“Whatever, I’ll have to stand up for you in any case, repay you for getting beat up with me when Ronnie McGovern wanted to stand me on my head in the toilet back at Cathy’s.”
Lance grinned a little as the memory came back to him of a giant red-faced kid with hair to match holding a much smaller and even skinnier Andy over a dirty toilet bowl in the high-ceilinged bathrooms of St. Cathleen’s. Andy had been trying to strike McGovern in the crotch and legs as he swung like a slim pendulum over the yellowed water, which no doubt contained the urine of the person holding his ankles. Lance had rushed in and pulled the swinging Andy away from the older boy, who in turn let them both fall to the wet floor in a heap. Ronnie then proceeded to practice his already accomplished soccer kick on the two smaller boys, until both had managed to crawl to the lavatory door and pull it open to call for help. At the moment, it hadn’t been funny at all. Somewhere during the eighteen years that had passed, it had taken on a humorous shellac that all memories not ending in death or extreme bodily injury seemed to accumulate with time.
“Yeah, you owe me big time,” Lance said as he smiled at Andy, who was still shaking his head.
“Well, figure out whatever excuse you’re going to use on these guys, ’cause we’re here,” Andy said as he slid the Audi to a stop near a five-story brick building on an active side street. Lance gazed up at the structure and grimaced before opening his door to let the busy sounds of the city invade the quiet of the car.
The meeting room was unremarkable. The walls were dull beige and, in Lance’s opinion, needed re-painting. The light fixtures above him and Andy were fluorescent and buzzed faintly. There were five chocolate-chip cookies lying on a plate in the center of the oak table that sat between them and the room’s door, along with a pitcher of ice water and two glasses. Lance followed the trails of condensation trickling down the obese sides of the glass that held the water and ice cubes. A clock ticked aggressively on the wall, as if it couldn’t wait to pass the time that its hands groped so desperately at. Andy began to tap his foot on the tile floor at twice the speed of the ticking on the wall, and Lance looked over at his jittering foot.
“This place is nasty,” Andy said, looking around as if seeing their surroundings for the first time. “Why don’t they spend a little money and clean it up? They have meetings with paying clientele in here?” With a disgusted sound, he sat back in his chair and began chew on the side of his cheek.
“I’m guessing since this is just a satellite office they don’t want to put a lot of money into it. Everyone’s gotta keep an eye on overhead these days,” Lance said. Andy made the same disgusted sound, which barely died away before the door opened and two men in dark suits strode into the room.
The first man Lance knew. Howard Cole was tall, well over six feet, and very slender. His head was large and it seemed that most of it was made up of face, as the man’s hairline had retreated almost into nonexistence. His features were exaggerated—his eyes looked to be the size of golf balls and his nose was flattened to reveal two nostrils that opened up like a set of tunnels into the man’s head. His mouth had slim lips, which barely covered a set of enormous horse-teeth. As Howard smiled and extended a pale hand to him, Lance was struck by the idea that if the publishing rep had been born 150 years earlier he would have made a great undertaker in a small western town. The thought curled his mouth to mirror the same polite smile that graced Howard’s countenance. The other man who had entered the room behind the publishing rep was of average height and build, and held a black briefcase lightly in one hand. His eyes appraised Lance coolly and he made no attempt to approach, but instead sat easily into a chair at the far end of the room. Howard, on the other hand, glided across the room with his arm extended.