bill. Which, I might add, is overdue.”
“You’ll get your money,” Tilley said. “But I’m not going to pay for equipment I don’t use.”
“This ain’t Sears, bud. All sales are final. Once you take delivery, the equipment is yours. It don’t matter to me whether you use it or not. All I care about is getting paid.”
“I told you,” Tilley said. “You’ll get your money. Something’s come up, though. I’ve had to adjust my timetable, move things up. You’ll have to give me a little more time.”
“How much more time?”
“I don’t know. Not long.”
The woman sighed. “Listen, bud,” she said, “we all got problems, but if I don’t get my money soon, one of the problems you’re gonna have is me. And, trust me, you don’t want that.”
“Don’t threaten me.”
“It’s not a threat,” the woman said.
Tilley’s teeth ground. “All right. You’ll have your money by the end of next week. Now, what about that other matter?”
“Yeah, about that,” the woman said, the brusqueness gone from her voice. “The little dyke may have made me.”
“What do you mean, made you?” Tilley snapped.
“Yeah, well, it happens.”
“You’re supposed to be a professional.”
“Up yours, donkey kong. It was you that wanted me to get close enough to pick up their conversation on the tape. Aw, fuck it. I’ve had it with this amateur-night shit. You want the tapes, pay me what you owe me. All of it. In cash. Today.”
With an effort, Tilley controlled himself. “I can’t get my hands on that much cash today,” he said, his voice grinding in his throat.
“Tough titty,” the woman said.
“Can you give me till Monday?” Tilley said, despising himself for pleading with this woman. It would clean out his bank account and max out both his personal and company credit cards, but he could probably manage it.
“Fine. You got till Monday. But if you’re not here by twelve hundred with the cash, the tapes go into the bulk eraser.” The line went dead.
Stifling a howl of rage, Tilley slammed the handset down. Something snapped off and flew across the office, ricocheting off a cabinet. The handset hung on the base unit in two pieces, joined by thin coloured wires. Tilley swept the ruined device to the floor. The dial tone taunted him. A quick slash of his boot heel shattered the base unit but failed to silence the tone. He wrapped the cable once around his fist, ripped the jack from the outlet under the desk, and threw the mangled telephone into the wastebasket.
Victoria was awakened by the sound of the telephone ringing, but when she picked it up, all she heard was a dial tone. Had it been part of the dream? she wondered. She looked at the clock beside the bed, the numerals glowing bloody in the darkened bedroom. Jesus, she’d slept most of the afternoon away. And yet she felt as though she hadn’t slept at all.
This was no good, she thought. As much as she might want to, she couldn’t spend the rest of her life in bed. She might as well just kill herself and get it over with, but she knew she no longer had the strength, the courage, or the will. Christ, what a bloody awful mess she’d made of her life. The British had an expression: cock-up. That certainly summed up her life. Cock-up.
She got out of bed and went downstairs. The house was dark and quiet. She turned on some lights and the kitchen radio. It was tuned to Consuela’s “oldies” station, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder singing “Ebony and Ivory,” insipid and obvious. She turned it off. She was hungry but didn’t feel like eating. A nagging urge somewhere inside her called out to her to have a glass of wine, but she ignored it and made a cup of herbal tea instead.
The dream had left her depressed and physically drained, although she couldn’t remember any of it. She opened the sliding glass doors onto the broad kitchen patio where on summer mornings she and Patrick would sometimes eat breakfast together. Today the stones were slick with rain and the rooftops lower down the mountain were shrouded in impenetrable grey mist. She stood in the doorway, breathing the cool, wet air. A pressure between her shoulder blades propelled her forward, out onto the wet stones of the patio, where the rain beaded in her hair and soaked through her blouse. She was aware of the cold, but it was soft and soothing against her skin.
She closed her eyes and saw herself standing naked in the rain in an unkempt garden. It was night, and the pale, diffused light shining through the misted glass walls of the small conservatory off his kitchen cast grotesque, desultory shadows before her.
“For god’s sake,” he said. “Someone will see.”
She turned around. Bill stood in the doorway. “Who?” she said, spreading her arms, feeling the cool rivulets of rainwater running between her breasts and across her belly, tickling though her pubic hair, rushing down her thighs. “There’s no one around, no one will see.” She whirled and the shadows danced.
“You’ll catch your death,” he said.
“It’s not cold. It feels good.”
“Come in,” he said sternly, reaching toward her from the shelter of the retractable awning over the kitchen patio.
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