“You work there too?”
“Computer geek. Timmy thinks he runs the show. I’m the one who really does.”
“You know those guys you always see in the mall and so on,” Bresh said, “old guys with bowling pin heads, a big round belly, and pipestem legs sticking out the bottom? That’s what GBS is like, only under the round belly there’s like a hundred legs, all of them going in different directions.”
“Now’s when Timmy usually breaks into his rogue bulldozer speech. Hope you’re not in a hurry.”
“You ever read Weber?” Bresh went on. “About bureaucracies? Firms like GBS, that’s what they came down to long ago. It’s all about not losing one’s seat on the bus, all about keeping the machine running the way it always has. Everything else-clients, employees, law itself-is secondary.”
“Doesn’t sound much like your loyalty oath took.”
“I’m part of the machine-”
“I am the bulldozer!” his friend said.
“-but that doesn’t mean I can’t see it.”
Bresh put his drink down on the narrow table just inside the door. Its far end was taken up by a transparent blue vase of silk flowers, cattails, and feather fans on long handles. In the center sat a wicker basket heaped with milky-white crystal eggs not much larger than marbles.
“There’s a man kept on retainer who does work for the company from time to time. Supposedly a messenger service, that’s how it’s billed, though there’s no listing for such anywhere I’ve looked.”
“What kind of work?”
“Can’t really say. Doesn’t happen in my yard. He liaisons with a junior partner.”
“And that’s where the call, your call, came from? To send the money out with Donnie?”
Bresh nodded. “Richard Cole, that’s who you want to talk to. You can catch him at the office tomorrow, follow him home. Or-” He picked the drink up again and turned toward what was presumably the kitchen, speaking as he went. “Or I could just give you his address.”
“Don’t care for cards, do you?”
Bill didn’t look at him. Another goddamned beautiful day outside the window. The window, of course, was sealed.
“Or TV. Or much of anything ’round here, you come right down to it. Am I right?”
Wendell turned back from the blinds he’d opened. Sunlight fell like a sloppy drunk across the floor.
“’S all about choices, Mr. Bill. I can choose not to be a crackhead dog like my mother was. You can choose not to lay up in there like a man who’s dying when we both know you’re not. Not hardly.”
Wendell laughed. Lot of chest in that laugh.
“Choices. Listen to me, I sound like one of the social workers always giving ol’ mom their good advice. Not to mention, a few of ’em, six or ten inches of hard dick.”
Despite himself, Bill laughed.
“There it is. Not something dead and dying men do a lot, laugh. Good thing, too. You imagine how noisy graveyards would get to be?”
Bill sat on the edge of the bed. Wendell was handing him his shoes. Rubbed at the tops with his shirt sleeve as he did so.
“Tell you what. ’Bout ten minutes, they’re gonna be starting up a gospel singalong out there in the day room. I saw the choir members when they got off the bus, be one hell of a racket made. And I’m not much more of a mind to sit through that than you are. What say you and me go for a walk? Get good earth under our feet.”
Back his first year in town, he and Shannon were on the set of Doomtown Days, a post-apocalypse film. Studios were turning out a lot of them then, mostly on shoestring budgets. Reluctantly heroic, barely dressed man or woman stalking across the wasteland alone, communities gone feral, automotive equivalents of zip guns, zombie sheep, that sort of thing.
Shannon had just said that the director looked to be all of sixteen years old. “Kid musta clipped out an ad from the back of a comic book. Want to direct movies? Sent in his two dollars.”
There was a guy hanging around the edges, wearing a print shirt, creased high-pocket trousers. Neither young nor old, good-looking or plain, nothing to draw attention to him. Driver pointed, asked who’s that?
“Danny Louvin. Everything you see here goes back to him.”
Driver looked again. Put a Your-Name-Here ID bracelet on him, a puka-shell necklace, he’d win the award for uncool. “That’s the money man?”
“The money man’s sitting over there in the producer tent. Knit shirt, leather loafers? Danny’s the one who keeps it running, makes it all work.”
“He doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”
“That’s how good he is.”
Driver remembered that as he drove out Cave Creek Road. Clump after clump of housing developments squatted on what within easy memory had been bare desert. He wondered if, late afternoons, the coyotes still came out, and what they must think about all this. Dark swatches showed on the hills where clouds blocked sunlight, making the landscape look like parts from two different worlds hastily patched together.
He was thinking about the people you see and the ones you don’t, the ones who really run things. Take this too far, it blooms to paranoia, you start finding conspiracies in how cereal boxes get lined up on the shelf. Consider it too little, you’re a fool.
Bresh believed that he ran the office at GBS, he was the one who kept things together. Maybe he was. And what about Beil, who claimed to be merely a broker, an arranger, a middleman? How far did his influence extend? Was there a wizard for every curtain? Or just one, behind all the curtains?
Billboards advertising a new community under construction out this way showed a string of faces from infant to elderly and read The Better Life You’ve Been Looking For. Driver remembered something else Shannon had told him, the story of a traveller who gave his life because he wanted to visit a town that was like all others in its area, but forbidden. He remembered it because the writer had been there when Shannon told the story. Two days later that same situation showed up in the ongoing rewrite of the script.
Richard Cole’s home was green stucco and had fake logs or at least fake stubs of logs built high into the outside walls. Plastic barn owls stood at each corner of the roof, searching the skies. Two cars in the driveway, a midnight blue Lexus and a red two-seater BMW.
No door bell, but a knocker shaped like a bear’s head. Driver used it then stepped aside, to the edge of the peephole’s sweep, turning to look away, as if in appreciation of the landscape.
“Who is it?” came from inside.
Driver didn’t respond. After a moment the door started open. Driver waited. When it was fully open, and the man stood there, anger and presumption spilling off his face, Driver took a single step forward and hit him once, hard as he could, directly in the forehead. Watched him stagger back and go down, saw the other guy come up from the couch.
“Bad idea,” Driver said.
The guy sat down. The two of them were dressed almost like twins, loose-fitting tan slacks, blue broadcloth shirts, soft, costly leather slip-ons. As Cole got back to his feet, this one slid furtively down to reach for the cell phone in what had been designed a century ago as a watch pocket.
“Worse idea,” Driver said. The guy held up both hands, palms out.
Cole looked at his friend, made a disgusted face, and looked back. His forehead was turning dark. “Who are you?”
“A delivery boy. Like Donnie.”
No response.
“Donnie-who, at your urging, carried a padded envelope into Mail N More this morning?”
Still nothing.
“What you’re going to tell me is where your urge came from.”
“Get out of my house.”
Driver turned as if to go, then spun back, right foot hooking Cole’s knee, pulling his legs out from under him. The man went down with a loud crack that probably heralded concussion. Driver planted the foot on his stomach.
“Please,” Driver said.
Cole didn’t try to move, but his eyes were going everywhere, north, south, east, west. White ceiling. Beige walls. Furniture legs. Ivory carpet. His friend’s feet showing beneath the couch. None of it any help.