by Susy Gage
Even Lou appeared a little impatient, rolling his eyes towards the door a few times as if pleading for an interruption.
When it came, it was in the form of a rather subdued and business-looking Absinthe. “Hello, colleagues,” she said with no trace of sarcasm and without shouting.
“Hello, Mastermind,” said Waddles. “We’re moving right along here with the plan.”
“Yes,” she murmured, sounded distracted. “That’s very nice… but I’m here to deliver a bit of bad news.”
“Naturally,” said Lou and Lori at once.
Abby looked quickly back and forth between them, then at Waddles with silent inquiry.
“Walter W. Waddles, Jr.,” he clarified, offering her hand. “Pay no attention to the, er, costume.”
“Right.” Abby swallowed a disdainful snort. “At any rate, I’m here because there was a question raised about the validity of your signature page—namely, that of the department head’s signature.”
“That fucking Kuzno.” Lou laughed demonically. “I figured he’d pull some stunt like that.”
“I’m not sure he’s entirely wrong.” Abby took a step backwards and averted her eyes from all three of them, looking at Lori’s only piece of furniture, a bookshelf containing all of the textbooks that had tormented Abby for her single year in graduate school. “He claims he never saw the signature page, and that Professor Rose falsified his signature.”
“You believe this?” Lori demanded, talking to Abby’s back. “Rose is the most famous person in the department.”
Abby turned around and smirked. “It’s not whether I believe it—it’s whether the President does. There appears to be a little history between him and Professor Rose.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” Lori wondered.
Abby spoke in a stiff voice. “The legal office wants an attorney—a position I happen to fill—to witness all of the signatures on a new page. The investigators, collaborators, and department head need to sign in my presence, then our office will sign, and then, if you’re lucky, the page will go back to the President.”
It sounded simple at first. Then all three of them simultaneously shouted, “Oh, shit!”
“Fucking Kuzno is on his way to Denver!” Lori recalled.
“It had to be his idea,” grumbled Grandpa Waddles. “Making oneself scarce is the best way for department heads to suppress projects they don’t like.”
“And he went one better—he made us think we had what we needed,” finished Lou. “That butthead.”
In an instant they all had their computers on, searching for flight schedules and wondering if they could chase Kuzno down in the terminal. Abby took part as if she were one of them, making Lori increasingly suspicious.
“Do you have his cell number, or do you think he’ll hide if you call him?” Abby wondered.
“He’d crawl into the cargo bay if he had to,” said Lou. “We have to go out there and tell the gate agents there’s been a family emergency. We already know what a convincing liar you can be, Dr. McRae.”
Abby had a JD, but no one ever called her “doctor,” and Lori noticed her flush slightly and smile as if that had been a compliment. “It’s Burbank, and he leaves in forty-five minutes,” she mused, leaning over Lou to get a good look at his computer screen. “I know a shortcut, and I drive fast, but I only have a two-seater.”
“Oh, no, now wait a second here!” Lori stomped her foot to get their attention. “Lou, if you are so deceived by her wiles to actually get into her stinky Porsche, that’s your choice, but I’m going to get your signature on my own copy of the front page before you go.” She sent two copies of the critical front page to the her printer, copies of the page Rose had locked in his safe but menacingly blank in all the important places.
Lou took them out and signed both, shoving one across the desk to her. “You have a Porsche, Abby?” he asked, eyes gleaming.
She seemed momentarily surprised that he would dare to speak to her directly, but love of her noisy, smelly car got the better of her and they wasted at least three minutes talking about various parameters until Lori could stand it no more. “If you guys are going to Burbank, then go! You don’t need me. Find Ben afterwards, and I’ll make sure Sol sticks around. Lou, here—take my copy of the cover page, get Kuzno to sign it, and FedEx it to me from the airport. Then when Abby murders you, I’ll still be able to get this in.”
For some reason this seemed to be the funniest thing those two had ever heard, and they both grinned at her with perfect, white, carnivorous teeth.
“I’ve learned a few things since yesterday,” Abby offered by way of explanation for why she was acting as if she were on their side. She still gave Lori a wide berth, though, and backed away nervously from Lou as he headed for the door. “I’m not sure…” she began.
“That I’ll fit in the car? My dad has a Carrera, I’m a pro.” He held the door for her, which seemed to reassure her a bit as she stumbled out of the office with her open laptop still in her hands. They resumed their Porsche conversation as they hurried down the hall, Abby squealing that she had to see Lou’s parents’ car.
“If you really want to, we can spin by after we see Ben,” was the last thing Lori heard Lou say. “I’d like to grill Gerson a bit while we get his signature.”
It was quite a relief not to be involved in this particular adventure. Lori forced herself to focus, sending Grandpa Waddles next door to collect the fake proposal and swearing that she wouldn’t move until the writing was done.
Twenty-Nine: New Mexico, USA
He was in a late-model Porsche with the top down, next to a beautiful woman under a beautiful blue sky, and Lou was more uncomfortable than he had ever been in his life.
It was clear that Abby despised him, so why was she doing this? If she had her own personal reasons for hating Kuzno, she wasn’t sharing them—in fact she wasn’t doing much besides spitting like an angry puma at the traffic jam backing up the 210.
“You can take La Tuna Canyon,” Lou suggested, fishing for his iPhone. The traffic map showed a web of red all the way through to downtown LA.
“WHAT?” bellowed Abby. (Shouting Abby, Lori called her. Yep).
“Take the surface streets to the airport, there’s less traffic.”
“How do you know?” she demanded.
“I’m from around here,” he replied, at last able to break the conversational embargo with giving directions. In a few minutes they had escaped the city and embarked on a winding mountain road that led through small farms, horse pastures, and plant nurseries to the Burbank airport. It was old-fashioned and scenic back in the chaparral-covered hills, with teenagers galloping by on horseback and a flock of Pekin ducks quacking at them from their pen in an orange grove.
Abby broke the speed limit just enough so that they might conceivably catch the enemy’s plane, but even she noticed the anachronism, and cooed “Oooh, cute” at a girl riding a long-haired black and white pony.
“This is how Southern California used to be,” said Lou, still determined to engage her in some sort of small talk besides directions and growling. “Even when I was a kid twenty years ago in Malibu, we went everywhere on horses—up in the mountains, down to the beach, everywhere.”
“You’re from Malibu?” cried Abby.
Success! “It’s less glamorous than it sounds,” he explained. “No one liked the coast in the early seventies, when my parents moved there from France. It was cold and plagued by landslides and forest fires.”
“I did my JD at Pepperdine, and I thought Malibu was heaven. The only other places I’d lived here Minneapolis and New York.”
“I hate Manhattan,” Lou agreed. “It’s like an alien settlement, with a purple sky and green clouds.”
“It also smells like urine five months out of the year, and everyone including little old ladies assaults you in the street. And I was married to a jerk who didn’t care how much I hated it.”
They emerged from the canyon an
d the small miracle evaporated. Burbank was squalid and vile, with cheap apartment complexes bordering fast streets and a constant roar and stench of traffic and airplanes. Just before the turn to the airport, they saw a small white poodle dash into traffic and get obliterated by a semi.
They both groaned in horror. “It’s an omen,” Abby said solemnly.
Lou was not superstitious, but he had to agree it wasn’t good. He was also pretty sure they were too late—it was nineteen minutes before the flight was scheduled to take off, and they probably closed the doors ten minutes before that. “Why don’t you leave the car with the valet and run in,” he suggested. “I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”
Abby opened her mouth to protest, then shut it, then opened it again. “You think that’s the fastest way?” was all she asked.
“Yes. Valet parking is right out front.” He was surprised she didn’t know where it was or how quick they were. Back in the old days, when he ran fast and security hadn’t gone Nazi, he’d showed up for his flights from Burbank with seconds to spare. It still had the feel of a tiny airport, with only three airlines and a small parking lot right by the entrance to the terminal.
After Abby took off and the valet parked the car, Lou sat for a few minutes with his eyes closed, considering the options. According to STI’s Honor Code, Kuzno could not refuse to sign unless he had real proof that the content of the proposal was fraudulent. All he could do was try to hide—but if they caught him, there were no excuses. So as long as Abby was genuinely on his side, if one or both of them hopped a plane to Denver…
“Do you need help, sir?”
“NO!” Lou was astonished at his own anger, finding himself screaming at the valet who had sneaked up and was standing right by the passenger-side mirror. “Go away! Leave me alone! I want to think!”
No doubt he appeared deranged, and the valet refused to leave until Lou got out his iPhone and pretended to be surfing the web. These things were God’s gift to dorks. Almost by reflex, he went to the Southwest Airlines site and started browsing for flights to Colorado. He was just getting to the first of the severe-weather alerts when Absinthe showed up, seething.
“It had already pushed back from the gate,” she grumbled. “I did my best—I said his parents had had strokes, his house was on fire, everything I could think of—no dice.”
“I wish I could have heard that.” Lou grinned for a second at the thought of Kuzno’s imaginary misfortunes, then came back to reality and showed her the screen. “We may be in even bigger trouble than I thought. They’re about to cancel all the flights to Denver because there’s a storm blowing in.”
“The gods are against us,” Abby reiterated, shuddering no doubt at the memory of the Omen of the Bloody Poodle. “How about the other airlines?”
The web sites were all slow to load, so finally they decided to split up and look at the departure screens at all three airlines, and call each other if they found anything. Before he was even out of the car, Lou could tell that it didn’t look promising. There was a long line of people for taxis, all of them disgruntled-looking, some with skis and others with surfboards. The words by Christmas floated by several times, and he realized that they were only four days away from the holiday that was supposed to mark the end of their ordeal. If we get stuck in Denver, he thought, I won’t have to visit my parents. Christmas with Abby and Kuzno! Oh boy.
The terminal was packed, and everyone was shaking their fists at the “Departures” screen. CANCELLED CANCELLED WEATHER DELAY CANCELLED, declared a list of flights to Denver, Boise, Omaha, and Salt Lake.
He found a spot in line and logged in to the Southwest website at the same time, not sure which would be faster. The people at the checkout were all refusing to leave their places even though the answer would continue to be the same: no flights in or out of Denver. Clinging to the luggage scale and crying was not going to help, though it seemed to be a popular approach.
The closest place they could get to on short notice appeared to be Albuquerque. Two years ago, he wouldn’t have hesitated—fly to New Mexico, rent a car, drive through the storm to Denver and get a room in the conference hotel where Kuzno was staying. Now the whole thing seemed like a recipe for humiliation and disaster. When you couldn’t even pee on your own, everything took absurd amounts of planning… he had never been any good at planning.
But really, what was the worst that could happen? They had pharmacies in Albuquerque. If he couldn’t get an accessible hotel room, he could always crawl into the bathtub. And surely between him and Absinthe, they could put snow chains on a car if they had to.
Feeling as if he were breaking all the rules of a game he didn’t even know, he signed in to his Southwest account and bought two tickets, then called Absinthe and told her.
Naturally she arrived shrieking, “WHAT?” but surprisingly, didn’t seem all that put out. “Can you drive?” was all she wanted to know.
“Yes,” said Lou, without bothering to provide any details. “I just don’t want to do it alone.”
“No, I don’t either.” She laughed nervously. “If the weather gets too gnarly, we turn around.”
“Of course.”
Suddenly she was stern again. “And I hope to all that’s good that you didn’t pay for those tickets with your grant. Because…” She clamped her hand over her mouth in an excessively obvious fashion, Oh I shouldn’t tell you, I know something you don’t know.
Lou shook his head dismissively. Barrow was right, Abby was a pain in the ass. “Of course I didn’t. Because what?”
She snorted. “You’re lucky not to have been fired ten times by now.”
Now it was his turn to screech “WHAT?”, but she refused to elaborate.
“Let’s go through security first,” she declared smugly.
Cursing her silently for distracting him, he sifted through his bag and tried to figure out what he could carry on, and what to do with all the tools that needed to be checked. It was a stroke of luck that he’d been carrying the portable hand controls, so they could rent any car they wanted—and this was only because he hadn’t cleaned out his backpack from the outing with Barrow on the River Trail. That meant the bag also had nasty crumpled power bar wrappers, along with old CDs of various versions of the proposal, crumpled journal articles stained with lunch items, and several things that were completely unrecognizable. He pulled stuff out in handfuls, making piles of Check, Carry-On, and Trash.
“Why don’t you just go and I’ll meet you at the gate?” he grumbled, nervous at the way she was staring.
But she refused, enjoying making him uncomfortable, or maybe curious about how he was going to go through the metal detector. It was not much fun being a spectacle for the amusement of the biggest bitch on campus.
He reminded himself that he didn’t have to like her as long as she acted as an effective weapon against the real enemy. Finally he was ready, checked his backpack at the kiosk, and fought through the angry throngs of thwarted ski vacationers and stranded Coloradans to the nearly-empty security line.
Absinthe looked doubtfully at the TV screen above their heads. The flight to Albuquerque still read ON TIME. “No one else seems to be doing this. Think it will work?”
Lou only shrugged. He doubted it would, but it was better than going back to face Barrow and Rose.
They had only until tomorrow night to get the signed proposals to FedEx. If they didn’t make it by ten o’clock, someone would have to fly the package to DC in person—and given what had shown up on the weather maps, that was an even sketchier proposition than what they were doing now.
Abby passed first through security and he lost her, but things went pretty quickly with nothing but his silly little plastic bag of stuff. He found her waiting at the gate, holding some kind of repellent blended coffee drink and a newspaper. Buried in the Local section, she of course continued to keep him in suspense about his reputation at the legal office. “They’re about to start boarding soon,” she muttered without
looking up. “Don’t you have to do something special? How does this work?”
“What, flying with a mutant? It’s easy,” he replied cheerfully, wondering how it was that appalling lies could come out of his mouth so easily. In secret he pretended to be immune to PC, but in public he would say whatever they expected, like an automaton speaking without will.
He didn’t want to introduce her to his private hell, could barely stand to think about it himself. He could never remember what he was supposed to do. Some airlines expected you to stand in line to register to pre-board; come to think of it, maybe Southwest was one of them. Back in the old days, Juju dealt with everything involving bills, tickets, or reservations, and Lou happily played the role of idiot savant. Then it was maybe cute—now he was just a retard. Fortunately, Abby was paying him no attention, so he sneaked off and went to see the gate agent.
They gave him a pre-boarding card and told him to wait. Southwest was easy, he recalled, since there was open seating so he could just sit in the first row by the window and not have to get into that frighteningly tiny and rickety aisle chair that they used to move the mutants through the plane. But no more Burbank Trick, where you sat at the back of the plane because you knew they’d put a staircase there and you could be the first one off. Come to think of it, would there be stairs onto the plane?
The agent didn’t mention it so he didn’t ask, returning to rejoin Abby and carefully subtracting the Arts section out of her newspaper. “So, when are you going to tell me what you promised?” he wondered.
“Huh?” She lowered the paper. She was wearing reading glasses—Barrow was right again, Abby was over 40 and lied about it. She snorted in disdain. “Meh. Come on, Lou, you can’t pretend you don’t know you’re the most financially irresponsible faculty member in the university.”
“Me?” he exclaimed, honestly surprised. “What have I done?”
“What haven’t you done?”
“Anything! Give me an example.”