Velocity

fourteen percent. Excellent in this market. Even after Barbara’s expenses, the principal is growing steadily.”
    “We’re smartly invested,” Billy agreed. “But I’m lying awake at night worrying is there a way anyone could get at the pot?”
    “The pot? You mean Barbara’s money? If you’ve got to worry about something, worry about an asteroid hitting the earth.”
    “I worry. I can’t help it.”
    “Billy, I drew up those trust documents, and they’re tighter than a gnat’s ass. Besides, with you guarding the vault for her, nobody’s going to pinch a nickel.”
    “I mean if something happens to me.”
    “You’re only thirty-four. From my perspective, you’re barely past puberty.”
    “Mozart died younger than thirty-four.”
    “This isn’t the eighteenth century, and you don’t even play the piano,” Harry said, “so the comparison makes no sense.” He frowned. “Are you sick or something?”
    “I’ve felt better,” Billy admitted.
    “What’s that patch on your forehead?”
    Billy gave him the story about a knothole in a walnut plank. “It’s nothing serious.”
    “You’re pale for summer.”
    “I haven’t been fishing much. Look, Harry, I don’t have cancer or anything, but a truck could always hit me.”
    “Have they been after you lately, these trucks? Have you had to dodge a few? Since when were you baptized a pessimist?”
    “What about Dardre?”
    Dardre was Barbara’s sister. They were twins, but fraternal, not identical. They looked nothing alike, and were radically different people, as well.
    “The court not only pulled her plug,” Harry said, “they cut it off and took out her batteries.”
    “I know, but—”
    “She’s an Energizer Bunny of Evil, all right, but she’s as much history as the Lebne and string cheese I ate for lunch a week ago.”
    Barbara and Dardre’s mother, Cicily, had been a drug addict. She had never identified their father, and on their birth certificates, the twins had their mother’s maiden name.
    Cicily wound up in a psychiatric ward when the girls were two, and they were removed from their mother’s custody and placed in a foster home. Cicily died eleven months later.
    Until they were five, the sisters had been shuffled through the same series of foster homes. Thereafter they were separated.
    Barbara had never seen Dardre again. In fact when, at the age of twenty-one, she tracked down and tried to reestablish a relationship with her sister, she had been rebuffed.
    While not as self-destructive as Cicily, Dardre had acquired her mother’s taste for illegal chemical compounds and the party life. She found her clean-and-sober sibling to be boring and uncool.
    Eight years later, after extensive media attention to the case, when the insurance company settled millions on Barbara to pay for her long-term care, Dardre developed a deep emotional attachment to her sister. As Barbara’s only known blood relative, she had brought legal action to be declared sole trustee.
    Fortunately, at good Harry’s urging, immediately following their engagement, Billy and Barbara had drawn and signed, in this office, simple wills naming each other as heirs and executors.
    Dardre’s history, tactics, and unconcealed avarice had earned her the judge’s scorn. Her action had been dismissed with prejudice.
    She had tried to get another court to reinstate her case. She had not been successful. They hadn’t heard from her in two years.
    Now Billy said, “But if I died—”
    “You’ve selected contingent trustees to replace you. If you’re run down by a truck, one of them will.”
    “I understand. Nevertheless—”
    “If you and I and George Nguyen are run down by trucks,” Harry said, “in fact if each of us is run down by three trucks, willing candidates for trustees, acceptable to the court, are standing by and ready to take over. Until they could be installed, day-today trust affairs would be in the hands of a bonded trust-management firm.”
    “You’ve thought of everything.”
    His massive mustache lifting with his smile, Harry said, “Of all my accomplishments, I’m proudest of never having yet been disbarred.”
    “But if anything happened to me—”
    “You’re making me nuts.”
    “—is there anyone besides Dardre that we should worry about?”
    “Like who?”
    “Anyone.”
    “No.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “No one who could take Barbara’s money?”
    Leaning forward, arms on his desk, Harry said,