Chapter 9 #3
“Yeah. I didn’t get much out of the visits except this. She told me anger was a secondary emotion. You hit your thumb with a hammer, you get angry, but the primary emotion is pain. A car almost runs you off the road—”
“The primary emotion is fear,” I recite. “We got the same shrink, Den. Why didn’t you ever tell me you went?”
His face goes a shade deeper as we hit the asphalt and walk out, past the plant.
“Because now I’m your supervisor, I guess.”
He says it in a factual voice, almost cold, but not quite. Bottom line, he’s my supervisor. Bottom line, he chose it over me. Okay, I can live with that. I’ve lived with worse.
I spot his Volvo out in BFE, short for Bum Fuck Egypt, as the back parking lot beyond the plant is known to employees whose schedules prevent them from getting one of the primo places close to the building or along the curb.
“A secondary emotion.” He gives me the look of one who has just gift wrapped a present and wants you to admire it. I’m not in the mood. Nor am I sure I’m in the mood for the coffee we’ll soon be sharing.
“Secondary?”
“Yeah.”
The Volvo waits just steps away. I look at him, look at it, then back at him once more.
“Where are we going?”
“Coffee. Some decent stuff, better than they have in the caf.”
I nod. I even try to smile as he unlocks the car door and looks down into my eyes. “Tell me what I can do. How can I help?”
“You know.”
He touches my arm, and I want to fall against him, the way I did that crazy night at the stupid holiday party, with too much champagne and too much Dennis. Just enough of both to make me want more.
“How, Rikki?”
“Killer Body.” I feel as if I’m spitting the words in his face. This rage will kill me—or someone else—if I’m not careful. “Find out everything you can for me. Please.”
“Use my connections through the newspaper, you mean, to acquire information about something that isn’t a newspaper story?”
“It could be a newspaper story. Depends on what we find.”
“But that’s not what you’re asking, is it?”
His car looks less dusty than usual. I realize he must have actually taken the time to wash it recently, then realize why; he drove it to a funeral last week.
Now, here I am, asking one of the most ethical reporters I’ve ever known—my supervisor—to compromise his ethics so that I can feel I’m avenging Lisa’s death. I know it’s not right, but I can’t help it.
“I guess that’s what I’m asking,” I say.
“For me to spy for you?”
“For you to help me dig up background.”
“That you hope will reveal something dirty about Killer Body?”
I meet his gaze. “Yes.” Shame dilutes but doesn’t destroy my resolve. “I can’t help it, Den.”
“Of course, any background I dig up for you on Killer Body, Inc. might help us learn more about what happened to Julie Larimore.”
“That’s true.” We both know that’s not why I’m asking. He opens the car door, and I wish I could apologize to him or to at least explain. “Den—”
“Yeah?” Those lie-detector eyes again, so pale in the harsh light that they’re barely any color at all.
“It’s a secondary emotion.”
“Let’s hope so.” His scowl registers impatience. “Get in.”
I do as he directs me, picking up a folder from the leather seat.
The Volvo holds one of those medicinal vanilla scents indigenous to the car-wash business.
He didn’t just hose off the outside; he paid for an inside-and-out wash, complete with this well-meaning, horrible scent.
Thank God he’s going to the other side of the car.
I don’t want him to see me right now. I need time to rearrange myself.
To keep from thinking, I look down at the folder. I start to stick it in the back seat, but then I see the words he’s scrawled on the outside. Killer Body.
I hear a soft moan, realize it is mine. It doesn’t matter, not with this gift I hold in my hands.
I open it up, and, damn, what a collection of research it is.
Biographies of Bobby Warren; photos of him in his weightlifter days.
Pages on Julie Larimore. Yellow sticky notes, in Hamilton’s bold scrawl, many of them quotes.
He did more than research; he talked to people.
It hits me now that he’s gotten in and is sitting here, beside me in the car, watching my reaction.
I turn to him, feeling incredulous, confused and so damned grateful.
“How did you justify doing all of this?” I ask in a voice so shaky I barely recognize it as my own.
“I haven’t.”
“Haven’t justified it?”
“Not yet, but I’m hoping it’ll happen. Otherwise, I’ll have to jump off the fourth floor of the Voice.”
I fight tears. I fight throwing my arms around him and thanking him for me, for my family, for my cousin and my aunt. No, forget that—for me, me, me.
Instead, I say, “You’re a good man.”
“I’m a bastard.”
“You’re a good man.” He starts the car, revs it, drowning out the rest of my words.
I wait until we are almost out of the parking lot, then try it again.
“Want me to tell you how I know you’re a good man?”
The scowl that never really goes away deepens. “Your choice, Rikki.”
“Because you make me want to be better.”
He turns, and we look at each other in a way we never have before—not when we feared each other, not when we clung to each other, not even when we, by mutual, unspoken agreement, pretended our one evening together didn’t matter the moment he became my boss.
“You’re just fine the way you are.”
Then he shoots out onto the street with such ferocity that I’m not sure that what I thought I felt and saw were real at all, or just what I needed at that moment. But that’s more than I can allow myself to contemplate now. What matters—all I can allow to matter—rests in this folder in my hands.
And I know, after the coffee I don’t need and the Hamilton fix I do—I know what has to happen next. I only hope I can pull it off.