Bad Move (6 page)

I went to reach for the kettle to fill it from the tap, but she nudged me out of the way and grabbed it herself.

"I'm really sorry," I said.

Sarah said nothing.

"And thanks for the stuff, that ointment. I was surprised you still went out and got it for me. I wouldn't have blamed you if you hadn't. I put it on my hand and it was right back to normal this morning. It stung a bit in the night, you know, but then it went away, so, thanks."

Sarah got out a teabag and a slice of bread for the toaster. When couples aren't speaking to each other, all the other sounds in a room become heightened. The ticking of the electric kettle warming up, the scraping of the butter knife across hot toast, the clinking of a spoon against the inside of a china cup. As much to break the silence as to find out what was going on in the world, Sarah turned on the small under-the-cupboard TV. In addition to reading a couple of papers every morning, she watches a lot of CNN and local news so that she has a good handle on what's happening before she gets to the paper.

"- the third house in the region police have raided this year," said the morning man with the very nice hair. "Police are alarmed by the growing number of people who have turned their homes into massive marijuana-growing operations. Not only is it against the law, but it's a major fire hazard, considering that these illicit growers bypass the electric meters, sometimes inexpertly, and all that extra power can overheat circuits with disastrous results."

"A woman in Bentley says the thief who stole her purse from her shopping cart also made off with a winning lottery ticket for $100,000. Lottery officials say they are paying special attention to people coming in to claim prizes."

"Finally, more about a story that still haunts this city, nearly two years later. Police say they may have some leads in their hunt for Devlin Smythe, wanted in the death of little Jesse Shuttleworth, who -"

Sarah scrambled for the remote on the kitchen table and turned up the volume.

"- was found dead in a refrigerator in Smythe's apartment. Police believe Smythe also went by several other names, including Devin Smythe, Daniel Smithers, and Danny Simpson. There have been reports of suspects matching Smythe's description in the Vancouver and Seattle areas."

"Jesus. Two years," Sarah said. "They always call her 'little.' Of course she was little. She was five years old, for Christ's sake." It was the most she'd said in my presence since the day before.

"Authorities in those areas are assisting local police in their inquiries. Coming up: Take a close look at those bills you've got in your wallet. They may just be counter -"

Sarah turned off the TV, dropped off her plate and cup in the sink, and went upstairs to brush her teeth before heading into the city. I refilled the kettle and plugged it in to make some coffee for myself. While the water heated I went into my study around the corner from that ground-floor laundry room, which was no longer the aphrodisiac it once was, booted up my computer, and opened the file folder next to the keyboard where I kept the pages of my manuscript. The word "Position" was scribbled across the otherwise blank title page, but that was just an inside joke. The real title, the one that would appear in the publisher's spring catalogue, was TechnoGod. There were 357 more pages under that title one, and only a last chapter to write and some proofreading to do before bundling it off to my editor.

I write science fiction, mostly, and you could probably figure this out by stepping into my study. Or else you'd conclude that I'm a thirteen-year-old boy trapped in the body of a forty-one-year-old man. Maybe you'd be right on both counts. The room is littered with SF kitsch. Star Wars figures, Terminator statuettes, plastic Jurassic Park dinosaurs from Toys "R" Us, a rubbery shark from Jaws, small diecast models of the various flying machines from the Thunderbirds puppet show, an assortment of Enterprises from all the Star Trek series and movies. My writing center constitutes the short end of a large L-shaped desk, while the long end is my modeling center. On this particular day there were two model kits on the go - a foot-long Seaview submarine from the 1960s television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and a resin model of Ripley, the Sigourney Weaver character from the Alien movies. I like building models of things - spaceships, submarines, futuristic cars - more than assembling models of people, but I've always been partial to anything related to the Alien flicks.

I'm aware that it may not be normal for men in their forties to collect such toys, but then again I don't make my living in a normal way. Being an author of more conventional fiction would be unusual enough, but writing SF puts you in a different category altogether. Science fiction writers don't find their books reviewed in Time or Newsweek or The New York Times, although the latter has its token science fiction column in the book section every couple of weeks. I've never understood the ghettoization. Science fiction offers cutting-edge social commentary, inventive allegory, a grand vision of where our current social and political trends are taking us, an exploration of the human condition told through high-tech metaphor. And, of course, little monsters with razor-sharp teeth bursting out of people's chests.

I'd been putting the finishing touches on my fourth book, and had hopes, as all authors do, that this would be the one that would once again earn me some critical attention, even if only in the cozy SF community, but in the pit of my stomach knew it wouldn't be. The novel would be published to little fanfare. There would be virtually no publicity. The author tour would consist of two magazine interviews by phone. It would be ordered by the major book chains in such disappointing numbers as to make it impossible to create an impressive display of copies near the front of the store. Instead, it would be put back in the regular stacks, spine out, on a shelf reachable only by NBA stars, thereby guaranteeing that no one would ever find it. The publisher would arrange one book signing, not at one of the big chain bookstores, but at a mall store, where I would be seated behind a table in view of passing shoppers weighed down with Gap and Banana Republic bags and carrying containers of vinegar-soaked New York Fries, who would wonder who I was but not care enough to stop and ask, and I would smile and nod as they passed, and then, miracle of miracles, a middle-aged couple would slow as they walked by, pause and look at the display of my books, turn, and approach, and my heart would begin to swell, that someone was actually going to talk to me, and maybe even buy a book, which I would be delighted to sign, to make out personally, even. And the woman would say to me, "Do you know where the washrooms are?"

I actually thought this new book might have a chance. It was a sequel to my first novel, Missionary, a title my publisher really liked because it would make people think that, at some level, it was about fucking, but which was actually about missionaries of the future. Or more precisely, reverse missionaries. The time is several hundred years from now, and religion has been outlawed on Earth. Faith has been overtaken by technology. Computers are God. The missionaries decide to take their message to other worlds, to persuade civilizations deemed more primitive than ours to abandon their beliefs in supernatural beings and embrace the computer chip. Things go badly when our know-it-all Earthlings, in the act of setting ablaze a house of worship on the planet Endar, have the life crushed out of them by a huge hand reaching down from the clouds.

I'm not a particularly religious person, but this book found its way into Christian bookstores as well as the mainstream ones, did reasonably well, and it was that book's success that has kept me going since. It seemed odd to see Missionary in the window of a religious bookshop, displayed alongside God Is My Anchorman, by a noted network news executive, and the collected scripts of Touched by an Angel. The book probably never would have made it there if the shop owners knew my editor thought its title would make people think about fucking. He's not a particularly religious person either, but it was his irreverence that prompted me to tentatively call my new book Position. My second and third books tanked (number two, Slime, was about nasty sewer creatures that pass among us by disguising themselves as cable company executives; and number three, Blown Through Time, about a guy who goes back in time to keep the inventor of the hot-air hand dryer from being born, had real potential, I thought, but went absolutely nowhere), so my decision to revisit my missionaries was an easy one. They seemed my best hope of coming up with another modest hit.

I was in the newspaper business when Missionary came out. I'd started out as a two-way, a reporter-photographer, which meant that most out-of-town assignments went to me. No need to buy two airline tickets for a reporter and a photographer - one seat would do. Although I liked shooting pictures, I grew weary of being on the road so much, and when a position became available at the city hall bureau, I applied. This, as it turned out, was a mistake. I became an expert in everything municipal. I knew all there was to know about planning acts and planning boards and official plans and amendments and amendments to amendments and zoning restrictions and parking enforcement and snow removal and zero-based budgeting, and there were times when I thought I'd like to take a copy of the city's collected bylaws, tie it around my neck, and throw myself off the pier at the foot of Majesty Street. I began to wonder if maybe journalism just wasn't my thing, and I plotted an exit strategy. My first book, written late at night and on weekends, became my way out.

The money from Missionary didn't go as far as I'd hoped, which meant taking the odd freelance assignment. I'd written articles for The Metropolitan (some futurist stuff, where the city would be in fifty years, that kind of thing), some magazine pieces. But with a nonexistent mortgage on the new house, we figured we could manage fairly well on Sarah's income until my next ship came in.

So I worked from home, was there when the kids left for school and when they got home, and could be counted on most days to give Sarah a kiss goodbye before she left for the paper. It didn't look as though that particular service would be required this day. All Sarah said as she headed out the door to the car was a simple "See ya." Enough to let me know, officially, that she was out of the house, and that she wasn't interested in any precommute snuggling. I watched from behind the curtain as she got out her keys, opened up the Camry, backed down the drive, and disappeared down the street.

o o o

Writer's block arrived before noon, so around eleven, on the way back from my walk along Willow Creek, I swung by the sales office for Valley Forest Estates. Phone calls hadn't worked. Maybe a face-to-face encounter would be more effective where honoring a new-home warranty was involved.

The office was just as you drove into the neighborhood, a couple of mobile homes stitched together with an elegant front built around it as a disguise. I had a feeling that once the development was complete, they would pack up their fancy desks and high-tech photocopying machines and architectural models of the subdivision, rip out the trailers, and build one last shoddy house on the lot where it stood.

Okay, maybe that's unfair. We'd had some problems with the house, but surely they could be fixed. I would turn on the charm with these dickheads.

As I entered the sales office, I glanced at the wood-paneled wall, where pictures of the various sales staff and company executives hung. I was looking for the guy who sold us the house. There he was. Don Greenway. The man our street was named for. Every day we basked in his celebrity. It was like living on Tom Cruise Boulevard and meeting Tom Cruise.

I approached the reception desk.

"Hello," said a perky blonde woman in a white blouse, her hair falling down around her shoulders. "Welcome to Valley Forest Estates."

"Hi," I said. "I wonder, is Mr. Greenway in?"

"Do you have an appointment?"

"No. I was just hoping I might be able to catch him. I was passing by."

"Were you thinking of purchasing a Valley Forest home? Did you want to see some of our brochures or take a look at our model homes?" She smiled the whole time she was talking, like an Entertainment Tonight reporter.

"No, we already own a home here," I said. And the receptionist's smile instantly vanished.

"Oh, I see. And what did you want?"

"Well, we've had a couple of problems and I wanted to see about getting them fixed."

"Oh." I had the sense that I was not the first person to come in here with a complaint. "Well, Mr. Greenway is very busy today, but if you'd like to leave your phone number with me, I'll make sure that he gets back to you at his earliest possible convenience."

"Well, that sounds great, but we had some trouble before, when we first moved in, with water seeping into the basement? And I had to drop by here several times before anyone came to take a look at it. And I've been in here before about our upstairs window, how I have to caulk it outside all the time, but the wind and the rain still manage to come through, and now our leaky shower has caused part of our kitchen ceiling to discolor, so there's this big stain, you know? If it's all right with you, I'll just wait around awhile until Mr. Greenway becomes available."

"Well, Mr. - What is your name, sir?"

"Walker. Zack Walker."

"Mr. Walker, I assure you, Valley Forest Estates takes any problems you might have very seriously, and I will convey to Mr. Greenway your concerns and -"

The door to the office where Sarah and I had signed the deal to buy our house opened and out stepped Don Greenway, all five-foot-six of him, about forty-five, a bit of a paunch held back nicely by keeping the jacket of his expensive suit buttoned.