Single Sashimi (3 page)

“Did you already call a tow truck?” There was no sign of the truck Dad had hit, so the other guy must have had his car towed and then taken off himself.

“Yeah.”

She joined her father against a chain link fence on the side of the road. They stood there in silence while an occasional car sped down Lawrence Expressway.

“Good thing there weren’t too many cars out this late at night.”

He grunted.

“Working late?”

“Crunching numbers for your grandma.”

Oh, the bank.

“I saw your mother at the bank today.”

This time, she grunted. “I thought Grandma gave her a position that doesn’t require her to be there.” Especially after the last fiasco involving a few thousand dollars she “borrowed” from a bank client that had to be replaced before he figured out what had happened.

“She’s in human resources now. She was turning in some papers.”

“Let’s hope she doesn’t screw that up, like she did everything else.”

“Venus.” His stern voice made her pout, and she didn’t look at him. “She’s your mother. You don’t talk about her that way.”

“She hasn’t been your wife for seventeen years, so I don’t understand why you’d care how I talked about her.”

He sighed, a low, reedy breath. “It’s because I owe a lot to your grandmother.”

“Yeah, well, Grandma kept you on at the bank after the divorce because she likes you more than she does her own daughter.”

“Venus.” His voice had become a growl.

“Sorry.” But she wasn’t. “So did you talk to Mom?”

“She seemed in a good mood.”

“That means she’ll be in a bad one tomorrow.” Her mother, the emotional yo-yo. Charming one moment, angry and insulting the next. Mom had been that way for most of Venus’s childhood.

He sighed but didn’t reprimand her again, even though she knew she deserved it.

“I didn’t think you’d be up so late when I called you.”

“I was cleaning.”

He shifted his weight and looked at her. “Why were you cleaning so late at night?”

She knew it was going to alarm him, but maybe it would make him feel more comfortable to worry about her rather than think about his accident. “I came home tonight and the front door was open. One of my junior programmers was walking out of my condo.”

His eyes suddenly blazed hotter than a sword-maker’s f ire. “W hat was he doing there?”

“He said he found a spare key under the doormat, and the CTO had sent him by to give me some sensitive papers that he didn’t want to leave outside.”

“Why do
you
think he was there?”

She’d kept her emotions at bay as she scrubbed the toilet, mopped the floors, disinfected all the door handles, drove here to find her father. But now the pain started in her gut, the feeling of being stabbed over and over with a carving knife. “I think he was looking for the Spiderweb.”

Her father grew very still. “How would he even know about it?”

“Jaye and I have been working on it for years. It’s a small industry—maybe word leaked out somehow.”

“Well, does it matter? Patent is pending—”

“All they have to do is make something similar that won’t infringe on the patent. It’s done all the time.”

“You had it locked up, right?”

“Of course.” She was her father’s daughter—she’d even bought the same brand of fireproof safe that he had. “But I think he tried to get into the safe.”

“He didn’t succeed?”

“He didn’t.”

A thoughtful, tense silence. Her father’s worry for her was almost a tangible thing that wrapped around her.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She stared up at the night sky, at stars dimmed by the nearby street lamp. She had to be rational, not fly off the handle the way she wanted to. “I can find out easily if he was telling the truth or not.”

“And if he wasn’t?”

“I don’t know, Dad. This company is like the Google of game development. It’s only going to get bigger, whether I’m there or not.”

“Do you want them to go big by stealing your proprietary program?”

Maybe it was the dust and dirt from standing beside an expressway, but a headache started throbbing behind her eyes. “It’s not even completed yet. I’m not ready to start my own company yet.”

“I keep telling you, you’ll never feel ready to start your own company.” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “You just have to do it.”

Maybe he was right. “Besides, if Oomvid makes me Game Lead in fact—rather than acting Game Lead—there’s a good chance I would sell them the Spiderweb. Why would they try to steal it?”

“Are you sure they’re going to hire you as Game Lead?”

“I’ve seen all the candidates. I’m the best out of all of them.”

Her dad snorted. “Does Oomvid really want the best? Or just whomever they happen to like?”

She didn’t want to think about it.

She didn’t have to—the tow truck arrived. After the wreck got sent to the garage her father used, they waved at the relieved policeman, and she drove her dad home.

He paused after getting out of her car. “What are you going to do tomorrow?” Always have a plan. He’d taught her that.

“I’ll see if Yardley really sent Edgar to my condo.”

“And then?”

“And then…” What could she do, short of turning in her resignation? “I’ll poke around, see what else he’s been up to.”

Dad sighed and looked grave.

“I’m not going to just quit, Dad. I’m acting Game Lead, and I’m not going to throw that away.”

“You’re
acting
Game Lead; Yardley’s an
established
Chief Technology Officer. There’s a big difference between them.” He walked up the driveway and let himself into his townhouse.

Venus wasn’t about to admit he might be right.

“I don’t like the face of this Goobermonster.”

Venus handed the sketch to her administrative assistant as they hurried down the carpeted hallway toward the boardroom. “Tell the design team to make him less like Barney and more like
Aliens.
He should make the consumer want to shoot him into tiny pieces, not sing along with him.”

Her admin, a young Asian girl right out of college, handed her another file. “Jaye can’t find the bug the testers complained about.”

“Schedule a meeting so the testers can demonstrate what they do to make the video game crash.”

“The testers have said they’re too busy.”

Venus stopped and planted her stiletto heel. Her admin halted and swallowed as she gazed up at her.

Venus frowned. The girl didn’t have to tremble as if Venus was going to eat her. It didn’t help that this particular admin was petite and frail-looking. “Tell the testers we pay them to help us make the game better, not to dictate to me if they have time or not.”

She turned and continued toward the boardroom. “If I have to go into the basement to roll some heads, I will.” In this male-dominated business, she wouldn’t let anyone be impertinent to her—certainly not a posse of uppity testers. Most testers she’d worked with at other game development companies had been nice guys—this particular group was like a high-powered laser rifle shot to the rear end.

She stumbled a little on a bump in the carpet. Her world tilted on its axis before it righted itself with agonizing slowness. Too little sleep, too much caffeine. She needed to be alert for this meeting. “Tell Edgar’s programmers that the Angoramonsters’ mass attack on level five is too slow. They need to speed it up a bit.”

The admin wrote the memo down and nearly tripped flat on her face as she struggled to keep up with Venus’s long stride. “They just finished the Inca Death Mine set for level nine.”

“I also wanted the Vampire Spike Field ready. Where’s that?”

The admin swallowed again. “They didn’t mention it.”

Venus ground her teeth. Edgar’s group kept “neglecting” to tell her if they were behind schedule—yet another small way some of the men under her flouted her authority. “If they needed more time, I could have reallocated resources or rescheduled the Smelly Werewolves design for a later date.”

The admin remained silent.

Venus would have to go down herself to get things done. She could never win with her admin choices—the female ones jumped every time she sneezed, which made them ineffectual at relaying Venus’s instructions to the men who worked under her. However, whenever Venus hired male admins in the past, they backstabbed her at the first opportunity, speculating that she’d warmed a few beds to get where she was.

This particular admin wasn’t bad—just intimidated by Venus’s height. Also possibly green at the way Venus garnered attention from a certain Korean American programmer, who looked like the hero of the girl’s favorite Korean soap opera. Venus wasn’t the most sensitive person, but she’d have to be blind to not notice how the admin straightened her posture and smiled more when Jin Hoo came to report to Venus.

She hadn’t yet found anyone she wanted to have a relationship with, and it wouldn’t be a programmer—she never dated someone who worked under her. When she’d been fat, they hadn’t been interested in her, anyway When she lost weight, she wasn’t interested in them because they’d acted so differently toward her, and that galled her. But no one knew she’d never had a significant relationship with any man, they just assumed she couldn’t have reached the age of thirty and still be a virgin.

Venus always gently brushed off Jin Hoo before he could make any overtures, like she did all her coworkers, but he never seemed to lose that just-been-slammed-in-the-face-with-a-sledgehammer look when he saw her. He never noticed the pretty little admin right outside her door.

Well, Venus could at least do something about that. With her hand on the boardroom door, she turned to her admin. “While I’m in my meeting, take the new design specs to Jin Hoo.”

The girl’s eyes sparkled like the Chopard earrings Venus had coveted in her latest
InStyle
magazine.

“I’ll be busy with the meeting all afternoon and you deserve a break. Leave your notes on my desk and then take the rest of the day off ” Hopefully with Jin Hoo at her side, if the girl had an ounce of female persuasion in her.

The admin looked like she wanted to kiss her. “Thank you, Venus.”

“Wish me luck.” Venus opened the boardroom door, ready to face Goobermonsters in Armani suits.

“You want me to do what?”

Venus bolted to her feet and stared down the length of the oak conference table at Ed Mandley VP of Marketing and the biggest idiot she’d ever worked with in all her years as a video game programmer.

Ed skewered her with dark eyes under his bushy gray brows. “This isn’t negotiable,
Miss Chau.
”

She hated it when they called her Miss Chau. It delineated her from the rest of them—the VPs in designer suits who sat on either side of the table. Her Versace business suit had masculine lines, but the feminine curves underneath didn’t. And those curves were all they saw, sometimes. Like now. They saw “brainless woman,” not “competent programmer.”

Venus took a sharp breath through tight nostrils. “The game heroine already has an improbable size C cup. She can’t possibly do all the flips and aerials in the fighting sequences with a larger chest size.”

Ed’s gaze didn’t waver. “The testers wanted a more sexually appealing character—”

“The testers are only supposed to be looking for software bugs and trying to make the game crash. They are not the product’s focus group.”

“On the contrary, our marketing department values their input highly.” The VP of Manufacturing, a thin man in a burgundy tie to her left, spoke up timidly.

“The testers do nothing but stare at a gaming monitor for twelve hours a day. Of course they’d want more stimulating eye candy.”
In lieu of a real social life…

“The testers are an important part of your team, Venus.” Ed cleared his throat and smoothed his Italian silk tie.

Venus flexed her jaw. He always found something in her to criticize, possibly because she’d spilled champagne down the front of his suit when he’d made drunken overtures to her at the last milestone party. “Lara Croft has been done already. We’ve gone through considerable effort to distinguish our heroine from Tomb Raider. A larger chest will only decrease our market impact.”