Bitter Waters (12 page)

“Do you want me to come home with you?”

“No.” He must have let the hurt on his face show, because she pressed her hand to his. “You said before that the best thing for us is to step back and give things time to work out. I need time. It's one thing to
know
you're one of them and that it's a package deal; it's something completely different to
see
it. Tonight gave me a lot to think about.”

 

Mom Lara was up with Kittanning when Ukiah finally reached home. She met him on the front porch, Kittanning bundled against the night chill.

“What are you two doing up?” Ukiah asked.

“He heard the bike coming.” Lara handed him Kittanning as the baby wriggled violently, trying to reach Ukiah. “Why did you bring the bike home?”

For the second time in one night, Ukiah realized that he had totally messed up. He had promised to take Kittanning to work with him, something he couldn't do on the motorcycle. Maybe he should think about getting a car.

“We'll ride into town with Mom Jo.” Ukiah took Kittanning and soothed away the separation anxiety. “Don't worry, we'll work something out.”

Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania
Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Sam was waiting patiently for Ukiah at Jorden's Auto Repair Shop; leaning against Kraynak's dead Volkswagen van, tapping a booted foot in time to loud rock music. The pose accented her long legs and tomboy good looks, earning her stares from the mechanics that she was ignoring along with the cold wind blasting out of the clear autumn sky. As Ukiah pulled into the gas station, she turned her sunglasses his way, wind ruffling her short blond hair. She had her leather jacket half-unzipped, unintentionally showing off that she wore a black turtleneck shirt under a corded green sweater and her nine-millimeter Heckler and Hoch in a shoulder holster.

She recognized him through the windshield and came to his driver's window as he shifted the Grand Cherokee into park. He pulled into the only slot available on the lot, by a large sugar maple just starting to turn fall colors.

He toggled down the window, letting in a blast of cold and her scent of leather, gunmetal, female sweat, and traces of Obsession perfume. “Hey.”

“I was starting to wonder if you were going to show.” Sam leaned against the Cherokee. “It's cold out here.” She indicated the waiting room. “And too hot in there with my jacket on.”

And with her pistol on, she wouldn't want to take off her jacket. Guns spooked most people, rightly so.

“Sorry, I hit a snag.” He glanced at Kraynak's van, smelling the overheated engine from where they stood. “So it melted down on you.”

“They say I broke a coolant pipe, and apparently it's not easy to find replacements. They say it's going to be a day at minimum.”

“Grab your things and I'll take you to the office.”

She had two large sports bags. Ukiah hit the universal unlock and got out to open the back for her. He closed the back quietly as possible, and did the same with his door, wincing when Sam slammed shut her door.

She went to fasten her seat belt and checked, seeing the occupied child seat for the first time. “What the hell? Whose kid?”

Ukiah glanced over his shoulder and was pleased to see Kittanning was still asleep, thumb in mouth. “Mine. His name is Kittanning, but we call him Kitt sometimes. He's ten weeks old.”

“Still counting in weeks.” Sam reached back to move a blanket aside to get a better look at the black-haired infant. “What a sweetie, but that's no surprise considering his stud muffin for a father.”

Ukiah blushed.

Sam had broken down on the turnpike, just inside the Pennsylvania state line. She called the office, getting Ukiah. He arranged a tow truck to get Sam and the van to Cranberry Township's Triple AAA repair shop. Getting Kittanning in the car required a bottle, a burping session, a change of diaper, and set of clean clothes for both of them.

Sam considered Ukiah silently as he pulled out onto busy Route 19, heading for I-79. “I thought it was a big no-no for you to have kids. The whole ‘breeder' thing and all.”

“Well, Kittanning isn't my son in the normal way.” Ukiah explained, “Just as I'm a surviving piece of Magic Boy that became human, Kittanning is a piece of me.”

Sam glanced again at the sleeping baby. “He's a blood mouse?”

“Yes. Hex stole one of my blood mice and made Kittanning.”

“And you just didn't take him back after you got him back? Like you did with Little Slow Magic?”

“I couldn't do that!”

“Why not? It seems saner than trying to raise him.”

He looked at her sharply, then paid attention to merging with the high-speed traffic of I-79. While he jockeyed the Cherokee into a safe slot, he tried to form a reply. “I'm what's left of Magic Boy, but I'm not him, I'm a totally new, separate person. And Kittanning is a new, separate person, and taking him back would be too much like murder.”

“But you could take him back?”

Ukiah shifted uneasily. “He has his own identity. He
knows
he's Kittanning and not me. He has his own soul.”

Sam startled in the seat beside him. “How do you know? Can you see souls?”

“I don't think so.”

“You seem so sure he has one.”

“If I have a soul, then he must have one too.”

“And you know that you have one?”

“I think I do. How else could I tell right from wrong?”

“I have to say one thing, kid, conversations with you are never boring. So, where's tall, dark, and scary?”

“Rennie Shaw?”

“Yeah, your sort-of dad.”

Ukiah reached out to feel for the faint prickle of Pack presence. He felt Bear Shadow ranging at the edge of his awareness. “The Pack has an eye on me most of the time, but nothing overt. I'm not sure where Rennie is, but we're being followed.”

Sam turned in her seat and scanned the cars behind them as they took the exit onto I-279. Most of the midday traffic consisted of large trucks, and a handful of cars. “Which one? The bug, or one of the sedans?”

“I think he's on Route 19 still, paralleling. They keep only a loose watch over me—Pittsburgh's a fairly safe town.”

“Pendleton was a very safe town, and look what happened there.”

“That was different,” Ukiah said.

They rounded the curve of I-279 and Pittsburgh did its
magic act, having been cunningly tucked away until this moment to appear, a sudden collection of towering skyscrapers.

“Where's Max?”

“We had some trouble crop up yesterday.” Ukiah explained about Agent Hutchinson and the cult as he threaded his way through the odd Celtic knot that dropped them onto Bigelow Boulevard. They left the skyscrapers behind, skirting the Hill District, to cut through Oakland to Shadyside. “Max is at Pittsburgh Data Haven that owns the server the cult's Web site is on. He wanted to go last night, but they put him off until this morning.”

“He's just going to walk in and toss a secure server?”

Toss?
Ukiah glanced at her and realized she meant rifle through it. “Probably. The owners owe Max a favor and he dangled some bright electronic gear in front of them.” Max had the money and connections to ride the bleeding edge of technology. His toys always outclassed anyone else's.

“Ah.” Sam fell silent as the neighborhood changed from the low-income Oakland area to the mansions of Shadyside. “Are these single family homes?”

“Some are,” Ukiah said. “Some have been renovated into condos.”

She fell silent again, murmuring only, “I should put out a trail of bread crumbs,” after they made a series of turns to shortcut through Shadyside's one-way streets.

He pulled up to the office's four-car garage and tapped the garage door opener. The middle door slid up. Sam took off her sunglasses as he slotted the Cherokee into the dark opening.

“Wow! Whose Hummer?”

“That's Max's.”

Sam turned to look at him, eyes narrowing. She walked out of the dark garage to stare at the looming splendor of Max's mansion. The green of her eyes were like spring ice. “This is the office?”

The question was void of all emotion; still it set off alarms in Ukiah. “Ummm, yeah.” He jiggled through his key ring to the back door key. “Come on, I'll take you to your room.”

Ukiah unlocked the back door, disarmed the security system, and set Kittanning's car seat in the center of the kitchen
table. Sam followed wordlessly with her two bags. He took her up the back steps to the second floor. “This is the laundry, if you want to do any wash while you're here. This is my room, when I spend the night, which isn't often. This is Max's room.” Actually it was a full suite complete with working fireplace, sitting room, kitchenette, king-sized poster bed, and master bathroom. Friends teased that Max planned to bunker down in it if World War III broke out. “Guest bedroom.”

Max talked about being torn between wanting to set a vase of a dozen roses in the guest bedroom, and knowing full well that he shouldn't. Sam's job offer had to be without strings attached, Max maintained, that would continue even if his romantic hopes crashed and burned.

Thus there wasn't really anything for Sam to stand in the doorway and scowl so. The queen-sized cherry sleigh bed matched Ukiah's, so he knew it was comfortable. He'd washed the linens so they were clean, and Max had made the bed to military neatness. Full bath, walk-in closet, towels, extra blankets and pillows: there was nothing missing.

“What's wrong?”

Sam slanted a look at him. She opened her mouth, considered, and closed it. Finally she said, “It probably wouldn't have occurred to
you
to mention that your partner is a fucking millionaire.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“What's wrong?” She tossed her bags into the room, cursing softly. “It would have been nice that sometime in the last few weeks, along with ‘the kid is an alien' and ‘we're going to do a salvage run on an alien spaceship,' someone—no, no, not just anyone—Max—would have said, ‘Oh, yes, I'm a millionaire.' ”

“He had a lot to think about.”

Sam snorted. “It's just that I spent the last three days, driving that damn manual transmission van across country, worrying that you guys wouldn't have dough to pay me when I got here, and bitching to myself for agreeing to sleep on a cot in the office back room in some bug-ridden, cold-water, third-story walk-up flat to save you money, and half-scared to
death that I wouldn't be able to get home without hitchhiking.”

“Third-story walk-up?”

“I've had a lot of time to think up worst-case scenarios!” Sam snapped, and then rubbed at her eyes. “I'm sorry, kid. You're not the one I should be yelling at.”

“Max has had a lot on his mind lately. He makes most of the decisions for the agency, and then he's got his own personal investments—and he dropped all of that to go to Oregon to find Alicia.”

“I know, I know. Between you being killed, and fighting with Degas, and all that
really weird
shit with the mice and the turtle and the spaceship and everything—” She took a deep breath. “How much is he worth?”

The pronoun threw Ukiah. Which “he” did Sam mean? “Max?” Earning a nod, Ukiah fumbled for an answer; he never asked Max about his personal finances, but his perfect memory had recorded bits and pieces of information. “I don't know exactly. He sold his Internet company for forty million dollars in 1998, but he's made a lot more since then. Bought low, sold high, and got out before the big high-tech crash.” A firm number eluded him. “The agency's Dun and Bradstreet is two million, and we share it even.”

Sam eyed Ukiah. “You're equal financial partners in the company?”

“Max gave me half of it, after I saved his life.”

“Ahhh,” Sam said with the note of sudden understanding. She looked off at a distance, staring at an oil painting hung across the room. “Well, all the little techno gadgets, and the multiple airplane tickets, and the expensive dinners, and the nice designer clothes, and the expensive cologne, and the—oh, shit.”

“What?”

“Oh—just that everything just got so much more—complicated. Well, at least I can stop worrying about you paying me, and how I'm getting home. We'll deal with the rest when Max gets back. When does that happen?”

“He hoped to get back around five.” He felt Kittanning stir in the kitchen. “Kitt is awake. I need to go downstairs.”

Sam cocked her head to listen. “How can you tell?”

“Pack can sense Pack,” Ukiah said.

“Ooooooookay.” Sam scrubbed fingers through her hair. “I'm going to take a shower and catch a nap, and maybe throw some things into the washer. Does he have a pool in this mansion?”

“No. Your bathroom has a Jacuzzi and a steam shower.”

“Decadence—got to love it.”

“Max had the kitchen fully stocked today.”

“Had?”

Ukiah assumed that she caught the implication that Max hadn't bought the food himself. “He ordered food over the Internet before we left Pendleton. It was delivered this morning. If you want something to eat, help yourself; anything in the kitchen is fair game. Max is kind of picky about the wine cellar, but what's upstairs in the game room's bar is okay to drink.”

“Go on, deal with your kid. I need a long hot shower.”

 

The office doorbell rang, a play of Westminster chimes in eight solemn tones.

“Bell,”
Kittanning thought.

“Somebody's here.” Ukiah headed for the door, testing the bottle on his wrist. Upstairs, the water in the guest bathroom turned off.

“Bottle?”
Kittanning added a cranky verbal complaint.

“It's too hot, honey,” Ukiah said, opening the door.

Later he would remember the man in painful detail.

He was tall, broad in the shoulders, with a handsome face ravaged by acne in his youth. The hair was a dull color, once a mousy blond but grayed to muddy flatness. The eyes were gray and cold and looked at him with clinical dispassion. A jeans jacket hung over a plain white T-shirt. Jeans. A belt. Heavy steel-tipped shoes.