Smoke Screen - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kyle Mills is the author of Sphere of Influence, Burn Factor, Free Fall, Storming Heaven, and Rising Phoenix.

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1

"So do you have to be naked to use the foosball table?"

At least that's what I think she said. The house's half-million-dollar sound system was being pushed to its limit by one of those repetitive, mechanical-sounding drones people slightly younger than me liked to listen to. I focused on her mouth as she spoke, trying to read her lips through the smoke and chaotic lighting, but found myself concentrating on their plump perfection instead.

I managed to turn slightly, bumping someone behind me and sending most of his beer down my back. It felt pretty good, so I shrugged off his apology and looked out across a dance floor so full that it made nonvertical motion completely impossible. On the downbeats, I could just make out some bare skin over the top of the pogoing crowd.

"I'm not really sure," I shouted loud enough for her to hear but not so loud as to shower her with spit. "I think it's more of a guideline."

She mulled that over for a moment. "Why?"

Now, that was a question that demanded an answer that was probably too long and complicated to get across in the current setting.

A hundred years ago, the house we were standing in had been the calculatedly imposing home of a wealthy plantation owner-a man who still sat, white suit and all, in an old daguerreotype above the toilet in one of the bathrooms. In its heyday, the house had been filled with European furniture, South American silver, and Chinese silk-all carefully maintained by a staff of ex-slaves who would have been well on their way to realizing that freedom was a more ethereal concept than they'd originally thought. Parties, frequent and lavish, would have been carefully planned to highlight the breeding and superiority of guests wandering stiffly through it and to nudge upward the social standing of the hosts.

All that was gone now, replaced by the previously mentioned sound system, an elaborate bar constructed out of an old VW microbus, no less than five big-screen TVs, concert lighting, and an undetermined number of sweating, occasionally naked, twenty-somethings. Outside, the once-stately gardens had been replaced with a twenty-person hot tub, a pool in the inexplicable shape of a star, and an inoperable crane that would soon be coaxing gravity-assisted projectile vomiting from aspiring bungee jumpers.

I shrugged as the girl and I sidestepped away from the expanding mass on the dance floor. I hadn't caught her name, or maybe I had and just couldn't remember. "I don't know. Tradition, I guess."

She tilted her head, causing her nose ring to flash hypnotically as she tried to decide if I was making fun of her.

I'd been trying to peg her age for the last fifteen minutes, but she was one of those people who seemed to gain and lose years with every change of expression. My current best guess was that she was a few years younger than me. Say, twenty-eight.

"You were telling me about your trip," I yelled, trying to divert the current flow of conversation, which would inevitably lead to questions about the infamous owner of the house-a subject to be avoided at all costs.

"After I left MIT, I did some traveling-you know, just put my bike on a plane went where it was cheap. I started in Europe...Have you ever been to Prague?"

I shook my head.

"Beautiful city-and you can hang out there for next to nothing. I rode across the Czech Republic-"

"By yourself?"

"Yeah. I was supposed to go with a bunch of friends, but they all got jobs right out of school and backed out on me. It was better, though, you know? I was kind of forced to dive into the local culture. The people were great-they took me in, let me stay at their houses...I even slept in barns sometimes with the cows."

I grinned, probably stupidly. "Really? Cows?"

"Hey, don't laugh. After a day of hammering your bike through the rain, you'd be psyched to curl up with a cow. They generate a lot of heat."

"Yeah, I guess I can see how they would..."

"So anyway, then I hopped a train and headed up to Scandinavia. Ever been to Copenhagen?"

A guy in a Superman costume climbed up on a pool table and dove into the crowd on the dance floor. I watched him surf along on a cushion of upturned hands and then get ejected onto the floor a few feet from us.

"Denmark? Huh uh."

"Nice place. Nice people. And everyone speaks English, which was a good change. But man, it's expensive. I only stayed a few days before I headed south again. I spent another month just cruising around and then shipped my bike back to my folks and headed for Asia. Ever been to Thailand?"

"Never."

"Really exotic. You should try to make a trip. Great food, super cheap."

"Yeah, one of these days. Hard to find the time, you know?"

"Yeah, they work you pretty hard here," she said, leaning in a little closer to my ear.

"I've only been at the company for six months. Kind of hard to make the adjustment from just screwing around all the time. What division do you work in? I haven't seen you around...Seems like I would have reme1mbered if I had."

I managed not to wince visibly when the cramped muscles at the base of my neck spasmed. Had that been an expression of interest?

The girl was beautiful, intelligent, looked good in a nose ring, told jokes about Tolstoy that were actually kind of funny, and was talking to me instead of one of the hundred other guys patrolling the area. I wasn't good under this kind of pressure.

She smiled, displaying a set of teeth that were well worth whatever her parents had paid for them. "Yeah, I definitely would have remembered."

First impressions of me were as varied as the personalities that formed them. I'm just a bit over six foot four, with thick shoulders and a narrow, well-defined waist that hasn't yet succumbed to my more-or-less sedentary lifestyle. It was a physique that provoked lust, envy, and intimidation, among other things.

My light blond hair, sun-deprived skin, and teeth that were overly white despite my best efforts to yellow them invited comparisons to angels and Nazis in roughly equal proportions.

The bad habit I had of holding conversations and maintaining relationships while almost never making eye contact made a few people paint me as shy, but most complain about my arrogance.

"I, uh, don't work for the company. I'm just friends with the owner," I stammered and then immediately cursed myself for being so stupid.

"Darius? You mean you know Darius? You're friends with him? No way!"

"Uh yeah. I guess I know him okay," I said, trying to backpedal.

Actually, we'd been best friends since the fifth grade. In fact, we'd been inseparable enough that Darius had followed me to Chico State, despite having nearly every Ivy League dean in the country willing to prostitute himself in surprisingly degrading ways to lure him to one of America's more esteemed learning institutions.

Honestly, I'd taken his willingness to drive me to California as just another excuse for a multistate crime spree. When we arrived-literally just hours ahead of the authorities-he'd disappeared, leaving me to wrestle my stuff out of the car and up the stairs to my dorm room. When he'd finally reappeared, he'd lost his shirt and socks, but gained a blanket, an alarm clock, and a full academic scholarship.

Five years later, with a total of thirty credit hours and a D average, security had escorted him from school grounds for the last time. So what did he do then? What any self-respecting college dropout would do: Stumbled drunkenly to the bank, withdrew the money he'd earned by skipping class and doing cutting-edge programming jobs, and started a computer game company. Now when God needed a loan, He called Darius.

"Is he here?" The Girl said.

I shrugged, and surprisingly the conversation moved back in my direction.

"So if you don't work here, what do you do?"

"I'm a, uh, trustafarian."

She...