Household Gods Read Online Free Page A

That’s gonna put a hitch in your get-along,
folks. Now Louise is over that jackknifed truck on the Long Beach in Helicop—”
    Nicole switched stations again. Suddenly, she was very, very tired. Too tired to keep her mad on, too tired almost to hold her head up. Her fingers drummed on the wheel, drummed and drummed. The natives, she thought dizzily, were long past getting restless. Her stomach tied itself in a knot. What to do, what to do? Get off the freeway at White Oak and go back to surface streets? Or crawl past the wreck and hope she’d make up a little time when she could floor it again?
    All alone in the passenger compartment, she let out a long sigh. “What difference does it make?” she said wearily. “I’m screwed either way.”
    Â 
    She pulled into the parking lot half an hour late—twenty-eight minutes to be exact, if you felt like being exact, which she didn’t. Grabbing her attaché case, she ran for the entrance to the eight-story steel-and-glass rectangle in which Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez & Feng occupied the sixth and most of the seventh floors.
    When she’d first seen it, she’d harbored faint dreams of L.A. Law and spectacular cases, fame and fortune and all the rest of it. Now she just wanted to get through the day without falling on her face. The real hotshots were in Beverly Hills or Century City or someplace else on the Westside. This was just … a job, and not the world’s best.
    Gary Ogarkov, one of the other lawyers with the firm, stood outside the doorway puffing one of the big, smelly cigars he made such a production of. He had to come outside to do that; the building, thank God, was smoke-free. “Nicole!” he called out in what he probably thought was a fine courtroom basso. To Nicole, it sounded like a schoolboy imitation—Perry Mason on helium. “Mr. Rosenthal’s been looking for you since nine o’clock.”
    Jesus. The founding partner. How couldn’t he be looking for Nicole? That was the kind of day this was. Even knowing she’d had it coming, she still wanted to sink through the
sidewalk. “God,” she said. “Of all the days for traffic to be god-awful—Gary, do you know what it’s about?” She pressed- him, hoping to hell he’d give her a straight answer.
    Naturally, he didn’t. “I shouldn’t tell you.” He tried to look sly. With his bland, boyish face, it didn’t come off well. He was within a year of Nicole’s age but, in spite of a blond mustache, still got asked for ID whenever he ordered a drink.
    Nicole was no more afraid of him than the local bartenders. “Gary,” she said dangerously.
    He backed down in a hurry, flinging up his hands as if he thought she might bite. “Okay, okay. You look like you could use some good news. You know the Butler Ranch report we turned in a couple of weeks ago?”
    â€œI’d better,” Nicole said, still with an edge in her voice. Antidevelopment forces were fighting the Butler Ranch project tooth and nail because it would extend tract housing into the scrubby hill country north of the 118 Freeway. The fight would send the children of attorneys on both sides to Ivy League schools for years, likely decades, to come.
    â€œWell, because of that report—” Gary paused to draw on his cigar, tilted his head back, and blew a ragged smoke ring. “Because of that report, Mr. Rosenthal named me a partner in the firm.” He pointed at Nicole. “And he’s looking for you.”
    For a moment, she just stood there. Then she felt the wide, crazy grin spread across her face. Payoff—finally. Restitution for the whole lousy morning, for a whole year of lousy mornings. “My God,” she whispered. She’d done three-quarters of the work on that report. She knew it, Gary knew it, the whole firm had to know it. He was a smoother writer than she,