Barranco’s lip curled. Bryant, seeming to miss it, sniffed and rubbed with a knuckle at both sides of his nose.
‘In the meantime, you have my word as a representative of the Shorn Conflict Investment division that until the time comes to implement those changes, you’ll be given access to the same covert export routes Hernan Echevarria currently turns a blind eye to.’
‘You’re going to take me to the table with Langley?’ Barranco’s gaze shuttled back and forth between Chris and Bryant. His tone had scaled towards disbelieving.
‘Of course.’ Mike looked surprised. ‘Who did you think I was talking about? They’re the premier distributors of illicit narcotics in the Americas. We don’t believe in doing things by halves at Shorn. I mean, we’ll hook you up with some other European and Asian distributors as well, naturally, but to be honest none of them are in the same class as Langley. Plus you’ll probably shift the bulk of your product in Langley’s back yard anyway, and they can do pretty good onward sales to most of the western Pacific Rim if you’re interested. More wine? Anybody?’
Carla drove them home, focused wholly on the road ahead. In the dashboard-lit warmth of the car, the silence came off her in waves. Chris, still smarting from the way she’d lined up with Barranco, turned away and stared out of the passenger-side window at the passing lights of the city.
‘Well, that was fucking great,’ he said finally.
Carla picked up the motorway feeder lane. She said nothing. If Chris had looked at her, he would have seen how close to the edge they were.
‘Mike in the bathroom powdering his fucking nose, Barranco on a political rant and you backing him up every fucking—‘
‘Don’t start with me, Chris.’ The Saab never wavered from its accelerating trajectory up the feeder ramp, but there was a ragged edge in Carla’s voice that did finally make him look across at her face.
‘Well, didn’t you?’
‘You should be overjoyed I did. Wasn’t that my job tonight? Make your client feel good. Relax him. Isn’t that what you said?’
‘Yeh, that didn’t mean hang me out to dry in front of him.’
‘Well perhaps you should have made yourself clearer. I’m your wife, remember, not some grinning whore out of the escort pages. I don’t do this shit for a living.’
‘You fucking enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me!’
It drew a sideways look from her. For a full two seconds she stared at him in silence, then her eyes went back to the road.
‘You going to shout like that at Mike Bryant tomorrow?’ she asked quietly. ‘For his bathroom manners?’
‘Don’t avoid the fucking question, Carla!’
‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked me one.’
‘You enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me, didn’t you?’
‘You sound pretty convinced already.’
‘Just fucking—‘ He clenched a fist, clamped his mouth. Locked down the fury. Forced out the words close to normal volume. ‘Just answer me the question, Carla.’
‘You answer mine first. You ever shout at Mike like this?’
‘Mike Bryant is on my side. Whatever else he might do, whatever problems he might have, I know that much. I don’t need to yell at him.’
‘Don’t need? Or don’t dare?’
‘Fuck you, Carla.’ It was almost a murmur. The sheeting fury had guttered out inside him. It wasn’t gone, but abruptly it was cold, and that frightened him more. Frightened him because in the chill he thought he could feel something slowly dying.
‘No, fuck you, Chris.’ Her voice was barely louder than his had been, but it hissed at him. ‘You want an answer to your question? Yes. I enjoyed it tonight. You know what I enjoyed? I enjoyed seeing a man who’s fighting for something more than his fucking quarterly bonus get the upper hand for once. I enjoyed hearing someone who cares what happens to other people telling the truth about the way your sick-making little world works.’
‘A man who cares.’ Chris bounced the loosely curled edge of his hand off the window in the weary ghost of a punch. ‘Oh, sure. A man who wants to sell crack cocaine and edge to children in the zones. Yeah, he’s a real fucking hero, Barranco is. You heard what he said.’
‘Yes, and I heard Mike Bryant promise to hook him up with Langley, who supply eighty per cent of North America’s inner cities. Langley, who you work with on a day-to-day basis. And this weekend, the two of you are taking Echevarria and Barranco both to the North Memorial to sell them the weapons they need to fight each other. And now you’re taking some kind of moral stance here? Jesus Christ, you could give lessons in hypocrisy to Simeon fucking Sands. What choice have we left these people, Chris? What favours have we done them? Why shouldn’t they swamp us all in crack?’
‘I didn’t say they shouldn’t.’
‘No, because the truth is you don’t care about that either. You don’t care about anything, in fact, except making your end of the deal stick so you can stay at the top table with the other big players. That’s what this is about, isn’t it Chris?’ She laughed, something that was almost a sob. ‘Chris Faulkner, global mover and shaker. Observe the cut of his suits, the cool command he brings with him to the table. Princes and presidents shake his hand, and when he speaks, they listen. Oil flows, where and when he says it will, men with guns rise up and fight at his command—‘
‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Carla.’ The anger was suddenly warming again, heating his guts, looking for the way to do damage. ‘You got such a thing for Barranco and his moral crusade, maybe you should have just gone up to his fucking room with him instead of coming home with me. Maybe a man of conscience’ll light you up a little better than I do.’
Sudden pressure across the chest, almost pain. The belt gripped him into his seat. He heard the brief shriek of tyres as the Saab slammed to a halt.
‘You fucking bastard, Chris. You fucking piece of shit.’
She sat with her fists clenched on the wheel, head down. The car stood slewed fractionally off centre beneath the sodium glare of the motorway lamps. The engine rumbled to itself. As he watched, she shook her head slowly and lifted her face. There was an unsteady adrenalin-shock smile pinned to her mouth. She shook her head again, whispered it like a discovery.
‘You piece of shit.’
It was her end-of-the-line insult, the one she’d never used on him except in play. In the whole seven years of their relationship, he’d only heard her label perhaps a half dozen acquaintances with it. Men, and on one single occasion a woman, that she wanted to wipe out of her life, and in most cases had. For Carla, it meant total shutdown. Beneath contempt.
He sat and felt it dripping off him like a physical thing.
‘You’d better mean that,’ he said.
She would not look at him.
‘This is a new level, Carla.’ He looked at his hands in the stained orange radiance coming down through the windscreen. There was a fierce exhilaration pumping through him that he dared not examine closely. ‘We haven’t been getting on, but. This is new. This is.’
He lifted a hand to gesture. Gave it up half-formed.
It must have caught her peripheral vision. She stole a glance at him. Behind her eyes he saw fear, not of him.
‘I ought to make you get out of this fucking car.’ Her voice was shaking, and he knew she was going through the same pounding near-the-edge rush. ‘I ought to make you fucking walk home.’
‘It’s my car,’ he said gently.
‘Yeah, and every centimetre I built for you, and rebuilt and rebuilt again, you ever, Chris, you ever speak to me like that again, you—‘
‘I’m sorry.’ It was out of his mouth before he realised he’d said it.
And then they were groping for each other across the space between, tears spilling down her cheeks, stopped up unshed in his throat, both of them held back by the idiot grip of the belts on their bodies. The solid ground of the relationship was suddenly back under their feet, the edge was gone, shoved back from convulsively, the thundering pulse of the drop receding in his ears, the familiar warm sticky slide of remorse and regret, the safety of it all again, bearing them up and binding them together.