Ear to the Ground. David L. Ulin

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СКАЧАТЬ and he’ll probably hire me—not right now, but down the line. In for a penny, in for a pound. Life is long. Grace came over then and scooted next to him, put her arm around him, and smiled to the others. He liked the way she smelled. She crossed her legs, making sure to pull down her skirt. She was pretty. That wouldn’t hurt him at Fox, either.

      Ian’s father still sent him two thousand a month, so he ordered another beer and one for Grace. A guy named Marcus began to talk about his new script—the dreadful tale of an airplane, a bomb, several black nuns from Detroit, and an ex-New York City cop. Meanwhile, under the table, Ian ran his hand lightly up Grace’s thigh. She tried to take it seriously—the story—because this twenty-three-year-old schmuck, Marcus, sold a spec last month to Joel Gold and was at the top of the B-list.

      However, by the time the SECOND NUN pulled an assault rifle on the hijackers, Grace was turned on. Ian had worked his way to her hip, fiddling with the elastic at the edge of her panties and watching her smile. Then he excused himself, went to the bathroom, and rolled a joint, which they smoked alone together in the parking lot, stealing kisses between hits, leaning against the rear quarter-panel of an old Ford Bronco parked in a space marked Ethel Waters. Across the street, a dark figure hustled toward Jones, a valet. He would make a fine character, Ian thought, and he and Grace kissed deeply for a moment, probing like scientists with their tongues.

      Charlie heard them come up the stairs, laughing and drunk; he heard their voices soften as they got inside her apartment, and when they came into the bedroom he heard them rise again as sighs and moans, a steamy call-and-response through the hollow wall. On the floor in front of him, two laptop computers exchanged data; their screens cast an eerie, underwater light. They’re screwing next door, Charlie thought, as he picked up the dog-eared address book by his side and reached for the phone. Flipping through the pages, he wondered who’d mind least if he woke them up.

       THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

      CHARLIE KEPT THINKING ABOUT THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. Ever since the night he’d heard her, like a Santa Ana wind through the bedroom wall, he had found her entering his mind at odd moments: in the supermarket, for instance, or while staring at a computer screen. He wasn’t obsessed—he had never even seen her, for Christ’s sake—just a little, well, curious, if that was still something people felt in this day and age, where everything was up for grabs and yours for the taking, if only you knew better than to ask.

      This morning, as he left his apartment, checking to make sure he had turned both locks, Charlie glanced across the landing at her door. The day was silent, the sun as white as movie light.

      On the sidewalk, Navaro dragged a dirty rag soaked in sudsy water across the hood of his Le Sabre.

      “So tell me,” he asked Charlie. “You renting that thing by the week?”

      “Pardon?”

      “The car.” Navaro nodded at the red Corsica parked across the street. When Charlie didn’t answer, the landlord straightened up and wrung his rag out on the ground. “Never mind. You meet Grace yet?”

      “Pardon?” Charlie felt like he was missing something, like he didn’t understood the words.

      “Grace.” Navaro looked at him though hooded eyes. “She lives next door to you.”

      “Grace?”

      Navaro laughed and kicked his right front tire.

      The Center for Earthquake Studies occupied a former sound stage on Culver Boulevard just west of Overland, catty-corner to the Sony Pictures Studios. Big and boxy and windowless, the building was painted a stucco shade of tan.

      Inside, an arched ceiling hung above the space like a dome of sky, reminding Charlie of a beehive. He nodded hello to a couple of faces he thought he recognized, and moved quickly across the room to a locked, unmarked door.

      It was always the same in the Prediction Laboratory, a subtle shade of twilight, quiet beneath the ever-present electrical hum. With its computer models and maps marked with pushpins tracing earthquake activity, the lab reminded Charlie of a command center, more military than scientific. Kenwood was already at his desk, staring at the wall above it as if deep in thought. Charlie didn’t want to disturb him, but then he realized Kenwood wasn’t working, just looking at a picture of a dark-haired woman. “You should really take it down,” Charlie said, his voice as even as the wind.

      Kenwood didn’t move. His face looked normal, except for the mouth, cut into an exaggerated mask. “You know what the thing of it is?” he whispered. “I keep thinking that in twenty years, she’ll just be someone I loved when I was young. I won’t even remember her. She’ll be obsolete.”

      “People die,” Charlie said.

      “We were married one year.”

      “It’s not your fault.”

      “What’s not his fault?” Charlie turned to see Sterling Caruthers standing in the door. Caruthers was the only other person with a key to the lab, and he made it a habit to show up unannounced, peering through microscopes and at computer screens as if he knew what he was looking for.

      “Nothing,” Charlie said.

      “What did he do?”

      “It’s personal, OK?”

      “What did you do?” Caruthers folded his arms across his chest and glared at Kenwood.

      “We were just talking,” Charlie told him.

      “You should be working. What about Indio?”

      “Indio was nothing.”

      “There were two temblors less than a mile apart.”

      “Tremors like that happen all the time out there.”

      “Listen,” Caruthers said, “if you don’t think Caltech’s getting ready to make a prediction of its own …”

      “Sterling,” Charlie said again, “those quakes don’t add up to a thing.”

      “Then it’s your job to make them add up. We are here to predict an earthquake, gentlemen. Now, if we mark a course from Indio up to L.A. …”

      Caruthers sat down at Kenwood’s work station and began to tap at the keyboard. On the screen, a map of Southern California took shape, a latticework of fine green lines. Charlie stared at it for a moment, thinking there was something delicate in its construction, a fragile balance similar to that of the earth itself. Certainly, he thought, there had to be a way to read that balance consistently. But it would take time to find.

      Caruthers’s voice droned on and on as he plotted points on the computer, and Charlie stopped listening, hearing it as if through a wall. It was like a sound that came at him from the other apartment. In the last week, there had been lots of noises, and once he thought he’d heard someone in the hall, but it was only a cat scratching at his doormat, looking for a place to get warm. Charlie tried to concentrate on what Caruthers was saying, but he couldn’t stop thinking of the girl next door.

       MEETING OF THE MINDS

      IAN СКАЧАТЬ