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ROAN woke up when Dylan slammed down the phone, cursing in Spanish. That was how you knew you’d really pissed him off—he cursed in Spanish. He didn’t do that often.
Roan turned over onto his stomach, snuggling into his pillow, and asked, keeping his eyes closed, “What’s wrong?”
“Those fucking press monkeys tracked Sheba down at work,” he exclaimed angrily, while putting a gentle hand on Roan's back. It was warm and comforting. “She told them she didn’t know you well enough to comment on you.”
“Nice of her,” he muttered into the pillow. It had been two days since he'd sent Holden after Brand, and he remained sequestered in his house, hoping to bore the press to death. Obviously he’d just sent them in another direction.
Dylan rubbed his back idly, then asked, “You okay? Sure you’re not mad at me?”
“Why would I be mad at you? I’m fine, Dyl. I should be ecstatic. No more cage.” Doctor Rosenberg had called him into her office yesterday. He had snuck out and met her at her office, and she told him the unbelievable: he no longer had a viral cycle. Being ready to transform all the time had seemingly kicked him out of it, and now he no longer had to worry about transforming without warning. So no more cage, no more worrying that the viral sequence would kick in sooner than he expected. He should have been thrilled. So why wasn’t he?
Maybe because his identity as King Freak was permanently cemented now. He was now a permanent outcast in a segment of society that should have accepted him to some degree. He’d always felt like an outsider, and now he knew why: he wasn’t them. Not really. No more than they were him. Maybe the gays would accept him; they were his last hope for any sense of unity. And he didn’t hold out much hope there, since he never got the homosexual agenda newsletter that every member of the religious right seemed to get.
Dylan rested his head on his back, between his shoulder blades, and said, “I know you should be happy, maybe, but you’re not.”
“I’m okay with it, really. I’m just still processing it.” Did he believe him? Probably not. Dylan was too perceptive. So before he could call him on it, he asked, “What time is it?”
“A bit after eleven.”
“What?” He finally lifted his head and opened his eyes, looking at the alarm clock as Dylan sat up, taking his weight off of him. Oh yes, he wasn’t lying—it was slightly less than an hour to noon. “Oh shit, I have to get going.”
“Looking for Brandon?”
“I’m outta leads. I’ve got to talk to Grey.”
“He’s back?”
“Told me yesterday they would be doing an afternoon skate at the Grind ice rink.”
Roan was on his feet, heading toward the bathroom in a half-dazed stumble, when he heard Dylan ask, “That’s an ice rink? I thought that was a skateboard place. Or a strip club.”
“I know. I didn’t believe it either, but apparently they do ice too.”
Roommate Brandon had turned into a huge pain in the ass. He had lived in the apartment he'd shared with Jasmine several months after the crime but, according to the landlord, moved out a few months ago, she wasn’t sure where. She also couldn’t describe him, beyond a “fragile, girly-looking Mexican boy.” (Roan assumed she meant Hispanic.) He gave his name as Brandon John Fallows, and the SSN matched... a teenage boy killed a little over thirty years ago in a car accident and buried in a cemetery in Burien. Now Fallows, who only seemed to pop into existence—after the thirty-year absence—a couple months before he'd moved in, seemed to cease to exist two weeks after moving out. An experienced identity thief, but beyond that was the troubling fact that Brandon—or whatever his name actually was—was obviously concealing his real identity, and no one did that without good reason. He’d now worked his way onto the bottom of the suspect list. What was he running from? Could it have gotten his roommate killed?
He had to get everything Grey knew about Brandon and try and find a lead from it. He wanted to do it in person, mainly because he wanted to make sure Grey didn’t lie to him, either intentionally or unintentionally.
This case had gotten more complicated than he’d expected. And to be honest, he was glad for the distraction right now.
Roan ended up parking in the back lot of Grind, which was almost as large a quadrant as the parking lot at the Seahawks stadium. Why? Was skating that popular in the Seattle area? Or had each player, crew member, and hanger-on driven here in their own car, but not before inviting a hundred random people to come watch them? There was a bus stop nearby, and he wondered if that was the reason.
As he walked the lot, he saw a bald guy (a white guy who shaved his head) in a denim jacket giving him the stink eye, like he recognized him as the guy who ran over his dog several times with a combine harvester. Roan gave him a sarcastic little wave, and the guy muttered something into a cell phone. Roan mimed a kiss, and the guy turned away. Yep, blowing a kiss at them usually did it.
There was a guy in a nylon jacket standing at the rear entrance of the rink, arms folded in the traditional security guard posture. But he was more lumpy than muscular, like the Falcons sweatshirt and the slacks he was wearing were full of mashed potatoes instead of prime beef. Not only was Roan sure he could take him, but anyone over the age of thirteen had a fair shot at taking him. He was bald, but unlike the guy giving him the stink eye, it wasn’t by choice. “Help you?” he muttered, making it one word: hepyu.
“I’m Roan McKichan. I’m here to see Grey Williams.” Roan tried not to stare, but the guard’s head was almost perfectly egg shaped. He wanted to ask him if he’d ever had a hen sit on him by mistake.
“Uh huh.”
“Ask him. He knows who I am.”
With great reluctance, the man lifted a walkie-talkie to his mouth and said, “Ryan, there’s a guy named McKeen out here, says Grey knows him.”
“McKichan,” Roan corrected, but figured Grey would know who was meant. If he was lucky.
There was a burst of static over the walkie-talkie, Ryan saying something, but it was impossible to make out what he said. Even the Eggman scowled at his unit, like if he frowned hard enough he could have made sense of it.
After almost a minute, the door behind the Eggman cracked open, and he stepped aside as Grey stuck his head out. “Oh, hey, man. Thought that might be you.” He came out dressed in dark sweatpants and a sweatshirt, none of which had a Falcons logo. His hair was damp, and his skin was slightly flushed.
“I didn’t pull you off the ice, did I?”
“Oh, hell no. There was some kinda scheduling snafu, so we had to do our skate early. We’re packin’ up. In fact, I thought I was gonna hafta call you and reschedule.”
“They got something else going in here? It explains why the parking lot is so full.”
Grey looked around, as if noticing it for the first time, and shook his head. “Yeah, it’s some ice skating thing. There’s a buncha MILFs in the lobby.”
Ah, straight people. As he was wondering what he should say to that, the door opened again, and a tall, slender guy came out. “Hey, Grey, this the detective?”
“Oh, yeah. Roan, this is Scott Murray, our team captain. Scottie, Roan.”
Scott held out his hand, and his handshake was dry and firm but not over-the-top bone breaking. “Hi. Really wanted to meet you. You were really impressive taking on those Nazi fucks.”
“Thanks.” How many people had Grey shown the video to? Well, it probably wasn’t his fault—it was shown ad nauseum on television for about twenty-four hours, until a more interesting story hit the news cycle. And considering this was a nice distraction from the fact that Scott was fucking cute.
He had a round face that ended in a squared-off jaw that wasn’t heavy, with sleepy blue eyes that softened his rugged looks and short black hair that was actually reasonably stylish, not harsh. He could have been Roan’s ex-lover Connor’s half brother, that’s how handsome he was, and Roan wanted to slap himself but didn’t dare. This wasn’t at all fair. The stereotype was hockey players had the best bodies—lean, hard—but the homeliest faces. Hadn’t Scott been given the memo? He was even better looking than Argent.
“Vancouver, right?” he asked.
Scott nodded. “Burnaby originally, but close enough. Accent gives it away, huh?”
“I’m very familiar with it.” How old was he? He looked barely twenty, but he had a bit of stubble suggesting that at least he was shaving age.
Now it seemed to be a “meet the team” party, as several other players dribbled out. In order: a tall, blond Russian called Sandy (who could have been a body double for Dolph Lundgren in that Rocky film), “Tank” Beauvais (who seemed oddly placid and yet gave off the vibe that he was a grenade waiting for his pin to be pulled), a guy named Richie whose nose had been broken so often it was now permanently crooked, and a guy with an astonishingly stereotypical New York accent named Jeff. (He’d learned from the Falcons own web page that there were only three American-born players on the team: Grey, Jeff, and somebody named Rozanski. Nearly all the rest of the team was from Canada, save for Sandy and a Finn named Henrik.) Roan felt like a trained monkey—were they expecting him to dance?
Another guy came out, but he was talking to the Eggman, and he was too old to be a player, deep in his mid-thirties. Also, he wasn’t wearing anything approximating workout gear, and Roan caught a glimpse of a silver watch that was reasonably expensive.
Not sure there was a subtle way to do this that Grey would catch, he told him bluntly, “I’m here to talk to you about the case. Should we go somewhere private?”
He shrugged. “No need. The guys know.”
“Okay.” Did they know he was looking into the murder of Grey’s best friend’s transsexual sister/brother? Maybe they honestly didn’t care. Most of the younger generation wasn’t as hung up on sexual roles as the older generation. “I need to know if you ever met Jamie’s roommate, Brandon Fallows.”
“No.”
“Know anything about him at all?”
He considered that, grimacing slightly. “Not really. Jamie hardly mentioned him in his letters.”
Roan stared at him blankly. “Letters? Jamie wrote you letters?”
“Yeah. For a while there I didn’t have an Internet connection, so that was easier.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before? Can I see the letters?” He was trying very hard not to get mad at Grey, not in front of so many big teammates (only Tank was about his size—short, his ass!) but it was difficult. Did he really want to sabotage his own case? It was hard to believe anyone could be this dumb.
“I didn’t save ’em.” He scratched his head, then added, “There might be one or two, though. I packed up a whole buncha stuff. I’m not sure about everything I packed.”
“If you could check, I’d really appreciate it.”
Roan had no idea why, but his personal alarm bells started going off as soon as he heard the rumble of a truck engine. Or maybe it was just he was being stared at, and usually he knew when eyes were on him. He looked over his shoulder to see a flatbed white Ford pulling to a stop in a parking lane almost twenty feet away (well, there weren’t a lot of places left to park), and the engine was left running as eight men of various sizes and ages—mostly older teens, most burly—hopped out onto the pavement, some carrying pipes or bats. Roan instantly recognized the skinhead who’d been giving him the stink eye earlier.
“You’re that kitty fucker, ain’t cha,” the skinhead asked, although it wasn’t a question. “Helped that motherfucking gook cat escape justice.”
“Vigilantism isn’t justice,” Roan corrected, although he knew he was a) being a hypocrite, and b) there was no way in fucking hell this asshole would understand it.
“You’re one of them, ain’t cha?” A guy who could have been Skinhead’s younger brother snapped. “Kitty fag. These your bang buddies?”
Oh no, he didn’t just say that. “Get back in your piece of shit truck and leave. You don’t want this kind of trouble.”
“You threatening us, faggot?”
“He said leave,” Scott said, his voice oddly flat. It was kind of fun to watch. You knew the guys had been teammates for a while because they all glanced at each other and instantly knew what battle formation to take. Sandy and Tank started slowly drifting right while Jeff and Richie started slowly drifting off left, leaving Grey and Scott (and himself) right in the middle. Wedge formation. As soon as the skinhead and his buddies went for Roan (and Grey and Scott), they’d be instantly surrounded. None of them were new to fighting, even off the ice.
“You his boyfriend?” the skinhead taunted and made a kissy face at Scott, evoking derisive laughter from his followers.
Scott didn’t take the bait, just glared at him. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with, do you?”
“Buncha fuckin’ kitty fuckers.”
“Ever seen Slap Shot?” Roan wondered.
This seeming non sequitur stopped the skinhead in his tracks. “What?”
“I thought it might give you some idea what’s about to happen to you. Ah, those who don’t watch classic movies are doomed to repeat them.”
“That’s a great film,” Scott replied.
Roan nodded. “Can hardly go wrong with Newman.”
Confusion briefly clouded the skinhead’s face, but it quickly sharpened to annoyance. “You fags are nuts.”
They closed in, but there was a strange hesitation, and Roan knew why when he glanced back at Grey and saw him smiling ear to ear, showing off his gap-toothed grin. He was so happy he was almost laughing. And why not? He was an enforcer—his ability to fight (and squash and manhandle) was why he was on the team in the first place. This was where he shined.
Technically they were outnumbered, and these guys did have weapons. But Roan figured they’d have them all down in three minutes.
As it was, that was a generous estimate.
Grey threw the first punch, a snap to the jaw that knocked out the skinhead’s brother instantaneously. He hit the asphalt like a bag of meat. In fact, his head had snapped around so sharply it was a minor miracle it wasn’t thrown off his shoulders. Grey hit like a jackhammer, and Roan suspected he was actually holding back a bit. “Next,” he said cheerfully.
A guy with a bat swung, but Tank blocked it with his arm and gave the assailant what Roan knew was called a “Glasgow kiss”—he brought his forehead down sharply on the bridge of the man’s nose, breaking it with a sickening sound of crunching cartilage. As blood burst from both nostrils and he stumbled back screaming, Tank ripped the bat from his hand and threw it away (Roan heard it break glass—someone’s taillight?) as he cursed him out in his French-accented broken English, “That a pussy weapon, you piece of shit redneck motherfucker!” Tank then started beating on the guy, big roundhouse slugs to the head that made one of his earlobes burst open and start spurting blood. He had no technique at all, but he had a surprising amount of rage and fearlessness that pretty much tagged him instantly as the crazy guy to avoid fighting at all costs. (Strong could be dealt with—but crazy? Oh no. You never knew what the crazy were going to do.) As the guy was now on his knees, shrieking, a friend ran in to try and help, and Tank threw an elbow that caught him flush in the mouth as he was running toward him, and teeth tumbled out of the man’s mouth like candy from a broken piñata. What amateurs. Didn’t they know you didn’t fight the crazy guy?
If the skinheads ever got a chance to use their weapons, it wasn’t obvious. Sandy and Jeff seemed to be having fun pummeling the cretins, shoving them between themselves like human Frisbees, Richie was lecturing the fallen (“You start a fight, you should know how to fucking fight, assholes!”), and Scott had simply grabbed the youngest guy and pulled his shirt up over his head, both blinding him and locking up his arms so he couldn’t take a swing at anything, putting him in an odd, bent-over position. As he tried to squirm free of his shirt so he could get in the fight, Scott grabbed the back of his neck, squeezing hard, and said, “Don’t make me break your jaw.” Scott pressed his knee up against the man’s shirt-covered face, just to let him know how easily he could do it. The boy wisely stopped struggling.
“You’re dropping your left, Jeff,” a man said, and Roan looked to see the guy with the watch was filming the fight on his camera phone. The supposed bodyguard was watching, seemingly bored, as if this happened a lot and he was sad to be left out. Roan almost laughed. This was kind of like Slap Shot, and he was with the Hanson Brothers—all six of them. He hadn’t even had to do anything yet. Richie was currently slamming one man’s head repeatedly into the tailgate of an SUV, shouting, “Who’s the faggot now?” He actually seemed to be waiting for an answer, but since the guy seemed half conscious and was bleeding from almost every orifice, an answer probably wasn’t forthcoming.
Grey, who had knocked three guys out and had yet to break a sweat, cracked his knuckles, and asked, “You want this guy?”
Someone had just gotten out of the passenger seat of the Ford and was stalking toward them, reaching into his coat pocket. Over the smell of so much testosterone, fear, and freshly spilled blood, Roan didn’t know if he had a knife or a gun, but either way he didn’t want to wait to see. “Yeah, leave him to me.” Roan sprinted to meet him, not wanting that weapon out of his coat, and upon seeing Roan coming for him, the man stopped and pulled it out. But he was still bringing it up as Roan grabbed his wrist and snapped it as easily as if the bones had been made of plywood. (It had been a gun, a small Saturday night special that probably would have been more annoying than lethal; he’d have to get up close to use it with any kind of accuracy). He took a breath to scream, and Roan slammed his forehead into his face, which made Roan almost black out, but the pain was something he could live with (especially since his morning Vicodin was just kicking in). The would-be gunman just hit the parking lot, unconscious, and Roan dropped his wrist, kicking the gun toward Grey. “Want a souvenir?”
A guy reeled away from Sandy, escaping his grasp, and Roan decked him with a casually thrown jab. He then looked around, shaking his hand (that guy had a face like concrete), and realized the only people left standing were him and the Falcons. All the skinheads were down and out, or, if at all smart, had run away screaming like kindergartners from a haunted house. A glance at his watch showed that barely two minutes had passed. Had any of the skinheads even landed a successful punch?
The driver still in the Ford took off so fast his tires squealed as he got out of there, leaving a shit-stain skid of rubber, and Tank threw one of the pipes at him, hitting the open rear tailgate of the truck (great throw.) It took a crazy bounce and caromed off into the sea of parked cars. “You pansy piece of shit, come back here!” Tank raged. Considering splashes of someone else’s blood colored his face, the front of his shirt, his sleeves, and his hands, he looked like a slasher in a horror film. A wild-eyed French slasher in a brown Puma T-shirt. “Bring your redneck family, and I’ll have my sisters beat you up! You limp dick ignorant pig shit!”
Roan found himself struggling not to laugh. Tank was great. He was going to start a Tank fan club. As he covered his mouth so he didn’t laugh, Grey came up next to him and whispered, “Goalies are all insane. Every one of ’em.”
Considering they volunteered to stand in front of frozen pucks being winged at their heads at roughly a hundred miles an hour, he could see why that might get you a reputation for insanity. If they weren’t before being goalies, they would be after.
“Nice right. You skate?” The guy who asked him turned out to be the guy filming the melee on his camera phone, the one who had told Jeff helpfully that he was dropping his left.
“No.”
“Too bad.”
Sandy clapped his hands together and said, “That was fun. We should do this more often.” He wasn’t being sarcastic.
“It’s a rush,” Jeff agreed.
Scott, who no longer had the kid (Roan figured he let him run for it, but he couldn’t be sure), looked at all the fallen, bleeding men littering the parking lot and asked, “What do we do now? Call an ambulance?”
“Nah. One of the skating moms’ll probably do it,” phone guy said, snapping it shut and putting it in his pocket. What was he, the coach? Assistant coach?
Tank clapped Roan hard on the back, almost making him jump with the shock of it, and said, “Pansy not a gay thing. You gay, but you not a pansy. These guys, they probably not gay, but they pansies.”
Roan nodded, smiling, trying not to laugh. Again, Tank was fucking hilarious.
“Anyone hurt?” the assistant coach (?) asked.
“I think my arm’s bruised,” Tank volunteered, rubbing the arm that deflected the bat blow.
“Think I jammed my pinkie,” Richie said, examining the digit. Looked fine to Roan.
“You’re fine to skate. You’re at the arena at three.”
“We got it,” Scott assured him. He gestured back to the door and said, “Tank, Sandy, why don’t you guys clean up. Then we’ll go get lunch.”
“I don’t need clean up,” Tank insisted. He saw the blood on his shirt and shucked it off, using it to wipe the blood off his face and hands. He revealed a surprising set of six-pack abs and a small heart tattoo between his pecs. If someone had tried to punch him in the gut, they’d have probably broken their knuckles. “I just need another shirt.” He walked back, and going in the door, handed the bloodied shirt to the assistant coach. “Frame this for me.” Sandy followed Tank back into the rink but kept his shirt on.
“He’s a goalie,” Grey explained. “They don’t get to fight a lot.”
“Does that explain the rage?” Roan wondered.
Grey shrugged, and Scott said, “That might be from yesterday’s game.”
“Oh,” Grey replied, as if remembering. “That asshole who butted him.”
Roan guessed that was some hockey terminology he didn’t know. “Pardon?”
“Hit him with the butt end of his stick,” Scott explained, making a gesture with his hands that looked like he was poking someone with an invisible stick. “It’s a shitty thing to do, but some guys do it, and the ref doesn’t always catch it.”
“Tank gave him a facewash for it and shoved him on his butt, and he got a game misconduct for it,” Grey said, finishing the story. “He wasn’t happy.”
“I wasn’t happy,” Scott said. “I argued so much with the ref he threatened to toss me in the penalty box.”
“I’m having a hard time imagining anyone deliberately trying to piss off Tank right now,” Roan admitted.
Grey grinned again, such a goofy expression that it made him look deceptively harmless. “Yeah, I know. He’s something off the leash, ain’t he?”
Scott sighed wearily and scrubbed a hand through his hair, mussing it up and making him look even more adorable somehow. Damn it, he needed to stop that! Scott looked at him, and Roan was afraid for a moment he'd caught a hint of the lustful ogling, but instead he asked, “Wanna come to lunch with us? We should buy you a drink.”
Grey threw an arm around his shoulders and threatened to crush him in a sideways bear hug. “Yeah, c’mon! Afterwards, we can stop by my place and I can see if I can find any of those letters.”
Put that way, he didn’t see how he could say no.
Besides, as bizarre as it was, he may have just found his people. No, he wasn’t a jock, but he was a lunatic, and he could see himself fitting in perfectly with the Falcons.
