Roadside Crosses

way Jack Bauer chased terrorists.
    Jon Boling had a lead: the possible location from which Travis had sent the blog posting of the mask drawing and the horrific stabbing of the woman who looked a bit like Kathryn Dance. The place where the boy would be playing his precious DimensionQuest.
    The “hours of operation” he’d found in the ghostly corridors of Travis’s computer referred to Lighthouse Arcade, a video and computer gaming center in New Monterey.
    The boy would be taking a risk going out in public, of course, considering the manhunt. But if he picked his routes carefully, wore sunglasses and a cap and something other than the hoodie the TV reports were depicting him in, well, he could probably move around with some freedom.
    Besides, when it came to online gaming and Morpegs, an addict had no choice but to risk detection.
    Boling piloted his Audi off the highway and onto Del Monte then Lighthouse and headed into the neighborhood where the arcade was located.
    He was enjoying a certain exhilaration. Here he was, a forty-one-year-old professor, who lived largely by his brain. He’d never thought of himself as suffering from an absence of bravery. He’d done some rock climbing, scuba diving, downhill skiing. Then too, the world of ideas carried risk of harm—to careers and reputations and contentment. He’d battled it out with fellow professors. He also had been a victim of vicious online attacks, much like those against Travis, though with better spelling, grammar and punctuation. Most recently he’d been attacked for taking a stand against file sharing of copyrighted material.
    He hadn’t expected the viciousness of the attacks. He was trounced . . . called a “fucking capitalist,” a “bitch whore of big business.” Boling particularly liked “professor of mass destruction.”
    Some colleagues actually stopped talking to him.
    But the harm he’d experienced, of course, was nothing compared with what Kathryn Dance and her fellow officers risked day after day.
    And which he himself was now risking, he reflected.
    Playing cop . . .
    Boling realized that he’d been helpful to Kathryn and the others. He was pleased about that and pleased at their recognition of his contribution. But being so close to the action, hearing the phone calls, watching Kathryn’s face as she took down information about the crimes, seeing her hand absently stroke the black gun on her hip . . . he felt a longing to participate.
    And anything else, Jon? he wryly asked himself.
    Well, okay, maybe he was trying to impress her.
    Absurd, but he’d felt a bit of jealousy seeing her and Michael O’Neil connect.
    You’re acting like a goddamn teenager.
    Still, something about her lit the fuse. Boling had never been able to explain it—who could, really?—when that connection occurred. And it happened fast or never. Dance was single, he was too. He’d gotten over Cassie (okay, pretty much over); was Kathryn getting close to dating again? He believed he’d gotten a few signals from her. But what did he know? He had none of her skill—body language.
    More to the point, he was a man, a species genetically fitted with persistent oblivion.
    Boling now parked his gray A4 near Lighthouse Arcade, on a side street in that netherworld north of Pacific Grove. He remembered when this strip of small businesses and smaller apartments, dubbed New Monterey, had been a mini–Haight Ashbury, tucked between a brawling army town and a religious retreat. (Pacific Grove’s Lovers Point was named for lovers of Jesus, not one another.) Now the area was as bland as a strip mall in Omaha or Seattle.
    The Lighthouse Arcade was dim and shabby and smelled, well, gamy—a pun he couldn’t wait to share with her.
    He surveyed the surreal place. The players—most of them boys—sat at terminals, staring at the screens, teasing joysticks and pounding on keyboards. The playing stations had high, curving walls covered with black sound-dampening material, and the chairs were comfortable, high-backed leather models.
    Everything a young man would need for a digital experience was here. In addition to the computersand keyboards there were noise-cancelling headsets, microphones, touch pads, input devices like car steering wheels and airplane yokes, three-D glasses, and banks of sockets for power, USB, Firewire, audiovisual and more obscure connections. Some had Wii devices.
    Boling had written about the latest trend in gaming: total immersion pods,