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“There are no new stories. We’re all in thrall to the old ways. Take this …” Tommy held the bottle aloft and tilted it so the light caught the rich amber glow. “If I told you we take a grain mixture that’s gotta be fifty-one-percent corn, put it in charred oak barrels—but they gotta befirst-time-usebarrels—for a buncha years, thatwe’d rotate these barrels through different spots in a warehouse, and that when it was done and we sipped it, we’d screw up our faces and say we tasted undercurrents of vanilla and caramel, you’d say I was as batshit as a witch doctor spouting ’bout rhino-horn powder and eye of newt.” He shook his head. “You can take the man outta mythology, but you can’t take the mythology outta man.”
Evan took a light pull from his bottle, the Kauffman going down with more grace and silkiness than seemed possible given the rules of the physical universe. “Tommy, if you’d decided to become an academic,” Evan said, “you’d have been a whole different force to be reckoned with.”
Tommy knocked back another slug of bourbon, snapped his welding goggles into place, and settled into his workbench for the duration. “Son,” he said, “All Souls College wouldn’t contain me.”
52
One of a Kind
For his first act of homecoming, Evan brought Vera III an ice cube, nesting it in her fleshy serrated leaves. Rather than express appreciation, she glared with reprobation from her bowl of rainbow pebbles. She was even more emotionally demanding than Veras past, though all of the aloe plants had been mouthy.
Exiting the Vault, he walked past his floating bed, pausing to pick a fleck of lint from the sheets. Moving through the great room into the kitchen, he set up at the island.
Then sat at one of the stools to wait.
Returning here now was the first time he’d made a move based on emotional logic alone. It occurred to him that it was not unlikely that he’d guessed wrong.
An hour passed and then another, the shadows attenuating on the poured-concrete floor. He’d lifted the discreet armored blinds, the windows of the building opposite throwing back magenta and orange interpretations of the sunset. It was calm and quiet in his penthouse and he could smell mint from the living wall.
He contemplated Luke Devine’s twisty manner of thinking, powerful judgment undergirded by sneaky logic. He wondered if Devine was lying outright or if he’d found a way to outthink his culpability in the deaths of Johnny Seabrook and Angela Buford. He considered willful blindness, shades of responsibility, plausible deniability, degrees of moral separation.
And out of respect for the First Commandment, Evan pried at his own assumptions, searching out weak spots. The facts formed different patterns depending on how he twisted the kaleidoscope.
When it came to Devine, he didn’t yet know enough in order to do what it was he did. And Devine knew that somehow. Which meant he’d have to dig deeper to get at the marrow of the truth.
It grew darker.
Evan felt foolish sitting there doing nothing.
He was about to abandon his plan for the evening when he heard a faint scratch at his front door.
He’d left it unlocked.
It swung open.
And there Joey was.
It was the longest he’d gone without seeing her since her stint at Swiss boarding school. She looked tired but undaunted. Her undercut was more severe, buzzed higher on the right side than usual, thick wavy black-brown hair cascading down to frame her face. A tiny green stone pierced her nostril, picking up the vivid emerald of her wide-set eyes. She wore jeans torn at one knee, scuffed Doc Martens, and a tank top that showed off her toned arms. The red-and-black flannel tied around her waist resembled a woebegone kilt.
She halted in the doorway, pick set in hand, backpack slung over one shoulder, Dog the dog tucked in tight at her side. They stared at Evan. One of them wagged their tail.
“What are you doing here?” Joey said.
Evan said, “Shouldn’t I ask you that?”
That dimple showed up in her right cheek. “Well, you saved me having to pick your shitty lock.”
His front door, with its extensive internal security bars, water core to defeat battering rams, and drill-resistant, pick-resistant,bump-proof dead bolt were hardly shitty. But resistance of most types tended to crumble before the will of Josephine Morales, so Evan figured it unworthwhile to argue the point.
“Go,” she said, releasing Dog. He scrambled forward, paws failing to find sufficient purchase on the slick floor. Evan stood as the hundred-ten-pound lion hunter slammed into him, muzzle buried in his crotch.
Evan absorbed the intimate greeting, scratching the ridgeback behind the ears. Dog kept his head smashed between Evan’s legs, tail thwapping to and fro, ringing against the barstool and nearly toppling it.
Joey had taken a step inside, the door swinging shut behind her. “I only came back ’cuz Devine’s system is tricky and I needed better hardware.”
“Uh-huh.”
Joey hadn’t budged. She fussed with her skull bracelet. “And I just came here ’cuz I set up that sick new water-cooled hashing rig for you in the Vault. It’s got more horsepower than I have at my place.”
