Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [83]
“You need more help besides me,” Stephanie said at one point. “If people are going to be playing games, you should have somebody to look out for your best interests. Someone able to speak to the media, too.”
“Who would you suggest?”
“A friend. Somebody you trust.”
There was a pitiful dearth of candidates. It was bad enough to die when everyone around me was going to keep on going, but to die realizing I had no real friends left was a patch of rough pavement I didn’t need just now. Stan Beebe or Joel McCain would have been my logical choices. It would have been a perfect job for Chief Newcastle, but we were a month late.
Ben or Ian might watch my back, but they were both young, and I wasn’t sure they could handle it.
The thought occurred to me that I might call one of the fifteen or twenty women I’d dated in the past couple of years, but I discarded that notion. I’d made a pretty good mess of all that.
As we drove, I spotted a kingfisher with a tufted crown sitting on a wire alongside the highway. The little bastard probably wasn’t going to survive the winter, but he didn’t seem to care, was intent on taking the summer minute by minute.
Maybe we could stop this syndrome; maybe we couldn’t. Whatever happened, I determined not to go down in a panic. I would do this with dignity. Same as that kingfisher on the wire.
Suddenly a greater sense of calm descended on me than ever before. The one big mystery we all face—our own death—was right in front of me. My mood today was a strange mixture of detached serenity and introspective hysteria. Serenity because I finally knew my end. Hysteria because time was running low. And because I’d always been, down deep, prone to hysteria. Maybe that was why I’d become a firefighter, in order to confront my basic nature.
Canyon View Systems was on a tree-filled campus in Redmond, three large buildings, an artistic collage of steel and glass and neo-something-or-other architecture. It was situated on a hillside, but most of the property had been graded until it was nearly flat, three or four wooded acres, no structure older than ten years, a score of sixty- and eighty-foot Douglas firs to shade the buildings in summer and keep out the worst of the winter storms, two fountains, a pond, and a bewildered flock of Canada geese shitting in the parking lot.
Stephanie swung past the guard gate and parked. As we got out of the Lexus, we found ourselves pursued by a heavyset guard in uniform. I had the feeling if we’d been getting out of my pickup truck instead of a Lexus, he might have pulled his pistol.
“Guess we were supposed to stop at the gate,” I said.
“I never have before.”
A Jeep roared up behind us with two more guards. “You been shoplifting?” I joked to Stephanie.
“This is crazy,” she snapped.
I kept quiet while Stephanie alternately chastised and argued with them. She was a doctor. Mrs. DiMaggio was her aunt. She had business here, and furthermore, if we weren’t allowed inside immediately, she would make it her goal in life to ensure that all three men lost their jobs. I believed her. They must have, too, because they left us alone, though one of the men from the Jeep trailed us into the building, pretending to pick up litter on the grounds when I looked back at him.
Inside, a Muzak version of “I Got You, Babe” spilled from hidden speakers. There was a large atrium reception and waiting area with two twelve-foot bamboo plants and a tall oak-and-brass counter with a woman behind it.
After we got past the receptionist, we went up a long open staircase and along a corridor full of offices. Although DiMaggio’s door was locked, we could see through a narrow, vertical window that nobody was inside.
“I think I know where she might be,” Stephanie said.
I followed her to a room two doors down, paint-splattered canvas tarps on the floor, a ladder in one corner, DiMaggio standing alongside two men in coveralls, the three of them flipping through carpet samples on a metal ring.
“Stephanie!” she said. “Stephanie, darling. What on earth are you doing here?