by F P Adriani
We left MSA together only moments later: the computer search had frozen, and I didn’t have the time to fix it and try the search again.
I was now on my driving-way to the Mapleville post-office, with Tan on my ass again. I liked when he was literally on my ass, but his paranoia toward my safety was ridiculous…. Or maybe not, considering my conversation with Hu.
The Mapleville post-office was farther away than the Sapphire Lake one, but I didn’t want to risk asking about the threat envelope in the place where it had been left.
I finally pulled my car into the Mapleville parking lot. Before Tan could get out of his car, I walked up to his open window and told him to just wait right there. “At the next one too.”
“Why!”
“Because. I want that one in particular to look like an ordinary visit.” I glanced at the clock on the dashboard inside his car. “Provided I get there before it closes.”
I rushed away and into the square brick-orange building.
I groaned when I saw the line of customers in front of the white counter…. But then the line went quite fast, and I was finally being served by the too-thin clerk there, who looked old enough to have been working at the post office from when Diamond was first settled.
“Excuse me,” I said to him now. “I’m wondering if you could tell me about this envelope?” From my purse I removed the plastic baggie and held it out to him. He started opening it. “No,” I said. “Don’t remove it.” His fingers stilled on the bag. “I think it might be from an ex of mine—it was a bad break-up. But we’re friends now somewhat, so I can’t be sure.”
His ancient gray eyes just looked at me.
“The thing is: there was nothing inside the envelope,” I finally said.
“Are you saying the post office stole something—”
“No! No.” I shook my head fast. “I’m just wondering why someone would send that to me. It’s probably a joke from my ex—his sense of humor is weird!”
The man’s eyes were down on the baggie again, his wrinkled face frowning slightly, his skinny forefinger scratching one of his cheeks. “Hmm, let me scan the stamp-code. I’ll be right back.”
He walked away with the baggie and came back a few moments later to lay it onto the counter and point down at it. “That didn’t go through the post office.”
“Huh?”
His forefinger pressed on top of the plastic, above where the postage-metering was. “You see this bar, for example? It’s a few millimeters too short.”
“So? Maybe the ink didn’t take there—like it wasn’t stamped right.”
“If something isn’t stamped right, it isn’t delivered. Faulty stampings can’t be read by the computerized system, so they’re all stored in a special spot in each post office, till they’re sent back to the senders. I’ve been working here a long time. And if you ask me…” his gray eyes moved to mine “…your ex did play a joke on you because that meter-stamp’s a fake.”
*
I walked up to Tan’s car and said to him through the window, “I’ve got time left—I’m off to the Sapphire post office.”
“But what happened?” he asked as I spun away from him.
“No time now!” I said, trotting toward my car.
*
So, I thought as I drove, good-old Nell’s suspicion had been correct.
And now, for like the fiftieth time since all this shit had started, I wondered what the fuck was going on. Why would someone put a fake postage-metering onto a threat to me? To make me think the person was farther away than he really was? To make me think something was going on at the post office when it wasn’t? …No, something must have been going on at the post office, or at least had gone on at the post office because how else could the letter have gotten into my box?
I pulled my car into the Sapphire post office’s parking lot, and when I got out and Tan stopped his car nearby, I flashed him a firm face rather than walking up to his window again. I had no extra time left to argue with him; the post office would be closing in twenty minutes.
I walked fast along the red-brick path toward the blue-painted building. As I had done earlier that day, I put my driver’s license into the security scanner’s slot outside the front door. Then the door automatically opened, and I walked in and over to near the counter.
Two people were on line in front of me, and it seemed to take forever for them to get waited on.
When it was finally my turn at the counter, I said to the red-headed postal clerk, “Hi. I have an envelope here I want mailed certified….” I pulled out the fake client envelope I’d wiped in my office. Address-side down, I handed the paper to her, but I didn’t quite let it go—and then I flipped up a corner as if I were looking at the address beneath. “Oh—wait!” I said. And she dropped her hand. “Ugh, I just realized I grabbed the wrong envelope from home. Shit.”
A laugh at my swearing burst from her lips, making the freckles on her nose twitch.
I put the envelope into my purse. “Well, I’ll have to come back. I’m sorry I wasted your time!”
She smiled at me. “No problem. Mistakes happen.”
*
I found Tan waiting outside his car for me this time. He was the only person in the lot, and he had been leaning back against the driver’s door, his sexy legs in his gray pants crossed at the ankles. My neck began warming…but then that sensation faded before it could fully blossom: I walked close to him and whispered that Nell was right about the letter not being mailed.
“Crap. Someone here’s jerking you around,” he said in a voice almost as low as mine.
My head tilted forward; I kissed his neck. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
One of his arms closed around my back, and I felt him sigh into my hair, felt his warm breath gently touch my cheek. “I’m hungry again,” he said then. “Let’s go home.”
We did. And as soon as I walked into the front hall of the house, I laid my case onto the table there, pulled out my Osier, and the envelope I’d made the woman touch—and found no fingerprint match.
“Shit,” I said, slamming the lid on my case closed.
“What—what?” said Tan coming into the house behind me.
“It wasn’t her prints—the clerk at Sapphire. I’ll have to try again tomorrow.”
“All right—that’s tomorrow. Tonight I just want to eat dinner and then collapse on the couch!”
*
Tan showered, then I showered, then we worked in the kitchen: he prepared us pasta salad, which we then ate. And then I made myself some tea and Tan some coffee.
When I was about to pour the hot drinks into mugs, the phone rang: Nell.
“How’d it go today in court?” she asked fast.
“It went. It seems like the bastard isn’t going to get the maximum time.”
“Shit!” said Nell in a very disappointed voice.
“That’s the way I’ve been feeling. Like shit.” On the way home from Sapphire, I’d considered going back to MSA to try that search on Spoonville again, but then I realized I was too wiped out by the whole day. I had done too much, seen too much, heard too much. I had my limits just like any person, even though mine were probably higher than many a person’s….
Nell was speaking again. “Don’t feel bummed, Pia. You always work too hard—you need a hobby!”
“I think—” I started saying, but then I remembered I fucking forgot to grab the jewelry supplies Nell wanted. “Oh crap, Nell—I forgot to get your bead-stuff from MSA!”
“Don’t worry about it—you can bring it by tomorrow.”
“I can’t come there, Nell. I intended to get Roberto to bring it.”
“Damn, Pia—when will I see you again…. You know what? I’m coming by MSA tomorrow—”
“Not when no one’s there!”
“So be there then. Can you—in the afternoon, about three? Derek’s only got a half-day of work tomorrow, so he’ll be with Annie.”
“All right, Nell. I’ll
see you then,” I said on a sigh.
When I hung up with her, I put the hot drinks for me and Tan onto a tray and carried it into the living room, where I promptly deposited the tray onto the coffee table and gratefully sank my tired ass into the couch.
Wearing only slate-gray pajama-pants now, Tan sat down too, saying, “So let’s summarize the day.”
“Oh Tan, let’s not. I don’t want to go over it all again.” We had while I’d showered, with him sitting on the toilet’s closed top while I in-detail relayed what had gone on at the post offices especially.
But how many times did he need to hear it? He was acting like the fucking police. So I told him that.
To which he replied, “Well, I’m thinking that you really should have called them!” His eyes were looking right at me.
But my face only closed up. “No. I told you. I can’t.”
“Why?”
I sipped my tea, hoping my silence would turn him off from making anymore I-want-info pleas. But then I knew that, at some point, I’d probably be forced to tell him more. I probably should have told him more a long time ago; I’d wanted to many times, but I could never think of the right time—when I even remembered the things I should have told him, which wasn’t often. I’d become expert at blocking out anything I didn’t want to remember for whatever reason. And some things were just too dangerous to remember.
The other issue was: how much should you tell about yourself to the people you love? Maybe if you told them too much…they wouldn’t love you anymore. That was my greatest fear all the time now: that I’d lose Tan. And that was always the greatest pain when you had someone else you loved. If you only had yourself to love, you couldn’t lose your loved-one then. To shield myself from anymore pain, I had lived most of my adult life in a lonely way, and that meant that much of what I had with Tan, much of my responses to him and to us—much of it was uncharted territory for me….
I stared at his face now, at his dark eyes, which were almost the exact same black-brown color as the coffee in the cherry-red mug in his hand. At that moment, I meant to say something to him, but then I suddenly thought of something else. “Crap. I forgot to ask Chuck or Arlene about the Astrals, about if they heard what’s going on there.” This was something Tan and I didn’t often talk about. It seemed Tan had picked up some of my ability to block things from my memory; though we weren’t married, we were still very close and had probably already begun affecting each other….
Tan put his mug back onto the tray. “Actually, I heard something about that—I keep forgetting to tell you. But the Army’s now setting up permanent bases near all the locations.”
“And?”
He shrugged. “That’s all I heard—I ran into someone from the Pine Mine. He’s being transferred over to the Astrals, decided he didn’t want to be a guard but wanted to be a soldier instead.”
“Do I know him?”
Tan’s head shook, a slow side-to-side motion.
“We almost never talk about all that stuff in the Astrals.”
He seemed to wince. “I work hard on not thinking about it.” As I’d thought.
“Well,” I said, “there are other things we really should talk about. Plenty of things.”
He turned to me, waiting.
Then I finally said, “I told you about my list of enemies—in my head I’ve scratched off TNI and Ronin. I’m not getting their stench around the threat. Ronin’s got bigger problems. And I haven’t been making any waves for the other scumbags. Not that I don’t want to, but I’m just so small. And it always seems like I’ve got so many personal problems that I’ve gotta prioritize somewhere.” I looked down into my almost-empty-of-tea blue mug, saw the slight wavy reflection of my face floating on the reddish liquid.
“Tan,” I said now, still looking down, “I’ve told you before that I tended to work alone.”
When I paused too long, he asked, “And?”
“Well, I didn’t always work alone,” I said, raising my head. “One time in particular I worked with two others on a job—a job that went wrong. This job’s on my list. But…I’ll get back to that because it’s not the event I want to talk about the most right now.”
Tan’s ass shifted on the couch. “Why do I get the feeling I’m going to hear something bad?”
“Because you’ve got good instincts. The thing is: one time while working alone, I did…something on Earth-Moon. I don’t know if you remember this from the news, but about four years ago there was a string of cross-planetary child abductions—the ones people know about because there were more than the publicized ones. It was a slavery ring. It was sick. But I had to take care of one of the people behind it. He was a real sicko. When he was done with some of the kids, he’d…shoot them in the head.”
I heard Tan’s sharply in-drawn breath. “Jesus Christ,” he said as he shot up from the couch and just stood staring down at the coffee table in front of us.
But I kept on talking. Now that I’d started, I found I couldn’t stop. “I know—I know. That made taking the job easy, believe me. The thing is: the sicko liked to vacation on that Moon a lot. So they sent me there.”
Tan’s eyes fell on me now. “Why you?”
“Why not?” I said, looking up at him. But I could tell by his taut face that he wouldn’t be satisfied with any evasion. I lowered my eyes, felt a burning near my heart. “This is hard for me to discuss.”
“Discuss it anyway. I’ve wondered about it. I knew there was something on Earth-Moon because the few times I’ve mentioned it, you avoided talking about it.”
“I knew him,” I said fast now. “I could get close to him. That’s why the UPG sent me. They knew we’d been involved.”
“YOU SLEPT WITH SOMEONE LIKE THAT,” his angry mouth shouted down at me.
“I didn’t know who he was then! It was a one-night stand months before. I was partying with a bunch of people on the Moon. I got drunk. I made an error.”
Tan’s face instantly twisted, and apparently he was so disgusted and so furious that he couldn’t help the spit shooting out of his mouth when he spoke now. “An error? And you couldn’t tell how sick he was? Please tell me you didn’t have to sleep with him again when you went to kill him—”
“No—christ, no! I’d never do that. Omigod, no. Plus, I only needed to get close to him. He remembered me all right and let me close. The rest was actually quite easy—”
“Spare me the details, please.” He was red in the face and he ran a fast hand through his hair as he plopped back onto the couch, his bare back hunching forward toward the table.
“About not seeing what he really was,” I said fast now, “he did seem distant. I barely knew him. I just thought he was a cold personality. Don’t forget that I wasn’t exactly warm myself then.” I flashed him ironic eyes. “But, what disturbs me the most, what I’ve been unable to grasp whenever I think about it all, is that I so easily killed a man I had sex with. This wasn’t something I ever wanted to do, and it never will be something I do again.” I looked at him. “Does that I did this…frighten you though? So many times I’ve wanted to tell you about all this, or at least I wanted you to know, but then I thought it was safer for you if you didn’t know…and I just didn’t want you to hate me, to fear me….”
“It’s too late for that. I’ve always been a little afraid of you. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
I just kept looking at him because I honestly didn’t know what the fuck to say to his strange statement.
And then he sighed, turned his head away and said, “Pia, sometimes I think you’ve got more skeletons in your closet than a cemetery.”
I snorted, my eyes on his profile. “What the fuck do you expect me to do about my past? I can’t take any of it back!”
He turned to me again. “I know. And I’m wondering why the UPG wanted the guy killed—what—did he not give them enough of the profits off the slavery?”
I snorted a second time, and partly because in recent times,
I had wondered the exact same goddamn thing.
A silence now fell between us, and I felt a distance growing within that silence. I’d felt that distance in the past, when we’d had problems, when we’d clashed over something I was doing, or wasn’t doing.
But he, apparently, didn’t seem to feel the same thing. He was still focused on the other thing. “So, do you think he’s the one who’s after you?”
“What? No. No, he’s dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. Very. I’ve made mistakes occasionally, but I’d never make a mistake about that.”
His eyes moved toward the ceiling and he seemed to be thinking about something. “You said people, in plural, were behind the slavery—he had partners?”
“Yeah. They’re a possibility. Not everyone involved was found, last I heard. But I don’t think they’d bother going after me because I’m just small potatoes. And why draw attention to themselves by getting revenge? If the ring is still going on somewhere—Universe forbid—they definitely wouldn’t want to stick out. The sicko made that mistake and got burned.”
“I wish I was there. I would have ‘burned’ him myself.”
“This was what I mentioned that first night here. The time I killed.”
“The only time?”
I didn’t respond.
“I never believed you when you said it was,” he snapped now, his head also snapping—away from me.
“In that context, you were talking deliberate assassinations. But people kill to save others. And in defense too.”
He sighed loudly. “I don’t want to discuss this anymore. You did what you had to do. I know you better now. I know you’re not a monster. A monster wouldn’t regret a damn thing. But you regret a lot.”
“Yes,” I said, especially because I was thinking that, some days, I really regretted my whole goddamn existence.
“So, where do we go from here?” Tan suddenly asked.
“Wh—what?” I stammered, my head spinning over to his because it sounded like he’d meant our relationship. And now I felt like my greatest fear would be coming true….
