Page 77 of Antihero

“Don’t ask her now. She isn’t ready for anything right now. Except rest.”

“Those pieces of shit are still out there,” Evan said. “Among a city filled with young women.”

“So find them. And kill them. You don’t need a statement from her to do that.”

“I swore to her that I wouldn’t kill them.”

“So find them. And maim them.”

“Okay.”

“Castration isn’t murder.” Candy’s knuckles were bloodless. Still her gaze did not lift. “Just an observation,” she said.

31No, Please

If there was one thing Evan was profoundly not in the mood for, it was the speakeasy-lounge vibe of the place Joey had selected. There were peated shishito peppers and whipped French feta and a thousand kinds of whiskey but nary a proper vodka. The crowded, narrow bowling-alley space hummed with stock tips and pickup lines, rat-a-tatting cocktail shakers, the clatter of designer flatware. Scarlet lighting infused high rows of glass cabinets lining the walls. At the far end of the restaurant before a curtain of red velvet, a Betty Boop singer in a sequined dress swayed on a cramped stage, mouthing baby-girl oohs and aahs with sultry aplomb. She had the demure-sex-bomb look down, round-faced with neotenous big eyes, a flapper coiffure, and a bright cherry garter that flashed alluringly beneath the high-cut hem of her dress.

Sunk in a plush maroon booth with button tufting, Joey looked more adult than made sense, glowing with a fresh confidence likely derived from her promotion. She wore a one-shoulder black dress and dark eyeliner, her hair in an expensive-looking sweep no doubt fashioned by a team of stylists Devine kept stored in one of the pantries. Shimmer makeup at her temple added a lustrous shine to her smooth bronze skin and her lips were painted an uncharacteristically bright shade of ruby.

He didn’t like any of it.

He wondered when he’d become such a fucking prude. He suspected that two hours and eleven minutes of video footage had something to do with it.

He sipped at his martini, an unimaginative but proficient vodka that he’d ordered dry because who the hell wanted aromatized wine sullying five-times-distilled Picardy soft winter wheat and limestone-rich water hauled a hundred and fifty meters up from a Gensac aquifer. Joey slurped at a gin-and-elderflower abomination rife with juniper, mint, blueberry, blackberry, rosemary, and lemon. He took a European view of her underage drinking; the offense was not that she was drinking but that she was drinking something that smelled like hippie bath oil.

In the gutter-wide alley between their booth and a neighboring table, a finance type with a booze-blotched pasty face tried to get jiggy with a hot young thing, his hands waving overhead as she twerked into him. Laughing drunkenly, he threw high fives to his seated associates.

Joey’s voice lasered in at him: “X, you okay?”

The “top shelf” vodka was warm, insufficiently shaken. “Yes.”

Her hand dipped into her clutch purse—when the hell had she acquired a clutch purse?—and slid a handful of flash drives across the table at him. They looked official-issue, each featuring the RedLite logo. “These are locked and loaded with all kinds of malicious shit,” she said. “Buffer overflows, boot-sector viruses, network share infectors. I made sure you have backups. Once one is plugged into a computer logged into the closed network, the worm’ll replicate itself through the system.”

“It’ll wipe any trace of Anca from the servers?”

Joey said, “It’ll do a helluva lot more than that.”

When Evan blinked, a strobe image flashed behind his lids: Goat Skull thrusts and grunts, his bare torso greased with sweat.

“Collateral damage?” Evan asked.

“Vast.”

“Good.”

“I should be able to hit some of their browser histories and bank accounts too, gut their profits, clean the money, donate it to, dunno, places like Children of the Night to help child prostitutes or something.”

Joey adjusted her hair and he tracked the tilt of her shoulders, caught her angling toward a young man with artfully curated stubble elbowed into the bar. She noticed Evan watching her, jerked her hand away from her face. “What?”

Something smoldered in his chest, a burning heap of refuse. He shook his head.

“What’s going on, X? You’ve been all weird since you got here.”

Eight-Pack grabs at Anca, squeezing and mugging for the camera, rocker tongue stuck through the ski-mask hole.

“Why are you dressed up, J?”

“What? Dressed up? We’re, like, out in a restaurant in New York. What do you want me to wear? A gunnysack?”