Infected: Freefall (2 page)

Roan had started running, but he could tell from the smell the robber was giving off that he was amped up and probably relatively impervious to pain. He started turning, gun out, and Roan realized he’d started running too late. The guy would have time to shoot him before he reached him.

So he lunged for him. He didn’t ram into him—somehow he landed with his feet on the edge of the counter, bracketing the man’s chest, putting him in a good position to grab the man’s gun hand and punch him in the face with his other hand. He felt a tooth give under his knuckle.

“Motherf—” The guy began struggling, and Roan snapped his wrist like it was made of plywood. He let out a horrified yelp, and Roan slammed his forehead down on the man’s face. It hurt like a motherfucker, and he saw stars, but the robber got it worse. Roan let his arm go so he could slide to the floor, and Roan instantly grabbed the edge of the counter, where he had planted his feet. Was this defying gravity? He supposed not, but it was pretty close. He was balancing—easily—on the very edge of the counter. He could see the clerk behind the counter, crouched down with a thin trickle of blood dripping from his scalp. His eyes were wide and definitely startled, like he wasn’t sure if he should be more afraid of Roan or the guy with the gun.

“You call the cops?” Roan asked, finally feeling the strain on the backs of his legs.

For a second he just stared at Roan like he couldn’t believe he was for real, then gestured to something under the counter. “Got a button back here.”

“Good.” Roan dropped back down to the floor, careful to avoid the robber, who was already coming around. Roan kicked him over onto his face and put a foot on the back of his head to keep him down, leaning back against the counter to wait. “Don’t struggle. I have your gun now.” Actually, it was still on the counter where it had fallen, and Roan had no interest in it. He didn’t need it.

The clerk stood up at some point, turning the set’s volume down to almost nothing, and eventually asked, “How did you do that?”

Oh no. “Do what?”

“That—that jump. I’ve never seen anyone do something like that outside of movies. Are you a gymnast or something?”

The jump? The jump. Staring down the aisle, he realized his lunge was done about, what, twenty feet from the robber? More or less? He should go for the long-jump competition. Roan wanted to say,
“No, I’m a cat,”
but managed to fight the urge. It was for the best. “Not exactly.” He didn’t know he could do that. But if he could jump from a third floor and manage to land on his feet (and not break every bone in his legs), why couldn’t he do this? It was a minor variation on a theme.

He wasn’t sure if he wanted the cops that showed up to know him or not, but as it turned out, the difference was split. It was Thompson and Bragg, two cops he had seen involved with crowd control at one of the Church of Divine Transformation protests he was called in to help patrol—they all knew of each other, but didn’t really know each other at all. Thompson was a rock-solid, six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound guy who bore a very minor resemblance to a young Jim Brown, a reference that Thompson totally didn’t get when he mentioned it. It made Roan feel so very old. Bragg was an attractive, slightly heavyset woman, ten inches shorter than her partner, who seemed to show no emotion whatsoever, no matter the situation. Thompson was a bit more jovial, but in a way that suggested that he and Bragg had worked out their whole “good cop/bad cop” routine in advance.

Bragg took his statement while the EMTs bundled the suspect off to the emergency room (broken wrist, possible concussion), and Thompson interviewed the clerk, who was actually the owner of the shop—it seemed he had a hard time getting people to cover the night shift. (No, really?) He gave Thompson an earful on shitty police coverage and response time, but Thompson took it all with the same good humor he took everything.

Roan got his tea. As soon as the cops arrived and took over, he got another bottle from the cold case. He offered money, but the clerk/owner waved it away. Maybe a free drink was the least he could expect. Maybe he should have tried to get a frozen burrito thrown in as well.

Bragg asked him if he carried a gun, and he opened his jacket and showed her the Sig Sauer in his belt holster. That made her raise a painted eyebrow at him. “You didn’t pull it?”

“Why? Get in a gun fight with a civilian right there?”

“When you hit him with the bottle, you could have just as well have shot him. There’d have been no fight at all.”

Roan scoffed. “Kill a guy for trying to rob a store? I don’t think so.”

She kept giving him that stare, like she couldn’t believe he was for real. It was then, inside the store, that Thompson let out a startled laugh and said, “Lisha, you gotta see this! This is fucking awesome.” Thompson was watching security camera footage of the incident. He looked up and met Roan’s eyes. “How’d you fuckin’ do that, man?”

“Pilates,” Roan replied, deadpan.

Thompson thought about it for a moment, thinking he was serious, but then he realized he was being sarcastic and laughed, shaking his head. “You’re crazy.”

He felt like it, but he knew Thompson meant it in a humorously complimentary way. Roan hoped that footage didn’t end up on YouTube too.

Roan drove home, listening to the Deftones and trying to stay awake. You’d think that his adrenaline would be high, but it wore off very quickly. He was tired and kind of drained. It was a shitty tail, and it had been a shitty couple of weeks. It was one of those times when he wondered if he should quit this job entirely, and then he’d wonder what he could do instead and reconsidered it. He was only qualified to be a smartass, and amazingly, no one paid for that. Well, very few at any rate.

The house was dark when he got home, but Dylan’s beater car was in the driveway, and he’d left the porch light on for Roan. He unlocked the door to a quiet house that still had the smells of recent cooking lingering in it. From the scent alone, he guessed it was something Moroccan, as he could smell peppers and cumin and couscous. Other things too—was that raisins?—but those were the dominant smells. There was a note from Dylan on the breakfast bar that he read while listening to the messages on his answering machine. It was short, saying Dylan had tried to stay up and wait for him, but he was tired, so he ate dinner and went to bed, but he’d left him dinner in the fridge. Fair enough. The messages were nothing remarkable. Unless Dylan had erased it, this was day number two without a death threat from an anonymous guy he'd started to think of as Mr. Asshat. He should mark it on the calendar.

But while it seemed good on the surface, it could be terrible. Maybe Mr. Asshat had gotten bored. Or maybe he’d decided that the time for talking was done, and the time for action was nigh. Fuck it—he’d find out soon enough.

There was a brief tug of war between hungry and tired, but tired won, so he simply went upstairs, letting the dim moonlight illuminate his path. He didn’t really need to see anyways; he knew this house, how everything was laid out. He didn’t need to see to know what was where.

Once he made it to the bedroom, he quietly stripped, piling his clothes on the chair before slipping into bed beside Dylan. Roan had bought new sheets and blankets, an attempt to move on even in a merely cosmetic sense, and he still wasn’t used to the feel of them against his skin. It was weird what you got used to without realizing it.

He didn’t want to wake Dylan up, but the shifting mattress seemed to do it, and he turned toward Roan and opened his sleepy eyes. “Hey there.” He must have glanced at the clock on the nightstand behind him, as he quickly added, “Wow, that was one long tail.”

“Yeah.”

Dylan cupped his face in his hand as he brushed one of his legs against his. This was still nice; he still missed the warmth of another Human being when it wasn’t there. “Anything happen?”

He wanted to say,
“I’m a hostage situation away from superherodom. Do you think I have an ass for spandex?”
But instead he said, “Nope, not really. How’d your night go?”

“Oh, dull. It was a really slow night for some reason.”

“Cock ring show in town?”

He smirked, too tired to laugh. “I think I’d have been informed if there was. I’m glad I grabbed one of your books before I left, ’cause I ended up reading most of it. Not that the boss was happy about me reading on the job, but there was no one to serve drinks to for long stretches.”

“Tell him reading makes you look smart, and smart guys are hot.”

“Only to some.”

“I don’t like himbos.”

He kissed him softly on the bottom lip, letting his hand trail down his chest. “I know. It’s very sweet of you.”

“I’m a weirdo.”

“Stop that,” Dylan said mildly. He snuggled closer, and Roan put his arms around him as Dylan nestled his head into his neck. He must have washed his hair before he went to bed, because Dylan’s hair smelled faintly of green-tea conditioner.

Roan could hear birds start chirping outside, as it was just about four in the morning, and out here some of the songbirds beat the sun by a good hour. Not many, though, so it wasn’t too distracting. He concentrated on Dylan’s breathing as it slowed and deepened as he fell back to sleep, and tried to copy him. He was tired, and yet not quite tired enough to fall asleep.

Maybe because somewhere, in the back of his mind, he had this awful feeling that something bad was going to happen, that he had dodged so many bullets that his luck was bound to turn. You could fight a lot of things, but odds and entropy always got you in the end.

Roan just wondered who Mr. Asshat was, and what they would do when they finally decided to pull the trigger.

2

Exodus Damage

R
OAN
dreamed that he was pleading to someone that he was trying. He didn’t know who, or what it was about, but, with jumbled dream logic, he was sure it was the most important thing in the world. He was desperate to convince this person he was trying, and he could feel his heart pounding even in his dream, anxiety spiking and punching through the dream state.

So when his alarm went off, he felt like he lurched out of sleep, the beeping so annoying he wanted to slap it across the room—and almost did, but decided he didn’t want to spend any more money on replacing broken alarm clocks. He turned it off and lay there for a moment, aware he was sweating and his heart rate was just starting to slow. Birds were chirping loudly outside his window, but it was a gloomy day, so light was filtered, as if through a dirty aquarium.

He heard soft footsteps in the hall, so he wasn’t surprised when he heard the bedroom door open. (He really needed to oil that hinge.) Dylan padded in and asked, “You awake?”

“Sadly.”

Roan heard a rustle of paper and smelled that curious soy ink newspapers used now, and Dylan asked, “Were you ever going to tell me about this?”

Roan opened his eyes and saw that he was holding out a folded square of the paper, opened to the inside of the local section, where they had these tiny articles about the crime beat. There was an article titled
“Robbery Thwarted By Customer.”
Oh terrific. Hadn’t it happened too late to make the morning paper? How fast was their turnaround time? The small article—and it was printed in small font—was only two paragraphs long, identified him and the would-be robber by name, but they couldn’t just leave it at names. Oh no. He was identified as
“Roan McKichan, a private investigator with ties to the police department.”
That would come as a shocker to most of the police department.

He looked up to see Dylan looking down at him with his dark eyebrows raised curiously. He wasn’t quite angry, but he was clearly wondering if he should go there. Roan sighed and rubbed his eyes, buying time. “It wasn’t a big deal. It happened on my way home. I just didn’t feel like talking about it last night. Or this morning. Whatever.”

Dylan sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. He looked only slightly more awake than Roan did, dressed in sweatpants and an old “Ski Mojave” T-shirt. Roan could smell eggs and toast, and hoped he’d made huevos rancheros. “Technically, it’s afternoon, but I made breakfast anyways. Wanna join me, hero?”

That last bit was weary, not sarcastic, so he took that as a good sign. He assured Dylan once he joined him downstairs he’d tell him everything, which would give Roan time to edit his story. He took a quick shower, washing away the sweat and letting his adrenaline levels even out. He didn’t know why fragments of such a banal dream could disturb him so much, but it did. An anxiety dream? Who was he failing? Dylan? He knew that one already. If he was going to be troubled by dreams, they could have the decency to tell him something new.

He really wanted codeine. He briefly considered even just popping half a Tylenol codeine, which was the equivalent of scarfing a baby aspirin, but ultimately he decided not to. He could at least try, for Dylan, even if he didn’t know it. He tossed on some old jeans and a tank top, mainly because they were the first items he pulled blindly out of the drawer.

He was greeted by the sharp scent of dark espresso and the mellow sounds of Sun Kil Moon on the stereo, as Dylan usually liked to listen to music when he cooked, and he had gotten the espresso maker out of the closet, unaware that it had been a wedding present from Paris’s parents to the both of them. Roan was sure if he told him he’d put it away, but Roan had never told him.

Dylan had made a kind of tofu scramble that was better than it sounded, and Roan told him an abbreviated version of what had happened at the convenience store last night. He stopped it at the throwing of the tea, implying that stunned the robber enough that he was able to subdue him until the cops arrived. He didn’t see it as lying, more as just simply not admitting he was getting more freaky as he got older.

Dylan did have some good news, although he didn’t seem very thrilled about it. He’d got a showing at a downtown art gallery, but not one of those smaller avant-garde places where he often had showings. It seemed the “big” city gallery had decided to highlight local artists, and he was chosen after someone else fell through, and one of the artists actually in the show recommended him. It’d be in two weeks, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. He was sure that no one in the gallery actually knew who he was, save for Reiko, who had recommended him. He felt like he was being tossed scraps, and on top of that, he had no idea what he’d show. Roan encouraged him to pick out his most “meaningful” pieces (Dylan said he didn’t have favorites, as he just couldn’t judge his own work that way), and to include at least one of his “bleeding hardware” series, if only for him. He was promising he’d go with Dylan to the debut showing, and Roan had no idea what he’d wear to an art gallery soiree (in fact, he was relatively sure that none of his clothes were nice enough), when the phone rang and probably saved him from sinking into even deeper trouble.