Chapter 4

“Mr. Sorensson.” Sinise from accounting scurries into step beside me. “That was a super presentation. But you always do such super presentations.” It wasn’t a super presentation. It was pure bullshittery. But then Sinise from accounting puts her hand on my arm and bends her leg behind her, leaning slightly to fix a strap of her shoe. When she stands back up, she shakes her head, tossing her long, oddly burgundy hair first left then right.

So.

It has nothing to do with the quality of my presentation and everything to do with indicating that she is receptive.

My assistant, Janine, quickly insinuates herself between us, her back to Sinise. She tells me that a client is waiting and unnecessarily adjusts my tie, thereby marking me. Telling Sinise that I am already fucking her.

Having defended her cunnan-riht, Janine points with her chin toward my office and the client Tony Marks sent who is waiting there. I can only see her from behind. Her thick, black hair hangs down wild, like flames pointing to the curve of an ass like a Japanese pear. Her strong, slim legs are encased in jeans, one leg of which is caught in the top of a pair of mud-spattered hiking boots.

Janine has returned to her office, which is really a windowless interior cubicle across the hall from my own. She has her hand on her mouse and her eyes concentrated on the screen. Unlike Sinise, this woman poses no threat. When she turns around, I see why. She is not beautiful in the way Janine recognizes. She does not have the tight symmetry that every cosmetic surgeon and every patient of one aspires to. She has a long nose in a face that is broad and soft below high cheekbones. Strong chin. Her mouth is wide and straight and unsmiling.

She is probably four inches taller and eight years older than Janine, and since she is not like Janine, Janine not only doesn’t see her as competition, she doesn’t see her at all.

This woman doesn’t flick her hair or coyly lower her eyes with a half smile. She doesn’t angle her hips or finger her collarbone or bite her lower lip. She is contained, quiet, still. And when I take a step closer, she smells nothing like carrion and everything like cold, damp earth.

“Elijah Sorensson,” I say, holding out my hand. Her hand has cropped nails and no ornament. Calluses in the grip between thumb and forefinger.

She sizes me up quickly with eyes the color of ironwood and just as unyielding.

“Thea Villalobos,” she says, and it takes me a moment to get my breath back.

“I’m sorry?”

“Thea,” she says slowly. “Villalobos.”

Wolves laugh about the madness and mutability of men. About how they are prey to the sudden whims of fate and their own emotional instability. From my jaded and indifferent perch, I have laughed about it too. Laughed about Max and his sudden passions.

But now, confronted by this woman with an ass like a Japanese pear, hair like night, eyes like ironwood, skin the color of gold rye, the ground shifts and topples me into a rotation around her.

Thea Villalobos. Goddess of the City of Wolves.

“Elijah Sorensson,” I repeat, stalling while I try to remember what Maxim had said about her. Tony Marks’s something. Daughter? No, that wasn’t it. She’d have money if she was Tony Marks’s daughter.

“Have a seat?”

I hit my toe on the corner of my desk and stumble into my chair, the Titan. That’s what my chair is officially called. The Titan.

I discovered it after four years at college, three years at law school, two years clerking for Judge Baski, and two more years at Halvors & Trianoff, crammed into tiny human-size chairs. Then when I became partner, my assistant at the time—Barbara, whose pubic hair was waxed into an arrow as though most men she’d had were too drunk to know where to aim—suggested the Titan.

Ever since then, each new piece of furniture has been upgraded, even the two chairs facing across from my big desk. Sitting with their feet dangling loose above the floor helps whether I need to intimidate or impress. And everyone who comes into my office has to be intimidated or impressed.

Thea Villalobos shrugs off her backpack and pulls out a file and a flash drive before settling into the corner of one arm of the chair, her knee propped against the other. I want to see her do it again. I want to see that economy of movement, deliberate and smooth.

“I think you’ll find everything you need here. I didn’t want to waste your time,” she says, “but my uncle felt that a letter from a firm like yours would send a stronger message than something downloaded from LawDepot.”

As I take the manila folder and flash drive, she settles back, almost motionless. Almost but not quite. Her ring finger gently pulses against the upholstered back of the big chair. There is, I think, a restrained sensuality in Thea Villalobos. I feel that long-lost prickling in my thighs, and my Pavlovian part stands up and remembers.

Leaning over my desk and her file allows me to adjust the suddenly awkward side tuck. My mind is only half there as I look over the papers she’s typed up.

Thea Villalobos is an environmental conservation officer living in Buttfuck, New York. Robert Liebling, lunatic, is suing her for springing the body grip traps he’d set on his land but right across the border from the wilderness she patrols. He set them again, and Thea tripped them again. The third time, he took video and decided to sue her for trespass. As she points out, by the time he’d taken the date-stamped video, trapping season was over.

“You’d done it before, though? During trapping season.”

“Maybe.” She watches me eject the flash drive. “But his case against me is based entirely on that video.”

“It would still be useful to know the history.”

She says nothing.

“You do know that everything you say here is privileged?”

“It’s not germane and I don’t think you would understand.”

I follow her unyielding eyes to the two shelves of my bookcase that are empty of books and filled with photographs of me with various high-profile clients. The head of the United American Energy Commission, the board of Northeastern Developers Association, the CEO of Consolidated Information. A line of men, none of whom will ever make it into Us or People or InStyle and must make do, instead, with ruling the world.

“I am not my clients,” I say.

She leans back, pulling an errant strand of hair away from her forehead. When she bends forward again, she sits closer to my desk.

“Have you ever seen an animal in a body grip trap?”

I shake my head. Hunters come during the Iron Moon, but we’ve only had one man set a trap on our land. Marked so heavily with wolf urine, no animal would go near it until the Iron Moon was over, and John had the opposable thumb he needed to trip it. And once she had the words she needed, Josi, the 3rd Echelon’s lawyer, took care of the silly little human.

“They say they’re humane, but they’re not,” she says, fingering the flash drive. “I’ve released animals when I can, but mostly you just have to kill them.

“Liebling claimed he was a trapper, that he needed the money and had the right to trap furbearers on his land. Furbearers. Like they’re nothing but the keratin on their backs. It’d be like reducing everything you were to ‘hair bearer.’” She leans back into the corner of the chair. “See, I knew a man like you would think it was funny.”

“No, not funny. Not funny at all. I agree with you completely. It’s just the part about ‘hair bearer.’ I can think of a few men who would say that was an apt description of me.”

“Bald men?” she asks, a cool half smile hovering around her lips.

“Mostly.”

“Anyway, Liebling claims he’s a trapper, but he doesn’t have a license. I took pictures of the skins he’s taken. They’re shredded and unsellable. It’s just so much pain and waste. So yes, I triggered those traps, and yes, I will do it again.”

I like this woman.

“You don’t like him much, do you?”

“No, he’s a shit.”

It’s one of the things you learn about humans early on. They’re always hedging their bets. Always putting things in the conditional, always making concessions. Leaving their options open.

Thea doesn’t, and it makes me like her more.

I tap the edges of the papers she’s given me, as though to even them up.

“Unfortunately,” I lie, “there are complications you haven’t accounted for here.”

She doesn’t say anything at first. Then she pulls out a pen.

“What kinds of complications?”

“He claims to be a farmer, so he doesn’t need a license to trap on his land.”

“He’s no farmer. I put some stills on the flash drive. Every month for five months during spring and summer of last year when he first brought up this ‘farmer’ idea. He put some plants in old plaster buckets that never got big enough to identify before they died.”

“I really am happy to do this for you, Ms. Villalobos—”

“Thea.”

“Thea. I’m just saying it may take a little longer than we originally thought.”

“And I’m saying I’d rather take care of it myself.”

“It’s all pro bono. Won’t cost you a thing. We owe it to your…to Tony Marks.”

Her ironwood eyes focus on mine. It is all I can do not to look away. “My uncle’s employer’s ex-husband?”

“He’s a big client. Look, you live in Arietta? We have an office in Albany and I have another very important client up near Plattsburgh that I visit…frequently. I could meet you in town and—”

She laughs at that. It’s deep and throaty and untamed, and I have to hear it again.

Everything I knew about Arietta came from a road sign on one of my more meandering drives home for Iron Moon. Turns out that Arietta is 330 square miles with a population of 304. Her physical address is a set of coordinates. Her mailing address is a post office box near Piseco Lake over forty-five minutes away.

But she agrees to meet me at the HST offices in Albany. Next week. I’ll have something drafted for her by then.

She pulls on her coat. Her eyes catch on my photographs again before she tosses her backpack over one shoulder. Then she slides her left hand in her jeans pocket, her anorak caught behind her forearm, and takes my proffered hand with a smooth slide of her palm against mine.

After she goes, I look at my photographs. How is it that I never noticed before? Never noticed that my pose is the same in every one of them: left hand in pocket, jacket on that side behind my forearm, right hand taking that of my powerful client.

Holding my hand to my mouth, I breathe deeply the scent of Ajax and black earth, while from the office window I watch the stretch of sidewalk that gives onto Vesey.

After a few minutes, Thea Villalobos emerges from the building. She bends down to loosen the pant leg from her boots. A little beyond her, the leashed man continues to work on the glass.

In Liebling’s jumpy movie, a woman in jeans, shitkickers, and a cable-knit sweater carries nothing but a long, thick branch. Standing far back, she pokes the thin metal trigger until it snaps. Her makeshift staff snaps on the second one. She picks up another branch and heads for the most distant one, the third.

“Janine? Tell Albany I’m going to need an office next Wednesday.”

Liebling waits for a little and then starts to move, whispering softly that he’s going to the third trap so the GPS on his phone will record that she was still on his land. “And, Janine? Where exactly is the Albany office?”

Then I message Samuel, the investigator I use most often, to stop by as soon as he gets back. Two hours later, I slide him a copy of the video and a piece of paper with Robert Liebling’s name on it. “Find out everything you can about him.”

He pauses, looking at the other side.

“Yes. About her too.”

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