by Keri Hudson
Bazz was struck by her beauty, an indefinable sparkle that he could hardly ignore. “Sebastian Malloch, friends call me Bazz.”
Freddie said, “You’re sure as shit one helluva friend of mine!”
Bazz said, “C’mon, we’ve gotta get you two outta here. Can you walk?”
Phoebe asked, “But… what about our friends?”
“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Bazz said. “And we don’t want to tamper with a crime scene any more than we already have. And these guys may have backup. They would have reported back to whoever hired them, unless they were working alone. Why’d they want you dead?”
The girl Phoebe just shook her head, and Freddie said, “Let’s just… get outta here, do whatever, that’s fine.” His nervous tone gave Bazz pause, but he didn’t think much more about it. The fellow had reason to be nervous, they all did until they were well out of the area.
So the three took the slow, difficult walk back along the slope to the other mountain trail, where Bazz’s own SUV waited.
CHAPTER FOUR
They drove back to Bazz’s small condo in Boulder, not far from the University of Colorado, in relative silence. The former hostages were stunned, and there was so much for them and their rescuer to consider and think about, it was almost as if none of them knew where to begin.
But once back at the small, two-story condominium, Bazz put on a kettle and poured some Earl Grey tea, oaky and warming and soothing for them all. He changed into his own clothes and burned the dead man’s clothes in a fire pit in his backyard.
Bazz finally had to say, “All right, well, does somebody what to tell me what’s going on here?”
“The cops,” Freddie said, “we gotta call the cops.”
“We will,” Bazz said, “but honestly, the cops around here… they’re a bit small-town minded, if you follow me.”
“Corrupt,” Phoebe said.
“It’s like Alabama with snow around here. You’re not locals?”
“Up from Arizona,” Freddie said, “traveling with the—”
“Freddie!”
Freddie stopped, absorbing the glare of his sister, before going on, “Traveling with our friends.”
Bazz could smell the dishonesty, but he knew the truth wasn’t far under the nervous surface. “Hitchhiking up to Canada to evade the draft?”
“Protesting,” Freddie said. Phoebe thrust an angry chin at her brother, but he shrugged his chubby shoulders. “The guy saved our lives, I think we can trust him.”
Phoebe turned her head, pouting into her teacup. “That bear saved us!”
The two sat in astonishment, and Bazz also pretended to be amazed. But he went on to ask, “So… protesting what, exactly?”
“Fracking,” Freddie said. “Company sank a shaft down in Arizona, and now they’re doing it here. Or they’re going to… if we can’t stop ‘em first.”
Bazz asked, “And how do you plan on doing that?”
“Public opinion,” Phoebe said. “We’re holding rallies in public parks, on street corners, handing out pamphlets and flyers.”
Bazz nodded. He’d seen such approaches before, and he knew well the wisdom to be found there. But it hardly warranted a multiple murder on a mountain road.
“You think the fracking company hired those rednecks to take you out over some pamphlets?”
“They’re surprisingly effective,” Phoebe said.
“Very surprising.”
A thick silence hovered over the three, filling the room as they each took sips of their tea, eyeing one another, suspicion clear on every expression. Bazz knew they weren’t telling him the entire truth, and he certainly wasn’t revealing everything to them. It was a survival tactic for him and just as much for them, he had to assume. And it seemed clear enough whom they had to avoid in order to survive. But those were only two steps on a long road for the two survivors of that mob-style hit, a strange fact that complicated things even more for all three.
Freddie looked around the modest house, furnished with wooden furniture and brass fixtures, rustic and cozy but clean and bright. “Nice place,” Freddie said. “Sorry to ask this way, but… they pay you to run around naked in the woods?”
“Freddie!”
Bazz chuckled. “No, Phoebe, it’s okay. I teach environmental studies at UCB.” He took in their confused, out-of-state expressions. “University of Colorado, Boulder. But we’re on summer break, so I’ve got time to spend up on the mountain.”
“Again,” Freddie asked, “naked?”
Bazz shrugged. “Humans are the only animal that wears clothes. And a lot of human cultures don’t wear them either. But it’s hard to understand that point of view until you’ve expressed it yourself.”
Freddie shrugged and took another sip of tea.
Phoebe asked Bazz, “What about our friends, what about the cops? There has to be justice, there must be some kind of investigation.”
Bazz nodded. She had a humane perspective that impressed him, a clarity of conscience that only made her that much prettier. Diverting his attention to more important things, Bazz said, “I think five bodies’ll be enough for them. No reason for them to come after any of us, unless they followed our tracks through the woods and back to my car, then down and all the way here. I wouldn’t bet on it… or on them finding out who was really responsible… unless you think those rednecks were acting alone?” They shook their heads. “Y’never know, locals hoping to get work from that company, that’s how they gain local support.”
“So you know about these fracking fuckers?”
“I teach environmental studies,” Bazz said, “so… yeah. And I’m with you in standing against them. There’s just about no worse a thing we can do to the planet, especially now, when she’s in such rough shape. I tell ya, we’re gonna blow this place up if we don’t burn it down first.”
Freddie was quick to ask, “Then you’ll help?” But he only earned another stern glare from his sister.
Bazz said, “Handing out pamphlets?”
Phoebe said, “No, Freddie, it’s too dangerous… obviously.”
“But you’re going to keep doing it,” Bazz said. “Handing out pamphlets?”
“It’s our business,” Phoebe said, setting down her teacup. “But thanks for helping us, we really do appreciate it.”
She stood, Bazz and Freddie following her lead. Bazz asked, “Where are you going to go now?”
“We’ve got other friends, we’ll be fine.”
Bazz asked her, “Why do you think that? If those guys were hired to take you five out, and I think we all agree that they were, then word’ll get back that only three bound bodies were found. And when reports come back—and they will, believe me—that all three hostages were men, then the people who wanted you dead, young lady, are going to come back for you. That means you really can’t just go back out there.”
“Like I said, we’ve got friends.”
“Then I’d hope you have enough respect for them, for any human life, not to put it so carelessly in danger. They’ve killed three people already, hoping for five. You think they’ll stop now?”
Phoebe seemed to give it some thought, slowly sitting back down. Bazz and Freddie did the same. Phoebe asked, “What about our… our other friends?”
Freddie said, “They’ve probably gone underground by now. That’s what this was really about.”
“Exactly,” Bazz said, “they were sending a message to the rest of your… your friends, and like-minded people all over the country not to stick their noses in where they truly don’t belong.”
After a tense moment of consideration, Bazz knew he’d be joining their effort. But he also knew they were still hiding things from him, and that could be a deadly mistake for them all. He’d root out the truth, and protect the two in the doing, and bring down or chase off the fracking company if he could. But it would take time and trust, and Bazz was already running short of both.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bazz set
up his new guests in his guest room, and spent some time in the living room, researching online. It was an easy matter to search Arizona fracking protests to pull up a variety of articles and video clips on the subject.
Field footage of a massive protest on a barren hillside bore a subtitle reading Camelback, Arizona. A crowd hundreds strong chanted Frack no! and waved signs reading Frack Off! and Go Frack Yourself!
The video scanned the crowd, catching Phoebe and Freddie Blaire in the front row surrounded by like-minded radicals, one with long, black hair and a thick beard, shaking their fists, faces a pair of angry masks. Even in that crowd, with her hair longer and pulled back, sneering in righteous indignation, Phoebe had a brightness that caught Bazz’s eye. She was no two-face, he could see that; she seemed to mean what she said, what she chanted.
Guess all those pamphlets go to some use; not really a lie, though.
Facing the crowd was a clutch of business-suited men and women. At their center stood a handsome young man, forties or earlier was Bazz’s guess, with feathered brown hair and a determined sneer. The man was flanked by several men who grabbed Bazz’s interest, one wearing black sunglasses with slicked-back, black hair, looking like a cheap New Jersey hood. They were standing at a podium but several feet back, too much danger to be on the front lines.
Typical, Bazz thought, shaking his head.
Around him were black-suited men in sunglasses, looking around like a team of bodyguards—probably just what they were by Bazz’s estimation.
Gunshots rang out, the crowd thrown into an instant turmoil. The video shot from one angle to another as the user quickly went from the stage into the crowd and then back. Nobody on the stage had been hit, and as the crowd fled the center of the violence, the camera found a group of men falling on somebody who was so deeply buried that there was no sign of the man under the men apprehending him.
The video ended, but a few more described the fate of the shooter, a gray-bearded radical by the name of Elijah Ott. News reports pictured the gray-bearded man, head shaved bald, as authorities perp-walked him into custody, hands zip-tied behind his back, head low, eyes wild as they caught the news cameras.
The news anchor reported, “Three weeks after the shooting, authorities now believe that alleged would-be assassin, Elijah Ott, of Eugene, Oregon, was acting alone in his efforts to gun down Brandon Malone, CEO of the global gas mining interest, Armstrong Corporation. Brandon Malone and his entourage were in Camelback, Arizona last month to break ground on a new natural gas mining facility.”
The familiar man with the brown feathered hair looked into a new camera, standing in front of Camelback Mountain. He looked around with a rugged squint on his handsome face, as if taking in the grandeur of the desert around them.
“What happened was unfortunate,” he said, “but it’s important for the country, and the world, to know that Armstrong does not get frightened off a site, not any site. In this case, we feel that the public has made itself known, and not just Mr. Ott either. And honestly, we have other locations where we’ll have an even stronger workforce on hand. You know, despite the controversies, natural gas mining brings millions of dollars into the local economy. And that drives prices up, not down. That makes life better, not worse. It’s true there are some bugs in the process to work out, but the same can be said for nuclear energy, which is still the cleanest source of energy we have. In fact, the same has been said about every form of progress society has ever known. Cars were considered a dangerous folly, countless men died bringing in the whale oil that ran the country for centuries. The Panama Canal, the US railway system, radioactivity—all of history’s great leaps forward came at some price.”
Cameras flashed at him, several mics leaning in.
“But let me reassure every American out there that we and other leaders in the natural gas mining industry are doing our best to work out these little kinks and make natural gas mining the efficient, effective, and safe alternative to fossil fuels that this country, and the world, so desperately need.”
“He’s completely full of shit, y’know.” Bazz turned to see Phoebe walk into the living room from the guest room. She stepped closer to him, shrugging one shoulder. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Your brother?”
“Out like a light.” They shared a smile and she walked even closer. She was lovely in one of his dress shirts, too big for her and hanging on her elegant frame like a cute and clumsy nightgown. “I… we didn’t have anything to do with that shooting.” Bazz nodded, but said nothing. She didn’t seem to think he was convinced.
He wasn’t.
“Honestly, he was acting alone. That’s what the police figured in the end. And if he’d been associated with us, they’d have found out.”
That made sense, but it only raised as many questions as it did provide answers. “Us?”
Phoebe arrived at Bazz’s desk, her perfect breasts supple and round under his shirt, nipples pushing up just a bit from under the cotton blend. He tried to resist the chemical reaction roiling in his blood with her proximity. “Independent Citizens United. But it’s a very loose organization, and we don’t do violence!”
“You said the man was acting alone.”
“He was! Two wrongs don’t make a right; we don’t operate that way.”
“S’good to know.”
Another silence passed, Phoebe’s eyes nervously finding the floor. “I should have told you, I… we generally keep pretty quiet about things. I guess you could tell.”
“Not at all,” Bazz lied with a smile.
“I... I don’t blame you if you don’t want to go on helping us. It’s… it’s dangerous, like I said. We’ll just go in the morning, not get you into any more trouble. I mean, you’re a university professor, you’re not meant for this kind of life.”
“And you are?”
Phoebe stood there, noble and humble, sweet and sexy. Every impulse in his primal person wanted to press himself against her, to woo her and love her and possess her. No, Bazz told himself, that’s for other people, that’s for her and her kind.
She said, “Somebody has to do it. Our folks were real crusaders—the Berlin Wall, No Nukes, all of that. We just… just try to follow in their footsteps, really.”
“That’s all any of us do, Phoebe. As long as we do our best, that’s all anybody can ask, and all anybody can do.”
CHAPTER SIX
Bazz sat back and waited for Phoebe to come out of the dressing room. Their clothes had remained with the caravan of ICU protestors driving up into Colorado. And they seemed to have scattered after the Blaire siblings disappeared and three were later found on the side of a mountain road alongside two butchered supposed hunters.
So they needed clothes in any case, though taking them out in Boulder was risky. Somebody knew she was still alive, likely that fracking CEO, Brandon Malone, and he’d have connections to more expendable rednecks to be on the lookout. The odds were with Bazz and his new friends, and there was a way to minimize risks even further.
Bazz turned to see Freddie sitting next to him, wearing his new casual wear and sporting his shaved bald head and clean-scrubbed jowls. The radical change of look was necessary, though the portly fellow didn’t seem comfortable.
His sister was another matter.
She stepped out of the Neiman Marcus dressing room in her new, short pixie cut, striking around her pretty, symmetrical face. It framed her high cheekbones and sleek little nose, her pouty smile. Those green eyes flashed from that milky, freckled expression. She did a little turn in her floral print, short-sleeved, flared midi dress, breasts rounded and perfect, legs long and strong, waist tiny and tasty.
Bazz almost felt guilty about feeling so good at a time when things were so bad for so many. Somewhere, five families were mourning, wearing funeral black instead of festive summer colors.
But it looked to Bazz like there was something about being out that Phoebe enjoyed. She didn’t seem to be much older than twenty-five, but s
he’d clearly spent most of them eschewing things like physical beauty or frivolous flirtation with boys. She was obviously a serious-minded person, like so many Bazz had taught over the years, so lost in their youthful commitment that they forgot to enjoy their youth.
Bazz recognized it in her because he’d been the same way, and he still was.
But he couldn’t resist the pull of his own attraction to her. At just thirty-five, he was still a good match age-wise, and they clearly shared a lot of the same priorities. And there was even more to it than that.
Bazz had grown up with a responsibility and a condition most men could never imagine, never mind endure. None of the shifters had it easy when it came to love, at least as far as Bazz knew. The lupes had to resort to kidnapping women to use as breeders just to beef up their numbers, but their success rate was luckily limited.
Bazz had heard that the occasional ursine shifter took a human bride, and he’d wanted that for himself for years. But there were terrible risks. Any woman he would love as his mate would have to know his secret, and few enough women could understand or tolerate, much less embrace, such a man.
And any woman with the type of intellect that Bazz required would be smart enough to know how dangerous their lives would be, how vulnerable she’d be to attack by lupes, alphas, even government goons who were known to shadow shifters and trace their activities. Bazz felt sure it had something to do with the coming shifter apocalypse, but he couldn’t be sure and had too many other things to think about.
Looking at Phoebe, it was hard to think about anything else. She ignited every spark buried within, his inner man stirring to imagine her breasts rising up to meet his lips, her head back, that creamy nape open to him, little gasps leaking out of her throat.
And she was more than just sexy in every way that Bazz could imagine. She was clearly tough and determined and resourceful, with a clear knowledge of what was important in life. Phoebe seemed like she’d have the wherewithal to accept Bazz for who and what he was. She alone might even have what it took to embrace it, desire it, love it—love him.