I thought of the porn magazines I’d taken from under Mona Vishneski’s bed, the magazines Chad had tucked away so Mom wouldn’t see them. Maybe Allie had posed in one of them and Chad was blackmailing the Guaman family. The magazines were at my office.
I got to my feet, put on a dry shirt, pulled on a sweater over it—a big, loose one that didn’t require me to wriggle and struggle—and went to the living room. Mr. Contreras was dozing on the couch. I thought about slipping out without waking him on the theory that it was better to apologize than to explain, but we’d had too many skirmishes over the years about my secretive nature. And I was too weak and sore to fight my friends along with my enemies.
When I woke my neighbor, he didn’t want to go back out in the cold and snow, and who could blame him? He argued that the magazines could wait until morning, but when I said I’d call Petra, ask her to stop at the office and find what I needed, he grumped to his feet.
“You ain’t sticking Peewee’s head in another tiger trap.”
“There’s nothing dangerous about going to my office,” I objected.
“Trust me, if you send little Petra there to get a magazine for you, chances are someone’s put a bomb in it.”
“So you’d rather my head got blown off?” I was half teasing, half hurt.
“Don’t give me those puppy-dog eyes,” he growled. “All the years I been knowing you, I been begging you to keep yourself safe, and you ain’t paid one minute of heed to me. I’m just asking you to take better care of the kid than you do of yourself. Look at you—bruises on your hand, your stomach, would make your own mother faint—”
“You’re right.” Gabriella used to beg me the same as Mr. Contreras when my cousin Boom-Boom and I ran into danger. Cuore mio, spare me more grief than my life has already held.
I bit my lip. But I still wanted to look at those magazines. The old man nodded, grimly pleased that his words had hit home. He started the slow process of pulling on his boots and his coat while I set the oven timer for the chicken. We took the dogs for company—the walker wasn’t coming for another couple of hours.
At my office, Tessa was working on some immense steel thing. While I went into my files, Mr. Contreras pulled up a stool to watch her. Tessa doesn’t usually tolerate an audience, but Mr. Contreras was a machinist in his working life, and she respects his advice on tools.
Chad had stuffed his girlie pix inside a copy of Fortune, and I’d left them bundled together when I put them into the file. The issue dated to before the economy’s collapse: there was an article on the high demand for luxury goods and the way you could make the middle class feel they were part of the hyper-wealthy elite. Another teaser claimed that Fortune had tested the iPhone against all comers. A third asked, “Will a change of owner change Achilles’ fortunes?”
I had removed the girlie magazines and was thumbing through them looking for Alexandra Guaman’s face, wondering if I would recognize it floating airbrushed above improbable breasts, when I did a double take on the Achilles headline. I had read it online when I was looking up background on Tintrey.
I went back to Fortune to reread the story. Tintrey had acquired Achilles, the maker of body armor, when it became obvious that the war in Iraq was going to last for a long time. Achilles had been developing nanotechnology, using particles I’d never heard of and wasn’t sure I could pronounce. Inorganic, fullerene-like nanostructures. They apparently were “gallium-based,” whatever that was, and stronger than steel. In a photograph of one of the particles blown up a few hundred times, the stuff looked pretty much like the cement they were pouring into potholes on the Kennedy Expressway.
Achilles had been losing money; R & D doesn’t come cheap. Fortune had a lot to say about shortsighted corporate policy that let Wall Street’s insatiable demand for current-quarter profits block long-term development strategies. Anyway, the long and the short of it was, Tintrey bought Achilles, which was bleeding red ink too fast to fight off a hostile takeover bid.
Jarvis MacLean’s first order of business was a campaign to sell Achilles shields to the Department of Defense. Some Achilles staffers, who spoke