hell, bulldog persistent, clever but not given to deliberation or self-criticism. Dad had neither understood nor accepted the growing complexity of the energy industry and the politics that went with it. Back in the 1890s when Great-grandfather McCarty had started out, even in 1964 when Garrett had taken over his father's holdings, the landscape had been pretty wide open. The rules of the Wild West still pertained, strong guys could still make the rules for themselves and their companies as they went along. If you ruffled some feathers, got some people's backs up, so be it and devil take 'em, you slugged it out and the best man won. But it wasn't that way anymore. Energy sources had diversified, coal had lost market share, margins had shrunk. Regulations had proliferated, citizen action groups had weighed in, the Indians had gotten restless, and politics with the big oil and nuke guys had gotten complex and devious: your good buddies one minute, competitors who would stick a knife in your back the next. Plus technology was changing so fast that by the time you finally decided to invest in the latest equipment it had already been replaced on the cutting edge by something even glitzier, more efficient, and more costly.
Donny looked over the audit materials he'd be reviewing today, increasingly distracted by the gnawing under his ribs. He hated the sensation, but he'd learned to make use of it: The heartburn was often an indicator that something was on his mind and needed attention. So what was today's trigger?
Simple: Julieta. That was it. What was she up to? Because, parapsychologist or no parapsychologist, Julieta didn't just visit the mine for the fun of it.
Garrett's portrait caught his eye, and he could almost hear his father's derisive voice: Worrier! To which Donny replied, Yeah, Dad, I'm a worrier. Partly because you left me with so many things to worry about. One of them being your sweet ex-wife and all the crap that came with.
A knock sounded at the door to the outer office, and after a pause the heavily paneled walnut slab swung open. Nick Stephanovic poked his blunt head in.
'Sahib,' Nick said. 'Just to let you know I'm ready when you are.' He extended a thick wrist and tapped his watch.
'Hey, Nicko,' Donny said. 'I'm almost there. Come in for a minute. Shut the door.'
Nick stepped inside, swung the door shut, and stood waiting with his hands folded in front of him. His ancestors were immigrants who had come to cut timber and lay railroads in the 1880s and had stayed to work in the mines that had flourished throughout the region. His Czech blood notwithstanding, he had the classic pug nose of the shantytown Irish tough, and though when in Albuquerque he wore a suit expensive enough for a CEO, it tended to cling to his broad shoulders and bulky upper arms and did nothing to conceal what he really was: bodyguard, personal assistant, driver, confidential consultant, and odd-job man. Among the rules Garrett had instilled in Donny from childhood was that you had to build a core of absolutely loyal retainers around you. In Donny's experience, there was no such thing as absolute loyalty-human sentiment being almost infinitely malleable, offered the right persuasions-but Nick came close. He was forty-nine, and Donny had inherited him as his right-hand man, along with the rest of the company, when Garrett had died.
Nothing would surprise Nick. After working for two generations of McCartys, he knew just about everything about McCarty family business, and what he didn't know he'd been given to surmise.
Donny rolled down his shirtsleeves, took his jacket from the coat-rack behind his desk, slipped it on, shot his cuffs. He went back to sorting papers, taking his time, letting Nick wait as he thought things through.
'Nick,' Donny said finally, 'remind me when we found those mutes out at Hunters Point-what was it, last year? Year before?'
'What the hell?'
'You remember our unannounced visitors to the site the other day? Mrs. Ex-McCarty and friend?'
'That's what that was about? Mutes?' Nick grinned incredulously.
Donny shrugged. 'Supposedly. The woman with her claims to be a paranormal researcher. I've checked her out, she seems legit- for a purveyor of bull, anyway. I agreed to meet her tomorrow to talk about mutes. Like I'm some kind of expert.'
'Why meet with her?'
Donny put the last of the papers into his briefcase and snapped it shut. He felt a hard smile on his lips. Because, he told the portrait of his father, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Sometimes it's better not to just bulldoze your way through. Sometimes you want subtlety, Dad. Finesse. 'Call it counter-intelligence,' he told Nick.
Nick nodded, knowing what he meant: trying to figure out what Julieta was up to. 'Last year. Spring. Two cut-up horses, over in the eastern end of Area Eighteen.'
'Anything strike you as coincidental about that location?'
Nick's face changed, amused contempt for Julieta giving way to a thoughtful look and then a dangerous glower that Donny savored.
'Oh' was all Nick said.
They didn't say any more as they went through the outer offices, tossed a wave to the secretaries, and walked out to the elevator. They waited in silence, but once the doors had shushed shut, Donny turned to Nick. 'So what's your day like?'
'I got a couple of items, but they can wait if you've got something more pressing.'
'This Dr. Lucretia Black, 'Cree' Black. From Seattle. I need to find a photo of her from somewhere. Make sure we're talking about the same person before I meet her.'
'Okay. What else?'
'Supposedly there's something oddball happening at the school. That's what Julieta implied, and I also got one of those tantalizing wee-hours phone calls from our good friend, suggesting she knew of goings on there that might be of interest to us. It'll take the usual teasing out and flattery and playing games. But my thought here is, if Julieta has in mind making problems for us, I'd like to have something we can throw right back at her. Give her grief in return.'
'So I should call the nurse.'
'Set up a meet with her. Turn on the charm. Remind her how much we loved and relied upon her husband and the rest of it. And give her my fond regards, of course.'
Nick nodded. The elevator braked and the doors hissed open to the basement parking garage. They stepped out and walked to the silver Mercedes Donny kept for town use. Nick beeped the doors open, got in on the driver's side, and leaned across the seat to open the door for Donny. When they came up the ramp and into the daylight of downtown Albuquerque, the sun beat down off the Maynard building with the intensity of a green laser. They turned right and Nick accelerated down the street.
Nick, bless his ugly Czech-Irish mug, knew when to keep quiet and let a man think.
Donny was feeling the familiar weariness come over him, the sense that it was all too much or too pointless. That so much of what happened or what he did was unnecessary, that there had to be more to life. After this meeting, he'd return to the office and work until seven, then go home to his suburban mansion in its rectangle of irrigated green lawns so startling against the brown-dirt desert, and to Liz and the marginal sense of human company she provided. She was young and refreshingly crass and inventive in bed-more so than he deserved or needed, actually, given the state of his libido; no, he wasn't like the old bucks of his father's generation. When he'd let her move in, they'd been seeing each other for six months and he'd thought maybe something would grow between them. But all that had grown was habit. A habitual theater of cohabitation, as good as it could be given her indeterminate status and the lack of any deeper heat or sense of future. When he thought of coming in through the chilly, polished-limestone foyer of his house, calling her name, seeing her emerge from the too-large rooms, the routine faux kiss they'd give each other, he felt a pang of loneliness like a blade that went up through his groin right into the heartburn behind his breastbone.
Another reason to hate the Maynard building, he thought blackly. Because if you stared hard enough at its wavery, bottle-green reflection of the windows of the McCarty Energy offices, you could pick out your own window and with effort even the solitary ghost of a figure standing there. Once he'd leaned close to the glass and waved to see his reflection, a barely discernible silhouette in the distorted surface light, wave back.
It could have been different. He hadn't always been this way. In high school, there'd been girls he'd loved with innocent tenderness, the swooning devotion you saw in the movies. Later, there'd been Bernadette, with whom he'd shared a couple of fairly sweet years until his father had brought home with unnecessary forcefulness just how inappropriate it was to consider marrying a half-breed.
And, admit it, for a short time, there'd been Julieta. An instant when he'd been able to see her as something
