Luisa watches the news bounce off her. No, it can’t compare to being driven off a bridge into the sea in semidarkness. Grelsch can’t meet her eye. “I’ve got a contract.”
“Who hasn’t? You’re fired.”
“Am I the only staff writer to incur your new masters’ displeasure?”
“So it would seem.” K. P. Ogilvy’s jaw flinches once.
“I think it’s fair to ask, ‘Why me?’ ”
“Owners hire, fire, and say what’s fair. When a buyer offers a rescue package of the bounty that Trans Vision offered, one doesn’t nitpick.”
“ ‘A Picked Nit.’ Can I have that on my gold watch?”
Dom Grelsch squirms. “Mr. Ogilvy, I think Luisa’s entitled to some kind of an explanation.”
“Then she can go ask Trans Vision. Perhaps her face doesn’t fit their vision of Spyglass. Too radical. Too feminist. Too dry. Too pushy.”
He’s trying to make a smokescreen. “I’d like to ask Trans Vision a number of things. Where’s their head office?”
“Out east somewhere. But I doubt anyone’ll see you.”
“Out east somewhere. Who are your new fellow board members?”
“You’re being fired, not taking down an affidavit.”
“Just one more question, Mr. Ogilvy. For three magical years of unstinting service, just answer this—what’s the overlap between Trans Vision and Seaboard Power?”
Dom Grelsch’s own curiosity is sharp. Ogilvy hesitates a fraction, then blusters, “I’ve got a lot of work to get through. You’ll be paid until the end of the month, no need to come in. Thank you and good-bye.”
Where there’s bluster, thinks Luisa, there’s duplicity.
55
YOU ARE NOW LEAVING SWANNEKKE COUNTY,
HOME OF THE SURF, HOME OF THE ATOM,
DON’T STAY AWAY TOO LONG!
Life’s okay. Joe Napier shifts his Jeep into cruise control. Life’s good. Seaboard Power, his working life, Margo Roker, and Luisa Rey recede into his past at eighty miles per hour. Life’s great. Two hours to his log cabin in the Santo Cristo mountains. He could catch catfish for supper if he’s not too tired by the drive. He checks his mirror: a silver Chrysler has been sitting a hundred yards behind him for a mile or two, but now it overtakes and vanishes into the distance. Relax, Napier tells himself, you’ve gotten away. Something in his Jeep is rattling. The afternoon reaches its three o’clock golden age. The freeway runs alongside the river for mile after mile, slowly climbing. Upcountry’s gotten uglier in the last thirty years, but show me a place that hasn’t. Either side, housing developments colonize the bulldozer-leveled shelves. Getting out took me all my life. Buenas Yerbas dwindles to a bristling smudge in Napier’s rearview mirror. You can’t stop Lester’s daughter playing Wonder Woman. You gave it your best shot. Let her go. She ain’t a kid. He sifts the radio waves, but it’s all men singing like women and women singing like men, until he finds a hokey country station playing “Everybody’s Talkin’.” Milly was the musical half of his marriage. Napier revisits the first evening he saw her: she was playing fiddle for Wild Oakum Hokum and His Cowgirls in the Sand. The glances musicians exchange, when music is effortless, that was what he wanted from Milly, that intimacy. Luisa Rey is too a kid. Napier turns off at exit eighteen and takes the old gold miners’ road up toward Copperline. That rattling isn’t getting any better. Fall is licking the mountain woods up here. The road follows a gorge under ancient pines to where the sun goes down.
He’s here, all of a sudden, unable to recall a single thought from the last three-quarters of an hour. Napier pulls over at the grocery store, kills the engine, and swings out of his Jeep. Hear that rushing? The Lost River. It reminds him Copperline isn’t Buenas Yerbas, and he unlocks his Jeep again. The store owner greets his customer by name, delivers six months’ gossip in as many minutes, and asks if Napier’s on vacation for the whole week.
“I’m on permanent vacation now. I was offered early”—he’s never used the word on himself before—“retirement. Took it like a shot.”
The store owner’s gaze is all-seeing. “Celebration at Duane’s tonight? Or commiseration at Duane’s tomorrow?”
“Make it Friday. Celebration, mostly. I want to spend my first week of freedom resting in my cabin, not poleaxed under Duane’s tables.” Napier pays for his groceries and leaves, suddenly hungry to be alone. The Jeep’s tires crunch the stony track. Its headlights illuminate the primeval forest in bright, sweeping moments.
Here. Once again, Napier hears the Lost River. He remembers the first time he brought Milly up to the cabin he, his brothers, and his dad built. Now he’s the last one left. They went skinny-dipping that night. The forest dusk fills his lungs and his head. No phones, no CCTV or just TV, no ID clearances, no meetings in the president’s soundproofed office. Not ever again. The retired security man checks the padlock on the door for signs of tampering before he opens the shutters. Relax, for Chrissakes. Seaboard let you go, free, no strings, no comeback.
Nonetheless his .38 is in his hand as he enters the cabin. See? Nobody. Napier gets a fire crackling and fixes himself beans and sausages and sooty baked potatoes. A couple of beers. A long, long piss outdoors. The fizzing Milky Way. A deep, deep sleep.
Awake, again, parched, with a beer-swollen bladder. Fifth time now or sixth? The sounds of the forest don’t lullaby Napier tonight but itch his sense of well-being. A car’s brakes? An elf owl. Twigs snapping? A rat, a mountain quail, I don’t know, you’re in a forest, it could be anything. Go to sleep, Napier. The wind. Voices under the window? Napier wakes to find a cougar crouched on a crossbeam over his bed; he wakes up with a yell; the cougar was Bill Smoke, arm poised to stove Napier’s head in with a flashlight; nothing on the crossbeam. Is it raining this time? Napier listens.
Only the river, only the river.
He lights another match to see if it’s a time worth getting up for: 4:05. No. An in-between hour. Napier nestles down in folded darkness for holes of sleep, but recent memories of Margo Roker’s house find him. Bill Smoke saying, Stand guard. My contact says she keeps her documents in her room. Napier agreeing, glad to reduce his involvement. Bill Smoke switching on his hefty rubber flashlight and going upstairs.
Napier scanning Roker’s orchard. The nearest house was over half a mile away. Wondering why the solo operator Bill Smoke wanted him along for this simple job.
A frail scream. An abrupt ending.
Napier running upstairs, slipping, a series of empty rooms.
Bill Smoke kneeling on an antique bed, clubbing something on the bed with his flashlight, the beam whipping the walls and ceiling, the near-noiseless thump as it lands on the senseless head of Margo Roker. Her blood on the bedsheets—obscenely scarlet and wet.
Napier, shouting for him to stop.
Bill Smoke turned around, huffing. Wassup, Joe?
You said she was out tonight!