Warrior (Freelancer Book 2) (17 page)

Rick strolled out to the sidewalk and spent a while just watching the street—men coming home from work, kids in the yards, and women sitting on their front porches. Finally satisfied that nothing was out of place, he headed up the stairs and into his home.

"Are you listening?"

Rick grunted and placed the bar in the supports of the weight bench. He picked up a small towel from the floor and wiped his face. "Yes. I am listening. It's responding that's hard when I've got the weights going."

In the afternoon, Rick had stopped by Sears and picked up a set of free weights, an essential part of his pre-sleep routine. As he took a breather between reps, he thought about how much more intense his exercise routine had been before he had a roommate.

Then he looked over at Eve, sitting on the edge of the bed with a small table pulled close to hold the spread of papers and folders she was reading, occasionally highlighting a line with a thick yellow marker or making a tiny note in pencil. He thought of the comfort of her strong arms waking him out of the endless nightmares that ruled his nights and the sheer wonder of feeling that body almost buzzing with life as she slept in his arms. An interrupted routine was an exceedingly small price to pay.

The rest of the house appeared to agree: he hadn't heard anything about Eve finding her own home since they'd gotten back. He figured part of it was the hassle of having to live with Kristee and Sage without Eve to act as mediator.

"You were telling me about your boss. Tommy Finkle?"

"Franklin." Without looking, she tossed her pencil in his direction. "I knew you weren't paying attention."

Rick caught the pencil out of the air and gently lofted it back on the bed so it rolled slowly and bumped her side. "What I don't understand is exactly what he expects you to do."

"That's the worst part." Eve picked up the pencil and went back to reading. "We're the first paralegals that Marsden Angle has hired. The woman who directs the program said that it depends on the lawyer we get assigned to."

Rick lay back and began another set of slow presses. "And what does your guy, Franklin, want you to do?"

"I don't know. The first day, I was told to meet him in the library." Eve shook her head. "It was the strangest thing. I walked in there and looked for him. My first thought was 'who left a pile of dirty shirts in here?'"

"Dirty shirts?"

"Yeah. It was Tommy Franklin, with his feet up on the table, glasses up on his forehead, and slouched all the way down in his chair. I swear the man is a walking wrinkle." She laughed, "I'd bet he thought I was a complete idiot staring at him with my mouth open, except I don't think he paid the slightest attention to me until I walked up and introduced myself."

Rick smiled despite the pressure of the weights. "Anyone who doesn't notice you can't be all that smart."

Eve grinned back. "Thank you, sir."

She turned back to the pile of papers she was working on, "But all he said was 'Can you shepardize?' and, when I admitted I didn't even know what it was, he just tossed a case transcript to me, and told me to find out."

"Isn't that some kind of dry cleaning?" Rick said as he racked the bar and wiped his face again.

"That's Martinizing, you dope. No, it's going through these massive books called, oddly enough,
Shepard's Citations
and finding out if every case mentioned in the file has been overturned—which is bad—or cited—which is good."

Rick raised one edge of the bench, locked it down, and began to do extremely slow sit-ups. "So, what's your case?"

"I have no idea." With a laugh, Eve swept the papers off the table. "I'll figure it out tomorrow."

After a short pause, Eve walked around the table and began to file the papers neatly into their folders. "The biggest problem I have is Tommy's clients."

"Why?"

"Well, he's representing tobacco companies. I spent half the afternoon measuring ads for the sides of buses to make sure that the Surgeon General's warning was no bigger than it absolutely had to be." She put the papers in her briefcase and pushed the table against the wall. "But tobacco companies aren't the real problem; they're bad but they're not evil."

"The Shangri-Las." Rick interrupted.

"Very good. No, the problem is that he's the point guy for the coal companies. You remember the guys who want to strip mine my home and built monster power plants on it?"

"Didn't sound like a great way to preserve the place for future generations to me." Rick hit a hundred sit-ups, got off the bench and, putting his feet on the bed, began slow pushups. "But I thought that had all stopped when we made the run with the…uh, when we made the run to Lame Deer."

Eve began to undress.

Rick immediately stopped with his arms at full extension and watched.

She laughed. "Aren't you going to end up with sore arms doing that?"

"Worth it. Definitely worth it."

Eve continued, enjoying the attention. When she was nude, she did a slow turn like a model. "So you approve?"

Rick's arms were just beginning to tremble, but he kept his gaze on her and said, softly, "You are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"Well, I think I had better cover up before you get all stiffened up."

"Too late for that."

She laughed and disappeared into an enormous T-shirt with a Daytona Bike Week logo on the front.

Rick resumed his pushups.

When her head popped out, she was obviously thinking about work again. "No, the leases haven't been canceled. They could still be overturned." She sat on the bed and bounced her way up to the pillows, pulled up the blanket, and tucked her feet in. "And, of course, the leases are technically controlled by our friends at the Bureau of Indian Affairs."

"Friends?" Rick asked.

"I was being ironic." Eve settled back against the pillows with her hands behind her head. "The BIA has been controlling Indian lands and selling off the natural resources ever since the Indian Wars. We're supposed to be getting the money, but somehow there never seems to be much left."

"I wonder if we could prove that." Rick finished and stripped off his shorts and t-shirt as he headed for the shower.

Eve whistled appreciatively. Rick said over his shoulder, "Stop that. You know you are not going to be happy until I get this sweat off. Give me two minutes."

"I am not going anywhere, trooper," she promised.

However, when Rick had showered, he came back to find her sound asleep. He slid into bed and wrapped an arm around her, drifting off almost immediately.

About three hours later, he awoke, shouting warnings about snipers in the treetops. Eve pulled him close and hugged him fiercely until he quieted.

The kitchen was a whirl of housemates. Steve was headed to a secret location in one of the least discreet cars in the world: a bright-red 240Z convertible. Rick whistled approvingly when he spotted Steve sliding into the car outside the house, Steve yelling back, "One of the perks of selling out to The Man."

In contrast, Eps and Kristee were walking down to Connecticut Avenue to catch the bus. Kristee only fussed a little bit over Sage, who was going to spend the day with Scotty and was clearly delighted about it. She started pestering the laconic programmer before her mother was even out the door. "Can we try the Volcano today?"

"Only after we make sure Gidget is OK."

The little girl didn't pause for a second, flying down the basement stairs, and asking if she could load the DECTAPE. She was disappointed for a moment when Scotty told her she was headed for another day at the cardpunch but cheered up when he said he'd teach her some FORTRAN.

Scotty paused at the door to the basement for a moment and said to Rick, "The cool thing is she has no preconceived idea that she can't program FORTRAN so she just does it. It's an interesting experiment."

He might have said more, but a plaintive "Scott-eee" came from the basement. He hurried down the stairs but not before Rick could hear the extra locks snap into place.

Rick was left alone with a cup of coffee and a fresh pack of Winstons. As he raised the coffee mug, he could see ripples. His hands were shaking, a remnant of the night's warfare. He put the cup down, extended both hands in front, and concentrated, willing the nerves to calm. It took almost 30 minutes before he could pick up the now cold coffee without a tremor.

I need to get that bike today, he thought. I'm like a heroin addict quitting cold turkey.

The Washington Post was blessedly free of Watergate coverage—at least on the front page—but there was an article on Wounded Knee entitled "Indians vs. Indians."

Rick shook his head as he read the first paragraphs. Clearly, AIM had brought in the tribal elders, described as "…cultural remnants. Seven old men, worn and toothless, who still clung to the lost glory of the Sioux nation."

Eve had described the elders as men of tremendous wisdom and integrity, but the government agents who had met with them had dismissed them out of hand. Their preferred leaders were modernized Indians like Dick Wilson, the elected tribal chairman of Pine Ridge, ready to assimilate, willing to work with the coal companies, and a giant fan of Richard Nixon.

It was also clear that the reporter felt the same way.

"Catching up on the news, trooper'?" Eve blew into the kitchen in a fury of controlled energy: getting coffee, checking her briefcase, kissing Rick on top of his head, checking the briefcase again, and finally, sitting down across the wooden drum table with her cup of coffee and a contented sigh.

Rick watched her with fond approval.

She looked up from her first sip of coffee. "What are you grinning about?”

"It's not a grin," he said. "I think it would be better described as a 'smirk.' It's the outward expression of feeling incredibly lucky."

"Lucky?"

"Yeah, you are one of the smartest, toughest, and sexiest women in this town, and for some unfathomable reason you seem to enjoy hanging with me."

She looked at him for a long moment. "OK, I'm going to assume that was a compliment. You know, you could be a little more succinct—we're not in court."

"I love you."

"Umph." Eve swayed a bit as though she'd been hit. "Take it easy, trooper. I knew that one day, all my sledgehammer work would put a crack in that 6-inch steel armor around your heart, but I'm not prepared to deal with it today."

Eve reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "We’ve got time. I'm not going anywhere. Ever."

She pulled the front section of the Post out from under his hands and made a show of reading through the articles in a calm and businesslike manner. Rick would almost have bought the act if he couldn't see the pulse in her neck racing.

"So, Wounded Knee ended and nothing was settled." She sipped her coffee, "I'm shocked. Shocked."

Rick didn't take his eyes off her, but he let his mind wander. "Any word on the coal leases up in Lame Deer?"

"Not really." She turned the page with an efficient snap, "The vote in Council was to terminate the leases, but it's being slow-walked by the BIA bureaucrats. The coal companies are putting on all the pressure they can: offering jobs, schools, cash, hell, anything, to get people to change their minds. My uncle says their slogan is 'Moving Forward to Prosperity.'"

"Good line. Was that one of Tommy's?" "Of course."

Rick leaned back in the chair and lit a cigarette.

Eve stuck two fingers out from behind the paper, he placed the cigarette between them, lighting another for himself.

Blowing smoke rings, he mused, "I wonder if there's a way to convince people that it's not actually going to be 'Forward to Prosperity'? I mean, from what you've told me, it's another crappy deal in a long history of crappy deals."

"Right."

"I can see the attraction of keeping the land for future generations." There was a pause as Rick took another drag, "but it's always struck me that can be trumped by promises of enormous profits, spiffy new houses, and pickups made of pure gold. What if we could prove that the deals suck financially as well as environmentally?"

Eve began to fold the paper, her face closed in concentration. "Hard to do. The contracts are a maze of incentive clauses, set-asides, and interlocking shell companies. They were impossible for me to crack."

"For you? When did you see them?"

"When the boys left the BIA, they didn't go empty-handed." Eve stood up and began to gather her things. "We've always known that the BIA was screwing us. I mean everyone is making out like bandits except the people who actually own the land. So they smuggled dozens of boxes of documents out right under the FBI's nose."

She laughed. "One of the last groups went out in a convoy guarded by the FBI and Metro Police. The guys were howling with laughter because the cops were essentially guarding all the documents stuffed into the trunks of those rusty reservation beaters."

Rick said, "Then it should be easy. We can get the documents and work the numbers."

Eve shook her head, her face now serious. "The FBI has been going nuts, trying to get those papers back. When we tried to give some to one of Jack Anderson's reporters, they put his ass in jail."

She blew out a sigh. "The papers themselves are radioactive, the boys are moving them continuously, and they are damn hard to understand. I don't know how we'd do it quickly enough to make a difference in the final vote on the coal leases."

Both were silent as they considered the problem. A muffled giggle came from the basement and then Sage could be heard saying, "You forgot to put in the macro for the DECTAPE before you did JOBSTART, silly."

Rick and Eve looked at each other and smiled.