Clear Water (22 page)

He heard Whiskey swearing next to him, even as the guys with the little security trackers grew closer to their location.

Patrick had to give it to him—Whiskey made a good go at it.

“See,” he said, just as the two guys with trackers came over the rise, “I told you someone would help us get unlost.”

Patrick made desperate eye contact, but Whiskey seemed committed. “So, we’re from Fish and Game, and we’re literally counting frogs. Is there any way you could steer us to civilization? Our satellite pooped out, and we’re butt fricking lost.”

They almost bought it. They were nondescript, twenties to thirties, dressed in jeans and T-shirts (and not linen blazers, as Patrick had always thought drug dealers
should
be dressed, or even gang jeans and gang T-shirts, either), and they appeared completely at a loss with Whiskey’s open smile, his calm, easygoing, just-a-couple-of-yahoos-lost-here, no-reason-to-risk-the-death-penalty smile. The meat-muscles were so at a loss that they might have just let them go out of the path of least resistance if, at that moment, Patrick’s douchebag ex-boyfriend hadn’t chosen to look up.

They were too far away for Patrick to hear what Cal said, but he was pretty sure his own name figured huge.

There was a squawking from the belt on the goombah with the security tracker, and Patrick winced when Cal’s voice came through loud and clear. “You get those cocksuckers down here so we can decide when to fucking shoot them!”

Whiskey grimaced and looked at Patrick. “Man, I
still
can’t believe you slept with him.”

“I was stupid,” Patrick said numbly as the two lumps of muscle pulled the semi-automatics from their pockets. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Whiskey said kindly, putting his hands over his head. Patrick did the same. “And you are
never
stupid.”

God, Whiskey was a nice guy, Patrick thought as the two of them took prodding from the nice security men with the submachine guns. There they were, about ready to get offed by Patrick’s ex-boyfriend, who had now exceeded douchebag and entered sublime criminal asshat territory, and he was once again reassuring Patrick that he wasn’t a waste of oxygen.

Too bad he wouldn’t be breathing it for long.

And what was
really
too bad was that Patrick was going to have to deal with said asshat before he died. If he and Whiskey could just spend an hour making love before Cal dropped an anvil on their heads, Patrick could probably look at death with a lot less irritability.

“Jesus, Patrick!” Cal said as they walked up. The hustle and bustle of an obviously thriving illegal business wasn’t interrupted in the least by their arrival, and Patrick wondered how many people they’d “waylaid” before.

“Jesus what, Cal? ‘Jesus, how could you possibly be counting frogs in my illegal pot operation?’ ‘Jesus, what are you doing near your father’s property after I screwed him out of twenty grand?’ Or maybe you’re going for the bigger question. How about ‘Jesus, what are you doing alive after I drugged you and tried to kill you so I could use all your credit cards?’”

At this point, Cal actually tried to defend himself. “I wasn’t trying to kill you—”

“Yeah? Because I sure did come damned close to dying!”

“I was just trying to—”

“Did you want to fuck me when I was unconscious?”

“No—I was just trying to get you here so we could hold you—”

“Hostage? Eww. Seriously—I liked the fuck me when I was unconscious thing better, because I might have enjoyed it more if I was asleep!”

“I just wanted to get some fucking ransom!” Cal shouted over him. “We just needed one more fucking van!” With a savagery Patrick had never suspected, he pulled a gun out of the waistband of his slacks and clocked Patrick across the face with it.

Patrick’s face went nuclear with pain, and he went down, spitting blood, and glared up at Cal with the unrepentant joy of a schoolboy who had finally made his teacher just fucking lose it. Whiskey was straining against his captors, and Patrick looked at him, for a moment, lost in misery.
God, Whiskey! Why couldn’t you have loved somebody worth a damn?

Patrick wiped his mouth and counted his loosened teeth and decided that if this was his last chance to stand up for himself, he would. Whiskey should at least know his vast well of patience hadn’t been squandered on someone who wasn’t listening.

“Nice!” Patrick spat, and even
he
knew his blood-dripping smile was unpleasant. “So, really, all I ever was to you was a tool! Awesome. Makes it that much easier for me to want to see you arrested and whining at the cops for a separate cage! Go Cal! You’ll be the sweetest prison bitch in Folsom!”

Cal kicked him in the ribs. “Shut”—kick—“the fuck”—kick—“up!”—two kicks for good measure. Patrick dodged one, caught one half-way, but the third one made a solid connection, and Patrick had to stop on his hands and knees and get his breath for a minute. That was okay—Cal wanted to say his piece too.

“God, you never shut up. It was always ‘I want to have a life! I’ve got to get my shit together! I can’t be a daddy’s little bitch for-fucking-ever!’ Jesus, you’re so fucking stupid! I mean, seriously, did you really think a freakshow like you was going go back to school? I can’t believe you ever held a fucking job! All you had to do with your whole pathetic fuckup of a life was let Daddy foot the bill, and you couldn’t even do
that.
So yeah—I cloned a credit card—so the fuck what! It funded part of this sweet little operation here, you know? It’s all good!”

“Yeah,” Patrick muttered, “about that. You think we’re the only people who are going to be showing up at your door? Man—you fucked up the ecosystem, Cal. We’re sponsored by the department of Fish and Game—we’re the first wave, man. When you dump so much weed killer into the soil that the frogs grow second heads, what next? And you totally neutralized the fucking water—do you know how much algae is going to start blooming? This whole area—you’ll be able to see the water react to what you’re doing by next year.”

Cal blinked at him. “I don’t even know what in the fuck you’re talking about. Two-headed frogs—
Jesus
,
Patrick, you really are a fucking retard, you know that?”

Patrick panted for a moment and then crawled painfully to his knees. “I’m talking about the authorities, dumbass! Do you really think all of this isn’t going to get their attention?”

Cal shrugged. “I’m sure of it—do you think we’re loading up all of the shit for the helluvit? Your dad has been bringing the po-po in almost daily looking for you—they can’t be that stupid all the time, eventually someone’s going to get wise.”

“Why the baking soda?” Whiskey asked out of the blue.

Patrick looked at him, because it was a pretty good question, actually. “Yeah—baking soda and marijuana—why in the hell did you dump baking soda in the river?”

Cal blushed and shrugged. “Uhm, well, that was my boss’s idea. After I sent the private detective to look for you because we didn’t want any loose ends, we heard about the Fish and Game thing. He thought… I don’t know. He’s been smoking an awful lot of weed, but he seemed to think the baking soda would get rid of anything in the water that would give us away.”

Whiskey and Patrick exchanged rolled eyes. “Ge-
awd,
” Whiskey swore, shaking his head. If they were back in the houseboat, Patrick thought he might have gone to eat half a gallon of ice cream, just to get the bad taste of this out of his mouth. “Are you serious? The dumbest fucking reason to do the dumbest fucking thing, and the you know what the worst part is, don’t you, Patrick?”

“It almost fucking worked!” Patrick answered, about as outraged as he was. “It almost worked!” Patrick looked at Cal, suddenly feeling every bruise in his ribs and his chest and wondering if his face would swell too badly to even speak in a few minutes. “But where did you get all the baking soda?”

Cal rolled his eyes. “It’s not all pot out there in them there hills, Patrick. We can grow coca plants too!”

Patrick shook his head. “Excellent. Cocaine! You should have your own show! But I got to ask—why not meth? Man, isn’t that your drug, you fuckin’ tweaker?”

Cal snarled at him and went to hit him again, and Whiskey fought hard against the guy holding him back. The other man-mountain took him down with a stomach punch, and Whiskey’s knees gave an obvious wobble. All the action stalled, and Whiskey managed to wheeze, “Jesus, he weighs, what? One twenty-five in his stocking feet? You don’t think the gun is overkill, douchebag?”

Cal looked at Whiskey—actually
looked
at him—and then squinted at Patrick. “God, Patrick, this one’s actually not bad.” Cal rubbed his jaw, probably in memory of Whiskey’s punch in Walmart. “Too bad you had to go and get him killed!”

“Why you got to kill us, Cal?” Patrick asked desperately. “I mean, really? Shooting us here? All that’s going to get you is two useless meat sacks to prove you’re guilty when the police show up!”

Cal rolled his eyes. “See what I said? You’re stupid. A total freak show of fucking dumb. We’re not going to shoot you—we’re clearing out! We’ve been planning it for weeks—it’s what I was using your old man’s credit cards for. But first, we’re gonna burn the place down—we figure, we blow up Daddy’s factory, there’ll be so damned much toxic shit in this area the fire will take weeks to get under control. By the time
that’s
taken care of, man, the shit that
used
to be growing here will be no big deal.”

Patrick knew his aching jaw was hanging open, and he couldn’t seem to set it right. “Blow up my dad’s factory? How?”

Cal twitched his mouth a little—that flat, grim, terrifying mouth twitched up, and Patrick felt the first wave of nausea that usually came with being really hurt. “You think I didn’t listen to all of that ‘Daddy saves the world’ bullshit? The guy was footing the bill for part of my little operation here, Patrick. I mean, having you fall on my dick was an accident, but a lucky one. You said it yourself. Every morning, he gets there, in his little inner office, at eight o’clock, before anyone else, so he can do books. All we gotta do is set the bombs tonight, my man, and leave you two locked in the fucking warehouse. We’ve already got the growth area wired—all your Daddy has to do is open his office door and his factory, this warehouse—it all goes up in flames. And us? We’ll be long gone and out of here.”

Patrick squinted at him and his sallow face and his unpleasant, evil-imp-from-hell smile, and thought,
I can’t believe I ever liked this fucker.
“You ever gonna answer the meth thing, dickhead? I mean, you’re monologue-ing and you’re about to stick us in a little room and leave us to die. The least you could do is satisfy my fucking curiosity.”

Cal shrugged and said the only truly absurd thing Patrick had heard since he’d first seen the two-headed frog with his name. “Have you
seen
the literature on meth labs? Seriously—they’re way too dangerous. I mean, I like me a noseful of party, but I’d rather just earn the money for it, you know?”

Patrick shook his head and allowed the gorilla with the closest gun to prod him toward the big featureless warehouse. “I know I spent most of the summer talking to a two-headed frog who made more sense than you. Sweartagod, Cal. I don’t know how people like you can even learn to walk and breathe—you should donate your body to science.”

Cal clocked him across the back of the head with his gun, and Patrick went down. His last really conscious moment was being slung over some gun monkey’s shoulder and shaken like a frog in martini mixer until the pain behind his eyes made him black out.

H
E
WOKE
up with his head on Whiskey’s lap. Whiskey was smoothing water on his face with a strip of his own T-shirt—and squinting at him from his own black eye.

“Jesus, Whiskey,” Patrick coughed. “What did they do to you?”

Whiskey shook his head. “Man, that was one of
the
ugliest breakup scenes I’ve ever seen. I’m totally serious about that—was there any way that could have gone any worse?”

Patrick shrugged and then winced as he pulled one of the muscles in his stomach. He might have cracked a rib or two—breathing wasn’t as easy as it used to be. “We were surrounded by jokers with guns. I think it’s a real good sign that they didn’t shoot us!”

One side of Whiskey’s lean mouth pulled up, and Patrick let himself get lost in those warm brown eyes for a minute. He raised his hand up and cupped Whiskey’s cheek, and Whiskey closed his eyes and leaned into the touch.

“How long was I out?” he asked. The light from the window at the top of the warehouse was twilight gray.

“A long fucking time, you bastard.” Patrick didn’t have to ask how much of a picnic that time had been for Whiskey, and he stroked that square, dependable cheekbone with his thumb in silent apology.

“You know we’re not gonna die here,” Patrick said seriously, and Whiskey nodded.

“I’m pretty sure Fly Bait’s bringing the cavalry,” he said quietly, and Patrick struggled to sit up.

“Yeah, but even if she wasn’t—we’re not going to die
here.
” He stretched a little, breathing past the tightness of the abused muscles, and then he stretched some more, looking at the little room they were in.

It had once been an office cubicle: it had a computer desk in it, and an old chair, and even a filing cabinet. He and Whiskey were on the floor, though Patrick thought there might have even been a couch inside the little thing once—but there wasn’t a ceiling. Not really.

The walls were eight feet tall—the cubicle was meant to go inside an actual office building, maybe, and it was backed up against the wall of the warehouse itself, the better to make use of the old electrical fixtures and probably even some plumbing. Patrick could see a tiny bathroom cubicle outside of their office cubicle, so the plumbing must have been run on the inside of the warehouse walls too, as well as the ventilation.

It was the ventilation and the electrical fixtures that would probably get them the hell out of there.

Whiskey followed his gaze and saw, like Patrick, that the desk would get them to the fixtures, and then the rest was monkey business—scaling shit, swinging to shit, basically being like a kid in a playground.