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Ruth shook her head.

“Just me,” she said. “My dad has another daughter; she’s five. But I’ve never met her.”

“Well, Philip was part idol, part embarrassment, part best friend, part tormentor.”

Silas looked at her as she reached again for the bag of rocks, settling into the routine.

“Imagine one part current boy-band hottie of the week, plus Mickey, plus your dad. Plus a military-grade information retrieval specialist.”

Ruth wrinkled her nose. “That sounds awful!”

Silas laughed full out and loudly enough that Ruth couldn’t help but join him.

“Okay, well, imagine it as cool.”

Ruth gave an exaggerated shudder but kept smiling. Silas went on.

“He did a bad thing, but he wasn’t a bad man. Do you know the difference?”

“I think so,” Ruth said. She inched closer to Silas, following the pattern of the rocks. Silas dug deeper into the cool earth.

“It’s an important distinction,” he said. He could be touching ground from years ago, he thought. He could be touching the same dirt from that very night. “He taught me everything I know.”

Ruth reached for a rock past Silas, her shoulder darting under and against his chest. She waited a beat for her fingers to clasp around it, to find their grip. He stayed above her, fighting the urge to free his hands. Fighting the urge to put them anywhere but right there in the dirt.

“Then he must be a good man,” she said, her voice in his ear before she pulled back, the rock freed and larger for it.





PEYOTE





WHEN CAL ASKED TREY for his help, he insisted she buy him dinner first. So, with the jalape?o poppers and the bottle of J?ger taking up most of the table, the interior glass wall of the conference room made me feel less like a fish in a tank and more like a fish in a contact lens.

“I thought we’d go over the Culver case, get Trey up to speed for tomorrow,” I started when we’d all sat. Cal nodded and opened her binder, and Trey opened a paper napkin and placed it on his lap.

“Cal is a beautiful name. Is it short for something?”

“She already went over this. Calamity Ganon. Like in Legend of Zelda? A Nintendo game.”

Trey reached for the bottle of J?ger and examined the label before unscrewing the cap and inhaling over it, deeply.

“We don’t have video games here,” Trey went on as he poured, his voice smooth as a soft-serve machine with a faulty thermostat. Each word sloshed forth sticky and empty-sweet. “Well, except those ones where you bludgeon hookers to death. Those are here, but we’re not allowed to play them. They’re just for the Third Floor’s Retribution Management Department.”

“Why?” Cal asked, nodding just slightly when Trey offered to pour her a glass. He didn’t once look at me.

“You were there; wouldn’t you know?” I said. I didn’t want any J?ger anyway.

Cal shook her head.

“You see, they take all the incomers who killed hookers in real life and embed their real human consciousnesses into the codes of the hookers in the video game, and then beam them out into millions of horny psychos’ PlayStations.”

He piled poppers onto both paper plates he took from the kitchen, despite Cal’s polite refusal.

“And then what?”

Trey paused to suck the grease from his fingers, slipping each one into the wet pulp of his mouth, then out, then in again.

“They live and die like that over and over for eternity,” he answered. “That’s what.”

“Karmic justice,” I said.

“I’ll show you Karmic Just Tits.”

I rolled my eyes too hard to see Cal’s reaction, but I could imagine it was about the same as mine.

“I mean it; she works at the Honey Pot on Wednesdays.”

“Trey, we need you to use your memory clearance to get some information out of our guy,” I said loudly, my binder sticking in a puddle of ranch dressing. Trey stiffened at the inevitable conclusion that this was, in fact, a business meeting, until Cal put her hand on his arm.

“I can’t wait to see you in action! Pey, what plan have you come up with that is missing just this one magic ingredient?” She tapped her fingertips against Trey’s skin with each word—”just” tap “this” tap “one” tap—so that by the time she got to “magic,” he was beaming into his Dixie cup. And I thought, not for the first time, that it must be nice to be a narcissist.

“Did Peyo tell you about the day I got awarded with memory clearance? It was a little chilly that morning, so I walked in wearing my—”

“Our mark, Jason Culver, is looking for someone. He knows the guy is still alive, but he doesn’t know where exactly. So we’re hoping you can dig around in Jason’s brain a bit and get us some information he doesn’t remember. Anything that can point us in the right direction.”

Trey glared at me and then leaned back, legs wide.

“What have you gotten so far?”

“Well, we have reason to believe the target is a confidence man who got his start as a high school football coach by screwing over his team. He’s on the run, but he’s still in America, somewhere in Georgia. Near the coast.”