Prey (30 page)

“—‘it’s me’. Say that, and you’ll be sleeping in the garage.”

Fair enough. “It’s not a question of trust. I’m just… if I talk about it, it’s real. If I don’t, there’s still a possibility I’m just making it up or dreaming; it could all be a figment of my imagination. But saying it aloud… I’ll have to deal with it. I’m not sure I’m ready for that.” He couldn’t look at Paris, not only because he wasn’t sure he could face his rightful indignation, but also because he had inexplicable tears in his eyes.

He had to rub them away before Paris noticed, and he had no idea why they’d appeared in the first place. Because it was the awful chickenshit truth?

There was a long and painful silence, but then Par touched his shoulder, giving it a small squeeze. “Sweetheart, I know you think this is horrible, but I don’t think it is.”

“I’m inhuman.”

“No.” Paris grabbed his face firmly in his hands and made him look Infected: Prey

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at him. He had his “wise beyond his years” expression on his face, his eyes a peaceful, sympathetic blue. “You are human, and you will always be human no matter what. What you have are gifts. They don’t make you less human.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t have them.”

“No, but I wish I did. Just think how much I’d get laid after that.” He gave him a big, cheeky grin, eyes sparkling like sapphires in the sun.

Roan didn’t want to feel better, didn’t want to laugh, but he couldn’t help but crack a smile. Par was just trying to make him feel better, but this wouldn’t be laughed away—how could it? “Can you ever not think with your dick?”

“I’m a man—of course not,” Paris claimed, then pulled him in for a kiss, dropping one of his warm hands to Roan’s thigh. It was nice, so nice he was kind of sorry they had to go to work. He kissed him hard in response, tangling his hand in Paris’s soft hair, and when Roan pulled away, he said, “We should go home for lunch.”

“Now who’s thinking with his dick?” Paris gave him a wink and got out of the car.

He sighed, blindly reaching for the door handle. The morning was overcast, the sky a layer of dirty cotton, but all it was doing was holding in the humidity. It felt like a storm was on the way, the ozone giving the air a sharp tang he could feel in his sinuses. “Bastard, you did that on purpose.”

Paris was already halfway across the parking lot, but he looked back at him with the kind of seductive smile that always cut him—and every other breathing humanoid member of the planet—off at the knees. “Did I?

Oh, but I’m so harmless and cute.”

Roan shook his head, unable to keep from genuinely smiling now.

“Cocktease,” he accused, just as one of the lawyers over at the small Gorman and Singh firm came out his unit door. He stopped as if shocked with a cattle prod, looked between the pair of them in goggle-eyed shock, and quickly turned and went back inside his office.

Paris tried to stifle a laugh but failed, and that startled a laugh out of Roan as well. Poor guy. Maybe they should send him a fruit basket or something as an apology.

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might be pushing it. Something manly was called for—a basket of power tools and motor oil. But he was a lawyer; a basket of Scotch and Pepcid AC would probably be most appropriate.

Once inside the office of MK Investigations, the phone on Paris’s front desk was already ringing, so he went into professional mode right away, and Roan put on the coffee before retreating to his office and getting down to the boring job of running computer checks. This was certainly the job for someone who worried they were losing what little humanity they had. Did anything make you feel more human than being a bored corporate drone? Inhuman was starting to look better and better.

He’d killed about forty minutes and two-and-a-half people on his list when he heard a tonal change in Paris’s voice out in the front office. He couldn’t make out the words precisely, not over the rattle and hum of the air conditioner, but Paris always had this smoothly professional but wonderfully friendly “assistant voice” he used on clients that always seemed to relax them and make them like him immediately. (Paris was the perpetual good cop, and he was the perpetual bad cop. Playing to strengths, as it were.) This was more his normal voice, with an added edge of hardness.

He got up and opened his office door, not sure what he expected to see, but fairly certain it wasn’t what he did see.

Paris was standing up behind his desk, his arms crossed over his chest in a posture of barely contained anger. On the other side of the desk, out of lunging distance, was the last person Roan had ever expected to see in his office: Eli Winters.

Eli had managed to get off his assault and unrestrained charges with nothing more than community service, proving that, as odious and ugly a person as Guy Stovak was, he had some redemptive value as a weasely, shit-slick lawyer. So that’s how he excused his own existence—Roan had always wondered.

Eli gave him a smile meant to be friendly, but it didn’t reach his eyes and looked like a rictus, a final, muscular spasm of a dying body. Eli had a new haircut, fashionably short with the bangs swept up like a sea wall and highlighted sunny blond, a two-hundred-dollar haircut he probably spent five hundred for, and—oh, he was dying to tell him—extremely gay. All he needed was a skintight white T-shirt and jeans that were slung just below the waist, showing a few centimeters of taut, tan flesh, and he could Infected: Prey

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have been every other guy in any gay bar in this city. Was Eli aware he had a gay cut? Maybe it was trendy… but wasn’t metrosexuality out now?

Eli’s outfit seemed to tell him metrosexuality was still in, as he was wearing tailored Armani slacks and a needlessly expensive silk button-down shirt of bright green, blue, and red vertical stripes, the shirt open at the collar so you could see the silver necklace with the small cat pendant.

Was it supposed to be a leopard? It was a detail-free silhouette, a drop of liquid mercury; it could have been any cat.

“Roan,” Eli said, his voice both flat and slightly edged with sarcasm.

“It seems your… assistant thinks I’m here to cause trouble.”

Roan leaned against the doorjamb, fixing him with a caustic glare that he hoped would scare him off. “You don’t cause much else.”

Eli attempted to chuckle, but it sounded forced and false. “People say the same thing about you.”

“In my case, it’s true. And if you don’t want some, turn around and leave.”

Half of his mouth quirked up in what might have been a genuine smile. “I like that, that’s good. You should be an action hero.”

“Five seconds, then I physically throw you out.”

He raised his hands in a warding-off gesture, as if Roan was physically advancing on him right now. Filtered sunlight coming through the blinds glinted off his platinum Rolex and a chunky gold and ruby pinky ring he always, inexplicably, wore. Roan thought it made him look like a Mafia don’s kept boy. “Look, I know you don’t like me, but this is no way to treat a client, is it?”

Roan straightened up, feeling muscles tense across his shoulders. “I told you to get out.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Eli continued, ignoring him. “It’s time to do something for your community, Roan.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a check, which he held up like a shield. “I want to hire you.”

If this was a joke, it was a really poor one.

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The Best Revenge

ROAN felt he had waited long enough for a punch line. “You want to hire me?” he repeated, not bothering to hide the disbelief and contempt in his voice. “For what exactly? Piñata?”

“I have a serious matter that needs looking into, and I believe in hiring within the community,” Eli replied, without a hint of facetiousness.

Paris rolled his eyes, and Roan had to restrain the urge to do the same thing. Eli was comparing himself to Roan because they were both infected, huh? “I’m not your community.”

“Oh, I know you don’t like it,” he said, with a patronizing smile.

“But we have much more in common than we have in difference.”

“Take that back and I’ll give you five minutes.”

“You this nice to all your clients? I’m surprised you’re still in business.”

Roan turned and walked back into his office, leaving the door open.

Eli followed, closing the door behind him. “All this hostility,” Eli said, as he looked around his office, as if appraising its worth. “It can’t be good for your chi.”

Roan sat behind his desk, closing the browser on his computer screen. “You’re wasting time.”

Eli sighed expansively, like a balloon deflating, and took one of the metal and leather chairs before his desk. Eli had a “messenger bag,” aka a man purse (Seriously, was he trying to look as gay as possible? Was this some sort of obscure shot at him?), slung over his left shoulder, and as he sat down, he swung it onto his lap. “Did you see the paper this morning?”

“Yes. Why?”

He rummaged in his bag for a moment, and pulled out the local Infected: Prey

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section of the paper. “You see this?” He tossed it on Roan’s desk.

The paper was folded so the story that was facing up was a tiny column on the mysterious shooting of a nineteen-year-old girl at the Wildwood Apartments, which he knew from his cop days was a tenement.

Nothing good ever happened at the Wildwood, so he couldn’t say he was surprised by a homicide—they probably had about three to five a year, mostly drug- and gang-related. “Yes. And?”

“Did you know she was infected?”

He scanned the article rapidly, but there was no mention of that. It only mentioned she was nineteen-year-old Ashley Cryer, originally from Corpus Christi, Texas, and a barista at the Starbucks on Third and Grant.

Dead from a single gunshot wound to the head, which probably meant she was killed almost instantly. Not likely to be a gangbanger, so what was the deal there? Robbery gone wrong? Mistaken identity? Psychotic ex-boyfriend? “It doesn’t say that.”

“I have sources, Roan. And do you know what? She’s the fourth infected who’s been mysteriously killed in a month. They’re all killed by gunshot wounds, usually to the face, usually point-blank.” He rummaged in his bag again and pulled out what looked like a computer printout, which he slid across his desk. “Look at them. On top of that, they’re just kids.”

The computer printout was a collection of different little articles—

and little was the key word, being at most four paragraphs long—about people dead by gunshot wounds in the area, going back to a little under three weeks ago. The first victim, chronologically, was a twenty-two-year-old named Patrick Farley, who lived downtown in a reasonably decent apartment building. Next was a twenty-year-old named Christa Hernandez, killed in a suburban housing estate, and last was twenty-year-old Melissa Prescott, killed eight days ago in a run-down complex about a mile from here. None of the articles specifically identified them as infected... but they probably wouldn’t. That was medical information, and if it wasn’t relevant to how they died, it would be left out so the surviving family didn’t sue for “defamation of character” or whatever bullshit reason a lawyer could cook up. But although the space of days was uneven, essentially there was one kill a week.

He glared at Eli. “How do you know they were infected? This goes no further until you tell me how you know.”

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Now Eli rolled his eyes, as if he was being pointlessly difficult. “The coroner.”

“You know the county coroner?”

“He’s a friend of the family. My dad and his dad were hunting buddies; we’ve known each other since we were kids.”

Oh fun. The coroner was of privileged stock, or had the Winters family occasionally slummed in its choice of companions? Either way, this was a nugget of information Roan happily filed away. That could become useful. “So he’s been leaking illegal information to you?”

“Don’t be a butthead, Roan. Don’t you hear what I’m saying?

Someone is murdering infecteds.”

“Have you been to the police?”

Eli clicked his tongue in exasperation. “Of course I’ve been to the police, but you know how they are with us. Hell, you should know better than anybody.”

“How they are with ‘us’? Rich-boy pricks who deify themselves?”

Eli glared back at him, and he supposed the look was supposed to be intimidating, but Roan actually had to swallow back the urge to laugh. Oh yeah, he was shaking; he was so scared he just might yawn.

“I know you hate me, Roan, but I had no idea you were such a self-loathing asshole.”

“Excuse me?”

“You hate being infected, don’t you? You probably think they got what they deserved.” Eli snatched back the computer printout angrily, and Roan half-expected him to ball it up and throw it in his face.

Roan’s own anger was tempered by puzzlement. Did Eli actually think they were “brothers” now, because they all shared the same illness?

“Infection is a disease, Eli. It’s not a divine gift, like you claim it is.”

His eyes flashed with resentfulness. “See? Self-hating. I pity you.”

“This is a police matter, Eli, and I only get involved in police matters if they ask me to.”

“Really? They asked you to get involved in the Henstridge case?”

Roan made sure to keep his eyes and expression stony. He wasn’t Infected: Prey

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going to give in to anger; he wasn’t going to give Eli anything that might suggest he was getting to him. That was not a pleasure he deserved. “That wasn’t a police investigation. They weren’t looking at him at all.”

“Which is why I’m here. For all your obvious faults, you’re a better investigator than that bunch of idiots that call themselves a police department. Besides, I thought you’d want to help your people out.”

“My people?” He rubbed his eyes, and was pretty sure he could feel a headache coming on. “Which ‘my people’? Are they gay? Or Scottish?

Oh, wait, are they crossword puzzle aficionados too?”