Alien Nation #2 - Dark Horizon Page 9

  As if Cathy needed that, instead. Now he didn’t have a clue as to why he was going over to see her. It would have been easier to stay at the station and put in overtime, cranking on the murder case.

  He slid off the stool and headed for the door, past the laughing, happy people. Next time he’d buy the drinks and just ask the bartender to give them to somebody else to toss back.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was sitting in Cathy’s apartment, and there were candles on the table and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on the CD player, and a glass of wine in his hand. And a pretty female smiling at him as she brought a pan of lasagna to the table—What an idiot you are, he told himself. He knew he should’ve come to her place right off the bat. She did more than pricey Scotch to chase off his bad mood. He could forget all about George-with-his-head-up-his-butt.

  “Hey, smells good.” He looked over the steaming pan, with its top layer of browned, bubbling cheese. “I thought we’d just be having raw veggies.” Rabbit food had always been the menu before, whenever she’d fixed him dinner. More than once, he’d left her place afterwards and driven straight to Original Tommy’s for a chili-burger protein fix.

  “Well, I thought you might like a change.” Cathy stayed standing, digging a serving spoon into the lasagna. “The recipe is out of that new Jeremiah Tower cookbook. They serve it up at Stars, in San Francisco.”

  “Stars, huh?”

  “Near the Opera House.”

  “Oh, right; of course.” He hadn’t thought it sounded like one of the red-lacquer Chinese joints, out in the foggy Avenues, that he always hit when he was in Frisco. “Nice place.”

  She set his plate back down in front of him. “I made a few changes to it, though.”

  “That’s cool. My mother never made meat loaf the same way twice.” Sikes watched as she continued fussing with the pan. “That’s a new look.”

  “Do you like it?” She touched the knot, with soft trailing ends, at the back of her neck. The head scarf was hand-dyed silk, rich sunset colors mingling together—it had taken him a few minutes, after she’d greeted him at the door and he’d come inside, to realize that it matched her dress, and that she must’ve spent a good piece of her salary from the lab on the whole outfit.

  “It’s lovely. Very . . . exotic.” He was lying, except about the exotic part. Gypsy stuff like that always made him think of Maria Ouspenskaya, in those old black-and-white movies. Or—to be fair, considering how young and pretty Cathy was—that ballet dancer with the thick Russian accent, who always wore scarves. Makarova, that was the name.

  Plus, there was something else nagging him. He had to wonder if Cathy had gone for the scarf because she thought it made her look more like a human woman. All her Newcomer head spots covered up—was that the deal? She did it to please him? Cut Lorraine out of the picture? Somehow, the whole thing caused a twinge of guilt inside him.

  “Hey . . .” He saw that she had dished herself a serving of the lasagna. “I thought you can’t eat cooked food.”

  “I figure a little couldn’t hurt.” She sat down with the loaded plate in front of her. A string of melted cheese dangled over the edge. “And you know, one way to overcome allergies is to expose yourself to small amounts of the allergen. That way, you build up an immunity. Don’t forget, we’re a very adaptable species.” She smiled and gestured toward his plate. “Well, bon appétit!”

  She watched as he took his bite. A weirdly sweet and pungent combination of tastes unfolded in his mouth. The immediate impulse was to spit it out, but he managed to keep his expression blank, and even swallow.

  “That’s . . . interesting.” He poked at the lasagna with his fork. “You said you made some, uh, changes?” It would’ve been hard to believe that people up north were paying money for this.

  “I added some chocolate . . . and some other things like that. I know how much you like them.”

  That goddamn pink box full of pastries—she must’ve been able to smell everything that had been in there.

  He washed the aftertaste down with a gulp of wine. “There’s some mint in there, too. Isn’t there?”

  “You can tell!” Cathy was delighted. “Do you like it?”

  “Mmm . . .” He nodded. “I can’t begin to tell you.”

  “Lasagna is a very popular . . . human dish, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Very. I mean, with most humans, it is.”

  She took a small amount on her fork and raised it up. “Well, here goes!”

  Sikes watched her with a feeling of apprehension. He knew she was putting on a brave face, but he’d been able to detect the slight drawing back of her head as she brought the fork to her lips.

  Cathy chewed and swallowed. All her attention was focused inward for a moment, then she realized how intently she was being watched by her dining partner. “It’s fine . . .” She took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “Really. I’m okay.” She gestured toward his plate with the fork. “Please. Don’t wait for me.”

  He got down another mouthful. It slid gluily into the place where his stomach used to be; all of his digestive organs seemed to have been replaced by small, somersaulting creatures. The taste of mint curled under his tongue.

  “You know, this is really great.” He poked at the lasagna. “But, uh, I just don’t have much of an appetite this evening . . .”

  Across from him, Cathy got down another bite.

  “I don’t want you to think it’s the food or anything—I mean, it really is good—I think it’s just ’cause I had kind of a late lunch down at the station. Big lunch, too.” Sikes set his fork down. “Phil—remember Phil?—anyway, he brought in these pastrami sandwiches, from that deli around the corner. You know the one, the Italian place, and now those Koreans run it? These sandwiches, they were huge . . .”

  She wasn’t looking at him any longer, but instead stared at her plate.

  “. . . with a lot of sauerkraut and . . .” His words slowed as he saw that Cathy was clenching her mouth shut. “And these deep-fried onion rings . . .”

  Her eyes went wide with sudden alarm.

  “Cathy . . . ?”

  Her chair fell backward as she bolted from the table. She made it to the kitchen sink in time.

  He waited a moment—he thought it was the tactful thing to do—until the worst was over, and she had torn a paper towel from the roll under the cabinets. He came and stood behind her. “You okay?”

  She kept her mouth covered with the paper towel, but turned and looked tearfully at him. “I’m so embarrassed—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I wanted it to be so nice for you.” She turned on the cold water tap, rinsing out the sink. “I’m sorry . . .”

  “No, don’t be.”

  She burst into tears. Blindly she pushed past him and ran out to the apartment’s hallway. He heard the bathroom door slam shut.

  The water was still running in the sink. He turned it off, and in the kitchen’s silence, leaned back against the tiled edge of the counter.

  He glanced over at the lasagna cooling on the table.

  Well, at least it wasn’t just me. At any rate, he didn’t think it had been.

  Noah couldn’t remember how long he’d been walking. You start walking, and thinking, and before you know it, the sky’s getting dark. Like the whole day’s been eaten up, or better yet, consumed into black ash by the fire locked inside your breast.

  Not even thinking, not really, but brooding without words. He slouched through the city streets, hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets. Nice streets, with green trees branching over the sidewalk, and billiard-table lawns, and small dogs yapping furiously behind the curtained windows. He’d left all those rich, pretty things behind, even catching a bus to roll closer to the city center, where the streets matched his mood. Where every liquor store had iron grilles over the window, and the gutters were wet and dark with decaying newspapers. People could sit in parks and talk about Flaubert all they wanted, they could do it till their stupid heads
swelled up and exploded with all that cute French crap—he didn’t have to stick around for it.

  The toe of his shoe caught an empty Night Train bottle. He gave it a harder kick, and it spun away and exploded against the graffitied base of a streetlamp. The glass shards glinted jewels in the circle of blue light. Shoulders hunched, Noah stood and gazed at the sparkling bits. He didn’t have to use words inside his head; some thoughts burned deeper than words. The shattered bottle—that was what it was going to be like for those smug assholes. Marilyn the teacher and Buck . . . the student. What a laugh.

  He moved through more pools of blue light, and stretches where there weren’t any, the streetlamps broken, bare wires dangling out of the blind sockets. He walked until he knew where he was; where he knew he had been heading all along.

  From across the street, he looked up at the windows of the apartment building. It took him a little while to figure out which ones belonged to Detective Sikes, but then he nailed it. He’d been sure Sikes lived up on the building’s fourth floor, but he spotted him a couple floors down, sitting at a table, eating and talking to somebody else.

  Noah moved down the sidewalk, to another angle where he could see who else was up there. In the shadows, he looked up and saw that the other person was a Newcomer, a woman. Even though she had some kind of a scarf on her head, he could feel right in his gut that she was one. Anybody could smell one a mile away.

  The slag woman jumped up from the table and ran off, to another section of the apartment. Noah still hadn’t been able to see her face. Sikes followed after, looking concerned. Then there was nobody, just an empty table close to the window.

  It didn’t matter. He’d seen enough. Noah had thought about going up there and talking to Sikes, the way he’d done so many times before, but now that idea had been crumpled up like old trash inside his head and booted into the gutter, where it belonged. Who needed that crap?—it hadn’t done him any good before. Sikes could shove his Kafka up his ass, for all he cared.

  Besides—something else he knew in his gut—Sikes wasn’t up there reading Kafka, or Flaubert, or anything else. Maybe Sikes and that Newcomer bitch were already in bed together. Nausea and lethal, shaking anger welled up inside him at the notion.

  He headed back down the street, his face feeling tighter and harder. To the darkness from which he’d come.

  They’d see. Now he wasn’t sorry about what he’d done, what he was going to do. They’d all see.

  C H A P T E R 9

  SHE REMEMBERED WHEN there would be bicycles parked outside a high school. You’re dating yourself, thought Marilyn Houston as she crossed the parking lot, books and graded papers stacked up in her arms. She supposed that when she had been in school—and it hadn’t been that long ago—she’d been in on the tail end of the great green eco-consciousness. Ride a bike and save the earth. Not that all the kids, or even most of them, had done it; but still, there had been at least some. Yeah, and where are they all now? The new kids—the ones she taught, or was trying to teach—had adapted to their new world. That was evolution in action, she knew; the concepts of dirty or polluted only had meaning for someone who remembered the world being even slightly less so.

  In the meantime, the student parking lot was filled with ace-looking hardware. She lifted the books and papers over her head, and turned sideways so she could squeeze past a Mustang 5.5 and a cherry Z. That was how to tell the difference between the staff lot and the one for the kids; the teachers all had bangers and credit union econoboxes. It wasn’t all mom and dad’s money paying for the sharp machines, either; she had so many students working multiple after-school jobs to make payments that she could’ve made book on how many heads each afternoon would nod and then drop with a thunk onto the desks in front of them. Simple fatigue seemed to be the drug of choice these days.

  It made teaching—being a teacher—hard.

  She would’ve given up after the first year or perhaps the second, found something easier and better-paying to do—unloading gravel trucks with a pair of tweezers, anything—except that there were always a few. In every class she’d ever taught: always a few, maybe a handful, of real students. Not necessarily the best and brightest, the ones with the inborn ability to skate through the syllabus without breaking a sweat; not the easiest to deal with, the ones who’d figured out they’d been born with charm and likability, and were counting on it, probably correctly, to get them through life. But the wrestlers, the ones who got it into their teeth, their minds and souls grappling with sheer ideas, the guts of thought and will . . .

  Like Buck Francisco. That was the prize, a place where the spark was alive behind the eyes. That made it worth the effort.

  Marilyn toted the books and papers into the teachers’ lounge. There was still a half hour before the first-period bell; she could use the time to finish grading the essays—a good half of them almost pathetically subliterate—that she had neglected last night. She had been reading Flaubert instead, and a little Zola, until three in the morning. The problem with sparks was that they could be inconvenient about rekindling other tinder.

  “Whoa, Houston; I’m impressed.” Hilgerman, one of the older teachers, slouched nearly spineless on the battered Naugahyde couch, balancing a cup of coffee on his stomach. “Look at that stack. Must be a fiend for work, ’s all I can say.”

  It was a joke, this clown teaching civics. He radiated equal amounts of cynicism and alcohol disguised with breath mints.

  She dropped the pile on top of a utility table. “It’s my job.” Yours, too, she wanted to say.

  “Ooh . . .” Hilgerman smiled, both weary and knowing. “Gung ho. Go get ’em, tiger.” He sipped his lukewarm coffee. “Ah, to be young again.”

  He wasn’t even halfway through his forties, and he looked gray and tired, like somebody who’d come to a grudging peace with ulcerative colitis. Inside herself, Marilyn shuddered at the thought of getting that old, that young. What happened to these people?

  “Don’t let ol’ Hilgie bust your morning.” Her buddy Deirdre glanced over from the coffee machine. Deirdre taught biology and senior chem, abrasively, but still pushing. “His high-fiber diet’s backed up into his head.”

  “Such trenchant wit.” Hilgerman always sat with a yellowing, broken-spined copy of the C. Day Lewis translation of the Aeneid next to him on the couch, but never opened it. He looked over his shoulder at Marilyn. “Still putting in the unpaid overtime with your star pupils?”

  She circled a word in red on the top essay in the pile, wrote Sp next to it. “Anything wrong with that?”

  “Nothing at all, my child. Personally, I say blessings on all these Newcomer brats. They showed up just in time. All the little Southeast Asian immigrants had discovered the joys of being completely Americanized, and being just as lazy and shiftless as everyone else. Can you imagine what SAT scores would look like in this state if we didn’t have these spot-heads pumping them up?” He shook his head. “Some of us might even have had to go out and look for honest employment. And that would be a tragedy.”

  Marilyn sighed and worked her way down the paper with her marking pen. Some people spent their lives finding sparks, and then pissing on them.

  “Hey, Houston . . .” One of the phys ed staff stuck his head around the lounge door. “Fisher’s looking for you. He wants you to swing by his office.”

  “Right now?”

  “Muy pronto.”

  “Arrgh . . .” Arms folded, Deirdre leaned against the back of the couch. “Sounds like trouble. The Fish likes to start his day on the warpath. Revs up his heart.”

  She dragged the essays into a neater stack, and weighed them down with the textbooks. “I’ll have to give you all a complete report.” She glanced sharply at Hilgerman.

  “You needn’t bother.” Hilgerman gazed ahead of himself, into nothing. “When you’re as old and wise as I am, you’ll realize that all strife is an illusion.” He closed his eyes. “Just noise. Just like everything else.”

  G
od save me, she prayed again as she headed out.

  “Go on ahead.” The principal’s secretary pointed a thumb behind her. “He’s been waiting for you.”

  “Ms. Houston . . .” Fisher looked up from his desk. “Please come in. And could you close the door?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Couldn’t this wait until after school? It’s not very long before the start of my first class.”

  “I’m afraid not. Please—have a seat.”

  She sat facing him, watching as he shuffled through a few sheets of paper on the desktop. “What’s all this about?” One of the thin strands of hair he combed across his balding head had gone astray, dangling near his ear.

  “Well . . .” Fisher sucked in his breath, teeth biting his lower lip. He shook his head slowly as he brought his gaze up to hers. “We have a problem here, Ms. Houston. A real problem.”

  “Oh? What’s that?” Here it comes again, she thought. She had gotten her butt politely chewed before, for various deviations from the curriculum. It wasn’t new to her.

  Fisher tapped a blunt finger on the sheet of paper in front of him. “It’s been reported to me, by the parents of one of our students here, that you were seen—not here on the school grounds, mind you, and not during class hours, but elsewhere, after school—you were seen . . .” He looked up at the office ceiling, then back to her. “How shall I put it? You were seen being, ah, intimate with another one of the students.”

  “Really.” Her stomach clenched, but she kept a surface calm wrapped around herself. “And who is the student that I’m alleged to have been ‘intimate’ with?” She knew already, knew what the name was going to be.

  Fisher read it off the paper, following the line his fingernail drew, just as though he didn’t have it already committed to memory. “Buck Francisco.”