She began to sing along, loudly and inexactly, to “I Won’t Back Down.” I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the room. A guy at the bar, a tall dude with long pale hair and narrow, angry eyes, had been giving Rachel covert glances for the last hour, and now he was just staring.
Rachel looked where I was looking. She leaned toward me and yelled, “That’s just Carlos!”
“Carlos?”
“Old friend of mine! We had a thing for a while! He gets protective!”
Great, I thought. Carlos. Then I thought: What if the guy staring at us hadn’t been Carlos? What if it had been one of the insurance adjustors from the drawings? It was possible I was endangering her simply by being with her. “Okay, Rachel. Let’s leave Carlos to his business and go home.”
She gave me a contemptuous, drunken smile. “Are you afraid of him?”
“Yeah. I’m terrified.” I took out my wallet and put money on the table. “You coming?”
She pouted but stood up, gripping the back of her chair to steady herself. She let me take her arm.
We passed Carlos on our way to the door. I avoided eye contact, but Rachel gave him a look that was half leer, half sneer. Carlos responded by standing up and blocking my way. He put his face in my face but he shouted to Rachel over the music hammering from the stage: “YOU ALL RIGHT THERE, RACHE?”
Rachel nodded. When it became obvious he hadn’t seen the nod, she said, “YEAH! I’M FINE! LEAVE HIM ALONE, CARLOS!”
“SURE ABOUT THAT?”
He was a messy talker. Some of his spittle missed me, some didn’t.
“YES! DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE!”
Carlos winced. Then he mouthed something I couldn’t hear. He stepped out of our way, but his nail-gun stare followed us all the way to the door.
In the car, windows open, cool night air flowing in, Rachel grew moody and quiet. She didn’t say anything until we reached the block where she lived, when she asked in a small voice, “I fucked up there, didn’t I?”
“Not sure what you mean by that.”
“Our big evening together. Rachel and Adam. What fun, huh?”
“Maybe just not my idea of a good time.”
“I should have known. Taus are potheads, not drinkers. Taus are a little bit prissy, too. So they say on the Internet. I mean—oh, fuck! Now it sounds like I’m calling you names. I’m sorry!” She leaked a tear. “I just wanted us to have fun.”
I helped her to the door of the low-rise building, helped her get the key into the lock. Helped her down the stairs, though she pulled away and insisted on unlocking the door of the basement apartment herself. The night had gotten chilly, but the air inside was overheated and stale. As soon as I had closed the door she leaned into me, pressed herself against my body, grabbed my hips. The smell of Bacardi and sour sweat swarmed off of her.
“Bet I know what you want,” she said.
Bet you don’t, I thought.
I excused myself for the purpose of using the bathroom. The parade line of brown plastic pill bottles caught my attention again. This time I was less scrupulous about inspecting them. Lithium, Depakine, Risperdol, Seroquel. Some of the prescriptions were old and expired, some were fresh.
She was slumped on the sofa when I came out. I said, “Rachel…”
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But yeah, I think that’s best.”
“Because I fucked up.”
“No. Listen—”
“Just go.”
“Rachel—”
“Do I embarrass you? Well, you embarrass me! Smug candy-ass Tau boy. Get out! I’m tired of you anyway. You know what’s better than your dick? My finger! My little finger! GO!”
Amanda was waiting in my hotel room when I got back (we shared keys). She said she wanted to see the sketches I had made. I gave them to her. She examined them approvingly. Then she asked me what happened with Rachel. And I tried to explain.
“She was showing you her world,” Amanda said. “Her apartment, her daughter, the ratty bar where she spends her weekends. Even the pill bottles she leaves out where people can see them. She probably wanted to find out whether all that would offend you or whether it would turn you on.”
“It didn’t offend me. I was just worried the wrong people would see us … Why would it turn me on?”
“Tough single mom in a working-class bar where she probably screws half the clientele? Catnip for a natural bottom like you.”
“What?”
“Look at you, you’re so tense you’re practically brittle.” She reached into her purse and fished out her pipe and the tiny, ornate wooden box in which she kept her weed. “We’ll share a little of this, then you can take your clothes off and I can fuck you silly.”
The smoke went directly to my head. I felt an unsatisfied need to explain, but the words were elusive. “It was,” I said, “I mean, I shouldn’t have let her think—”
“Oh, stop. You got the sketches, right?”
“Sure, but—”
“That’s what’s important. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”
Chapter 9
My research team hit a snag that week. The cranial sensors used in Affinity testing were a proprietary design, and their specifications had not been among the data Meir Klein had provided. We determined that the closest equivalent was a neural scanning sensor manufactured by a company in Guangzhou called AllMedTest. These were dime-sized devices, incredibly sophisticated, and an array of six or seven would be enough to generate the kind of imaging the test required. But they were expensive, and buying them in quantity would be a major investment.
When I approached Damian about it, he said not to worry: “We have T-Bourse money to invest, and I can’t think of a better use for it.”
“Okay, but the sensors are fairly delicate, which we have to factor into the design. And my tech guys have to know exactly how much processing power they need to build into a portable device. They’re complaining that the flow of information from the theoretical side has slowed way down.”
“They’re right,” Damian said. “The thing is, we’ve come across some anomalies in Klein’s data.”
“Anomalies?”
“Some unsettling implications.”
“Such as?”
He looked unhappy. “We’ll talk about it on the weekend. You, me, Amanda, the two team leaders, plus a security detail. I rented us a place on Pender Island. We’ll be out of harm’s way and we’ll have a couple of days to think it through. Okay?”
It sounded like trouble, and I wanted to know more. But Damian wasn’t ready to talk.
The ferry from Tsawwassen to Pender Island chugged through a rainstorm that raised whitecaps on Georgia Strait and turned what should have been a postcard view into a gray obscurity. Damian was too moody to make conversation, and Amanda was using the downtime to read through a report from her team leader. I crossed the promenade deck of the ferry and found an empty seat by a rain-slicked window, took out my phone, and returned a call that had come in that morning. The call was from my brother’s home, but it was Jenny Symanski who picked up.
I had talked to Jenny only sporadically since her marriage to Aaron six years ago, not because of any lingering awkwardness between us but because my brother had become the wall over which any communication had to pass. When I spoke to Jenny it was usually at Christmas or Easter, and it was Aaron who handed her the phone and Aaron who took it back when the conversation was finished. If Jenny carried a phone of her own, neither she nor Aaron had given me the number. “Jenny,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”