Chapter 21

Los Angeles. There's no way I can adequately describe my first impression of that monstrosity of a city. I'd never been there, but I'd seen fragments on the news, scraps of it in movies and on TV. In some ways LA is no different from any other large American city; beautiful in spots, appealingly sit-com-ish around the edges, and just plain nauseating at the core.

In other ways it's completely different; the filthy rich traipsing the streets alongside the pathetically poor, diamond wearing trophy wives pointedly ignoring strung out crack whores, tanned and trim Ivy League lawyers in three thousand dollar Italian suits tossing the keys to their BMWs, Mercedes and Porches to red vested illegal immigrants who, if they were lucky, were making minimum wage. Hollywood power brokers, some with more homes than they could ever possibly live in, spent hundreds of dollars on un-eaten lunches in restaurants habitually haunted by hapless streams of the homeless, who aimlessly wandered past the gilded gates and doors of a luxurious world they could never be a part of. Some of these poor souls were busy talking themselves into a paranoid panic while others ranted piercingly at passers-by in terms only they understood. Most of these lost souls had a flat, bleak glaze to their eyes ... eyes that rarely, if ever, looked up; eyes that appeared to be held in thrall by the pale concrete sidewalks they followed mindlessly on a never-ending path to nowhere. Watching them gave me a hollow, hopeless feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I've been to New York. It's old and grim, new and glistening, dark and light, over-crowded and isolating ... all at the same time. I don't like New York. Not one little bit. (To be fair though, I have to say that the last time I was there was prior to 1995 and the expanding of my sensitivity.)

I work in Washington DC. It's busy, frantic and frenetic, full of potential in the abstract and implausibly pathetic in the here and now. There were times when DC reminded me of nothing more than an elaborate morgue, where hopes, dreams and ideas come to be dissected, debated and then shoved into frozen storage. I thoroughly dislike DC, which is one of the reasons why I live in Virginia.

But LA was an entirely new experience. For the both of us.

Lilly, I realized from our conversations on the drive up, had the standard starry-eyed Midwestern expectations most people have of the place. There was probably a time when I did as well. But those days, for me anyway, were long gone. Lilly saw the glamour, the bright colors, the fascinating façade, and was as thrilled as any young wannabe starlet fresh off the bus from Oshkosh.

I saw the rust hiding behind the chrome. I felt the horrendous anxiety, the immense insecurity, the barely muted anger and dissatisfaction that bubbled beneath the smiling faces we saw wherever we went. The relentless ambition, ruthless greed, remorseless lust ... they were everywhere. They almost completely blotted out the thin layer of more positive emotions I could sense lying beneath like a thick ugly cloud of smog squatting over a field of daisies.

LA is huge, sprawling and ominous. There were times when it seemed to go on forever, hungrily expanding like a cancer, always looking for more. More. LA felt, to me, like a living, breathing, desperately insatiable need for more.

It made me uncomfortable as we hit the southern city limits. By the time we were arrived at our Hotel in Beverly Hills I loathed it. After we returned from dinner at Spago (courtesy of a little emotional arm twisting) and prepared for bed, I was thinking there was nothing I'd like more than to torch the whole damn city. I'd done what I could to shield Lilly, to keep her from knowing just how badly LA was affecting me, reflecting back at her the excitement, the jubilant curiosity and joy she was feeling and passing it off as my own. But how long could I keep it up?

LA — Day 1

I barely slept that night. More like dozing off for a few minutes every couple of hours. I was in a lousy mood from the start. It was all I could do to put on a pleasant face for Lilly. I didn't want to be the one to trash her fantasy.

We had breakfast in the hotel's restaurant then left and drove up to UCLA.

I got my first taste of outright hostility when I met the Chancellor. She could have been Senator Gottschalk's sister. Her general appearance and sense of style were noticeably better; her manners and political leaning however left a lot to be desired. I overcame her objections by the simple expedient of suggesting the school's federal funding might be endangered by her lack of cooperation.

The dean of the Science and Technology school was made of sterner stuff. He refused to allow me access to any of the professors, stridently proclaiming that my presence was an abuse of government authority. The man had tenure and was relying on that to protect him. Foolish, foolish fellow. He'd been in academia far too long.

I had him sobbing on the floor of his office within seconds, and a printout of the school's professors, associates and grad students in my hand a few minutes later, along with a tear stained, hand-written note suggesting in no uncertain terms that anyone I wanted to talk with provide their fullest cooperation.

My skin was crawling by the time we located the first name on the list. I felt grimy, filthy, itchy, irritable and out of place.

The first interview went well enough. He was a fairly young guy, a full professor at the ripe old age of thirty-three, who'd been, by his own admission, a bit of a black-hat in his younger days. Yes, he'd heard of Lucifer, but had no idea who the guy might be. In fact, he'd heard of most of the hackers on my researched list. He spoke admiringly of a few and sneered at the rest. Most, he said, were posers. Their time would have been better spent playing video games.

I actually found myself liking the guy, until I realized that he was spending as much time staring at Lilly as he was talking to me. Charming, soft spoken, knowledgeable, good looking...

And Lilly was pleasantly flattered by the attention.

Well of course she is. Why shouldn't she be?

A low rumbling started in my chest and gradually made its way up to my throat, emerging as a snarling growl.

The professor shifted uneasily in his chair. Lilly, sitting next to me, reached out and slipped her arm possessively around mine, clutching fingers tightened around my bicep.

"Professor, in your opinion, what is the best computer security company in the state?" she asked him, tightening her hold on my arm, adding her body weight to mine in an effort to keep me seated.

"Uhm ... what, the best?" He looked at me as though I'd just sprouted fangs and was going to tear his throat out with them. "Computek is the oldest and most well known. They've been into computer security since the seventies. They handle most of the established companies and corporations on the west coast. But there is one ... White Dragon Security; they're a lot smaller, very new in the business. They started up about five years ago. Privately owned. I hear they've built up quite a reputation with the Silicon Valley crowd. Dot com type companies swear by them. Word in the community is that their clients don't get breached. Not ever. There was a rumor going around recently that White Dragon was on the short list of contractors with the federal crowd as well. You know ... embassy and government offices? That sort of thing."

"Where?" I choked out. The professor flinched back in his seat.

"San Francisco."

Lilly stood up abruptly, pulling insistently on my arms with both of hers. "Thank you for your time, Professor. We'll show ourselves out."

She literally dragged me out of his office, hustled me out of the building, onto the sidewalk and shoved me down onto the first bench we came to.

"What the hell was that all about?" she demanded.

My hands were clenching and unclenching like clockwork. I stared down at them, watching the veins and tendons swell and flex.

"Well?"

I looked up into her face, my eyes felt gritty and sore. The emotional mirror I'd been holding up cracked.

"Oh..." she said sadly. Lilly sat down on the bench and leaned against me.

"Ike..." she started.

"You didn't do anything wrong." I said finally. I took a deep breath. The morning air was cool, clean and smelled faintly of roses, but I felt as though I were suffocating.

"Do you feel alright? You're not sick, are you?" She put the back of her hand across my forehead.

"I don't know. I don't think so, but something's wrong. I just don't know what. I didn't sleep very well last night." I admitted. "But that doesn't matter. We need to finish up here."

"Okay. But after that we're going right back to the hotel and you are going to rest." She stood up, stepped between my legs, pulled my face against her breasts and stroked the back of my head. "Just remember something, will you?"

"Remember what?" I asked, nuzzling a hardening nipple thru her blouse.

"Remember that you're the only man I want."

The other four interviews were strained, but I got thru them without making a scene. Unfortunately they were less revealing than the first had been, Lucifer-wise anyway. Two of the four were elderly men with a lot of scientific knowledge but little interest in the activities of hackers. The other two were women, which I gathered from the emotional chips on their shoulders was unusual. One, in her early forties, was obviously a lesbian, and she aggressively flirted with Lilly, while at the same time doing her dead level best to ignore my presence altogether. My little flower was neither flattered nor amused. The other woman, a big breasted California blond, was about Lilly's age and did everything but climb into my lap. Lilly was less than amused by her antics.

I couldn't have cared less at that point. My head hurt, my chest felt like iron bands had been welded in place around it, every muscle and joint ached and the walk back to the car left me sweating like a pig and gasping for air. Lilly rushed us back to the hotel, driving like one of the maniacal natives.

Lying in bed that night, spooned up behind Lilly, I tried to sleep and couldn't. The afternoon and early evening rest period hadn't done me a lick of good. I was more fatigued than I'd ever been in my life, brushes with death included, as eager and desirous of the temporary oblivion unconsciousness offered as any man could be. It just wasn't happening. Sleep was nowhere to be found.

Their feelings wouldn't leave me alone. An entire city's worth of emotional sludge was seeping in and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Once Lilly was asleep I got up, went into the living room portion of our suite and slumped onto the loveseat. I was restless, miserable, strung out and growing more and more depressed by the minute. Slitting my own throat started to seem like a viable option. I went to the mini-bar and gulped down the contents of half the tiny liquor bottles. That helped dull things a little, but not nearly enough to let me sleep.

It was like that day at the mall when I was thirteen and I linked with thirty odd people all at the same time ... magnified a million times.

At this rate I'll be insane by morning.

I walked across the room, just missed slamming my shins into the glass and metal coffee table, swung open the sliding glass door that led out onto the narrow balcony and stepped out into the tepid early morning. I stood still, allowing the vapidly listless breeze to flip my hair off my shoulders and into my face.

"Daddy?"

I put both hands on the wrought iron railing, hunched my shoulders and lowered my head between my arms.

"Daddy?" her bell-like voice persisted.

I turned my head and peered disinterestedly thru the hair that half covered my eyes.

Tink sat in the corner, looking as dejected as only a little girl could, one of Peggy's shiny pink vibrators in her hand.

"It stopped." she said, pouting. She held it out to me. "Can you fix it? Please?"

I stood up, took my hands off the rail, stepped over and crouched down next to her. Tink pushed the pink piston at me. I held out one hand, palm up, and she laid it across my fingers.

After a few seconds of examination, twisting this and flipping that, I looked up.

"I think the battery's dead."

She smiled, the tip of her tiny pink tongue poked out between the gap created by her missing baby teeth.

"It's not dead ... but it is dying. All it needs is to be filled up."

I bobbed my head curtly. "And how do you propose I do that?"