"Can't last," Parker said.
"It wasn't supposed to last. The thing is, we came up with— The two of us came up with, but that was a dispute later, but the two of us came up with a server application that was just awesome. Everybody wanted to invest, we had Brazilians wanted to invest!"
"Drug money?"
"No! Legit legit! Bank money! Venture capital money! All of a sudden, barely out of school, we're millionaires! On paper, but still. Millionaires."
"He screwed you," Parker suggested.
"It's that obvious, isn't it," Lloyd agreed, disgusted with himself. "I trusted him, I thought we were a team forever. There had to be contracts, legal papers, deals, all of that, but that wasn't the real stuff, the stuff inside the molecules was the real stuff, and the stuff in our veins. So Brad's sister's husband's brother was our lawyer, but so what, he was our lawyer, we all loved each other."
"Until," Parker said.
"Until there was a distribution," Lloyd told him, "and I wasn't part of it. Everything had been going into the business until then, just a little draw for us to live on, but now there was the first distribution, and Brad is on the list, and his sister and her husband are on the list, and the lawyer's wife is on the list, but I'm not on the list."
Lloyd was silent. The Cherokee kept creeping around tree trunks and boulders, skirting ravines and too-steep slopes, looking for the road down to Marino's place. Parker waited for Lloyd to calm himself down, silent and invisible over there.
"All right," Lloyd finally said. 'Thank you for not pressing me."
"We've got time," Parker said.
"Yes. All right. What I did— I couldn't bring myself to go to Brad, as though I was accusing him, because it had to be a simple fuckup, an explanation somewhere, so I brought it to our office manager, the one in charge of disbursements, and she said the list was straight from George. The lawyer, George. I said this can't be right, this is some sort of fuckup, I called George, George told me to look at the papers I'd signed, I was an employee, he offered to fax me over copies of everything I'd signed in case I didn't have it all myself, I hung up on him. I thought, Brad can't know about this, this is something George the sleazy lawyer did because he's George the sleazy lawyer, it's a sleazy lawyer thing is all. So I went to see Brad, he had a nice weekend place north of the city—New York, I mean—up in the Shawangunks, good climbing mountains, he'd become a mountaineer by then, and I confronted him, I mean, to the extent I ever confronted anybody, and he was very bland and smooth and of course we were both stoned, we were always stoned but functioning, you know, that creative high, and he said I'd never been anything but his assistant from the beginning, he was the genius with the ideas, I was his girl Friday, that's all I was. So I hit him with a laptop, right on the back of the head with a laptop, and threw him off his goddam terrace with the great view of the Gunks, and threw his laptop after him, and I seriously positively wanted to kill him, and thought I had. And I set fire to the house, and I stole his Porsche, and I forged his name to a few checks, and I tried to access the business accounts so I could steal everything, and somewhere in there they caught me."
"You cut a pretty good swath," Parker said.
"I sure did," Lloyd agreed.
"How long were you in?"
"Six years, four months, nine days."
"Not that long, with everything."
"No, well, that's where it turned out I maybe wasn't that stupid, after all," Lloyd said. "I had a couple things come out right for me later on. Like Brad didn't die, for one, which at first I thought was too fucking bad, but then I realized it was a blessing."
"Because it wasn't murder."
"No, because I could rat him out." Lloyd laughed, a harsh sound, and said, "Due to the fact I'd gone in and screwed everything up, made such a mess of the firm, the feds had to come in and take a look around, and it seemed I wasn't the only one Brad was screwing. He wasn't really doing it for the money, he had money, he was doing it to prove he was smarter than everybody else, and that meant everybody else, including the government. Embezzling from his own company to avoid taxes on profits, filing false income tax returns, all kinds of shit like that. So, it turned out, maybe Brad was the genius, and I was just the— He was the grasshopper and I was the ant, but when it came to game theory I thought of it first."
There was another little silence. Again Parker waited him out, and this time Lloyd, sounding defiant and embarrassed, said, "He who flips first wins."
"You went state's evidence."
"I traded my best friend Brad for a reduction of sentence." Lloyd giggled, a strange sound. "He won't be out for a few more years."
"Okay," Parker said.
Now the silence returned in the slowly moving Cherokee. Parker was satisfied, felt there was nothing more to say, but a minute later Lloyd asked, "Does that worry you?"
"Does what worry me?"
'That I ratted out Brad."
"You did what you had to do."
"I just don't want you to think, uh ..."
Parker said, "Don't worry about it."
"All right."
"You won't be in that situation, with me," Parker said.
* * *
Parker gradually became aware of light, off to his right. It was pinkish gray, dim, diffuse, like a false dawn, but narrower. Lloyd said, "Isn't that—?"
"Maybe it's where we're going," Parker said, and up front Wiss cried, "God damn! At last!" He spurted the Cherokee forward a few feet, then stopped, his red brake lights shining from behind Parker, brighter than the faint illumination downslope to the right.
They'd earlier switched off the Cherokee's interior lights, so it stayed dark when Elkins climbed in, saying, "Well, we found it. Too far south, though."
"Doesn't matter," Wiss said.
Parker said, "What doesn't matter?"
Elkins told him, "I wanted to come in above the shed, just to look it over, but we can do that on the way back. Marino's got a shed, like a little cabin, up at the top of the road, in case anybody wants to take a leak, have a shower, drink a beer."
"Small, for him," commented Wiss.
"I figured," Elkins said, "if we went there first, we'd get some idea what's changed around here."
Wiss said, "Should we go up there now?"
"No," Parker said. "We're here. I want to see what those lights are."
"So do I," Elkins said.
"Done," Wiss said, and put the Cherokee in gear.
Elkins had taken his goggles off now, but at first Wiss kept them on as he drove, so he could find the road. Soon, though, the light out ahead got stronger, more amber now than either pink or gray, and he took the goggles off.
It was strange, almost an underwater feeling, to drive into the aura of the light, the pine forest becoming more solid, the sky now like a roof, black where the soft light didn't reach.
Just as Parker saw the first floodlight out ahead of them, Lloyd sharply said, "Stop! Stop here."
They stopped, and all four got out onto the road, a narrow ribbon of gray concrete barely two lanes wide, curving up the slope through the forest, angling around the larger trees. Ahead of them were two floodlights, mounted atop twenty-foot-high metal posts. One was about ten feet from the road to the right, the other an equal distance to the left. Both lights were aimed away from them, downslope, through clear plastic mountings that dimmed and diffused them. There was no glare at any point in among the trees, just a steady low illumination, as though Marino had given the entire forest a night-light.
Lloyd said, 'This is the new perimeter. These fixtures will circle the house."
"Hell of a big perimeter," Wiss said.
"But this is the way to do it," Lloyd told him. "Mounted up there with those lights will be motion sensors and cameras. If a deer walks through here—"