Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

Five minutes later Donna Mason slipped in. All I could do was watch her come across the floor and shake my head.

She threw her arms around me and buried her fragrant black curls in my neck. “God, I’ve missed you,” she said.

Hypok slept until almost midnight. Then he sat up and swung his feet over the bed, straightened his back and breathed deeply. He pulled a burgundy-colored robe over him and let it fall past his waist as he stood and slid his feet into his slippers. He tied the robe sash in a double knot, snug up against his stomach. At the bedroom window he stood erect, each hand in a robe pocket, feet together, head cocked just a little to the right, and stared through the darkness. Same thing he always saw: sycamores dense and high and lit faintly by a neighbor’s patio light, the thick black power line sagging upward toward its pole on the street behind his, part of the rooftop belonging to the rose-crazed old jackoff who lived next door, the guest quarters at the far end of his own backyard dark now but the guests inside certainly astir just like he was.

Things start moving early in spring when the moon’s down, he thought, like tonight, part of nature’s way, what keeps us all fed.

He went to the kitchen and made coffee. Extra strong, to stand up to the milk and kahlua and tequila he added to it — just a wave of each bottle really — to get him off to a firm start. With a big steaming mug in his hand he went into his workroom and turned on the overhead fluorescents. They were arranged on the ceiling in two rows of three long bulbs each, and bathed the room in cool white light. More like moonlight than daylight, he thought.

First, get the mail and check with the Friendlies on the Web. He booted up and keyed to the PlaNet provider software, listened to the modem as it dialed and made contact, saw the standard PlaNet junk fill the screen as he fingered past it to get his e-mail. He leaned his elbows on the desk and lowered his head to his hands for comfort. Odd to feel the new smooth face, he thought, and the new short white hair is odd too. The new me. He read his mail:

Lums-

Things are popping in the Adirondacks: 2 horridus already, one male and one female, darker phases, active midday. Westerns out yet? Any six-foot reds?

Lums-

As you requested, prices for fresh-frozen mice are pinkies, fuzzies and hoppers 40 cents; adults small, medium or large 45 cents. Rats add 20 cents per item. Shipping is by the pound, not bad from Texas unless you’re buying by the ton.

Lums-

Can supply you gossamesh at .89 per yard on orders of 1,000 yards or more. White, black, wine, flesh. Thank you for your interest.

Lums-

PlaNet has a wonderful new way for you to save money on your monthly credit card purchases!

Eat crap, PlaNet. Hypok keyed out of his mailbox and into a private chat room of the Midnight Ramblers, people who shared his interest in youth activities. He got the weekly chat schedule on Mondays from the boring home page for Fawnskin, a resort area up in the mountains of Southern California. First he’d scroll past the weather and fish catches, the precipitation and rental availability, all the way back to the local news items, which contained the coded live chat schedule if you knew where to look for it and how to read it. Then he’d know where and when to lurk the Ramblers. They met three different days of each week, at the changing, prearranged times. Midnight and the middle of the day were popular. If they weren’t careful the server monitors would shut them down, might even call in the cops. Hypok had gotten to know a handful of the Ramblers, and considered them his Friendlies. Talked to them in person, seen them face to face. Let them help him sometimes. Risky but profitable.

He lurked.

E-Rection: True, but that still doesn’t explain why so many of us are chatting here, unloved and unoccupied. Isn’t there something new and clever we can think of?

O-Ring: Why not finance a set of custom works from some artistic friend? We can pool our resources.

Rod & Real: Too expensive, that’s why.

Lancer: I stand by my opinion that the public outdoor shower is the most cost effective way to acquire wood. We lucky enough to live in temperate climes can enjoy the youthful siren song May through October. How to chop it is the problem.

E-Rection: The day of the overcoat is over.

Lancer: Especially in August.

O-Ring: Give me pix any day. Privacy and dignity.

E-Rection: And reusable.

Hypok followed the conversation and drank his coffee. He was tempted to jump in and offer up some custom images, or just some reworkings, but no use sounding eager. He would let them stew, get hotter, drive the value up. For now, the freelance dating service work was paying well and keeping him as busy as he wanted to be. Plus, what went down with Chet and his group was going to spread the heat everywhere. Let it cool. Be cool. Lie low. Create.

He left the computer on so he could lurk later, but he rolled his office chair away from the little desk and positioned himself in front of the work station. The table was a handsome right-angled expanse of two-by-six pine planks held up by sawhorses that took up almost an entire wall of the workroom and part of the adjacent wall. The planks were thick and he’d alternated the grain and inlaid them with strips of dark red cherry and run the dowels in every four inches for strength and planed and sanded the whole thing to the smoothness of a pearl before shellacking then buffing it to a shine not of this world. The wood made him think of the bridge of a great luxury yacht; the technology on top of the wood made him think of the flight deck of a jetliner. He felt great sitting here, important, like the captain of a Spanish galleon or maybe a spaceship. Hypok looked at his powerful 129-meg Mac with the latest Adobe Photoshop, his Pivot 1700 Portrait monitor; his Epsons, his Stylus Pro XL scanner, his 200-meg SyQuest for image storage, his 2000-meg NuDesign backup unit, two film recorders, the video editor, his video and still cameras, his digital cameras, his light table and big desk blotter where he sometimes roughed things out in sketch form the old-fashioned way — with a pencil.

Ah.

He fired up the Mac and told the SyQuest to present the image bank of his latest project: a modernization of some classic Dutch stuff of the early part of the century. It was all black and white and the backgrounds were indistinct, plus the girls themselves had a dated, frankly hokey look to them no matter what they were doing. It was the kind of stuff you could pull off the Web any day of the week, the kind of bread-and-butter images the p’philes started out with, before they got educated in the kinds of things they could get from people like him. He’d spent the last week coloring everything, then brightening up the backgrounds and inserting some modern touches — a digital clock in one, a stereo CD system with bookshelf speakers in another, a personal computer in still another. He’d updated what little clothing the models were wearing. Small things, but they brought the images out of the twenties and thirties and into the nineties very convincingly. Then he had started replacing the girls’ faces with those of models in magazines, but none of them really looked right. So today he would start creating his own from scratch, give to each of these little angels a face that today’s man would just look at and drool over. Innocent enough, and all just for a buck, Hypok thought: he could sell these as originals by the time he got done with them, and it was one-tenth the work of getting a true original. And about one one-hundredth the risk.