“How about Dickhead?”
He laughs. It sounds genuine. Then she remembers nothing about him can be taken at face value.
“I like you, Charley. I know you might not believe that, but I really do.”
“I wish I could say the feeling is mutual,” she says.
“No, it isn’t, but that’s OK. We can still accomplish great things together. Get in the car, Charley. Let’s go for a drive.”
“Tell me where we’re going.”
“First the 101 North. Once you’re there, I’ll give you the next set of directions.”
“You’re trying to keep me on the phone with you.”
“I am. I’ve really been looking forward to catching up.”
Tick tock, Bailey texts.
She texts back. You initiated this damn call without my consent. If you’re not happy with the timeline we’re under, you fix it, Little B.
Then, her jaw clenched so tightly she’s afraid the bone’s going to snap, she grabs her car keys off the console table.
The next text from Bailey reads, I’m cool with the nickname so long as it’s LI’L B.
“Bite me,” she mumbles.
“What?” the man in her ear asks.
“Nothing,” she whispers.
Keep yr headlights off until ur a few blocks away. I just knocked yr car tracker offline and yr tail’s so far away they prolly don’t have eyes on you.
She obeys, wondering if there’s ever going to be a moment in the near future when she’s not being bossed around by a bunch of men with personality disorders.
35
“What happened to no babysitting?” Donald Clements suddenly asks.
For the past few minutes, Cole’s been describing Lacey Shannon’s visit to the sheriff’s station, while Donald, in his dining room at his home in North Carolina, stares vacantly at his laptop computer. He’s been resting one elbow on the table next to him. This in turn allows him to rest his stout chin on his bear paw of a fist. Every few minutes the video connection gets a little fuzzy, so it’s not as easy to read his expression as Cole hoped. The man could either be bored or quietly intrigued; there’s no telling. One thing’s for sure: he didn’t think this call merited anything more formal than a plain white T-shirt.
Cole was hoping they’d speed through this quickly. Like businessmen. Even if the cultural gap between them is wide.
Cole is West Coast Ivy League–educated and an unapologetic bone smoker. Donald Clements hails from a family of coal miners, loves a version of Jesus Cole can’t quite get with, and was the only member of his family who became fascinated with how the long tunnels his father, uncles, and cousins shuffled down to work each day were actually built. Cole keeps himself cleanly shaven, sometimes exfoliating twice a day; Donald’s silver mustache looks like a single solid metal plate across his long upper lip.
Still, money makes strange bedfellows. Money and the desire to build things. Quickly.
“Babysitting?” Cole asks.
“Yeah. This feels like babysitting.”
“I don’t remember a discussion of babysitting. Why don’t you refresh my memory?”
“You and I, I thought we agreed, we weren’t going to ask each other a lot of questions about how to make this work.”
“Questions like what?” Cole asks.
“Like why you needed a tunnel of this size in the middle of nowhere.”
“Nowhere? My resort isn’t nowhere. Haven’t you seen the renderings? It’s going to be wonderful!”
“You could have just widened the mountain road.”
“Mountain roads make me carsick.”
“It raises questions, is all. Questions I’m not asking.”
“Because you know I can pay my bills.”
“You’re not the only one who pays my bills. The state of California chips in here and there, and I’m sure the deals you made to put that in place are . . . complicated. Point is, the thing’s like a bridge to nowhere, and it’s not exactly going to make my company front page news, but I’ve put everything I have on it. For you.”
“I wasn’t aware you wanted your company to be front page news. You keep a pretty low profile in general.”
“I do my work, and I do what it takes to keep doing my work.”
Donald’s bushy eyebrows form a single white line as he frowns. He leans forward. Cole’s not sure if he’s doing it to flex his thick bicep or if he just wants Cole to get a better look at the expressionistic painting of a bull rider hanging on the wall behind him.
The motel room has no desk, so Cole’s sitting on the foot of the bed, Scott Durham just out of view. Fred Packard’s outside guarding the motel room door. They’ve already made sure the room next to them is empty.
Donald says, “You wanted speed. Clearly, you were under some kind of pressure. Do it fast, and you can do it in a way that’s personally profitable. Those were your exact words.”
“Not exactly, but close.”
“Either way, I took that to mean no babysitting. Now you’re butting in to my son’s private life. What’s that about?”
There’s no arguing with the guy, because he’s right.
If the gossip about him is true, Cole figures Donald Clements would probably just build some secret side tunnels between Altamira’s valley and the Pacific, mainly for the transportation of goods he didn’t want to show up on anyone’s account ledgers. If the goods ever turned out to involve human cargo, Cole made a promise to himself he’d put a stop to it. But Clements doesn’t have a rep as a human trafficker. Just a guy who’s richer than someone in his profession should be and has deep misgivings about things like tax filings.
“With respect, your son’s private life stopped being private when his girlfriend walked into the local police station and made a claim,” Cole says.
“A false claim,” he says.
“Do we know that for sure?”
“You’re accusing my son of beating up his girlfriend?”
“Did you know about any of this before I called? Maybe you should ask him.”
“Parenting advice. OK. That’s interesting.”
“Try business partner, pointing out a potential exposure.”
“My son doesn’t hit women. I didn’t raise him that way.”
“If he didn’t, he made her angry enough to lie. To the police.”
“You don’t have kids, right? You didn’t, like, adopt any or anything.” The word adopt comes out of Donald like something between a hiccup and a low belch.
“I have things that are important to me.”
“Things. OK. Like what?”
He sees Charley, Marty, and Luke glaring at him as he walked away from them earlier that day. The memory pokes a strange tangle of feelings inside him. Frustration, anger, and a tinge of self-loathing; if the last one isn’t how a parent feels when they let down their kids, it’s got to be damn close.
“I want you to move him,” Cole says.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I want you to move Jordy off the project.”
Emotion enters Donald’s expression for the first time, clear enough that no wavery video transmission can blur it out of evidence. Now he looks dazed and anxious, like someone wondering if they left the stove on at home just as their plane reaches cruising altitude. “I don’t have any other projects. Anywhere. I turned down two so I could do your tunnel in record time.”
“Maybe Jordy can help you take on another one. Somewhere else.”
“What the hell is this? You want me to punish my son for having bad taste in women?”
“No, I want you to punish your son for bringing unwanted attention to a project neither one of us wants going under a microscope.”
“Whose microscope, the Altamira Sheriff’s Department? What, do they have three people working for them? Come on. She walked out! She didn’t even bring charges, probably because she sobered up and realized she was full of it. The only one making a stink about this is you.”
“
She’s missing, Donald. She’s been missing for two days.”
“She left. She left like she always leaves because she’s a drug addict. And it’s not like her family’s going to come looking for her; they hate her damn guts.”
You’ve certainly done your homework on Lacey Shannon, Cole thinks. Or you’ve just listened to your son complain about her a lot.
“That’s not how it looks,” Cole says.
“To who?”
“To anyone who has the presence of mind to ask why a young woman suddenly disappeared a few hours after walking into a sheriff’s station and claiming your son was responsible for the bruises all over her face. Right now, that person is me. What happens if the next one works for the LA Times?”
“What’s done is done. Taking Jordy off the project isn’t going to change anything. It’ll just look more suspicious if somebody does come sniffing around. And besides, given the nature of our agreement, I’d hope you’d protect him rather than hanging him out to dry at the first sign of trouble.”
“My arrangement is with you, not your son. He’s been strutting all over Altamira like he owns the place. Everyone in town knows who he is, and if he can’t keep his nose clean, he needs to go somewhere where he can.”
“I’m not doing it.”
“Why don’t we table this for now and tomorrow we can check in and—”
“I said, I’m not doing it. My son is a patriot who served this country in a never-ending clusterfuck of a war most people have forgotten about. I’m not going to have his integrity questioned by some little . . .” Donald catches himself.
“Some little what?” Cole asks.
“Let’s just say we can do business together, but we’re not going to share a beer anytime soon.”
“Good. I don’t drink after other people. It’s a good way to get sick.”
“Yeah, you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”
Cole’s used to his fair share of vaguely homophobic ribbing in business, but this is something else, and there’s no amusement in Donald’s expression. Maybe if Cole hadn’t seen all those screen captures on Jordy’s computer, this moment would seem like nothing. But it doesn’t. And suddenly he feels as if he’s breathing through a straw.
Donald says, “I meant, because you make medicines and all.”
“Yeah, sure you did.”
“Look, before either one of us crosses the Rubicon here, let me just lay it out for you, real simple. You make me pull my son off that project, I pull all my men off that project. And if I do that, I start talking to folks about how weird it is doing business with Graydon Pharmaceuticals. How’s your board going to feel about that?
“I’ve done my homework on you, Mr. Graydon. Your track record as a CEO? Spotty at best. Your company hasn’t made headlines with a new drug since your father died. So I don’t know what in Sam hell this resort is for, but it’s important to you for some reason; otherwise you wouldn’t have put your ass on the line for it. So let’s just work together, all right? And we’ll start by you never saying my son’s name to me again with anything less than the total respect he deserves from someone like you. Got it?”
Before Cole can answer, Donald reaches for his computer. A second later, Cole’s laptop goes dark.
For a while, he just sits there.
Finally, Scott Durham says, “You OK?”
“I’ll live,” Cole answers.
He closes his computer. It’s silly, but the gesture makes him feel like he’s enclosing Donald’s infuriating parting words inside a titanium box.
“So,” he finally says, looking right into the eyes of his new security director, “what’s your take on all that, Mr. Durham?”
“I think Bluebird and her crew might be onto something.”
36
“Do you have a tail?”
She’s been driving north on the 101 for about fifteen minutes, but it doesn’t feel like anyone’s following her. A few times she’s slowed down and let most of the traffic pass. The only holdout’s been a lumbering Mack truck. It’s still far back in her rearview and looks like it might be towing some kind of livestock.
When Cole offered to buy her a new car, she asked for something that could take almost as much punishment as she can when she’s triggered but wouldn’t stick out too much in pickup truck–filled Altamira. A day later, he had a brand-new Volvo V60 crossover wagon delivered to her house. It’s the color of weak tea, with tinted windows and black leather interior that don’t exactly scream I’m just a hometown girl! But it’s safe, and it drives like a dream.
“How about you let me handle the road?” she says.
For a while she drives in silence, so much of it she starts to wonder if the call dropped.
“You still there?” she asks.
“I am. Our conversation didn’t seem productive, so I decided to drop out.”
“Well, smell you, Nancy Drew.”
“Excuse me?” Noah sounds genuinely puzzled.
“I’m just always amazed by your ability to sound so completely superior no matter how insane you’re being.”
“I am superior. To most people anyway. I’m incredibly smart, and I’ve made an amazing drug. The majority of people will spend tonight watching some sort of vacuous TV show and wondering if that person they hate at work is going to hurt their feelings again.”
“And you’ll spend it under armed guard because of your crap judgment calls.”
“Oh, please. The tendency of this world to judge geniuses by the standards applied to middle management is going to produce a generation of dullards who think getting out of bed in the morning is an achievement.”
“For some people, it is. The ones who’ve had their lives screwed up by people like you. You used to pretend to care about people who’d been hurt, back when you were masquerading as a psychiatrist.”
“I care about helping people. In real, meaningful ways. Not just chatting them up about their perceived issues so that these so-called problems can loom ever larger in their self-obsessed minds. You needed some chitchat, so I gave it to you. It was the only way to get you to a place where you were ready for what I had to offer. And when it was all over, your life was ten times better, thanks to me. Admit that, and it will only continue to improve.”
“You know what I think your problem is, Noah Turlington, a.k.a. Dylan Thorpe?”
“Oh, I can’t wait.”
“You can’t see where your life ends and other people’s lives begin.”
“Good, because if I did, I wouldn’t give a damn about helping anyone. I’d just reap the rewards of my own genius. Alone.”
“What would that look like exactly?”
“Crime, probably. Lots of it. The profitable kind. I certainly wouldn’t allow myself to be held prisoner in this pretend, rustic . . . Christ, I don’t even know what this place is. I think it was Cole’s father’s idea of a hunting lodge, but there’re no weapons or trophies in it. Enough about me. How’s the lovemaking with your former bully?”
“Maybe you could give me some sense of how long this drive’s gonna take.”
“Why, so you can come up with ways of avoiding my questions?”
“Is it, like, Salinas long, or San Francisco long?”
“Why don’t you just say it?” he asks. “All of it. Say it now, Charley.”
“All of what?”
“Whatever you need to say. About me. About all the terrible things I’ve supposedly done.”
“I thought you hated talking.”
“No, I hate self-indulgent wound licking.”
“I’ve been honest with you right along. I still believe what I said at the farm.”
“We said a lot of things at the farm.”
“I think you picked me because you hated me. You thought I profited off the movies and the book and the murders.”
“Why would I need to hate you to pick you for this?”
“Because there was a chance I might tear myself apart. Literally.”
&nbs
p; “No, there wasn’t.” He says it so casually it’s possible he’s just being dismissive of the possibility. “I knew you’d do just fine.”
He sounds strangely confident, but when has he ever not?
A text from Bailey lights up her phone’s screen. FYI, yr security in Amira is a JOKE.
“What?” Noah asks.
“It’s Bailey. He says our security in Altamira is a joke.”
“Well, for the time being that’s a good thing. Because I don’t want anyone to see where you’re going.”
When Julia Crispin’s name flashes on his cell phone, Cole tries to suppress a groan. He fails.
Fred Packard’s driving them to his living quarters and control center, which he’s described to Cole as a tiny tract house they’re renting for about the amount of money Cole spends per hour on fuel for his helicopter. Hardly the local command center Cole told Ed to establish.
As soon as he answers, Julia barks, “Who hacked my technology?”
“Excuse me?”
“Someone hacked Turlington’s TruGlass earlier today while you were with him.”
“And did what?”
“We’re still sorting that out. They sent him a text message through the device while he was meeting with you; then as soon as you left they started looping footage to throw us off the scent. Your people missed the first contact, and then my people found the hack. Now your guys are telling me they’ve ID’d inconsistencies that prove parts of the past few hours were looped.”
Cole remembers the sudden splitting headache Noah seemed to undergo right as he was leaving. Is that what Noah was reacting to? An unexpected text message inside his eye?
“Continuously?” he asks.
“Intermittently, it looks like.”
“So you’re telling me my coverage of Noah has gaps in it?”
“I’m telling you someone on your end hacked my tech! Worry about your ex-boyfriend later.”
“Who hacked your tech?” He’s thinking of their old business partners, Stephen and Philip, and the suspicious one-month delay before they can meet.
“We don’t know! Your digital services team just told me about some independent contractor none of them have met, and they don’t even know what he does or where he’s based. Or if it’s a he. Is this person behind this?”
Blood Echo Page 22