Clear Water (20 page)

But Sunday evening, after they’d puttered back to the dock, they had nothing to do but wait for Fly Bait in the cooling pink twilight. They spent the time sitting on the back of the houseboat, their legs dangling over the side a foot or two from the water, and holding hands.

Whiskey was fascinated by Patrick’s hands. They were long and spidery, like his body, all pointy joints and awkward length, but they liked to touch things. Patrick spent a thoughtful, quiet time letting his hand walk gracefully from Whiskey’s thighs to his hips to his shoulders before Whiskey captured it, kissed the center, and put it back in his lap. They spoke occasionally—emotional shorthand, almost like the science shorthand that Whiskey used with Fly Bait.

“Mmm… pretty.” Patrick’s lake-blue eyes were fixed on the horizon.

“Sunset?”

“Yeah. Pink, orange, purple, black. Can’t find shirts that color.”

“Not in stores men shop.”

“Sue me. I’m gay.”

“Would rather fuck you ’cause you’re gay.” Normally, Whiskey’s inappropriate sense of humor would be shot down here—he was much aware.

Patrick’s throaty “Hawm-hawm-hawm!” rang out over the quiet, slow-flowing river, and Whiskey had to wonder how Fly Bait’s louder laughter had scared him so badly. They both sounded very much alike.

Suddenly Patrick shifted, rested his head on Whiskey’s shoulder. “Are we going to have sex again, now that Fly Bait’s back?”

Whiskey nuzzled that hair—it only got more streaked with white-blond in the summer sun, and curlier as well—and smiled. “Oh hell yeah.”

“Won’t she object?”

“Fly Bait? That woman can sleep through her own snoring.”

Patrick pulled back and looked at him thoughtfully. “I’ve never heard her snore.”

Whiskey’s smile was slow and kind. “Because you can sleep through it too.” Whiskey could now, too, for that matter—but then, Whiskey had been in the adjoining room of a
very small
cabin when Loretta and Fly Bait had first hooked up, so he figured Fly Bait owed him a Patrick night. Or several. He figured they had nearly two months before real life caught up with them and they had to plan for Whiskey’s trip and Patrick had to decide how he wanted to deal with being left behind for six months.

Whiskey was usually a doer—he didn’t look at an unpleasant task and put it off; he looked at an unpleasant task and faced it. He was not particularly excited about “doing” in this case. In this case, he figured the “doing” would come soon enough. Right now, he wanted to concentrate on the living. Patrick had literally been dropped into his lap from heaven—he wasn’t all that excited about chucking him back now that they were happy together. So for a little while, Whiskey thought he could be forgiven for not “doing” and for simply “being.” Patrick sighed against his shoulder and made a little wiggle, and together they heard the sharp click-clack of Loretta’s high heels coming down the dock.

“You want to go say hi?” Whiskey murmured.

“Yeah. Think they’ll want to come in for ice cream?” They had bought some more from the little dock store.

“We could ask them.”

“Hey, we could ask them!” Patrick grinned, and they were both aware that they were quoting
Ocean’s 11
and that Whiskey hadn’t even had to ask if Patrick had seen that movie. They stood up and walked to the little door on the deck to welcome Fly Bait and her beloved home.

They had ice cream and happy conversation that night, and Fly Bait went up top to bid Loretta a reluctant goodnight. She came back down and looked at the two of them sourly as they cleaned up the dishes.

“Oh, God. You two. You’re disgusting. I’m going to bed. Wait thirty minutes before you make him scream like a horny orangutan, Whiskey—I need to be totally out for that!”

Whiskey nodded soberly, and he and Patrick pretended they didn’t see Fly Bait’s overbright eyes.

They sat and watched a movie for a little while, but since Patrick practically had to sit on his lap to even see the screen on the laptop, that just turned into a quietly obnoxious game of grab-ass, so they went to bed before the movie was only halfway done.

And
then
Whiskey managed to make Patrick scream like an orangutan.

S
IX
weeks later—God, six weeks later, Whiskey still didn’t want to think about the future. But he had to, because he and Fly Bait weren’t any closer to figuring out where the chemical that was fucking with the frogs was coming from, and they only had two weeks to finish their research.

“Okay, okay okay,” Whiskey muttered at the little kitchen-non-table. The three of them were seated at it, notes and figures and shit in front of them, in an exercise that had started as lunch but had turned into a brain trust clusterfuck of banging their heads against the wall. “Let’s go over what we know.”

Fly Bait started. “We know that the only pesticide we can find is atrazine, which is known for messing with frog DNA, but we’ve got stats on every farmer in the area that says nobody has used it in ten years. It’s not in the soil, it’s not in the vegetation, so it didn’t hang out and fuck things up—it’s got to be something recent.”

“Right,” Whiskey said, nodding.

“And we’ve got the problem of the chlorine levels dropping,” Patrick contributed, not looking shy or out of place at all. “This probably means that baking soda or some other neutralizer is being dumped into the river, but we don’t know why someone would do that, because it seems pretty fucking stupid. We know my dad’s recycling plant uses that shit, but we called them”—Fly Bait had called them—“and their last inspection confirmed that once the baking soda was used to clean up spills, it was put through a clean-up treatment, because otherwise it would be toxic waste, and that’s what the fucking factory is supposed to
avoid.
So if they
were
dumping that shit in the river, it would have something else nasty in it, and it
doesn’t
,
so we’re fucked.”

Whiskey looked at Patrick and waggled his eyebrows, because in spite of the grimness of the situation, the fact was, the two of them had been fucked many times over the last six weeks, very often mercilessly and with lots of yelling. Fly Bait hadn’t mentioned a thing, but she had started dropping really personal details about her and Loretta as sort of a revenge thing. It was okay—Whiskey was bi enough to be turned on, and Patrick had no idea what a Feeldoe was, so their sex continued uninterrupted. So now, Patrick grinned back, and then the two of them focused their mind on the damned project, because Whiskey had
never
written a “findings inconclusive” paper, and he wasn’t
going to start now.

“We’ve talked to the paper plant, and nothing
they
use has any resemblance
at all
to atrazine,” Whiskey muttered.

“Atrazine is a herbicide that the frogs breathe through their skin which affects their DNA and it’s super bad shit and it’s fucking illegal.” Patrick winced immediately after he said it. It wasn’t the first time he’d just blurted something out, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. He didn’t have to draw Whiskey a diagram—just blurting out whatever the hell was in his head came with the über-poor impulse control, and bringing up Patrick’s dad’s company had shorted out whatever semblance of a neural control board Patrick had left. Whiskey and Fly Bait both looked at him and nodded so he could see the acknowledgment. (They’d tried ignoring him once, and he’d gotten stuck on an auto-loop of “Frogs are amphibians, which means they live in air
and
in water” for nearly fifteen minutes.)

After they acknowledged him, and he took a breath and aligned himself, Whiskey went on with what they knew. “And everything they
claim
to use is all over the soil, the vegetation, and the water, and nobody I’ve read about or talked to says they’d be using this shit anyway. So we’ve got
one
untested part of the grid, and it’s the one that Patrick swears has nothing on it but an abandoned building.”

“The last time I was there,” Patrick qualified, and Whiskey nodded, because they’d discussed this too.

“I asked,” Fly Bait muttered, “and the rep from your dad’s company said they weren’t doing anything with that place. Maybe… I don’t know, someone started an illegal corn operation or something.”

Patrick looked at her. “How could corn be illegal?”

“Fucked if I know,” Fly Bait shrugged, and Patrick shrugged back.

“Okay,” Whiskey said, nonplussed. “Illegal corn. Illegal whatever. We’re going to have to go and actually
see
the fucking warehouse. We can drive down an old service road past Patrick’s father’s factory, but that ends with two miles to go, because the warehouse has been empty for ten years, and the last flood pretty much wiped out the gravel road in. The rest of it is going to be tramping on foot. Patrick, do you remember
anything
about the area? We’ve got satellite pictures, but they’re about three years old. Back then, it looked like abandoned marshland that dried into kindling during the summer. Should it be anything else now?”

Patrick shrugged. “Uhm, no—but the hike’s gonna suck. It’s really hilly—my dad and I used to go there and fly kites.”

Well
that
was a surprise. “Really?”

Patrick blushed. “Well, yeah. I guess it didn’t
all
suck. But the hills were pretty bare, and there weren’t power lines every-fucking-where like there are now. That’s why we stopped going out there. I think that’s why Dad closed down the warehouse and just built one close by the factory. He, like, inherited that one, and it was one of those stupid structures built when they
thought
they were going to develop the area, and they
didn’t.
”

Whiskey nodded. Those things happened in undeveloped wetlands, especially on what was, in spite of all the legislation claiming otherwise, a flood plain. “Okay,” he said. “So this is the one place we haven’t gone to look, partly because it’s inaccessible as hell and we were playing the odds, and partly because it’s supposed to be deserted, and, well, that whole playing the odds nightmare. So are we ready to take a look now?”

Well, hell. Why not? They only had two weeks left.

“Have we let my dad know we’re going to be on his property? Without mentioning my name?”

There had been a reason Fly Bait had done the calling on her new phone. The Monday morning after their first weekend—their
honeymoon
weekend, as Whiskey thought of it fondly—his phone had buzzed in his pants, next to the bed.

Patrick had grabbed it and squinted at the number. “Oh, fuck,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“It’s my dad.”

Well, of
course
it had been Patrick’s dad, because it
was
the twenty-first century, and caller ID
did
exist, didn’t it just?

“Fuck. Answer it.”

Patrick had, and Whiskey had kept a firm arm around his shoulders, the better to stop him from hurling the phone when the conversation went south.

“Yeah, I’m staying with friends, Dad. Friends. You know. People who
don’t
fuck you for your money? I didn’t charge
jack.
I
told
you I canceled them. Well, if the credit cards say I canceled them, maybe I’m telling the fucking truth! No, I have no idea how a canceled card got charged for five grand. Did you ask the credit card company? Okay, so it’s been cloned. I have no idea how you’d do that. Why are you asking me?”

There had been a digestive silence for a moment, and when Patrick spoke again, his voice had been bitter and flat. “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was getting the same charge before this happened. For three months? Yeah. That’s how long I was seeing Cal. I don’t know what to tell you, Dad. He was a scumbag, and I was fucking stupid. Are you happier, hearing that? I don’t know why it would make you happy—I guess everyone likes to know they were fucking right! You were right, I’m a fuckup, and my ex-boyfriend fucked you over with my credit cards and then drove me off a bridge and left me for dead—and stuck you with the bill. I’ll pay you back for that—I haven’t forgotten. Yeah, Dad. I’ll have a job that pays real fucking money, okay? Once I’ve paid for school, I’ll give you some! Now do you have any other ways to fuck up my week? Are you going to dump my clothes on the lawn? Announce my fuckheaded stupidity to the press? Hire a private detective to track me down?”

Whiskey had winced. They still didn’t know why Cal-the-skeezemonkey-ex had done that. It was a loose end. Whiskey didn’t like those.

“I don’t know—Cal sure was hot to find my ass. No, I’m not telling
you
where I am either!” Whiskey had heard the shouted question on the other end and cringed when Patrick had shouted back the answer. “Because unlike Cal,
you
can still hurt me, Dad! And go ahead and laugh yourself to sleep with
that
one!”

He’d very carefully hit “end call” after that and handed the phone to Whiskey. Neither one of them had said anything, but Whiskey had held him for a good ten minutes after that, until Patrick’s body had stopped shaking with tension and his wandering froggy fingers had begun to make lazy patterns across Whiskey’s chest.

So no, Patrick’s father had no idea that the pesky biologists who kept bothering him about frogs and pesticides were also the people who’d sheltered his son all summer, and they planned to keep it that way for a while. Patrick knew he was going to have to move back home, if his dad would let him, or maybe live in the houseboat while he fixed it up, but they’d studiously not talked about that.

It was going to be hard enough when the time came for Whiskey to get on the damned plane for the North Pole.

So no, Patrick’s father didn’t know.

“Is there any time your father doesn’t work?” Whiskey asked, and Patrick shrugged.

“I don’t think so. He goes on vacation for a couple weeks a year and skis the shit out of the Sierras or some shit like that, but other than that, he spends a couple of hours a day there, minimum.”

So much for
that.
“Okay, then. We’ll go tomorrow morning, plant some probes, and scope it out. What do you say, Fly Bait?”

Fly Bait shrugged. “Anything that gets me out of a position of having to hear Patrick scream ‘oh God yes’
at least twice a night is on my to-do list.”