Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

She fell silent, trying to remember that, how that felt. It was funny how time and trauma combined to sponge out the best moments of a person’s life. She knew those days had once been real to her, but was unable now to recall any of the warmth and hope he’d inspired in her. What she remembered best in this moment was that Dan had hated the commute from her house, a forty-minute drive in the morning that could easily turn into two hours coming home in the right strain of rush hour. He wanted to move. She wanted to stay. He liked the city. She liked the woods. All those strings of little half-fights that so easily turned into make-up sex and simmering exasperation. But he’d said he loved her. She only wished she could still remember that.

Tagen let her be for several minutes, but as her gaze began to drift unhappily back to her hands, he squeezed her wrists to bring her back to him. “You worked at Kruegar and Lauder,” he pressed.

“And they hired someone,” she continued, and sighed. “A man named Traynor Polidori. When they asked him if he’d ever been arrested, he said yes. When they asked what for, he said stealing from a clothing store. I guess they were so impressed with his honesty that they never bothered to check and see if he was actually telling the truth.”

Tagen nodded and leaned back, his hands slipping from hers to fold together. He had never looked more like a cop to her than he did right then. It was as though he already knew everything she was about to tell him, and everything she wouldn’t. “What was the truth?”

“That he killed a woman ten years earlier. Tortured and raped and then killed her.”

Tagen nodded once, slowly, almost to himself. “His crime was not discovered?”

“Sure it was. He was even sent to prison. For about three years.”

Tagen’s brows knotted with the same hesitance he showed when he suspected his English wasn’t keeping up with hers. But when he spoke, he astonished her by saying, “Not guilty…by reason of insanity?”

Daria gaped at him, and then laughed a little. “I forget, you watch Law & Order all day. But you’re right, that’s what they said.” She started to pick up the thread of her monologue, but dropped it to ask, “What would have happened to him on your planet?”

Tagen’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment she didn’t think he would let her escape from her story. But in the end, he said, “Our doctors have ways of determining whether or not mental defect is present, and our people are tested routinely in their youth. It is unlikely Traynor Polidori could have escaped detection for so long, but it does happen…although never more than once. Traynor Polidori would have been chemically corrected and fit with a monitoring device for a probationary period after his first victim. If no such mental defect were found, he would have been imprisoned.”

“Forever?” she asked.

“For a crime of such violence, yes. There is an option given for self-termination at any time.” Tagen shrugged. “Seldom employed at first, but I am told it becomes popular after forty years or so.”

“No one ever comes out of jail?” Daria asked. “No time off for good behavior? Ever?”

“It is the behavior prior to prisoning that our judges concern themselves with.” Tagen shifted in his chair. “We do not permit what you call appeal. Trials are swift and exacting. Prisons are constructed around lifeless worlds which provide the prison’s only heat and light. The prisoners are responsible for maintaining the growth of their own food, and unmanned supply ships are sent on a regular schedule to make up for any inadequacies. The supply ships irradiate their interior upon leaving the prison, making escape by that route impossible. Sentry-satellites monitor the prisons at all times for disturbances and wardens stationed in synchronous orbit keep watch over the readings. Their main function is to implement repairs when necessary, but they are all well-armored and armed. Our policy is that any prison forced to lock down by riot must be destroyed immediately. We have never needed to do so, I think, because it is so well-known, but there stands the sum and substance of our attitude toward violent criminals.”

Now it was Tagen’s turn to drop his eyes. He looked away toward the window, but not through it. His claws tapped lightly over the table. “I have heard a thing said on this video program you so despise. It was said, ‘Our system is based on the principle that it is better that twenty criminals go free than send one innocent man to prison.’” His voice softened as he recited, but strengthened, as though he paid tribute to the words with the speaking of them.

“I admire that,” he said, and turned back to her, his eyes burning with emotion. “I would like to make these words my own. I feel the power of them, the virtue. It is a good, honorable thing to take for principle. It has given you a world of freedom and liberty…and Traynor Polidori. And so I admire those words, but I will not take them back with me to Jota. In our prisons, there must be many innocent men…but there are few criminals on our streets.”

“E’Var and his crew excepted, of course,” she said, almost smiling.

He almost smiled back at her. “I did say ‘few’, did I not? Not none, but few. And it is perhaps worth observing that E’Var did not operate his crimes on-world.”

“Have you ever had a jailbreak?”

Tagen paused again before answering, and this time, the pause was longer. Finally, he said, “I think I take your meaning, and the answer is no. There are no…what your media call escape pods on prisons, and no tools for the building of one. There have been many escapes by the condemned, such as E’Var, and like E’Var’s, all occurred in transit. Transport of prisoners is a dangerous, unstable business, especially when the use of a Gate is required. And for lesser crimes,” he added, looking thoughtful, “certain behavior modification and monitoring, although less effective at preventing repeat offenders, has sufficed. There is crime on Jota. There are killings and there are many chemists and smugglers who deal in violence as part of off-world trade, but there are none on Jota like this Traynor Polidori, who kill and are imprisoned and released to kill again.”

Mechanically, Daria said, “Polidori didn’t kill me.”

Tagen looked at her, his eyes tinged for the first time with pity. “You think not?” he said.

She could not look at him, or think of any way to answer.

She heard him sigh. “Daria…”

She didn’t want to hear anything that came after that. “He started to follow me,” she said loudly. “Polidori. He found out where I lived and what I did, where I went and on what days. He got ready, and on the day Dan and I used to go to dinner, he followed us. I had clams that night,” she remembered suddenly, and sat back, surprised at herself. “They tasted like they came from a can. I tasted it all night. I’ve never been able to eat them since.”

They really had been terrible clams, tinny and rubbery, made bitter by too much wine in the sauce. She’d eaten all the breadsticks and most of Dan’s pilaf, trying to make light of it, teasing each other about picking up some burgers on the way home, and the whole time, Polidori had sat in his car in the parking lot, watching through the tinted window.

“There was a place we used to go to, after dinner,” she continued. “We’d make believe we were still dating. You know, drive up to the Point, sit in the car, look at the lights of the city. Sometimes…Did you ever used to go places like that with a girl, Tagen?”

“We do not date,” he said simply.

“Why not?”

“Mathematical logic,” he replied. “There are many, many more males than females. Monogamy is unrealistic and potentially damaging to the continuance of our species.”

“Yeah, but you don’t…don’t ever fall in love? Get married?”

He put his hand over hers. “What happened at the Point, Daria? When you sat in the car with your Dan?”

“Nothing, really. Except…” Daria looked away from Tagen’s piercing eyes and out the nearest window, frowning. “We were…making out a little. Like teenagers. It was stupid. But…but it was fun and…and anyway, these headlights came on. A car was parked right behind us. I didn’t even notice when it drove up, but the headlights came on while we were kissing and this car pulled out slowly and drove away. I remember thinking it was his car…Polidori’s. I couldn’t prove it at the trial, of course, but…but I’m sure it was his car. He saw us.”

“Yes.” Tagen’s voice was no more than a murmur of assent, serving only to keep her train of thought in place.

“And the next morning, I was at my desk at work and he came up to me. Polidori. He was smiling. He had a paper sack in his hand. He said he had a present for me.” Daria could hear herself speaking, her words coming mechanically and without emotion, but her mind was drifting off to other things. Her trees needed pruning. “It was a bag from a bakery. I thought it was a muffin or something. I didn’t want to accept presents from a guy when I was dating someone else, but I was kind of hungry and a muffin sounded good. I held out my hand. He reached into the bag. He took out a mayonnaise jar. There was clear liquid in it. He opened the jar and threw the liquid at me.”

Tagen’s eyes sharpened and he looked at the side of her face—the bad side—for the first time. Shock opened up on his alien face, and Daria realized that up until that moment, he had never even noticed how out of place and ugly her scars had been.

She could have kept talking, told him everything she’d said on the witness stand at Polidori’s trial—how it had hurt, how it had burned, how she had been blind in her left eye until the corneal transplant operation, her first shocked look in the mirror at that new and unnatural green eye—but it was an awful thing to see that shock on Tagen’s face, and to know that her one chance at having a normal conversation with someone completely unmoved by horror or pity had come and gone. She fell silent, her eyes dropping to the table top.

“He…did that to you.” Tagen’s voice was harsh. Wounded by comprehension.

Daria made herself nod so she wouldn’t have to speak.

Silence. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked away the minutes.

“He went to prison for three years?” Tagen demanded.

“Almost three.” Daria’s eye was wandering toward the window again. She wondered if she asked Tagen, would he help her prune the trees? “His first conviction was ruled inadmissible at my trial, and the defense managed to prove that since Polidori knew the acid wouldn’t kill me, it couldn’t be called attempted murder. They could only try him for aggravated assault. He was sentenced to five years in prison and three months in a psychiatric institution to undergo counseling.”

She didn’t know how much of that Tagen could follow, but he didn’t ask her to clarify and she remembered again his fascination with Law & Order and realized he probably understood more about the legal system and its frailties than she did.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, looking away to the window. “Another inmate stabbed him to death after almost three years. Do the inmates in your prisons ever kill each other?”

“Frequently.”

“Is it considered a crime?”

“Yes.” Tagen shrugged one shoulder. “There is even a second trial of sorts, during which the prisoner may make some plea in the event of self-defense or other extenuating circumstances. If it can be proven the prisoner attacked and killed another prisoner without provocation, he or she is removed to a solitary cell for the remainder of his or her life.”

“I guess there’s no point in having two life sentences when your prisoners actually serve their entire life, huh?”

“No.”

Daria looked out the window at her too-scruffy trees. “Dan left me.”

She wanted to say more about that, but even now, years afterward, she couldn’t think of any way to express the horrible glut of baffled emotion she felt. They used to talk about getting married, maybe. Maybe having kids. Vacations in Hawaii. They had lived together three years. They had bought so many things together. They were friends, they were lovers. There were so many things they always meant to do with all the time they had left to do it in.

He’d come to see her almost every day at the hospital, for about two weeks. Then he’d started coming in only the weekends. And then she didn’t see him at all until after her new eye was installed. He’d brought her flowers for that. And told her he was very sorry, but he just couldn’t handle this. It was too much, he’d said. He’d called once or twice after that, but that was the last time she’d seen him. He left all the stuff in his room. She could do what she wanted with it, he said. Sell it or give it away or anything. And she’d boxed it, believing with her whole heart that he would come back someday and unpack it.

“I sued Kruegar and Lauder for not checking Polidori’s record,” Daria continued after a pause. “They gave me a lot of money. And I spend it,” she added, shrugging. “I order my groceries delivered. I order my clothes. I order…everything. I don’t work any more. In fact, before you came here, I hadn’t left this house for six years except to pick up my mail or drive around sometimes at night. But I don’t stop anywhere. I never stop the car.” She slid him a dry, unhappy smile. “What would your people do about that?”

He was quiet a long time. “I would like to tell you we would not have allowed it to happen to you in the first place, but I know too well that Jota’s forces do fail its people. I do not know, Daria. It is likely you would have gone to live at a recovery center for a time, but it is my experience that such places are difficult to leave once one arrives. Like your home here, it is easy to make a prison of security.” He studied her gravely in the morning light as coffee-maker hissed and clicked. “It is a terrible thing that happened to you, Lindaria Cleavon. I regret that I have caused so much pain to bleed back into your life.”

He stood up then and went to put the peas back in the freezer.

Alone at the table, Daria stared at her hands and marveled at herself. She hadn’t cried once in the telling of it and she hadn’t lied to him. It hurt, but like the pain of a lanced boil, it had lessened some as it poured out of her. He was a good man, she thought. And he deserved a hell of a lot better.

“Tagen,” she said suddenly.

He turned, one brow raised inquiringly.

“It’s going to be hot,” she said.

His face darkened and his jaw set. “I know.”

Daria chewed at her lip.

Slowly, Tagen closed the freezer and faced her fully. “What are you thinking?”

She took a deep breath, her heart hammering as the enormity of what she was about to suggest struck home. She smiled shakily at him. “Let’s go for a drive.”

*

The middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday when it was 100 degrees in the shade meant that there just wasn’t anything for a girl to do when she was manning the helm at Luv-A-Lot’s adult novelty store except to line up the contestants for that night’s Vibrator Races. Janey Foxx was just changing out the batteries on the eight-inch jelly slim-line she favored (ribbed for traction!) when, lo and behold, the door opened. She didn’t know it yet, but she was about to have the strangest customer experience of her adult store career.

Janey popped her head up over the counter long enough to make sure her customers were at least eighteen, as mandated by federal blah blah blah, and they sure appeared to be. A guy and a girl. That was refreshing. Been a long time since she’d seen a hetero couple shop in here together.

Janey tucked the battery box away again and hopped up, slapping her hands on the countertop and trying to look perky and efficient in a we-sell-sex-toys sort of way. “How you folks doing?” she asked brightly. “Hot enough for ya?”

The couple exchanged a ‘look’. The man nodded once, somehow conveying a great depth of irony. “Quite,” he said, demonstrating with one word the kind of reverberating sexy growl of a man’s voice that could get any woman wet. He looked around—at the magazine shelves, the leather masks, the whips and paddles, the board games and inflatable demo-dolls—and he did not look a bit surprised at anything he saw. Not even when he saw the sheep. Clearly, a man who knew his way around a store like Luv-A-Lot’s.

The woman, on the other hand, was doing a pretty good beet impersonation. She, too, took a quick visual inspection of the merchandise, and then said, “I can explain this.” Her eye struck the inflatable sheep. “Most of this.”

“Ha.” It was not laughter, exactly, only a statement of dry humor. “We have porn on my planet, too.”

Or at least, that was sure what Janey thought he said. Maybe he was trying to be funny. Janey had once known a guy from Kansas who introduced himself as coming from another planet, and the big man did have a weird accent.

The women glanced at him, inched a little ways down the novelty aisle, and then came back to the counter. Her hands were wringing, and her face was practically in flames. “Can you tell me where, um, where you keep the, um…”

Janey grinned at her, leaning over the counter. “His or hers?” she asked.

“His,” the woman stammered. “The, um…the not gay…um…”

Janey pointed, and the woman grabbed her fella’s arm and ducked away. There was nothing else to do except watch, but at least Janey had the courtesy to use the mirrors.

The man was a great, broad-shouldered specimen in sunglasses. He had to be at least six and a half feet tall, but he was muscled all over, not lean-looking the way very tall guys tended to be, and not grotesquely pumped like a steroid freak. More like a well-built dude that had been magically blown up to slightly mammoth proportions. He was, in short, the kind of guy that looked like he could give a girl a real rodeo and not shag out after the first five minutes, and he moved in a careful, quiet, completely in-control way that made Janey think ‘cop’, even though he seemed pretty cool about browsing Luv-A-Lot’s.

His date, on the other hand, was completely average in every way, which made her appear positively petite next to her fella, and as always when she was bored, Janey found herself idly picturing the two of them in bed. The girl would have to be on top; either that, or doggie-style. Janey just couldn’t see him going at her missionary without smothering her.

Janey’s reflections were cut short as soon as the man reached the back wall where the His & Her toys were kept. He got one good look at the double-pronged foot-long black dildo on the top shelf, and all his been-here-done-that composure went right out the window. “What the tar?” he said, and that was probably the only time Janey had ever heard that particular exclamation.

“What? Oh.” The woman looked a little nonplussed. “I thought you said you had porn.”

“Yes, but you have people to do this!” The man swept his arm at all the rubber dicks. “Why would you…you…Is that a fish?”

The woman glanced back at the counter, caught her fella’s sleeve, and pulled him over to the Just for Guys section. Soon, they were standing together at the far end of the shelves, conferring in low voices as they looked at the toys. Janey couldn’t make out quite what they were looking at, but his attitude of quiet incredulity was only growing. Janey found that a little surprising; when they’d first walked it, she’d figured the girl for the vanilla, not him.

The girl was explaining something with her hands that could probably be explained better without clothes, standing back so that Janey could finally catch a peek at the merchandise. They were apparently considering a pussy-pump. The Pumpmaster 5000, it looked like, but it was hard to tell from here.

The man asked a question and the girl flipped the box over and read silently, then sent several hesitant glances in the direction of Janey’s back. Janey looked busy and approachable and not at all nosey.

“Um…miss? Hang on, Tagen.” The woman came over to the desk, holding the battery-operated pussy in both hands. “Look, I need a really…um, really good version of this. What can you, uh, recommend?”

“Well, it’s not exactly my thing, you know,” Janey said modestly, trying to put the customer at ease with a little humor.

The lady laughed, but it had a shrill, freaked-out quality that made Janey wonder if the girl was high.

“But okay, assuming sound and money ain’t an object, I’d have to recommend the Jenna Jamason model, which is over there on the wall, top shelf, in the silver box. See it?”

Girl and Guy both looked, and then the fella started over to have a closer look.

“Best suction, tight seal. Pricey as hell, but it ain’t too loud when it’s running. Want to reach it down for me, Highpockets? I’ll demonstrate.”

The man complied, and Janey, who was looking down for the battery box, thought for a second she’d seen something really bizarre about the dude’s hand, but when she straightened up and looked again, his hands were in his pockets and the girl was holding the pump.

Janey popped the seal on the box and fished out the pussy and the cellophane blanks it came packed in, slid in some batteries and unwound the remote cord. “You’re gonna want to use some lube,” she remarked, ducking under again. “We don’t recommend Vaseline, ‘cuz it eats latex, and don’t use any kind of cooking oil, ‘cuz it’ll go rancid and this piece of ass is a bitch to clean. But we have a good stock of flavored, scented, warming, etc, body oils, or you can use good old-fashioned K-Y. Anyway, give the mouth a good spurt and rub it on yourself.”

Janey held out the bottle of cinnamon musk, but it was the girl who took it, and who tentatively poked the pussy lips when Janey offered that, too.

“Feels…pretty normal.” The girl hesitated. “Cold.”

The guy frowned.

“It’ll warm up. Just get her going.” Janey thumbed the remote cord and a soft purring ground out of the device. “Stick your finger in there. Feel.”

Looking squeamish, the girl slipped two fingers into Jenna Jamason. Her face underwent a violent series of convulsions and she burst out into nervous giggles. “Ew!”

“It’s sucking,” Janey translated, for the benefit of the girl’s date, who had stopped looking intrigued in favor of looking alarmed.

“And it’s vibrating,” the girl informed, grinning. “And it is heating up,” she added with a schoolmarm’s nod of approval.

“Come on, play with it a little,” Janey prodded. “There’s no refunds, so you need to know what you’re buying. Work it a little. Feel what it can do.”

The lady was wiping her fingers on her shirt, shaking her head emphatically. “No, no. I think we’re good. We’ll get it.”

“Anything else? Something for you?” Janey winked. “What’s good for the gander is good for the goose.”

The man and woman avoided each other’s eyes. Bizarre.

“No, thanks,” said the lady. “That’s the lube aisle, Tagen. You better get some.”

And Janey, who had just about decided these two were some new breed of devout Catholic who were turning to hardcore masturbation in order to save themselves from the actual sin, got her mind half-blown when the man politely and extremely serenely turned to her and asked, “Do you have anything that is made from a woman’s natural oils?”

“I don’t think so, Tagen,” the lady said, before Janey could get her mouth back in working order. She didn’t look or sound the least bit shocked or scandalized by the question, either. “They might have some synthetic musk, though.”

“I do not think that will help.” The man frowned. “The stimulant is essential.”

“Try sniffing some of them. See if you get a reaction.” The woman turned back to Janey. “Do you have, like, a peppermint based one or something? That opens up the blood vessels pretty good, right?”

“Are you guys fucking with me?” Janey demanded, planting her hands on her hips.

Both man and woman looked at her with unfeigned surprise. “No,” they said, in unison.

Janey stared at both of them. “Okay,” she said at last, and shook her head as she walked around the counter and into the lube aisle. “Takes all kinds, I guess.” And she was going to have to invent some whole new kinds in order to make any damn sense of those two.

Janey and the big man headed into the land ‘o lube, leaving his girl at the counter. She found a few of the best-sellers in synthetic musk and passed them over, but the fella kept his hands in his pockets, obliging her to open the bottles herself and let him sniff them like a Frenchman with a wine cork. Up close, she realized he had to be wearing some fucked-up contact lenses, because he had the eyes of an eagle or a lion, a brilliant shade of burning gold, and practically no whites at all. Looking into those eyes almost made Janey forget just how weird the guy was and only remember how deep his voice was and how broad his chest was.

“You know,” she said, sotto voce in case the lady was listening and really was connected to this guy. “If you’re in the market for a girlfriend, you don’t have to settle for the ones that require batteries.” She winked.

His eagle eyes fixed on her in an instant, although his expression never changed. There was a heat there, a real burning hunger that went way beyond a man’s natural appreciation for the goodies a gal like Janey had to offer and into the realm so purely physical it was almost an abstraction. He didn’t know her, didn’t like her, didn’t not like her, and didn’t need to. He’d just take her. Thoroughly. Repeatedly. Fantastically. Looking up at him, Janey had the dizzying sensation that sex with this man would be a tantric phenomenon. It would be sex for the sake of pure, animal sex.

“I’m off at five,” she heard herself say. “You can meet me here. I’ll take you back to my place and we’ll take turns blowing each other’s minds.”

His nostrils flared. The heat in his amazing eyes smoldered. Still, he did not speak.

“This is a come-on, Jack,” she said, a little curtly. She’d never propositioned a customer before. She couldn’t believe she was doing it now, but here it was and he was giving her no clue at all. “What do you say? I’m covered, so you don’t have to wear a skin. I’ll let you feel the wonders of the modern world. If your girl weren’t here, I’d let you do me right now on the floor.”

He glanced down at the carpet and then up at her again, proving that the barrier wasn’t English, at least. And when he’d broken their mutual stare, however briefly, Janey had clearly seen that her words were having a sizeable impression on the man, so it wasn’t like he needed a pill.

“Come on, sport,” she whispered urgently. “I ain’t embarrassing myself by asking again. If you want to fuck me, say so now.”

He closed his eyes and his face was stone for several seconds. When he opened them again, he was looking past her to the lady still waiting by the counter. He sighed. “I’ll take what you have in your hand,” he said, and walked away.

Janey stared at the open bottle of lube she held and slowly capped it. She could feel her cheeks flaming, but she wasn’t sure exactly why. She was frustrated, yes. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d come on so strong to anyone, and God knew, all most guys needed was a wink and a smile and they had their pants flying in the air. But if she was surprised by anything, it was that she’d practically flashed the guy right here in the store, right in front of his girlfriend, without even knowing his name. And he’d turned her down? Naw, really?! God, he probably thought she was some psycho-chick fresh from prison.

She got an unopened bottle of lube and went back behind the counter to ring him up. The lady paid and the fella just stood there, staring into the ceiling tiles with that tight, sizzling look in his eyes. They left. The fella opened and held the door for his girl, and while he did, he glanced back and pinned Janey with his burning eyes just briefly.

The bones went out of her legs and she stared back at him, dry-mouthed with excitement. In his eyes, she could see him taking her. She could goddamn feel it! She could feel the wall at her back and his hands on her thighs, that first phenomenal thrust and then the crush of every thrust that followed. The man didn’t just want, he needed! He needed fucking like he needed air and Janey was there, Janey was willing, Janey was wet and wanting him. He could have her if he so much as snapped his fingers for her.

He left.

Janey sagged into the countertop, breathless, but only for a minute. Then she grabbed Contestant Number Five for the Vibrator Races, flipped the lock on the door and ran into the stock room for yet another first in her illustrious career at Luv-A-Lot’s. And a second. And a third.

His eyes. The burning, brilliant hunger in his eyes…

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