No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (28 page)

I had made a mental bet with myself that Keaton would fuck Zielinski silly.  She never passed up an opportunity to needle me.  She hadn’t hammed it up or anything, nor harmed him, which took work for an Arm.

She had sent Zielinski off with her old juice meter, specifically to give to me as a present.  I found, carved on the juice meter, an ‘SK’, thus another possession she now trusted me to keep and protect.  The juice meter and the Zielinski sex sent me a message: ‘if you mess up Zielinski, I will have your guts for garters; you’re an Arm again, you’re mine and you will be judged accordingly’.  I could live with her requirement.  The payment, the incredible amount of money Keaton poured into this research project, was quite welcome, and another message.  What I did was important to her, she wanted results from her investment, and she had her dormant money making organization going again.

Zielinski continued down his checklist with the stubby hotel pencil while I watched him from my position seated on the edge of the near bed.  “I’ve got the bank accounts set up, the personal ones and the transit accounts, to hold the money on its way in from offshore.  I’ve located the plastic surgeon you wanted for me,” grimace, “and gotten the locations of the Texas and Louisiana Transform Clinics.  I’ve also hired the private detectives you wanted to look into Haggerty’s background.  Everything should be squared away within a week,” he said.  “I’ve also got leads on the volunteer Transforms you need for Haggerty.”  The private detectives wouldn’t be his long term responsibility, but until I started my recruiting, we would all be doing double and triple duty.  We both realized that for a long time we would be depending on his Transform community contacts for things like volunteer Transforms for the baby Arms.

“What about a Houston Network contact?” I said.  I had also dropped that one on Hank’s lap.

“I talked to Lori and got the list of local Houston Focuses, plus Lori’s evaluation of the ones she’s had contact with,” Hank said.  “I’ve put my recommendations on the list, as well.”  He handed me the list, and I read it over.  Both he and Lori had recommended a Focus Laswell, who they described as a steel-spined Focus bitch with enough brains to run a positive cash flow.

“Thanks,” I said.  “I’ll work that one immediately.”  I still had to suppress the urge to go into a stalk around Transforms.  I needed to fix that, given Keaton’s plans.  I needed to be capable of doing anything with Transforms, up to and including making love to them.

Establishing a new territory in such a cautious and thoughtful manner half bothered me.  I had made one pass through Houston to get a sense for the place.  It was larger than I expected, and my instincts said to expect Transform problems, but compared to Chicago or Pittsburgh they appeared to be small.

I had been in many new towns, but this one would be mine, this town of oil and space and heat.  I had never been to Houston before.  When I thought of Texas, I thought of the dry West Texas desert and the somewhat greener Dallas.

Houston was hot and wet, a reclaimed swamp, an extension of the swamps of Louisiana.  A place of incredible green.  Hibiscus, azaleas, mold, vines, and ancient live oaks covered with Spanish moss.  And bugs.  Lots of bugs.  I didn’t know roaches got to be two inches long.

My soon to be new territory was a vibrant, chaotic place.  No zoning in the city, and the city itself was as wild a growth as the local vegetation.  A place of big dreams, from the Texas oilmen, to the Ship Channel which made a city 50 miles from the ocean into a major port, to the impossible dream of space itself.

A good place to forget past failures and start again.  After seeing the skyscrapers and the freeways and the signs pointing to NASA I decided this city might be a good place for me, despite all my worries.  I felt obscurely unfaithful to Chicago by my decision, but Chicago was gone from me for now.

---

For my next project, I needed to improve my control around tagged Transforms and make contact with Focus Laswell, before I officially moved to Houston.  Right now I suffered through a bad case of Keatonic paranoia.  Caution became my middle name.  My incarceration memories kept me on high alert.

I also wanted to be able to visit Focus Rizzari’s household; from what Hank said on the subject, her household was the most interesting Transform tourist attraction on the planet.  Plus, I wanted to prove to myself I could still learn new things and improve myself.

My desires didn’t have anything to do with any need on my part to see Lori Rizzari again and lose myself in her beautiful glow.  No, not at all.

To start with, I found a tagged Transform in Austin, a truck driver delivering supplies to a restaurant on 6
th
Street, and followed him around until I couldn’t stand it anymore.  I found a different Transform, this time a librarian at a library out by Town Lake, and did it again.  I repeated this until I could deal with a tagged Transform at the edge of my range.

After some meditation, I followed a Transform, this time a clerk at the JC Penney off I 35, closer, until the following bothered me so much I backed off.  Damn but this was easier when these Transforms had a Focus around.  I pushed myself to where I got to just outside of touching range of the tagged Transform without edging toward a stalk, but then my progress plateaued out.

While money gathering in New Orleans the next day (a simple robbery of a successful heroin dealer) I found some prey, hunted her down, and got her just minutes before her Monster conversion.  Yum.  When I went back to my training the next day, with the juice monkey off my back, I found my problems with tagged Transforms mostly gone.  I even struck up a conversation with the one I followed, a twenty-three year old bartender with an overbite, and the idiot hit on me.  I decided to skip the sex test for now.  Nevertheless, I didn’t fall into a stalk.

Next I snuck myself into Houston with Hank and Frances, his acting secretary now.  During the day I occupied them working on a huge list of information we needed, while I got a part time job.  We commuted back to Austin every evening.  Sleep wasn’t on my schedule save for once or twice a week, which burned through juice like you wouldn’t believe.

The next step of learning to deal with tagged Transforms involved one Rosenda Renya, one of Focus Laswell’s Transforms, a gym manager.  I hired myself out to her as a part time trainer at the gym, and spent a week with a bunch of Texas matrons with teased steel hair, teaching them to exercise without sweating.  Now
that
is a specialized skill.  In any case, I spent hours on end in close contact with Rosenda.  Torture, utter torture.  I only slipped once.  I was low on juice and Rosenda was cranky because of some problem with her kids.  She crowded me, verbally and physically, and I let the predator show.  Only for an instant, and then I told her I was sick and needed to go home.  Instead, I spent the rest of the day hunting in Houston, and at night in the Clear Lake area.  I found an oil refinery worker, about to take his family down with him on his way to hell, and I saved their bacon as only an Arm could.  As far as anyone would be able to tell, he died, at night, in one of those freak refinery accidents that only served to drive up refinery insurance rates.

---

“So, is it possible?  That the bad juice you found in me is causing this level of head problems?  This gristle dross stuff?”

Zielinski, sad frown on his face, closed the little journal of activities I had put together.  Midnight was long past and the hotel was quiet, except for the low buzz of Frances snoring on the far bed.  Zielinski nodded.  “I can’t imagine the gristle dross isn’t causing some form of problem, ma’am.  I believe we need to find out what those problems are.”

Hell.  He only called me ma’am in private when he got formal and did what he termed ‘pulling on his tag’.  Being Zielinski, he had of course figured out how to use the tag for his advantage.  “Let me guess.  No one knows how this works on normals, not to mention Transforms.  Or Arms.”

“Correct, ma’am.”

My journal covered the time from when Zielinski ‘cured’ me to the present.  He had done an in-depth analysis of my activities.  His results showed me to be human: days off doing nothing, repetitively doing the same thing I should have been able to do once, and decisions put off until later.

I wasn’t working on Arm time.  I just thought I had been.  I had to go without sleep just to keep up with a lazy Arm’s workload.

The idea of facing withdrawal again to cure myself didn’t appeal.  Zielinski thought his trick would work, and I wasn’t willing to ask him why.  “It isn’t real withdrawal.  It will just feel like withdrawal,” he said.

Great.  Just what I wanted to hear.  I paced the small space at the foot of the beds, along the wall, and dresser, and old television.  A couple of pictures of stylized flowers stared down at me, garishly colorful in the dim room.

“Okay.  I think I’m willing to try plan B.”  Plan B was to see Lori, the expert on Crows, and arrange something similar to what Hank went through after his assassination experience.  “Before you go, send Keaton one of your letters,” I said, pacing back to him and putting my foot on the second chair.  I leaned my forearms on my knee.  “Tell her what we’ve discovered and what we’re doing about the problem.”  I invited Zielinski to plan for bad contingencies, of which far too many were possible.  To insure his survival.  I didn’t bother explaining.  Zielinski could figure this one out for himself.

Before I could execute plan B I needed to finish my tagged Transform resistance training and visit Focus Laswell.

---

Focus Laswell and her household lived on the southwest side of Houston, near where the city was building a new freeway.  Her household was a well-appointed smallish place on Jackwood Street, and the tiny back yard backed up on the Westwood Country Club.  Too small for a Focus household, but I figured out their arrangement when I sensed tagged Transforms in four separate houses all in a row.  Something about Houston and its weather made them build their suburban houses close together, close enough to touch both houses if you stretched your hands out wide.  Many houses would fit within the hundred-yard range of a Focus in Houston.

I rang the doorbell at the address indicated, a two-story brick house with a bright red door, and a lawn of bright green St. Augustine.  A kid answered, a bratty pre-teen with a Marine cut.  Houston was like a time warp in many ways, still stuck in the fifties.  Or perhaps the forties.  I noticed a few longhaired youth around, but not as many as in the rest of the country.  Most of the teenage boys looked like they had just stepped out of a recruiting poster.  For World War II.  “You must be mom’s visitor, Miss Parks.  Gladtameecha, ma’am.”

I nodded.  Miss Parks was the identity I used at the lady gym.  The identity was supposed to be well muscled, but I wore a baggy long sleeve blouse and mid-calf skirt for this meeting.

Zielinski had described Focus households to me, with the tight structure and the sense of everyone in everyone else’s hair.  I sensed some of that, but not as much as I feared.  The kid took me back to the combined kitchen dining area, where a mob of people greeted me and then went about their business as if I wasn’t there.  One of them, a Transform, even bumped into me, which made me break out in a cold sweat.  I stifled my juice monkey while some unnamed Transform introduced me to Focus Laswell.  She took one look at me, read my tension as if I had written it on my face with a pen, and suggested we find a quiet place to talk.

Focus Laswell led me back to a bedroom office, clearly her room, with a bed, a desk, and a few old office chairs, squeezed into a space not quite large enough to fit, and cheery blue curtains over windows looking out into the tiny back yard.  From what I saw, hers was the only room in the place not stacked deep in bunk beds.  Some of her people must work off hours and share beds in shifts, I decided.  She led me to a couple of the chairs and we both sat.

“Glad you could come.  I hope you aren’t havin’ too many problems.  From the letter the other Arm sent out I thought it might be her nosin’ around, but when I figger’d out it was you I thought an invite might be nice.  I hope I wasn’t bein’ too pushy and lettin’ my waggin’ tongue git me in trouble again, but well, here we are anyway!”

Oh.

Focus Laswell was, um, cute.  She had wavy black hair, half teased up in that style they called the Texas poodle.  Darkly tanned, she had a button nose and big rosy cheeks.  Save for heavy red lipstick of a style I hadn’t worn since Junior High, she didn’t use any make-up at all.  Didn’t need to.  She bubbled.

“I’m sorry I caused Rosenda those problems.”  I felt horribly out of place here.  Whatever nice social polish I once possessed had vanished in my withdrawal and what I had learned since didn’t fit.  I had become one of the guys, or, among women, comfortable only among the flower children.  Social niceties with a Texas-bred woman were out of my league.

“Ahw, ‘twas nothing.  She’s just a big scaredy-cat.  What did you do to her anyways?”

“I gave her a look like this,” I said, and flashed a bit of predator at Thelma.

“Whoo!”  She didn’t even jump back.  “I want you on my team, but there’s a problem.”

What, had I lost my touch or something?  No.  I had certainly gotten to Rosenda.  I doubted I would be welcome back working for her.  Lori did know her stuff.  I had asked for a Houston Focus who wouldn’t panic because I was an Arm and she had delivered.