“Hhmmm.”
“Not my type.”
“Who gives a fuck what your type is, Baxter? Jesus.” A pause. “I could do petite and forty, no problem. So long as she’s got a halfway presentable face.”
“Well… she’s got good bone structure.”
“Right.” Lebrecht rolls his eyes. “Who does she work for?”
“Sunday Times. Of London. Business section. She’s on the private equity beat.”
“They have a PE beat? How fucking sad is that?”
“She’s doing a piece on the increased pressure CEOs are under these days from their private equity bosses. You know, to perform, to succeed.”
Lebrecht laughs out loud at this. “To perform? Damn right. They be my bitches, nigga.”
“Maybe not the line she’ll be expecting, but-”
“Shut up.” He takes out his phone and starts fiddling with it. “What line should I give her? The unvarnished truth or some kind of scented bullshit?”
“I’d go with the scented bullshit. In a piece like this she’s bound to find someone who’ll break ranks, but there’s no reason for it to be us.”
“Right.”
“So…?”
“What? You want me to rehearse? Fuck. I don’t know, er… we manage companies efficiently and profitably, we deliver higher returns, not just for the wealthy but for pensioners as well.”
“Good.”
“And we create more jobs than the stock market. Sure, CEOs are under pressure, but when was that ever not the case?”
“Okay.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said that’s okay.”
“It’s okay?” Half turning. “It’s fucking okay? What’s that meant to be, Baxter, your seal of approval or something? I know you’re experienced, you’ve been around the block a few times, but I can do this shit on my own, you know. Jesus.” Turning back. “Could do it in my sleep.” Distracted now, composing a tweet.
I’m on a panel this morning at this year’s-
On a panel soon at this year’s…
He glances out the window.
Hundred and Tenth Street, at last. John the Divine. Central Park.
Global Equities Conference… in Manhattan’s…
At Manhattan’s… Herald Rygate.
At the Herald Rygate.
How many does that leave?
Sixty-one.
The things we do for love.
Thirty-four.
Tweet.
A moment or two later, Baxter puts a hand up to the side of his head. “Er… I’ve got Teddy Schmule for you.”
“Oh.” Lebrecht shifts in the seat and adjusts his earpiece. “Yo, the Schmulemeister.”
“Scottsdale. What’s up?”
“Nothing. I’m in New York, at a conference. I’m down for a nine-thirty slot, panel discussion. Couple of things after that, then I’m heading out to the coast. You get Shem Tyner? Are we good?”
“Meh. We’ll see. You’ve got to play a long game where Shem is concerned.” He pauses. “Shem is Shem, you know.”
“Yeah, but Teddy… tell me he’s at least read the script. That he’s psyched.”
Teddy Schmule snorts at this. “Oh, he’s psyched alright, and he loves the script. It’s just that by the time he gets through with it… well, you might have a hard time actually recognizing it.”
“Fuuuuuuck.”
“Shem always does this. It’s one of his things.”
“We don’t have the time.”
“The one thing you’ve always got in this business, Scott, believe me, is time.”
“No.” He clenches his fist and bangs it against the window. “No. Fuck him. We can scale it down, go with someone else, someone who’s hungry. This is my third time out, Teddy, and I feel it, it’s the big one. I’m not going to let a little shit like Shem Tyner take the reins.” Shaking his head. “No way. This is a Black Vine production.”
The pause that follows is long and weary.
“Okay. Let me get back to him.”
“You do that, Teddy Schmule.”
Outside, they’re canyoning into midtown. A few moments later, they pull up outside the Herald Rygate.
Reaching for the door, Lebrecht pauses and turns to Baxter. “Okay,” he says, “so I’ve got this thing now, right? Then Reet Petite. Then… where am I having lunch?”
Frank Bishop checks the time, drains his coffee and heads for the bathroom. Over the course of four or five minutes in there-quick dump, hands, teeth-he doesn’t look in the mirror.
Doesn’t look at himself.
Not even once.
Is that weird? Maybe, but it’s become a habit lately.
It seems easier.
Avoidance.
In the car on his way to work, however, there’s something he can’t avoid. It’s been bugging him for the last two days.
He stares at the road ahead.
After his little snit on Monday, he never got back to the regional manager, and the regional manager never got back to him. And that has to mean trouble. What kind of trouble exactly, Frank is unwilling to contemplate.
But it’s not just that.
It’s the humiliation.
A further run-in is inevitable-on the phone, face-to-face, whatever-and he’s dreading it. This is because he knows he cannot win, or come out ahead, without groveling, without begging to keep his job. And all for what? Because he didn’t feel like taking shit from some pimply-faced little motherfucker at the head office? Because he decided to speak his fucking mind?
So it would seem.
The other source of anxiety for Frank this morning is Lizzie. He hasn’t heard back from her yet, either. He called again yesterday afternoon and left a brief message. Then, a while later, he thought about sending her a text.
He’s thinking about sending her one now.
But he knows that in Lizzie’s book that would probably qualify as harassment.
He’s sure she’s fine. She wasn’t fine on Saturday evening when they spoke, he knows that, but Saturday evening is probably ancient history already as far as she’s concerned.
He takes the wide bend at Cedar Bay Drive, and the enormous, creaking mall heaves into view.
He gets to the parking lot, turns in, and crosses its vast, mostly empty expanse. He finds a space near the main entrance. On his way inside he takes a detour to the Walgreens on the lower level to get some Excedrin and maybe make eye contact with that gorgeous Asian woman who works there, maybe even get served by her.
Kickstart his day with a little squirt of serotonin.
But it’s not to be.
He doesn’t see the woman anywhere and gets served instead by a skinny black kid called Felix.
It’s just after nine thirty when Ellen Dorsey rolls over in the bed.
Shit.
She didn’t fall asleep until nearly five, her muscles knotty and aching, her head buzzing with facts-with the fact of these facts.
The weight of them.
And as her eyelids grind open now, these facts are first to greet the light. His name is Scott Lebrecht. He’s thirty-three. He’s from Philadelphia. He’s worth a billion dollars. He’s the CEO of Black Vine Partners.
He’s on a hit list.
He’s next.
She sits upright in the bed.
Or at least that’s how it all seemed last night.
She looks across the room, through the open door, her desk in the living room partially visible.
No matter how she spins it-that it was random, a coincidence, the kind of spooky but ultimately meaningless shit the Internet throws up all the time-there’s no escaping the key fact here: Two of the three people mentioned in that post are already dead.