Another grunt sounded in his throat. "It's what I do," he replied and his voice had become soft as well, smoky with exhaustion. "Albeit not very well lately. Just wish I could've done more for her. The Doll, I mean."
Bobbi nodded silently. He found himself dozing, her warmth slowly quenching his adrenaline high. It had been years since he'd so much as looked at a woman, never mind lay next to one. "Say... Tom," she murmured, herself muted with her sleepiness, "What is it about them? I mean, they're just machines now, right?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Put out the lights," he murmured, "And I'll tell you."
"Sure," she murmured and reached in her pocket. She took a little remote out of her pocket and brushed her thumb against its surface, bathing them in the night.
Silent for a while, Walken listened to Bobbi's breathing. It came on in rapt waves, waiting for his answer, patience written all over the warm curves of her body as it lay curled against him. He thought of his last girl. Her name was Annie, another Narco officer back in Baltimore. Her eyes were gray and lovely, not harsh like Lionel's, and her dark hair used to pour heavy and cool across his chest at night.
After a while he spoke. "It's because of what they were," Walken said, his voice low. "They're still just little girls. They never stopped being that, to me."
"Yeah." The hush of her voice matched his in the darkness, as soft as her breasts pressing against him. "But they aren't, though. They got all that shit in their heads, now, the biochips and processors."
Walken made a dark sound and shrugged. He felt a few locks of Bobbi's hair spring back up, licking his cheek. His skin flushed despite himself. "I hear that," he said and he shifted against her to get more comfortable. "Everybody says that. And on the surface it sounds logical, but then I wonder: what about us, then? If all it takes is a lot of biocomp in your head — or silicon, for that matter — to become something other than human, what does that say about the rest of us?"
She chuckled. "You trying to say I ain't human, baby?" Bobbi's face nuzzled in against him, her arm squeezing him around the middle. "'Cause I'm right here, you know."
He smiled to himself. "Yeah, you are," he said. "But are you the same as you were before you got that I/O jack in your head? What about whatever came after? I figure you got a fair bit crammed in that head of yours, pretty as it is."
Bobbi was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, she sounded tired for the first time. "You make my head hurt, Tom," she said, quiet again. "Not the gear inside it. Is this all you do? Think about the deep secrets of the universe and shit?"
Another shrug. "I got a lot of time to myself."
"Maybe you should change that," she offered. "Get yourself a girl. Make your life a little better."
"I had one, once. In Baltimore."
"Yeah?" He felt her shift, lift herself up on her arm again. One small hand splayed upon his chest. "She pretty?"
Images of Annie flashed in his head, stretched out naked on his bed at night, dark hair pouring over her shoulder, her breasts — the breasts so different from Bobbi's, small and high and sweet like peaches. "Yeah," he said. "She was. Left her behind, though."
"Poor girl." It was halfheartedly said, he could tell from the smile in her voice. He could feel her nails tracing little patterns on his bare chest, the skin perking up beneath them. "So why did you do that?"
"She was my partner." He'd never said it out loud before and it felt strange in his ears.
Bobbi sounded absolutely enthralled. "Yeah?" she asked. "That sounds very unlike you, baby. I thought you were all about regs, huh? Fraternization's definitely not in character for the lawman I know."
He shrugged, looked down at himself. In the dark, he could just barely make out the presence of his own chest, the faint gleam of her painted nails. Or maybe it was just his mind filling in the blanks. "I was a different person then," he said. "She and I were on Narco together. We went undercover for a long time, trying to root out who was bringing the Rocket out to Baltimore. You know?"
She nodded, laid her head on his chest. He felt the crest of her hair lick the bottom of his chin. "So is that when you guys got all hooked up? Ridin' the Rocket?"
His fingers dug into the futon in reflex and he narrowed his eyes tightly. Bobbi felt his tension and sighed. "Sorry, Tom," she whispered. "I didn't mean to drag up anything bad."
"It's all right." Walken took a deep breath, let his fingers relax. "They gave us treatments to cut its effectiveness, you know, so we didn't go apeshit and try to rampage like most others — but yeah, we ended up doing a lot of it. Made us both ramped up, edgy."
She sighed, drew more spirals. "Must've been hard. So you two got together in order to burn off the energy, right?"
He nodded. "At first, anyway. But after a while...we just got so close and the Rocket seemed to pull us together..."
"So what happened?" She cuddled up a bit more; he felt her breasts press against his side, the nipples hardening up a bit against his lean muscle. Bobbi's voice was a mixture of interest and concern, made smoky with low volume and proximity.
He opened his eyes again to the dark, wished that he could see something; instead all he saw were images, flashes of memory, frames of a dark Baltimore squat and long nights spent trying to sweat the rush out with Annie under dingy sheets. Him, working over dealers to get names of those higher up, worse — things he didn't talk about. He stopped believing in things. People. God, he supposed, though he never really thought of it before then. The crisis of such horrors threw the absence of something greater into sharp and hideous relief; no Creator, no architect with even the meanest spark of compassion toward its work would ever allow such things to exist.
Walken swallowed down such thoughts and answered her. "The Rocket stopped coming in, even though we never found out who was distributing it. They pulled us into detox and I was all right. But..."
"But not your girl," she finished for him. Apology was written on her tongue. "I heard the withdrawal symptoms were terrible."
"Her skin started hardening up, you know, like those harlequin babies. Got all white. She's still in a hospital, I heard. They put her in a coma for the pain, but by the time they did that she was already crazy." He sighed. "She looked like..." Like a Doll, a voice in his mind whispered. He ignored it and shook his head. "We found out the Rocket came outta Wonderland, or at least did before it stopped coming and then..."
"Then that's when they came and got you? The Bureau?"
Another nod. "I had to get out of there. So I came out here and it was like fucking black magic all over. It wasn't just the Rocket, it was all kinds of shit and not just drugs or biologicals. We take away all kinds of the weirdest shit in raids. It's like they just want to make all this horrible shit, just because they can and then people over here... well. We're supposed to be better than that. People."
In the darkness, Bobbi took a deep breath. "I don't think anyone's all that good anymore, baby," she said gently. "I know I'm not. But I could be better, maybe."
She trailed off and her fingertips drummed once on his chest. "You need a girl, Tom," she said then, her voice cheering, returning to its usual smartass chime. "Somebody fast, you know? Smart. Ain't never gonna last on your own. You're too honest. You care too much."
He chuckled, glad now for the change of subject. "Maybe so," he said. "Would be nice, I guess. Maybe once I get this whole damned thing taken care of, yeah? I can look into it."
She sighed, exasperation in her voice and he felt her shift, throw her leg over his hips, straddle him. Her weight was slight, much less than what he expected with her build. He stirred beneath her buttocks. "Baby," she announced, "You ain't very smart for a detective. Lemme say again, okay? Nice and loud? You need a girl."
He was taken aback by the suddenness of her movement, but he quickly collected himself. He smiled up at her in the dark, his own hands sliding around her wrists, easing them down to rest on his ribs. "I see that I do," he said after a moment, amusement in his eyes and
in his tone. "You don't know me that well, though, eh?"
"I know you well enough, between what Stadil told me and tonight." She drummed her hands on his chest. "C'mon, now, Tommy. Don't make me beg. You can't leave me like this, after all we been through already."
"You don't beg," he said and he felt his lips spread into a grin for what felt like the first time in years. Endorphins began to trickle in, sidelining the exhaustion. "You're not the type."
She slid her hands under his t-shirt, short, blunt nails dragging lightly down his stomach. "You aren't the type to make me do it, either. C'mon." She ground her hips into his, heat spreading through her thighs. She leaned down over him, the softest purring sound issuing from low in her throat. "Put your hands on me, Tom," she whispered. "I need you."
Whatever resolve he might have had was blasted by this breathless admission. He needed her right back in that moment, more than anything else. He slid his hands up her arms, leaning up to press his lips hard against hers; his mouth was hungry and the force of that hunger caused her to let out a soft cry of surprise before she pushed back against it with her own. He reached up, grabbed her shoulders, flipped her bodily onto the futon. All the stress of the night, of all the nights before it, seemed to flow together and ignite inside of him.
"Jesus," she breathed, a catch in her throat, "Oh, yes —"
He laid a hand across her mouth and nose, the faded gasoline smell mixing with that of her own strong desire. Her eyes widened in the darkness, surprised, but then her hands clutched at the waist of his fatigues and he knew that it was all right. He left it there for a moment, cutting off her air, until her fingers spasmed and her back arched and he lifted it clear.
She coughed, gasping, but an electric thrill of pleasure made her body run rigid for a moment before she finally relaxed. Walken smiled in the dark, brought himself down to kiss her. She arched against him, groaning and she was tearing at his shirt, pulling it like a skin over his head as his hands dove to clutch at her large breasts and squeeze them through her top. Her nipples felt thick, like thimbles, hard and begging for exposure. He had his shirt off before he grabbed at the collar of her top with both hands and pulled hard.
Bobbi shivered and smiled as the shirt tore. She slid her arms over her head as her breasts fell, bouncing and spreading over her chest. Her nipples were standing at attention and crinkling in the cold air and he imagined the light spray of freckles across their upper curves that he had noticed earlier beneath her tank top. "All yours," she whispered around a wisp of a laugh. "But you gotta take me."
He said nothing. His hand came down and yanked the shirt off her and she closed her eyes as he wound it around her wrists. The cloth twisted, formed a strong knotted cuff under which she flexed experimentally.
"Oooh," she purred, "You've done this before?"
Flashes of imagination, of memory nearly forgotten, surfaced. Himself as a youth, reading ancient Japanese bondage kinos, webs of thin hemp rope woven artfully around beautiful forms. "No," he said softly, "But I always wanted to. Never found the right kind of girl, believe it or not." His eyes hardened, smouldered with the heat of the furnace that his body was very quickly becoming. "Now shut up and let me take you, girl."
She grinned and her face turned into an 'o' of surprise as he sealed his mouth around the swells of her breasts, first one and then the other, teeth working each nipple — her skin prickled as she gasped against the wet swirling of his tongue, the sizzling buzz of pain as he bit each one; she was whispering to herself, words he couldn't hear. He was peeling off her jeans, sliding off the black denim and the silver foil thong panties underneath, breathing in the spicy scent of sweat and her arousal. His fingers locked around her knees, spread her wide enough to taste her.
She twisted against him as his tongue snaked over her and the old instincts, instincts not remembered since he'd left Annie in far Baltimore, took over. He took hold of one ankle, struggling out of his jeans as he held her that way and he grabbed her throat with the other hand. She gasped, eyes fluttering under their lids and grunted softly with him in unison as his slid into her. And then he took her, slick with her wetness, driving into the sacred space between her hips with a fury he had never felt before.
Maybe it was the adrenaline, the brush with the near loss of her, but his claiming of her, his hand firm on her throat, felt natural to him; he drove himself inside her, over and over, with a rhythm borne of need as much as the animal exultation of survival. They flexed, shuddered and then she was crying out in celebration of a need long unfulfilled, the sound made small but clear with his restricting hand and his own orgasm blazed in his head with hurricane urgency as he claimed her body from within.
Outside the warehouse night was thinning into the purple chords of the coming dawn and they collapsed into one another and the velvet hand of sleep.
Walken rose to the sound of industrial lifters sailing over the Field, massive ground-effect planes wheeling over the storage barns; their roars were magnified off the steel walls of Bobbi's warehouse, vibrating his bones until he woke. He looked for Bobbi and found her sleeping peacefully beside him, still submerged in post-coital warmth.
He smiled and got to his feet, scratching himself as he crossed to the room across the makeshift hallway and found the makeshift kitchenette he'd thought he'd seen. Coffee brewing in a little Braun travel machine made his nostrils flare and his mind shudder awake. "Gonna be a long day," Walken told himself, allowing himself to be Captain Obvious while the excuse of being half-asleep still stood. "Gonna get killed most likely."
"Now you," chimed a sleepy voice behind him, "Are full of shit." Bobbi came padding into the room behind him, hair a very unintentional sort of spiky crest, her large breasts swaying, her lean frame still gleaming with the sweat of the night's union.
"Morning," Walken said through his cottoned mouth.
"Morning!" She stepped up wrap her arms around him from behind, her hands lacing under his sternum. She squeezed him tightly and for a moment he had forgotten how small she was. "You sleep all right?"
Walken grunted. "Far better than I probably should have," he replied, pouring hot coffee into a mug and offering it to her. She waved it off, going to fetch her own. He shrugged. "You look nice," he said instead.
"Mmm," she said with a little smile, pouring herself a mug. "Do I?" She snatched a bottle of sweetener from the top of the half-fridge on which the Braun sat and dumped a generous portion into her mug. "Well, thank you. You dress down pretty nicely yourself." As she stirred her coffee she reached back to take hold of him, squeezing gently, then laughed as he let out a squeak of surprise.
After the two of them had had coffee they sat in her workroom, Walken watching as Bobbi worked her magic with her terminal. They went over the newest police reports and Bobbi's skill allowed her to hack the police net enough to read the CivPro and federal blotters. "There's some nasty countersoft on the CivPro net," she told him, shaking her head after unplugging herself after a forty-minute span, "That's why I don't really get too far into it. You try and hit anything other than the street kiosks for the officers and it's black walls all the way."
"Well, I'd hate to get you killed on my account," he said pleasantly, tousling her all the more.
"Yeah, yeah, fuck me up," she said pleasantly. "And harder next time."
What they had found on the CivPro network was about what he'd expected. Walken, still on the run, was being watched for by both the Federal heat and CivPro. CivPro had offered a bonus to whatever corporate personnel imparted information leading to his capture. It wasn't a full-blown manhunt, at least, but he was surprised they didn't just blame the death of the two officers at the overpass on him as well.
"Yeah," Bobbi had said after she'd broken this unhappy news, "But if Stadil was behind all that he wouldn't have known about cops getting killed, would he? Even if he'd assumed it would happen I don't think he wanted to get you killed."
"Just arrested and frozen," Walken said with a sigh.
<
br /> "Yeah, well," Bobbi said, getting up from her bank of floating holoscreens, "I told you he was a weird fucker."
He chuckled, then his face hardened as a thought came to mind. "Bobbi," he said, "You said he put you on a hunt, right? So what else do we have to do?"
Bobbi wrinkled her nose. "Well, baby," she said, "That's the issue. The trail ends with Lionel as far as I've been told — maybe we'll solve the mystery when see him next. C'mon, let's go get a shower."
They showered and dressed, but Bobbi wouldn't let him put on his overcoat. "Too fucking bloody," she'd said, "And anyway, they'd see you a mile away." Instead, she gave him the dull gray overalls of the sniper camo she'd been wearing; it had been fitted for all sizes, she revealed and heat-stretched into a more snug-fitting suit thanks to a special heater that came with it. The suit's visored cowl folded into a square that he slid into its kangaroo pocket, along with the C-J and the knife. A few other things went in as well until he looked like he was sporting a paunch.
"With a woman just one night," Bobbi said, her eyes glittering again, "And look at you. Body's already going to Hell. How do you ever survive?"
He laughed and they went out together into the pale gray morning.
The majority of the morning was spent negotiating the city jungle. They had walked out of the Field and down to the dock hub, where the nearest magrail station could be found. They would have to head into the Verge, where Bobbi had announced that they should get breakfast.
The station was a simple concrete platform on the north end of the harbor, lined with painted steel rails and spangled with a forest of holographic advertisements. They were the only ones there, standing under the dubious glow of a twenty-foot holographic sign of a woman in a vinyl rendition nun's habit and a black body harness patterned after Japanese ropework. She clenched shielded data cable between her teeth like a gag.
Walken's stomach rumbled faintly. "So what about that breakfast?"
"Not yet, baby," she said. "We got appointments. Should go by Pierre's first — he'll have a car for us — and then Lionel if he says he's ready."
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 17
