“Nah, old guy just wanted to set things right. I wonder what’s on that reel,” Blakely said thoughtfully. “Ya know, he’s got a hell of a grip for his age, nearly squeezed my hand off.” He winced and shook the hand Van Heusen had clasped. “still kinda stings a little.”
“That’s what you get for shaking hands with the old pimp,” Holt lectured.
“Ah, Holt, where’s the harm?” Blakely shrugged. “C’mon, let’s get this little lady home so she can get to work on the article for her next Pulitzer.” He threw an arm around Sadie’s waist and Holt copied his partner’s motion and wrapped his own long arm around her shoulders.
“I haven’t got the first one yet,” she reminded them, finding herself falling automatically into step with them as they walked to the parking garage.
“Just give it time, honey,” Holt told her comfortably. “Just give it time.”
22
By the time they had reached their hovercraft, Blakely was feeling decidedly strange. He felt hot, then cold, then so hot he had to take off his jacket and unbutton the top two buttons of his shirt. His head had started to throb, too; probably, it was all because he had missed his morning caffeine-brew. Holt, who drank mostly herbal tea, had insisted that they had no time to stop at the Starbucks on the way, and Blakely just wasn’t himself without his daily jolt of caffeine. Still, it didn’t usually give him such an intense headache. He tried to shake it off and just concentrate on being with Sadie again. It was so damn good to see her, especially when he and Holt had figured she was out of their lives forever—her choice, not theirs. Several times in the past six months he had wanted to pick up the vid-screen and give her a call, but Holt had always vetoed the idea.
“We’ve gotta let her know we’re still interested. Let her know we’re thinkin’ of her,” Blakely had protested, but Holt always said the same thing: “We don’t want to pressure her. If she comes to us it’s got to be her choice.”
The dark-haired detective didn’t completely agree with that point of view, but he was willing to defer to Holt’s judgment—for a while. Actually, he had been on the point of deciding that when they got home from the trial he would call Sadie no matter what Holt said. He could tell her about Van Heusen’s sentencing—it would be the perfect excuse to remind her of their history together and let her know they still cared. He had never been more shocked or excited in his life than when he’d rounded the corner looking for a caffeine-brew dispenser and saw her standing in the fourth security check line nearly naked and completely embarrassed.
She looked absolutely stunning, Blakely thought, stealing a glance in her direction as she and Holt talked. There were times in the past six months that he had wondered if he’d exaggerated her beauty in his memory, but if anything he had downplayed it. Her long silky, honey-colored hair swung around the shoulders of her cobalt suit, which emphasized all her luscious curves to perfection. The big, amber-brown eyes were as deep and beautiful as he remembered and just as easy in which to get lost.
Blakely knew that Holt thought Sadie’s being here in New New York had everything to do with her new career move and nothing to do with them, but surely even his pessimistic partner couldn’t ignore the way the three-way bond throbbed between them and how the T-link opened and poured out energy with an intensity that he had never felt before. Even with minimal contact they were generating enough energy to light up half the city, he thought.
“Blake, you driving?”
“Huh?” He blinked and realized the other two were looking at him expectantly. “Oh, sorry. Sure.” He juggled the suit jacket he was carrying to his other arm and reached in his pocket to pull out the key card then fumbled it through suddenly clumsy fingers. “Oops,” he mumbled dully.
Sadie bent to retrieve the card and held it out to him, looking concerned. “You all right, Blake?” she asked. “It’s not like you to be clumsy. And you’re sweating too.”
“Just tired.” He made an effort to stand up straight. And suddenly, he was. His arms and legs felt like they were all made of lead. “Maybe Holt c’n drive. I’m beat.” He motioned for Sadie to hand his partner the key card instead.
“Now I’m worried,” Holt said, frowning. “Since when do you ever let me drive? Especially in the city?”
Blakely shrugged as well as his new lead shoulders would let him. “Not feelin’ so good is all.” Holt opened the craft and he clambered awkwardly in and collapsed in the back seat, leaving Sadie and his partner to take the front.
As they drove, Holt kept glancing worriedly back at him until Blakely insisted he watch the road. By then even his tongue seemed to be dipped in lead and his words were coming out slightly slurred. Sadie and Holt were whispering in the front seat and Blakely caught the words “hospital” and “emergency room.”
Making an effort to sit up he leaned forward to make himself heard. “Not gonna go to no damn hospital, Holt,” he said, as clearly as he could. “Just tired ’cause you didn’t let me have my caffeine today. Maybe comin’ down with the flu. Drop me off at home ’n I’ll be fine.” Holt gave him a disapproving look and Sadie gave him a worried one, but his partner at last signaled and turned the craft in the direction of their apartment.
“Okay buddy, let’s get you inside.” Blakely was suddenly aware of a familiar pair of arms pulling him upright. Had he gotten drunk on a night on the town again? Damn, he knew how much Holt hated that.
“’M, sorry, Holt,” he tried to say but his tongue didn’t seem to want to work.
“I think he’s trying to say something. Holt, I really don’t like this.” That soft, feminine growl would be Sadie. Damn she had a sexy voice. Blakely felt it all the way down to his balls every time she talked. Or he usually did, when his balls weren’t made of lead, that was. Blakely wanted to say something to her, something about how glad he was that she had finally come back to them, but it was like someone had glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth—nothing was coming out.
“I don’t like it either,” he heard Holt say. “Come on, we’ll get him to the med-chair and see what it says.”
He tried to open his eyes and watch as they pulled him down the hall, but every time he tried it was a huge effort for nothing; the world was just one big colorful blur so why bother? Blakely shut his eyes and let himself be dragged. He was vaguely aware when they got him into the familiar apartment he and Holt had shared for the past six years and he could still hear his partner and Sadie talking, but all his other senses seemed to be fading in and out alarmingly.
“Here, give me a hand, would you? Grab his right arm and on the count of three…”
“Oh my Goddess, Holt. His hand…look at it!”
“What the hell?” Blakely felt his arm grabbed and cried out weakly. The rest of his body felt dull and lethargic, but suddenly the hand they were looking at was insisting that it hurt! That it was on fire!
It reminded him vaguely of the time he’d gone to visit his cousins on the old Mexi-Tex border and had stumbled into a nest of mutie lava ants. The thumb-sized, bright red insects had swarmed up his ankles, gouging fiercely with their serrated pinchers as they went, injecting their horrible, burning venom that felt like fire in his veins. If Uncle Vernon hadn’t been right there and had the hose in his hand to spray Blakely off with he would’ve been a goner for sure. The ants were back now and this time they were in his arm.
“Water…wash ’em off,” he tried to say but nothing but a strangled moan came out.
“Quick, help me take off his shirt and put him in the chair. It’s linked to emergency services.” He was pushed and pulled into position until he was reclining in the diagnostic med-chair that was a standard feature in every house and apartment since Old Earth had finally gotten standardized health care.
“Well, what does it say?” Sadie’s voice was anxious, eager.
“It says…no, that can’t be right.”
“What? What?” Through a haze of pain he heard Sadie asking something but he couldn’t understand what
she wanted to know.
“It says…Sadie, it says he’s dying.” Holt’s voice was low and ragged.
Not dyin’. Just get the ants off. But by now he couldn’t even moan. The pain in his arm began to creep into his shoulder and chest and then everything went black.
23
“Dying? No, he can’t be dying.” Sadie sounded as frantic as Holt had ever heard her but he couldn’t spare much thought for her feelings just then. “Call a doctor, call an ambulance…reset the chair and check it again. That can’t be right.”
Numbly, Holt did as she asked, resetting the med-chair and asking it to run a full diagnostic again. Slumped in its electrode-studded depths, his partner and best friend lay breathing shallowly, seemingly unconscious. Blakely’s curls were plastered to his forehead by a thin film of sweat looking very black against his suddenly pallid face. His right hand and arm were swollen to twice the diameter of the left arm and there were evil-looking red streaks running up his wrist like some weird tattoo.
The machine beeped and Holt tugged the screen on its long, flexible arm around to read the results, already knowing what he would see. “It’s true,” he said dully. “I don’t know how or why, but it’s true.”
“Let me see that,” Sadie snapped, yanking the screen away from him and scanning it rapidly. “Holt, this can’t be right. According to the chair Blakely’s in the last stages of Multiple Sclerosis. Has he been diagnosed with MS that you know of?”
“No,” Holt said. “He’s…he’s always been healthy as a fucking ox.”
“So then there must be something wrong with your med-chair. It says his nerves are deteriorating at an unbelievable rate. But there’s no way…it must be the chair.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the chair,” Holt said. He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. “Besides, I don’t need the damn chair to tell me what’s going on.”
“How…?”
“I can feel it here.” Holt pressed the back of his neck where the Tandem chip was implanted. “If you’d stop denying your bond with us you’d feel it, too, Sadie. I don’t know how or why, but the chair is right—Blake’s dying.”
“But…but…” Tears spilled out of her honey-brown eyes in a sudden flood. “I can’t…we can’t lose him like this. There must be something we can do. We have to think, Holt. It’s like an allergic reaction, the way he’s swelling up. Is he allergic to any insect stings? Something he ate?”
“No, no, nothing I know of.” Holt forced himself to think past the dull despair that wanted to take over his brain. He could literally feel Blakely slipping away from him, from them, he realized, because Sadie had to be feeling it through the bond as well. Think! he commanded himself. If it was him lying there in that chair dying, he knew Blakely wouldn’t have rested until he found the reason, had found the solution. But nothing came to mind.
Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, Holt pulled the screen out of Sadie’s hands again and read the diagnostic results. MS…nerves deteriorating…a sudden memory was gnawing at the back of his brain, something about the latest in nerve-destruction…demylinization…
“Van Heusen!” he snapped, turning to Sadie. “Do you remember what he was saying, about the new drug the needles in his needler were dipped in when we were on Iapetus?”
Sadie’s face got almost at pale as Blakely’s and she brought a hand to her mouth, her amber eyes wide pools of shock. “Yes…he said it caused the nervous system to…to shred itself. Oh, Holt! The hand that’s swelling up—it’s the one he shook with when Van Heusen asked him to shake hands, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Blake’s a lefty but of course he shakes with his right,” Holt muttered. “Still, I don’t see how…”
“The ring! That huge vulgar ring,” Sadie exclaimed. “I thought I saw Blake wince when they shook and remember, he was saying how Van Heusen had a firm grip and his hand hurt? He must have pressed as hard as he could so Blake couldn’t feel it when he was scratched.”
It sounded too logical to deny. Carefully, Holt grasped his partner’s wrist and turned it over to see the palm. On the underside of Blakely’s thumb was what he had been looking for—a tiny smear of dried blood. He stared at it in disbelief and horror, remembering what Van Heusen had said about the drug being fatal and wondering how such a tiny thing, no bigger than a paper cut, could be robbing him of the best friend and partner any man could ever have.
After a moment, he became aware that Sadie was tugging at his sleeve.
“…reel. The com-reel that Van Heusen gave you. Play it. Quick, Holt! Maybe there’s some kind of hint or clue or something,” she was saying urgently.
Numbly, Holt dug inside his jacket pocket and produced the fingernail-sized reel. He flicked the tiny indicator carefully to view and they watched as a Van Heusen’s face popped into view in a holo-projection about the size of Holt’s palm.
“If you’re watching this, Detectives Holtstein or Blakely, then I have been successful,” Van Heusen’s tinny, old man’s voice said. “If you’re watching this then one or both of you is dying.”
“Oh no!” Sadie’s gasp was more like an intake of breath, but Holt shushed her anyway.
“I will be brief since you won’t be able to give me your full and undivided attention for long; the process is much too painful for that.” The grin on that narrow, wrinkled face was pure evil. Holt had a terrible urge to wrap his fingers around that scrawny throat and squeeze until the cold gray eyes bugged out, but Van Heusen was only with them in spirit and it wasn’t possible. Instead, he had to go on listening to the message.
“How I wish I could see you scrambling around, trying to save yourselves. I tried to arrange for a camera in your apartment, but, alas, it was beyond even my means. So I must content myself with imagining, which isn’t so bad—I have a wonderfully vivid imagination, that I can assure you. However, I digress.
“As I was saying, one or both of you will be writhing in pain by now, no doubt trying to reach the vid-screen and call for help.” Van Heusen grinned, the cold, sharklike grin that made Holt feel like his heart had been dipped in ice. “Call all you like, gentlemen, there is no known cure. I repeat: no known cure. You won’t believe me of course. You’ll spend your last hours looking for answers that aren’t there just as I will spend my last years rotting in prison. But at least mine will be a relatively slow death. I say relatively because by the time you finally breathe your last, you will be wishing I had used a much faster-acting agent. But I wanted you to have time to reflect…time to suffer.” The grin widened even more and the room filled with the sound of Van Heusen’s dry, sardonic chuckle.
“As you have taken my life from me, gentlemen, so I have taken yours from you. An eye for an eye, you might say.” He looked thoughtful. “Actually, I rather hope only one of you is dying right now. You seem so close that I think the pain of losing your partner is a more fitting punishment than almost anything else, even death. As one of my favorite poets once said, ‘Parting is all we know of Heaven and all we need of Hell.’ I am quite sure that by the end of your little ordeal you will agree with that sentiment whole-heartedly.
“Gentlemen,” the holo of Van Heusen’s face nodded gravely. “I bid you a fond adieu. Someday I hope to see you both in Hell.” There was a crackling flash that caused Holt to throw up an arm to shield his eyes and Sadie to cry out and take an involuntary step back and the com-reel shriveled to ashes.
24
Losing him, we’re losing him. Holt’s right, I can feel him slipping away… Sadie shook her head. No! There must be something they could do—some way to save Blakely, but Van Heusen’s words kept ringing in her head: no known cure.
“Blake…Oh, Goddess…” The broken voice belonged to Holt. The tall, lanky body was slumped beside the med-chair now and he was holding his partner’s left hand—the one that wasn’t swollen and red—in his own left hand. Holt’s right hand was pressed to the back of his neck, rubbing methodically,
and he looked like a man who was suffering from the worst tension headache in his life. He rubbed harder and winced at the same time that the still unconscious Blakely moaned.
“Holt?” Sadie felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice cubes into her belly. A cold fear, one she tried with all her might to push away and ignore, had begun growing there. “Holt, are you all right?” she asked anxiously.
“No, ’fraid not.” Blakely moaned again and the blond winced as if in pain.
“What…how…?” She couldn’t even make herself form a logical question, but Holt seemed to understand her anyhow.
“Blake and I have been tandemized a long time, Sadie. We’re too…too close. He’s going and I think…think he’s gonna take me with him when he does.”
“Take you with him?” Sadie felt what could easily be the start of hysteria begin to build in the lift of her voice. “What are you talking about? Do you feel sick, too?”
Holt shook his head, the fine, blond hair glinting like gold in the apartment’s soft lighting. “Not yet, but I will…I can tell it. Right now I just feel weak. Getting weaker all the time…”
Losing them both…Dear Goddess in Heaven please, no. No! I can’t be losing them both… Sadie shook her head, feeling the words of denial bubbling up in her mind like a hysterical chant. She couldn’t lose them, couldn’t lose the only two men in her life she had ever really loved, who had ever really loved her. She thought of all the ridiculous reasons she had given herself as to why she couldn’t be with them—immorality, fear, pain, her career—and they all melted away like fog when the sun comes out. She thought of that mean little voice inside her head, the one that sounded like Aunt Minnie and Gerald and Goshen all rolled into one…she had listened to that voice and thrown away her happiness with both hands.
For the last six months she had been wasting her life millions of miles away from Holt and Blakely, wasting precious time that she could have spent with them. They could have been loving each other, learning to live together, making memories that would last forever. Instead, she had been stuck on Io working on a career that now seemed pointless and trying to get people who never would to accept and love her, when all along Holt and Blakely were waiting for her, wanting to love her, protect her, cherish her. She had pushed them away and now it was too late, her time was up and she had wasted the most precious gift that had ever been offered to her, their love.