Authors: Finder
I rolled over abruptly, but in the opposite direction from the one I'd thought about a minute before.
Sunny said, "It's all right. Go to sleep."
I didn't think I could anymore. But as I waited for sleep, I heard myself say, "I didn't even think I was on my way here. I was just getting away. I didn't know I was getting away to Bordertown. I was
hitchhiking—I got one of those rides that your parents tell you about to try to scare you off hitching.
God, if anybody ever got one, of course I would."
She didn't say anything at first; then she said, "You don't have to tell me this."
"I know I don't have to," I said, and sucked in my breath against the pain. "That's why I can."
If I had to,
I'd fight it like death itself. But with you, I don't have to
. That was what I was echoing: Tick-Tick's words.
I pressed on. "I'd taken some recreational drug, I don't remember what. I was almost always on something back then. I thought I could turn off the finding ability with it, if I just found the right thing to
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take. And
this guy stopped for me in his big damned boat of a car, and he had some hash, a
nd some pills
of some kind, and
the next thing I knew it was night, and he'd pulled off the highway down a
dirt road
by a creek.
"I can't remember it all. I know I woke up and looked out the car window, and saw him setting up a camp under the trees. I got the door open and tried to walk away, back up the dirt road, but walking was… I couldn't coordinate. And the driver spotted me, ran up and grabbed me by the collar and threw me out of the road, into the grass. I kept trying to get up and he kept hitting me. Then I was further off the road, where he was pitching camp, and he had something in his hand, and I was so scared. I felt something under me, in the grass. I picked it up and swung it at him. I didn't know until it hit him that it was his camp hatchet."
I stopped for breath, and Sunny didn't say anything. Maybe she'd fallen asleep. Maybe I was reciting this for my own benefit, and in the morning I'd discover that I'd gotten it off my chest without ever spilling the secret. "The next thing I remember was trying to get his car, his huge damned Chrysler with its damned stick shift, turned around at the end of the dirt road without getting stuck in a ditch, and the headlights lighting up the long grass and nothing past it. I just knew it would be like in a horror movie, that he'd come lurching up out of that grass with his hatchet still stuck in him, and break the windshield and kill me."
"Instead, you got the car turned around and came here," she said behind me. I rolled over and stared at her. She was propped up on her elbows, gazing at the brightening window. "And as soon as you got here, it never happened. You came to the Borderlands, and your past was cut off like six inches of hair.
It never happened at all."
We lay there like that for what might have been a long time. Then she said, "Go to sleep," and I curled up and obeyed orders.
I woke up several hours later with sun knocking on the blinds. I was alone in bed. I remembered whose bed it was pretty quickly, and I remembered at about the same moment that there wasn't any Tick-Tick anymore.
The first fact warred with the second, and won. I couldn't lie there staring at somebody else's ceiling all day, the way I could have if it had been
my
ceiling. But I thought about the logistics of it, and felt a whole new reluctance to get up. My clothes were on the back porch, and my borrowed robe was in the living room. I hadn't realized before just how much ambiguity there was in going naked in the house of a woman you'd just had sex with for the first time, who you might be in love with but who you were pretty sure was not in love with you.
I worked up enough courage to slink out into the hall. There were noises coming from the kitchen, but I made it to the living room and got the robe on without seeing her. The white one was still on the floor.
I headed for the kitchen, trying to make a little noise myself. "Good morning," said Sunny. "There's coffee left over." She was dressed: gray pants, a green Boiled in Lead T-shirt, and her shoulder holster.
Fully armored.
"You've had less sleep than me." Now
that
was clever. What the hell had I been trying to say?
She shrugged. "Messenger came this morning." She poured a cup and handed it to me.
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"Where from?" I as
ked, before it occurred to me that if she wanted me to know, she'd tell me. "
Never
She seemed to think about it for a second before she said, "Ms. Wu sent a note. She thinks Linn's come through the worst of it."
I looked into my coffee cup and throttled my most primitive worst instinct, and said, "I'm glad." She had seen my friend die, and knew that hers might, as wellùmight already have died, and the word not
reached her yet. Tick-Tick's death and the threat of Linn's had been in the mix last night, in the place where my grip on Sunny met her grip on me. Now she could stop being afraid, and I could try not to think,
Why does her friend get to live, when mine died
?
"I know," she said, in the matter-of-fact voice she'd been using all morning, and I got the feeling she wasn't answering what I'd said out loud.
I fetched my clothes in off the line and put them on in the bathroom. The jeans were still damp around the waistband, but they'd warm up, if they didn't actually dry.
"Breakfast?" Sunny asked when I came out.
I tried to imagine sitting across the table from her, the effort involved in not crying and not saying any of the wrong things. "I don't think so. What do you need me to do today?"
She took a gray linen jacket off the back of a chair and shrugged it on. It lay nicely over the holster.
"Nothing yet, though if anything goes wrong, that'll change. Today's work is tricky business, and some of it I have to do alone. I need to get a lid on this before Toby finds the lab has been sealed, or has the chance to talk to his boy biochemist and maybe convince him to break his oath and blab. I have to get authorization to lock up a cop. Once I get it, I have to move like hell to get to him before somebody tells him about it. In the meantime, I want to look like business as usual and you're," she said apologetically,
"unusual."
"You have to get permission to jail a cop?"
"Yeah." She smiled that smile that wasn't amused, and added, "It's a wonderful world. That's because none of the stations are in very good communication with any of the rest of the stations, and they say if we mess with each other without some higher office giving the go-ahead, we'll screw up ongoing
investigations. That's what they say."
"Might be true."
"Sure. And maybe you
can
keep water from boiling by watching it." She checked the back door lock, and asked, "Where can I find you if I need you?"
"My apartment, on Sentiment."
"I know where it is."
Yes, she knew. "Can I drop you someplace?"
She shook her head. "I've got a neighbor who used to rent me his bike every time I had to pull the engine
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on the T
riumph. I'll check with him."
She let me out the front, and I walked down the stairs alone. So what were the most stressful experiences in most people's lives? Death, love, job changes, and moving? Well, the job was kind of built in, but maybe I could find a new apartment and complete the set. I told myself that Tick-Tick's bike was happy to see me; at least it started right up. My God, the first time it didn't was going to be a landmark bad day.
When I got to my block I stopped at the market, which had been a bar when the World had just been the world, and Bordertown just another city. Now the shelves behind the bar in front of the mirror were the candy counter. Oswald Assai was the only member of the family in the place, though there was a hired kid stocking shelves. Ozzie greeted me noisily, and asked me how I was, and I wished I'd gone for groceries in some part of town where I didn't know anybody.
"I'm fine, Ozzie. Is there any beer in?"
"Yeah, Fern Hobarth brought in some brown ale yesterday. You want that?"
"Sure. Six—no, make it twelve." After all, I'd probably be getting condolence callers. Oh, God, what a horrible, horrible thought.
I shopped without an appetite, which always makes for an interesting icebox. Ozzie helped me carry the stuff to the sidecar. I was afraid he'd bring that up, what was I doing with the Ticker's bike, or was she here? But I complimented him on his hair, and the subject didn't come up.
It was my apartment. It was just my apartment, and nothing had changed, and maybe if I went up to the roof to work on my tan, maybe everything would start over and I could make it come out different this time. I put the food away and started to clean house.
The laundry and the bedclothes went first, and the rugs and towels. I separated them into loads on the picnic table in the back yard, and started the first one thrashing in the gas-powered washer on the porch.
Then I took the cotton mattress out and beat it, and left it to air in the sun, put another load in and hung the first one to dry. I went back upstairs and took a broom to the cobwebs in the corners, moved all the furniture (there wasn't really very much) into the hall and swept the floor. Downstairs again, to tend the next load of laundry and get the bucket and the scrub mop.
I washed the windows, which I could almost sort of remember how to do. I was surprised at how well the wood floor boards responded to the mop; I'd have sworn they'd never been that color while I lived there.
By then I needed another shower, but there was no point in having one before I finished. I was careful not to think of how nice it would be to use Sunny's shower again, where the water was actually hot. I changed into cutoffs and dropped last night's shirt and jeans off the upstairs porch railing onto the last load of laundry. There went another piece of history; there went another inch of hair.
I came back down the hall to find that someone had threaded his way through my furniture and was
knocking on my front door. It was a tall, thin person with long white hair, and for a second in the dim hallway I didn't recognize him. But he turned when I came near, and I saw Captain Hawthorn's long face and severe features. My heart gave an ugly kick, but he smiled when he saw me, that annoying warm paternal smile, and I relaxed.
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"Capta
in Hawthorn. Hullo." He put out his hand, so I gave him mine. I was suddenly afraid that this
might be a s
ympathy visit—but no, it was the wrong smile. "Come on
in—oh, I guess you'd better bring
a chair."
He laughed and picked up the big armchair, which didn't seem to give him any trouble. "Where do you want it?"