SIX

Deirdre Holly didn’t understand why some authors used foreign phrases in their writing. Like we all spoke Latin? or even French? And some writers didn’t even offer the English translation. She understood that by doing so they were exhibiting a class thing, showing up the rest of us. She’d learned recently that a lot of things in life are about class snobbery. Deirdre had only come to reading fiction in the last few years. In her twenty-eight years she’d come to many things late. As she put it, “I came to the bad things way early, the good things a little late.”

She had left home at fifteen, left Monrovia and the San Fernando Valley and headed up the coast to Santa Cruz. Surfing had changed her life, her awkward body finding balance and confidence as her ability grew, her strong shoulders finally an asset. But surfing hadn’t changed her life as much as Jay Chevalier was changing it now. It had only been slightly over six months since she’d followed him into what had then been Wendell Alden’s boardroom, yet it seemed like years.

Jay had interviewed everyone in the company during the first month and a half of his takeover. Her interview, about two weeks after the famous Monday, stunned her. First thing he said when she walked into his office was, “Hey Deirdre, how are you? Thanks for not calling security.” She realized he wanted her to know he’d remembered. Then he asked her a lot of questions about herself. Wanted to know all about her. Like everything. And she felt comfortable around him, which hadn’t happened with most men. She had never had a boss treat her this way. A week later, he dropped the bomb.

Jay asked her to be in charge of the LiveCell manufacturing facility. “I’ve only had two years of community college. I have no background in any of this,” she reminded him. His response was, “You are the one I want—it has nothing to do with formal education or previous experience.”

She ended her relationship with Cathy, a decision that was long overdue, and moved into her own place. A really nice place too, south of Market. If only she still communicated with her family, something in her wanted to show it off to them, wanted to make them envious. Yet she knew better: like how many blows to the head do you have to take till you wise up? It hadn’t really started until her father was injured on the job, but then he’d been home all the time, her mother working, and with nothing to do but drink and smoke pot, that’s when the real trouble started. But when she finally rebelled after a year, her mother took his side, believed him not her, almost seemed to blame her, and Deirdre had fled and tried hard never to look back.

LiveCell needed a factory to fabricate the phones, though the phone’s cell aggregates were replicated rather than fabricated. This required a unique environment providing sterility and a precise control of temperature and humidity—a clean room. The delicate cultures of cloned neurons, which had been seeded from Jay’s initial pineal gland extraction, were added to the collagen and proteoglycans used as a supportive matrix. This mixture grew best at 37˚ C in a carbon-dioxide oxygen blend, and a clean room would provide this environment.

So Jay and Deirdre had the interior of an old warehouse renovated during an intense three weeks, the place saturated twenty-four hours a day with builders and contractors. She watched the transformation with a conflict of emotions, eager and nervous to begin her new job. Eventually they were finished: the floors gleaming white tile, the main room full of perfectly aligned stainless-steel lab tables canopied with multiple culture hoods and growth-inducing apparatuses, the lighting as bright as an operating room. She even had an office, a small unrestored room to the right of the double front doors, across the hall from the changing cubicle for the workers’ sterile gear. She told Jay that she preferred the rough warehouse flooring and the old plaster walls, sensing that would please him and not wanting him to spend extra money just for her. After everything was completed, the building from the outside matched her office; it offered no clues to the high-tech facility that was now inside.

While the factory was being renovated, and with Jay assisting her, she hired two dozen workers. Sharing the factory-hiring process with him, she better understood the method by which he’d hired her. It was by believing in something he must have sensed—it sure wasn’t on her resume. That was how he hired everyone. She had to admit some of the choices simply baffled her. Like made no sense at all. He even hired a few Santa Cruz gang members, and they really looked like gang members, too. His print ads in the newspapers attracted all kinds of strange applicants. Too many applicants. Who didn’t want to work for LiveCell? The pay and the benefits were unrivaled. And in a barren job market, everyone showed up to interview for the two dozen positions. Deirdre was exhausted and impatient by the end, Jay unaffected. Did anything ever get to him?

So LiveCell began production with this collection of carefully chosen misfits, Deirdre applying herself to her new job with the same big-boned intensity she’d used to master the waves. As the weeks passed she came to respect Jay’s hiring decisions, even the few that had really surprised her, but she was learning not to be overly surprised by anything having to do with Jay Chevalier. As the workers adjusted to their jobs, LiveCell gradually increased output to around five-thousand phones a day. The procedure wasn’t as complicated as she’d first thought. It was almost like baking bread or something. You just had to be really precise and thorough. It was simply amazing watching the cells replicate and then solidify as they achieved maturity. She never tired of watching the process, knowing she was creating something important.

It took about a week to make a phone. The basic cell aggregate first grew in bioreactors, the quick-replicating cells turning and rotating until they reached the phone’s basic dimensions. Jay had developed an improved bioreactor that could form a long cylinder of cell matter, creating dozens of phones with one unit. As this fragile mixture multiplied, feeding on the substrate host, the stainless culture hoods that supplied the perfect air mixture and the UV-irradiation to prevent contamination were lowered. On the fourth day, the hoods were lifted, and the young phones could be disassociated from the host by proteolysis, carefully segmented and cradled in phone-sized plastic vessels where they matured and reached full structural density. Before they finished curing, she oversaw the injection by pipette of viral DNA into the center of each young phone. Over the next two days, the virus spread through the cells and modified the neurons, elongating and intensifying their electrophysiological capacity.

Every evening, after the work crew had gone for the day, Jay would stop by to check the finished phones. She staggered the replicating process so that a new batch of phones would reach maturity at the end of each day. The warehouse would be empty, the day’s freshly finished phones ready, laid out in an exact grid on the polished metal tables, thousands of them, missing only their pronged black boxes. She always waited for him, though he told her many times that she worked too much.

“Don’t wait for me, there is no need,” he’d say.

And she would answer, “I just want to be sure that everything was done right.”

It was a point of inflexibility between them. Jay, however, insisted she not watch him do whatever he did in the clean room with the phones. Made her promise. He was adamant about it, asking her to wait in her office. It made her very curious, particularly since he always looked changed somehow after he was finished. Each time he went in there, he turned off all the rows of fluorescent lights, so she began to leave it that way for him. But like what can you check in the dark?

This was the routine through the fall and the winter, production increasing with each season, until LiveCell was outputting over ten-thousand phones a day. It was in early spring that she came to appreciate fully Jay’s choice in workers.

One morning two men in ill-fitting dark suits and bland ties sauntered arrogantly into her office. She came out from behind her desk and politely asked if she could help them. They flashed IDs and said they were from the FCC, were there to investigate the premises. She ignored their bluster, explaining that no public access was permitted, to anyone. Like what would the Federal Communications Commission want with LiveCell? She knew the licensing and all the permits were in order because the company lawyers had gone over everything carefully. Jay had been very thorough. And even if there was a problem, would this be the way the FCC would address it?

They argued with her, demanded admittance, became increasingly rude as she held ground, she more and more convinced they weren’t FCC. “Miss Holly, do you realize the ramifications of obstructing a government investigation?” said the burlier of the suits. Like this was a government investigation? She didn’t answer. She’d already told them to contact Jay Chevalier, made it repeatedly clear that only a search warrant would get them through the clean-room door. Like why waste more words? But the burly suit suddenly shoved her out of the way, her body banging into the doorframe with a painful thud, and the two men headed down the hallway toward the clean room.

Jimmy Hakken was one of the Santa Cruz gang members whom Deirdre hadn’t wanted to hire—she’d heard about his reputation over the years—until Jay insisted. He was changing into his sterile gear when she called out for help. In black chinos and sleeveless T-shirt, six-two, shaved head and fully tattooed arms, he charged out of the cubicle. The suits froze at the sight of him. Hakken stopped a few feet in front of the two men, blocking access to the clean room. He said nothing, his posture erect, his body dead still. His look said everything. It almost projected an eagerness for the suits to make a move, but his expression was too neutral for that, too unreadable. She decided there was something about absolute willingness that was really scary. Three other workers emerged from the clean room and blocked the doorway. She figured it was overkill.

The suits muttered a few more threats, backed up and left. She thanked her crew. “No problem, Dree,” said Hakken with a quick nod. The others smiled, everyone going back to work as if nothing had happened. She returned to her office, livecelled Jay and told him what had happened.

“So you’re okay? Everyone is okay?” he said.

She reassured him.

“Did you get a look at their IDs?”

“They were weird about showing them. Just flipped them like, and wouldn’t let me examine them. Made me suspicious right away. Classic suit cop types, you know? Really forceful, in-your-face kind of bullshit.”

“You did great.”

“You should’ve seen Jimmy. He like really turned the tide. He comes blazing out and one of the suits like yelps. This little squeak. Really funny.” Now that the tension had passed, she started to giggle. Her mind flashed to when she’d pursued Jay into Wendell Alden’s boardroom trying to stop him. How different it was to work for Jay.

“This won’t be the end of it,” he said.

“You think they really were FCC?”

“We’ve been fully cleared with the FCC. And they would have contacted our legal department in writing if there was a problem.”

“That’s exactly what I thought.” She wasn’t laughing now, worried again. “It just seemed too weird. They were somebody with power. Real cocky, you know?”

“I don’t want you or anyone to get hurt.”

“You should have seen the crew—they were ready.”

“Not the point.”

“I’m just saying—they’re loyal. Really loyal.”

“Deirdre, you have great people. I know that.”

“I mean, you chose them, but they’re really like my crew now. I can’t tell you how good that feels.” She paused. “They talk about you. You know what they say?”

He was silent.

“Because of Jimmy Hakken they think you’re some kind of knight now or something. That’s why he calls you The Chevalier and doesn’t use Jay. Like you’re from the Round Table or something. ‘He’s a knight, Dree—Chevalier suits him,’ he says. Like just Jay isn’t cool enough. And now he thinks he’s this yeoman or something, that’s what he calls himself. He takes it serious, too. I shouldn’t have loaned him those books to read, but I told him I was trying to educate myself more, and he was all into the idea. He said he’d read a bit as a kid but then stopped. I think Dumas really fired him up, and now he’s got everyone at the factory into it. He’s really a natural leader, you know.” God, these phones were so intimate. Like she could almost feel him, she understood him better, he got inside her somehow. Not that she could hear his thoughts unless he spoke or anything like that. “Jay?”

He answered.

“You know how much all this means to me, like what you’ve done for me and the rest of the crew, right?” Silence. “You there?”

“Shall we all go eat Mexican tonight? I’ll invite everyone.”

“You got to stop this.”

“Dos Reales?”

“You’re too generous, it’s ridiculous. You don’t need to do this.”

“You like Dos Reales, don’t you?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Think of that cactus salad.”

“Cut it out.”

“Those flautas?”

“Jay!“

“Mole Poblano?”

“Okay, what time?” She was laughing again. He could talk her into anything, always made her feel better about everything.

“I have to tend to the phones, then I’ll meet you. You get everyone started. Tell them it’s on me—they’ve earned it.”

“I’ll send them ahead and wait for you here.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I know.”

That evening when Jay arrived at the warehouse, Deirdre’s sixties Dodge wagon was alone on the lot near the front entrance, illuminated by one of the two security lights. Then he noticed a black late-model sedan parked along the darkest side of the building, March twilight almost hiding the car.

He parked the Cutlass next to her wagon and got out, irritated that his door squawked so loudly when he opened it. He left it that way and quickly climbed the steps to the front doors. He rotated the steel knob slowly, pulled on it gently. Locked. It was unlikely it would have been Deirdre; she always kept it open for his arrival.

He leapt down the steps and sprinted to the far side of the building, his passkey in his hand by the time he reached the emergency exit. He unlocked the metal door, jerked it open, and was in the factory. All the banks of fluorescent lights were on. Normally they would have been off. He moved between the laboratory tables, the bioreactor apparatus humming. At the doors leading into the front hall, he cracked one, stood for a few seconds and listened. Muffled sounds were coming from the half-open door to Deirdre’s office. As he entered the hall he heard her yell, “Fuck you,” obviously terrified. There was a hard slap.

She was trapped awkwardly in her office chair, hands taped behind the chair’s back, ankles taped to the rungs, her cheeks marked by red welts, mouth bleeding, eyes bleary with tears.

“Leave her alone,” he said.

The two men in front of Deirdre turned to face him, a hulk in a rumpled suit and a smaller one with almost no forehead lazily pointing an automatic in his direction.

“Doctor Chevalier, I presume,” said the one with the gun, a bored smile barely changing his expressionless face.

Jay moved straight at the voice and threw a right uppercut into the jawbone so hard it almost lifted the guy off his feet. The body slumped heavily against the desk and pitched loudly to the floor, the gun clattering across the unpainted floorboards.

The large guy stared in disbelief at his downed partner. “What the fuck?” he said, grabbing inside his suit jacket. He fumbled a few seconds, and there was the black glint of a snub-nosed revolver. Jay stepped toward it, trying to get inside the gun’s reach before the angle of the barrel found him. Using his left arm to deflect the weapon, he drove a straight right into the guy’s lower ribcage. He heard the explosion but didn’t feel the bullet or suspect that he’d been shot; the pain would come later. The impact spun him off balance and back a few feet. Deirdre screamed.

The guy swayed, bent over, wheezing painfully, the gun smoking in his hand. There was a second report and a dull thud, the bullet lodging into one of the thick planks inches from Jay’s shoe. Jay recovered as his assailant began to straighten. He stepped in and started to throw a left hook when he realized his arm wasn’t reacting. A spike of nausea jabbed him in the gut, flashing him back to his days in the ring. The same sensation as when he’d been stunned by a punch, but now covering up wasn’t going to save him. The gun rose slowly and inexorably toward his head. Someone cried out. With the gasping face before him, the leaden cruelty of the eyes, he swung a brutal roundhouse right, his fist contacting the soft tissue and arteries at the side of the gunman’s neck. The third shot remained unfired.

“Jay, Jay, Jay, . . .” he heard her saying between sobs.

Shocked by the violence of his punch, he looked down at the two splayed men and worried that he might have killed the second one. He’d never throw a blow that fierce in the ring, but there was nothing he could do about it now. Though he figured he didn’t need to, he still kicked the two guns into a corner of the room. His left arm was numb, covered in blood. Blood was dripping freely from his hand as he attempted to wriggle his fingers, testing the damage. Nausea hit him again, and for a moment he thought he might go down. Supporting himself by grabbing the desk with his good arm, he could vaguely hear Deirdre saying something. He waited and his head started to clear.

“Jay, you’re shot!”

“I think I’m okay. Just some blood.”

“You need a doctor.”

“We better call an ambulance.”

“I can drive you. It would be faster.”

He found a serrated plastic knife among her papers, guided himself along the desk’s edge to her chair, and with a sawing motion cut through the duct tape. “I mean for these two.”

“You’re the one who needs a hospital. To hell with those fuckers.” She lifted herself clumsily out of the chair, rubbing her wrists.

“All I need is a flauta,” he said, and winked at her. “And maybe a beer.”

Slowly, the smile appeared.

It was almost eleven o’clock when they finally sat on the tattered bench seat of the Cutlass headed to Dos Reales. She called the restaurant as Jay drove. Her Dodge was left on the lot; it was not a night to be alone. Ricky, the owner, explained that a few of Deirdre’s crew were still hanging around drinking beer and he would be glad to stay open for her and Jay. “Food? No problem. I make whatever you guys want.” They were both hungry, and she’d never craved a vodka rocks more than at that moment. Like who wouldn’t?

“How’s the arm?” she said.

“Fine,” he said, but she knew it wasn’t. She’d cleaned and bound his flesh wound, which was similar to some of the worst surfboard cuts she’d seen, except for the ugly powder burn. She’d sterilized and butterfly sutured the gash in his bicep, using a first-aid kit from the factory. It still needed stitches, more than a few, but at least the bullet hadn’t done as much damage as it could have. She’d urged him to let one of the paramedics examine his arm, but you couldn’t get him to do something he didn’t want to do. Like way stubborn.

“How can you say fine?” she said. “It must hurt like crazy. That thing is nasty.” As the streetlights washed over his face, he appeared even paler than normal. Like a ghost. A real stubborn one.

“The trouble with complaining,” he said, “is once you start you can’t stop.”

They drove awhile, both locked in their own thoughts.

She broke the silence: “The cops acted a little weird, don’t you think? Like they didn’t really believe you. Like you couldn’t possibly have taken out those two guys with guns. Or maybe the whole thing didn’t make sense to them either. But that one detective seemed to like you. Otega? Something like that. The Puerto Rican looking one. The others though . . . This whole thing is really too weird.” She looked over at him, waiting for him to say something. “I thought we would never get out of there. Took forever. They sure had enough cops and paramedics running around. Like the whole force. I still can’t believe you wouldn’t let a medic look at your arm. You can be pretty weird, you know? And you sure won’t talk to the press. Like not at all.”

He still didn’t say anything. She didn’t care. He probably realized she just needed to talk. It made her feel better. Her face had even stopped stinging so painfully, though the inside of her mouth was still raw and getting itchy. The vodka would help that. She’d told the police that one of them was the same guy who’d visited the factory that morning insisting he was from the FCC. She’d never seen the other, the one who looked like a rat. He’d questioned and beat her. He was the one she hated.

What she didn’t know was that Jay had quietly noted the serial number from the .38 before the police arrived. It told him something that the gun still had its number, belonging to the hulk. The one on the automatic had been filed off. She also didn’t know that as he drove he kept replaying the event, realizing it had probably been a setup. He still had the mushy collapsing sensation of the guy’s neck in his memory and was sickened by the violence. If they were after something in the factory, wouldn’t they have entered at night? And why involve Deirdre? It was obvious to him now that they’d been waiting for him, using Deirdre as bait, had half-hidden their car so he could spot it. Were they testing him? Trying to scare him? Kill him? No, there were much easier ways to kill him if—

“Jay?” she said.

He moved his eyes from the street to her. “You okay now?”

To Deirdre he looked drawn and tired. She realized with a pang that he was vulnerable, that he had weakness. She wanted to bring her hand across the seat fabric to touch him.

“Thanks,” she said instead.

He smiled at her, and she could tell he was mustering his energy.

“I wish I could fight like you. Then those assholes couldn’t have pushed me around. They were all over me with their bullshit questions about you and the phones, and I’m all yeah right, like I’m going to tell you fuckheads anything. Maybe I should’ve locked the door, but I figured you’d be coming any minute, and I never lock the door until we leave. That gun really scared me. I hate guns. Seen too many horrible things happen with guns.”

She looked out at the shadowed facades of city buildings, a small late-night grocery, closed shops, a brightly lit gas station as it flashed by in a fluorescent blur. Absently these images flickered across her consciousness as the fight dominated her mind.

“Jesus you can sure throw a punch,” she said. “You lifted that one guy right into the air. That was so amazing. The rumor is you used to fight in the ring. It’s true, isn’t it?”

“What I did wasn’t good. There was nothing good about it. I should have known better . . . but they hurt one of my family, and I overreacted.”

That stopped her. “You feel that way about me?”

He nodded.

She glanced out the window again, not seeing anything this time.

Soon, there was the Dos Reales neon in the distance. He took his good arm off the wheel to reach across and flip on the blinker.

“I could have driven you know,” she said. “Your arm must be killing you.”

“We’re here.”

Jimmy Hakken listened without moving as Deirdre described what had happened. Only Hakken and Ramon had waited for them in the big padded booth. In the parking lot, Jay had asked Deirdre not to mention the incident, but she’d convinced him otherwise. She told him it was their workplace, she was their boss, and they had a right to know. Besides, he was bleeding through his bandage, like what was she supposed to tell them? Jay cut himself shaving? And how about the newspapers tomorrow? She continued to be put out that he wouldn’t go to the hospital. His wound needed stitches. Tape wasn’t going to hold the skin together long enough for it to heal. He was even paler, dabbing at the leaking blood with a paper napkin. But food was on its way, she’d already downed one of her signature vodkas, the second on order. Jay worked at a can of beer.

Jimmy Hakken sat immobile after she’d finished the story. He rarely spoke, and he was difficult if not impossible to read. He was the tall silent type, who just happened to be covered in too many medieval tattoos and have a shaved head with reddish sideburns. The ugliness of his face was almost handsome because of his eyes, the lightest of blue like a Nordic sled dog.

“Chevalier,” he finally said. “Anything like this ever happens again, say the word, and my guys are there.”

Jay took a sip. “Jimmy, we’re not about violence. We make phones so people can communicate better.”

“They fucked with you and Dree, man. That burns my ass. All I’m saying is, you need us, we’re there. I don’t give a fuck who they are.”

“Let’s hope this is the end of it.”

Hakken examined his beer can, shook his head back and forth for what seemed an eternity. “Man, you know it ain’t over. Look—understand—it would be a fucking honor to move on this. You gave me a chance. No one else would’ve. I don’t forget. Ever.”

“I have your work. You do great work. That’s all I need.”

Hakken paused again, staring at Jay as if he were trying to memorize everything about him, scowling slightly. “Chevalier, you know I dig you. You know I respect your ass. But no one can go it alone.” He crushed his beer can, dropped it, slid out of the booth and stood. He held out his hand to Jay with intense seriousness. They shook and released. “Take care of the wing,” he said. He nodded to Ramon, blinked quickly with both eyes at Deirdre, and lumbered out of the restaurant.