Drayne didn’t know who had nicknamed him in the first place; the oldest girl cousin, Creepy’s sister, Irene, had passed the name along to Drayne once when she and Drayne had been teaching each other how to play doctor. The name came from the way he stared at people. He’d been a shrimpy little black-haired boy who looked at you crooked without blinking for what sometimes seemed like ten minutes.
“What happened?” Drayne said. He hadn’t known Creepy that well, but hearing about his death left him feeling oddly distressed.
“He was waterskiing on Lake Mead. Apparently he fell and was run over by another boat. Knocked unconscious, then cut by the boat’s engine propeller. He lost a lot of blood before he was fished out, and there was extensive head trauma.”
His father related the information as if talking about the weather, no excitement, no grief, deadpan and almost in a monotone. Fell. Run over. Cut. Always the cool federal agent.
“Oh, man. That’s awful. How’s Aunt Edwina holding up?”
“She is, of course, greatly distressed.”
Creepy was dead. It was hard to imagine. The kid had grown up, gone to school at UNLV, married a girl he’d met there, gotten a degree in history, then stayed to teach high school somewhere outside Salt Lake City. Orem? Something like that? Him and — what was her name? — oh, yeah, Brenda, probably the only two non-Mormons for as far as the eye could see. They’d gotten a divorce after a couple years, and Creepy stayed there. It had been five, six Christmases since Drayne had seen his cousin. He’d actually turned out okay, a nice guy.
“The funeral will be day after tomorrow at Edwina’s church in Newport Beach. I’ll be driving up for it.”
Edwina and her husband, Patrick, were Presbyterians. God’s frozen people.
His father was coming to L.A. Well, shit. So much for jetting off to Hawaii. Drayne said, “You, uh, need a place to stay?”
“No, I’ll stay at Edwina’s or get a hotel room nearby. She’ll need family support. The funeral will be at ten o’clock. Can you get off work to attend?”
That was the kind of man his father was. If he’d still been working for the FBI when his nephew had been killed, he would have worried about shit like that. Sure, he’d have taken a personal day and gone, but he would have fretted over missing work. Duty was his reason to get up in the morning.
Drayne said, “Sure, no problem, I can take off.”
“I’m going to be at Patrick and Edwina’s at nine and then drive over to the church. You can meet me either place. You remember how to get to her house?”
It had been a long time since he’d been there. “She still at that place overlooking the highway?”
“Yes.”
“I can find it.”
“Good. I’ll see you then. Good-bye, Robert.”
Drayne tapped the speaker button and shut the com off. That was his old man. Just the bare facts — who, where, what, when — and he was done. No emotion in his voice that his sister’s only son, his nephew, was dead; it was just a flat recitation:
Drayne sighed. Well, okay, this was gonna put a small crimp in his plans, but Creepy had been his cousin. He was family. You couldn’t just not go, not if you ever had to bump into the rest of the family again. Traffic would be a bitch that time of day, he’d have to get up and get rolling on the PCH early, by seven, at least. Maybe six-thirty. You didn’t want to be caught in a traffic jam on the way to a funeral.
Shit. First it was Zeigler, then Creepy. Bad things came in threes. He hoped the next one wouldn’t be Tad.
Or himself…
Jay Gridley stood in the cafeteria line. The woman behind the counter slopped a big ice cream scooper full of mashed potatoes onto his compartmentalized baby blue Melmac plate, turned the scoop over and pressed it against the creamed spuds to make a concave indentation, dipped the scoop into a pan of greasy brown liquid, and said, “Chon‘tgravyth’thet?”
Jay made the translation mentally:
By the time he’d figured out what she said, the server had already poured the warm goo all over the plate, slopping into the green beans, the hamburger steak, and the little empty slot where Jay had planned to have a piece of cherry pie. Forget that.
“Uh… sure,” he said, way late.
She handed him the plate back, under the angled glass sneeze guard.
This was where Mr. Brett Lee of the Drug Enforcement Administration had gone to high school, graduating at age seventeen, third in the class of’91, before going off to Georgia Tech to get his master’s in criminology. He’d gone to work for the DEA the year after he had graduated college and had thus spent nearly thirteen years working for them.
In the real world, Jay would be looking at the school yearbooks, talking to teachers and fellow students, downloading pictures and stats, and putting together an education history of Mr. Lee. In VR, he had built a scenario that would let him walk through the school itself — or rather what he imagined a place named after a Southern Civil War hero might look and feel like — and absorbing the information in a much more interesting manner.
Lee had been well-liked, had gotten good grades, and had hung with jocks, having been a middle-distance runner on the school’s track team.
Jay had come as far back as high school because he had not been able to discover any connection between Brett Lee and-Zachary George either in their work careers or college. While the two men were only a year apart in age — George was thirty-seven, Lee, thirty-six-Lee had been born and raised in Georgia, while George had grown up in Vermont. When Lee was at Georgia Tech, George had been at New York University. They had not crossed paths that Jay could tell until they were both working for the federal government, and while there was no record of their first meeting there, there was some kind of friction apparent by the time both had been in harness for a few years.
Jay had all that — the two didn’t like each other, maybe they just rubbed each other the wrong way or something — but the cause of the conflict had not come to light. He could pass on what he’d come up with to Michaels, but it didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.
The young Lee, sitting at a table with four guys and two girls from the track teams, dipped a French fry in catsup and ate it as Jay moved to sit at a conveniently empty table behind the group.
Convenient, hell. He had designed the setup that way himself.
The conversation was hardly enlightening. They talked about things of interest to teenagers: music, movies, who was going out with whom, teachers they hated, the usual. And in the twenty-year-old jargon, it was pitifully dated. Lee was close to Jay’s age, and if he’d talked like this, he must have seemed a terrible dweeb to any passing adult. Or dork. Or dickhead. All phrases the boys used fast and furiously, mixing and matching as needed:
“Yeah, well, Austin is a dickhead dweeb,” one of the boys said. “He gave me a fuckin’ C on the midterm because I didn’t use the right color ink!”
“Yeah, Austin’s a dork, all right,” another boy said.
One of the girls, a pretty bottle-blond in a gray T-shirt held together with safety pins, said, “Yeah, but he’s kinda cute.”
The other girl, a brunette with hair worn so short as to almost be a crew cut said, “Yeah, too bad he’s gay.”
One of the boys said, “Gay? Shee-it, he ain’t gay. I seen him lookin’ up Sissy Lou’s skirt and gettin’ a hard-on in debate one, you know how she sits with her knees apart. You’re just pissed’cause he don’t look at you that way. Maybe if you wore a skirt instead of jeans all the time, you’d see.”
“I don’t think Jessie here owns a skirt,” the third boy said, poking the short-haired girl on the shoulder. “But I hear she’s got some black bikini panties.”
Jessie slapped at the third boy.
