The (After) Life of the Party [3/?]
Title: The (After) Life of the Party [3/?]
Author:
xxdance
Fandom(s): Fall Out Boy/Panic! At the Disco
Pairing: Pete/Ryan, Pete/Patrick.
Summary: Ryan's just another dead starlet. Patrick's just another overworked detective. Pete's just another shady character. Sort of.
Rating: R. [Violence, drug use, language.]
Warnings: Complete crack. Beyond crack. Detectives is all I'm saying, I'll save the other cracky warnings for later. Slash, language, and drug use as well.
Author's Note:whatchamacall1t, because she spurs me along and gives me great ideas for weirdness.
one two
Patrick's apartment was neither spacious nor glamorous, which, considering the fury he came home in, was probably for the best.
He was angry with himself (blushing?), he was angry with Pete (boundaries, goddammit), hell, he was angry with Andy, who he'd seen for ten minutes that morning (of all the desks to put the file on, of all the possible detectives). He kicked off his shoes, not caring that in about ten minutes he'd be swearing under his breath and trying to scrub that black scuff off of the wall. His coat hit the floor, and he knew he'd pick that up, too, but for the moment he enjoyed the faint feeling of bad, the slight rush he got from any deviation from his usual polite, calm, and collected persona.
Today had not been a good day.
It wasn't even that he was trying to solve a case where the only witness was a belligerent asshole (or, not entirely). It wasn't even that Patrick had let him be a belligerent asshole.
No, it was the fact that Joe had been right. He was blushing, goddammit, and that was entirely the belligerent asshole's fault.
You just don't do that, he thought to himself, heaving an angry sigh and picking up his coat, his temper tantrum over. You just don't invade people's personal space like that, especially when they're trying to clear your name. Even if it's to tell them to 'shh.'
And really, Patrick rationalized (by this point he'd gotten a rag and a bottle of cleaner from under the sink and was scrubbing, almost smiling, at the scuff he'd left on the wall), maybe the blush was the result of anger. It was plausible--probable, even, that Pete's actions had made Patrick pissed off enough to blush. Not blushing, maybe--flushing, because that's what happened with anger, wasn't it? Yeah, you could totally flush with anger.
Patrick didn't lie often, and there was a damn good reason for it--he was good. As someone in the business of worming the truth out of people, he'd learned every lying trick in the book (and the few that were too good to be written down). Within an hour, his walls spotless, clothes hung and entire living room tidied, he'd convinced himself that anger had been it. Maybe not even that--maybe, as he was rapidly beginning to suspect, it all came down to the interrogation room being hot and the night air being cold.
But, even as he drifted off with a contented smile on his face, some tiny, annoying voice at the back of his mind hummed a tune Patrick would rather have ignored.
---
It wasn't self-conciousness, really. It was brutal honesty. No matter how many times Joe preached the gospels of his own arrogance ("It's not about actually being extremely good looking, Patrick--and now pay attention here because I really think you can benefirt from this--it's about pretending to be extremely good looking. Positive thinking, is all it is, and look how well it's working for me!"), Patrick refused to believe it. Besides, Joe was more classically good-looking, whereas Patrick was...not. Chubby, short, glasses, prematurely receding hairline? Patrick wasn't about to kid himself. Yeah, okay, he had his occasionally good days, but overall he just wasn't a dashing guy. Definitely not tall, dark, and handsome, and that's what everyone went for, wasn't it?
Patrick looked down to realize he'd been gnawing at the pen he was supposed to be organizing his thoughts with. But Joe had shown up, twenty minutes late, a huge grin on his face and his hair messy. "You," he'd said, leaning over Patrick's desk (Patrick could tell he'd stayed at her house--his breath smelled like a multitude of things Patrick didn't care to identify), "need to get out more."
"Really," Patrick had said, drawing a circle around the word 'Ryan Ross' he'd scribbled in the middle of the page.
"Yes," Joe had replied, sitting half on top of Patrick's paper. "Because I had an amazing time last night, and it's not fair of me to keep this all to myself."
"Joe, please, I'm trying to--"
But Joe had been off again, just as he was at least once a week, telling Patrick all about it, using words like 'game' and 'hot' and 'ass,' words Patrick really didn't want to hear in the context of Joe. Just like every other time Joe tried to give this speech, Patrick tuned him out.
He drew a line from the circle around 'Ryan Ross' to where he'd written 'Wentz'. He made lines for each of the people Pete had mentioned--Travis, Beckett, Saporta, Spencer, Jon. He had a feeling it could go on forever, lines branching out every which way, and he'd never get anywhere. Patrick sighed, crumpling the paper and throwing it into the wastebasket as a shadow fell over his desk.
"They need you at the morgue," Andy said, looking somewhere between grim and worried.
"Now?"
"Now," he nodded. "Something's gone haywire with the autopsy. Don't call Wentz."
Patrick frowned, pulling on his coat. "Why not?"
Andy shook his head. "Just don't. You'll understand when you get there."
"So, what, you're just going to be all mysterious and not tell me why?"
Andy leaned forward, voice hushed. "It's not something we should really be talking about in front of the office. Just go. You'll figure it out once you get there. Bring Joe, too."
Patrick stared, raising an eyebrow. "If this is some weird kind of joke, Hurley, I hope you know--"
"It's not," Andy assured him.
If it was anybody else (read: Joe), Patrick would have wormed his way out of it. He did his best to avoid the morgue entirely, preferring to have reports dropped off at his desk. He saw enough dead bodies in his line of work--why spend more time around them than necessary? Andy was, generally speaking, a pretty good-natured guy, one of the few in the station that could actually get a laugh out of Patrick on occasion. He smiled, more often than not, and it was that fact alone that allowed him to keep his long, dark hair--his smile reassured everyone from Patrick and his frazzled nerves to Joe and his inherent naiveté.
This grim-faced, stern person at Patrick's desk was not Andy.
"Okay," Patrick agreed, casting a glance to Joe's desk, where he was doing his best (terribly) to pretend he wasn't eavesdropping. "Come on, Joe."
Normally, Joe would have continued to feign his innocence. This time, however, once they were out of earshot, he whispered, "What's going on?"
Patrick shrugged, clutching his jacket tighter around himself. "No idea. Andy wouldn't say. Apparently something's gone wrong with the autopsy."
"I thought those things were foolproof?" Joe asked, frowning.
"So did I," Patrick said, pursing his lips. "I've never heard of one of the new systems failing. Ever."
---
For a moment, Patrick blamed the medical examination's failure entirely on the coroner. When he had extended a hand to greet them ("Hi, I'm Doctor Urie, call me Brendon, that's with an 'o', mind you, and I'll be your medical examiner this morning.") he'd grinned in a way that was entirely inappropriate for someone in the business of determining the cause of deaths. His hair stuck out at odd angles and a pair of red-rimmed glasses peeked out from the pocket of his lab coat. If it wasn't for the way he'd started babbling on about equipment and processes Patrick knew nothing about, he might have declared Andy a very good liar and punched him in the face.
"Okay, so, I realize you're not in medicine and this might be a little difficult to grasp. I'll slow it down for you," Brendon explained, once he'd led Patrick and Joe into the room where Ryan Ross' extremely dead body lay, half-covered with a white sheet. "Basically, the process is you take your corpse--" here he gestured in Ryan's direction, "--you inject it with this chemical, here," he said, pulling out a vial of green fluid, "--wait an hour or so, snip a bit of hair, some skin, whatever, depending on the type of stiff you've got--" Patrick flinched at the slang, "--run it through the computer and you'll get a neat printout of everything in their system. That thing'll point out a hangnail."
Patrick nodded, wondering how, exactly, Brendon had made it through medical school.
"So that's what we did, with our boy, Ryan here. Shot him up, grabbed the sample, popped it in."
"And?" Joe asked, looking (to Patrick's mind) eerily interested.
"And the goddamn computer crashed," Brendon said, shaking his head. "Can you believe that? The computer knows everything in the goddamn book--hell, it wrote the book--but apparently Ryan's too much for it."
"So, that means?" Patrick asked, confused.
"It means we're working with something weird. Like, really weird. As in we've never experienced this weird. So anyhow, I run the test again, pop in the sample, and BAM! The computer crashes again, only this time it won't start back up. Thing's fried."
"It can't identify what's wrong? Did you get any report at all?"
"Well, yeah, we got something, but I'll get to that in a minute. By this point I'm fair puzzled, so I test him for the third time and send it and the information off to New York for more analysis."
"And?"
"Crashes the whole fucking system. I get a call about ten last night, basically telling me 'fuck you very much' and that they'd appreciate it if I didn't send them computer viruses anymore."
Patrick frowned, not sure he was really understanding. "So whatever killed Ryan was something unheard of?"
Brendon laughed. "No, not really. See, before I crashed the computer here for the second time, I got half a readout on it. Bunch of nonsense, if you ask me, but some guy from tech wanted to see it, thinking maybe he'd get an idea of what was wrong with the system. Turns out he knows all this programming shit, I don't know, magic computer codes or something, and what I've handed him is a bonafide computer virus. A computer virus."
"So Ryan...crashed?" Joe asked, barely holding in a laugh.
"No, at least that we'd be able to explain. He's not a robot or anything like that. He's completely organic, carbon-based, you know, alive."
"So what you're saying," Patrick asked in disbelief, "is that a computer virus, a bunch of programming, was in Ryan's system?"
Brendon nodded, shrugging. "Don't ask me how, I have no clue."
"And that's what killed him?"
"No, see, it gets even weirder here. We finally got the system back up just this morning by replacing the hard drive, right? So I shoot him up one more time, get the sample, and remove the virus variable from the test. So it scans, right, and I get this great long printout of what's going on in his body."
Patrick, impatient, asked, "And?"
"And he's probably the healthiest person on the face of the earth. Nothing abnormal, aside from the blood loss and nasal deterioration. But he's got cocaine in his system. Not a lot, like, less than a tenth of what your average starlet's taking in. But the readouts I'm getting show respiratory failure, even though his lungs are perfectly healthy and there's no evidence of the kind of cocaine use that would cause failure," Brendon explained with a wild kind of grin. "It's bizarre."
"But it's possible to die of cocaine use the first time, right?"
Brendon shrugged. "Well, yeah, of course it's possible. But with the amount he'd taken, and I mean really little, fucking minuscule, it's extremely unlikely."
"What if he's just really sensitive to it?" Patrick asked, determined to make this somehow normal.
"Again, possible, but not likely."
"So it was the coke that killed him?" Joe asked. "And what about the virus? What does that mean?"
"As far as I can see, it was the coke. All we know about the virus is that it was there, in some form or another. It wasn't affecting his organs, or if it was, there's no possible way to detect it as we don't know what the hell it is. All I can say about it right now is that we've got several medical bureaus on our ass right now--they want your boy's body."
Patrick stared. "But you won't--"
"No, no, no," Brendon assured him, shaking his head. "Definitely not. I've dabbled in research in the past and let me tell you, that bunch is as big a group of creeps as you could ever wish to meet. Granted, I examine dead bodies for a living, but," he grinned, "you know, I don't test shit."
Patrick got the distinct impression that they were about to get very off topic. "So, the body--"
"Will stay here, until we get clearance from you lot and find out what exactly we're to do with the body after that. Kid's got money, I doubt he'll be shipped off for testing."
Patrick peered around Brendon to Ryan's corpse. "Mind if I take a look?" he asked, ignoring the shudder that threatened to creep up his spine.
"Go right ahead."
Ryan was almost exactly what Patrick expected--he'd seen the press photos, of course, but everybody knew those things were edited beyond belief, and Ryan's body had been covered by a sheet at the scene. A thin, willowy build, fashionably angular haircut, big eyes, small mouth--
"Cute, isn't he?" Brendon asked.
Patrick twitched. "Not my type."
Ryan's face was permanently etched in an expression of what appeared to be confusion. Patrick could identify.
"So what are we putting the cause of death down as?" Joe asked, twirling a pen between his fingers. "Computer virus, cocaine, what?"
Patrick chewed his lip in thought, staring at Ryan's still face. Computer virus? It was laughable. Sure, what with society's dependency on technology, computer viruses had the power to be crippling. Sure, they got worse as time wore on. But they were programming. To attack a person with a computer virus would be like a computer catching a cold. It didn't make sense. And Patrick was no expert on cocaine, but he trusted Brendon's opinion on the subject (maybe it was judgmental of him, but Christ that level of energy in one person couldn't be legal).
"Unknown," Patrick sighed.
---
"Look, all I want is to get my fucking phone fixed. You're the phone company. Get it?" Pete hissed, compulsively flipping his phone open and shut. He stood up, jamming it into his pocket and stomped across the room, jerking open the curtains to scan the streets. Sure enough, the taxi was still there.
"I haven't gotten any of my calls for the past week and half," Pete explained, storming across his apartment and into the kitchen. "Do you know what I've been through this week? Someone very close to me died because I haven't been getting my calls!" He threw the container of peanut butter he'd grabbed from the cupboard. It hit the wall and bounced off, rolling quietly to a rest at Pete's feet.
"W-e-n-t-z," he spelled, leaning over the counter and putting his head in his hands. "Peter, and please tell me you can at least spell that."
Pete paused, taking a breath that was supposed to calm him down, but instead he choked. "What? No, I have not changed my number. Someone's fucking around with my account, then, because I haven't. What's the number?"
He fished a pen from his pocket, returning to the living room for a piece of paper. "Yeah," he said, glancing out the window. The taxi was still parked, still running. It had been there for the past hour. "Yeah, got it. I'll call it and call you back in a minute."
Pete pulled his cell phone from his pocket, placing it on the windowsill, still eying the taxi. The taxi had followed him home from work, its driver and occupant hidden by tinted windows. He pressed his forehead to the window, dialing the number the phone company had given him.
"Hey, it's Pete," his voicemail said, though the phone in front of him didn't ring. It was his voice, all right. "I'm not answering my phone, and I probably won't return your call if you leave your name and number. If I don't answer, it's most likely because I don't want to talk to you. Get it?"
On a whim, he typed in his voicemail password. Couldn't hurt.
"Pete," Ryan's voice said, and Pete shivered. "Pete, yeah, you there? You there, Pete? I redecorated too much, Pete, you know that new wallpaper I put up? It's on top of other wallpaper, on top of other wallpaper, there's so fucking many layers of it, I can see it swelling, Pete, it's closing me in, every layer makes the room smaller, I can't breathe in here, fuck, I took too much--"
His voicemail beeped and cut off--the message was too long.
Pete stared at the phone for a moment, hands shaking. He threw it against the wall, taking a shuddering breath as the screen broke off neatly, display going black.
From the street, he heard a car door slam.
He caught a glimpse of someone dark, something slung over their back, emerging from the car. Pete's eyes went wide--whatever the stranger was carrying, it didn't look friendly. He wasn't really an escape artist (especially not under the circumstances), but he clutched his home phone tighter in his hands and ran for the kitchen window and the fire escape. As his feet hit the ground, he heard wood splintering from above.
Pete pressed his back to the wall and slid to the ground. His hands shook as he dialed the first number his rattled brain could think of.
Two rings, and then a tired voice said, "Detective Stump, here."
Author:
xxdanceFandom(s): Fall Out Boy/Panic! At the Disco
Pairing: Pete/Ryan, Pete/Patrick.
Summary: Ryan's just another dead starlet. Patrick's just another overworked detective. Pete's just another shady character. Sort of.
Rating: R. [Violence, drug use, language.]
Warnings: Complete crack. Beyond crack. Detectives is all I'm saying, I'll save the other cracky warnings for later. Slash, language, and drug use as well.
Author's Note:
whatchamacall1t, because she spurs me along and gives me great ideas for weirdness. one two
Patrick's apartment was neither spacious nor glamorous, which, considering the fury he came home in, was probably for the best.
He was angry with himself (blushing?), he was angry with Pete (boundaries, goddammit), hell, he was angry with Andy, who he'd seen for ten minutes that morning (of all the desks to put the file on, of all the possible detectives). He kicked off his shoes, not caring that in about ten minutes he'd be swearing under his breath and trying to scrub that black scuff off of the wall. His coat hit the floor, and he knew he'd pick that up, too, but for the moment he enjoyed the faint feeling of bad, the slight rush he got from any deviation from his usual polite, calm, and collected persona.
Today had not been a good day.
It wasn't even that he was trying to solve a case where the only witness was a belligerent asshole (or, not entirely). It wasn't even that Patrick had let him be a belligerent asshole.
No, it was the fact that Joe had been right. He was blushing, goddammit, and that was entirely the belligerent asshole's fault.
You just don't do that, he thought to himself, heaving an angry sigh and picking up his coat, his temper tantrum over. You just don't invade people's personal space like that, especially when they're trying to clear your name. Even if it's to tell them to 'shh.'
And really, Patrick rationalized (by this point he'd gotten a rag and a bottle of cleaner from under the sink and was scrubbing, almost smiling, at the scuff he'd left on the wall), maybe the blush was the result of anger. It was plausible--probable, even, that Pete's actions had made Patrick pissed off enough to blush. Not blushing, maybe--flushing, because that's what happened with anger, wasn't it? Yeah, you could totally flush with anger.
Patrick didn't lie often, and there was a damn good reason for it--he was good. As someone in the business of worming the truth out of people, he'd learned every lying trick in the book (and the few that were too good to be written down). Within an hour, his walls spotless, clothes hung and entire living room tidied, he'd convinced himself that anger had been it. Maybe not even that--maybe, as he was rapidly beginning to suspect, it all came down to the interrogation room being hot and the night air being cold.
But, even as he drifted off with a contented smile on his face, some tiny, annoying voice at the back of his mind hummed a tune Patrick would rather have ignored.
---
It wasn't self-conciousness, really. It was brutal honesty. No matter how many times Joe preached the gospels of his own arrogance ("It's not about actually being extremely good looking, Patrick--and now pay attention here because I really think you can benefirt from this--it's about pretending to be extremely good looking. Positive thinking, is all it is, and look how well it's working for me!"), Patrick refused to believe it. Besides, Joe was more classically good-looking, whereas Patrick was...not. Chubby, short, glasses, prematurely receding hairline? Patrick wasn't about to kid himself. Yeah, okay, he had his occasionally good days, but overall he just wasn't a dashing guy. Definitely not tall, dark, and handsome, and that's what everyone went for, wasn't it?
Patrick looked down to realize he'd been gnawing at the pen he was supposed to be organizing his thoughts with. But Joe had shown up, twenty minutes late, a huge grin on his face and his hair messy. "You," he'd said, leaning over Patrick's desk (Patrick could tell he'd stayed at her house--his breath smelled like a multitude of things Patrick didn't care to identify), "need to get out more."
"Really," Patrick had said, drawing a circle around the word 'Ryan Ross' he'd scribbled in the middle of the page.
"Yes," Joe had replied, sitting half on top of Patrick's paper. "Because I had an amazing time last night, and it's not fair of me to keep this all to myself."
"Joe, please, I'm trying to--"
But Joe had been off again, just as he was at least once a week, telling Patrick all about it, using words like 'game' and 'hot' and 'ass,' words Patrick really didn't want to hear in the context of Joe. Just like every other time Joe tried to give this speech, Patrick tuned him out.
He drew a line from the circle around 'Ryan Ross' to where he'd written 'Wentz'. He made lines for each of the people Pete had mentioned--Travis, Beckett, Saporta, Spencer, Jon. He had a feeling it could go on forever, lines branching out every which way, and he'd never get anywhere. Patrick sighed, crumpling the paper and throwing it into the wastebasket as a shadow fell over his desk.
"They need you at the morgue," Andy said, looking somewhere between grim and worried.
"Now?"
"Now," he nodded. "Something's gone haywire with the autopsy. Don't call Wentz."
Patrick frowned, pulling on his coat. "Why not?"
Andy shook his head. "Just don't. You'll understand when you get there."
"So, what, you're just going to be all mysterious and not tell me why?"
Andy leaned forward, voice hushed. "It's not something we should really be talking about in front of the office. Just go. You'll figure it out once you get there. Bring Joe, too."
Patrick stared, raising an eyebrow. "If this is some weird kind of joke, Hurley, I hope you know--"
"It's not," Andy assured him.
If it was anybody else (read: Joe), Patrick would have wormed his way out of it. He did his best to avoid the morgue entirely, preferring to have reports dropped off at his desk. He saw enough dead bodies in his line of work--why spend more time around them than necessary? Andy was, generally speaking, a pretty good-natured guy, one of the few in the station that could actually get a laugh out of Patrick on occasion. He smiled, more often than not, and it was that fact alone that allowed him to keep his long, dark hair--his smile reassured everyone from Patrick and his frazzled nerves to Joe and his inherent naiveté.
This grim-faced, stern person at Patrick's desk was not Andy.
"Okay," Patrick agreed, casting a glance to Joe's desk, where he was doing his best (terribly) to pretend he wasn't eavesdropping. "Come on, Joe."
Normally, Joe would have continued to feign his innocence. This time, however, once they were out of earshot, he whispered, "What's going on?"
Patrick shrugged, clutching his jacket tighter around himself. "No idea. Andy wouldn't say. Apparently something's gone wrong with the autopsy."
"I thought those things were foolproof?" Joe asked, frowning.
"So did I," Patrick said, pursing his lips. "I've never heard of one of the new systems failing. Ever."
---
For a moment, Patrick blamed the medical examination's failure entirely on the coroner. When he had extended a hand to greet them ("Hi, I'm Doctor Urie, call me Brendon, that's with an 'o', mind you, and I'll be your medical examiner this morning.") he'd grinned in a way that was entirely inappropriate for someone in the business of determining the cause of deaths. His hair stuck out at odd angles and a pair of red-rimmed glasses peeked out from the pocket of his lab coat. If it wasn't for the way he'd started babbling on about equipment and processes Patrick knew nothing about, he might have declared Andy a very good liar and punched him in the face.
"Okay, so, I realize you're not in medicine and this might be a little difficult to grasp. I'll slow it down for you," Brendon explained, once he'd led Patrick and Joe into the room where Ryan Ross' extremely dead body lay, half-covered with a white sheet. "Basically, the process is you take your corpse--" here he gestured in Ryan's direction, "--you inject it with this chemical, here," he said, pulling out a vial of green fluid, "--wait an hour or so, snip a bit of hair, some skin, whatever, depending on the type of stiff you've got--" Patrick flinched at the slang, "--run it through the computer and you'll get a neat printout of everything in their system. That thing'll point out a hangnail."
Patrick nodded, wondering how, exactly, Brendon had made it through medical school.
"So that's what we did, with our boy, Ryan here. Shot him up, grabbed the sample, popped it in."
"And?" Joe asked, looking (to Patrick's mind) eerily interested.
"And the goddamn computer crashed," Brendon said, shaking his head. "Can you believe that? The computer knows everything in the goddamn book--hell, it wrote the book--but apparently Ryan's too much for it."
"So, that means?" Patrick asked, confused.
"It means we're working with something weird. Like, really weird. As in we've never experienced this weird. So anyhow, I run the test again, pop in the sample, and BAM! The computer crashes again, only this time it won't start back up. Thing's fried."
"It can't identify what's wrong? Did you get any report at all?"
"Well, yeah, we got something, but I'll get to that in a minute. By this point I'm fair puzzled, so I test him for the third time and send it and the information off to New York for more analysis."
"And?"
"Crashes the whole fucking system. I get a call about ten last night, basically telling me 'fuck you very much' and that they'd appreciate it if I didn't send them computer viruses anymore."
Patrick frowned, not sure he was really understanding. "So whatever killed Ryan was something unheard of?"
Brendon laughed. "No, not really. See, before I crashed the computer here for the second time, I got half a readout on it. Bunch of nonsense, if you ask me, but some guy from tech wanted to see it, thinking maybe he'd get an idea of what was wrong with the system. Turns out he knows all this programming shit, I don't know, magic computer codes or something, and what I've handed him is a bonafide computer virus. A computer virus."
"So Ryan...crashed?" Joe asked, barely holding in a laugh.
"No, at least that we'd be able to explain. He's not a robot or anything like that. He's completely organic, carbon-based, you know, alive."
"So what you're saying," Patrick asked in disbelief, "is that a computer virus, a bunch of programming, was in Ryan's system?"
Brendon nodded, shrugging. "Don't ask me how, I have no clue."
"And that's what killed him?"
"No, see, it gets even weirder here. We finally got the system back up just this morning by replacing the hard drive, right? So I shoot him up one more time, get the sample, and remove the virus variable from the test. So it scans, right, and I get this great long printout of what's going on in his body."
Patrick, impatient, asked, "And?"
"And he's probably the healthiest person on the face of the earth. Nothing abnormal, aside from the blood loss and nasal deterioration. But he's got cocaine in his system. Not a lot, like, less than a tenth of what your average starlet's taking in. But the readouts I'm getting show respiratory failure, even though his lungs are perfectly healthy and there's no evidence of the kind of cocaine use that would cause failure," Brendon explained with a wild kind of grin. "It's bizarre."
"But it's possible to die of cocaine use the first time, right?"
Brendon shrugged. "Well, yeah, of course it's possible. But with the amount he'd taken, and I mean really little, fucking minuscule, it's extremely unlikely."
"What if he's just really sensitive to it?" Patrick asked, determined to make this somehow normal.
"Again, possible, but not likely."
"So it was the coke that killed him?" Joe asked. "And what about the virus? What does that mean?"
"As far as I can see, it was the coke. All we know about the virus is that it was there, in some form or another. It wasn't affecting his organs, or if it was, there's no possible way to detect it as we don't know what the hell it is. All I can say about it right now is that we've got several medical bureaus on our ass right now--they want your boy's body."
Patrick stared. "But you won't--"
"No, no, no," Brendon assured him, shaking his head. "Definitely not. I've dabbled in research in the past and let me tell you, that bunch is as big a group of creeps as you could ever wish to meet. Granted, I examine dead bodies for a living, but," he grinned, "you know, I don't test shit."
Patrick got the distinct impression that they were about to get very off topic. "So, the body--"
"Will stay here, until we get clearance from you lot and find out what exactly we're to do with the body after that. Kid's got money, I doubt he'll be shipped off for testing."
Patrick peered around Brendon to Ryan's corpse. "Mind if I take a look?" he asked, ignoring the shudder that threatened to creep up his spine.
"Go right ahead."
Ryan was almost exactly what Patrick expected--he'd seen the press photos, of course, but everybody knew those things were edited beyond belief, and Ryan's body had been covered by a sheet at the scene. A thin, willowy build, fashionably angular haircut, big eyes, small mouth--
"Cute, isn't he?" Brendon asked.
Patrick twitched. "Not my type."
Ryan's face was permanently etched in an expression of what appeared to be confusion. Patrick could identify.
"So what are we putting the cause of death down as?" Joe asked, twirling a pen between his fingers. "Computer virus, cocaine, what?"
Patrick chewed his lip in thought, staring at Ryan's still face. Computer virus? It was laughable. Sure, what with society's dependency on technology, computer viruses had the power to be crippling. Sure, they got worse as time wore on. But they were programming. To attack a person with a computer virus would be like a computer catching a cold. It didn't make sense. And Patrick was no expert on cocaine, but he trusted Brendon's opinion on the subject (maybe it was judgmental of him, but Christ that level of energy in one person couldn't be legal).
"Unknown," Patrick sighed.
---
"Look, all I want is to get my fucking phone fixed. You're the phone company. Get it?" Pete hissed, compulsively flipping his phone open and shut. He stood up, jamming it into his pocket and stomped across the room, jerking open the curtains to scan the streets. Sure enough, the taxi was still there.
"I haven't gotten any of my calls for the past week and half," Pete explained, storming across his apartment and into the kitchen. "Do you know what I've been through this week? Someone very close to me died because I haven't been getting my calls!" He threw the container of peanut butter he'd grabbed from the cupboard. It hit the wall and bounced off, rolling quietly to a rest at Pete's feet.
"W-e-n-t-z," he spelled, leaning over the counter and putting his head in his hands. "Peter, and please tell me you can at least spell that."
Pete paused, taking a breath that was supposed to calm him down, but instead he choked. "What? No, I have not changed my number. Someone's fucking around with my account, then, because I haven't. What's the number?"
He fished a pen from his pocket, returning to the living room for a piece of paper. "Yeah," he said, glancing out the window. The taxi was still parked, still running. It had been there for the past hour. "Yeah, got it. I'll call it and call you back in a minute."
Pete pulled his cell phone from his pocket, placing it on the windowsill, still eying the taxi. The taxi had followed him home from work, its driver and occupant hidden by tinted windows. He pressed his forehead to the window, dialing the number the phone company had given him.
"Hey, it's Pete," his voicemail said, though the phone in front of him didn't ring. It was his voice, all right. "I'm not answering my phone, and I probably won't return your call if you leave your name and number. If I don't answer, it's most likely because I don't want to talk to you. Get it?"
On a whim, he typed in his voicemail password. Couldn't hurt.
"Pete," Ryan's voice said, and Pete shivered. "Pete, yeah, you there? You there, Pete? I redecorated too much, Pete, you know that new wallpaper I put up? It's on top of other wallpaper, on top of other wallpaper, there's so fucking many layers of it, I can see it swelling, Pete, it's closing me in, every layer makes the room smaller, I can't breathe in here, fuck, I took too much--"
His voicemail beeped and cut off--the message was too long.
Pete stared at the phone for a moment, hands shaking. He threw it against the wall, taking a shuddering breath as the screen broke off neatly, display going black.
From the street, he heard a car door slam.
He caught a glimpse of someone dark, something slung over their back, emerging from the car. Pete's eyes went wide--whatever the stranger was carrying, it didn't look friendly. He wasn't really an escape artist (especially not under the circumstances), but he clutched his home phone tighter in his hands and ran for the kitchen window and the fire escape. As his feet hit the ground, he heard wood splintering from above.
Pete pressed his back to the wall and slid to the ground. His hands shook as he dialed the first number his rattled brain could think of.
Two rings, and then a tired voice said, "Detective Stump, here."