Clear Water (21 page)

Patrick turned red. “I do not,” he lied.

Whiskey looked at him, head cocked, and nodded. “Baby, be real, okay?”

Patrick turned redder and dropped his eyes. “Sorry, Fly Bait.”

Fly Bait’s smile turned crooked, and she stood and patted his shoulder. “No worries, kid. Other than that, you could be my second-favorite intern ever.”

With that, she wandered up to the deck to start washing and prepping the probes for another go round, and Patrick and Whiskey started setting the telemetry equipment up and checking the readouts. They were a team now, the three of them, and they worked very well together.

That night, Patrick took Whiskey deep into his throat and tickled his balls and even probed his back entrance for a little before Whiskey warned him to move.

Patrick didn’t.

Whiskey tried to pull his head away, and Patrick stayed there, Whiskey’s cock down his throat, until Whiskey had no choice but to blank out and come.

Patrick hauled himself up, gulping come and wiping his face of what had run down his chin, and Whiskey looked at him helplessly.

“Patrick… condom?”

Patrick looked at him, soft lower lip vulnerable and lake-blue eyes as big as they could get. “You’re as careful as I am,” he said seriously, swallowing again. He kept fighting his expression—the taste was obviously nothing like ice cream, but he apparently didn’t want to look grossed out. “You never go without one, you get your blood tested every six months, you haven’t had a lover in almost a year. I trust you. We have to wait six months until we’re sure I’m clear, but… but in the meantime… you can come in my mouth. I’ve never let anyone come in my mouth before, but
God,
I really wanted to taste you.”

Whiskey looked at him, surprised. He wondered how many people had underestimated Patrick’s intelligence—and the depth of his heart—because he tended to go
kersplang!
without warning. “Have I said the ‘L’ word yet?” he asked, and Patrick’s lake-blue eyes got even bigger.

“No,” he whispered.

“Well, you let me know when the word won’t make you jump off the boat, and I’ll say it to you then,” Whiskey temporized. God, he
really
wanted to say that word.

“I’ll say it first,” Patrick told him seriously. “That way you’ll know you won’t be hanging.”

Whiskey closed his eyes and kissed Patrick’s temple. “God, I love you. No return service necessary. Just know that it exists, okay?”

Patrick sighed into his arms and burrowed in deeply, in spite of the mugginess and the heat that not even the open hatch could dissipate.

“Of course I love you too,” he said, his voice muffled by Whiskey’s shoulder. “You didn’t really think I’d leave you hanging, did you?”

“No.” No. Of course not. Only an idiot would underestimate Patrick, all of him, from his rabbit-quick mind to the depths of his quick-beating heart.

Patrick
Atrazine is an Herbicide and ADHD is a Behavior Disorder and Some Plants are Illegal as Fuck

P
ATRICK
’
S
Walmart tennis shoes had gotten a workout that summer. They’d started out tacky and now were held together with duct tape and a prayer.

“Think they’re going to make it one more hike?” Whiskey asked as they were packing for the hike.

Patrick shrugged. He’d had blisters on his feet last time, but he’d put Band-Aids on the blistered parts today, so he figured they’d be okay. “I probably could have gone home and gotten more clothes,” he said apologetically. “Dad seems to think I’m coming back to live anyway—it’s not like I’ve been kicked out.”

Whiskey’s mouth twisted. “Maybe it was just as well you didn’t. Maybe your father needs some time to think about what he’s done.”

Patrick squinted at him. “So he’s been on fatherhood time-out? For what?”

“For being an asshole,” Whiskey muttered, and then he grabbed the backpack and thumped his way up to the deck.

Patrick sighed and got out the duct tape. He didn’t know what to do when Whiskey made pronouncements like that. No amount of explaining to the man that Patrick was deeply flawed and that his father had the right to be upset seemed to make Whiskey think any better of Shawn, and Patrick was starting to think that maybe he should just keep his mouth shut about what a fuckup he’d been.

Whiskey didn’t seem to think he was a fuckup, and Whiskey loved him. Maybe if you weren’t a fuckup for the person that loved you, you’d done enough right not to freak out about it. It sure was relaxing not having to apologize all the time.

Patrick didn’t want to say “I’m sorry!” anymore. He wanted Whiskey to tell him he was beautiful, and thank him for what they did in bed together, and touch his hands like they were precious. He had other ambitions—he wanted to teach yoga and he wanted to go to school (although he was starting to think biology might not be his thing) and he wanted to move out of his father’s house, but mostly, he just wanted Whiskey not to ever think he was too much a pain in the ass to keep.

He finished taping his shoes and popped up topside, grinning at Fly Bait. “Once more into the breach, my friends!” he quoted. “‘And fill the…’ uhm, you know. Fill something with your froggy dead.”

Fly Bait blinked. “Both gross and inaccurate. The Bard would be appalled.”

“Yeah, well, English wasn’t my thing anyway,” Patrick answered, not abashed in the least. “Whiskey, are we ready to go?”

“Yeah. Fly Bait?”

“Yeah, I’ll drive you wussies to the end of the damned service road.” She pitched her voice to mock them. “‘Help me, Fly Bait, I’m a big strong man and I can’t walk five miles all by my lonesome!’”

“Fly Bait, do you want to get the fuck out of Sacramento and back to Seattle so you can screw your girlfriend silly?”

“Got the keys right here, boss, get the hell in the car!”

Patrick was sort of sad during the fifteen-minute trip. This part of Sacramento was lonely and quiet, and he found he really liked it. The bare hills and critter-populated marshes were nice company, even in the summer, when every breath felt like solar winds from Azeroth. Whiskey had made some more comments about the boat being his home and Patrick fixing it up while he was gone. Patrick hadn’t gotten around to ripping out the carpet, but he’d started making lists of things they’d need, options for insulation, things they could do for the floor. He’d worked them out during the evenings, while Whiskey and Fly Bait were doing the really erudite shit they needed to do to give their results to the Department of Fish and Game, and then showed Whiskey when he was done.

Whiskey’s face lit up, and he said things like, “Can the carpet be blue? I know it’s stupid, but if you could find blue carpet, and then green tile, that would really be awesome.”

Fly Bait told him that he was more of a girl than she was, but then she said, “Yeah, but you’d have to rip the crappy faux paneling out and paint the walls ecru or eggshell to really make that work,” and Patrick knew she was getting as excited as they were.

So he had a hope that this might be his home, a hope that he and Whiskey might get a dog and throw it sticks and let it frighten the jackrabbits and chase the pheasants and he could commute to work and to school (not far, really, once you got on Highway 5) but no certainty. It seemed that an actual future with Whiskey, as opposed to just an interlude, was really too much to ask for.

On the way into the service road, they passed the great warehouse/factory where Patrick’s father made his living, and Patrick looked at it, feeling like the child he used to be when he visited the factory. It was huge, and the worker’s parking lot was filled to overflowing. Scary, scientific things were done inside, and the weight of a thousand people’s happiness rested on its back. It kept the valley clean(er), and it was more important, far more important, than Patrick’s happiness, and it always had been. He knew that. He’d understood that from a very young age.

But that didn’t stop him from looking at it with a little bit of loathing as they drove by. It made him feel small, and it made him feel worthless, and he hated that.

He looked to the front seat, where Whiskey and Fly Bait were currently engaged in a monosyllabic debate over the best way to canvass the area. Whiskey was a fan of the bigger-to-smaller concentric circles, and Fly Bait liked the series of longitudinal lines. Patrick left it up to them. If it had been him in charge, the route through the scorched hills and squishy marshes would have been meandering, like a frog up a tree or a rabbit through the brush, and that was a perfectly good route for wild things trying to escape, but not so great for a man trying to find things.

The road to the factory turned to dirt and old blacktop after it passed the entrance to the parking lot and then abruptly ended in a stand of marsh grass and cattails that sprouted from a runoff ditch that led to the river. It looked to be rough going, and in spite of the August heat, both Whiskey and Patrick had light denim shirts over their T-shirts to keep the Off-proof mosquitoes at bay.

They hopped out of the car, Whiskey gave an experimental try on the walkie-talkie, and they both plunged into the marsh.

Twenty minutes later, Fly Bait buzzed them from the Jack in the Box line to tell them that she was getting an iced soda the size of a swimming pool. Whiskey told her to fuck off and die and Patrick called her a ball-busting bitch, and she laughed until Whiskey killed the connection.

It was hot, it was humid, the marsh grass was as thick as a fucking razor-wire curtain, there was some sort of pungent tree/shrub in their way, and it was damned fucking hard to make a nice, neat little grid out of five square miles of hills, tributaries, and flatlands. Patrick pushed ahead grimly and Whiskey followed in the usual, moody way that possessed them when they were on the field.

It was Patrick who finally said, “Look, Whiskey—see those hills? Let’s go up there. The plants and shit stop before the top of the hill, and maybe we can get a better look at the land. It seems to me like we should have seen the warehouse by now. It’s like, we used to fly kites out here, right? I don’t remember
nearly
this many plants here.” Patrick looked around, his nose wrinkled. “What the hell kind of plants are these anyway?”

Whiskey’s eyes suddenly popped open. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he muttered. “I was so up in my own head I had it shoved up my ass. Jesus, Patrick—you were dating a drug dealer—don’t you recognize these things?”

Patrick looked at the plants again. They were big—human-sized big, with big, flat, five-fingered green leaves. They’d gone to seed, and the seeds were tiny little pebbles clustered at the apex of bunches of leaves.

“No,” he said. “Should I?”

Whiskey shook his head. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck… atrazine. An illegal pesticide. Baking soda. What do you use baking soda with?”

It was like he was speaking a foreign language. “To clean the frog boxes?” Patrick asked, a little desperately.

Whiskey looked at him and shook his head. “Patrick, this is actually bigger than the frogs, if you can believe that. Come on—let’s look at that rise. But stay under cover of the giant seeding pot plants. I don’t want to attract the attention of the drug dealers who are probably swarming the fucking warehouse as we speak.”

Patrick blinked at him and then blinked at the marijuana plants they’d been shouldering their way through. “Oh Jesus fuck me sideways,” he said with no inflection at all. He was actually too freaked out to get upset. In fact, he had the most absurd urge to huddle under one of those obscenely large plants and hide in hopes that the bad guys weren’t going to come do bad things.

He looked up at Whiskey and said, “Call Fly Bait. Call her now. Tell her to come pick us up.”

Whiskey grimaced. “Let’s get up to the rise, okay? I may have to tell her to go pick up a few things first.”

“Like
what
?” Patrick asked, the panic in his voice making it thin and bright-edged. “A lighter and rolling papers?”

Whiskey’s laughter had the same bright edge. “Uhm,
dude.
There’s not enough college dorms in the
world.
No. Let’s get to the top of the hill and we’ll see if we can even sneak out of here, okay?”

Patrick shouldered the backpack and followed him, muttering to himself. “Sneak out of here? Why would we need to sneak out of here? I mean, we got
in
here, right? Why would sneaking be involv—oh. Jesus, fuck me—”

“Frontways, sideways, backways, and over the fucking table,” Whiskey breathed. They didn’t even need to get to the bare top of the hill to see what the foliage had blocked from them before.

The “abandoned” warehouse was not abandoned anymore. It hadn’t
been
abandoned for probably quite some time, if the size of those plants meant anything at all. There was activity there—muscular guys hauling kilo bags from the warehouse to stack on pallets and other guys stacking the pallets into a motley assortment of big serial-killer vans, minivans, and battered SUVs.

There was even a steward of sorts going from car to car with a clipboard, apparently counting how many bags made it into how many vehicles. He looked sort of familiar, but Patrick didn’t dwell on it because there were also two guys checking out what appeared to be a tracking monitor of some sort and heading in their direction. Well, shit. Odds were really good pot plants weren’t the only thing they’d stepped on as they’d crashed through the foliage.

Whiskey didn’t waste any time after that. “Fly Bait?” he said, turning down the feed so he had to hold the thing up to his ear. “Yeah, shut up. I want you to go get the fucking cops, the fucking SWAT team, and the fucking National Guard and bring them back here with drug-sniffing dogs and a hostage negotiator or some shit like that. We are in deep kimchi, baby, and we’re gonna need your help getting out.”

Whiskey turned off the walkie’s reception, tossed it into the bushes, and then made eye contact with Patrick.

“Play it stupid,” he said to Patrick, and Patrick understood what he meant even while he realized that it was completely moot.

“I already did,” he said, looking at the
very
familiar figure stalking among the grunt workers in the fairly large operation below them. Besides the clipboard, he had dyed black hair and unfortunately sallow skin, even from the distance of the hilltop. “I think I dated someone in the chain of command.”