“I’m not like you, Jacob,” he said. “I have a life. I have a family. I have a dad who’s already lost one child. I can’t go to Bali, and I can’t have you in my life—”
His throat closed up around what he was going to say, trapping the “not if you’re going to leave again” somewhere between his diaphragm and his Adam’s apple. It was too raw, too close to that irrevocable step. He swallowed, worked his throat around the knot, and found something a little bit less honest to sub in.
“Not even if I wanted to.”
And he did. It just didn’t change anything. Not for him and not for Jacob, to judge by the resigned shrug Simon got before Jacob headed off to get dressed. Left alone Simon stared down at his plate as though the answer might be somewhere in the congealing eggs. The tick of toenails on wooden floors jarred him from his introspection, and he looked down into Fozzy’s hopeful teddy-bear face. With a sigh he leaned over and set the plate down in front of the dog.
“At least you’re easily pleased,” he said. The dog, face-first in the eggy leftovers, twitched an ear at him in acknowledgment.
Simon gave his bony head a scratch and then he pushed himself up. Enough. Wallowing wouldn’t change anything, and while he wanted Jacob to stay, he didn’t want it to be in a jail cell.
MARION, TEXASwasn’t exactly the sort of place you’d expect a hot-shot climate researcher to put down roots. It was sun-bleached and dusty, and the Old-West-fronted brick buildings rattled on their foundations as a train dragged a mile of freight cars past the town.
Simon guided his car through the empty streets of the business district—abandoned at eight thirty, except for a few shop owners dragging stock out onto the pavement and a tired-looking man who pushed a broom from one end of the block to the other. His phone, tossed onto the seat next to him, gave him directions in a stilted voice that took him off smooth asphalt and onto cracked, rutted concrete.
When the phone finally congratulated him on reaching his destination, Simon rolled past low white houses on patches of scrubby green lawn. Some of them were neat, with painted fences and matching trim, while others had rust-stained roofs and had let the desert take dusty bites out of their gardens.
Lau’s house had a battered kettle barbecue on his lawn. Rust ran down its legs to stain the grass, and the fence had been pulled over to make room for a wilted, electric-blue Plymouth to sit on its rims. The drive was full of a hard-used pickup, the bed of it full of tarps, and the sides caked with streaks of dried mud.
Simon pulled up on the dusty verge behind the pickup, blocking it in, and got out. The air was still chilly, but the watery sunlight had started to warm it up. He paused for a second to check out the car’s sleek blue lines under the coating of dust. Plymouths weren’t his car, but it was a pretty bit of muscle to leave rotting on a lawn. He flicked the thought out of his head. Even when he had more time on his hands, his Firebird was still lodging expensively at the mechanic waiting for him to source a drive belt and a manifold. That was enough of a hobby.
The steps up to Lau’s door creaked under his weight. It made Simon tense with pointless reaction, and he realized his mouth tasted of dust and pennies again. On edge. After yesterday it made sense. He swallowed the taste away and glanced around to gauge whether it was his brain misfiring or his instincts picking up on something wrong.
In the lot opposite, a swing rattled on its chains in front of a boarded-up house. Down the street a middle-aged woman in a T-shirt dress was hanging up her washing on the line. It was the cotton flapping in the wind that made his mouth sour.
Not real. Or at least not immediate.
He turned and hammered on the door. His irritation added a bit of extra force to the blows, and the side of his hand stung. The door was sturdier than it looked. Simon thumped it one last time and turned to check the street again. That time he wasn’t looking for a threat. He was looking for surveillance. Nothing installed that he could identify, but that meant nothing. He’d been out for a couple of years, enough time for the tech to bypass him.
The door wrenched open, and Lau glared out at him and squinted as he pulled his glasses down from his forehead and set them on his nose. When he recognized Simon, surprise supplanted the scowl for a second and then gave way to fear.
“I didn’t tell Clayton anything,” he said as he backed up from the door. “I don’t know what Syntech thinks happened, but it was nothing to do with me. Okay?”
Simon’s stomach knotted, a hollow ball of dread squeezed up against his spine, and he took a second to be glad that Jacob wasn’t with him. He stepped forward to block the door with his body when Lau tried to shove it shut.
“How about we talk about that inside?”
Lau looked like he’d rather do anything else, but it wasn’t as though Simon were giving him a choice. He stepped back reluctantly and gave Simon enough room to get into the house.
THE COFFEEwas black and bitter, stewed to the point of being Turkish, and hot enough it was nearly bubbling. Simon let it sit and cool on the table in front of him. Lau drank it like water. He had to have an asbestos mouth. Either that or his nerves were so bad he didn’t care about scorching off his taste buds.
It was obvious his nerves were bad enough that he’d lost weight. Lau’d been stocky before. Not fat, but solid and calfy—the sort of man who did geolocation treasure-hunt hikes into the mountains and posted selfies on rock faces. Now he looked skinny, and his jock-amiable face was pared down into sharp lines and angles.
“Do you know what happened to Clayton?”
Lau twisted his hands around his Star Wars mug—he had climber’s knuckles, all scars and lumps—and took a slurping drink of coffee. “He’s dead.”
“Do you know why?”
“Do you?”
“Pretend I don’t know anything.” It was still too close to the truth. But he didn’t want to let Lau in on that fact, not when Lau seemed to think he was still working for Syntech.
Lau slurped his coffee and twisted his hands. “I’m not supposed to talk about this. I signed a nondisclosure agreement. Hell, I signed it twice.”
“So did I.”
Not lately, not about this. It still seemed to work on Lau, who nodded and took a deep breath. “Okay.”
