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“It would be terrible,” Evan said. “And then we’d deal with it.”
Next stop was Joey’s temporarily vacated apartment. She’d texted Evan to swing by because she needed a physical reboot on one of her servers; a memory leak in the video-recording software she’d written had left the system hanging when she tried to access it remotely.
To ensure that she’d be safe living alone here as a sixteen-year-old, he’d bought the building through a tangle of shell corps andhad overhauled the security measures. Joey being Joey, she’d figured it out quickly and deemed him overprotective and paranoid. He’d informed her that those were his finest traits.
Approaching the building, he admired the stainless-steel digital call box at the front door. Before he could tap in the code, a college guy with an overburdened backpack hustled in front of him and used his key.
“Man,” the guy remarked. “It’s hot as balls today.”
He swung inside, held the door for Evan.
“Don’t let me in,” Evan said. “You don’t know who I am.”
“Dude, come on,” the guy said. “You don’t look like a problem.”
“What if that’s the point?” Evan said.
Standing in the foyer, the guy stared back at him, suddenly sweating a bit more profusely. “Um,” he said.
Not breaking eye contact, Evan swung the door closed between them. The guy watched him through the glass, frozen. Evan punched in the code, opened the door himself, and brushed past the guy on his way to the stairs.
Joey’s place smelled like her, vanilla lotion, Red Vines, and Dr Pepper. Her massive hardware station, a circular desk with mounted monitors stacked three high, was at rest. Dog the dog’s fancy pillowtop disk of a bed was in the corner, the skull-and-crossbones water bowl empty. Joey’s collection of speedcubes, all tidily solved, rested on the windowsill, and the air was unvented.
He opened a window.
Circling through the pie-slice opening in her desk, he nudged her mouse with his knuckles.
The monitors hummed to life. For a second, standing in the relative silence, he thought he heard the clatter of Joey working a speedcube.
He sat in her gaming chair, which cocked back so severely it nearly dumped him onto the floor. Righting the ship, he clicked the KVM switch like she told him to, performed the reboot, then sat a moment watching the screens repopulate.
His eye snagged on one of them, and his breath caught.
Details of his biological father, the man he’d never known. Jacob Baridon, an honest-to-God rodeo cowboy, as clichéd and ridiculousas that was. Against Evan’s wishes Joey had been tracking him down. The open file showed that she’d unearthed a debit card from a checking account that had been closed three months ago. A scattering of gas-station charges grouped around the town of Blessing, Texas, and a few more line items for Mixed Blessing, a local bar.
Before he could dig deeper, the screens wiped, replaced with images of Joey on every monitor. They all looked angry. “Why are you snooping around?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
She was on the bed in a hotel room with a scattering of room-service dishes and Dog the dog stretched inelegantly across the bed beside her. His head hung upside down off the edge of the mattress, mouth stretched in a smile, tongue lolling.
The multitude of Joeys said, “I told you to reboot my server, not look at all my files.”
“Why are you searching the man who … my biological …?”
“Foryou, X. I mean, he’s out there. How can you not want to at leastseehim? Just so you can put it to rest? He’s yourfather.”
“I didn’t have a father,” Evan said. “Jack. Jack was my father.”
“I mean, ifIhad a chance to talk to my—”
“You’re out there looking for answers right now. I’m not.”
She exhaled and leaned back from the screen. Dog tried to haul himself all the way up onto the bed, but the sheets avalanched beneath him. He landed with a thump on the carpet, lifted his head sheepishly, then lost himself in an Olympic bout of crotch licking.
“Fine.” Joey fiddled with a woven metal-fiber bracelet he’d given her, its magnetic clasp formed by stainless-steel skulls that clinked together. “I only got as far as a town he was in a few months ago.”
“Drop it.”
