River’s End

eighty-six?”
    “Yeah.” And since that had gotten the kind of rise out of his friend that soothed the soul, he narrowed his eyes. “She broke it by shoving it into my computer monitor.”
    “That sick, evil bitch broke your computer? Christ, God.” He was up now, stumbling through the wreckage to Noah’s office.
    Computers were Mike’s first love. Women could come and go—and for him it was usually the latter—but a good motherboard was always there for you. He actually yelped when he saw the damage, then leaped toward the once-sleek trophy.
    “Jesus, she killed it dead. She mutilated it. Butchered it. What kind of a mind does this?” He turned back to Noah, his eyes wide and bright and blinking as his contacts haloed his vision. “She should be hunted down like a dog.”
    “I called the cops.”
    “No, for this you need a vigilante like Dark Man, you need ruthlessness like the Terminator.”
    “I’ll give them a call next. Think you can salvage anything off the hard drive? She trashed every stinking one of my disks.”
    “She’s the Antichrist, Noah.” He shook his head sadly. “I’ll see what I can do, but don’t hold out any hope. There’s the pizza,” he said when he heard the knock. “Let me fuel up, then I’ll do what I can do. And you know what? I don’t even want rebound sex with her now.”

Fifteen
    It took Noah a week to get his house in order. The sorting, cleaning, dumping was purely a pain in the ass, but the demands of it kept him from feeling helpless. A new computer was a priority, and with Mike egging him on, he bought a system that sent his friend into raptures of delight and envy.
    He wouldn’t have bought all the damn software games if Mike hadn’t kept pushing them on him. And he sure as hell wouldn’t have sat up half the night playing video pinball if he hadn’t bought it in the first place.
    But he told himself that was beside the point. He’d needed the distraction. He outfitted his living room with cargo furniture, ordering straight out of an in-store catalog by pointing at a page and telling the salesman: “Give me that.”
    This delighted the salesman and saved Noah a headache.
    Within two weeks, he could walk through his house without cursing and made serious inroads on reorganizing his office and regenerating lost data. He had his car back, a new mattress, and a half-baked promise through Smith’s admin for a meeting when the lawyer returned to California the following month. And he managed to track down Lucas Manning.
    Manning wasn’t quite as cheerfully forthcoming as Lydia Loring had been, but he agreed to talk about Julie. Noah met him at Manning’s Century City suite of offices. It always surprised and slightly disillusioned Noah that actors had big, plush executive offices.
    They might as well be CEOs, he thought as he was cleared through several levels of security.
    Manning greeted Noah with a professional smile and assessed him with eyes of storm gray. The years had turned his once burnished-gold-coin hair into the brilliance of polished pewter and filed down his face to the sharp points and angles of a scholar. According to the polls, women continued to find him one of the most appealing leading men in the business.
    “I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.”
    “I might not have.” Manning gestured to a chair. “But Lydia campaigned for you.”
    “She’s quite a woman.”
    “Yes, she is. So was Julie. Mr. Brady, and even after all this time it’s not easy for me to talk about what happened to her.”
    No need for small talk, Noah thought, and following Manning’s lead, he took out his recorder and pad. “You worked together.”
    “One of the happiest experiences of my life. She was a brilliant natural talent, an admirable woman and a good friend.”
    “There are those who believed, and still believe, that you and Julie MacBride were more than friends.”
    “We could have been.” Manning eased back, laid his hands on the ornately carved arms of his chair. “If she hadn’t been in love with her husband, we would have been. We were attracted to each other. Part of that was the intimacy of the roles we played, and part was simply a connection.”
    “Sam Tanner believed you acted on that connection.”
    “Sam Tanner didn’t value what he had.” Manning’s trained voice hardened at the edges and made Noah wonder if the delivery was emotion or simply skill. “He made her unhappy. He was jealous, possessive,