Page 35 of The Fourth Option
Vargas’s lips curled. “Kimbel, tell me, are we going to blow out the quarter? Or are company earnings meetings in New York next week going to involve apologies?”
Kimbel hesitated. “Sir, it’s probably best if Dr. Matheson steps out for this part. He’s the face of the company. Better to have him prepped with just the right information for the earnings call.”
Vargas laughed softly, eyes glinting coolly. “Ah, yes.” He leaned closer to the screen. “We can’t have the doctor’s hands getting dirty, now, can we?”
“None of us wants that,” Kimbel said, desperate to extract Matheson from further haranguing. “We also have the gala tonight. It’s important to get Mr. Matheson there on time. There’ll be civic leaders and press. Good optics.”
Matheson rose slightly in his chair, smoothing his expression into a mask of tired diplomacy. He felt it was time to reclaim his dignity. Kimbel was right. They had a schedule to keep.
“Wait.” Vargas’s order sounded like a gunshot on a crisp fall morning. “I’ll have someone there tonight. Watching.”
Kimbel offered a reassuring nod.
“I have many investments in this hemisphere. I look after them.” Vargas straightened, casting a long shadow across the screen.
“Of course,” Matheson replied.
Vargas tilted his head. “My people are nervous. They think the woman may not play ball and that the cops might double-cross us.”
Matheson and Kimbel traded a glance.
“I want to assure you,” Kimbel said, leaning forward in his chair. “We will deal with her.”
“Oh, yes we will,” Vargas responded. “Get a handle on this. That woman better not get all high and mighty on us.”
“She won’t, she’s…” Kimbel didn’t finish the rest of his point. The screen had gone dark.
Matheson exhaled through his nose and stared a moment longer at the blank screen. It was always easier when the devil wore horns. Harder when he wore a linen shirt. He turned toward Kimbel.
“Take me home,” he said quietly. “I need a minute to think before the gala.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
BY THE TIMEWalker rolled into the Lower Ninth Ward, the sun was slouched low against the rim of the levee, casting long amber fingers through a lace of broken shingles and hanging trees. The light gave everything an eerie warmth, the same sensation he felt when studying the Hopper paintings.
Much of the Ninth, Leigh Ann had explained, was still condemned. But as his van rattled down the mostly empty streets, it seemed to Walker that the Ninth didn’t resist the condemnation. It wore its wounds plainly and proudly, daring the observer to look away.
Walker eased the van along Reynes Street, tires crunching on gravel and windblown glass. Around him rose the aftermath of a storm that had blown out over twenty years ago. Leigh Ann had called it poor, butpovertydidn’t feel like the right word. This was something more elemental, quieter, crueler. In Kandahar, poverty screamed. Here, it whispered.
He passed a car that looked more like a battle wreck, its hood tilted like a broken jaw, wheels stripped bare. Windowless shotgun homes leaned at odd angles, craning toward the street, weary of what they had experienced. One porch held the husk of a rusted tricycle with a wheel missing. Everything living had either fled or was growing through the wreckage.
Walker slowed near what might once have been a store. The faded sign readBuy Rite, though only half the neon sputtered in pink light. A pay phone dangled nearby, its cord twisting softly in the breeze like a pendulum without a clock.
He stared at it for a long moment.When was the last time I saw a pay phone?
On his drive from one corner of the country to the other the week before, he had seen manicured avenues, majestic mountain passes, cornfields that stretched to the horizon, light reflecting off grain silo, the geometry of a well-kept ranch, the pastel hues of morning sun chasing away evening showers.
But not here. Here, the world had stopped being beautiful.
This wasn’t poverty. This was neglect, institutional and generational, a spiritual rot as thick as the Spanish moss on the branches. A war zone, like Afghanistan. Not the firefights, but the blank spaces between. The way a bombed-out village looked two years after it stopped making the news.
Paladin stared out the window. He too knew a war zone when he saw one.
If Leigh Ann’s decoding of Connor’s journal was correct, it meant that Connor had dug through the bones of this neighborhood, peeling back layers of corruption in search of the rot at its core. An aspiring journalist working on his first story with a Moleskine and an inconvenient conscience, asking questions no one wanted answered, perhaps in a quest to connect a modern chemical weapon, fentanyl and Snowball, to floodwaters and failed promises.
And if Leigh Ann’s theory was correct, someone killed him for it.
Walker passed a house that had had its front door torn off the hinges. A spray of yellow insulation clung to the threshold, fluttering like a moth’s wing. Another’s roof slumped inward, the siding buckled, stained with black mold.
