“Sure.” Carrie let him guide her because she felt so weary.
The bar was right inside the door, and was crowded and noisy. They found a secluded corner
,
and Carrie sagged into the booth.
She didn't even know what she wanted. They were provided all day long with unlimited coffee, tea and soft drinks. Anything more potent was dangerous. She could sleep for a year.
She ordered juice and Elliott gave her a damping look. She knew what his objection was: a small glassful in this posh bar cost as much as a half gallon in the store.
Well, he ought to be made to pay. He hadn't half paid for all the anguish he'd caused her, and all the misery he was putting her through. She hated working with him. A partnership that had been so charged up six or eight months before was now a battle of wills that left her wrung out and angry every day.
So that was probably the reason for this little off-the-cuff meeting, where bosses couldn't eavesdrop, and everything they said would be between themselves.
“So...tell me,” he began, “what
have
you been doing these past months you've been out of circulation?”
Spin time,
she thought. You never told the truth. And you never quite lied. “Well, I went back home, I straightened out a few things, and then I started my own business. You know, you find those niches, and you grab the opportunities when they present themselves.”
“No kidding. Clients?”
“I'm building slowly. Local stuff mainly. The arts council and the Trilakes Chamber of Commerce. About a dozen area businesses. Not million-dollar clients by any means, but enough to build a dream on.” That was
poetic, she thought. Did she mean it? And if she did,
why
was she here?
“Yet you accepted the offer to come back here.”
Yes, he was getting at something. “It was short term enough so I could delegate my ongoing projects. And I wanted to get some seed money, and maybe a credit for my résumé. Big-name campaigns always help when you want to move up, don't they, Elliott?”
He smiled sourly. “We did work well together.”
Did
.
“But something's missing now, isn't it?”
She didn't know quite which way to play it. He was either going to fire her or assign her to someone else. And maybe better heads had prevailed on that decision.
Which did she want, in her heart of hearts?
“We do seem to have different ideas about the direction things should be going,” she said carefully.
“We do. I'm glad you're thinking that way, and that we both want what's best for the client. I wonder whether you'd want to give it a shot with Andrea Lopez.”
Her heart leaped. “Sure. I know Andrea”
“Good.” He took a gulp of his drink. “I guess we weren't meant to be that dream team.”
“I guess not,” Carrie murmured.
I know not.
And it was only the end of September.
Dear God.
Why am I here?
Â
CARRIE SENT Truck a flurry of E-mails:
Things are heating up. I changed partners and now I can dance. Concept finalized. Prints and story on the boards. Competition cutthroat. Secrecy imperative. Cannot talk.
It was as if she was working for some counterintelligence
organization. You couldn't get hold of her, she was as formless as air.
And by the time Truck responded to her last message, her E-mail address had been encrypted and eliminated. It was as if she had vanished into a maw.
He didn't even try to figure out what she meant by those messages.
He just made sure the leaves were cleaned off of her roof and porch. He started to install an electric baseboard heating system. He worked on her computer, and slept at home.
October came. Passed. Weather got chillier and chillier. The tourists left, the woodpiles grew. Winter was coming on.
He tended to think like that now, in short, effortless phrases that required no energy and barely any communication.
“Go after her, son,” Old Man kept telling him.
He had work to do, and no time at all to waste on chasing after a teenager's dream. But the dreams were still there, fueled by the blinking cursor of an E-mail message, a tenuous link at best, that brought New York that close to Paradise.
A man could always hope.
He took on a helper, and more installations than he could handle. Things always got real busy toward winter and it meant he didn't have to think too hard about the fact she was E-mailing him less and less. Because if he did, he didn't know what he would do, and it was all he could do to keep his feelings suppressed and his desire in check.
“Go after her,” Jeannie kept telling him. “You don't understand. Carrie's really changed. She liked what was happening here. I think she loved you.”
Go
after her, after her,
after her...
...actually, I thought it was loveâ
Â
DECEMBER 15. Client meeting. Deadline. Panic.
Every agency pitching the account received a schedule of presentation. The end was almost near, and Carrie sat at her drawing board with Andrea Lopez over her shoulder, and studied her presentation.
This was the end. This was it. Whether they won or lost, she was gone. And she couldn't wait to be gone.
She had forgotten about the protocols and the layers of bureaucracy. She had forgotten about how fingers meddled in your pie so that when the idea and the concept were finally realized, there was nothing of your contribution left except the dot on the
i
.
Granted, she was working on a much larger scale with this account. And the stakes were high: millions of dollars, all costs told. But the aggravation, the secrecy, the constant humiliations were just not worth it for something so pie-in-the-sky.
And Global Vision was only one of ten agencies going through this first round. The client would then choose two campaigns it liked, and the face-off between the finalists would be continuing after that until the client made its choice. It was a six-month-to-a-year process, a merry-go-round that never ended; and then there was always another client, always another campaign.
She had her own work to do, and Carrie found herself sometimes wishing so hard that she could just have some time to think. There was no time for anything now but the client's concerns, the client's concept, the client's campaign.
No time, no time, no time.
She and the whole team were so sleep deprived, they
barely walked through the succeeding intense days. This wasn't creativity as she loved it. This was creation by committee, with every politically correct comma in place.
And she wished, in her heart of hearts, that she had never come to New York, because anybody with her experience could have sat in her place.
Â
PORTLAND WAS about as big a city as Truck ever wanted to visit nowadays. New York was daunting. Huge. Enveloping, with those towering buildings everywhere you looked.
He liked a smaller scale, where a man could see where he was in relation to things. And in fact, he didn't know where he was in relation to Carrie, but enough was enough.
Truck intended to find out.
He didn't know the exact moment he decided to take Old Man's and Jeannie's advice and come to New York.
It might have been that he was damn tired of wrestling with his memories of the feel and heat of her that could not be exorcised by work and ruthless determination.
Or he might have decided that night he couldn't sleep, with every inch of his skin aching for just the touch of her hand.
Or it might have been that Old Man was right, and it was time to go after the warrior princess, capture her and bring her back to the castle.
A man lost patience sometimes waiting for results.
He had no particular plan. He just drove his van four hundred miles south one morning, with her motorcycle in the back. He hadn't even made a reservation anywhere; he arrived just about in time to check in for the
night And he found a hotel with valet parking, which was good because he knew nothing about the cutthroat parking rules in the city.
He was thinking straight, he thought as he checked in. He'd brought the cycle, surely an easier way to maneuver through the streets than trying to drive the van, and he was confronting his rivalâthe city and all it had to offer someone like Carrie.
And he had the name of the infernal agency: Jeannie had remembered it, and that night, he found the address in the phone book.
It wasn't going to be easy. Just from his first phone call to Global, asking for Carrie, and that cautious voice of the operator telling him she wasn't reachable, Truck knew he was going to need the strategy of an army general.
They made everything more important than it was and more difficult than it had to be.
He checked out the building. An innocuous white marble tower at the corner of Third Avenue and 52nd Street. People streaming in and out all day who all looked the same: slick and suited, with briefcases and laptop cases and perfect hair.
But he didn't see Carrie.
There was no phone listing for her, either so she hadn't rented an apartment or gotten a phone.
That made things harder.
That made him more determined.
And maybe it was as simple as storming the barricades, whatever they were. For some reason, her agency was hiding Carrie and everyone else working on the project that had brought her to New York.
He wondered what could be so all-damn important about it.
Well, it was time for a frontal assault.
He'd come on a Wednesday, reconnoitered on Thursday, and the following morning, he hitched himself onto the Harley and roared out into traffic.
He'd forgotten about the traffic, the jam-packed streets, the way you could only go a mile in about thirty minutes. But the nice thing about the Harley was you could zip down the avenues in between the lanes and avoid all that endless stopping and starting.
At nine o'clock precisely, he pulled the beast up onto the sidewalk in front of the Global Vision building, and rolled it into the lobby.
“But you can't,” the guard protested.
“I'm going to,” Truck said, and he must have looked so fierce, so wild and so menacing, the guard let him park there. “Where's Global?”
“Ten through fifteen.”
Truck opted for floor fifteen, and when the elevator doors slid smoothly open, he stepped out into the bustle of the creative floor.
There were people streaming across the reception area in an endless do-si-doâin one door, cross the floor and out the other. There were sofas you could sink into and maybe disappear forever. Modern art on the walls, all slashes and bright colors.
And a receptionist who looked as if she might be helpful.
Or maybe not.
“Get Carrie Spencer.” A tough voice, matched by a tough stance, it was the only way.
The receptionist picked up the phone. Dropped it. Couldn't keep her eyes off him. “Um, Carrie can't be reached.”
“Reach her.”
He could see she was waffling. “There's a big meeting upstairs today. I'm sure she's involved in it, and she won't be available until very late.”
“Get her.”
She punched in some numbers very fast, spoke in a low voice to whomever she reached on the other end and then looked up at him.
“Have a seat?”
“No. Is she coming?”
“They said they'll...um...send her right down.”
“I'll wait by the elevator then.”
“Right.”
But what “they” meant by “right down” was wholly different from what he meant.
Damn them all.
They
. The mysterious, omnipotent
they
...
Ten minutes passed, fifteen... The receptionist was watching him warily. He must have looked dangerous, unstable. He felt that way.
Truck wheeled around to pin down the receptionist, and he saw her, coming from another direction, from behind the reception wall.
Leather and silk. That was Carrie. She looked thinner, or maybe he was hoping this project had been such a drain, she'd run into his arms, thankful to be rescued.
Fat chance. No, this was going to require drastic measures.
The receptionist pointed toward him.