Go-Between (9 page)

One thing left on her to do list.

Bobby.

As it turned out, she didn't have to go looking for him. He leaned against the end of the bar, having a glass of wine, holding up the goblet and checking out the red's legs.

“Hey, Emily,” he said.

“Bobby.”

He could have someone at the airport. Someone in the restaurant. A customer. A busboy. The bartender. And it didn't have to be sinister. Just, “give me a call when Emily gets in, okay?”

“You have a few?” he asked.

“Sure. Let's take a walk.”

No way she wanted to have this discussion inside Evergreen.

Fog dripped onto the
flagstones of the plaza, and someone had hung a large red bra from the outstretched arm of the McKinley statue. Double D?

Bobby adjusted his Kangol hat low on his forehead. Michelle zipped her fleece up to her chin.

“So, I guess Jeff ran into some trouble,” Bobby said.

Michelle nodded.

“How's he doing?”

“He's doing okay.”

“Does he
. . .
I mean, do you need anything, or, is there something I can do
. . .
?”

Can you get him out of jail? she wanted to ask. “Not really.”

Bobby paused at the foot of the statue. It was a quiet night on the plaza. The fall term hadn't started yet. A group of homeless men, passing around a paper bag. A couple of tweakers, a guy with a neck tattoo and a woman with sunken cheeks and skeletal limbs. A few knots of college kids who lived in town kicked a hacky sack around, and a violinist dressed in a 49ers hoodie played a concerto—a famous one, but she couldn't remember what it was called. No one seemed to be listening.

“Look
. . .
Jeff does me a solid, I'll do him one. You know?”

“No, I
don't
know,” she said, irritated. A “solid”? Who talked like that, other than a frat boy? And Bobby was somewhere in his fifties. “What are you saying, exactly?”

“Just that he stands up for me, I'll stand up for him.”

“And what, what does that even mean, you'll stand up for him?” she snapped. “What can you actually
do
?”

Bobby glanced around. Made sure no one was in earshot. “I'm not tied to any of it, okay? I mean, whatever he says, there's nothing to back it up.”

“He hasn't
said
anything. Jesus.”

“I know, I know,” Bobby said quickly. “Jeff's a stand-up guy, no worries about that.”

“If you're not worried, then what's this conversation about?”

He readjusted his cap once more. Michelle fought the urge to knock it off his head.

“Just checking in. Making sure we're on the same page. Because there's some guys who're pretty pissed off they didn't get their delivery. They're gonna want to take it out on somebody. So we need to stick together on this. Right?”

He stared at her a moment, his eyes unusually steady behind his round tortoiseshell glasses.

“Right,” she said.

Chapter Nine

She booked an extra
day in San Francisco. She needed a break between the obligations that she had in Arcata and the craziness she'd committed to in Houston.

Also, she needed to do something about her hair.

She'd always worn her hair shoulder length or longer. “Don't cut it,” Tom had murmured, twining her hair in his fingers. “Don't ever cut it.”

“You have such great hair,” everyone had always said.

The problem was, the last thing she needed was her face turning up on CNN or whatever, her standing at the shoulder of Caitlin O'Connor looking exactly like the Emily that people knew back in Arcata.

Changing her hair wasn't foolproof, but at least it might discourage people from looking twice.

“I'm thinking short,” she told the stylist who stood behind her chair, the two of them staring into the three-sided mirror. “And maybe we should have some fun with the color.”

“You want to just go for blonde? I mean, obviously fake blonde.” He framed her face with his hands. “I think you could pull it off.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Oh, I love the
hair!”

Michelle smiled and twitched a shrug. “I figured it was time for a change.”

“Change can be good, or so everybody tells me.” Caitlin laughed. “I don't know, I'm pretty sure they're full of shit. Change is overrated, in my book.”

As before, Michelle had met Caitlin in the Great Room. It was just after 4
p.m.
, and Caitlin had a bottle of chardonnay on ice. She looked to be on her second glass.

“I guess it depends,” Michelle said. She'd been ready to leave Tom, at the end, or so she told herself, but who knew if she actually would have gone through with it? When the change had finally happened, she hadn't had a choice.

She thought about Danny. “I've had both good and bad,” she said.

Danny being both.

Caitlin poured a fresh glass of chardonnay and held it out to Michelle.

“Thanks, but I should probably get settled in first.”

“Oh, don't worry about that.” Caitlin waved like she was shooing off a fly. “We can start tomorrow. I don't have anything going on till that fundraiser in
. . .
I think it's Los Angeles. But it's not till next Tuesday.” Her brow wrinkled. “Or maybe Wednesday?”

“I'll make sure to check.”

She'd gotten into Houston yesterday. Rented a car at the airport. Gone to the corporate housing Porter had recommended, on the outskirts of River Oaks but still only a ten-minute drive to Caitlin's house. The rental office was sleek, soothing, a large room that resembled a community center at a condo complex, with tall ceilings, fabric-draped walls highlighted by sconces, a coffee urn and water with lemon slices, and a large salt water aquarium.

She'd picked the smallest, cheapest unit available. One bedroom. Second floor. Two easy points of entry, the front door and a window close to it. She'd have those wired with a cheap alarm system. Nothing that would stop a pro, but it might surprise someone who didn't expect it.

The apartment was furnished with industrial upholstered chairs and a love seat done in rust and hunter green. The back window overlooked a main street, which in the direction of Caitlin's house was lined largely with oaks and the backs of estates. Then, at the intersection where her complex was, it shifted to a mix of businesses: restaurants, realtors, a florist. From her window she could glimpse the sign for a “gentlemen's club” called The Zone Erotique.

Was there any zoning in Houston, she wondered?

Think of it as a hotel room, she told herself. That's all it really is.

After that, she'd gone
to the AT&T store to get a new phone, and a new number. Michelle could have a real phone now, though she'd have to be careful with it. Anything other than a burner, anything attached to a regular account, with GPS, with useful apps, Gary could easily track.

I need to buy more burners, she thought.

“Are you sure there
isn't anything I can help you with today?” Michelle asked Caitlin now.

“No, I don't think so, hon. Come on by tomorrow morning, and I'll make sure someone's here from the office to help you get set up on the computer here, and bring you over a laptop for the road. Make sure we get our calendars in sync.”

“All right.” Probably for the best. She needed to do some shopping, buy bedding and a coffeemaker and a few other things for the apartment.

Michelle took a last sip of her chardonnay. Too bad she shouldn't finish it. Much better than what Caitlin poured the last time.

“Then tomorrow afternoon, there's the board meeting. You don't have to come to that if you need some more time to settle in.”

Board meeting. Michelle felt a prickling down her spine.

“Would
. . .
am I allowed to attend?”

“Well, if you want. We have them every other week or so. I don't attend every time, to be honest.” Caitlin laughed briefly. “They'd rather do them without me, I'm pretty sure.”

“It feels like a good way for me to get a better sense of what you're doing, how things work,” Michelle said. “But if you have things you'd rather have me do—”

“No, of course not—if you want to go, well then, I think you should.” Caitlin sipped her chardonnay. “Just be warned—there's lot of talk that generally doesn't lead to much.”

“Consider me warned. But I'm actually really excited to have the opportunity.”

Gary wanted her babysitting Caitlin for a reason. Safer America was important to him. The people on that board might give her a clue as to why.

“You back in Houston?”

“What do you think, Gary? Like you don't know.”

She heard Gary chuckle through her earbuds.

“I guess I can't put one over on you anymore, can I?”

Michelle lay back on the bed in her new apartment, covered by her brand-new sheets. “You know, it's late, and I've got to get to work tomorrow.”

“You enjoying it? The work?”

“It's a little soon to say.”

“Well, you'll like why I'm calling you. That first installment we agreed on—you can pick it up tomorrow.”

“Great,” Michelle said. She felt a little rush of enthusiasm. She needed the fucking money, after all, to pay for this place, to pay for her new sheets, to figure out what she was going to do about a car in this sprawling city.

“You'll get some instructions tomorrow night. You're not going to have a big window, time-wise—you'll have to hustle to the drop.”

“Okay. You going to tell me what time?”

“It'll be after seven
p.m
. Just be ready.” A snicker. “Don't let Caitlin talk you into cocktails.”

Porter Ackermann looked at
his tablet. “So, back to 391. Everybody's had a week to think it over. Are we in agreement?”

They sat around a walnut table in a dark-paneled meeting room with a view of the mall across the street. The meeting had started at 3:30
p.m
. By now it was 4:45. It seemed to Michelle that not very much had actually happened.

“I agree it should be a priority. But do we really want to focus that large a percentage of our resources on one campaign?”

The speaker was a middle-aged white man—all seven of the board members save Caitlin and the Secretary of the Board were middle-aged to older white men.

This one had a square head and gunmetal gray hair brushed back close to his scalp—the Donald Rumsfeld look. His name was Randall Gates, and he was involved with a company named Prostatis.

“I don't think we have a choice.” An older man—white hair, big gut, genial expression, the perfect shopping mall Santa Claus: Michael Campbell, who represented something called ALEAAG. “We do public advocacy for law enforcement issues,” he'd explained when he'd introduced himself, giving Michelle a pillowy handshake.

They'd all introduced themselves at the beginning of the meeting, after Caitlin presented Michelle as her new “right-hand woman”—“any time you need to set something up for me, just talk to Michelle here.”

“She's a real go-getter,” Porter had added.

Michelle, for her part, smiled, accepted handshakes and a few lingering looks—a couple of the men doing their “how fuckable is she?” inventories—and took notes. There was nothing strange about Caitlin's new assistant wanting to know the names of the board members, was there?

“As California goes,” another one of them said, a compact, balding man with crow's feet around his eyes reminding her a little of Danny—that look a person gets who's spent a lot of time outdoors, or staring into the sky. She thought his name was Steve. He hadn't named the organization he represented.

“If this proposition passes, we are looking at marijuana legalization sweeping across the country,” Steve said.

Of course. Proposition 391: Legalize cannabis for recreational use in California. She felt an electric sensation in the palms of her hands, a little adrenaline rush.

Danny in jail for pot. Maybe there was no meaningful connection.

Maybe there was.

“So what if it does?”

It was Caitlin who spoke. The first words she'd said since her introduction of Michelle. You could feel a little wave of shock go around the room: everyone suddenly more attentive, expressions ranging from surprised to skeptical to carefully neutral.

Caitlin waved a hand. “I don't know, it's getting to the point where all the fuss over pot just seems silly to me. I mean, how many people in this room have ever smoked pot?”

Michelle wasn't about to answer that question.

“Well, I never have.” Debbie Landry, the secretary of the board, sat up straight. Probably in her fifties, but she looked younger—long, carefully dyed blonde hair, cheeks a little too taut, maybe some Botox on the forehead—but she was in great shape, too, her bare arms toned and cut.

“It's one thing for kids from stable backgrounds to engage in some youthful experimentation,” she said. “And even then you never know who might be susceptible to mental and emotional problems from taking that drug. For kids from disadvantaged backgrounds? We might as well just consign them to failure.”

Another one of the men, Matthew Moss, nodded. Barrel-shaped, a helmet of brown hair, big head, full cheeks, like a Lego mini-figure. Moss had been the more obnoxious of the “is she fuckable?” crew (Campbell was too jovial for her to take seriously), holding her hand a little too long, doing the overt checking out of her cleavage. He'd introduced himself with the attitude that she should already know who he was and what he did. She didn't.

“It comes down to, what kind of America do we want?” he pronounced. “One that's populated by a bunch of stoned slackers? It goes against our values as a country.”

Had she seen him on TV, maybe? On one of those stupid political talk shows with shouting heads?

“It's not that I disagree with you,” Randall Gates said. “I'm just wondering if it makes sense to put all our eggs in one basket, resource-wise. We've also got 275 in California, and I don't need to tell you what the implications of changing those sentencing guidelines are. And if we can't hold the line in California, and I'm not convinced we can, we'd better start focusing on shoring up our defenses elsewhere. There's a couple of Congressional races where, as you know, we definitely have dogs in those hunts.”

Porter nodded. “That we do. I think the obvious answer here is, we'll just have to raise more money.”

A round of chuckles.

“We're on track to raise thirty-seven million this year,” Debbie said.

Porter smiled. “I think we can do better than that.”

“The polling on 391 shows a six percent majority in favor,” Steve said. “Those are numbers we can move. If we're willing to devote the resources.”

Matthew Moss nodded. “I think we have to make a stand on this.”

“We'd better,” Steve said. “Things are going to get trickier in California if this new disclosure bill gets traction.”

“Disclosure bill?” Moss asked.

“We'll have to report donors over one K to the secretary of state for any California races.”

They didn't have to already? Michelle thought. That didn't seem right. Maybe she misunderstood.

“Surely there will be work-arounds,” Porter said.

Steve nodded. “There will be. But this is an easier campaign to run now. In the future?” He shrugged. “The momentum and optics may not be on our side.”

“You find me a single user of meth or heroin who didn't start with marijuana,” Campbell said, wagging a finger. “And then there's the correlation with criminal behavior—”