W Is for Wasted

wagons. Any hint of trouble, they close ranks. Shit. Gotta go. Bye.”
    The line went dead though he was still tuned into her end by way of the pen mike. Pete heard a door open and a muffled exchange. Mary Lee said, “Wrong number.”
    A few seconds later, the door shut and there was silence. She and Willard must have moved into the living room.
    What he’d been listening to wasn’t romance. It appeared Mary Lee and this fellow were in cahoots, but what was the object of the exercise? Linton Reed, obviously, but in what context? Pete swapped out the tapes, inserting a blank on the off chance another call might transpire while he was gone. Once he was back at his desk, he put the recording into his player and listened to it twice. At first, he was annoyed he couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Clearly, Mary Lee Bryce and Owen Pensky were trying to get the goods on Linton Reed, and if Pete hoped to profit, he needed to know what he was talking about. Faulty information was useless. “Glucotace” was the word he’d missed. He deciphered it on the third go-round and figured it must be a medical condition, maybe a test of some kind. There’d also been mention of cooking numbers, which must be what it sounded like. You cook numbers, you’re slanting the results. That’s why Linton’s getting the big grant put so much at stake. He worried the subject, turning it this way and that. As far as he could tell, there was only one interpretation. Linton Reed had been falsifying data. He wasn’t sure how Mary Lee picked up on it, but she’d known him in the past and apparently, she’d been an early victim of his shady manipulations.
    At 5:00, he gave up, locked the office, and headed for home. He was just pulling into his garage when he had a flash. He’d been thinking he couldn’t move forward until he filled in the blanks, and how was he to do that when he didn’t have a clue? What occurred to him was that all he had to do was go over to the medical library at St. Terry’s and have somebody look it up. Linton Reed was vulnerable. Pete had no idea how, but he knew Owen Pensky and Mary Lee Bryce were closing in on him. Judging from their phone chat, the good Dr. Reed hadn’t quite caught on yet. Pete would be doing him a personal service by alerting him to the danger. There might even be a way to head off trouble, which was bound to be worth something to a bright young fellow with a rich wife and his whole life ahead of him.

14
    The route from Santa Teresa to Bakersfield isn’t complicated, but there aren’t any shortcuts. I could drive north on the 101 and head east on Highway 58, which meandered a bit but would finally put me out on the 99 a few miles north of Bakersfield. Plan B was to drive south and cut over to Interstate 5 on the 126. It was going to take me two and a half hours either way.
    I went south, in part to avoid passing the town of Lompoc, where my Kinsey relatives were entrenched. My grudge against my mother’s side of the family was predicated on the fact that they were only an hour away and never once made contact in the three decades following my parents’ death when I was five. I’d enjoyed feeling righteous and I’d taken great satisfaction in my sense of injury. Unfortunately, the conclusions I’d drawn and the assumptions I’d made were dead wrong. I’d taken the Kinseys to task only to find out there was far more to the story than I’d known, and while I was willing to admit my error, I didn’t like to be
reminded
of it.
    I wasn’t sure why it hadn’t occurred to me to hold my father’s family to the same strict accounting. Where had they been all these years? As it turned out, they’d been in Bakersfield, which seemed curiously remote. Geographically, it was only 150 miles away, but located in an area of the state through which I seldom traveled. Somehow that afforded them a pass in the matter of my resentment. Contributing to the difference in my attitude was the fact that my rage had begun to bore me, and my long whiny tale of woe had become tedious even to my own ears. As much fun as I’d had being irate, the drama had become repetitive. I could probably still wring sympathy from a stranger, but the recital had taken on a certain rote quality that lacked energy and conviction.
    I tuned into the moment at hand. The sky was a washed-out blue, contrails like chalk marks beginning and ending for no apparent reason. Sunlight caught the telephone wires and turned them