Infected: Shift (58 page)

Yeah, okay, that didn’t make sense. “Who’s the head of Visionics Limited now?”

“No one. It’s a dummy corporation.”

He knew Fiona wasn’t trying to be irritating, but this kind of was. Would it kill her to just spit it out? “Who’s in charge of Cook’s estate?”

“No one.” Her blue eyes gazed back up at him expectantly, as if she was hoping he would make sense of all of this. “His family was gone, he was an only child, he never married or seemingly had a serious girlfriend. I think he was closeted gay or asexual. Anyways, his will stipulated that all his money be shared between six different charities.”

“So the Visi-whatever the hell name is up for grabs.”

“Technically, although not a lot of people know about it.”

Roan considered this all carefully, feeling he was getting closer to something big and ugly. “Hatcher had to know about the shell corp.”

She bit her lower lip in thought. She wasn’t wearing makeup right now, but she was still attractive in a warm, open way that you really wouldn’t anticipate from someone with a footlocker full of whips and nipple clamps. “You’d think so. But you don’t think the snuff site is his, do you? Why would he hire you if it was? He wouldn’t want this coming out.”

“How would it? He hired me to look for Jordan, not for the owner of a snuff site.” A couple of things seemed to suddenly pop up in his mind, like corpses finally rising to the surface of a stagnant pond. “That’s why he’s been ducking my calls. He can’t find the owner of the site ’cause it’s him, and he doesn’t want me to know. Bet the server isn’t in Romania either. Son of a bitch.”

“But if Jordan’s run off to find the snuff film location, wouldn’t he know?”

“Hatcher’s a busy guy. I bet he’s not hands-on with the site. In fact, he may just profit from the fucking thing, and someone else runs it. Someone who wouldn’t know Jordan on sight, especially if he gave them a phony name.” Did that sound right? No, none of this would ever sound right, but it felt sickeningly plausible. Was that how Jordan found the site in the first place? He found the name somewhere among his dad’s stuff and checked it out and discovered he liked it. But he never let his father know he was in on his dirty secret. It allowed him to hide in plain sight from his father, and who would look for him on a porn site? Certainly not Hatcher.

“Then…,” she began, turning back to the computer screen. She sounded like she didn’t know what to say. “Are we dead? Is he gonna have us killed ’cause we know his dirty little secret?”

“You watch too many bad movies. Killing us would just bring more attention to the problem he’s trying to sweep under the rug.”

“So how would he sweep us under the rug?”

She locked eyes with him, and he felt something loosen in the pit of his stomach. A man like him would delegate, would get someone—someones—with no connection to him whatsoever to take care of the problem.

Like white supremacists? He suddenly wondered how you went about hiring a gang of them, and how much it cost.

If Hatcher had started this ball rolling, Roan didn’t care how much money and power he had. He was going to kill the bastard.

Roan
stormed out of Fiona’s place with a full head of steam (not just a cliché—it actually felt like it, like his head was a teakettle, and steam was just going to erupt through his ears at any moment). He called Hatcher’s number and got his machine again, so he simply said, “Either get back to me immediately, or this is all over the web. Hope you’ve had a colonoscopy recently, ’cause the Feds will be crawling up your ass by the end of the day. Close your eyes and think of England, you sick fuck.” He felt like throwing the phone, but he would have broken it. He made himself remember that this was his cell and not Hatcher himself. He just had to wait; then he could pick up Hatcher and throw him, hopefully from a very tall building.

What if his own money-grabbing exercise had killed his own son? Would that convince him that maybe, just maybe, this was all a big fucking mistake? Hard to say with raving capitalists sometimes.

He had just got in the car when his phone went off. Checking he saw it was home calling. In a way, he hoped it was trouble, because then he could vent some steam on some assholes. “Yeah.”

“Honey,” Dylan said in a quiet, lilting voice. “I don’t want to alarm you, but our home has been infested by hockey players.”

“Not the entire team, I hope.”

“No. Actually, Tank is a hell of a cook.”

That was a surprise. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah! He made these buttery, cheesy omelets that were so good, I swear if he was gay, I’d have left you for him.”

“That’s it. Pack your shit and get out, you disloyal bastard.”

Dylan snickered. “He claims he can only cook breakfasts, though. Omelets, pancakes, crepes.”

“He makes crepes? Hot damn, I’ll leave you for him first.”

“I’ll try and save you some eggs, but hockey players eat like pigs. Scott already had to take off on an egg run.” He paused briefly. “Tank has an interesting story.”

“He’s been talking?”

“No, but he doesn’t have to. There’s a surprising amount of depth in his eyes. He always seems to be thinking. I bet he’s a hell of a lot smarter than he seems to be, probably—no offense to the rest of the Falcons—the smartest guy on the team. He’s also surprisingly good-natured for a man I wouldn’t trust around a loaded firearm. Speaking of which, I called my therapist.”

Dylan used to see a therapist on a regular basis but had quit about two years ago. Roan scoured his brain, trying to dig up the name. “Savage, right?”

“Yes, Doctor Savage. She has an opening on Thursday and can squeeze me in.”

“The problem is me, not you.”

“Bullshit. I learned how to manage my anger effectively, and I backslid. I don’t want to keep falling backwards.”

“Then you probably need to get away from me.”

“None of that. My wanting to protect you isn’t a failing on your part. It’s me needing to deal with my issues.”

“You know, it’s very sweet you want to protect me. Most people figure I’m on my own.” He leaned back in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes. For some reason, anger often exhausted him.

“Well, you are a super-macho dude.”

“And inhuman. Don’t forget that.”

He sighed dramatically. “Don’t take this the wrong way, sweetie, but fuck you to hell.”

That made Roan chuckle. Really, he deserved no less. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just a little tired. I still can’t believe someone did that. Also, I can’t believe I’m entertaining a bunch of jocks from Canada.”

“Grey’s American.”

“Which explains so much about him. Of course he’s the team enforcer. Can we sue the Falcons for stereotyping?”

“You know, you’d think we should be able to. But it’s a fair cop, and society is to blame.” It was stuffy in the car, so Roan rolled down the window and noted how much better he was feeling. When he'd first got in here, he was ready to kill someone (Hatcher). Talking to Dylan had pulled him back to sanity, which was probably the best thing for everyone involved.

“You can’t go to the Monty Python well forever.”

“You’ll pry Monty Python from my cold, dead hand.”

“Wow. There’s so many things wrong with that sentence.”

“Yes, well, there’s so many things wrong with me.”

“Knock off the self-pity shit. But does that explain why you sounded so pissed off when you answered the phone?”

“Yeah, I was expecting another call. In fact, I’d better get off. And you’d better buckle up, ’cause there might be a shitstorm after this.”

“Another?” He sounded genuinely exasperated. “I know money is tight, but can we go somewhere and get you away from all this trouble you seem to be causing? Drive to California or something? What about Canada? We can go back to Canada.”

There was almost a plea in Dylan’s voice that made Roan feel bad. He was putting him through the ringer, hurting the only person he really didn’t want to hurt. He had to make this right with him, but he didn’t know how, or even if he should. If Dylan was a friend, describing a relationship with someone else, he’d advise him to pack up his shit and run, put as much distance between him and this drama-magnet boyfriend as possible. It was what he should tell Dylan now, only he wasn’t that noble. “Once we get through this, we can go wherever you want. You pick the place.”

Dylan thought about it a moment. “Atlantis.”

He smiled weakly at Dylan’s attempt at a joke. “The place has to actually exist.”

“Damn it. What is it with you and these picky loopholes?”

“I’m an asshole. Now I know it’s a pain in the ass, but stick with the rough boys ’til you hear from me again.” The rough boys were, of course, Grey, Tank, and Scott (and any secondary Falcons they may have roped into this baffling guard duty).

Dylan sighed heavily and seriously. He probably hadn’t been thrilled to wake up and find everyone else but Roan in the living room. “And when will that be?”

“I don’t know, honey. Soon, I promise.” He paused, looking out the windshield, finally noticing it needed to be cleaned. If these Aryan fucks weren’t amateurs, he knew leaving Grey, Tank, and Scott to protect Dylan wouldn’t be enough, would just get them all killed, but they
were
amateurs, and Grey alone would be enough to take them out. But the others were just insurance, a guarantee that no matter what, Dylan would get through this okay. Physically okay, at any rate. “I love you.”

“You’d better,” he replied, in mock anger. “And remember, you’re not indestructible. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“You know damn well it’s too late for that.”

Roan waited for Hatcher to call him back, but he didn’t, and by the time he was driving along the lake, headed for Hatcher’s extravagantly expensive house, his anger had swelled to a nearly unmanageable size. He called Fiona to let her know he was going in, and if she hadn’t heard from him within an hour, to go ahead and let it run. She was ready to post at some hard-core tech sites, giving them the breakdown of Hatcher’s connections to the website. Not only would it then spiral, as web gossip was wont to do, but she was convinced there’d be some quality Hatcher-hating crackers (not hackers—that was apparently a gauche term) who’d infiltrate anything of Hatcher’s they could get their hands on. She was sure, illegal or not, they’d dig up even more dirt.

He drove up to the gate and gunned the engine. As soon as the speaker clicked on, he said, “Either let me in or I bring this gate down. There’s enough steel in this car to do it.” There was. Oh, how he loved Paris and his love of Road Warrior cars even more now. He could drive this puppy through the gate and straight into Hatcher's living room, and with its huge windows, it wouldn’t even be remotely difficult. He could probably keep the GTO going until the kitchen before he met sufficient resistance.