Free Company Man by Joseph Finder Page A

hour—it’s Marta’s night off. Turn off the computer.”
    â€œBut I’m in the middle—”
    â€œSave it and shut down. Come on, sweetie.”
    He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up for Lucas. No reply. The house was so unnecessarily big, though, that sound didn’t carry far. Nick went upstairs, past Laura’s study, its door unopened since her death, to Lucas’s room.
    He knocked. The door, slightly ajar, opened inward a few inches. He pushed it open the rest of the way, called, “Luke?” No answer; no Lucas here. His desk lamp was on, a textbook open. He walked over to see which textbook it was, inadvertently bumping against the desk. The iMac’s flat panel screen came out of sleep mode, displaying a profusion of colorful flesh-tone photographs. Nick looked again and saw naked bodies in various sexual contortions. He came closer to get a closer look.
    The entire screen was taken up with pop-up windows of slutty-looking women with huge boobs in garish shades of pink and orange. “Real Amateur Pussy,” one window read, the word “real” flashing red like a neon sign.
    Nick’s first reaction was a very male one: he looked even closer, intrigued, felt a stirring he hadn’t felt in months. Immediately after, though, he felt disgusted at the tawdriness of the images—who were these girls who were willing to do this stuff for all the heavy-breathing Internet world to see?And then the realization washed over him that this was Lucas’s computer, that his son was looking at all this stuff. If Laura had discovered this, she would have freaked out, called him at work, demanded that he come home at once and have a Talk with his son.
    Whereas Nick didn’t know what to think, how to react. He was at a loss. The kid was sixteen, and developmentally a fairly advanced sixteen at that. Of course he was interested in sex. Nick remembered when he and a buddy, around the same age, had found a matted, waterlogged Playboy in the woods. They’d dried it out carefully, pored over it as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls, hid it in Nick’s garage. Looking back on it now, it was amazing how different smut was in those days, how innocent, though it sure didn’t seem it at the time. The photos in Playboy were so heavily airbrushed that it was something of a shock when Nick first got an up-close glimpse of his first real-life tits not long afterward, in the finished basement of his first real girlfriend, Jody Catalfano. Jody, the cutest girl in the class, had been after him for months, was ready long before he was. Her breasts were far smaller than the voluptuous babes’ in Playboy, her nipples larger and darker with a few stray hairs around the edges of the areolas.
    But this stuff, garish and flashing, was way too real, somehow. It was more blatant, more perverted than anything from Nick’s fevered adolescence. And here it was, a couple of mouse clicks away. It wasn’t half-buried under dead leaves in the woods, didn’t require conservation efforts or concealment in an empty Pennzoil box in a garage. On some level it was almost sickening. And what if Julia had wandered in here and seen it?
    He picked up Lucas’s desk phone and called his son’s cell.
    Lucas answered after five rings, fumbling with the phone a long time. “Yeah?” In the background was loud music, raucous voices.
    â€œLuke, where the hell are you?”
    A pause. “What’s up?”
    â€œWhat’s up ? It’s suppertime.”
    â€œI ate already.”
    â€œWe have dinner together, remember?” This “dinner together” thing had become one of Nick’s recent obsessions, particularly since Laura was gone. He sometimes felt that if he didn’t insist on it, the remains of his family could all fly away by centrifugal force.
    Another pause. “Where are you, Luke?”
    â€œAll right,” Lucas said and hung