wanted the circular monstrosity; hardly likely-games were fun, but wheels were a teen’s holy grail. “I thought vampires couldn’t die,” she said to Evan.
“The bullets are silver.”
“Must get expensive.”
“It’s only virtual silver,” he said, laughing.
She held out the piece of gray plastic. “What’s this?”
“Garbage.” He took it out of her palm and tossed it into a nearby can with one arc of his right arm, then appeared surprised by her surprise. “They’re just punch-outs from the sphere arms. We swept this room, but there’s still a ton scattered around, I’m sure.”
“What’s the holdup with Polizei Two?” one of the boys asked.
Evan bounced on his toes, his gaze darting between Rachael, Theresa, the boys in front of him, and the rest of the crowd. “Trying to get the fuzzy wings on the vultures just right. The graphics are killing me.”
“Seriously, dude. It was supposed to be out for Christmas.”
Evan bounced harder. “There are a lot of factors at play here. I wanted the sphere to be ready for preorder with the game.”
“You could have embedded an ad and order form in the higher levels. Why hold up the game?”
Theresa wondered if the boy, with his Chinese-symbol tattoo and peach-fuzz beard, felt the same urgency about his geometry homework.
His friend, thinner and pastier, came to Evan’s rescue. “Don’t hassle the guy, dude. His wife died, and all.”
The first young man remembered his manners. “Oh, yeah. That really sucked, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Evan agreed, watching Rachael. The bouncing subsided.
But then the sympathetic one revealed his own area of curiosity. “But wasn’t it weird, like, being married to an escort?”
The first one perked up again. “Yeah, was that cool? Did she do all sorts of-stuff?”
“But didn’t it bug you what she was doing with, you know, other guys?” the second one ventured, cautious but persistent. “I would think that would be kind of-”
Say something, Theresa urged Evan with her mind. Tell them to shut up.
The first one ran with the idea. “Well, yeah, I bet it’d be like being with a porn star, every guy looking at you and wondering what she’d do that he can’t get his chick to do.”
Evan let his gaze wander over the crowd; he didn’t respond to the boys’ questions, but neither did he seem bothered by them. In fact, his earlier grin surfaced again at the corners of his mouth.
Well, it bothered Theresa.
The second one blushed. The mouthy one seemed pleased to have regained her attention, like a little boy who just belched in front of his mother. Evan simply watched her, as if the conversation had nothing to do with him. Shock? Or indifference? Or just happy to get off the subject of his overdue video game?
“I’m sorry about your wife,” she repeated.
“Thanks.”
“I’m afraid the pathologist hasn’t ruled yet. Her case is still open.” She didn’t know why she said that, perhaps just to keep him talking about Jillian. Perhaps to prompt some solemnity in the two brats standing there.
It didn’t work, or maybe having other boys around to posture for made him reckless. Maybe he truly didn’t know how to express his feelings. Maybe anything, but he said, “I can always go back to Georgie and hire another one.”
The boys tittered.
The crowd cheered as Rachael triumphed over another vampire. Evan watched Theresa, as if there were no one else in the building. She wondered if he could see the rage spreading from her brain through the rest of her body, until her fingers tingled and her toes went numb and her stomach clenched into a fist.
“Good luck with the guardianship,” she said.
He blinked, as if perplexed by the change of topic, but that tiny upturn to his lips remained. Maybe he, not much more mature than these boys, enjoyed baiting her just as they did. “What?”
“You’ll have to go to court to get guardianship of Cara. I just wanted to wish you luck. I’ve heard that can be a long process.”
He began to bounce again, just a slight up-and-down lift to his body. “I already have Cara. She’s my daughter.”
“Not legally.”
“I was married to her mother. That makes me her father since she doesn’t have one.” A furrow appeared between his eyes, his mind forced away from the video-game world. The boys shifted, bored by talk of babies and courts.
“No, see, I spoke to one of my cousins at a birthday party last night-she’s a lawyer. Since you weren’t married to Jillian at the time of Cara’s birth, you’re not her legal father. Of course, you’ll almost certainly be granted guardianship, given the absence of any biological father or other applicants.”
He came to rest. “Exactly. Jillian’s parents have never even come to see the kid.”
She nodded, forcing her face into an expression of empathy she didn’t feel. First he spoke of his dead wife with a stunning lack of emotion, now he didn’t even give his stepdaughter a name. “Nevertheless, they’re her legal next of kin. If anything happened to Cara.”
His body went preternaturally still as, she felt sure, the implications of this filtered through the matrix of his brain, assessing the threats and forming a plan, just as Rachael now did in the center of the sphere.
Then he shrugged. “I’ll get my lawyer on it; he loves easy and billable hours. Jillian’s parents never showed the slightest interest in them.”
Them, not us. “That’s too bad. Though they might change their minds if they thought Jillian’s death wasn’t an accident. Or suicide.”
“So,” the tattooed boy asked, “does Polizei Two take place at the same cas-”
Evan brushed past the kid and came closer to Theresa, so close she could feel the heat from his torso. She had taken a step back before she could stop herself, even with a hundred witnesses surrounding them. The posture felt threatening, but his voice sounded merely curious.
“Do you have any proof?”
She blurted out, without thought, “That’s an odd question. Not what makes you think that or
“Exactly. Proof.”
She said nothing, and that became answer enough.
He straightened, still close, a large fleshy wall that seemed quite adult now. “I thought so. You don’t want to start a pissing contest, Mrs. MacLean. You’ll need an umbrella. I have some”-he looked her up and down, obviously unimpressed by something, her stature, her gender, or her taste in shoes-“natural advantages.”
“So do I,” she told him, though she could not for the life of her have listed a single one at that moment. Rachael emerged from the gyroscope, and Theresa took her arm and guided her out of the building. While shutting the door behind them, she saw Evan install another participant in the sphere, this time choosing the man in the Harley shirt while proclaiming that the sphere could support much more body weight than the typical undernourished teenager. He did not look in their direction.
Rachael didn’t argue at their exit, still in the throes of an adrenaline rush. “I’d like to try that again. You know what that would be great for? Exercise. You could be, like, snowboarding in the Himalayas, or walking on a beach in Hawaii.”
“Uh-huh.” They headed back along the snowy sidewalk. Theresa probed her memory of the past two minutes. What the hell was Evan Kovacic? A cold-blooded killer? Or a somewhat immature young man more adept with computer software than people?
“They could hook up little fans and things that could blow air on you so it feels like you’re moving, and maybe put some scents in there like pine trees or saltwater-”
“Uh-huh.”
Theresa bypassed the first building, continuing on the snowy sidewalk. “Are we leaving?” Rachael asked.
“Yes.”
“Why? We haven’t gone through all the booths yet-”
