him Missus Frakes had parked herself on potentially millions of dollars worth of high-tech swag.
Lathrop reached for the cat’s dish, spooned some food into it.
Sullivan had been careful to a degree, but he’d never been as smart or guarded as he thought he was. He’d also had a habit of showing off — his conceit like a thin balloon, overinflated with insecurity, ready to burst at the prick of a pin. Those weaknesses had cost him that night on Wards Island, and maybe there was still a way to exploit them. Dragonfly was the score of a lifetime, and Sullivan had known it. Thought he was clever holding back the keys, too… it had been all over him. If he’d had the opportunity to open his mouth about that to someone — in his own mind, safely boast — Lathrop was betting he’d have done it.
He crouched, set the dish on the floor. He pictured the Irishman with his restored hairline, his trendy ski jacket, his top-end Jaguar sports car with its plush interior. All evidence of his vanity, meant to impress.
Who would he most want to dazzle with it… and also feel he could trust to hang on to what he’d thought would be a big piece of insurance, something that might bail him out of a jam in the event one of his after-hours transactions went bad?
Lathrop scratched Missus Frakes on the back of her neck, thinking the answer seemed much too easy.
“Pillow talk, Missus Frakes,” he said. “Sullivan was going to whisper secrets into somebody’s ear, it would have been his old lady’s.”
The cat bent her head to sniff the food in her dish and, satisfied it was to her liking, started on her meal with relish.
THREE
“How does this rock seem to you?” Roger Gordian said.
“Wait a second, I’m not sure which you mean.”
Ashley released the handles of their wheelbarrow, smacked her hands together to dust off the thick cowhide work gloves she was wearing, and stepped toward him. They were at the bottom of a shallow wash about thirty yards down from where they’d left her Land Rover below a switchback that zigzagged roughly east-west through the Santa Cruz mountains.
“Look over there.” Gordian pointed at a scattering of sandstone near the base of the slope. “That rock.”
“The round one with that sort of reddish stripe?”
“No, no.” Gordian gestured. “The flattish one with those brown patches just to its right.”
His wife stood beside him, inspected, considered.
“It would be perfect,” she said, and nodded.
“Thought so,” Gordian said. “I’ll start digging it up.”
“Oh no, you won’t.”
His expression went from pleased to perplexed.
“You just told me—”
“I know what I told you,” she said. “But I can see from where we’re standing that it’s set deep in the ground.”
Gordian reached for the long-handled shovel he’d rested against a small, weathered outcrop.
“That’s why I brought my friend here.”
“Can your friend there dig by itself?”
“Ash—”
“Because I won’t let you break your back excavating a rock that probably weighs forty pounds and is going to be a
They stood looking at each other a moment in the bright, warm noonday light. Both had worn jeans, hiking boots, identical heavyweight gloves, and denim jackets to keep the stones they’d come to collect from snagging their shirts. On Gordian’s head was a blue-and-white striped railroader’s cap meant to likewise protect his scalp, his wispy gray hair offering it scant cover from sunburn these days. Ashley’s thick blond locks, meanwhile, were in some kind of elaborate feminine twist-and-tuck under a lilac fashion bandanna.
“You can’t build a retaining wall with pea gravel and sand,” Gordian said.
Ashley frowned.
“Excuse me, wise guy,” she said. “Are you suggesting that’s what I’ve loaded into the wheelbarrow?”
Gordian decided he’d better curb his testiness.
“No,” he said.
“They’re nice, good-sized rocks, hon. I mean it.”
“I hope so, for your sake—”
“Although I do think we need some larger ones,” he said, scratching his head under the cap with one finger. “Especially for our end stones.”
Ashley produced a sigh.
“I don’t want you overdoing things, Roger,” she said. “On last count, it’s been a few years since you’ve been in your twenties.”
“We could have bought dressed rocks from a stone yard and had them dropped five feet from my rose garden on a pallet,” she said. “If I’d realized you were going to be this stubborn, I might have hired a professional contractor.”
Gordian looked at her.
“I know a little bit about putting together a stone wall,” he said. “My father owned a construction supply business, don’t forget.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“You also shouldn’t forget your stated aversion to made-to-order retaining walls that look like big piles of potato chips.”
Ashley frowned again.
“Fried corn chips,” she said. “The comparison I made was to fried corn chips. They tend to be more uniform in shape.”
“I stand corrected.”
They regarded each other quietly.
“Ash, listen,” Gordian said. “I stepped down as chief executive of UpLink so we could finally share the personal life we’ve always missed. So I’d be able to spend more time doing things with you — and for you— after decades of endless responsibility to a corporation with thousands of employees scattered across every continent on earth. But the key phrase is
Ashley glanced down at the lumpy soil underfoot, scuffed the toe of her boot around in a way that endowed her with an unaffected girlishness. Gordian managed to resist a smile.
“Okay, I concede,” she said, after almost a full minute of toe-scuffing had left a swash in the dirt. “With the stipulation that we can revisit this issue the instant I see you bend over backward with a
“Sounds fair enough to m—”
The oddly distant tweedle of his cell phone interrupted Gordian.
