Heavy Weather

"Oh, with you and I, it's personal," Leo assured him. "You kept me from telling my brother good-bye, face-to-face. I dearly wanted to see my brother, because I had certain important personal business with him, and I might well have gotten past his entourage and seen him privately, but you interfered. And then, in the press of business, it became too late." Leo's brow darkened. "That's not sufficient reason to kill you, I suppose; but then, there's the money. Juanita has no money left; if you're dead, she gets yours, and Jerry gets hers. So your resources go to environmental science, instead of being squandered on the drug habits of some decrepit weakling. Killing you is genuinely helpful. It'll make the world a better place."

"That's wonderful, Leo," Alex said. "I feel so honored to assuage your delicate feelings in this way. I can only agree with your trenchant assessment of my moral and societal worth. May I point one thing out before you execute me? If the shoe were on the other foot, and I were about to execute you, I'd do it without the fucking lecture!"

Leo frowned.

"What's the matter, Leo? An old bulishit artist like you can't bear to let your condemned man have the last word for once?"

Leo raised the pistol. Behind his head, a thin black noose snaked up silently from the forest floor.

"Better kill me now, Leo! Shoot quick!"

Leo took careful aim.

"Too late!"

The smart rope hissed around his neck and yanked him backward. He flew off his feet, his neck snapping audibly. Then he leaped up from the forest floor like a puppet on a string as the serpentine coils of the smart rope hissed around the butt of a cedar branch. There was a fragrant stink of burned bark as the body was hauled aloft.

The hanged man swayed there, violently, dangling from the tree. And at length was still.

IT TOOK ALEX forty-seven hours to get from a smashed forest in Oklahoma to his father's penthouse in Houston. There was a lot of bureaucratic hassle around the federal disaster zone, but the Guard and the cops couldn't stop him from walking, and his luck changed when he got his hands on a motor bicycle. He didn't eat much. He scarcel~ slept. He had a fever. His lungs hurt very badly, and deat was near, death was very near now, not the romantic death this time, not the sweet, drug-addled, transcendent death. Just real death, just death of the cold, old-fashioned variety, death like his mother's death, an absence and a being still, forever. He didn't love death anymore. He didn't even like death anymore. Death was something he was going to have to get over with.

It wasn't easy to get into his father's part of town. The Houston cops had always been mean, tough cops, the kind of cops that had teeth like Dobermans, and heavy weather had not made them kinder. The Houston cops were kind to people like him, when people-like-him looked like people-like-him; but when people-like-him looked the way that he now, the Houston cops in 2031 were the kind of ho collared diseased vagrants off the street and did secret things to them far out in the bayous.

But Alex had his ways. He hadn't grown up in Houston r nothing, and he knew what it meant to have people owe him favors. He got to his father's building without so much as a change of clothes.

And then he had to work his way past his father's own worked his way into the building. He won his own way with the machine in the elevator. The human receptionist at the penthouse floor let him in; he knew the receptionist. And then he found himself waiting in the usual marble anteroom with the giant Aztec mandalas and the orangutan skulls and the Chinese lamps.

He sat there coughing and shivering on a velvet bench, in his filthy paper suit, with his hands on his knees and his head swimming. He waited patiently. It was always like this with his Papa. There were no alternatives, none. If he waited long enough, some gopher would show up and bring him coffee and sweet English biscuits.

After maybe ten minutes the bronze double doors opened at the far end of the anteroom, and in came one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen. She was a nineteen-year-old violet-eyed gamine with a sweet little cap of black hair and a short skirt and patterned hose and high heels.

She took a few tentative steps across the inlaid marble floor and looked at him and simpered. "Are you him?" she said in Spanish.

"Sorry," Alex said, "I don't think I am."

She switched to English, her eyes widening. "Do you want... to go shopping?"

"Not right now, thank you."

"I could take you shopping. I know many nice places in LIStOfl.

"Maybe another time," said Alex, and sneezed vioShe looked at him with deep concern, and turned and left, and the doors closed behind her with a tomblike clunk.

Maybe seven minutes later a gopher showed up with the coffee and the biscuits. It was a new gopher-it was pretty much always a new gopher, gopher being the lowest rung in the Unger organization-but the British cookies were really good, and the coffee, as always, was Costa Rican and fine. He kept the cookies down and had several cautious sips of the coffee, and he physically recovered to the extent that he really began to hurt. He ordered the gopher off for some aspirin, or better yet, codeine. The gopher never returned.

Then one of the private secretaries arrived. He was one of the older secretaries, Señor Pabst, a family loyalist, a nicely groomed old guy with a Mexican law degree and a well-concealed drinking problem.

Pabst looked him over with genuine pity. Pabst was from Matamoros. There were a lot of Unger family co

"I think you'd better get right to bed, Alejandro."

"I have to see El Viejo."

"You're not in any condition to see El Viejo. You're going to do something foolish, something you'll regret. See him tomorrow. It's better."

"Look, will he see me, or won't he?"

"He wants to see you," Pabst admitted. "He always wants to see you, Alejandro. But he won't like to see you like this."

"I think he's past shock by this time, don't you? Let's get this over with."

Pabst led Alex to his father.

Guillermo Unger was a tall, slight man in his late fifties, with carefully waved artificial blond hair the very color of the finest-quality creamery butter. He had blue and very watery eyes behind very thick glasses, the unfortunate legacy of a prolonged experiment with computer-assisted perception. Beneath his medicated pancake makeup, the acne from the hormone treatments was flaring up again. He was wearing a tropical linen suit. His mood seemed-not good, you could never call it good-but positive.

"So you're back," he said.

"I've been staying with Juanita."

"So I understand."

"I think she's dead, papa."

"She's not dead," his father said. "Dead women don't read their E-mail." He sighed. "She's still shacked up with that big dumb bastard of a mathematician! He's taken her off somewhere in New Mexico now. A failed academic, for Christ's sake. A crazy man. She's thrown it all over, she's let him smash her whole career. God only can help her, Alejandro. Because God knows I can't."

Alex sat down. He put his hands to his head. His eyes filled with tears. "I'm really glad she's still alive."

"Alejandro, look at me. Why the paper suit, like a bum off the street? Why the dirt, Alejandro? Why do you come into my office looking this way, couldn't you at least get dean? We're not poor people, we have baths."

"Pa pd, I'm clean as I'm going to get. I've been inside a big tornado. The dirt lodges deep in your skin. You can't wash it out, you just have to wait till it grows out. Sorry."

"Were you in Oklahoma City?" his father asked, with real interest.