The Big Dark Sky (47)
She was impressed that he could bite down on his grief, would not cry, would not dwell on his father’s death, but instead focused on the hope of escape and vengeance. He seemed to possess an innate toughness that perhaps he was just discovering in himself.
“It’s not that far up there,” he said. “Like maybe twelve feet. If you could stand on my shoulders . . .”
“I’m not a gymnast,” she said. “Are you?”
“No. But I have this.” From a pocket of his jeans, he produced a Swiss Army knife.
“How’d you manage to keep that?”
“The sonofabitch made me empty my pockets, so I was like . . . like begging him not to kill me. He was getting off on how scared I was, staring into my eyes, not watching my hands close enough. He’s not just a killer, that guy, he’s some kind of freaking pervert. I don’t know what, but he’s something.”
In the interest of not scaring the kid further, Ophelia chose not to share the fact that Optime was such a fanatic that he had castrated himself.
Once more turning his attention to the separation between the sacristy roof and the church, Colson said, “If I could get up there, I could maybe work at the edges of the hole with the knife. It’s got all kind of tools, like a wood saw and a corkscrew and stuff.”
Just then descending from high noon, the sun began to align with the gap in the roof. The infall of light grew much brighter, and an unobstructed beam slanted down on them, golden and warm, with motes of dust turning lazily in the dazzling shaft. Perhaps the direct lance of sunshine ought to have given Ophelia hope; however, it seemed to mock her with a false promise of freedom, and the hole above appeared to grow smaller, more distant.
39
Women found Kenny Deetle attractive and fun to be around, and they thought that his work as a white-hat hacker was cool and daring and edgy, so he didn’t spend a lot of nights alone. This girl he’d met the previous evening, Leigh Ann Bruce, was herself a keyboard kick-ass, capable of cracking any system, backdooring it for future ease of access, and installing a rootkit of such exceptional design that she could pull a Claude Rains and remain invisible even to the best IT-security teams who suspected her presence. Kenny liked her, and he might have learned to love her, but he was unnerved by her exhibitionism. She was great to look at, and in bed she was a feast for the eyes, a smorgasbord of rich visual desserts; spending one night with her put him at risk of diabetes of the libido. Once out of her clothes, however, Leigh Ann seemed to forget how to dress herself. She prepared breakfast in the nude, read the newspaper in the nude, washed the dishes in the nude. Even after she showered, she paraded around without putting on so much as a pair of socks. The warehouse apartment was industrial chic, lots of drab open space, rooms flowing into one another without walls, and he had to admit that she warmed it up. But he worked best when nothing was more interesting to look at than his HP screen. As he sat at his main computer, she leaned over his left shoulder, over his right shoulder, and though hers were the most perfect breasts he’d ever seen, eventually he found himself thinking, Not these again. Kenny wasn’t a prude, but he wasn’t a satyr, either; he had a job to do for Wyatt Rider, and when he was working, he was, damn it, working. Finally, exasperated, he took her to bed again, hoping that a vigorous half hour in the sheets would punctuate the day’s erotic activities with an exclamation point, encouraging her to put on her clothes. Afterward, Kenny dressed, but Leigh Ann went to his backup computer and sat down, Lady Godiva on an office chair instead of a horse.
Settling beside her at his main workstation, Kenny said, “Shouldn’t you get dressed?”
“Huh? Why?”
“Aren’t you chilly?”
“No, baby, I’m hot.”
As she switched on the computer, he said, “Just so you know, I’ve got no more.”
“No more what?”
“No more anything today. You broke me.”
“I have a little job of my own here, and I work best naked.”
“Well, it’s distracting.”
She grinned at him. “See, you’ve still got more, after all.”
For a minute or so, he watched her long-fingered hands work the keyboard with the grace of a concert pianist caressing music from a Steinway. “What little job?”
“Don’t worry your pretty head,” Leigh Ann said. “No net cop ever born can track me to source. Nothing I do is gonna bring any heat down on you.”
“Yeah, but see, I’m totally white hat.”
Focused on her screen, she said, “What makes you think I’m not?”
“I’m just the suspicious type.”
“I’m righteous, boyfriend. You should know that already.”
“How would I know that?”
Without looking at him, she said, “When you were the most vulnerable, I didn’t cut your dick off.”
“Is that something you sometimes do?”
“Not me. But it’s a thing that happens in this screwed-up world of ours. You bring a nice girl home and she turns out to be Hannibal Lecter with knockers.”
After a contemplative silence, he said, “You’re unique.”
“Everyone is, boyfriend. Now, don’t you have a job to do?”
He should have expected that this relationship would be in one way or another—or in many ways—unusual, considering that chance and coincidence played such a role in their encounter. The previous night, he had been supposed to go to a club, Cranked, with three friends—Brian, Rafael, and Maynard. But Brian, who was a junior executive with Google, had to fly off to an emergency corporate meeting. Rafael came down with a cold. And after months of trying, Maynard got a last-minute date with Shanese, which no one could believe, including Maynard and Shanese. Feeling abandoned by his buddies, Kenny availed himself of the services of Uber, so that he could drink irresponsibly without consequences. The young driver, Georges, proved to be upbeat, opinionated, and persuasive. Georges declared that Cranked was the suckiest club in the city and insisted on taking Kenny to a place called Eldorado. The name might have struck Kenny as tacky and very ancien régime, like something out of the Sinatra era, except that as a teenager he had been totally into the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. In the back seat of Georges’s Honda, he recited the first six lines of “Eldorado,” about a gallant knight who “Had journeyed long Singing a song In search of Eldorado.” Georges took this to be a concession, and Kenny found himself at the bar in Eldorado, three stools away from Leigh Ann, who was waiting for a date, Curtis, who was twenty minutes late. As the bartender poured Negra Modelo into a frosted glass, Kenny gave voice to the sixteenth line of the Poe poem: “‘Shadow,’ said he ‘Where can it be’ ‘This land of Eldorado?’” Proving herself to be a Poe aficionado, Leigh Ann said, “‘Over the Mountains Of the Moon Down the Valley of the Shadow.’” Wearily, evidently having been here before, the bartender finished it: “‘Ride, boldly ride’ The shade replied ‘If you seek for Eldorado!’” Ten minutes later, Kenny and Leigh Ann were sitting on adjacent stools when Curtis called her to say that he was dealing with police because his house had been burglarized, trashed, everything of value taken, including his beloved black cat, Pluto. He asked for Leigh Ann’s understanding, and she assured him that she wasn’t in the least put out, that she hoped he would find Pluto.