“You’ve spent too much time listening to Dick and Jim,” Lindsey said, which wasn’t a charge he could exactly deny. “And what happens when Junior”—she set a hand on her still-flat belly—“turns eighteen? Even assuming there’s something like high school here then and he, she, whatever, graduates from it, what about college?”
The University of Hard Knocks trembled on the tip of Rob’s tongue. He gave the serious effort he needed to keep it from falling off. Despite his love for smartass cracks, he came equipped with enough sense to see that that one would land him in deep, deep kimchi. It might be true, but that made it worse, not better.
Instead, he said, “Hey, the University of Maine at Orono is still a going concern, right? That’s not super far away. It’s—what? Sixty or eighty miles? Something like that. It’d be doable.”
He did make Lindsey stop and think. But she shot back, “How will we pay for tuition? Moose meat?”
If there are any moose left when Junior hits college age, great. One more thing Rob didn’t say. What he did say was, “We’ll work something out. Not like we’re the only ones up here worrying about this kind of stuff.”
“Well… maybe.” His wife still didn’t sound convinced. But she also didn’t sound like someone who wanted to pull up stakes and head for warmer country before dinner. To Rob, that felt like a victory, and not such a small one, either.
XI
Vanessa Ferguson had a way of walking around with a chip on her shoulder. To her, there was rarely any such thing as a slight. If something was big enough for her to notice, it was big enough to send her off to war, flags flying and bugles blaring.
Being as she was, she fired the first shot more often than not. And so she had even more trouble than most people might have in getting over the Pearl Harbor that Bronislav Nedic had dropped into her life.
She’d loved him. She’d trusted him. She’d opened the postern gate in the fortress of her self and let him inside. She hadn’t just let him inside—she’d led him inside.
She’d let him inside her body, and she’d let him inside her heart. He’d screwed her and he’d screwed her, respectively. He’d taken what he wanted and he’d bailed out. Vanessa had disposed of a string of boyfriends. Now it was her turn.
It damaged her all kinds of ways. Her bank account, for instance. B of A admitted she hadn’t made the withdrawals that drained her savings. But it said they were her fault; she’d given Bronislav access to her personal information. That she didn’t know she’d done it till too late was no excuse. The bank’s fugheadedness held just enough truth to infuriate her all the more.
And now there he was in Mobile, sitting pretty in the restaurant he’d always talked about. He’d cared more for the restaurant than for her. No doubt he figured he could always find another woman. With those Nicolas Cage-y looks and those big, sad eyes, no doubt he could, too. But a restaurant, now, a restaurant didn’t come along every day.
A restaurant didn’t go away every day, either. Not even her father the famous cop had been able to make the Mobile police get off their sorry, lazy asses and bust Bronislav. He was making money in their town. Such birds were so rare these days, they didn’t want to pluck this one.
Her dad hadn’t passed on Gabe Sanchez’s crack about the package bomb. He hadn’t needed to. Vanessa thought of it on her own. The only thing that held her back was a healthy fear of getting caught.
Messing up Bronislav’s life with computer skullduggery, the way he’d messed up hers, also crossed her mind. But she didn’t know any of his passwords. Even if she had, she lacked the computer fu to do anything with them.
Which didn’t mean she didn’t know people who had such arcane talents. Several of them infested Nick Gorczany’s widget works, starting with the big boss himself. Vanessa disliked him too much even to think of approaching him about it.
Some of the other engineers and programmers, though… She spoke, in a hypothetical way, to Bruce McRaa. No, the HTML whiz couldn’t navigate an English sentence with a gun, a camera, and a road atlas. But put him in front of a monitor and all of a sudden he knew what he was doing.
No matter how hypothetically Vanessa talked at lunch one day, he knew what she had in mind, too. Maybe he wasn’t as naïve as he looked. Well, he couldn’t be, not if he wanted to stay alive. “That’s interesting,” he said when she got done. “Illegal, of course, but interesting.”
“That asshole didn’t care about what was legal when he shafted me,” Vanessa said savagely.
“That was his choice, not mine,” Bruce replied. “He must have thought the reward was worth the risk. What kind of reward would we be talking about here?”
Vanessa remembered a bumper sticker she’d seen on a truck bumper—not Bronislav’s. GAS, GRASS, OR ASS—NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE, that was what it said. She remembered TANSTAAFL, too: the annoying libertarian acronym and mantra. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. She had no idea whether the enchanter Bruce was a libertarian, though a disturbing number of guys who did things with and to computers seemed to be. Whether he was or not, he understood quid pro quo just fine.
“How much do you want?” Vanessa asked. “If you think I’ll pay you as much as he stole, forget about it. I don’t just want revenge. I want to get back what’s mine, if I can.”
“Oh-kay.” Bruce blew a speck—probably dandruff—off his glasses. “Well, there’s money and then there are other things,” he said at last.
She looked at him. That she thought about it, at least for a second, said she wasn’t the person who’d moved to Denver not long before the supervolcano erupted. But she didn’t think about it much longer than a second. She remembered too well how much she’d hated herself and the whole goddamn world every time she blew that stinking FEMA dweeb in exchange for services rendered. If she had a choice between stringing up Micah Husak and Bronislav, she would choose the FEMA dweeb every time. Bronislav stole her money, yeah. Micah had robbed her of her self-respect.
“Let’s just forget about it, then,” she told the enchanter Bruce.
He looked disappointed. What really pissed her off was, he looked surprised. “I thought you wanted this bad,” he said.
“Badly.” The correction came almost without conscious thought, as it would have were she editing him on paper. She went on, “Anything that went on between us, that would be bad.”
“I don’t think so.” Lewd imaginings filled Bruce’s voice.
Vanessa sighed. “Of course you don’t. It’s always good for guys. But letting somebody screw me to get even with somebody for screwing me… That still leaves me screwed, if you know what I mean.”
If it could make a computer or a tablet or a smartphone jump through hoops, Bruce understood it the way Theocritus understood Doric dialect (that Theocritus had used the Doric dialect was one of the useless factoids she remembered from her time with Bryce). If it had to do with human beings and the way they worked, the HTML wizard was a clueless git.
One of the field marks of a clueless git was that he was clueless about being a git. The enchanter Bruce proved he belonged: “You might like me better after you get to know me that way.”
“If you’re the kind of guy who expects to get his dick wet in exchange for doing something for a woman, nobody in her right mind is gonna like you.” Vanessa spelled it out as plainly as she could: plainly enough to make Bruce McRaa turn pink. Even Micah Husak hadn’t been that dumb. In fact, the FEMA dweeb had got off on having her go down on him when she couldn’t stand him.