The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (14 page)

Head lowered, eyes over the peaks of his fingers, he said, “I like my coffee with cream and one sugar.”

* * *

The string sculpture inspired McCallum. He always thought that acts of insubordination, sabotage, or breaches in policy were works of art. Not good art. Not pleasant art. But they were crafts, sometimes simple, other times intricate, that made one thing look like another. As smudges of charcoal on parchment could call to mind a meadow in winter or a woman pondering her missteps, a guy could look like he was doing his job all day, not dropping every one-thousandth tube of toothpaste coming off his line into his boot.

And if indiscretions could be art, perhaps he could make one. Any decent artist could — maybe should — be insubordinate on occasion.

He told his chief he’d received a tip that someone might be skimming gasoline from the emergency generator supply at the water plant. It was an oral tip. In high confidence. No traces. No one liked to mess with the water supply, so the chief gave him a slush-line budget to investigate. $1,200. Tops. McCallum told him that would be fine for a cursory look see.

The funds gave him enough time and cover to run video checks for gasoline-powered vehicles on the shared roads. He started near John Raston’s house, six months in the past, and spiraled out.

Raston was a god damned ferret. The computer could pick out human faces from partial profiles behind tinted glass passing at 35 miles per hour. It couldn’t find a single red Jeep. McCallum knew he’d left at night, and the vehicle had no need of roads. He didn’t think the man could miss all the cameras, though. Not all 24,000 on the roads alone. Even sticking to fields and ditches could only get you so far. You couldn’t go ten miles in this region without needing to cross a bridge.

Unless he didn’t run that far? McCallum initially figured Raston was hundreds of miles from home by now. Maybe thousands. Maybe he figured wrong. John could’ve run and hid in the area he knew best. All that farm country and woods just south of Lake Ontario. John could be living less than 25 miles from his house.

McCallum expanded the timeline of the search. No way that Jeep carried enough supplies for six months. John may have used it this winter to build up his stores.

Two hours later the computer had a hit. McCallum’s monitor showed him a few seconds of a Jeep, possibly red, with a canvas roof and side drapes, crossing a bridge up in the greater Niagara Falls catchment. It had a Christmas tree tied to the top.

McCallum checked his budget. $567. Not enough to raise anyone’s eyebrows. He sent a message to his chief that the gasoline thing was dead. Then, for the first time in recent memory, he asked for a week of vacation.

Chapter Seventeen

The whole of the modern world works for me, Sylvia told an interviewer back at the start of the new year. She had tried for bravado without arrogance. She wasn’t quite sure she had pulled it off. The sentiment held true, though. Everyones’ lives lie spread open for the world to peruse. Everyone had a story, plain to see, if you took the time to look. She did. Then she shaped those stories into documentary films. A term she still used, even though reels and developing and silver nitrate were so far in the past she knew them only from the pictures. Moving pictures.

She sat in a café that offered free monitor use. Order a cup of tea, tap your cuff on the port and you didn’t have to look at the tiny screen on your bracelet. The noise and meandering people were a welcome by-product. She liked watching people almost as much as she liked watching movies. She liked trying to puzzle out their personal stories from the way they dressed, walked, tried not to look at that gorgeous boy two tables over who seemed oh-so-ever alone.

Today, she wanted to look into a couple of lives that required a bit of digging. Another term she liked— digging. Her two jobs were not that different, down at the ground level. Scratch, plant, grow and hope people gain from the results.

She searched out friends of Patricia Racie, the brittle young woman she’d interviewed in Niagara Falls. Sylvia databased everyone Patricia associated with. She couldn’t get into her private circles and knew that’s where the good stuff hid. She isolated Patricia’s closest, most frequent friends and set them up in a separate list. She summoned up dossiers on each and crossed them against Gavin’s data. No matches. No one ran in the same crowds as Gavin or worked for divisions to which he had some attachment.

She opened Marshall’s curriculum vitae and cross-checked. Finally, she got a commonality. Marshall sat on the board of directors of an architectural firm, employing one of Patricia’s dearest friends, James Nygyn.

Message to Marshall: Need access to James Nygyn’s personal accounts. He works for Camphore, Lumberson and Park. You sit on the board, in case you don’t remember.

Sylvia ordered another cup of chamomile with lemon.

From Marshall: Good God, it’s Sunday. The day of rest.

Message to Marshall: No rest for the wicked.

Muscling into private lives wasn’t her favorite tool. She hated the fact that someone had probably used it on her recently, resulting in her forced decampment to Atlanta. It had given her this idea, though. Fire with fire and all that. If they were going to push her around, she’d push someone else. Maybe, in the process, she’d get to push back.

The café had a polished feel that left it looking so ten-minutes-ago she couldn’t imagine ever returning. It was the type of faux maple contraption that corporate could, and probably did, construct all around the planet. Dark greens and peach tones. Brass trinkets here and there. It lacked a sense of being Atlantian. No history. No elevation beyond being a café. This entire city seemed to her like one big, freaking hotel.

Message from Marshall: Here you go. Hope it’s worth it.

Sylvia took the codes and entered Patricia Racie’s more personal world disguised as her good friend James.

As expected, Patricia’s messages and posts to her friends were a vapid mixture of daily grief and miniscule joys. She quickly extracted a list of everyone she communicated with, ever. She databased that list and gave it a good look. Friends from school, from work, from her neighborhood and her extended family. Only one name didn’t fit, a man with whom she appeared to have nothing in common: John Raston.

John Raston did not allow ‘James’ access into his private stuff. Sylvia would need a new sheep’s coding.

More lists.

Finding friends of John Raston proved more difficult than she expected. He didn’t have many. He didn’t have much contact with the world at all. None in the past six months. None? That was a story. The kind she liked.

John’s slow reclusion from society began two years ago, with the death of his husband, Roger Gow. Fascinating. She looked into Roger Gow’s history and realized they hadn’t been together when he passed. He’d been transferred a year earlier. The company didn’t make it a habit of splitting up married couples, but they were non-procreating, so the rules weren’t as stringent.

Roger Gow’s cache of memories survived him. She opened up his life, which he hadn’t been too concerned with keeping secret. Roger had spent the last year of his life in a beryllium plant. Dangerous work. The company sent him there after he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. If you need people to work in an environment that may cause cancer, why not send workers that already have it? Sylvia could see the company’s logic.

“That would make a good movie,” she said out loud.

Not that it would ever get made
, she said to herself.

Roger had hundreds of photos in his core memory. Sylvia wanted to see what this John Raston looked like. She opened the pictures starting with the most recent. And there they were.

John Raston could have been made of reeds. His glasses were the thickest thing about him. They didn’t obscure the intelligence in his eyes. Roger had the sagging skin of rapid weight loss. She could tell he’d been handsome in the years leading up to the illness. Bone structure never lied. They had been happy together. Arms on shoulders, smiling. Lots of photos of wine glasses and barrels, shot at outdoor tables, with vines behind them.

She flicked though photos and flicked and flicked and stopped. That wasn’t like any winery she’d ever seen. The long walls and old, old stone buildings. Square parapets and a big body of water on the other side. She’d never seen anything like it on the west coast. In one photo John and Roger held up glasses of deep yellow wine, grinning, with a field of shacks and tents in the background. A tramp camp.

“Ollies,” Sylvia said. They’d visited an off-the-grid vineyard.

What a grand place to hide.

She copied all of the winery photos and sent them to Samjahnee.

Message to Samjahnee: Find this place. Now.

* * *

“They want the baby,” Lillian said in a dead calm that chilled the back of Emory’s neck.

“What?” he replied.
Go away. Get out
, he ordered her in his head.

“Lizzie,” Lillian continued. “The bank told me they’d found a family that will give me eight thousand dollars for her.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Emory glanced around the common room, chipped and worn, tables, chains and occupants alike.

“Because I can’t keep the house. The bank said we could discuss options and that’s what they gave me.”

“You’ve got… we can’t.”

“We’ll sell,” Lillian said.

“My parents?”

“Your parents are tapped out. My parents are tapped out.”

“Did you call John?”

Lillian’s face crunched. Emory could see the tendons in her neck strain against her jaw.

“You think John’s the answer to everything? Is that what you think? He’s the problem, Em. Not the solution. John was no wizard. He had a couple of tricks and he fooled you with them.”

Emory clenched his hands. They hurt. He opened them and clenched them again. Harder.

“Don’t worry. I’ll sell the house. I’ll probably have to take the transfer corporate offered. Tel Aviv. Figures, right? An ocean away.”

“But research, it can be done anywhere.”

“Anywhere the company wants. Our marriage no longer registers. I’m in heavy debt. They can send me to the Artic.”

Emory pressed his hands together in front of him. He didn’t know what else to do with them. He didn’t know what else to do with any part of him.

“I…” he didn’t know what to say, either. He closed his mouth, afraid that if he opened it again he might just howl. A coyote in a trap.

“John’s gone,” Lillian said. “He disappeared the night our troubles started.”

“How do you know? Did you try contacting—”

“Of course I tried. Just to scream at him I tried. The ASS ops can’t even find him.”

“He might be able to…”

“To do nothing. He’s gone off line. That’s what that stupid message was. That last one he sent you.”

“The video bit?”

“Yeah. The fork in Niagara Falls. Fork Niagara. Get it?”

“Fork Niagara…” Emory wanted to bring his brain back around. He used to be bright. Really clever. That’s why he could… that’s why he was here, on the chain gang. A place between too smart and not smart enough.

* * *

As far as McCallum knew, there were two types of ollies: those in hiding and those the company wanted hid. Both cases tended to fall outside his job description. The company didn’t care about the latter and lost interest in the former. Spending money to get somebody back on the payroll didn’t make a whole lot of business sense most of the time. In his whole career he’d only tracked down one off-liner and that was because the man’s brother thought he might be a decent kidney donor. That story did not have a happy ending. McCallum didn’t think this one would, either.

He pulled into the convenience store anyway. A dreary concrete box marked off by trees on three sides. Mostly naked. He got out of his car and stared for a spell at a row of pines that were not. Green, holding on to bales of melting snow. They looked like the opposing team. They’d won on the home team’s field and didn’t want to celebrate with too much vigor. He liked the mix of species up here in the Niagara Falls catchment. He didn’t think to bring his sketchpad even though he told anyone who asked that he’d be doing just that. The evergreens had a timid pride about them. We held out against the harsh northern winter. We didn’t shed half our body mass. We gave up nothing. The three of us stood strong, if a bit prickly, because that’s the way to survive. McCallum held up his wrist and took a picture, despite the weak lighting.

He turned as another car pulled up. Long, lean, yellow. Black windows. Silent, save for the tires popping on the pavement. He didn’t know the make, as it wasn’t an Ambyr car. He knew luxury, though. This was a decent vehicle and he didn’t need a set of ads to convince him. Rosalie got out of the passenger side, jeans and a short leather jacket. She tossed her hair over her shoulder, not because it hung in her way, he knew, but because of the presentation. The effect it had on him. As Ambyr Incorporated had picked McCallum to be an op due to his observational abilities, India Group had made Rosalie an op because she could twist men into tiny, useless knots.

“If you’re looking to get back together, I’m thinking you picked the wrong place.” She stopped in front of McCallum and put her hands on her hips.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” McCallum said. “Kind of my thing.”

“How you been?”

“Spring is in the air. You look good.”

“Thanks, Eddie. You too,” Rosalie said. “So I’m the only person you know in the ISS?”

“The only one I trust,” McCallum said.

“All right,” Rosalie started towards the front door of the convenience store.

McCallum glanced back at the yellow car and wondered what kind of driver sat behind the wheel.

The woman behind the counter eyed them as they entered. Two young boys in the back corner stood in a trance, holding open the door of a 20-foot drink cooler, filled with beer, malt-liquor, wine-soda pop mixes that gave McCallum a headache just looking in their direction. He figured the woman held a stake in the shop, because she bothered to glance back and forth between the kids and the surveillance monitors on her counter. She had more pounds than she needed, less brownish hair and the posture of a laundry sack. In the city, this kind of store wouldn’t warrant a full time clerk. Out here, McCallum guessed things were different.

“Hi.” Rosalie approached the counter. McCallum followed.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked.

“I’m hopin’ so…” Rosalie glanced at her cuff, then up to the woman. “Mrs. Margery Ealing, manager and operating partner of the Large Mouth Mini Mart, division of India Group.”

Margery took a large, shoulder-pumping huff, crossed her arms and drew a thoroughly fake smile across her mouth. “You the new sheriff? ‘Cuz you’re gonna have to palm a lot of cream horns to catch up to the last one.”

“No,” Rosalie said. “I’m here on a special.”

Margery’s smile dropped. She gave McCallum the once over. “This takes two of you? What’s that costing?”

Rosalie held up her bracelet. “Mind a bump?”

“I have a choice?”

“We all have choices.” Rosalie clinked her cuff against the woman’s. “You’re making the right one.”

Margery tapped her bracelet, then flicked her finger across the top. She looked at the monitor embedded in her counter. McCallum looked back at the two teenagers. They each selected a beverage and closed the frosty door.

“Have you seen this man?” Rosalie asked.

“Can’t say as he rings any bells.”

“You sure? Why don’t you give him a good long look?”

Margery ran her eyes over the monitor too fast to focus.“Nope,” she told Rosalie.

“You sell gasoline?” Rosalie asked.

“You tell me.”