city blues 01 - dome city blues (22 page)

I dive again.

I’m about to turn toward the surface when I realize that something has snagged my left pants leg.  I reach down to free the snag and find Maggie’s fingers wrapped tightly around the fabric of my pants.

Maggie!  Frantically, I pull her hand loose from my pants and try to follow her arm down to the rest of her.  I’m stopped at her wrist by a grating.  She’s trapped under it.

It’s time to surface for air.  I ignore the burning in my lungs and feel my way to the edge of the grate.  When I get to the edge, I try to slip under but I run into the wall.

I try to shift the grate.  It won’t budge; it’s wedged against the wall by several other pieces of wreckage.  I try to brace against the wall and gain a little leverage.

It’s not going to go.

I increase the power to my arms.

It’s still not going to go.

More power, I don’t know where it comes from.  Something gives in my left shoulder and I begin to see colored fireworks inside my eyeballs.  I’m totally out of air now, but the grate is starting to move.  A little...  a little more...  Come on, you Son of a Bitch, move.  Farther...

The opening is big enough.  I dive under it and grope around in the ink black water until my questing fingers latch onto Maggie’s jacket.

Her body has gone totally limp.  I wrap an arm under her breasts and try to fight my way back to the surface.

I don’t know what keeps me from passing out before we get there.  Every grate and twisted metal stanchion in the pit manages to sneak between us and that lovely slick of oily scum that marks the boundary between water and air.  My lungs can’t even remember what oxygen feels like.

I’m losing it.

Maggie.  Concentrate on Maggie.  Do it for Maggie, boy.  She’s been without air a hell of a lot longer than you have.

We’re not going to make it.  We’re not going...

My head breaks the surface and I gulp down a huge gout of air.  Polluted or not, the stale air or the warehouse is the most delicious thing that I have ever tasted.

I fight to get Maggie’s head above water.

It seems to take forever to pull both of us out of that hellish hole.  The entire time, I’m extremely conscious of the fact that Maggie isn’t breathing.

I lay her limp body on the cement as gently as I can and check for breathing or a pulse.  She has neither.

I give her mouth a quick sweep for foreign objects and then start CPR.  Come on girl, you can do it.  Come on.

She’s not responding.  Come on Maggie, breathe.  Do it for me, baby.

Oh God, don’t do this to me.  PLEASE God...

“David.  Come on David, wake up.”

I kept my eyes closed, trying to will Maggie to life.  “Please God... Please...”

“David, it’s just a dream.  A nightmare.  Open your eyes.”

I felt warm fingers on the side of my face, felt them smear the hot tears that squeezed out from between my tightly shut eyelids.

Recognition filtered slowly into my brain.  Sonja.  She drew me into her arms, pulled my head against her chest and rocked me gently, the way a mother soothes a frightened child.

I lay there, clinging to her, listening to the quiet rhythm of her heartbeat.

My eyes stayed closed.  Somehow, if I didn’t open them, the dream wasn’t over.  And if the dream wasn’t over, it might not be too late to go back and do something differently.  I didn’t know what, but
something
.  If I could do something differently, the
right
thing, the dream wouldn’t end the way the reality had: with my wife lying dead in my arms on the floor of an abandoned warehouse.

Eventually, the feeling faded and I became self conscious about crying in the arms of some woman I barely knew.

I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling.  “I need a drink.”  I started to sit up.

Sonja pulled me back down onto the bed.  “You do
not
need a drink.  You need to finish crying.”

“I’m finished.”  I stifled a sniff.

“I don’t think so,” she said.  “You’re not going to be finished crying until you cut it loose.  You’ve got to let her go, David.”

“I
have
let her go,” I said.  “She’s dead.”

“Then why haven’t you been able to say good-bye?”

“I can’t say good-bye,” I said  “I couldn’t.  I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

“Why couldn’t you?”

I realized that I was on the verge of breaking down again.  I had to stop this.  I couldn’t let this person, this stranger, so far inside my guard.  “Look, Maggie is dead, okay?  She’s gone.  It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Please don’t do that, David.”  Sonja’s voice was gently insistent.  “Don’t slip behind that wall that you’ve built for yourself.  Right now, you’re close to something, maybe closer than you’ve been in years.  Don’t run away from it.  Face it.  It’s a question you need to answer.  If not to me, then at least to yourself.  Why couldn’t you say good-bye?”

Fresh tears welled up in my eyes.  I squeezed them shut again.  “They took her from me.  The bastards took her away.”

“Who took her?”

“I carried her,” I said.  “I could barely walk; my hands were sliced up; one of my ankles was twisted, but I carried her.  I don’t know how, but I carried her from that... from a warehouse about three klicks Northeast of Dome 10, all the way to the Humboldt Street Lock.”

I stopped, swallowing several times before continuing.  “A taxi rushed us both to the hospital.  I had a concussion.  I’d taken a pretty good knock on the head.  I guess I passed out in the cab on the way to the emergency room.  I woke up in a hospital bed three days later, ranting and raving, demanding to know about Maggie.  Eventually, one of the doctors worked up the nerve to tell me what I already knew: Maggie had been dead on arrival.  I could have dealt with that.  I could have
learned
to deal with it, but they... they...”

“What, David?  What did they do?”

I lay there breathing heavily, trying to gain control of my voice.

“They said it wasn’t their fault.  It was a computer virus.  Maggie...  Maggie’s body was on ice, in deep freeze.  Her file was supposed to have been marked ‘hold.’  But they said the virus scrambled a lot of their data.  Somehow, Maggie’s file got re-flagged.”

“Re-flagged?”

“For... organ barter.  An organ clinic bought her whole body while I was lying unconscious in that hospital bed.  I tried to track it down, but the clinic broke up her body and sold it for parts before I got there.”

Sonja hugged me tighter.  “Oh, David.  I’m so sorry.”

“They wouldn’t even give me the names of the organ recipients.  They said it would be illegal.  The hospital was terrified that I was going to sue, or drag their name through the media.  They offered me a big settlement.  I didn’t want their damn money, but their lawyers kept after me until I accepted it.  I didn’t want their goddamn money.  I wanted to say good-bye to my wife and the bastards even took
that
away from me.”

I was sobbing uncontrollably now.

Sonja rocked me until my sobs faded into quiet breathing.

After a long while, I slipped into the temporary oblivion of dreamless sleep.

My room was still dark when I woke again.  I followed a slow path up the mountain from oblivion to waking.  Someone was touching me.  I had an erection.  A gentle scraping of teeth on skin and the feather light flicker of a hot tongue told me that Sonja was also awake.

I heard the hissing rush of waves washing up on a beach, quietly at first, but growing until the sound became the pounding of surf.

Sonja’s fingers danced on my skin.

The walls of my room cycled slowly from darkness to an indigo suffused glow.  The projection unfolded until the bedroom was invisible behind a starlit beach.

I felt a sharp pang in my chest.  House was running our favorite program, Maggie’s and mine.  The one she’d always liked to make love by.

I mumbled something, trying to tell House to stop the program, to shut it off, but I was not quite awake enough to speak.

“Shhhhhh...”  One of Sonja’s hands came up to cover my mouth.  “Go back to sleep.”  Her weight shifted as she moved to straddle me.  Her hand slid away from my mouth.  Her lips replaced the hand.

The tip of her tongue parted my lips and slipped into my mouth at the exact instant that she impaled herself upon me.  She froze for a second, totally motionless and then her body shuddered almost as strongly as mine did.  She began to rock back and forth, slowly to begin with, then gathering speed.

At first, I attempted to match her rhythm, meet her thrusts with my counter-thrusts, but she used her thighs to clamp my legs to the bed.

The message was clear.  This was
her
ride.  I was a passenger.

I experimented and discovered that Sonja’s unspoken rule against movement didn’t seem to apply to my hands or mouth.  I began a journey of exploration across the unknown landscape of her upper body.

My hands discovered and cherished a myriad of wonderful things: the tiny ridge of bone between her shoulder blades, the shallow dimples at the small of her back.

Her nipples awoke and hardened under the attentions of my tongue and fingers.

It couldn’t last long; there was no way.  I hadn’t been with a woman in years.  Besides, she was a professional.  Surely her techniques and instincts would coax an orgasm out of me faster than any amateur could.

But it did last, longer than I would have dreamed possible and then, longer still.  She wasn’t teasing me; she was trying with all her heart to push me over the edge, but something in me resisted.  I couldn’t quite turn loose.  She kept me dancing on the razor’s edge for longer than I would have dreamed was humanly possible.

Her own breathing became faster.  She began to make little self-concerned grunts, the kind of sound you never make when you think someone else can hear you.

She didn’t squeal when she came, or yell, or moan, or any of the things you’d expect from someone whose job depended on a flair for theatrics in bed.  Instead, she gripped me tighter than I have ever felt before and continued to ride me as she ran through a series of unbelievable contractions.

Then, she leaned down and bit my shoulder. 
Hard
.

The dam gave way.  Four years of sexual repression reached up and broke free like a butterfly tearing its way out of a cocoon.

Her lips fused themselves to my mouth as we both rode our orgasms down to a dizzying stop.

She lay her head on my shoulder and fell asleep on top of me.  In a little while, I drifted off for the third time that night.

CHAPTER 13

Sonja stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the frame.  She yawned and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.  She was wrapped in one of my old robes.  Her hair was a mess, her face swollen.  She looked beautiful.

I tried to smile.  “Morning, sleepyhead.  What are you doing up?”

She stretched languidly.  “I smelled bacon frying.”  She yawned again.  “What time is it?”

I forked a couple of strips of bacon out of the pan and onto a plate.  “Breakfast time.  Why?  Got an appointment?”

She shook her head, throwing her mop of auburn hair into artful disarray.  “I don’t do appointments anymore.”

“What does that mean?”

She picked up a slice of bacon, looked at both sides of it and nibbled the end off.  “It means what it sounds like.”

She swallowed the bacon.  “I figure it like this: you’re either going to solve this case, or you’re not.  If you
do
, Michael’s insurance will pay off his indenture.  With my savings, what’s left over should be enough for me to retire on, if I’m careful.  If you
don’t
solve the case, I’m going to have a steady job for at least the next decade, so there’s no point in maintaining my clientele.”

She shrugged.  “I’m betting on you.  I think you can solve this thing.”  She took another bite of bacon.