Rachel Caine: Devil's Due

Omar. She'd forgotten about him. She'd have to call and tell him to take a few days off—or better yet, see if he could trace the fake FedEx. Pity she hadn't opened the red envelope all the way. She dearly wanted to know what they'd had to say. Whoever they happened to be.

McCarthy fished the keys out of the bag in his hand and shook them lightly with a bemused expression.

"What?" she asked.

"Just thinking. Jazz put my car and apartment stuff into storage, but I guess I should pick up the car, at least. Most of these keys don't mean much anymore. Apartment's gone. Office—well, I don't think they were saving my desk in the squad room. Anyway, I think I'll pick up the car, then head for the motel." He still wasn't looking at her. "Unless you want to grab some dinner. You've got to be hungry by now."

"Starving, actually. We could eat, then I could give you a ride to your car." She smiled slowly. "Besides, I'm the only one who's actually armed, I believe. Unless you're hiding a gun somewhere I don't want to know about."

"I don't like to boast about my weapons." He dropped the keys back in the bag and followed her out.

Her car was downstairs, in non-emergency parking. They got in and she drove silently through the moderate nighttime traffic to Vine Street. Odd that she didn't feel a need to talk, and even odder that she didn't feel awkward with his silence. He was thinking, she sensed.

"Where are we eating?" he asked, as she slowed and turned into the parking garage.

"Best pizza in town," she replied. "Delivered. Sorry, but I can't stand being in these scrubs another moment. We can pick up your car after."

He didn't comment, just raised his eyebrows a little. She key-carded into the parking garage and found her spot, then led the way to the elevators. They let them in the lobby, which was vast, cool, and had two security guards on duty.

"Ms. Garza." The first one nodded. "Evening. Should I even ask about…?" He gestured at her clothes.

"Mr. Marsh, I'd rather you didn't," she said. "This is my friend Mr. McCarthy. Ben, they'll need your driver's license. Nothing personal. This is a high-security building."

"How high-security?" McCarthy asked, and handed over his license. Marsh scanned it in and handed it back.

"Can't talk about that," he said, and smiled. He was a huge man, intimidating when the situation called for it, but generally good-natured. Lucia liked him. She especially liked that he never let anybody he didn't know pass without ID. "Let's just say Ms. Garza here isn't the most high-profile resident we've got."

"Jagger and Clapton both keep apartments here," she said. "For when they come to town."

"You're kidding. To Kansas City ?"

"Home of the blues." She shrugged. "You'd be surprised. This place has millionaires, CEOs, a few movie stars. I'm lucky they let a peon like me in the door."

"You're good to go, Mr. McCarthy," Marsh said. "Check in before you leave via intercom. Elevators won't work without a passkey or us releasing one for you."

McCarthy was looking at her as she slid her passkey into the slot in the apartment elevators and pushed the button for the sixth floor. "What?" she asked.

He shook his head. "You must be loaded, living in a place like this."

"Let's say I have resources." Not that she was particularly proud of how she'd come by them. The elevator rode smoothly up to six and dinged arrival, releasing them into a corridor with gleaming white walls, original artwork at regular intervals and deep plush carpeting.

"Jagger live next door?"

"He has his own floor," she said, and led Ben to the second door on the right. Two key locks. Once she'd ushered him in, she flipped on the lights and went to the control panel to shut off the intrusion alarms. The blinking lights went from red to a steady, soothing green.

"Damn," McCarthy was murmuring. "So I guess breakfast at Raphael's was just par for the course for you."

She glanced around, seeing it through his eyes. A sleek, modern kitchen in black and golden woods; a panoramic view past the dining table. A balcony out past the living room, overlooking the city. It was comfortable and classic, and it had virtually nothing of her personality in it.

"Looks like a really nice hotel," he said. "This how you live?"

"Pretty much," she said, and went to pick up the phone. She called the pizza place and ordered two large pies. McCarthy, it seemed, was a meat-lover. She wasn't much surprised. Hers remained, of course, vegetarian.

"Make yourself at home," she said, and picked up the TV remote from the low coffee table. She tossed it to him, and he fielded it without hesitation. "You said you missed TV. Have at it."

She walked past him and grabbed clothes from the closet before making her way to the bathroom to change. She heard the TV start up as she was pulling on a black knit top. Baseball, it sounded like. Men, she thought, and smiled. Her hair needed brushing. She took care of it and thought about applying makeup, but it seemed ridiculous at this point. She looked tired, but she'd come by it honestly, and no amount of concealer was going to help.

You realize, she told her reflection, that you're thinking about makeup and appearances when you're about to eat pizza. With an employee, no less.

Unsettling. She shook her head, tossed her sleek black hair back over her shoulders and went out into the apartment.

McCarthy was on the couch, feet up, watching—yes, she'd been right—baseball.

"Beer?" she asked. He turned to look at her, and kept looking. "I assume beer and baseball still go together."

"Sorry," he said, and muted the sound on the TV. "It's been awhile."

Whether he meant baseball or something else was open to interpretation. He stood up and joined her in the kitchen as she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold bottle. Imported beer, the only kind she willingly drank. She popped the cap with an opener and handed it to him, opened a soft drink for herself, then clinked their bottles together. "To surviving another day," she said.

"Amen."

They tipped bottles and drank. McCarthy was still watching her, but his eyes closed when the taste of the beer hit his tongue. Sheer ecstasy, from the look on his face.

"Wow," he said, when he put the bottle down on the counter. "It really has been awhile. And obviously, you know beer."

"I try." She took down two plates. "You want to tell me anything?"

"Like?"

"Like your theory on why the evidence exonerating you showed up so conveniently when it did?"

He took another sip of beer. Stalling for time.

"Didn't seem very convenient to me," he said. "Considering I'd already had the crap beaten out of me."

"Maybe they decided you'd suffered enough."

"Let's just say that little things like compassion don't enter into the equation for the Cross Society. And I mean that literally, by the way."

She slid onto a bar stool and sipped from her bottle. She hadn't offered a glass; he hadn't seemed to mind. "I don't think I understand."

"What Simms does—you understand about him, right? That he's looking at alternate realities, not just telling the future?"

"Excuse me?"

McCarthy shook his head.

"Oh boy. You'll need a lot of beer, somebody smarter than me and some kind of consulting physicist." He shrugged. "Okay. There's this thing called string theory. Don't ask me how it works—I'm just a cop, okay? But the idea is that there are a whole bunch of realities all layered up against each other. Every decision everybody makes, there's a slightly different chain of events, right? Take six billion people times about a billion decisions—good, bad or indifferent—and you get how many potential realities we're dealing with here. The thing is, most of these decisions end up being meaningless, in the great scheme of things. They cancel each other out, and such. So instead of sixty fazillion realities, you get some manageable number, like a couple of million that simultaneously exist in the here and now."