Page 85 of Lone Wolf

Evan crumpled it off the doorknob and shoved into his penthouse.

Joey was sitting glumly at the kitchen island, thumbing at her phone, Dog slumbering as close to her barstool as he could get.

Evan tossed the balled-up advert into the trash can beneath the coat hangers and trudged in.

Joey barely looked up. “’Tsup, X. I’m … I have this thing I need to…”

Vestigial streaks of peanut butter besmeared a spoon resting on the counter beside her. A half-empty glass of orange juice sat nakedly beside it, not four inches from where he’d strategically positioned the stack of coasters.

He paused at her shoulder. “Update?”

She had her snout in her phone again, distracted. Evan cleared his throat and she snapped to, setting it down but keeping her hand on it. “Been in the Vault literally all day.” Her phone chimed and dinged with incoming texts, Evan squinting against the distraction. “Ran into column-level encryption on the Solventry databases—more layers between us and Doc Hill’s work. Whatever the hell he was up to, it’s buried deep in there. I just popped out for … Gonna head back to oversee the cracking of the RC4 private key…”

Her phone lifted in her palm once more as if it were controlling her hand, its glow uplighting her cheeks. She shot off rapid-fire replies to texts, one after another: Selfie with her tongue out, hang ten with her hand. Back to a flat expression as she scrolled to the next. Another reply: 😂😂 !! Her face didn’t change. Another selfie: Eyebrows raised with distress. Sent. Dead-faced text: OMG. LMFAO!

He glared at the phone with enmity, bitterness swirling in his stomach. Allman’s words were still roiling around in there, too.

He started to say something to Joey.

Decided against it.

He moved on to the freezer vault, the mist curling up his nostrils, chilling his windpipe, drying the sweat at his hairline. The door closed behind him with an airtight thump, and then it was just him in a glass-encased room with the purest of liquids also encased in glass and spaced at equal distances on glass shelves. And just beyond, through an armor-plated floor-to-ceiling pane, that south-facing view of Century City with its blocky high-rises, empty offices checkered at random with yellow rectangles, windows to the soulless. It felt safe in here, a vodka Faraday cage protected from the signals and transmissions of the modern world that invisibly ruled the air, tentacling their way into screens and from there into brains.

He set his hands on the freestanding bar in the center to breathe.

A craving arose in him to scour his insides, an urge for cleansing warmth, antiseptic numbing.

A tall slender bottle to his left held Smoke Point, a vodka made from smoke-tinged malbec and merlot grapes that had been damaged in the Northern California Glass Fire. An idiosyncratic offering from Hangar 1, it was fruit-forward at first sip but then turned bold, almost aggressive. The distillation process cleared away most traces of flame, leaving behind licorice, pepper, and allspice. He had respect for the vodka and the punishing filtration process it had undergone to transform itself from base matter into pure.

Seeding a stainless shaker with five ice cubes, he glugged in two fingers and shook and shook some more, skin fusing to metal, his palms aching with the cold.

A proper martini glass rested on a lower shelf, frosted to opaqueness. He poured, ice crystals snowflaking the surface. With a steel pick, he skewered a smoked olive, dunked it in twice, and set it aside.

The first sip struck wrong as it sometimes did, a scalding hit of rubbing alcohol. He swallowed quickly, let his taste buds relax, then took a second sip.

There it was, his palate soothed into readiness, the elixir warming his tongue with pleasing viscosity. He could taste the blighted vineyard, strong enough that he’d only be able to handle a few sips.

With his front teeth, he plucked the olive from the pick, chewed, breathed out smoke and salt.

The next taste was perfectly balanced, soothing his insides.

He indulged another sip, let it wash its way down. Then he emerged into the penthouse, the contrast of room temperature sheening his skin with humidity.

Walking over to Joey, he set down his RoamZone on the island and pulled up a stool across from her.

She kept at her phone. “It’s just … this sorority thing…” Her voice droned off with her attention. “Been, like, super mixed-signals-y confusing with all this stuff around the rush. Like, they posted a pic with some of the other girls from rush but not me.…” She zombied out for a few more seconds. “Dunno if it’s, like, intentional. Or just ’cuz. Do they want me? Do they not want me? But I don’t think it’s…” Tap tap tap. “I guess at the sorority house it’s the Syncocalypse, you know, that time of the month for all the girls living together, so it got all Mean Girls-y … Trying to…”

“Hey,” he said. And then: “Hey.”

But she’d glossed over again, trancelike, staring into the void and nervously nibbling a fingernail. He watched her thumbs pecking, the glow reflecting in her eyes, turning them deader yet. ROTFL. LOLOLOL. BWAHAHAHA!

He wanted to shout.

He wanted to shake sense into her.

He wanted to say, You’re deeper and truer than any fake reality found inside that phone. And the fact that you think for a moment that you have to preen or audition makes me murderous with rage at the people who built that device and all the shit that runs on it.

Instead he said, “Josephine. Put the phone down.”