Orbital Decay by Allen Steele Page B

entertaining. You guys should give him a job, and put up a sign outside ‘Live Dancing’….”
    Kurt flashed him a sour look. “That was going to be on the house, but for that crack you can pay up.”
    Hooker closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows, and slipped his bank card into the pay slot on the bar. Kurt entered the charge on the cash register, and a receipt started to ticker out on the printer. “Go ahead and keep my number in the machine, Kurt,” Hooker said. “I plan on being here a while tonight.”
    “Awright. Good luck avoiding your ex.”
    “If you see her, tell her that a squid really did get me.”
    Hooker hung around near the bar, staying away from the side of Mikey’s where the pool tables were situated. He chatted with a few friends, drank a couple of more beers, watched the end of the Pink Panther movie. He had wanted to shoot some pool, but since his ex-wife was over there, the idea was out of the question. Instead, he drifted over to the video games near the front door.
    It was on his third game of PsychoKiller when he met Jeanine and indulged his monthly habit of falling madly in love.
    Although she never explicitly mentioned either her age or background, Hooker managed to figure her out at least to an approximate degree. Her soft, unlined face and firm figure put her in her early- to mid-twenties. Her poise and taste in clothes gave her away as being from an upper middle-class family: a country club refugee, given to slumming during weekends away from Everett and Richard and the rest of the horsy bunch. Her manner of speech—grammatically perfect, hardly a contraction or a split infinitive to be found—indicated that she was college educated, possibly from an Ivy League school. Although she tried to pass herself off as being an old salt from the local area who happened to drop into town now and then, Hooker recognized her as being a fairly common type found in Cedar Key now and then: affluent, bored with champagne society, conservative Republican family, tending to take off to the boonies in search of freewheeling good times and perhaps a brief romantic interlude with someone who would show her a better time than dinner at the Oak Tree and being pawed in the back of the old man’s BMW.
    But despite all this, Jeanine was fun. She was beautiful to look at, took the ruckus brewing around them in stride, could hold her Scotch and make easy conversation about homicidal video games and weird fishermen who danced on bar tops, and had a nice laugh for his stupid jokes. And, as best as he could sense, she was clearly interested in having him take her home that night.
    It seemed as if that was what he was going to do, until he excused himself to go visit the john. The last he saw of Jeanine’s smiling young face was when he said, “Stay put, I’ll be back in a sec.”
    When he came back a few minutes later, Jeanine was gone, and he found Laura waiting for him.
    “Looking for your friend?” she asked him sweetly.
    Hooker stopped when he saw her and simply glared. God damn it, she has done it again.
    “What did you tell her this time?” he asked, after giving himself a moment to simmer down. “That I had a contagious social disease? Or did you think of something more clever, like I was the reincarnation of the Boston Strangler?” He didn’t even bother to look around Mikey’s for her. Jeanine, he knew from the moment he saw Laura standing in her place beside the PsychoKiller machine, was gone.
    Laura shrugged, her brown hair falling over her narrow shoulders in a way which had once been provocative and had since grown to be merely irritating; tomboy grown up to be mischievous siren or smartass harpy, depending on circumstance, personal outlook, and the day of the week. “Nothing much, really,” she said soothingly. “I just slid up to her and suggested that rumor had it you were into bondage, sodomy, and cigarette burns.”
    She paused. “To tell you the truth, I think she was rather