Clear Water

by Amy Lane

  The electrical pipe ended, and Patrick reached out and grabbed one of the light fixtures—it creaked a little, and Whiskey winced. This was the part he knew wouldn’t hold his weight, and he held his breath, waiting to see if it would hold Patrick’s. It did, but barely, and Patrick managed to shimmy up the connecting bar and then grab one of the ventilation pipes over his head. It was a little too big to comfortably hand-over-hand, and Whiskey could see the muscles on Patrick’s arms trembling, but he held on, oh thank the gods, he held on, kept going, until he came to a smaller pipe, this one leading directly to the window.

  Patrick got there, dangling by his hands, and started kicking at it. The window was the kind that rested on a fulcrum and the top part swung open as the bottom part swung in. Whiskey couldn’t have done this part either, because once the window had been kicked open until it was horizontal, Patrick was going to have to wriggle through the space between the glass and the top of the window frame.

  Patrick—thin, limber, and bendable—was going to have to swing his legs through that gap first and then let go of his one safety in order to slide through the window.

  Whiskey didn’t breathe for the entire moment, especially as Patrick’s head, flat to the glass, scraped the top of the window frame as it went out, and then the window overbalanced and tilted up completely. Whiskey heard Patrick swearing and saw his fingers caught between the window and the frame, and then Patrick did what Whiskey hoped he would (at least, that was what Whiskey guessed, since he couldn’t really see this part) and hooked his leg around the light post and slid his fingers out of the window entirely.

  Whiskey knew it had worked when Patrick knocked the side of the warehouse twice, and then it was his turn.

  He cleared the cubicle easily (but without grace) and went to Patrick’s spot, and knocked on the warehouse. He could barely hear the rustling that meant Patrick had heard his signal and had taken off to go warn his father, and Whiskey closed his eyes for a brief moment. Go, Patrick, go! Then, with a deep breath, he turned to the front door of the warehouse and walked to the soft gray outline against the vast dark.

  It was easier than he thought it should be. The explosive device was, well, basic. Electrical charge, wire, ground, all stuck into a healthy-sized wad of C-4. It would have been high school science fair stuff if it weren’t for that pesky little thing about live explosives freaking the authorities out. After he’d scoped it out not once or twice but five or six times to make sure there were no surprises, Whiskey disabled the detonator damned quickly and then set about finding the catch to the door.

  It didn’t take him long to do that either, and within moments, he was outside the warehouse, jogging down the practically overgrown service road in the mild gray chill of the pre-dawn.

  He was ducking under branches and fighting some really seedy pot plants when he saw the first set of headlights—followed by an entire train of them disappearing back toward the recycling plant into the dawn. Just to play it safe, he ducked behind the giant pot plant and waited for the SUV to draw abreast, but he wasn’t surprised to see Fly Bait in the front seat, glaring at some poor man in a suit.

  Whiskey stepped out from behind the bush and flagged them down, only mildly surprised when Fly Bait rocketed out of the front seat of the vehicle and into his arms.

  “Jesus fucking Christmas, you fucking moron!” she snapped, and Whiskey nodded and held her really tight.

  “Man, when you bring the cavalry, you don’t fuck around, do you?” he asked, and she stepped back and nodded, wiping her eyes with a scowl.

  “But I’m sorry about the timing!” she said, and he grunted, not wanting to yell at her specifically, but still.

  “What the fuck took you so long!” What had it been? Fourteen hours? Slowest fucking cavalry on record!

  “They didn’t fucking believe me!” Fly Bait snapped. “Had to wake the fucking head of Fish and Game and boot his ass out of bed to vouch for us, and there were fucking skeezeweasels all around the goddamned houseboat, and don’t even get me started on explaining how we had Patrick with us, not to mention who the fuck he is….”

  She trailed off, and Whiskey started jumping from one foot to the other. It was real nice that she’d brought the fucking cavalry and everything, but for the first time in their friendship, he really wished she’d shut up. Finally the lightbulb went on.

  “Where’s Patrick?” she asked, her eyes big as she looked around behind him like a scrawny yet full grown man had hidden back there somewhere.

  Whiskey breathed deeply and swallowed on all the worry he’d been chewing on since Patrick had first hopped to the top of the cubicle and shimmied up the light fixtures.

  “Trying to stop his dad from opening a door. He must have stayed in the plants to avoid you guys, but we gotta catch him! Can I talk to the suit?”

  It took Whiskey minutes—too many minutes—to explain the idea of a bunch of explosives wired to one detonation spot, and by the time he was done, the guy in the suit had the entire caravan of cars backing up fruitlessly in the almost impassible service road, and Whiskey and Fly Bait looked at each other helplessly.

  “What time is it?” he asked, realizing the sun was pretty damned strong and that it might not be considered pre-dawn anymore.

  Fly Bait still had her phone and she pulled it out of her pocket. “About seven fifteen,” she said, and Whiskey swore.

  “We don’t have time for this shit,” he muttered, worry for Patrick knotting up his stomach and his lungs and his balls. He looked at the suit—DEA Agent Johnson or whatever—and said, “I’m gonna go get my boyfriend before he gets himself splattered across half the delta, is that okay with you?” and before the guy could answer him, Whiskey took off running, Fly Bait jogging at his side.

  “Jesus,” she muttered, looking at the actual terrain as they ran. “If we’d found this place in college, we never would have graduated.”

  “I’m sayin’,” Whiskey confirmed. He and Fly Bait had possessed the best bong collection in the dorm too—hell, probably on the freakin’ campus, if not that half of the state!

  “You really think Patrick’s going to do something stupid?” Fly Bait asked apprehensively, and Whiskey grunted. Oh God. He was so trusting and such a good man… not a boy, a man, with a man’s sensibilities and a man’s body and a man’s pride. But Patrick was not a thinker, and he was still a spaz—he was Whiskey’s spaz, and Whiskey loved him more and more with each moment on the planet, but God help them all, he did not think well under pressure. The grunt changed to almost a whimper, and Fly Bait made the same sound.

  “Oh hells,” she said breathlessly. “Jesus, Whiskey, run faster, dammit! I really fucking love that kid!”

  Whiskey was breathless and sore and exhausted, but he didn’t think he could have made better time through that weed field when he’d run cross-country in high school.

  They had just reached the actual road—and had breathed a sigh of relief to no longer be thrashing through hallucinogenic foliage—when Fly Bait’s phone rang. (Whiskey had tried to remember if THC had the ability to permeate the skin and failed. Those stats had probably been killed with his pot-smoking brain cells in college.)

  She stopped breathlessly to answer it, and Whiskey stopped with her, dancing in his impatience to continue the jog of death. (God, he was out of shape. He thought tramping through the marshlands had kept him fit, but it was apparently child’s play compared to running through the pot-lands.)

  She listened for a few moments and then nodded. “Yeah. I hear you. It’s still live. Look—we’re running as fast as we can. You think you can get a car out here faster than this lardass can fucking run and we’ll move faster, but otherwise, don’t bother me with details!”

  “Fuck—” pant “—you. What’d he say?”

  She drew abreast of him, and they started jogging again. “That was Agent What-the-Fuck. They just ran a bunch of people back at the factory based on what you just told us, and they’ve managed to disconnect most of
the explosives. But they can’t find the main one—the one that sets off the entire chain. So the factory’s not going to go up and Armageddon’s been postponed, but—”

  “Auuuuuuuughhhhhh! Fuck!” But Patrick was still in danger, because that was the one fucking bomb that he was running for full-tilt!

  “Yeah,” Fly Bait muttered, “I knew you’d see it that way. But Whiskey, the place is crawling with cops and shit—what are the odds Patrick isn’t going to be stopped by them, you know?”

  Whiskey just looked at her, so full of agony he couldn’t even think about odds. “What were the odds that I’d be out taking a walk when that car went through the guard rail?” he asked her, and she grimaced. Yeah—Patrick was never about the odds, was he?

  They kept running.

  They could see the factory from the small rise they’d just puffed their way up. It was not, as Whiskey had hoped, “crawling” with cops. They could see a truck and a few dark uniforms with some bomb-sniffing dogs—excellent. But the dogs were still doing the frantic yum-yum pee-pee dance at all the entrances, and that was bad, because there was still something in there.

  “Where’s Patrick?” Fly Bait asked, and Whiskey remembered small things he’d talked about—coming to work with his father sometimes, being in the little office in the back, playing on the floor and screwing around with Legos and computer cords and….

  Oh Jesus.

  “He’s already in the fucking building,” Whiskey muttered. “I don’t think we were on time—I think he’s in the building with his dad right now.”

  Fly Bait looked at Whiskey in complete puzzlement. “Wouldn’t they have seen his car?”

  Whiskey shook his head and gestured with his chin. There was one vehicle there that wasn’t government-issue. It was a silver Mercedes, and it was in the far back corner of the employee parking lot—almost back in the weeds, as was appropriate for a man who probably bragged that he worked more than his employees. “Look at it, Fly Bait—we can see it up here, but you can’t see it from the road, and once you get close to the building, you’re not going to be looking for it. No. I think they’re already there—for all I know, Patrick’s probably arguing with his old man right now. C’mon!”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To stop the fucking argument!”

  They ran down the hill balls out almost smacking into the DEA and federal agents at the bottom of the hill and definitely freaking out a couple of dogs.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t go in there—” The man was wearing black with a helmet and goggles, and he seemed faceless, like much of authority had always seemed to Whiskey.

  “Don’t you get it?” Whiskey shouted, done with patience. “Someone’s in there already!”

  “You’re mistaken, sir. The building was vacant when we arrived.”

  “Vacant means nobody is inside! The boss’s car is parked in the far field, dammit, and the boss’s son is in the factory, trying to keep his dad from opening a fucking office door!”

  The man stepped back in surprise, because the possibility that Whiskey might be right had apparently hit him hard. He spoke briefly into his radio, and Whiskey used the moment to sprint—yes, an actual sprint—in a wide sweeping arc around the factory, Fly Bait and, apparently, faceless-walkie-talkie man and his bevy of bomb-sniffing dogs in his wake.

  By the time they’d reached the side indicated by the location of the car, Whiskey and Fly Bait were close enough to see the tiny, almost hidden entrance into the factory that would have been easily missed by anyone trying to do recon. Ignoring the shouted cries of the authority behind them, the two of them barged down the hallway, and Whiskey paused long enough to shoot an angry glance behind him when they could all hear voices.

  At the end of the hallway, the factory opened up—big echoing spaces filled with big equipment, conveyor belts and computer carcasses, all of it hidden in shadows, because the fluorescent lights hadn’t even been switched on. But that wasn’t the part that caught Whiskey’s attention. What he was worried about was Patrick, fifty feet away, standing to the side of a modest red door to what looked like the working version of the office that he’d been trapped in less than an hour before. This office had an actual ceiling, but it was still like a small building inside a larger one, and a short, stocky, ginger-haired man who could only be Patrick’s father was standing in front of the door itself, scowling at his son.

  “Dammit, Patrick—”

  “Dad, you can curse me out later… man, take your time, put it in writing, do it right! But right now… just don’t open that door, okay?”

  “Patrick, I don’t have the faintest fucking idea of what you’re talking about. All I want to do is put my shit in my office, and maybe we can talk then—”

  “There’s a bomb in your office! Don’t touch the door handle, dammit!”

  Whiskey and Fly Bait started shouting then, but Shawn Cleary’s hand was on the door, and as he turned toward them, it turned in his hand—

  --and Patrick tackled him just as the bomb went off, blowing the door on top of them both and knocking everyone else in the hallway on their asses in confusion.

  Whiskey’s memory of what happened after that was fractured. He and Fly Bait pulled the wreckage of the door off of the two people on the floor—they must have. The door was hot from the blast, and they both had bandages on their hands for the next couple of days.

  The back of Patrick’s head was bloody, and so were his shoulders, and his shirt had burnt off with the heat of the blast. He’d already had blisters forming as Whiskey bent down to him.

  Fly Bait was shouting at him, but he couldn’t hear her until she put her hands (weeping from the burns) on his shoulders and shook him. Her voice was like a whale in a fishbowl, and he got the impression that he shouldn’t move Patrick, but he still bent down, squatted down to look at him, as he lay on top of his father. Blood was trickling from his ears, and the bruising on his face was livid and swollen, and his nose was as big as a cabbage. He blinked lake-blue eyes at Whiskey before they rolled back in his head and he passed out.

  Underneath him, Shawn Cleary said, “What in the holy hell… Patrick? Patrick?” and Whiskey shoved him down against the concrete when it looked like the ungrateful bastard was going to sit up.

  “Stay put until the medics get him,” Whiskey growled, and he didn’t know where the authority in his voice came from, but it must have come from somewhere, because the man who had Patrick frightened down to his undershorts actually shut up, stopped moving, and started whispering his son’s name.

  THE ambulance ride was surreal—they let him and Fly Bait ride with Patrick, and Whiskey seemed to remember pain and being given some meds for it.

  He didn’t get clarity until the two of them were set up in a triage room with IVs for shock and their hands were bandaged and Patrick was hustled off to—

  “Oh shit!” Whiskey cried, ripping an IV out of his arm without flinching. “Where’s he going?”

  “Whiskey, wait….” Fly Bait had the presence of mind to take her IV on its little wheeled rack, and she started chasing him down the hall.

  Whiskey ran straight into Patrick’s father, who was standing right outside a clearly labeled OR waiting room, looking on as Patrick’s gurney was wheeled through the swinging doors.

  “Where’s he going?” Whiskey asked plaintively.

  Shawn shrugged and winced. Besides the burns, he’d apparently had some bruises and cuts too—and he had his own IV to boot. His gingery-gray hair was grizzled and flying in every direction, and his tanned, freckled face was blackened with soot. He looked as lost and as frustrated as Whiskey felt. “They said his brain was swelling and they needed to relieve the pressure, and they needed to set some of his injuries. I guess his arm was broken pretty badly, and his ribs had cracked and punctured his lung….”

  Whiskey blinked back tears. “Yoga. How’s he going to teach yoga? He was looking forward to it all summer, teaching yoga, making his tuition money… how’s
he going to do that…?” Oh, God. There were so many greater things he needed to worry about. There were—but all Whiskey could think about was Patrick’s big blue eyes, the shy smile, the way he had of looking forward eagerly at the same time his shoulders shrank back, like he was excited about something but trying not to get hurt too.

  “He was really going to do that?” Shawn asked in wonder, and Whiskey slammed back against the glass window of the waiting room, rocking his head so hard against it that the thunk made Fly Bait suck in a breath.

  “Of course he was,” Whiskey whispered. “Jesus… how could you not believe him?”

  Shawn looked a little bit uncomfortable—and then he just looked away. “Well, you know him, I guess. I mean, he’s not really reliable, right? I mean—”

  “Has he ever lied to you?” Whiskey asked. “As an adult, has he ever lied to you?”

  Shawn shrugged. “Sure, uhm… well, I mean—”

  “He told you he was getting his shit together, and you said ‘yeah, right!’ and he stopped. But other than that, has he ever lied to you?”

  Shawn kept his vision focused on the OR doors.

  “Answer me!”

  Shawn Cleary looked back and shifted on his feet. “What do you want me to say?”

  Whiskey shook his head. “Not a fucking thing. Go back to your room. Someone will tell you if he’s going to be okay, I’m sure. I’ll stay here and wait, because I actually give a shit, and no, motherfucker, not once has he ever lied to me. Your fucking kid tells you there’s a bomb in your fucking office, and he’s begging you to listen, and you can’t. Man, he’s got your eyes, but mostly, I guess you were the fucking sperm donor, because I don’t see a single thing he got from you that counts.”

  “What in the fuck did you just say to me?” Shawn Cleary was suddenly right there in his face, and Whiskey wanted a piece of him. God, he wanted to take him out.