“So how about it?”
She tapped her fingertips on her lips, weighing the offer.
“Just think—no harassing phone calls from your ex. A few days away from the city and the Web site. Nothing to do but work with Lilith and relax and build your pack leader skills. And when we come back, we’ll go to the hearing and kick some ass.”
That last bit must have hit a nerve, because Roxie looked at him and nodded. “I guess it wouldn’t kill me,” she said.
He stretched up and placed a kiss on her cheek, smiling to himself. From what he’d seen of Roxanne Bloom, that response had been downright enthusiastic.
Eli closed his eyes for a moment, keeping his face hidden in her hair as he wrestled with the weight of what he’d just done.
* * *
That instant—as the sip of forty-year-old Glenfiddich merged with the CAO Gold’s creamy smoke at the back of his throat—that was Raymond’s version of a religious experience. The walls of the Havana Club formed his church. Blended Scotch was his altar wine and cigar smoke his incense. Raymond’s disciples were gathered at his table, enjoying the tale of how his ex-girlfriend’s attack dog had gone for his throat, and how he planned to eviscerate her in a court of law.
“A bitch with a bitch,” said one of his buddies, to much hearty laughter.
Ah, yes. A bitch with a bitch. Dos biatches. It amused him, really. Poor little pathetic Roxanne. She had to go out and get herself an ugly, vicious bitch-dog to keep her company after he dropped her ass. She must have needed something to keep her warm at night that could also double as the mascot for her castrating Web site. Raymond took another puff of his CAO Gold, then twirled it in his fingers, mesmerized by the series of perfectly round smoke rings he’d just produced.
She’d been such a fresh-faced go-getter when he first met her, wide-eyed and in awe of him. Raymond couldn’t help but smile as he remembered. Those were truly satisfying days. She would come when he called. She would drop everything when he had a few hours to spare. He had the girl on a schedule, for Christ’s sake! If she wasn’t in his bed, Roxanne would call him when she woke in the morning and when she went to sleep at night. She relied on him to advise her, comfort her, guide her, and fuck the hell out of her.
Raymond knew that for good or ill, relationships were like litigation—you found the hole in your opponent’s case, and you went in for the kill. And like a whole lot of fucked-up young women these days, Roxie Bloom was looking for a daddy, whether she realized it or not. So that’s what Raymond gave her—a mean ole daddy she could worship.
It wasn’t his fault that he was more than she could handle.
“I saw your new assistant,” said one of his disciples. “She’s got a hell of a booty on her.”
“I’d do her,” said someone else.
Raymond chuckled.
“How long is it going to take you to start tapping that ass?” someone else asked.
Raymond took another sip of golden nectar, swirling it around in his mouth. “Already tapped and flowing, gentlemen,” he told them, to a burst of appreciative laughter.
He smiled to himself, thinking he might hurry things along with Ricky. Maybe it was time for a late night at the office with some Chinese takeout. He’d let her think she’d made a real contribution, then he’d let her suck him off.
“Damn, I wish I were you, Sandberg,” said one of his disciples.
Raymond raised his glass to that.
Chapter 10
Eli entered the revolving door of the downtown skyscraper, glad there weren’t many more of these meetings ahead of him. He’d survived ten of them in the last ten months. That meant that he’d reminisced with ten middle-aged men about their years at Berkeley. He’d cautiously asked ten men whether they remembered a pretty yellow-haired anthropology major named Carole Tisdale. Then he’d talked ten men into giving a sample of their DNA to a diagnostics lab and waited, sometimes for weeks, for the results.
Each time there was no match. And Eli was downtown that day to find out about number eleven, a guy who ran a real estate leasing company. Milt Horvath was fifty-three, on his second wife, with three grown children. His hobbies included cruises to Hawaii and golf at least twice a week. That’s how Eli had originally cornered him—in the parking lot of the Union League Golf and Country Club. It had been one of his more blatant stakeouts.
“Mr. Horvath,” he’d said, as the man unlocked the trunk of his BMW and stored his clubs.
“Yes?” He sat down on the fender of his car to remove his golf shoes. “Can I help you?”
Eli broached the subject gently. The guy looked at him with shock and wonder as Eli explained why he’d tracked him down. Then the man shook his head as if to clear his mind. “Sure I remember her,” he said. “I always wondered what happened to her—she just disappeared.”
Eli filled in the blanks for him. Carole Tisdale had moved back home to Denver to have the baby; she’d gone back to school, where she’d met a great guy named Robert Gallagher. Eli had assumed Bob was his biological father until his death last year, when he’d discovered otherwise.
Milt Horvath looked up at Eli for a moment, quite serious, then slammed the trunk door before he turned to him. “That sounds tough,” the man had asked. “You’re, what, thirty-two? Why didn’t they ever tell you?”
Eli gave Milt Horvath the same antiseptic story he’d told the others: his parents didn’t want to upset him when he was younger, then believed it was pointless to bring the subject up once he was an adult. He’d told Milt that with his mother’s help, he’d narrowed it down to a dozen possibilities. Two of the men had moved to other areas of the country—New York and Atlanta—and Eli went there first. Then he moved to Northern California to find, contact, and get lab results for all the rest. If Milt wasn’t a match, he told him, there was just one more possibility.
Of course Eli left out the more personal details. Like how he’d been so furious at his mother that he hadn’t spoken to her for six months, not even during the funeral. How he’d become obsessed with filling in the blank of his origins. Who was he? He needed to know. What kind of man was his real father? What parts of him had Eli inherited?
Milt Horvath listened patiently, studying Eli’s face with intensity. He gave Eli his card and Eli handed him the packet containing everything he’d need to complete the DNA test. When they agreed to meet again to review the lab results, Milt looked melancholy.
“You seem like an exceptional young man,” he’d told Eli, placing a hand on his shoulder. “There’s one thing I want to ask you to do for me.”
“Sure,” Eli said.
“Don’t think too harshly of your mother. We were kids. I’m not saying that Berkeley was any more wild back then than it is today, but those were the days before a one-night stand could kill you outright. We didn’t see things the same.”
Eli nodded. He’d heard the same excuse from a few other men, though they were usually asking Eli not to judge them, not his mother.
“It was nice to meet you, Eli,” Milt had said, getting in his car and driving away from the country club lot.
That had been three weeks ago, and now Eli was taking the elevator up to the twenty-first floor to meet with Mr. Horvath, who’d received the results several days before.
Eli went to a reception desk and waited for only a few minutes before Milt came out to greet him. He ushered him into his large, tasteful office and had him take a seat near him at a grouping of comfortable chairs.
“Shall we?” he asked, holding up the FedEx envelope. “Would you like to do the honors?”
“Sure,” Eli said, pulling at the envelope’s tear strip. He reached in and slipped out the results. The findings weren’t exactly a shock. Eli handed the paper over to Milt, saying, “Looks like you’re off the hook.”
He watched Milt read and reread the test results, then sigh deeply. “I’m sorry, Eli,” he said.
“No problem. I appreciate your willingness to do this,” he said, standin
g.
Milt put out his hand. “If there’s anything else I can do for you, you just let me know.” He shook his head and laughed. “You know, while we were waiting for these results I started thinking back to when I knew your mom. It was, uh, you know, pretty crazy. Things got a little out of hand sometimes.” Milt looked down at his shoes, embarrassed. “I hadn’t thought of all that in a long, long time.”
Eli cocked his head. “How do you mean?” None of his mother’s accounts painted her as a saint, obviously, but nothing she’d described sounded “crazy” or “out of hand,” words Milt had just used.
“Oh.” Milt shifted his weight and shrugged. “I only meant that I’d been with your mother a couple times. She and a bunch of her girlfriends came around the off-campus hole in the wall where I worked as a part-time disc jockey.” Milt laughed. “And I’m talking right at the peak of disco. Polyester wide-collar shirts and gold chains and the whole bit. Jesus, it’s funny to look back on that now.”
“So what happened with my mother?” Eli asked, suddenly uncomfortable.
Milt cleared his throat. “Nothing terrible. It’s just that I’m not very proud of myself for my behavior back then, that’s all I’m saying.” He pasted a smile on his face and extended his hand again. “It was a pleasure. I wish you the best of luck in sorting all this out.”
Eli nodded, knowing two things: Milt Horvath wasn’t telling him the whole story and Eli had just been told to get the hell out.
“Thank you,” Eli said, ending the handshake. He headed for the office door. “I’ll be out of town for a week or so. If you should think of anything else I might need to know, please call.”
Eli decided to glance behind him. Milt’s expression had frozen. His mouth was still smiling, but his eyes sure weren’t.
“Unless you want to tell me now,” Eli offered.
“No, no, it’s nothing,” Milt said, laughing it off. “Just tell your mother that Milt-in-Your-Mouth sends his regards.”
Eli lowered his jaw and blinked. “Right,” he said.
On the elevator ride down to the parking garage, Eli calmed himself by noting he had just one more of these god-awful errands to run. One more possibility. One more guerrilla meet-and-greet. One more sales pitch. One last lab test.
As Eli reached his truck he made himself a promise. Even if suspect number twelve wasn’t a match, he was done looking. That would be it. He’d given this his best shot, but it would have to be over. He’d survived three decades without knowing the identity of his biological father, and he could survive a few more.
Milt-in-Your-Mouth?
There was only so much of this shit a man could take.
* * *
Five hours into the drive, Roxie looked over at Eli’s golden-boy profile and it hit her—this thing between them wasn’t fading. It was only getting stronger. It felt right to be with Eli Gallagher. She felt calmer in his presence. And the peacefulness had nearly lulled her usually pragmatic mind to sleep.
She’d almost forgotten that she hated men. That she didn’t trust them. She’d nearly forgotten the sacred promise she’d made to herself—she would never again be the kind of girl who got lied to, used, and disrespected. No more stupid moves. No way. No how. Not her.
Roxie took another quick peek at Eli and frowned. He did have quite a few redeeming qualities, no question, but that didn’t change the fact that she was taking a whopping risk, putting herself in this position. She was in a strange man’s truck, on a deserted highway, headed to the strange man’s remote Utah compound, where God only knew what she’d encounter. Some kind of dog whispering religious cult? A survivalist fringe group? A polygamist’s paradise? She was headed to Utah, for crying out loud. Willingly. And with a man she hardly knew!
Roxie stroked Lilith’s fur, thinking this through. She’d never been to Utah. She’d never had any desire to go to Utah. There had to be a reason for that. Maybe she should insist Eli turn right around and take her back to the city, where she belonged.
God, what am I doing?
Roxie concentrated really hard, willing her heartbeat to steady, her breath to slow. It didn’t work. In her mind she pictured events as they might unfold a few years on. A lone hiker on a nearly inaccessible Utah trail would stumble upon a partially decomposed body in a shallow grave … dental records would finally solve the mystery of whatever happened to missing San Francisco blogger Roxanne Bloom … and people would shake their heads and say, what a pity … the girl had been an idiot to put herself in such peril … she should have known better … the girl had been too stupid to live …
“What are you thinking over there?” Eli asked, shooting a clean and sweet smile in her direction.
“Huh? Uh, nothing. Just thinking how relaxing all this is.”
“Yeah?” Eli asked, laughing. “I thought maybe you were sittin’ over there trying to convince yourself I’m not a psycho killer.”
Roxie laughed, a little too frantically, she knew, but by then it was too late to do anything about it. She continued to stroke Lilith’s fur and stare out the window.
Speaking of being pragmatic, Roxie had to acknowledge that this wasn’t exactly her idea of a fun time. She was windblown and sweaty. And she didn’t much care for the country music coming out of Eli’s sound system, even if it was the cultural icon variety. Truth was, she’d never been attracted to men who wore cowboy hats and Wrangler jeans and listened to Johnny Cash while driving their trucks down deserted highways. She’d always preferred the cool, sexy, intellectual types who wore gray flannel and drove their sports cars along city streets while listening to vintage Pearl Jam or Public Image Limited. In addition to all that, Roxie’s jeans were now covered in dog hair and silvery streaks of Lilith drool. As a bonus, she had to pee like Secretariat.
“Would you be up for stopping for lunch in Baker? It’s another half hour or so. It’s my usual watering hole.”
“That sounds perfect,” she said.
“If Lilith is crowding you, you can scoot over here a little and let her have the spot next to the window. I think she wants to let her head hang all the way out.”
“Oh. Sure.”
As she rearranged Lilith and edged closer to Eli, Roxie felt a shiver go through her. This whole situation was embarrassing. Confusing. Miraculous. And boy, was it ever different.
The macho-man pack leader routine aside, Eli had been nothing but a gentleman. When he left her house the other night, he left behind a dog with a wagging tail and a woman with her honor intact. Eli had patted Lilith affectionately and kissed Roxie softly. He’d promised to call her the next day. And he actually had. During the call he suggested what she should pack and promised to pick her up at six A.M. He’d been right on time. It was truly unusual.
And now, five hours into the trip, Roxanne was stunned to realize that they’d talked and laughed most of the way from San Francisco to close to the Nevada border, covering everything from favorite movies and food to the collapse of American journalism, politics, music, and travel. And despite her occasional worries about cults and shallow graves, Roxie had felt herself unwinding with each passing mile, inching closer to reaching an understanding with herself. Maybe this hadn’t been a stupid call, after all.
Roxie grinned at Lilith, happy that her girl was discovering the joy of hanging her head out the window of a moving vehicle, just like a normal dog, her ears flying back and her eyes half closed in ecstasy.
Maybe her decision to come with Eli to Utah would turn out to be the smartest thing she’d ever done.
Bea had certainly thought so. “That’s awesome!” she’d cried, nearly jumping with glee as she’d hugged Roxie. “You’re going to have a wonderful time—I just know it.”
Ginger had been supportive, as well. “Good for you,” she’d said. “Relax and enjoy. You deserve to have some fun.”
On the phone, Josie squealed with delight at the news.
But Bea also mentioned that Mrs. Needleman had had a minor stroke and was in the
hospital. And Josie confessed that her doctor had ordered bed rest for the last couple weeks of pregnancy. Then Ginger had informed Roxanne that her baby’s head had dropped, a development Roxanne didn’t quite understand, nor did she want to. All she knew was it couldn’t be good.
After hearing all that, Roxanne decided the time wasn’t right for her to leave town.
“We’ll all survive a few days without your supervision, I guarantee it,” Bea had said. “Besides, I’ll strangle you with my bare hands if you don’t go.”
“We’re here,” Eli said, slowing the truck and pulling into the Baker Town Diner parking lot. “I’ll take Lilith for a stroll if you want to freshen up before we eat.”
Roxanne nearly ran to the ladies’ room. When she came out, Lilith was content under the shade of the front porch, lapping at a bowl of water. Remarkably, the dog barely seemed to notice the three men who strolled out of the diner just a few feet from her bowl, which shocked Roxanne, seeing that her dog’s usual reaction would have been snarling, barking, and a display of fangs.
“It’s a miracle,” Roxie said, striding up to Eli. She noticed he wasn’t even holding her leash.
“No, just simple communication,” he said, glancing from the dog to Roxie’s face. “I show her how it is. She knows it’s in her best interest to follow the program.”
“Because she feels safe? Because it makes her happy?” Roxie looked up into Eli’s smoky green eyes when she asked her questions.
“You’ve been paying attention, Roxie Bloom.”
Over a lunch of barbecue sandwiches and homemade potato chips, Eli dropped the bomb. “I’ve got eight dogs at the ranch,” he told Roxanne, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “We’ll introduce Lilith to a couple at a time. There’s only one who might give her a hard time.”
“Excuse me?” Roxanne stared at him in disbelief. “You’re going to force her to deal with eight strange dogs in a strange environment? She’ll go ballistic!”
Eli smiled. “Let’s give her a chance to show us what she’s made of, okay?”
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