Rest & Trust Page 2

  “I’m not fucking paying for you to kill my kid.”

  She nodded, as if she’d expected no better from him. “Fine. Wait here. I’ll get your kutte and the rest of your stuff. We’re done, you and me. For good this time.”

  “No shit,” he snarled. Then he remembered Dylan and Chelsea. “I want to say goodbye—”

  With a shake of her head, she cut him off. “No. They’re used to you coming and going. They’ll forget you before they think it’s weird you haven’t come back.”

  That stung as much as anything else she’d said. “Christ, Tare, when did you get to be such a bitch?”

  Smiling coldly, she didn’t answer him, but turned and went back into her house. He stood on her porch, trying to organize his thoughts. He felt furious and powerless, and like he’d been a fucking fool for years. He’d never realized that she’d thought so little of him.

  Rocked by a rage unfamiliar in its power, he picked up the wooden bench and hurled it into her yard with a fierce shout. It landed in the grass and broke apart, and he felt absolutely no better.

  When she came back out, she gave the fresh rubble on her lawn a long look but said nothing. He snatched his kutte out of her hands and pulled it on. Then he filled his pockets with the rest of his crap and stalked off to his bike without a word.

  The thought that he was walking away from his kid sank into the base of his skull and got comfortable, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t force her to have it, and the things she’d said—he didn’t want to be bound to her, either. All he felt for her now was contempt. Loathing. Violent rage.

  So he mounted his bike and rode away.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Okay, Mr. Penney. To see what’s going on, I need to get remote access to your unit.”

  “Eh?”

  “That means I need to take over your laptop for a few minutes so I can find the problem.”

  The gruff, shaky voice of an elderly lifelong smoker filled Sadie’s ear. “Oh…oh…is that legal?”

  “It is if you say it’s okay.”

  “I don’t want you to hack me. I saw it on the news about the hacking.”

  Sadie rolled her eyes. Mr. Penney was eighty if he was a day, and she was fairly certain he thought the internet was an elaborate system of strings and tin cans. He’d called customer support because he couldn’t make ‘The Facebook’ open on his ancient laptop. The first level of troubleshooting—checking the power source, rebooting, etc.—was handled by the initial call center rep. Sadie didn’t get passed a call unless that didn’t fix a problem.

  “I’m not hacking you, sir, because you’re letting me in. This is like you inviting me over so I can sit next to you and see the problem on your screen. Okay?”

  “O-okay. You have a sweet voice.” He made a sound in her ear like he’d just sucked a grape through his nose and then hawked it out. Gross. She hoped that didn’t have anything to do with her ‘sweet’ voice.

  “Good. Now, I need you to do a couple of things first. Can you go into System Preferences for me?” She knew it was an absurd question, but sometimes she got lucky.

  “Eh? Uh—eh?”

  “In the dock—in the strip of pictures on bottom of your screen. One of them should be a box with what looks like a gear in the middle. See it?”

  “Oh! Next to the ‘W,’ you mean?”

  Sure, dude. Whatever. “Sounds like it. Okay. Click that for me.”

  “I got lots of other pictures that came up.” He began to read: “‘General,’ ‘Desktop and Screen Saver,’ ‘Dock’…”

  “Okay, good. You’re in the right place. One of those pictures should be a blue folder with a street sign, like a ‘crosswalk ahead’ sign. It should say ‘Sharing.’ Can you find that?”

  “Next to the cloud?”

  “Yep. Click that for me. You should see a menu, and the top item should say ‘Screen Sharing.’ Got it?”

  “I do!” He sounded so excited that Sadie had to grin.

  “Good work. Just click the box next to it so a checkmark shows up, and then I can take it from there.”

  After a few more keystrokes, Sadie had control of Mr. Penney’s unit. As soon as his desktop came up on her screen, she slammed her hand on the side of her head, killing her mic.

  “HOLY FUCK!” she yelled into her empty apartment. Getting control of herself again, she activated the mic on her headset and forced herself to speak in the same tone she’d been using. “Okay, Mr. Penney. I’m going to look around and find the problem. It might take a few minutes. As long as you hear music, that means I’m on the job. I’ll check back in when I figure out the problem or if I have more questions.”

  The voice of what she’d thought was a sweet, dotty old man filled her ear again. “Okay, honey. What should I do?”

  The word ‘honey’ made her cringe, but she kept a smile in her voice. “Just sit tight, Mr. Penney.”

  “I’ve got the TV right here. Can I watch The Price Is Right?”

  “Sure. That’s a good idea.”

  She killed her mic again and pulled up her cohort chat. The members of her cohort were located all over the western half of the country—Sadie herself was in Southern California—but they were based in Dallas, and that was where their supervisor was. When they had staff meetings they used video chat, but text chat was easier to do referrals and troubleshoot problems with each other during their shift.

  Probably all tech support reps everywhere were geeks, but Sadie liked to think that her cohort were the geekiest. Whenever they had slow spells, their chat was full of awesome geek talk. They could keep a riff going on a topic for days. They’d once chatted the entire script of The Wrath of Khan. From memory. Around their customer calls.

  The higher-ups could tap into any chat they wanted, but the prevailing philosophy was that friendly play like that during downtimes was good for morale, especially since remote work could be so isolating and solitary. So they encouraged banter and play, as long as it stayed clean and didn’t get in the way of their work.

  Sadie and her cohort pals were always changing their avatars to suit some random theme. One of them would change, and within half an hour, they’d all have keyed into the same idea. Currently, they were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sadie was Raphael. Their supervisor, Raymond, was Splinter, of course.

  For most of the shift, they’d been chatting in character. But Sadie broke character now.

  Just RA’d a massively FU unit. Ray—she tagged their supervisor—need a private.

  Andy, who was currently posing as Shredder, posted You can’t drop that and not spill. FU how.

  She ignored that. Just then, a private chat window came up, and Ray asked, Problem?

  I’m looking at kiddie porn, she typed. Really sick. I’m supposed to be making the browser work for this dude, and his wallpaper is freaking me out. It’s his *wallpaper* There are—she stopped and counted—more than two dozen jpgs on his desktop and I can tell from the thumbnails that I do not want to see them more closely.

  His answer was nearly immediate. Grab the screen and send it and deets to me, then refer him up. Mark the contact and the call. Then logoff. Chill. I’ll call you asap.

  Raymond knew her history, and he’d taken her on anyway last year, so she knew he had a good idea how she’d react and what she’d need. She had never met him in person in her life, but she trusted him completely.

  She typed Kthx, grabbed the screen and noted the call details, sent it all to Ray, then swallowed and hit her mic again. “Mr. Penney?” The muffled cheers of a game show crowd answered her. “Mr. Penney?”

  The rustle of someone picking up a phone. “Hello? Hello?” the old perv croaked. Now that Sadie had shared the story with her boss, it had gained the weight of reality, and she felt truly freaked and grossed out.

  She’d seen all kinds of very weird shit on people’s computers. She’d seen plenty of porn, and a surprising number of dead animal pictures, and just more weird shit than she would h
ave believed existed. People didn’t seem to realize that she was an actual person actually seeing their actual weirdness when they let her into their computers. But what she was looking at right now was by far the most upsetting thing she’d ever seen.

  BDSM kiddie porn. There was a little kid in that picture. On the perv’s fucking wallpaper, like it was just normal.

  And she still had to be nice to the sick fuck, so he wouldn’t get nervous or suspicious.

  “Hi, Mr. Penney. I haven’t been able to fix the problem, so I’m going to refer you to our most senior expert. I promise that Ray will be able to fix you.” She got some small satisfaction from the double entendre that he knew nothing about.

  “I…don’t know. It’s taking an awfully long time…”

  “I’m sorry about that sir, but Ray will take care of you.”

  “Okay, then. I guess that’s okay.”

  “Well, you have a great day, Mr. Penney. I’m going to send you over to Ray now.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to do the end-of-call spiel. Before he could say anything else, she transferred his call.

  Then she tore the headset off her ear and tossed it to her desk as if it had gained eight legs and fangs. She pushed herself away, letting the wheels of her ergonomic chair roll back as far as they would.

  There was more she needed to do to preserve and mark the evidence, but she was so fucking grossed out. She felt like she needed to bleach her whole area. And burn everything that image had touched. Including her eyeballs and brain.

  With a Herculean force of will, she dragged her chair back to her desk. She finished doing what she needed to do to mark the call. The cohort chat was blowing up, but she ignored it and, as soon as she could, logged off.

  Her apartment was a studio, designed to resemble a loft—though it was a new building, so the whole industrial aspect was all affect. She walked from her work area to her kitchen area and pulled a can of Diet Coke out of the fridge. Today had suddenly become a day that she could really use something much stronger, but since she was getting her one-year chip in three days, it would be pretty pathetic and humiliating to cave now.

  She chugged half the soda down, then went to her desk, picked up her phone, and walked out to her balcony to wait for her boss to call and talk her off the ledge. So to speak.

  ~oOo~

  By the end of her shift, she’d talked to Ray, Ray’s boss Mary, and a detective in Mr. Penney the Perv’s hometown in New Mexico. She’d finished a whole six-pack of Diet Cokes and was still feeling completely skeeved out. Every time she told the story, the image in her head got more detailed—and not just the actual image that had invaded her eyes but the whole scene that had invaded her mind. Her fucked up, hyper imagination had filled in all the details of how that picture, and the probably hundreds like it, had gotten taken.

  She’d been in that real little kid’s imaginary head all afternoon. It sucked.

  Sadie really, really, really did not want to have an apartment full of people in a couple of hours. But a date had been set for the class-action trial against Valiant Energy Corp., and she had been involved in the protests against the company since she’d gotten out of rehab, just as the stories began to emerge about the communities Valiant been decimating with toxic waste. They had faced government sanctions for breaking scores of environmental laws, but they’d managed to get off with fines. Now the civil process was underway.

  Her rehab counselor, and her sponsor, too, had wanted her to find something positive she could become invested in, and she’d found a Cause. She’d been involved in some protests in college—against students’ and women’s rights, primarily—and even high, she’d appreciated the good that could be done on the ground, if only to force light and discussion to problems people preferred not to see or talk about.

  Her group now was planning a mobilization for the trial, and now that they had a date—only a month away—they needed to get serious about getting things ready.

  Most people seemed to have a sense that protests just sort of randomly happened: people got mad, went out, suddenly found themselves in a group as if by accident. No. That was how riots happened. Protests took planning. Careful planning—and significant resources, which also took planning.

  People worked better when they could relax; she’d learned that in her own actual job. Her group approached meetings a little bit like parties. There was always food and drink, and they sat comfortably and let ideas roll around the room before they sorted them out and decided which ones worked. So getting ready to host a meeting took some work.

  Sadie was not in the mood, but she figured that the fact that she would be ‘entertaining’ tonight was maybe the only thing that was going to keep her from using after three-hundred-sixty-two days clean. It was also keeping her to her less psychotic coping mechanisms.

  Like Diet Coke and cleaning.

  Sadie had been a very high-functioning addict, right up to the point that she’d stopped functioning altogether. She’d worked at the tech bar in one of the company’s retail shops throughout college and for a couple of years after, rising to the level of supervisor, even while she was living almost her whole life high. Hell, she’d finished school at UC Riverside and graduated cum laude while she was high. She’d fucking floated across the stage in her cap and gown.

  When she’d finally tanked, everybody had been shocked. Her work record was so good, and she’d forged such strong relationships in the company, that when she came out of her three-month stretch in rehab, a new job had been held out to her. One that took her out of the massive stress of the retail shop.

  She could work from home, control her environment better. Her rehab counselor, her sponsor, her bosses old and new, even her father—they had all agreed that it was a good solution.

  And they’d been right. But it did leave her on her own, practically speaking, when a stressor presented itself.

  When she realized that she was on her knees in the bathroom, scrubbing the grout behind the toilet, she decided to call her sponsor. She was running out of things to clean.

  ~oOo~

  Three days later, Gordon, her sponsor, handed Sadie a one-year chip. It was an unassuming little bit of bronze, and Sadie let it lie on her fingers for a moment and stared at it. So much about her life was different from the life she’d had a year ago.

  Exactly one year since her father had dropped her off at the recovery center at Big Bear Lake. She had not relapsed once. Not once. She’d had some very close calls, and Gordon told her often that some of her coping mechanisms were their own kind of trouble, but she had not slid a needle between her toes, snorted anything into her sinuses, or swallowed any pill stronger than ibuprofen in three hundred and sixty-five days.

  Gordon—a skinny black guy in his fifties who’d invited her for a bite to eat after the first time she’d spoken at a meeting and had become her sponsor thereafter—patted her arm. When she looked up and met his eyes, he smiled and gave her a little side nod. Oh. Right. People were waiting for her to speak.

  Usually, people just sat around at this meeting and talked, almost like group therapy, but when somebody was getting a big milestone chip, they set up a podium and had slightly better snacks. Gordon stepped away and took a seat, and Sadie turned and faced the…well, not a crowd. The gathering. The dozen or so meeting regulars, a couple of newbies…and her father, Johnson Ballard, sitting at the back of the room in his business suit, with his arms crossed over his chest.

  He looked horribly uncomfortable. But he was here. He’d been shocked the year before at how much he hadn’t known about his daughter. They had a lot of rebuilding to do. But he’d been trying to be supportive, and he was here, in this church basement, looking like a man who’d just realized he’d gotten on the wrong train and had headed into the bad side of town.

  She waited until he brought his eyes back to the front of the room. When they made contact, she smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Sadie.”

  “Hi, Sadie,” came the ritual
response from her audience. She saw her father say it, too.

  “So, I don’t really talk all that often at meetings, mainly because I’m tired of my story, and I don’t like the sound of my own voice, but since I got this shiny new trinket, and since there’s somebody here who’s only ever gotten my story in pieces, I thought I’d mark the occasion by telling the whole thing. The Cliff’s Notes version, anyway.”