“While I love Patootie, she’s in heat and I can’t handle her cries of lusty doggy despair. I’m also out of ice cream, and my D&D group has cancelled because someone has band practice. Let’s go watch a cute journalist get everyone all riled up. You can tell Sheila you were doing reconnaissance.”
Marina laughed. “She’s already sending a merc team of her own, and we don’t want to get in their way.” She considered theproposition from a different angle. “But then, we’ll also be in the background, and I might get some more ideas about who’s on board and who could be nudged to sell.” She shrugged. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Cari gave a little shimmy. “How exciting!”
Marina shook her head and was still grinning when Rob came in and flopped onto the couch. “Why the hag face?” she asked.
“I never look anything other than perfect, I’ll have you know.” He rested his head against the couch. “I want to retire and spend all my time by the pool being waited on by cute pool boys. Is that so much to ask?”
“So do it.” She continued to watch Adriana’s videos with the sound off. “You guys have enough money to retire and live frugally.”
His look of disgust made her laugh. “We have enough to live more than frugally, we just don’t know if we could stand each other for that amount of time each day if we didn’t have to go anywhere. And what has you in a good mood?”
“A reporter is doing a series on gentrification projects by Black Pinnacle. Cari and I are going down to see the first filming of one in South Shore tonight.”
He sat up, frowning. “Your client is about to come under fire and it’s making you laugh? Have you officially cracked?”
She leaned forward. “You know how much I love a good fight. And this promises to have teeth. I’m not the media legal team. I’m just the real estate person handling paperwork, so I can enjoy the show from the sidelines without getting my hands too dirty.”
His eyes narrowed. “No…there’s more to it than that.” Suddenly he raised his hands. “It’s the hot woo-woo butch. You get to crawl up that mountain of a body and deny anything todo with the media bullshit. You understand she won’t see you as anything other than the enemy anyway, right?”
Just like that, Marina’s good mood evaporated. “I can still look. And fantasize.”
“And be distracted.” His expression of pity looked odd on his normally jaded face. “Babe, you could have just about anyone. Why lust after someone you can’t go anywhere near?”
She considered. “Because she’s safe. She’s a mental distraction, but emotionally and physically she’s just something off a hot-butch calendar. So I can look and smile and play, and know she’s way too different and out there for anything real.”
He nodded, and the pity disappeared. “Okay. Perfect. Have fun and let me know you haven’t been murdered.” He gave a little wave as he wandered out.
Marina started scrolling through Adriana’s platforms and the more she did, the more she saw just how much of a pain in the ass she was going to be. Marina didn’t like Sheila, that was a given. But she’d be damned if Adriana was going to make a mess of a client’s deal when her career was on the line. A new video icon popped up, and she clicked on it.
“Hey all. I’m on my way to Chicago, and you’re going to want to hear the story I’ve got coming your way. Corporate greed, displacement, social inequality, we’re about to get into all of it. If you like a good David and Goliath story, make sure you’re with me when I go live at six tonight.” She gave a wave and a little mischievous smile and was gone again.
“Shit.” It wasn’t any worse than she’d imagined, it just made it a little more irritating, like a hangnail you couldn’t yank off.
“You see it?” Cari popped her head around the edge of the door.
“Yeah. Maybe we shouldn’t go. The journalist already knows I’m on the Black Pinnacle team. I don’t want to get hounded and end up saying something stupid.” The thought of just sittingback and watching it with the rest of the doom-scrollers made her want to throw something.
“That’s true. You wouldn’t want to call someone a dung beetle who finds their clients in manure piles, for instance.” Cari finally came all the way into the office, a stack of files in her arms.
Marina winced. “I thought I’d managed to get that snippet scrubbed from the earth.” It had been early in her career, when the opposing council had been a seedy turd from a shady law firm, and he’d pushed her a step too far with his “little lady” routine.
“Nothing in the techno era goes unnoticed. Your TV and alarm clock both listen to everything you say. Yesterday, I was talking to my boyfriend about how I want to go to the Maldives one day, and then, poof! My Facebook feed is nothing but trips to the Maldives.” Cari shrugged. “Pretty convenient in a creepy, world-ending kind of way.”
“I think there have been plenty of movies that warned us about what was going to happen when AI took over.” Marina flipped through the files as Cari set them on her desk, instantly noticing the gaps and lack of signatures. “But it can’t be any more inept or fucking irritating than humans are.”
Cari scooped the stapler off the desk and tossed it gently onto the couch. “You can throw that after I’ve left. For now, these three are most important. So, are we going or not?”
Marina stared out the window at the lake. A few boats bobbed on the choppy white tops, and the mast flags snapped in the rising wind. “Doesn’t look like a good night to be out. Maybe she’ll cancel if it gets worse.”
Cari snorted. “Come on, boss. You’ve seen the videos. And it’s not like she can’t do what she needs to do, say,inside.” She rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “I didn’t think you were indecisive.”
Marina glared at her. “We’re going. But we’ll stay away from the cameras.”
Cari saluted. “I’ll bring a ballcap and dark sunglasses. Totally incognito.” She left with a different stack of files than the ones she’d brought in.
The rest of the afternoon flew past as Marina fixed and amended the files she’d received from Black Pinnacle, and before long Cari ducked in. “I’m heading home to get changed. Meet you back here in an hour?”
