Honeymoon

Chapter 108

THE GRAY-HAIRED GEEK installing my new phone the next morning gazed down at the scattered pieces of my old one. Then he looked at me with a knowing, seen-it-all smile. “It just fell off your desk, huh?”

“Stranger things have happened,” I said. “Trust me on that one.”

Minutes later the new phone was up and running. At least something was. I remained deskbound, tormented by boredom, not to mention self-doubt and a whole lot of guilt, truckloads of the stuff.

The new phone rang.

My first thought was that an encore was on its way—Nora wanted another conversation, another chance to turn the screws. On second thought, I knew better. Everything about her call the day before said it was a one-time-only event.

I picked up. Sure enough, it wasn’t Nora.

It was the other woman in my life who currently had it in for me. Needless to say, Susan and I weren’t exactly on the best of terms. Still, we remained professional.

“Any word yet from the audio lab?” I asked right away. The recording of my conversation with Nora was being analyzed for possible background noises that suggested her general, if not specific, location. An ocean wave; a foreign language being spoken by a passerby. Just because I couldn’t hear it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

“Yeah, I got the report back,” said Susan. “Nothing they could pick up.”

Technically, it was more bad news, but the way she delivered it—as if it were irrelevant—told me something.

Susan knew something.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“What’s going on? You’re still incredibly fucking stupid, John. If you could hurt me, you would have broken my heart again.”

She was holding out on me.

“I know that, Susan. There’s something else.”

She chuckled at my intuitive grab. “How fast can you get to my office?”