Boyfriend from Hell (Saturn's Daughters) (10 page)

“Saturn is a damned planet!” I shouted, but the image was gone. I wanted him back. Other people just
told their boyfriends to go to hell and could take back the words later and make up. Me, I had to actually send mine there.

I wasn’t ready to believe I was actually seeing Max and not experiencing hallucination-by-guilt, but where had the Satan/Saturn nonsense come from? Maybe that weird Themis message had sunk into my psyche and my hallucination had reproduced it. In mirror writing? I’d have to ask someone else if they could see it, but I didn’t want confirmation of my mental state.

Thinking uneasily of the website about Saturn’s daughters dying young, I figured my mind was simply feeding on my fears, like nightmares do.

Not entirely certain proactive insanity was working for me, I tucked Milo into my messenger bag and headed downstairs with catching the bus in mind.

Andre was waiting for me in the parking lot. He threw open the passenger door and gestured for me to climb in.

I had half a mind to walk on by, but he was my boss. My lunacy has its limits. I slid in and lifted my eyebrows questioningly.

“We have to talk.” His pretty-boy visage looked grim as he shifted into gear and peeled onto the street.

My stomach knotted. If he meant to fire me, I’d never find another job as convenient as this one. Sure, the pay sucked, but at what part-time job didn’t it? There probably ought to be combat pay included for working in the Zone, but nasty jobs like mine went to beggars who didn’t have the resources to fight for their rights.

“There are reporters crawling all over Edgewater Street,” he finally said when I refused to encourage him. “They’re looking for you, but they’re asking questions we don’t want asked.”

I hid my surprise. Had Jane really sicced her fellows on the story I’d fed her? Or was this a different vendetta, created by the little episode last night?

“Personally, I think it’s time people started asking questions,” I said, before I could bite my tongue. So much for keeping my head down and my mouth shut.

“You want to ask questions, ask me. But the media is only out for sensationalism and page views, and that’s not going to help us. Next thing we know, they’ll have a congressional committee down there wanting to turn the area into a landfill. Then where will we go?”

With his serious face on, Andre looked manly and intriguing instead of sly and irritating. I still didn’t trust him. “You’ll just take all the money they give you for your property and find another impoverished slum to infect. Do you really care what happens to the rest of us?”

“The Miss Snide act is going nowhere,” he informed me curtly. “You know nothing about the Zone. You don’t live there. You come and go without getting to know any of us. And that’s not lasting much longer. I’ve set up an office for you at Chesty’s. Everyone will carry their cash receipts to you there so you don’t have to be on the street until the reporters clear off.”

“Wow, my very own office,” I chirruped, clearly out of my mind. Was I looking to get fired? “Does it come with my very own porn on the walls?”

“I’m covering your ass, which isn’t half as good as the ones on Ernesto’s walls, so shut up until you know what you’re talking about. Your fancy college degrees haven’t taught you anything about real life.”

Andre looked pretty hot when he was mad. Not John Wayne studly, but better in a slick
Maverick
sort of way.

“I think I’ve seen plenty of real life,” I reminded him. “It sucks. And it’s getting suckier by the minute.”

“That’s the kind of argument they teach you in law school these days?” he asked with almost a laugh. Maybe a snort of derision. “I think I like you better when you don’t say anything, but you have to keep your eyes and ears open if you want to stay alive.”

“Will you quit being so damned mysterious and just spill it?” I demanded as he swung into Chesty’s parking lot. “I’ve had a crappy week, and I’m starting to really, really hate changes in my routine.”

“We’ll talk tonight. I’ll have Cora make the bank deposit. I’ll buy you dinner at Chesty’s.” He stopped the car and waited for me to climb out.

“I have plans for later this afternoon,” I informed him, aiming for aloof and not pathetic, and not exiting at his command. “What time do you want me back for dinner?”

“I don’t want you on the street at all!” he shouted.

Nice. I’d finally crawled under his skin. I kind of liked that, since he’d already gotten under mine. “Well, isn’t that just ducky dandy. You want to tell Geek Boy to come visit me at Chesty’s so I don’t have to go to him?” That was the unoriginal company name on the
business card Cora had given me. Since she said the owner knew Andre, I assumed he knew Boris.

Andre clenched the steering wheel in much the same way Max had that last time I’d seen him alive. I took the emotional punch to the gut without flinching. Much. Milo poked his head out of my bag to see what was happening. I scratched the spot between his ears and hoped it would unknot my insides.

“What the devil do you want with my geek?” he asked, narrowing his eyes and releasing his grip on the wheel.

“You don’t own me, Andre,” I warned. “You don’t have to know everything about me. Don’t even try or I’m outta here.” I gathered my courage and asked, “Or is that what this is all about? Do you want me gone? If you do, say so. I’ll go.”

I tried not to hold my breath. I was just starting to think I had friends down here. If he fired me, I’d probably never see them again. I desperately needed a few friends right now.

“You are the most obtuse female who ever walked the planet!” He grabbed the back of my head, dragged me half across the console, and planted a hot one on my mouth.

Before I could even respond to the electric shock spiraling from my lips down to lower parts, he jerked away. “I’ll send the geek to your office. Get inside before that flake over there recognizes you.”

My head was reeling so badly that I could barely glance out the window to the blue-jeaned kid studying Andre’s slick Mercedes. I pushed open the door and
slid out without comment. I was so not ever opening my mouth again.

Andre kept the car between me and the door until I slipped inside. He’d probably only been hiding me from reporters, and I’d been imagining the passion but . . . wow. Just wow. Four-eyed gimps simply didn’t get kissed by sex machines. Ever.

Still trying to wrap my head around that spit exchange, I checked the darkened interior of the club. Sarah was sweeping the floor on the far end by the stage. She glanced up at my entrance.

I’d have to open my mouth to talk. I couldn’t walk around in a daze like a high school nitwit who’d just locked braces. I didn’t want to be fired, but I didn’t want Andre taking advantage of me, either. My head said,
Back off.
The rest of me wasn’t so sure about that. The man kissed like dynamite.

He kissed like dynamite because he had experience, my head corrected.
And he’s dangerous.
The man had had more women than I’d had years, months, and probably weeks. I didn’t want to be anyone’s special of the day.

“Andre says I have an office,” I said to Sarah, passing the bare tables with chairs slung over them. For some reason, half the tables had turned a bilious green—the Zone’s opinion of last night’s act or the food? “Tell me it isn’t the broom closet.”

Sarah smiled tentatively and laid the broom against a table. “Andre had them partition off Ernesto’s office. I’ll show you.”

“Did you hear any of the discussion?” I asked,
feeling safe talking to someone who practically disappeared into the woodwork, except for the hooters, of course. Maybe Sarah’s diffidence was a result of the stares she attracted. “Why did they decide I needed to be hidden?”

“I try not to listen,” she said apologetically. “It’s not any of my business.”

“I’m beginning to suspect that in the Zone, everything is everyone’s business. Keep your ears open, if only for your own good.” I was regurgitating Andre’s earlier speech, I realized. I hated to admit it, but he had a point.

A strand of her frizzy hair fell across her face as she stared at her feet and nodded. She was starting to remind me too much of me, and I wasn’t liking the picture.

Ernesto had a fancy mahogany paneled door with an engraved brass name plaque. I entertained evil ideas of insisting on a plaque of my own as Sarah turned the knob and showed me what they’d done.

The front right-hand corner had been partitioned off into a cubicle so my desk was the first anyone saw as the door opened. Ernesto would be livid. I wasn’t much happier, since my cubicle had no door and no way of shutting out his wandering hands. I contemplated fastening a paintball machine gun to the battered metal desk they’d found for me. The ugly fluorescent overheads cast a bad light across both spaces. Ernesto’s desk was black and shiny and littered with expensive chrome accessories. Mine was empty.

Still, it was a desk, when I’d had none before. I just couldn’t figure out what I’d do with it.

A male voice suddenly erupted from the barroom. “Anyone here?”

In an instant, Sarah had vanished. In her place, a chimpanzee wearing baggy jeans clung to the top of the partition.

And just like that, with Milo leaping from my bag to examine the chimp’s feet, I knew I could no longer blame these Zone phenomena on hallucinations.

“O
kay, I didn’t see that coming,” I muttered, wondering if I ought to reach up and haul the chimpanzee down before she collapsed the partition of my brand-new office.

The Zone could turn us into chimps? Should I run like hell or admire the entertainment?

“Who is it?” I yelled back instead, afraid to leave Milo alone with a chimp. Or Sarah. Or whatever in hell had happened here. Those sure looked like Sarah’s shoes discarded on the floor, and that was Sarah’s tank
top clinging to monkey shoulders. The baggy jeans had slid off but the top covered her.

“Andre said someone named Clancy needs a geek?” called a voice from the lounge.

“Okay, be right there.” I studied the chimp. “Sarah? Will you be all right if I go out there and close the door?”

The chimp glanced at the drop to the floor, and I caught on. I dashed back to the lounge, waved at the short guy nervously peering at obscene murals, grabbed a chair, and zipped back into my office. I set it beneath the chimp’s feet, and she nodded, reaching for the chair back with her toes.

This was just too weird. “Milo, don’t go anywhere,” I warned, insensibly. Heck, if chimps could understand me, why not cats?

I shut Ernesto’s—
our
—door and returned to greet the Geek, who probably thought I was nuts by now. But if he knew Andre, he was used to it, probably more so than me. I’d learned to tolerate weird behavior in objects—but shape-shifting chimps, not so much.

If things like this happened frequently down here, Andre was right: I’d been clueless. I kinda thought I’d like to remain that way.

The cavernous dark lounge smelled of cheap beer, not precisely an office environment but probably suitable for this transaction.

“Hi, I’m Tina Clancy.” Preferring to maintain my professional persona, I stuck out my hand to the muscularly deficient, middle-aged nerd not more than a few inches taller than I. I felt safe calling him a nerd,
because he so obviously wanted to be one, from the thick eyeglasses to the pocket protector—in a T-shirt pocket. I mean, who has pockets in their T-shirts? The eyeglasses, those I understood. No one notices us bespectacled types.

“Boris the Geek,” he said, taking my hand. “Best not to know more about me than that. Andre says you wanted to see me?”

I would have liked to use my new office about now, but no way was I taking him back there if Sarah was morphing into a human video game. “I have a question that probably can’t be answered without doing something illegal,” I said cautiously. “If you have a problem with that, then thanks for stopping by, but I don’t want you involved.”

His dark bushy eyebrows rose above his steel glasses frames. “Just a question answered? I wouldn’t have to do anything actively illegal? Other than hacking,” he amended.

I could swear one of the wall mural nudes was leaning closer to listen.

I lifted a chair from one of the bilious green tables in the middle of the room, away from the walls, and offered it to him, taking another for myself so we could talk privately. “Are there different levels of illegality in hacking?”

“Different levels of difficulty, but it’s
all
illegal. Me? I just figure if the feds can do it without permission, then we all ought to have freedom of information.”

“That’s warped logic, but I won’t argue with it. What about a bank?”

He glanced over my shoulder, and I turned around to see Sarah—in her normal big-breasted form—easing out of Ernesto’s office. She threw a nervous look to us and hurried over to her broom.

“She’s off-limits,” I said, bringing his attention back to me.

“I just looked.” He still appeared a little shame-faced. A man didn’t go into a club called Chesty’s and
not
look at the scenery. “Banks are pretty high on the difficulty scale. It will cost you.”