The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (6 page)

Marco let her go first
through the revolving door. Something odd happened as she was
halfway through. She just stopped. I could see it from the street.
She stopped pushing the door and just stood in that glass-walled
limbo between in and out. I thought Marco might’ve spotted me, but
no—he never looked back. It was more like hesitation, like she
didn’t want to be going where she was going.

Whatever it was, it lasted
four seconds, then onward she went. By then I’d made it to the
front of the building. I saw them through the all-glass exterior.
They walked right through the lobby to the elevator bank, never
looking at the directory. Wherever she was going, she’d been there
before.

I
did
glance at the directory when I
got inside, only because it was next to the security board showing
the progress of the elevators. The lights of the one they’d hopped
into danced all the way to the top.

The fifth floor, I found
out a minute later, was a random collection of offices off a bland
hallway. Potted plants at either end, safe paintings on the walls.
Industrialized nice. I counted two doctors’ offices, two law
offices, various businesses, a pair of restrooms. I could hear
voices behind some of the doors, but none I could identify as
Georgiana’s.

There was a stairwell at
one end. I waited inside, keeping the door open crack-wide enough
to see the hall. Over the next five minutes office doors opened and
closed, elevators dinged, people came and went. Busy
place.

I heard a noise below me.
Someone on one of the lower floors was using the stairwell. I shut
my door and waited, ready to move. No need. Whoever it was only
traveled one flight of steps, but as the person was leaving the
stairwell he or she sneezed, and whether it was the echo-distortion
of the cement walls or whatever, for a second I thought somebody
was shouting my name.
Mc-SHANE
. Made me realize:
I’m
way
too
tense.

A door closed in the
hallway. I peeked out, saw Georgiana and Marco coming from the
other end of the corridor. Walking this way, but turning their
heads, glancing around like they were making sure nobody was
watching. The fuck’re they up to?

I ducked back in the
stairwell and closed my door again, listening for whatever move
they were going to make, the ding of the elevator maybe that would
take them back down. Instead I heard a key in a lock, a door
opening, Marco saying, “I’ll wait here.”

Got it—the ladies’
room.

A good two minutes went
by. I heard the door open and shut. But only a moment later the
elevator hit the floor and a woman and child got off. The kid—a boy
from the sound of it—was complaining about something and his mother
was telling him to keep it down. I could still make out Georgiana
and Marco’s steps—they were going away from me—but they were hard
to hear over the uproar. Then the mother and son went into one of
the offices and all that was left was the two adult steps. They
were clear enough for me to time them, follow them with my ears all
the way to the end of the hallway, where they disappeared behind a
closed door.

The end of the hallway—the
last door.

I left the stairwell and
walked my way down the hall. The nameplate on the last door held
two simple words:
Trident
Manufacturing.

It surprised me. A
manufacturing company? What the hell was Georgiana Copely doing
here? It struck me as an unusual destination for a blind psychic
photographer.

I moved back to the
stairwell, took out my phone and went to school on Trident
Manufacturing. Couple minutes of searching told me it was an
umbrella title for a number of different companies. Majority owner,
Monte Slater. And one of those companies—this was good—was called
Trident Textiles.
Textiles.
A connection was beginning to grow.

I narrowed the focus to
Trident Textiles, and the more I saw, the better it got. Up came
stories about Trident Textiles’ declining sales, its grim financial
outlook. Then I found a motherlode of a story. Trident Textiles was
involved in a $12 million lawsuit. Monte Slater and partners were
the plaintiffs. The defendant? Material Witness Laboratories, owned
by Wooly Cornell.

>>>>>>

FRIDAY JUNE 15, 12:20
P.M.

THE TESTING
PROCESS

“I always say,” Wooly said,
“there but for the grace of God…goes Monte Slater.” He stuffed a
handful of asiago cheese in his mouth. “Some people are homeless?
He’s
honeless
. I
can’t see that dumb cluck-fuck getting involved in anything like
this.” He reached for more cheese.

Genevieve went to whack
his hand with her knife. She was dicing the asiago, getting ready
to make a sauce for her chicken tetrazzini. “You keep eating like
that, there’ll be nothing left to cook.”

Crestfallen, he moved away
from the counter. “What you saw, to my mind, it’s just this short
of interesting. I just don’t think Monte Slater would be trying to
kill me.”

“Why not?” I
said.

“He’s just not the type,
for one. He’s the kind of person, he takes all his anger out on
himself. Number two, his business tanking and all, he’s got enough
troubles on his own.”

“His troubles have
anything to do with the lawsuit?”

Wooly snorted. “The
lawsuit—forget the lawsuit. It’s neither shit nor shat. I’ve been
involved in many suits, both sides, and I can tell you this is
nothing big. Believe me on this. I’ve got as many lawsuits going as
I’ve got changes of underwear, and this is nothing.”

“Wish you had a few more,”
said Genevieve.

“Yes, I heard your amusing
little remark.”

“What about Georgiana?”
said Nickie. “Why’s she meeting with Slater?”

“I don’t know,” said
Wooly. “With his luck, maybe he needs a séance.”

“I can’t buy it,” I said.
“Two people who don’t like you—you don’t think they’re doubling up
on you?”

“I don’t know. That I
don’t know.”

He grabbed for another
fistful of cheese to console himself.

“Will you
stop
it!” said
Genevieve. “”Get your fat ass out of my kitchen!”

Nickie and I went with him
to the living room, Wooly standing in front of Georgiana’s photo,
giving it a long look.

“I can believe her trying
to off me. Her, absolutely. Not Monte.”

“Tell me about the
lawsuit,” I said, “meaningless as it is.”

“What’s to tell? He came
to me with some product, I tested it, it sucked.” He turned away
from the photo. “Thing about Monte, he has no respect for the
testing process. Doesn’t take it seriously. To him it’s just some
unnecessary
blockage
, a fucking lark. But your test results, your whole
reputation
rests on your
test results. That’s how you go out in the world. You gotta go out
proclaiming the
strength
of your product, the dura— Wait,
wait
, out here, I wanna
show you something.”

He yanked us through the
double Mormon Tabernacle doors and dragged us out to the weird
living room set on the front lawn. The cast aluminum couch, ottoman
and armchairs, the plugged-in floor lamps.

“Now
this
,” he said, “look at this.” He
plopped on the couch and pounded the mattresses at his sides. “This
is
fabric
.”

Nickie and I each took an
armchair. “What is this stuff?” I said.

“It’s the best material
you’ll ever find. Or I ever found. We tested it once—it stood up
to
everything
we
threw at it.
More
than stood up to it. It’s the most durable fabric I ever came
across.”

“But why a living room
outdoors?”

“Oh I don’t know. It’s
just something I wanted to do. I thought it would be
cool.”

“You ever use it?” said
Nickie. “You ever sit out here?”

“No, it’s just, you know,
decoration. It’s just something to, I don’t know, spruce up the
place.”

Durable as the fabric
might be, it wasn’t very comfortable. I got up, walked around the
rest of the furniture. “Can you give me some details about the
lawsuit?”

“Details, sure. Like
what?”

“You tested Monte’s
product.”

“I tested it.”

“It sucked.”

“Big time.”

“So he sued
you.”

“Well, no, not exactly.
First he says to me, can I keep the results quiet? The answer
is
no
—I can’t do
shit like that. Then he offers me a bribe. Can I retest the stuff
in a different way? With different results? The answer, again,
is
no
. I can’t
compromise the integrity of my quality checks. So I tell him that,
no uncertain terms, and
that’s
when he files the suit. Claims my testing
standards’re too high, they constitute unfair business practices,
etc. etc.”

“And this wouldn’t want to
make him kill you?”

“On the basis of the suit?
No. It’s baseless and he knows it. You know what the most valuable
thing about that lawsuit is? The paper clip it came
with.”

Nickie wasn’t getting it.
“So why’s he asking for 12 million?”

“Ah who the fuck knows?”
Wooly stood up, stretched his back, circled around the couch.
“Maybe he thinks I’ll settle, pay him off some just to get rid of
him. You know, this is the trouble with Monte. He can’t accept that
he fucked up. He still wants more. He wants more and more and more.
Just like everybody fucking else these days—they all want
more
. They all want the
old
smoreeny
.”

I was standing in the
middle of the setting, studying the floor lamps—the wires running
across the lawn, thinking about the work that went into this
lunacy—when I heard the car. Nothing unusual about traffic on the
road. Two or three cars had already gone by while we were out
here.

What
was
unusual was hearing Nickie shout
“Get down!” and me suddenly getting hit in the back by a flying
tackle. A body landed on top of me as I did a face-first on the
lawn and a sharp
ping
rang against the cast aluminum.

This was followed by a
whole blitzkrieg of noise—gunfire shattering the air, bits of dirt
and grass exploding around us, more pings as bullets ricocheted off
the furniture. I couldn’t breathe—all the oxygen had been burned
out of the air.

“Don’t move!” Nickie
yelled, her voice vibrating through my back and into my
chest.

“I’m not fucking moving!”
Wooly yelled back.

I took a peek at the road,
saw a green shape against the trees. The Ford Fusion, all
splattered with mud now. The car was sitting in the road spitting
fireflies out its window. The car was vomiting fireflies in the
daylight. The driver’s face was dark, maybe from a ski
mask.

The barrage went on—four,
five seconds, maybe an hour. Nickie rolled off me, pulled her Smith
& Wesson and started returning fire. I looked back at Wooly. He
was scrambling on all fours behind the couch. I worked the Glock
out of my pants, and as bad as the noise was, it multiplied by 100
with three guns firing. There was nothing else in my head but the
roar of war.

It didn’t last long. The
gunfire built to a quick pentacostal climax and then the Fusion
took off. The car gave a little spin as it pulled away, its tires
yelping like a dying dog.

Genevieve ran out of the
house, kitchen knife in her hand. “
Wooly!
Wooly!”

“I can’t
believe
this!” Wooly was
huffing and puffing as he hoisted himself up by the couch’s
frame.

“Tell me you’re all right,
Wooly.
Tell
me!”

His face was flowing with
sweat and his body was shaking with shock. He could barely stand.
But he could talk. “My own
house!
In front of my own fucking
house
this happens!”

>>>>>>

Alex Tarkashian was
squinting at his notes as if the sun reflecting off the pad was
hurting his eyes. He didn’t look happy, though I don’t think it was
the light that was bothering him.

“You have nothing else to
tell me? It was the same car?”

“The
same
car,” said Wooly, the whole
back of his shirt stuck to his wet body. “The same fucking Ford
Fusion.”

Nickie and I were standing
off to the side, sipping the ice tea that Genevieve was handing
out. Out on the road, Alex’s two pork-bellied cops were making a
lazy examination of the crime scene.

“Did it have a plate this
time?’ said Alex.