Infected: Shift (59 page)

He was starting to judge how far he’d have to back up before getting sufficient momentum (Paris also made sure the engine could go from zero to sixty in almost no time at all) when there was a buzz, and the gates started automatically opening. Believed him, did they? Good; they should, because he was more than ready to do it. Oh sure, Hatcher could sue him for property damage, but fuck it—he was too poor to ever be able to pay him a cent. He probably knew that.

Roan screamed up the drive, ignoring the pristine view of the water, and barely stopped before he collided with the ornamental fountain. He launched himself out of the GTO like a bullet, stomping up to the door and almost colliding with it before officious Andrew opened it and stationed his narrow, angular form in the entryway. “Mr. Hatcher does not—” he began, his voice cold and sharp.

Roan snarled. Not a Human approximation, but the real thing; he let enough of the lion out that it was happy to make itself known. Andrew jumped, and Roan continued growling while he forced himself to spit out words, which sounded like he was trying to talk through a mouthful of broken glass. “Get out of my way or pay for it.”

Roan pushed through the doorway, and Andrew was backing up in horror, mouth opening and closing dumbly, a pale hand fluttering to the base of his throat. Had he started changing? Roan honestly didn’t know. He knew his jaw hurt, he knew his vision was a little blurry, but that often happened when he was this angry. It didn’t mean he’d changed; it just meant he was on the verge of losing his shit. But the way Andrew was acting, the way the fear reek came off of him like bad intentions, maybe there was some change occurring, something (even if it was only anger) was transforming his face.

They were in the sterile, expensively appointed front room before Roan was even aware of it, bathed in so much light it was like being in heaven’s waiting room. Hatcher appeared in the archway of his study, and said, “Would you stop terrorizing—” Hatcher’s sentence petered off as he stared at Roan, and his expression was a studious blank, a wonderful poker face that actually told him all he needed to know. Hatcher was scared too.

Roan walked around Andrew and headed straight for Hatcher. “You motherfucker….”

“I don’t know what you think you’ve found—”

“Fuck you!” Roan roared, a genuine roar, and he had no idea if the words were even recognizable to anyone else. He gave Hatcher a flat-palmed shove in the chest, and he seemed to fly across the room, hitting the window wall hard enough to have all his breath knocked out of him. It was probably double paned or maybe bulletproof glass, otherwise Hatcher might have sailed right through it, although Roan thought he’d barely touched him. “Visionics Limited,” he rasped, trying to get his growling under control. “Tabu triple x. Your site, you own it.”

Now Hatcher looked baffled as he gasped in breaths like a newly surfaced drowning man. “What? What the hell is this, McKichan? Why—”

“People are dead because of you. They died because of you. You’ve probably killed your own son. You should join them.”

Something new and genuine blossomed on Hatcher’s face, and it was enough to make Roan pause. Confusion, fear, despair, all warring for supremacy. “What? What are you talking about? Where’s Jordan? What’s happened to him?”

Roan studied him carefully, head cocked to the side, looking for the tell, for the twitch that would let him know this was a bluff, Hatcher busting out his acting skills in an attempt to escape justice. But no, his sudden anxiety seemed genuine. Roan decided to interrogate him and make his next move accordingly. “Visionics Limited. You own it.”

“No!” He exclaimed it out of reflex, and he looked like a man who had suddenly lost his footing climbing a mountain. He scrambled for a new verbal foothold. “I-I own it with Conrad Maddux. Why?”

A new name. Not what he needed right now, as he always found it difficult to think like a Human when the lion was out. “Who’s he?”

“A business partner. He takes care of….” Hatcher paused.

“He owns the porn sites,” Roan finished for him. “He takes care of that side of the business.”

He looked like he wanted to deny it, but Hatcher glanced at Roan’s face and looked away, down at the floor. It wasn’t a tell; he was too scared to look at him. Why he didn’t look at the flat screen tuned to some British financial news program, he didn’t know, but Roan could see the stock readouts scrolling out of the corner of his eye, see the blandly handsome newsreader talking to a man who looked like an animate scarecrow. “Yeah.”

“The site is killing people.”

“No.” He began shaking his head. “It’s fake. It’s all fake. You couldn’t—”

“There’s bodies. It’s stopped being fake.”

Hatcher froze, his posture stiff, his hands clenching at his sides. “What? You can’t have… it’s not here….”

Wow. Maddux had fucked Hatcher; he’d changed the rules of the game and not even told him. “It is now. Where would it be?”

Hatcher was shaking his head again, and it seemed pathetic, like a child trying to refuse his punishment by rejecting reality. “He wouldn’t dare. You don’t shit where you eat. You don’t bring it into America….”

“He did. And Jordan’s there, Hatcher. Now tell me, where would he put it?”

“Jordan?” Now he looked at him, too shell-shocked to be scared. “Why would he—”

“He found the site. You went over his computer. You must’ve seen it.”

“Yeah, but so? It’s a porn site! It doesn’t mean—”

A snarl of anger escaped him before Roan reined it in. “It’s not just a porn site. It’s fake death, it’s people fucking and killing each other. Pretend or not, it’s sick. I think he may have wanted to get into the business himself but decided in the end to go hands on.”

Hatcher started shaking his head again, but his eyes had the sudden shine of sickening knowledge. “No. He wouldn’t be that stupid. He wouldn’t—”

“I saw him.” Roan remembered the screen cap Holden had sent him and made his hands work, made them come out of fists and search his pockets for Dylan’s phone, which he still had. He found it, but he needed to focus to get back into Human mode, to use his fingers and read words. With it, his anger faded, but it didn’t disappear; it remained in the background, as loud as the BBC, brighter than the late-afternoon sunlight. Roan found the photo still and tossed the phone at Hatcher. It bounced off his chest before he caught it in his hands clumsily, and when he looked at the phone’s screen, he didn’t seem to get what he was seeing. Finally, he said, “What—”

“Friend of mine started going through the film clips, looking for recognizable victims. Jordan was taking part in one of the movies.”

Hatcher didn’t react at first. Then his expression fell, and his hands started shaking. “No,” he said, his voice a stunned whisper.

“He was a fucker, not a fuckee, if that makes it—”

“Noooooooo,” Hatcher said louder, drawing out the syllable to a near wail, tears welling in his eyes, his hands shaking so badly it looked like he was going to throw the phone himself. He sank down the window slowly, as if melting, finally sitting on the floor, back starting to curve like he was about to become an O. He was watching Hatcher break, and Roan wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It should have been triumphant, but it was just sad. He was the world’s biggest fuckhead and his son was clearly trying to follow in his footsteps, but they were still as depressingly human as all the rest of them.

He got a chokehold on the lion inside of him and pulled it back as he asked Hatcher, “Did you send someone after me? Skinheads?”

He was shaking his head vehemently, but he wasn’t sure if it was at the realization his son had joined the death circus or if it was aimed at his question. “No.”

Roan was a bit disappointed, mainly because he wasn’t lying. So if Hatcher hadn’t sent the white trash army after him, who had? Well, easy answer: Conrad Maddux, the silent partner. “Where do I find Maddux?”

Hatcher almost seemed to be in a trance of despair, but after several long seconds, he said, “Osaka.”

“Japan?” Okay, it wasn’t really a question—was there an Osaka, Texas?—he was just shocked. He'd expected Hatcher’s hands-on guy to be within arm’s reach. He probably should have known better. Thanks to the Internet, you didn’t need to be on the same continent as your immediate employees. “Does he have an employee, a manager doing his bidding? Who’s he? I need names.”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? A man like you, a paranoid despot, you should know what your workers do in their free time—”

“I don’t know!” Hatcher shouted angrily, despair slamming against his resolve and coming out as fury. “We keep enough distance between us that he can’t be tied to me! I don’t fucking know who works for him!”

And that made sense. He was a “silent partner” after all. If he got caught up legally, he couldn’t be officially tied to Hatcher; Maddux would go down alone and keep his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him. How much money did you have to spend to get that kind of loyalty? How much of your soul did you have to sell to make money off what was essentially necrophilia porn? There was so much here he didn’t and couldn’t understand. He needed to find Dennis Cooper some day and ask him if he could explain any of this stuff to him.

Hatcher bolted to his feet and lunged for his desk, anger making him move faster than he probably had in years. He clipped a Bluetooth onto his ear and called Conrad, but did he talk? No, he was leaning on the desk like it was the only thing keeping him on his feet, and he began screaming, “You fucking bastard, give me back my son! If you’ve hurt him, I swear to God I will have you killed! Do you hear—”

Roan ripped the Bluetooth off his ear, and exclaimed, “Idiot! You’ve just given him fair warning to pack his shit and run.” Roan held the device up to his ear, to see what Maddux had to say to his angry boss, but there was just a mechanical voice asking if he was satisfied with his message. Hatcher had gotten the man’s machine.

Hatcher glared at him, the look in his eyes wild and mad. Insane mad and angry mad; he was covering the spread. “He can’t run from me.”

Hatcher certainly believed that. Roan wasn’t sure he did.

Roan tossed the Bluetooth on the desk, having no further use for it, but Hatcher didn’t seem to notice. He was in some ugly place inside his own head, only marginally aware of the outer world. “Find him,” he said, his voice a low croak. “Find Jordan. And burn that fucking place to the ground.”

Hadn’t Hatcher noticed that was exactly what he was trying to do?

Here
was the problem facing Roan now: Hatcher was a victim of his own design. What did you do in those circumstances? He still wanted to kick his ass very badly, and hey, if Hatcher hadn’t started this ball rolling, the Tabu site wouldn’t even exist. He deserved to get the shit kicked out of him before Roan left. But in the face of his truly anguished grief, it almost seemed like enough bad shit had happened to him. It hadn’t, of course, but he felt he needed to get out of there and think. But before he left, he fixed Hatcher with a stare, and told him, “I may call you, and I may need something. If I do, you don’t ask why, you just make it happen. Understand?”

Hatcher, his face ruddy and slimy with rage and tears, looked like he wanted to argue for a moment, ask questions, but after a moment, he simply nodded. “Find him.”