T. Boyle - Talk Talk

By ten in the morning he was parked at a turnout just off the road to her parents' house. The season was spring, late spring, and already the vegetation was twisted up like a knot, weeds crowding the front bumper, the branches of the trees in full leaf, but still he was afraid she'd notice the car-metal-flake silver wasn't exactly an earth tone. Cars went by, three and four at a time, as if they were attached on a cable, then nothing, then three and four more. There were birds crowding the canopy of the tree that hung out over the car-tiny black-and-yellow things he'd never noticed before, popping in and out of the leaves like puppets-and he worried briefly that they'd spot the top of the car with the drooling white beads of their excrement, but eventually they faded out of his line of vision and he forgot all about them. He didn't really know what he was doing there parked under a tree on a back road to nowhere, didn't have a plan, and yet every time he heard the hiss of tires on the road his heart started slamming at his ribs. He watched pickups rattle by, cars of all makes and descriptions, a kid on a green Yamaha. There was the smell of the sun on the pavement. After a while he buzzed the window down all the way, let the radio whisper to him, the soft thump of a song he'd heard so many times he might have written it himself. An hour cranked by, two hours, three.

Finally, and he might have dozed for a while, he couldn't be sure, he came up fully alert, just as if someone had slapped him or doused him with a bucket of ice water: there she was. Her car. The metallic blue Honda her father had bought for her, and she was behind the wheel with her ugly black-framed glasses on, two little white fists like claws jerking back and forth though the road ran straight as a plumb line in front of her, and there was the kid's seat in back-Sukie, strapped in and clutching a neon-orange teddy bear, her face a blur-and another face there too, on the passenger's side in front. The car was coming toward him-he'd chosen this straightaway for its sight lines-and the whole thing was over in the space of ten seconds, come and gone, and yet still he recognized that face, round as a beachball, the sleepy eyes, the clamped dwindling afterthought of the mouth, and before he could think he'd turned the key in the ignition and slammed the car into gear.

If she hadn't seen him there at the side of the road, she saw him now. He watched her eyes go to the rearview and then her head bobbed toward Yan's and Yan looked over his shoulder and that was all it took to put him over the line, that unconscious gesture of complicity, of intimacy-“putting their heads together”-and he came up on the bumper of the Honda so fast he had to hit the brakes to keep from tearing right through them. And he might have-might have run them off the road, because he was acting on impulse only, inimical to everything that walked or drew breath on the planet-if it wasn't for Sukie. His daughter. His daughter was there, strapped in with her bear, and he was the one out of line here, he was the one endangering her. He dropped back half a car length-safety, safety first, because Gina was as uncoordinated and ungifted a driver as he'd ever seen-but he stayed there, raw and hurt and put-upon, stayed there, right on their tail, till a gas station rolled up on the right and Gina hit the blinker and pulled in.

As if that could help her.

He was out of the car in a heartbeat, screaming something, he didn't know what-curses, just curses, maybe accusations too-and he had his hand on the driver's side door of the Honda even as Stuart Yan was puffing himself out the other side and some bald suit at pump number 3 shouted, “Hey, what's going on here?” If he recalled anything with clarity from those diced and scrambled moments excised from his life, it was the look on Gina's face behind the rolled-up window and the locked door-pale, distant, afraid, terrified of what was about to unfold-and the look of his daughter. Her face was like a big open wound, hurt and puzzled and caught dead-center in a tornado of emotions. That look-Sukie's look-almost stopped him. Almost. But he was running on fumes at this point, the high-octane stuff, fully combustible, and he lit into Stuart Yan with a kick to the windpipe and then he took hold of the suit-some real estate drone with an inflated opinion of himself-and flung him across the hood of the car. What did it take? The trash can, the first thing that came to hand, metal anyway. He raised it above his head, shit flying everywhere, cups and paper wipes and soda cans, and brought it down against that window, again and again and again.

He lifted his eyes from the computer screen and looked out over the bay to where a string of pelicans blew like leaves across the belly of the water. In the foreground was a gently curving row of palms, just like in Florida or Hawaii, better even; sun glinted off the hoods of the Jags, Mercedeses and BMWs in the reserved parking; sailboats crept by like moving statues. If Gina could only see him now. He was sitting on a condo worth three-quarters of a million dollars, he had a new BMW, money in the bank, a girlfriend any man would kill for, and he was leaning over his antique desk under the light of his antique lamp, doing research, manipulating things, the kind of work that always had a calming influence on him, but then he wasn't calm. And he wasn't happy. Not today. In fact, the more he thought about it, the angrier he got, filled right up to the neck with the bitter concentrate of the very same rage that had come over him the day he'd put Stuart Yan in the hospital. And why? Because he'd been careless, because he'd let himself get sucked in, because Natalia was the one thing he couldn't let go of. And Dana Halter wasn't the problem, he saw that now. Bridger was. Bridger Martin.

Once he had the cell number, the rest had been easy. He went online to a reverse phone directory to get the carrier, then called customer service, claiming to be Sergeant Calabrese of the Fraud Division of the SFPD. The woman on the other end of the line, whether she was in India or Indiana, never asked for verification, though he had a legitimate police code he could have used, and she matched the cell to the account number and brought up the name and address on the account. For twenty-five dollars an online information broker gave him the header information on the credit reports-full name, address, social security number, d.o.b.-and he faxed all three credit reporting agencies on the stationery of one of his ersatz businesses, Marin Realty, asserting that Bridger Thomas Martin, of #37, 196 Manzanita, San Roque, was applying for rental property and ordering up a copy of the credit reports. A little research, that was all. Just watching his back.

He'd been busy since he'd got that phone call at the Smart-Mart, very busy, but it wasn't as if he hadn't known it was coming. The same Realtor who'd sold him the condo would be handling the resale, and though he'd probably get screwed out of a couple thousand here or there, it didn't really matter-he'd already set up an account in New York to handle the transfer of the funds once it sold. And it would sell fast, prime property right on the water, people lining up to get in. The hard part was Natalia. She didn't know a thing about it, not yet. The real estate woman wouldn't be showing the place till they were gone, and he was ready to just walk and leave everything behind, the desk and the lamp and the bedroom suite and all the rest of it, but Natalia was going to put up a fight, he knew it. And that was what made him angry. The thought of it. The thought of losing her. And for what? For Bridger Martin?

A week, that was all he needed. The reports would be in his hands by then and the new credit cards too, though Bridger Thomas Martin, whoever he was, wasn't exactly a tycoon and the credit limits were lower than he would have liked ideally, but that wasn't a worry-he had plenty of cards, cards were nothing. No, he had something else in mind for this clown, something else altogether. A week. A week to wrap things up, and then they'd be gone, and he saw it already, the new car-he was going to look at a Mercedes this afternoon, on the way back from his workout-with plenty of room in back for Madison and her toys and pillows and blankets, he and Natalia sitting up front in style, stopping wherever they liked, first class all the way, a nice little vacation and educational too, good for the kid. See the country. The sights. Pike's Peak. The Great Lakes. Gettysburg. And Vegas, definitely Vegas. Natalia could hardly object to that.