Page 75 of The Deeper Game
He gave me that horrible smile-frown.
A creepy guy with stupid hair,I wanted to say, but I needed to be smart, not antagonistic.
I pulled out. He hadn’t made me give up my weapons. Was it possible he was such a creep that he couldn’t imagine a little lady besting him? By the time we were about four blocks away, I was really thinking about trying something, but he was watching me too closely.
“And they don’t need your fucking lessons,” I said.
“But they do,” Manning said. “I’ve been with them all along. I’m like theirsensei. Do you know what a sensei is?”
“From the context of that sentence, I’d go withloserish jackalope.”
The fist across my jaw was sure and swift, and the pain blinded me for a split second. I drove, vision fuzzing with rage. Blood oozed inside my mouth.
“You mean that’s not what it means?” I asked, refusing to let him think he’d cowed me.
“A sensei is a wise teacher. I was fighting a private war long before your three masters were.”
“They’re not my masters,” I bit out.
“Technically, your masters are excellent at what they do, but I feel their emotional maturity isn’t where it should be.”
“Theiremotional maturity?”
He jerked and I stiffened, waiting for a strike that didn’t come, thankfully.
He laughed, like that was a clever gambit or something. “I see you fancy yourself as something of a teacher, too. Such as you are. Turn here,” he said, indicating an on-ramp. We veered onto the highway, heading east, out of LA. “Your point about vengeance the other day, about an agency not being able to beg for mercy, I felt it was a cogent one.”
“You have microphones throughout ourhouse?” The idea horrified me.
He smiled. “Not microphones—your masters would find them in a second. I tweaked the security apparatus in the house to serve as a pickup for the parabolic mics outside.”
I frowned. “And you framed that Travis guy.”
“And Ingvey before him. If it hadn’t been for their lust for that bank, they would’ve seen through it. Odin almost did, but he couldn’t quite let go of his need for vengeance. That’s this lesson, you see. Your masters need to operate from the point of logic, not emotion.”
Jackalope,I thought.
“I’d say exhibit A of that point is on your arm. Everything with that tattoo is wrong. It’s no wonder he had to tie you.”
It took me just a few minutes to get it. “You watch, too.”
I took his sneer as a yes.
My lip where he’d hit me felt huge and swollen.
I drove on with tense perfection, raging with anger, scrambling to think. Rush hour traffic was light for once. Like a horrible miracle that I didn’t want.
“You’re sick.”
“I’m just glad I don’t have A/V stuff up in the hills where they took you the other night, though I heard them planning it. That sounded like some fucked-up shit. I find it disgusting when you masturbate to that cartoon porn. You’re as deviant as they are.”
“We’re not deviant, we’re awesome,” I bit out.
He directed me back onto a surface street after a while. I drove farther and farther out, past familiar strip malls full of familiar chain stores, and then past unfamiliar strip malls full of familiar chain stores.
I wondered if they’d discovered the note yet. Of course they wouldn’t have; it would take them a long time to pull apart that bank. Two more hours at least, probably three or four.
It was possible Thor would get back and find it first.
