Clear Water Read online

  “Mercury?”

  “High but not abnormal.”

  “Other chems?”

  “Don’t have a sig.”

  And all of a sudden, their code, the back and forth they’d practiced over nearly two decades of environmental studies in each other’s company, was shattered on the rocks of Patrick’s profanity.

  “Manufacturer’s list?”

  “The recycling plant or—”

  “Mother-fucking—”

  Bam!

  “—the paper company—”

  Crash!

  “—cock-sucking—”

  Crack!

  “—or the warehouse for—”

  Smack!

  “Ouch! Son-of-a-fucking-whore-slurping-ass-banging—”

  Whiskey and Fly Bait stopped completely then.

  “—come-jerking-prick-teasing-bastard-mother-fucker—” Smash! Bang! Kaboom! “Ouch! Fuck! Ouch!”

  Fly Bait’s eyes narrowed in the sudden silence, and Whiskey shrugged.

  “What?”

  “He hurt himself.”

  Whiskey felt his eyes grow large, round, and shiny. “You care about this?”

  “He just cleaned the bathroom.”

  “So?”

  “I’ve been sending samples into the lab when I got bored. They are as of yet unidentified. It never occurred to me to clean the damned thing.”

  Whiskey sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know, I know, I know—you don’t want to get blood all over it now that it’s clean.”

  Fly Bait shrugged apologetically, as though it had maybe just once occurred to her that she was a girl. In the middle of her silence there were a couple of deep, shuddering breaths from the head that Whiskey swore made the boat rock in her berth.

  “Why am I the one who gets to bandage his boo-boos?”

  Fly Bait just looked at him, and he realized he didn’t want to answer that question, and he really would rather she didn’t either.

  “Fine. Fuck.” He stalked to the bathroom and gingerly opened the door. Sure enough, Patrick was trying to bandage a cut on his hand with a roll of gauze and a piece of duct tape, and Whiskey mentally added another couple of items to that grocery list he was going to go over.

  “Here,” he commanded gruffly, and Patrick pulled his hand to his chest protectively.

  “I can do it.”

  “No you can’t. Give me your fucking hand.”

  “I’m not helpless.”

  “So you keep telling me. Give me your fucking hand.”

  Patrick scowled at him. “I’m not a burden or a leech.”

  “If you were, Fly Bait would have let you bleed to death. Or starve. Now give me your fucking hand.”

  Patrick extended it, and Whiskey sighed. “You need to rinse it off.” He took that slender, bony white hand and ran it under the faucet. The slightly gaping slice across the top of his knuckles swished in the water, and the blood ran down the sink. Whiskey looked sideways and saw Patrick looking at his hand and gritting his teeth.

  “You don’t have to look,” Whiskey said gently, and Patrick shrugged.

  “This is the weirdest day,” he said out of nowhere, and Whiskey couldn’t argue.

  “Is there a clean towel in here?”

  Patrick handed him a small towel that must have just come out of the quay’s small drier, and Whiskey looked at it and sighed.

  “Not that I’m complaining, but I didn’t mean you had to start right away.” He dabbed at the cut to get the excess water off the skin and risked a look at Patrick’s face.

  His lips were pouty and pillowy, although his mouth looked like the wide kind, the kind that smiled easily and could probably be vivacious if he weren’t all tense and in pain and trying not to talk about getting pulled out of a sinking car.

  “I don’t have anything else to do,” Patrick murmured, and Whiskey tsked and started rewrapping the gauze.

  “You know, you sort of had a really shitty night, and you haven’t done half bad at fucking up your day. Maybe just sit for a little, have a bottle of water, maybe go back to the bunk and take a nap.”

  “I can pull—”

  “Your own weight.” Whiskey sighed and gave the gauze a little tug before reaching into the cabinet and bringing out the sterile tape. “I know. Look, ki—Patrick, I don’t know what’s going on in your twisted little noggin, but nobody here has accused you of being a fuckup. So maybe you wait until you have something to do before you start trying to prove you can do it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Whiskey finished the dressing and realized he was still holding onto Patrick’s hand. He didn’t let go.

  “Who called you a fuckup?” he asked after a moment.

  Patrick had the prettiest eyes—blue. Crystal lake blue, and his lashes were brown. His hair was sort of a sun-streaked toffee, now that it was dry, and Whiskey didn’t see any tell-tale marks that would indicate that it wasn’t natural.

  “Please,” Patrick whispered. “Please. Don’t make me be pathetic. You’ve been really nice to me. Maybe, for a little while, I can just hang out and not be pathetic, okay?”

  “You’re a good kid.” Whiskey ruffled his hair. Get it? He was a kid, right? “Maybe cut yourself a break and relax. You try to clean the bathroom all tense like that and this isn’t the only blood you’re going to shed.”

  Patrick nodded and smiled a little. That wide, mobile mouth looked like maybe smiling was what he was best at. Whiskey resolved to see more of it.

  “Why is your name Whiskey?” the kid asked seriously, and Whiskey sighed.

  “Because Wesley Keenan sounds like a science geek who can’t get laid,” he told the young man honestly. “Fly Bait started calling me Whiskey when we were undergrads. I’d been calling her Fly Bait since we met. The names stuck.”

  The kid nodded. “You guys, uhm…?”

  Whiskey’s mouth twisted. “Not at present. Just here to do the job.”

  The shot of relief that blew across that little, round, transparent face made Whiskey feel like shit. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Should have said yes.

  “What job?”

  “Want to find out what’s fucking up the frogs.”

  The kid’s hands were oddly shaped. The fingers were long and splayed, like a frog’s fingers or a spider’s legs, and that long-fingered hand was still in his own, and he was breathing shallowly, like he was conscious that each breath might disturb the moment. It was a good time to think about frogs or spiders, because maybe that would make the pale expanse of skin on the kid’s arm not quite so magnetic.

  The kid blinked, lost his self-conscious presence, and pulled back. “You mean like Cal and Catherine?” he asked. “Or the little anomaly-frog-babies? What do you think would do that?”

  Whiskey couldn’t help it. It was an honest, curious question, and the kid had asked it guilelessly, without an academic agenda, just because he was curious. That, and he’d called the frogs by their names. It was an unspoken empathy thing, and it made Whiskey like him even more.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. Frog anomalies have been popping up a lot where water pollution has increased. Usually it’s caused by a particular pesticide, which is pretty damned illegal right now. A frog’s skin is designed to breathe, so it’s more permeable than most other creatures’. But that means it lets all sorts of shit in to fuck with its genetic makeup, so—”

  “Two-headed frogs. Can they mate with each other, because I know that sometimes frogs can change their genders if there’s too many boy frogs and not enough girl frogs, and if Cal could knock up Catherine, that would be totally fucked up, like masturbation but better, you know, like one of those freaky yoga guys who give themselves their own blowjobs and shit, right?”

  Whiskey’s pants got really, really tight. He couldn’t help himself. “Can you do that?” he asked, knowing his voice squeaked and not caring. “Because I saw you doing yoga.”

  Patrick’s face fell. “Not yet.” H
e brightened. “I’m working on it though.” And then that visible, unhidden mood swing again. “Especially because I’m single again. I’m going to need to know how to do that.”

  Whiskey couldn’t help it. He imagined that impossibly thin, limber young body contorted and Patrick’s wide, mobile mouth engulfing his own cock, and he found he had to rest his head against the doorframe. What he said next made no sense—it was like some other man, some better man, had taken over his head. “Being single can be a good thing,” he muttered. “Maybe you should stay single for a while.”

  A sigh—it seemed to carry the weight of the world. “Well, it’s not like I can do any better than Cal anyway.”

  “Bullshit,” Whiskey said, the thought of the skeezemonkey crawling out of the car and leaving Patrick to die making his cock shrivel in his jeans. “A bald gorilla would be better than that fucker,” he snapped, and then he went to turn around and get out of there before the kid could start talking about anything else that would make his cock explode.

  “A bald gorilla wouldn’t have me,” the kid snapped back, and Whiskey closed his eyes.

  “He’d have you, kid—he’d bend you over and fuck you until your eyeballs bled come. But just because he’d have you, and even if he was the only one who wanted you, it wouldn’t mean that you didn’t deserve way better.”

  He couldn’t take anymore of this conversation, so he turned away and said, “Stop cleaning the fucking bathroom, come out here, and sit down. We’ve got books. Read. Watch movies on my phone. Go swimming off the back dock if you want. But stop trying to earn your keep. It’s quitting time.”

  He stalked back into the kitchen/dining room with Fly Bait and looked at the clock. It was four in the afternoon, and he and Fly Bait had probably two or three more hours of analyzing data. Fuck. But he’d meant what he said to the kid (Patrick!) too. That kid needed to lighten up and back off from himself.

  He heard movement behind him and he looked at Fly Bait. After a moment and a closed door, she said, “He’s gone into your berth—probably to lie down. Good. Junior needs a nap.”

  “Jesus, Fly Bait—that was almost maternal.”

  Fly Bait shrugged. “Yeah, well, there’s ovaries in there. They kick in once a month—you’ve felt it.”

  Whiskey grunted. By his count, he and Patrick had six days to go before he hauled the kid out by his ear on field work and let Fly Bait plan the destruction of all testosterone-based land mammals on general principle. “Yup.” He would have left it there, but there was something else… fuck it, so many things bothering him. “Fly Bait, you got the Internet going?”

  “Yeah. In fact, I was doing all sorts of fancy shit on my phone!”

  Whiskey glared at her sourly. “You don’t need the Internet for that. All you need for that is a phone plan through someone who doesn’t deal off the back of a truck. I meant on the computer. But it doesn’t matter. You’re right—I can look at it from my phone.”

  He pulled out his phone—one of his few actual toys—and typed in Ritalin for the search engine, then sat down on the little bench and had himself some reading.

  A HALF an hour later, he took his phone and went in to wake the kid up.

  He was stretched out on the berth, his chin pillowed in his hands, his shoulders hunched protectively around his face, and Whiskey couldn’t help what he did next. He sat next to the boy (Patrick!) and rubbed between his shoulder blades gently until those self-protective shoulders relaxed and the kid gave an unconscious groan.

  “Kid? Kid—Patrick. C’mon, buddy, I need you to wake up, okay?”

  “Why?”

  Whiskey looked sideways and saw that those pretty blue eyes were open, and he was looking at Whiskey unhappily.

  “A couple of reasons. The first one is I thought you’d like to try to cancel your credit cards again. The second one is I was wondering if you bothered to take your meds this morning, because maybe, you could take them tomorrow morning, and we could all keep our phones intact.”

  “The meds are a crutch,” Patrick mumbled woodenly. “If I was a real grown-up I could pull my own shit together and not need to be dependent on chemicals.”

  “Well, yeah, if you were ninety-eight percent of all the people in the world, sure! But doctors don’t prescribe this stuff to adults because they’re using it as a crutch. They prescribe it to adults because your brain chemistry isn’t outfitted for the twenty-first century, and you need a little help.”

  “Wonderful. I don’t even fit into the time I was born in. You got equipment out there that can measure my happiness?”

  Whiskey had to laugh. Patrick was talking into his folded arms, but he was still letting his smart-ass show.

  “C’mon, kid. I would really rather not have you knock yourself unconscious on the side of the boat, okay? We’ve got a limited grant and not a lot of insurance, and….” Whiskey moved his hand to cover Patrick’s forehead. There was a bump there, a dark spot against the pale skin. “And I just don’t want to see you hurt yourself anymore.”

  Patrick nodded in the middle of a long silence. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. Now sit up. You had the right idea about cancelling your credit cards. You want to try this again?”

  Patrick sighed. “I should just call my dad and tell him they got stolen.”

  “I take it you don’t want to talk to your dad?”

  Patrick closed his eyes. “I’m a chickenshit fuckup,” he said, and Whiskey winced, even though the kid seemed to take it in stride. Patrick Cleary, five foot eight, pretty blue eyes, chickenshit fuckup.

  “Won’t he be worried?”

  Patrick seemed to think about it. “No,” he said after a few heartbeats. “I sincerely doubt it.”

  Whiskey didn’t. Whiskey couldn’t imagine a kid like this, all this earnestness and fragility, wouldn’t have anyone who worried about him. But Whiskey wasn’t volunteering to step in and be Daddy, either, so he wasn’t going to push the issue.

  “Well, then, here. I looked up the major credit card companies, and all you have to do is call the ones that are yours. I’ll stay right here. You start getting all twisted, give the phone to me, I’ll walk you through it, okay?”

  Patrick nodded and wiped the back of his hand wearily over his eyes. “This is hella nice of you. I’m so—”

  “Fuck sorry. Don’t want to hear sorry. Don’t want to hear thank you. Just want to hear you get your shit sorted, ’kay?”

  Patrick nodded. “’Kay.”

  He hit the appropriate number and send and then locked his limpid, hurt blue eyes with Whiskey’s and started what seemed an impossible navigation with bureaucracy. By the time he was done, Whiskey wanted a drink and a baseball bat and something to hit. But more than that, he wanted someone to blame, because Patrick hurt, and it seemed like nobody had paid.

  Patrick

  Someone Else

  IN HIS entire life, Patrick had never wanted so badly to be someone else.

  Whiskey—sexy, dark-eyed, black-stubbled Whiskey—was treating him like a child, a kid brother, a well-meaning seventh grader, and Patrick kept looking at him with fully adult eyes.

  And Patrick couldn’t blame him—not even a little.

  Making the phone calls was painful.

  “Six thousand dollars?” he asked, his voice void of emotion. He simply didn’t have any left. “Six thousand dollars? It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. How could he have racked up six thousand dollars?”

  Patrick was aware that he was clenching Whiskey’s hand in his own and fighting the urge to fall apart. Hell, even the woman on the other line sounded sympathetic.

  “Do you verify that these charges are not authorized?”

  “Anything after six o’clock last night was not authorized.”

  “Are you aware that you have a multi-card protection on your cards? If you give me your mother’s maiden name as verification, I can check on and cancel every card you’ve been issued.”

  Patrick had n
ot been aware—it must have been his father’s doing. Well, once again, Shawn Cleary had his shit together where his son clearly did not.

  When the phone call was over, the damage was staggering.

  “Twenty-three thousand dollars,” Patrick muttered, looking at Whiskey in shock. The little berth had the hatches open, but it was still sweltering at five in the afternoon, and Whiskey’s dark skin was glistening and sticky with sweat. “He put a down payment on a car, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Slick little fucker.” There was a tinge of admiration in Whiskey’s voice, and Patrick looked at him sharply.

  “Well,” Whiskey said with a shrug, “if he was going to be a skeezemonkey, at least he picked a path and committed.”

  Unlike Patrick, who apparently couldn’t even commit to staying alive.

  “I hate him,” Patrick said, his voice flat and dead.

  “No you don’t,” Whiskey said, shaking his head.

  “The hell I don’t!”

  “I’m serious,” Whiskey said, patting his hand kindly. “You’d have to love him to hate him, and I don’t think you ever did.”

  Patrick blinked. “I thought I did….”

  “Yeah, but think about it, Patrick. You knew. You woke up without a wallet, and you knew. You asked where the guy was, and I told you he’d ditched you—you knew. You didn’t trust him to save you, you jumped to the right conclusion about him drugging you—you can’t love a guy you don’t trust. You didn’t trust him, you didn’t love him, you can’t hate him.”

  Patrick glared at him. “Then why do I want to smash his face in?”

  Whiskey smiled. “Excellent. Perfectly logical reaction. You want to smash his face in because he’s a skeezeweasel and he needs to have his head caved in by a rock. It’s perfectly natural. Makes me think better of you, actually.”

  Patrick slumped miserably. “I thought it was childish and immature.”

  Whiskey’s dark eyes narrowed and moved sideways to the thinking-things-through place. “Well, only in the way that comes with two testicles and a dumbstick.”

  Patrick laughed and rubbed a hand over the slickness on the back of his neck. “God, it’s hot. Did you say something about swimming?”