I lead him to the beveled glass dining room table under the twinkling glass chandelier. Chester is deferential and insists that I sit at the head. He sets the briefcase on the glass and moves his thumbs across the combination locks. The latches spring open.
Sharon bursts through the door with two handfuls of dangling plastic bags. I’ve never been happier to see her, which is saying something. She looks at Chester and her face goes pale, then she glowers at me.
“ Sharon, you are beautiful,” he says.
In fact she is. Her summer dress is a weird shade of green that looks ravishing on her, her espadrilles have good heels, her body is tanned beautifully from all the swimming and sunbathing we did down in Laguna this last weekend.
“Help, Ron?”
But Chester is up and there before I am, sweeping the bags from Sharon ’s grip and small-stepping across the hardwood floor to the granite countertop, where he gingerly lands the bags and smiles at her. Still smiling and oddly formal, he moves toward the dining room.
Sharon sets her purse on the counter beside the shopping bags and gives me an even darker look than the one she gave me when we were seventeen and I declared my love for her. “Get him out of here,” she whispers. “Fast.”
But Chet has gone back to his briefcase on the table and brought out a bottle of wine. From my occasional splurges at the locked premium rack of the wine store, I recognize it as a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Anderson Valley cabernet sauvignon. Then he’s back in the kitchen again between Sharon and me, twisting the lead cork sealer off the bottle with one little white hand and then pushing the corkscrew in and turning, all the while chattering away about possible names for the new company-Chetronsha Arms being his favorite, a neat compounding of all our names, equal billing with allowances for seniority and…
“You’ve got five minutes of my time, Chester,” says Sharon. “Starting right now.”
We sit at the dining room table, and Chester passes the documents to us. The cover sheets bear the name of a prominent Newport Beach business law firm. In a soft voice, Chester summarizes the contents and intentions of each thick clipped packet. He makes them sound logical and simple. There are scores upon scores of thin rubber arrows stuck to the edges of the sheets to mark the places for signature and dating-blue for me, pink for Sharon, and black for Chet. Among the docs are a draft general description of the new Chetronsha Arms, a DBA form, a business plan, a tax plan, an asset sheet describing the real property and furnishings here at the former Pace Arms address, and several shorter agreements, addenda, letters of intent, an applicable compendium of State of California corporate laws, and finally a draft proposal of Chetronsha Arms corporate bylaws.
Sharon has gone silent as she reads. I do, too. I can hear the faint tap-tap-tapping of the gunsmiths downstairs and their music, which I know is loud down there but barely audible up here. When Chester looks at me, his expression tries to confirm my joy and pride in these sounds. I’m not much of a businessman, so I just scan the pages, looking for God knows what. Sharon, on the other hand, is a very attentive and discriminating reader of business documents. She used to drive Contracts crazy with her eye for minutiae when she was tasked with proofing their drafts.
Five minutes comes and goes. I’ve drunk half the wine. I look out the window and see nothing now, just a pale infinity of fog through which come no shape and no light and no color.
Sharon reads on for another five. During the last two minutes, she’s not really reading, just flipping pages with increasing speed and loudness. When she turns the last page, she is shaking her head.
“Thanks for all your hard work, Chester,” she says. “I see you spent a lot of money on good counsel. They’ve been thorough and thoughtful. Ron and I have talked long and hard about this company. We have dreamed about it. We have worked hard to put ourselves into the position of making it a reality. We have a vision for it, and this vision does not include you as the president and CFO. It does not include you at all. With due respect, Chet, I now ask you to take these documents with you and leave this building forever. Ron?”
“She’s right, Chester. I’m sorry. That’s just what it is.”
The great whiteness of Chester ’s face has changed to pink, and his small blue eyes blink quickly as if in defense. He sets a hand upon a stack of documents. “I have given you everything you wanted. I’ve provided for your dreams. Surely there can be a place in them for me.”
“I’m sorry, Chester,” I say.
“I’m not,” says Sharon.
“For your father, Ron? My brother? For old times?”
“We’re starting up a company, Chet, not putting a contract out on you.”
“Man to man, blood on blood?”
“No.”
A long pause while Chester stares into space. “I’m very, very disappointed.”
Chester stacks the documents neatly and sets them in the still-open briefcase. He squares them, closes the lid, snaps down the latches, and spins the small steel combination numbers. He stands and sets the briefcase upright before him, both hands on the leather handle. He looks at Sharon, then at me. He bows his head formally. Then he turns and sweeps the briefcase from the table, and when his back is to me, he pivots around once like a discus thrower and slams the corner of it into my head. I get my hand between my skull and the briefcase but not much of it. Then I’m on my back on the floor, looking up at the chandelier. However, the chandelier is not bright and white but the color of my eyelids. I try to open them as in a nightmare, but they will not open. I hear grunts and whimpers and the gagging of strangulation. I hear the tearing of fabric. I hear gasps. Then these sounds lose volume, and I fear that I am losing consciousness. I stand. I fall. I stand again and my eyes open. The penthouse whirls around me. I stagger toward the sounds in the bedroom. I stand in the doorway looking in. Chester has his enormous back to me and he has planted his bulk upon Sharon on the bed, her legs splayed and her heels raining helplessly down against his huge haunches. He’s got her hands pinned over her head to the mattress with one of his own, and with the other he’s trying to get off his belt. They’re both growling.
Without thinking, I throw myself onto him. It takes him a moment to acknowledge me. I smell baby powder. Then he rises up smoothly like a breaching whale and wrenches himself off the bed. I land on the floor. He towers over me. He looks down and his expression is the same as it always is. He pulls me up by my shirt collar, tosses me into the air just a little, and catches my head between the meaty vises of his hands. He holds me up to face him, eye to eye, and I’m struggling and kicking and hanging onto his forearms with both hands to try to keep my skull from buckling. He squeezes. “There are no new ideas. Only old imperatives,” he whispers. I feel my skull plates grinding. My vision constricts, then fractures. All I can see for certain is the bed below me, the blessedly empty bed.
Then I hear three sharp cracks. Through Chester ’s palms I register three small tremors. His hands shiver and his eyes widen and he growls again, then grimaces, his small even teeth not a foot away from my face. He drops me to the floor. I roll toward the door and there is Sharon, standing just inside the doorway, her dress ripped and dangling and a Pace Arms Hawk.22 up in both hands, aimed at Chester. He lumbers toward us. I stay down on my knees to give her a clear sight line. If he gets close, I’ll spring onto him to keep him from her. She shoots him three more times and Chester stops. I can see two small bloody circles on his shirtfront and a bright red gash high up on his skull where the bullet has bounced off. He grunts and twists one arm behind his back as if trying to scratch an itch, and I realize this is where the first three shots hit. Sharon has eight shells left if the magazine was full, nine if there was also one cartridge in the chamber. Chester steps forward and Sharon shoots him three more times, pretty much dead center at this close range. He rocks and staggers backward. He sways, then steadies himself. “Nobody does that to me,” Sharon says dreamily. She fires and misses and misses again. The bullets smack the wall. Then she cracks a shot between his small blue eyes. His head shakes and settles and he looks at us. He sits on the foot of the bed and places his hands on his thighs, as if he were about to say something. There’s blood running down his mouth and off his chin. He extrudes a small pointed tongue and tastes it. His torso is drenched in the red blood of his lungs and the black blood of his heart. He collapses then, like a building imploded, his lower body slumping to the floor first and his head whipping down last with a sharp centrifugal splat. The back of his cream linen coat is a bloody thing, too. Sharon hands the gun down to me and walks unevenly away, one shoulder and half her back showing above the flap of her torn green dress, one foot bare and the other still shod.