Lace cast her eyes around for a waiter or waitress, one finger pointing at my coffee. She nodded as the connection was made, then turned back to me. "They're supposed to. You know, don't reveal your sources. Don't destroy people's lives just to get a story. Don't pay people for interviews."
"You're studying journalism?"
"Journalism and the law, actually."
I nodded, wondering if that was an undergraduate major. Somehow, it didn't sound like one. I revised Lace's age up to the lower to mid-twenties and felt myself relax a little. Suddenly, this was even less a date than it had been a moment before.
"Cool," I said.
She looked at me like I might be retarded.
I tried to smile back at her, realizing that my small-talk muscles were incredibly rusty, the result of socializing only with people in a secret organization who pretty much only socialized with one another. Of course, if I could just steer the conversation to rinderpest infection rates in Africa, I knew I'd blow her away.
Rebecky - at sixty-seven and three hundred pounds, my favorite waitress in the world to flirt with - appeared and handed Lace a cup of coffee and a menu.
"How're you doing there, Cal?" she asked.
"Just fine, thanks."
"You sure? You haven't been eating much lately." She gave me a sly wink.
"On a diet," I said, patting my stomach.
Her standard response: "Wish that diet worked on me."
Rebecky chuckled as she walked away. She's amazed by my appetite, but her repertoire of where-does-Cal-put-it-all jokes had shrunk to the bare minimum over the last months. As a guy with something to hide, there's one thing I've learned: People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that's the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.
Lace looked up from her menu. "Speaking of funny diets, Cal, what the hell happened in my building last winter?"
I leaned back and sipped coffee. Evidently, Lace wasn't up for small talk either. "You in a hurry or something?"
"My lease is up in two months, dude. And last night you promised you wouldn't jerk me around."
"I'm not jerking you around. You should try the pepper steak."
"Vegetarian."
"Oh," I said, my parasite rumbling at the concept.
Lace flagged down Rebecky and ordered potato salad, while I crammed some bacon into my mouth. Potato salad is an Atkins nightmare, and more important, the parasite hates it. Peeps prefer protein, red in tooth and claw.
"So tell me what you know," she said.
"Okay." I cleared my throat. "First of all, I'm not really Morgan's cousin."
"Duh."
I frowned. This revelation hadn't provided the same oomph that it had on my mental flowchart of the conversation. "But I am looking for her."
"Again: duh, dude. So you're like a private detective or something? Or stalker ex-boyfriend?"
"No. I work for the city."
"Cal, you are so not a cop."
I wasn't quite sure how she'd come to this assessment, but I couldn't argue. "No, I'm not. I work for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Sexually Transmitted Disease Control."
"Sexually transmitted?" She raised an eyebrow. "Wait. Are you sure you're not a stalker?"
I reached for my wallet and flopped it open, revealing one of the items I'd picked up from the Night Watch that morning. We've got a big machine that spits out laminated ID cards and badges, credentials for dozens of city agencies, both real and imaginary. This silver-plated badge was very impressive, with the words Health Field Officer curving along the bottom. In the ID case next to it, my photo stared grimly out at her.
She stared at it for a moment, then said, "You know you're wearing the same shirt today as in that picture?"
I froze for a second, realizing that, yep, I hadn't changed since that morning. In a brilliant save, I glanced down at my Kill Fee T-shirt and said, "What? You don't like it?"
"Not particularly. So what's that job all about? Do you, like, hunt people down and arrest them for spreading the clap?"
I cleared my throat, pushing my empty plate away. "Okay, here's how it works. About a year ago, I was given a disease. Um, let me put that another way - I was assigned a specific carrier of a certain disease. I tracked down all his sexual partners and encouraged them to get tested, then I tracked down their sexual partners, and so on." I shrugged. "I just keep going where the chain of infection leads me, informing people along the way. Sometimes I don't get enough specific information about someone, so I have to poke around a little, like I was last night. For one thing, I don't even know Morgan's last name." I raised my eyebrows hopefully.
Lace shrugged. "Me neither. So let me get this straight: You tell people they've got STDs? That's your job, dude?"
"No, their doctors do that. All I'm allowed to do is tell them they're at risk. Then I try to get them to cooperate and give me a list of people they've slept with. Someone's got to do it."
"I guess. Wow, though."
"So far I've spent a whole year tracking down the offspring - or rather, the infections from that one carrier." I smiled at my cover story's cleverness. Nifty how I worked the truth in there, huh?
"Wow," Lace repeated softly, her eyes still wide.
Now that I thought about it, the job I'd chosen for myself did sound pretty cool. A little bit of undercover work, some social consciousness, an air of illicit mystery and human tragedy. One of those careers where you'd have to face life's harsh realities and be a good listener. By now, she had to figure I was older than nineteen - more like her age, and probably wise beyond my years.
Her potato salad arrived, and after a fortifying bite of carbs, she said, "So what's your disease?"
"My disease? I didn't say I had a disease."
"The one you're tracking, dude."
"Oh. Right. I'm not at liberty to say. Confidentiality. We have ethics too."
"Sure you do." Her eyes narrowed. "And that's why you didn't want to talk in front of my friends last night?"
I nodded. My cover story was sliding into place perfectly.
She put down her fork. "But it's one of those sexually transmitted diseases that makes people paint stuff on the walls in blood?"