Warrior (Freelancer Book 2) (12 page)

Rick shook his head ruefully. "Why is this somehow not all that comforting? I think I'll just continue trying to avoid people with guns."

"You can, but your track record on that is far from perfect. I'd suggest having it around in case you change your mind. I'd like to see if it works." Scotty checked his watch and headed for the stairs. "Let's go up. I think our new housemate should be here."

Everyone was in the living room when Scotty and Rick came back upstairs. Eve was on the sofa, holding hands and talking animatedly with a woman Rick had never met. She was average height, skinny, with mousey brown hair and a face that could almost have been called pinched. Her brown eyes didn't stay on Eve but darted around the room as if someone might attack her at any time.

It took a moment for Rick to realize that there was a little girl next to her, sitting so close that she almost disappeared behind the woman. Rick supposed that they were mother and daughter. There was a resemblance in the hair and angular features but, more than that, they had the same darting eyes always looking for trouble. He wasn't very experienced with children, but he guessed she was seven, maybe eight, years old.

When Eve paused long enough to notice he'd come in, she said, "This is Kristee, my college roommate. She's from Wolf Point which makes Lame Deer look like a big city."

Eve reached around the woman to poke the little girl in the ribs. "And this little hellion is Sage." The girl squirmed even further behind her mother to escape Eve's finger.

Rick noticed that, even when she giggled dutifully, she never stopped her constant scrutiny of everyone in the room.

"Hi guys. I'm Rick," waving a greeting as he sat on the floor with his back against the sofa where Eve was sitting. Eve put one hand on his shoulder, still holding the woman's hands with the other.

"Rick was out at the reservation with me," said Eve. "And then we did a little detour into Wounded Knee on the way home."

Eps was sitting in one of the old recliners. "Wounded Knee? Cool."

"What were you doing there?” asked Scotty from the other chair. Steve was lying on his back on the other sofa. His eyes were closed, but Rick didn’t think he was asleep.

Rick just jerked his head back to indicate it was Eve's idea. "Everything had to be carried in on foot at night, so we volunteered to make a food delivery," Eve said. "It was…an interesting experience."

"I'll bet," Steve said without opening his eyes. "Kristee and I met at the University of Montana. We were both in Kyi-oh. She was a fifth-year senior but she kept an eye on me in my freshman year," Eve said, squeezing the other woman's hands a little tighter. "
Ho-wah,
I was so lonely that year. You saved my life."

Eve stopped for a second and cleared her throat. "She left me a message at the Iron Crows, and I called her before we left for Lame Deer. She said that…maybe she should tell her own story. At any rate, she's a computer tech, so I told her to get in touch with Steve, figuring he could find some work for her."

"Which I did. She starts at Riggs with Eps tomorrow," Steve said. "The guys agreed we could put them up here for a while."

"Long as you want," Eps broke in.

Scotty smiled and nodded in agreement.

"Eve said you needed help and that's good enough for us. On the other hand, if we knew what the problem was, we might be able to work on a solution."

The room was silent.

After a moment, Eve whispered, "Come on, honey."

Kristee's voice was low with a smoker’s rasp. "I think we'd better get this girl to bed first," She said as she wrestled the little girl out from behind her back.

"Come on, tough stuff. Stop your hiding back there and get upstairs. Put your pajamas on, brush your teeth, and then I'll be up to tuck you in."

It took a while, but Sage finally dragged herself up the stairs, one loud step at a time.

Rick was surprised that Eps and Scotty, who were usually blissfully unaware of social tension, filled what could have been an awkward silence with a long and involved story about a recent Spacewar tournament they'd hosted on the Riggs Bank mainframes. In the end, it turned out that MIT had won, but later Scotty proved that they had tweaked his game program and made gravity a variable instead of a constant. Steve joined in and the three discussed how they planned to introduce reverse gravity in the next game.

The conversation was animated but stopped when Kristee returned from her post at the bottom of the stairs, satisfied that her daughter was, if not in bed, at least out of sight. Eve had gone to make coffee but quickly returned and ordered Eps to come with her and do whatever one did with what she called their "unholy" collection of beakers and distillation coils to make coffee.

She emerged with a cup for Kristee and handed another to Rick.

"I think it's coffee," she said. "It could be almost anything."

"Hey, who needs kitchen equipment that only does one thing?" Eps came out with his own cup. "That's a great setup. Just this afternoon, I made a batch of rocket fuel with it."

Rick who was just about to take his first sip stopped, thought for a second, and then drank. It tasted like coffee.

Kristee carefully, gingerly, put her cup down on the battered table beside the sofa. Eve settled in beside her. "OK, no more stalling. What's the problem?"

"Well, you remember Gary."

"Unfortunately," Eve replied.

"Yeah, you never did like him." Kristee sighed. "But he was my boyfriend since forever, almost before I can remember. Then, when I got pregnant, he did the 'right thing' and we got married. My God, I was fifteen! What were our parents thinking?"

Eve laughed. "It was a different world back then."

"That's for sure. One day, I'm going to sleep with 17 stuffed animals and the next, I'm standing in my pajamas in the bathroom at Gary's parents' place and so scared I'm throwing up. Seven months later, there was Sage."

She smiled and nodded her head toward the stairs. "It's funny. She ruined all my plans, and I'd guess you could say she pretty well screwed up my life; at the same time, she's the best thing I've ever done, and I wouldn't give her up for a million dollars. How can something be so good and so bad at the same time?"

Eps said, "It's like Madame Curie and radium. I mean, her research into radium enabled her to become the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but it also ruined her health and eventually killed her."

Steve and Scotty smiled in agreement, but Eve glared at them. "It's not even remotely like Madame Curie and radium."

She turned back to Kristee who was smothering a laugh. "Go ahead, sweetie."

"You know, on a bad day, I think that having a child is a little like radium poisoning but…well, back to the story. So there I am, a high school junior with a baby. The high school decided I could continue, but I couldn't come to class. They got this weird little phone device that Sophie McAllen would carry from class to class and plug in. I could hear everything, and if I pushed the button on top, it lit up a light and that was me raising my hand."

The thin woman made a face. "It was so lame. I mean, I wasn't contagious. No one was going to catch a baby from me!"

Everyone laughed. "Anyway, that's how I got through junior and senior years. It wasn't so bad; we'd listen to a lot of classes while Gary and I were just sitting around the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and feeding Sage. Hell, she probably learned more than I did."

"Anyway, Gary dropped out of school and worked nights stocking at the Valu-Mart. I thought he was an idiot—"

Eve nodded vigorously.

Kristee waved a dismissive hand at her. "I know, I know. So somehow, I managed to graduate by remote control and went to Missoula.”

"I can remember passing Sage around at the Kyi-oh meetings like a talking stick," Eve said and then seeing the blank looks on the men’s faces explained. "'Kyi-oh' is an Indian student organization. Mostly just social—keeps us from dying of homesickness—and at the meetings, a 'talking stick' is passed around; if you're holding it, it's your turn to talk and no one can interrupt."

Steve said, "Do you think we could get one? We—“

"—could really use—," Scotty interrupted,

"—one in this house," Eps finished.

Scotty and Steve nodded in solemn unison.

Eve laughed and then turned serious, "OK, that's all ancient history. Where's Gary, and why do you and Sage look like hunted rabbits?"

Kristee said slowly, "That's a pretty apt description. I feel like I'm always trying to make sure I've got a good deep hole to hide in."

Steve raised his hand and opened his palm to indicate the house. "This is as good a hole as any."

"Better than most," Scotty added.

Thinking of the basement, Rick agreed.

Kristee looked at the guys closely as if she couldn't quite believe they weren't kidding.

"Anyway," she said to Eve, "if you remember, you never saw much of Gary. He came with me, of course, and got a job at the checkout counter at Olsson's. Then he kind of disappeared."

"Yeah, I didn't really miss him." Eve said. "I always thought you could do better."

"Well, if you look around Wolf Point, you won't see a whole lot of prime husband material," said Kristee with a bitter smile. "I figured if he was ambulatory at least one night every weekend, I was ahead of the game."

"OK. OK. Point taken. What happened to him?"

"Well, the two of us had joined another group besides Kyi-oh, a political discussion group that used to meet in the Humanities Building in the evenings. I never paid all that much attention; it was just a way to get out of that stinking room over the Chinese restaurant and sit with Sage for a while."

Kristee shook her head slowly, "But Gary…he got real serious. It was as if he was hypnotized or something. Afterward, he would just talk and talk and talk about politics and religion and, you know…" she made air quotes…"'The Revolution.'

So finally, he was given some sort of scholarship or grant or something and came to Washington for what they called…” more air quotes “…advanced training'."

Rick had been watching Scotty as his face became more and more concerned.

Scotty asked, "Advanced training? That's what they called it? What's the name of the group?"

Kristee looked at him. "It's a weird religious-political mishmash. Originally, it was a bunch of radical left-wingers, and then it got religion and became the Children's Crusade formed by this guy who calls himself Stephen Cloyes and based near here, out in Warrenton. Why?"

Scotty's face relaxed, and he exhaled a long breath. "I've heard the same phrase, but it was another group. One I used to belong to until I ran out of money for all that 'advanced training,' and they kicked me out."

"And you are lucky they did," Steve said. "We almost had to resort to drastic measures."

"Yeah," Eps chimed in, "We were all set up for electroshock therapy."

Scotty shot them a look. "I wasn't aware of these plans."

"You would never have known anything about it," Eps said cheerfully. "A couple of thousand volts while you slept and—Shazaam! A deluxe brain wash-and-wax with a mental tune-up thrown in while you wait. We had the contact electrodes built into your pillow."

Scotty looked suspicious. "Are they still there?"

"Um, Possibly. Why?"

"Probably nothing. Some strange dreams."

"I wonder if there is some residual Gaussian pickup from the house wiring." Eps looked excited. "We could raise the voltage and—"

"Boys, discuss your mad scientist experiments later," Eve interrupted. "Kristee still has the figurative talking stick. Go ahead, sweetie."

Kristee jumped off the couch and walked quickly to the stairs. "Sage! I can hear you rutching around up there like a calf after it's been roped. Get your pjs on and brush your teeth, now!"

There was a muffled complaint from the top of the stairs.

Kristee pointed one finger and said, "Move, little girl," in what could only be described as a "mom voice."

Loud footsteps stomped off in the direction of their bedroom. Kristee waited a few seconds and came back to the sofa.

She sat with her feet up, wrapping her arms around her knees and pulling her face out of sight. Rick thought that she was compressing herself into as tight a ball as possible like someone who expected to be hit. Eve put a hand on her shoulder and massaged gently. Kristee raised her head and took a deep and shaky breath before speaking.

"I finally graduated and…well, I was married, and married people live together, right?" Eve nodded. "So you helped me pack up Sage and everything we owned—which wasn't much—in Dad's old pickup, and I drove out here. Dad wasn't big on the idea but there wasn't anything for me in Wolf Point. Dad ran a hunting lodge, and I'd been working there all my life, but business is bad and…”

She hid her face again behind her knees. Her voice was soft and muted. "Since Mom died, Dad hasn't been interested in running the lodge, or seeing his granddaughter or, much of anything, really."

No one spoke and, after a long moment, Kristee said, "Mom got to see Sage, but the cancer took her like a month later."

Eve put both arms around her friend and squeezed. Rick looked at his housemates. Their frozen faces demonstrated what he already knew. They were even worse at handling emotion than he was.

After some sniffling and a deep breath, Kristee said, "So we came out here. The Crusade has a big place. I think it used to be owned by millionaires or something. It's got one big house and about a dozen smaller places that used to be for cars or servants or something. Now it's all just bunkrooms for the… Well, the people who truly are way deep into this thing call themselves 'Crusaders’." She shook her head. "I never bought the whole thing. The leaders—the Inner Circle—are just creepy."