She didn’t feel like sitting at the scrimshaw project. She didn’t feel like watching television or listening to music or reading. What she felt like doing was going for a five-mile run to clear her mind. Or a half hour of stretching and then
No point in even bothering to think about such things. It would only make her feel worse, if that was possible.
Other women must have gone through this. She could do it if anybody else could, she kept telling herself. But that didn’t help.
The house was clean. She had spent way too much time doing that lately, wiping counters, sweeping floors, rearranging shelves. You could eat off the floor — if you were allowed to bend over and take the risk.
She wandered into the bedroom. The bed was made. The bathroom was clean. Nothing.
The floor in Alex’s closet by his shoe rack had some clothes piled up to be dry-cleaned. Well, she could do that. Surprise Alex, given as how she didn’t usually fool with his chores.
She picked up a suit, a sports jacket, a couple of good silk shirts, a few ties. The laundry-to-go basket was in the garage, where Alex would usually notice it when it got full, toss the dirty clothes into his car, and drop it off at the Martinizing place run by a family of Koreans on the way to work.
As she started dropping the clothes into the hamper, she automatically went through the pockets. Being raised in a family full of brothers had taught her that when doing the wash. Boys left all kinds of crap in their pockets, and a handful of coins clattering in the washer or dryer would drive you nuts, not to mention chipping the inside of the machines. Ink pens could ruin a load of whites, and it was no fun picking lint from a washed, shredded, and dried paper napkin from a load of dark shirts, either.
In the suit trousers, Toni found a paper clip box, and inside that, the capsule.
She knew what it was from Alex’s description, it being big and purple and all, and it puzzled her as to why it was in his pocket. But maybe it was important. She seemed to recall the stuff had some kind of timing chemical in it, and it would be inert after a day or so. Alex hadn’t worn this suit yesterday, had he?
She reached for the phone on the workbench, looking at the capsule. She put it down next to the scrimshaw piece she’d been working on as Alex’s com bleeped.
“Hey, babe, what’s up? You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was taking your dry cleaning out to the hamper—”
“You were what?”
“Don’t sound so amazed.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Anyway, I found this purple capsule in your pocket.”
“Ah, damn. I keep forgetting about that. I was going to take it by the FBI lab and have somebody look at it. That’s the one John got on the raid I told you about.”
“I can do that for you, run it by the lab.”
“No, you can’t. You aren’t supposed to be driving, remember? Hang on to it for me, I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Fine.”
“Uh, thanks for calling me about it.”
“You at work yet?”
“Almost there.”
“I’ll see you later,” she said.
After she broke the connection, Toni stared into space. She sure hoped this baby was worth all this crap. He’d better be.
She wandered back into the house. All of a sudden, she was tired. Maybe she would lie down and take a short nap. Might as well. She couldn’t do anything else.
Jay shook his head, feeling stupid. It had been right there in front of him all along, and he had just skipped over it. He had narrowed his focus too much and missed the connection.
Maybe all this navel-gazing was good in the long run, learning how to clear your thoughts, to relax your mind, but the old Jay Gridley wouldn’t have let this slide past unseen.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be too relaxed mentally in his business.
He ran it down. The most important piece took a while, but finally, he got it. Wasn’t proof of anything, of course, but certainly it was a circumstantial lump that would choke an elephant.
Jesus.
He needed to fly it past the boss, to get his hit on it, but he was pretty sure it meant something important. He reached for the com to call, then decided maybe it would be better to avoid using the phone or net. Net Force’s corns, especially the virgils, were scrambled, the signals turned into complex binary ciphers that were supposedly unbreakable by ordinary mortals. That little episode in the U.K. with the quantum computer had cured Jay of his faith in unbreakable binary codes, however. And given the people with whom they were dealing, maybe face-to-face was better.
“I have to go into HQ,” Jay said to Saji on his way to the door.
“This late?” She opened her eyes and stared at him, still seated in her meditation pose.
“It’s important. I love you. See you later.”
“Drive safe,” she said.
He thought about his discovery all the way to Net Force HQ. Boy, wasn’t the boss going to be surprised at this twist!
27
Tad sat at the gate, slouched in a chair, waiting for his connecting flight back to LAX. Even full of painkillers, speed, and steroids to the eyeballs, it was all he could do to hold himself up. Every muscle, every joint, every part of him he could feel ached, a bone-deep, grinding throb that resonated through him with every heartbeat. The best dope he could get only dulled the pain, it didn’t come close to stopping it. He was so tired he could hardly see straight, and the way he felt, if he sneezed, his head would fall off. But his fuck-up was fixed, and, yeah, okay, he’d had to ice some poor sucker to wrap it. At least Bobby wasn’t pissed at him anymore. He hated to disappoint Bobby, who put up with a lot of his crap without kicking him out. Only friend he’d ever had, Tad knew, and the only person on earth who had ever given a shit about him. You just didn’t let people like that down.
A goth girl of eighteen or nineteen walked by and slouched into the bank of chairs across from Tad, eyeing him. She wore a torn black T-shirt under a distressed black leather jacket with the sleeves cut off, black sweatpants, and pink tennis shoes. She had short hair dyed purple, a nose ring, lip ring, eyebrow ring, and nine ear studs showing. Tad would be real surprised if she wasn’t wearing more gold and steel in her belly button, nipples, and labia. She gave him a twist of a smile — yep, there was the tongue stud — and he managed a lifted lip in return. Probably saw him as a kindred spirit, and what the hell, probably he was. Some of the kids who dressed the part were wanna-be’s, some of them were nihilists, some of them true anarchists. You could usually tell after thirty seconds of conversation which they were, but right now, he couldn’t summon the energy needed even to wave her over and see. Not that it much mattered if she did come over; he wasn’t in any condition to slip off to the john to snort some coke, smoke a joint, or screw, if any of those were her pleasure. Truth was, he liked Bobby’s kind of woman anyhow, the pneumatic bunnies who pumped dick as well as they did iron. Not that he’d had much interest in that area lately. Well, except for that royal fuck-up in the gym with Wonder Woman.
The announcer came on and garbled something out. Tad didn’t have any idea what she’d said, but people started to get up and shoulder their carry-on bags or tow them behind them on little leashes, like Samsonite dogs who didn’t want to go for a walk and had to be dragged. Tad didn’t have any luggage. If he needed clean clothes, he bought them and threw the old stuff away, shirts, pants, underwear, socks, whatever. It was a trick he’d learned as a street kid in Phoenix a thousand years ago. If you have to travel, better to travel light. If you don’t have nothin’, nobody can steal nothin’ from you. You don’t have to remember anything, and if you have to split, you can do so without looking back. He had his e-ticket printout, a wallet, five hundred or so bucks in it, a couple of credit cards,
