before gravity finished him.
Candy cleared his throat, wincing in pain, and spat toward the dead man
below.
He tasted blood. This time it was his own.
Turning away from the window, he surveyed the office, wondering where he
would find the answers he sought. If he could locate Bobby and Julie
Dakota, they might be able to explain Thomas’s telepathy and more
important, they might be able to deliver Frank into his hands.
AFTER TWICE responding to an alarm from the radar did and avoiding two
speed traps in the west valley, Julie cranked the Toyota back up to
eighty-five, and they dusted L.A.
off their heels.
A few raindrops spattered the windshield, but the spring rain did not
last. She switched the wipers off moments after turning them on.
“Santa Barbara in maybe an hour,” she said,
“as long cop with a sense of duty doesn’t come along.” The back of her
neck ached, and she was deeply weary, she didn’t want to trade places
with Bobby; she didn’t have the patience to be a passenger tonight. Her
eyes were sore not heavy; she could not possibly have slept. The events
of the day had murdered sleep, and alertness was assured by thinking
about what might lie ahead, not just on the highway behind them but in
El Encanto Heights.
Ever since he’d been awakened by what he called the “wordburst,” Bobby
had been moody. She could tell he was worried about something, but he
didn’t seem to want to talk about it yet.
After a while, in an obvious attempt to take his mind off wordburst and
whatever gloomy ruminations it had inspired he tried to strike up a
conversation about something different. He lowered the volume on the
stereo, thereby trating the intended effect of Glenn Miller’s “American
trol,” and said, “You ever stop to think, four out of our eleven
employees are Asian-Americans?” She didn’t glance away from the road.
“So?”
“So why is that, do you think?”
“Because we hire only first-rate people, and it so happens that four of
the first-rate people who wanted to work for us were Chinese, Japanese,
and Vietnamese.”
“That’s part of it.”
“Just part?” she said. “So what’s the other part? You think maybe the
wicked FuManchu turned a mind-control ray us from his secret fortress in
the Tibetan mountains and made us hire ”em?”
“That’s part of it too,” he said. “But another part of it is I’m
attracted to the Asian personality. Or to what people think of when
they think of the Asian personality: intelligence, a high degree of
self-discipline, neatness, a strong sense of tradition and order.”
“Those are pretty much traits of everyone who works for us, not just
Jamie, Nguyen, Hal, and Lee.
“I know. But what makes me so comfortable with Asian Americans is that
I buy into the stereotype of them, I feel everything will go along in an
orderly, stable fashion when I’m working with them, and I need to buy
into the stereotype because… well, I’m not the kind of guy I’ve
always thought I was. You ready to hear something shocking?”
“Always,” Julie said.
OFTEN, WHEN Lee Chen was laboring in the computer room, he popped a CD
in his Sony Discman and listened to music through earphones. He always
kept the door closed to avoid distraction, and no doubt some of his
fellow employees thought he was somewhat antisocial; however, when he
was engaged in the penetration of a complex and well-protected data
network, like the array of police systems he was still plundering, he
needed to concentrate. Occasionally music distracted him as much as
anything, depending on his mood, but most of the time it was conducive
to his work. The minimalist New Age piano solos of George Winston were
sometimes just the thing, but more often he needed rock-‘n’-roll.
Tonight it was Huey Lewis and The News: “Hip to Be Square” and “The
Power of Love,”
“The Heart of Rock & Roll” and “You Crack Me Up.” Focused intently on
the terminal screen (his window on the mesmerizing world of cyberspace),
with
“Bad Is Bad” pouring into his ears through the headset, he might not