Market Forces Part 12

She stayed beneath the car. 'What does it look like I'm doing. I'm checking your undercarriage.'

'I thought you'd gone to bed.'

There was no response other than the creak of something metallic being tightened.

'I said I thought you'd gone to bed.'

'Yeah, I heard you.'

'Oh. You just didn't think it was worth answering me.'

From the stillness he knew she had stopped work. He didn't hear the sigh, but he could have cued it, accurate to milliseconds.

'Chris, you're looking at my legs. Obviously I haven't gone to bed.'

'Just making conversation.'

'Well, it's not the most engaging conversational gambit I've ever heard, Chris. I'm sorry I didn't pick up on it.'

'Jesus! Carla, sometimes you can be so--' Anger and dismay at the idea of having a row with his wife's feet gave ground in a single jolt to mirth. It was such a ludicrous image that he suddenly found himself smirking and trying to stifle a snort of laughter.

She heard it and slid out from under the car as if spring-loaded there.

One hand knuckled across her nose and left streaks of grease.

'What's so funny?'

For some reason, the irritation in her voice combined with her rapid ejection from under the car and the grease on her nose drove the final nail into the coffin of Chris's seriousness. He began to cackle uncontrollably.

Carla sat up and watched curiously as he leaned back on the wall and laughed.

'I said what's so . . .'

Chris slid down the wall, spluttering. Carla gave up as a reflexive smile fought its way onto her face.'What?' she asked, more softly.

'It was just,' Chris was forcing the words out between giggles and snorts. 'Just your legs, you know.'

'Something funny about my legs?'

'Well, your feet really.' Chris put his gla.s.s down and wiped at his eyes. 'I, just.' He shook his head and waved a hand with minimal descriptive effect. 'Just thought it was funny, talking to them, you know. Your feet.' He snorted again. 'It's. Doesn't matter.'

She got up from the floor with an accustomed flexing motion and 81went to crouch beside hmL 1 urnmg her hand to present the ungrimed back, she brushed it against his cheek.

'Chris . . .'

'Let's go to bed,' he said suddenly.

She held up her hands. 'I've got to wash up. In fact, I need a shower.'

'I'll come with you.'

In the shower, he stood behind her and ran soaped hands over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, down across her belly and into the V of her thighs. She chuckled deep in her throat and reached back for his erection, hands still gritty with the last of the engine grime. For a while it was enough to lean in the corner of the shower stall together, locked in an unhurried kiss, rubbing at each other languidly in the steam and pummelling jets of hot water. When the last of the dirt and soap had cascaded off them and swirled away, Carla swung herself up and braced her upper body in the corner while her thighs gripped Chris around the waist and her hips ground against this.

It was an inconclusive coupling, so Chris shut off the water and staggered with Carla's arms and thighs still locked around him into the bedroom, where they collapsed giggling onto the bed and set about running through every posture in the manual.

Later, they lay on soaked sheets with their limbs hooked around each other and faces angled together. Moonlight fell in through the window and whitened the bed.

'Don't go,' she said suddenly.

'Go?' Chris looked down in puzzlement. He had slid out of her some time ago. 'I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying here in this bed with you. Forever.'

'Forever?'

'Well, till about six-thirty anyway.'

'I'm serious, Chris.' She lifted herself to look into his face. 'Don't go on this Cambodia thing. Not up against Nakamura.'

'Carla.' It was almost a reprimand the way he said it. 'We've been over this before. It's my job. We don't have any choice. There's the house, the cards, how are we going to cover those things if I'm not driving?'

'I know you've got to drive, Chris, but at Hammett McColl--''It's not the same, Carla. At HM I already had my rep. I've got to carve it out all over again at Shorn, or some snot-nosed junior a.n.a.lyst is going to call me out, and once that starts you're watching your tail forever. If they think you're easing up, going soft, they're on you like f.u.c.king vultures. The only way to beat that is to stay hard and keep them scared. That way you make partner, and from then on it's a Sunday afternoon spin. They can't touch you. No one below partner 82status is allowed to call you out.' A vague disquiet pa.s.sed over him as he remembered what Bryant had told him about Louise Hewitt and the partner called Page. 'And partner challenges are few and far between.

You see them coming. You can negotiate. It's more civilised at that level.'

'Civilised.'

'You know what I mean.'

Carla was silent for a while. Then she rolled away from him and huddled herself into the pillow.

'The disc says Nakamura are going to send Mitsue Jones.'

Chris shifted a little and tucked in behind her. 'Yes, probably. But if you'd stayed to watch the rest of it, you would have seen that Jones hasn't duelled in the last six months. And it won't be her home turf.

There's a good chance they won't even use her because of that. Not knowing the road can get you killed a lot faster than going up against a better driver. And anyway, driving on the same team as Mike Bryant and this other guy Makin, I've got nothing to worry about. Really.'

Carla shivered. 'I saw a profile of Jones a couple of years ago. They say she's never lost a tender.'

'Nor have I. Nor has Bryant as far as I know.'

'Yes, but she's driven over two dozen challenges, and she's only twenty-eight. I saw her interviewed, and she looks scary, Chris. Really scary.

Chris laughed gently against the skin at the nape of Carla's neck.

'That's just camerawork. In the States, she's done centrefolds for Penthouse Online. Pouting lips, the works. She's a f.u.c.king pin-up, Carla.

It's all hype.'

For a moment, he almost believed it himself.

'When is it?' she asked quietly.

'Wednesday next week. Dawn start. I've got to sleep over at the office Tuesday night. You want to come in and stay in the hospitality suites with me?'

'No. I'll go across to Dad's.'

'You could always ask him to come and stay here for a change.' Chris frowned and nuzzled at her back. 'You know I don't like the thought of you sleeping in that s.h.i.thole. I worry about you.'Carla turned round to face him again. It was hard to tell which was uppermost in her expression, affection or exasperation. 'You worry about me? Chris, listen to yourself, will you? Next Wednesday you're out on the road, duelling, and you're worried about me sleeping in some substandard housing. Come on.'

'There's been a lot of violence on that estate,' said Chris doggedly. 'If Ihadmyway '

83lie stopped, not entirely sure what he wanted to say next.

'You'd what?'

He shook his head. 'Doesn't matter. Forget it. I just think, why can't Erik come and stay here with us for a change?'

'You know why.'

Chris sighed. 'Yeah, because I'm a f.u.c.king suited parasite on the lives of honest working men and women.'

'Got it in one.' Carla kissed him. 'Come on, I'll be alright. You just worry, about keeping my s.p.a.ced armour intact. If you come back with the wings all chewed up like last time, you really will see some violence.'

'Oh yeah?'

She jabbed him in the ribs. 'Oh yeah. I didn't put in all that work to have you broadside and stick like a f.u.c.king no-namer. You drive like it matters what happens to your wheels, or that'll be the last b.l.o.w.j.o.b you see this year.'

'Have to go to my usual supplier then. Ow!'

'f.u.c.king piece of s.h.i.t! Usual supplier did you say? Who else are you getting b.l.o.w.j.o.bs from, you piece of---'

'Blowtorch! I thought you said blowtorch.'

Their mingled laughter penetrated the gla.s.s of the window and sounded faintly, in the still of the garden beyond. Had Erik Nyquist been there in the darkness, he would have been forced to admit that what he could hear was, indisputably, the sound of his daughter and the man she had married having fun. He might even have been glad to hear it.

Unfortunately, Erik Nyquist was nearly a hundred kilometres southwest of the laughter, listening instead through paper-thin walls to the sounds of an edge dealer beating his girlfriend to pulp. In the garden, the only witness to the noise of Chris and Carla's hilarity was a large tawny owl who watched the window unwinkingly for a moment, and then turned its attention back to the more pressing matter of disembowelling the half-dead field mouse in its talons.

84TWELVE.

Apparently, it was a long-standing Shorn tradition to do final briefings down among the variously stripped and jacked-up bodies of the company workshops. Chris could see where the custom originated. Nominally, it gave the executives the opportunity to do some corporate bonding with the mechanics overseeing their final vehicle checks. Far more importantly, the scattered flare of welding torches and the stink of scorched metal put the hard edge of reality on what might have otherwise seemed very far removed from the air-conditioned civility of a more conventional briefing room. In Shorn parlance, it avoided any potential ambiguity.

Accordingly, Hewitt kept it brutally short. Keep it tight, don't f.u.c.k up. Come back with the contract. Leave the others in pieces on the road. She thanked the chief mechanic personally for his team's hard work, and walked away.

After she'd gone, Bryant went for Indian carry-out and Chris sat in the open pa.s.senger doorway of the Saab, leafing absently through the background printout on Mitsue Jones, while two mechanics in logo flashed company coveralls strove in vain to find anything worth doing to the engine that Carla had not already done.

'Chris?' It was Bryant, somewhere off amidst the clang and crackle of the body shop. 'Chris, where are you?'

'Round here.'

There was the sound of stumbling, a clatter and cursing. Chris repressed a grin and did not look up from the printout. Ten seconds later Bryant appeared round the opened hood of the Saab, cartons of take-out food in his arms and a huge naan bread jammed into his mouth. He seated himself without ceremony on a pile of worn tyres opposite Chris and started laying out the food. He took the naan bread out of his mouth and gestured with it towards two of the cartons.

'That's yours. Onion bhaji, and dhansak. That's the mango chutney.

Where'd Makin go?'

Chris shrugged. 'Toilet? He looked pretty constipated.'

'Nah, Makin always looks like that. a.n.a.l-retentive.'

A shadow fell across the food cartons and Bryant looked up, biting on the naan again. He talked through the mouthful.

85IN1CK. l our tlRKas In there. Klce there, bpoons."

Makin seated himself with a wary glance at Chris.

'Thanks, Michael.'

There was silence for a while, broken only by the sounds of chewing.

Bryant ate as if ravenous and finished first. He cast glances at both men.

'Make your wills?'

'Why? I'm not going to die.' Makin looked across at Chris. 'Are you?'

Chris shrugged and wiped his fingers, still chewing.

'See how I feel.'

Bryant coughed laughter. Makin allowed himself a small, precise smile. 'Vewy good. It's good to have a sense of humour. I hear they ah big on it at HM. Must make losing more beahable.'

'Yeah.' Chris smiled gently back. 'It can make winning pwetty wad ical too, you should twy it.'

Makin tensed. His gla.s.ses gleamed in the overhead arc light.

'Does the way I speak amuse you?'

'Not weally.'

'Hey, you guys,' Bryant protested. 'Come on.'

'You know, Chwis,' Makin looked down at his open right hand as if considering using it as a fist. Tm not a chess player. Not much of a game player at all. Oh, I know you like symbolism. Games. Humour.

All good ways of avoiding confontation.'

He tossed his fork into the cooling sauces of Chris's carton.

'But tomorrow is a confontation. You can't laugh it away, you can't turn it into a game. Mitsue Jones won't play chess with you. She'll hit you with evything she's got and she'll hit you fast.'

On the last word he clapped his hands violently and his eyes pinned Chris from behind the rectangular-paned screens of his gla.s.ses.