Cottonwood (40 page)

But when the doors did open, they opened on Piotr Lantz, the kind of evil that stomped on people until their ribs broke and their livers ruptured.

Piotr greeted her with a grunt and a distracted crawl of his eyes over her body. When he got to her face, he paused, then thinly smiled. “Penny for your thoughts, Pollyanna.”

“I was wondering if you ever wore a suit.”

Piotr looked down at himself—khaki combat fatigues and flak vest, fashionably accented with rifle, handgun, bowie knife and boots—and then up at her again. “I don’t remember asking you to the prom.”

“I was just wondering. Do you?”

He shrugged, escorting her out into the hall (which was well-lit and nicely painted, even if it was concrete). “Been known to happen. Funerals, mostly.”

She put out her hand, walking.

“What’s that about?” he asked warily.

“My penny.”

His laughter was a doggish bark, but he dug into his pocket and found her one. “I like you,” he said, this man who had nearly killed her and left her dog hanging by his collar on her back fence. “You believe that?”

“Yes.” She did.

“Tell you what, princess. Friday night, me and you. They gotta have someplace fancy in this cow-fucking town,” he said, glancing back at Beech-or-Birch, trailing along behind them. “Got any recommendations?”

Her supervisor’s smile was gone, but other than his tight jaw and brick-red ears, he showed no sign that he’d heard the insult. “There’s a dinner club in Wheaton with a decent prime rib, but I believe you have to be a member.”

Piotr did not appear to consider achieving membership in the next four days as any real obstacle. He merely grunted and turned his appraising eyes back on Sarah’s shirt-front. “Seven o’clock,” he told her boobs. “Wear something tight. I gotta dress up, so do you.”

“Do you have a favorite color?” Sarah asked evenly. “As long as I’m buying a dress.”

His grin sharpened into a leer that suggested she wouldn’t be in it long enough to matter. “I’m easy to please, princess.”

She forced a smile back at him. “Seven o’clock it is.”

He moved on ahead of her to swipe his passcard through a reader and open a door. He held it for her. A true gentleman. Sarah found herself thinking fleetingly of her sister and Kate’s unspoken habit of ensuring employment by sleeping with her boss. Sarah had never acknowledged that she knew about the affairs, but they’d both heard their mom’s “respect yourself and your body” speech and it was hard not to judge. And now here she was, accepting without question the prospect of going to bed with this thug—date was nothing but a crude euphemism in Piotr’s mouth, not that he’d actually used the word date—so that her job could not be threatened. As soon as Sanford had his little machine fixed, he’d need her to help him get out. She could put up with anything until then. Anything.

She smiled at him as she walked through the door under Piotr’s arm, thinking how much she hoped they served drinks at this dinner club. The sex was going to be hurtful and unpleasant and she had absolutely no intention of being sober when it happened.

Van Meyer was waiting in the hallway on the other side. A short hallway, wide, with black lines painted on the floor, running parallel to the walls, bisecting the small space into something even smaller. It felt claustrophobic and institutional, miles away from the manicured lawns and happy families of IBI’s residential neighborhood somewhere above them.

It occurred to her in a distant way that no one knew she was here, not really. No one but the driver who had dropped her off and then driven himself away. He’d had his orders, he’d followed them, and what happened after that was really none of his concern.

She looked back, hoping to catch some glimpse of her floor supervisor’s face—still a witness, even if she didn’t know his name—but saw only Piotr in front of a closed, locked door with his arms folded across his chest. Not smiling. Not really paying attention. Idly perusing the ass he’d be tapping Friday night, maybe, but only as a means of passing the time until he was needed again.

Sarah looked back at van Meyer, who simply extended his hand and waited for her. She took a bracing breath of stale, subterranean air, put her faith in her big, honest eyes, and took it.

His hand engulfed hers, leathery and much stronger than it appeared. Not a businessman’s grip. He’d had a manicure recently, square-cut and professional. His thumbnail was warped down at the cuticle; he’d been burnt or scarred or something once, but long ago, and now all that was left was a wrinkle in his manicure.

His other hand came up and closed over the first, trapping her little hand between them. “How do you feel?”

“I’m fine,” she said mechanically and could have kicked herself. She was not supposed to be fine. She was supposed to be broken. “I’m tired, mostly. More than I thought I would be.”

“I will not keep you long. I must say,” he went on, still holding her hand, holding her. “I was surprised to see you so soon. It was expected that you should take time off. Your health is not to be risked.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with myself at home.”

“This I understand very well.” He nodded to prove it, but his eyes showed no sympathy. They just kept prying around the edges of the honesty in hers. “Still, I have concern. IBI is not the family I would like it to be, but you, Miss Fowler, you have become very personal to me.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He stared her down, smiling, stroking her hand, and when her eyes at last dropped, the teeth on that trap tightened. “Piotr tells me you had a visitor during your stay in hospital.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bug.”

“One of my clients. Mr. Sanford. Mostly his child.” There was no point trying to hide their identities, but she hoped to lessen the significance of this information with a tentative smile and half a confession: “I like working with the children. I know it isn’t professional of me, but they’re just so small and cute.”

Van Meyer laughed and nodded. “A devious trait to be found always in nature,
nee
? Bear cub is soft and fuzzy, crocodile crawling out of egg peeps like chick, and who deny big eyes and ugly-sweet face of young chimpanzee? Ah, but all these animals remain wild. When they grow up, the human who raise them is often only animal, only meat. The creatures we love do not always love us back.”

Sarah bit at her lip, wondering how far to take this, how much risk was too much, or not enough. “But these aren’t creatures, Mr. van Meyer. They’re aliens…they’re bugs…but they’re still people.”

“
Ja
. And so you form attachment and so perhaps it is true they form attachment to you. Did you go to see your small bug today?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was he glad to see you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And his father?”

Sarah kept her eyes on him with great effort, trusting to her honest face to hide her twisting stomach, her racing heart. “He let me in.”

“This is not the same thing as affection.” Van Meyer nodded, stroking her hand again. “I am pleased to see you understand that.” His expression grew even more serious and he leaned close, uncomfortably intimate in this small space. “I say that you are personal to me,
ja
? I take personal pride in the good work that you do here. And I take personal offense at the harm that befall you.”

He straightened, released her hand, and opened the door behind him. He gestured. Ladies first; another gentleman. Sarah saw no alternative but to enter. She recognized the room without ever being in it before. She’d seen it a thousand times, in a thousand different bad movies. Sometimes it was in a torchlit cave and sometimes on a spaceship, but the overall function was the same: an interrogation chamber with sinister figures in the foreground and helpless captive behind bars. She may have gasped. She knew she stared. And when van Meyer offered a chair in his concerned grandfatherly way, she sat without really being conscious of his presence.

Baccus. The plates over her chest were cracked and shiny with leaking blood. The side of her face had swollen, pushing one eye shut. She stood with her arms raised and her head down, breathing hard and drooling blood and chaw in a slow trickle down her own chest.

“You are quite safe,” van Meyer was telling her. “It cannot escape, cannot reach you. Piotr, water for Miss Fowler.”

“I’m okay,” Sarah said somewhere in the world and all the fine gentlemen in the room consoled her until Piotr came back with a bottle of water. The thought of drinking it in front of Baccus was obscene; she held onto it with both hands instead, grateful for something, anything, to hold.

“Turn,” van Meyer said, and as Baccus faced the wall, he rested his hand gently on Sarah’s shoulder. “You will wish to enter his number, my dear. You may not realize, but you know this bug.”

“It’s one of my clients,” she managed. She did not bother with her paz. “It’s Mr. Baccus. What is he doing here?”

“A fair question, but I think better question would be where did we find him, hmm? On what side of containment wall?”

Sarah looked up at him, baffled. “He was out? What…How?”

“Another fair question, and another better one: Why?” Van Meyer patted her shoulder and gestured past all these smiling people at the silent, drooling alien in her cage. “Miss Fowler, we have found the bug who do you such grievous injury.”

The words circled several times before their meaning finally found her.

“No,” said Sarah and shook her head for good measure. “No, that’s not…It wasn’t…It was just some guys!”

“Oh?” Deeply concerned, van Meyer retreated to consult his own paz, a Juno model, with a floating holograph screen that made it impossible not to recognize Sarah’s own police report. “Then you do see your attacker?”

“No, but—”

“You hear him, then.”

“Not a word. Not a sound!” Sarah added, pointing at Baccus, whose wet breaths hitched in a flinch. “I would have heard that. I would have heard clicking or…or something! I would have known!”

“Even the bug can be quiet when stalking. But we do not require that you identify, Miss Fowler,” van Meyer said, tucking his paz away in his jacket. “We have indisputable proof already. We have the bug himself and we have his confession.”

“What…?” Sarah looked at Baccus. She would not meet her eyes.

“Speak,” van Meyer said. He did not raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

“I did it,” Baccus said, as if he’d pulled a hidden string in her back. She choked on the words a little, spat blood on herself and said, louder, “I hurt the caseworker.”

Sarah’s head began to shake back and forth again. She couldn’t seem to stop.

“Tell us why,” van Meyer prompted.

“She brought food. I thought she would have more food where she lived. I went to her house but I did not find food. When she came home, I hurt her.” Baccus raised her eyes haltingly to van Meyer and dropped them again. “I kicked her. It was me. I ran.”

“No. It…no. How did…How did he know where I lived?” Sarah demanded. Not she. If they found out Baccus was female, it wouldn’t be from Sarah, no matter what they said or did. She would go on a hundred dates with Piotr Lantz stone-cold sober before she let that slip. “How could he possibly know where I lived?”

“This we do not know,” van Meyer admitted as Baccus just stood there. “After so many years, there is still so much we do not know. Perhaps he track you by scent or perhaps he simply follow you home. Perhaps—”

“Fagin!” Sarah blurted. “They shot Fagin, sir! They hung my dog up on the fence and they shot him!”

Van Meyer glanced at Piotr. Piotr shrugged and said, “The dog was a mess. You told the cops you were robbed, naturally we’re gonna think it got shot up. If we knew it was a bug the whole time, we’d have known the dog really got chewed on.”

“I did it,” Baccus began. “I ate the dog.”

“See?”

“There were shell casings everywhere!” Sarah said, her voice rising. “I had to clean them up! He got
shot
!”

Some of the other people in the room shifted. Someone whispered to someone else. Baccus breathed and bled. Van Meyer and Piotr just looked at each other.

At last, van Meyer turned and looked at the alien in the cage. He said, calmly, “Where do you get the gun?”

Baccus looked at Sarah. Sarah shook her head. Baccus looked back at van Meyer and said, “I found it in the Heaps?”

“No,” said Sarah. “Oh no. No.”

“Go on.”

“IBI killed my eggs. I killed the caseworker’s dog. I did it.” Baccus looked at Sarah again. She lowered her arms slowly to her sides. “I knew they would catch me,” she said. “So I did what I could.” She wiped at her mouth, studied the blood this left on her hand, and said, haltingly, “I’m not sorry.”

At some signal unseen by Sarah, the other men in the room stepped up to the bars of the cage (which were, Sarah noted with surreal clarity, clearly wide enough for a person to slip through. They had been built only to hold aliens, built to hold bugs) and put Baccus in restraints. They weren’t mean about it, which actually made it seem worse. They gave orders without shouting, refrained from epithets, never even touched their weapons, much less brandished them. Baccus made it easy for them; her head was ducked, her antennae low and her delicate claspers tucked up tight. She followed them from the cell without coaching, walked between them into the hall, and was lost behind the quietly closing door.

‘I will never see her again,’ thought Sarah. It sounded, even in the privacy of her own head, unforgivably theatrical and even a little silly. This wasn’t one of her stupid movies. This was America. This was the twenty-first century and these were visitors. This was the real world so this wasn’t really happening.

“Where are you taking him?” Sarah asked, knowing he would lie.

“To speak with legal advocate and then to counseling center. A very pretty name for prison,
nee
? But there is no more we can do.” Van Meyer rolled his shoulders in an elegant sort of shrug. “The bug has violent nature which defy all rehabilitation.”

“I don’t believe he did it. I haven’t heard any proof.”

“Loyalty to client can be admirable, Miss Fowler, but please do not be foolish.” Van Meyer studied her as she sat numbly gripping her water bottle and finally sighed. “I had hoped it would comfort you to know that your attacker had been caught, that he would never hurt you again. I would seem to have made error.”