Prey (39 page)

As he bent down for a better look, Roan already knew what he’d just discovered—that huge, dark stain. “Is that, uh…”

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“Yep.”

He looked down at it a moment, transfixed, then slapped his hand over his mouth, the color draining from his face with a frightening rapidity, and he dropped his glow stick as he turned and bolted into the small bathroom. Since he didn’t have time to close the door, Roan could hear him vomiting quite clearly. See, this is why he preferred doing things on his own.

The apartment was tiny, enough so that Roan figured Ashley must have been a small cat, perhaps a cougar, to keep from breaking out of here.

The living room and kitchenette were separated only by their floors—the living room had the carpet, while the thin strip of floor that marked off the kitchen was cheap, peeling linoleum with an alternating square pattern.

The walk-in-closet-sized room on the right was the bedroom, and the tinier spare-closet-sized room straight ahead was the bathroom where Matt was puking up his lunch. He figured it was a good thing the lights were off, as the apartment would probably be more depressing if he could see it clearly.

He crouched down to pick up Matt’s glow stick, which had rolled toward the base of the avocado green refrigerator, a relic from the ’80s if not the ’70s. It was close up that he noticed a thin magnet advertising a pizza place was stuck to the fridge’s bottom metal grill, and he caught a glimpse of an edge of white paper on the floor, wedged between the fridge and the kitchen cabinet. The magnet must have been holding up the paper and both had slipped down.

He pulled out the paper and wasn’t surprised to find it was a business card with the logo “New Horizons” on the front, and on the back there was a handwritten note about an appointment with Doctor Johnson, which was at three-thirty next Wednesday. There was an appointment she was never going to make.

He’d heard of New Horizons; it was a hodgepodge of services for the infected, one of those liberal social policy compromises that made this city so attractive to the infected. They probably had a ton of Doctor Johnsons that worked out of there, but he thought it would be worth checking out. It was just a shame that it didn’t say what kind of doctor Johnson was: a dentist, a GP, a psychiatrist, hell, maybe even a nutritionist (they had a whole bunch of odd services available, some very questionable).

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Matt had finally stopped retching, and turned on the taps to rinse out his mouth before he came out. Roan had tucked the appointment card in his pocket and picked up the glow stick, which he handed to Matt as soon as he rejoined him. “I’m sorry about that,” he said sheepishly. He still looked quite pale.

“It’s okay. But you see why I didn’t want you to come here? She was your friend; this has to hurt.”

“She wasn’t my friend. I wanted to be friends, but she so was scared.

I didn’t get it at all.”

“What was she scared of?”

He shrugged, grimacing slightly. “I dunno. Being infected? Trusting people? She musta got screwed over pretty badly.”

So he wasn’t talking about a specific person. Too bad; that would have made his job easier.

A cursory search turned up nothing of note, nothing as interesting as the card from the New Horizons center. Matt remained oddly quiet and trailed behind him, embarrassed about barfing and afraid of what he might find if he wasn’t careful. The kid really shouldn’t have been here; he felt kind of bad for him.

They left, and Matt remained strangely cowed. By the time they left the building, the sky remained gunmetal gray but the rain was no more than a cool mist, the kind that drenched you even better than a downpour.

They had to walk over to the next block, as there was no way he was parking the Mustang around here, and it was then that Matt asked, “What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“Your boyfriend, the Hottie.”

“I thought we weren’t talking about that anymore.”

“Oh c’mon, I’m dying of curiosity over here. Also, it’ll take my mind off things.”

He weighed precisely how much he should care with the possibility that it didn’t really matter. He was honestly surprised that everyone at Panic didn’t know Paris by his first name by now. Then again, maybe he never said so he never got stalked. “I’ll have to check in with him first. He Infected: Prey

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might go out with a pseudonym.”

“Come on, dude! That’s so not fair. But hey, why don’t you ever go out with him, y’know? Why is he always out with the fag hag?”

“She’s his best friend. Also, he usually goes out with her when I’m busy.” There was no point in telling him, when he was in the transitional phase of his virus. Matt could know he was “in the tribe,” but he didn’t need to know he was infected. He didn’t need the sympathy. “And as I said, I hate the club scene.”

“Why? You’d be a hit.”

“You’d be surprised how little I care about that.”

He grinned broadly, an expression that lit up his face and seemed to bring some color back to his cheeks. “I bet I wouldn’t.”

Yeah, perhaps not.

The next block over had lots of sad little shops: a corner store, a barbershop, one of those cheap teriyaki places that just seemed to spring up out of nowhere, a liquor store with extravagantly barred windows, that kind of thing. A downtown neighborhood too poor to qualify for strip-mall status, but still losing a monumental amount of business to the strip malls and big box stores in the neighboring outskirts and suburbs. Almost anyone who had the ability to shop elsewhere did, so these shops were dying a slow, crumbling death, usually reflected in their dirty windows and scabby facades. Only the liquor store would probably survive.

He’d parked the Mustang beside the curb in front of the teriyaki place, the only open slot when they drove up, but as they came up the street he realized the car was sitting kind of funny in the back. He stepped out onto the curb as they approached, and checked out the side of the car that faced the street. Just as he feared, the back tire had been slashed; there was a deep, long gash he could put his fingers in.

He felt the shadow of Matt behind him, and he whistled low. “I’d say you ran over a nail, but I don’t think so.”

“Slashed with a knife. Somebody really hated this tire.” Or him; hating him was clearly more likely. But that raised a couple of troubling questions.

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probably consider himself lucky that the asshole didn’t key the car—that really would have pissed Paris off.

“Gonna call triple A?”

He shook his head, standing up and attempting to brush the grime on his hands off on his pant legs. “I got a spare in the trunk.”

Matt stared at him in wide-eyed shock. “You can change a tire?

Really? I can barely pump my own gas.”

Roan stared at him in open disbelief. “I’m sorry, but no one is that femme.”

He let out a breathless laugh. “I am, seriously. I only had a car for a year before I sold it for coke, and at that time I’d had my license suspended anyways, so I didn’t think losing it would be a big deal, y’know. I haven’t had a car since.”

Roan dug out his car keys and sifted out the trunk key. “You’re saving yourself a lot of money.”

“Probably, but I’ve saved more being off the coke, y’know. It’s kinda expensive… well, the
good
stuff is. I mean there’s a lot of shit stuff on the market, people who put in too much filler, y’know, shit that doesn’t do anything….”

Roan had pretty much tuned him out at this point—he really didn’t want to know how you quality shopped for cocaine—but he’d just moved around to the trunk when he heard a loud but well-tuned engine, purring like a panther. Why the hell did it strike him as odd?

Roan didn’t know, and wasn’t sure he would ever know. Something made him turn and look, and he saw a dark green Jeep Grand Cherokee speeding down the street, so clean it almost shined, and he glanced down at the license plate to see that something had been inserted into the frame—Paper? Masking tape?—something that totally obscured the plate.

Its windows were also tinted, not so much dark as complete ebony.

That was his only warning.

He was already moving up to the sidewalk, glad he’d decided to wear his SIG Sauer for the walk to the Wildwood, when the person in the passenger seat opened fire. Roan had already shoved Matt brutally aside, throwing him down behind the Mustang, as he pulled his gun and took aim even as he threw himself behind the car.

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Time slowed to a crawl, and he could see everything with crystal clarity, even though he didn’t think he should have been able to. The gun barrel was sticking out of the open passenger window, and the person behind the gun was a dark blur. Were they wearing a ski mask? He saw the flashes from the muzzle, heard the shots (which were always less than impressive; they were loud, but not quite the cannon blasts you usually heard in films) and heard glass breaking as the gunmen sprayed bullets wildly, shattering some of the windows of the Mustang and a window of the teriyaki joint. He also felt something hit him in the upper left side of his chest, but he didn’t know if it was shrapnel or what; it was more force than pain. He squeezed off two shots of his own before the Mustang obscured his view, and he knew they hit. He saw one shatter the passenger window and another disappeared in a dull thunk of impact, and he was sure it’d hit the door.

By the time he hit the pavement, the impact jarring his body, he heard the squeal of acceleration, the skid of tires on a wet road, and the Jeep tore around the corner, causing a car at the intersection to blare its horn at him. His shoulder hurt, and his left arm felt numb.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Matt shouted, on his hands and knees on the sidewalk, eyes wide and wild with fear. “Who the fuck was that?!”

“No idea,” he admitted, rolling up to a sitting position. Just moving made it feel like some muscles tore in his chest, and his back felt damp from the pavement. Had he landed in a puddle? That would figure.

“God,” Matt panted, sitting back on his haunches and putting his hand on his chest, like he was having a heart attack. “You saved my life.”

He put the gun back in his belt holster, hidden beneath his jacket.

They could come back for a second pass, but he was fairly certain he’d hit the gunman, or at least scared the fucking shit out of him. “No, I didn’t.

They were shooting at me.”

“What? Why? And how fast can you move? How’d you get your gun out that—oh shit.” Matt had suddenly stopped talking, looking horrified and staring at him.

“What?” He looked down at where he was staring just as Matt suddenly grabbed his trench coat and threw it open.

Okay, now it was easy to see why. He had a neat little hole in his shirt just above his left pectoral muscle, and pouring from it was an 246

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interesting amount of blood, which had already soaked through the left side of his shirt. No wonder he felt damp. Shouldn’t it hurt more? It just felt a bit bruised. The first time he was shot it hurt a lot more, but he was younger then. Maybe age desensitized you in some fashion.

Matt exhaled like he’d been holding his breath, and said, “Okay, good, completely missed the heart. But the trajectory might’ve—”

He grabbed Matt’s hand as he reached for his shirt. “Get away from my blood. I’m infected.”

Matt stared at him, the shock still naked on his face. “Huh? You mean.…”

“Yeah, I’m one of those kitty fuckers too.” He’d unconsciously grabbed his cell phone, and had already punched up 911. It was strangely automatic, almost like when he was a cop and you always reached for your radio. Same difference, really. As soon as the 911 dispatcher picked up, he said, almost cheerfully, “Hi. There was just a shoot-out on Brazil Street, and apparently I was shot in the process. The gunmen are gone, so don’t worry about sending out the tactical squad. I’m on the sidewalk in front of the teriyaki place.” The woman tried to get a word in edgewise, but he knew exactly the kind of information she needed, so she didn’t need to go through her script. “I’m Roan McKichan, a private detective—you might want to pass this on to the cops, as several of them will get a good laugh out of it. The wound’s not serious, I don’t feel that bad, but there’s a lot of blood, and I’m infected, so warn the EMTs coming in. The gunmen were in a dark green Jeep Grand Cherokee heading northwest down Elmore, and no, I didn’t get a plate, it was covered, and I have no idea who they were, except they didn’t like me very much. I may have hit one of them with return fire; I definitely hit the Jeep. I think that about covers it, so let the EMTs know they should check behind the Mustang that’s had the shit shot out of it.” As he cut the connection and dropped the phone back in his pocket, it occurred to him that what had happened to the car would break Paris’s heart. He could probably fix it, but it would take a while, and glass was always a motherfucker to replace.

“How can you be so calm? You must have balls of steel,” Matt said, shucking off his coat, and before Roan could comment on that, Matt pulled off his own shirt. He quickly wadded it up and pressed it up against the bullet wound. He took a breath to say something, but Matt cut him off with, “I don’t have any open cuts on my hands, I’ll be fine. You need to keep pressure on it to slow the bleeding.”

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There were so many things he wanted to ask, but he settled on, “How do you know so much about bullet wounds?”

“I don’t. I mean, I know about wounds in general. My mother’s a doctor over at County.” He grimaced sheepishly. “So as you might imagine, my coke habit was pretty embarrassing for her.”

“Teenage rebellion is embarrassing for everyone.”

He shrugged his naked shoulders, which were surprisingly bony, and now his skin was pimpling with gooseflesh since he was exposed to the cold drizzle. But now Roan could see the tattoo on Matt’s chest, the one that had been peeking up slightly beneath his neck. It was a spectacular Chinese phoenix design, a stylized bird with a swan neck and broadly spread wings, its tail almost dragonlike, the feathers reproduced with such loving detail that they almost looked like they would be soft to the touch.