Alien Taste (5 page)

 

It was a long drive from the morgue back to Ukiah's moms' place. Usually Ukiah liked the trip; it let him unclutter his mind of useless junk before rejoining his family. The day before, however, still contained choppy flashes of memory. He could tease nothing new from the time after he woke wounded in the park. There remained only the morgue with its grisly puzzle, and he wasn't sure he wanted to think about it.

Max stayed quiet until they hit I-279 north, running up out of the city. Then he glanced over at Ukiah. “You okay?”

“That was really, really scary, Max.”

“What, special Agent Zheng?” Max snorted. “Don't let her get to you.”

Ukiah shook his head, running his hand repeatedly down the back of his neck in an effort to get the hair
to lie down again. “The stuff in the morgue. I've never seen anything like it.”

“It looked pretty gory. So what did you find?”

Ukiah shrugged, having no idea where to start. “Janet Haze was really sick when she died. All her organs had extensive damage to them due to viral infection. Or at least that's what the coroner noted on the organ bags.”

“Oh Jesus, I wonder if she was working on a germ-warfare project. Maybe we should get you checked out. If she was exposed to something nasty, you could have been too.”

Ukiah pondered his own body. “I don't feel sick. Hungry again. And I could use a nap, but I'm not sick.” A memory came to the surface—her room filled with K'NEX toys and books on robots. “Anyhow, she worked in robotics, not biology.”

“What else?”

He sat for a long time considering what to tell Max.

Max shot him a puzzled look after the first minute or two of silence. “That weird?”

“Far as I can tell, Max, all her internal organs”—he shrugged with helplessness—“changed. They became weasels or mink or something. They attacked the coroner and killed him.”

“Yeah, that's weird.” Max nodded, then screwed up his face trying not to scowl or laugh. Ukiah wasn't sure which. “Changed into weasels? Are you sure? Even if they did, how could those little animals kill a man?”

“Scout's honor.” Ukiah retold how the residue blood and organ cells were missing and that all the bags contained was animal fur. “And the coroner had a heart condition. I figure it probably would be scary enough to kill someone.”

They fell silent for a few moments. They hit where I-279 merged with I-79 and worked their way into the traffic.

“What really freaks me out is the fur,” Ukiah finally admitted. “But I think it's the real proof of the organ changing somehow. There were two sets of DNA active in it. One set was the weasels' DNA. The other set was Dr. Janet Haze's.”

Max shot him a look that he had given Ukiah often over the years. Ukiah wasn't sure what emotions hid behind the look. Max had used it only once on someone else, a con artist that could steal your wristwatch while you were checking the time.

“So,” Max muttered after a while. “They cut out Doctor Haze's organs and set them aside. Poof, they turn into a pack of rabid weasels and attack the coroner. Like any sane human being, he's scared silly and drops dead and they eat him.” Max considered the run of logic. “Okay, it hangs together in a twisted
Outer Limits
kind of way. I suppose you could even say that after all that effort to change into a weasel, one would be very hungry and snack on whatever was at hand. Then what happens? Where do they go, and what happened to the rest of her body?”

“I don't know, Max. Agent Zheng stopped me before I could get into seriously tracking them. But I got to thinking. If her vital organs can change into weasels, why can't all of her body? The coroner had knocked the grill off the air vent. They're little, they all could have gone into there.”

They glanced at each other. After more than three years of working together, they had developed a full language of expressions. The look they exchanged was an agreement not to talk about it for a while. Ukiah looked away to stare out the window at the passing landscape.

They were almost to their exit before Max found a semisafe subject. “So, tell me about these people in Schenley Park that you went haring off after? You didn't tell Agent Zheng everything.”

“How could you tell?”

“Oh, after you learn wolf body language, you're as clear as water.”

Ukiah wasn't sure if Max was joking or not. “Well, after I killed Doctor Haze, I passed out—”

“After she sliced you open, you passed out,” Max corrected him with a light cuff. “Shock does that to people. Which reminds me.” He pulled over onto the shoulder. “Let's have a look at that cut.”

Ukiah sighed and winced as he peeled up one edge of the bandage.

Max set the Hummer's hand brake, leaned over, and peered closely at Ukiah's neck. “Take the bandage all the way off,” he commanded and pulled the Hummer back into traffic.

“Really?” The Hummer was sadly lacking in vanity mirrors.

“The cut looks better than that huge bandage. If you're feeling okay enough to run all over Schenley Park in the middle of the night, then we might as well do damage control with your moms. It's a good thing you heal so quickly.”

Ukiah considered the truth of this and started to coax up the sticky bandage. “Well, I passed out. When I came to, there were police and the helicopter and everything.”

“Yeah?” Max was obviously puzzled as to where Ukiah was leading.

“And there were these two people, standing off where I couldn't see them, talking about me.” He recounted the discussion completely. “I went back to Schenley Park to look at the tracks. It was creepy
how they could move through the thick brush, in the dark rain, at a full run, without anyone noticing them.”

“This case gets better and better.” Max leaned over and cued up the disc on the Hummer's deck. “I didn't pay any attention to your headcam after you went down. I was glued to the GPI screen. When I watched the recording this morning, I turned it off after Haze dropped. Your watcher might be on the disk.”

The screen hissed with static and came up with the chaotic jumble of police cars outside the apartment building. “Testing Ukiah's VOX.” His own voice always startled Ukiah. The timbre was wrong and slightly higher than he expected. “Testing, 1, 2, 3. How's that?”

Max sounded like Max at least. “Good, it's coming through clear. There's my channel good and strong. We're go.”

It was the first time Ukiah had ever really watched one of their recordings. Usually his memory was so much fuller and clearer. This time, however, there were holes in his memory. He and the camera went into the building. Despite state-of-the-art steadycam, the view was jittery and vaguely fish-eyed. The lack of smell and touch, the limited view, and the reduced sound left Ukiah feeling more and more frustrated. Finally he started to skip through the tracks, letting time leap forward in huge bounds. He would watch the disk later, maybe. He hated the gaps in his memory, but he didn't want to relive the case right now.

He found the end, his gun flashing again and again, set the recording to play normally. The camera showed only part of Janet's unmoving foot. There was silence in the foreground except for the hiss of rain. Max's voice continued in the background.
“Ukiah! Ukiah! Kraynak, Ukiah's down and not responding. The fucking girl got him with the sword. I think he's hurt bad. I'm coming in.”

This started a heated argument between Max and Kraynak, which Ukiah tuned out. He considered the angle of Janet Haze's body and what he remembered of the footprints in the mud. If he were right, then the male watcher would enter in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

“When I went back to the crime scene, his tracks put him right here.” He tapped the screen, and at that moment lightning lit up the woods. “There! Did you see him?”

“Ukiah, I'm driving. I didn't see anything.”

Ukiah clicked the recording backward frame by frame. For one frame only, a man stood in the brilliant light, facing the camera but starting to turn. “There's the guy.”

From the angle, it was hard to tell how tall the man was. He was lean—rangy was what Mom Jo would call it—with shaggy, grizzled hair and dark eyes. The flash of brilliance had drained his face of color, making it all stark angles and shadows. Ukiah guessed at an age range of mid- to late-twenties.

Max glanced over and shook his head. “Doesn't ring any bell except he wasn't any of the police running around last night. None of the media either. Here.” He pulled off onto the shoulder again. “Why don't you drive?”

They switched places, and Max tried not to wince when Ukiah ground the gears starting out. Max worked at pulling a usable headshot from the recording, muttering, “I've got to let you drive more often. It's the only way you're going to get any better.”

“I could go to the defensive driving school. The ad looked like fun.”

Max laughed. “It's in California. Two days ago your moms might have let you go, but today, I doubt it.”

“So when do I get to stay an adult all the time and not have to go back to being a kid?”

Max shrugged. “It's weird with parents, Ukiah. There's shit I don't tell my dad because I don't want to deal with his fatherly outrage.”

“Yeah, but he can't stop you from doing what you want.”

“No. He can't. There! One clean mug shot. Let's see what we can pull up on our friend the peeping tom.”

Ukiah got off I-79 at the Evans City exit, whipsawed down 528 to the small town itself. Town, both blocks of it, was quiet as they drove through. They were approaching the long twisting drive back to the farm when Max swore. “Oh hell, this just gets better and better. Pull over and listen to this. Our friend in the park is Rennie Shaw, and he comes with Mr. Uck stickers. ‘Armed and considered dangerous.' ‘Do not approach.' ‘Report all contact to the FBI.' He's suspected of arson, auto theft, burglary, carjacking, drug dealing, drug smuggling, oh I see—we just go down the alphabet. Homicide. Manslaughter. Murder. Look at all those outstanding warrants for arrests. Wanted for questioning in the death of FBI agents. Wanted for questioning in the disappearance of FBI agents. Wanted for questioning . . .”

“What about arrests and convictions?”

Max scrolled downward. “Looks like they've never managed to catch and hold him.” Max suddenly killed the window and started to type. “Let's hope that I'm consistently paranoid.”

“What do you mean?”

“This man, this very bad man, is curious about you, and he knows your name. I'm doing a search on your name to see what he can learn about you.”

Ukiah glanced up the driveway to his mothers' house. “He's not coming here?”

His driver's license photo came up on the Pennsylvania Motor Vehicle database. Name: Ukiah Oregon. Address: 145 Maryland Avenue, Pittsburgh. He blinked at it and pulled out his wallet to check the hard copy. “The office address?” He flipped through his wallet. His private detective license. His weapons permit. His motorcycle registration. “They're all to the office.”

“Technically, my house. Gifts of my paranoia. We were heading into Annie Krueler's kidnapping trial when we started to establish your identity. I wanted to make sure you were safe from any stray idiots, so we put my house down as your residence. If anyone official questioned it, we were going to say you lived with me.”

Three years ago he had been too ignorant to even notice the oddity of his paper trail. Now he knew where the holes could develop. “What about next of kin? Who to contact in case of emergency? Life insurance beneficiary?”

“We figured all the angles. I'm listed for next of kin, emergency contact, and beneficiary.”

“Mom Jo agreed to this?”

“She hated it. You would have thought I was trying to steal you with legal mumbo-jumbo, but Lara pointed out that it was for your safety and Cally's.”

“So the farm is safe?” Ukiah shifted the Hummer down into first.

Max nodded, but the worried look remained.

Tuesday, June 16, 2004
Evans City, Pennsylvania

His five-year-old sister, Cally, was in the front yard when they pulled up, playing with a mix of Tonka trucks and Barbie dolls in the sandbox. She sprang to her feet and ran to the Hummer shouting, “Ukiah's home! Max is here!”

She slammed into Ukiah's legs and hugged them hard, giggling as if all the joy of the world was flowing in her. “You're home! You're home! Mommy said you were sick and might not be home for a while.”

Ukiah tousled her curly black hair, soft as puppy fur. “I got better and Max brought me home.”

“I'm so glad. I prayed special for you last night. Do you think God heard me and made you better?”

“I'm sure of it, pumpkin.” Ukiah shook his head, amazed at how much Cally seemed to love him for how little time he had spent with her over the last three years. He left in the morning before she was awake and often worked days in a row, doing stakeouts or traveling cross-country for out-of-state jobs. Yet every time she saw him, she showered him with a child's pure, strong love.

It amazed him more because when she was born,
he had been miserably jealous of her. Envious of the time his moms took caring for her. Covetous of the love they showered on her. Resentful that they never seemed angry with her. His moms and the farm had been his whole world, and Cally had suddenly appeared to take it all away. He'd sit in his tree house and sulk whenever she was awake.

His change of heart had come when he started to work with Max. It gave him a new, all-consuming world to explore. Slowly he left his childhood behind, and at some time arrived at being an adult. The farm was still a comforting retreat, but it wasn't his life. With no need to compete, he'd been able to stand Cally's presence, then welcome it.

Mom Lara came out of the house and hugged Ukiah warmly. She smelt of yeast, sweat, and honey. Her gold hair was swept up into a bun, and flour streaked her face. White hand prints—her own and Cally's little ones—decorated her blue jeans and crisp linen shirt. “Oh Ukiah.” She gave him a radiant smile. “I'm so glad you're home in one piece.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

She turned, one arm holding Ukiah securely, to look up at Max still in the Hummer. “Where do you think you're going?”

Max tried his normal dodge. “I just ran Ukiah out. I was heading back to the office.”

“You look worse than Ukiah, Max. We're grilling steaks for dinner tonight and having a picnic. Why don't you stay, take a nap, and eat with us later?”

She merely stood there, smiling up at him. As always, Max sighed, tucked the Hummer's keys over the visor, and climbed down to join them on the lawn. “You made your potato salad?”

“Of course I did.” She kissed Max on the cheek in greeting, wove her free hand into his arm and guided
them toward the house. “I was making bread to celebrate the Mars landing, so the house is beastly hot, but it's nice out on the porch.”

 

An hour later the house was silent.

Mom Lara took Cally off to pick strawberries at a neighboring farm. Max was dozing on the porch hammock. Ukiah slipped into the house and cut off a still-warm heel of bread, smeared it heavily with blackberry jam, and ate it with a glass of cold milk. Done in from the night before, he went yawning up to his room.

Mom Jo's family once had been well-to-do, and the old house was a huge three-story Victorian with breezy rooms filled with sunlight. The entire attic was his, although he owned little more than a bed and a dresser. He had been too old for toys when Mom Jo found him; too illiterate for books; too solitary for most sports equipment. For a long time it had been one large empty echoing room. Mysteries and criminology books—spillover from his work—were starting to fill up the vast space. On the one tall wall, he had hung framed newspaper clippings, awards, commendations, and letters of thanks from the people he had found—lives he had saved. He fingered them, trying to drive away the strange hollowness the latest case formed in him.

All these cases,
he told himself,
and I've only done good. One bad case shouldn't taint it all.

Memory was an odd thing. It felt like he had always been Max's partner, but there was a definite day that he went from a part-time tracker to a full partner. Max had taken his moms by surprise by announcing that his promotion was a done deal. Memory being what it was, he also recalled that had been the last time his moms sent him to his room. He had
lain in bed listening to his moms and Max shout at one another, arguing about his future.

“You went behind our backs!” Mom Jo had shouted for the third time.

“If you want to see it that way, then there's nothing I can say to change your view, but I didn't.”

“What gives you the right to—?”

“Can we get off my rights and all this other shit and talk about what is important? He's eighteen, or close to it as far as we can tell. What is he going to do for the rest of his life? What can an ex–wolf boy who has no education, no driver's license, no birth certificate, no Social Security number—no legal identity at all—do? Nothing! What would happen to him if you both were killed in a freak accident? People would fall over themselves to adopt your daughter. Ukiah? There would be nothing. No one takes an eighteen-year-old in, the welfare system won't recognize him, and if you don't do something to get him set up in work, he won't be able to take care of himself. You're all he has right now. If there were a fire in the house tonight or a car accident tomorrow, he'd be screwed. I learned the hard way that shit happens unexpectedly.”

They were shocked to silence. That was as close as Max ever got to talking about his dead wife. After several minutes of the silence, Max started again, much quieter.

“He needs a means of taking care of himself. I can take him on as a partner. He'd make good money with full benefits, including a retirement plan.”

Ukiah remembered a moment of silence, which probably meant Mom Jo and Mom Lara were doing their marriage telepathy thing and communicating only in glances. “Are you sure he could qualify for a PI license?”

Ukiah had let out a deep sigh of relief, surprising himself with how much he wanted his moms to say “yes,” “maybe,” or even “we'll think about it and let you know.”

“You've told me he reads and writes at a high enough level to pass a GED. I can help him study for the Pennsylvania Private Investigator licensing test. If he can pass a GED, with his memory, the licensing test shouldn't be any problem. He'll have no trouble with the physical. Bonding might be trickier with his weird background. But to get it all started, you have to go to the courts and get him recognized by the United States legal system. You have to get him recognized as a legal adult. You have to get him a Social Security number.”

He hadn't thought Mom Jo would go for all of it. She hated and feared “the system.” He had heard her whisper more than once to Mom Lara, “If they ever knew Ukiah wasn't legally adopted, they would take him away from us.” When he had been younger, he had had nightmares about “they.” He had been amazed that she said yes.

Memory being what it was—three years later and almost asleep on his bed—Ukiah realized that probably the only reason his moms had said yes was because Mom Lara had been told she might have only weeks to live.

 

Cally woke him for dinner. She crawled onto his bed and hugged him awake with more sharp knees and hard elbows than a human child should have. She gave him a blackberry jam kiss, a sticky smile, and then demanded a horseback ride down all three flights of stairs to the yard.

He recalled his last thoughts before going to sleep and the horseback ride went down into Mom Lara's
rose garden to visit the grave of one Miss Pretty Lightfoot. Sometime over the years the rock marking the grave had been moved. If Cally even remembered the burial, she gave no sign. To have the memory of a child—he wondered what it was like.

The ride went to the big wraparound porch where his moms and Max were laughing. His feet boomed on the painted wood floor, so he made a complete circle of the porch, making the most of the effect. Finally he collapsed onto the top porch step to drop Cally off.

“Again!” Cally cried, half-choking him with one of her misplaced bear hugs.

Mom Lara saved him by gently prying her off. “Cally, honey, it's almost dinnertime. Go wash your face and hands.”

Mom Jo gave him a hug and let him go with a “Now let me look at this.” She tilted his head aside to look at his neck.

“It's nothing, Mom.”

“Nothing? An inch over or wider—” She shook her head and scowled first at Ukiah and then at Max. “Sometimes—”

“Mom, I'm fine.” He grinned at her, silently vowing that she would never see the disc in Max's Hummer. “I cut myself worse than this the first time I shaved.”

They heard a shout of laughter from inside the house, and Mom Lara called, “You have to admit Jo, he did.”

With that, it was over—the least amount of fuss they had ever put up over him being hurt while working.

 

They had steak, medium for Mom Lara and mooing for Ukiah, Max, and Mom Jo. Cally announced
proudly she had picked all the salad ingredients, and the mangled vegetables showed it. Max talked Mom Lara through grilling summer squash instead of her normal pan-fry. Mom Jo brought out a bottle of wine and a glass of grape juice for Cally. Dusk fell and the yard became bejeweled with fireflies. Cally begged a jar off of Mom Lara and went off chasing the gleaming insects.

Ukiah sat on the porch, watching her play, drinking the wine with the other adults.
When did I become one of them?
It had happened sometime when he wasn't looking. Was it this year? Last year?

When he had arrived, he wasn't sure, but he could recall the signposts along the road. The first had been certainly Max taking him on as a partner. The second probably had been buying his motorcycle. If he was going to work full-time with Max, he had to be able to commute into Pittsburgh daily. Max and his moms took turns teaching him how to drive, with some vague notion he'd drive Mom Lara's '95 Neon to work. He found the whole process of driving a car awkward, and it left Mom Lara without a car all day. He pitched the idea of the motorcycle to Max first, pointing out that he had ridden dirt bikes on the farm for years. He could put a down payment on a brand-new, reliable machine with his first paycheck and only use Mom Lara's car on days of bad winter weather. It took a while to get Mom Lara over the amputation rate in motorcycle accidents, but his moms agreed. Max drove him to the bank and then to the dealership, but he let Ukiah pick and buy his machine, stepping in only at the end to haggle down the price and help fill out the registration paperwork.

Another signpost had been his moms telling him but not Cally that Mom Lara had a brain tumor and might not survive the surgery. Ukiah was never sure
if this was a blessing or a curse. Cally had remained happily ignorant the day of the surgery while Ukiah was sure he'd die of worry.

Another had been when he discovered that the medical bills were driving his moms into bankruptcy, so he used his paychecks to pay off the debtors. At first they protested, but he pointed out that if he was working, he should pay rent and his share of the food. Then he extended his health benefits, covering Mom Lara as part of his family, something Mom Jo couldn't do, despite their marriage.

 

Mom Jo took Cally off to bed and then went to exercise her pack of ten wolf dogs. Mom Lara was in the kitchen, watching the Mars mission on the NASA channel as she washed up dishes. Max sat rocking back and forth on the glider. Ukiah lifted the wine bottle to pour himself another glass and discovered it was empty.

He glanced over at Max, realizing that he had been quiet for some time. Max was a quiet, introspective drunk. “You okay?”

Max waved a hand at the empty bottle. “I never know when to stop anymore.”

“Staying the night then?”

“Looks like it.”

Ukiah stood, holding out his hand to Max. “Want a hand up?”

“I guess so.”

In the guest room, as he helped Max with his shoes, Ukiah realized how much Max had become part of their life. His alarm clock was on the nightstand. A change of his clothes was in the dresser. His spare toothbrush hung in the guest bathroom.

“There are times,” Max said quietly, “that I wish
one of your moms would marry me. I wish that this was my place, that these were my kids, that this was my life. When I was young, this was the life I wanted, it was the life I thought I was going to live, it was the life I worked hard to have.”

Ukiah wasn't sure what to say. He gripped Max's shoulder, a little ashamed at the inadequacy of the gesture. “I'm sorry.”

“Kid, if you ever find a girl that loves you, that you love, grab hold and never let anything happen to her.”

“I will.”

“Good night, kid,” Max muttered, sprawling out onto the bed.

“Good night,” Ukiah whispered, and closed the guest room door on Max's quiet misery.