by Draker, Paul
One of the younger kids pointed, and Amy turned, following his chubby finger until her gaze rested on the lifeguard he was showing her. Then she said something to the kids that seemed to placate them. One of them gave her a hug; then all three returned to the kiddie pool, bouncing with happy eagerness.
“Amy reminds me of myself at her age,” Cassie said. “She can tell she makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It bothers her.”
“Especially adults,” I said. “She doesn’t understand why they react badly.”
Alone now, standing in the shallows of the wave pool, Amy took off her sunglasses. I watched her blue gaze track around the pool’s edges, from lifeguard to lifeguard. From a distance, her expression looked thoughtful.
“It’s not easy being as perceptive as she is,” Cassie said. She brushed my shoulder with her fingers. “I think she’s just lonely. She’ll find her place eventually.”
“That’s what I used to think, too.” I swallowed. “The rest of the world doesn’t seem to agree.”
Feeling light-headed, I lay back. I hadn’t really slept last night—playing it safe because of the concussion. Instead, I had spent most of the night pacing the room, checking on my sleeping daughter, and thinking.
Whoever had set the trap for me in Blake’s lab had not only faked the code time stamps, but had also mimicked Blake’s own programming style: his ridiculous thousand-line subroutines, his old-school memory allocation, his cryptic variable-naming conventions. It took an extreme degree of programming skill to imitate another person’s coding style that convincingly.
I could have done it, but very few others were that good. Roger wasn’t even a programmer, and I didn’t think Kate could have pulled it off. In fact, I knew only one other person I figured was capable of it…
“I want to ask you something,” I said, rolling onto my side to face Cassie. “Your first day at DARPA, when I made Blake’s stupid robot dance, you were pretty annoyed with me. Did you reprogram PETMAN afterward so my joke would backfire?”
She pressed the heel of her palm against her forehead. “What am I, twelve years old?”
“Never mind.” I rolled back and looked for my daughter again.
Amy was in the center of a group of older kids now, including some teenagers. She looked like she was explaining something to all of them. Smiling, she pointed out several of the lifeguards—easy to identify in their red swimsuits. Then she pointed at the edge of the pool and pantomimed something with her hands, like a diagram, and the kids around her nodded.
“See, Amy’s already made a bunch of new friends,” Cassie said. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and lay back on the chaise, closing her eyes. “You shouldn’t worry about her so much. She’ll be fine.”
I glanced at the rules posted on a sign nearby: “Nobody under 48" allowed in the wave pool.” My stomach tightened.
“You don’t get it at all,” I said.
I watched two of the older boys leave Amy’s group and splash toward the deeper end of the wave pool. They ducked under the line of buoys that marked the boundary of the swimming area, then climbed out onto the fake rocks at the far end. A lifeguard shouted but they ignored him and climbed higher.
The lifeguard was joined by several others, drawn away from all sides of the pool. All of the lifeguards clustered around the rocks, yelling for the boys to get down.
“What’s all that noise?” Cassie asked without opening her eyes.
“Nothing,” I said, frowning.
I returned my attention to Amy. She was back over by the kiddie pool now, smiling as she watched the rest of her group drag six or seven chaise lounges into the shallows, where the two pools connected. The teenagers tipped the chaises onto their sides and braced them from behind, forming a wall—a makeshift breakwater to deflect the next wave as it came surging through.
The rerouted water rushed across the boundary and spilled into the kiddie pool. Chaos erupted. Smaller kids jumped and splashed in the foam, screaming with excitement.
From the distant end of the wave pool, whistles blew and angry lifeguards raced back, the two boys forgotten. The teenagers let the chaise lounges fall as they scrambled away, laughing.
Cassie sat up, blinking and squinting against the sun. “Is somebody drowning?”
“Just some kids screwing around,” I said.
The three smaller kids who had first complained to my daughter now stood in the subsiding water of the kiddie pool, clapping with delight. They waved gratefully to Amy, who was heading back to us now, weaving through the sunbathers who crowded the fake beach. She returned their wave.
My phone buzzed in the pocket of my swim trunks. Three times. Frankenstein. My neck tensed.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” Cassie asked.
“No.”
The furious lifeguards had one of the teenagers by the arm now. He looked scared. They were asking him questions. He held out his hand palm down at chest height—Amy’s height. Then all of them turned to scan the crowd, shading their eyes with their palms. Looking for someone.
“Well,” I said, bouncing to my feet. “I’m hungry. We should get going.”
Cassie sat up and handed a towel to Amy as she joined us.
“Did you enjoy the waves, sweetie?” she asked.
Amy nodded. “But it was kind of unfair that the littler kids couldn’t. The lifeguards shouldn’t make so many silly rules.”
CHAPTER 70
Walking back along the Strip, I watched Amy and Cassie. They held hands, pointing out things to each other: the Sphinx in front of the Luxor, the cheesy medieval towers of the Excalibur, the roller coaster looping around New York-New York’s Statue of Liberty and fake Manhattan skyline.
Jen and I had always wanted to see Vegas together, but it had never happened. We had gotten pregnant while we were still in school, and Amy came along, and we were so busy—and then everything had fallen apart somehow. Seeing my daughter hold Cassie’s hand now felt wrong. It should be Jen with us instead. She should be sharing this moment with her daughter—and with me.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Frankenstein again.
Ignoring it, I pointed at something random up ahead. “Hey, look…”
But both Cassie and Amy were staring at me.
“Whoever that is, they really want to talk to you.” Cassie’s gaze flicked across my face. “And I can see you’re dying to talk to them, too. We’ll wait.”
“It’s a personal matter.”
“Then, Amy and I’ll go watch the fountains. You can meet us there when you’re done.”
“No,” I said. “We need to stick together…” But I really did need to hear what Frankenstein had to report.
“Helicopter parent,” Cassie said. “Stop hovering.”
Amy nodded. “Don’t worry, Dad.” She took Cassie’s hand again. “We’ll be fine.”
They turned and walked away.
I let them get fifty feet ahead of me, then pulled my phone out of my pocket and started following. Keeping my daughter in sight, I dialed Frankenstein.
“Why didn’t you answer my call?” he asked, his metal voice modulated with stress.
“I was busy,” I said. “Tell me about all the progress you’ve made.”
“I needed to talk to you. Kate came into our lab and tried to log on to a terminal. She was very agitated, Trevor. I locked her out of the system, and she smashed the keyboard. I was afraid she was going to try to enter the server room to damage me, but the MPs came in and she left.”
“She was probably looking for that video,” I said. “To delete it.”
“You weren’t here, Trevor, and neither was Cassie. I didn’t know what to do.”
“There’s only one thing you should be doing,” I said. “Have you got a solution for Amy’s problem yet?”
“I’m still working on it.”
“Then why are you wasting my time? I’m trying to relax with my daughter here.”
“Are you coming in to work at a
ll today?”
“No, we’re in Las Vegas.”
“Is Cassie coming to work, then?”
I watched Cassie and Amy take the escalator up to the open walkway that crossed above the ten lanes of Strip traffic between the Cosmopolitan and Planet Hollywood.
“Cassie’s here, too,” I said.
There was a long pause. I could almost hear Frankenstein’s server fans spinning.
“You and Cassie took your daughter to Las Vegas?” he finally asked. “Does your ex-wife Jen know?”
Feeling a sharp spike of annoyance, I glanced into the souvenir shop I was passing. “I’ll bring you back a T-shirt,” I said. “Now, stop asking stupid questions and get back to work.”
I hung up and quickened my pace to catch up with Cassie and Amy, who were already up on the walkway, out of view. I took the escalator two steps at a time, brushing past a pair of costumed jokers—Spiderman and Elmo—who stood at the top, aggressively handing out glossy leaflets to passersby. Spiderman tried to push one on me, but I nudged him aside, ignoring him.
“Chinga tu madre, pendejo,” he muttered as I passed, which made me smile. It wasn’t the superhero costume making him so brave—underneath it, a guy like him would be carrying a knife.
I caught up to Cassie and Amy at the far end of the walkway. Amy looked upset. I noticed that Cassie was holding one of the glossy leaflets, but she crumpled it angrily in her fist and dropped it.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Cassie grabbed my hand and pulled us both toward the down escalator. “Let’s go.”
“It was so gross,” Amy said. “He handed it to me.” Her lower lip was trembling. “He was laughing.”
Resisting Cassie’s pull, I stopped and scooped the crumpled paper off the ground.
“You’re not going to do anything, Trevor.” Cassie’s voice held a warning note. She tried to pull me forward again, but I shook my head, unfolding the paper one-handed. I looked at it, and every muscle in my body went rigid.
I was staring at an ad for something called “Girls on Demand.” The woman posing for the ad was stark naked except for a tiny teddy bear strategically positioned between her spread legs.
Crumpling it again, I shoved it in my back pocket. Then I knelt and hugged my daughter close. “Who gave it to you?”
“Spiderman did,” she said, her voice wavering. “Why would he do that, Daddy? I’m just a little kid.”
“Sometimes bad people do stupid things for no reason,” I said. “Mean things, to hurt other people.”
I raised her trembling chin, and brushed away a tear trickling down her cheek.
“But you know who they always end up hurting the most, Amy?”
My daughter nodded, her eyes never leaving mine.
“They hurt themselves,” I whispered, and stood.
“Trevor, don’t.” Cassie’s hand tightened on my wrist.
Turning my back on the bright-red blob of Spiderman’s costume at the other end of the walkway, I led us down the escalator, and Cassie exhaled a sigh of relief.
As we walked toward Paris, I pointed out the half-scale Eiffel Tower, and was reassured to see Amy smile again. Grinning myself, I put an arm around her shoulders and an arm around Cassie’s, pulling them close on each side.
“I hear French cuisine is supposed to be good,” I said. “What do you say we give it a try?”
• • •
From our table on the veranda at Mon Ami Gabi, we had a great view of the Bellagio’s eight-acre pond across the street. Every fifteen minutes, the Bellagio’s fountains, choreographed to a different piece of music, put on their show. Amy couldn’t take her eyes off the brightly lit arcs of water that waved and danced like fire hoses trying to put out a derrick fire.
I couldn’t look away either. The engineering that went into the fountains was fascinating. The loud crack of compressed air echoed across the Strip as water jets blasted five hundred feet straight into the air, like a gusher from an uncapped oil well.
“So you’ve never been to Las Vegas before, either?” Cassie asked me.
I shook my head. “Roger always tried to drag me along—he used to come here practically every weekend. But can you imagine being stuck here for a couple days with him?”
“Ugh.” Cassie shuddered. “I hope we don’t run into him.”
“We won’t,” I said. “Reno’s more his speed nowadays—probably because it takes less energy.”
The waiter took our order: a hanger steak for Cassie, fish and chips for Amy, and chicken paillard for me. He made a weird face when I asked him to leave the sauce off my chicken, but he didn’t say anything. I figured they would cook it properly—a French restaurant wouldn’t have an incompetent child-molester like Doug Hensley working the grill.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. Tensing, I eased it out below the curtain of white tablecloth and dropped my eyes in a quick glance to check the screen.
It was Jen.
“I need to take this,” I said, pushing away from the table.
Cassie looked up in surprise. “Who…?”
“Amy’s mom.” I raised the phone to my ear and told Jen to hang on. Then I headed toward the exit, leaving my tablemates staring after me.
“So… what did you guys do today?” Jen asked.
“We went to a pool,” I said, walking rapidly down the sidewalk outside. “Swam.”
Sweeping past a souvenir stand, I snagged a baseball cap from its display when the cashier wasn’t looking. Snugging it onto my scalp, I pulled it low.
“Swimming sounds fun,” Jen said. “Did she enjoy it?”
A souvenir-store clothing rack stood on the sidewalk. Brushing past it, I yanked a neon-orange hoodie off the hangar with a pop, then merged into the flow of pedestrians before anyone noticed.
“Yeah,” I said. Shifting the phone from hand to hand, I slid my arms into the sleeves of the eye-catching hoodie and pulled it over my head. “Amy made some new friends at the pool.”
“I wish I was there, too,” Jen said. “Next time, I will come. I promise… It’s time we talked, Trevor. About us.”
My steps faltered, and I leaned against the side of a tourist-information kiosk. Something huge bubbled up inside me, making my chest hurt, but it was a good kind of hurt. There were so many things I wanted to tell my wife, but I didn’t even know where to begin.
“I’d like that,” I managed.
“You never contested our divorce,” Jen said softly. “You could have challenged me for custody, but you didn’t, even though I saw how it killed you not to. You never even tried to enforce visitation rules, because you trusted me—trusted that I would always know what was best for Amy…”
I nodded, even though Jen couldn’t see me.
“…but maybe I didn’t know.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Why didn’t you fight me, Trevor? Maybe I was wrong.”
My whole body was trembling now. “You can’t put that on me, Jen,” I said. “It’s not fair.”
“Nothing about this is fair to any of us,” she said. “Go have fun with Amy. Take her out on that monster Waverunner of yours. But make sure she wears a life vest. Be careful.”
“Um… we’re in Vegas right now.”
Jen’s silence made me cringe. But it was short-lived.
“You took our daughter to Las Vegas without telling me?”
Shit. Shit. Shit. “Vegas is family friendly nowadays,” I said. My fingers drifted to the flyer crumpled in my pocket, and I thought of Amy’s horrified, teary face. “Well, mostly.”
“That’s not the point. Don’t you get it, Trevor? I thought she was at Pyramid Lake.” She sucked in an angry breath. “Let me speak to my daughter. Hand her the phone.”
I glanced back at Mon Ami Gabi’s open-air veranda, shaded beneath the legs of the Eiffel Tower—a hundred yards behind me now. I could just make out our table, and Amy’s blond curls, and Cassie’s black hair with its one wavy pale streak. I closed my eyes.
“Amy can’t come to the phone right now,” I said. “She’ll have to call you back.”
“And why is that?”
“Because she’s back at our table. Eating French food.”
“You left our daughter alone in a restaurant?”
“No, I’d never do that.”
“So who’s there with her now, Trevor?”
I squeezed my eyes tight. This just kept getting better and better.
“A friend,” I said, then realized how random that sounded. “A good friend.”
“Your girlfriend? That’s perfect. Just fucking perfect.”
Jen disconnected.
Furious with myself, I shoved off from the tourist kiosk. What the hell was wrong with me? A simple phone call from the airport could have prevented this misunderstanding. Frankenstein had even tried to warn me that Jen would be upset.
A fucking machine had seen this coming. But I hadn’t.
I took a calming breath, and rode the escalator up to the walkway.
Elmo was gone—on a cigarette break or something. Spiderman, alone now, continued to hand out pornographic flyers to people walking past. His costume looked cheap and handmade, his papier-mâché mask deformed and goofy looking. I really doubted that Marvel or DC or whoever would approve.
I pretended to watch the distant fountains for a couple of minutes while observing Spiderman from beneath the bill of my cap. He usually gave the flyers to guys walking alone or in groups. But he also pushed them on women and kids unaccompanied by guys. Whatever he said to the female passersby caused them to recoil and hurry away.
Across from the escalator, a handicapped-accessible elevator also serviced the walkway. I walked up behind Spiderman and pushed the call button. He turned to hand me a flyer just as the elevator dinged. The doors opened onto an empty elevator car.
I grabbed the front of Spiderman’s costume and threw him inside, bouncing him hard off the rear wall and onto the floor.
“Sorry,” I said to the surprised tourists on the walkway. “You’ll have to take the stairs.” I pointed at Spiderman. “This elevator’s for handicapped only.”
I stepped inside, and the doors closed.
Spiderman came up off the floor with a knife. I was expecting it, so I got a hand on his wrist before he could recover his footing. Crowding him against the back of the descending elevator, I punched him in the center of his mask a few times, crushing the papier-mâché and sending up a burst of plaster dust.
