by F P Adriani
Derek and Nell soon left, but Tan and I remained on the patio.
I was lying on one of the loungers when he brought me another glass of fruit juice. At that moment, I really wanted to share some things with him about what had been going on…but I held my tongue. The night had been so wonderful….
“You want to talk?” he suddenly asked me, flashing me a serious face as he sat down on the lounger beside me.
“Actually, I really don’t want to ruin this perfect night.”
He shook his head at me. “You won’t, you won’t. Communicating shouldn’t ever make anything worse, unless it was bad to begin with.”
Why the fuck did he have to say that? A sharp caustic pain filled my throat. I lifted my head at him. “What’s going on with you?”
“I wanna know what’s going on with you?”
I sighed a long sigh, my head falling back again as I glanced up at the purple-black sky and said, “I think I may have to go to Hera soon.” I turned to him again, watching for his reaction.
He’d been sipping his own fruit juice, and now he stopped, his brow lowering at me. “What are you talking about?”
I laid my drink onto the little table beside me. “Ringer. Ringer mentioned an institute there. Castano was involved with it.”
“So? What does that mean? I have a membership card to The Acrylic Painter’s Institute.”
“Tan, you didn’t turn up….” I never finished my sentence—his possible death was the last thing I wanted to think about tonight—or ever! “Aye-yaye-yaye! What the hell am I saying?” I sprung off the lounger and walked nearer to the beautiful hot-pink mountain. We’d just had such wonderful moments right here with our friends. Where on Diamond had those moments gone….
“Have you heard from Hu again?” came Tan’s voice from behind me. When I spun around now, he was standing right there in front of me.
“Is that what all this was about tonight?”
“No…but it’s part of it.”
I just stared at him for a long moment. Then: “Yes, I heard from her.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t. But when I do, I promise I’ll let you know…. Now I don’t want to talk about this anymore! Let’s go inside. The perfume out here’s done things to me tonight, things I’d like you to finish.” I grinned, quickly lifting my eyebrows at him a couple of times.
Then he grabbed my hand and spun me toward the house.
*
Afterward, when we were both lying naked on his bed, he said, “You ever been to Hera?”
I shook my head “no.”
“I have—one time. It’s suffocating. I don’t think you’d like it being indoors all the time.”
“I’m not moving there,” I said in a dry voice. “It’s just that I’ve been pointed there.”
“How?” he asked me, sitting up on his elbows a bit.
“Since I came back to Diamond, a bunch of things kept coming up about Hera.” I turned my head away from him.
“Hera’s even more corrupt than here.”
Now I looked at him again, my hard eyes indicating that his statement was exactly why I should check out any Heran leads.
He sighed, sounding frustrated, but he didn’t press the don’t-go-there issue. Instead, he flopped onto his back and said, totally changing the subject, “The Diamond Sphere’s visible now.”
The Diamond Sphere was Diamond and its two moons, Crayton and Photon, and Hera and its moon Joon. Two times during most Diamond years, when a ship emerged from the oldest main space flume to Diamond’s layer, visually Diamond sat at the center while the other four planetary bodies seemed at almost equal distances from Diamond. Everything was bathed in a spherical yellow-orange glow then, Diamond looking star-like, as if all four nearby bodies orbited Diamond. It was a trick of perspective in this part of the Universe, via space-bending in the space-flume’s vicinity, which trick bent the light spectrum too, inverting some colors and adding and subtracting others, depending on the angle of flight. The whole strange effect had been confusing to the first humans ever to exit that space flume, who thought they were about to crash into a star….
I hadn’t responded to Tan’s statement, so he continued now, “I’ve heard The Sphere’s really beautiful in person. I’ve always wanted to see it.”
“Then at some point you’ll need to leave Diamond and come back through the old flume,” I said.
Slowly, with a small frown on his face, he nodded at me. “You ever seen The Sphere?”
“Once, when I was a kid. I was so little. I remember color—the planets looked suspended in sunlight.”
“I want to see that someday. I think we should see it together.” His mouth lovingly tilted up at the corners, and that warm little smile of his somehow warmed my whole body.
“I agree,” I said finally, smiling back at his beautiful face and not for the first time thinking that, one of these days, my heart would literally, finally melt in his presence.
*
I started the next day with a lot on my mind. I was simultaneously remembering that whole moment the night before, that beautiful smile of Tan’s, that warmth filling my heart, the warm color of The Diamond Sphere…and, unfortunately, all the work I had to do.
Normally I didn’t work on Saturdays because they were my rest day. They were also my favorite day of the week: Sleep All-Day Day.
But I had too much going on in my life right now to sleep too much. So when I’d woken up, I decided to pop into the office and make a second call to a place I’d contacted about guarding Julianne that first night.
When I had finally let myself into my office and was about to pick up the main-desk’s phone, it rang. Roberto this time, to tell me that he was at Julianne’s and how very happy he was to do the Julianne job now: Lori Godwin had offered him advance payment, separate from what MSA would be paid.
Still, though that was good for him, I told him it would now be too much work. Then I added, “Possibly seven days a week for weeks, months—who knows. If you work every day, you’ll lose your effectiveness. You just can’t do that.”
“Thanks for telling me what I can’t do, Mom,” he said in a snide voice.
“Don’t you ever talk sexist to me like that again,” I snapped loudly. “Or you might need a new job permanently.” I slammed down my receiver.
Then I continued with the call I’d intended to make, and, an hour later, I had someone I’d used previously—Darla—set up for the weekends with Julianne, starting next week. This weekend Roberto would have to finish out by working both days.
He’d so annoyed me that I didn’t feel like telling him the temporary good-for-him news.
“Fuck him,” I said out loud. But I knew I was being stupid: Julianne was a client, and now I’d probably have to deal with various kinds of sticky situations because of her, both outside my office and inside my office. That was the way this shit usually went.
I sighed and began writing out some bills-due.
But then after about an hour of doing that and other office-keeping things, my strained eyes began feeling painfully dry.…
Fuck it. I’d go back to my hotel room and get some of my Saturday-rest. Really, I wouldn’t be any good to anybody if I fell apart physically.
*
For the rest of that day, I sleep-vegetated and awake-vegetated; then the next day, I decided to go to the Castano house.
Lori Godwin let me in at around one in the afternoon, and as soon as I walked inside, I saw Roberto step into the hall from where the kitchen was.
He walked up to me, saying, “Hey, Boss. Didn’t know you were showin’ up here.” His brown-shirted shoulder twitched in my direction, but he averted his eyes. Our last phone call could have been responsible for his newfound shyness. But he looked a little too…off today. I wondered if something was going on. So I asked him about that.
His blue eyes looked right at me. “Nothing, Boss—nothing’s happening. Been quiet like Tut’s tomb.” N
ow he sort of looked askance at Lori Godwin.
“I repeat,” I said, “what’s up?”
Lori interjected smoothly now, “I think Roberto’s just a little worried because we were eating lunch when you arrived.”
Roberto’s face flushed, quite badly. I couldn’t recall ever having seen that. It looked so strange on him, so youthful.
“Yeah, Boss—yeah,” he said now, fast-latching onto Lori’s words. “Just don’t want you to think I was sitting down on the job.”
“I know you’ve got to eat sometimes,” I said. “Where’s the girl?”
“Listening to music in her room,” Lori replied.
“I’d like to see her.”
Lori’s graying head jerked at me once—quick. Then she motioned for me to come with her. As we walked away from Roberto, I realized that, oddly, he and she had the exact same gray-blond hair color.
*
When we reached Julianne’s doorway, music blasted out at us from a radio farther inside. We stepped into the long brown-and-purple-decorated space, which contained a big tent-like fabric structure, which apparently encased Julianne’s bed. When Lori shouted her name, Julianne quickly emerged from that tent-spot and lowered the radio.
“Pia wants to talk to you,” Lori said. Then she left the room, pulling the door closed behind her.
“Hello, Pia,” Julianne said, a forefinger pushing up the bridge of her eyeglasses.
“Hi,” I said, smiling a little. “I’ve always wondered if eyeglasses are uncomfortable when you’ve gotta wear them all the time.”
“Sometimes they are. I hate them. But eye-lenses irritate my eyes, and I don’t want an operation to correct my vision.”
“One thing about me: I’ve always had perfect vision.”
“You’re lucky,” Julianne said in too dry a voice for a fifteen year old.
I walked up to her radio and turned the volume knob till the music got louder again. I motioned for her to stand with me in the room’s center, away from the windows and connecting walls.
Standing less than a foot from her, I said as I faced her, “I need to know more about the map. How many pieces were there?”
Her head shook fast. “I don’t know.”
“Come on—”
“I don’t. My mom never told me.”
“Well, how many do you think there are?”
Her dark-brown eyes turned to me, a little shrewdly. “It looked like three probably.”
Exactly what I had thought. I nodded. “So where are the other two pieces you didn’t have?”
“I don’t know,” she said again. “But I guess my mom had them somewhere. Wouldn’t she keep them?”
“I have no idea. I never knew her. She’s your mom.”
“She was my mom,” she said, her voice cracking a bit and making me feel like shit for my tongue-slip.
But before I could say anything further, she jumped across the floor toward her bed-tent, and then into it.
I moved closer, stood at the fabric’s opening. It was darker inside, the light passing through casting a bluish hue over her prone form. She was on her back, with an arm pressed over her eyes.
“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?” she said, her voice shaking, her arm still hiding her face.
I didn’t respond to her question. Instead, I said, “At some point, you’ll have to trust someone to really help you.”
“You mean like that John?” she said fast, nearly spitting the words. “Where’d he go?”
Again I didn’t respond to her question—well, I couldn’t really. I sighed. “So what do you know about where your mom worked?”
The arm came off her face and she sat up a bit. “You mean The Citadel? I like it there. It’s interesting.”
“It is, but that’s not what I meant. She only consulted there some days. What did she do the other days?”
Julianne shrugged. “She worked a lot, several times a year she traveled. Lori stayed with me then.”
“Do you know where she traveled?”
“Well, I guess she must have mapped the map at some time.”
“That’s a good point,” I said, nodding.
And that was also a troubling point because if Amy Castano had left a traceable traveling itinerary, someone could possibly look that up and, even without having the map, that someone could possibly locate where that DANGER spot was. Someone like me could do that, which wasn’t troubling. But if a not-me someone thought of the same idea….
“Can you give me anything else—can you think of anything?” I asked Julianne. “Even if it doesn’t seem important, tell me.”
Her face scrunched up a bit, and she did that quick finger-push at the eyeglass-bridge on her nose. “Hmm…there was one time—last year I think. My mom said she was going to Hera, and I always wanted to go there—see The Purple City, you know? Purple’s my favorite color. I kept saying that to her. But she wouldn’t let me come. I cried but she said, ‘No matter your tantrum, you’re not coming there’. I never got to see it. But my mom’s gone…. So I guess maybe now I could get to Hera someday.”
Maybe I could too, soon. …Well, really: there was no maybe about it now.
*
“Boss,” said Roberto in my office the next morning, “I want the weekend shift too. This is bullshit, you pulling me off. And for Darla? Who the hell’s she?” He’d stopped by before he would be heading off to the Castano place again.
“This isn’t your decision to make,” I said to him now, my eyes on the paperwork in front of me on the main desk. “If you don’t like it, there’s the door.” I pointed to it without looking up. “Darla did a job for me before you started working here. I trust her as much as I can trust anybody. This Castano job’s dangerous, or haven’t you noticed?” Now I looked up at him, shaking my head. “It’s like everyone’s losing their minds lately, and it’s a real pain in the ass. You really think you can do without sleep? What about your night job at Maximum?”
He shrugged his wide shoulders. “I told ’em I was taking a vacation. Hope I don’t have to go back ever. A kid like that—she should have a guard regardless, with all that money.”
“You’ve got dollar signs in your eyes. And I need you to have eyes in the back of your head. I also might have some Hera work for you.”
His frown was big and swift. “No way.”
“All right then. I’ll give the work to Mike. And I didn’t mean going there. Put away those dollar signs on your fucking head, and get back to fucking watching over the girl. And fucking keep in touch.”
“Boss, you got a foul mouth,” he said, and then he strode away—to the sound of my laughter filling the office.
*
I wished I could have laughed through the rest of that day, but that laughing just wasn’t meant to be.
Not too long after Roberto had gone, I was sitting at my desk going over paperwork the new bank job had just messengered me, when someone knocked on the outer office’s door.
I walked through that office, looked through the hall door’s peephole, and saw gray—a gray uniform. A gray Diamond Police uniform. And then the flash of the official whole-front-lapel DP badge.
Uh-oh. My hand shook on the lock as I opened it.
Two cops stood in the hall, a big guy and a big gal, both wide-shouldered and block-shaped. They looked like twins.
“Pia Senda?” the guy finally asked in a gruff voice.
“Yeah. What can I do for you?”
“We need to ask you some questions. Mind if we come in?” He didn’t wait for my response. He walked past me to the center of the outer office, spinning around a little, his eyes scanning the area. “Nice room,” he said.
“Um, not really,” I replied.
A small smile played around his mouth, a small sarcastic smile. Then the smile faded fast as he faced me. His partner walked up to him, facing me now too.
I closed the hall door and strode over to the chair behind the main desk.
Then the guy said, “I’m
Detective Burroughs, this is Detective Shaver. We’re here to ask you about a Millie Rodriguez.”
With all my might, I stopped myself from flinch-pausing as he said her name. My black-panted ass smoothly went from air to chair…at least I hoped it went smoothly.
I shrugged now. “What about her? She’s the janitor here. She cleans the toilets across the hall.”
“That’s correct. And she and her toilet brush have gone missing. We got a visit from this building’s manager, Don Smith. Millie Rodriguez is his cousin. He says she hasn’t shown up for work since Wednesday.”
“Well, I hadn’t noticed,” I said, when I really hadn’t noticed. …And that had been fucking stupid of me, especially because since Wednesday, the hall bathroom had been in an even dirtier state than normal. I should have put two-and-two together….
“No sign of her at her house, and no one’s seen her since Thursday,” Burroughs continued. “That day someone saw a slim woman with straight shoulder-length brown hair outside Rodriguez’s house. Description sounds a lot like you.”
“A lot like plenty of other people too,” I shot back. “But I admit I was there—to ask her about something.” My hands now longed to strangle Don’s skinny neck. Instead, I quickly swallowed my anger and kept my exterior cool. If I had to, I could be fake with the best of them; after all, I’d been trained for that. “But I have no idea where she is,” I said now, which was actually the truth.
“Miss Senda, we know why you went to see her. Smith admitted it. Guess the thought of her being hurt was more important than her being questioned about a burglary. Why didn’t you report the break-in?” I now imagined my fingers curled around Don’s neck….
“Well, color me embarrassed,” I said in a frank-sounding voice. “I’m supposed to be a security specialist and someone broke into my office. I’m not sure it would do too good for my reputation if word got out about that.”
“For your security-specialist information, Millie Rodriguez has a criminal history that goes back to the ancient Earth Egyptians,” Burroughs said. “Maybe you should have checked her out when you knew she’d be around sensitive information.”