“Yeah, you can bring me the Kiker briefs.”
Harold wrinkled his nose. “Such sordid business,” he said as he marched from the room.
Harold couldn’t even begin to imagine how sordid. Kelly Kiker was a hard, chain-smoking woman who looked like she’d been rode hard and put up wet too many times to count in her forty-two years. She’d been in and out of the court system for most of those years, but she had finally gotten her act together, was living in her father’s trailer, and had landed a clerical job collecting fees. Kelly Kiker might have made some bad choices in her life, but she wasn’t stupid, and she quickly figured out that her boss was siphoning a little extra pocket money for himself from those fees. When she confronted her boss about it, he fired her. Kelly was going to let it go—she was used to letting stuff go—but the more she thought about it, the more she thought it wasn’t right, and went to the trouble to get Matt’s name from her probation officer (who happened to be another woman he’d once dated).
Matt had been doing litigation so long that nothing really surprised him anymore. But there was still occasions where a case would cross his desk and make him question his decision to become a high-flying lawyer. Cases that left him so bewildered that he would literally lie awake at night wondering what the hell had happened to mankind. Where was the good?
Kelly Kiker was definitely one of those cases. She was trying to do right and had been kicked in the teeth for it.
Why Tom’s campaign had all the feel of being another one of those things to keep him awake at night, he didn’t know—but it sure made the image of Rebecca Lear that kept flashing by his mind’s eye all the more irritating.
While Matt was trying to craft a legal argument for getting Kelly Kiker justice, Rebecca had come back from a Transformations Seminar (Track Four) where she had learned how to self-visualize her alter ego (Visualize success! Visualize your future!). Currently, she was visualizing herself as a campaign strategist, and was trying to figure out how to surf the internet for any information on strip mining.
Fortunately, she had Jo Lynn to keep Grayson occupied. Jo Lynn was her seventy-year-old neighbor who lived alone just the other side of six acres of blackjack oak, cottonwoods, and mesquite trees. Jo Lynn had posted a note on the bulletin board at Sam’s Corner Grocery in Ruby Falls: Looking for something to do a few hours each week. Rebecca had called her; they’d had a lovely chat, and Rebecca hired her to watch Grayson a few hours a week.
Grayson had been resistant at first— “I want Lucy!” he’d screamed. When Rebecca told him he couldn’t have Lucy, he had run into his room and slammed the door shut, crying, “You’re MEEEEEEEEEEEEAN, Mommy!” But then Jo Lynn had come over with a bucket of homemade ice cream and her pet goat, and Grayson had stopped crying for Lucy. Jo Lynn was a spry, “practically widowed” woman (practically, she said, because her husband, who was in a home for Alzheimer’s patients, did not know her) who loved life. She had skin that looked like buttery leather, and laugh lines that seemed to have been hand-tooled onto her face. The sun had yellowed her gray hair, too, which she wore in a girlish ponytail. And oddly, practically everything Jo Lynn wore was tie-dyed—which gave the impression of some horrific laundry accident.
Jo Lynn loved Grayson, spoiled him rotten, and was doing so this very moment, down at the river.
Which left Rebecca with some time to hone her Internet skills. Heretofore, her forays onto the World Wide Web hadn’t been many. Not that she was completely isolated from it—she used it for e-mail like the rest of the world, and she shopped online from Neiman Marcus (God, did she miss that store). She was determined to find some coherent information about strip mining and politics before tomorrow. Because tomorrow, Tom was having a meeting in his new campaign offices, and she’d be damned if she was going to show up without giving Matt Parrish a little something to think about.
Rebecca would bet her entire net worth that she’d met all the exasperatingly arrogant men she could possibly meet in a lifetime, but that guy had to take the cake. She was determined to find a way to rub that smirk right off his face, and visualized, per Track Four, doing just that. With her bare hands. Rambo-style.
Seated in her big square kitchen, she glanced up over her laptop and saw Jo Lynn marching across the lawn, Grayson and the dogs trailing earnestly behind. They clomped up the back porch steps and into the kitchen; Grayson immediately headed for the refrigerator and a box of juice. Jo Lynn helped him climb onto a stool at the kitchen island before wandering over to where Rebecca was working. She peered over her shoulder at the computer screen. “Whatcha doing?”