Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(25)

She does.

“OK. Pretty nondescript.”

“I’ll come in slow so you don’t miss me.”

“No, I’m glad it’s nondescript, ’cause you’re gonna leave it there and come with me.”

“I don’t want to go into the city right now.”

“I understand. That’s why I’m taking you to one of our safe houses. We put high-value witnesses who get threats there if law enforcement won’t step up.”

“Good. That’s real good. Thank you. I can’t th-tha . . .”

“Charley, drive now. Feelings later. OK? I’ll see you in a few hours.”

Drive now, feelings later, she says to herself as she hangs up the phone.





II





11

“Can we maybe do something about the glare?”

Cole Graydon isn’t sure who asked this question.

He’s one of seven people seated around the executive conference room’s frosted-glass table. The others include three members of his company’s legal team, the director of marketing, the chairman of his board, and Dr. Nora Suvari, head of gastrointestinal treatments for Graydon Pharmaceuticals.

It had to have been Nora, he realizes. She’s the only one looking at him and not the eighty-inch LCD screen at the front of the room.

Up until a few seconds ago, she was doing a pretty good job of pretending to watch the final edit of this idiotic video they’ve gathered to approve.

A better job than he was; that’s for sure.

For most of the presentation he’s been looking out the window at a group of kayakers down in La Jolla Bay. Their tiny yellow oars wink in the sun. Their kayaks are bright red, making them look like bits of shark bait determined to avoid their fate. Will they manage a full loop around the bay before the video ends?

That this is the question occupying his mind on the eve of their biggest drug launch in three years—well, it won’t be the first secret he’s kept since taking the reins of his late father’s company.

But Nora’s question, and her vacant stare, makes it clear he’s not the only one bored stiff. The glare to which she just referred is falling across the screen of her iPad, not the screen at the front of the room. When she catches him looking, she closes a Pinterest page and quickly replaces it with the first projection spreadsheet she can open.

He fights the urge to cackle. Instead he hits a button on the remote control next to his laptop. The wall of glass to his left darkens. The view’s still there, but now it looks shadowy and slightly unreal.

He owes his life to that view.

Maybe not his life—maybe just his sanity. The compact skyline of La Jolla’s village and the flower garland of mansions that crown the bluffs overlooking the bay have offered him countless mental escapes from the soul-crushing responsibilities of running this company, most of which bear down on him in this gleaming, glass-filled room.

He should chide Nora; he knows it. Call her out for pinning wedding dresses when they should be perfecting every detail of one of the most expensive launches in their company’s history. He’s pretty sure that’s why the chairman of the board, Tucker Albright, is giving him a long look now.

If Cole stays silent, Tucker will no doubt report this exchange to Cole’s mother, who may well see it as cause to hop in her hired car and be chauffeured down from her horse ranch in Rancho Santa Fe, just to see how Cole is handling everything. Which, after some prodding, she’ll admit is code for, I’m here to find out whether or not you’re about to run our family’s company into the ground again.

He’s not going to upbraid Nora. Not now, not later. She’s a Harvard PhD who came to Graydon with dreams of eradicating stomach-eating parasites in developing nations. Today she’s responsible for a piece-of-shit heartburn drug they’re about to market as the only thing that will keep America’s stomachs from exploding.

I know, Nora, he thinks. I had big dreams, too.

Tucker Albright, on the other hand, is one of the country’s wealthiest beef distributors, whose only qualification for running Graydon’s board is that he’s chummy with Cole’s mother.

But he’s still studying Cole with icy focus, so Cole gives the man a warm smile.

Tucker nods and returns his attention to the giant television screen.

Caught, Cole has no choice but to watch the video.

Again.

For the hundredth time.

On-screen, an actress whose last big role involved getting devoured by man-eating slugs in a gas station bathroom sits under dramatic lighting that would better serve an interview with a Syrian refugee. The music is like Chopin on laudanum. The actress is describing, in a tone more appropriate to the recounting of a violent sexual assault, how heartburn has taken over her life. How she no longer enjoys food. How eating became a source of constant fear and worry. There’s a shot of her standing outside the window of a New York deli, staring at the sandwiches inside like an orphan watching a happy family enjoy Christmas dinner.

The video is one of several that will post to a website scheduled to launch next week, www.EnjoyFoodAgain.com. While the site will be scrubbed of any obvious clues it’s owned and operated by Graydon Pharmaceuticals, more than half of the visitors who flock to it, the ones sharing the most dramatic stories of heartburn-related trauma, will be those hired by a marketing firm with one explicit goal: to convince the people who end up there by chance that they’re suffering from a completely bullshit condition that was invented by Graydon’s marketing department.