Dancing sounds like a good idea

Admittedly the last time Rick had gone dancing, things had gotten out of control. But that had been because Kat and Usha had gone off script and because Rick had followed his dick rather than common sense in dealing with the situation. He intended to give his brain at least equal authority to his dick in the next few hours.

Going to the same club where the shave-head crew had hung out sounded particularly stupid so he used his phone to check for local places.

McKinney seemed devoid of good dancing so he headed south to Plano... where they ran into a problem.

"Sorry. No children."

"You have your ID, Nicki?"

"Uh, no."

A couple more failures had Rick searching for another idea.

"You know," Nicki said, "I haven't been carded since I was like thirteen."

"You look younger."

"Yeah, that's weird though, isn't it?"

It was weird. What was weirder is that apparently Dan hadn't bothered telling his daughter what he was doing.

Rick pulled his car over to the side of the road. "I'm going to tell you a story, Nicki. You may not like it and that's okay. If you want me to stop I will. But I think I can explain what's happening to you. Now, if I tell you, it's a huge secret and there's no going back. It'll change your whole life. So be sure you want to know."

"I definitely want to know."

"You know your dad works for bio-DNA and they have a super-expensive drug, right?"

"Yeah. So?"

"The finished version comes with an app. You can use it to modify your body. If you want bigger muscles, you can just adjust the app and your body will develop them without you even having to work out. If you need glasses, you can use the app to adjust your eyesight to 20/20 or better. If you take bio-DNA, you can see beneath the surface of people. You can sense the way their nerves are sending signals to each other. If you take bio-DNA, the connection between your body and your brain improves so you can quickly learn things like new dances or sports."

"That sounds completely cool. I can see why people would want to buy it."

"Of course, that's assuming that you could run the app yourself. If you gave someone bio-DNA and ran the app yourself, you could do all those things for them or you could do other things. You could make them seem younger, for example, by--"

"Stop right there."

Rick stopped.

"You're saying my dad drugged me and has been running an app to like transform me into some sort of Lolita?"

"In a nutshell."

"He would never do that. He loves me."

Rick shrugged. "If you say so. But who else would have done it? Who else has access to bio-DNA? Who else has a pretty young intern he's been fucking who's also somehow been transformed into another Lolita? Who lost his wife recently, just when she started asking hard questions and talking about moving out on her--"

"You're saying my father killed my mother. That's impossible."

"Is it?"

"I mean it really is impossible. I was with him the night my mother was killed."

Well, that was convenient. "Your mother told me your dad didn't have the balls to kill anyone when I tried to warn her to stay safe. Maybe she was right. Maybe Dan wouldn't be able to do something like that himself. But you remember that fake doctor with the shaved head you told me about? bio-DNA hired a bunch of thugs to supposedly provide security. But we've learned they do more than that. They clean up messes for bio-DNA executives. And to your dad, your mom had become that kind of me--"

Nicki made a gagging noise, opened her door, leaned out and puked.