Infected: Lesser Evils (15 page)

“Roan McKichan.”

“Oh, I know. Grey told me you were the only guy he ever sparred with who kicked his ass. Nice to meet you.” He then gave Tank a stern look and pointed behind him. “Get back in there, now.”

“Why? I don’t have a concussion. I just got my bell rung. You take a hundred-mile-an-hour shot in the face and see if that doesn’t leave you speaking French.”

See, now Roan felt that was a fair point. Even with a high-impact mask between him and it, that was still a hell of a thing, and the fact that Tank managed to finish the game in spite of it spoke volumes about his stubbornness. Paul just continued to stare at him and continued to point, and Tank sighed wearily, turning away. “Au revoir, Roan.”

“Bon voyage, Tank.” It wasn’t the only French he knew, but
au jus
probably didn’t apply here.

He heard Dylan say, “Hey Tank,” before Roan turned around, and Dylan caught him up in a big bear hug. “I should have known that you’d get into trouble.”

“I’m a trouble magnet,” Roan agreed, enjoying the hug in spite of the bruising pain to the cuts on his torso.

After a moment, Dylan held him back at arm’s length, looked him up and down, and shook his head. “You’ve already got the IV out. How fast do you do these things?”

“Tank helped.”

“I’m sure he did.” He sighed wearily. “Hon, I know most of my friends are pretentious jerks, but most of your friends are fucking weirdos.”

“I know. You do realize I also consider you one of my friends.”

“Yes. It’s a cross I have to bear.”

“Where were you?”

“Visiting Holden. I thought I ought to pop in, see how he was doing.”

“How was he? Besides bruised.”

“A little depressed, but you’d expect that. He hates hospital food so much I was thinking of making a run to Jack In The Box and getting him something to cheer him up.”

“Ooh, could you pick me up something? I’m starving.”

He gave him the put-upon sigh, and said, “Fine, I’ll play gofer. Is there any chance at all you’re staying here tonight?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought. Go visit Holden, and try not to start any more fights.”

“I didn’t start it. I was just here.”

Dylan patted him on the shoulder. “I know. Just wait until you heal before you go and kick someone else’s ass.”

He saluted sarcastically, making Dylan frown at him. But he still kissed him before leaving, and Roan made his way to the elevators, figuring if he got an empty one maybe he could do a partial change. But his luck wasn’t good, as he ended up sharing an elevator with a nurse and a guy in a wheelchair with a broken leg. They both looked at him like something the cat dragged in—no pun intended. Oh, well, maybe a little.

Holden was sitting up on the bed in his room, reading an
Entertainment Weekly
that someone must have smuggled in for him, the cover displaying the empty-eyed smile of a star Roan didn’t recognize. Holden’s face was less swollen now, reduced to a more reasonable level, and the eye that had swollen shut was almost open again, although it was a grape-y dark purple that looked painful. “Wow, what happened to your face?” Holden asked him. Coming from him, that was kind of funny, but Roan didn’t feel like laughing.

“Leopard tried to eat it.”

“So you ate his instead?”

“No. I didn’t have any mustard handy.” He sat in the plastic chair that was still warm from Dylan, and said, “It’s done. Your friends might be worse off than you.”

He put the magazine down on his lap, and looked surprisingly pensive. “Thank you. I realize you’re not a weapon for hire, but—”

“All those fuckers deserved it,” Roan told him, and it even surprised him how much venom was in that statement. But he hated anyone who abused their authority, judges and cops especially. He was aware that, being a former cop who’d lost his job because he’d kicked the shit out of a drunken wife beater, this made him something of a hypocrite, but at least it could be argued that the guy probably deserved worse.

Although Holden blinked in surprise, he seemed to let it go. “Things have taken a turn for the shit, haven’t they?”

“I’m sure things are going to get worse.”

“Before they get better?”

Roan looked at him, and wondered if he should tell him the truth, or just go for the comforting lie.

Sometimes there was just no way to win.

You’re a Target

A
S
WEAPONS
went, sleep was an odd one, but Roan embraced it anyways.

After he stuffed his face with fast food, Dylan took him home, and Roan almost instantly crashed, sleeping for about twelve hours straight. When he woke up, after an unsettling dream where someone (he didn’t know who—dreams could be frustrating like that) was shot and fell on him, pinning him to the floor, blood seeping down on him like warm rain, he needed a moment to decompress. It woke him up, mainly because he really had to pee.

He had just done so, and was getting ready to take a shower when there was a brief knock on the door and Dylan peered inside. “Good. I thought I was gonna have to get you up before the cops arrived.”

See? This was why sleeping was such a risk.

Dylan led him outside, where he got to see what the vandals had done. They had splattered the house with fake blood (mostly food coloring, but there was piss mixed in), and written “Your dead freek” and “Fags” on the side of his house in foot-high black letters. Beneath them were three roughly parallel lines, deep knife (?) scratches in the wood about six inches long, probably mimicking a cat scratch mark.

Roan sighed wearily, and said, “Should I be worried that the spelling errors bother me more than the actual message?”

“You know, when the shock wore off, that’s what I thought. I thought, “Roan’s going to point out the misspelling and lack of apostrophe. Do I know you or what?”

“I think you have grounds for divorce right there.”

“I would, if we were properly married. But we have a half-assed civil partnership thing, which isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

“Ain’t second-class citizenship grand?”

He didn’t know the cops who arrived to take a report and pictures, a grim-faced woman who was clearly the superior officer, and her rookie partner, who was so new he might as well have had factory packaging still on him. Roan figured that the vandals had hit last night, when they weren’t yet home from the hospital, and since they got back late at night and had no cause to go around the side of the house, they never saw it. Dylan only saw it when he went out to his car.

The cops had been there for ten minutes, getting their statements and taking pictures, when an unmarked cop car rolled up, and Seb got out from the driver’s side. He was still rocking the vaguely Columbo-esque rumpled trench coat, although it was over a
Law and Order-
worthy dark suit. He gave the female cop a friendly nod as he walked up, so Roan knew who sold him out.

Seb glanced at the slurs and said, “At least this is indisputable proof they’re complete fucking morons. I mean, the ‛freek’ might be a white-boy attempt to be ghetto, but there’s no excuse for abusing ‛you’re’.”

“Tell me about it.”

Seb gave Dylan a friendly nod. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, numb. I think I’m getting used to this kind of shit.”

Seb clapped a friendly hand on Roan’s shoulder, which he didn’t trust. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Seb, it was just he knew exactly what was coming. “Time to bring you into protective custody.”

Roan brushed his hand off his shoulder. “Which is jail without the charge. No thanks.”

“Roan, I warned you, and this shit ain’t getting any better. Your home phone number may be unlisted, but clearly the fundamentalist assholes know where you live. Until things lower from DEFCON four, the Chief wants you protected.”

He shook his head. “You wanna protect the morons from me.”

“No, that’s just a twofold reason for doing this.”

He was going to protest, but Dylan grabbed his arm and gave his bicep a little squeeze, his silent way of saying
Shut the fuck up
. “Hon, it isn’t safe here, not now. We probably should go.”

“They are not going to chase me out of my home.”

“No one’s chasing anyone out. Frankly, I’d like to get you out of here, take you into the mountains and cut off communication with the outside world for a week.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Seb said encouragingly.

“Except it’s not happening,” Roan told him, giving him a deadly look. The one he turned on Dylan was kinder. “You can’t expect me to do that.”

“I don’t. Well, we don’t really have the money for it right now anyways. But I think a new base of operations might be a good idea, Bruce.”

“Bruce?”

“Bruce Wayne,” Seb said. “Right?” Dylan nodded, and ignored the dirty look Roan was giving him.

He knew an argument he couldn’t win when he heard it. Still, he made a show of thinking it over, although his contempt for the idea was no act—he really didn’t want to give these fucks the impression they’d won even the most minor of battles. After a moment, he said, “We could move in with Scott and Grey. That would be funny.”

Dylan rolled his eyes. “You just want Grey to beat the shit out of them, and drag all his fellow enforcers with him.”

“Yeah! That would be hysterical. Can you imagine those toothless pigfuckers realizing they had to fight Grey? They’d have two seconds to shit their pants before they were punched into next Thursday. It’d be worth the admission.”

“Grey?” Seb wondered.

“Grey Williams,” Roan told him. “Chief enforcer of the Seattle Falcons.”

“The hockey team?” At his nod, Seb snorted a surprised laugh. “I’d heard you’d been hanging around with them, but I couldn’t believe it. What is it with you and big Canadians?”

“Grey’s American.”

“Still. How’d you get in with those jock boys?”

“Long story. But they like me because they’re guaranteed at least one good fight if we all go out on the town.”

“And their goalie has a huge man crush on him,” Dylan added.

“Only because we have similar reflexes.”

Seb looked between them curiously. “Whoa, you guys are serious?”

Dylan gave him a weary look. “Roan only has weird friends.”

“And Dyl covers the pretentious ones, so we have a good balance.”

The look Seb was giving them suggested he was about to pull out his Taser and use it. He managed to suppress the urge (for the moment). “I—You know, I got nothin’. You’re all a buncha weirdos.”

“Quoting Sam the Eagle gets you bonus points.”

“Huh?” Dylan wondered.

“
Muppet Show
.”

“How young are you?” Seb asked Dylan. Dylan frowned, looking slightly offended. So Seb shook his head, and went on. “Considering the amount of shit you’re in, Roan, I think you need to avoid as many fights as possible.”

“What shit am I in now?”

“Garcia’s been suspended for one week, and is going to have to attend a cultural sensitivity class.”

“Ha.” So Thompson went ahead and reported what had happened. Good on him.

“Speaking of which, where’s his service weapon?”

Roan tried on the most innocent expression he had. “How would I know?”

Dylan sighed heavily. “It’s in the glove compartment. I’ll go get it.”

“Aww,” Roan said.

“You have enough guns,” he scolded.

“The Chief wants to talk to you, probably to chew you a new one. I realize it was a tense situation last night, but what did you think you’d accomplish by putting Garcia in a chokehold and disarming him?”

“He’s a fuckhead, and he deserved worse.”

“That isn’t the point,” Dylan said, turning around and facing them. He wasn’t far enough away that he couldn’t hear them. “Yeah, he’s a macho asshole, but so are you. And none of the other people in that hall deserved to be hurt. What if that gun had gone off, or you couldn’t control your temper? Innocent people would have been hurt, and you couldn’t have lived with that, Roan, don’t tell me you could have. I understand that adrenaline was high and everyone was on edge, but that’s when you need to step back and be the more mature person. Think of others, not yourself. You like protecting people, Roan—protect them.” With that, he turned and walked to the car to get Garcia’s gun.

After a moment, Seb asked, seriously, “How’d you hook up with the Dalai Lama?”

He could only shrug. He honestly had no idea. Presumably it was proof of irony in the universe.

They both watched Dylan get his keys out and unlock the car, and once the door was open, Seb turned to him and asked, in a low voice, “You know a judge named Lloyd Garver?”

He shook his head. “No. Why?” Technically it wasn’t a lie. He’d broken into his house, beat him half to death, but he didn’t really know him.

“What about a couple of Staties by the names of Carmody and Muhlfeld?”

“I don’t know any Staties. What’s this about?”

Seb studied him for a moment, as if trying to determine whether he was lying to him or not. But he caved with an extended exhale, like by giving him this he was acknowledging he was innocent. “Weird case came in, it’s McCluskey’s and Carey’s baby, but McCluskey was telling me about it. Judge Garver got seriously assaulted in his home—they don’t know if he’ll ever be able to use his right arm again—and he told a story about some guy who blamed him for a case that wasn’t his, but his story doesn’t make sense, and it’s changed several times. And he’s never explained why he didn’t shout and alert anyone else in the house.”

“So he’s lying.”

“Of course he is, and not well. You’d expect better from a judge. Oh, and a couple of Staties were viciously assaulted the same night—one in his condo, the other in his truck in front of his house—and some stuff at the scene points back to Garver, but the Staties say they barely know him, and they’re lying too. It’s really weird.”

“So why ask me about it?”

“The assailant—whom we assume was the same man—was incredibly strong, and seemed to be smart enough to leave the scenes relatively clean. Superstrong and smart, it makes me instantly think of you.”