Clear Water

by Amy Lane

  “Fly Bait, do you want to get the fuck out of Sacramento and back to Seattle so you can screw your girlfriend silly?”

  “Got the keys right here, boss, get the hell in the car!”

  Patrick was sort of sad during the fifteen-minute trip. This part of Sacramento was lonely and quiet, and he found he really liked it. The bare hills and critter-populated marshes were nice company, even in the summer, when every breath felt like solar winds from Azeroth. Whiskey had made some more comments about the boat being his home and Patrick fixing it up while he was gone. Patrick hadn’t gotten around to ripping out the carpet, but he’d started making lists of things they’d need, options for insulation, things they could do for the floor. He’d worked them out during the evenings, while Whiskey and Fly Bait were doing the really erudite shit they needed to do to give their results to the Department of Fish and Game, and then showed Whiskey when he was done.

  Whiskey’s face lit up, and he said things like, “Can the carpet be blue? I know it’s stupid, but if you could find blue carpet, and then green tile, that would really be awesome.”

  Fly Bait told him that he was more of a girl than she was, but then she said, “Yeah, but you’d have to rip the crappy faux paneling out and paint the walls ecru or eggshell to really make that work,” and Patrick knew she was getting as excited as they were.

  So he had a hope that this might be his home, a hope that he and Whiskey might get a dog and throw it sticks and let it frighten the jackrabbits and chase the pheasants and he could commute to work and to school (not far, really, once you got on Highway 5) but no certainty. It seemed that an actual future with Whiskey, as opposed to just an interlude, was really too much to ask for.

  On the way into the service road, they passed the great warehouse/factory where Patrick’s father made his living, and Patrick looked at it, feeling like the child he used to be when he visited the factory. It was huge, and the worker’s parking lot was filled to overflowing. Scary, scientific things were done inside, and the weight of a thousand people’s happiness rested on its back. It kept the valley clean(er), and it was more important, far more important, than Patrick’s happiness, and it always had been. He knew that. He’d understood that from a very young age.

  But that didn’t stop him from looking at it with a little bit of loathing as they drove by. It made him feel small, and it made him feel worthless, and he hated that.

  He looked to the front seat, where Whiskey and Fly Bait were currently engaged in a monosyllabic debate over the best way to canvass the area. Whiskey was a fan of the bigger-to-smaller concentric circles, and Fly Bait liked the series of longitudinal lines. Patrick left it up to them. If it had been him in charge, the route through the scorched hills and squishy marshes would have been meandering, like a frog up a tree or a rabbit through the brush, and that was a perfectly good route for wild things trying to escape, but not so great for a man trying to find things.

  The road to the factory turned to dirt and old blacktop after it passed the entrance to the parking lot and then abruptly ended in a stand of marsh grass and cattails that sprouted from a runoff ditch that led to the river. It looked to be rough going, and in spite of the August heat, both Whiskey and Patrick had light denim shirts over their T-shirts to keep the Off-proof mosquitoes at bay.

  They hopped out of the car, Whiskey gave an experimental try on the walkie-talkie, and they both plunged into the marsh.

  Twenty minutes later, Fly Bait buzzed them from the Jack in the Box line to tell them that she was getting an iced soda the size of a swimming pool. Whiskey told her to fuck off and die and Patrick called her a ball-busting bitch, and she laughed until Whiskey killed the connection.

  It was hot, it was humid, the marsh grass was as thick as a fucking razor-wire curtain, there was some sort of pungent tree/shrub in their way, and it was damned fucking hard to make a nice, neat little grid out of five square miles of hills, tributaries, and flatlands. Patrick pushed ahead grimly and Whiskey followed in the usual, moody way that possessed them when they were on the field.

  It was Patrick who finally said, “Look, Whiskey—see those hills? Let’s go up there. The plants and shit stop before the top of the hill, and maybe we can get a better look at the land. It seems to me like we should have seen the warehouse by now. It’s like, we used to fly kites out here, right? I don’t remember nearly this many plants here.” Patrick looked around, his nose wrinkled. “What the hell kind of plants are these anyway?”

  Whiskey’s eyes suddenly popped open. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he muttered. “I was so up in my own head I had it shoved up my ass. Jesus, Patrick—you were dating a drug dealer—don’t you recognize these things?”

  Patrick looked at the plants again. They were big—human-sized big, with big, flat, five-fingered green leaves. They’d gone to seed, and the seeds were tiny little pebbles clustered at the apex of bunches of leaves.

  “No,” he said. “Should I?”

  Whiskey shook his head. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck… atrazine. An illegal pesticide. Baking soda. What do you use baking soda with?”

  It was like he was speaking a foreign language. “To clean the frog boxes?” Patrick asked, a little desperately.

  Whiskey looked at him and shook his head. “Patrick, this is actually bigger than the frogs, if you can believe that. Come on—let’s look at that rise. But stay under cover of the giant seeding pot plants. I don’t want to attract the attention of the drug dealers who are probably swarming the fucking warehouse as we speak.”

  Patrick blinked at him and then blinked at the marijuana plants they’d been shouldering their way through. “Oh Jesus fuck me sideways,” he said with no inflection at all. He was actually too freaked out to get upset. In fact, he had the most absurd urge to huddle under one of those obscenely large plants and hide in hopes that the bad guys weren’t going to come do bad things.

  He looked up at Whiskey and said, “Call Fly Bait. Call her now. Tell her to come pick us up.”

  Whiskey grimaced. “Let’s get up to the rise, okay? I may have to tell her to go pick up a few things first.”

  “Like what?” Patrick asked, the panic in his voice making it thin and bright-edged. “A lighter and rolling papers?”

  Whiskey’s laughter had the same bright edge. “Uhm, dude. There’s not enough college dorms in the world. No. Let’s get to the top of the hill and we’ll see if we can even sneak out of here, okay?”

  Patrick shouldered the backpack and followed him, muttering to himself. “Sneak out of here? Why would we need to sneak out of here? I mean, we got in here, right? Why would sneaking be involv—oh. Jesus, fuck me—”

  “Frontways, sideways, backways, and over the fucking table,” Whiskey breathed. They didn’t even need to get to the bare top of the hill to see what the foliage had blocked from them before.

  The “abandoned” warehouse was not abandoned anymore. It hadn’t been abandoned for probably quite some time, if the size of those plants meant anything at all. There was activity there—muscular guys hauling kilo bags from the warehouse to stack on pallets and other guys stacking the pallets into a motley assortment of big serial-killer vans, minivans, and battered SUVs.

  There was even a steward of sorts going from car to car with a clipboard, apparently counting how many bags made it into how many vehicles. He looked sort of familiar, but Patrick didn’t dwell on it because there were also two guys checking out what appeared to be a tracking monitor of some sort and heading in their direction. Well, shit. Odds were really good pot plants weren’t the only thing they’d stepped on as they’d crashed through the foliage.

  Whiskey didn’t waste any time after that. “Fly Bait?” he said, turning down the feed so he had to hold the thing up to his ear. “Yeah, shut up. I want you to go get the fucking cops, the fucking SWAT team, and the fucking National Guard and bring them back here with drug-sniffing dogs and a hostage negotiator or some shit like that. We are in deep kimchi, baby
, and we’re gonna need your help getting out.”

  Whiskey turned off the walkie’s reception, tossed it into the bushes, and then made eye contact with Patrick.

  “Play it stupid,” he said to Patrick, and Patrick understood what he meant even while he realized that it was completely moot.

  “I already did,” he said, looking at the very familiar figure stalking among the grunt workers in the fairly large operation below them. Besides the clipboard, he had dyed black hair and unfortunately sallow skin, even from the distance of the hilltop. “I think I dated someone in the chain of command.”

  He heard Whiskey swearing next to him, even as the guys with the little security trackers grew closer to their location.

  Patrick had to give it to him—Whiskey made a good go at it.

  “See,” he said, just as the two guys with trackers came over the rise, “I told you someone would help us get unlost.”

  Patrick made desperate eye contact, but Whiskey seemed committed. “So, we’re from Fish and Game, and we’re literally counting frogs. Is there any way you could steer us to civilization? Our satellite pooped out, and we’re butt fricking lost.”

  They almost bought it. They were nondescript, twenties to thirties, dressed in jeans and T-shirts (and not linen blazers, as Patrick had always thought drug dealers should be dressed, or even gang jeans and gang T-shirts, either), and they appeared completely at a loss with Whiskey’s open smile, his calm, easygoing, just-a-couple-of-yahoos-lost-here, no-reason-to-risk-the-death-penalty smile. The meat-muscles were so at a loss that they might have just let them go out of the path of least resistance if, at that moment, Patrick’s douchebag ex-boyfriend hadn’t chosen to look up.

  They were too far away for Patrick to hear what Cal said, but he was pretty sure his own name figured huge.

  There was a squawking from the belt on the goombah with the security tracker, and Patrick winced when Cal’s voice came through loud and clear. “You get those cocksuckers down here so we can decide when to fucking shoot them!”

  Whiskey grimaced and looked at Patrick. “Man, I still can’t believe you slept with him.”

  “I was stupid,” Patrick said numbly as the two lumps of muscle pulled the semi-automatics from their pockets. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Whiskey said kindly, putting his hands over his head. Patrick did the same. “And you are never stupid.”

  God, Whiskey was a nice guy, Patrick thought as the two of them took prodding from the nice security men with the submachine guns. There they were, about ready to get offed by Patrick’s ex-boyfriend, who had now exceeded douchebag and entered sublime criminal asshat territory, and he was once again reassuring Patrick that he wasn’t a waste of oxygen.

  Too bad he wouldn’t be breathing it for long.

  And what was really too bad was that Patrick was going to have to deal with said asshat before he died. If he and Whiskey could just spend an hour making love before Cal dropped an anvil on their heads, Patrick could probably look at death with a lot less irritability.

  “Jesus, Patrick!” Cal said as they walked up. The hustle and bustle of an obviously thriving illegal business wasn’t interrupted in the least by their arrival, and Patrick wondered how many people they’d “waylaid” before.

  “Jesus what, Cal? ‘Jesus, how could you possibly be counting frogs in my illegal pot operation?’ ‘Jesus, what are you doing near your father’s property after I screwed him out of twenty grand?’ Or maybe you’re going for the bigger question. How about ‘Jesus, what are you doing alive after I drugged you and tried to kill you so I could use all your credit cards?’”

  At this point, Cal actually tried to defend himself. “I wasn’t trying to kill you—”

  “Yeah? Because I sure did come damned close to dying!”

  “I was just trying to—”

  “Did you want to fuck me when I was unconscious?”

  “No—I was just trying to get you here so we could hold you—”

  “Hostage? Eww. Seriously—I liked the fuck me when I was unconscious thing better, because I might have enjoyed it more if I was asleep!”

  “I just wanted to get some fucking ransom!” Cal shouted over him. “We just needed one more fucking van!” With a savagery Patrick had never suspected, he pulled a gun out of the waistband of his slacks and clocked Patrick across the face with it.

  Patrick’s face went nuclear with pain, and he went down, spitting blood, and glared up at Cal with the unrepentant joy of a schoolboy who had finally made his teacher just fucking lose it. Whiskey was straining against his captors, and Patrick looked at him, for a moment, lost in misery. God, Whiskey! Why couldn’t you have loved somebody worth a damn?

  Patrick wiped his mouth and counted his loosened teeth and decided that if this was his last chance to stand up for himself, he would. Whiskey should at least know his vast well of patience hadn’t been squandered on someone who wasn’t listening.

  “Nice!” Patrick spat, and even he knew his blood-dripping smile was unpleasant. “So, really, all I ever was to you was a tool! Awesome. Makes it that much easier for me to want to see you arrested and whining at the cops for a separate cage! Go Cal! You’ll be the sweetest prison bitch in Folsom!”

  Cal kicked him in the ribs. “Shut”—kick—“the fuck”—kick—“up!”—two kicks for good measure. Patrick dodged one, caught one half-way, but the third one made a solid connection, and Patrick had to stop on his hands and knees and get his breath for a minute. That was okay—Cal wanted to say his piece too.

  “God, you never shut up. It was always ‘I want to have a life! I’ve got to get my shit together! I can’t be a daddy’s little bitch for-fucking-ever!’ Jesus, you’re so fucking stupid! I mean, seriously, did you really think a freakshow like you was going go back to school? I can’t believe you ever held a fucking job! All you had to do with your whole pathetic fuckup of a life was let Daddy foot the bill, and you couldn’t even do that. So yeah—I cloned a credit card—so the fuck what! It funded part of this sweet little operation here, you know? It’s all good!”

  “Yeah,” Patrick muttered, “about that. You think we’re the only people who are going to be showing up at your door? Man—you fucked up the ecosystem, Cal. We’re sponsored by the department of Fish and Game—we’re the first wave, man. When you dump so much weed killer into the soil that the frogs grow second heads, what next? And you totally neutralized the fucking water—do you know how much algae is going to start blooming? This whole area—you’ll be able to see the water react to what you’re doing by next year.”

  Cal blinked at him. “I don’t even know what in the fuck you’re talking about. Two-headed frogs—Jesus, Patrick, you really are a fucking retard, you know that?”

  Patrick panted for a moment and then crawled painfully to his knees. “I’m talking about the authorities, dumbass! Do you really think all of this isn’t going to get their attention?”

  Cal shrugged. “I’m sure of it—do you think we’re loading up all of the shit for the helluvit? Your dad has been bringing the po-po in almost daily looking for you—they can’t be that stupid all the time, eventually someone’s going to get wise.”

  “Why the baking soda?” Whiskey asked out of the blue.

  Patrick looked at him, because it was a pretty good question, actually. “Yeah—baking soda and marijuana—why in the hell did you dump baking soda in the river?”

  Cal blushed and shrugged. “Uhm, well, that was my boss’s idea. After I sent the private detective to look for you because we didn’t want any loose ends, we heard about the Fish and Game thing. He thought… I don’t know. He’s been smoking an awful lot of weed, but he seemed to think the baking soda would get rid of anything in the water that would give us away.”

  Whiskey and Patrick exchanged rolled eyes. “Ge-awd,” Whiskey swore, shaking his head. If they were back in the houseboat, Patrick thought he might have gone to eat half a gallon of ice cream, just to get the bad taste of t
his out of his mouth. “Are you serious? The dumbest fucking reason to do the dumbest fucking thing, and the you know what the worst part is, don’t you, Patrick?”

  “It almost fucking worked!” Patrick answered, about as outraged as he was. “It almost worked!” Patrick looked at Cal, suddenly feeling every bruise in his ribs and his chest and wondering if his face would swell too badly to even speak in a few minutes. “But where did you get all the baking soda?”

  Cal rolled his eyes. “It’s not all pot out there in them there hills, Patrick. We can grow coca plants too!”

  Patrick shook his head. “Excellent. Cocaine! You should have your own show! But I got to ask—why not meth? Man, isn’t that your drug, you fuckin’ tweaker?”

  Cal snarled at him and went to hit him again, and Whiskey fought hard against the guy holding him back. The other man-mountain took him down with a stomach punch, and Whiskey’s knees gave an obvious wobble. All the action stalled, and Whiskey managed to wheeze, “Jesus, he weighs, what? One twenty-five in his stocking feet? You don’t think the gun is overkill, douchebag?”

  Cal looked at Whiskey—actually looked at him—and then squinted at Patrick. “God, Patrick, this one’s actually not bad.” Cal rubbed his jaw, probably in memory of Whiskey’s punch in Walmart. “Too bad you had to go and get him killed!”

  “Why you got to kill us, Cal?” Patrick asked desperately. “I mean, really? Shooting us here? All that’s going to get you is two useless meat sacks to prove you’re guilty when the police show up!”

  Cal rolled his eyes. “See what I said? You’re stupid. A total freak show of fucking dumb. We’re not going to shoot you—we’re clearing out! We’ve been planning it for weeks—it’s what I was using your old man’s credit cards for. But first, we’re gonna burn the place down—we figure, we blow up Daddy’s factory, there’ll be so damned much toxic shit in this area the fire will take weeks to get under control. By the time that’s taken care of, man, the shit that used to be growing here will be no big deal.”