Infected: Freefall (44 page)

The look she was giving him was deadly serious, and he knew this had nothing to do with grabbing a smoke. His stomach twisted at the thought that she was going to give him bad news about Roan, but he obeyed, mainly because it was reflex.

After the death of his parents, Dylan was raised by his aunt, but also most of his mother’s family—those who were in the States—chipped in as well. (He never really saw his father’s family, and after several years, he’d forgotten their names or where they lived. He probably looked more white than Hispanic, but the racially mixed side of his family were the ones who chipped in and held together—what that meant he had no idea—but even in spite of his new, Caucasian-sounding last name, he was continually startled when anyone just assumed he was white.) What this led to was a lot of time spent with his (maternal) grandmother and even for a little bit his great-grandmother, both incredibly feisty women who didn’t let a variety of physical frailties keep them from being bossy and a feared ruler with an iron fist. As a result, he now found himself unconsciously deferring to older women in general, especially if they had a strong personality. He already knew Rosenberg was a strong woman, and he was going to have to fight his natural tendencies here.

“I don’t smoke,” he told her as the doors slid shut, even though he knew it had nothing to do with cigarettes.

She shrugged. “Didn’t think you did. And good for you. It’s a horrible habit.”

“So why don’t you quit?”

“I have, five times.” Again, another shrug. “Nicotine is a bitch goddess.”

Dylan grimaced, holding back a laugh.

“Look, I’m sure you’re a smart guy, so I’ll just cut to the chase: do you love Roan?”

Wow, this came out of nowhere. He felt like he might have gotten whiplash from this conversational shift. “Uh, um, yes, I do. Why?”

“’Cause there’s probably gonna be some tough times ahead, so if you don’t, now’s the time to bail.”

He swallowed hard. Oh shit, it was bad. “I’m not leaving.”

“Good, ’cause Roan’s gonna want you to. He doesn’t like looking weak in front of anyone. He hates being vulnerable. It’s why he’s such a prickly bastard. He prefers hatred and fear over pity. Who wouldn’t?”

“You know what’s wrong with him.” It wasn’t a question, and tears threatened, making his eyes feel dry and hot.

“No, I’m not a diagnostician. I can only guess, and I wouldn’t put much stock in me there.” The elevator doors opened on the ground floor, and they needed to get out before everyone else came in, including at least one person on crutches. Dylan followed her, but he didn’t know why, as he was now kind of afraid of discovering the truth. Still, he did.

The conversation continued once they were outside in the parking lot. Rosenberg walked around the corner of the building, which he assumed was the smoking area, and started rummaging in her small black purse. The wind came up, cold and ragged, and blew cigarette butts and assorted other detritus across the asphalt with a scraping sound like skeletal fingers. “So you’re an expert on infecteds?” Dylan asked, wanting to say something.

She shrugged again. “Who’s an expert on this virus? It’s a fucking nightmare of impossibilities. No one should be able to transform into another species, not even a facsimile of another species, but there that fucker is, doing it. We can’t even agree on how it came to be. The fucking thing is still a big mystery.” She found her pack of cigarettes and pulled them out, a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds that seemed to only have a couple of cigarettes left in it. She must have seen him looking at it, because she said, “I only allow myself two cigarettes a day, three if it’s a fucking crappy day. This is gonna be a six-cigarette day, I just know it.”

He had no idea she was so profane. But, again, it made sense that Roan would consider her a friend. “So what’s your speculation on Roan’s problem?”

She shook her head as she stuck a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “I can’t tell you even if I wanted to. A patient should hear it first, family second. But I will tell you this, although if you repeat it I’ll have to deny it, ’cause I’ll be drummed out of the medical profession. But I don’t think you need to worry about Roan. I don’t think the virus is going to let him die just yet.”

Dylan momentarily thought that was a sick joke, but as she lit her cigarette and took what was obviously a satisfying drag, he realized she was perfectly serious.

What the fuck was that supposed to mean?

H
OLDEN
was glad to hear that Roan was okay. But he knew Dylan was lying to him about something.

It was because Holden heard a sort of thickening in his voice, like he’d been crying (or possibly just eaten a whole buttload of cheese, but somehow he didn’t think that was a possibility). Dylan insisted that Roan was fine, though, conscious and awake, and that he thought Holden had the wrong end of the stick. Roan thought the answers to all of this lay with Kyle or Jessie.

For the record, Ahmed agreed with Roan. “Killin’ someone with potassium is just weird,” he said, as they crossed the Oregon border. “You need a weird person to do something like that. John doesn’t sound weird enough. He sounds kinda pathetic.”

That did have a ring of truth to it, which irritated Holden no end. Being an asshole wasn’t enough? What was the world coming to when being a major grade-A asshole wasn’t enough to get you accused of murder?

They made a pit stop at a Starbucks, and they had Wi-Fi, so Holden did some surfing. Jessie Newberry was a bit hard to find, but eventually he tracked him down to his Facebook page, where his handle was Jessie369. Holden recognized him even with his clothes on.

Kyle was better looking in the face, although Jessie had a harder, gym-toned body. A little too gym-toned, actually, he’d crossed that subtle line between hot and gross. Veins stood out on muscles that had lumpy shapes, and Holden could imagine the track marks even if he didn’t see them. Was he more of a steroid guy or an HGH guy? Maybe both.

While paging through his personal photo gallery, Holden came away with the idea that this was a man so in love with himself that calling him a narcissist would actually be an understatement. There he was pumping iron; there he was striking a pose in a Speedo (and having seen the sex tape, Holden knew he was padding it, ’cause his dick just wasn’t that big); there he was supposedly impressing a bleached blonde with huge, fake tits with the bulbous muscles in his arms; there he was in his gym tank top in front of the juice bar—

Wait a fucking second.

Holden scoured his page carefully. Jessie worked in a gym? He did. He claimed he was a personal trainer, which included not just exercise but a nutritional regime of his own design. (Jessie had his whole sales pitch in the “bio” section.)

Oh shit. This was it.

As Ahmed came back to the table with his second green tea Frappuccino, Holden asked, “Do you know where the Seattle Fitness Center is?”

He took a sip of his drink, then said, “Seattle?”

Holden scowled at his poor joke. “We need to get back on the road and get there now. I think I just found a huge clue.”

Ahmed sighed and shoved himself out of his chair. “Yippee skippee. You know, I’m kind of wondering what you get out of being Hawk to his Spenser.”

Holden stared up at him blankly and asked, “What?”

Ahmed shook his head and walked away.

Actually, he knew the reference he was making. Holden just felt like being a jackass.

20

Warbrain

H
OLDEN
hated lying to Ahmed. He hoped he never found out about it.

All the way to Seattle, Ahmed tried to talk him out of “seeking revenge” or “going off half-cocked” (oh, the fun you could have with that phrase), and after a bit Holden let him get his way, telling him to just drop him off at his apartment. He said he had a client to meet at the Sheridan in a couple of hours, anyways. That sent Ahmed off on his usual lecture about how exploitative prostitution was, even if he didn’t feel exploited, blah blah blah. He’d heard it several times before. It wasn’t that Ahmed didn’t have a point, because of course he did, and all day (and night, sometimes both) he worked with broken people who often had such things in their past or present. Of course he was right.

But Holden knew he wasn’t broken. He’d decided long ago he was going to sell himself, sure, but he was going to exploit his clients, not the other way around. And if Ahmed thought they were broken, he hadn’t met their clients. Most of them were the sorriest sons of bitches he’d ever met. Sad, sad people.

But maybe it took one to know one.

Holden called Seattle Fitness from his home, and was able to wheedle Jessie’s number from someone with a bullshit story about having to cancel an appointment he’d made with him but he’d lost his business card. (He’d just guessed Jessie had a business card. It was a correct guess.) He then called Jessie and got his machine, and he left a very succinct message: “Hey, Jessie, I’m a friend of Colt Brixton’s, and he gave me this digital video file on a jump drive that I bet you’ll want to have. If you’re not interested, I’ll give Kyle a call.” He then recited his phone number and hung up.

Holden poured himself a gin and juice for courage and turned on his stereo, giving himself some background music to distract him from his darker thoughts. Ironically—or maybe not—he still had his iPod plugged into the stereo, and it started playing that The National song, the one about people throwing money at each other and crying. Presumably the song was about a bad relationship, but he thought it had the hooker/client relationship down pretty well. Same thing, perhaps. He then made a call to someone he didn’t call very often, a guy named Phat.

Holden had time to change his shirt, to put on a skintight black tank top that showed off his broad chest, and had stripped down to his underwear by the time the phone rang. It had taken Jessie twenty-five minutes to call back.

“What the fuck do you want?” he snarled. Holden could almost hear the foam frothing at the corners of his mouth.

“Don’t be that way,” he replied, turning on the teasing, oozing charm he usually adopted when he was trying to calm his more nervous clients. Usually newbies or virgins. “I’m not so crass as to want to blackmail you. I have a much more… profitable proposition for the both of us.”

“Who is this?” Jessie demanded, sounding suspicious.

“A businessman. Call me Marco. Can we meet? I’m on my way to Seattle right now.” Although in general a lie was easier to swallow when sprinkled with some truth, sometimes Holden discovered there was a strange emotional symmetry when you did nothing but lie. People felt better, found it easier to swallow when the bullshit was so smooth and pretty and even.

“You’re lying,” he accused. He sounded unsure. “You don’t have a copy of the tape. This is bullshit.”

“That thing on your left butt cheek—was that a mole or a pimple? I couldn’t tell since the lighting was so poor.” It was a pimple—Jessie had a case of bacne, suggesting steroid abuse, but to tell him he knew of it would give the game away.

Jessie was quiet for a long time. All Holden could hear was his ragged breathing. Finally, he told him to meet him at an address in two hours. Holden agreed, hung up, and immediately Googled the address.

A private home in the well-off part of the Madrona district. Jessie’s place? A good guess, and he was glad that his hunch that Jessie would want to meet in private was the correct one. He probably wouldn’t tell anyone of the meeting either, sealing his fate.

Holden pulled on vaguely out of fashion baggy jeans, baggy enough to hide what he was carrying, and was finished dressing when there was a knock at the door. Phan—known on the streets as Phat—was there, a rangy, short guy in a baggy canvas jacket and camo pants, emo-boy shaggy hair squashed awkwardly under a dark knit cap and sticking out beneath it like warning spikes. He was an average-looking Vietnamese guy who looked seventeen but was in actuality twenty-five, a father twice over by two different women, and supposedly had a cousin who was some sort of Asian gangster, but if that was true, why was he simply a street-corner dealer? Maybe he was trying to work his way up. Gangsters all had to start somewhere.

“Y’know I usually don’t make house calls.” He sniffed as he made like he was going to shake Holden’s hand but slipped him the plastic-wrapped package from his palm. Holden took it, shoving it in his pocket, where he also pulled out the folded money and hid it in his hand as he grabbed the front pocket of Phat’s camo pants and pulled him forward, as if threatening to give him a kiss. He snuck the money in his pocket. “Hey, no fag stuff,” Phat warned.

“Take it like a man, Phat,” he teased, leaving in a hard edge. “You never know who could be watching.”

That seemed to remind him how dangerous this was, and Phat, twitchy at the best of times, seemed to visibly fidget. “Yeah, yeah. But why d’ya want the bad stuff—”

“The less you know, the better off you are.”

Phat hardly needed to think about that. He just nodded, sniffing again. Either he had a constant cold that wouldn’t go away, major sinus problems, or he was a big fan of coke. “Got a new shipment of Viagra over the border.”

“I’m good, but I’ll let you know when I need some,” Holden said and closed the door on him. Not that Phat cared, as he was already turning away. Phat may have been a street dealer, but he rarely dealt in your standard drugs. He dealt mostly in prescription and “club” drugs and made better money than you’d think by both his wardrobe and his pedestrian tastes. Less violence that way too.

Holden prepared it and got it ready, putting the final result in a small velvet bag that he had no idea how he’d acquired. Just one of those things that occasionally seemed to breed and materialize in the chaotic darkness of junk drawers. He checked himself out one more time in the mirror, making sure there were no suspicious bulges, and put on his white, motocross-style leather jacket, which always made him feel like a whore. He wasn’t actually sure why, but he felt that something about the jacket screamed,
“I’m a cheap hooker.”
And that was fine by him. The more harmless Jessie thought he was, the better. The last thing he grabbed was the jump drive, which did have something pornographic on it, but it wasn’t Jessie’s sex tape.