"Mike told me. It's slick, but I see a lot of players do it. We almost all use it. Is it really that clever?"
"Depending on your background, it's more than clever. Isaac Newton didn't do a lot more when he deduced elliptical orbits from the inverse square law."
"Look, Paul... I'm truly sorry, but even with Bill and Irma, it's just too dangerous."
Mike thought about the pain in his arm. And then about the twin sisters he had once had. "Uh, Boss, could you and I have a little talk?"
Wentz raised an eyebrow. "So... ? Okay. 'Scuse us a minute, Paul."
There was a moment of embarrassed silence as the two left the room. Naismith rubbed his cheek with a faintly palsied hand and gazed across Highway 101 at the pale lights just coming on in the Shopping Center. So very much had changed and all the years in between were blurred now. Shopping Center? All of Santa Ynez would have been lost in the crowd at a good high-school basketball game in the 1990s. These days a county with seven thousand people was considered a thriving concern.
It was just past sunset now, and the office was growing steadily darker. The room's displays were vaguely glowing ghosts hovering in the near distance. Cameras from down in the shopping areas drove most of those displays. Paul could see that business was picking up there. The Tinkers and mechanics and 'furbishers had trotted out their wares, and crowds were hanging about the aerial displays. Across the room, other screens showed pale red and green, relaying infrared images from cameras purchased by Wentz's clients.
In the next room the two officers' talk was a faint murmur. Naismith leaned back and pushed up his hearing aid. For a moment the sound of his lung and heart action was overpoweringly loud in his ears.