Dar covered her eyes in pure reaction. "Holy shit."
"I was holding off calling you until I was absolutely positive the only thing you could do was pat me on my head," Kerry sighed. "I have every critical thing we've got loaded on the sat links, but..."
"Jesus."
"No. Just me." Another sigh. "The one bright spot in my day was that piece of moose pooter meeting got canceled."
The waitress returned, putting down her beer and giving her a bright smile. "Wings'll be right up. K?"
Dar nodded, picking up the frosty mug of beer and taking a long swallow of it. "Ker..."
"Tell me you're in a bar having a beer, and I might have to fly to New York just so I can bite your butt for that."
Dar almost spit her mouthful of beer out across the table, but she managed somehow to swallow it instead. "Um..." She cleared her throat. "Want me on a plane back there?"
Kerry sighed very audibly. "Yes," she replied in a quiet tone. "There is nothing in the world I want right now more than to have you here right next to me."
Dar checked her watch, then reached for her PDA. "Gimme a minute...let me get the flights..."
"Sweetheart, hold on," Kerry said. "I have so many people pissed off at us down here, do we really need another client ticked off because you walked out?"
"Fuck them." Dar was busy with her flight scheduling.
"Dar."
"In addition to the fact that they all mean jack nothing to me next to you, Kerry, the rest of the company does take precedence over them," Dar replied, reviewing her options. "You should have called me before now."
"Yeah, I know." Kerry's tone now just sounded tired. "But I like to think I can actually do the job you pay me for sometimes."
Dar paused in mid tap. She put her PDA down and concentrated on the phone exclusively. "Kerry, this has nothing to do with your competence. This is outside anyone's scope." She hesitated. "You want me to butt out and let you handle it?"
There was a very long silence after that. Finally, on the heels of the faintest of sniffles, Kerry spoke up. "Professionally? Yes."
Dar winced, the rejection stinging more than she'd anticipated.
"Personally, no," she went on quietly. "So what should I do? Can you give me some advice so I can make some kind of peace with myself?"
Dar released a held breath, and ordered her thoughts, sipping her beer as she pondered the question. "Okay," she said. "I'm assuming the big cluster is our lines being down."
"Yeah."
"I'm assuming you've already browbeaten and bullied everyone in Bellsouth you can get your hands on."
"Mmph...yeah. Problem is, emergency services are priority, and we're not," Kerry said. "Even though we pay them for diversity out the wing wang."
Which was true. "Okay." Dar closed her eyes and thought. "The blown switch is out of our hands, but the other Central Office is just out of power?"
"Yeah."
"Send Mark to Home Depot and have him buy every big generator they've got, then just go in there and hijack the bank we're in and push power through it."
"They're not going to let us do that."
"Don't ask them," Dar said quietly. "Just show up, walk in, don't take no for an answer."
"They're going to think we're nuts."
"Yeah," Dar agreed. "But our customers are going to think we're miracle workers."
A soft rattling of keys came down the line, along with the ghost of another sniffle. "You were right," Kerry said, after the rattling stopped. "I should have called you before now," she admitted. "Damn."
Kerry had been doing everything humanly possible, Dar was sure. They'd been through enough crises together for her to trust her partner's judgment implicitly. But sometimes when Kerry encountered the unlikely and was under a lot of stress, thinking way outside the box wasn't her first instinct.
It was always Dar's first instinct. "It's okay, sweetheart." She tried for a faint joke. "S'why you pay me the big bucks, remember?"
A faint chuckle rewarded her.
"I wouldn't have called anyone either," Dar admitted. "Never have been able to do that. So..."
"Hello pot, kettle here." Kerry sighed wryly. "Wanna get together for some macaroni and cheese?"
Dar relaxed a little, the knots in her guts easing slightly as she felt her heartbeat start to settle and cease its painful pounding inside her skull. "Sounds delicious."
Kerry chuckled a little. "Do me a favor?"
"Anything," Dar responded. "I've got the flights in front of me. Offer's still open."
Kerry was very quiet for a bit, and Dar gave her the space to wrestle with her own conscience. At last, she grunted softly. "Tell you what, partner. If this doesn't work, I'll give you a call with your flight information, okay?"
A compromise. Dar accepted it reluctantly. "You know I'm going to be a mess all night, right?" she found herself saying anyway. "I'll be sweating that call."
"I know," her lover said. "But if it works, I'll take out a full page ad in the Herald and tell everyone what a smart and amazing person I have as my boss."
"That's supposed to make me feel better?"
At last, Kerry laughed, if only briefly. "Or maybe they'll get the power grid back online, Dar. Having the entire city down with no AC is putting more pressure on the powers that be than I ever could."
"Mmph."
"Call you back as soon as I know something," Kerry went on. "Promise."
"Okay." Dar sighed. "Hang in there, Ker."
"Love you."
"Love you too." Dar closed the phone reluctantly, thoughts running through her mind at a furious rate. She looked up as a plate appeared in front of her, meeting the eyes of the waitress.
"Wings?" the girl said.
Wish I had a pair. Dar nodded in response, staring at the crispy golden items before her. With a sigh, she picked one up and turned it in her fingertips, completely uninterested now in everything except for the vanished voice on the other end of her disconnected phone.
Chapter Thirteen
KERRY FORCED HERSELF not to tense up, concentrating on keeping her hands down at her sides and not balled up into fists. "Listen, Barry, you don't have a choice here." Already in her shirtsleeves in deference to the dank mugginess of the emergency lighting lit office, she resolutely refused to wipe the sweat off her face as she ordered her arguments.
The man she was speaking with, a tall, gangly station manager with a drooping moustache and desperate eyes, slammed his hand on the desk. "Kerry, I can't do it," he repeated, for the nth time.
"You can," Kerry replied inflexibly. "Bottom line is, you have no choice." Her voice already had a slight rasp in it.
"If I let you do it, I have to let everyone. Do you know how many lines go through this building? To the financial district? Jesus, Kerry, do you think you're the only one who's down?"
"We have a contract."
"THEY ALL DO!" Barry yelled, at the top of his voice in frustration. "Woman, you can't understand what you're asking."
What would Dar do? Kerry took a breath. Dar would just yell louder, until the walls shook. But she couldn't do that--it wasn't really her style. "Barry, you have a contract with us to provide diversity. You didn't. Are all those other companies paying you top dollar for that kind of insurance?"
He stared at her.
"We pay you to make sure." Kerry inhaled and upped the volume just a little. "MAKE SURE that we never go down. NEVER. Not 99 percent, not 99.5 percent, not 99.9 percent. 100 percent, Barry. I can't afford any less, and you god damn well know it."
"Yes, I know, but..."
"Barry." Kerry leaned forward. "What is your guarantee worth if all you can tell me is too bad, take a number?"