Eddie gave a slow shake of his head. “Permit? Come on, man. You know how long it takes to go through the hoops, do all the paperwork? You can’t wait that long. Look, carrying an unlicensed weapon is a misdemeanor, okay? A hundred-buck fine. And that’s if you get caught. Which you won’t, because you won’t have to use it. Isn’t that worth it to protect your family from that sick fuck? A hundred bucks?”
“All right. Get out of here-I need to check my e-mail, and then I’ve got three meetings stacked up.”
Eddie rose. “Man, you got some fancy computer equipment up here. I could use some monitors like this for my department.”
“Not up to me,” Nick said. “I’m just a figurehead.”
8
Scott McNally lived in a decent-sized, but perfectly ordinary, house in the Forest Hills section of Fenwick where many of the Stratton execs lived. A successful accountant could have lived here. It was a generic white colonial with green shutters, a two-car garage, a rec room, a finished basement. It was decorated generically too. Everything-the dining room set, the couches and chairs and rugs-seemed to have been bought all at once, at the same mid-priced home-furnishings store. Obviously Eden, Scott’s trophy wife, didn’t share Laura’s interest in design.
Nick and Laura had talked about Scott’s house once. He admired the fact that Scott, who was loaded from his McKinsey days, didn’t try to show it off like so many financial types. Money to Scott wasn’t something you spent. It was like frequent-flyer miles you never use. Still, Nick couldn’t put his finger on what felt funny about Scott’s house until Laura pointed out that it looked somehow temporary, like those short-term furnished corporate apartments.
As soon as they arrived, the kids dispersed, Julia to the bedroom of one of Scott’s twin twelve-year-old daughters, and Lucas to the rec room to sit by himself and watch TV. Scott was manning the immense, stainless-steel charcoal grill, the only remotely expensive thing he seemed to own. He was wearing a black barbecue apron with a yellow hazard sign on the front of it that said DANGER MEN COOKING, and a matching DANGER MEN COOKING baseball cap.
“How’s it going?” Nick said as they stood in the smoke.
“Can’t complain,” Scott said. “Who’d listen?”
“Think that grill’s big enough?”
“A cooking surface of eight hundred and eighty square inches, big enough to burn sixty-four burgers at once. Because you just never know.” He shook his head. “That’s the last time I let Eden go shopping at Home Depot.”
“How is Eden these days?”
“The same, only more so. She’s become a real fitness nut. If it were up to her, we’d be feasting on texturized tofu, spirulina, and barley green juice. Her latest obsession is this Advanced Pilates course she’s taking. I don’t quite get how that works. Does it keep getting more advanced? Can you do graduate work in Pilates, end up with a doctorate?”
“Well, she looks great.”
“Just don’t call her arm candy. She’d rather be thought of as arm tempeh.” Scott checked that all the knobs were set to high. “You know, I’m always kind of embarrassed when you come over. It’s like the feudal lord leaving his castle to go visit the peasants in their hovels. We should be roasting a boar, really. Maybe a stag.” He looked at Nick. “What would you like to drink? A flagon of mead, my liege?”
“A beer would do it.”
Scott turned and began shouting to his portly nine-year-old son, who was sitting by himself on the back porch making immense bubbles using a strange gadget, a long pole with a cloth strap dangling off it. “Spencer! Spencer, will you get over here, please?”
“Aww!” Spencer whined.
“Right now!” Scott shouted. Lowering his voice a bit, he said, “Eden can’t wait until he’s old enough to send to Andover.”
“Not you, though.”
“I barely notice the kid,” he said with a shrug. If Nick didn’t know Scott better, he wouldn’t realize Scott was kidding, doing his usual shtick. When his son was within speaking range, he said, “Spencer, could you please get Mr. Conover one of those brown bottles of beer?” To Nick he said, “You’ll love this beer. It’s a Belgian Abbey ale that’s brewed in upstate New York.”
“Got any Miller?”
“Ah, the Champagne of Beers. What I’d like to find is the beer of champagnes. I think Eden bought some Grolsch, if that’ll work.”
“Sure.”
“Spencer, look for the green bottles that have the funny metal tops with the rubber stoppers on them, got it?”
“Dad, it’s not supposed to be good for you to eat barbecued meats.” Spencer folded his arms across his chest. “Do you know that barbecuing at high heat can create polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are known to be mutagens?”
Nick stared at the kid. How the hell do you learn to pronounce that stuff?
“Now, that’s where you’re wrong, son,” said Scott. “They used to think that aromatic hydrocarbons were bad. Now they know that they’re the best thing for you. What do they teach you in school, anyway?”
Spencer looked stymied, but only momentarily. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you if you get cancer later in life.”
“I’ll be dead by then, son.”
“But Dad-”
“Okay, kid, so here’s your burger,” Scott said blithely, holding up one of the raw patties. “Go fetch yourself a bun and some ketchup, okay? So instead of cancer, you’ll get salmonella and E. coli bacteria. Mad cow too, if you’re really lucky.”
Spencer seemed to get his father’s sense of humor but wouldn’t let on. “But I thought E. coli naturally colonizes the human intestine,” he said.
“You don’t stop, do you? Go play in traffic. But first get Mr. Conover his beer.”
The boy trudged reluctantly away.
Scott chuckled. “Kids these days.”
“Impressive,” was all Nick could think to say.
“I’m sorry you don’t want to try this Belgian ale,” Scott said. “I discovered it at that dude ranch in Arizona I went to last month with my old college buddies, remember?”
“You didn’t exactly rave about the place.”
“Ever smell a horse up close? Anyway, I liked the beer.”
“So, Spencer’s a little scary, huh?”
“I guess. We first had an inkling of that when he was three and he started composing haiku using the letters from his alphabet soup.”
“I don’t think you appreciate how cooperative he is. If I’d asked Luke to go fetch me a beer he would have ripped my face off.”
“Tough age. By the time Spencer turns sixteen we’ll probably see him just once a year, at Christmas. But yeah, he’s usually well behaved, and he’s into math just like his dad. Of course, later, when he turns into Jeff Dahmer, we’ll discover the dissected remains of dogs and cats in the backyard.” He started to chuckle, and then his face fell. “Oh, shit, Nick, I forgot about your dog. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I can’t believe I said that.”
“You might want to turn the burgers. They’re burning.”
“Oh, right.” He wrestled with a big metal spatula. “Nick, the cops have any idea who did it?”
Nick hesitated, then shook his head. “They’re guessing it’s a downsized employee. But I could’ve told ’em that.”
“That narrows it down to five thousand and sixty-seven. You don’t have a security system?”
“Not good enough, obviously. I mean, we’re in a gated community.”
“Jesus, that could happen to us too.”
“Thanks for being so sensitive.”
“No, I mean-sorry, but as the CFO I’m just as responsible as you are for the layoffs, and-God, you must be spooked as shit.”
“Of course I am. But most of all I’m fucking pissed off.”