Timothy Zahn - The Green And The Gray

little probing, and she came up with her pen and the pack of chewing gum she kept for the people in her office who seemed perennially in the throes of cigarette withdrawal. The bedroom curtains weren't thick enough to keep out curious eyes, but the bathroom window was made of frosted glass.

Taking the pen and gum in there, she closed the door and turned on the light.

There wasn't a lot of writing space on the silvery paper that came wrapped around a single stick of gum. But years of filling out real estate forms had given her plenty of practice in microscopic writing.

Roger: Damian Groundshaker, ready move on NYC—time unknown. Melantha not here. Sylvia Group Com in charge. Don't bring Grays. I love you, C.

She added their home phone number and laid her pen aside, gazing down at the note. There was so much more she wanted to say to him. So much more she needed to say. But there was no room for inessentials like love and hope and trust. Carefully, she refolded the paper around the gum and slid it back inside its outer wrapper. She would just have to hope that they would both make it through to the other end of this alive, and she could say it in person.

Turning off the light, she left the bathroom and returned the gum and pen to her purse. Then, one final time, she climbed wearily into bed. It was time to get some rest, and to prepare herself for the crucial day ahead.

"Well?" Fierenzo asked as the five of them stood beside a tall granite boulder on the edge of the steep hill. "Does it work, or doesn't it?"

"It works, I suppose," Jonah said, sounding a little doubtful as he peered between the trees with a compact set of binoculars. "I can see a corner of the main house, if that's really the Green estate we're looking at down there. If I can see it, we can theoretically get there."

"Pretty bumpy landing from this high up, though," Jordan added, sounding even more doubtful than his older brother. "I'd vote for someplace closer."

"Get too close and you're likely to run into a picket line," Fierenzo warned. "Anyway, there's not going to be any sliding, bumpy or otherwise. You're here to watch and listen and, if necessary, make it sound like we brought a small army with us."

Beside Roger, Laurel shivered. "But that's an absolute last resort," Fierenzo added, glancing at her.

"And only on Roger's direct order."

"Understood," Jonah said. "Be careful."

"Trust me," Fierenzo said wryly. "Okay, Laurel. Your turn."

A few minutes later Laurel was curled in a sort of fetal position inside the Buick's trunk, completely covered by the old emergency blanket Caroline kept back there, the outline of her body camouflaged by the various department store bags Fierenzo had scattered strategically around her. "You okay?" he asked, repositioning the bags one final time.

"I'm fine," her muffled voice came.

"Okay," Fierenzo said. "Remember, now, you're only supposed to listen for Melantha's voice. No calling out on your own. We don't want them spotting you, and we definitely don't want them identifying you."

"I know," she said. "Let's get this over with."

"Right." Closing the lid, Fierenzo headed for the passenger door. "And you two watch yourselves," he added to Jonah and Jordan. "I don't want some Green Warrior sneaking up and sticking a knife in one of you. Let's go, Roger."

Roger got behind the wheel and turned the car back down the winding road toward the main highway below. "You've been pretty quiet the last twenty miles," Fierenzo commented as he drove.

"I've been thinking about some of the things I've said to Caroline in the past few weeks," Roger admitted. "Some of the things I've thought even when I was smart enough not to say anything."

"What sorts of things?"

Roger shook his head. "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes she just doesn't seem to think, I guess. Or we're getting ready to go somewhere and she suddenly heads off to do something at the last minute that she could have done anytime that afternoon."

"Mm," Fierenzo said. "How long have you been married?"

"Four years," Roger told him. "Seems longer sometimes."

Fierenzo chuckled. "Trust me, you're hardly even started. She's a real estate agent, right? You need a certain amount of brainpower to handle a job like that, wouldn't you say?"

"Of course," Roger said. "I didn't mean—"

"She gets along well with people, too?" Fierenzo went on. "Mixes well at parties, puts strangers at their ease—that sort of thing?"

"Yes, that too," Roger agreed.

"Remembers anniversaries and birthdays and when each of her nieces lost their first tooth?"

"Uh... yeah, I think so."

"And she's better at all this than you are?"

Roger grimaced. "Probably."

"Well, see, there's your problem," Fierenzo said. "You just don't understand how your wife thinks."

Roger snorted. "Careful," he said, only half jokingly. "You get tossed into sensitivity training these days for saying things like that."

"I'm a detective," Fierenzo countered. "Part of my job is to understand people and learn what makes them tick." He shrugged. "Not to mention twenty-two years of marriage to that same kind of woman."

"So enlighten me," Roger said. "How does she think?"

"Let's start with you," Fierenzo said. "If you're like me—and I think you are—you think in terms of numbers and facts and problems and solutions. We approach life as a set of difficulties and puzzles that have to be conquered. True?"

Roger thought it over. That did seem to be how he looked at things. "I guess so," he said. "And Caroline doesn't?"

"Nope," Fierenzo said. "I mean, she probably can do that if she needs to. But most of the time she looks at the world in terms of relationships. Relationships between people; relationships between events; how individual parts combine to make the whole. You as a contract-law paralegal probably see your job in terms of statute and case law and contract details. Caroline, if she was doing it, would probably see it in terms of who was in difficulty and how they could be helped and what the consequences would be for them and their families of her doing a good job. You see the difference?

You'd both ultimately accomplish the same thing, but you'd have approached it from different mental angles."

"Yes, I see," Roger murmured, thinking hard. This was something that had never occurred to him before.

"Like I said, my wife's the same way, and early on it sometimes drove me nuts," Fierenzo went on.

"But I've learned how to take advantage of it. Since she sees things differently, she can often fill in the gaps and blind spots in my own mental vision. I can't even count the number of times I've been discussing some brass walnut of a case with her when she's made a comment that suddenly threw light on something I either hadn't noticed or hadn't considered the right way."

"So when Caroline waters plants at the last minute...?"

"She's probably got her plants connected mentally to something that also connects to the two of you going out," Fierenzo told him. "It's a convenient relationship, and it works, so she sticks to it."

"But we're always late," Roger argued.

"Are you?" Fierenzo countered. "Or are you just not as early as you'd like?"

Roger frowned. "Well... mostly the latter, I guess. So how does this connect to her always losing things?"

"Probably a matter of her focusing on one thing and not paying attention to everything else,"

Fierenzo said. "It doesn't all have to connect, you know."

"I guess not," Roger said, a stray memory flitting crossing his mind: Stephanie, in the hotel room last night, pointing out that Green and Gray minds didn't work the same way, but that neither was better or worse than the other. "Just different," he murmured.