Infected: Shift (21 page)

From the fear in his eyes, Sean had some idea.

The
sun was just starting to come up when Roan knocked on Grey’s door, and he suddenly wondered if he should be bothering him right now. But he was just so wired he wasn’t sure what else to do.

In spite of the codeine and partial transformation, his heart was thundering in his chest, making it look like his hands were kind of shaking, and he did wonder if he should be worried about having an aneurysm explode in his brain any second. But you know, if he was going to die, he was going to die. No point in worrying about it.

Grey lived in an old house that had been partitioned into apartments, and he lived on the upper floor, so Roan had to use a staircase around the back—it used to be someone’s patio deck, now an oddly spacious landing—and then he knocked on a wooden door that felt kind of flimsy under his hand. Either he was knocking too hard, or it was made for internal as opposed to external use. At least there was a very big hockey enforcer living here—anyone who broke in would be very sorry very quickly.

Roan heard a lock being unlatched before the door opened, and he was surprised to find Scott there. “Roan? Hey man, what’s up?” he asked before yawning extravagantly.

Oh, goddamn straight boys who appeared in their underwear and never realized how hot they were. Scott was wearing nothing but jockey-style red underwear (Red?), and he had that long, lean, hard body of the dedicated athlete, muscles slender but strong enough to make him look like he’d be a good blast shield in case of explosion. He didn’t have a six pack of abs but a two pack, his stomach flat as an ironing board, and Roan really wanted to bite his knuckle. His weakness was men with those wonderfully solid, flat stomachs. Six packs were impressive and could be attractive, but not as much as these sandwich board guys. Why, he had no idea, but that was just the way his libido went. He was suspicious of gym bunnies and men built too much like marble statues.

His hair was sleep mussed, and he had a dark stain of stubble along his jaw… crap, crap, crap. He was cute enough to give Dylan a run for his money. “I, uh, didn’t realize you lived here too,” Roan said, aware that if Scott was more awake, he might have noticed Roan had looked at him a bit too long for comfort. (But damn, he was cute. It really caught him by surprise. At least he could console himself with the knowledge that a straight man, confronted with a hot woman in her underwear, probably would have been flustered for much longer.) But Scott had probably been on sports teams most of his life. He probably thought nothing of casual nudity and near nudity, unaware of the fact that he was smoking hot and could have been a model for a gay calendar or underwear ad.

Scott nodded, yawning again and running a hand through his hair. “Yeah, it’s easier to split the rent, and we’re used to rooming together on the road.” After dry washing his face, he honestly opened his eyes, and he squinted at Roan’s shirt. (Did he wear contact lenses?) “Is that blood?”

Roan looked down and checked. “Um, yeah.”

“Yours?”

“Some.”

He didn’t react to that admission at all. “Give it to me. I’ll getcha a clean shirt.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yeah, I do. You don’t wanna walk around in a bloody shirt. Besides, I got this great stuff that gets out bloodstains.” At Roan’s look, he clicked his tongue in impatience. “I play hockey. I better know how to get bloodstains outta clothes.”

Roan was going to point out he thought the equipment manager did stuff like that, but hell, at the minor league level it might be more DIY. So Roan shrugged off his leather jacket, tossing it on the front room’s homely blue Goodwill couch, and peeled off his shirt, which was a bit more damp than he thought. But the bleeding from his mouth was always much more than he expected, and he had no idea why. Shouldn’t he be used to it by now? He turned the shirt inside out and tried to hand it over on a dry side, but Scott gasped in shock. Roan suddenly and horribly remembered his scars. Oh shit, how did he forget about these things?

“That is fucking awesome,” Scott said, coming over and grabbing his arm. He was, it turned out, looking at the tiger tattoo Dylan had drawn for him. “Oh my God. Where’d you get that done?”

“Actually, it was drawn by my boyfriend. Someone else tattooed it on, but she followed his design.”

“Wow. Could he do one for me?”

“Umm, I don’t know. You could ask.”

“Yeah, I will. That’s beautiful.” He stared at the tiger for a moment, and then unconsciously caressed it with his thumb before letting his arm go. It raised goose bumps on Roan’s arm, and he really wanted to hit him. Damn straight boy—he had no fucking clue, did he?

He walked away, holding Roan’s bloody shirt, and Roan couldn’t help but notice what a great ass Scott had as he called back, “You’re here to see Grey, right?”

“Right.”

Scott headed down a short hall that was parallel to the small, open kitchen. It may have been the apartment of two straight bachelors, but it seemed remarkably tidy, and all the pale stained hardwood suggested a warmth reinforced by the hominess of the mismatched but not inelegant Goodwill furniture. The only thing that really gave this away as a guy’s place was the sheer number of remotes scattered across the coffee table.

Scott pounded on the door as if trying to bust it down, and shouted, “Grey, get the fuck up! Roan’s here!”

He could have done that from here. Well, not the pounding on the door, but everything else. There might have been a grunt of acknowledgment, but Roan couldn’t tell.

Scott went in the room, and after a moment, there was a thud—like a body hitting the floor—and a startled, “’M up, I’m up.” After a moment, Scott came out, pulling on a pair of loose gray yoga pants, and he tossed Roan a dark shirt.

“Did you shove him onto the floor?”

Scott half grinned, still sleepy and still so thoughtlessly sexy Roan wanted to pound his own head through the wall. “Sometimes it’s the only way to get him up. I gotta warn you, he’s useless until his first Red Bull.”

“He doesn’t do coffee?” Roan finished pulling the shirt on, and probably shouldn’t have been surprised that it had the Seattle Falcons logo emblazoned across the chest.

“Not enough caffeine for him. He likes to start his morning with a heart attack.” He padded off to the kitchen, and Roan felt awkward, so he sat on the arm of a slightly threadbare but oddly elegant dark-blue velvet armchair and looked around the apartment, not at all staring at Scott and his long, lean back, or the way those yoga pants sat so lightly on his hips it looked like they could fall off at any second. (He probably didn’t know it at all, but he was a total cocktease.)

What was he doing? Why had he come here so early? It could have waited—there was no reason it couldn’t have. Okay, if he was honest, he was so keyed up and wired he probably wasn’t thinking straight. No pun intended.

He heard a toilet flush, and Grey came shuffling out like a zombie, eyes barely open. By the time he reached the living room, Scott shoved a can of Red Bull in his hand and pointed him toward the sofa. “There he is. Now go sit and talk.”

Grey grunted and shuffled forward. Scott stayed by the entrance of the hall and said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna go back to bed.”

“By all means. Sorry I woke you.”

“It’s okay. If we had a skate this morning, we’d have been up.”

“Skate?” Grey said, plopping down on the couch. The way he said it reminded Roan of the decrepit Father Jack in the sitcom
Father Ted
(although he said “Drink?” not “Skate?”), and he had to bite back a grin.

“No, not today. Today’s a day off. Now drink your Red Bull.” Scott gave him a wave, which Roan returned, and then he disappeared back into his room. Were all team captains like that? He gave orders and Grey followed them without question. Maybe it was just the nature of their relationship irrespective of the team, or Grey was too tired to question anyone’s orders.

Still, Grey popped the top of his Red Bull and took a healthy swallow, which made Roan grimace. He’d only had it once, but he thought that it—and most energy drinks of that kind—tasted like piss. But if it got Grey going, he could hardly criticize.

Grey was big enough that he made Scott look svelte. He had a V-shaped torso, a broad chest narrowing to a slim waist, and he wore dark boxer shorts that covered about half of his tree-trunk-thick thighs, although none of the rest of his sinewy legs. He looked a bit more like a boxer than a weight lifter, and that made perfect sense. While he wasn’t overly bulked out with muscles, he still looked like he could stand in for a retaining wall if the need ever arose. How did anyone ever hit by him get up again? Roan was kind of relieved he did nothing for his libido, but maybe that’s because he was a client. Roan was sure never to even mildly entertain the notion that a client was attractive. That was only asking for trouble.

Grey cleared his throat and opened his eyes a bit more. “Okay, I think I’m up now. Wow, you’re wearing our shirt. I can get you a better one….”

“Thank you, but that’s not what I’m here about.”

“Didn’t think so. Just sayin’.”

“What I want to know, Grey, is if you just wanted to know who killed Jamie. Aside from getting the guy chucked in prison.”

“Huh?”

“I know who killed her. But I don’t think I can legally prove it.”

Grey just stared at him, and Roan wondered if he was awake enough for that to really sink in. But he must have been, because he said, “Yeah, I wanna know. It was Switzer, right?”

“Switzer and Sean Brand.”

There was a pause. “The guy’s name was Michael, wasn’t it?”

“The guy Jamie named in the suit, yeah. But he wasn’t the killer.”

Grey stared at him blankly again. He was slowly waking up. “Huh?”

Roan sighed and wondered how to best put this. It took Roan a bit to understand it too, but Sean was a stammering mess, terrified of him and his transforming face and diseased blood. “From what I was able to get out of Sean, it seems Jamie had met someone she was seeing but hadn’t told you about yet: Michael Brand. Switzer, his cop partner at the time, found out and discovered that Jamie was a pre-op transsexual. Switzer knew Sean casually and passed this on. Sean didn’t want a fag in the family any more than Switzer wanted a fag as a partner, so one night Sean and Switzer beat the shit out of Jamie and bullied Michael into silence. Jamie turned around and filed a charge of police brutality, but named Michael. Probably because Sean wasn’t a cop, and probably because Jamie wanted to force Michael out, make him fess up about his asshole partner and half-brother. But you know what happened instead: Switzer and Sean killed Jamie, and Michael just gave up.”

Grey listened with his head tilted to one side, listening like a parakeet. The same amount of understanding appeared in his sleepy eyes, but it seemed to connect. “So Michael Brand knew.”

“He must have. Suspected is hard to swallow, especially since he must have known that Sean and Switzer beat Jamie.”

“He was dating Jamie? Why didn’t he do anything?”

Roan shook his head. “That I can’t say. But having met him, I’m gonna say he’s been broken. By who and why I don’t know. It’s possible Jamie’s death sent him into a spiral, and he simply didn’t want to—or just couldn’t—rat out a fellow officer.”