Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  “Then be with him, Cecilia. Don’t let a few parasites and pufferplants come between you.”

  She shook her head. “He’s a Shifter, and I’m not. His world isn’t my world.” She rested her head against the back of the seat, letting the tears roll. There was hard-won dignity in her stillness.

  “So what are you going to do? Go home—”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “—and wait for them to come and arrest you?” She said nothing. She had thought everything through, up until the point of their escape, and no further. “Instead of Parsec doing twenty to life, it’ll be you.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?” she blazed. “Throw myself on the mercy of the Grizzly’s Bar & Grill crowd? I’m a normie! They wouldn’t shelter me … now that I can’t pay them anymore.”

  “You paid them to throw a Molotov cocktail at my house, huh? To warn Rex not to go to the police.”

  “Yes. I don’t know all the details. The Kodiaks took care of that. But I did tell them to make sure that the children were not harmed.”

  “That’s mighty big of you.”

  I could not forgive her for endangering Lucy. Or for the dead officers and civilians on the Buonaville road. I could not forgive her for blackmailing Rex, and wrecking my relationship with Irene.

  But I also could not forget that she had saved Lucy last month. If not for Cecilia Parsec’s common sense and compassion, Lucy would be somewhere in the Core right now, or trailing after Sophia on her murder spree through the Hurtworlds, a living trophy on my ex-wife’s coat. I shuddered to think of it. We had dodged a bullet. Scrub that. We had dodged an asteroid, thanks to this woman. At the end of the day, I owed her.

  “You can’t go home to Ville Verde.” I was trying to decide what her best option would be when a solution arrived in the form of a motorbike in the outbound lane, flashing its headlamp at my truck.

  It was Martin. When I’d cut off my call to him at the scene of the jailbreak, he’d jumped on his bike and come looking for me.

  I parked on the shoulder and rapidly explained the situation to him. We had to consider satellite surveillance. This was risky, but it seemed like a safer option than taking Cecilia out to Alec’s place. Chances were Alec wouldn’t have her, anyway.

  “So you want me to take Mrs. Parsec? Up to the top of a high cliff and throw her off?”

  “I was hoping for a less terminal solution,” I said. “Do you know anyone that might have room for her?”

  “In their stomachs, maybe.”

  “Marty.”

  “Kidding. Sure, I can think of a couple people.” He took his extra bike helmet off the pillion. “We snakes believe in gratuitous deeds of kindness, you know. It’s our way of buying cosmic insurance. That’s why they consider me a maverick. ‘Marty,’ they’re always saying to me, ‘Marty, ya gotta be nicer to people.’”

  I grabbed the helmet, ran back to the truck, and persuaded Cecilia to put it on. “I’m not sure if you know Martin Woods. Friend of mine. He’ll take you somewhere safe. We’ll work out a longer-term solution once the heat is off.”

  She grabbed her oversized backpack. “Can I trust you?”

  “Yes, you can.” I felt the weight of the words as I uttered them.

  Cecilia got on the back of Martin’s bike and wrapped her arms around his waist. I heard him telling her to relax, as she was too big to swallow, anyway. Then they roared off.

  I climbed back in my truck and followed at a more sedate pace.

  Now that I was alone, my body let me know there was a price to pay for climbing trees and roaming through the jungle. The nausea had passed, mercifully, but my energy levels were bottoming out. My scratches from climbing the weatherstopper were starting to sting, and I’d wrenched my shoulder somewhere along the line, too. I found a half of bourbon in the glove compartment and drank stingy sips as I drove, trying to see only the road, and not the riot birds crashing, the people burning to death inside … Larry K’s body on a stretcher … He didn’t have IVK, but he’d gone before me. All life felt temporary, and at the same time, I had the strangest feeling that I was immortal, for the time being. The bourbon helped with that.

  I reached Mag-Ingat as the sun slipped into the sea. I wasn’t due to meet with d’Alencon until nine. I had hours to kill. I needed to do it somewhere that wouldn’t set the algos off.

  I hooked a right out of the rush hour traffic and drove to Christy Day’s new address.

  39

  Standing in the lobby of Christy’s new building, I wondered what the hell I was doing here. If not for the bourbon I wouldn’t have got this far. The building was a vertical suburb, north of the trendy downtown district where Christy used to live. A hollow square, it enclosed its own park, playground, and village shops. Kids rushed in and out of the automatic doors, taking the time to stare at me. Was it the green stains on my jeans, or the absence of a credit dot on my arm, or the look in my eyes, or all three? My stomach knotted again—but now with anxiety, not nausea. I didn’t belong here. I should bail before I got myself, or Christy, in trouble.

  Then she answered her intercom. “Mike?”

  My doubts faded away. I got in the elevator and rode up to the sixth floor.

  She opened her front door. I got an impression of several rooms opening off the hall, and then all I saw was Christy standing in front of me. Her hair floated in a cinnamon cloud around her face. It was too dim in the hall for me to see the hazel flecks in her eyes.

  “Hey, you,” she said.

  “I have to apologize for yesterday,” I said. “I was pretty rude on the phone. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Is Lucy OK?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, come on in. Tell me what happened. I’ve got some of her stuff, as I mentioned.”

  I glanced down at myself. “I’m kind of a mess …”

  “Are you ever not a mess, Mike?” she said with a quick, mischievous smile.

  Something inside of me which had been knotted tight for weeks started to loosen. “You got me,” I said, smiling into her eyes.

  The bewitching pink flush I remembered rose to her cheeks. She broke eye contact. “Anyway,” she said, “look at me.” She wore a t-shirt smeared with mud or clay, and cargo shorts in a similar condition. “I just got back from camp.”

  “You know,” I said, “I didn’t even notice what you’re wearing. All I was thinking was how good you would look out of it.”

  The words came straight from my groin without detouring through my brain. I groaned and started to apologize.

  She shut me up with a kiss.

  It was a revelation of something I had already known, but had tried to forget: the spark between me and Christy Day could power the whole city. Her velvet tongue and soft lips set off fireworks in my brain. A sudden rush of blood to my groin drained my capacity for thought. All that remained was need. I crushed her against me, this close to scooping her off her feet, before she could change her mind, and …

  Stop. STOP.

  I held her off. She licked her lips, redder now from kissing. “Wow.”

  Desire was scrambling my synapses. I focused on her face, as opposed to anything lower down. “So, uh, before I completely forget why I came over, I owe you an explanation. The reason Lucy left camp unexpectedly was because some lowlife bears blackmailed a friend of mine, and instead of paying Lucy’s camp fees, he used the money to pay off the blackmailers.” I deliberately didn’t give Rex’s name, as Christy knew the Seagraves, too. “She’s out in the jungle right now, staying with a different friend. She’s doing fine.”

  “O… kay.”

  “No half-truths, right?” I said, wondering if I had revealed too much.

  Christy grinned. “I’ve missed you.” I stood stupefied by lust, watching her trim rear end as she walked lightly along the hall. “Come on through. I’ll fix us something to drink.”

  The living-room and kitchen were a single open-plan area, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the cen
tral park of the complex. School and camp supplies and piles of laundry towered on all the surfaces. It was homey and welcoming, but the place seemed too big for one person, and I wondered why she had left her painstakingly decorated studio apartment.

  I sat on her floral-patterned sofa. She sat kitty-corner to me and placed two tall glasses on the coffee table. They were a disturbing shade of blue. “Blueberries, spinach, and klimfruit.”

  “Sounds good,” I lied, taking a reluctant sip. It tasted as healthy as it sounded.

  “Better for you than whiskey.” She must have tasted the booze in my mouth.

  “I had to get the courage from somewhere to come and see you.”

  “I really did miss you,” she said, looking at her knees. “While you were away, I felt kind of hollow.” The words winded me. I had forgotten her extraordinary, unassuming honesty. “It felt like there was an emptiness in my life that wasn’t there before.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I hadn’t earned it. “When I was in the Hurtworlds, I thought about you. It was almost like you were there. It inspired me. Helped me to deal with … stuff.”

  Christy looked troubled. I kicked myself for bringing up Sophia, even obliquely. I did not want her shadow to fall across … whatever we had.

  “I have to ask you, Mike …” Christy shook her head. “This is tricky for me. I’m not supposed to violate confidentiality.”

  “What confidentiality?”

  “Between a counselor, me, and a camper, Lucy in this case.”

  “Screw that,” I said, alarmed. “I’m her father. Is there something I should know?”

  “We spent a lot of time together while she was at camp. She’d come to my office during her free periods, and sometimes we would hang out on the beach. She seemed to feel that she could confide in me.”

  I didn’t know whether to be pleased or worried. Had Lucy latched onto Christy as a mother figure?

  “That’s one reason I was upset when Mr. Seagrave took her away, but anyway.” Christy took a deep breath. “I’m just going to say this straight out. I know that Lucy’s mother attempted to abduct her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to know a little more about that situation. Did you and your ex have a bad divorce?”

  I took a sip of my blue drink. Oh, fuck it. I didn’t have the willpower to evade the topic anymore. “Yes. She’s a Traveller, and in fact, she was responsible for the Founding Day attack. She’s currently the most-wanted woman in the Cluster. I ran into her on the Hurtworlds and she tried to shoot me dead,” I drawled. “Next question.”

  “Oh,” Christy said. “Oh my God.”

  “You asked.”

  “Your ex-wife is a Traveller?”

  “Yup.”

  “I think you could have told me that before.”

  “It never came up.”

  “Well … that’s why, then.”

  “Why what?”

  “I thought Lucy was fantasizing, to be honest. She used to talk to me about her mother. She said that she has a doctorate in AI studies, and she’s beautiful and tough, she’s a crack shot, she has her own spaceship … and so on and so on.”

  “All that is factually correct, except that Sophia can’t shoot for shit. That’s why I’m sitting here alive today. Oh, and she also has a master’s in philosophy.”

  “How can I ever compete?” Christy said ironically. “Well, that explains a lot, I suppose.”

  “Explains what?”

  “Mike, Lucy is terrified of her. On three separate occasions, she woke up screaming. I was informed that she said she’d dreamed her mother was coming to get her.”

  “Oh God. Poor Lucy,” I muttered. “I should have been there.”

  “Yes, you should. At the very least, you should have filled us in. Your daughter is going through a difficult time, and I was unable to provide appropriate care and counseling, because I didn’t know the backstory. I understand that you’re concerned about her privacy, but she was this close to being labelled with mental health issues—”

  “Over some nightmares?!”

  Christy pressed her lips together. She got up and fetched a box from the other side of the room. “This is Lucy’s stuff.” I glanced in, got an impression of kiddie crafts.

  “Christy, I’m sorry. I would have told you, but …” I sighed. It was hopeless. I stood up with the box in my arms. “Thanks for the drink.”

  She rose, trapping me in between the sofa and the coffee table, and looked up into my face. “When we first met, I felt like I could be completely honest with you, and you wouldn’t be shocked, or push me away.” I nodded. “But if you can’t be honest with me, this isn’t going to work. Even on the level of friendship.”

  I set the box down again without looking, and knocked my scarcely-touched blue drink over. It flooded across the coffee table. “I’m ten years older than you, Christy. I’ve been knocking around the Cluster since I was seventeen. I’ve been killing since I was seventeen. The day I left Lucy with you on the mall level, I’d just shot a man dead.” There was no risk in telling her about Canuck. “I have a Traveller ex—” and I hadn’t even told her that I had spent the afternoon helping Parsec escape from custody. “I’m more trouble than I’m worth. I’m like a cute stray dog that turns out to be a wolf, tears your house apart, and pisses on the carpet. How’s that for honesty?”

  She rose and went into the kitchen for a towel. Pressed it on the spill. Righting the glass, she muttered, “Memo to self: stop trying to improve Mike’s diet.”

  “My life is a shitstorm.” There was an inch left in the glass. I downed it. “A few vitamins can’t hurt.” All that remained was to tell her about IVK.

  She took the towel over to the sink and rinsed it out. “Your daughter is one of the brightest kids I’ve ever worked with. As you know, she scores in the 95th percentile on all of our standard tests. Not only that, she’s imaginative, kind to younger children, and a natural leader. Did she tell you that she was selected to lead the Orca team? Everything that I said about her issues around her mother, you have to take that in the context of her enormous potential.”

  I sat on the sofa grinning from ear to ear. Nothing could soften me up faster than praise for my daughter. “She did mention the Orca team, yeah. Sounds a bit suspect to me.”

  “So, I figure you must be a pretty great guy to have raised a daughter like Lucy.” Christy came back to the sofa. She straddled my knees, still standing. “I want in on that shitstorm.”

  I laughed. My hands went to her waist. “Oh man, Christy. You have no idea what you do to me.”

  She tucked her hair behind one ear, leaving a smear of blue on her cheek. “Why don’t you show me?”

  “That sounds like a challenge.” I pulled her down onto my lap. Her arms went around my neck. We kissed, frantically. As she ground on my lap, I reached under her clothes, hungry to touch every inch of her skin—

  The front door clunked open.

  Christy sprang off my lap. “Oh crap, I wasn’t watching the clock.” My raging erection wilted. She tugged her clothes straight. “Hey, guys,” she called out. “How was school?” To me, she added, “There’s something I didn’t tell you about, either.” She winked. “It just didn’t come up.”

  I stood up as footsteps came down the hall.

  In walked Jan and Leaf Khratz, Pippa’s cousins.

  40

  I had not seen Jan and Leaf since we parted at the Space Island quarantine center. What were they doing here?

  They were no longer the ragged waifs I remembered. They wore shorts and t-shirts with annoying embedded holos, like every other kid, and carried backpacks. Jan, the thirteen-year-old, had his hair cut in a trendy diagonal fringe. Leaf, nine, had flashing star stickers on her round cheeks.

  Jan hung back, scowling; he hadn’t changed that much—but Leaf ran at me and hugged me. “Mr. Starrunner!”

  “Meet my foster kids,” Christy said, grinning.

  “Wow.” I was grinnin
g, too. I held Leaf off and picked those awful star stickers off her cheeks. “How are you guys doing?”

  “We had English and numeracy today,” Leaf said.

  “They’re taking summer classes to get caught up,” Christy explained. “It works with my schedule at Lagos del Mar.”

  “So that’s why you moved.”

  “Yeah. I get a stipend for fostering these two monkeys, although I’d do it for free.” Christy smoothed Leaf’s hair and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Ideally, I would like to live in Shiftertown and send Leaf to Shoreside Elementary and Jan to Creek High. But I have to meet all these conditions, one of which is living in an approved area. And Shiftertown isn’t one.” Christy rolled her eyes. “Supposedly it’s dangerous.”

  I matched her grimace, while mentally acknowledging the point.

  Leaf twirled into the kitchen area. “Christy, can I have something to eat?”

  “Sure, honey, what would you like?”

  Christy. I remembered how hard it had been to get the kids to call me anything except mister. They came from a background of radical deprivation, although you wouldn’t think it to look at these two now. Christy had watered them with love and they had blossomed like flowers.

  I could still see the refugee camp in Jan’s distrustful glare, though. He grabbed a carton of juice from the fridge and headed out of the room. A line appeared between Christy’s eyebrows.

  “Hey, uh uh,” I said. I grabbed Jan’s skinny shoulder, turned him around and stared him down. “Sit yourself down right here and let’s catch up. I got some questions for you … and if you’re interested, I also got news of your cousin Pippa.”

  *

  We talked for over an hour, as the sunset deepened into twilight and the skyline lit up. I showed them the v-mail Pippa had made for them. That undermined Jan’s hostility. I did not, of course, share the hair-raising details of our escape from Yesanyase Skont. I just said that I had helped Pippa move to Mittel Trevoyvox, which she herself described in the v-mail as a great place to live. I also said that Mechanical Failure had stayed with her, which reassured the children—they’d been appropriately intimidated by MF while they were travelling on my spaceship.