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Excerpt from Black in White
I tilted my
head, still smiling, but letting my puzzlement show.
“Why are you
talking to me at all?” I asked finally.
“Why shouldn’t I
talk to you?” he said. “I’ve already told you that you’re the first person to
walk in here that I thought might be worth my attempting to communicate.”
“Because I’m
female?” I said.
“Because you
seem to be less of a fool than the rest of them,” he corrected me at once.
“But you said
Nick had a mind?”
“I said he had a
mind of sorts. Not the same thing at all. Although, given the nature of his
intellect, he has undoubtedly chosen the right profession for himself.”
I smiled again.
“I’m sure that will be quite a relief for him.”
I heard laughter
in the earpiece that time, right before Nick spoke up.
“See if he’ll
tell you his name,” he said to me.
“Certainly, if
you really want to know,” the suspect said, before I could voice the question
aloud.
“My name is
Black. Quentin Black. Middle initial, R.”
I stared at him,
still recovering from the fact that he’d seemingly heard Nick give me an instruction
through the earpiece.
Clearly, he
wanted me to know he’d heard it, too.
“You heard
that?” I said to him.
“Good ear, yes?”
he said. Smiling, he gave me a more cryptic, yet borderline predatory look.
“Less good with
you, however. Significantly less good.”
He paused,
studying my face with eyes full of meaning.
I almost got the
sense he was waiting for me to reply—or maybe just to react.
When I didn’t,
he leaned back in the chair, making another of those graceful, flowing gestures
with his hand.
“I find that…
fascinating, doc. Quite intriguing. Perhaps that is crossing a boundary with
you again, however? To mention that?”
I paused on his
words, then decided to dismiss them.
“Is that a real
name?” I said. “Quentin Black. That doesn’t sound real. It sounds fake.”
“Real is all
subjective, is it not?”
“So it’s not
real, then?”
“Depends on what
you mean.”
“Is it your
legal name?”
“Again, depends
on what you mean.”
“I mean, could
you look it up in a database and actually get a hit somewhere?”
“How would I
know that?” he said, making an innocent gesture with his hands, again within
the limits of the metal cuffs.
Realizing I
wasn’t going to get any more from him on that line of questioning, I changed
direction. “What does the ‘R’ stand for?” I said.
“Rayne.”
“Quentin Rayne
Black?” I repeated back to him, still not hiding my disbelief.
“Would you
believe me if I said my parents had a sense of whimsy?” he asked me.
“No,” I said.
“Would you
believe that I do, then?”
I snorted a
laugh, in spite of myself. I heard it echoed through the earpiece, although I
heard a few curses coming from that direction, too.
I shook my head
at the suspect himself, but less in a “no” that time.
“Yes,” I
conceded finally. “So it is a made-up name, then?”
The man calling
himself Quentin Black only returned my smile. His eyes once again looked
shrewd, less thoughtful and more openly calculating.
Even so, his
weird comment about “listening” came back to me.
Truthfully, he
was looking at me as if he were listening very hard.
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