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.
Terminating the call, she said to Kenny, “Synchronicity.”
“Entirely,” he agreed.
She said, “We should have dinner together.”
He said, “That would be a nice start.”
Now, leaving her to whatever mischief she’d undertaken au naturel at his second computer, Kenny returned his attention to the problem of the Liam O’Hara residence in Montana. If someone obtained the satellite-dish link, invaded the house computer, built a clever back door, and now controlled all electronics in the home, the perp would almost certainly have left digital fingerprints, spoor that an ether-breathing bloodhound like Kenny Deetle could follow through cyberspace to an address in the real world.