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Chapter 39

 

TUESDAY, JUNE 14TH

Tuesday, Meg called Dan after the show. He'd talked to her only once since the story of how Puck had saved his life had come out. She'd been somewhere between cool and frosty—after letting him know she was glad he wasn't dead, she didn't have much else to say.

He couldn't really blame her. She hadn't known he was dating Janna at the same time that he was dating her. She apparently thought he hadn't been seeing anyone else—and evidently was offended that he hadn't been exclusively hers. Now she sounded crisply professional. "Puck said you were willing to act as spokesman for the Devil's Point project. We're ready to go on the sale of the land. Can you meet with everyone at my office?"

He leaned back on his couch and closed his eyes. The day had been as tough as Monday. Someone had leaked the story that the three Devil Bombers had started building five other bombs, and notes and journals targeting others sympathetic to the Hellraised had supposedly been found at the scene. Call-ins had been heavy and draining. "What time?"

"Three."

Dan looked at his watch—already two. He'd have to shower, shave again, change clothes . . .

He sighed heavily, hoping she'd get the hint. She didn't. Instead, she said, "It's important, Dan. Really important—to Puck and to a lot of other Hellraised souls who won't find a good second chance elsewhere."

"I can be there." He rolled his eyes at Fetch, who sat in the corner of the living room sucking on one of his toes. Fetch grinned at him. Dan grinned back.

The meeting turned out to be as awful as he'd dreaded. By five o'clock the environmentalists were calling the old-money contingent crazed imperialistic capitalist and planet killers. By six, the old money was calling the environmentalists tree-hugging fascists and eco-Nazis. The Hellraised contingent sat in the middle of the melee grinning over their future clients from both camps.

By seven, Dan had a headache that would have killed a blue whale. Or a blue chip stock. To keep one shoe of his hyperbole firmly planted in each camp.

He listened and listened, and no one got anywhere near middle ground. The temperature in the room hit 90, with tempers fifteen or twenty degrees hotter than that. Finally, Dan slammed his fist on the table and said, "Hey assholes! Listen to me! Sell the Hellspawn the land—which is all we came to do—and let's get out of here. None of you people are going to convince anyone else that you're right. None of you will shut your mouths long enough to listen to what anyone else has to say. And you don't want to listen anyway. You just want everyone else to listen to you." He stood up, his voice getting louder. "Well, I'll tell you something that might surprise you. Nobody wants to hear what you have to say, either. You're ALL full of shit, and you're ALL assholes!"

Meg glared at him, and he realized that somewhere along the way, he'd crossed the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, at least in her eyes. She said, "I was handling the meeting."

The chip on her shoulder plus four hours of listening to idiots got the better of him. Before he could stop himself, he blurted out, "No you weren't. You were trying to build a consensus between people with no common ground. We don't need a consensus. All we need is for these people to sell their land, for those people to buy it, and for them to turn around and sell it to the Hellraised. That's all. It's so simple. And either the econuts came to sell their land or they didn't. And if they didn't, they should just shut the fuck up and go home. And either the imperialist assholes came to buy it or they didn't. That's all anybody needs to know."

One of the consortium members said, "This is the man who's going to make our selling land to the Hellraised acceptable?"

"No," Meg said, her voice cool. "I don't think he is."

Dan's eyes narrowed. "Well, just so there won't be any doubt, sweetheart, I'll guarantee you that I'm not. You want somebody to sell your project, it can be somebody else."

He started to leave. Puck rose from the far end of the table. "Dan," he said.

Dan's gut knotted. He turned slowly and looked at the devil. "Puck, I owe you for saving my life. If you insist that this is want you want me to do to repay you, then I will." He stared at the roomful of angry faces glaring up at him. "But I don't want to help anymore. You—yes. But not these people." He put his hand on the doorknob and twisted. "If you decide you still want me to tell people I'm in favor of the project, you can tell me about it tonight."

The whole drive home, he stewed. But by the time he'd changed into a pair of shorts and his purple, orange, and green macaw shirt, dropped back into his easy chair, and put his feet up, he realized he'd been wrong. Big-time wrong. He'd been incredibly rude to Meg, and Meg hadn't done anything to deserve it. He'd been rude to a group of people who had neither needed nor wanted his opinion of them.

I was tired, he told himself. I've been dealing with people as ignorant and frustrating as those were all day long. Well, all week long.

He closed his eyes.

Actually, shithead, he told himself, that's what you do for a living. If you can't cut it anymore without blowing up at a friend or the people your friend is working with, maybe you should look into a different job. One that keeps you away from people.

Things were already bad enough between Meg and him. The second he saw the news with Janna—obviously in love with him—giving a statement to the press, he knew that Meg was going to be angry. Hurt. She was going to feel cheated and lied to.

And now he'd humiliated her in front of the people whose deal she was trying to broker by acting like an asshole. He'd said a lot of things that he might have meant, but that he didn't have any real right to say. Not then, anyway. Not there. No one was paying to hear his opinions at that moment.

He groaned "Fetch," he said, "I said some truly rotten things to Meg. You think she'll forgive me?"

Fetch looked at him and slowly shook his head.

"Thanks for the reassurance, dude." He scratched the back of the imp's head, and it began to make a sort of rumbling, purring noise. With the other hand, he picked up the phone and dialed Meg's number. He got her machine. "Meg, if you're there, pick up. I need to grovel."

She didn't answer.

He called her office, and got the machine there, too.

"Meg, I'm sorry I was such a jerk. I could give you a lot of reasons, but none of them would make the situation any better. Please forgive me."

He waited twenty minutes, hoping that she'd been en route to her uncle's place from work, and tried her machine again. This time Ed picked up.

"Ed. It's Dan."

"I recognized the voice on the machine the first time. You made quite an ass of yourself at the meeting."

"I know. May I talk to Meg? I need to beg forgiveness."

"She isn't home yet. But I wouldn't worry about it too much. Your outburst was like a bucket of ice water dumped on the participants. They shut up after you left and got to work. I'll thank you here and now—if you hadn't blown up like that, we'd probably still be there."

"That was what I was afraid of," Dan admitted. "And I had a long, shitty day."

"Well, the land was sold, then sold again, all the documents were signed, sealed, and copied, inordinate amounts of money changed hands—including enough that went directly to Meggie that she'll be able to buy that house she's been wanting. I should be able to get my guest bedroom back now."

Dan breathed a relieved sigh. "You don't know how pleased I am to hear that."

"Why? Did you have designs on my guest bedroom?"

Dan laughed again.

Ed laughed with him. "Don't be too relieved, though. I think Megan is still royally pissed at you."

"She has every right to be. Please have her call me when she gets there. Tell her I'm—"

His doorbell rang. "Could you hang on for just a second?"

"Of course."

He ran to his door. To his surprise, Meg stood at the door. "Meg!"

"I can't stay—"

"I'm so sorry—"

"—and I didn't stop by to hear you beg forgiveness. As far as I'm concerned, we don't have a personal relationship, so your behavior affected no one but you. The people who were there got to see the real Dan Cooley, and they weren't impressed, but that's your problem, not mine."

She didn't look angry. She just looked cold. Professional. He realized he wanted to see her radiant smile and hear her loony laugh, and at the same instant he realized that he probably never would again. That had been reserved for the private Dan Cooley, not the public one.

Meg continued. "Puck still wants you to represent the Devil's Point project, and so do the rest of the Hellraised who were present at the meeting. They've put together a standard 'spokesman' contract, I've vetted it to make sure there aren't any elements that shouldn't be in there—"

"Like selling my soul."

"—like selling your soul—though if I were you, I wouldn't worry. They'll probably get it at bargain prices a few years down the road. If you don't mind, I'd like for you to sign it. I need to get back—I'm not through with the final portion of the meeting yet."

"Can I look it over for a couple of days?"

Her eyes went even colder, and got that distant look in them again, and she said, "Don't you trust me?"

The woman who had dedicated her life to doing good law for the financially disadvantaged accusing him not trusting her—that hurt. "Yes, I do," he said. "I can't think of anyone in the world I trust more than you. But I don't want to sign a contract that might in some way conflict with previous obligations. I have previous obligations through my work with the radio station, and you don't know what they are or how they might conflict."

She nodded. "Then certainly, look it over tonight. The Devil's Point development team has a press conference scheduled for tomorrow, though, to announce the sale of the land and the planned number of outside jobs the Devil's Point contract will create. I'd like to know you are in our camp by the time we meet the press tomorrow."

"Our camp . . ." he said to her retreating back.

He closed the door slowly, and went back to his chair, and sat down, frowning. Then he realized the phone was still off the hook. He picked it up. "Ed? You still there?"

"Yes."

"Sorry about that. Meg was just here."

"Oh. Then I guess everything's okay again."

Dan thought about that for a second. "No. I don't think it is."

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