She watched the screen with her head turned slightly to her right, keeping Rockport Man in sight just enough to know if he suddenly rose from his chair.
Still facing her, he had not yet turned on his computer.
Bertold Shenneck, using a pack of forty white mice with nano-machine brain implants, provided a vivid visualization of how a herd of larger animals might one day be managed more efficiently. Turned loose in a room, the mice raced helter-skelter. When a technician at a computer keyboard transmitted a command to the implants, the mice froze all in the same instant. As other commands were given, the forty rodents moved as one in the same direction, wall to wall and back again; formed into single file and circumnavigated the test room; came together into four groups of ten each and went to the corners and waited for whatever was required of them next.
The video ended a minute after the mice. She was grateful for that. She had seen enough to be iced to the bone, a chill so deep it couldn’t be soothed by warm air, hot coffee, or anything but time.
When Jane logged off, Rockport Man said, “Friends call me Sonny. What’s your name?”
“Melanie,” she lied.
“You sure have a look, Melanie. Edgy but stylin’.”
She had all but forgotten the purple wig and eye shadow and West Hollywood clothes.
“I like your look. You in your second year or first?” he asked.
Getting up from her computer, she said, “First.”
He rose to his feet as well.
As the guy reached under his jacket with his right hand, Jane reached under her open biker’s jacket to the Heckler & Koch.
Instead of a gun, he produced a long ID wallet of the kind that might have contained a badge. From it, he took a business card. “My people and I were meeting with the director of library services about using the library as a location. Film location.” He held out the card.
Her clutched stomach relaxed. Acid eased back down her throat but left a bitter taste. She withdrew her hand from her jacket and picked up her purse.
When she showed no interest in the card, he approached, holding it out to her.
“I’m not into movies,” she said.
“When opportunity knocks,” he said, “it doesn’t cost anything to listen.” He had a killer smile—or thought he did. “Anyway, it doesn’t have to be about business.”
“I’m married.”
As she turned away, he said, “Me, too. Second wife. Life is complicated, huh?”
She faced him again. His bleached teeth looked radioactive. “Yeah,” she said. “Complicated. Damn complicated.”
“Take the card. Look at the name. You’ll know it. What’ve you got to lose? Make a new friend. Nothing more. A quiet dinner.”
That damn bitter acid taste.
Purse slung over her left shoulder, she reached under her jacket with her right hand and drew the pistol and held it at arm’s length, a foot from his face, as steady as if she were a statue carved in stone.
His chambray shirt had a gray warp and a green weft, and both colors seemed to flush his face under the machine-smooth tan. He was either unable to find words or unable to speak.
She couldn’t believe what she was doing. She couldn’t stop herself from doing it.
“For dinner,” she said, “let’s say we put an apple in your mouth, bury you in a pit of hot coals, and have a luau later.”
He needed to make an effort to speak. “I…I have two children.”
“Glad for you, sorry for them. Back up and sit down.”
He backed into the chair at the computer that he had not used.
“You sit there five minutes, Sonny. Five full minutes. You come after me, I’ll spare those two kids the ongoing misery of a rotten father. Are we clear?”
“Yes.”
She holstered the pistol. She turned her back on him. It was a test, and he passed it, remaining in the chair.
At the door, as she went out of the room, she turned off the lights. Darkness was conducive to contemplation.
20
* * *
SHE DROVE FROM suburb to suburb, the lowering sun orange behind her, the shadow-filled world tilting all its distorted silhouettes eastward.
More than once, when she stopped at a red traffic light, she adjusted the rearview mirror to look into the reflection of her eyes. She didn’t see crazy yet, but she wondered if it was coming.
She had long thought of herself as a rock. But rock, too, could fracture. Under enough pressure, even granite crumbled, decomposed.
Pulling her gun on that asshole Sonny had been stupid. He might have reacted recklessly. Someone might have walked into the room as she was drawing down on him.
She told herself that the problem arose from too little sleep. She needed a long night of rest. If there were bad dreams that woke her, well, she would have to roll over and give herself to them for whatever rest nightmares allowed.
She couldn’t bear the thought of eating in a restaurant, of ordering from a waiter, of smiling at the busboy, of listening to the table talk of other customers.
Some days she grew sick of people, maybe because she had to interact with too many of the wrong kind. She recalled the mother and the asthmatic boy on the bus bench, a friendly salesclerk in West Hollywood, but they weren’t enough to bring balance to the day.
She cruised in search of takeout for dinner and found a deli that wasn’t a plastic-and-plain-bread franchise. A reuben sandwich that weighed nearly a pound. A dill pickle, huge and fragrant. A quarter pound of champagne cheese for dessert and two bottles of Diet Coke filled the bag.
At the motel, after she filled the ice bucket in the vending-machine alcove, she locked her door and closed the draperies.
She stripped off the leather jacket. Removed the purple wig and brushed out her hair. Washed off the eye shadow and purple lipstick.
She looked tired. She did not look defeated.
There was a clock-radio on one nightstand. She couldn’t locate a classical-music station and settled for one playing oldies. Taylor Dayne’s “Love Will Lead You Back.”
A small round table allowed dining for two. She sat across from the empty chair, put her pistol on the table, unpacked the deli bag.
In a motel glass, she mixed Coca-Cola and vodka over ice. The sandwich was delicious.
The deejay promised three hits by the Eagles, no commercial interruptions. The first was “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”
Jane was overcome by a yearning as sharp as a razor’s edge. At first she thought her longing was for Nick. But though she missed him every day, she was too practical to pine so intensely for what could never be. And though she longed for Travis, this wasn’t about her boy, either. She yearned for home, a place of the heart where she belonged, which was almost as useless as wishing Nick’s death could be undone, for she had no home anymore and no prospect of one.
21
* * *
SHE LEFT A WAKE-UP CALL for 6:30 and then sat in an armchair in the dark, the only light a bone-white blade that stabbed out of the bathroom through the gap between door and jamb. Drinking vodka-and-Coke, listening to the radio, she thought about Bertold Shenneck up there in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. On the edge of Silicon Valley if not in it. The kingdom of tech miracles. She expected she would dream of regimented mice, and most likely worse.
A busy day ahead. For starters, meeting Jimmy Radburn in Palisades Park and getting out of there alive with the information he brought her.
Not yet drunk, she dared not drink any more. She undressed, went to the queen-size bed, and tucked the pistol under the pillow that would have been Nick’s.