Living Dead in Dallas

in the suburbs with a wife with streaked hair and two sandy children.
    “Are you divorced?” I asked impulsively. I was sorry when I saw the grief cross his face.
    “Yes,” he said. “Pretty recently.”
    “Too bad.” I started to ask about the children, decided it was none of my business. I could read him well enough to know he had a little girl, but I couldn’t discover her name and age.
    “Is it true you can read minds?” he asked.
    “Yes, it’s true.”
    “No wonder you’re so attractive to them.”
    Well, ouch, Hugo. “That’s probably a good part of the reason,” I said, keeping my voice flat and even. “What’s your day job?”
    “I’m a lawyer,” Hugo said.
    “No wonder you’re so attractive to them,” I said, in the most neutral voice I could manage.
    After a longish silence, Hugo said, “I guess I deserved that.”
    “Let’s move on past it. Let’s get a cover story.”
    “Could we be brother and sister?”
    “That’s not out of the question. I’ve seen brother and sister teams that looked less like each other than we do. But I think boyfriend-girlfriend would account for the gaps in our knowledge of each other more, if we get separated and questioned. I’m not predicting that’ll happen, and I’d be amazed if it did, but as brother and sister we’d have to know all about each other.”
    “You’re right. Why don’t we say that we met at church? You just moved to Dallas, and I met you in Sunday school at Glen Craigie Methodist. That’s actually my church.”
    “Okay. How about I’m manager of a . . . restaurant?” From working at Merlotte’s, I thought I could be convincing in the role if I wasn’t questioned too intensively.
    He looked a little surprised. “That’s just different enough to sound good. I’m not much of an actor, so if I just stick to being me, I’ll be okay.”
    “How did you meet Isabel?” Of course I was curious.
    “I represented Stan in court. His neighbors sued to have the vampires barred from the neighborhood. They lost.” Hugo had mixed feelings about his involvement with a vampire woman, and wasn’t entirely sure he should’ve won the court case, either. In fact, Hugo was deeply ambivalent about Isabel.
    Oh, good, that made this errand much more frightening. “Did that get in the papers? The fact that you represented Stan Davis?”
    He looked chagrined. “Yes, it did. Dammit, someone at the Center might recognize my name. Or me, from my picture being in the papers.”
    “But that might be even better. You can tell them yousaw the error of your ways, after you’d gotten to know vampires.”
    Hugo thought that over, his big freckled hands moving restlessly on the steering wheel. “Okay,” he said finally. “Like I said, I’m not much of an actor, but I think I can bring that off.”
    I acted all the time, so I wasn’t too worried about myself. Taking a drink order from a guy while pretending you don’t know whether he’s speculating on whether you’re blond all the way down can be excellent acting training. You can’t blame people—mostly—for what they’re thinking on the inside. You have to learn to rise above it.
    I started to suggest to the lawyer that he hold my hand if things got tense today, to send me thoughts that I could act on. But his ambivalence, the ambivalence that wafted from him like a cheap cologne, gave me pause. He might be in sexual thrall to Isabel, he might even love her and the danger she represented, but I didn’t think his heart and mind were wholly committed to her.
    In an unpleasant moment of self-examination, I wondered if the same could be said of Bill and me. But now was not the time and place to ponder this. I was getting enough from Hugo’s mind to wonder if he were completely trustworthy in terms of this little mission of ours. It was just a short step from there to wondering how safe I was in his company. I also wondered how much Hugo Ayres actually knew about me. He hadn’t been in the room when I’d been working the night before. Isabel hadn’t struck me as a chatterer. It was possible he didn’t know much about me.
    The four-lane road, running through a huge suburb, was lined with all the usual fast-food places and chain stores of all kinds. But gradually, the shopping gave way to residences, and the concrete to greenery. The trafficseemed unrelenting. I could never live in a place this size, cope with this on a daily basis.
    Hugo slowed and put on his turn signal when