Sacramento.’ From behind him Mike could make out the governor telling a joke, the firehose-pressure vowels of the Austrian intonation. Garner held up a finger. The aide sighed, said, ‘You got thirty seconds,’ and withdrew.
Mike and Garner regarded each other, the silence cut only by the ticking of a carriage clock and muffled conversation from the sitting room.
‘So what do you say?’ Garner leaned forward on the desk, a flash of skin peeping through the slit in his shirtsleeve. ‘For the benefit of forty families, think you can smile for a few cameras?’
He gestured toward the sitting room, his gold cuff link glittering.
On his knees, Mike peered into the flickering fire. It threw an orange glow across his face, the carpet, the white duvet of their bed. In his hand he clutched the photo showing that telltale elbow of PVC. Ridiculously, it struck him that his posture was that of a shamed samurai.
Annabel stood behind him, still absorbing the scene. Kat, thankfully, was in her room with the door closed, engrossed in homework.
Annabel hadn’t spoken. Not since he’d trudged in, tugged off his suit jacket, and taken his spot on the floor. She didn’t have to. She already knew and was just waiting for him to tell her.
‘They don’t want a delay,’ he said. ‘They need the PR from the award ceremony. They threatened that the families will lose the subsidies.’
‘Then we should absorb the cost for them,’ Annabel said. ‘How much is it? On top of the pipe replacement costs?’
‘Eleven million dollars.’
He heard the breath leave her.
‘So what… what are we going to do?’ she asked.
He held out his hand, dropped the photograph into the flames. The picture curled and blackened.
‘Okay.’ Her voice was faint, crestfallen. ‘I guess I’ll buy a new dress.’
The bathroom door clicked shut behind her. He stared into the fire, wondering what the hell else a lie like this could open up.
Chapter 5
A baby’s sputtering cry split the night air, rising from the basket placed on the front porch. Folds of fluffy blue blanket poked up from the woven straw. All was still, save the flecks of circling gnats in the yellow smudge of the porch light. Night-blooming jasmine, trellised up the porch, perfumed the air. SUV bumpers gleamed up and down the street. Every third house was being remodeled, the lowboy Dumpsters as much a mark of the neighborhood’s affluence as the Boxsters slumbering beneath car covers.
The intermittent cries strengthened into a wail. Finally footsteps came audible within the house, then the beep of an alarm being turned off. The front door cracked so far as the security chain allowed, and a woman’s sleep- heavy face peered down. A gasp, then the door closed, the chain unclasped, and she stepped out onto the porch. A well-kept woman in her fifties, she clasped a blue bathrobe shut at her throat. Stunned. Her knees cracked as she crouched to grab the basket with trembling hands.
The blanket was twisted over itself, and she tugged at the folds frantically but gently, the cries growing louder, until finally she pulled back the last edge of fabric and stared down, dumbfounded.
A microcassette recorder.
The red ‘play’ light beamed up at her, the baby’s squawks issuing from the tiny speakers.
The crunch of a dead leaf floated over from the darkness of the front lawn, and then a man’s massive form melted into the cone of porch light. A gloved fist the size of a dumbbell flew at her, shattering her eye socket and knocking her back into the front door, rocketing it inward so hard the handle stuck in the drywall.
A moment of tranquillity. Even the crickets were awed into silence.
The large man stood at the edge of the porch, breath misting, shoulders slumped, his very presence an affront to the quiet suburban street. His plain, handsome face was oddly smooth, almost generic, as if his features were pressed through latex. He held a black duffel bag.
Another set of footsteps padded across the moist lawn, a second man finally entering the light. He was lean and of normal height, but he looked tiny next to his counterpart. He shuffled as he walked, one foot curled slightly inward, matching the awkward angle of his right wrist. As he finished tugging on his black gloves, his arms jerked ever so slightly, a symptom of the illness.
Ellen Rogers grunted on the foyer floor where she’d landed, one eye screwed off center, the skin dipping in the indentation where her cheekbone used to be. Her nose was split along the bridge, a glittering black seam. One leg was raised off the tile, paddling as if she were swimming. Her breaths were low, animal.
The men stepped inside, closed the door behind them, stared down at her. The lean one, William, said gently, ‘I know, honey, I know. Dodge can put some muscle behind a punch. I’m sorry for your face. Don’t think we wanted this any more than you.’
She whimpered and drooled blood onto the tile.
When Dodge dropped the duffel, it gave a metallic clank. He placed two cigarettes in his mouth, cocked his head, got them going with a cheap plastic lighter plucked from his shirt pocket, and passed one to his colleague. William sucked an inhale past yellowed teeth, closed his eyes, let a ghostly sheet of smoke rise from his parted lips.
‘Mr Rogers,’ he called down the hall. ‘Can we please have a word?’
The muted light thrown from the Tiffany lamp seemed the only thing holding darkness at bay. The office’s mallard-green walls dissolved into black; they might as well have not been there at all. Beyond the lip of the desk, a stock-ticker screen saver glowed out of nowhere. An artful photograph framed on the sofa’s console table showed the family a few years earlier posed cute-casual on the rear deck: proud parents leaning over beaming teenage son and daughter, matching smiles and pastel polo shirts. A nautical motif suffused the room – burnished brass compass, gold-plated telescope, antique loupe pinning down the parchment pages of a leather-bound atlas. It was the office of a man who fancied himself the captain of his own destiny. But William and Dodge hadn’t chosen the room for the design.
They’d chosen it because it was soundproof.
Ted Rogers propped up his wife on the distressed-leather couch, which Dodge had covered entirely with a plastic tarp. Ted had a softness befitting a man his age and circumstances. A fine, well-fed belly, spectacles accenting a round face, a close-trimmed white-gray beard – all jiggling now with grief and terror. When William had asked him into the study, he’d taken one look at Dodge and complied with all instructions.
Ellen shuddered in her husband’s arms, murmuring incomprehensibly. Her neck kept going slack, Ted’s plump hands fussing to keep her head upright.
‘Boss Man is displeased.’ William scratched calmly at the patchy scruff on his neck. ‘That little move of yours, it’s gonna prove costly to him.’
Old cigar smoke had settled into the furnishings, sweet and comforting.
‘I… Listen, please, tell him I’m sorry,’ Ted said. ‘I understand, now, the gravity-’
William held up a finger. ‘What did Boss Man tell you?’
‘I can get it all back first thing tomorrow. I swear to you.’
‘What. Did. Boss. Man. Tell. You?’
Ted’s chest jerked beneath his bathrobe. ‘If I did anything to betray his trust, he’d kill me.’
William moved his hand in a circle, prompting, cigarette smoke swirling like a ribbon. ‘
Ted leaned forward, gagged a bit, wiped his mouth. His voice came out unnaturally high. ‘Painfully.’ His hand rose, chubby fingers splayed, a man used to resolving conflict, to meeting halfway, to finding sensible solutions. ‘Look’ – his rolling eyes found William again – ‘you can take
William and Dodge just stared down at him.
Ted’s tongue poked at the inside of his lip, making that well-trimmed beard undulate. ‘I was in some trouble
