Burn Out Read Free

conversation.”
    “Since he met you. When I first came to work here for him, about a year after his first wife died, he barely spoke at all. A more depressed man I’d never met.”
    We sat in silence for a while, Ramon smoking his cigarette, then grinding it out on the floor and putting the butt in his shirt pocket.
    “You’re damn depressed yourself,” he said.
    I shrugged.
    “You want to talk about it?”
    “. . . I don’t think so. Not now, anyway.”
    “You change your mind, I’m here.”
    The next day I brought Ramon a book on Shoshone tribal customs that my birth father, Elwood Farmer, had given me. Lear Jet glowered at me from his stall. Did he think I should’ve brought
him
something? No way, not after he’d thrown me.
    Throughout the week I had contact with the outside world, of course. Daily calls came from my operative Patrick Neilan, to whom I’d turned over administrative matters at the agency, as well as my office manager, Ted Smalley. Just general reports: everything’s okay here, we wrapped up the so-and-so case, three new jobs came in today. It was all I cared to know about a business I’d nurtured lovingly for years. And that unnerved me.
    Mick had relented and located the person who’d been using my credit card: a deliveryman employed by a Chinese restaurant in our neighborhood who frequently delivered takeout to us. Citibank and the police were dealing with him.
    There was also a daily call from Hy, who was restructuring the corporate security firm—formerly RKI, now Ripinsky International—of which he’d become sole owner after the death of one partner and the decampment of another. He’d moved their world headquarters to San Francisco, turned over marginal accounts to other firms, and closed unnecessary branch offices, and was busy creating a corporate culture that—unlike the old RKI’s—was free of corruption. His calls further depressed me, although I did my best to hide it. I’d never heard Hy so vibrant and optimistic, but could only briefly get caught up in his enthusiasm. His feelings about his work were so opposite to how I felt about mine that once the calls were over, I wanted to crawl into bed and bury my head under the pillows.
    Which I did most nights, falling into a restless sleep that was repeatedly visited by the dream of the pit, as well as an odd new one: an Indian girl standing in the cold shadows outside a large white building. She looked at me in the glare of passing headlights, eyes afraid, and then the earth at her feet cracked open and swallowed her up.

I awoke with the dreams heavy upon me, like a hangover. My hands shook as I fixed coffee and my head throbbed dully, even though I’d had nothing alcoholic to drink the night before.
    I took my coffee to the living room and curled up under a woven throw in one of the deeply cushioned chairs by the stone fireplace. Unlike the kitchen, this room was pure Hy: Indian rugs on the pegged-pine floor, antique rifles over the fireplace, and in the bookcases flanking it to either side, his collection of Western novels from the thirties and forties and nonfiction accounts of the Old West. Over the time I’d been staying here, I’d read some of the novels, paged through a few of the nonfiction volumes. But this morning my mind was not on history—at least not anything going back more than five months.
    This stay in the high desert wasn’t working out as I’d thought it would. I’d managed to fill up empty hours with useless activity, while avoiding the larger issues: Did I really want to go on sitting behind a desk hour after hour, reviewing client reports, okaying invoices and expense logs, interviewing new clients, assigning jobs, and mediating employee disputes? Did I really want to continue taking on the larger, more complex cases that required me to be on the move a lot and that—too often in the past year—had ended in danger and near death?
    Over the course of my career I’d been stabbed, nearly