“So,” I said. My lips were dry, and when I licked them, they stung. “Kevin. Good to see you.”
Kevin smiled and leaned his elbows on the table, bringing his hands together as if in prayer, and regarded me through his specs. I realized that Kevin had maneuvered me to sit with my back against a wall while he sat between me and the only two exits: the back door and the hall we had walked down. Sweat prickled in my armpits. Then I recalled Greer’s baton in my coat pocket, and I drew some comfort from that.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” I said.
“Security cameras,” Kevin said. “Front and back doors. Saw you tiptoe across my front lawn and peek around back.” He cracked his knuckles and continued to regard me.
“Okay,” I said after a long pause. “Now what?”
Kevin scratched his arm again in a preoccupied sort of way. “Now you tell me why you’re here,” he said.
I realized belatedly how stupid this was. I was alone, in an isolated house somewhere outside of Charlottesville, with no cell phone. With a casual bravado I didn’t feel, I said, “This how you treat all your visitors?”
Kevin was grinning now. “Just the ones who are trespassing in the middle of the night. Or were you interested in buying some orchids?”
I looked blankly at him. He seemed disappointed.
“Ollie’s Orchids?” he said. “The sign out front?”
“Missed that,” I managed to say. “Who’s Ollie?”
“Olivia. Woman I bought the business from.”
“Which business?” I asked without thinking. Shit.
Kevin’s grin slowly drained off his face, and he now appraised me like a puzzle he needed to work out. He looked like a graduate student in his tee shirt and jeans, specs, and scruffy beard. “Ah,” he said. “Well, there it is. Which business. I bought the orchid business from Olivia. She wanted to retire, move to Florida. Her father built this place back in the fifties.”
I said nothing. Kelly scratched his arm again, noticed it, stopped.
“But you’re not growing orchids,” I said.
He considered me. “No, I’m not growing orchids. And you, you’re teaching at Blackburne.” The way he said “Blackburne” suggested a sense of loathing that had not been in his voice before.
I took a minute to process this. “Why?” I managed.
He frowned slightly. “Why grow what I grow?” he said. “I’m good at it. It’s lucrative.”
“No, I mean why sell at Blackburne?”
Kevin’s eyebrows went up. “Why? Why the hell not?”
“Just seems like a lot of effort,” I said, keeping my voice at a casual register. “I mean, you’d get better sales in cities, at colleges. Blackburne’s isolated. It’s—”
“Do you ski, Matthias?”
I stared. “What?”
“Ski. It’s a beautiful sport. Trying to go as fast as you can without falling down or running into anything. There’s a kind of purity to it. A contest between you and the slope.”
I looked at the cartoon moose on his tee shirt—it was grinning madly as it apparently zoomed down a snowy hill—and tried to formulate a response.
“People ski for lots of reasons,” Kevin was saying. “Because other people do it and they’re like lemmings. Or because they think it makes them cool.”
“Or they like the clothes,” I said, trying to keep up my end of the conversation. “All that neon.”
Kevin smiled appreciatively, a parent indulging a wayward child. “Or they like the sport of it, the contest,” he said. “The rush as you fly down the side of a mountain fast enough to bash your brains out if you scrape a tree or hit a rock. And every time, something’s different. The snow pack is thicker, or the moguls icier, or the wind is blowing in your face instead of at your back.”
“It’s a game,” I offered.
Kevin nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s it. A game.” He waved a hand around him. “Which is what this is. A game with a nice payout. But instead of a mountain, I’m playing against people.”
“I don’t—”
“People,” he said louder, “with their weaknesses and addictions and their need to take anything to make themselves feel better. People with their bullshit rules and narrow minds. But I provide a service that people want. You know how many customers I have who smoke because they’re sick and nothing else works? Cancer patients, people in constant pain.”
“Like Pelham Greer,” I said. I wondered how quickly I could get the baton out of my pocket if I needed to.
Kevin jabbed a finger at me. “My point exactly. Pelham Greer. There’s a guy who got injured in the service of his country, a country whose government won’t pay for a surgery that could make his life infinitely better. And that same government deems illegal the one thing that makes him feel better, that gets rid of his headaches. Back-ass-ward. Medical marijuana, my friend. It’s the future. Hell, it’s here now.”
A slow-building emotion turned over sluggishly in my chest. It took me a moment to realize what it was: anger at Kelly’s self-justification. “It’s not just pot,” I said. “What about the oxy, the Vicodin? And you aren’t selling to cancer patients at Blackburne.”
Kevin narrowed his eyes. He reached below the table for his waist—I thought he was scratching his stomach—and when he brought his hand back above the top of the table, I saw that he was holding a knife. It was broad, with a serrated edge like a shark’s mouth, the other edge polished and gleaming so I could see, even in the weak light, the sweep of the blade curve upward to a point. It looked like something you could use to kill and butcher a wild hog.