VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [101]
“All right. All right, Sarah,” he said. “What do you think I should do?”
“What we really need, if you want my honest opinion, is to stop all the ad-hoc policymaking, take a step back, and take a good look at how we operate not just as a lab, but as a business. We need to get rid of the bullshit. And I think we need to map out a clear strategy. It’s every bit as simple and as complicated as that.”
“How? How should I go about this?”
“I don’t know exactly. I don’t know if just you and I come up with something, or we bring in a consultant –”
“Ha! There you go! When in doubt, bring in a consultant to give you advice you’ll never use!”
He drained his glass and made a contemptuous flourish as he set it down.
“Look,” said Sarah, “it’s getting late …”
Viktor sighed.
“I think you should go.”
She stood and took his empty glass to the kitchen. When she turned around, he was right there, and he tried to put his arms around her, but she would not let him.
“Sarah, I’d really like to stay.”
“Yes, I know you would, and I told you when you came in –”
“I just don’t want to go home to an empty house. Not tonight.”
He took one of her hands in his and gave her the most beseeching, pathetic look.
“You can sleep on the sofa if you want.”
“Well … better than a cold empty place, I suppose.”
She got a pillow and blanket for him, then quickly exited up the stairs and into her bedroom. She started to press the privacy lock on her door, but hesitated, then set it, and got in bed.
Not long after, she heard him. He was outside her door. He turned the knob, and the locked knob clicked back and forth. He tapped softly on the door. She did not answer or make any sound.
“Sarah? Please … ?”
She sat up and yelled: “Either sleep on the sofa, or go home!”
Nothing more from him. She pulled the covers over her head. A few minutes later, outside, the Porsche’s engine fired. Viktor drove off, redlining in first gear, or nearly so, using the brutal sound to express his displeasure.
Sarah waited, half expecting him to come back. Then she went downstairs. She made sure the front door was locked. After standing there in her robe in the darkness for some time, she went to the sofa, lay down where he had been, kissed the pillow where his face had been, and finally drifted off.
That evening after dinner, just past eight o’clock, Amy was indulging in the single glass of wine she allowed herself at the very end of days when she actually had time to sit and sip – when her cell phone went off. She muttered something she would not have said in front of her mother, and checked the incoming number. And she stared at it. The number was Tom Dawson’s.
She let it go on ringing a few more seconds, unsure of what she wanted to do, and then impulsively she flipped open her phone and said:
“Suzie here.”
“Oh,” said Tom’s voice. “Um, sorry, I must have the wrong … wait, Amy? Amy, is that you?”
“No, this is Suzie Robincrotch,” said Amy.
There was a long pause – after which Tom erupted in a hyena-like laugh. “Suzie” was Marine slang for the generic girl left behind.
“How’d you know that?” he asked.
“I know lots of things.”
Another pause, and then Tom asked, “So what else do you know?”
“I know I am at home in my own house,” she said. “Where are you?”
“I am in some shithole of a town in the middle of Africa with a name that sounds like it was puked up.”
“Are you by the pool?”
“Uh … no. The only pools around here are the ones you don’t even want to look at.”
“Sounds fabulous, Tom. So cosmopolitan compared to Highboro.”
“Oh, it’s a happenin’ place, I can tell you. No tourists, but lots of nice people who want to be your best friend right up to when they rob you or kill you. No sewage, no safe water, no doctors or hospitals, but it does have a cell phone tower and a dinky little airport. And one bar where it’s okay to drink if you keep your back to the wall.”
“You’ve been drinking?”
“Not by my standards. You?”
“I’m loaded,” she said, examining her half-empty, half-full glass of wine.
“So how’s work?” Tom asked.
“Work sucks,