Tahoe Heat

by Todd Borg

  Without waiting for Ryan’s approval, I walked out the front door and got Spot out of the Jeep.

  They were both standing just inside the front door as we approached, Ryan in front of Lily, air-washing his hands as if to rub the skin off. As we came close, Ryan looked alarmed. He picked up Lily and stepped back.

  “This is Spot.” Spot looked at them and wagged.

  Ryan’s eyes twitched with fear. Lily strained to get out of his arms.

  “Come in, Spot.” I took his collar and walked him through the doorway. I didn’t want him approaching Ryan or Lily. The fear in the air was too intense. They could approach him when ready.

  “Spot, sit.”

  He sat. His tail swept the floor. I shut the door, locked the deadbolt, and hooked the chains to make Ryan feel comfortable.

  “Spot, please meet Ryan and Lily.” She waved at him.

  I said to her, “Do you know what he’s thinking?”

  She shook her head.

  “He’s thinking that the pleasure is all his.”

  Lily grinned. “He has an earring.”

  “Yeah. Spot, come here.” I kept hold of his collar so he wouldn’t greet them with too much enthusiasm. I walked him over to the great room. He turned to look behind at Ryan and Lily as we went past. I had him lie down on the rug in front of the fireplace.

  “Lily, come over and meet Spot. He wants you to pet him.”

  Ryan put her down. She ran to us and put her hand out to pet Spot.

  If children haven’t been repeatedly cautioned about dogs, they have no natural fear. Just as dogs have evolved to direct their primary attachments to humans, humans have evolved similar hard-wiring and feel a natural desire to approach and pet and hold and talk to dogs. Lily couldn’t have weighed more than thirty or forty pounds, a fifth of Spot’s 170, yet she walked up to him with no hesitation.

  Lying down, his head was almost shoulder height on Lily as she stood before him. She put her tiny hand between his big ears and stroked him as gently as if he were a new-born kitten. Over and over she stroked. Spot shut his eyes under the delicious touch of the little girl.

  She fingered his rhinestone ear stud. “How come he has an earring?”

  “An accident made a little hole in his ear. So my girlfriend got him the stud to fill the hole.”

  Lily kneeled in front of him. She reached her arms up and hugged his neck, his giant head over her diminutive shoulder.

  Ryan came over, sat on a nearby chair. He watched Lily and Spot and seemed to relax.

  “Are you from the Bay Area?” I asked.

  “No. Just down the hill on the Nevada side. In Gardnerville.”

  “How did you come here? Move in with your parents?”

  “No. My mother ran away when I was three. I don’t remember her. My dad died two years ago. Lily was the result of a second marriage. Shortly after Lily was born, her mother divorced my dad and moved to Mexico with a truck driver. Dad didn’t have much luck with women. He began his career as a teacher, then became a principal. He lived in Reno the last part of his life until he died. This is my house.”

  “You’re what, mid-twenties?”

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  “Twenty-six is young. Forgive my prying, but how does someone your age come to have this place? A house of this size, on the lake, would be several millions. What do you do for CalBioTechnica? Or did you inherit?”

  “It’s my company. I’m founder and Chairman.”

  EIGHT

  “So you bought this house,“ I said.

  “This is the age of technology,” Ryan said. “Like many young people who are educated techies, I have money. More than I could ever spend.”

  “How did you start the company?” I asked, thinking that he couldn’t be too delusional and still put together something as demanding and complex as a large bio-tech company like CalBioTechnica.

  “I invented a new approach for doing recombinant DNA projects. Easier, cheaper, faster. My friends Jeanie Samples and Elijah Nathan believed I could start a company based on my concepts. But I had no idea of how to begin. Their enthusiasm was so strong, they convinced me to pursue it. They believed that the three of us had most of what we needed to make it work.”

  “They’re friends in addition to being business partners.”

  “Right. We met in college, and we’ve been best friends and business confidants ever since.”

  “Where did you go to college?”

  “Stanford. We all stayed on at Stanford to pursue graduate school as well. Both Jeanie and Eli got their Ph.D.s, hers in math, his in physics. I stopped at a masters in biology.

  “Early on, there was actually a fourth in our group, William Hughes, who was a wizard video game programmer from the time he was very young. When we started CBT, he did some critical computer modeling that helped me with my original DNA research. We asked him to be part of our company, but he declined. He’s probably smarter than the rest of us, but he wasn’t good at follow-through on anything except video games. He dropped out of Stanford in his third year. He actually ended up starting his own company, and he’s been very successful. He’s a classic basement gamer, maybe a little autistic, a loner who relates more to binary code than to people. So he declined our invitation.

  “We ended up a troika of geeks, socially maladroit kids who had difficult childhoods. None of us fit in. Even as we found success, we still felt like we were unfit for society. The kids who did well in our high schools went on to become doctors and lawyers, and some ran for political office, and some went into entertainment. Meanwhile, we pursued our geek focus and got quite rich. It’s a weird position to be in. So incompetent at mixing with people and yet owning a portion of the future of American industry and the wealth that comes with it.”

  Ryan was much more relaxed as he talked about subjects that were distant from his current stress and worries. “Our coping mechanism was to celebrate our weirdness. We had an ongoing joke about not having time to be second rate, that the real losers are the bullies who kicked sand in our faces when we were young. That came from a line in the Queen song, We Are The Champions. Eli had these micro portable speakers he plugged into his iPod. At the end of our weekly café meetings, we three would walk down the sidewalk, arm-in-arm, singing along with Freddie Mercury. We Are The Champions.

  “We discovered in college that there are lots of kids like us. Stanford is full of people who can invent the new world but don’t know how to play sports or ask a girl or a boy out on a date. And the school nurtures our community.”

  “The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article on that,” I said. “About the crucible of the top schools, a technology culture, and venture capital that gives birth to technology companies.”

  “Yeah. I remember what one of my professors said. That the Bay Area economy kicks out more dollars per capita than anywhere in the world. And a huge portion of Bay Area business is high-tech. You’ve heard all the names. What people sometimes forget is that those name-brand companies and the thousands of others coming up are mostly started by, owned by, and run by young techies like me. It’s like there’s a new geek dynasty.”

  A loud phone rang, and Ryan leaped as if he’d stepped on a tarantula. He put his hand to his chest as if to calm himself, then walked over and looked at the readout.

  “Private!” He made a stifled cry that was half fear and half anger.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. The phone was still ringing.

  Ryan shook with tension. “Nearly every time it says private number, it’s like a creep show. I don’t answer it any more.”

  I reached for the phone. Ryan handed it to me.

  “Lear residence,” I said.

  First there was silence. Then came the slow, creepy creaking of a rusty hinge. It reverberated like the sound of the basement door opening in a horror movie. Then came a woman’s scream. Even from a distance, Ryan heard it, and he recoiled.

  I hung up the phone.

  “You’ve had
those calls before,” I said.

  “Many times.”

  “You have no idea who is making them?”

  He shook his head. He looked sad and scared, like he was about to cry.

  “Is the call different each time?” I asked.

  “Yes. Sometimes it’s like a ghost laughing. Sometimes it’s a woman crying out, ‘Help me, help me.’ Sometimes it’s a man screaming, ‘No, not the knife! Don’t use the knife!’ Then he screams as if he’s being killed. You hear the gurgling of blood in his lungs. It’s horrible.”

  “Someone is using a sound-effects recording to scare you.”

  “More than scare me. They’re trying to take me apart, make me come unglued. And I’m afraid they are succeeding.”

  “Do they call you at your Bay Area house?”

  “Yes. Only my cell phone is safe. But now, when I get a private call on my cell, I start shaking and sweating. When I answer, I’m so upset that I can barely talk.”

  “Who could benefit from you coming unglued?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve tried to think, but it makes no sense! It’s like the person simply wants to torture me.”

  “Why don’t you get yourself something to drink, calm you down.”

  He nodded, a dazed look on his face. Like someone in shock. He went toward the kitchen, then turned back.

  “Do you want something?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  He left, then came back with two glasses of water.

  “Tell me about your partners,” I said.

  He took a deep breath, shut his eyes, eventually spoke.

  “Of the geek troika, Elijah Nathan was the business genius. He was the one who came up with the concept of how we could build a company around my DNA manipulation techniques. He learned how to start a corporation and helped orchestrate the process. It was his idea that we would each own twenty percent of the company. Together, we’d always have a controlling interest of sixty percent, and we could sell forty percent to outside investors in order to get funding for growth. Our pact was that, as a group, we’d never give up control of the company. Eli thought that because the company was based on my ideas, I should be chairman. He and Jeanie would each be vice presidents, she of finance, he of sales and marketing. I’d also be temporary President, but our plan was to bring in an experienced grayhair to be President and CEO. And we’d each sit on the Board of Directors. We’d all have equal compensation packages regardless of how successful we became.” As Ryan talked, he relaxed a little.

  “All for one, and one for all,” I said.

  Ryan nodded. “Right. The Three Musketeers. As long as our Geek Troika stayed unified, no one could take away our company. We’d always have a majority.”

  “Not to segue too far,” I said. “But don’t venture capitalists often demand fifty-one percent in return for investing?”

  “Often, yes. But we figured that once it was obvious that our company had huge potential, we wouldn’t have any problem getting someone to come in for forty percent. In fact, we even discussed the psychology of how an outside investor would be the single largest shareholder, and they would be reassured by the concept that if they had a really good idea, they would only have to sway one of us over to their side to have a majority voting block. Of course, in our minds that could never happen. So we felt that we could entice investors with no worry for us.”

  “And did someone come in for forty percent?”

  “Eventually, yeah. In our second year, Eli sold a ten million dollar production contract to one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies. A few months later, he got two big development contracts with other giants. Once we had that revenue flowing, we got Bob Mendoza to come onboard as President and CEO and steer the ship.

  “Then Business Week did a story on us. And Forbes ran a big feature. The Chronicle did a human interest piece on our new biologicals and how they were already saving lives. With all that attention, we ended up having a little auction of sorts among three investors. We knew the guy who won. You’ve probably heard of him. Preston Laurence. He put up forty-five million for forty percent of CBT.

  “Anyway, Eli was our master of the universe. He pretty much excelled at everything.”

  “What does Jeanie Samples do?”

  “Jeanie is our financial guru and our visionary. When I first got the idea for using my new DNA technique to make a different kind of biological cancer drug, she was the one who saw how unique and potent it was. She also created a new kind of mathematical model that we could use to predict our future business and pharmacology environment. She says it’s like the complex equations they use for meteorology, only it’s for forecasting conditions in our business arena instead of forecasting the weather.”

  “Your expertise is biology,” I said. “What else do you bring to this Geek Troika?”

  Ryan looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure how to say this. Aside from the core of our business, our DNA work, what I brought to the group was a kind of sensitivity. In the world of technology - like any world, I suppose - people can be bulls. Especially Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Caltech alums. These highly educated techies often have an unshakable confidence in their intelligence. They believe that they’re better than anyone else in the world when it comes to their particular specialty. As a result, they sort of charge ahead without any sense of consequence. Even though they might be meek in social situations, they can be almost tyrants in their geek world. Both Eli and Jeanie needed someone to be a human interface.

  “Of course, you’re thinking that no way could I be a stand-in for how regular humans function. That’s true, and I know it better than anyone. But I have always been good for Eli and Jeanie by visualizing how other people would see our products. I’m like an editor, cleaning up Eli and Jeanie’s concepts before they submit them to their target audience.”

  “Is CalBioTechnica growing?”

  “Yeah. Pretty fast. We’ve had a few offers to buy the company outright, which would have put a much bigger sum into our bank accounts, but we’ve never wanted to sell. It’s too exciting to be at the leading edge of medical research. And anyway, it’s not like I would know what to do with more money. I have an accountant who spends a lot of time figuring out how I should be structuring my compensation. Much of it is deferred of course, and much of the rest gets invested. But I still have a lot of regular income to dispose of. That’s part of why I bought this place along with the next property to the south. A house and an old lakeshore cabin. I’m incorporating the cabin into the new building, a Washoe Spirit Lodge for my people.”

  “You are Washoe?”

  “Half, yes. My father was Washoe. My mother was a white woman named Mary Thomas. Lily’s mom, my dad’s second wife, was Brenda. Now there’s an interesting mix, because Brenda is mostly Maidu Indian. You probably know that for all the thousands of years that the Washoe were in Tahoe, the Maidu lived in the foothills, and they didn’t get along well with the Washoe. Well guess what? Brenda and my dad didn’t get along, either.”

  Ryan looked over at Lily. She was sitting next to Spot, slumped against him, one arm draped over his back, her head leaning against his shoulder, apparently asleep.

  Ryan lowered his voice. “Brenda was much younger and had a taste for men closer to my age than my dad’s age. I don’t even know what she saw in him other than a decent income. So not long after Lily was born, Brenda and dad got a divorce.”

  “What’s your spirit lodge going to be about?”

  “Whites invented land ownership, and they decided that they owned Tahoe even though it was Washoe country for ten thousand years. The only property the Washoe have left in Tahoe is the Meeks Bay Resort. Maybe I’m wrong - I hope I’m wrong - but to my knowledge, I’m the only person of Washoe descent who owns a house on the lake. Our lake.”

  Ryan paused. “I know a spirit lodge sounds like it’s about the Washoe shamans, like what I’m building is directed by the tribal elders and such. But the reality is that I’m not ve
ry tight with the elders. My dad moved me away to Reno when I was young. In fact, the elders might not like what I’m doing. But my goal is to build a lodge where other Washoe can come and be at the lake. No obligations. No questions. Just a chance to come back and experience a tiny bit of what their ancestors had. My ultimate goal would be to get some kind of tax exempt status in place, like for a church, and then deed the property to the Washoe Tribe.”

  “Did Eli know that you are half Washoe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he know that it is now illegal to climb at Cave Rock?”

  “Yes, I’m sure he did. All climbers know it. The ban has been well publicized. What he did was terrible, separate from getting himself killed. He knew that it’s a sacred site. He knew that I would disapprove. Climbing there is a desecration. Like going into a church and climbing the altar.”

  “Then why did he do it?”

  “I can only guess that it’s because he didn’t respect others. He was bullheaded and self-centered. He didn’t care what other people thought. If he went into a great cathedral, he’d probably climb the flying buttresses if he could get away with it.”

  I nodded. “Your dad raised you alone?”

  “I was raised by my dad and neighbor ladies and people from the Unitarian church and teachers and anyone else who thought that I needed and deserved help.”

  “And now you’re raising Lily,” I said.

  “Yes.” Ryan glanced at Lily. “When her mother Brenda moved to Mexico, I became Lily’s legal guardian. A year ago, after word of CBT’s success started making the papers, Brenda wanted back into our life. She started sending me postcards. Not to Lily, but to me. That’s when you know that Lily is really loved. When the mother who abandoned her doesn’t contact her, but reconnects with me in an attempt to get money.

  “Of course, I’m in the Bay Area a fair amount, so Lily has Hannah Serrano, a nanny who stays here at the house when she’s working. Hannah takes care of Lily and does the domestic stuff whenever I’m gone. But I’m here quite a bit. Being chairman has some advantages. I do what works for me and Lily.”