Coyote Blue Read Free Page A

nice to him for $4.95 a minute. Sometimes, while he was getting his hair cut, sitting in the chair with his protections and personalities down, the hairdresser would run her hands down his neck, and that small human contact sent a lonesome shudder rumbling through him like a heartbreak.
    "I'm here to see Mr. Cable," he said to the secretary, an attractive woman in her forties. "Sam Hunter, Aaron Assurance Associates. I have an appointment."
    "Jim's expecting you," she said. Sam liked that she used her boss's first name; it confirmed the personality profile he had projected. Sam's machines had told him that James Cable was one of the two main partners who owned Motion Marine, Inc., an enormously successful company that manufactured helmets and equipment for industrial deep-sea diving. Cable had been an underwater welder on the rigs off Santa Barbara before he and his partner, an engineer named Frank Cochran, had invented a new fiberglass scuba helmet that allowed divers to stay in radio contact while regulating the high-pressure miasma of gases that they breathed. The two became millionaires within a year and now, ten years later, they were thinking of taking the company public. Cochran wanted to be sure that at least one of the partners could retain controlling interest in the company in the event that the other died. Sam was trying to write a multimillion-dollar policy that would provide buy-out capital for the remaining partner.
    It was a simple partnership deal, the sort that Sam had done a hundred times, and Cochran, the engineer, with his mathematical way of thinking, his need for precision and order, his need to have all the loose ends tied up, had been an easy sale. With an engineer Sam simply presented facts, carefully laid out in an equationlike manner that led to the desired answer, which was: "Where do I sign?" Engineers were predictable, consistent, and easy. But Cable, the diver, was going to be a pain in the ass.
    Cable was a risk taker, a gambler. Any man who had spent ten years of his life working hundreds of feet underwater, breathing helium and working with explosive gas, had to have come to terms with fear, and fear was what Sam traded in.
    In most cases the fear was easy to identify. It was not the fear of death that motivated Sam's clients to buy; it was the fear of dying unprepared. If he did his job right, the clients would feel that by turning down a policy they were somehow tempting fate to cause them to die untimely. (Sam had yet to hear of a death considered "timely.") In their minds they created a new superstition, and like all superstitions it was based on the fear of irony. So, the only lottery ticket you lose will be the winning one, the one time you leave your driver's license at home is the time you will be stopped for speeding, and when someone offers you an insurance policy that only pays you if you're dead, you better damn well buy it. Irony. It was a tacit message, but one that Sam delivered with every sales pitch.
    He walked into Jim Cable's office with the unusual feeling of being totally unprepared. Maybe it was just the girl who had thrown him, or the Indian.
    Cable was standing behind a long desk that had been fashioned from an old dinghy. He was tall, with the thin, athletic build of a runner, and completely bald. He extended his hand to Sam.
    "Jim Cable. Frank told me you'd be coming, but I'm not sure I like this whole thing."
    "Sam Hunter." Sam released his hand. "May I sit? This shouldn't take long." This was not a good start.
    Cable gestured for Sam to sit across from him and sat down. Sam remained standing. He didn't want the desk to act as a barrier between them; it was too easy for Cable to defend.
    "Do you mind if I move this chair over to your side of the desk? I have some materials I'd like you to see and I need to be beside you."
    "You can just leave the materials, I'll look them over."
    Technology had helped Sam over this barrier. "Well, actually it's not printed matter. I