Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) (12 page)

“Since you've let Morgan know that you're not useful to him, he'll consider you a threat.” Alice glanced over at Godiva. “He might still try to recruit
you
, though.” Her voice was carefully neutral.

“Recruit me as what?” Godiva asked bitterly. “The same thing I was doing for Dr. Klein? I'm out of that line of work.”  

Catskinner was still in the driver's seat, and I didn't interfere. I wanted to know what he was thinking, too.

“
what can be done to dissuade morgan?
”

Alice cocked her head to the side. “Dissuade?  I didn't expect euphemisms from you.”

“
you want him dead.
”

Alice met Catskinner's gaze in my eyes. “Yes.”

“
you want me to do it.
”

“Yes.”

“how do you benefit from his death?”

“He considers me a threat as well.”

“
why haven't you killed him?
”

“I can't. I'm not good at killing.”

“
i am.
”

“Yes.”

“
you need me.
”

“We can be useful to each other.”

And Catskinner sunk back down into me, became a warm alert presence across my back. It felt kind of like being pulled up on stage to follow the opening act.

Godiva wasn't touching me any more. Both she and Alice were looking at me, and I still couldn't think of anything to say.

“Okay,” I tried. “So that's that.”

Godiva reached across and took my hand. She started to speak, but then the waiter showed up with a lot of food. We leaned back and let him cover the table with plates. It all smelled good.

After the waiter left Godiva squeezed my hand. “You're more than a just a killer,” she said softly, then turned to Alice. “He is. He's not just Catskinner's driver, you know.”

Alice nodded. “And you're more than Dr. Klein's whore.”

Godiva looked down. Alice reached out and took her free hand. “We can do some good.”

Godiva looked up, met Alice's eye. Alice reached out and took my other hand. Now we were sitting around the table holding hands, like someone was about to start praying. Alice looked me in the eye. “All of us.”

And my bacon was getting cold. I retrieved both of my hands. I never went to summer camp, never learned to sing Kumbaya, and I was hungry.

I forked in some bacon and followed it with pancakes, then coffee. It felt good.

“Who's using euphemisms now?” I asked Alice once my throat was clear. “Is 'doing some good' the new code phrase for murder?”

“No.” Alice said. She reached for my hand again and I dodged her, speared some more bacon. “I meant what I said, “she continued. “I think we can do some good.”

Philosophy took a backseat to protein. Then, “Good for who?”

“For whom,” Godiva corrected. I glanced over at her, and she ducked her head, embarrassed, and drank her orange juice.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Good for whom?”

“For us, to begin with,” Alice said.

I raised an eyebrow. “Us, meaning...?”

“You. Catskinner. Me. Godiva.”

“And that's to begin with?”

“Who else do you care about?”

Good question.

“Okay, we can skip that part.”  

“Okay,” Godiva spoke up. “So we kill him. How?”

Alice looked over at her. Godiva continued. “I mean, I assume the frontal approach is out? It's not like James is going to walk up to him and say, 'Hello, you killed my father, prepare to die.'”

“Actually,” I pointed out, “I killed my father.”

Godiva stared at me. “Uh. The point is, that we have to have a plan.”

“Agreed. We can't take him at the Good Earth. God knows what else he's got there.” I looked to Alice. “Where does he live?”

“At the Good Earth.”

“So much for getting him on his commute. Where else does he go?”

Alice sighed. “Nowhere.”

“Everybody goes someplace,” I argued. “He told me he runs this trade network. He's got to go meet people, do business.”

“Everybody comes to him. From what I can see, he hasn't left the Good Earth for years.”

“That is going to be a problem.” I went back to my pancakes.

“We have to draw him out,” Godiva said.

Alice nodded. “Somehow.”

“We attack something that he has to defend. Something that he can't stand to lose.”

Alice nodded, thoughtful.

“Sun Tzu,” Godiva explained. “
The Art of War
.”

Alice and I had finished eating. Alice asked for the check and Godiva asked for a box to take her breakfast with her.

“I'm going back to my place,” Alice said. “I have my notes there. I can figure out what will draw him out. Do you want to come with me?”

“Yes,” said Godiva at the same time I said, “No.”  

Godiva frowned at me. “We'll catch up,” I told Alice. “We need to do some shopping first.” It felt strange to say, “we”. Strange but good.

Godiva smiled. “Yeah, we can come over later.” It felt good to hear her say it, too.

There was a Mega-Super-Ultra Store a few miles down the road, one of those big boxes that sells everything from toothpaste to lawnmowers to computers. Godiva ate in the van on the way. Once we got there I grabbed a cart and went through the grocery section while Godiva went to buy new clothes.

While I was shopping I wondered about Godiva. She seemed able to eat ordinary food, she just needed to take her teeth out to do it. I wasn't sure how that worked—I'd avoided watching because it seemed to embarrass her. Would soft foods help?  I wasn't going to go as far as getting baby food, but maybe she'd like pudding. Or salsa. Or—

I didn't have any idea how to shop for another human being, much less another person who wasn't entirely human. I filled my cart with stuff that I liked, plus some pudding. Maybe I should get a blender—they sold them, too. I decided not to make any assumptions—she could tell me what she needed.

Godiva met me at the checkout line. She didn't want to let me buy her clothes, but I insisted. She might need the cash she had for an emergency. Her life seemed to be composed mostly of emergencies the last few days.

The clothes she'd selected weren't expensive, a couple of T-shirts, a blouse, a few skirts, and tennis shoes.

We went by the motel first. I'd planned just to stop long enough to put the food away, but Godiva wanted to change clothes, and that meant she wanted to take a shower first.

“I'll be really quick,” she promised, her green on green eyes peeking over the top of her sunglasses. How could I refuse? I messed around on-line for a while, watched some videos of cute cats.

And listened to the sound of water running in the shower. After what actually qualified as “really quick” the water shut off and I listened to a body moving around in the bathroom, toweling off, and then, “James?”

“Yes?” Yes.

“Could you hand me my clothes, please?”

I hadn't planned on opening the door any wider than needed to pass her the bag from the box store—or maybe I did, I'm not sure. But the door opened wide and she didn't stop it, and there I was holding the bag, and there she was, damp from the shower, toweling her head, naked.

Her body was lovely, and I couldn't look away. Tanned to a rich gold, smooth, voluptuous. Her hair, damp, was a darker gold. Her breasts were as full and ripe as any pin-up model, the waist below tight and slim. I knew I was staring, couldn't help myself. Her body captivated me. Her legs were muscular, curved and smooth. Between them—

Between her legs was a penis and testicles, lightly furred with golden hair.

My experiences with pin-up girls had not prepared me for that.

I was still staring, and I suppose my expression changed. Godiva's body language changed, from coquettish to alarmed. I looked back to her face, met her deep green eyes.

“Uh,” I said. I handed her the bag.

“You didn't know,” she said softly. She?  Yes, she. It's what she wanted to be called.

“No.”

“I thought Catskinner . . .”

Did he? In broad outline, I guess he did. “He's not real clear on details.”

She wrapped the towel around herself. “I assumed you knew. Last night, I wouldn't have—”

“It's okay,” I said. “I mean, it's okay. It, uh, looks good on you.” Wow, that was awkward.

I turned away. I felt rather than saw her withdraw into herself, huddling in the towel. I couldn't leave it like that. Catskinner's the monster; I'm just along for the ride.

“Wait,” I turned back to her. She looked up at me, wrapped in a towel, hair still damp, without her glasses or her teeth. She wasn't human. I had been making her human in my head, I realized, trying to keep her in a category that she didn't fit any more. Whatever had been done to her placed her outside the Earth, beyond the realm of the terrestrial. Just like me.

I took her in my arms, felt her warm body against mine. She held herself stiffly for a moment, then relaxed against me. Her eyes, green on green, grew liquid, and I realized that whatever she had become, she still could cry.

“It's okay,” I said, not sure what I meant, but knowing that I meant it. Whatever it was, if it wasn't okay, well, then Catskinner and I would make it okay. Provided that it was something that could be made okay by violence. In my experience, most things could, but I'd be having some new experiences lately. Maybe a new approach was called for.

I kissed Godiva on her forehead, just above her strange eyes, and she smiled at me.

“We should get going,” she said softly, and in no more than ten minutes we were. Godiva was dressed in her new clothes, teeth in, glasses on, and she was beautiful.

Alice Mason's base of operations turned out to be a four-family flat in Maplewood just off the highway. The ride there was surprisingly non-awkward. Godiva turned on the radio and sang softly along.

There was an asphalt parking lot behind the building with an ancient pickup truck partially covered by a tarp in the corner and big blue sedan next to it. I parked in the opposite corner, facing out. Just in case I needed to leave in a hurry.

Alice Mason's address ended in 1E, so I knocked on the first floor door on the east side. She answered in jeans and a T-shirt, which made her look younger and less intimidating than her suit.

She smiled to see us, which made me think that she wasn't sure we were coming. “Please, come in,” she said.

She knew all about doing the guests coming over thing, got me some soda and Godiva some tomato juice (with a straw). Her office was big and full of stuff—books and papers and computers—but it looked organized. I still wasn't exactly sure what she did, but she seemed to be pretty good at it. She had some comfortable chairs and I sat down, drank some soda, and all at once I realized that I didn't have the slightest idea what to say.

Godiva and Alice were both looking at me expectantly. Me?  

“So,” I started, then “Well,” followed by “Uhm.”  Catskinner, naturally, had nothing to add.

Godiva flashed me a smile and looked back to Alice. “The obvious place to start is the Manchester nest.”

Alice folder her hands. “Okay,” she said in that way that means “tell me more.”

Godiva leaned forward. “First, there's no question of how James knew about them—he got the information from Dr. Klein. We don't want to advertise your involvement right away.”

“I drove the van through Morgan's fence,” Alice pointed out.

“True,” Godiva conceded. “But are we sure he knows that? It was a busy couple of minutes there.”

Alice nodded for Godiva to continue.

“Next, it's a sitting target. They're too big to move and too strange to hide. I mean, I know about them, and I'm nobody.”

I was going to object to that, but she was still talking.

“They're well connected, which is part of being on the high profile side of low profile. This is an intelligence gathering exercise as much as anything else. Everybody knows them and they know everybody.”

“Don't you think Morgan will see it as an obvious move, too?” Alice asked.

“Of course he will. But how much is he willing to invest in protecting them? Warn them we might be coming? Yeah, that doesn't cost anything. Offer them some extra gear in exchange for favors to be named later? Sure, that strengthens his position no matter what. But he's not going to go out on a limb for them—they're too easy to replace. Expendable.”

I was confused. “So, if they are expendable, why attack them?”

Godiva smiled at me. “Well, information, like I said, and because it is an obvious move. Every move tells your opponent something about your overall strategy, the more obvious the move, the less you reveal.”

“We have an overall strategy?” That was news to me.

“Harass Morgan's interests until he's forced to respond by coming out into the open where we can kill him,” Godiva said.

That did sound familiar, particularly the killing him part. I nodded.

Godiva looked back at Alice. “Now, what can you tell us about the nest?”

It turned out to be quite a lot. She told us there were at least sixteen nestlings, maybe as many as twenty. She had pictures of about a dozen of them—ordinary looking people, for the most part, in their twenties and thirties, but with a universally distant look in their eyes, as if they were all listening to something no one else could hear.

“Now, you say they are all . . . possessed by a single outsider. Like a hive mind or something?”

Alice nodded. “What one knows, they all know. One creature with thirty-two eyes and thirty-two arms.”

“And it, or they, can do what Catskinner can do? That fast, that tough?” Not good.

Alice shook her head. “The Nest doesn't have that kind of deep connection with the host bodies. It's like the difference between driving a car by sitting in it and using a remote control on RC toys—in this case, a whole bunch of RC toys. They'll be coordinated, but no one host is going to be any more than human—less in a lot of ways.”

That made sense. I nodded.

meat toys. no more than obstacles.

Yeah, I get the picture.

Alice had an architectural plan for the department store, although she cautioned us that the nest was sure to have extensively remodeled it in ways that would be impossible to predict. “Remember, it's not built for humans, it's built for the outsider that uses humans as its hands. Don't expect it to make sense.”