Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Davis wanted to believe it. “Are you positive it was him? The guy who hurt your mom? He is your donor?”

Justin’s head bobbed with a barely perceptible motion, more like a vibration than a nod. “Oh, yeah, shit!” he said. “There’s another thing.” He pushed himself to his feet and lifted his shirt up over his head, turning his back to Davis. Davis stood up too and Justin turned his head, looking down over his shoulder, his shirt twisted around his forearms. “That.”

“What?” Davis leaned back and scouted the white plane of the boy’s backside. “What? The birthmark?” Davis put his hand very near it but never touched the boy’s skin. It was shaped like the top of a teakettle and disappeared under Justin’s belt. “He had this?”

“Exactly like it,” Justin said. “Right in that spot.”

“Jesus Christ,” Davis whispered.

Three rooms away, the back door opened and Joan shouted, “Hi, Dave!”

“Jesus Christ!” he said again. “You need to go now. But we need to keep talking. Saturday?”

“Yeah, I can do Saturday. Where?”

“I don’t know.” He heard Joan’s footsteps leaving the kitchen and pushed Justin toward the front door as the boy struggled to get his shirt back on. Davis took a card out of his wallet. “This is my cell phone. Call it tomorrow. I’ll figure it out.” Justin snatched the card and ducked out the door without saying good-bye.

“Who was that?” Joan had entered the foyer. He couldn’t tell what she’d seen.

“Hmm? A kid selling candles. For a band trip.”

“You ordered one?” Joan asked.

Davis realized he had his wallet in his hand. “Two,” he said. “They’re going to Saint Louis.” Christ, he hadn’t warned Justin, hadn’t told him not to tell anyone, hadn’t told him he might be in danger if this Cash fellow put together the same pieces Justin had. Now that he had run out the door, there was no way of telling him. Not without violating the restraining order or involving a third person.

Joan waved a bottle of shampoo and walked into the living room. She leaned over to shut out the draft coming through the window and picked up the open copy of Time of Death. “I’ve read that,” she said, handing it to Davis without a review. He took another card from his wallet and used it to mark his place before setting it down again.

Just as she was leaving private investigation and starting a new life, Sally, like millions of others, became immersed in Shadow World. The depth of the digital creation was fascinating to her. Every time she discovered a new spot in the game – a restaurant, a thrift store, a car wash – she sought it out on the real streets of Chicago and was always amazed when she found its twin. If she faced disappointment in the real world, she could usually find same-day redemption on her computer. The new duality of her life was both exciting and comforting, and her days were now divided almost equally – nine hours in the world, nine hours in the game, six hours sleeping.

Although they remained physically apart for more than three years, grown-up Justin never stopped visiting Sally in her dreams. The mornings after such meetings she felt invigorated but a little woozy, often unsure of what had been said, what intimacies had been exchanged. That sensation was almost always followed by sadness. Martha had been Sally’s friend, but she found it was Justin she missed most. Not the real, flesh-and-blood boy almost twenty years her junior, but, as Justin/Eric himself once put it, the idea of him. No real man would ever measure up. Now that they were friends again in Shadow World, she could actually get to know Justin, the ideal Justin, separated from his teenaged body.

It was getting so Sally was almost looking forward to a fresh Shadow World murder.

Female secretaries, paralegals, and summer interns at Ginsburg and Addams shared a regular appointment. Law firm politics stratified employees into sections and subsections – those with a law degree and those without, those with testes and those without – and so the workers who fell into both of the without groups, thrown together by sexism and caste, met informally once a week for happy hour at a bar called Martin’s (frequently called Martini’s, in an ongoing, unfunny joke). Once together and half full of gin and vermouth, they explored other things they had in common – the weather, fear of the Wicker Man, vacations, men, and horror stories about a senior associate named Sam Coyne.

Coyne had parallel reputations in a number of categories, all of them bad. He was a cruel boss, an overly competitive softball player, an arrogant negotiator, and a strange, selfish, and violent lover. Stories regarding the last of these were usually told in the gossipy fashion of urban legends, and these stories were repeated often as the staff turned over, month by month. In fact, if the gathering at Martin’s included, on average, a dozen young women, three of them had probably slept with Sam Coyne (or performed an act other than intercourse most people would count as sex, or had started such an act and not completed it because of something he said or did, or had tried to stop but felt compelled to see it through because of alleged physical or psychological coercion on Coyne’s part). In most cases, these women never told their coworkers of their own involvement, but instead passed along embellished accounts of the events with the names of long-gone Ginsburg and Addams employees substituted for their own. Occasionally, one of the women would get drunk enough and fess up to a tryst with Coyne. Such a person would earn head-of-the-table honors at Martin’s and would be pressed for explicit details. At the very least, she’d be expected to comment on the most notorious Sam Coyne rumor of all, that the handsome young attorney who specialized in mergers and acquisitions had a cock like the grip on a tennis racket, and a woman in the know would always confirm this by contorting her mouth into a wide oval and holding her hands apart at an exaggerated length, and a soprano-pitched roar would go up from that corner of the bar and martinis would be ordered by the tray.

Some Sam Coyne stories had sober endings (and even more dubious attribution) and they drew a different reaction. There was Nancy, who had to cover her bruised arms and legs for an entire month; Jenny, who discovered the handcuffs and the crazy leather masks in his closet and also discovered that she was kind of into it; Carrie, who felt degraded kneeling in front of Coyne in a downtown parking garage while he pulled her hair and growled commands down at her like she was in some sort of perverse puppy school; and there were multiple stories of former Ginsburg and Addams employees, usually girls right out of schools in Missouri or Indiana, who’d been briefly imprisoned by Coyne in his car or his apartment and forced to perform on him while being verbally and physically abused. The women with tenure traded legends of raped paralegals paid to shut up and sexually harassed secretaries bullied into silence – “sexual harassment harassment,” they called it. Sam Coyne was handsome like a movie star, smart like a politician, mean like a jungle cat, and hung like a bell tower, and men with that combination, the Friday night cynics at Martin’s agreed, can get away with just about anything.

Sam knew the women talked about him. He heard them whispering sometimes in the break room, or caught the new ones searching his slacks surreptitiously for some topographical evidence of his infamous attribute. It didn’t bother him. He even worked it into his come-on when he found him-self drawn to a new girl, when he saw some darkness in her eyes, some clue in the way she dressed, some unexpected piercing, or the faint arc of a buried tattoo. “What do they say about me?” he’d ask in the late hours of overtime when one of the newbies volunteered to stay late and help him with copying or filing or whatever she could do. “Nothing,” the new girl would say, looking at him with her big eyelids at their apex and her mouth turned down in a determined attempt to appear naive. He’d say, “Half of it isn’t true, you know,” which would make her blush, betraying the fact that, yes, they did talk about him, and much of it was juicy and even shocking, and then he’d say, “Does that disappoint you?” and the girl would say, if she were mature beyond her years, “It depends on which half, ” and that’s when he knew he’d have her in his bed or on his desk or in the copy room or in his car (or on his car), depending on the mood and circumstances and whether or not this one would lose her nerve at the last minute, like too many of them did.