Infected: Freefall (39 page)

Fi looked over his shoulder and said, “Here.” She turned the keyboard toward herself, entered a username and password, and got him into the site. He looked at her in surprise. She gave him a lopsided grin, coloring slightly. “What can I say? If I’m gonna watch a porn, it’s gonna be a gay porn. Straight porn just makes me ill.”

He so didn’t need to know that about her. Dylan turned to the web page, amazed at the sheer amount of dicks and balls everywhere, and searched for Colt Brixton. Dee came over and sat on the other side of him so he could peruse the website as well. “You’re not an Internet porn guy, are you?” Dee guessed.

Dylan shook his head. “Not a porn guy period. Seriously, how does anyone get turned on by that acting?”

“See, you’re not supposed to be paying attention to the acting.”

“Yeah, hon, although sometimes it’s hilarious,” Fi admitted.

He shook his head. “No, I’m too distracted by it. It’s too painful. I used to date a theater major, and I have a low tolerance for hideous acting.”

Dee gave him a disbelieving look. “But hot naked guys, Dyl.”

He snorted derisively. “I work in a gay nightclub. I’ve seen lots of hot naked guys. After a while, it’s just wallpaper. Besides, I’m not a big fan of the gym-bunny look, and look at these guys. You could grate cheese on their stomachs.”

“There is such a thing as overboard,” Fi agreed. “But you know, you can probably say this because you’re hot, and your boyfriend’s hot. It might be different if you weren’t.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dylan said, although he supposed she had a point. It was an easy thing to say when you had a boyfriend who was really incredibly sexy. But she thought he was sexy? He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Yeah, he had to look relatively good for the day job, but beyond that he didn’t think a lot about it. Maybe that made him luckier than most.

He found Colt Brixton, and kind of wished he hadn’t. The guy had a lean, hard body, all muscles defined and heightened, and he had a hard hawk-featured face, not at all appealing, although he cultivated a type of tough-boy sneer that was popular amongst insecure adolescents. He had a type of tribal-sun black tattoo ringing his navel, seemingly highlighting it, although why you’d want to accentuate your belly button Dylan had no idea. Maybe it was a porn-actor thing. “Eww,” Dylan said. Absolutely not his type. He was trying to look like street-tough jailbait, one of those gay-bashing teens whom every gay suspected was just fighting his own sexuality, and it was almost a stereotype. Fetishizing the enemy is what Roan called it. Dylan imaged he was trying to look eighteen, but he looked twenty-six at the youngest.

“Yeah, I don’t usually go for that kind either,” Dee agreed.

“He’s one of those guys who looks like he’s constantly smelling something bad,” Fi said. “Put a bag over his head, and he might be okay.”

All the titles this guy was in were hilariously bad—
The Postman Cums Twice
, really?—but nothing screamed Newberry sex tape. “What about this tape, Fi?”

“Oh. Gunther and this other guy, Declan, had seen it, but they said it had barely been leaked when it disappeared. The word through the underground is someone with deep pockets bought up every copy, even digital ones. Gunther’s interested in purchasing a copy, though. If we can get it, he’s willing to pay for it. He thinks it’ll be huge.”

Dylan sighed. So why did he have to look up this guy? Again, think like Roan. “When was it bought up?”

She shrugged, her eyes still glued to the laptop screen. “Gunther thinks it was about a month ago, more or less. He said it disappeared too fast for anyone to upload it.”

Dylan considered that, wishing he was Roan. He had a feeling he’d know exactly what this meant. “Okay, so how does this help us?”

“Umm,” Fiona said, considering it. “Well, my thought was we could talk to Colt. Maybe he knows who paid to scoop up the tape.”

“Or maybe he still has a copy,” Dee suggested. “Porn guys can be pretty narcissistic.”

“So how do we contact him?”

“I was figuring Holden would know,” she admitted. “He knows the hustlers.”

“But he’s a porn star, not a hustler.”

Dee clicked his tongue and shook his head. “He’s a very minor porn star, regional as opposed to national. A lot of these guys hustle on the side. There might even be a web page for him, if we knew where to look. Can I see that?”

Dylan gave him the laptop. “Help yourself.”

Dee’s fingers got busy on the keyboard, searching for the link where you could rent Colt for a while. Dylan felt like Dee and Fi were so much better at this than he was. He felt lost. Dylan grabbed the phone and punched in Holden’s cell number. They were right—you needed a hustler to deal with another hustler. It was their milieu, a secret world with its own rules and protocols. Or maybe he was being too dramatic. After all, anyone could be a hustler. You just had to sell yourself for money. It got complicated when you decided to make a living out of it, whether by necessity or impulse.

His phone rang five times before he picked up. “What is it, Dylan?” Holden asked curtly.

Considering how friendly he had been earlier, that threw him a bit. Moody, was he? “There’s been an interesting development in the case. It seems there’s a Kyle Newberry sex tape that appeared for five minutes and disappeared after lots of money got thrown around.”

“What kind of sex tape?”

“Kyle and two men, one of whom has been identified as Colt Brixton, a regional porn star.”

Holden’s pause seemed portentous. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“No idea. Dee seems to think he’s probably a hustler and may have a copy.”

“Where’s he work out of?”

“Umm, Portland, and a place called Champion Studios.”

A pause, but this time, Holden held the phone aside and said to someone else, “Pull over.” Another pause, and Holden said to his mysterious friend, “Did I stutter? Pull the fuck over. Now.”

“What’s going on?” he asked. Dylan had a sudden bad feeling about this. What was Holden up to?

“I’m investigating a lead. I think they may connect.”

“How?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I do. Gotta go. I’ll call back in a few minutes.” And with that, Holden hung up before Dylan could even take a breath.

“Well, fuck you too,” Dylan muttered, hanging up the receiver.

“Holden recognize him?” Dee wondered.

Dylan could only shrug. “He seemed to think it was familiar. Guys, he’s doing something. I don’t think it’s good.”

Fi made a noise of disbelief. “He’s not tricking, is he?”

“No. I think it’s… I dunno.” The anger in his voice when he told his mystery guest to
“pull the fuck over”
was palpable over the phone. It left a bitter taste in Dylan’s mouth. Investigating a lead? He had a sudden, fearful feeling he had a member of the Newberry family in his company, and it wasn’t willing company. “He doesn’t own a gun, does he?”

They both gave him surprised looks. “Did you hear a gunshot?” Dee wondered.

“No.” Dylan wasn’t actually sure if he could explain it to them. All he knew was that after Jason’s death, he had been so angry he’d wanted to murder the man who’d driven the car that hit them. And after stewing on it for a while, he’d got that gun and resolved to shoot that motherfucker before he could be released on an unsuspecting populace. Dylan knew the sound of someone deciding to do something irrevocable, the cold anger that wasn’t so much rage as surrender. You were giving up to your darkest impulses and no longer cared what happened to you. In a strange way, you were begging to be killed, obliterated, only if you got to take the object of your hatred with you.

But maybe he was being a drama queen. Maybe Holden was just pissed off. Could he be blamed? This was all so deeply fucked up. Still, he thought Holden was currently doing something very stupid, something that could get him killed.

Maybe this had been enough to call him off, to make him refocus his energy. Maybe. Dylan would never claim to know how Holden thought.

But he hoped it worked. They’d need to put all their heads together to figure this one out if Roan wasn’t here to guide them.

15

The Use of a Tourniquet Is Not Advised

H
OLDEN
tried his best to puzzle this out in his mind, but there was more than one thing going on. There simply had to be.

“You blackmailed your own nephew,” he said aloud.

John stared at him like he was insane. “What?”

“Over Kyle’s sex tape. You blackmailed him and decided to go after your brother—”

“That’s not what fucking happened!” he roared, his anger genuine. “Joel bought the fucking thing!”

Holden wondered if this was true. Then he wondered why he doubted it. This was so fucked up it was incredible. “He bought up his son’s sex tape?”

“Yes. Someone approached him, said they’d release it on the web if he didn’t pay them. I thought you couldn’t trust the bastard, but Joel wanted the tapes destroyed and the whole thing put behind them, so he paid up.”

“Who was the guy?”

“How the fuck should I know? Supposedly a… participant, but I don’t know. I stayed out of it.”

“’Cause it was icky?”

John grimaced and looked away. “I didn’t need to know this shit, okay? Not my business.”

“Was the participant’s name Colt?”

“What kinda name is Colt?”

“A porn name.”

John shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing and kind of hoped he’d never have to hear it again. “I don’t know shit about the tape, except Joel said he took care of it.”

“How soon before his death?”

The question seemed to catch him off guard. “What?”

“What I said.”

He had to think about it. “A week, maybe? Two?”

“Kyle knew about it?”

He shrugged helplessly. “How the fuck do I know?”

“So Joel paid blackmail money on Kyle’s sex tape, and then you decided to blackmail him too, since he was such an easy mark?”

“What kind of scumbag do you think I am?”

“A huge one.”

“Fuck you.”

“How fucked up is your family?” Holden shot back. “Why would Joel, of anyone, want to help keep his own son in the closet?”

“Because the Ashers have money coming out the ass, and he’s good friends with Evangeline Asher and didn’t want to humiliate her.”

“Good friends.” Holden figured that meant he was fucking her, used to fuck her, or wanted to fuck her. Joel was a predictable horndog. There was also the possibility that if Kyle’s secret came out, some of Joel’s might as well. “This is fucked up.”

“Tell me about it.”

Holden decided that the answer lay—no pun intended—with Colt Brixton. Duane Malloy was probably a skeezy bastard, but he could wait. He needed to talk to Colt now. “You want to live, John?”

He scowled at him. “Is that a trick question? Fuck yeah.”

“Fine. Then this never happened. You report me to the cops, I’ll be sure to tell them all about Joel, and all about you.”

“What d’ya mean all about me?”

“Brothers sharing a hustler. It’ll make the top of the news cycle for weeks. You can’t buy that kind of salaciousness.”

His eyes almost bugged out of his head, and a vein throbbed visibly in his neck. “What the fuck…? I’m not gay! I’ve never hired you!”

“I know. But who cares about truth when a lie is so good? It’s what you call… truthiness. You could get the Pope to swear it never happened, but it won’t matter. You’ll forever be known as that guy who hired his brother’s hustler. You will never live it down.” Holden opened the passenger door, and half in and half out of the car, he looked at the sweating, bleeding John and gave him a deeply insincere smile. “Makes holding a gun on you seem like nothing, huh?”

“You motherfucker,” John snarled, but he looked away, his shoulders slumping. Holden knew he wasn’t going to do a damn thing. The thought that Holden would lie and paint him as a closet fag was just too much for him to bear. Pussy.

At least they weren’t too far from the casino. Its huge, garish neon sign lit up its corner of the sky like a spotlight. It was an ugly place, as gaudy and cheap as a ten-dollar hooker, and Holden couldn’t fathom who would spend all their time in there, wasting all their money. But he felt the same way about cocaine, and that certainly had a fan club.

Walking along the road, he pulled out his cell phone and punched up a familiar number. “Julian, it’s Fox. I need you to work some pimp magic and find a hustler for me. He works porn out of Champion in Portland, goes by the name of Colt Brixton. Ideally I need a place to find him, or a personal phone number. I need this ASAP.” He hung up without saying good-bye, as he’d gotten his machine. But you always got Julian’s machine. Did he ever answer his fucking phone?

Holden decided to call Ahmed and see if he was in the mood for a road trip. Julian would call back eventually, and he wanted to be ready.

Julian didn’t disappoint. It just took him a while.

He called back around four-thirty in the morning, clearly wasted, and said several things that were completely unintelligible. But eventually he spit out what sounded like an address and a grudge. (The words Holden was able to make out were “fucker,” “stash,” “me,” “light,” “butt,” and “fluffer.” He couldn’t put them into a coherent sentence, though.) By the time the call came through, he was crashing on Ahmed’s couch, which was—of course—black leather. A leather queen was going to have a leather sofa.

Holden told Ahmed what was going on, but Ahmed had been smoking his evening joint at the time and didn’t really follow it. (He liked to say some people had a beer to relax after work, but Ahmed—musician, guerrilla journalist, and social worker—preferred to have a joint. Fair enough. Holden begrudged no one their vices, especially since his income depended on at least one.) Holden tried again, but Ahmed just waved his hand dismissively and said, “I’m thinking it’s probably best I don’t know all the details. Now, who wants a grilled cheese sandwich?”

To be fair, Ahmed made great grilled cheese sandwiches.

While Holden took the time to catch some sleep, Ahmed remained up, in spite of the joint, and after Julian called, they piled into his vintage DodgeCharger and started driving to Portland. Ahmed had been working the late shift lately and was keyed up, as he said his body clock now told him he couldn’t sleep until the sun was up. He was becoming a vampire—or, as he preferred, a Blacula. Being both a leather queen and a few inches shy of seven feet tall, Ahmed was naturally intimidating, but he was amazingly laid-back and had a goofy sense of humor that Holden imagined Roan would love. They would probably get along great, come to think of it, but they’d only met once, and not under the best of circumstances. Ahmed would probably love Roan’s vintage muscle cars.