Want To Play (Monkeewrench)

the idea. Catharsis? Empowerment?’

She pretended he hadn’t said that, either. She simply crossed a jeans-clad leg and looked over at the side wall, away from him. One of Diane’s first paintings hung there; a quiet abstract with a lot of white space. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

He gave her his eyes, and they gave her everything else.

‘What would happen if you ever wiped the desk first?’

He smiled his first genuine smile of the day. ‘Armageddon.’

She smiled back, a little wickedly, he thought, but not soon enough to save himself. He shouldn’t have said that thing about catharsis. He shouldn’t have alluded to that at all, and now she was going to punish him.

‘No one’s going to find out, Mitch.’

He sighed and decided to play straight man. ‘Find out what?’

‘About the Speedo thing.’

‘Oh, God. Grace, for heaven’s sake, this is not about that.’

‘Come on, Mitch. You nearly passed out when you read it in the text file.’

‘It surprised me, that’s all. I hadn’t thought about it in years.’ He shook his head a little, eyes closed. ‘Christ. I can’t believe you put that in there.’

Grace shrugged happily. ‘I needed a clue.’

‘Uh-huh. And the one and only clue you could think of was a necklace with “Speedo” engraved on it.’

‘You loved that necklace. It looked just like dog tags, which went perfectly with your Army Surplus Grunge couture, I might add. You laughed till you cried when you opened it, and you wore it all the time.’

‘Under my clothes, if you remember, so no one would ever see it. And I had to wear it. It was a gift. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Did you know that damn thing turned my chest green?’

It had turned his chest green, and still he wouldn’t take it off, just because she had given it to him. ‘I thought you’d get a kick out of seeing it in the game.’

‘Oh, really? You thought I’d get a kick out of being reminded of one of the most humiliating experiences of my life?’

Grace looked positively merry. ‘Hey, you were a babe. You still have the pictures?’

‘No, I do not still have the pictures, and would you please keep your voice down? Do you have any idea of what kind of flak I’d get from those guys out there if they found out . . .’

‘That you modeled Speedos?’

‘It was a one-time thing. I needed the money. And they were not Speedos.’

‘They were tiny. Really tiny.’ She grinned, waiting for the blush to start creeping up his neck, for his eyes to start blinking rapidly the way they always did when she teased him about something, but he surprised her.

‘You’re bringing it all up again, Grace,’ he said, his expression deadly serious. ‘I never thought you’d want to do that.’

And then Grace was the one who blinked.

7

That night Grace watched from the stove as Charlie climbed slowly up onto the kitchen chair, carefully placing his massive paws to avoid tipping it over. It had taken him a long time and many toenail-scrabbling falls to the linoleum to teach himself the trick, and Grace thought that in doggy terms, Charlie was probably a genius.

Once he had all four paws centered on the slippery wood seat, he turned by inches until his stub of a tail brushed the chair back, then sat down with an audible sigh.

‘You are a brilliant animal.’ Grace smiled at him. Charlie smiled back, letting his tongue fall out.

She had no idea why the dog insisted on sitting in chairs, but she understood panic when she saw it, and the first night she’d brought him home from the alley where she’d found him, Charlie had panicked when she’d tried to keep him off the furniture. He hadn’t lain on the floor with his head in his paws, whining pathetically; he’d danced on his hind feet, howling in terror, as if the floor were writhing with monsters, and height was his only salvation.

Full-grown then, but obviously weak from near starvation, she’d had to help him up into a chair, acting first and thinking only later that the strange dog could easily have turned on her with flashing teeth.

But Charlie hadn’t done that. Once she had him safely above whatever nightmares lived on her floor, he’d only whined softly and licked her face, over and over, making Grace laugh, and then strangely, making her cry.

‘Which was more than all those silly psychiatrists were able to do,’ she told Charlie, as if he’d been privy to her mental reminiscing. He cocked his head at her, then nudged the heavy ceramic bowl on the table in front of him, politely reminding her that supper was late.

It was lamb stew tonight. Grace took hers without kibble.

After supper Charlie headed for the couch and Grace headed for the long, narrow room sandwiched between the kitchen and dining room. A pantry, originally, the realtor had told her, back in the early part of the century when the house was young.

It was the first room Grace had remodeled, stripping the floors and refinishing the wood, replacing the one existing window with stained glass in deep, impenetrable colors. You couldn’t see the bars on the outside of the window anymore, and no one could see in, either.

There was a desk-high counter on one wall where computers hummed twenty-four hours a day, and barely enough floor space for a rolling chair that Grace rode up and down the length of the counter.

‘You can’t possibly work in here.’ Mitch had been horrified when he’d seen it. ‘This isn’t an office; it’s a coffin.’ But it was the one place in the world where Grace felt almost safe.

She walked to the big IBM that was networked to all the office computers. ‘Come on, come on.’ She spun the ball on the mouse to bring the computer out of suspend mode, and waited impatiently, fingers poised over the keyboard.

She’d been struggling with a stubborn command line for the last murder all day at the office and had finally visualized the solution during dinner. She could hardly wait to test it.

She heard the familiar muffled sounds of the hard drive examining itself, then finally, the soft crackle of the monitor coming to life. She’d imposed a digital photo of Charlie on her desktop, long tongue lolling, eyes half closed as if he were smiling around a secret. It always made her smile.

She reached for the function key that would call up the programming file for Serial Killer Detective, but never had a chance to push it. She frowned when the screen suddenly went black, then froze as the scrawled red message appeared on her screen.

WANT TO PLAY A GAME?

She straightened slowly, her eyes glued to the words on the monitor that simply shouldn’t be there; not unless she’d called up the game file, and even then, not until she’d moved to the second screen.

Glitch, she thought. It has to be a glitch. But even knowing that, for a moment she still felt that old fear tiptoeing up her spine, prickling at the back of her neck, paralyzing her.

The past ten years vanished in an instant, leaving the younger Grace that still lived in her mind huddled in a dark closet, trembling uncontrollably, being very, very quiet.

8

Alena Vershovsky walked in mincing steps, teetering on the highest heels she’d ever worn, constricted by the tight dress. In this deathly quiet place she could actually hear the sequins rubbing against one another, snicking like the scales of a snake scraping across grains of desert sand.

‘Sequins make noise,’ she whispered, lips parted in delight.

‘Yes they do. Aren’t they wonderful?’

Alena nodded happily, then held up her fingers to look at them again. As dark as it was, she could still see the red enamel gleam of the long press-on nails, making it look like someone else’s hands were dangling at the ends of her wrists.

Oh, how she loved this. Never had she dressed in such a way, and with good reason. Her parents would have killed her. But this was the first night of her life away from home; a night for breaking rules and taking chances with