The Hinky Bearskin Rug (12 page)

Clay crinkled
his eyes at her.

Ed grunted. “I
wouldn’t touch ’em.”

She said, “So
our hunch about how the pocket zone got there looks good. Inspectional Services
is involved, so it has to be someone in the city. That kind of points in a
certain direction. So can you get clearance from the Fifth Floor to give us the
lists of properties the city wants to buy?”

Ed said, “I’ll
try. They’re tight with that shit.”

“Great,” Jewel
said. “And I think we may have found a way for the city to employ Randy. He can
move hinky stuff for us.”

“Don’t get
carried away.” Ed waved both hands. “I got no clout. You know that.”

“Hey, if
pocket zones become a regular issue in Chicago, the Hinky Division will
definitely need a toxic waste removal guy.”

“He got
papers? I ain’t crossing the Immigration on this.”

“Of course he
has papers,” she said, and sent Clay look intended to drill straight into his
skull.
Randy needs that ID, stat!
she
tried to beam at him telepathically.

Clay suggested
Thai food and a movie and Jewel let him come back to her place. They sat on the
sofa and pigged out.

She felt very
sorry for herself.

She felt
pooped, stupid, fat in the can, and, what was most unfair, guilty. The sadness
in Randy’s face as he faded away wouldn’t leave her.

“What did I do
wrong?” she wailed.

“Couldn’t tell
you,” Clay muttered, nose in the pad thai.

“He always
acts so insulted! I never met anybody so worried about his dignity all the
time! Swear to God, if I worried about his precious lordly feelings, I’d end up
tiptoing around like I really am his milkmaid or something.” She stabbed a pot
sticker with her chopstick and bolted it. “I can’t stand thinking of him in
that place where those women are — are
working.”
She noticed Clay wasn’t saying anything. “I’m sorry. I won’t rant any more. I’m
totally wiped.”

Clay put his
chopsticks down and scooted closer to rub the tendons on top of her shoulders. “Save
your worries, worrywart. Tomorrow’s another day.”

“You should
get on the system at work and find out what you can about Bing Neebly. Use Ed’s
ID.”

“You’re
loosening up,” Clay remarked, his hands working wonderfully on her back.

“Mmm, thank
you.”

He said, “Two
weeks ago, you wouldn’t have encouraged me to use a supervisor’s access code to
snoop on a city official.”

She moaned
under his squeezing fingers. “I’m broken. My integrity and my common sense are
shot. Plus, it turns out I’m a milkmaid after all. Lowborn
and
provincial-minded.” She thought of the scene on the bearskin
rug and shuddered.

“What’s with
milkmaid? Did Randy call you that?”

“You wouldn’t
understand. I guess it’s because he knows my family owned a dairy farm. He told
me recently that if I was back in eighteen-whatever, when he was a lord, he
wouldn’t even give me the time of day. I’m too low. I suppose he wouldn’t
bother to fuck me if he had his druthers,” she added gloomily.

That was the
worst part. She faced this every single time he did a zapper into some other
woman’s bed.

She’d got used
to Randy’s sexual services. Perilously comfortable with his magic mojo. Scarily
satisfied, probably addicted.

And she wasn’t
good enough for him. Oh, good enough to save his butt when he got stuck in a
bed somewhere. But long term? If he ever got free of the curse?

“Let me get
this straight,” Clay said, his hands pausing on her shoulders. “He
told
you that if he was walking down the
street in eighteen-whatever and saw you, he’d just walk on by?”

She sniffed. “Yes.
And I could see what he was thinking, too, because that was before you fixed
what that Venus Machine did to me, when it gave me telepathy about men and sex?
And he thought I was a
milkmaid
. I
mean, with the yoke and pails and a big white stupid hat like some girl in a
beer ad!”

Clay turned
her on the sofa to face him. “You do know that machine was a fake, right? It
didn’t work.”

“I only wish.”

He looked
exasperated. “Jewel, you can’t afford to be credulous. We’re supposed to be
catching frauds, not buying into the con.”

“I suppose you
think you can teach me all about that,” she said, stung. “Mr.
Yeah-but-I’ve-never-been-indicted.”

“Well, yes.
That’s more or less what Ed said when he hired me.” Clay seemed miffed.

Was he cheesed
off because she was obsessing about Randy?

“I could see
what you were thinking, too.” She lifted her eyes to his. Suddenly he looked
very not-frivolous and unsmug. “You would look at me, and I’d see a white
picket fence and a golden retriever.

A moment of
panic flickered in his eyes. He pulled away. “Tell me again what you thought
you were doing.”

“Reading men’s
minds. Randy put it into my head,” she said with venom, “and then that stupid
Venus Machine zapped me, and then whenever I made eye contact with a man,
euw.
Randy was like a sheet of glass, I
always understood what he was thinking. But then, I almost always do. You, I
don’t know. I never figured out the dog and fence thing. Probably you thought I
was a bitch, or else I was trying to keep you inside the law, or something. But
random guys on the street, euw. Thank God you were able to fix the machine and
reverse the effect.”

Clay made a
sound in his throat.

She frowned. “You
had this whole explanation about chakras and vibrational frequencies. Don’t
tell me you’ve forgotten.”

In a troubled
voice, he said, “You thought it would work, so it
worked.”

“Is that like
real magic?”

He shook his
head, watching her face. She’d never seen Clay look so serious for so long.
When he wasn’t trying to put one over, he seemed like someone who’d been
fighting a losing battle all his life. A sweet boy, too young for war.

While she
watched, his eyes darted to hers and crinkled up in a mischievous expression.
Kid to con artist in four seconds.

He held up a
cellophane-covered square.

“Wanna look at
feelthy pictures?”

So she let him
play the Hot Pink movie Onika had given them. She was too tired to argue. Sheer
surprise at having an intimate moment with Clay Dawes when she wasn’t the one
on the defensive had thrown her off balance.

She was so off
balance, in fact, that she let him get fresh on the sofa.

Onika’s porn for
women came across cute and sweet and sexy, sort of like Wilma, the blonde
mascot of Artistic Publishing. The story was about a lady librarian in hornrims
and frumpy clothes who hooks up with a geeky male professor-type in hornrims
and a tweed jacket, while researching Tantric sex in the limited-access
shelves. Once they were naked, of course, they proved to be physically perfect.
But at least the professor didn’t have a foot-long schweinstücke. And the
camera spent more time on their faces and slow caresses than on jackhammer
genital action. He even wore a condom.

At some point
in the middle of a silly yet tender scene where the professor tried to put his
ankle behind his own head, Clay slid his hands up under Jewel’s red knit top.
She let him.

I shouldn’t sleep with my partner. More
than a mantra, it’s a good idea.

Jewel was sick
of being responsible. She hadn’t had sex in forty-eight hours, her incubus was
doing somebody else, possibly this very porn star, damn her scrawny ass and
perky tits, and Clay, as usual, was just Clay. A normal guy. He almost fell off
the couch trying to kick his shoes off, and she laughed until she got the
hiccups.

And yet she
couldn’t forget that moment of vulnerability in his face. He was so darned
sneaky. If she were to take his sexual messages seriously — the heavy focus on
intimacy, the extreme vanilla quality, his slowness — she might almost believe
he had been making love to her all this time, while she’d been having sex with
him.

That unsettled
her.
This is not about l.o.v.e.
Setting
aside his style in bed, Clay’s message came across loud and clear:
I’ll go easy on you if you go easy on me.

She would
never have to work at a relationship with him.

On the other
hand, she might never know who he was.

This whole
train of thought gave her the willies.

They spent an
hour on the sofa in front of the TV. By the end of Onika’s girlie-porn movie,
Jewel felt sad and unaccountably lonely. Clay did his best but, every time she
looked over at the screen, she saw the girl from the bearskin rug, and her mind
wandered off, picturing the dreams that Velvita Fromage might be having while
she cavorted with Sancho and Randy.

In the end, to
Jewel’s deep shame and confusion, she faked falling asleep.

Clay took it
like a gentleman. She lay still while he got up and put his shoes and shirt
back on. As he bent and pressed a kiss to her forehead, she felt an urge to
drag him down on the sofa with her again. She kept her eyes closed.

When the door
had shut behind him, she got up, got naked, crashed into bed, and pulled out
her battered vibrator, wondering why on earth she had turned down a perfectly
good man when she was horny.

Maybe tonight
the vibrator made her feel more in control. She badly needed to feel in
control. Odd, because boffing random guys used to be her number one way of
feeling in control.

Of course Clay
wasn’t random. Anything but. Her partner. She rationalized her decision by
invoking the don’t-fuck-your-partner rule, which hadn’t worked very well so
far.

Maybe that was
why, as her little electric friend buzzed, she thought about Randy instead.

o0o

Next morning, as she checked her email, she had a sudden
attack of nosiness and inspected the register that kept track of Randy’s
activity on her computer.

The browser
history was a mile long.
Hm. Have to ask
Clay about this click-bot thing.
Excel tutorial. Microsoft Word tutorial.
Good boy, Randy was building solid work skills there. Solitaire — he’d used the
most advanced form and had beaten the computer more than eleven hundred times.

And a text file, eleven kilobytes, called “My First
Month, by Randy Darner.” She clicked on it.

As she read
the first line, Jewel flushed.
This is
private.

Her mouth went
dry.

She couldn’t
have stopped reading for a million dollars.

“My First Month”

by Randy Darner

I was
twenty-six when my life ended and I became immortal. I didn’t know at the time
that this had happened. One moment, I was sneering at my mistress, my pride
stinging from her complaint, and the next, I was bodiless, blind, hearing her
voice pronounce a sentence that has yet to run its course. As judges will,
secure in their wigs of office, she ranted a good deal, but what I remember
vividly is this:
Until you satisfy one
hundred women, you are a prisoner in this bed, an incubus.

A hundred
women! From my lady’s complaint I was to understand that I had yet to satisfy a
single one. That stung worse than ever her vengeful magicks could.

Come, Randall, this
is tedious. This is to be porn,not puling lamentation.

Of my first
days as an incubus I remember little. I dreamed of whores, and the things
whores do. In time, with growing dismay, I realized that the brass bed in which
I lay imprisoned was situated in a brothel.

Well, at least
my task should be easy enough.

So I thought.

My lady had granted
me magical powers, powers to enter a woman’s secret heart, be she never so
respectable, and sniff out, as a hound sniffs out a coney in its burrow, her
hidden desires. Whoso lay in my bed, I would know her wants, and would have the
power, supposedly, to render her wanton.