Authors: Andrea Speed
He needed an injury, a mark, a bruise, to legally excuse what he was going to do to this man.
The bat hit hard, possibly fracturing a bone, but Roan hardly even felt the pain as he yanked the bat out of Hatch’s hand and threw it away, hitting something with a solid thud. Hatch’s eyes darted toward the hit object, but Roan never bothered to look.
Hatch tried to land a punch then, throwing a wild right, but Roan easily caught his hand and twisted the arm with a sharp, savage motion, snapping the bone clean. At the same moment, he kicked out, stamping a foot flat against Hatch’s left knee with excessive force. The leg bent as it was not supposed to, and the crack of his leg breaking was as loud as a rifle blast in the tiny shed.
Hatch tried to scream, but he had no breath; the noise that came out of him as he toppled to the floor was a high-pitched squeal, like some kind of bizarre tea kettle whistle. But as soon as he hit the floorboards it jarred his broken leg, and he managed a surprised, agonized yelp, grabbing for his leg with his one good arm as tears of pain streamed from his eyes. “Do not try me,” Roan grated. “You will lose.” Only belatedly did he realize he was growling as he spoke.
Swallowing back his rage, reining in the beast, he went over to check Danny. He was still breathing, but his breaths were slow and shallow, and even when Roan called his name he didn’t move. He appeared naked to the waist, but that’s where a tattered green blanket covered him; it was probably safe to assume he was completely naked. The handcuffs looked like old regulation issue, before plastic ties came into wide use, and the Infected: Prey
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skin of Danny’s wrists looked abraded, like he’d been in them for some time. “Where are the fucking keys?”
Hatch was still curled up on the floor on his side, his broken arm hanging down uselessly, and when he looked up at Roan his slate-gray eyes were wild and showing too much white. He was a soft-looking man, of above average height, but middle age was catching up to him rapidly, making his bark-colored hair lank and thin, and his middle looked like a pillow of slowly swelling dough. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m a detective hired by Danny’s parents to find him, you sick son of a bitch.” He saw that Hatch’s good hand was scrambling to pull out something beneath a lower shelf, and just because he felt like playing with his prey he let Hatch pull out the gun—a little Smith & Wesson 9 mm—
before he put his foot down on the gun and let him take a good, long look up the barrel of his HK. “Mine’s bigger.” He kicked the gun behind him, and Hatch didn’t try to fight. From the sharp new scent in the shed, he’d just pissed himself. “Now, keys, or I’ll take your other arm.”
It took him a moment to form the words; all the blood had drained from his face, and he wondered if Hatch was starting to go into shock.
Like he gave a fuck if he was. “C-coffee can, to your right.”
There was an old Folgers can on the largest shelf, roughly waist high, and inside it were the little silver keys to the cuffs. He plucked them out and holstered his gun—like Hatch was capable of making a sudden move right now—before freeing Danny’s hands. It was then he noticed small needle holes in Danny’s bicep, ones that looked fairly fresh. “What the fuck did you shoot him up with?” When Hatch didn’t answer promptly, he snapped, “You have more bones I could break. Wanna see?”
“Special K,” he replied, his voice weak and defeated. Part shock, and part realization that he was powerless. Roan bet he was in a lot of fucking pain now that the initial numbness had worn off. “He wanted it; I wasn’t doing anything he didn’t want.”
“Oh fuck you, asshat. If he was so willing, why did you keep dosing him with Special K? Why are his wrists raw?” He pulled out his cell phone, and hit the number for Sikorski.
He picked up on the third ring. “This better be good,” Sikorski replied crossly. Roan thought he could hear a lot of noise in the background.
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“I need you to get your ass down here ASAP and send ambulances to 125 Lake Court South. I got a kid dosed on ketamine, a probable victim of sexual assault, and the perp’s been injured.”
“Whoa, whoa—what? What the hell are you involved in,
McKichan?”
It was funny how he called him by his last name only when he was angry at him, or about to get angry. “I found my clients’ kid. He’s not in good shape.”
That news, a good answer, seem to short-circuit Sikorski’s temper tantrum. “Oh shit. You hurt?”
“Do I sound hurt?” Actually, his arm was aching a little where he took the blow (not from a baseball bat—he could see now that it was an ax handle), but the fact that Hatch was hurting so much more made him feel better.
“What’d you do to the perp?”
“Nothing,” he replied blandly, couching his sarcasm in a dark, funereal tone. “He fell down the stairs.” He hung up the phone before Sikorski could comment on that.
Sikorski must have been worried that he was going to go psycho on the guy before he got there, because a patrol car came screaming into the cul-de-sac barely three minutes later. Still, Roan had time to look around the shed: a miniature and very cheap-shit version of a sadomasochist’s lair, layered with cheap soundproofing and small Internet and digital video cams set up to capture the action, although none appeared to be on yet. But those hard drives—all of them—were active and humming. He’d probably interrupted just before the show could start.
The blue boys (actually, one was female) had to deal with Hatch’s wife, whom he could hear shouting epithets and abuse at the cops until they had no choice but to cuff her and stash her in the back of their prowler. It made Roan fairly certain she knew what her husband’s hobby was; perhaps she participated from time to time. Although most sex predators were men, you did find the odd woman or two.
The ambulances and Gordo and Seb arrived at about the same time, with the two detectives who usually got the sex crimes beat (Foster and Blanchard) close behind, and he was glad to see a friendly face among the EMT crews, Diego Cole. Diego was actually an ex-boyfriend of his, but Infected: Prey
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unlike him and Con, their breakup had been mutual and free of drama and hard feelings. They just knew they weren’t a good match, and there was no point trying to pretend they were. Roan’s idea of relaxing after a hard day was reading a book, maybe watching a movie; Diego preferred playing Xbox until three in the goddamn morning. He liked to say it kept his reflexes sharp, but somehow Roan doubted that.
Gordo and Seb took it all in, and seeing Hatch on the floor in a small pool of his own piss, they both stared at Roan as the two EMT teams split up, the strangers going to Danny, while Diego and his rig partner, Steve Tsuro, got the fun task of working on Hatch. “His right arm’s broken, as is his left leg,” he told them.
Diego, who was crouched beside Hatch, looked up at him rather coolly. “Anything else we should know, Dirty Harry?”
He scowled at him, but decided to save the evil remark for a more private moment. “He’s a total prick.”
There was some fear that Danny had been mildly overdosed on ketamine—mild meaning he wasn’t dying, but he was barely alive. His respiration rate was incredibly low, and they couldn’t even get a reflex response from him. The rest of them had to clear the shed so the EMTs could work, and Seb kept an eye on things from the doorway, but there was hardly any need: Hatch was too hurt to try anything, and knowing Diego and Steve, they’d just smash him over the head with their kits if he did. Foster remained in the shed, looking over the crime scene, while Blanchard stood near the back of the house, barking into her cell phone that she needed Judge Shapiro to get her a warrant now.
He gave Gordo his gun, still in its holster. Since he hadn’t fired it, Sikorski’d give it back to him as soon as statements were taken and everything was judged kosher. To make it all easier, Roan lied about what had led him to the shed, namely he said he had smelled blood and fear, and recognized Danny’s scent from the Nakamura home. Complete bullshit, but everybody was so in the dark about his smelling ability that they wouldn’t be able to disprove it, and they wouldn’t know that the Nakamuras kept their home so surgically clean that they had all but scrubbed out every trace of Danny’s scent, and that the dog shit around here was so pungent it was overwhelming his sense of smell. It was all more legally plausible than simply saying he had a hunch. In the shed, Foster had recovered Hatch’s gun.
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Hatch, clearly shocky and immobilized on a portable gurney, complained that he’d just broken in and attacked him, and then repeated that he didn’t do anything Danny didn’t want. That’s when Roan showed the cops the bruise on his right forearm, and even he had to admit it was impressive. A deep, angry red already becoming blue-black at the edges, it was in the exact shape of the segment of the ax handle that hit him. “He hit me first,” he pointed out. “I simply defended myself.” And that was the truth, even though it was a deliberately calculated truth on his part. He could have prevented the hit, but he didn’t. Again, it was something that couldn’t be proven.
Diego, done with Hatch, came over and looked at his arm. “This looks bad. You’d better come to the hospital with us.”
He stared at him in surprise, almost feeling betrayed by Dee. “What?
It’s a bruise.”
“Which could be a fracture. Look, you can see the imprint of the damn thing in your skin. And don’t you even think about arguing with me.” Dee gave him that look, the kind of look you could only get from an ex who knew you so well that it was borderline mortifying, and he knew arguing was pointless.
Didn’t matter. He could give his statement at the hospital as easily as he could here.
BY THE time they got to County General, the waiting room was swamped with an unusual amount of people. Apparently there had been problems at the police station involving some angry cultists, who’d turned over cars in the parking lot and got their fool asses hurt. (Paris was right: he should have been there with the video camera.)
He was lucky, if you could call it that. Being an infected, he was to be handled a bit differently than everyone else, and therefore got processed pretty quickly, with people wearing latex gloves as thick as oven mitts handling him gingerly as they x-rayed his arm, as if he was somehow wildly contagious even though he was not bleeding. It did turn out he had some blood on his hands, but it was Danny’s; he must have gotten it while taking the cuffs off of him.
Afterward he called the Nakamuras, and when he told Sara he’d Infected: Prey
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found Danny, she actually shouted with joy, an emotional response that surprised him. It also made him feel worse when he had to tell her Danny was in the hospital.
Danny was expected to make it, but right now there were many questions about the condition he would be in when he regained consciousness. The problem with ketamine was it could fuck people up as much as a bad acid trip: it could give you a psychosis you never had before using it, and some people who abused it a lot could find it as psychologically addictive as heroin. The fact that Hatch was pumping him full of so much of the stuff and not saying how much he’d dosed him with and for how long meant they wouldn’t know how profoundly Danny had been affected until he woke up. The only good news in that was if Danny was riding high on Special K through most of his ordeal, he might not remember any of it.
His injuries were essentially superficial, although there was basic confirmation he’d been raped, or at least subjected to rather rough sex (and if he was on ketamine, it was considered rape regardless—it was a date-rape drug after all, a dissociative anesthetic, and no one on it could make any kind of decision or consent). Hatch had stopped complaining and started demanding a lawyer, but he was totally fucked. Not only were they confiscating his hard drives, but a rather large stock of ketamine had been found in the shed, and that shit was so illegal he was guaranteed to spend a butt-load of time in prison for possession of it alone.
Although things weren’t perfectly clear at the moment, Roan had figured out a workable scenario. LadyLeopard, the not-so-secret secret admirer on Danny’s MySpace page? It was either Hatch or Hatch’s wife, using infection and the Church of the Divine Transformation as a lure to meet impressionable, lonely kids in their general vicinity, and fuck them up royally. Hatch was nothing more than a bargain-basement predator, who simply adapted tactics to use the taboo “thrill” of infection to lead them to victims who would inadvertently help them. After all, if you were running away to get infected, you’d hardly announce it to your parents, would you?
And the kicker? He wasn’t infected; neither was his wife.
Presumably Danny got lucky, but he was being tested anyway, because it was unclear if Danny had been “shared” by other people.
When the Nakamuras arrived, he was prepared to break the news to them, but in an odd act of sympathy, Gordo came over and helped him do 154
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it. Although horrified by what had happened to Danny, they seemed glad the cops had the perpetrators in custody (although for the moment one was in surgery; Roan had apparently done a real number on Hatch’s leg), and Sara had hugged him for “rescuing” their son. Maybe they were a bit hard on him, but they loved Danny, and that was probably what counted the most.
He went and sat in a currently unused exam room afterward, feeling like he wanted to be alone. He didn’t know why exactly, technically this had to count as a good resolution—he’d found Danny, he was still alive, he’d gotten at least one predator off the street (and fucked him up pretty good)—but in an ideal world, Danny never would have been hurt in the first place. In an ideal world, he’d have just been crashing on a friend’s couch and smoking pot all day. But this world was not ideal, and he didn’t know why he suddenly wanted it to be.
Diego tracked him down, coming to join him sitting on the edge of the exam table. Dee was his height but much more slender in frame, almost willowy (although he would object to that description), a light-skinned black man with male model cheekbones and sleepy but expressive dark eyes. He was, as he liked to say, “half black, half Mexican, all man.”