Page 3 of Catch a Kiwi
It was going to stop. It was going to …
It didn’t stop. It reached the edge and teetered for a second. In that second, I was getting closer. Closer. All I had to do was wrench the door open and grab Delilah. If she had her seatbelt undone. If she …
It went over the edge. I couldn’t see. Too much rain, andtoo much vegetation. I could hear, though. The splintering of wood. The tinkle of broken glass. The crunch of metal. And, finally, an enormousthudthat I could hear just fine despite the rain. Despite the wind.
I got to the edge. The van was on its back like an overturned bug, with the back wheels still spinning like they had someplace to go. But that was all that was moving.
Slipping down the hill in the mud, sliding on the slickness of wet ferns. My heart banging away so hard, it was taking my breath, my mind trying to skitter away, trying not to know this.
Delilah.
She’d be all right. She was wearing her seatbelt! Please, let her not have taken it off.
Please.
2
HOW TO LET GO
Roman
“Let go, or be dragged.” I muttered the words aloud to myself. That sometimes helped.
Easy for you to say, Sensei,came the answer in my head, because as an Aikido student, I was sometimes rubbish. Which was the point of Aikido, of course. Knowing you were rubbish, and gradually becoming less rubbish.
I breathed and relaxed my hands on the wheel, but I also put the Kia EV6 into GT mode and put my foot down. Driving fast relaxed me, and there was almost nobody on the motorway, not this far south of Dunedin, in this rain and wind. The car shot forward like a greyhound out of the gates, and now I could think about what had just happened, could examine it from all angles and see the truth.
Even if the truth was that I’d been wrong.
Not my best thing, but I was working on it.
“Twenty-two of the turbines are still on the ground,” Jordan Brawley had said, sliding a pen through his fingers as he sat on the edge of his seat in the conference room. “Wecould remove the rest, abort the whole thing. What do you want to do?”
“Dunno, mate,” I said. “You’re the Director of Operations. What do you recommend?”
“I thought I’d check with you first,” Brawley said. “The cost of repair in the field is likely to be … And this is the second year we’ve had flooding in Hawke’s Bay. We thought it was just the cyclone last year, but we’re not even operational yet, and … But then, the land’s bought and the foundations done already. Sunk cost, though, so if we want to pull out …”
Instead of answering, I turned my focus to the chief engineer, Dane Franks. “How long to assess damage?”
He said, “Should know more next week. I’ll keep you posted, shall I?” He paused a moment. “Both of you.”
“Do that. Every day.” It wasn’t that hard to get answers, as long as you framed your questions right. How much to repair the cyclone damage on the forty-eight half-installed wind turbines, and how long would it take? What was the insurance cover? What was the likelihood of future flooding on the site? Two years wasn’t necessarily a trend. How much could we sell the land for, if it came to that? When you knew enough answers, you knewtheanswer.
I could have run through all of it, step by step, but there was more than one way to throw good money after bad, and I couldn’t be the only person capable of solving problems anymore. I was juggling too many balls for that, so I stood up and said, “Give me a report by next Friday. Hang back, Jordan, will you? And Dane—wait in my office, please.”
Dane looked surprised for a moment, or as surprised as a bloke like Dane would ever look, then said, “Sure.”
“The rest of you,” I said, “if you’ve got issues with the flooding—houses, families, all that—go see to them, and I’ll see you Monday. If not, don’t. Tell your staff, too.”
Some relieved looks, either because they weren’t the onesbeing called on the carpet or because they wanted to get home and check their sandbags, and the rest of them filed out of the room. All but Esther, my assistant, who remained at the foot of the table with her hands poised over her laptop. Esther had decided, somewhere in the early days, that what I needed in my life was a sort of court reporter who’d take down everything that happened. She probably had it all indexed, too, because she could recall it almost before I could ask the question. Esther was my permanent record.
Jordan glanced at her, then at me, and looked relieved himself. I couldn’t be doing anything too bad to him, his body language said, if Esther was still here.
I said, “This isn’t going to work out. Sorry, but you’ll have to go.” No point dancing around it.
“What?” His pale blue eyes darted around the room for an instant as if searching for support, then came back to me, and a flush was mounting on his cheekbones.
“We spoke two months ago about bringing solutions,” I said. “I don’t hear solutions, and I need solutions from my Director of Operations. You’ll get your four weeks’ pay in lieu of notice. You’re a good engineer. You’re not a good manager. You could think about that when you look for your next job.” More than I usually said, but he looked poleaxed, full-on stunned mullet. Which was why he wasn’t a good manager. When a problem came up, you didn’t run away from it. You shifted into it.
