“The week’s going to be crazy.” As she acknowledged this she felt the tension creep back into her shoulders. “But, you know, sometimes I like it when you just sleep beside me. Midweek-ish.”
He kissed her again, gently, ran a finger along her lips. “I promise,” he said smiling. That reverse déjà vu caught her again, made her smile back.
* * *
Geo’s Geo-appointed secretary poked her head into Daci’s office. “Geo sent me down? For some forms?” She squinted just slightly as her eyes adjusted to the light, then pointed at the stuffed white monster looming over Daci’s desk. “Cool bear! It’s like the Addams Family or something. Except theirs was on the floor I guess. Anyway. Forms?”
Daci pointed a finger at the floor, circled it around. “Geo had a little accident.”
Chloe sighed, rolled her eyes. But she squatted without complaint and began collecting Geo’s forged expense reports from off the white rug of Daci’s office.
“I saw you on Okrah Winspear a few weeks ago,” the girl said. Well, ‘girl’ was a bit of a misnomer; Chloe was Zane’s age. “They should have showed this office! That would really tell people you mean business. Like, business your way.” She paused and looked up. “I gotta tell you: I think you’re pretty cool.”
“Thank you. The office wasn’t finished at the time, though. You’re friends with Vonnie.”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“I talked with her. Just a little. She mentioned that she had a friend who worked here.”
“Really?”
“Uhm-hmm. She doing well?”
Chloe, still collecting papers from the floor, raised a shoulder and let it drop. “Yeah, actually. They finally decided to get officially divorced. And now she hardly even tells any jokes about him. Got her life back or whatever.”
“I followed the interesting fiasco the night she played Purple Dot.”
Chloe collected the last of the papers from the floor, rose to a stand. She pointed at the wire V on the bookshelf with a thin spark running perpetually up it. “I made a Jacob’s Ladder once for a science project.”
Daci smiled. A smart one—how refreshing! Unlike her boss.
“Geo Rivera is your supervisor.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m curious if you’ve witnessed anything corrupt. Sordid.”
“Witnessed? Or been subjected to?”
Hmm. Not the intended direction. Daci had long recognized Chloe’s crush on Geo, figured this emotional tie would be easy to exploit, but hadn’t predicted the girl would be so forthcoming about it. She delicately clarified. “Witnessed. Anything questionable from a business standpoint.”
Chloe set all her weight on one foot and linked one of her hands through her belt loops. “Uhm, lookit, I’m not trying to get fired, for, like insubordination? But if you just tell me what you’re actually looking for, this will probably go a lot faster.”
Daci inventoried this young woman. Watched her unabashedly to see how she addressed scrutiny. Chloe held her gaze for a respectable moment, then dropped her eyes to the floor. Daci saw her shoulders tense as she fought the urge to tap her foot or sway or whatever. Chloe glanced up at her again and Daci rewarded her with a smile.
“Alright.” She pulled a rectangle of thick, clothy, orange paper, just slightly larger than a dollar bill, from her top desk drawer. “You know what this is?”
“No.”
“Have a seat.” Chloe did as instructed, examining the orange certificate.
“Those are called NOx credits,” Daci informed her. “NOx is N-O-X, it’s a chemistry term. The N is for Nitrogen, the O for Oxygen, and the X is a variable, most often a 1 or 2, at least in atmospheric chem. You follow?”
“So far.”
“You can’t physically manufacture anything without generating nitrogen oxides as a side-product. And they screw up the environment.”
“Greenhouse gas?”
“Themselves, no. But they oxidize Carbon Monoxide and hydrocarbons, which produces more ozone and that affects the radiative balance.”
Chloe squinted slightly. “You’re close to losing me.”
“NOx impacts climate change. Adds to global warming. It’s also part of smog and acid rain. It’s not friendly stuff. Hence, we can’t generate NOx emissions legally without permission to do so.”
“So each of these coupon thingies is a certain amount of NOxes?”
“Exactly. And we seem to be missing quite a number of them.”
Chloe frowned at the paper still in her hand. “What’s that have to do with Geo? I mean, he’s a sales guy.”
Daci paused. She liked Chloe but didn’t know her, could only trust her so far. What this really had to do with Geo was that in the three weeks she’d spent snooping and digging after most everyone else had gone home, those were the only things Daci successfully uncovered—Geo’s screwed up expense reports and missing NOx credits. Nothing related to research, firings, or disgruntled employees, just these stray pollution credits. Had she not been scrutinizing every used tissue, she probably wouldn’t have even noticed they were gone.
But the fact of those two items being the only anomalies among the immaculate books, coupled with Geo’s relationship to the former company president, well, like her father said, it may have been nothing more than a meaningless act of spite. But who knew.
Daci certainly didn’t, and this is part of what drove her decision to obfuscate. “It’s complicated,” she told Chloe. “Geo has a history with other employees that might have made him privy to information. Most likely they’ve been misplaced. We are proceeding as if that is indeed the case. If we need to report them as missing we can, but that involves fees and fines we’d rather avoid.”
“Oh.” The girl ran her fingers along the thick orange paper, her brows knit and her mouth slightly pursed.
“I’m not asking you to go through his desk.” Daci said this with a laugh, to sound light. “I’m perfectly capable of that myself. I’m merely requesting that if you do see something odd or suspicious, be it regarding Geo or any other employee or department, give me a heads-up, yes?”
“I guess so. I mean, yeah, of course.” The young woman gave another half-shrug.
Daci knew Chloe was wondering why she’d been singled out. Doubtlessly the girl also recognized the veiled half-lie she was being told. Daci’s hope was that she’d interpret it as a privilege, an act of trust. She waited, watched Geo’s employee sigh and squirm with the unasked question.
Chloe eventually looked earnestly into Daci’s eyes, but what she finally inquired, still clutching the NOx credit, was “Can I keep this?”
Daci suppressed a smile. “Sure.”
* * *
The week skimmed by in a patchwork of meetings and arguments and phone calls by day, stitched together by long nights of digging through lab notebooks and breaking into everybody’s C drives in search of archived data. Apart from the missing NOx credits, Daci had found no evidence of anything in the research or manufacturing departments. So it was time to follow the money. This posed more of a challenge. Computer hackers and scientists populated Daci’s world heavily, but accountants and auditors proved an underrepresented demographic.
Zane found her a young woman supposedly named Laurel Johnson who claimed she could not only account, but could skip-trace. “That’s what I did before I got into the business,” she told Daci in the informal interview. Daci had seen the girl’s sparkling new truck, recognized the bling around her neck as Tiffany’s, knew the tracksuit Laurel wore cost close to four hundred dollars: Didn’t have to ask why Laurel hadn’t gone back to skip-tracing.
She hired the girl for an hourly fee high enough to keep her from talking but short of making her want to quit working for Zane. Not one to worry over problems other people had been hired to fix, Daci f
inally could return her efforts to the Flower Flu treatment. But sometimes a neglected pot over-boils.
Friday morning, everything came to a screeching halt. The same kind of awfulness where you sit tense waiting for the sudden, sickening impact of metal and the shatter of glass.
Daci was heading to work, approaching the 405/101 interchange, sipping a French press coffee and listening to Roshan Rolland Kirk play three horns simultaneously when her cell phone rang. Few people phoned her before nine, and those who did were important. This morning’s important person was Terri.
“I just woke up and I can’t see.”
And everything stopped. “Shit,” Daci whispered, then promised to be there soon, cure in hand.
As she exited the freeway and got back on in the opposite direction, horrible images filled her sight, visions of Terri in the hospital, shitting out her own intestines, pink foam of her destroyed stomach frothing from her mouth and ugh. Brrrr! Because that’s what the Flower Flu did. Despite its innocuous media name, the retro virus RV707 had originally been transmitted from the Venus Fly Trap. No researchers had yet pinpointed the source of the morning blindness, but it served as a miraculous harbinger. The virus’s mechanism ultimately caused the human body to digest itself from the inside out.
But Survivanoia had the cure. A tiny pill, smaller than aspirin, on a three day regiment beginning within twelve hours of the onset of morning blindness, and the victim recovered completely. This little miracle was the thing Survivanoia withheld, waiting for their co-conspirators to catch up. And this withholding had served to crack open her and Sydney’s already stressed relationship.
The circumstances had led her to take over Survivanoia and if getting this pharmaceutical to the public meant destroying the company then so be it. Sydney had been oddly acquiescent to the arrangement. But, Daci knew, he believed she would fail, and in the process learn what drove had driven his decisions, thereby enabling her to receive his apologies, recognize the situation as inexorable, and everything would go back to the way it was.
She shoved the key into the lock of her door as her rotoscoper neighbor came stumbling up the stairs clutching a paper coffee cup and looking like she’d been mugged by death. Brianna, that was her name, she raised a hand in hello.
“How long this time?” Daci asked.
“Three days. Well, sixty-eight hours. But it looks awesome. I’m gonna go pass out now.” The petite blonde opened the door to her place then paused. “You alright? You look a little rugged.”
This coming from a woman who had just worked three days non-stop.
“A friend of mine is very sick,” Daci told the girl.
Brianna offered condolences and a soup recipe. Daci thanked her, dashed inside, pulled the pills from her fire-proof safe, and sprinted out again. Normally the view of the marina and the lazy boats buoying on the water calmed her the moment she arrived home. Today she didn’t even see them. Back in the Hummer she checked herself in the rearview and saw fear and worry describing their tell-tale lines in her visage.
From Marina Del Ray up PCH to the Palisades. Twenty minutes that felt like twenty hours and her mind going nonstop the whole time. She still had no plan to accomplish her main, original goal—getting the drug released. Sydney offered no help, believing such backroom deals to be the insurmountable means by which businesses survived. His first lecture had been an explanation of how Survivanoia’s arrangement was with not one but two other firms, both of them Big Pharma.
Daci failed to see how such a bargain benefited Survivanoia monetarily.
“If we hadn’t been the first,” Sydney explained patiently, “we would have wasted enormous dollars in research. This arrangement makes for a more conservative investment. It guarantees returns regardless of who discovers an antidote first.”
“But Survivanoia always discovers everything first,” Daci had protested.
Sydney dismissed this as dumb luck.
Daci figured as company president, she’d simply break the deal, sell the drug and accept the consequences. But: “They can take a lot more than just the company,” Syd had assured her. “And you will go to jail.”
“Me! You brokered the deal.”
“The deal is legal. Breaking it means breaking a legally binding contract. I also can promise you that once you are in jail it’s unlikely you’ll make it out again. Big businesses these days are better connected than gangsters and warlords. And their tolerance for traitors is lower.”
This last sentiment quieted her for a few days. Daci never surmised when Sydney alluded to warlords if he intended a double entendre. Eventually, though, her righteousness eclipsed her consternation, and she approached him again.
“Is there a time limit for these other companies to develop their cures?”
Sydney, she remembered, had smiled like the father of a teenager caught drunk. “Yes,” he relented. “Three years.”
“What if they realize they can’t do it in that time frame?”
“There’s a forfeiture clause in the contract, certainly.” He paused, shot her that toothy grin that disconcerted people. “Sabotaging a lab would, of course, be life threatening to the scientists who work in it.”
She’d feigned indignation, but was once again caught off guard by Sydney’s uncanny ability to predict her motives. Only Syd and Terri—no one else had such insight. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t quite let him go, not completely. There is unmatched comfort in the luxury of being understood.
Daci made the right onto Entrada, then left onto Mesa and finally left again onto Amalfi, where Terri lived. The little house had both ocean and mountain views, and typically screenwriters haunted the neighborhood, walking around Will Rogers state park mumbling to themselves. Today the area seemed still and empty. Post-apocalyptic. Daci found herself spooked.
She took a deep breath, cleared her mind. No point in running into Terri’s in a panic—doubtlessly her friend would already be frightened. Best to play it cool, nonchalant, like RV707 wasn’t really that big of a threat, and the treatment on the brink of mass distribution, anyway.
Sure.
She took another deep breath. Exited her modified Hummer, got nearly slammed by the morning’s heat. One thing she knew, Terri would help her find a solution, develop a plan. And as she knocked on her friend’s door she realized how focused she’d become, felt a clarity of vision that had heretofore escaped her. Because now more than righteousness drove her. As of that moment the fight became personal.
CHAPTER 19
Melvina Mills stood six-two and carried the body of an aging linebacker. Melvina spoke in a husky, confident growl, smelled pleasantly of Old Spice aftershave, and at the time of her late-morning interview, five-o’clock shadow just blossomed on Melvina’s cheeks and chin. This same Melvina sat in the chair opposite Daci’s desk, sporting a floral print caftan accented with a tunic length blue blazer. Melvina was a man in a dress.
The fact of Melvina Mills choosing a dress for the interview and punctuating his apparent preference by tacking an A to the end of his decidedly male name had not yet become a topic of discussion in the interview. This, more than anything, impressed Daci.
Sick to death from the boredom brought on by listening to executives and sales people chastise each other while aggrandizing themselves, Daci had fired half the HR staff just to give herself an excuse to regularly meet people from the outside. So far, interviewing had proven the most enjoyable aspect of running the company.
“Documentaries are formulaic,” Melvina was saying of his old job. Or her old job, Daci supposed.
“It was like somebody designed a video template, then we entered the topic. Also these supposed documentaries told the viewer how she should feel about stuff. You know: Wars, a necessary evil.”
“Is that why you left?”
“Uhm…not exactly.” Melvina glanced t
o the side as if weighing the advice of a friend. “I got away from the documentary department for that reason. I preferred the infomercials, at least they were an honestly titled product. I fact-checked copy from the scripts against what was provided by the manufacturer. We were trying to sell commercials to the captive audience market. The TV’s in the subways or in the supermarket lines?
“But I couldn’t get over the fact that I was writing commercials for commercials. It gave me vertigo. Like being trapped between two mirrors. And it really got me thinking. I started jotting ideas down then typing them up.” Melvina scowled at the floor, seemingly embarrassed.
Daci raised an eyebrow. “You were writing a novel while you were supposed to be working?”
“Yes. But my work was done. On time. I never blew a deadline. That’s the truth, you can call and ask. Also, I worked for Epstein’s L.A., she’ll give me a sparkling reference.”
Daci’s ears pricked right up at that. “Epstein’s. Really.”
“Three years. It’s on my resume.”
“I didn’t read your resume. Why’d you leave?”
“Well, it’s a small magazine.”
“So, Money. Or lack thereof.”
Melvina nodded. “I hated to, she’s great. But she’s down to publishing once a month now. The online edition is still weekly.”
“Do you list contact information for her?”
“Yes! Like I said, her reference will be stunning. I’d love for you to talk to her!”
“Oh, I don’t need to,” Daci assured the man the man-in-a-dress. “When can you start?”
* * *
“Epstein is under investigation, though.” This was Zane’s response Tuesday evening when Daci shared her news. He closed the book he’d been reading, set it on the night stand, and snuggled under the sheet. The breeze from the Marina shimmied the curtains, necessitating a sheet and quite possibly, later, the cotton blanket folded at the bottom of Daci’s sleigh bed.
“Under investigation for what?”
“Tax evasion. Probably trumped up charges but it’ll keep her quiet.”
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