12 - Can’t Exist

Dylan wondered how often he had been in emergency rooms since he had been dating Roan. More than he had before he started seeing Roan? Yeah, he was pretty sure this pushed it over the amount he’d been in a hospital his entire life before Roan. Maybe this was the price you paid for hooking up with the hot, mysterious, dangerous guy. Was this agony worth it?

He answered questions for the cops while they worked on Roan somewhere behind the emergency room doors. Luckily the cops seemed to know Roan, and didn’t consider him a suspect (well, at least not yet). Before he passed out, Dylan got some information from Roan: he’d taken three pills (he held up three fingers), and the pill bottle was in the glove compartment (he nodded an affirmative to that). He then passed out while Dylan was on the phone with the 9-1-1 operator. He tried to wake him up - the only thing he was sure about was he had to keep him conscious - but save for getting his eyelids to briefly flicker, he couldn’t wake him up. His heart rate had dropped absurdly low by the time the paramedics showed up (he’d been hoping Dee was one of the paramedics, but he wasn’t). The cops arrived to take the pill bottle into custody and check out the car, but the couple now questioning him - Walker, the somewhat good looking, lanky black man and Shale, the more compact, slightly masculine brunette woman - had given him a lift to the hospital. He knew they at least knew of Roan, because as soon as Walker asked him if he knew of anyone who might want to hurt Roan, he rolled his eyes and admitted it might be easier to start listing the people who didn’t want to kill him. Shale snorted humorously at that. As far as Dylan could tell, it wasn’t meant in a mean way, just an ironic one.

He had no answers for them, but they didn’t seem to hold it against him. All he could say was what little Roan had told him when he got home. As far as he knew, no one had access to his car (although clearly someone did), and he was off on a case, so he had no idea where in town he might have been. He couldn’t even tell them about the case. He said Roan hadn’t told him, which was a lie; he knew he was working the Newberry case. But until that was relevant, he was going to play the dumb, clueless boyfriend. Being a bartender at Panic helped. As soon as he told them where he worked, they exchanged this look that Dylan recognized as “himbo”. They’d already written him off as a vacuous boy toy. Again, fine; he didn’t give a shit - they could think of him as Paris Hilton for all he fucking cared. He just wanted to know if Roan was going to pull through or not.

He thought he’d held himself together well. He’d wanted to cry, but he didn’t. He’d been swallowing back the tears since he saw Roan slumped on the couch, his eyes glassy and his lips perfectly bloodless. There was a time and a place for emotional displays, and he preferred to lose his shit when no one was around to see it.

Dylan tried to empty his mind, use a Zen meditation technique to take himself out of himself and let the time go by faster, but that was hard to do when all you could think was your lover was dying in the next room.

Didn’t he know this could happen? The problem with Roan was he thought he was indestructible. He wasn’t, although he arguably had a decent case for it, what with being able to turn into a lion and all. But that wasn’t indestructibility, it just made him riskier to hurt. Roan didn’t seem to care about that difference at all. Incredible bravery or a suicidal tendency? It was a fine line, and kind of hard to say. He didn’t know, and he was sure Roan didn’t either. The suicidal aspect could just be his pill habit, but maybe not; maybe that was just for the numbing effect. For all his tough guy exterior, he knew Roan felt things a little too deeply for his own good. The pills were just back up for his armor, an inner framework that he leaned on more and more. Dylan wondered what it said about him that he decided to accept Roan as a drug addict, just like he accepted that he was always going to love Paris more. It was sad. He always had more self-esteem than that, and yet he decided if he wanted to be in Roan’s life, he’d have to compromise.  Sometimes loving someone just sucked.

Dylan sensed a person near him, and a vaguely familiar voice said, “I took a guess and figured you were a tea drinker.”

He looked up to see Fox a/k/a Holden Krause, Roan’s male prostitute friend. Or acquaintance; Roan was never able to explain what he was exactly. He’d actually seen him in Panic once or twice, back when he bleached his hair, but he hadn’t seen him lately. Tall, broad shouldered, he was more masculine than you would expect (save for his voice, which did give the game up a bit), and he wasn’t a pretty boy. He was one of those guys who, if they didn’t have a transcendent sort of charm, would be forgettable. Not ugly, not anonymous, just not special enough to warrant noticing. It also helped that a sort of furtive intelligence burned in his sea blue eyes; it came and went, depending on how much of himself he decided to show to you, but it made Dylan distrust him the first time he saw him. If he wasn’t a hustler, he was a guy on the make, someone calculating and predatory, and the fact that he actually was a hustler made him think of him in a tiny bit better light. He had a reason to calculating then, a reason to be hunting.

Holden wasn’t in costume; he was wearing very ordinary jeans and a promotional t-shirt for 30 Days of Night that was a size too large for him, the fabric slouching on him like it was damp and fresh out of the washer. His brown hair was messy in a way that suggested he’d gotten dressed in a hurry and came right over. He was holding out a paper cup of steaming liquid - some awful tea or another - and Dylan remembered to take it with a small nod of thanks. How long had he been sitting here staring at the cup? “I am, yeah. Thanks.”

Holden sighed as he sat in the empty plastic chair beside him. “How is he doing?”

“I have no idea. They haven’t told me anything.”

“Is this a gay thing? You’re not family so you don’t count?”

“I think it’s more they’re trying to figure out what he took and how they can counteract it.”

“What was happening to him, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Odd question. He gave Holden a sidelong glance, but he sensed he was trying to figure something out; he had a strange, focused look in his eyes. “He was slipping into a coma. His heartbeat and breathing were dropping lower and lower. I kept trying to wake him up, but nothing happened. He was slipping away from me and I got to see it -” Dylan had to stop, as his voice caught and he could feel those treacherous tears surging back. He closed his eyes and focused on stomping them down. He was not losing it, especially not in front of a man he didn’t fully trust. And he didn’t mean it in a sexual sense; there was nothing going on between him and Roan, it wasn’t even a question he had to ask. There was something so calculating about Holden he knew he’d never appeal to Roan. Ro had trust issues, and something about Holden made you wary about trusting him.

Dylan almost jumped when he felt Holden’s hand on his back, giving him a reassuring pat. “I’m so sorry, Dylan. Roan’s a tough motherfucker. The lion would never let him go without a fight.”

That was probably true, but for some reason, he resented him for saying it. He mentally wiped it away, and opened his eyes, no longer afraid that he’d start crying. “Why are you here?” He hoped that didn’t sound accusatory, but fuck it if it did. He didn’t feel like being polite right now.

“Dee called me,” he said, surprising him again. “He’s stuck at the scene of a huge pile up on I-5 near the Silverdale exit and couldn’t get here. He called me and asked me to come check on you and Roan for him.”

“Oh.” Diego called him?! That meant Dee must have trusted him on some level. Dylan wasn’t sure if that was comforting or not. “I was wondering why he wasn’t here. The paramedic news network is formidable.”

“So I’m learning.”

Finally a short Indian woman in a white doctor coat approached them. Dylan stood, and so did Holden. “How is he?”

“Alive,” she said. She had the brusque but not unkind manner of every hurried ER doctor everywhere. “As far as we can tell, he took an animal tranquilizer.”

“What?” Dylan replied. He wasn’t sure what he expected her to say, but it wasn’t that.

“Like ketamine?” Holden asked.

The doctor shook her head. “Heavier. This is stuff used to sedate elephants in a zoo. Two should have killed him, three pills should have been a nail banged into the coffin. But he’s not a normal human by far; he has the constitution of an angry musk ox, and we got to him in time.” She sighed wearily and rubbed her forehead, as if she was even more tired than she looked and trying hard to keep focus. “He’s lucky he’s a hybrid, although I doubt anyone can convince him of that.”

“Hybrid?” Dylan asked. He’d heard Roan say something about that before, something about his rarity in catching colds.

She grimaced, as if she realized she’d said something wrong. “I simply meant his virus child status was a help in this case.”

“Can I see him?”

“Not now. He’s in the ICU on a respirator. Come back tomorrow at -”

“He’s on a respirator?” Dylan interrupted impatiently. She hadn’t mentioned that.

“It’s mostly a precaution. Respiratory depression is common in these kinds of things, and he may need some help breathing until it’s mostly out of his system. We don’t foresee any lasting problems. In fact, if you’d let me finish my sentence, I was going to say you should come by tomorrow, when we’ll probably be removing him from the respirator.” She patted him on the arm, a clumsy attempt at comfort. But Dylan vaguely recognized her, so she must have worked on Roan before. It certainly explained some of the implied familiarity. “He’ll be okay. It’s just the other guy I’m worried about.”

“What other guy?”

“Whoever slipped him the mickey,” she said, as her pager went off. She picked it up and glanced at it frowning as she turned away. “Roan isn’t a forgive and forget type.”

“No,” Dylan agreed, the syllable lost in a sigh. He dry washed his face, and wondered what he was supposed to do with himself tonight. Somebody had tried to kill Roan, and now a machine was doing his breathing for him. How did you sleep? How did you spend all those agonizing hours waiting for the sun to come up and a new day to start? He’d done such things in his life, but he never wanted to do them again.

“This is all my fault,” Holden said suddenly.

Dylan glanced at him, a little surprised by the certainty in his voice. “What do you mean? You didn’t give him the drugs, did you?”

Anger flashed through Holden’s eyes, and he scowled. “You think that little of me? No, I didn’t slip him the elephant tranqs. It’s just my fault it happened.”

“How?”

He huffed a sigh through his nose and crossed his arms over his chest. “I hired him to look into Joel Newberry’s murder. Someone slipped him a lethal amount of potassium, and now they tried to get Roan with tranqs. This shitty bastard likes deaths that can be written off as accidents, no matter how weird they are.”

“But he just started the investigation. This person would have had to have known Roan was investigating this right from the start. That’s not possible, is it?”

Holden looked away as he considered it, muscles going taut in his jaw. “I don’t know. At this rate, we can’t discount anything.”

Great. He sounded like Roan there for a moment.

Dylan started walking away, wondering what he was going to do with himself, when Holden grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Look, stay with me tonight, or let me stay over.”

“What?”

“This guy, whoever he is, attacks with stealth. He doesn’t like confrontation, he doesn’t want a fight, and he won’t risk taking on two guys at once. There’s safety in numbers.”

Was this some bizarre come on, or was he serious? Dylan’s head was still spinning from the fact that someone had tried to kill Roan. He didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with this right now. “You think he’s going to come after me?”

Holden shrugged. “It depends on how concerned he is about loose ends. But if anything happens to you, Roan will kill me. I’ve already seen what he does when someone hurts you; I don’t want to be on the other side of that.”

Dylan considered that, but still felt as if he didn’t have a grip of things. “Are you making fun of him?”

“Absolutely not. He just loves you enough that he will kill for you. Literally - he will kill. He will let the lion out and rip people to pieces. I don’t want to end my life as a bit of food in his colon. “ He paused a moment. “I bet there’s a dirty joke in that, but I’m too angry to make it right now.”

This sort of went in one ear and out the other. He couldn’t take much more tonight. He used to have a rather sedate life. Oh sure, he had his weird art friends, and the interesting employees at the gay club, but he had a very normal routine: work, painting, watching TV, meditating. That was pretty much it. Pretty normal, much like everyone else’s with a couple of variations. But then he met an unusually attractive man named Paris, who was the only tiger strain infected he had ever met, and seemed to talk all the time about his boyfriend, Roan. And somehow, his life took a weird sideways turn from then on. Suddenly his life was full of death, iron cages, books, guns, dominatrixes, paramedics, and male prostitutes. While he was baffled much of the time, you’d think he’d been more miserable than he actually was. Oh sure, he was miserable right now, but for the most part he was perversely happy with Roan. In spite of the hard exterior, he was one of sweetest men he’d ever known; he seemed genuinely interested in helping people. Merging that with the man who could turn into a lion and eat people was a brain twisting dichotomy. “He … what? Are you saying you saw him do this?”

Holden got this look on his face that suggested he suddenly realized that he had made a mistake. “And he didn’t tell you about it at all. Right. I should have guessed that really. Forget it. You know he has a temper; that’s all it is.”

“He tried to kill someone because of me?”

“No. If he wanted someone dead, they’d be dead. He just scared the living shit out of them.”

“But you said -”

“I’m full of shit, Dylan. Now, are we headed to your place or are you coming back to mine?”

How weird: he was lying and telling the truth at the same time. Dylan hadn’t known that was physically possible. But, again, he couldn’t deal with that now.

It was disappointing to think that maybe he wasn’t strong enough to be in Roan’s world, but he was starting to wonder.

****

Holden knew he was many things, but a decent detective wasn’t one of them. Under normal circumstances. But circumstances were far from normal; circumstances were pretty well fucked.

It was bad enough the doctor obviously lied to them: no one on a respirator was “okay”. That was like saying the guy on the iron lung only had a “mild cough”. But he figured Roan would recover eventually, because he generally did. He was a bad penny, and he kept turning up.

Poor Dylan. Not only did he look shell shocked by all of this, but he asked him in the car, “You think Roan really loves me?” Oh, it was so weird. He told him that obviously he did, and obviously he didn’t admit it because the idea of it freaked him out. Lingering Paris guilt? Maybe. Holden really had no idea. The one time he thought he was in love, his heart was so thoroughly crushed that he was no longer sure he ever was in love. He thought love was a sham used to sell greeting cards and heterosexual conformity, even though he generally recognized the delusion when it popped up in others. Roan had it bad for Dylan, although he supposed he could understand. Dylan was a good looking guy, but not vain, and he was as mellow as a heavily stoned person without being actually stoned or completely fucking stupid. He’d be an easy target for anybody who wanted to kill him.

Holden knew he wasn’t an easy target. He looked like he was, but he wasn’t. He learned long ago you did what you had to do to survive, and sometimes your survival meant hurting someone else. It happened. You just tried not to hurt anyone without necessity or good reason if you had any shred of a conscience. Holden had a shred, but only just. He figured it would serve him well.

Today, while “working” at John Newberry’s office, he found a very queeny assistant to befriend. It wasn’t difficult; a bit of flirting, a bit of flattery, and this poor guy was following him around like a puppy. The scary thing? This guy couldn’t have been more than twenty two, making Holden feel vaguely like a dirty old man. Okay, he was only thirty, but in hustler years that was ancient. The guy - Spencer - might have been shiny young, but he wasn’t very attractive, and had a bit of a belly. Not much of one, but in the perfectionist world of the gay dating scene, that made him little more than a drunk desperation fuck at best. Attention from Holden meant a lot to him. He felt really bad for stringing him along.

He got access to some of John’s emails and line item budget items for the past couple months. What he discovered was that only yesterday, John sent a rather large payment to a Duane Malloy. A bit of Googling and use of less widely known search engines turned up that he was a private investigator for a firm working out of Lakeview. John Newberry had hired a private investigator and just paid him off in a way that suggested their business was done. He wanted to ask Roan what that could possibly mean, if it was sinister as he felt it might have been, but Roan wasn’t conscious enough to ask.

Holden had to drop Dylan off at his place anyways, and luckily Dee was there to meet them. Holden whispered to him to not leave Dylan alone, which earned him a quizzical look, but then he told Dee and Dylan he’d be back as soon as he got some things from his place. Holden then headed off to find Burn.

Burn was one of those guys you met when you lived on the streets or very close to the gutter. He was a wheeler dealer, a vulture living off the corpses of other people’s misery and actively encouraging the misery for money. He was a heroin addict who derided methheads until he got addicted to meth himself. When Holden tracked him down, he was shocked at how rapid his decline had been. His skin looked grey, like he was already dead, and his cheeks had sunken in, giving him a look akin to the embodiment of Famine. When he talked, Holden saw his gums were an odd color, his teeth the color of candy corn and occasionally similarly shaped, and his breath smelled like someone had just taken a shit in a vat of nail polish remover.

They sat in the dark corner of a dive bar where you could buy a hit of meth or a girl in the piss reeking bathroom, and Holden passed over a wad of cash for one of Burn’s “specials”. They were guns with their serial numbers filed off and their barrels often altered; they were usually stolen from out of state or bought at gun shows, untraceable and anonymous, a gun without a country. They were made to be used for one gig and then tossed, guns altered specifically for evil things.  Holden got a semi-automatic with six bullets in it. It was in good shape; Holden’s only objection was that it had flashy silver plating, which was important to those who wanted to show the gun off but had no use otherwise. Still, it would do.  The bullets were hollow points. Holden wondered if the hit of meth he’d just paid for would be the death of Burn, and if that would really be a bad thing considering the shape he was in.

Holden could shoot. He was raised in a good Christian American household; he could use a gun before he knew how to use long division. Pastor Krause had his priorities in order. But Holden had never shot a Human. Yet. There was a first time for everything.

He’d already Google mapped the location of Duane Malloy’s private detective agency. It wasn’t his own, he worked for an agency called Security Solutions, which sounded like a burglar alarm company. It did have an alarm, but a cheap one; it was easy to disable. The locks were also easy to pick. He’d learned that skill from a fellow street kid, Trips, that he had a huge crush on for a while. Shame he was straight. Holden wondered what happened to him. One night he decided to hitchhike to Vegas, and Holden never saw him again. He hoped he found himself a life.

Holden went through Malloy’s files, looking for something on Newberry. Sadly, Duane wasn’t as meticulous a record keeper as Roan was. The computers were locked down with passwords they hadn’t written down on Post-It notes, which Holden had been surprised to find they did in Newberry’s office. (You were just asking for people to fuck around with your shit. Holden was glad it was that easy.) Holden picked the locked drawers of his desk and a nearby file cabinet,  and looked through the folders and papers he found there. That’s where he found the pictures of Joel.

Big glossies of Joel entering an expensive hotel, and in a short sequence of shots, Holden saw himself entering the same hotel, eyes hidden behind sunglasses but still vaguely recognizable. There were other photographs of  Joel and him entering other expensive hotels. Never together, there were no pictures of them engaging in any sort of act, but there was something circumstantial about it all. There was a copy of a hotel bill, Joel’s, which showed that Joel, alone on a business trip, had ordered two different dinners and an expensive bottle of gin. (Holden remembered that; the gin was okay, but weirdly enough, he knew a cheaper brand that tasted so much better.) Then Holden found a copy of an old arrest report, when he was a juvenile and had been brought in for solicitation of prostitution, as well as a print out of his recent profile on the escort company’s website. There was no fucking way they should have had that arrest report, but then again, how did they get a copy of the hotel bill?

So he had been made. Malloy discovered that Joel was most likely associating with a known male prostitute. And this information was given to his brother John. Blackmail? But who was doing the blackmailing? Did Malloy blackmail John, or did John simply pay him to dig up dirt on his own brother? At least Joel was right to feel paranoid.

Holden suddenly realized something. The last photo taken was on the last day he saw Joel. Duane and John knew he had seen him. Was he still being shadowed? If so, they’d have seen Roan come to his apartment, and Duane would most likely recognize a PI as unique as Roan. It wouldn’t be hard to figure out why Holden might want to see him, hire him.

And that’s how they swapped out Roan’s pills. He didn’t know it, but he had been under surveillance since he left Holden’s apartment. That’s how the killer knew that Roan was looking for him by day one.

This was his fault. Holy shit, was someone going to pay for this.

He closed the drawers, locking them again, and shoved one combined folder full of pictures and case notes down the front of his shirt, keeping his hands free. He locked the office up again but didn’t bother to reconnect the alarm system, because fuck it - let them wonder who the hell hit them. Let them wonder why.

Once he was in his car, he tucked them under the front seat, wedged inside a copy of Scientific American. He then made sure the safety was off the gun, and it was ready to go.

Time to pay someone a visit. Time to see if he was angry enough to shoot someone in the face.

11 - Ghosts

Dennis Caldera was perhaps the most dapper lawyer that Roan had ever encountered. He always wore tailored suits, never too expensive, but cut so exquisitely it didn’t matter that they were far from Prada. He had prematurely silver hair that was cut and styled just so, adding to the air of dignity he seemed to naturally exude. If he thought about it, he couldn’t recall Dennis ever cursing either in his office or at the courthouse; he was always aware of the image he was presenting. He was a class act, no ambulance chaser him; if you were represented by Dennis, you were being represented by the best. Judges generally liked him, and juries liked him even more, seeing a knowledgeable charmer with good taste and genteel manners.

So it always baffled Roan why Dennis decided to use him as his primary PI. He could have found someone more professional, someone who didn’t look like he’d just rolled out of bed half the time, someone who actually liked wearing a suit and tie, someone who could testify in court without the opposing attorney pointing out he was infected and snickering at his “special powers”. But this was where being the only openly gay private detective in the city helped him for once. Dennis liked to keep business with the “community” whenever possible, so Dennis either had to hire him or be a hypocrite. He could have been a hypocrite - most people were - but he decided to live by his code, and Roan’s bank account could thank him for that. He had to worry when another gay detective hung out his shingle.

Because he was such a class act, most other lawyers liked Dennis, at least in a professional capacity. He seemed to know people everywhere, which is why Roan called him. As soon as he said Cooper, Weiss, and Cooper, he made a “hmm” noise, the kind of hmm noise he made when he really didn’t like something and didn’t know how to politely tell you you were a fucking idiot for even thinking about it.  He then had to assure him that he wasn’t in debt to the mob or something, he just needed some inside information on a client. That made Dennis “hmm” some more, and then put him on hold. He was on hold long enough for Roan to take another pain pill. The pain wasn’t fading fast enough.

Roan was starting to feel slightly disconnected from his body when Dennis got back on. He said he knew a paralegal who worked for CWC, Taylor Sanchez, who was rather dissatisfied with his job. He’d probably be very happy to spill on any of CWC’s clients, although Dennis specifically asked him to not ask him for anything illegal, as he was young, naïve, and bitter. Roan appreciated the warning; too bad he intended to use it.

He called Taylor and got him, and told him that Dennis Caldera had recommended he talk to him. He put him on hold - Roan took that moment to scream in frustration and slam his phone down on the steering wheel - but when he came back, he just told him he got off work at five, and to meet him at the Wendy’s on Larson Street. Taylor had rung off before he could ask why.

Killing time, he got in contact with Fiona, only to discover her attempts to get in contact with Cherry had met a dead end. Cherry made regular visits to a very upscale spa and salon, but it turned out she hadn’t made an appointment for this week, and hadn’t been in for a while. She was laying low since the death of Joel, presumably.

Holden had better luck. He said he was in at John’s office as a temp. This was a surprise to Roan, because he was pretty sure Holden didn’t know how to do any office chore and didn’t want to know, but Holden told him he had an “in” which would allow him to fake it, as long as he actually didn’t have to sit down at a desk and do actual work. The “in” was apparently an employee he knew “very well”. (Holy fuck, how many closet gays were there?!) He said he was hoping to get something “incriminating” by the end of the day. Roan didn’t think it was possible to grab something so fast, but okay.

By the time he found the Wendy’s on Larson, he felt like he was floating. It was weird, but nice. He ordered a shake and waited at a front table for someone who looked like a paralegal to come in.

Taylor was one of those type A guys who were so full of energy they seemed to vibrate even while standing still. You imagined if  you gave him cocaine, he’d explode. He was a bland looking guy in a bland suit and tie type of outfit, with a plain white button down shirt and a dark tie that was a type of navy blue that Roan, for some reason, always associated with airline pilots. His haircut was short and neat, probably a Supercuts special, and he was trying very hard to corral the type of pimples that could often plague a person well into their late twenties. His eyes were such a pale hazel they were almost a suggestion of a color rather than an actual color, and his wire framed glasses made them look smaller, exacerbating the problem. He was all nerves as he came over to the table, but Roan couldn’t help but note that didn’t stop him from ordering a “Baconator“. And in spite of everything, Roan had to assure him he wasn’t a cop, and lifted up his shirt to prove he wasn’t wearing a wire. (Although with the perfection of directional mikes, you hardly needed to wear a body mike nowadays, but he wasn’t going to tell him that.) The funny thing was, no one seemed to notice or care. Considering the neighborhood, one man showing another man his nipples was probably one of the least strange things that had ever been done here.

Taylor went off for a bit on how he hated working for Cooper, Weiss, and Cooper, as he knew some of the clients were “shady” (only some?), and he was terrified the Feds were going to bust the office at any time. He wanted to get work at Dennis’s firm, but they had all the paralegals they needed, and it was a plum assignment anyways. Dennis had emailed him, though, asking him to hear Roan out, and he seemed to think that maybe helping him would give him an in with Dennis.

Roan told him he needed anything he could get on any legal or under the table transactions done by Kyle, John, or Joel Newberry in the past year (that was a guess). The name Newberry made Taylor sit ramrod straight in his plastic seat, as if he’d just received a cattle prod up the ass. Apparently everyone reacted that way when you brought the Newberrys into it. Roan watched sweat ooze out of his pores, gathering on his forehead like the visible remnants of evil thoughts, and then he put his cholesterol bomb down and excused himself from the table, ducking into the men’s room. Was that too much for him to attempt? Poor kid. He just wanted to get ahead, and some stranger was asking him to put his neck on the chopping block.

Someone at a near by table had abandoned their newspaper, so he picked it up and glanced at it. He instantly wished he hadn’t.

A big cat had mauled someone in Bishop Park last night, and killed another person, as well as a couple of pets (or at least it was blamed on the cat - investigation could render it an erroneous assumption). They’d already made connections between the Bowles killing and the German killing. He wondered briefly why Gordon hadn’t called him in on it, and then remembered he was in the hospital due to his heart attack. Son of a bitch, how had he forgotten that?  What was fucking wrong with him lately?

He rubbed his eyes, and realized they felt funny. Dry, and almost kind of hard, like they’d been replaced by stones, but when he pressed on them he could feel pressure, pain. It was hard to focus on the article, it was a little blurry (goddamn soy ink; sure, it was environmentally friendly, but it ran easily, and it smelled funny to his nose), but he could see at least one city councilman was calling on the chief of police to get the “goddamn cat menace” under control. As if that had never occurred to anyone; as if they were letting Grant run wild on purpose. (If it was Grant; it could have been another big cat. There were no details in the paper that actually swung it one way or another, and he knew the department wouldn’t release those kinds of details.)

Suddenly Taylor was back at the table, looking at him funny. “You okay, man?”

Roan wanted to ask him how he had managed to teleport from the bathroom to his chair, but then he realized the paper had fallen from his hands and was on the floor, and had probably fallen there a minute or so ago. For some reason, he only realized it in retrospect.

Those pills he took were just Tylenol codeine he scored up in Canada, right? He thought they were. Maybe they were. Holy shit, what did he take? He could be such a fucking idiot sometimes.

He lied and said he was, and Taylor was too freaked by the idea of digging up dirt on the Newberrys to call him on it.  He said he’d try, as long as Roan put in a good word for him to Dennis, and he agreed. The kid hinted around money, and Roan told him he’d be compensated, which was just the type of lawyer speak he wanted to hear.

He had stuff to pursue, other leads, he needed to check in with Seb on both the Grant Kim case and Gordo, but suddenly right then he wanted to go home, so he went home. He blacked out for about half the drive, so how he got there in one piece he had no idea. At the last minute, he checked the bottle in the glove compartment: Tylenol codeine. Then what the fuck was going on?

Roan stumbled in the door, and had just collapsed on the couch when he heard Dylan coming down the stairs. “I didn’t expect you home so early,” he said. “But I’m glad you are, ‘cause I was thinking I could make dinner tonight. But I have no idea what to -” He stopped suddenly and stared at him like he was a complete stranger. “Roan, what’s wrong?”

He looked up at him and didn’t know what to say. His head didn’t ache anymore, but it felt like it was filled with a damp, velvet fog. “I dunno. I had a headache, a migraine …” he forgot the word, so he just went on without it. “I took some Tylenol codeine for it. But there’s something wrong with it. “ Was it his ears, or did his voice sound kind of thick? Slow. Wrong.

Dylan initially frowned - Roan had promised him he’d given up the pills, after all - but he quickly got past it. “What do you mean there’s something wrong? With the pills?”

“Yeah. They’re not what was supposed to be in the bottle. I think. I dunno. I don’t feel well.” He realized it was getting harder to breathe. There was a tightness in chest, something he hadn’t felt since he was a kid and had walking pneumonia. His limbs felt heavy, and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could move them. If he could get mad, maybe he could bring the lion out, fight it back a bit, but he couldn’t imagine what would make him angry at this point. He was exhausted, and getting angry would require more energy than he had.

Dylan picked up the phone, and he heard him say, “Yes, I need an ambulance. I think my boyfriend’s been poisoned.”

Poisoned? That seemed overly dramatic. But Roan had to admit to himself that that might be the only word for it.

10 - The Shit Sisters

They went down the street to what could be called an upper class fern bar, where they served wine around the clock with overly expensive meals. Kyle ordered the wine without the food. Roan contented himself with water, although Kyle kept trying to rope him into joining him. When Roan mentioned he didn’t like wine, all he did was snort.

This place tried for an airy café look even inside, with high, small round tables and window walls looking out on grim sidewalks that no amount of potted plants could disguise. Kyle got them a corner table (of course), and the table was so goddamn small it was a joke; their knees were almost touching just sitting across from each other.

He laid the groundwork for his cover story, asking Kyle about what he did for the company and basic background shit (Kyle said he worked in “publicity” for the station, and it was all Roan could do not to laugh), and Kyle gulped down two glasses of wine like he was dying of thirst. By the third, color started seeping into his complexion, and he was deliberately rubbing his knee against his. Every time Roan moved his leg, Kyle’s leg still managed to find his again. He was considering kicking him, but he felt the need to ingratiate himself in with this drunken playboy loser until he was further along in his investigation.

Kyle got tipsy enough to get bored with his questions, and as Roan was writing one of his answers down in his notebook (actually, he was writing “Hard core alcoholic - needs to be drunk to relax around people”) Kyle touched his hand. Roan reflexively yanked it away. “Whoa, hey man, just lookin’ at your ring,” he said, partially smiling, a lopsided look that only made him look drunker. “That an engagement ring? I didn’t think women liked that kind of shit.”

“It’s a wedding ring.”

“Seriously? How long have you been married?”

“I’m not married anymore; I’m a widower.” It was such a weird thing to say: widower. He was, but when he put it that way, he seemed to realize that Paris was gone and had been gone for so long that it was unbelievable. Part of him still expected to wake up in the morning and find him hogging all the blankets.

Kyle frowned at him, his falsely tinted eyes betraying confusion. “Yer young for that, ain’t cha? So what’d she die of?”

“He was infected. Now, can we get back to you? You attended college, right?”

Kyle sat back and stared at him for a moment, then laughed. “Oh man, I knew you were too good looking to be straight. So did you run off to Boston or something?”

Roan gritted his teeth, trying to keep from reaching across and smashing Kyle’s stupid head into the table. He was so sorely tempted it was hard to resist. “He was Canadian. So where did you go? Yale, Harvard?” Roan knew where he’d tried - and failed - to go to college, he just wanted to change the subject.

It seemed to work. Kyle snorted again and poured the dregs of the wine bottle into his glass. “Oh yeah, right, ‘cause I’m so fucking brilliant and my dad wanted me to have the best, right? I went to UCLA for almost two years. Got some bullshit diploma my dad was able to buy, so my getting kicked out wasn’t so bad.”

“What were you kicked out for?”

“Well, they had this stupid rule where you actually had to show up for classes. Sometimes even sober.”

“Imagine that.”

“I know. I don’t remember that being in any contract I signed.” He swigged back the whole glass of wine in a single gulp, then slammed the glass back down with finality. He motioned the waitress over, and ordered another bottle of red. She looked nervously at both of them, but scuttled off without a word, aware that Kyle Newberry was the drunken customer asking, putting him in the special category of guys who could be served no matter how drunkenly obnoxious they got.

“I’m sorry about your father,” he said, holding back his observation that he didn’t seem all that broken up about his death.

Kyle shrugged, rubbing his leg against his again under the table. Motherfucker. He was asking to get punched. “That’s what happens to old guys. They die.”

“You sound so broken up.”

“We weren’t close. I mean, he bought me my diploma, yeah, but that was only to save face. He didn’t need to spell out what a disappointment I was to him. I got it.” The waitress brought over the new bottle of wine, and Kyle obviously checked out her ass as she walked away, although he was still playing footsie with him under the table. “It sucks that he died, but hey, I ain’t gonna miss him. I hardly ever saw him anyways.”

“So your relationship was distant?”

Kyle opened the new bottle and splashed a good amount into his empty glass. “More like non-existent. We had an occasional photo op, but that was it. Why do I give a shit? Guy was kind of a douche bag anyways.” Kyle leaned forward, propping his head on his hands, and gazed at him with a lascivious, drunken smile. “I have to admit I’m kinda curious about you gay guys. Why don’t we get out of here and see how curious we can get?”

Was he always this crass, or was it the booze talking? Truth be told, Roan didn’t give a shit which - he was physically repulsed by this asshole. “Stop the shit, Kyle. I know you’re one of those closet queens who won’t come out. Does your fiancée know she’s a beard, or is she going to find out when she comes home early and finds you getting reamed by the gardener?”

This made him burst into a hearty laugh, almost spitting out his wine. He smacked the table with his open palm, making it shake. “Damn, you’re hilarious. You’re a top, aren’t ya? Gotta be a top. I bet you’re a monster in bed.”

“I’m a monster in general. What about you?”

He gulped down his wine, and sat forward, with a folksy sort of grin on his face. But his eyes were flat and empty. “Listen, little man. I can buy and sell your piece of shit detective agency with one phone call. I could own your tight little ass, and the ass of everyone associated with you. You don’t want to fuck with me. Don’t even think of blackmailing me.”

That was interesting. Why did his mind go straight there? The easy answer to that was because it had happened before. “Someone’s blackmailed you, Kyle? Because you’re gay?”

“I am not gay,” he spat, lowering his voice to a harsh whisper. “And if you say that again, I’ll do you for slander.”

“Slander? I thought you just wanted to do me.”

He slumped back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest. “Play your cards right, be a good boy, and maybe you’ll get lucky.”

“If I get any luckier, I’ll have to shoot myself in the head.” He slid out of his high backed stool, and said, “I’ll call you if I have any further questions.”

“Yeah, you do that,” he said coolly, like he’d already started forgetting who he was. Monstrously fickle. Or did he have no genuine feelings, so he faked them at the drop of the hat so people didn‘t catch on? Kyle was hard to read in that sense, but Roan had already decided if this guy was any colder, you’d get freezer burn from mere proximity to him.

“One thing. Did your dad know you were getting blackmailed?”

Kyle stared at him gimlet eyed, his falsely green contacts insufficient shields for hiding his general contempt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The party line. Roan simply turned and walked out, not even sparing him a parting glance, although he could see Kyle’s reflection in the window, gulping down more wine. He had such a tolerance that Roan was sure he wasn’t even close to drunk; he had just acted that way so he’d have an excuse for his flirty behavior.

Roan also knew he was lying - he did have an idea of what he was talking about. The problem with his extra-sensory truth telling sense was that he didn’t know if Joel knew Kyle was being blackmailed. All he knew was someone had blackmailed (or tried to blackmail) Kyle, and someone else in the family probably knew. But who was an open question. Outside on the sidewalk, he found himself singing under his breath, “What exactly is my net worth of pride?”

He’d pulled out his phone to call Fi, see how she was doing with Cherry, when a sudden pain in his head almost dropped him to his knees. He did drop his phone as he grabbed his head; it felt like a hot drill bit had just burrowed into the soft meat behind his skull. For a moment he heard nothing but blood roaring in his ears, a wave of nausea waxing and waning, and when the pain and the noise started to subside, he was suddenly aware of people standing beside him. “Are you okay?” the man asked. It was a couple, an Asian man and a Caucasian woman, both in their mid to late forties, with figures so comfortably middle aged and similar that he guessed that if they weren’t married, they’d been together for years. The woman had picked up his phone, which miraculously hadn’t exploded into pieces on the pavement.

“Uh, yeah, thank you,” he said, straightening up and taking the proffered phone. Did he have tears in his eyes, or had things gone a bit blurry at the edges? He rubbed his eyes, and it seemed to get a little better. Maybe.

He reassured the kind strangers that he was all right and went to sit in his car for a moment. He worked in such a dark corner of life that he sometimes forgot there were decent people out there. They were few and far between, perhaps, but they were out there.

Sometimes he’d get sudden sharp head pains as a migraine precursor, but never any that sharp, never any that threatened to drop him to the pavement. What the fuck was that? Did someone have a voodoo doll of him, and they just shoved a knitting needle through the cranium? It felt like it.

The pain echoed, but was fading rapidly. Still, he reached under the seat and found his emergency bottle of water. He had his emergency pills in the glove compartment, and he took a couple, washing them down with the lukewarm, plastic tasting water. Holy shit. If his migraines kept coming on this bad, he’d have to go to his doctor. No, he supposed he’d have to go to the doctor very soon. First he collapses, now he almost gets dropped by a head pain. Something was going on with him, and there was no fucking way it was good.

His phone hummed in his pocket, and he let it go for a couple of rings before pulling it out. It was Dylan, so he answered it. He let Dylan talk, because he still felt winded. “Hey, Ro, I forgot to tell you last night I may have discovered your drug dealer named Mikey.”

“Really?” That was about Grant’s case, right?

“Yeah. Josh, one of the circuit boys, says the big source of Ecstasy and other club drugs was known solely  as MDMA, or Mike for short.” MDMA was the acronym for the chemical name of Ecstasy. “You want Sunshine or any variant, he’s the main man you go to. Supposedly he does nightclub hopping on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, hitting all the party places, straight, gay, and mixed. That’s where he does most of his selling.”

“He hit Panic?”

“Well, of course. I already asked Josh to point him out to me if he comes in.”

“Good. Call me the second he shows, and keep him there until I show up. I need to talk to this guy.”

“Sure.” He paused briefly. “Um, did you ask me to move in with you this morning?”

“I did.” Roan dug out his notebook and started flipping through it. He really wanted to check out the Kyle blackmail angle while he could still function. But where did he start there? “Does it freak you out now that you’re fully awake?”

“I don’t know. It kinda feels like we’re living together already.”

“My feeling exactly.”

“It’s just … are you sure? Living with a moody, self-absorbed artist is a total pain in the ass.”

“Living with me is a total pain in the ass. No difference.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say that …”

“I know. You’re Buddhist, and so much nicer than me. See, that’s why I need you. You can patch up all the gaping holes I punch in people’s emotional walls.”

He paused briefly. “Was that a mixed metaphor?”

“Fuck if I know. I think after the interview I just had, I’m just gonna start saying “I am a fish” for the next hour or so.”

“It was that bad?”

“The closet queen son of Joel looks like my best bet for killer at the moment, and fuck if I don’t hate nailing my own kind.”

“Well, gay people are just as capable of committing crimes as straight people. More so, if you believe James Dobson.”

“As a rule, I don’t believe a goddamn thing Dobson shits out of his mouth.”

“See? We agree on that.”

“We’re a perfect couple,” he concurred, finding a note he’d almost overlooked. Kyle, John, and Joel shared a law firm: Cooper, Weiss, and Cooper. Interestingly enough, he knew they were very expensive, and a whiff of rottenness lingered over everything they touched. Most cops knew these fuckers were helping launder money for drug dealers and anyone wealthy enough to afford their services, but they were slick enough to never get caught. They’d probably have no problem arranging a blackmail payoff - or whatever else might be deemed necessary to get rid of the problem. That was a good place to start.

“So why do you think the closet queen did it?”

“I have nothing tangible. He’s simply a sociopath with all the emotional empathy of a desk drawer, and I think he may have been blackmailed, but I’m not sure where or if that fits into this.”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here: he pissed you off.”

“Oh fuck yeah. Smarmy little prick. He pretended to get drunk at lunch and kept hitting on me with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the crotch. He also threatened me, but fuck that. He has money and power, but I can turn into a lion at any time - I win.” All the money and power in the world couldn’t keep a hungry, angry lion from eating you. It was a strange comfort, but a comfort all the same.

“He was hitting on you? Should I be jealous?” There was a hint of teasing in his voice.

“Since when am I attracted to conceited dickheads? Oily, closet queen conceited dickheads?”

“Well, if you put it that way, I sound like an idiot.”

“No, you don’t. Actually, it’s cute that you’re jealous.”

“Cute?”

“Sexy cute.”

“Damn right.”

Roan’s mind had already started wandering as he considered how to approach Cooper, Weiss, and Cooper. If they knew he was an ex-cop, they’d shut him out instantly and there wouldn’t be a damn thing he could do about it.

But didn’t he know someone who could help him get a foot in the door?