insincere smile. “Makes holding a gun on you seem like nothing, huh?”

“You motherfucker,” he snarled, but he looked away, his shoulders slumping. Holden knew he wasn’t going to do a damn thing. The thought that Holden would lie and paint him as a closet fag was just too much for him to bear. Pussy.

At least they weren’t too far from the casino. Its huge, garish neon sign lit up its corner of the sky like a spotlight. It was an ugly place, as gaudy and cheap as a ten dollar hooker, and he couldn’t fathom who would spend all their time in there, wasting all their money. But he felt the same way about cocaine, and that certainly had a fan club.

Walking along the road, he pulled out his cell phone and punched up a familiar number. “Julian, it’s Fox. I need you to work some pimp magic and find a hustler for me. He works porn out of Champion in Portland, goes by the name of Colt Brixton. Ideally I need a place to find him, or a personal phone number. I need this ASAP.” He hung up without saying goodbye, as he’d gotten his machine. But you always got Julian’s machine. Did he ever answer his fucking phone?

Holden decided to call Ahmed and see if he was in the mood for a road trip. Julian would call back eventually, and he wanted to be ready.

Julian didn’t disappoint, it just took him a while.

He called back around four thirty in the morning, clearly wasted, and said several things that were completely unintelligible. But eventually he spit out what sounded like an address, and a grudge. (The words Holden was able to make out were “fucker”, “stash”, “me”, “light”, “butt” and “fluffer”. He couldn’t put them into a coherent sentence, though.) By the time the call came through, he was crashing on Ahmed’s couch, which was – of course – black leather. A leather queen was going to have a leather sofa.

He told Ahmed what was going on, but Ahmed had been smoking his evening joint at the time (he liked to say some people had a beer to relax after work, but Ahmed – musician, guerrilla journalist, and social worker – preferred to have a joint. Fair enough; Holden begrudged no one their vices, especially since his income depended on at least one) and didn’t really follow it. Holden tried again, but Ahmed just waved his hand dismissively, and said, “I’m thinking it’s probably best I don’t know all the details. Now, who wants a grilled cheese sandwich?”

To be fair, Ahmed made great grilled cheese sandwiches.

While Holden took the time to catch some sleep, Ahmed remained up, in spite of the joint, and after Julian called they piled into his vintage Mustang Charger and started driving to Portland. Ahmed had been working the late shift lately, and was keyed up, as he said his body clock now told him he couldn’t sleep until the sun was up. He was becoming a vampire – or, as he preferred, a Blacula. Being both a leather queen and a few inches shy of seven feet tall, Ahmed was naturally intimidating, but he was amazingly laid back and had a goofy sense of humor that Holden imagined Roan would love. They would probably get along great, come to think of it, but they only met once, and not under the best of circumstances. Ahmed would probably love Roan’s vintage muscle cars.

Ahmed had made lots of road trips down South, so he knew several short cuts and ways around the heavier traffic areas, but still Holden ended up dozing for about half the trip. It was well into morning when they reached Portland, but it was hard to tell because it was gray and raining, the sun hiding behind a cloud layer as thick as sheep’s wool.

Holden thought about calling Dylan or Dee when they stopped at a gas station to have a piss and get directions, but he ultimately decided against it. What if they told him Roan was dead? It was unlikely, but still possible. Could he handle that? He didn’t think he could, so he decided to operate in ignorance for now. Besides, if he found out Roan was dead before he met Colt, he might just beat the shit out of him, and how did you get information out of a guy with a broken jaw?

They got a bit turned around, but after about forty minutes they found Colt’s apartment building. It was a shitty little brick building in what looked to be a seedier part of town, and for some reason, it called itself Lincoln Towers, even though there was just the one building (why the plural “Towers”? Did there used to be another one?) and it was only, at most, about six floors high. Hardly a tower.

Colt was in a ground floor apartment, 5-A, and Ahmed offered to go in with him, but Holden managed to convince him to wait in the car. Being a social worker who was part of a mental health “crisis team”, he was accustomed to defusing tense situations and being so fucking bloody reasonable that it was almost impossible to bully and intimidate someone with him there. Oh sure, he could intimidate with his size alone, but once he started talking, he revealed his soft marshmallowy center and pretty much blew the deal. Holden wanted to get in this guy’s face, and he didn’t need Ahmed hanging around being reasonable.

The interior of the apartment building was exactly what Holden expected: poorly lit, reeking of piss, vomit, and stale malt liquor. Dimly through doors he heard crying babies, loud televisions, louder music, some shouting in a language he didn’t recognize. Holden lived in a much better apartment, and his porn enterprise wasn’t really off the ground yet. But then again, Holden was his own boss there, it was all internet, and he didn’t have a drug problem. Lots of the guys who got into porn and/or hustling got drug habits, but it was very chicken and egg – did they get into drugs to stand hustling, or did they hustle to get money for drugs? After doing a little research on Colt, he guessed he probably did have a drug habit. What other reason could there have been for Champion to not give him more high profile work? He was probably a minor player because he had problems that couldn’t be solved with a fluffer.

He found 5-A and knocked on the door, but as soon as his knuckles made contact with the door, it opened a couple of millimeters. Not just unlocked, but open.

Oh wow, this wasn’t good. Holden made sure he was still carrying his gun before nudging the door open and walking inside. “Hello?”

A messy apartment, it smelled like mold and boiled over soup, with an undertone of sweat. He saw some drug paraphernalia on the coffee table – glass pipes, blackened foil – and a bunch of wadded up blankets on the floor beside it.

As he inched closer, Holden realized they weren’t blankets at all. Well, there was a blanket, but it was mostly covering a body.

Terrific. This was the gift that kept on killing.

14  – Lost Weekend

“You know, you’re not a detective,” Diego said.

Dylan sighed, sitting back on the couch, balancing his cup of tea on the arm of the sofa. He’d been going through both Roan’s laptop and the notes he’d found, hoping to find something that jumped out at him, something that said, “Yes, I’m the bastard that tried to kill him.” So far, that elusive clue wasn’t jumping forward and revealing itself. “Obviously Dee, or this would make more sense to me than it does.”

“Hardly. Ro may keep a lot of notes, but they’re not always linear,” he replied, between swallows of his beer. “They’re stream of consciousness half the time. I’m not sure if he does that to keep people from reading them and making sense of them, or if he really thinks like that. You know, he might think that way. I dated him, but I still can’t say I’ve ever totally understood him. How are you doing on that front?”

Was he trying to distract him? Could he blame him if he was? “I’d never claim to understand completely how he thinks, but I think I know where he’s coming from most of the time. And his notes aren’t that bad. They’re kind of like he’s having a conversation with himself, trying to figure out where one piece slots into the bigger picture, if it does. He generally assumes everyone’s lying about something and tries to figure out what they’d be most likely to lie about. It’s a chess game where you can only guess what and where the pieces are.”

Dee gave him a funny look. “I think you just gave me a headache.”

“I never said it was easy.”

“Obviously.” He paused briefly, pondering his next statement with care. “How do you think we should approach his continuing pill problem? I’d suggest an intervention, but knowing Roan, he’d pull a gun and open fire on us.”

Dylan shook his head, looking at the notes on screen so he didn’t have to meet his gaze. “I think that’s not even on the table right now. He needs to recover, and then we’ll deal with it.”

There was a very telling pause. “Wow. You’re writing it off? Really? You think you can live with that, Dylan?”

“I think it doesn’t matter right now. If he dies, none of this bullshit is going to matter.” He could feel his anger rising, and along with that, tears. He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose like he had a bad case of eyestrain. Now was not the time. In fact, despite Holden’s warning that he shouldn’t be alone, he really wanted to be alone. If the killer wanted to get him, fine, he could come and have a go. It would allow Dylan to see if he still had the will to kill inside of him.

Luckily, there was a knock on the door. Dee sighed and levered himself out of his chair. “Finally. I was wondering if Holden had stopped for a trick or something.”

He had been gone for a long time. But Dylan wasn’t that surprised, mainly because he had a sneaking suspicion he had somewhere else to go. It was just the way he left in a hurry; he looked like a man on a mission.

But when Dee opened the door, it wasn’t Holden that came in. It was Fiona, greeting Dee with surprise before breezing past him and making a beeline for the sofa. Dylan was barely on his feet before Fi engulfed him in a hug.

“How are you, sweetie?” she asked. She was wearing a vanilla scented perfume that was very soothing. Or maybe it was just vanilla; it was hard to pick up anything perfumey about it.

“Okay, considering,” he said, as Fi finally let him go. She had her long red hair back in a ponytail, but otherwise looked very much the same as before, in a t-shirt, jeans, and a red leather jacket. Her eyes were a bit tired, like she’d been up too long. (Hadn’t they all been?) “How are you?”

She shrugged and grimaced. “I’m getting used to people trying to kill my boss. Isn’t that sad? Anyways, how is he?”

“No change from before,” Dee said, returning to his chair. “In the case of an animal tranquilizer overdose, we can take that as good news.”

Dylan sat back down on the sofa, and he moved the laptop so Fi could sit down beside him. “That’s good, I guess.” She glanced at what was on the laptop screen. “Case notes?”

Dylan nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure out if the answer was here, if Roan was so close to the guy he decided to kill him.”

“Well, I have something that isn’t in the case notes,” she said, almost excitedly. “Something that may alter the case a bit.”

Now that was intriguing. “What?”

She shifted on the couch, turning to face him more, getting comfortable. “Okay, you know I have friends in the sex industry, right?”

“I’ve seen your dominatrix ad in the back of The Stranger,” he replied. He had, but only after Roan found it and pointed it out. Still, no need to tell her that.

That made her grin in a slightly sheepish way. “It’s only part-time. I don’t have time for many clients anymore. Anyways, I was talking to Gunther, down at the sex dungeon -”

“There’s a sex dungeon?” Dylan exclaimed. He wasn’t sure if being frightened or appalled was the proper response.

“Oh yeah,” Dee said, surprising him further. “Me and Shep got called there once. A guy forgot the safe word and got choked to unconsciousness.”

“I heard about that,” Fi said.

“Weirdest thing? He was that guy who runs all those used car lots on the west side. Shep recognized him from his TV commercials.”

Fi shook her head as if the guy should have known better than to forget the safe word, and shifted her gaze back to Dylan, moving on. “Anyways, Gunther told me about something involving Kyle Newberry.”

“He’s a closet ‘mo,” Dylan interrupted. “Yeah, Ro included that in his case notes.”

“No, not that. There’s a sex tape.”

Dylan and Dee shared a surprised look, and both sat forward. “A sex tape?” Dylan repeated. “Kyle having sex with a man?”

Fi grinned in a savage way. “Two guys; they were having a Newberry sandwich. And one of them was a regional porn star. Gunther recognized his dick and the tattoo on his stomach.”

Dylan didn’t even know where to start with this one. So he tried to pretend he was Roan, and ask questions Roan would ask. “Who’s the guy, and where’s the tape?”

“The porn star goes by the name of Colt Brixton.” She rolled her eyes. “Shitty name, I know, but hey, most of the good names were probably taken.”

“That’s almost familiar,” Dee said, frowning in thought. Watched a lot of porn, did he? “What’d he do?”

“Besides everyone?” She grinned at her own joke. “He works mostly for Champion Studios out of Portland.”

Dylan opened a search engine browser and entered the name Champion Studios. What he came up with were a page of links to its website and to various adult films it had for sale. Their home page, which you had to give a credit card number to venture further into, had its heading as Champion STUDios. Cute. Fi looked over his shoulder, and said, “Here.” She turned the keyboard towards herself, entered a username and password, and got him into the site. He looked at her in surprise. She gave him a lopsided grin, coloring slightly. “What can I say? If I’m gonna watch a porn, it’s gonna be a gay porn. Straight porn just makes me ill.”

He so didn’t need to know that about her. He turned to the web page, amazed at the sheer amount of dicks and balls everywhere, and searched for Colt Brixton. Dee came over and sat on the other side of him, so he could peruse the website as well. “You’re not an internet porn guy, are you?” Dee guessed.

Dylan shook his head. “Not a porn guy period. Seriously, how does anyone get turned on by that acting?”

“See, you’re not supposed to be paying attention to the acting.”

“Yeah, hon, although sometimes it’s hilarious,” Fi admitted.

He shook his head. “No, I’m too distracted by it. It’s too painful. I used to date a theater major, and I have a low tolerance for hideous acting.”

Dee gave him a disbelieving look. “But, hot naked guys, Dyl.”

He snorted derisively. “I work in a gay nightclub. I’ve seen lots of hot naked guys. After a while, it’s just wallpaper. Besides, I’m not a big fan of the gym bunny look, and look at these guys. You could grate cheese on their stomach.”

“There is such a thing as overboard,” Fi agreed. “But you know, you can probably say this because you’re hot, and your boyfriend’s hot. It might be different if you weren’t.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, although he supposed she had a point. It was an easy thing to say when you had a boyfriend who was really incredibly sexy. But she thought he was sexy? He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Yeah, he had to look relatively good for the day job, but beyond that he didn’t think a lot about it. Maybe that made him luckier than most.

He found Colt Brixton, and kind of wished he hadn’t. The guy had a lean, hard body, all muscles defined and heightened, and he had a hard hawk featured face, not at all appealing, although he cultivated a type of tough boy sneer that was popular amongst insecure adolescents. He had a type of tribal sun black tattoo ringing his navel, seemingly highlighting it, although why you’d want to accentuate your belly button Dylan had no idea. Maybe it was a porn actor thing. “Eww,” Dylan said. Absolutely not his type. He was trying to look like street tough jailbait, one of those gay bashing teens whom every gay suspected was just fighting his own sexuality, and it was almost a stereotype. Fetishizing the enemy is what Roan called it.  Dylan imaged he was trying to look eighteen, but he looked twenty six at the youngest.

“Yeah, I don’t usually go for that kind either,” Dee agreed.

“He’s one of those guys who looks like he’s constantly smelling something bad,” Fi said. “Put a bag over his head, and he might be okay.”

All the titles this guy was in were hilariously bad – The Postman Cums Twice, really? - but nothing screamed Newberry sex tape. “What about this tape, Fi?”

“Oh. Gunther and this other guy, Declan, had seen it, but they said it had barely been leaked when it disappeared. The word through the underground is someone with deep pockets bought up every copy, even digital ones. Gunther’s interested in purchasing a copy, though. If we can get it, he’s willing to pay for it. He thinks it’ll be huge.”

Dylan sighed. So why did he have to look up this guy? Again, think like Roan. “When was it bought up?”

She shrugged, her eyes still glued to the laptop screen. “Gunther thinks it was about a month ago, more or less. He said it disappeared too fast for anyone to upload it.”

Dylan considered that, wishing he was Roan. He had a feeling he’d know exactly what this meant. “Okay, so how does this help us?”

“Umm,” Fiona said, considering it. “Well, my thought was we could talk to Colt. Maybe he knows who paid to scoop up the tape.”

“Or maybe he still has a copy,” Dee suggested. “Porn guys can be pretty narcissistic.”

“So how do we contact him?”

“I was figuring Holden would know,” she admitted. “He knows the hustlers.”

“But he’s a porn star, not a hustler.”

Dee clicked his tongue and shook his head. “He’s a very minor porn star, regional as opposed to national. A lot of these guys hustle on the side. There might even be a web page for him, if we knew where to look. Can I see that?”

Dylan gave him the laptop. “Help yourself.”

Dee’s fingers got busy on the keyboard, searching for the link where you could rent Colt for a while.  He felt like Dee and Fi were so much better at this than he was; he felt lost. Dylan grabbed the phone, and punched in Holden’s cell number. They were right – you needed a hustler to deal with another hustler. It was their milieu, a secret world with its own rules and protocols. Or maybe he was being too dramatic. After all, anyone could be a hustler; you just had to sell yourself for money. It just got complicated when you decided to make a living out of it, whether by necessity or impulse.

His phone rang five times before he picked up. “What is it, Dylan?”  Holden asked curtly.

Considering how friendly he had been earlier, that threw him a bit. Moody, was he? “There’s been an interesting development in the case. It seems there’s a Kyle Newberry sex tape that appeared for five minutes and disappeared after lots of money got thrown around.”

“What kind of sex tape?”

“Kyle and two men, one of whom has been identified as Colt Brixton, a regional porn star.”

Holden’s pause seemed portentous. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“No idea. Dee seems to think he’s probably a hustler, and may have a copy.”

“Where’s he work out of?”

“Umm, Portland, and a place called Champion Studios.”

A pause, but this time, Holden held the phone aside and said to someone else, “Pull over.” Another pause,  and Holden said to his mysterious friend, “Did I stutter? Pull the fuck over. Now.”

“What’s going on?” he asked. Dylan had a sudden bad feeling about this. What was Holden up to?

“I’m investigating a lead. I think they may connect.”

“How?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I do. Gotta go. I’ll call back in a few minutes.” And with that, Holden hung up before Dylan could even take a breath.

“Well, fuck you too,” Dylan muttered, hanging up the receiver.

“Holden recognize him?” Dee wondered.

Dylan could only shrug. “He seemed to think it was familiar. Guys, he’s doing something. I don’t think it’s good.”

Fi made a noise of disbelief. “He’s not tricking, is he?”

“No. I think it’s … I dunno.” The anger in his voice when he told his mystery guest to “pull the fuck over” was palpable over the phone. It left a bitter taste in Dylan’s mouth. Investigating a lead? He had a sudden, fearful feeling he had a member of the Newberry family in his company, and it wasn’t willing company. “He doesn’t own a gun, does he?”

They both gave him surprised looks. “Did you hear a gunshot?” Dee wondered.

“No.” Dylan wasn’t actually sure if he could explain it to them. All he knew was that after Jason’s death, he was so angry he wanted to murder the man who’d driven the car that hit them. And after stewing on it for a while, he got that gun, and resolved to shoot that motherfucker before he could be released on an unsuspecting populace. Dylan knew the sound of someone deciding to do something irrevocable; the cold anger that wasn’t so much rage as surrender. You were giving up to your darkest impulses, and no longer cared what happened to you. In a strange way, you were begging to be killed, obliterated, only if you got to take the object of your hatred with you.

But maybe he was being a drama queen. Maybe Holden was just pissed off. Could he be blamed? This was all so deeply fucked up. Still, he thought Holden was currently doing something very stupid, something that could get him killed.

Maybe this had been enough to call him off, to make him refocus his energy. Maybe. He would never claim to know how Holden thought.

But he hoped it worked. They’d need to put all their heads together to figure this one out if Roan wasn’t here to guide them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13- Cosmopolitan

 

Although the rich and powerful always had it much easier, in this day and age, it was hard to hide.

 

This was doubly true of local celebrities, a phenomenon that continued to strike Holden as incredibly weird. Was that something to be proud of? You were famous in a two thousand mile radius, and then, after that, progressively less so, until you were just another schlub again at the state line. It made you an egotistical asshole and an emotionally needy asshole at the same time.

 

Holden knew something about John that most people didn’t. He visited the Pacific Queen Casino (oh, the jokes he could have made …) almost every night. He had many luxury cars, but when he came to the casino, he always drove an old Mercedes, black with a dented fender. He didn’t want everyone to know he was a high roller up front; he tried to keep his true wealth a secret. Considering how much he blew in the casino, Holden had no idea how he thought he kept that all a secret. But at some point, someone was humoring him.

 

A security guard, an overweight guy with a polyester uniform and a posture that suggested he’d been broken long ago, desultorily prowled the lot in a marked sedan, but the parking lot was fucking huge, so he only had to wait for him to go on by, continuing his rounds further on, before working on the lock of John’s passenger door. It was incredibly easy.

 

All he had to do was wait. He came late enough that he didn’t have to wait long, although he was regretting not having his iPod with him. Finally John came walking through the parking lot, talking on a cell phone, completely oblivious to everything around him. Why did Holden even hide? He didn’t need to. He could have been following him and he’d have never noticed.

 

John was busy lying. He was telling someone – his wife, presumably – that the meeting finally got over and he was on his way home. He talked about someone named Dan going on and on about boring shit, an attempt to give the lie some realistic detail. Holden had heard this done a million times, by men he had just fucked, men calling their wives and family – and, in one notable case, congress – and assuring them they were having a boring, awful trip and couldn’t wait to get home. Sometimes they’d glance at Holden and roll their eyes, sometimes they’d pretend he was already gone. So was the way of men – men, by nature, lied. Did women? Maybe. Maybe it was just a Human condition, a compulsion that couldn’t be resisted. But from what Holden knew and experienced, men were generally pieces of shit. That’s why he didn’t feel bad about what he had to do.

 

He waited until John had gotten in his car and finished his call before he came up and opened the passenger side door, sliding into the seat before John had realized he had an unwanted hitchhiker.

 

“Hey,” John said, and Holden pulled out the gun and pressed it against his forehead, shoving him back until his head was pushed up against the window.

 

“You know who I am,” Holden told him. “Just like I know who you are. But if I blow your fucking brains out right now, it’ll never be connected to me. You’ll be a mystery, much like the death of your brother. The curse of the Newberrys. Although considering your gambling debts, they’ll probably think that finally caught up with you.”

 

“Wh-what … who are -”

 

Holden shoved the barrel even harder into John’s head, and the back of his head thunked against the glass. “Not this shit. I want to kill you enough as it is. Don’t make me lose my temper.”

 

“I- I have money.”

 

“I know you do. That’s your problem. Now tell me why you’ve had me followed and who tried to kill Roan McKichan before I just start breaking things.”’

 

John swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in an unstable manner, as his eyes nervously studied his face. Maybe he was serious about not knowing him at first, because Holden could see recognition click into place now. His wariness was tempered by fear, and a modicum of sneering contempt. Holden could read his mind in this second – he was thinking “Filthy whore”. Maybe because he was gay, there was an extra fear of cooties, or worse yet, contagious gayness. Maybe if they shared air too long, he’d get the gay too. “I had nothing -”

 

Holden hit him with the gun barrel. Just drew his wrist back sharply and turned the gun just slightly, so when he made contact with his skin the sight hit him first. Skin ripped along his forehead, making John yelp, and a small seam of blood opened, trickling down his face. “I’ve already decided to kill you,” he told him. “You know, I’m as liberal as anyone else in the sex trade, although we love you conservative repressed guys. If not for you, we’d be out of a job. But I’ve been studying people long enough to know that there are some who are a waste of flesh; they do nothing but steal oxygen and cause misery for everyone else. They have no reason to exist, and really shouldn’t, for the greater good of us all. You’re one of those people, John. You’re a cold blooded fuck who extorted his own brother for money. Did you kill him too? Not personally; you’re a ball-less wonder if I’ve ever seen one. But did you pay someone to do it for you? Or is making sure your brother gets an overdose of potassium an easy thing? I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child. Well, I wasn’t really, but I was raised one, so I missed out on all the sibling bonding. Tell me why Joel had to die, John.”

 

John grimaced in pain, bringing a hand up to his forehead. When he saw the blood that came away on his hand, he looked ashen, slightly ill. Did the sight of blood make him sick? No wonder he took to poisoning people instead: no blood, no icky bodily fluids, just a corpse. “I didn’t kill him,” he said, more a plea than anything else, his voice cracking with fear and confusion. “I wouldn’t do that. Why would I do that?”

 

“Because you’re up to your ass in debt, John, and you need the buy out to take place, so you can have a fresh hard cash infusion. That’s a hell of a murder motive. According to a detective friend of mine, money is usually the number one reason for death.” Or maybe it was number two – he couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter anyways.

 

John was cracking, easily and quickly. He believed Holden was serious about killing him, or guilt was eating away at him, or he noticed the safety was off. Maybe all of the above. “I didn’t do it. Okay, yeah, I need the money, but Joel’s estate is all going to his bitch of a current wife and his spoiled brat kids. How do I benefit from his death?”

 

“The buy out.”

 

He let out a scoff of a laugh, breathless and mirthless. “I have to split it with the rest of the family. It wouldn’t be much. I’d get more if Joel was alive to negotiate the deal. He could get blood from a stone.”

 

That felt like truth. Joel had an appealing charm when he turned it on. “Why did he oppose the buy out?”

 

“I dunno. He said some shit about our legacy and local media, and a whole bunch of grade A bullshit that never made any sense to me. I think he was just being a fuckhead, opposing it because the rest of us were all for it. It was his way of reminding all of us he was in control.”

 

That too had a ring of truth. The men who hired him did so because they were trying to control the scenario. An anonymous trick might discover who you are; a boyfriend might become bitter. But a prostitute was engaged in a simple business transaction, and had much to lose if they decided to expose you. It was mutually assured destruction if the secret leaked out. Or so the johns thought, and that was fine with Holden if they honestly believed that to be true. It wasn’t, though. A whore might have been just a whore, but a man who paid another man for sex never seemed to live it down in this country. Paying a woman was almost understandable, and seemed to earn sympathy in some corners, but a man? Never. You were the eternal butt of a joke. But desire often outweighed logic, thankfully for his bank account. “What exactly did you pay Duane Malloy for? And consider your answer carefully.”

 

“How-” he paused, deciding that the question was irrelevant, because Holden wouldn’t answer it. The guy with the gun didn’t have to answer a single fucking thing. “We needed a new security -”

 

Holden punched John right in the balls. He convulsively knifed forward, slamming into his own steering wheel, a high pitched keening noise escaping him. “I said I was gonna start breaking things, John. Do you think I’m fucking around? Do you want me to prove how much I want to hurt you?”

 

“No,” he wheezed, still in pain. When he sat back, his eyes were red rimmed from tears, and a string of saliva dangled from his wet lower lip. Had he almost barfed? Probably. “Did Joel mean that much to you?”

 

“He didn’t mean anything to me,” Holden snapped, and was mildly surprised to discover that was true. There was familiarity and routine, but nothing else. Perhaps that was what marriage was like. “I was curious what happened to him, especially after what he told me. No, the reason you’re gonna die is because a good man is dying in a fucking hospital because of your family and your shit.” There it was: he was furious that they had hurt Roan. Part of him thought it should have been him that was the target, the killer should have come after him, but didn’t for an obvious reason – who cared? He was a fucking whore, a hooker, and his word would mean nothing. The cops would roll their eyes, a judge would dismiss him, a jury of wonderful straight people would regard him as a leper and every word out of his mouth as contagious garbage. He could witness a murder, and any attorney worth their ambulance chasing shoes could rip him apart. He could find the poisoner standing over Joel’s body with a container marked “potassium”, and no one would believe him or care. No lawbreaker ever had to worry about him, because he was an Untouchable, and no one would listen to him.

 

But Roan … Oh, poor Roan. He would be believed. Infected, gay, but an ex-cop, and a police adviser on kitty cases; he had a patina of legitimacy that no amount of boyfriends, cat jokes, and suspicions of pill popping could erase. Then there was a vague sense of unease around him since he seemed to have super human abilities, one of which – his supernatural sense of smell – was considered admissible in a court of law. On the one hand, people mocked him; on the other hand, they were terrified of him. He should have been a flaming queen, he should have been a sickly virus child, he should have been gone by now. He almost seemed to be karmic retribution, but whose was in question. The only thing everybody could agree on about him was he was dangerous, much more dangerous than you would initially think, much more than he should have been. When Malloy told the killer who was visiting Holden’s place, he must have panicked. To be fair, Holden didn’t think he’d want Roan after him either, even if he got the guarantee that he wouldn’t turn into a lion at some point.

 

How did he feel about Roan? He wasn’t really sure. He’d come to believe he was a genuinely good person when he first encountered him as a cop. Holden didn’t like cops as a matter of course – tiny little tyrants, many with homosexual impulses they fought by becoming extremely homophobic – but Roan always seemed a little off. He seemed to treat everyone like a Human being, whether they were a hooker or a junkie. Holden figured then there was no fucking way he was going to last in the job, and he was right. He was strangely attractive, not a pretty boy but weirdly alluring all the same, with intense, haunted eyes. And god, was he trouble: not just infected, but an obvious depressive, too smart for his own good, a romantic turned cynic, battered by the world and not sure how to handle it. He raged at dying light, or whatever was handy, and had taken to numbing himself with chemicals. He was stubborn and moody, a total pain the ass. Holden didn’t envy Dylan, putting up with him. But that was the weird thing – he didn’t envy him, but wasn’t he still a bit jealous anyways? Yeah, he was trouble, but Holden suspected that he was rarely ever boring. The true outcasts rarely were. Nothing could ever work between him and Roan, but Holden bet it would have been a fun disaster.

 

“I had nothing to do with that,” John insisted, his voice still raspy with pain. Holden hoped he burst a testicle. “I wanted nothing to do with that guy. Malloy warned me off; he told me we had to shut this down before he got wind of it. He didn’t wanna follow him.”

 

That too was believable. He couldn’t imagine that one private detective wanted to follow another. If you knew the tricks of the trade, you could spot a tail pretty easy. “What did you hire Malloy for in the first place?”

 

He sniffed, wiped snot from his face with the back of one hand, and rubbed his crotch with the other. “Fuck, I think you did some real damage.”

 

“I warned you not to lie to me. Stop trying to change the subject.”

 

“I’m not. I hired him to … fuck. I hired him to dig up dirt on Joel. I needed leverage.”

 

“Leverage for what?”

 

“For what else? Convincing him to take the fucking deal. We all wanted to sell; he was the lone hold out, and for no good reason. He just wanted to remind us who was in control. So I thought I’d show him he wasn’t as the hot shit he thought he was. Of course, I didn’t know he was a fag.”

 

“He wasn’t; he was bi.”

 

John glared at him. “What’s the fucking difference?”

 

“The difference is gay guys really don’t want to fuck women. Joel would fuck anything.”

 

John winced at this and looked out the windshield. “That’s more than I ever wanted to know about him.”

 

“Then why hire a private detective?”

 

He shrugged a single shoulder. “I figured he was fucking around. No guy with money and power is actually gonna stick with just one woman. They know that, right? You’re gonna fuck around. You can have anyone you want, so why stay in and have reheated leftovers when you can go get something fresh, you know? I figured he had a mistress, probably more than one. I didn’t expect him to have … you. But he probably coulda had a guy for free – you fags’ll fuck anybody, right? You hook up in bathrooms and shit. Why didn’t he just do that?”

 

Holden restrained the urge to start pistol whipping him. Mainly because the gun could accidentally discharge in any direction, and he didn’t want to accidentally shoot himself. “Use the word fag again, and I’ll break your other ball. Get me?”

 

John looked like he wanted to say something, maybe belittle him for being so PC, but then he remembered he was holding the gun and had already done some testicular damage to him, and he managed to swallow it down. But Holden saw it in his eyes, the continued, endless contempt. He didn’t know him, but he disgusted him. “Yeah.”

 

“Let me get this straight: you still employed Malloy to follow me after Joel’s death. What the fuck for? Wanted my number, John?”

 

Holden got the reaction he wanted, the sudden, reflex revulsion. “No! I ain’t a f – that way. I thought maybe you had something to do with it.”

 

This was unbelievable. “With his death?”

 

“Yeah. I mean you’re … you’re a criminal, right? You do shit like that.”

 

As infuriating as that statement was, it didn’t quite fit. Why? Because of one very important thing. “I’d be perfect to frame for the crime if something went wrong. It sort of begs the question how you knew Joel had been murdered when everyone assumed he’d died of a heart attack.”

 

His mouth open and closed soundlessly, as he almost said something and then thought better of it. He tried again, more successfully this time. “That’s not – Joel was in too good of shape to just drop dead like that. I didn’t know he was killed, but it didn’t feel right.”

 

“Umm, no. You’ve told enough truth that a lie could slip through, but I lie for a living, asshole. Did you really think you could bullshit me?” He pressed the barrel of the gun against his temple with renewed ferocity. “Drive.”

 

There was a smell coming from John now. Not piss, not exactly, just fear sweat, a rank smell of failed deodorant and desperation. Holden wondered if people smelled like this to Roan most of the time, and if so, how did he stand them. “Drive where?”

 

“We’re gonna pay Duane Malloy a visit,” Holden told him. “And then we’re gonna find out if any of us are gonna live through the night.”

 

Oddly enough, Holden wasn’t bothered by this prospect. Maybe he’d finally found a new occupation.