“Earned it how?”
“By lying,” Shawn said. “He knew we were old friends from the last time I met the guy. So I told him that your presence in the company had established a psychic link for me to see its aura. And that emanation was pulsing red for danger.”
“He bought that?” Gus said, dismayed.
“Your boss is kind of a moron,” Shawn said. “Unless he’s actually the killer. Think we have time for dessert before we go back to the office?”
Gus slid out of the booth, fished in his pocket, and dropped a couple of bills on the table. “You do,” he said. “In fact, you should have dessert for both of us. You don’t need to stop by the office before you head back to the airport. I’ll tell D-Bob you’re on a vision quest or something. He’ll like that.”
Shawn took one last suck on his milk shake and scrambled out of the booth to follow him. “I can’t go back to Santa Barbara now,” he said. “I’ve got a job to do.”
“Making my life miserable?” Gus said as he pushed open the door and stepped out onto the busy sidewalk.
“That’s part of it,” Shawn said.
That was so astonishing Gus stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. At least until a kid texting on his phone while he rode his skateboard slammed into him, propelling him into the street. Just before he flew into traffic Gus grabbed the pole of a NO SKATEBOARDS Sign and swung himself back into the mass of pedestrians, nearly knocking over a trio of secretaries.
Shawn waited patiently until his acrobatic display was done, then fell into step alongside him.
“You’re admitting it?” Gus gasped once he had his heart rate back down to sustainable levels. “You only took this job to make my life miserable?”
“Not only,” Shawn said. “Also to make your life happy. And exciting. And boring. And easy. And difficult.”
“Are you planning on doing this in sequence?” Gus said. “Because you could start by making my life a little more lonely.”
“I’ll put that on the list,” Shawn said. “Along with all the other sorts of things your life can only be if it’s a going concern.”
“You’re saying you took this job to save my life,” Gus said.
“I took this job because I thought we were going undercover to expose a murderer who had found a way to kill without ever being noticed,” Shawn said. “That is, by going after people no one would ever mourn- pharmaceuticals executives.”
“I’m a pharmaceuticals executive,” Gus said.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Shawn said. “I took this job because I thought we were going undercover together. But I’m keeping it because I’m not going to let you be the next victim.”
“I can’t be the next victim, because there haven’t been any previous victims,” Gus said. “There’s just been a series of unfortunate accidents, which is not that surprising when you consider how many thousands of people Benson Pharmaceuticals employs worldwide.”
“And one suicide,” Shawn said.
“And one suicide,” Gus agreed. “If it makes you feel better I’ll promise not to put on a cheerleader’s outfit and hang myself in my mother’s basement.”
“That’s good, because you really don’t have the legs for it,” Shawn said.
Gus stopped as they reached the corner of Market Street. He pointed at the long escalator that descended to the subway stop under their feet. “Here’s the BART station,” he said. “You can take that right back to the airport.”
“Only if you come with me,” Shawn said.
“I’m not coming back,” Gus said. “I’ve got a life here.”
“Sure, but for how long?” Shawn said.
“Shawn, there is no danger at Benson Pharmaceuticals,” Gus said. “How can I convince you?”
“You can start by explaining that.”
Shawn gestured down Market to the glass-and-steel tower that housed Gus’ office. A thick crowd of people had formed outside the lobby doors. As Gus watched, a steady stream of onlookers squeezed forward to get a better view, then pushed their way out of the crowd, looking sick. One woman threw up on the curb.
Gus was running before he knew he’d meant to. His flat shoes slapped on the bricks of the sidewalk and sent a sharp sting of pain through his feet with every step, but he barely noticed. He reached the edge of the crowd and let his momentum carry him through the close-packed bodies. He could feel the onlookers push back against him, but he kept going, using knees and elbows to clear any obstruction his combined mass and velocity couldn’t move. After what felt like an eternity he broke through into a clearing, a wide, empty space on the sidewalk, ringed by spectators.
But that space wasn’t completely empty. The first things Gus noticed were the clear pebbles that littered the sidewalk. He realized he’d been walking on them since before he’d entered the crowd; some of them were still stuck in the soles of his shoes. They looked like the bits of windshield that were left on the highway once a serious crash had been cleaned up.
Gus could easily have spent the next few minutes thinking about the marvels of safety glass, wondering what kind of technology was required to make it shatter into beads instead of jagged shards. It was thicker than normal glass, true, but was that enough? Or did it have to go through some kind of chemical process? Gus had heard it referred to as tempered glass, but he had no idea how you would go about tempering something. And could a sheet of glass lose its temper the way a person could? That would make a kind of sense, since a person who lost his temper would fly into a rage, and a pane of glass that lost its temper would fly into jagged shards. Maybe this was just an etymological accident. Or perhaps Gus had stumbled onto some great truth about glass or emotions or flying into things.
Gus wanted to explore all these ideas in detail. All he had to do was turn around and push his way back through the crowd. Then he could walk around the corner to the Drumm Street entrance, take the elevator up to the sixteenth floor, lock himself in his office, and spend the rest of the day in rapt concentration. He might have to ignore the cold wind blowing through the corridors, but he was willing to do that, because the alternative was so much less appealing.
That alternative was to focus on what lay in front of him, spread out on the sidewalk. And that was the last thing he wanted to do. The last thing, but the only thing.
Gus forced his eyes to look down at the ground. He tried to avoid taking in the whole picture and instead to focus on the tiny details. Like the cracks in the bricks where the shock wave from the body’s landing had rippled out across the sidewalk. Or the brown loafer that had come off either in flight or on landing and now lay by its owner’s head. Or the tie. That hideous floral tie he had spent so much of the morning staring at across the conference table. The one Steve Ecclesine put on whenever he planned to engage in an act of corporate brutality, as if the cheery flowers could hide the cruelty of his actions.
There were short bloops of police siren from the street behind him, and Gus felt the crowd jostling as a pair of uniformed cops muscled their way through to the body lying on the ground.
“Okay, let’s move on, people,” a gruff voice said from behind him. “There’s nothing to see here.”
How wrong that voice is, Gus thought. There were things to see in every direction. If you looked down, there was the body. If you looked up, you could see the hole in the building where the window had popped out of its sixteenth-story frame. And if you looked to your left, you could see Shawn looking right back at you.
“So,” Shawn said. “We still working on that string-of-unconnected-accidents theory?”
Chapter Twenty-nine
“I quit,” Gus said.
“A bold statement,” Shawn said. “Forcefully spoken. Brief and yet eloquent. If I could give you the tiniest smidge of advice, I’d just say that it would be more convincing if you weren’t on your knees while you said it.”
