Page 47 of The Bad Weather Friend

Lambert raised his chin and looked offended that the life of anyone as inconsequential as Benny should be of interest to him. “Ruined your life? Why would I ruin your life? I’ve never met you. I don’t even know who you are.”

The attorney sounded as though he was genuinely baffled, but Benny wasn’t as easy to deceive as he’d once been. When your mother turned out not to be the person you thought she was, when she would have called animal control and consigned you to the dog pound if only you’d been canine rather than human, when she cut you loose at thirteen, what naivete still pooled in your heart was flushed away as abruptly as the contents of a space-shuttle vacuum toilet.

“Oh, you know who I am,” he told Oliver Lambert. “You put the screws to Handy Duroc and others to turn me into a nonperson. I’m Benjamin Catspaw.”

Lambert’s bafflement swelled into astonishment. “You?Why would they go to the trouble of erasing you? You’re an obvious nonentity.”

“I’m an entity, all right,” Benny objected. “I’m very much an entity.”

“You’re a mediocrity,” Lambert said, his expression of disgust precisely what it would have been if he spooned a dead mouse out of his bouillabaisse. “Look at you. Those clothes. Your posture. Thathair. You’re a nobody.”

“He’s cute,” Harper said.

“Thank you,” Benny said.

“Had I seen a photograph of you, even just a blurry photo,” Lambert said, “I would have suggested to them that it was a mistake to waste time and effort on an insignificancy like you.”

“You never even saw a photo of me?”

“Your values and principles might be those we must oppress if we are to have a better world, but you’re a lightweight jackstraw incapable of serving as an example to others, incapable of spreading your dangerous ideology.”

“Ideology? What ideology? I don’t have an ideology.”

His nostrils flaring as though he could smell the moldering truth of his unwanted visitor, the attorney said, “You’re awalking-talkingideology, but you’re no danger to the new world being shaped because you have no charisma. You are no great matter, apeu de chose. The most ineffectual kind of nullity.Look at you.”

Benny never got angry. Life was too short for anger, and rage accomplished nothing worthwhile. However, he felt a need to defend himself, especially after Harper said he was cute. “I’ve had two years of excellent sales. I was rising fast in the dirt business before ... before this.”

“I have antique automobiles worth more than any house you ever sold,” Lambert said. “I have a Jackson Pollock painting worth more thanallthe houses you’ve sold put together. You are an obscurity, a trifler, a piddler, and I am profoundly put out that I wasted an entire day directing your erasure.”

“You know, everything isn’t about you,” Benny admonished. “Thisisn’t about you.”

“Don’t be stupid. It isonlyabout me,” Lambert said. “You came to me. I didn’t come to you. Everybody comes to me. Your father was a dipsomaniac, and your mother was asouillon, a wanton trull, and you are nothing but the consequence of their mutual inebriation.”

Oliver Lambert possessed inexhaustible energy for argument and vituperation, not to mention a colorful vocabulary. The lawyer would continue to defame, revile, and slander long after Benny retreated in exhaustion from the conversation. And so Benny said only, “You are not a nice man,” and was done with it.

Lambert swelled with pride at that accusation. “I’d rather be dead than nice. Niceness is the refuge of fools. Humility is for losers. This is a hard world that can be run effectively only by hard people. Whatever you came here to extort from me, you’ll fail to achieve, a piddler like you. Nowget out.”

Almost inconceivably, Oliver Lambert had become so enthusiastic about disparaging Benny that he seemed almost to have forgotten the seven-foot tower of tuxedoed muscle who had whispered him away from the kitchen and placed him on the bed.

Said tower now asked, “Them?”

Lambert shifted his attention from Benny to Spike. “What?”

“You said that if you’d even just seen a photo of my friend here, you would have ‘suggested to them that it was a mistake to waste time and effort’ on him. Them who?”

Benny’s retreat to the simple accusation that Oliver Lambert wasn’t nice seemed to convince the attorney that he should also stand up to Spike. He rose from the bed. “You have no idea with whom you’re dealing. If you don’t want to be arrested, jailed, and held without bail, charged as a national security threat, then get the hell out of my house.”

This was a mistake.

With his left hand, Spike seized Lambert by the throat and lifted him off the floor as though he weighed five or ten pounds. Then, as only a craggle could do, he grew his arm—along with shirt and coat sleeves—to a length of perhaps six feet as he hoisted the attorney to the ceiling, lightly bumping the man’s head against the plaster.

As terror and astonishment contested for control of his facial features, Lambert clawed at his assailant’s wrist with both hands, but to no avail. He looked down from on high at Harper and didn’t wink, at Benny and didn’t sneer, at Spike and said, “Gah.”

“You’re just a glorified messenger boy,” the giant said. “Tell me who decided to erase Benny’s career and happiness. Tell me how they were able to coerce people like Handy Duroc to screw him over. Be quick and succinct, or I’ll squeeze until blood squirts out your eyes, brains drool out your ears, and your head pops off.”

Benny was pretty sure the threat wasn’t sincere, that it was only intended to intimidate Lambert. Nevertheless, he said, “Uh, Spike?” The giant gave him a look of mild vexation, and Benny said, “Well, I had to ask.”

Dangling at the end of the elongated arm, Oliver Lambert was forced to divulge the required information through clenched teeth, because the primary force of Spike’s grip was upward, under the attorney’s chin, rather than around his throat. Although Lambert sounded somewhat like Donald Duck, the tenor of his voice conveyed fright rather than the exasperation that frequently sent the fabled duck over the edge.

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