CHAPTER 80

Antioch March was enjoying another pineapple juice and studying the TV screen in the Cedar Hills Inn.

The hotel was so posh that it featured a very special television – one with 4K resolution. This was known as ultra-high-definition video. It was nearly double the current standard: 1920 wide by 1080 high.

It was ethereal, the depth of the imagery.

He was presently watching an underwater video, shot in 4K, flowing from his computer, via HDMI cable, onto the fifty-four-inch screen.

Astonishing. The kelp was real. The sunfish. The eels. The coral. All real. The sharks especially, with their supple gray skin, their singular eyes, their choreography of motion, like elegant fencers.

So beautiful. So rich. You were there, you were part of the ocean. Part of the chain of nature.

There was not, as yet, much content in 4K – you needed special cameras to shoot it – but it was coming. If only the family on the rocks at Asilomar had lingered but a minute longer he might have given the Get their ultra-high-definition deaths: his Samsung Galaxy featured such a camera.

Somebody’s not happy …

The landline phone rang and he snagged it, eyes still on the waving kelp, so real it might have been floating in the room around him.

The receptionist announced that a Fred Johnson had arrived.

‘Thank you. Send him over.’ Wondering why that pseudonym.

A few minutes later Christopher Jenkins was at the door.

March let his boss into the entryway. A handshake and then into the luxurious suite. Once the door was closed, a hug too.

Mildly reciprocated.

Jenkins, who, yes, resembled March somewhat, was in his fifties, broad-shouldered, compact – a good foot shorter than his employee – and tanned. His hair was blond, close-cropped and flat against his skull. A military bearing because he had been military. He glanced up at March’s shaved head.

‘Hmm.’

‘Had to.’

‘Looks good.’

Jenkins didn’t really think so, March could see, but he’d never say a word against his favorite employee’s appearance. To March, Jenkins seemed no older than when the two men had met six years ago. He was a bit heavier, more solid. Jenkins had his own Get, but it wasn’t March’s. Amassing money was what numbed Jenkins’s demon. Whether buying a Ferrari for himself or taking a boy out for a thousand-dollar dinner or finding a Cartier bauble … that was what kept Jenkins’s Get at bay.

Odd, how their respective compulsions worked. Symbiotic.

‘Carole says hello.’

‘And to her too.’

One of the girls Jenkins had dated on and off. March wasn’t sure why he kept the façade. Who cared nowadays? Besides, you can’t cheat the Get, which knows what you want and when you want it, so why complicate things? Life’s too short.

‘Your drive good?’

‘Fine.’ Jenkins had a faint Bostonian drawl. He’d lived in a suburb of Bean Town before the army.

March had ordered the best – well, the most expensive – wine on the list, a Château Who Knew from France. A 1995. Had to be good: it was six hundred dollars. It was already open. He’d had a taste. It was okay. Not as good as Dole.

‘Well. Excellent!’ Jenkins said, looking over the label – all Greek to him, a private joke, considering March’s heritage.

He allowed Jenkins to pour him some of the sludgy wine and they tapped glasses, toasting their success. Over the past few days they’d made several hundred thousand dollars.

‘Always loved it here, the Cedar Hills.’

Chris Jenkins reminded March of the people in those infomercials: the handsome man, next to the beautiful woman, on a Florida or Hawaiian porch, boats in the background, palms nearby, talking about how they’d made millions with hardly any effort in the real-estate market or by inventing things. In Jenkins’s case, selling something very, very rare and valuable.

The men sat on the couch. They regarded the crystal TV screen, on which fish swam and kelp waved, hypnotic.

‘Good picture. Four K. Man, that’s beautiful. We’ll keep that in mind.’ Jenkins set the glass down. ‘Now where are we?’

‘All good.’

‘What about Otto Grant? I heard the news. They seemed to buy it.’

‘They did.’

March paused the shark video and called up another video file on his computer. The video, a high-definition (only 2K), showed Otto Grant, kicking in the last moments of his life, trying to get leverage to pull himself up and somehow unhook the rope from where March had tied it to stage the suicide. He struggled for a time, then shivered and went limp.

‘Did he come?’

There was a rumor that upon being hanged, men sometimes ejaculated. Neither had been able to confirm this.

‘Just peed.’

‘Ah.’

‘I left evidence in the shack that the man he hired is from Chicago and has already left to go back there, left right after the incident in the hospital. Solid leads. Phone calls, proxies, emails. They’ll sniff up that tree for a while.’

‘Good.’

‘Now, you were mentioning a new job.’ March knew Jenkins had come to Carmel for another reason, but he wouldn’t’ve made up the part about a new job entirely.

‘Client’s in Lausanne, so he wants it to happen anywhere but Europe. He mentioned Latin America.’

‘Any preferences as to how?’

‘He was thinking a fall, maybe a cable car.’

March laughed. He could hotwire an ignition, he could disable an elevator. That was the extent of his mechanical engineering skills. ‘I don’t think so. A bus?’

‘A bus would work, I’d think.’

‘Send me the details.’

Glasses clinked again. March had sipped the wine once. He’d also eyed the pineapple juice.

Jenkins laughed and handed the juice glass to March, making sure their fingers brushed once more. ‘Just don’t mix it with Saint Estèphe.’

March let his boss’s hand linger on his for a moment.

‘Dinner?’ Jenkins asked.

‘Not hungry.’

March never was, not at times like this. All the work, hoping it would pay off. The way he planned out the jobs, well, it was fragile. There was a lot that could go wrong. Wasting all that time and money, the risk. Anyway, what it came down to: when the Get was hungry, March was not.

‘Oh, here. I brought you something.’ Jenkins dug in his Vuitton backpack. He handed over a small box. March opened it. ‘Well.’

‘Victoria Beckham.’

They were sunglasses, blue lenses.

Jenkins said, ‘Italian. And the lenses change color in the sun. Or get darker. I don’t know. I think there are instructions. You’ll love them.’

‘Thanks. They’re really something.’

Though March’s first thought was: wearing bright blue sunglasses on a job, where you would want to be as inconspicuous as possible?

Maybe I’ll go to the beach sometime. On vacation.

Would you let me do that, Get? Just relax?

He tried them on.

‘They’re you,’ Jenkins whispered, squeezing March’s biceps.

March put the glasses away and picked up the remote.

Click. The hypnotic ballet of sea creatures resumed on the TV. ‘Extraordinary. Four K,’ he said reverently. ‘Who shot this?’

‘Teenager, believe it or not.’

‘Four K. Hmm. Wave of the future.’

Jenkins asked, ‘What’s the plan?’

‘We need to stop her.’

‘That investigator? Dance?’

‘That’s right.’ He explained that the attempt to injure her boyfriend, somebody named Boling, hadn’t worked out. Now they needed to do something more efficient.

‘We’re leaving tomorrow. Why do anything? We’ll be a thousand miles away by noon.’

‘No. We have to stop her. She won’t rest until she gets us.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes,’ March said, staring at the sharks.

‘What do you have in mind?’

Dance, he’d seen when he’d slipped into her Pathfinder at the Bay View crime scene, was presently attending a concert at the Performing Arts Center in Monterey. He’d thought momentarily about staging a final attack there, with the chance that she’d be severely injured or killed. But coming after Grant’s suicide that would be suspicious.