The Mall of Cthulhu (2 page)

"I try to avoid the subject of Fleetwood Mac at all costs."

Did her eyes just sparkle? And did it just get brighter in here, or was that just her smile? "I'd love to do the same, but my parents guaranteed me a lifetime of Fleetwood Mac jokes."

"I guess it could be worse. They could have called you 'Landslide' or 'You Make Loving Fun.' Dumbass! He just made a Fleetwood Mac joke!

Rhiannon was still smiling. She took a sip of her latte and still didn't move away from the counter. "That was actually a Fleetwood Mac joke. But I forgive you, because you have made what I think is the best latte I've ever had."

She
did
appreciate the platonic latte! And she still wasn't running off! "Hey," he said, "I don't know if you are . . . "

Jean-Marie interrupted him. "TED! I said medium half-caf, half-soy mochachino!"

Half-soy? Who the hell wanted half-soy? Make up your mind!

"Hey, can I get my drink sometime this week?" Ted looked at the half-soy mochachino drinker. He was indistinguishable from any of the other guys in suits who came in here—white guy, medium height, medium build, look of barely suppressed rage like he'd probably once played a contact sport and now had become a lawyer so he'd have a socially acceptable place to put his aggression.

Rhiannon was now fading back from the counter. "I'll be back tomorrow," she said, and she smiled and disappeared.

Ted smiled at this little miracle. Funky, beautiful women just didn't come in to this Queequeg's unless they were on their way to their arraignment or something, and, given the fact that she'd said she'd be back tomorrow, it seemed a safe bet that Rhiannon wasn't on trial for anything. The half-soy guy was tapping his fingers on the counter, so Ted began the process of assembling the half-caf, half-soy mochachino. Half-soy. Jesus Christ. He wondered if it was even worth trying to assemble perfect proportions for this particular drink, since nobody else was ever going to order it. Dutifully he steamed the milk-soy mixture, and the guy was practically hanging over the counter, on which he was resting his big leather man-purse. "I really have an important meeting," the guy said.

"Yes sir. I am steaming with all due speed," Ted said.

"Don't be a smartass, okay, just make the fucking drink," the guy said. Ted simply wasn't feeling macho enough to counter this with anything at all, so he poured the drink and called out, loudly, "Half-caf, half-soy mochachino! And may I suggest foregoing caffeine entirely next time!"

There were snickers from the other patrons, and the guy grabbed his drink, slung his man-purse over his shoulder, and stormed out. As he swung the man-purse off the counter, a CD case fell out of it and clattered to the floor at Ted's feet. There was no way he was calling after the guy for that, and he seriously considered just crunching it under his foot, but then Jean-Marie was calling more orders.

He made five more drinks, and he kept kicking the CD case as he shuttled from fridge to steamer, so when there was a temporary lull, he reached down and picked up the CD. He considered throwing it away, but then, without really knowing why, he tucked it into the pocket of his ocean-blue apron instead.

Laura looked up from the ATM receipts to the grainy video on her computer screen. Was that Whitey? Some old guy in a baseball cap and sunglasses withdrawing four hundred dollars in Boca Raton. Well, he might well be a fugitive gangster. Or else he was just an old guy with bad fashion sense in Florida.

She rubbed her eyes and stood up. She looked over the tops of white cubicles bathed in cold fluorescent light, over the identical heads of all her co-workers, to the one sliver of window visible from her cubicle. She could see that it was a sunny day outside, and for a brief moment, she thought she should just feign illness, go get on her bike and enjoy the sunshine, maybe in the Arboretum. Or maybe she should just quit, just say the hell with it, and see if Ted could get her a barista job where at least she would never have to think about old people at Florida ATMs again.

Suddenly, McManus' doughy, florid face was peering over the top of her cubicle. "Find something, Harker?"

Startled, Laura said, "Uh, no sir. I mean, well, more of the same."

"Well, Harker, I don't know what kind of song and dance the recruiters at your top-five law school gave you, but the real business of law enforcement is often boring as shit."

"Yes sir."

"There's no shortcut, you know. They caught Capone by combing through his books. You think that was fun?"

Laura wanted to tell him that she'd seen that movie, that she didn't need any lectures about Eliot Freaking Ness, and that this office would have caught Whitey ages ago if people inside the office hadn't tipped him off. Instead she said, "I'm sure it wasn't, sir."

"Goddamn right it wasn't. There are no shortcuts in this work. Even if you're brilliant and female and get out of paying the dues other people have to pay."

What, exactly, was she supposed to say to that? She figured McManus was trying to bait her, and, unable to think of a safe response, she said nothing.

"Well. Back to work, then."

"Yes sir." She watched as McManus walked away, then carefully pressed her hand against the slate-blue carpeting on the cubicle wall and flipped him the bird.

Sighing, Laura sat back down and looked at the clock at the bottom of the screen. Shit! It was already ten, and she still had so much more work to do. There was no way she was going to make it to Queequeg's to see Ted this morning. On the other hand, she could really use the caffeine if she was going to be staring at grainy video for eight more hours. Maybe she could get Ted to deliver.

As she dialed Ted's cell phone, Laura realized this was at least partly a passive-aggressive move. Maybe he wouldn't show up. Then she could just drink bad coffee from the lounge and she wouldn't have to see him. She felt guilty—as much as Ted needed her, which was very much indeed, and as tiresome as this got, she had certainly needed him when she had been captured by Camilla's hypnotic gaze, when she'd been powerless in the face of evil. She owed Ted not only her life, but very likely her soul as well, because if it weren't for him, she would have signed right on for the bloodsucking, and the day sleeping, and instead of being a cog in the machinery of law enforcement, she'd be an abomination, enduring the soulless eternity of the undead.

Except, sitting here in a cubicle with slate-blue fabric walls under flickering fluorescent lights, it was very hard to believe in the undead. It just seemed impossible that a world as mundane as the one she inhabited also contained unholy murderous creatures of the night. Still, there were living humans every bit as evil as the undead, horrible sociopaths who terrorized and tortured and killed people. She'd joined the FBI in hopes of chasing them down, of being a strong woman who didn't need some skinny male nerd to rescue her, of being a woman who helped make the world safe for the living.

Instead, she was looking for an old man in Florida—a pointless search for hay in a haystack—and she just didn't feel like dealing with Ted's babbling, with his neediness, with the pathetic wreck of his life that only reminded her that while she had a better paying job and some career prospects, she hadn't managed to get close to anybody else in the last ten years either. Well, how can you get close to anyone when you can't tell them about the central event of your life? How do you create a self that doesn't include the very event that made you who you are?

Ted answered his phone. "Hey there, Clarise Starling! What's up?"

"Confidential drudgery. Listen, I'm up to my neck in incredibly boring data that needs sifting through here. Any chance I could get a delivery?"

"Sure. I'm happy to get a break. The usual?"

"Ugh. You'd better give me an extra shot of espresso today. I'm gonna be here a long time, and this stuff is just so far from interesting that I'm going to need a lot of caffeine to get through it all."

"Can do."

Laura saved her work, walked through the cubicle maze hoping to avoid the eyes of McManus, her supervisor who insisted that it was suddenly urgent to pore through a year's worth of Florida ATM crap looking for Whitey, though he'd been missing for years.

At the end of the hall, Laura swiped her ID to unlock the door. Inside the elevator, she swiped her ID to get downstairs. In the lobby, she waved at Hassan the security guard, and then headed outside to wait for Ted with her coffee.

Only a few minutes later, Ted arrived with an extra-large Queequeg's cup in hand. God bless him.

"Oh, thank you so much. I really don't think I could complete my workday without this. You really have no idea how boring law enforcement is."

"Well, I know that
you
did not have a flirtatious conversation with a very hot young woman named after a Fleetwood Mac song this morning."

"Shows what you know. I stopped by Big Love's desk just this morning."

"Special agent Big Love?"

"Yeah, she sits next to Gypsy."

"Isn't that a Stevie Nicks solo song?"

"I'm pretty sure it's Fleetwood Mac."

"Who cares? Anyway, I think something's gonna happen. She lingered around the counter and gave me this heavy-lidded smile and told me she'd be back tomorrow."

"She did not give you a heavy-lidded smile. That's an exclusively post-orgasmic look."

"Well, I do make a hell of a latte." Poor poor Ted. Maybe Go Your Own Way really was flirting with him, and he'd get laid, and then he'd fall in love, and then he'd have to explain, because Ted always had to explain, he couldn't come up with a cover story, he'd come to the point where he either didn't trust her enough to tell her about the vampires, or else he did trust her enough and he'd tell her about the vampires and she would think he was nuts and he'd be devastated.

This, of course, was wildly different from what happened in Laura's relationships. Because she wasn't crazy enough to think that anybody would ever believe the part about the vampires, so there was always an important part of herself she wouldn't share, and eventually there'd be a fight, often with screaming and tears, you're so distant, you don't trust me, this isn't a real relationship, and Laura would say this is how I am, take me or leave me, and thus far, everyone had taken the latter option.

She returned to the present, and the matter of Ted's supposedly orgasm-inducing espresso drinks. "Well, I'm drinking one of your lattes right now, and I have to say I'm not even close."

"Yeah, well, you don't play for my team."

"So your lattes are so good they induce orgasm, but only in straight women. What about gay men?"

"I don't know. Okay, okay, it wasn't the latte. Maybe it was just looking into my sensitive, tormented eyes."

"Anything's possible, I guess. Anyway, thanks for bringing the coffee over. I'm going to be working late tonight and probably tomorrow, but maybe we can have Indian food on Thursday." She actually wouldn't be working late tomorrow, but goddammit, it had been ten years. She needed to carve out a little bit of Ted-free time.

"Oh . . . " He looked a little crestfallen, and Laura felt guilty. "Well, okay. I'll probably have a date by tomorrow anyway." He glanced at his watch. "Oh shit. I gotta get back or Michelle is going to chew my ass, and if she were just a little more attractive, I might enjoy that, but as it is, it's just no fun at all."

"Okay. Say hi to Sara for me."

"Ha! It's Rhiannon!" And he was gone, running back to his coffee-slinging. As Laura headed inside and began the x-raying, metal-detecting, badge-showing, and badge-swiping ritual that would allow her to get back into her office, she did kind of envy Ted. Usually she felt some combination of tenderness, gratitude, worry, and annoyance, but now she added a little dollop of envy. Ted was the fuckup, the perpetual slacker who had his life ruined, and she was the achiever, the one who didn't let the trauma hold her back. And yet he was practically skipping back to his workplace, while she was definitely trudging. And neither one of them seemed able to sustain a relationship with anybody else.

Well, there was really no point in thinking like that, or in thinking at all, except about whether Whitey was dumb enough to open a bank account and access it from a strip mall in Boca Raton. She took a long sip of her latte, and while she was nowhere near orgasm, she did have to admit that Ted made a hell of a good coffee drink.

Ted approached Queequeg's and decided that the best way to avoid Michelle's wrath over his now-seventeen-minute break would be to try to sneak in the back and pretend he'd been back there arranging bags of sugar or something.

He walked through the filthy alley behind Queequeg's, squeezed past the rusting dumpster and winced at the smell, then cursed as something brown dripped from the dumpster's black plastic lid onto his apron. He opened the back door and beheld stainless steel counters, the fridge, a mop bucket, giant jugs of ammonia and giant foil bags of coffee. He threaded his way past the cleaning supplies and giant bags of coffee, and pushed the stainless-steel swinging door to the front. The door refused to swing open wide enough to allow him access to the front.

"Shit," Ted said under his breath, "I bet fucking Michelle did this, just so I'll have to pound on it and then she can come and yell at me about my seventeen minutes. Shit!" At the last word, he pressed his shoulder against the door and shoved with all his weight. It moved a crack. He shoved it again and again until there was just enough room for him to squeeze through. He had made so much noise it was going to be completely obvious he was late, but at least he'd deny Michelle the satisfaction of having him pound on the door.

He squeezed through, and immediately tripped over whatever had been blocking the door. "Fuck!" he said as he went sprawling. "Michelle, you'd bett—" He stopped as he realized that Michelle was what he had tripped over. Well, Michelle's big, long body anyway. Ted felt a sick rush of adrenaline such as he hadn't felt in a decade, and he screamed—Michelle's apron was soaked in blood, and Ted felt it, still warm, seeping through the fibers of his clothes from the floor.