Kelley Eskridge (32 page)

“I don't think it's weird,” Jackal said
softly.

He opened his eyes. “No one's ever helped
me with an aftershock,” he said. “The tourists don't know what to do,
and other solos either can't deal with it or it just doesn't occur to
them. Usually I just wake up on the floor and hope that people haven't
stolen too much beer while I've been out. Oh shit, is the bar still
open?”

“It's okay. I took care of orders while
you were out, and I put Razorboy in charge until I get back. Turns out
I'm good with beer and wine, but you might want to teach me how to make
a tequila sunrise sometime.”

This time his smile didn't look quite so
sad. “It's a deal.”

More silence. Then he said, “Thanks for
taking care of me. But I think I'd like to be alone right now. Jesus,
now there's an irony for you.” His face cramped, and she knew there
were more tears pushing up behind his eyelids.

“I can stay,” she said, but he was shaking
his head no; so she patted his arm gently and said, “Don't worry about
the bar, I'll take care of it, okay? You just rest.” She let herself
out and made sure that she pulled the door shut firmly, so he would
hear the noise and know that he was safe.

Downstairs, she found Razorboy pale but
coping.

“You okay?”

He nodded.

“Any trouble?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Want to help some more?”

He thought about it. “Okay.”

“Great. Take this tub and go bus the
tables.”

He did; and he stayed until two-ten when
she finally shooed the last straggler out the door. She hadn't seen
Estar leave: she wondered what Estar would make of Jackal's
disappearance and their sundered evening. Nothing, probably, she
thought crossly, and realized how tired she was.

Razorboy brought in the signboard. “Where
should I put this?”

“Just leave it there inside the door.
Scully can put it away tomorrow.”

“You want me to do anything else?”

“No. You go on home. Thanks for helping.”

“Yeah, it was pretty crisp. We kind of
worked together, didn't we?”

She suppressed the amusement and just let
the gratitude show in her smile. “We sure did. It would have been tough
doing all this myself.” And she wondered what kind of headlines she
would find on the web site tomorrow:

Segura Up
Close
! And the coy text. Well, fine. It was a small enough
price to buy Scully a little peace of mind tonight.

She was mopping the floor when she heard
him come down the stairs.

“How are you feeling?” she said without
looking up from her work.

“Okay. My head is killing me.”

“Try some Redhook, it works great for me.”

“Thanks, I might do that. Join me?”

“Sure.” She figured the floor was clean
enough; she put the mop away in the small closet by the back stairwell
and sat across from him in one of the booths. They each stretched out
full length and savored the beer in appreciative silence.

“It was really nice of you to do all
this,” he said. “Why did you?”

She put her glass down. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, why did you do all this?”

“Because we're…I mean, I thought…” She was
surprised at how vulnerable the question made her. “I want us to be
friends.” Now she felt like she was about six years old.

“Oh. Well…me too,” he said, equally
nervously, and it was suddenly important to her to be very clear.

“It matters having friends. Maybe we
aren't so good at it anymore, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.”

He looked at her. “Okay,” he said finally.
“Okay.”

“Okay.”

He drew parallel lines in the condensation
on the side of his glass. “Don't tell anyone about Bert.”

“I won't. Anyway, I think it was a great
strategy. Better than mine.”

He looked up. She knew he wouldn't ask;
she would have to give. She was tired from mopping and wiping tables
and stacking chairs, but he was her friend and he needed to hear her
story. Not the breakthrough: she couldn't afford to talk about that,
especially now that she knew how frightening it was for him to be
trapped. It would only be cruel to tell him that she'd had a whole
world to explore inside VC. But she found that she wanted, she needed,
to tell someone about the rest of it, the battles she had fought and
the way that solitude had compelled her to dismantle and then
reassemble herself.

“Do you want to hear about it?” she said;
and instead of the yes she had expected, he answered, “Please. Please.”

17

SHE SHUFFLED HOME ABOUT SIX-THIRTY
IN THE MORN
ing, worn out with beer and hours of digging up
handfuls of herself. She had told her story of the crocodile, and the
different kind of madness that led her to turn herself to stone. And
she had finally spoken of Snow and the web and her training with Neill;
and the discovery, just before it all ended, that she wanted nothing
more fiercely than to do the work Ko wanted. But in spite of the beer
and the special buzz that came from revealing herself, she'd had the
wit to withhold the information about her false Hope status and the
deal she'd struck to protect her family and her web. It was the last
job they had given her, and she would do it well. In that way, at
least, she still belonged to Ko.

Her desktop cheeped softly at her: mail
waiting. She came within a breath of shutting the whole thing down and
going to bed: she didn't think she could bear any bad news on top of
the emotional rib-spreading she'd done tonight. But she opened the
mailbox and found a single message, from an address she did not
recognize at first, until she read

Dear R
Segura: we are currently seeking a project manager and have reviewed
your qualifications with interest in further discussion. Our search is
winding up, so I must ask if you are available on short notice for an
interview
. The gallery: good, her instincts had been on
target. She pulled up her calendar program to record the date and time,
squinted, checked the e-mail again, squeaked “Oh,
sharks
!”
and ran for the shower: she had two and a half hours to clean up, eat,
print some leave-behind copies of her résumé, and try to
gather some semblance of brains.

The rushing around gave her less time to
be nervous, and she made it to the gallery as much past on-time as she
could get without being officially late. She was grateful for the
ten-minute obligatory let-the-candidate-stew holding pattern to steady
her breathing and let some of the sweat under her arms dry in the cool,
faintly coffee-scented air. It was strange to be wearing formal
business clothes after so many months of Neill-style loose dressing,
and there was nothing she could do about her too-short hair, but she'd
caught the right overall tone, judging by the people she saw in the
hallways: including the one who stepped through the glass doors off the
lobby area and came purposefully toward her. She straightened and then
stood.

“Ms. Segura? Thank you for coming in. I'm
Mark Levinson, Ms. Oronodo's assistant. If you'll come with me, the
interview team is ready.”

“Certainly,” she said, took a deep breath,
and followed him in.

She arrived back at her apartment tired and
hungry, her bladder full to bursting with all the sparkling water she'd
been politely offered, and had politely accepted, during the three
hours of various group and individual conversations. She wished she had
someone to talk to; then she thought about Scully's friend Bert and
marched into her bedroom, where Frankenbear sat on the dresser, his
crooked-sewn eyes steady and reassuring. She knelt down so that she
could look straight at him.

“I was great,” she said. “You should have
seen it. They loved me.” She carried him with her while she peed and
ran a bath, and she told him all about it: the behavior-based group
interview approach, a screening process she approved of and knew how to
manage well from both sides of the table; the project stories she'd
told to illustrate her ability to keep people focused and motivated;
and the subsequent tour of the office that was really a thinly
disguised series of one-on-one meetings with key staff, to determine
her connection-building techniques and assess her communication style
in action. At the end, Jennifer Oronodo had shaken her hand and said,
“It's been a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Segura. We'll be in touch by the
end of the week. I assume that your availability will hold until then?”
Jackal had solemnly assured her that she would juggle her schedule to
keep herself open, and restrained her grin until she was more than a
block away from the building.

The only tricky point had been the
gallery's insistence on references. “It's part of our standard contract
with clients that we complete reference checks on anyone working on
their projects. It's a necessary formality,” Oronodo had said. “If
you'll give Mark three local business contacts, that should be
sufficient.”

“That's a problem,” Jackal said candidly.
“I'm new to this area and am only now lining up business for myself. Is
there another way to meet your needs?”

She hoped that Oronodo would follow a
typical corporate pattern and dismiss the check on the basis of ‘my
seasoned executive gut tells me that a person who fits my needs so well
must be a fine individual.’ Unfortunately, Oronodo was a better manager
than that. “I'm sorry,” she said, “I do need some kind of verification.
Tell you what, how about a reference from one of your projects with Ko?
If you can give Mark a director-level or above contact, I can justify
the lack of local experience. But I will need two local personal
references to confirm that you are you, and that you haven't mugged any
old ladies lately.” Oronodo smiled to show that she was sure Jackal
understood. Jackal smiled back as best she could.

Oronodo said good-bye and disappeared into
the core of the office complex: it was a compliment to Jackal that
she'd come all the way to the lobby. Levinson waited. Jackal chewed her
lip. The local references took no thought: she only knew four people in
town, and it would be professional suicide to name Estar or Gordineau,
although it was tempting in a macabre way. She provided Crichton's and
Scully's e-mail addresses: Scully could represent himself as an
established business owner, and Crichton—well, Crichton would think of
something unexpected and utterly convincing, if she was in the right
mood. Then, with outward assurance and a huge inward flutter, she told
Levinson, “The best contact at Ko is Gavin Neill at Ko Prime. He's the
Executive Vice President of Planning for Ko Worldwide.”

Levinson raised an eyebrow and then broke
his corporate demeanor long enough to grin. “I guess we'd be happy with
his recommendation,” he said with a chuckle.

“Do me a favor, will you? Give me the
afternoon to let the local people know that I've provided their names.”
There was no point asking for time to contact Neill; either he would
support her or he wouldn't, she told herself. Begging wouldn't work
with him, and what other reason was there to call?

But now, after the bath to slough off some
of the stress, she said to Frankenbear, “The thing is, I'd be scared to
call him anyway.”

Frank regarded her solemnly from his perch
on the cold water faucet of the sink.

“Because if he's going to say no, I'd
rather find out from Oronodo.”

Frankenbear waited.

“Because it matters to me what he thinks.”
She hugged her knees in the tub. “I do not want to cry anymore, Frank.
I've cried enough about this stuff. And it would make me cry to have
Neill cut me off.”

How come? Frank seemed to ask.

“Not because he would be mean. He wouldn't
have to. But we were…I was…” She flopped a washcloth into the water and
trailed it around her like a fish. “Okay, because I was special.” It
sounded almost defiant. Frankenbear didn't seem to mind. “And I'm
probably not special to him anymore and I hate that, you know?” She
crunched the washcloth into a tight ball in her fist and scrubbed her
face with it. Then she climbed out of the tub to dry herself, coming
down now from the interview high, trying not to feel sad. Frank looked
at her with button-eyed staunchness; you are special, she imagined she
heard him say. She kissed him on the nose and kept it in her mind—I am
special, I am special—while she called Crichton.

Her phone didn't have a view option—one of
those budget trade-offs. She clutched Frankenbear against her chest,
and heard Crichton say, “Hello.”

“It's Jackal Segura.”

“What?”

It was reassuring that Crichton on the
phone was so consistent with the in-person experience. “I applied for a
job today and gave you as a reference.”

Silence.

“Someone from Calabrese Galleries will
probably e-mail you in the next couple of days. I've applied for a
contract position as a project manager. I had to give a couple of local
references.”

“I see.” Fleetingly, Jackal wondered what
color Crichton's eyes were today, and whether the lenses made her see
the world in the same color. “Are they aware of the nature of our
professional relationship?”

“If you mean, do they know that I'm a
carefree killer in the triple digits, then no, I left that out of the
conversation.”

This silence was different. Jackal could
almost see Crichton's mind working. “When did you last eat?”

“What? I don't know. Dinner.”

“And when did you last sleep?”

“I don't know. Night before last.”

“You go fix yourself something to eat and
then take a nap. We'll talk about this later.”

“Why? What difference does it make if I'm
tired and in complete insulin cycle mayhem? Seems like a perfect time
for you to hold me up for that nonexistent information you think I've
got.” She felt a long way from herself; it was interesting to hear all
that anger bubbling up.