Infected: Shift (41 page)

“Nice save,” Roan admitted, still surprised a guy as big as Grey could move that fast. The man was struggling, but Grey was making him kiss the wall, and there was no way he could get his hand free. He wasn’t moving until Grey allowed him to move. “You missed your calling in security.”

“Yeah, well, if the hockey job ever goes south, I figure I can bodyguard or something. I know judo, you know.”

“I know.”

The man spoke, but his voice was so nasal and muffled by glass it was hard to tell what he said at first. After thinking about it a moment, Roan realized he’d asked, “Since when do you have a bodyguard?”

“Weren’t you paying attention to our conversation? He isn’t my bodyguard. He’s my hockey enforcer.”

“I prefer defenseman in mixed company,” Grey said wryly.

“My mistake.” He looked at the weapon the man was still holding, even though blood circulation to his hand was starting to cut off. Roan pried a finger loose and said, “If you don’t drop it, I’ll start breaking fingers.”

With reluctance, the man dropped it. It clattered on the floor, looked almost like a mini sickle, with a solid black plastic handle leading up to a wickedly curved blade and a sharply pointed tip. “What the fuck is that?” Grey wondered. The assailant gurgled. He wasn’t trying to talk, he was simply trying to breathe while his face was being ground into the wall.

“It’s a tile cutter,” Roan told him, having seen Paris use one enough on his various home renovation projects. He also knew that those bastards were far sharper than your average knife.

In theory, a clumsy weapon. But if you really wanted to kill someone, a great choice.

Roan
had little to no familiarity with organized sports, so he had no idea if the reaction of the rest of the Falcons was par for the course. But if it was, he missed out on having teammates.

Tank noticed they’d been gone for a bit and needed to piss anyways (those pink confetti daiquiris catching up with him), so he came in shortly after Roan had put in a call to 9-1-1 to report that he’d been almost stabbed, but had his assailant pinned down in the bathroom of Panic. To say the dispatcher wasn’t sure how to handle that was an understatement. As soon as Tank saw Grey holding a bleeding guy pinned to the wall, he opened the door and shouted in his hockey voice—the one that carried across a rink to his teammates when the crowd was loud and the music was booming—“Avant!”

Grey explained later that that was a kind of a code. It was a bit of French that everyone knew, meaning “before” or “forward,” but Tank used that to call in defensemen. Not all the Falcons on the pub crawl were defensemen (Jeff and Zach were wingers, whatever that meant precisely, Sandy was a center, and of course Tank was the goalie), but within seconds they all crowded the men’s room, ready for a fight. Save for Zach, who was a little too drunk to respond so rapidly.

Grey explained the situation while the guys crowded around the assailant, giving him the stink eye, and Roan almost felt bad for the guy, especially since Grey let up on him so he could get a good look at how totally fucking screwed he was, surrounded by big, angry men. Of all the nights to try and attack him, he had to do it on the one night he was doing the town with half a hockey team. That was the definition of bad timing. Or karma, perhaps, depending on your perspective.

Dylan followed them in too, and was shocked that someone would try for Roan at his place of work. Roan tried to get the guy to talk, but he wouldn’t. Grey and the guys offered to “make him talk” (how ominous did that sound?), but luckily the cops had arrived by then. Also luckily, he knew the cops who showed up, Parker and Kinney, and they didn’t seem the least bit surprised to find him with a group of guys in the men’s room. When they discovered the guys with him were part of the Seattle Falcons, Parker started laughing and didn’t stop until he was crying. Finally he got a hold of himself and slapped the cuffs on the guy, telling him, “You hafta be the stupidest guy I’ve arrested this week. And I get all the stupid ones, so that’s something.”

The guy still wasn’t talking. When asked his name, why he wanted to attack Roan, he only said, “I wanna lawyer.”

“Of course you want a lawyer,” Parker replied. “You guys always want lawyers.”

As the cops led him out, the club members applauded them. But when Roan and the guys came out of the men’s room, they were greeted with applause and wild cheers. Drunk Zach raised his arms and let out an explosive, “Wooo!” He then casually leaned over, vomited behind a table, and then half staggered, half collapsed against the bar. “Woo,” he added anemically. “Fuck, I’m tired.”

Jeff grabbed him under the shoulders, propping him up with a single arm (how strong was Jeff? That was a bit unexpected). “Lightweight. You’ve just shamed Saskatchewan. But thanks, ’cause I won the pool.”

Grey pulled out a small clump of bills and tossed it on the bar. “Sorry for the cleanup,” he told Luis as he gathered the money.

Luis scanned the bills, and replied, “Honey, you tip like this, you can puke on our floors any time.”

“I’m not a lightweight,” Zach argued belatedly. “I haven’t shamed Skacth… Suchcutch… home.”

“I told him not to order the Tie Me To The Bedpost,” Dylan said. That was the name of the drink Zach had ordered in the girlie drink contest. According to Dylan, it had rum, vodka, and Midori in it, which sounded disgusting and could fuck you up pretty fast. Zach may have been living proof of that.

“He shoulda went with the Royal Fuck,” Tank added.

Sadly, that was a drink too. Roan didn’t even want to know what was in that.

In spite of the fact that it seemed like the night had ended on a sour note, the guys were eager to do it again sometime soon. Roan happily agreed, as he had had fun. Dylan gave him a look, the kind of look only a person who loved you could give you. It said, without words, “You’re fucking crazy.” And yes, he understood he was. After dropping off Grey, Scott, and Tank at Grey’s and Scott’s place, Dylan said it out loud: “You know, they mean well, but I think they’re all a bit nuts.”

“They play hockey. Of course they’re nuts.” After a brief pause, he admitted, “That’s probably how come we get on so well, even though we have absolutely nothing in common.”

“Except a love of trouble.”

“I don’t love it. It loves me.”

Dylan was driving, since he hadn’t had any alcohol. Roan didn’t feel at all tipsy but figured it was easier to surrender the keys than argue. “Did you recognize that guy?”

“The one who tried to attack me? No.”

“Any idea what that was about?”

He was forced to shrug. “A lot of people hate me. I couldn’t even begin to narrow down the list.”

“Shit, that’s sad.”

“Tell me about it.” What did you do about that? Public apologies, start handing out money, a little bit of both? And even then, that probably would only cut down his enemies list marginally.

He wondered if it was the church. Yeah, they’d backed off since he'd almost ripped that guy’s arm clean off, but they were never going to be best buddies, and some followers got overzealous. It was always the religious nutcases who were the most dangerous people: they honestly believed God was on their side, so nothing they did was wrong, even if that included massacring kindergartners on a playdate. It’s one of the reasons he always distrusted religion as a whole. No one should ever feel that right about something, so justified in their righteousness that nothing they did was out of bounds.

No, the guy hadn’t been infected. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t in the Church of Divine Transformation. It only meant he hadn’t been infected yet.

The combination of alcohol and downers was a risky one, and by the time they got home he just decided to fall into bed. Dylan joined him and seemed to hold him tig
hter than he usually did. Scared? Possibly. He even asked, as Roan was falling asleep, “Do you think Hallmark makes a ‘Thank you for saving my boyfriend’s life from the psycho’ card? I should send one to Grey.”

“He didn’t save my life. I coulda took him.”

“You’re hard to kill, hon. You’re not invincible.”

“I know, but it wasn’t stepping in front of a bullet.” After a moment, he added, “You could probably make him a mix CD for practice.”

“I’m leaving that to you, alt-rock fan.”

“Hey, they’re a hockey team. They like the harder stuff.”

In the morning, Roan checked his phone messages and e-mail messages and got a couple of surprises. The guy arrested last night was named Charles Crosby—the name meant nothing to him—and it turned out there was a warrant on him in California, for assault and domestic violence. So he was most likely going to take a trip across state lines, and Roan wouldn’t have to worry about it for a while. He still never said why he went after Roan. E-mail wise, Darren had responded to him with some wariness. Roan had already picked out his assumed identity from the Rutherford database: a student named Chelsea Yamamoto, a cute younger student who could have no class overlap with Darren, so there was little chance they’d met before. Pretending to be her, she talked about having seen him hanging with his friends, and how she thought he was kind of cute but was afraid to talk to him for fear of being embarrassed. Darren responded before he got off-line: he would be at Club Amsterdam tonight, in one of the VIP rooms, and she was invited to join him.

Horny bastard. It was so nice to know teen boys were the same, whether gay or straight or somewhere in between.

Club Amsterdam was a hell of a place to invite a sixteen-year-old girl, though. It was a strip club that tried to present itself as classy and exclusive, but really only it’s even more absurd prices and large building separated it from its competition. Supposedly, its dancers were “screened,” but for what Roan didn’t know—STDs, dependent children, track marks, well-tucked-away dicks? No idea. He wasn’t looking forward to going there.

Then there was the added problem that Darren would probably have his bodyguards with him, as silly as that was. As soon as he realized Roan wasn’t Chelsea, he’d order them to sling him out. He needed something to tip the balance, something that would make them pause and not be so fast to act. He needed bodyguards of his own.

Well, that was a no-brainer, wasn’t it?

He called Grey, who picked up almost immediately and sounded very chipper. No hangover for him—he had the alcohol tolerance of Charles Bukowski. (Or maybe he didn’t drink that much—come to think of it, Roan could only remember him having three alcoholic drinks last night. Mostly he drank water.) Roan asked him how everyone else was doing, and he said everyone else was fine, save for Zach, who was greener than Shrek, but who was surprised there? Anyways, Roan told him the deal: he had to question a kid who always traveled with professional goons, ex-military bodyguards who probably mainlined steroids for breakfast and were most likely armed. He really didn’t want to get into a fight with them. All he wanted was a stalemate. Would he be interested? “Oh hell yeah,” Grey volunteered almost instantly. “Should I pick you up?”

“You know where Club Amsterdam is?”

“We took Carty there for his birthday last year.”

He had no idea who Carty was. Probably an unmet teammate. “How was it?”

“Weird. How can a strip club be arrogant?”