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“So can you breathe now?”
Davy’s head jerked, in a curt nod.
“Good.” Sean gave his brother a hard shove that made him stumble. “Then go home and fuck your wife. Dickless pussy.”
Davy’s leg swept Sean’s feet out from under him, dumping him on his ass. “We’ll see how well you deal when your turn comes.”
He turned back before climbing into his truck, and gave Sean a steely, squint-eyed look. “If you get in trouble tonight, I’m going to rip off one of your arms and beat the shit out of you with it,” he warned.
Sean grinned. “I love you too, man,” he replied. “Drive carefully.”
He watched his brother’s taillights winding down the switch-backs that led up to the house.We’ll see how well you deal when your turn comes.The thought gave him a tug, around the center of his chest.
Right. Like he was ever going to found a dynasty. With who? A dance club fuckbunny? Someone like Stacey or Kendra?
Besides, Davy and Con were always on his case about his short attention span. The way they talked, he’d be liable to forget his own kid in a basket on the top of the car and drive off onto the expressway. He ought to do his hypothetical kids a favor. Give fatherhood a wide miss.
His two brothers had the preservation of the species well under control. He should probably just go to the doctor and snippity snip himself right out of the gene pool. Make it a non-issue, forever.
For some reason, the idea depressed the living shit out of him.
CHAPTER6
From: witchywoman Bware: hi is anybody out thereMiles checked the message he’d sent out, in the dialog box in the chat room. No bites yet. He turned to his other computers. He was futzing around in several chat rooms, using different characters and e-mail idents. Nobody interesting had come by, but it was early yet.
He was lucky that he could do his favorite thing—dicking around on the internet—and actually get paid for it. He was racking up those billable hours as a tech-consultant in Con’s Geek Eater investigation, pimping his various fantasy personas in chat rooms where nerds and geeks hung out.
Mina, aka witchywoman Bware, was his most successful lure so far. She got lots of attention. He was hoping for a hit from Mindmeld tonight. He’d been the only one who’d wheedled Mina into a private chat room and asked about her childhood, under the guise of wanting to know her better. Miles had spoon-fed him Mina’s hard luck story in a self-deprecating tone that he was proud of; junkie mom, deadbeat dad, raised by grandma, but Gran was dead, sniff sniff…going to college because of Gran’s inheritance…etc., etc. He might actually turn out to be good at this social engineering stuff. And Mindmeld, who had confessed that his name was Jared, seemed to have a hidden agenda.
Miles could smell it. Like a fart in a car.
He turned away from the monitors, with their soothing blue glow. It was oddly depressing, being in his basement lair again. The McCloud brothers had kicked his ass until he rented a place in Seattle, just a room over someone’s garage, but it was good to be independent. Still, it made no sense to rent another room in Endicott Falls for two months while his folks’ basement stood empty. He didn’t have money to burn.
The problem was, the place reminded him way too much of his longtime crush on she-who-must-not-be-named. He’d spent years in this hole, listening to recordings of her playing her sax. Watching video montages of her. Wanking off to wishful, erotic scenarios where Cindy had an epiphany from God, and started seeing him as something other than a convenient adjunct brain. An external hard drive she could program to do her coursework while she went out partying with other guys. And he shouldn’t even go there. God knows, enough guys had already been there before him. A path had been blazed, by God.
A flash on the screen. A response to his query. He shot across the room on the rattling swivel chair. Excellent. Mindmeld himself.
R U still there witchywoman Bware
He dove for the keyboard, typed.Yes hi how R U
Good thx did U like my abstract
Jared had sent Mina an abstract he’d written on using roex filters to represent the magnitude response of auditory filters. Miles intuited that it was either a love offering or a sort of test, so he’d ripped the sucker apart. He grabbed his notes, and began to type.Yes but I have problems wt roex filters—fits 2 notched-noise masking data R unstable unless filter is reduced 2 a physically unrealizable form & there’s no time domain version of roex (p,w,t,) 2 support…
His hands clattered away. His reasoning was that if Jared was a garden variety boy dweeb trolling for sex and validation, he would be scared away by a girl who showed him up, and Miles wouldn’t waste any more time on him. But if Jared was the Geek Eater, he would lick his slobbering lips and make another move. And Miles might start earning the money Connor was paying him. He wanted some results.
It was embarrassing, but he felt a constant need to prove himself to those McCloud guys. They were so good at every freaking thing they did. Hanging out with them was a sure recipe for a bitching inferiority complex. He gritted his teeth and coped, partly because he wanted to learn the crazy stuff they knew. Mostly because he really liked them.
Still. Every one of those guys, Seth included, was a super-solvent, successful sex god and ninja maniac. Fucking unreal. It would give him a lot of satisfaction to make a contribution to Con’s investigation. Helping nail the Geek Eater would be a coup. A big self-esteem fluffer.
“Hi, Miles.”
The soft voice from behind him made him levitate about five inches out of his chair. He spun around, heart pounding. Geek Eater, Jared, Mina, McClouds, utterly wiped out of his mind in an instant.
“Fuck,” he gasped out. “Cindy? What are you doing here?”
Cindy stood there, smiling uncertainly, backlit by the light that spilled down the stairs from the kitchen, front lit by the eerie blue glow of the computers. She was wearing a lace-up red thing that clearly demonstrated that the wearer had no need for a bra.
