CHAPTER EIGHT

I followed the security guard out Quentin’s door, through the hallway and down the miles of stairway. We accomplished this entire trip in silence. As we reached the ground floor, I headed automatically toward the foyer, but Cortez (I would never be able to call him Bram) turned in the opposite direction. “This way,” he said, and led me down a wide hallway toward the back of the mansion.

I tried not to stare too obviously, though I had not been to this part of the house before and I knew Marika would want details. We walked past what had to be the formal dining room, huge and elegant and decorated in cream and gold. The chandelier itself was as big as Quentin in his wheelchair and at least as fragile, decorated with coins of cut glass that glistened even in the low light of a shuttered room. Most of the other doors we passed were closed. Eventually we turned down a broad, well-lit stairway, and exited onto an asphalt-covered area that was about as big as a city block. It was ringed by six separate garages housing what I guessed was a fleet of powerful and very expensive automobiles. A few sports models—which might have been owned by the staff or been part of Duncan Phillips’ less valuable collection—were parked in out-of-the-way places between the garages.

I’ve never understood the American male’s fascination with cars. As far as I was concerned, Henry Ford had sat down and fashioned the Model T simply as a way to transport humans from one point on the map to another, and the invention had caught on because it was a fantastic improvement over the horse and buggy. Successive improvements to transportation systems—light rail, airplanes, and teleport—had superseded automobiles, at least in my opinion. I just couldn’t understand why anyone would want to maintain, insure, or drive a vehicle.

Intellectually I knew there must be women who were fascinated by cars, but the only people I knew who absolutely loved them were men. Jason and Domenic could talk cars all day, describing make, model, manufacturer, specs, speed, fuel requirements, comparative advantages to those fuel requirements, fatality rate—you name it. They attended auto shows for the new models and checked out museums of the antiques.

Jason had never owned one, never having had the requisite money for the purchase or the maintenance, but for a while Domenic had kept a beat-up champagne-colored old Akisa. Whenever we had gone anywhere within the greater metropolitan Chicago area, he had insisted on driving us there, which meant we all had to teleport to his apartment, wait while he fetched it from some off-site garage, fight over which lucky person got the front seat and which two unfortunates got crowded into the back, and then take a long, slow, tortuous drive through a city of three million people. Even though only a fraction of those residents also owned cars, that was enough to clog the roads with traffic any time night or day. And God forbid there would ever be anything like convenient parking near our destinations, so the whole exercise had to be played out in reverse. Finally, Marika and I refused to participate in the drives; we just met Jason and Domenic at whatever bar or restaurant we had chosen for the night.

Once I asked Domenic, “Why do you want a car, anyway?”

He said, “Why do guys want anything? To impress girls.”

Marika snorted. “I can’t speak for all females, but I have to think that a high percentage of the women on this earth don’t give a rat’s ass about riding in some tumbledown contraption that you want to describe in great mechanical detail as you try to make it to a wedding or some event that really matters to her, only no way will you be on time because you’re stuck in some mile-long traffic jam on Lake Shore Drive and the car’s about to overheat anyway. You want to impress a girl? You take her to a nice restaurant and buy some expensive wine. But leave the auto behind.”

I think it was about a month later that Domenic sold the car.

I had to admit, though, Bram Cortez’s vintage Mustang was a lot more impressive than Domenic’s lousy Akisa. For one thing, it had probably cost five times as much. For another, the silver-gray machine was a sleek but whimsical little number with curvy lines here and pointy accents there. I was sure Bram Cortez would have been able to rattle off the correct terminology—fins, fenders, spoilers—but I didn’t really want to hear it.

“Looks nice,” I said politely.

“You ever ride in one of these?” he asked, palming the outer keypad to unlock the doors.

“A Mustang? Or a car?”

He grinned. “Mustang,” he said. “I assume you’ve been in a car.”

“Not often.”

“Climb in.”

I slid onto the satiny gray leather seat and strapped myself in. A decade or so ago, as car safety became a mania with manufacturers, 360-degree airbags had become standard features on most models. Upon impact (so I was assured by Jason and Domenic), the passengers of a car would be instantly surrounded by a protective cocoon. However, the receptacles for these airbags often took up so much interior space that there wasn’t much room to put your feet, rest your elbow, or raise your head. At least, that had been the case in Domenic’s Akisa. There was so much space in this front seat that I wondered if Bram Cortez had had the safety devices removed.

“How long have you had this car?” I asked.

“About five years,” he said, starting the engine. It purred to life and we were in motion while I was still waiting for the jolt and shudder I had come to expect from the Akisa. “I wanted one twenty years ago, but I was in the army then, and cars weren’t part of our travel allowance.”

I leaned back against the seat. Well, hell, maybe Domenic was right. A good car just might impress a girl. “You were in the army? That seems to jibe.”

“With my personality, you mean?”

“What I’ve seen of it. How long were you in the service?”

“Ten years. That’s back when we were seeing some action along the Chinese border. Lot of skirmishing, but nothing ever conclusive because—” He shrugged. “War in the 21st century is just too dangerous. You can’t pull out your ultimate weapons or you’ll end the world. So it’s all drones and IEDs and one city bombed to hell, but you can’t ever just annihilate the enemy or you’ll annihilate yourself, too.”

While he spoke, we traveled slowly down a long, cloistered drive protected by marching ranks of bareheaded trees. As we passed a black wrought-iron gate, Cortez waved to the guard, then pulled out onto a wide, empty road. I realized we had to be even farther out in the northwestern suburbs than I had thought.

“But all those raids and roadside bombs cause a lot of deaths,” he continued. “After a while, it just seemed stupid.”

“So what did you do after you left the army?”

“Became a cop.”

“That also fits.”

He kept his eyes on the road, but a faint smile touched his lips. “Are you saying I’m predictable?”

“Oh no. I don’t know you well enough to predict a thing. But, you know, soldier—cop—security guy. Kind of a common theme. Where were you working? Chicago?”

“Not at first. I was in Boston, in Denver, then L.A. Then I came here.”

I looked over at him. “The Hot Zones.”

He nodded, still watching the road. A few cars had started passing us, and someone had come up behind us at a pretty rapid speed, whipping by before I’d even been aware the car was approaching. “Yeah. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Sort of like war in its way. A lot of battle strategizing. ‘This is what this gang might do, here’s how we can block that.’ Life-and-death stuff.”

He was silent a moment. “Lot of boys die young in the zones,” he finally went on. “They’re the ones starting the wars, they’re the ones running the gangs. Juntas, that’s what we called them when I was on the force. Used to be a word they used for paramilitary groups in Central America who ran drugs and attempted coups. Now that’s the word we’re using to describe kids who’re dead before they’re twenty. I saw more people die on the South Side than I saw die the whole time I was in the army.”

Did you ever kill anybody? I wanted to ask, but I wasn’t comfortable making the inquiry. For him, at least as far as I could tell, this conversation was a rare run at intimacy, and I didn’t want to jinx it by asking stupid questions. “Is it really as bad as they say?” I asked instead.

“Worse. People living in—squalor’s not a good enough word for it. Tearing down old brick buildings to build these hodge-podge shacks to live in. In some places, the city water and sewer lines still work, and in some places they don’t. No one who lives there knows how to fix the broken pipes and no one from the city will come in. So there’s whole neighborhoods where people live, but they have to cart their water in from somewhere else. The weird thing is, they’ve got all sorts of power—batteries and generators and old solar reflectors—so you’ll be in some godless dump of a building that smells like blood and urine, and some kid’ll be sitting on the floor of this bombed-out building, playing games on the latest-model laptop. I saw that more times than I could tell you.”

I spread my hands. “You have to wonder—how does anyone survive? Where do they get food? How do they eat? You’d think the Hot Zones would eventually disappear because everyone would be dead.”

“Plenty of people in the Hot Zones hold jobs. They earn enough to buy food, but not enough to move out. And there are a lot of charities that set up food banks on the rim of the zones.”

“I used to work in one.”

For the first time since we’d gotten in the car, he looked over at me. “You did?”

“When I was in college, I belonged to a service sorority. Some of the girls volunteered at health clinics, some tutored kids and adults. I joined the food kitchens. Worked there once a month for three years.” I felt a wave of the old sadness wash over me. “I knew it was important work, but I could never tell how much good I was doing. There just seemed to be so much need and not enough resources to fill it.”

He nodded. “I used to ask myself, how can we fix this problem? I could never figure out the answer. There were days I just wanted to go into the South Side and torch the whole place, burn it right to the ground, and whoever survived, survived. Other days I wanted to go door to door, handing out bread and hundred-dollar bills. I don’t think either course of action would have changed a thing.”

“So how long were you a cop?”

“Eight years.”

“What made you quit?”

“Almost getting killed. Me and the three guys I was with got ambushed. Two of them died. Two of us got out alive.”

I waited a beat to see if he would offer any more details. “The strange thing,” he said after a moment, “was that it had happened before. I’d seen other guys go down, and I’d be shaken up—we all would be—but I’d go back the next day anyway. I was convinced, for a while at least, that the job I was doing was worth the risk. We were losing men, but we were saving lives. I was in a war, and even if I wasn’t winning, I was making a stand. That’s what I used to think, anyway.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I don’t know. The pointlessness of it, maybe. We might be able to wipe out the Hot Zones—somehow, some way—but not by patrolling the streets and taking out one felon at a time. Nothing I did, walking those streets with my gun in my hand, was going to change the equation. If there was no reason for me to risk my life, I wanted to stop risking my life. So I got out.”

“And then what? You came to work for Duncan Phillips?”

“Not right away. I took some high-risk security jobs, did some political work, got some training to catch up on my technology. Didn’t start working for Phillips until three years ago.”

He signaled and took a ramp from the street to an elevated highway. Instantly, we were engulfed by cars, all moving extremely rapidly and with no apparent respect for the laws of physics that said no two entities can occupy the same space. If someone wanted to be in our lane, they just came right over, heedless of our existence and our speed. Cortez grew quiet as he negotiated a few lanes to get to some more advantageous alleyway of death. Why one such lane would be preferable to another was a mystery to me, but I trusted that he knew what he was doing.

I concentrated on doing my math. Say he had joined the army when he was twenty-one. Ten years there, eight on the police force, a couple years to knock around, three years with Duncan Phillips . . . “So you’re about forty-four?” I asked aloud. Not really meaning to.

He looked amused. “Forty-five this summer.”

I could feel myself blushing. “I just—well, I couldn’t tell by looking. Not that it matters.”

“So when do I get to start asking you questions?” he said.

I laughed. “What could there possibly be for you to ask? You’ve already got a complete dossier on me.”

“I can think of a few things I’d like to know.”

“Let’s finish with you first. So. Duncan Phillips. How’d you get this gig? Do you like it? What’s he like, anyway? I still haven’t met him.”

“He’s a bastard,” Cortez said calmly. “I can’t stand him.”

I absorbed that for a moment in total silence.

“When I first started working for him, I didn’t care,” he went on. “Hell, I’ve set up security for presidential candidates that I wouldn’t vote for to run a carnival, let alone the country. I don’t have to like a guy to try to keep him alive, right? And the money was good. And the job was a whole lot easier than the one I’d just left. And I thought I’d take a little time to figure out what else I might want to do with my life. So, no problem that I didn’t like him. He wasn’t paying me to like him.”

“What changed?”

He gave an infinitesimal shrug. “I got to know him.”

“Why do you stay?”

For the second time since we’d gotten in the car, he glanced at me. “Quentin. That’s why anyone stays.”

“Dennis—Francis—they don’t like Duncan Phillips either?”

Cortez actually snorted. “Oh, no.”

“What’s he done that’s so awful?”

Cortez was silent a moment, watching the road. We were still in the suburbs, green lawns and substantial trees visible from the highway, but the buildings were crowding closer together as we drew near the city limits. “Name it,” he said at last. “But I don’t want to talk about Duncan Phillips.”

“Okay, we can talk about you some more.”

He actually laughed. I didn’t think I’d heard that sound before. “There’s not much to tell.”

“Marital status?”

“Divorced. Twice.”

“How long were you married?”

“Seven years the first time. Two years the second time.”

“What went wrong?”

“A lot of things. Hard to pinpoint. But both marriages failed.”

“There are all kinds of failures,” I pointed out. “Failure of love, failure of communication, failure of tolerance.”

“Failure of hope, maybe,” he said thoughtfully. A car swerved suddenly into his path but he maneuvered around it, completely unruffled. Someone behind us honked furiously, and horns sounded in response all around. None of this seemed to faze him. “I think they both gave up on me, figured I’d never change.”

“No one ever does change.”

“I have,” he answered.

Traffic came to a complete halt for a full minute, then slowly started inching forward again. “But I didn’t change in time for them,” he went on. “What went wrong? Right woman, wrong time. Wrong woman, wrong time. For me, it was always the wrong time. I was too busy being super soldier or super cop, patrolling the Chinese border or bashing in heads in the Hot Zone. Thought I was the toughest guy around. I liked being married, the few hours of the day I remembered I was married, but neither of my ex-wives liked it so much, and I didn’t worry about it a lot when they left. I went on being Mr. Macho, leading all the raids, throwing the first punches, shooting off the first bullets.

“Then one day it dawned on me. I might know more about hand-to-hand combat than any guy on the force, but hardly a soul on this earth loved me. My sister, maybe, but nobody else. Doesn’t matter how many medals you have, how many creeps you bring to justice, how many wars you stop or start—doesn’t matter if you save the world—if you die and no one’s at your grave crying, your life has not been worth living.”

I was absolutely stunned by this speech. That anyone would make it—that Bram Cortez had made it—that he had made it to me. To have gone from being a man who could embrace that life to a man who could reject it was a stark testimony to the truth of his earlier statement. Indeed, he had changed.

“I can’t imagine that,” I said softly. “If I were to die tomorrow, I can think of at least fifty people who’d come to my funeral, and probably half of them would be sobbing. My family—my friends—my students—my former students—my co-workers. I mean, there’s never been a time in my life I wasn’t connected to other people by pretty significant emotional bonds.”

“That’s because you’ve figured out what’s important.”

“No! Every day I wrestle with that. What have I done this day, this year, ever in my life, that has mattered? I haven’t cured disease or saved the poor or even had much luck getting my students to reliably improve their use of apostrophes. I don’t know that I’ve ever made a valuable contribution to the world. But I’ve never felt alone in it, either.”

“I think that’s the key,” he said. “That’s what I’m working on.”

Ahead of us, in the extreme right-hand lane, two cars came together with a percussive thud followed by a musical tinkling of glass. Cortez looked over, seeming to assess the damage and the degree of danger to the victims. The drivers, both of them young men, had already leapt from their cars and begun a heated verbal exchange. Neither seemed to be suffering so much as a sprained rib. Cortez returned his attention to the road, and we drove slowly on.

“So what about your marriage?” he asked. “To Daniel Faberly. Which lasted four years and a few months. What went wrong there?”

Funny how talk about my divorce seemed to be a recurring theme this week. Still, it was only fair that I answer the question; he had fielded so many of mine.

“At the time, it seemed very layered and complicated,” I said. “I would have hourlong conversations with friends about the precise level of insult in some offhand comment Danny had made. I could tell you why he didn’t respect me or exactly how to interpret some gesture he made over dinner. But mostly I think we went into the marriage with different expectations. I thought we’d grow and mature and work toward common goals—like owning a house and having kids and getting to know our neighbors. I don’t know. Mundane stuff, I guess. I thought we’d meld together as a couple.

“Danny thought he needed to stake out his territory as an individual, which meant he had to challenge me at every turn. I mean, sometimes, it seemed like he was trying to thwart me over the simplest things, like getting dinner on the table before nine at night. I was saving money to buy a dining room set. He took the money and bought a new computer. We needed the computer. We could live without the dining room table. But—I don’t know that I can explain. We never wanted the same things. And it seemed like he deliberately subverted my dreams. And I felt like I was always fighting to define myself and keep my dreams at an equal weight with his.”

I shrugged and stared out the window at the slow-moving cars. “Marriage is a power struggle, some of the time. Maybe a good marriage isn’t. But unless your goals are always in complete agreement—and how could they possibly be, between two individuals?—someone’s going to lose on every divergent issue. And I think it’s important that you take turns winning. But I also think it’s important that you don’t spend all your time drawing battle lines. Some of the time, it should be fun.”

I glanced over at him and caught him grinning. “The fun is the best part,” he agreed.

I laughed and stretched my feet out till they touched a rounded plastic compartment. The housing for the protective airbag, perhaps. “Though you sound like a jerk when you say, ‘I’m leaving this guy because it’s not fun.’ Or ‘because it’s too difficult.’ And I fretted for a long time about whether I was making the right decision. Was I trying hard enough to make the marriage work? Should I give in more often? If I loved Danny, wouldn’t I want him to be happy, wouldn’t I want to give him things, let him have his way? I thought I was letting go too soon.” I smiled. “Of course, my brother and my friends thought I had held on too long, but they were partisan.”

“Do you ever want to see him? Danny?”

“Nope. I talked to him last year when his mother died, but I haven’t heard from him since. He’s in California now, I think. Every once in a while, I run into one of his friends, who tells me how well he’s doing. Married again, someone more submissive, I hope, and working at some great job. Good luck to him.” I glanced over. “How about you? In touch with your ex-wives?”

“Marilee calls now and then. My first wife. She’s got a good heart—she cares about everybody—she couldn’t wish bad luck on anyone except maybe some baby-killer. I think she likes me better these days, because she sees some softening in me. Actually, we’re sort of friends, and it’s nice.”

“Maybe she’d come crying to your graveside.”

A flicker of a smile. “Maybe. But not Ellen. She was too unhappy and too mad when she left. I think she just wants to forget she ever knew me and move on with her life.”

“Best to honor that, then.”

“Oh, I do.”

“I’m sure I’d be civil if Danny called again,” I said thoughtfully. “I used to play this game with myself. Say Danny called in the middle of the night, in the middle of some tragedy. He needed to borrow ten thousand dollars, or he was violently ill and needed someone to come save his life. Something like that. What would I do? Give him the money? Go take care of him? Save his life?”

“And?”

I laughed. “Some days I would and some days I wouldn’t. I think—no matter who it was—if someone I knew and had had any affection for ever called me and needed something desperately, and I could supply it, I’d give it to him. One-time emergency deal. But I don’t think I’d let that person back into my life on a permanent basis. That’s what I think.”

“Interesting game,” he commented. “I’d do anything for Marilee. Ellen wouldn’t call, so it’s not even an issue. Couple of my ex-cop buddies—yeah, I’d go bail them out, if I could. Can’t imagine that too many of them would think to call me if they suddenly needed help.”

“That’s as sad as saying no one would come to your grave.”

“I know.”

We drove on a few minutes in silence. Crept on, more like. We were absolutely locked in traffic, bumper-to-bumper cars in all lanes on both directions of the freeway. It was the Lake Michigan of automobiles. You were sure there had to be a far shore free of tire tracks, but you could not visualize it from where you sat.

“This would drive me crazy,” I said at last. “Being stuck in traffic like this. How can you stand it?”

“I don’t come into the city that much.”

“Where do you live?”

“Palatine. Not all that far from Quentin’s. You still run into traffic, but nothing like this.”

“Well, sorry to bring you into these hellish conditions.”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “I like the city.”

Another silence. It seemed Cortez’s confidences were over, and for the life of me I couldn’t think of any interesting new topics to introduce. My eyes wandered over the dashboard screens, crowded with LED indicators, and my attention was caught by a heads-up stereo display.

“What do you usually listen to in the car?” I asked. “No, let me guess. Audiobooks about financial investments or historical battles from World War II.”

He smiled slightly. “I do like nonfiction books,” he admitted, “but I’m more apt to listen to history than money tips. Good guess, though.”

“How about music?”

“There’s a few things there. Check them out. Put something on if you want.”

I tapped the buttons so the readout came up. He had a good selection of feenday bands, one or two more contemporary swoon croon albums, and a few albums by groups I’d never heard of. I went with the mellow ancient rock of Santana and we both listened in contented wordlessness for the next twenty minutes or so.

I’d decided I shouldn’t distract him with any more nosy questions since, impossible as it was to believe, traffic had gotten denser and drivers had become more reckless. The speed would pick up for a few miles, then suddenly everyone in front of us would come to a screeching halt, for some impediment that we never discovered. We were very close to the city now and the towering brick and glass buildings were throwing their shadows across the glutted highway. There were streets in Chicago, I swear, that had never felt the kiss of sunlight. That’s how close and crowded and high those buildings were.

“Do you happen to know the best exit for your neighborhood?” Cortez asked.

“Um—not really. I live right off Diversey.”

He nodded. “I know your address. I’ve been spying on you, remember? I’m just not sure of the best way to get there.”

“Teleport code is five-six-seven-two-one,” I said helpfully. “Nearest stop to my apartment.”

“Never mind,” he said, and I saw him key my address into a dashboard screen. “Is there street parking in your neighborhood?”

“Um, I guess? But you can just drop me off.”

“I have to come in and get Quentin’s shirt.”

I could just run up and fetch it for you and run back down , I wanted to say, but of course he could figure that out for himself. He probably wanted to come up and check out my apartment, make sure I wasn’t harboring revolutionaries or building bombs in my spare time.

“Great,” I said. “I’ll give you a beer.”

“I’m on duty.”

“Really? Don’t you have, what was it, a dozen men covering for you back at the Phillips mansion?”

“Not quite that many. I’m not officially off until six.”

“Probably be six before you get back, but it’s up to you,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to waste my beer.”

He grinned and concentrated on negotiating back toward the exit lane on the right. I honestly couldn’t have told him if this was the way to my apartment or not. I read an essay once that said the invention of the teleport had turned us into a population of geographical idiots. Not only could we not differentiate the countries on the globe, we couldn’t provide a reliable map of our own cities. True in my case, I must say. Actually, I’m probably better with a world map than a local one. I know that the lake’s to the east, Evanston is to the north, Atlanta is to the south, and Houston is way to the south, but I couldn’t really reckon miles and I absolutely could not draw a map to scale. There were neighborhoods not three miles from my apartment that I had never been in. Back in the days when people drove, or walked, or took buses from point to point, they physically had to cover every mile they traveled, so they developed a familiarity with their closest landmarks. But I skipped straight from the teleport gate to the other side of the city, and I couldn’t tell you what lay in between.

But there was no need to worry—the onboard navigator took us directly to my building. “Hey, this is my street!” I exclaimed.

“And, look, parking right down the block,” he said. “Probably the only time a space has opened up in the past ten years.”

A few minutes later, we were stepping into my apartment. I hadn’t been expecting company, so I hadn’t exactly cleaned the place up, and I gave one quick look around as I tossed my purse to the table. Only a few dishes in the sink, only a few bills on the dining room table, a few more pairs of shoes than strictly necessary strewn around the living room. It could have been worse.

“Of course, the question is, Where did I put Quentin’s shirt?” I asked aloud. “I thought I left it in here so it would be visible enough for me to remember it. Hmmm . . .”

My apartment is not large. The kitchen, dining room and living room all open off each other to form one big space. Most walls are lined with bookcases. The living room features, in addition, a jaunty selection of furniture, some second-hand, some left over from my marriage: a big red couch, a puffy brown chair, a rocker, some wooden stools, and an entertainment center. The dining room holds a table, mismatched chairs, a glassed-in cabinet that used to belong to my grandmother, and more bookcases.

There are also various boxes and piles in the corners—clothes, papers, books, things I haven’t gotten around to sorting or putting away. The kitchen is too small to require furniture or accommodate boxes.

Cortez was looking around with great interest, and I wondered what would first grab his attention. He zeroed in on the item that most people noticed right away: a half-size bronze sculpture of a naked girl, sprouting stained-glass angel wings from her back.

“What’s this?” he asked, walking closer to examine it.

“Butterfly Woman. A gift from my friend Marika.”

“I like it,” he said. “She looks happy.”

“It’s my very favorite thing that I own.”

“What about this?” he said, pointing to a small furry bat—fake, I mean—hanging upside down from one of the bookshelves.

I grimaced. “A gift from my friend Domenic. He decided that if Marika was going to give me butterflies, he would give me bats. But that was the only one he gave me, and then he got tired of it.”

Cortez’s eye had been caught by a volume lying open beneath the bat. “This seems like a strange book. Sociological Theory in Mid-Millennium Urban Centers .”

“That’s from my brother Jason.”

“Have you read the whole thing?”

“Oh, no.” I didn’t bother to explain. I glanced around the room again. “Well, hell. I don’t think it’s in here. Must be in the bedroom.”

Uninvited, Cortez followed me to the bedroom, no doubt to see what other strange objects I had lying about in there. First thing he saw, of course, was the water bottle hooked over the headboard of the bed. Well, it’s not just a water bottle—it’s more like a supersize canteen, with a long, snaking plastic straw that curls down to just above the pillow.

Cortez pointed. “What’s that? Or will it embarrass me?”

“No, of course not. It’s a water container. Jason rigged it up for me. I get thirsty in the night.”

“Sure, but a nice tasteful mug of water—”

I flung myself on the bed, arms outstretched. “I hate getting up in the middle of the night. I don’t even like to lift my head from the pillow. Once I wake up, I can’t fall back asleep. So Jason made me this—spigot. See, you can lie here, and guide the straw to your mouth, and take a drink of water—” I demonstrated. “Without moving an inch.”

He was regarding me quizzically. “Doesn’t it drip all over your face at night?”

“No, there’s a little valve or something that keeps the water inside until you suck on it.” I sat up. I could tell I was flushing. “Would you like to try it?”

“I don’t think so, thank you very much.”

I came quickly to my feet. “So where would I have put the T-shirt? Not in the dresser, since I wasn’t going to keep it. In the closet? Does that make sense?”

He pointed to a stack of boxes next to the dresser. Was this really the reason he’d wanted to come up, so he could catalog all my idiosyncrasies? “What’s in the boxes?”

“New shoes I haven’t worn yet,” I said, my voice muffled because my head was in the closet.

He did a silent mental count, I guess, because next he said, “Nine pairs?”

I pulled my head back out. “I don’t like new shoes. I actually have a phobia about them. I’m afraid they’ll hurt my feet. So I’ll buy them and then not put them on for, oh, six months. By which time the shoes they’re replacing will have literally fallen to pieces on my feet. And then I have to wear them.”

“That seems a little extreme.”

“I know. I’m not good with new things. I usually wear the same two pairs of earrings every day. I don’t change my hairstyle much. I don’t rearrange the furniture. I like things the way they are.”

“Do you like new people?”

“Almost always.” He didn’t say anything, so I added, “I know. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I was thinking,” he said, “it’s better to like new people than new products.”

And which do you prefer? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t. “Where the hell is that shirt?” I demanded.

“In a bag under the couch,” he said. “Or at least something is.”

I gave him a look of great irritation and hurried back into the other room. Sure enough, there it was, almost invisible under the frayed red skirt of the sofa. He had sharp eyes, Bram Cortez, though a rather devious manner. Would not have expected that of him.

“Here,” I said, formally handing him the bag. “I hope he likes it.”

“He will. Quentin likes every gift.”

A moment’s silence. “You can still stay and have a beer,” I said.

He shook his head. “No, I need to get back. I have to check on Quentin before I leave for the day, and go over reports with the guys on duty. But it’s been interesting,” he said, without a change in his voice.

I smiled. “Very. Why were you so talkative?”

“I’m always talkative,” he said, and headed for the door. “You just haven’t been around that much.”

And he smiled at me from the threshold—gave me a real smile, not that faint look of amusement that I had seen on his face before. I know my own expression must have been one of sheer astonishment, because he laughed out loud, shook his head, and walked out, closing the door behind him.

I thought, Friday will not come soon enough.