The Darkest Evening of the Year

right places to bounce in the right way, she’s hot. A bounce is a sexy lady.”
    “What do you call a sexy guy?” Vern asked.
    “I don’t find guys sexy.” Bobby frowned. He put both hands on the wheel and sat up straighter. “You don’t find guys sexy, do you?”
    “No. Hell, no. Don’t talk crazy.”
    “So what is this Von Longwood business?” Bobby asked.
    “What do you mean? He’s my avatar. In Second Life.”
    “I don’t know about that.”
    “I told you. Don’t you listen?”
    “You’re always talking about him.”
    “And you’re never listening. He’s an avatar, like a cartoon version of me, just another identity. He’s me, I’m him.”
    Scowling into the desert glare as they turned onto an exit ramp, Bobby said, “It sounds kinky to me.”
    “It’s not kinky. Mostly it’s a role-playing game.”
    “I heard about these two gay guys—one dressed up like a nurse, the other like a Nazi, then they’d go at each other.”
    “Not that kind of role-playing. It’s cool. Go on-line, look up Second Life, educate yourself.”
    “I don’t need the Internet. I’ve already got me a life, and it’s packed full. I don’t need a play life.”
    Simmering, Vern said, “The next road, go left.”
    Cottonwoods and clusters of wild oleander thrived along a dry streambed, but on the hills of rock and sand, nothing grew other than withered mesquite and sage and bunch-grass.
    “How much you pay for your fabulous flying car?” Bobby asked, punctuating the question with a smirk.
    Although he knew he was being mocked, Vern could not resist saying with some pride, “A hundred fifty thousand Linden dollars.”
    “What’s a Linden dollar?”
    “That’s the money you buy to spend in Second Life. Linden Labs, they started Second Life.”
    “How much is that in real money?”
    “Six hundred bucks.”
    “You paid six hundred bucks for a cartoon car? No wonder you drive a losermobile in your real life.”
    Vern almost said My second life is my real life, but he knew a Philistine like Bobby would never understand.
    Instead, he said, “So which is the real you—Bobby Onions or Barney Smallburg?”
    The starboard wheels stuttered on the graveled shoulder of the road, but then found the pavement again.
    “You sonofabitch,” said Barney-Bobby. “You investigated me.”
    “Anybody I’m gonna hire to back me up on a job—I find out who he is first. You changed your name two years before you got your PI license. I’ve known it since the first case you worked with me.”
    “In a paramilitary profession,” said Barney-Bobby, “image is important.”
    “Maybe you’re right. Barney Smallburg doesn’t sound like a guy with gonads.”
    “Compared to Vernon Lesley, it sounds totally kick-ass.”
    “You’ll be making a right turn in about half a mile.”
    Runty cactuses clawed out a life on a sand-and-shale hillside, their spiky shadows creeping eastward as the westering sun sought the distant sea.
    “Tell you what,” said Barney-Bobby. “You never tell anyone I changed my name, I’ll stop riding you about Von Longwood.”
    “Fair enough.”
    “You’re of the old school, I’m of the new,” Bobby said, “but I’ve got a lot of respect for you, Vern.”
    That was bullshit, but Vern didn’t care. What people thought of him in his first life was of no concern to him anymore. He had his refuge now, and his wings.
    “So what’s the story with the bounce?” Bobby asked.
    “She had her own other life before the current one. She’s hiding under the name Redwing. ”
    “Hiding from who?”
    “I don’t know. But they found her. And they hired me to search for every proof she kept of that life and take it from her.”
    “What proof?”
    “Documents, snapshots.”
    “Why take it from her?”
    “You ask too many questions,” Vern said.
    “You, me, every good procto has to have curiosity.”
    Procto. Vern decided not to ask for a definition. He said, “All I care is, it’s a good payday.”
    As Vern had instructed, Bobby turned right on a badly fissured blacktop road so long neglected that weeds sprouted from the cracks in the pavement.
    “Are you ironed?” Bobby Onions asked. “You don’t look ironed.”
    Squinting down at his shirt and pants, Vern said, “I always buy this wrinkleproof polyester-blend crap. I just let the wrinkles hang out. What the hell do you care anyway?”
    Bobby sighed. “‘Are you ironed’ means are you carrying iron, are you packing a