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If Joe Trohman – Joe Troh, Joe the baby of the Fall Out boys – has a life motto at all, it's "don't die over stupid shit." It's served him pretty good so far, and though there may have been some stupid shit (green or brown, it all gets smoked eventually) before, he's always survived it. Thanks in part to being a known 'associate' of the two pin-sharp, fast-footed, freaky-scary former fighters P and P, and the smartest knife guy in the business. Fuck what people say about the Cobras, fuck Saporta, he knows what he knows; Andy's the best knife guy in the business and there's no arguing.
So, so far he's not died of stupid shit.
But this is different. There are gaps gaping in the edifice of the Waypire (Joe wishes Pete hadn't taken to calling it that, it's stuck in his head and one day he's going to end up saying it where Mikey can hear him and then his last moments will be weird and horrible. Either that or nothing will happen to him. You can't ever tell.) and known faces as well as unknown ones are sticking knives and guns through those gaps, all trained on the brothers Way and anyone who gets in the … you know. Way.
The hotel is still filling up with people, the scary kind of people. Joe lies in the en-suite bath surrounded by the silly skull-patterned tiles and frowns at a black rubber duck as he does the same mental calculation as everyone else in the hotel: who have we got? Are they going to be enough?
They've already had to move rooms once. His and Andy's got the full benefit of Janice's boys blowing in through the windows, but they aren't going to be the last to try that route. Not by a long shot.
Joe sinks under the water, his head feeling weird without the weight of his curls soaking up the bubble bath; since Andy explained his own crop he's been thinking, and tonight 'not dying of stupid shit' includes 'what happens if I get my hair all matted with blood and it flies in my eyes right at the worst minute?' So his hair is mostly padding out the trash can now.
So, so far they have:
The Cobras. Which is a problem all on its own. It's great they're on their side, it's better than having them as enemies, but it's bad that 'they' includes Saporta. There's bad blood – is there ever any other kind? – between him and Andy and now's a real bad time for it to spill. Also, Vicky gives him the creeps. No one that pretty should be that good at breaking knees, and they definitely shouldn't smile like that when they do it.
No word from the Panic crew, yet, which worries everyone, even if they think they're hiding okay.
And McCracken's boys stayed after the last fight, to Andy's obvious and twitchy discomfort. If the atmosphere wasn't already stiffer and thicker than an old jerk-off sock, Joe'd be giving his roommate all kinds of rib-poking hell over that little detail.
Joe shakes his head, getting water on the walls, but no longer smacking himself in the face with the soggy locks of half-unspiralled hair. It's gonna take some getting used to, this absence of pot-scented cushion on his head. He's probably gonna wake up freaked out by its absence in the night, and get Andy on edge too by twitching awake with a start when his hair doesn't brush his ears as he turns over.
He lifts himself out of the bath, a tsunami of lukewarm bubbles shaking the goth duckling onto the floor along with too much water.
Fortunately, Joe knows a good solution to panicking.
"Oh not in here," Andy sighs. He opens the window with less caution than he might before they moved; it leads into a light well, not the open street like their previous room. The opposite window is four feet away and it's pretty inaccessible unless you're a fucking ninja.
"You should," Joe says, knowing full well it's futile to even suggest. Andy returns to his bed, to playing with his knife like it's an extension of his hand, flick-shut, flick-shut, "you should. We're all gonna go crazy from waiting around else – "
"Except you, and you're going to die of being too high to react when they come." Flick-shut, flick-shut, Andy can't keep his knife still; right there in Andy's palm, it's probably warm as a body part, with its own blood-flow. With the blood it's been seeing recently it might as well have its own blood-flow. No thing has ever fitted Andy Hurley so perfectly as that knife does; Joe doesn't want to find out what temperature it is but he carries right on anyhow.
"So it's not 'marijuana psychosis in forty years' any more?" He scratches the back of his neck. Not all the buzzed-off hair soaked away, and it's probably not going to for a while. "I thought I was s'posed to get hit by a car because of my slow slow reactions."
Flick-snap. "You think you're going to live to see sixty now?" Andy sounds like he's talking to himself. Joe scrabbles a book of anonymous-looking bar-room matches from inside a dirty sock. They're Way Hotel matches, the matte black card-and-phosphorous-head and complete absence of any logo as blatant a sign as printing their name on each one: branding, although here, in the basement rings, that word has different connotations. Has had. Sometimes the smell of cooking meat makes Joe think his roommate has the right idea, when it brings back the stink of scorched skin.
"I'm not a doctor." Joe takes a hit off the red glass bong and nearly chokes on it as Andy raises his eyebrows, all no shit, Sherlock - when he's least expecting it.
"We're under siege," Andy mutters, rolling over on his bed to face the wall, his knife apparently clasped between his palms like a prayer to whatever god watches over Bad Men. "And you're smoking pot."
"What else is there to do?" asks Joe, who cannot face another fucking weapons inventory without crying from boredom and frustration. The grass is thick and sweet as molasses and smells like a tramp's armpit, the smoke so heavy he has to pull it up with his tongue like he's drinking thickshake.
Andy snorts at the wallpaper, his shoulders hunched. "Never change."
They are under siege; Joe's been avoiding thinking about it so he still has an appetite and uninterrupted sleep (at least, if he smokes). It's a subtle, self-imposed siege mostly, but fewer people are heading out now, fewer people are leaving the building for business elsewhere.
All business is here. Toro has become surgically attached to his phone, calmly and politely shaping the face of the outside world, while in various suites around the building men whose primary purpose in life is to inflict pain kick their heels and wait, winding themselves up to fever pitch with knife-counting and talk.
Pete and Patrick have had two knock-down scuffles already; Pete's got a band-aid on his nose from where he wasn't fast enough and nearly got himself a third nostril. Smoke embraces Joe's lungs in a calm and sticky cloud, a blanket of enforced well-being, and he exhales towards the window, away from Andy's t-shirt and Andy's bed and Andy's side of the room.
Either someone out there makes a move soon, Joe thinks, or the whole powder keg will explode on its own without a single step from the vultures circling the place he's cautiously thinking of as a kind of home.
He smokes two bowls before his stomach overpowers his prudence and he slouches barefoot through to Pete and Patrick's sleep-silent room, pulling a t-shirt down over his head as he goes, down to his nipples before he forgets what he's doing with it and just wanders on, letting the fabric shuffle its own way down.
Out in the corridor with no open window the air is almost oppressively warm, and the prickles of shaved hair on Joe's head match the prickles of the short, patterned nylon carpet under his naked feet; he only needs to be a little more stoned before he starts thinking the logical answer to that is to lie down and rub his scalp on the floor, bristles against bristles, whipping up a static storm. Oh yeah, like the hotel needs any more electric tension in the air, Jesus.
Instead he yawns and shuffles down and down, aiming for the kitchens as he passes mumbling and silent rooms and navigates treacherously curved staircases. There are industrial-sized tubs of peanut-butter, white and sinister plastic buckets of the stuff, in the hotel kitchens, and right now he could eat a whole one himself. With a fucking spoon.
He rubs the back of his head the wrong way, against the lie of what remains of his hair, and nearly falls to his knees on the tiled landing in shock at the sensation. So, so Andy never mentioned that about buzzing his hair off all in one go. But then Joe guesses Andy doesn't know a whole lot about how everything gets that little bit more … touchy … when you're high.
But they get their kicks in different places, he supposes. Like, Andy so clearly likes hurting people – only people who like to be hurt, Andy's said, several times now – and Joe's so not into being hurt. He's like, the opposite of being into being hurt. He's into the opposite of pain. That, Joe thinks, is normal.
The Cobras are on inner perimeter patrol for the first part of tonight, McCracken's boys on outer, which leaves Joe and the guys on the sleep roster … along with a load of guys Joe hasn't learnt the names of yet. He's not even sure if having the Cobras on perimeter makes him feel a whole lot safer, and Joe gets this flash of inspiration that possibly the reason Andy is sleeping with his comfort-blade wrapped between his hands is not so much to do with intrusions as attack from inside.
It's not a good thought to have when he's already greened out and getting increasingly lost in the belly of the hotel. The slight tickle of paranoia gets at the back of his brain, and Joe wishes he was at least wearing socks. Jesus. The air may be warm but the floor's really kinda cold when you get off the carpets.
Joe stumbles through the swing doors at the end of the kitchens opposite to the one he's used to coming through; the lights are on, buzzing low and dim and blue over brushed-steel tables which seem a whole lot less hygienic when, like Joe, you know what they've been used for in the past. The place smells of disinfectant for a good reason. There are huge knives and cleavers hanging innocently from the walls and Joe's paranoia gland makes a stink again. He pads over the dry, cold, hospital-scented tiles towards storage, thinking mostly about peanut-butter and possibly, possibly, toast.
The first of the tables is not empty, and Joe flinches with the sudden recognition of truth in Andy's threat: he is too slow, too stoned.
There's a newspaper spread out over part of the table, covered in bits of gun and a tub of grease. This has to be the worst place in the hotel to be cleaning a weapon like that (what if, he thinks, someone wants a sandwich?), but Joe's not about to draw attention to that. His breath catches in his throat and he feels absurd and not as high as he was, standing here in his Batman boxers and a t-shirt he is beginning to suspect isn't even his.
But the impossibly tall and thin black guy responsible for the mess just waves amiably and carries on wiping the components of an assault rifle with an oily rag, and Joe relaxes. He recognises the guy, even if he doesn't remember his name; someone who floated into the hotel alone a few days ago, someone covered in more gang tats than anyone Joe's seen yet, with the possible exception of Andy's new boy toy.
Not boy toy, okay.
"Uh, hi," Joe gestures vaguely, a nervous hand movement to brush away hair that isn't there and oh that's what Andy's been doing, he wasn't swatting at imaginary flies after all. He feels so dumb. "I'm, I'm looking for, I'm … Joe …"
"Don't mind me," says the guy with the assault rifle in pieces over the kitchen table. Joe would like to laugh at the absurdity, but he has cotton mouth all of a sudden and screw peanut-butter toasties, what he really wants is water. Dude has delicate features that don't work with the huge tats and the gun but go really well with his loose-limbed sprawl over the red plastic chair.
Joe tries not to mind him.
He gulps down a glass of very cold water and when he's done he knows he's not so baked any more and that the dude is still watching him. Joe turns on his heel, the gritty texture of industrial kitchen floor unpleasant against his soles (he's spent too much time already picking glass dust from his feet, why didn't he think to put on sneakers?) and says, "You're, uh," because the silence is awkward but all the endings to his sentence are too, and he's tired now.
"Travis," says the dude, calmly laying down the rifle's sights and giving Joe a smile that's fractional but notable. It's welcoming, and without the usual underlay of menace that characterises the smiles he's seen recently. "Back-up, at the moment." He picks up something else, Joe doesn't see what, and begins wiping it methodically with long, broad sweeps of his long, broad hands. "Or did you mean a different 'uh'?"
"Maybe?" Joe suggests. The kitchen is cold, his face is hot, and he's really not hungry any more. "I think… I'm lost."
Travis lays down the other bit of the rifle and says almost gravely, his eyebrows raised, "This is the kitchen."
"Ha. Ha," Joe says automatically, forgetting for a second that this isn't Pete sarcasm, but unknown-quantity sarcasm; Travis came alone to the Ways' Hotel, and no one seems to have the measure of him yet, not one they care to share with Joe.
There's another silence.
"I'm gonna, I'm gonna go," Joe offers, waving vaguely at the door.
"See you round," Travis says, making it sound like a pleasant option rather than a threat, and that's pretty novel, too. Joe almost backs out of the kitchen and stops himself just before he gives a stupid little wave to indicate that he's leaving.
And then he gets lost again.
It's not his fault, Joe thinks defensively, though there's no one around to defend himself to or against, it's all these corridors looking all the same. On the ground floor every freaking door leads to a darkened conference room, and try as he might (one hand idly scratching the back of his new-shaven head, the other knuckling the imprint of boxer elastic on his belly) he can't find the lobby and the corresponding bank of elevators.
There's light coming from under the next nearest door, so Joe drags his ragged-nailed toes over the carpet and pushes on it with his elbow and hopes –
Fate has taken a dislike to him this evening. It's not a way through to the elevators and back up to his room, just a pair of Ways like dishevelled magpies (two for joy; whose joy he's not sure), hanging around in a conference room with a CB radio on an otherwise empty table. Gerard is slumped, thighs apart, in one of the ugly, ugly, horror-movie chairs, in the process of rubbing his eyes. Mikey is –
Joe tries not to swallow his own tongue.
-- Mikey is right by his fucking ear. Just like that, with no goddamn warning and no apparent noise or movement, although Joe's willing to accede that he's not at his most alert right at this minute.
"Joe," Mikey says in his creepy monotone, "you cut your hair."
He doesn't apologise even though he gets the feeling he ought to. "It's, um, more practical." Joe swallows, suddenly aware that he's talking to a guy who looks like all the rooks in the city breed on his head, and who has never been observed to have facial expressions of any kind, ever. "The, the blood doesn't … stick it together this way."
"Hardly unreasonable to expect a bloodbath at this stage," Gerard says, his eyes shut. There is a livid scratch over one eyelid, Joe sees, and with a horrible lurch in his guts he wonders how close these close shaves are getting. How many breaches the perimeter's suffered that he doesn't know about. No wonder Mikey's so tense, so quick to move; someone or something has drawn his brother's blood, someone or something will be made to pay. Quicker to move than before. "Good thinking," Gerard finishes wearily, and for a stoner second Joe's forgotten what he's talking about and nearly says huh? like a complete moron.
He can't ignore Mikey's sharp-faced presence by his side, the overhead light reflecting orange ghosts into the lenses of Mikey's thick-rimmed glasses. Joe fidgets his weight on the bare balls of his feet.
"Have a seat." Mikey suggests. Joe knows better than to refuse; he's seen Frank Iero play a suicidally dangerous game of 'can I ruffle Mikey Way's feathers?' on more than one occasion, but he's also seen Frank Iero take a guy's arm out of its socket with one wrench, in the ring. Joe is not Frank Iero and he will not be offending or alarming either of the Ways, ever, if he can help it.
So Joe sits on his ankle on one of the chairs nearest the door, and he waits to see what will happen next, his foot going slowly numb.
What happens next is Vicky has caught a rat.
The first Joe knows about it is the CB's tinny voice breaking the unearthly silence that's descended, and the Ways' heads jerk towards it like carrion birds.
"He's slow, sorry. There in five, Vicky-Cobra out."
In five, Joe discovers that the 'he' who is slow is slow because Vicky has been … Vicky.
The door opens with a bang, and stays open instead of slamming back again; it takes him another stoner second to realise this is because Mikey's wedged his toe against it – though in truth he's more tired than stoned now, and just a little bit too cold, and feeling pretty stupid and uncomfortable, sitting on a sleeping foot mostly-undressed in a room he's not meant to be in.
And there's a moment where Joe thinks it's lucky for the intruder that it was Vicky who caught him, and not someone else; he's heard about Saporta. Just because Vicky made the guy crawl from wherever she found him to the conference room with two broken knees, his jeans russet with blood and his face ashen with pain, that doesn't mean that's the worst that can happen to him. If that was Saporta, he'd be kitten-crawling in with one of his eyes hanging out.
Of course it's still not the worst that can happen to the guy; Mikey Way is watching him with detached interest and it's all Joe can do not to shiver. The sight of a broad-necked, broken-kneed dude flopping onto his belly as Vicky pokes him in the calf with the end of her baseball bat - Biff, because she is the kind of person who names her weapons – and groaning an involuntary grunt of agony as she does, does little to disturb him. He knows the game, he knows the rules.
But Mikey's cocked head and complete absence of emotion as their intruder props himself up on his elbows and falls back on his face again, muttering something, Mikey's owlish eyes and immobile eyebrows, those are making him pretty uncomfortable.
Vicky flashes him one of her prettiest smiles and bounces the end of her bat off the back of the dude's knees. There is a strangled groan. "Hi, Joe, you cut your hair!"
Joe waves awkwardly.
"You recognise him?" Gerard asks her. He hasn't moved. He looks exhausted, like the sheer weight of living might knock him into the floor at any minute.
Vicky shakes her head.
Gerard sighs. "Send Bert's boys in here, can you? And anyone else you run into." He can't call them on the CB, Joe thinks, because who knows who else is listening? Letting everyone know that the perimeter's all but undefended now would be suicide. Right now everything seems like it might be suicide in two moves.
The guy on the floor is still muttering. His blood soaks through the front of his jeans; Joe can see it spreading out to stain the carpet. He's getting stupidly cold now, and it seems those weren't so much stoned-munchies as genuine hunger pangs earlier, because he can feel his stomach contract painfully, once or twice, as Mikey Way peers down through his glasses at the guy lying face-down on the floor.
Vicky must have run into people fast, because the room fills up like there's a leak from the ceiling: Bert's boys, one or two other guys. Their intruder is manoeuvred onto one of the chairs, his arms threaded through the chair back, tied there with cable. Joe's unimpressed; he would have used tape, but the guys doing the tying seem keen on making sure something bites into the intruder's wrists like they're trying to draw blood instead of just hold him still.
Now the guy's upright – sorta – Joe can see his face. It's sort of … smooth-looking, and still defiant despite the pain he must be in. His upper lip's curled up, there's metal in the bridge of his nose, and his head's naked with the exception of a bright red stripe of hair down the centre which would look menacing and blood-like if he didn't have huge stains of real blood over both of his shins.
"Do you know him?" Gerard asks. He's apparently asking someone other than Joe, so for a moment Joe doesn't pay attention; Bert McCracken's in the room, deliberately not looking at the guy in the chair or at Gerard, his weirdly intense little face focused on counting air molecules or something. "Do any of you know who he is?"
Joe thinks maybe Gerard does know who he is, and that he's asking because someone else knows too. He misses the next thing said because someone's just sat down behind him, and made him jump.
"Hi," Travis murmurs, directing his gaze back to the scene at the centre of the room.
The bitchy-faced one of Bert's boys shoots a look straight at the guy in the chair and says, "He used to run with us." He puts so much emphasis on used to, such a snarl, that Joe's almost impressed that the dude they're talking about doesn't jerk back in his seat with the force of it. He gets the impression that this used to wasn't the kind you can go back to. "Brandon."
"I guess you should be the ones to find out why he's here, then," Gerard says, and he still sounds more tired than anything else. Mikey's drifted along to stand beside him, a hand on his shoulder, eyes narrowed.
There's a moment; Bert and his bitchy-faced right-hand man exchange a glance that probably has whole phone directories of information encoded into it, and there's a longer moment, and Andy's favourite little tattooed fighting guy looks at both of them, and the tall hulking one - Dan, Joe remembers his name because it's short and Pete has been referring to him as Dan The Man Who Can for reasons he's not sharing but which are apparently really really funny - says, "Okay."
He goes to work, but it's … cursory. Kinder than Joe thinks anyone else would be. And there are no answers.
"Let me," says the bitchy-faced one, and he pushes Dan The Man Who Can out of the way with one flat-palmed hand, and gets his knees up against the ruined mess of Brandon's knee-capless knees.
Joe's interrupted by something smooth and small and plastic shoving insistently into the palm of his hand as it dangles down the side of his chair. He nearly yelps; instead he looks down and there's two long fingers and a baggie of green entering his grasp. He closes his fingers around it, bewildered but kinda grateful, and Travis's murmur is low but audible, soft by his ear, "You're gonna need that."
It doesn't look like Travis is wrong, either. The savagery and animal fury with which bitchy-faced guy goes to work on this, this, this Brandon speaks volumes about that "used to". Around the room faces are mostly impassive; some of the more worrying ones are eager. Mikey's as ever is eerily blank. Bert looks … Bert's clenching his fists by his sides, unclenching them, clenching them again.
There's this truly nasty keening sound, like a broken fire alarm, but it's coming out of the guy on the chair, and Joe knows from too long in this business what that means. It means if this doesn't stop soon they won't get answers because there won't be any brain left to give them; there's an easily audible crack of snapping, shattering femur as bitchy-faced guy twists at Brandon's lower leg, and Joe starts to feel a little sick. Fights are fine. Fights he can handle. Fights make sense. But there's always gonna be a part of him that's not okay with this, with torture.
"Stop," Gerard says, slumped in his chair like some old time king. "Allman. Stop. Enough."
Bitchy-faced guy doesn't stop. He has something thick and metal-looking jammed between Brandon's teeth and he's hammering it, levering it, like he's trying to yank those teeth out. Maybe they're pliers. Maybe he really is going to pull the guy's teeth out – like Joe didn't hate dentists enough already; he squashes the baggie of green in his grasp, like a comfort blanket.
"Allman," Gerard repeats in a louder voice, "cut it out now."
This is getting serious, because if Allman, bitchy-faced guy, doesn't stop when Gerard says he should there's that little hint, that undercurrent of rebellion, and those things can grow and sour and cause splits and factions … if it comes to that, Joe knows where he stands, always knows these days that he stands behind Pete and Patrick and Andy and hopes like fuck, but he doesn't want it to come to that. There's a groan, a pop, an oof of effort, and something small and bloody plops onto the carpet and rolls a little way.
It has roots. It is a tooth.
Joe concentrates on breathing through his mouth.
"Allman," Gerard says a third time, half-rising out of his chair – but it's Bert he's looking at, and it's Bert who reaches forwards to tap Allman on the back of the thigh.
"Quinn," he says, so quietly that no one at the back of the room will hear it.
Quinn – Allman – bitchy-faced dude – slides almost breathlessly back from the chair, his legs momentarily unsteady. He looks like he's wearing wet red gloves, and pliers dangle slippery and black from one of them; his hair is hanging sweaty in his eyes and he wipes his nose on the back of one of his wrists, leaving a small brown-red smudge on his upper lip. But he stops, and that's the main thing.
Joe avoids looking at Brandon just yet. He can't figure out why Quinn, why Dan – okay, so Saporta is on perimeter patrol, but there are other interrogators, genuine interrogators. They don't need to rely on someone with an obvious grudge to keep his not-very-calm temper in not-very-good check.
Hell, Andy would do a great job. Joe believes that; Andy would be calm and rational and composed and slow and he would get answers. All of them, if necessary. Because Andy knows the, the psychology of tor—of interrogation, of sticking the knife in only where it needs to go. He's neat like that, in both senses of the word. Why isn't Andy down here, doing this?
A cold hand of metaphor and dread steals up to Joe and punches him gently in the stomach. None of the Fall Out boys are here but him. There is no fidgety, breathy presence of Pete, leaning on Patrick and watching the whole show like it's a circus, making rude remarks, getting on Iero's nerves and in his face; and Iero's not here either. And Andy's not here. And Saporta is … on patrol.
The coldness in Joe's stomach is matched by a quickening thump in his chest, an arrhythmic rhythm that beats out a real and present sense that something fucked up is happening somewhere outside of this room. His foot has pins and needles as it touches the carpet.
Everyone is looking at Brandon's messed-up face. Joe doesn't look, not too closely. He just feels cold, right down to the centre of his bone marrow, and edges out of the door like a clumsy, shaking shadow. And he doesn't give a fuck who sees or what they think, not right at this minute.
The corridors that seemed endless in their complexity before seem even longer as his bare feet burn and thud on the short nylon carpets, his ragged, uncut toenails scraping the odd spark as he barges round corners, but his direction is back. It's like a hook curled up in his stomach, dragging him back to their suite, all he has to do is follow the urging between his shoulder-blades and try to keep the mental chant of shit shit shit shit from becoming too vocal.
This is it, this is their perfect cover, one intruder and anything, any-fucking-thing could be happening right now and he was just roaming the stupid hotel half-stoned and confused instead of holding down, instead of getting their back, getting his boys' back. Stupid, stupid.
Breathing burns Joe's lungs as the carpet burns his naked feet; he nearly smacks into the railing as he pounds up the stairs – the elevators are too slow, too inescapable, too much like the definition of a death trap – and as he hits the second turn he rockets past two familiar shapes, coming onto the stairwell as he bounds up it.
He doesn't know if Bob and Frank come after him to see what the hell's going on, to help him, to stop him, or to snap him in half; he doesn't know if they're bloody and fresh from just taking care of Pete, or just sweaty and glowing from fucking in an empty room, or confused and bleary from recent, interrupted sleep. Right now he doesn't give a fuck which of those things they're doing. All he can think of is running, running, getting to the suite; Joe doesn't even have the first fucking clue what he's gonna do when he gets there.
Thump thump: his heart, his feet, his pursuit up the stairs, his absurd skinny bare legs flashing pale and hairy in the half-lit well. Joe smacks into the door that leads to his floor, to their floor, hard enough to wind himself on the bar; straightens up, yanks it open and stumbles on through. By now all he can hear is his breath, ragged as his nails, reverberating in his ears, and he's more stumbling than running.
Joe gets his shoulder against the wood and shoves – the door to their suite gives, opens just a little, enough to get his foot in, and suddenly all his haste drains from him along with every last trace of weedy well-being and any comfort he might have drawn from the baggie that's … since fallen out of his damn hand anyway. Joe's heart just about stops.
There's blood sprayed up the wall.
The door blocks his view of the rest of the room but it's – it's – he knows arterial spray when he sees it. He's seen it enough, often enough, in his work. And there's so much of it, so much that the wallpaper has changed colour, and it's fresh, and the smell of copper, and iron – sour metal, the smell of blood, the discordant smell of death, the smell of shit from voided bowels, the smell of blood – permeates the air the way his pot smoke had before he left the room.
It could be. It could be. He knows they're fast and they're sharp and he knows Patrick moves like the intervening space isn't there, like he can fucking bend time, but the cold in his guts won't leave. Joe doesn't even flinch when two sets of footsteps thump to a halt behind him.
It's not good enough to be fast and sharp; mostly they've just been lucky and right now in the smell of blood and shit and his neck prickling (is that anticipation or the remains of his hair?) he's so painfully aware that no one's luck lasts forever.
Bob shoves past, knocking through the door with a mutter of, "Stop blocking me, Trohman." Impatient. The door is still stuck on something, so Bob has to squeeze through the gap, the door latch tugging hungrily at his shirt.
Joe goes right on blocking the doorway.
"Move, damnit," Frank snaps, behind him, pressing something that isn't a gun or a knife – it takes him a minute to realise it's an elbow – into Joe's spine.
"I can't, the door's stuck."
"The others?" Bob's voice is loud and Joe wants to puke, suddenly, the smell of shit and blood and the tension and the close, cloying air on his scalp and his hunger all too much to swirl around inside him.
But it passes; "They're in the other room," says Patrick's voice, thank fuck. Joe shoves the door until it gives way, and ignores the horrible squelch, the wetness against his feet. "Andy and Pete are having a talk with them."
The room's beyond repair. The curtains are scorched – the stink of death is so bad Joe didn't even pick up on the scent of burning fabric – the beds smashed, the window in fragments, blowing cold air onto Joe's shins. There's blood on the ceiling, on the walls, all over Patrick's arms and face like a mask, and there are an indeterminate number of lumpy bodies lying throat-cut on the red carpet.
Bob straddles two of the wheezing bodies, the one which is still heaving with laboured breaths, the dying rattles that have no echo, and toes it onto its side. "You recognise this one?"
Patrick shakes his head. He's smiling. Joe wants to leap over the unfortunate bleeding bodies and hug him until his eyes bulge out of sheer gratitude, but he also doesn't want a knife in his liver and that will happen if he tries to.
"Any of them?" Bob persists.
Patrick shakes his head. "Andy's working on one of the live ones."
"Someone needs to get back downstairs and tell Gerard he has an international problem," says a soft but firm voice from behind Joe. It isn't Frank; that's not the language he uses. He'd just have yelled at Joe to get his ass moving, no polite suggestions. It's a voice Joe recognises, though, and he only half-turns before he knows it's Travis, less out of breath than the rest of them, peering round the door.
"Why's that?" Frank does not sound best pleased. This may be because Travis is looking over his head like he's not even there.
Travis points an almost delicate finger at the dude choking his last between Bob's boots. "That guy runs with a British gang."
Frank elbows his way past Travis and takes off like his feet are on fire. The patter-patter-thuds of his footsteps vanish damn fast, and Joe realises his legs are shaking; he's tired, he's cold, he's hungry, and the panic adrenaline's leaving him in waves.
"My guess," Travis says, standing real close behind him, close enough that he can feel the guy's body heat on the back of his head, "Johnny's the one your friends have in there. They're not going to get much from him."
It's almost funny how close their chorus is: Bob, Patrick, Joe, "You haven't seen what Andy can do." Because if Travis had seen those tapes, that footage, he wouldn't be saying that. Andy will get his answers.
"Not to impugn your man's interrogatory techniques," Travis says calmly, "more that Johnny's an idiot."
Bob frowns and reaches for the suite's inter-connecting door; Joe's derailed by a warm hand on his shoulder.
"You look like you could use this," says Travis, and when Joe looks he's holding up a fat, exquisite blunt like it's the answer to all his problems (which it might well be), a beacon of hope in a dark universe.
"Maybe," Joe admits. Bob's talking quietly through the adjoining door but Joe can't hear what he's saying –
"Can you walk and smoke at the same time?" Travis asks, apparently without sarcasm, taking two steps back into the corridor. "I'm thinking the charnel house in there might not be the best place to smoke up."
Charnel house, Joe thinks, incredulous, and if he was still stoned he'd be giggling by now. He's not high any more.
"Maybe," he repeats, conscious now of the blood squidging between his toes. Patrick's joined Bob – no one's looking at him but Travis. Joe carefully wipes the sole of his naked foot, the sides of it, on the carpet outside the suite. They're gonna have to move rooms again.
Travis hands him the blunt and a lighter – a nice lighter, a pewter refillable one with some Greek letters down the side, maybe he lifted it from some frat boy; Joe can't guess and doesn't care.
The smoke's like a comfort blanket on his lungs even with the embarrassing unexpected cough that follows his first pull. He starts to walk, no real idea where he's heading except away from anywhere people might be getting tortured, and as Joe absently rubs the back of his neck, Travis falls into step with him.
They end up in the kitchens again.
Now the smell of disinfectant isn't so prevalent. Joe's nostrils are full of smoke now, taking the edge off everything including the cold, the stuffiness, and the sense of being surrounded by so many X-rated film scenes: torture, torture, torture. He slumps into a chair beside Travis – the newspaper covered in oil remains, though the gun parts are gone, stashed somewhere – and feels a little guilty that he's clearly smoked the whole fucking thing without letting Travis have any of his own blunt.
He drops the extinguished roach on the papers and says, "Sorry, I … I bogarted your blunt."
Travis shrugs. "You needed it, I guess."
Joe examines Travis's long, long-fingered hands spread almost elegantly on the table and doesn't dispute this. What would those huge, strange hands feel like on his fresh-buzzed scalp (buzzed in, Joe grins, both senses of the word), with their cold rings and warm whorled fingers.
"What?" Travis asks.
"Did I just say that out loud?"
"Yeah, if what youintended to say was 'mumble mumble fingers'." Travis almost smirks at him, the aforementioned fingers tracing circuitous patterns on the brushed-steel table top like tiny little figure skaters on a private rink.
"Uh," Joe offers.
"Let me rub your head," Travis suggests, out of nowhere – Joe's not actually sure how long they've been sitting here, time has gone kinda gloopy. "For luck."
Joe submits to this without question. It feels – he's pretty sure – better than anything in the whole world except backrubs and half-melted cookie dough ice-cream - oh god he's so hungry - he's also pushing his head up into Travis's fingers like a cat, and Travis hasn't stopped stroking yet.
It feels so gooooo-ooo—oooo-ooood. Joe blanks totally on everything else. There is nothing but the warm yellow fuzz inside his skull and the gentle tickle on the outside, Travis tracking some crazy dance that's got shivers traipsing up and down his spine.
He pitches sideways as his back turns to jelly, and hopes his new friend – oh yes, friend - doesn't object to having a catastrophically stoned wheels-and-tape, back-up kinda guy sprawling across his lap, face-down and murmuring encouragement in the universal language of Bakedese.
Travis doesn't mind, or at least he goes right on making those incredible motions on Joe's scalp and that's pretty much the same thing in his book.
He turns to get his face comfortable against part of Travis's jeans – some part that isn't so much the freaking crotch, not that he isn't seriously considering just blowing him anyway so long as he carries on doing that to his head – and his ear bumps something too solid to be even the most insistent of boners, and the wrong shape to be a gun, the wrong shape to be a knife. He turns again. It's not even brass knuckles.
Joe half-lifts his head, cosy stoner oblivion skewered by curiosity, and his blood runs cold and scared from his face, his vocal paralysis no longer a matter of weed and the warm, faintly sexual strokes on his bristly-buzzed scalp.
Staring back at him from very close quarters is the unmistakeable metal and enamel leather-mounted insignia of a police officer.