‘ ’s happening?’ he asked as he stuck his head around the door.
Chris jerked visibly as Bryant spoke. Clearly he’d been a long way off. Coming across the office to the window, Bryant was hard put to see anywhere visibly more attractive than the fifty-third floor of the Shorn tower, and was forced to conclude that Chris had been daydreaming.
‘Mike.’ Chris turned away from the view to face his visitor. His eyes were red-rimmed and angry with something not in the immediate vicinity. Bryant backed up a step.
‘Whoa, Chris. You’ve got to lay off the crystal edge.’ It was only half a joke, he admitted to himself. Chris looked like shit. ‘Remember Rancid Neagan. Just say No, not ’til the weekend.’
Chris smiled, a forced bending of the lips, as he rolled out the time-honoured Dex and Seth comeback.
‘Hey, I don’t do that shit no more.’
‘What, weekends?’
Reluctantly, the smile became a grin. ‘You come up with a move or what?’
‘Not yet. But don’t worry, the turnaround is in sight.’
This time they both grinned. The match, currently their fifth, was well into the endgame, and, barring a brain haemorrhage, Chris couldn’t lose. Which would make it four to one against Bryant, a score that the big man didn’t seem to mind as much as Chris had thought he might. Bryant played a flamboyant, queen-centred game and when Chris inevitably worked out a fork and took that piece away from him, Bryant’s strategy usually went to pieces. Chris’s cautious defensive earthworks stood him in good stead every time and Bryant continued to be perplexed when his assaults broke on the battlements of pawns while a pair or a trio of innocuous pieces chased his exposed king around the board and pinned it to an ignominious checkmate. But he was learning, and seemed content to pay the price of that process in defeats. His calls at weekends came far faster than they had in the beginning, and Chris was taking longer to respond each time. This last match, at over two weeks, had already lasted twice as long as the preceding games. Chris thought it might be time to go up in the loft and bring down some of the battered strategy books his father’s brother had given him as a child. He needed to sand off the rust if he was going to hold his lead.
Maybe in return, Mike was teaching him to shoot. They were down to the Shorn armoury a couple of times a week now, firing off Nemex rounds at the holotargets until Chris’s gun hand was numb with the repeated kick of the big gun. To his own surprise, he was turning out to have some natural aptitude. He hit things more often than he missed, and if he didn’t yet have Mike’s casual precision with the Nemex, he was certainly making, in the midst of the crashing thunder on the firing range, a quiet kind of progress.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
‘Got something for you,’ said Bryant, producing the briefing disc from his pocket with a conjuror’s flourish. He held it up between index and ring fingers. The light caught it and opened up a rainbow-sheened wedge on the bright silver circle. Chris looked at the colours curiously.
‘And that is?’
‘Work, my friend. And this season’s shot at the big time. TV fame, as many drive-site groupies as you can handle.’
Chris ran the disc at home.
‘Look it over,’ Bryant told him. ‘Kick back and relax, take off your tie and shoes, pour yourself a shot of that iodine-flavoured shit you drink and just let it wash over you. I’m not looking for feedback for at least forty-eight hours.’
‘Why can’t I just run it now?’ Chris wanted to know.
‘Because,’ leaning closer, with a secret-of-my-success type air, ‘that way you’re keyed up with anticipation and you eat it up at a deeper level. Your brain really sucks it in, just like the forty-eight-hour wait after gives it time to really stew, and by the time we meet to talk about it, you’re ready to boil over with insight.’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘Old consultancy trick from way back.’
‘This just you and me?’
Bryant shook his head. ‘Three-man team. You, me, Nick Makin.’
‘Oh.’
‘Is there a problem with that?’ Bryant’s eyes narrowed. ‘Something I should know about?’
‘No, no.’
Watching the closing sequences of the briefing disc, Chris turned it over in his head and tried to work out why he did feel there was a problem with Nick Makin. Makin hadn’t exactly come across as friendly, but neither had Hewitt, or Hamilton for that matter, and a lot of Shorn execs had probably heard the story of Elysia Bennett and Chris Faulkner’s sentiment attack.
The disc ended with the Shorn Associates logo engraved into a metallic finish on the screen, then clicked off. Chris shelved his thoughts, picked up his drink and went to look for his wife.
He thought for a moment she’d gone to bed with a book, but as he passed the kitchen he saw that the connecting door to the garage was open and the lights were on. Led by the clinking sounds of tools, he walked through, and around the bulk of the Saab, which was jacked up on one side. Carla’s coverall-clad legs and hips protruded from under the car beside an unrolled oilskin cloth full of spanners. As he watched she must have stretched out to one side for something, because the angle of her hips shifted and the plain of her stomach changed shape beneath the coveralls. He felt the customary twinge of arousal that her more sinuous movements still fired through him.
‘Hey,’ he kicked one of her feet. ‘What’re you doing?’
She stayed beneath the car. ‘What does it look like I’m doing. I’m checking your undercarriage.’
‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’
There was no response other than the creak of something metallic being tightened.
‘I said I thought you’d gone to bed.’
‘Yeah, I heard you.’
‘Oh. You just didn’t think it was worth answering me.’
From the stillness he knew she had stopped work. He didn’t hear the sigh, but he could have cued it, accurate to milliseconds.
‘Chris, you’re looking at my legs. Obviously I haven’t gone to bed.’
‘Just making conversation.’
‘Well, it’s not the most engaging conversational gambit I’ve ever heard, Chris. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up on it.’
‘Jesus! Carla, sometimes you can be so—’ Anger and dismay at the idea of having a row with his wife’s feet gave ground in a single jolt to mirth. It was such a ludicrous image that he suddenly found himself smirking and trying to stifle a snort of laughter.
She heard it and slid out from under the car as if spring-loaded there. One hand knuckled across her nose and left streaks of grease.
‘What’s so funny?’
For some reason, the irritation in her voice combined with her rapid ejection from under the car and the grease on her nose drove the final nail into the coffin of Chris’s seriousness. He began to cackle uncontrollably. Carla sat up and watched curiously as he leaned back on the wall and laughed.
‘I said what’s so…’
Chris slid down the wall, spluttering. Carla gave up as a reflexive smile fought its way onto her face.
‘What?’ she asked, more softly.
‘It was just,’ Chris was forcing the words out between giggles and snorts. ‘Just your legs, you know.’
‘Something funny about my legs?’
‘Well, your feet really.’ Chris put his glass down and wiped at his eyes. ‘I, just.’ He shook his head and waved a hand with minimal descriptive effect. ‘Just thought it was funny, talking to them, you know. Your feet.’ He snorted again. ‘It’s. Doesn’t matter.’
She got up from the floor with an accustomed flexing motion and went to crouch beside him. Turning her hand to present the ungrimed back, she brushed it against his cheek.