Bitter Waters

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Bitter Waters

  A ROC Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 by Wendy Kosak

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1252-3

  A ROC BOOK®

  ROC Books first published by The ROC Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ROC and the “ROC” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: September, 2005

  ALSO BY WEN SPENCER

  ALIEN TASTE

  TAINTED TRAIL

  To James Larkin,

  who taught me not to waste daylight

  Thanks to D. Eric Anderson, Barbara Carlson,

  George Corcoran, Starr Corcoran aka Lady Jade,

  Amy Finkbeiner, “Agent” Joan Fisher, Nancy Janda,

  Kendall Jung, James and Carol Larkin, Heidi Pilewski,

  Dr. Hope Erica Ring, June Drexler Robertson,

  Lara Van Winkle, and all the Snippet Hounds of sff.net

  And special thanks to Ann Cecil

  CHAPTER ONE

  Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania

  Sunday, September 12, 2004

  Ukiah Oregon peered up the city street that climbed the steep hillside; normally so narrow that passing cars risked clipping side mirrors, it was now lined with television news trucks and police cars. Red and blue strobe lights were reflected in every raindrop. Nations of people gathered in the islands of light generated by the streetlamps: curious bystanders with umbrellas, tired cops in rain gear, and TV crews trying to ignore the drizzle as they prepared for the eleven o’clock news report.

  “Well, this is certainly the right street.” Ukiah scanned the row houses stepping up the hill on either side of the street. “2197 would put the house at the top of the hill.”

  “Ah, Christ, what a circus,” Max Bennett, Ukiah’s partner, muttered as he threaded the Cherokee up the slick paving bricks and found a parking space. “Are you really up to this?”

  After two grueling weeks in Oregon solving a missing persons case, Ukiah and Max had flown out of the Pendleton Airport at dawn, West Coast time. Bruised, battered, and bone-weary, they had planned to go straight home once they landed at Pittsburgh International Airport. Ukiah had looked forward to seeing his fiancée, Special Agent Indigo Zheng, and his son, Kittanning. An urgent call about a missing boy, however, caught them at the layover in Houston, and reluctantly, they agreed to check out the case.

  Ukiah eyed the confusion of people and vehicles. “Yeah, I should be fine—this is Pittsburgh.”

  There was a tap on Ukiah’s window, and he lowered it to find Pittsburgh policeman Ari Johnson standing beside the Cherokee.

  “Hey, Wolf Boy!” Ari grinned at him. “How’s that kid of yours?”

  “Kittanning?” How did Ari know about Kittanning? Considering the alien Hex created Kittanning out of Ukiah’s blood without benefit of a woman or the normal nine months of waiting, they kept the baby a family secret.

  “Ukiah. Kittanning. I get it. You named him after the town.” Ari guessed correctly. “He’s what? Like three months old now? Hopefully it’s been a quiet three months, not like when he was born.”

  Ukiah’s memory clicked in: Ari had been at the shoot-out the day Ukiah recovered Kittanning; the officer had provided them with diapers, clothing, and formula.

  “Um, yeah, three months,” Ukiah said.

  “Is he sleeping through the night yet?” Ari asked.

  Max scrubbed at his face. “Jeez, Ari, you sound like an old woman.”

  “Triplets do that to you,” Ari said. “My life is all about babies and guns at the moment. You look like shit, Bennett!”

  “Eight hours on a plane will do that.” Max tilted his head in puzzlement, and then squinted at Ari. “You put them on to hiring us?” In “you,” Max meant the cops, not Ari as a person.

  “You’ve been out of town,” Ari said. “We’ve had too many kids go missing lately.”

  “How many is too many?” Ukiah asked.

  “Personally, one is too many, but the count is higher than that. This makes five.”

  “Within the last two weeks?” Max looked like he’d bitten into something sour.

  “Yeah. It’s been one every two days or so. Everyone’s fairly jumpy.”

  “Shit.” Max sighed, looking out his driver’s window and seeing hidden danger in the night. They had learned the hard way that kidnappings usually meant people with guns and the will to use them. In the following moment of quiet, rain lightly tapped on the roof of the Cherokee. Max swore again, and turned to Ukiah. “Well?”

  “We do it.”

  “Okay. I’ll deal with the family, kid. Gear up the best you can.”

  As a result of two layovers, some of their checked luggage had gone astray: specifically the bag with their body armor and some of their more sophisticated electronics. Luckily their guns and basic communications gear hadn’t.

  Ukiah slid up the window and opened his door to step out into the rain. “Fill me in, Ari.”

  “The missing boy is Kyle Yonan.” Ari took out his notepad and glanced at it. “He’s white, approximately four-one, sixty pounds, brown on brown.” Meaning the boy had brown hair and eyes. “Last seen wearing a red shirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes. He turned four in July.”

  So, they were looking for a child of limited abilities except for finding trouble.

  Ari tucked away his notepad. “The kid has a history of winding up in odd places. Locked himself in a car trunk once. Disappeared at Monroeville Mall and ended up in the mock-up of Santa’s workshop. Weird shit like that all the time. We’re hoping that it will be something like that again and not another grab and run.”

  “How long has he been missing?” Ukiah lifted the back hatch on the Cherokee.

  “About ten hours. There’s a small patch of yard in the back. Kyle was playing in it with an older brother this morning. The brother came into the house for a drink, and Kyle vanished. The family looked for three hours before they called us.”

  Us being the police.

  “No ransom demand?” Ukiah asked.

  “None of the missing kids had ransom demands.” Ari went dead serious. “We’re praying you can find this one.”

  And with four kids missing already, the police had the parents call Bennett Detective Agency to get the legendary Wolf Boy inv
olved.

  “How long has it been raining?” Ukiah found his rain gear—boots, pants, and coat—and pulled them on.

  Ari glanced upward, as if noticing the fine rain for the first time. “Maybe about two hours. Off and on. It’s the first time in weeks that it’s rained, wouldn’t you know. The family turned the house upside down, and we’ve combed the neighborhood. Not a sign of the kid.”

  “This rain is going to make it tough,” Ukiah told him.

  Ari shrugged with a rustle of rain gear. “They say you’re the best at this.”

  Ukiah knew they said a lot more than just that. He found the bag with the GPS equipment and pulled it out of the pile of luggage. It felt odd threading the tracer into his belt without first putting on his body armor.

  Max returned with a baby blanket as Ukiah pulled on his radio headset. “This is Kyle’s blankie.”

  Ukiah brushed his fingertips over the worn blue cotton, finding genetic traces of a dark-haired boy with dark eyes and a tendency toward hyperactivity, who would someday be tall and intelligent if he survived his adventure. Ukiah pressed the blanket to his face, closing his eyes, and breathing in the boy’s scent. No blood trace or sign of violence stained the cloth. He came up out of focusing on the blanket to find he missed most of what Max had said, but it was stored in his hearing memory, recorded despite his lack of attention to it.

  “This is going to be nuts, kid,” Max had said, checking on the tracer’s signal. “This boy sounds like he has less sense than God gave a rabbit. They’ve got two locks on his bedroom door just to keep him in at night.”

  “He’s not stupid,” Ukiah told Max. “He’s just got too much curiosity, too much energy, and no experience.”

  “That’s just as bad.”

  Ukiah considered what he knew of the area. They were on the edge of Wilkinsburg, where it climbed up into the hills that separated it from Penn Hills. Like much of Pittsburgh, the houses dotted the steep hills wherever one could find a foothold to build. Pockets of scrub woods occupied the parts deemed too sheer. At the foot of the hill lay the rest of Wilkinsburg, with plenty of buildings standing empty and a reputation of being a rough neighborhood, and then the river. Fascinating danger lay in every direction.

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  A flood lamp gleamed on the tiny, rain-bejeweled backyard, littered with toys. Barely ten feet by twenty feet, the fenced-in area of worn grass seemed a relatively safe and escape-proof area. Ukiah ignored the toys and grass to concentrate on the fence. As he expected, the rain-slick steel held traces of the boy’s climb to freedom. Beyond the fence, the land fell away into a nearly sheer drop, its steepness disguised by wild cherry trees and banks of dying goldenrod. Animals had pushed paths through the tall brush, and the boy had followed.

  The path came out on the parallel street, lower down the hillside. The cement of the sidewalk seemed washed clean by the rain. Ukiah crouched at the edge of the woods, sweeping hands over the wet stone, trying to find any clue. Max drove up in the Cherokee, turning off the headlights as he turned the corner so as not to blind Ukiah’s now highly light-sensitive eyes.

  Focused on the hunt, Ukiah was only dimly aware that Max had gotten out, and signaled Ari in his squad car to kill his lights. The policeman got out with the thud of a car door and the quiet squeak of rain gear rubbing against itself.

  “How does he do it?” Ari asked quietly. “I can’t even see.”

  “He was raised by wolves.” Max misled Ari. It was true Ukiah spent years running with the wolves, but it had nothing to do with his abilities.

  “I thought all that wolf boy stuff was bullshit.”

  “Not all,” Max said. “By the way, Ari, thanks for the baby stuff in June. It was a lifesaver.”

  “No problem,” Ari said. “You two really weaseled out of there fast; not that I blame you, the first of the media was already showing up. Hey, that reminds me though. There’s a new federal agent in town asking questions about the shoot-out.”

  “Federal agent? What branch?”

  Ari grunted and searched his pockets for a business card. “Grant Hutchinson. Homeland Security. He pulled me into questioning on Friday. He had photographs of you two.”

  “Us?” Max asked as Ukiah glanced up, startled out of his focus. Max flashed the business card so Ukiah could see it and then studied it himself. “What kind of photos?”

  “Professional photographer’s photos, really high-quality stuff. Most of the pictures were of you guys, but he had one of me. He wanted me to ID you two.”

  “Did he say why?” Max asked as Ukiah went back to tracking.

  Ari made a rude noise. “No. Not a clue. He kept me in interrogations for an hour, asking everything from my religion down to if my belly button was an innie or an outie.”

  “What did you tell him about us?” Max asked.

  “Your names,” Ari said. “That the kid is a tracking wonder and that you two were out in Oregon, trying to find Kraynak’s niece. I don’t know any more than that, other than, as far as I’ve ever heard or seen, you’re good people.”

  “Thanks,” Max said. “Friday, eh?”

  “Friday afternoon, just after I went on shift,” Ari said.

  As Max questioned Ari about the federal agent, Ukiah finally found the trace he had been searching for: the rich earth of the hillside stamped into the shape of a small shoe print. All but crawling, he followed the track down the street another hundred feet before it vanished. He crouched in the drumming rain, patiently sweeping the cement with his fingertips. The chill of the night vanished for him, as did the beat of the rain. The distant hiss of tires on wet pavement silenced. Even the light went as he focused in tight on the rough cement. He became aware of the sand versus gravel content. The faint feel of bird tracks left from a sparrow crossing the newly poured cement sometime in the far past.

  Nothing of the boy.

  He flicked through his other senses. Unless he found something here, the trail was gone. He could begin a spiral search pattern, hoping to stumble across a new start, but in the rain, every minute made the chance less likely.

  Fine-tuned, he realized he was drawing in air ever so faintly tainted by blood. He stilled completely, aimed at the scent. It pressed against his skin, invaded his nose. Locked onto the smell, he sniffed, nostrils flaring, casting about doglike. Slowly, he worked his way to a corrugated pipe set into the ground where a side alley joined the main road. Water ran in a tiny stream down the street and into the mouth of the pipe. No water, he noticed, poured out of the pipe on the other side of the alley.

  “Kyle? Kyle?” he called into the pipe. His voice echoed back at him.

  Under the sound of rain and rushing water and his own heartbeat, he thought he could hear the faint ragged breathing of something small.

  “You found him?” Max came to crouch beside him. Ari trailed behind.

  “I think he’s in this pipe.” Ukiah considered crawling into the drain. No, only a small child would fit. He examined the narrow darkness with his flashlight. “It’s T-shape with a drain in the center. If he’s in there, he’s down the center pipe somehow. There’s so much white noise with the rain that I can’t be sure. I’m smelling blood.”

  He sniffed again, drawing in the coppery smell. Blood, but not enough information to tell the source.

  Ari shifted restlessly behind them. “It could be a wounded raccoon or possum.”

  “You said he got into weird places,” Ukiah countered.

  Ari eyed the pipe as if it would bite him. “Yeah, but, shit, that’s a creepy little hole in the ground.”

  Max stood and swept his flashlight back up the hill to the boy’s yard. “His brother told me that they had been playing with a ball, throwing it back and forth. If the ball landed on this street, it would have funneled down into this pipe.”

  Lying in the water, Ukiah reached in as far as he could stretch, questing with his outstretched fingers. His fingertips found the ragged edge where the pipe turned down, w
ater pouring over the lip, washing away any sign of the boy.

  The rain started to come down harder, moving from a light patter to a quickening drum.

  Max swore. “If he’s down there, this is going to get ugly fast. This is part of Nine Mile Run.” Sometime in the past, several creeks had been routed completely underground in concrete culverts that converged to form Nine Mile Run; it was a deadly labyrinth they had dealt with before. “Damn, if the airline hadn’t lost our luggage, we could snake one of the minicams down the drain to be sure.”

  “I’ll call for a rescue team and look for a manhole,” Ari offered, seeming anxious to get away from the narrow pipe.

  The rill of water coming down the hill was already deepening. Ukiah flashed to another child in the storm drains, a maze of swirling dark waters and an unhappy end, when Max was forced to pull him out half-drowned. “Max, I don’t want to do that again—wander around lost while the kid drowns. We should see if we can find a map of the system.”

  “The rescue team can deal with the storm drain,” Max said. “All we need to do is convince them that he’s really down there. Are you sure?”

  “No,” Ukiah had to admit. How he could squeeze into the pipe and see if Kyle was actually stuck in the pipe? If he was younger, closer to Kyle’s age, he could fit.

  It occurred to him there was a way to be smaller.

  Ukiah dug his Swiss army knife from his pocket and made a deep cut across his wrist.

  Max swore in surprise and caught Ukiah’s shoulder. “What the hell? Ukiah? What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to make a mouse.” Ukiah caught the flow of hot blood in his palm. “And I’m going to use it as an extra set of eyes.”

  Max released him. “Okay. Just keep it out of sight. I’ll keep Ari distracted.”

  Ukiah clung to the memories of the boy as the rest of the day drained down into his hand. The blood stopped as the wound healed shut. He concentrated on the blood cupped in his hand, urging it to take form instead of seeping back into his body, merging with him again. It formed a quivering sack. Bones took form, a racing heart, and then finally the dark fur of a black mouse.