Blackwater Sound

‘Is anyone supposed to know about Roy besides you and me?’

Johnny shook his head.

‘Is even Dad supposed to know? Or Jeb Shine?’

‘No. Roy’s a secret. Just between us.’

‘So why did you do that, Johnny?’

He took a breath and his hand went into his pocket.

‘You need to think, Johnny. You have to organize your thoughts, deliberate before you say or do things.’

‘I’m too reckless,’ he said. ‘I have low impulse control.’

‘Johnny, listen to me. You’re a fine brother. I’m proud of you. You’ve been a great help to me lately. But we’re at a crucial juncture. No rashness allowed. Self-discipline, restraint. We have to be very careful, Johnny. Very very careful with everything we say or do.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I let you down.’

He drew the knife out of his pocket and opened it. His mouth was crimped. He blinked his damp eyes.

‘No, Johnny, wait. You don’t need to do that.’

Morgan stood up, came quickly around her desk. But he’d already peeled the bandage off the thumb of his left hand. The cap of his thumb was scabbed over.

Morgan made a grab for his hand, but Johnny swung his back to her.

He hunched over and pressed the blade against the tip of his thumb. He gritted his teeth, then clamped his eyes and balled his hand into a fist. With a low growl, he shaved off the scab and a layer of bloody flesh beneath it. Blood washed down his hand.

Morgan groaned and looked away. She took a full breath, then snatched up a wad of tissues from her desk and took hold of his hand, pressing the tissues to the wound.

‘It hurts,’ he said.

‘I know, I know.’ Morgan put her arm around his shoulder. ‘I wish you wouldn’t do these things, Johnny. It’s not necessary. Really, it’s not.’

‘I need negative reinforcement,’ he said. ‘That’s the only way I’m ever going to learn.’

She kept her arm around his shoulder until he stopped trembling. When he grew still, she gripped his chin and turned his face to hers. She leaned close and kissed both his teary eyes, then smoothed a hand across his cheek and stepped back.

‘Now you’re better. Aren’t you? The pain is all gone.’

He looked at her and nodded.

‘Some of it.’

‘I want you to stay here,’ she said. ‘Pull yourself together. I’ll be back in a minute and we’ll go home. You can choose what you want for dinner. Burger King, pizza, anything you want, Johnny.’

As Morgan approached her father’s office, Jeb Shine stepped from his doorway and peered at her over the frames of his reading glasses. He was a tall, hump-shouldered man. Bald, with a half-assed ponytail he plaited together from his stringy fringe hair. He was wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt printed with yellow hula girls and pink flamingoes. His khaki shorts were rumpled and he wore his usual pair of rubber sandals. Same age as her father, but dressed like a college kid on perpetual spring break.

‘Got a minute, Morgan?’

‘Not really.’

‘It’s important. Quite important.’ He stepped aside, bowed at the waist, and motioned her into his office. But she held her place in the hallway.

‘If it’s about payroll,’ she said, ‘we don’t need to cover that again. Just find another creative solution, stretch us out a little longer. A week, ten days, that’s all we need. Things’ll be fine.’

‘I’m fresh out of creative solutions, Morgan. There isn’t a bank left in South Florida that hasn’t turned us down. We’ve depleted our rainy-day fund. We’re a dime away from being flat broke. Short of a bag of money showing up on my desk by next Friday, all the payroll checks are going to bounce.’

‘One week, Jeb. That’s all I need. Seven days. You’ll see. I have a deal working.’

‘What kind of deal?’

‘Don’t worry about it, Jeb. Have I let you down yet?’

He looked at her for several moments. When he spoke, his voice was as gloomy as the haze in his eyes.

‘It’s more than the payroll, Morgan. And I think you know that.’

He walked over to his desk and pushed aside a pile of folders and took a perch. His thick, white, hairless legs dangling. Despite his island-boy clothes, Jeb was as pasty as a hibernating mole.

‘On top of everything else the spark plasma furnace went down again.’

She sighed and came into his office and shut the door behind her. Lately, Jeb had developed a nodding habit, as if he were constantly consulting some inner voice. He nodded now as he stared down at the weave of the carpet.

‘It was working fine, DC voltage pulses steady. We were getting excellent results. Better than the liquid phase sintering oven, all that microgravity stuff. This is much better. Good deflection temperatures, dimensional tolerance, the tensile elongation modules all running fine. Ran perfectly for the last few weeks, no sign of anything wrong. Then suddenly it shut down. We’re trying to track down the problem now. Should have it back on-line by morning.’

‘And that’s what you wanted to tell me.’

He looked up at her and nodded to himself.

‘You know, Morgan, I was never much of an accountant. This CFO thing, it’s always been a joke. Me and A.J. were just a couple of tech guys, lab rats. We didn’t give a shit about money. Only reason I got stuck taking care of the books was because A.J. was so damn bad at it. But it’s never been something I relished.’

She kept her tone relaxed, working up a little smile.

‘But you do it so well, Jeb.’

He scratched at his bare knee, avoiding her eyes.

‘So today, I was going over the quarterlies, looking for expenses to trim, some way to get beyond this crisis.’ He nodded at the far wall. ‘It’s been a while since I took a good look at the books. I’ve been a little lax, letting you and the real accountants run the show. I’ve been so involved with setting up the new furnaces.’

‘Is there a point here, Jeb? I’m really very tired.’

Jeb closed his eyes and nodded gravely.

‘I found an item I couldn’t explain, Morgan. A distressingly large item tucked away in the fine print.’

She felt the air harden in her lungs.