“She’s still awake?”
“Her mother made an exception.” Lee released Shannon, opened a door marked with characters that even in another language clearly read DO NOT ENTER, and started up a set of stairs.
“Who’s Alice?” Cooper asked.
“My goddaughter.” She smiled over her shoulder as they climbed. “She’s eight and a beautiful genius.”
“And why did he call you Azzi?”
“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?”
A cluster of shrieks echoed down the hall where Alice had led Shannon. Cooper helped himself to a fresh beer and followed the noise. He found Shannon in the family room, standing on top of a sectional sofa, counting down with her eyes closed. “Three, two….one…go!”
Seven children, Alice among them, all shifted from foot to foot, ready to dart. Shannon opened her eyes, glanced around the room, then made a languorous fake to the left before leaping off the couch to the right. The boy she lunged at tried to dodge, but she tapped him with one hand, spun, saw two children running toward each other, held a half a beat, then tagged them both as they collided. The touched kids stood still as statues, while the remaining four dodged around the edges of the room, using the furniture and their frozen friends as cover. Shannon said, “I’m gonna get you,” then turned and tapped a boy who had been sneaking behind her. He giggled and froze.
Cooper watched the game with a broad smile. Shannon stalked the final three children, easing left and right, corralling them. The woman was the indisputable master of freeze tag.
“You have kids?”
“Huh?” He turned, saw Lee had come in behind him. “Two. A boy and a girl, nine and four.” He thought but did not say their names. Took a long swallow of beer.
“Greatest things in the world, aren’t they?”
“Yes. Yes they are.”
“Even when you want to kill them.”
“Even then.”
Shannon tagged out the final three in rapid succession, getting Alice last, then wrapping her in one arm and tickling her with the other. When Shannon finally let the girl breathe again, Alice said, “Me next!” She moved to the center of the room. But instead of beginning a new round of tag, she said, “Chicago places.”
“Navy Pier,” said a pig-tailed girl.
“600 East Grand Avenue.”
“The Zoo!”
“2200 North Cannon Drive.”
The other children began to yell out. “Tasty City!”
“My mom’s house!”
“The airport!”
“2022 South Archer Avenue, 337 West 24th Place, O’Hare Airport is 10000 West O’Hare and Midway Airport is 5700 South Cicero.”
Cooper’s belly tightened as he realized what was happening. As the children kept shouting places, he turned to Lee. “Your daughter is gifted?”
The man nodded. “We started on Goodnight, Moon, but she prefers the phone book. She’ll get on my d-pad and read listings for hours. Not just Chicago, either. She knows New York, Miami, Detroit, Los Angeles. Anytime we go on a trip she reads the phone book first.”
Lee’s pride radiated in every word and every muscle of his face. Smitten with his daughter, and delighted at her abilities. It stood in such sharp contrast to the typical parental reaction, to Cooper’s own reaction. This wasn’t a man worried about what the world would think, afraid that she might end up tested or labeled or living in an academy. This was pure joy in the wonder that was his daughter.
“Now you, Zhi.” Shannon pointed to the boy who had tried to sneak up on her.
“Okay.” He stood ready, a pupil confident before a teacher.
“Use the addresses. Add them.”
“34,967.”
“Multiply them.”
“1.209 times 10 to the 36th.”
“Add them with north and west positive and east and south negative.”
“Minus 243.”
Alice joined in. “The Zoo times Tasty City minus Andrea’s house.”
“4,448,063.”
“Navy Pier divided by the school.”
“2.42914979757085…”
The kids were having a ball, and Zhi stood in the center of it, giving every answer without hesitation. Cooper stared, realization dawning. “They’re all brilliants?”