“My last name. My dad’s Lebanese.”
Shannon Azzi. From Chicago. It sounded so much less dramatic than the Girl Who Walks Through Walls. One was a terrorist operative, a lethal agent of the most dangerous man in America. The other was, well, a woman. Smart, funny, and gifted in both senses of the word. And damned attractive. You may as well admit that, Agent Cooper. “Funny to think of you having a dad,” he said.
“Enough with that.”
Cooper smiled.
The sounds changed as they reached the top, and the smells. Sharp spices, garlic, and fish sauce. A burst of laughter came from down the hall, and a child’s happy shriek.
“You having a party?”
“A play date,” Lee said. “Friends with kids.”
Like most parties, everyone had clustered in the kitchen. A dozen or so men and women, all Chinese, were jammed together around a counter packed with bowls of food. A pot simmered on the stove, a sweet, sour smell rising on wisps of steam. Everyone glanced over as they entered, their smiles slipping only slightly when they saw Cooper, no hostility in it, just surprise.
“You all know Shannon,” Lee said. “This is her friend Nick Cooper.”
“Hello all.” He looked around the room, spotted a slender woman perched on a stool, stylishly dressed, delicately chic in that distinctly Asian-girl way. He read the comfort in her body, said, “You must be Lisa.”
She slid off the stool, held out her hand. “Welcome.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you hungry?”
He wasn’t but said, “Starving.”
“Good. We have way too much food.”
“I wonder how that happened,” Lee said dryly, plucking beer bottles from the fridge. He twisted the caps off, passed them to Shannon and Cooper, and kept one for himself.
Lisa ignored her husband, slid her arm into Cooper’s. “Let me introduce you.”
“Aunt Shannon!” A blur of dark hair and pale skin streaked past him, collided with Shannon, who laughed and wrapped her arms around the girl. The two began firing questions at one another, neither waiting for the answers.
Lisa piled rice on a plate and handed it to him, then began to point out the dishes, saying their names, explaining each as if he’d never eaten in a restaurant. Cooper said how good everything looked and scooped some of every dish, balancing his beer against the plate. Shannon brought the girl over, said, “Alice, this is my friend Nick.”
“Hi.”
“Hi. Can you do me a favor, Alice? Can you call me Cooper?”
“Okay.” The girl took Shannon’s hand and dragged her away. “Come on, come play with us.”
Cooper ate and drank and moved around the room. Most everyone spoke in Chinese until he joined, then shifted seamlessly to English. He spent half an hour making bland party conversation. Everyone was very nice, but he felt the same discomfort he always had at parties. Small talk wasn’t his thing, and he didn’t have the knack for storytelling. There was a skill to organizing your life into neatly bundled anecdotes, and he lacked it.
Besides, what are you going to say? “So this one time, I was tracking an abnorm who had played a loophole in Bank of America credit cards and racked up half a million in microtransactions before killing the bureaucrat who came to his door and fleeing into the backwoods of Montana on a snowmobile?”