Hard Stop (6 page)

“You know why? Beyond the obvious?”

“Mostly fear. Maybe love. Those are good enough ‘whys’ for starters.”

“Good enough for you?”

“Sure. I’ve seen what fear and love can do. You have any other theories?”

I could almost see the imperceptible tug as the hook caught. It was hard to know all the forces that drove Jackie’s busy, chaotic brain, but I knew one of them was curiosity. And its co-conspirator—the fear of boredom.

“Do you think Donovan will hold up his end of the deal with you? If you find Iku?” she asked.

“I’m wondering the same thing. I want you to take a look at my severance agreement and the settlement of the intellectual rights suit. Let’s see if Donovan’s as omnipotent as he thinks.”

“Could be a lot of money.”

“That’s what Donovan thinks.”

I spent another half hour making sure Jackie had what she needed to do whatever she did on the Internet. The potency of the Web was just starting to take hold about the time I evolved from divisional vice president to finish carpenter, and I’d seen my friend Rosaline Arnold pull off some
astounding online research. I promised I’d learn how to do it myself someday. After I evolved a little more.

I left Amanda’s Audi Avant back in her driveway before sunset, which was just starting to heat up over on the western shore of the Little Peconic Bay. Clumps of luxuriant clouds were getting into formation, bathing in the first golden wash that radiated from the horizon. Eddie ran up to me just long enough for me to rub his head, then darted back toward Amanda’s. A true loyalist.

I peeled out of my clothes and put on a pair of swim trunks. The September air was only slightly cooler than late August, but the bay was still warm. I walked gingerly over the pebble beach and dove through the miniature waves, feeling the salty grey-green water scrub off a coating of City grit, startling disruptive revelations, and unexpected possibilities.

I’m not a great swimmer. My body’s too dense to float, though as a little kid I’d mastered a sort of hybrid dog paddle–Australian crawl that would keep me from drowning as long as my stamina held up.

I swam out as far as I dared and looked back at the tip of Oak Point. My cottage and Amanda’s stood side by side a few hundred yards apart, two Foursquare testaments to the power of hope, forbearance and weathered cedar. My father built mine during the Second World War. Amanda’s had also been raised by her father, though not with his own hands. He built about thirty other houses along with it, most of which she still owned, along with a big piece of abandoned industrial property at the base of the lagoon that bordered her lot. This alone would have made Amanda a very wealthy woman, even without the bulging portfolio of investments she’d inherited along with the real estate.

Besides the cottage, all I inherited was a debt from the nursing home that looked after my mother during the last
years of her life. I was able to pay it off before taking my career, my marriage and my financial wherewithal off a cliff, leaving me with just enough to live on for a while before I had to reacquaint myself with finish hammers, nail sets and miter saws.

I wanted to think the financial discrepancy between us didn’t matter, but it always does. I didn’t feel I had to match her net worth to be worthy of the relationship, but having nothing versus having enough to underwrite a small country was a pretty big gap. Not a rich girl growing up, it had taken Amanda a little while to get used to fathomless resources, but she was getting there. She’d never be extravagant, but she had a right to have as full a life as her means would allow. It had never been an issue between us, but I wasn’t about to let it become one. I’d never let her let me hold her back.

So it wasn’t only concern for my daughter that caused me to drop for Donovan’s offer. Sitting there in his library—funded by the river of technology royalties that had flowed daily into his company, technology I’d had a major hand in developing—I felt an unfamiliar tug of self-interest. It wasn’t until I was out there trying to float around the Little Peconic Bay that I fully understood what it really meant.

I wanted some of my past back. A past I’d shed like a suit of flames. I didn’t want my job back, and surely not my ex-wife. I didn’t want the icy, faux-modernist house we had in the woods above Stamford, or the garden parties on the velvet lawns of Fairfield and Westchester Counties. I didn’t want the crushing responsibility or nerve-searing professional stress. I didn’t want to stand in front of the Board of Directors and sell them on the need to preserve one of the few assets they owned that actually contributed to the long-term health of the corporation—an asset they then threw away for eighteen
months of stock lift. All I wanted was something I had truly lost all hope of ever having again.

I wanted the money.

The next evening Amanda and I hit the nightclubs.

It was more like late afternoon, since I wanted to talk to the bartenders and waitresses before things heated up. Not long ago all the clubs would have been closed by mid-September, but seasonal boundaries in the Hamptons were steadily blurring. There was still a big drop in population after Labor Day, but not like the old days when everyone from the City and beyond—renters and owners alike—would suddenly vanish and the locals would have the South Fork to themselves again. The socioeconomic Left Behind, and happy for it.

On the way to the first club on our list we stopped at the small shop off the main parking lot in Southampton recommended to me by Jackie Swaitkowski. It was called Good to the Last Byte and its purpose was akin to that of the auto repair shops I used to work for as a kid: basic computer maintenance and repair. It was cleaner and smelled better, but looked as if somebody’d set a bomb off inside a bank of mainframes—wire racks crammed with cartons, boxes and devices with faceplates splattered with tiny LEDs, heaps of printed circuits, loose CDs, stacks of packaged software, monitors of every vintage and size, plastic crates disgorging tangles of cables and surge protectors, pizza boxes and a full-size trash barrel filled with empty Mountain Dew cans.

“No wonder Jackie likes this guy,” I said to Amanda as we picked our way to a rolling wire rack recruited as a service counter by the owner of the place.

“Randall Dodge,” I said.

“That’s me, Sam. Nice to see you again,” he said, unfolding his full six-foot-eight frame and putting out his hand to shake.

Randall lived on the Shinnecock Reservation and was a racial gumbo of African, European and indigenous peoples. I knew him from Sonny’s, the boxing gym I went to north of Westhampton Beach. I met him one day when he found himself at the top of a bench press with a bit more weight then he could safely put down. His request for a little help was remarkably calm and polite, given the circumstances. From then on we spotted for each other, and I had a chance to show him some things, like how to hit the speed bag and how to stay on his toes when moving around the ring. Like me, he almost never sparred, which was lucky for the rest of the kids who worked out at the gym. He was thin and slower than an earth mover, but he could reach halfway across the ring, and if he ever managed to connect with a punch it’d be good night, Irene.

“This is Amanda Anselma.”

Randall took her hand and gave a little bow.

“My pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

“This your place?” I asked.

“For certain. Used to be my uncle’s, but the technology got a little ahead of him. I was sorry to see him go. He didn’t talk much, but you get used to the company.”

Randall’s head was big even for his beanstalk body. Or maybe it just looked big because of his broad face and high cheekbones, framed by a pair of slender, tightly woven braids. I never saw him form a smile, but his eyes were perpetually alight.

“I thought you were going to Hofstra,” I said.

“I dropped out after taking all the computer science courses they had. After four years in the Navy I’m too old to
be sitting through lectures on poetry and poli-sci. Got to get down and dirty with the circuits, you know?”

“Yeah, I do. What do you know about digital photography?” I handed him the disk.

“I’m a warrior of the Photoshop,” he said, studying the disk as if the silvery surface could reveal its inner mysteries. “What are the issues?”

He slid the disk into an aquamarine Macintosh and brought the picture up on a big flat-screen monitor. I explained how we’d pulled the shot off a website, but needed a clearer image.

“The first thing you have to deal with is the low resolution,” he said. “The original photo was probably high-res, but you can’t have that on the Web. Slows everything down.”

I reached over his shoulder and pointed at Iku.

“That’s the girl. I’d love a good-sized printout. Clear enough to make an ID.”

“Hard to do, boss,” said Randall.

“Not for a Photoshop warrior,” said Amanda.

Randall’s sparkly eyes looked at me.

“Did you tell her pretty women drive me to impossible feats?” he asked.

“Why do you think I brought her along?”

“Go buy her a cup of coffee. I need a few minutes. The impossible could take a little longer.”

We got drinks instead, at the big restaurant on Main Street. Seemed an appropriate way to ramp up to the evening. I had vodka. Amanda sipped red wine and filled the joint with radiant beauty. I never tired of looking at her. It was one of the few failings I allowed myself without reproach. When I wasn’t feeling charmed by her smile I was lost in her pale green eyes. Or distracted by an ankle or the shape of her neck. I used to like looking at Abby, my ex-wife, but that was different. More an objective admiration of elegant, comely form. There was
nothing objective in my appraisal of Amanda. Quite the contrary. The longer I lingered, the weaker my judgment.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I am.”

“Shouldn’t we see how Mr. Dodge is fairing? While we can still see?”

“I’m clear as a bell.”

“Of course you are. It’s so irritating.”

We paid the bill and walked back to Randall’s shop. It wasn’t a long walk, but I enjoyed every step. It was times like these, random events, that reminded me I’d given a lot of my life to misplaced ambitions and faulty desire. Not to dwell on regret, but to better appreciate the moment.

I watched Amanda as we walked, at once a presence so close at hand the barest twitch would alert her attention, yet as distant as the moon. This was something I’d learned about Amanda. She was there, and then not. And that was okay, now that I knew her better. I’d been through a lot of trial and error, sorting it out. But as long as she was there, walking next to me, I assumed she was willing to press on, even without a confirmed destination.

“You’re staring at me again,” she said.

“I am?”

“I don’t mind as long as I haven’t done something ridiculous.”

“I’ll tell you when you do.”

“And they say you aren’t a gentleman.”

“They do?”

Randall looked hypnotized by his computer screen when we got back to his shop.

“I’ve got something, not sure what,” he said to us without looking up. I walked into his work area and looked over his shoulder. A vivid portrait of Iku Kinjo filled the screen.

“You got what I wanted,” I said.

He looked up at me.

“You sure? The skin tone doesn’t look right.”

“Her father was African-American. A soldier.”

“Shoulda known. I got a big dose of that myself. On my mother’s side.”

“And you’re just as pretty, Randall. Give me a half dozen copies.”

In a few minutes we were out of there with a big white envelope stuffed with pictures of Iku. The whole experience made me feel as if the world had surged abruptly into the future without me—caught unawares and preoccupied with the Little Peconic Bay, questioning the point in having any future at all.

“You didn’t actually box with that young man, I hope,” said Amanda as we walked back to the Grand Prix.

“I never fight with techs. Too good at getting even.”

The first two clubs were a bust. Nobody remembered Iku or took any interest in helping advance the cause. It wasn’t worth the effort. They wore indolence as a cloak of pride. It made Amanda a little tense, glancing sideways to gauge my reaction. But I remained circumspect and polite. Pacing myself.

By the time we hit the third place, a dance club called the Playhouse, the early autumn nightlife had gained some traction. The house system was at close-to-full roar and a quorum of happily scrubbed and perfumed young aspirants were executing arrhythmic contortions on the dance floor. The men, anyway. The women moved much more fluidly, their eyes on each other, or the ceiling, or otherwise disengaged from their partners so as not to betray their amusement or horror at the situation they’d put themselves in.

I waited until we were hard up against the bar before showing around Iku’s picture. Safe haven.

“Sorry, man. Haven’t seen her. Friend of yours?” was the usual response.

“Sister.”

After a long string of blank faces, Amanda decided to take over. As if the beauty of the investigator determined the results.