The Baby Merchant Read online

  A blue band runs across the bottom of the screen with block letters flashing again and again, on a perpetual loop:

  CONSCIENCE CORRUPTED DETAILS AT SEVEN.

  The knocking begins. Jake turns to her and with a stupendously mixed expression of love and guilt and resentment, flicks the rest into oblivion. “I only did it because I love you,” he says and, moving faster than he has since they were eighteen, he picks up the baby and trots to the front door. “Coming. I’m coming,” he shouts. “With the baby. Don’t shoot. I’m giving myself up.”

  A weaker woman would have thrown herself at him, begging him to give her baby back. This is right, she thinks, dying. And lets him go.

  Although the fates are not famous for being open-handed, Maury will be all right. She’ll survive Jake’s trial and of course she’ll promise to wait for him and settle in to do exactly that, although there is some question as to whether when he comes out, anything will be the same. Still, rough-hewn as he is, self-centered and tough-minded, he loved her enough to convince the law that she had nothing to do with the illegal aspects of the transaction, and to make it stick. Remember, they’ve been together since they were kids. She loved him then and she loves him well enough now to wait, and to pick up whatever pieces are left of his ego after he gets out of prison. There was the possibility that she’d be charged as an accessory but the last thing the firm did before they let her go was see to it that all charges against Maury Bayless, who was in fact an accessory, were dropped.

  There were no charges but there will always be gossip. Maury will never work in the private sector again. At least she wasn’t disbarred. Instead of working with rich, intelligent clients, she’ll spend the rest of her working life in the State Attorney’s office, chasing deadbeat dads for unpaid child support.

  There is no apology she can make to Sasha Egan. She won’t even try, but for the rest of her life, in odd hours Maury will scour the Web, looking for images of Sasha and her little son.

  She will, in time, be engaged in a custody matter— murder-suicide, no surviving adults— and become legal guardian of the orphaned child because she’ll fight all the way to the State Supreme Court to keep her from becoming a ward of the state. After seven years during which no other claimants come forward, the court will allow her to adopt.

  37.

  Tom Starbird spent his life trying to do the right thing and until today, he’s never known exactly what that is. He still doesn’t know, but this, at least, feels right. Everything he had to do today has been accomplished. Zorn’s ruined. Sasha will get her baby back. The girl won’t thank him, but that isn’t the issue. It’s that he’s done it. Try not to think about Maury Bayless with her sweet face and that sad mouth trembling, the glow when he settled the baby in her arms. Think about tough, fiery Sasha Egan, getting back what she fought so hard to keep. At least he has done one thing right.

  Keep going on this and try to forget her accusation, the cold, hard blade of hate.

  Try to be cool, try to understand, try to be what you must become, Tom Starbird, even though you have no idea what that is. Maybe this is all he is and all he’ll ever be, the sum total of his efforts.

  Maybe this is who he’s been all his life, the person he was trying so hard to find, or to get back to and get to the heart of, his deepest needs distilled and driving him forward, in pursuit of something he can’t see and may never understand.

  It isn’t the act that matters, he tells himself, it’s the compulsion. I want, he thinks, a fact that he always refused to recognize. It hurts. This is the only sign he has that there really is something out there, the concept or the entity that he’s been trying so hard all his life to find and has so badly failed to reach. Whatever it is, he’ll have plenty of time to think about it wherever they put him, unless he gets bushwhacked and murdered on his way to Death Row. Would that be the hand of justice? Fitting retribution? He doesn’t know.

  In a funny way, the failure to comprehend is his answer. Unless the question is. That there is a question he can’t begin to ask. It exists, whoever or whatever It is, and the proof? The merciless, inexorable want.

  It’s time to turn it all off. Computer, television. Everything.

  He sits and waits for them to come.

  Titles by Kit Reed from Tom Doherty Associates

  @expectations

  Thinner Than Thou

  Dogs of Truth

  The Baby Merchant

  “A thriller about the horrors of pregnancy that can stand beside Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.”

  —Thomas M. Disch

  “Now I know why we emerged from the caves into the light, discovered the wheel, and lit the first fires: to become a species that would produce Kit Reed; so that Ms. Reed would write The Baby Merchant. What a long, wearying, but worthwhile trip it has been.”

  —Harlan Ellison

  “A smart, twisty thriller in a future far too easy to imagine.”

  —Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

  “A heartfelt, heart-stopping novel ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, The Baby Merchant explodes our national obsessions with celebrity, children, and cold hard cash.”

  —Elizabeth Hand, author of Mortal Love

  “Kit Reed’s work freaks me out. The Baby Merchant is whip-smart and thoughtful, nervy and nervewracking.”

  —Daniel Handler

  “Reed writes a fast-paced thriller with a consummate sense of style.”

  —Booklist

  “Reed presents the full range of joys, sorrows, inconveniences, and pleasures attendant upon bringing a new life into the world. In Starbird, she fashions a unique antagonist, a damaged man who has compartmentalized himself away from most human emotions and who is surprised when his walls are breached. By the time the novel’s climax arrives, Reed has orchestrated the central conflict for maximum impact, and the rightness of its ending distinguishes The Baby Merchant as one of the most satisfying thrillers—science fiction or otherwise—of the season.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The most startling part of this psychological thriller about the black market of babies is how easy it is to see it all really happening. The Baby Merchant is first and last a smart, sometimes startling thriller, graced with an interesting bad guy and with Sasha, whose metamorphosis from self-absorbed student to panicky single mom to avenging mother tiger powers the story.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “A very powerful novel, and just too damn plausible.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Sometimes when you’re all caught up in the process that we know as life, the only way out is to go far out. If you like reading science fiction that may soon be more science than fiction, then The Baby Merchant by Kit Reed should be next to you on the beach blanket this summer. A page-turner [that] will have you reading well into the night.”

  —Single Mothers by Choice Newsletter

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE BABY MERCHANT

  Copyright © 2006 by Kit Reed

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  eISBN 9781466827257

  First eBook Edition : August 2012

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reed, Kit.

  The baby merchant / Kit Reed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1557-1

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1557-2

  1. Pregnant women—Fiction. 2. Unmarried mothers—Fiction. 3. Adoption—Corrupt practice—Fiction. 4. Ad
optive parents—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.E367 B33 2006

  813’.54—dc22

  2006040385