Diana Tregarde - Burning Water Part 4

Di grew immediately thoughtful. "That's very welcome; I'd rather not do my karate exercises around all these antiques. I suppose " now it was her turn to look wry " Mark told you about that, too."

"Good guess," Mark grinned. "You'll find you don't have a lot of secrets Aunt Nita doesn't already know."

"I won't even try to keep any, then. Why waste energy?"

"I save the best for last," Aunt Nita said with a smile full of mischief. "And I had intended to use this as an inducement to tempt you to stay here instead of risking your 'virtue' as Mark would say, with him. That door there is the closet, but the one next to it is your own bathroom."

"Oh, Aunt Nita you know your s.e.x only too well!" Di laughed. "Given the choice between having my own bathroom and sharing one with anyone much less a man, who is likely to leave the cap off his toothpaste what would any sensible female do?"

THREE.

Mark was still a little fl.u.s.tered by Di's too-accurate reading of his emotional state. As he watched her unpack, he thought about the mess with Sherry, and wondered if she'd mind giving him a sympathetic ear on that one, too.

He decided, given that she'd brought it up, even if obliquely, that she probably wouldn't mind. And he wanted badly to talk to her about it. Di had a way of asking the right questions that let you at least get a new handle on things.

So he waited for her to finish getting her things put away, and watched patiently for the right opportunity.

It didn't take her long at all to get settled in; Mark noted that she still tended to travel light. Jeans, under-things, the ubiquitous leotards one good suit, the fancy s.h.i.+rts and gear that went with it.

There really wasn't much that was out-of-the-ordinary in her wardrobe; none of the trappings of occultism so beloved of movies and bad novels. No dark, hooded robes or strange costumes, although one of the things she'd brought with her the lab coat raised his curiosity. She had everything neatly stowed away in less than an hour. The only bag she did not unpack was the smaller of her two carryons.

He remembered that she had never allowed him to take it. What that signified he had no idea, although it did suggest that she had come prepared for trouble of a nonphysical nature. Certain of her "tools"

were very sensitive; things of that ilk she generally kept at home, where she could be certain they would remain uncontaminated. To have brought them with her proved that she was taking this whole problem with deadly seriousness.

That unopened bag went into the closet, still packed.

"Well," she said, folding her arms and pivoting to face him as he lounged on the room's short couch, "I don't know about you, but I'm hungry. I'm not sure what it was they were serving on that plane, but I doubt it was ever alive. I have the feeling that my so-called Reuben sandwich had been on enough planes to earn a frequent-flyer trip to Hawaii before I ever saw it. What are my options?"

"Aunt Nita will feed you breakfast and supper lunch will be on the department, and probably either hot dogs or our G.o.dawful cafeteria slop. But tonight how about Italian? My treat."

"You're on " Her purse was lying on the bureau by the door; she grabbed the strap and slung it over her shoulder in one smooth motion. On the way out she turned to check the door as she shut it behind them to make certain it had locked.

Then she dug briefly in the purse and came up with a vial of colorless liquid. Dipping her finger in it, she traced a wet line around the doorframe, then drew an invisible but intricate diagram on the door itself.

She accomplished the entire bit of rigamarole in something under thirty seconds; if he hadn't been standing right there and watching, he probably wouldn't have guessed she'd stopped long enough to do anything.

She glanced over at him as she stoppered the vial, and grimaced. "As they say 'just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean there isn't anyone out to get you.' When I get back I'll do a more thorough job and include the windows but the patterns on those ceremonial rugs will be enough to keep 'things'

out for the short time we'll be gone."

"The what? The rugs?"

She grinned. "That's what you get for being a medium instead of a sensitive. Or else you're so used to the vibes you don't notice them anymore. More of your aunt's instincts, I suspect those aren't just any rugs on the walls, those are medicine blankets. Good ones, too. I'd give a pretty to know how she got them."

"They were mostly given to her grandparents by the local Indians," he said, slowly. "They were pretty enlightened for their times, and unusual in the way they treated the natives like equals."

"I b.l.o.o.d.y well guess! There must be an interesting story there d.a.m.n! I wish I had more time "

"You could always write her and ask when this is all over," Mark pointed out. "Aunt Nita is one of the old-fas.h.i.+oned type of letter-writers; for her, six pages is short. She'd love to correspond with you."

"Good thought." Di brightened. "Well, I think I hear a lasagna calling me don't you?"

Mama Antonia's was a little family-operated place; Mama cooked, Papa was the waiter, three of the daughters were waitresses. It was a longtime favorite of Mark's. Papa welcomed him with a sly grin when he saw that Mark wasn't alone, and showed them to a table in the back corner, hedged in with ferns and lit mostly by candles.

"The lasagna is a good bet, provided you aren't worried about gaining weight."

She shrugged, and tossed her hair over her shoulders. "You'll be running it off me, I have the sinking feeling. Lasagna it is."

"Two " Mark told hovering Daughter Number Three, a pretty, plump little child of barely seventeen, named Angelina, "and the house red."

One dinner and half a bottle of wine later, Mark felt the last of his reticence vanis.h.i.+ng. Di sipped her own wine and looked at him with amused expectation.

"You have, I suspect, a personal problem?"

"I've got a question for you, first."

"Shoot."

"You're holding out on me." He'd known that from the way she'd clouded up when she'd talked about having heavy expenses. "Something's into you for a chunk of your income; I'd like to know what it is."

She looked uneasy and uncertain. "I "

"C'mon, Di, I'm a friend. I'm also a cop. Maybe I can help. You being blackmailed or something?"

"No." She looked at him, long and hard, then seemed to make up her mind. "No I've got a sick friend. Too sick to work anymore. He's got major-medical, but I'm covering his nonmedical bills for him.

Lenny's done me some pretty hefty favors in the past; I figured it was my duty to do the same. So I am.

Besides, like I said, he's a friend, and right now, he hasn't got a lot of those."

Mark put two and two together, and made the jump to twenty-two. "AIDS, huh?" he said, making it a statement.

Her eyes widened. "How did you guess?"

He shrugged. "Put 'male," friend,' and the fact you were p.u.s.s.yfooting around the subject together.

I've got no argument with that not like I'd have if somebody was putting heat on you. You do for friends, but you d.a.m.n well don't pay danegeld."

"Well it'll sure help if I can get as many of my expenses paid for as possible."

"No sweat; I'll figure a way to squeeze as much out of the department as I can. Like we're good for long-distance calls so long as they're partially business, okay? And if you need to FedEx something, we can probably put that on the account."

It seemed he had relieved her of a certain stress with his matter-of-fact acceptance of her situation.

"Very okay. Now what about that problem of yours?"

He sighed. "It seems pretty trivial stacked up against six corpses."

"But you'd like to talk about it anyway." She looked at him sharply, and bit her lip, as if to hide a smile. "Mark Valdez, I do believe you are in love!"

"Yeah I guess so " he said gloomily, and stared at his half -empty winegla.s.s. "Problem is, the lady is married. And has a kid."

"Oh, boy " She raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

"I do not go around seducing other people's wives." He glared at her, daring her to challenge him."I never suggested that you should."

He traced around the squares of the checked tablecloth with his finger. "The other problem is who she's married to. An old friend of mine going back to when I could barely toddle. He's a professional photographer, Robert Fernandez."

"The wunderkind? I'm impressed. You can't open a magazine without seeing his models these days." She gave him a second, sharper glance. "Mark, you are miserable, aren't you?" She shook her head sympathetically.

"I guess so."

"How long has this been going on?"

"Oh almost a year. Since he hit the bigtime. Back before then, I'd never met Sherry I knew about her, but I'd never met her. Robert well, he wasn't doing real well. I used to get him freelance work for the department when I could I fed him lunch about three times a week. Then he went off on that Mexico City trip, and came back with a portfolio full of gold."

"The travel spread. I heard about it set the Dallas sportswear mavins and the tourist business on their respective ears. Even made Time, as I recall. I've got a friend who has a travel agency those photographs more than doubled her Mexico bookings, and she told me it was the same across the country. Those four girls are just incredible "

"And they won't work with anybody but him, so he's got it made. He's banking enough to keep him comfortable from now until the end of the universe, even if he never works again. So he decided to start paying me back."

He laughed, but his heart wasn't in it. "Took me to you wouldn't know the name a fancy restaurant. The only reason I didn't get thrown out was because I was with him. I've never been so uncomfortable in my life. Rob figured that wasn't going to work, so he started inviting me over to his new place in the Bear Creek complex for dinner and drinks, and for the parties he's been throwing.

That's when I finally met Sherry."

He sighed, and chewed his thumbnail.

"How often are you seeing them?"

"A couple times a week; she's got a thing about being the gracious hostess. It's driving me nuts and I can't seem to stay away."

"Hm. I've heard that excuse before." When he looked up, the velvety brown eyes that met his over the candle flame were cynical.

"Yeah, I know." He sighed again. "It's just when I'm there the girls aren't. Rob's a real Don Juan; I know he's sleeping with all four of them, because he told me himself. Sherry knows too; it's making her wretched. She still loves him."

"One wonders why," Di remarked dryly, playing with a bit of candle wax. "It doesn't sound to me like he's worth keeping, money or no. I still don't understand why you keep inflicting mental pain on yourself by hanging out around her. Last time I looked, you weren't a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t."

"Because the girls never show when I'm invited. Whenever I'm over there, Sherry can forget about the girls for one evening, pretend they don't exist. It may be driving me insane, but it gives her a break, so I keep coming. Gives Bobby a break, too poor little guy. They keep wearing perfume and stuff that he's allergic to, and he's asthmatic. I think he's picking up on the tension between his parents; Sherry says he's been having really b.l.o.o.d.y nightmares every night. I like the little house-ape, anyway, and he knows it; thinks I'm better than Magnum P.I. And Rob sure doesn't pay much attention to him. s.h.i.+t, I'm not sure Rob's even sleeping in the same room with Sherry anymore. But I won't take advantage of the situation, dammit, I won't!"

Di echoed his sigh. "Lordy it's as bad as one of my novels. What a mess! I wonder "

She suddenly broke off the sentence to stare out the window, brow creased with puzzlement and something akin to pain.

"Di "

"There's something wrong." She frowned, her attention focusing inward, eyes plainly not seeing him.

"What?"

"I don't know it's too nebulous but Mark, I think we'd better be leaving, and fast "* * *

Dwight Rhoades should have been a happy man. He'd been promoted to DP manager of Ransome International just this past year the goal he'd been aiming at since he'd hired on. Data Processing had a.s.sumed an extraordinarily high level of visibility since the new director took over. The new man on top was convinced that the DP department was the one likely to make waves and save money in the future.

So Dwight was in a position to make his mark.

He closed and locked his gray office door, and shuddered. The way things looked now, the only mark he was likely to make was a blot when he hit the sidewalk.

The grey carpet m.u.f.fled his footsteps as he pa.s.sed the row after row of identical cubicles that held his staff during the day. If only he could make them over the way the corporate planners had made over the DP complex take away the spouses, the kids, the outside interests; make them into perfect servants of Ransome. Take everything away from them except a need to spend sixteen or twenty hours out of every twenty-four sitting in those little cubicles and producing the miracle that would save him.

Because it was going to take a miracle to save him.

He shouldered open the outside door, stepping out into the balmy evening. It slammed shut behind him of its own weight, the thud of its closing echoing across the parking lot.

It had a very ominous sound, like the lid slamming shut on a coffin.

He headed for his car, his own footsteps echoing in the silence.

d.a.m.n the new tax laws! That's what had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He'd agreed to a deadline set by guess and then undercut, a guarantee to get them into the system, a reckless deadline that had made the director's eyes light up the programmers had tried to tell him it wasn't possible, but he knew better. He'd seen them, seen the way they worked. They were too used to taking it easy, too used to putting in their eight hours and heading home. They thought they could put one over on him because he'd been in data management, not programming. But regs said salaried personnel weren't ent.i.tled to overtime pay, and that compensatory time off was up to the discretion of the manager. And this manager had had every intention of showing them what it was like to hustle.

Besides, jobs were scarce in Dallas, what with the oil business bottoming out. He had wagered they wouldn't dare revolt if they wanted to keep getting their paychecks. So when things began to get tight on the schedule, he'd just handed them the appropriate ultimatum put in the overtime, or look somewhere else for a job.

But now the project was weeks behind, every new body he'd hired had either quit ("You can take your six hours a day of uncompensated overtime and shove it up your wazoo," one had screamed at him, throwing his resignation on the desk) or gotten transferred. The director was beginning to wonder why he had such a high rate of resignations, and why the DP department had suddenly become such a hotbed of discontent. Antimanagement cartoons were showing up on bulletin boards and little signs and stickers ("Poor planning on your part does not const.i.tute an automatic emergency on mine," read one) were appearing in the director's interoffice mail. The old employees, the ones who had too much time in to quit, had come up with a new twist they were getting "sick" as soon as five o'clock came around migraines, allergies, nothing catching, nothing you could or couldn't prove. They went home "sick," and didn't "recover" until eight the next morning. And since they weren't getting "sick" during regular working hours, none of the regulations intended to keep salaried employees from pulling "sick- outs" like forcing them to come up with doctor's notes proving they were really suffering from some infirmity or illness could be enforced.

And as one told him insolently " You want to force me to work when I'm sick? Go ahead and try my lawyer says that would make me very rich."

Somehow, somewhere, he was going to have to find somebody to blame for this mess before the director landed the blame squarely on him.

He was so involved in trying to think of a scapegoat who was high enough in the hierarchy to be credible (but low enough that when it came to claim versus claim, the higher rank would win out) that he never heard the footsteps behind him and never felt the blow that knocked him out.

* * *When he woke up, the first thing that he noticed besides his aching head was that he was terribly cold...

He opened his eyes slowly, and moved his head just enough to look down at himself. He discovered that he had been stripped of all his clothing. He dropped his head back down; he'd been left lying on his back. He found himself staring up into a lacework of naked tree branches against the starry sky.

My G.o.d I've been mugged He started to lever himself up into a sitting position; his head throbbed so painfully it was all he could do to roll over onto his side. For a moment he couldn't even see; his eyes fogged over and his stomach churned sour bile.

When his vision cleared, he realized that it wasn't an ordinary mugging.

He could see quite clearly in the moonlight. He was wearing something. Not much. And not his underwear. A loincloth, the kind TV Indians wore; some strange jewelry. When he moved his head slightly, he realized there was something fastened on it, tied under his chin. He felt along his head, and encountered feathers. He grabbed the feathers and pulled the thing off it was some kind of weird headdress that would have looked about right on a Las Vegas showgirl. He dropped it on the sandy ground beside himself. There were more feathered things on his upper arms and on his ankles, but he ignored them since they weren't bothering him.

He tried to get his feet under him, and felt a tugging at his right ankle. That was when he discovered that one of the feathered ankle things concealed something else. He was tethered by his ankle to an enormous boulder beside him.