Rest & Trust (2 page)

That had been fine with him. He was thirty-eight, but he’d never really expected to be a man who ‘settled down.’ Even as brother after brother had taken an old lady—married her or at least marked her—Sherlock hadn’t thought he wanted to be one of them. He liked what he had here, when he had it—a little family for a while, a nice fuck and a cozy sleep, and then off to his own place, set up the way he liked, where he could game without getting shit for it, and sit in his boxers and watch television, leave his clean clothes in the laundry basket, and have cold pizza out of the box for breakfast.

But she was sitting here telling him that there was a baby—his baby—inside her, and that she was going to throw it away, and the thought made his hands shake.

“You can’t fucking kill my kid.”

“Don’t be melodramatic. You’re no fundie Christer. I’m not killing your kid. I’m having a clump of cells removed from
my
body before it can become a kid. This is my choice, and I don’t want another baby. I’ve got my hands full as it is.”

He turned and looked at her again. She was finishing her glass of wine, and he had a strong urge to smash that glass into her face—and urge so strong he could see it happening.

Giving his head a brisk shake, he tried to clear that insanity away. Christ. With a breath to smooth out his nerves a little—he was wishing he hadn’t stomped out the joint now—he spoke more calmly. “I’d help. I’d be there—for you and the kid. All the kids.”

Again that derisive laugh. “Please. You’re not father material, Tim. Look at you. Half your life, you’re an almost forty-year-old teenager who plays video games and argues with my third-grader about Star Wars movies, and the other half you’re a criminal. No, I think I don’t want to bind my life to yours with a child.”

His shock at all this was still too great for her words to slice deeply, but they managed to sting. “Then why did you fucking tell me at all? Just to fuck with me?”

She sighed. “It’s expensive. I need help paying for it.”

Now it was his turn to laugh. “You have got to be out of your mind.”

Again she sighed, this time setting her glass and tin on the porch floor and standing up. She walked over to him—and damn, she was ugly as fuck now—and stopped just in front of him. When she laid her hands on his chest, he caught them and pushed her away.

“I’m sorry, Tim. Maybe I should have done this differently, but it’s easier not to get emotional about this. What we’ve had was good most of the time, but there’s nothing real between us, and you know it as well as I do. Our lives don’t work together. I told you because I think you have the right to know—but that’s all you have a right to. This is my call, and I’ve made it. It’s for the best—for all of us. If you don’t want to help me pay for it, then that’s
your
call. I’ll work it out another way.”

“I’m not fucking paying for you to kill my kid.”

She nodded, as if she’d expected no better from him. “Fine. Wait here. I’ll get your kutte and the rest of your stuff. We’re done, you and me. For good this time.”

“No shit,” he snarled. Then he remembered Dylan and Chelsea. “I want to say goodbye—”

With a shake of her head, she cut him off. “No. They’re used to you coming and going. They’ll forget you before they think it’s weird you haven’t come back.”

That stung as much as anything else she’d said. “Christ, Tare, when did you get to be such a bitch?”

Smiling coldly, she didn’t answer him, but turned and went back into her house. He stood on her porch, trying to organize his thoughts. He felt furious and powerless, and like he’d been a fucking fool for
years
. He’d never realized that she’d thought so little of him.

Rocked by a rage unfamiliar in its power, he picked up the wooden bench and hurled it into her yard with a fierce shout. It landed in the grass and broke apart, and he felt absolutely no better.

When she came back out, she gave the fresh rubble on her lawn a long look but said nothing. He snatched his kutte out of her hands and pulled it on. Then he filled his pockets with the rest of his crap and stalked off to his bike without a word.

The thought that he was walking away from his kid sank into the base of his skull and got comfortable, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t force her to have it, and the things she’d said—he didn’t want to be bound to her, either. All he felt for her now was contempt. Loathing. Violent rage.

So he mounted his bike and rode away.

CHAPTER TWO

“Okay, Mr. Penney. To see what’s going on, I need to get remote access to your unit.”

“Eh?”

“That means I need to take over your laptop for a few minutes so I can find the problem.”

The gruff, shaky voice of an elderly lifelong smoker filled Sadie’s ear. “Oh…oh…is that legal?”

“It is if you say it’s okay.”

“I don’t want you to hack me. I saw it on the news about the hacking.”

Sadie rolled her eyes. Mr. Penney was eighty if he was a day, and she was fairly certain he thought the internet was an elaborate system of strings and tin cans. He’d called customer support because he couldn’t make ‘The Facebook’ open on his ancient laptop. The first level of troubleshooting—checking the power source, rebooting, etc.—was handled by the initial call center rep. Sadie didn’t get passed a call unless that didn’t fix a problem.

“I’m not hacking you, sir, because you’re letting me in. This is like you inviting me over so I can sit next to you and see the problem on your screen. Okay?”

“O-okay. You have a sweet voice.” He made a sound in her ear like he’d just sucked a grape through his nose and then hawked it out. Gross. She hoped that didn’t have anything to do with her ‘sweet’ voice.

“Good. Now, I need you to do a couple of things first. Can you go into System Preferences for me?” She knew it was an absurd question, but sometimes she got lucky.

“Eh? Uh—eh?”

“In the dock—in the strip of pictures on bottom of your screen. One of them should be a box with what looks like a gear in the middle. See it?”

“Oh! Next to the ‘W,’ you mean?”

Sure, dude. Whatever
. “Sounds like it. Okay. Click that for me.”

“I got lots of other pictures that came up.” He began to read: “‘General,’ ‘Desktop and Screen Saver,’ ‘Dock’…”

“Okay, good. You’re in the right place. One of those pictures should be a blue folder with a street sign, like a ‘crosswalk ahead’ sign. It should say ‘Sharing.’ Can you find that?”

“Next to the cloud?”

“Yep. Click that for me. You should see a menu, and the top item should say ‘Screen Sharing.’ Got it?”

“I do!” He sounded so excited that Sadie had to grin.

“Good work. Just click the box next to it so a checkmark shows up, and then I can take it from there.”

After a few more keystrokes, Sadie had control of Mr. Penney’s unit. As soon as his desktop came up on her screen, she slammed her hand on the side of her head, killing her mic.

“HOLY FUCK!” she yelled into her empty apartment. Getting control of herself again, she activated the mic on her headset and forced herself to speak in the same tone she’d been using. “Okay, Mr. Penney. I’m going to look around and find the problem. It might take a few minutes. As long as you hear music, that means I’m on the job. I’ll check back in when I figure out the problem or if I have more questions.”

The voice of what she’d thought was a sweet, dotty old man filled her ear again. “Okay, honey. What should I do?”

The word ‘honey’ made her cringe, but she kept a smile in her voice. “Just sit tight, Mr. Penney.”

“I’ve got the TV right here. Can I watch
The Price Is Right
?”

“Sure. That’s a good idea.”

She killed her mic again and pulled up her cohort chat. The members of her cohort were located all over the western half of the country—Sadie herself was in Southern California—but they were based in Dallas, and that was where their supervisor was. When they had staff meetings they used video chat, but text chat was easier to do referrals and troubleshoot problems with each other during their shift.

Probably all tech support reps everywhere were geeks, but Sadie liked to think that her cohort were the geekiest. Whenever they had slow spells, their chat was full of awesome geek talk. They could keep a riff going on a topic for days. They’d once chatted the entire script of
The Wrath of Khan.
From memory. Around their customer calls.

The higher-ups could tap into any chat they wanted, but the prevailing philosophy was that friendly play like that during downtimes was good for morale, especially since remote work could be so isolating and solitary. So they encouraged banter and play, as long as it stayed clean and didn’t get in the way of their work.

Sadie and her cohort pals were always changing their avatars to suit some random theme. One of them would change, and within half an hour, they’d all have keyed into the same idea. Currently, they were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sadie was Raphael. Their supervisor, Raymond, was Splinter, of course.

For most of the shift, they’d been chatting in character. But Sadie broke character now.

Just RA’d a massively FU unit.
Ray
—she tagged their supervisor—
need a private
.

Andy, who was currently posing as Shredder, posted
You can’t drop that and not spill. FU how.

She ignored that. Just then, a private chat window came up, and Ray asked,
Problem?

I’m looking at kiddie porn,
she typed.
Really sick. I’m supposed to be making the browser work for this dude, and his wallpaper is freaking me out. It’s his *wallpaper* There are
—she stopped and counted—
more than two dozen jpgs on his desktop and I can tell from the thumbnails that I do not want to see them more closely.

His answer was nearly immediate.
Grab the screen and send it and deets to me, then refer him up. Mark the contact and the call. Then logoff. Chill. I’ll call you asap.

Raymond knew her history, and he’d taken her on anyway last year, so she knew he had a good idea how she’d react and what she’d need. She had never met him in person in her life, but she trusted him completely.

She typed
Kthx
, grabbed the screen and noted the call details, sent it all to Ray, then swallowed and hit her mic again. “Mr. Penney?” The muffled cheers of a game show crowd answered her. “Mr. Penney?”

The rustle of someone picking up a phone. “Hello? Hello?” the old perv croaked. Now that Sadie had shared the story with her boss, it had gained the weight of reality, and she felt truly freaked and grossed out.

She’d seen all kinds of very weird shit on people’s computers. She’d seen plenty of porn, and a surprising number of dead animal pictures, and just more weird shit than she would have believed existed. People didn’t seem to realize that she was an actual person actually seeing their actual weirdness when they let her into their computers. But what she was looking at right now was by far the most upsetting thing she’d ever seen.

BDSM kiddie porn. There was a little kid in that picture. On the perv’s fucking
wallpaper,
like it was just normal.

And she still had to be nice to the sick fuck, so he wouldn’t get nervous or suspicious.

“Hi, Mr. Penney. I haven’t been able to fix the problem, so I’m going to refer you to our most senior expert. I promise that Ray will be able to fix you.” She got some small satisfaction from the double entendre that he knew nothing about.

“I…don’t know. It’s taking an awfully long time…”

“I’m sorry about that sir, but Ray will take care of you.”

“Okay, then. I guess that’s okay.”

“Well, you have a great day, Mr. Penney. I’m going to send you over to Ray now.”

She couldn’t bring herself to do the end-of-call spiel. Before he could say anything else, she transferred his call.

Then she tore the headset off her ear and tossed it to her desk as if it had gained eight legs and fangs. She pushed herself away, letting the wheels of her ergonomic chair roll back as far as they would.

There was more she needed to do to preserve and mark the evidence, but she was so fucking grossed out. She felt like she needed to bleach her whole area. And burn everything that image had touched. Including her eyeballs and brain.

With a Herculean force of will, she dragged her chair back to her desk. She finished doing what she needed to do to mark the call. The cohort chat was blowing up, but she ignored it and, as soon as she could, logged off.

Her apartment was a studio, designed to resemble a loft—though it was a new building, so the whole industrial aspect was all affect. She walked from her work area to her kitchen area and pulled a can of Diet Coke out of the fridge. Today had suddenly become a day that she could really use something much stronger, but since she was getting her one-year chip in three days, it would be pretty pathetic and humiliating to cave now.

She chugged half the soda down, then went to her desk, picked up her phone, and walked out to her balcony to wait for her boss to call and talk her off the ledge. So to speak.

~oOo~

By the end of her shift, she’d talked to Ray, Ray’s boss Mary, and a detective in Mr. Penney the Perv’s hometown in New Mexico. She’d finished a whole six-pack of Diet Cokes and was still feeling completely skeeved out. Every time she told the story, the image in her head got more detailed—and not just the actual image that had invaded her eyes but the whole scene that had invaded her mind. Her fucked up, hyper imagination had filled in all the details of how that picture, and the probably hundreds like it, had gotten taken.

She’d been in that real little kid’s imaginary head all afternoon. It sucked.

Sadie really, really, really did not want to have an apartment full of people in a couple of hours. But a date had been set for the class-action trial against Valiant Energy Corp., and she had been involved in the protests against the company since she’d gotten out of rehab, just as the stories began to emerge about the communities Valiant been decimating with toxic waste. They had faced government sanctions for breaking scores of environmental laws, but they’d managed to get off with fines. Now the civil process was underway.

Her rehab counselor, and her sponsor, too, had wanted her to find something positive she could become invested in, and she’d found a Cause. She’d been involved in some protests in college—against students’ and women’s rights, primarily—and even high, she’d appreciated the good that could be done on the ground, if only to force light and discussion to problems people preferred not to see or talk about.

Her group now was planning a mobilization for the trial, and now that they had a date—only a month away—they needed to get serious about getting things ready.

Most people seemed to have a sense that protests just sort of randomly happened: people got mad, went out, suddenly found themselves in a group as if by accident. No. That was how riots happened. Protests took planning. Careful planning—and significant resources, which also took planning.

People worked better when they could relax; she’d learned that in her own actual job. Her group approached meetings a little bit like parties. There was always food and drink, and they sat comfortably and let ideas roll around the room before they sorted them out and decided which ones worked. So getting ready to host a meeting took some work.

Sadie was not in the mood, but she figured that the fact that she would be ‘entertaining’ tonight was maybe the only thing that was going to keep her from using after three-hundred-sixty-two days clean. It was also keeping her to her less psychotic coping mechanisms.

Like Diet Coke and cleaning.

Sadie had been a very high-functioning addict, right up to the point that she’d stopped functioning altogether. She’d worked at the tech bar in one of the company’s retail shops throughout college and for a couple of years after, rising to the level of supervisor, even while she was living almost her whole life high. Hell, she’d finished school at UC Riverside and graduated cum laude while she was high. She’d fucking floated across the stage in her cap and gown.