"That was very open of you, sir," said Alé with as gentle, appreciative, and respectful a voice as she could muster. "If you don't mind me asking, how do you feel about the interventions she made?"

The Brit had retracted, his lips thinly pressed together, looking miserable and lonely, and he examined his phone as he waited for a response from whomever it was he was talking to, but as she looked at him she did sense that he might have wanted to be texting someone else.

That he might have wanted to be talking to someone else.

"Ineffective, ultimately," he said with bitterness, "and usually she tends to only be half right. Which means, of course, that she is usually also half wrong. But most ordinary people have similar odds."

"That's not very kind," said Alé, who was less than thrilled at the idea that he probably considered her ordinary. But she acknowledged that she had no reason to accept whatever opinions others had of her unless she allowed them to become important to her, so she treated it with a neutral glance.

"It's true," he said with a wave of his hand, dark and angular against the florescent glow of his smartphone screen. "Most people are spectacular idiots."

As such an intuitive person as she was, this thinking-machine Brit's comment struck her funny-bone in an unexpected way, and before she could tell herself to shut her big mouth she was laughing.

"What the world might do without people like you!" she exclaimed after a moment. "People who disavow the things that make us human just as much as our rationality does – people who despise emotionality. You need both, mister, if only because rationality keeps you alive, and emotionality makes it worthwhile to stay alive. Otherwise...it's just staying. And I'm sure you can understand how that might not be fun."

The comment really seemed to hit home, because as she said this, the Brit withdrew like a mollusk into its shell, folding his legs to his chest, wrapping his long, sinewy arms around them, and burying his face into his knobby knees.

It was disconcerting to see a grown man in such a position, but Alé took it in stride. She'd seen the toughest of the tough in the times of their greatest vulnerability, in jail cells, at their homies' funerals, and as drunk or high as was humanly possible.

"Eh, man, I'm sorry," she said, seeking to make it better, though she knew an apology wouldn't necessarily help this dysfunctional man, "that was not kind or necessary, and I don't know that it was true."

"It was none of those things," he agreed, venom in his voice, though his insistence merely confirmed her suspicions that what she had said resonated more with him than he could admit.

She had to notice, too, that he had not been texting for some while. Fiddling with his phone, making the screen light up and dim down over and over as he checked for text messages, yes, but not technically texting.

However, she was feeling the pull of sleep, and this, augmented by having gotten absorbed in the conversation, was threatening her driving.

"I need coffee," she breathed again, "how 'bout you?"

"Oh, God yes," he asserted, unfolding like a flower at the thought, "and carbohydrates."

"I gotta say, you do look like a man who likes carbs," she said with some amusement. "I guess your brain alone uses well over the average hundred a day."

"I don't eat when I'm on a case," he said, surprising her, "but when it's over, I'm famished."

"Disordered eating habits," she said, then laughed. "But don't worry, I withhold judgment on that, I've never been an 'ordered' eater in my life, either."

"So frequently...I feel like food's not worth the bother."

Alé paused as she looked for a place to get off the freeway. "Thank God, we're at Camarillo already...so wait a minute, you aren't here on a case?"

"Not one worthy of my presence here, no."

"Then a...mundane one?"

"More than mundane. It's ridiculous."

"Mhm." She paused. "And this is concerning the UMQRA group, correct?"

"Your inclination to refer by everything with its initials betrays your long experience in government work."

He suddenly reacted to his phone as if it had rung, picking it up and reading a text message that had noiselessly surfaced on its screen.

"Do you have one of those mosquito ringtones?" Alé asked as they pulled off the freeway.

"It's new. 22 kilohertz," he answered blandly. "It's the upper range of the human ear's capacity. Virtually unhearable. Unless you're trained." He paused in his typing. "How long until we get where we're going?"

"About thirty minutes, just let me please get some tougher caffeine in my system. This stuff I've been drinking is just sugary shit."

They pulled into a gas station and Alé leaped out, flipping a switch to open the gas tank cover.

"You got a credit card?" she demanded, not bothering to look at him as she shoved the nozzle into the tank.

"Oh, how rude of me, I insist that you let me pay for the gas," he replied, hating to be told what to do as much as she did.

"I'll buy you coffee. I'm sure it's crap, but it's something."

"Black, two sugars."

"Got it."

Leaving him with her keys in the ignition, she sprinted into the convenience store, exhilarating at the chance to exercise her muscles a bit.

Returning bearing two piping hot but definitely crappy coffees, she found him leaning against the car, reading her latest issue of Journal of Adolescent and Gang Intervention in Social Work.

"Are you an ex-gangmember, then?" he asked, not looking up at her but accepting the coffee she pressed into his hand. He didn't seem to notice how hot or how putrid it was, sipping with undiscerning taste.