Firebreak

'Why? You know Frank and Ralph, don't you?'

'But I don't know you. And I don't go by other people's judgment.'

There was a little silence over there, while Lloyd got used to the idea, and then he sighed and said, 'I'm not proud of it.'

'Most people aren't.'

'I mean, I was stupid, I was emotional, I was hasty, I was careless, I was everything I've always prided myself on not being.'

'When was this?'

Lloyd let out a long breath. 'All right,' he said. 'In engineering school, I partnered with a guy named Brad Grenholz, a brilliant guy, a real innovator. I was always more of the grind, the detail man, the one who tidied up.'

'So you made a good team.'

'The best. If only—'

Parker waited, and finally Lloyd did another long sigh and said, 'When you spend all your imaginative time inside molecules, it makes you nervous. You're very fast, and very jumpy, but you don't think you're fast enough, you need to be mare jumpy, so pretty soon Brad and I were doing a lot of drugs. A lot of drugs.

Liquor, too, but that was to come down. That was our only downer. Everything else we took was uppers. I swear, static electricity ran over our bodies like an electrode.'

'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