Eddie took a long sip, then gave a contented sigh. “Hey, Johnnie, Daddy’s home. What are you drinking, buddy?”
“Better not. I’ve been taking a pill to sleep, not supposed to mix it with alcohol.”
They left the kitchen, entered the dark back corridor, illuminated only by the orange glow from the switch plates. Nick switched on the lamp on the hall table, another of the millions of little details about this house that reminded him of Laura every single day. She’d spent months looking for the perfect alabaster lamp until she found it one day in an antiques store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when she’d accompanied him on a business trip. The shop dealt only with the trade, decorators and interior designers, but she’d sweet-talked her way in, then spotted the lamp. The base was carved of alabaster quarried in Volterra, Italy, she’d explained, when Nick asked why it had cost so freaking much. To Nick it just looked like white rock.
“Aw, don’t take pills, man. You know what you need to help you sleep?”
“Let me guess.” The lights in his study came on automatically as they entered, pinpoints in the ceiling and little floods that washed the hand-plastered walls, the huge Sony flat-panel TV mounted on the facing wall, the French doors that opened onto the freshly seeded lawn.
“That’s right, Nicky. Pussy. Look at this place. Incredible.”
“Laura.”
Eddie sank into one of the butter-soft leather Symbiosis chairs, took a swig of his Scotch, and placed it noisily down on the slate-topped side table. Nick sat in the one next to him.
“So I picked up this chick Saturday night at Victor’s, right? I mean, I must’ve had my beer goggles on, because when I woke the next morning she-well, she had a great personality, know what I’m saying? I mean, the bitch must have fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.” He gave a dry, wheezing cackle.
“But you got a good night’s sleep.”
“Actually no, I was shit-faced, man. Point is, Nick, you gotta get out there and start dating. Get back on the trail of tail. But man, watch out, there’s a lot of skanks out there.”
“I don’t feel like it yet.”
Eddie tried to soften his voice, though it came out more as an insinuating rasp. “She died a year ago, Nicky. That’s a long time.”
“Not if you’re married seventeen years.”
“Hey, I’m not talking about getting married again. I’m the last one to tell you to get married. Look at me-I don’t buy, I lease. Trade ’em in regularly for the latest model.”
“Can we talk about my security system? It’s late, and I’ve had a long day.”
“All right, all right. My systems guy’s a total fucking wizard. He put in my home system.”
Nick’s brows shot up.
“I mean, I paid for it out of my own pocket, come on. If he can get the equipment, I’ll have him put one in tomorrow.”
“Cameras and everything?”
“Shit. We’re talking IP-based cameras at the perimeter and at all points of entry and egress, cameras inside, overt and covert.”
“What’s IP?”
“Internet-something. Means you can get the signal over the Internet. You can monitor your house from your computer at work-it’s amazing shit.”
“Back up to tape?”
“No tape. All the cameras record to a hard drive. Maybe put in motion sensors to save on disk space. We can do remote pan-and-tilt, real-time full-color streaming video at seven and a half frames per second or something. The technology’s totally different these days.”
“This going to keep my stalker out?”
“Put it this way, once he sees these robot cameras swiveling at him as he approaches the house, he’ll turn and run, unless he’s a total whack job. And at the very least, we get a bunch of high-quality images of him next time he tries to break in. Speaking of which, I saw some serious cameras around the guard booth down the road. Looks like you got cameras all around the perimeter fence, not just at the entrance. We mighta got lucky, got a picture of him. I’ll talk to the security guys down there first thing in the morning.”
“You don’t think the cops already did that?”
Eddie made a pfft sound. “Those guys aren’t going to do shit for you. They’ll do the bare minimum, or less.”
Nick nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“I know I’m right. They all hate your fucking guts. You’re Nick the Slasher. You laid off their dads and their brothers and sisters and wives. I bet they love seeing you get some serious payback.”
Nick exhaled noisily. “What do you mean, ‘unless he’s a total whack job’?”
“That’s the thing about stalkers, man. They don’t necessarily obey the rules of sanity. Only one thing can give you total peace of mind if he comes around again.” He unzipped the black nylon gym bag and took out a small oilcloth bundle. He unwrapped it, revealing a blunt matte-black semiautomatic pistol, squarish and compact, ugly. Its plastic frame was scratched, the slide nicked. “Smith and Wesson Sigma.380,” he announced.
“I don’t want that,” Nick said.
“I wouldn’t rule anything out, I were you. Anyone who’d do that to your dog might well go after your kids, and you gonna tell me you’re not going to protect your family? That’s not the Nick I know.”
6
Nick slipped into the dark theater-the FutureLab, they called it-and took a seat at the back. The Film was still playing on the giant curved movie screen, a high-gain, rear-projection video screen that took up an entire curved front wall. The darkness of the theater was soothing to his bleary morning eyes.
Jangly techno music emanated in surround sound from dozens of speakers built into the walls, ceiling, and floor. Watching this beauty reel, you were careening through the Kalahari Desert, down a narrow street in Prague, flying over the Grand Canyon, close enough to the walls to be scraped by the jagged rocks. You were whizzing through molecules of DNA and emerging in a City of the Future, the images kaleidoscopic, futuristic. “In an interlinked world,” a mellifluous baritone confided, “knowledge reigns supreme.” The Film was about the future of work and life and technology; it was totally abstract and cerebral and very trippy. Not a stick of furniture was anywhere to be seen.
Only some customers were shown The Film. Some visitors, particularly Silicon Valley types, were blown away by it and, when the lights came up, wanted to chatter on and on about the “seamless integration” between office furniture and technology, about the Workplace of the Future, ready to sign on the dotted line right then and there.
Others found it pretentious and annoying, didn’t get it at all. Like this morning’s audience, a delegation of nine high-level executives from the Atlas McKenzie Group. It was one of the world’s largest financial services companies, had its spindly tendrils in everything from banking to credit cards to insurance, in more than a hundred countries and territories. Nick watched them squirm in their seats, whispering to each other. They included the Senior VP of Real Estate and the VP for Facilities Management and assorted minions. They’d been flown up from Chicago the day before on the Stratton corporate jet, been given the full-out tour by Stratton’s Guest Experience Team. Nick had had lunch with them, shown them around the executive offices himself, given them his standard pitch about the flattening of the corporate pyramidal hierarchy and how the work environment was moving from individual to the collaborative community, all that stuff.
Atlas McKenzie was building an immense office tower in Toronto. A million square feet, a third of which would be their new corporate headquarters, which they wanted outfitted from scratch. That meant at least ten thousand workstations, at least fifty million bucks up front, and then there was the ten-year maintenance contract. If Stratton got the deal, it would be a huge win. Beyond huge. Unbelievable. Then there were all the Atlas McKenzie offices around the world, which could well be standardized on Stratton-Nick couldn’t even calculate how much that could mean.