“I can see why he’d be upset.”
Wooly shut the door and kept moving. “Yeah, but this happens all the time. Lots of people’ve asked me to bury the results or queer the standards. Monte’s just one.”
The next room was basically a steam bath. We stood outside, watching through a glass panel as swatches of material were washed in waves of humidity and heat.
“I call it Panama City at 3 p.m.,” said Wooly. “Plenty of product’s wilted and failed here too. I’ve gotten sucked into many an ugly spat just over this test alone.”
“I guess,” said Nickie, “it’s a contentious business.”
“You have no idea,” he said as we walked. “This business brings out the worst in human nature, it really does. I know some people say it’s bars or hotels, but it’s this line of business that shows people at their worst.”
There was also a window at the next door. Inside, two workers dressed in hazmat gear were exposing samples to clouds of brownish gas.
“This one I call Mexico City at 3 p.m. We pump in carbon monoxide, all your major pollutants. It’s 15 times as toxic as what the federal regulators call a bad-air day.”
“Wooly.” Farooq was coming up the hall, three clipboards still under his arm. “Jay Chan just called, said you stiffed him on $3,000.”
“Stiffed him? I never stiffed him.”
“The repairs he did, the recalibrations? He said he billed you for $8,000, you only paid five.”
“Jay Chan?”
“Right.”
“It was only worth five. One of those machines was almost new—you could still smell the clean on it. Tell him he’s only getting five.”
“Then why did you agree to eight?”
“Jay knew I was gonna fuck him out of three. Tell him five is all he gets.”
Farooq started to say something, then his face collapsed in give-up pain and he turned and walked away.
“You put him through some kind of shit,” I said.
“Yeah, but Farooq’s better off than when I first met him.”
“When’s that?”
“When he broke into my house trying to rob me.”
Nickie and I exchanged boggled looks.
“I hear a noise one night,” said Wooly. “I get up, grab my Berretta. I see this guy climbing into the living room window, so I shoot him. Once he got out of the hospital, though, I felt sorry for him. Dropped the charges, gave him a job. Was out of guilt, I guess, but he’s worked out. Really does a fine job, though he’s still got a language thing. Couple weeks ago I tell him I wanna try to start eating lite. He looks at me, he’s not getting it. He says, what kind of light?”
We came to the last door in the hallway. It led into a room that was much smaller than the rest. One Xenon-arc light fixture stood in the middle, shining on a mere three samples.
“This is mostly for my own amusement,” said Wooly. “Every once in a while we get product that hardly shows any wear—they pass with flying colors, so to speak. When the testing’s done, I bring ‘em here, study them myself, just for the hell of it. I just want to see how long it’ll take for them to go. Why? I don’t know, there’s just something fascinating about disintegration, watching something falling apart with the passage of time. In a way, it’s like looking into the future, predicting what’s going to happen.”
“Sort of liked being psychic?” I said.
Wooly wasn’t at all pleased by the comparison. “Yeah,” he said, “except I get it done.”
>>>>>>
SATURDAY JUNE 16, 1:35 p.m.
A NEAT FREAK
At least I felt I had a better understanding of testing now—I was in a better position to talk to Monte Slater. In terms of somebody wanting to take Wooly’s life, Monte was still at the top of my list.
Downtown Hidden lake was crowded today, tourists enjoying the weather, lot of traffic. Including an ambulance, parked in front of the Executive Center. And an emergency service truck from the HLFD. Plus two cop cars pulled up and parked on the street.
My lungs stopped working. The air had been vacuumed out of my chest.
Okay, it could be anything. There are plenty of tenants in the building. But then I got to the fifth floor and I thought I was dreaming. The yellow tape down the end of the hall, the tape cordoning off the area around the Trident Manufacturing door, it didn’t seem real. It felt like a dream coincidence.
One of Alex Tarkashian’s paunchy cops was standing outside. “Whatta you want?” he said as I approached the tape. He was reeking with attitude.
“I was hoping to see Monte Slater. What happened?”
“What did you want to see him for?”
“I wanted to talk to him.”
The cop gave it some thought. “Did you have an appointment?”
“No.”
More thought. “Wait here.”
Alex came out of the office a minute later. His face was a sick white.
“I’m seeing too much of you,” he said.
“What’s going on?”
“You say you wanted to talk to Monte?”
“I talked to him yesterday. I thought he might have something to do with the threats on Wooly.”
“You can probably take him out of the running.”
“I’m hearing a lot of past tense.”
Alex nodded. “His body’s in there.”
“How did it happen?”
“He ate a gun.”
My lungs weren’t airless anymore. They were beyond that now. They’d been crushed flat.
“You sure it’s suicide?”
“He left a note,” said Alex. “He was in terrible financial shape. The shit was coming down on him hard.”
“The textiles?”
“Everything. The textiles, the plastics, some real estate deals he had. It was all going bad. He was about to lose everything.”
Neither of us said anything. Alex looked like he wanted to lean over the tape and hurl.
“Pretty messy in there?”
“Actually, no,” he said. “Monte, it turns out, was a neat freak. There’s a supply closet in there? He lined it with plastic, actually tacked plastic sheets to the shelves. They caught all the brain splatter.”
Gary Bogash, Monte’s partner, stepped quietly out of the door. His hustler’s eyes had gone glassy, his tanned face looked even more neutered now. He looked at me.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“You ask me that now? Don’t say anything to me. Do not to me say anything.” He glanced emptily down the hall, running a hand through his spiked blond hair.
Alex turned to me. “You talked to him too yesterday?”
“About Wooly, yeah.”
“When I think of all the people,” said Bogash, “trying to make this world a better place, and then I think about Wooly Cornell…”
“You should go,” Alex said to me. “You shouldn’t be here.”
I turned to the hallway, the potted plants, the sanitized paintings. None of it looked like it belonged on earth. I remembered following Monte down the hallway yesterday, remembered the broken way he’d talked, the way he’d slap his palm as he spoke, slapping it with solid whacks. Wooly was right about him. He takes his anger out on himself.
>>>>>>
SATURDAY JUNE 16, 2:50 p.m.
ON THE SLIDE
Wooly had a bottle of beer in his hands but he wasn’t drinking from it. He just kept turning it around and around, every once in a while peeling a bit of wet paper off the label. “Monte wasn’t a bad guy,” he said, his voice swollen. “Not a bad guy at all. He was just trying to do too much at once.”
The kitchen was warm—Genevieve was baking a bean pie. We all sat with him, a silent four-sided knot around the table. No gloating from him, no I told-you-so’s. Just a soft moment.
“Diversifying, you know, it can be a good thing,” he said. “But not the way Monte was doing it. The way he was doing it, it was ill-assumed. He was sticking his fingers into too many knotholes.”
“It’s a sad case, a very sad case,” said Wooly. “He was hoping for a conquest. Instead he got conquested.”
“There’s somebody here.”
Genevieve was looking out the window closest to the oven.
“Somebody’s out back.”
I jerked out of my chair and ran to the window. For like 3/5 of a second I saw something in the woods, the sun catching someone moving through the trees.
“I’ve got the house!” Nickie yelled. “Go.”
I had the Glock out by the time I hit the back yard. No sign of anybody now. Into the woods it was. The silence fell as soon as I passed through the first fringe of pines, the background hiss of civilization suddenly giving way to total wraparound stillness. It was as deep and solid as before, but there was something different about it now. There was something, I don‘t know, disturbing about it.
I heard a soft snapping coming from a southwest direction, the sound of a foot cracking a twig. Then, as my ears adapted, I could hear faint footsteps from the same direction, feet landing hard and fast. They lasted a moment, then got lost in the chatter of crickets and heat-crazed cicadas.
I set out that way, picking up the sound again about 20 seconds later, running on a winding path that was only crisscrossing say about 800 other paths. I could smell marshes, the swampy water of the actual Hidden Lake. But then, whoever this guy was, his direction changed, switching away from the lake and back to the world. He seemed to be sticking to the outer edges of the woods.
His steps were maybe 12 seconds ahead of me when their pace changed. They got slower, lighter. The guy had stopped running. A few hundred feet later I caught a quick glimpse of somebody on the trail ahead. I saw long reddish-blond hair and a fast-walking pigeon-toed waddle. Then the trail turned through a cluster of tupelo trees and the guy vanished from my view.
I made a careful pass through the tupelos, ready to confront the guy, nothing out here but me and him and the ghosts of dead Algonquins hovering in the green silence.
Then it was all gone—the trees, the bushes, everything. I was standing in an open field of tiny twisted trees. Dwarf pines, gnarled growths three or four feet high that looked like something left in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb hit.
The sun struck my eyes like bullets. I could just make out the person walking in the middle of the stumpy trees. I saw the hair, the waddle. I saw a dirty T-shit and shorts and a soggy posture. I saw the legs, the hips, the shoulders. It was a woman.
She was moving quickly, yeah, but the pace seemed natural to her gait. I didn’t sense she was running away. I put the Glock back.
“Excuse me?” I yelled.
She stopped and spun around. It wasn’t a woman. It was a girl. It was a kid.
>>>>>>
She said she was 19. I didn’t card her, but I was guessing 15, 16 at best. She had the wet-rag slouch and pigeon-toed walk of a mid-teen. She had a baby face that was still filled with freckles. I was born looking older than this kid.
Her name was Jen, or so she said. She wouldn’t tell me her last name. She said she’d been living in the woods for a little over a year. I asked her why.
“Basically, because nobody cares,” she said. “Nobody gives a shit.”
“Nice attitude.”
We moved out of the field and back under the green shade of the trees. Jen told me about her survival routines, grabbing a piece of that long reddish-blond hair every once in a while and smelling it while she talked. Strange kid, strange habit.
She said she was a scavenger mostly, living off whatever people in stores, restaurants and homes threw away. In the mornings she’d usually do a can and bottle run, using whatever deposit money she made to buy kerosene for the stove she’d found. The stove was now parked outside her tent, which was a tarp strung over a tree branch.
Her father had originally put the tent up. He’d worked in construction, and when he got laid off and they lost their house, he and Jen became woodsies.
“He’d been down some rough roads,” she said. “He said it was a lot easier out here.”
Except for a few months ago, when he’d caught pneumonia. She’d taken him to the local hospital but he didn’t make it. Now she was out here by herself, carrying on the same life. She took showers in the bathhouses at the public parks and beaches. She got through the winter by layering with blankets and keeping the kerosene stove going.
“There’s a lot of freedom out here,” she said, “long as you know how to take care of yourself.”
Part of me admired this kid’s guts. Part of me was horrified. I kept thinking about my daughter. What if, a few years from now, she decided to take off and live in the shadows like this? I’d go insane. I remember a time, when she was 2, I took her to the playground. She was playing in the sand by the slides and I looked away for a moment—really, 10 seconds at most. When I looked back she was gone. The sandbox was empty. Then I saw her—she was halfway up the ladder of one of the slides. I was floored. She could never climb the ladders before. She’d never even shown any interest in the slides. Now there she was, halfway to the top, climbing there all on her own.
Jen was smart not to tell me her family name.
“I spotted you from a house,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. The crazy guy’s. Wooly Cornell’s. I usually go there at night. This time his wife saw me from the kitchen.”
“You go there much?”
“They put out good garbage. It’s one of my preferred sources. He’s a prime waster—he throws a lot of good stuff away.”
“You know much about him?”
“I’ve heard stories.”
“Like what?”
She pulled a handful of her hair to her nose and gave it a sniff. Something was on her mind.
“I know he takes walks in the woods,” she said. "He goes to this rock.”
“That’s him.”
I looked at the trees around us. Nothing was moving. I took a 20 out of my wallet.
“You want to make some money?”
Jen wrapped her arms around her shoulders, hugging herself. Her freckles became lost as the blood rushed to her face. “I don’t do things like that.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean I’ll pay you for information.”
“What kind?”
“The guy, Wooly? He’s in some trouble. He’s got someone on the premises, guarding the house.”
“I’ve seen her. Hispanic woman, scarred face.”
“But she’s on the inside. We need somebody watching the outside, the woods. Something might happen to Wooly, especially in the next five days. You see anything that’s off, you let me know.”
She took the money. “I can do that.”
“You stay out of trouble, but if you see anybody hanging out back there, you let me know. You have a way to get in touch? Is there a pay phone anywhere?”
“I don’t need a pay phone. I have this.”
Jen pried a cell phone out of her shorts. “I found it. It’s a pre-paid. It works.”
“Good. I’ll give you my number—call me if you see anything. Can you do that and stay out of trouble?”
“I can stay out of trouble.” She put the cell back in her pocket, then grabbed another noseful of hair and looked out at the field of dwarf pines. There was nothing there to look at as far as I could see, but she kept looking at it.
“Can I ask a question?”
“Depends,” she said, a little guarded.
“Why do you keep doing that thing with your hair?”
“It’s a tic.”
“I know, but why? Does it remind you of something? What does your hair smell like?”
She thought for a moment. “Hair.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 4
PASS THE DRAGON
>>SUNDAY JUNE 17 (4 days to go)
SUNDAY JUNE 17, 9:00 a.m.
HE’S JUST HIM
A day of rest, a day of peace. At least that’s the way I was looking at it. I woke up thinking about Monte’s suicide, thinking too about the talk I’d had with Jen. It just felt like a day to make things right. Specifically, like a day to sit Wooly down with Georgiana Copely and let them hash their differences out. I didn’t know who’d been taking shots at Wooly, but it was true—as he’d spared no pains to point out—that it’d all started with Georgiana’s prediction. It was time for them to make amends.
I told Nickie my idea when she woke up. She agreed. Psychologically, at least, she thought it would be a good move.
We found Wooly in his Bugs Bunny PJs, finishing off his stack of a dozen pancakes while Genevieve made coffee. He was open to the notion. What happened to Monte, he said, had left him in a contrite mood. Maybe it was time to make nice.
I called Georgiana’s assistant, Marco Sung, told him what was on our minds. He conferred with his boss. Yes, she was certainly willing to talk. She was more than willing to put their differences behind them. We set a meeting.
The ugly undercurrents of the past few days seemed to be running dry. Things, as the weather people say, were milding up.
“I been thinking,” said Wooly, “maybe it’s time to recalibrate the attitude, you know? Maybe it’s high time to cultivate more positive thoughts.” He got up from the table. “Though if she pulls out a pair of ballcutters on me, I’ll blow her fucking head off.”
He toddled off to get dressed.
Et cum spiritu tuo. And may the spirit be with you.
“Don’t mind him,” said Genevieve. “He’s just him.”
“There’s probably some kind of medal,” said Nickie, “for living with him.”
“I knew what I was getting into,” Genevieve sighed, “knew it from the start.” She sat down. “Knew it from our wedding day. He’d paid for the whole thing—my family didn’t have a dime. We’d ordered a vanilla cake with chocolate mousse inside. Suppose to signify interracial love, all that. We cut the cake, it’s all vanilla. Vanilla cake, vanilla mousse. He starts hacking at it with the knife—where’s the chocolate, where’s the fucking chocolate? The caterer runs up and says there must’ve been a mistake. Wooly picks up the whole three tiers and throws the cake at the caterer. I start yelling you’re ruining my fucking wedding, he yells it’s my fucking wedding too and it all went berserk from there on in. He fought with the waiters, he fought with the guests, he fought with the cops when they came. Finally I had enough. I walked out, got in our car and started driving away. He comes running out—you can’t leave without me!—and throws himself on the hood of the car. That’s how we left for our honeymoon. Me driving in my wedding dress, him straddled on the hood of the car.”
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 6