“Doesn’t matter,” Lisa said. “I have to finish setting up.” She looked at Ruskin. “Where’s my laptop?”
“It’s where you left—”
“For Christ’s sake, you just left it there?”
“I’ll get it.” He looked at Sandra. “Is there somewhere else we could work? That office behind the gym is simply not acceptable. There were basketballs in there. It smells like Bigfoot’s jockstrap in there.”
“I can have another room set up,” Sandra said.
Sandra led the two of them down another hall, then held open the door to what was normally the center administrator’s office, which came with its own private washroom.
“I suppose this will have to do,” Lisa said, going in and closing the door behind her.
“Jesus,” Sandra said under her breath as Ruskin went off to fetch his boss’s computer.
Movement at the end of the hall caught Sandra’s eye.
“Incoming,” she said to herself. The first wave of reporters was entering the building. She trotted up the hall and was starting to quicken her pace when a hand reached out from an open door and grabbed her by the wrist.
Sandra let out a muted scream as she felt herself being pulled into a room with a sign on the door that said technical. Whoever’d grabbed her kicked the door shut, wrapped both arms around her, and spun her around.
And then a man’s lips were on hers.
Sandra submitted, briefly, to the embrace, then put both hands on the man’s chest — almost getting her finger caught in the badge pinned to his chest that read JOE BRIDGEMAN, CHIEF — GARRETT ISLAND POLICE.
“Shit, Joe, are you out of your mind?”
Joe, just under six feet with black hair, a thick black mustache, and dressed in a tan shirt and slacks, grinned mischievously.
“You look very hot,” he said.
“Yeah, well, you probably played hell with my lipstick. I’ve got a horde of journalists to greet and I can’t go out there looking like I kissed a ripe tomato.”
He pulled her close, pressing himself into her. “They can wait a couple minutes.”
“Wait while we do what?” she asked, glancing about the room. This was the guts of the community center. A huge furnace, circuit breaker boxes, hot water tanks, security system panels, wires and pipes running all over the place. “Believe me, nothing is happening in here.”
Joe’s smile turned less lascivious as he loosened his grip on Sandra. “I just wanted to give you a kiss for good luck.”
Sandra relaxed, rested a hand on his chest instead of trying to push him away. She blew a strand of hair away from her eyes. “I’m a wreck.”
“No. You’ve got this.”
“I do? The CEO’s already complaining of food poisoning.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I was in there when it happened. She went running off so fast she almost knocked over her assistant. But I don’t think it was anything she ate. Probably just nerves, like you.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a lot riding on this, for all of us. So long as nothing else goes wrong, I could get a lot of other jobs out of this.”
“It’s gonna be great.” He gave her shoulders a squeeze.
She shrugged, immune to his attempt to boost her confidence. Suddenly, she had a question. “What the hell are you doing in here?”
“Just checking things out. Someone tried to plug something in, wouldn’t work, came in here and found the breaker had flipped. Bud, the maintenance guy? He’s around somewhere, but I was able to find the problem. I’ve been doing the rounds, making sure everything’s okay from a security point of view.”
“You’re the best,” Sandra said.
It was his turn to shrug, “I want everything to go perfectly for you. These corporate types are very worried about security, you know, other companies snooping around, so I’ve been trying to put them at ease. That Lisa Carver, man, she’s a piece of work.”
“Her assistant’s no better.”
Joe paused, then said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking.”
“Joe, not now.”
“I’ll be quick. I just wanted to say, it looks like I’m going to be able to move my mom into a place. I think I’ve found a good spot for her. So once that happens, you and me, I mean, we could, or I could move in—”
“Joe, I haven’t even told the kids about you. What are they going to think? One day, I’ve got no one in my life, the next day, you’re standing in the kitchen in your boxers frying some eggs?”
“I know, I know, we have to start gradual. All I’m saying is, think about it. Would you at least do that?”
She nodded quickly, not so much because she agreed, but because she had work to do.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Yeah, okay, me, too, as it turns out. I got to take a run down to the ferry dock.”
“Why?”
“One of your media types is missing. They say he didn’t get off the boat. I told them to check the head. Lot of people who don’t expect to get seasick do. He’s probably losing his breakfast in the ferry bathroom, or maybe he never got on the boat in the first place. Could be that’s what happened to that Carver lady. Delayed seasickness.”
“Okay,” she said, and tilted her chin up to allow him to give her one more kiss. He did, but made it a quick one.
He opened the door. “You go out first. I’ll wait fifteen seconds.”
Sandra caught her reflection in the glass door of a fire extinguisher housing. She pursed her lips, muttered, “This’ll have to do,” and slipped out of the room.
She headed straight for the registration desk, where representatives from the various media outlets were picking up their IDs.
Moments before things were ready to go, she saw that one badge had not been picked up. CLYDE TRAVERS — CONSUMER SAFETY.
Well, it wasn’t as if Clyde was from one of the biggies, Sandra thought. If he missed the event, she’d courier a media packet to him tomorrow.
Seven
“Just drive around, Pamela,” said Archie’s friend Nick, who was sitting in one of the two front seats of the lime-green Arrival.
Archie, sitting in the back seat next to his friend Rory, said, “Nick, why’s the car called Pamela?”
Nick turned around completely, putting his knees on the seat and wrapping his arms around the headrest for support.
“So, my mom thinks my dad named it Pamela after his aunt Pamela who, like, died years ago, but he actually named it Pamela after Pamela Anderson.”
“Who?” said Rory.
“Oh my God, there’s a video you have to see from about a hundred years ago. Anyway, she used to be this sex symbol that my dad always had the hots for. I heard him telling one of his friends that he never got to take a ride on that Pamela, so this one will have to do.”
Archie, not quite sure whether that was a dirty joke or not, glanced at Rory to see if he was laughing. Rory snickered, so Archie did the same.
“Good one,” he said. “So how come Pamela’s responding to your voice? I thought the car would only work for your dad.”
“We were at the mall parking lot, right?” Nick said. “Just me and my dad? And I asked if I could try driving, or at least telling the car what to do, so he set it up to respond to my commands.”
Rory’s eyes went wide. “So your dad’s okay with you taking it out without him?” he asked disbelievingly.
Nick grimaced. “Not... exactly,” he said. “He just didn’t get around to canceling the programming. He sort of doesn’t know I took it out today. He went to Boston last night, had to fly to Chicago on business.”
“What about your mom?” Archie asked.
“She kinda slept in,” Nick said.
Archie figured, by the end of the day, Nick’s mom would kill him, or maybe she’d wait until his dad was back from Chicago and let him kill him, but either way, it really wasn’t Archie’s problem. He was an innocent bystander, or innocent passenger. Something like that. The truth was, Archie didn’t care as much about following the rules as much as he once did. In simple terms, he didn’t give a fuck.