Boyfriend from Hell (Saturn's Daughters) (12 page)

Max stared back at me, almost as startled as I was.

“
Lookin’ good, babe. Didn’t think I could pull this one off. Your mirror connection is
way
stronger here,
” he murmured inside my head before fading away.

I sat down on a stool and snapped the compact shut.
What was I?
increasingly seemed a more and more valid question under the circumstances—one I couldn’t answer.

Customers began filing in just before six. Sarah had disappeared into the kitchen before the first customer entered. Ernesto’s current mistress, Maria, in black miniskirt and plunging neckline, took her station at the door. The model-tall bartender with flowing blond hair began polishing glasses. I’d take Bill’s bar any day, but then, I didn’t possess the requisite equipment to appreciate this place.

I took a booth in a dark back corner, switched off the little table lantern that provided the only light, and, succumbing to my new obsession, watched everyone entering. The blue-jeaned kid sauntered in, trying to look cool. Maria zeroed in on him, and he forgot being cool or a reporter or whatever he was. With his gaze firmly on her nearly bare assets, he couldn’t see me.

Fortunately, the wall nudes had stopped moving, but I could see Andre’s point about keeping the lookyloos out of the Zone.

A few industrial workers marched in, obviously regular customers who didn’t even notice the newly
green tables. A scantily clad waitress sidled up to take their orders.

A big bloke already looking half loaded staggered up to the bar. He pinched the rear of one of the dancers on her way back to the dressing rooms. She hauled off and whacked him one, but he just laughed, as if they’d been flirting. I grimaced at the byplay.

I didn’t have issues with sexual exploitation—it worked both ways, the way I saw it. But years of being tyrannized by thugs bigger than me had instilled an active dislike of bullies, and a childhood spent watching Clint Eastwood westerns had given me an over-inflated sense of justice. I took an instant dislike to the blowhard and wanted him gone. I wanted to be a bouncer, but the crippled leg had diminished my martial arts skills, and I didn’t own a gun.

I wasn’t sure what Andre meant for me to learn by hanging out down here, but once I got past the bully, I will admit I was amused when a couple of business suits entered, looking wary. I expected them to tug on their white shirt collars in discomfort. We didn’t get suits in the Zone. The suits were the people Andre was really concerned about.

I know Zone inhabitants are often derisively referred to as trolls. If we were trolls, these guys were gold-digging gnomes. Or maybe treasure-hoarding dragons. Creeps with money.

The drunk at the bar scanned the room, looking for more trouble. I thought he nodded at the suits, but that could have been my paranoia. I disliked the look he cast in my direction.

“That’s the chippie sent her boyfriend up in flames?” the drunk asked of no one in particular, glaring unsteadily through the gloom in my direction. “There’s people who would give good money to hear how she did it.”

Like a balloon, he started to rise, but a waitress distracted him with her cleavage, and he settled back down to salivate.

A nervous shudder wracked me. What people? And did they really believe I’d killed Max? That was ridiculous. That had to be alcohol and hot air talking.

A plate of spaghetti slid onto the table in front of me, and I looked up to see Andre slipping onto the bench across the table. He deposited another plate of pasta there. He did not look like a man who had just kissed the snot out of me and wanted to do it again. I couldn’t decide if I was disappointed. I liked the kiss. Andre, I wasn’t so hot about.

Had he heard the drunk? I refused to inquire.

“No salad?” I asked, picking up the napkin-wrapped utensils a waitress hurried to lay down, pretending the kiss had been an aberration like all the other aberrations around me.

“It’s coming.” He unrolled his napkin and spread it on his lap without acknowledging me, just as if this were a business dinner. “Nice table choice, but you should be sitting over here, where people can’t see you.”

I relaxed. I could do casual. “Old cowboy trick, back-to-the-wall defense. Besides, I’m enjoying the view. The suits are the ones who have you worried?”
The spaghetti was edible. I made better marinara, but not often. Cooking was merely a survival technique.

The brute at the bar shouted an obscenity. I glanced up to watch one of Ernesto’s bouncers leaning on him. Ernesto’s efficiency went up a notch in my estimation. I dragged my wandering mind back to Andre. He hadn’t even noticed I’d wandered.

“It’s that the suits are here at all that worries me,” he said in reply to my question. “They’re from the city. If they visit just the once, they’ll dismiss the vanishing clock and talking manhole covers as special effects, not know your hair isn’t natural, and everyone else will stay out of their way. They’ll leave without understanding what we are. But if they keep coming and bring more eyes and ears with them, our days are numbered. The EPA will cordon off Edgewater as well as the harbor, and we’ll all be out of luck.”

He was biting off more than I could chew. I put my fork down, held up my hands in a time-out signal, and tried to formulate a thousand questions into one. “Beginning, please. I moved here two years ago, went looking for a job on the bus line, and you hired me. At the time, I was a tourist who thought the blue buildings were special effects. Are you telling me that most of the city is stupid enough to believe this?” I wasn’t in my happy place, and he wasn’t making things better.

“The rest of the city knows we’re regularly hit by floods, engulfed in chemical stenches, and that industrial waste is dangerous. They stay away, and we don’t advertise. Acme pays off the EPA, and the media
forgot about us years ago. We don’t have much in the way of families requiring government agencies coming around. The cops know what goes down, but I take care of them.”

“
Bribery?” I asked in disbelief. “Why?”

“Just think of it as protective coloration. We want outsiders to overlook us.”

I had vaguely grasped that the Zone was weird, but I’d always considered it more like fun-house weird. Someplace one would go to be entertained by the oddities. Of course, up until Max died, I hadn’t met invisible thieves or chimpanzee shifters, either. “And you want to keep out others, why?” I asked.

“You’ll understand if you stay here long enough,” Andre said, not even looking up from his pasta. “None of us is exactly what we seem, which is why we’re keeping an eye on you. Blowing up boyfriends is not on our list of accepted activities. Blowing away reporters
might
be.”

“I didn’t do either of those,” I protested indignantly, forgetting drunks and bouncers and bribery in my outrage that Andre could believe the reports. “Max crashed my car! I didn’t ask him to do that. And his biker friends trashed the media. Anything else is pure imagination.”

The salad was delivered, but I’d lost my appetite. What had I done by coming to work down here? Had I ruined my life even more than I had protesting crooked provosts?

“What are
you
if you’re not what you seem?” I returned to his earlier statement, diverting the subject
from myself. Besides, I was curious. Everything about Andre was out of place in this sleazy bar.

He forked his lettuce and chewed it thoughtfully, his gaze considering me. He had disgustingly thick lashes for a man, and eyes of a peculiar blue-green. “I’m not sure I ought to tell you.”

“You
can’t
tell me, because you’re making all this up to scare me and haven’t the imagination to pretend you’re an illegal immigrant who smuggles drugs.” I was getting even for his earlier cracks.

He snorted and nodded toward the bar. “I started out like him, except over at Acme.”

I turned and watched Detective Schwartz, wearing a security guard uniform, take a glass of water from the bartender. He looked damned good in khaki. He didn’t see me, and I pulled back into the booth. I hadn’t known he worked for Ernesto. Apparently Andre was right: I didn’t know a lot.

“You were a cop? You moonlighted as a security guard? And then what, you started blackmailing the Man, made enough to buy your first bar, and the rest is history?”

“You should write a book,” he suggested wryly. “I was a boy from the hood who went to war, got messed up, came back and took a job as security, and got caught in the first chemical flood. And that’s all you need to know until I figure out if you’ll fry me for saying more.”

“If I knew how to fry you, I’d have done it long since.” I blew a strand of hair out of my face in frustration. I wanted to know more about getting
messed up,
but Andre’s expression made it clear he was done talking about himself. “So you’re nailing me as a freak simply because I got my hair fixed?”

He looked impatient. “You could have dyed, permed, and added extensions to your stringy mop and it wouldn’t look like it does now. Down here, good looks come at a price.”

Andre’s calm acceptance of Zone peculiarities was chilling as well as eye-opening. I didn’t want to believe anything he said, but either I believed I was morphing into weirdness or believed I was insane. I wasn’t even sure which I’d prefer.

I snorted. “Good looks come at a price anywhere. Check out your former high school class. What do the beauty queens and athletes look like now? Unless they’re paying for upkeep, they look like the suits over there.” I indicated the paunchy, saggy-jawed specimens ogling the pole dancer who’d just emerged onstage. But he was right again, damn him. My hair wasn’t real.

“Your glibness doesn’t disguise the changes we can see with our own eyes. It’s happened too often down here for you to hide from us. Sarah isn’t our only shape-shifter. Until now, though, no outsider has paid attention to our oddities. If Max was an unfortunate accident, I’m sorry for all of us. We’re a pretty reclusive lot, and we prefer our privacy. No one else has ever done anything quite so media-worthy as blowing up their boyfriend and a bank in the same blow. Do you even know who Max really was?”

I propped my elbows on the table and shoved both
hands into my hair, not meeting his eyes. “I thought he was my boyfriend. If you want to tell me more than that, go easy.”

“Max’s father was once a senator who decided he’d make more money as a lobbyist. Word is, he was persuaded to that decision because of a few bad political and personal calls, including influencing the zoning for the chemical plants, but for some odd reason, the media never followed up on the rumors. Max had a healthy trust fund. He left it to a half-dozen environmental agencies.”

Oh, crap and filth.

I’d sent a rich do-gooder to hell.

A
pparently sensitive to my distress, Milo leaped up to the bench beside me. He smelled of fish. I was beginning to think that feeding him fish from the Zone was not a good idea, except he’d probably been born down here. Were the defects genetic by this point?

I wanted to pull out my compact and yell at Max for not telling me he was a damned trust-fund baby, but I resisted that particular eccentricity. “Is it the air or the water or the food or what exactly are you claiming is hazardous to our health?” I asked.

“Probably all of the above. The nonprofits that Max left his money to are all out to shut us down as a toxic waste dump. I suppose they could have people out on the street now, trolling with the rest of the suits, but nonprofits are notoriously understaffed. I doubt they move that quickly. Max was different. He had connections to Acme, the plant that caused the spill.”

Trust funds and matters of money made mighty good motives for killing an annoying insect, and much as I liked Max, he was more than annoying. He could be a worse tick under the skin than Andre.

So just who might Max have been biting before he died? And could they be after me now? And
why
? Suddenly, looking into the limo hit-and-run and Max’s death wasn’t guilt-relief but a matter of survival.

I glanced at the drunk now pawing another dancer. Was he a regular? Or one of the creeps out to spy on me? And did I really want to know? Because he was causing an ugly gnawing in my gut. Maybe I’d better go back to keeping my head down. Had
Max
been using me to spy? That would certainly have explained why a trust-fund hunk would take up with a pint-size gimp. I didn’t have issues about my body but I’m a realist, and the possibility hurt, bad.

“And there’s some reason
why
the Zone shouldn’t be shut down?” I demanded, releasing my pain in obnoxiousness. “Just exactly how dangerous is it?”

“No one knows, but there’s nowhere better to give misfits a second chance. Frank used to be a bum living under the bridge until he developed a nose for
finding things. Bill has served time for beating up people for a living, but he graduated from bouncer to bartender after he settled a few fights with some weird Zen hum. I was an addict who could have gone postal at the drop of a pin until buying out people I hated became more important than attacking them. At the same time, we’ve had other inhabitants turn to murder or end up in the homeless camp or lunatic wards. Nothing about this place is predictable except knowing that if you stay, you’ll change. Ernesto is new. We’re holding out hope he’ll improve.”