by F P Adriani
I bent over to pick them up, and one particular cover-page immediately caught my eye: Festival Bombing, it said.
My eyes scanned the page and beyond, and found a security report of that day, that day when I interrupted the bomber and chased him and then wound up in Hu’s cave.
Tan had since told me that the bomb guy had never been found; I never expected he would be. But in the report I now read about the two people who were killed then and about how the bomber had gotten in with the explosives: he’d used an undetectable-to-the-security-scanners liquid fuel from Crayton, one of Diamond’s moons. The building’s basement bomb had been a very damaging hot kind so had caused part of the basement to melt and collapse, which was why the explosion had seemed to have earthquake-like aftershocks….
There were aftershocks going on now, in my angry stomach. What a monumental fiasco-fuck-up that day was. I really didn’t need to see this goddamn report today of all days. I wanted to tear up the fucking thing.
I was just about to throw it back onto the pile when Tan walked in. When he saw what was in my hand, he said, “Shit—I didn’t mean for you to see that. Been cleaning out my basement lately, but I didn’t know you were coming tonight.” He rushed over and grabbed the papers from me.
“What’s the big deal?” I said. Then: “Really, it’s not a big deal.”
“I don’t want it to bring up bad memories.”
“Well, if I had to keep all those down, I’d have hardly any memories left in my head,” I said dryly.
“You can always make new ones,” Tan said then as he straightened up.
“I have been.” I looked straight into his warm dark eyes.
But now they traveled down me, down my flesh, settling around my crotch. He smiled as his eyes slowly roamed back up me again. “All clean now?”
I nodded.
“Good!” he said. Then he grabbed me and pulled me to him. “I like when you’re squeaky clean—you’re my squeaky-clean bad girl.”
“Oh christ,” I said, laughing, and slightly rolling my eyes and my head. His mouth latched onto my neck then.
“I really am sorry for that before,” he mumbled hotly against my skin. “I should have said bad girls aren’t bad—I mean they’re actually really GOOD.”
“Mm hm,” I said, because that was all I could do now: mumble. His mouth had moved lower toward my left tit, which he then popped into his mouth. And now I couldn’t speak at all. My hands grabbed him by his silky hair as he sucked on my flesh.
Moments later we were sliding on his bed and he was sliding inside me. We both sighed and moaned; he was on top of me, and my recent shower had dampened our connection. When his skin would pull away from mine, I’d feel an ever-so-slight chill. When his skin would come back, I’d be warmed once again.
He pushed and pulled inside me in long exaggerated motions, pulling his dick nearly all the way out and then carefully sliding it in firmly but slowly. We usually didn’t screw like this. We usually went at it fast. But this time felt so…nice. So special. Like he didn’t want it to end for either me or him.
A tear slid out my right eye. Another soon followed.
He must have seen them. “Hey…hey,” he said. And then he kissed me, warmly whispering Don’t cry against my mouth. Then his weight shifted to on top of me even more, till we were so close, as close as human-body possible. Even as our pelvises moved, our chests and bellies never separated. We felt like one person, one body…content, complete.
*
Not long after, I was using his bathroom again. When I walked out and sat back against his bed’s headboard, he was lying down staring up at the ceiling; he seemed unaware I was there.
“Penny for your thoughts?” I asked, my right hand reaching out and stroking his hair, my left pulling a pillow on top of me.
“That paper before reminded me,” his soft voice said now. “You seen the news lately? Another explosion two days ago, at West Legion Mine. There was another article last week—‘Miners Win Big Particulate Fight’ about improved air-quality standards in the cave-mines in general. But no matter what, it’s like the shit never stops. It’s less now, but what good is less for something that shouldn’t be happening at all?” He sighed. “I feel guilty sometimes, that I left. Even without all the political attacks, general security things are still important.”
“Well, you’ve still got a job doing that. Protecting museums is important. Some people would love to destroy those.” For some reason, Hu popped into my head. Was she that kind of destructive person? If she’d destroy people, wouldn’t she destroy knowledge too?
Now Tan said to me, “You should come there—see what you can find out. I’ll show you around.”
I stared down at his head; it twisted back up at me. I’d been to The Citadel only once since he’d started working there. But he’d never said then that he’d show me around.
“Amy Castano—you should look into that,” he added finally.
“I thought you didn’t want me to get involved.”
“If you’re going to be involved, so will I. I don’t want you getting hurt.” He was still looking at me. “Maybe there’s a danger to the place too—who knows?”
So that was the reason. “I see: you just want me to help you in your job.”
“No, Pia. I really want to support you with the other thing. I was shocked when I heard Amy died. She looked so healthy, like she was a fitness freak. How the hell could she die of a heart attack?”
“There’s too much death on Diamond,” I said, staring ahead of me now. “We need more life here.” I paused. Then: “You know, Nell’s going to have a baby.”
He rose up on his left elbow; his eyebrows also rose up. “No kidding?”
“Nope. No kidding. She really is.”
“Wow,” he said. Now he too stared straight ahead at the wall opposite the bed.
And I finally asked him, “A couple of times, you said to me that you wanted a kid—you still feel that way?”
His head shook from side-to-side a bit. “No. I mean, I’m not sure I ever did. I like my life the way it is. Don’t think I’m cut out for kids. I’m too ordered. Kids represent disorder.”
“But what about that first night here, when you said you wanted a child around your mountain?”
His head slid around in my direction; he was grinning. His eyebrows shot up again—fast, three times. “That was a line.”
I laughed under my breath, began slapping him with my pillow.
He lifted his arms and feigned being wounded as he said, “So you think it was a good line or what?”
I slapped him with the pillow again, and he lightly bit my arm, then blew a loud raspberry on it.
“I’m here, ain’t I?” I said, pulling back my arm and the pillow, and laughing again.
But my smile soon faded. “I’m really not cut out for kids either. I can’t imagine being pregnant. Actually, I don’t want to imagine it.”
“There’s always adoption. So many kids here need homes—”
“But you said we’d make a beautiful baby together—”
He did that evil grin again, making my laughing start up again. Now he said, “There was this guy I knew once—I don’t mean to be mean, but the guy was just…not attractive. And his biological parents were both gorgeous. No genetic guarantees in life.”
“No guarantees in life, period,” I said.
*
The next morning I left Tan’s place quite early; I drove back to my house to shower and change into fresh clothes, then I went to my office.
When I got there, Roberto was waiting outside the front door. I punched in the code to turn off the building’s door alarm; then I inserted the keys to open up the door, keys only Nell and I had.
When I pushed open the door, I said to Roberto, “You’ve gotta go back to the Castano place.”
He frowned at me as I stepped into the hall. “What for? That place seems like bullshit.”
I looked at him. “It may be, it ma
y not be. I still want you there. Keep your eyes open and check her security system—if it’s been compromised.” Roberto knew about those things: a few nights a week, he moonlighted for a home-security company.
“If the girl goes out, you go with her,” I said. “Come back here after three. But from tomorrow on, you’ll probably only have to tag along with her when she goes out. Get her schedule.”
His block-shaped face was still frowning. “I can’t stand babysitting kids.”
“Well, this kid will be paying me enough money for this one job so that I’ll be paying you more than I’ve paid you since the get-go here.”
He snorted and said, “All right,” then he turned around and left.
Mike showed up a few minutes later, and I quickly put him onto the new bank job. I was unfamiliar with the security set up there, so I wanted him to in-person talk to the bank’s manager today.
From behind the main desk, I looked up at Mike’s black hair and wide dark-blue eyes; he was young, only twenty-five, and he often seemed out-of-it mentally. I suspected he was very good friends with some mind-altering substances. But I didn’t care about his “social life” as long as he got a job done, which he always did. He also used to work for Great Guards, which I thought would be the best company for providing guards for the bank.
When Mike finally left for there, I did a few office-keeping activities at Nell’s desk, then I filed some papers. As I was doing that, I bent nearer to the wall safe behind Nell’s desk—and that was when I noticed something wasn’t right there.
…Did I mention that I actually had two safes? One was for show, the other was for the real stuff. From my old job I’d learned that keeping dummy duplicates of important things was common—safes were one of those important things. What I’d learned from breaking into other places I now applied to protecting my own places.
Unfortunately, it seemed I couldn’t apply my fucking knowledge correctly one-hundred percent of the time.
My face flamed in a humiliated heat as I examined the fresh scratches on the polymer coating that I or Nell always resprayed around the safes’ combination-lock mechanisms—so we could detect any tampering. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Roberto or Mike…well, maybe I shouldn’t have trusted them because someone had tried to get into this safe overnight—had tried and failed. Or maybe had succeeded and found nothing, so then unsuccessfully tried to close it back up and not alert me.
I opened the safe now, rummaged through the dummy contents, but didn’t find anything missing. Then I rushed away from the safe and double-locked the hall door.
In the outer office first, I searched around for anything not-ordinary, anything mini-camera-like; I looked and felt under the furniture and along the walls, checking any holes, checking the light fixtures. I came up with nothing in the outer office or in my inner office. Then I checked the real safe, the one under the floorboards in the far corner of my inner office, beneath a large file cabinet I kept over a hidden tricky track—tricky because the cabinet could only be slid away if you knew the proper sequence of directions to slide it in.
Using my high-powered magnifier lens and my Osier scanner, I examined the real safe’s lock and saw no tampering and came up with no prints (Nell and I always wore gloves when we opened the safe). I also examined the safe’s contents—including the notes Nell had taken yesterday—and again I saw nothing had been tampered with or stolen.
Nevertheless, it seemed someone had gotten into the outer office and tried to do something that wasn’t supposed to be done.
The timing of the break-in could have been a coincidence. Maybe someone from MSA’s brief past wanted to find out something for whatever reason.
But it seemed too big a coincidence considering what happened the day before.
I used my portable phone to call Nell’s place.
She breathlessly answered “Hello!” on the second ring. She must have been washing pots or something because I heard brittle clanging coming over the line.
“Nell,” I said, “someone got into the office here last night. Or very early this morning.”
“What?” she said, the clanging abruptly stopping.
“The dummy safe—the polymer coating is scratched.”
“Oh wow,” said Nell. There was a long pause, then she asked fast, “Are you sure we didn’t accidentally scratch it?”
“I haven’t gone near there in almost a week. Didn’t I see you check it two days ago?” We always checked the safes at least twice a week.
“Yeah. Nothing. You know, it could be someone with a grudge from a while ago….”
“Yes, I thought of that.” I wanted to tell her about Hu’s having called me, but I thought it best for Nell’s sake that she didn’t know, which I hated because here I was breaking my vow to be up front with everybody in the office.
I sighed, and Nell said in a slower voice, “Pia, remember I told you the other day that I didn’t like the way the new janitor looked?”
My office was part of a bigger building. My area had its own hall, but a lone janitor always worked the whole building and also had the alarm-system code.
A new janitor had shown up not even a week ago, and she told Nell then that the old janitor had been fired….
“Or it could be the old fired one broke in here,” I said to Nell now. “I better look into this.”
On my way out to the building manager Don’s office, I checked both my outer office’s locks and the front door lock, but neither lock looked picked, according to my equipment. At the entry to my outer office I’d had nonmetallic stone-covered locks installed to prevent their being opened by magnetized lock picks, but, amazingly, someone had been able to defeat even these stone-covered locks.
Down the hall there was another office, but it had been empty and pad-locked up for months. And down the hall’s other end there was a back emergency door that could only be opened via an inside lever. My office windows opened only at the very top; no one could squeeze through those spaces.
All of that left the front door for the most likely point of entry.
I looked over that door a second time, from the outside—and that was when I noticed the nearby mostly-hidden overhead security camera had apparently been turned off at some point, and I hadn’t even realized this till now.
I could feel that heat in my face again. I wanted to be perfect, but that I wasn’t perfect had become so damn evident lately. No matter how hard you tried to prevent certain things, you just could never plan for every eventuality in life. And that really sucked.
*
Seated behind his black and slightly-bent-at-one-end metal desk, Don insisted to me that the previous janitor had been fired only because he hadn’t shown up for his shift several times. I repeatedly pressed Don for more info on the new janitor, and he finally revealed to me that she was his cousin.
He said then in his usual annoyingly-emphatic sing-song way, “I’m telling YOU, she would NOT steal anything.”
“I didn’t say anything was stolen,” I replied, standing right in front of his desk and staring down at him.
He was very skinny, with a twig-like neck, and he smelled like a musty combination of both rotten onions and cigarette smoke. But internally I squeezed my nostrils together as I tried to get more information from him. Basically, I didn’t trust Don on this issue. Plus, in the past out of the corner of my eye, a couple of times I’d caught him and his lewd smile looking at me.
Now I said to him, “Maybe a curious someone just wanted to take a look-see. And a nap on my couch. Or play with himself there.”
His face flushed crimson and his hands twitched on his black desktop. He shot up from his seat. “Now I’m telling YOU, I never go IN there.”
“And I’m telling you that someone has—last night. Even the fucking camera outside the front door’s not on. How’d that happen?”
“I have no idea. I saw NOTHING on the video. Maybe it’s those goons YOU employ. One worse-looking than the NEXT—”
“Be careful what you say about my friends,” I snapped.
“Well, I’m telling YOU, be careful what you accuse my cousin of.”
“I want her name and address, or I’m going to the cops about the break-in.”
Don grumbled and groaned and made bird-like pinched onion-smelling faces at me, but I pressured him some more and he eventually gave me her info.
“Don’t you DARE do anything to her,” he said.
“What kind of person do I look like?” I replied.
*
When I got back into my office, the phone was ringing. I slammed the door closed behind me and rushed to pick up the phone, figuring it would be Nell because she’d said she would call me back.
But it wasn’t Nell. It was Hu. Again.
“What’s going on with Julianne?” she asked.
“What the HELL do you want?” I growled, my hand doing one of those death-grips on the receiver.
“Just what I asked. My man still never got back to me. He’s disappeared. And I’m very concerned.”
“You broke into Julianne’s house yesterday,” I said, growling again. I almost shot back that she’d also broken into my office, but something stopped me in time. She didn’t need to know everything.
“Well, I wouldn’t use those exact words…. But I did have someone search around in there, yes. Look, I need what she has, but she doesn’t easily trust people. And I don’t want to go near her. I’m afraid that would harm her. Being around me tends to do that to people, considering my wanted-by-the-law state.”
“Tell me why I should care about your problems—or even hers. Other than the money she’s offering.”
“Have you taken the job for her then? As I’ve said, I’m blind here since John disappeared.”
I knew she was lying about being blind because now I knew about Lori. But I played along with Hu anyway. “Maybe he’s double-crossed you—you ever think of that? No honor among thieves and all that.”