Six Bad Things_ A Novel - Charlie Huston [46]
Jesus F. Christ.
The phone rings. It has to be Tim, who else would do this? The machine picks up. Caller hangs up.
Goddamn it, Timmy, you know I can’t answer the fucking phone. Just talk to the machine, you burnout.
The phone rings.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
The machine picks up. The caller does not hang up.
—Mr. Thompson.
A voice I don’t know, a caller for Mr. Thompson: my dad.
—Mr. Thompson? Are you there?
I stop holding my breath.
—Mr. Henry Thompson, please pick up.
Oh.
So yeah, turns out the call is for me after all.
MILL’S CAFÉ is the oldest restaurant in town. When I was in high school, Patterson was so small there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Now there’s a McDonald’s and a Taco Bell and a Pizza Hut and God knows what else, all thanks to the Silicon Valley real-estate boom that sent people scurrying farther and farther east of San Francisco in search of affordable housing. We could have gone to one of those new places where all the employees are kids that I’ve never seen, but he wanted to try this place, where the waitress serving us is the same one who used to bring me burgers and Cokes after baseball games. I keep my shoulders slumped, Dad’s sunglasses on my face, and try not to look around too much.
He takes another bite of his egg-white omelet and keeps talking.
—Honestly, it’s easier to explain in terms of political science rather than business.
He pauses, gathers his thoughts.
—OK, OK, I got it, it’s like this. When a country gets a nuclear weapon, the first thing they do is to test it. Publicly. They don’t do this because they want to know if the weapon works, but because they want everyone else to know that it works. For a country, having nuclear weapons isn’t so much about being able to blow up your enemies, it’s about letting your enemies know that you can blow them up. You test your new A-bomb where it can be seen and heard so that you can be sure that your enemies know what’s coming if they piss you off. Now Russians understand this kind of thinking because they pretty much invented it when they tested their first hydrogen bomb after the war. That’s why your particular Russians never sent anyone to kill your parents. What would be the point? They kill your folks and it removes the biggest weapon from their arsenal and they don’t get anything in return. What they wanted was for you to surface so that they could threaten to kill your parents unless you gave them back the money. Now, after that, they would have killed them, and then you of course.
A couple old-timers are at the counter reading the Patterson Irrigator. Other than that, it’s just us. I’m drinking coffee, but I was only able to eat a bite of the English muffin I ordered. When he mentions my parents, that one bite of muffin flops over in my stomach.
—That was a sound strategy, and it was clear to me that it was one I should stick with. Except the part about killing your folks and you once the money is returned. That’s just pure revenge. The Russians had their reasons for wanting revenge, but I could care less about what you did or who you killed. For me this is purely a business proposition, and revenge is a poor business strategy at best. If I get my money, that’s all I care about. And I want no confusion about this: it is my money now. I paid for it.
He’s just a few years older than me, and everything about him screams Manhattan. He’s got one of those two-hundred-dollar haircuts that’s engineered to look like he paid thirteen for it at Astor Place Hair, and the flecks of premature gray at his temples set off the titanium frames of the rectangular glasses he’s wearing. His Levis look worn, but I’m certain they are a pair of phenomenally expensive historical replicas of a pair owned by some prospector in 1849. His feet are tucked into bright blue-and-yellow vintage Pumas, and over a designer T-shirt of some extra-clingy material that super-defines his razor-edged pecs he