Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

There was a baffling disconnect between Lucas on the inside and Lucas on the outside. Externally, Lucas was a mature sixteen, a tall and handsome man. His almost feminine prettiness had taken on a sharp-featured masculinity. His eyebrows, above blue eyes with long lashes, were dark and thick. The Lucas inside, though, was five or six: petulant, easily wounded, expert at finding insult in the most unexpected places, capable of holding grudges to the end of time.

“You’re not smoking, are you?”

Lucas cast his father a look of withering contempt. “Ever hear of second-hand smoke? I was around people who were smoking.”

“Ziggy doesn’t smoke.” Kenny Ziegler was a big, strapping blond kid, a swimmer who was Lucas’s best friend from when he was still on the swim team. But ever since Lucas had quit swimming, six months or so ago, he hadn’t been hanging out with Ziggy nearly as much. Nick doubted that Lucas had actually spent the afternoon and evening at Ziggy’s house. Somewhere else: some other friend, probably.

Lucas’s stare was unwavering. His music squealed and hissed.

“You got homework?” Nick persisted.

“I don’t need you to monitor me, Nick.” Nick. That was something else new, calling his father by his first name. Some of Lucas’s friends had always called their own parents by their first names, but Nick and Laura had always insisted on the traditional “Mom” and “Dad.” Lucas was just trying to push his buttons. He’d been calling him Nick for the last month or so.

“Can you please take those earphones out when I’m talking to you?”

“I can hear you just fine,” Lucas said. “Where’s Barney?”

“Take off the earphones, Luke.”

Lucas yanked them out of his ears by the dangling wire, let them drop on his chest, the tinny sound now louder and more distinct.

“Something happened to Barney. Something pretty bad.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We found him... Someone killed him, Luke.”

Lucas whipped his legs around until he was perched on the edge of the bed, looking as if he were about to launch himself toward Nick.

“ Killed him?”

“We found him in the pool today — some nut...” Nick couldn’t continue, couldn’t relive the gruesome scene.

“This is the same guy who keeps breaking in, isn’t it? The spray-paint graffiti guy.”

“Looks that way.”

“It’s because of you !” Lucas’s eyes widened, gleaming with tears. “All those people you fired, the way everyone in town hates you.”

Nick didn’t know how to answer.

“Like half the kids in school, their parents got laid off by you. It’s fucking embarrassing.”

“Lucas, listen to me—”

Lucas gave him a ferocious look, eyes bulging, teeth bared, as if Nick were the one who’d killed Barney. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of my room,” he said, his voice cracking.

Nick’s reaction surprised himself. If he’d talked that way to his father, he’d have had the shit beaten out of him. But instead of flying into a fury, he was instead overcome by calm, patient sorrow — his heart ached for the kid, for what he’d had to go through. “Lucas,” Nick said, so softly it was almost a whisper, “don’t you ever talk to me like that again.” He turned around and quietly closed the door behind him. His heart wasn’t in it.

Standing in the hallway just outside her adored older brother’s room was Julia, tears streaming down her face.

It wasn’t long after Nick had finally gotten Julia back to sleep — picking her up, hugging her, snuggling with her in her bed — that there was a quick rap on the front door.

Eddie Rinaldi, Stratton’s corporate security director, was wearing a tan fleece jacket and a pair of jeans, and smelled like beer and cigarettes. Nick wondered whether Eddie had just come over from his usual hangout, Victor’s, on Division.

“Shit, man,” Eddie said. “That sucks, about the dog.”

Eddie was a tall, lanky guy, edgy and intense. His frizzy brown hair was run through with gray. He had pitted cheeks and forehead, the legacy of a nasty case of acne in high school. He had gray eyes, flared nostrils, a weak mouth.

They’d been high school teammates — Eddie was the right wing on the same hockey team on which Nick, the captain, played center — though they’d never been especially close. Nick was the star, of the team and of the high school, the big man on campus, the good-looking guy all the girls wanted to go out with. Eddie, not a bad hockey player, was a natural cut-up, half-crazy, and with a face full of zits, he wasn’t exactly dating the prom queen. The joke about Eddie among some on the team was that he’d been left on the Tilt-A-Whirl a bit too long as a baby. That wasn’t quite fair; he was a goofball who just scraped by in school, but he had a native cunning. He also looked up to Nick, almost hero-worshiped him, though his idolatry always seemed tinged with a little jealousy. After high school, when Nick went to Michigan State, in East Lansing, Eddie went to the police academy in Fraser and lucked out, got a job with the Grand Rapids PD, where after almost two decades he hit a bad patch. As he’d explained to Nick, he’d been accused of brutalizing a suspect — a bullshit charge, but there it was — banished to a desk job, busted down the ranks until the publicity blew over, or so he was assured by the police chief. But he knew his career was as good as done for.

Nick, by then CEO of Stratton, stepped in and saved his ass, offering Eddie a job he was maybe underqualified for, assistant director of corporate security, in charge of background checks, pilferage investigations, that sort of thing. Just as Nick had assured the longtime security director, a white-haired sergeant who’d retired from the Fenwick force, Eddie had poured himself into the job, deeply grateful to Nick and eager to redeem himself.

Two years later, when the security director took early retirement, Eddie moved into the top job. Sometimes Nick thought it was like the old hockey days: Nick, the star, the power forward as they called him, with his hundred-mile-an-hour slap shot, taking the face-offs, making a pass through nine sticks as if he were threading a needle; and Eddie, grinning wildly as he did wild stunts like kicking an opponent’s skates out from under him, spearing guys in the gut, carving some other guy’s face with his stick, skating up and down the wing with a jittery juking craziness.

“Thanks for coming over,” Nick said.

“First I want to see the kitchen.”

Nick shrugged, led him down the hall. He switched on the light and peeled back one of the heavy plastic sheets, taped to the doorjamb, which served as a dust barrier between the kitchen and the rest of the house.

Nick stepped through, followed by Eddie, who gave a low whistle, taking in the glass-fronted cabinets, the Wolf commercial range. He set down the little nylon gym bag he’d been carrying. “Jeez Louise, this gotta cost a fortune.”

“It’s ridiculous.”

He switched one of the burners on. It tick-ticked and then ignited, a powerful roar of blue flame coming out. “Man, serious gas pressure. And you don’t even cook.”

“Had to bring in a new line for that. Tore up the lawn, had to reseed and everything.”

“Shit, how many sinks you got?”

“I think they call that one a prep sink, and that one’s for dishes.”

“The dishwasher’s gonna go in there?”

“Yeah.” Fisher & Paykel, was that it? Another result of Laura’s star-searches for the best appliances ever. It’s two drawers, she’d told him, so you can run smaller loads . Okay, whatever.

Eddie tugged at a handle, releasing a slab of rock maple. “This a knife drawer?”