"Is that our problem?" Kerry asked.

"Well, he's being told it's our problem," Dar sighed. "Somehow we managed to miss the capacity being pushed there. I've got someone checking the alerter system, but I think we just missed adding an alert for it."

"Ugh." Kerry grimaced. "You're not going to cause me a bottleneck up there, are you? I've got a lot of very touchy accounts up in those parts."

"Would I do that to you?" Dar's voice sounded bemused. "I may have to fly up there and meet with them, though, and I heard from Quest. He's pulling together a meeting of all the bidders at the Intercontinental on Wednesday."

Kerry nodded, even though her partner could not see her. "Well, you said I'd be spearheading that anyway," she remarked. "So forward the info on to me, boss, and I'll take care of it."

"Already done," Dar replied. "Looks like I'll be late. We're just going to start the sales meeting in an hour."

"I'll be waiting for you." There was a momentary silence, bringing a knowing smile to Kerry's face. "Give me a buzz before you leave, okay?"

"I will," Dar answered softly. "See you later."

Kerry put the phone down, her smile still lingering as she picked up her now empty basket and walked back through the living room, her mind busy with planning her strategy for Quest's meeting. A bright flash on the television broke her concentration, however, and she turned to look at the afternoon news blurb. "Oh." She paused, as they seemed to be continuing the news report from the previous night, now showing a picture of the man the police were looking for.

Kerry blinked, and then she simply stared at the picture, matching the somewhat blurry details with a memory from the previous day, from the car across from theirs, in the lazy afternoon sunlight of a summer day.

Was it the same jerk?

She squinted at the picture, which seemed to be from a passport. "Son of a bitch," she whispered. "I think it is."

"SO." THE LOW, powerful voice rolled out over the room. "As you can see, the capacity will remain relatively constant across the board, throughout the international and national grids, but our focus is going to be on refining the bandwidth usage and streamlining demand service."

A grid flashed onto the screen. "The net effect of that project will be for us to be able to add another fifty percent in capacity without increasing the hardware." Dar paused and leaned on the lectern. "Any further questions?"

She let her eyes sweep the room, suspecting the edge in her voice was suppressing the raised hands at last. "All right. Thank you, folks. That's all." Dar stepped back, acknowledging the applause in the room with a curt nod before she shut down the screens and retired the lectern, glad the damn thing was finally over.

Finally.

Dar dropped down into her seat at the head of the presentation table, it's cool leather closing around her as the noise level in the room rose. She picked up her glass of water and drained it, glad of the moisture for her dry, scratchy throat.

The crowd of sales directors was breaking up into clusters, all carrying printed hand-outs of her presentation as they discussed the session. Dar was happy to be left relatively alone, isolated at the front of the room with just enough space between her and the rest of them that even the few eyeing her hadn't gotten up the courage to approach.

Dar assumed a dour glare to reinforce the distance, exhausted from her two hour speech. It had gone over all right, she thought, but that, and the hour of questions after it had frazzled both her patience and her tolerance for occasionally stupid questions.

She did not want to entertain any more of them right now. Though the presentation room was an interior space and she could not see windows from where she was, she knew it was getting dark outside and the long day was nearing its end at last.

Time to go home. It had been a crappy day. On top of her discovering a fault in their monitoring system, the security reports were beginning to pile up on her desk like elephant crap. She was surprised Mark hadn't taken out a contract on her yet.

Jose finished his conversation with another sales director and headed her way. Dar fixed him with her glare, but the Sales VP ignored it and circled the table, taking a seat right next to her. "Good! It was very good, Dar."

"Thanks."

"We have too much people scared out there." Jose went on, resting his silver silk covered elbows on the table. "Everybody was running like chickens. Now, they see we have a plan."

"Uh huh." Dar rested her elbow on the chair arm and propped her head up on it. "We have a plan."

Jose looked at her. "What is wrong with you?"

Dar's eyebrows hiked.

"You are acting like you do not care," Jose said. "These people, what you say to them, that matters how they do their job, Dar."

"I know," she agreed. "I do care. It's just been a damn long day, Jose and I'm tired. It may be exciting to them, but to me, it's a rehash of the same damn speech I've already given the board, given the international board, and given the lot of you down here."

The Sales VP snorted. "You have no attention. It is like my son. He looks at one thing, and then..." Jose snapped his fingers. "It is the old news, and something else he goes to find. You are like that." He pointed at Dar. "Always, you have been like that."

Dar tried to get mad at him, but didn't find it in herself. She ended up shrugging instead. "Yeah. And?"

Jose also shrugged. "Nothing." he said. "I will tell you something however, Dar. Being married is good for you. I say so. My wife, she says so too. She told me she thinks you are not so much a bitch since then."

"Thanks," Dar drawled. "Your being married hasn't made you less of an asshole. How'd she figure that?"

Jose took a breath to answer, a red line creeping up his neck as he lifted his hand to shake a finger at Dar. "What did you say? I am being here so nice to you, and what is this?" His voice rose in outrage, attracting attention from the crowd still chatting around them in the room.

Dar snickered at him. "Miss the old days, Jose?" she inquired, a wry twinkle in her eyes.

"Puta," he growled, slapping his hand on the table. "There is the bitch I remember."

"Oh yeah." Dar leaned forward. "It's in there. It just takes a lot more now to get it to show." She got up and twitched her sleekly tailored jacket straight. "Gentlemen." She gave the now watching salesmen a gracious nod. "Ladies," she added, to the two women directors standing nearby. "Jose," she tacked on just for fun, as she stepped around the table and headed for the door. "Have a good night.

"Wait, Dar!" One of the women directors hustled to catch up to her, the other woman close behind. "Can we steal a moment of your time?"

Dar actually growled at them. "You had three hours of my time."

The women eased out of the conference room with her. "Just a few quick things...while you're walking?"

"Talk fast." Dar headed for the elevator. "Stacy, I've said all I wanted to say for the night in there." She hit the door button and headed into the car almost without a pause as her shoulders just barely cleared the opening. "It's been a long ass day."

The two women followed her hastily inside. "It isn't about the presentation," Stacy Allman said. "We wanted to talk to you about the ship contract." She glanced at the other woman. "Rhonda and I happened to be in the same bar as some old friends of yours, and we got an unintentional earful."

Dar leaned against the wall as the car rose to the fourteenth floor. "Everybody got a damned earful," she said. "I got nothing but the entire time I was up there." She studied the other two women, who could have been twins in their conservative suits and stylish haircuts.

Stacy waited for the doors to open before she answered. "Dar, let us take you out for a drink," she said, as they entered the quiet, half darkened floor. "You need to hear this, and the mausoleum's really not the place, if you catch my drift."

She caught it. Dar headed for her office, holding her outer door open before following the two saleswomen inside. She wasn't especially close friends of either, but they were both relatively old timers and she'd had a somewhat common bond with the few women who had made the climb up the ladder with and around her.

Both were savvy. Stacy was from New York, and Rhonda was from Los Angeles. Even though both women were straight as boards, neither had ever shown the veiled aversion to Dar's lifestyle she'd detected in others in the company. "I don't know, people. Like I said, it's been a long damn day."

"Cmon, Dar." Stacy followed her into her inner office, pausing to look around as Dar continued to her desk and started to pack up her briefcase. "Huh. This place looks a little different."

Dar's head lifted, and she looked around her office in mild confusion, expecting to find the carpet had been replaced in her absence or a different color wall weave installed. But the large space seemed much as she left it, so she glanced at Stacy to see what she was talking about. "What?"

"Listen, Dar, we won't keep you all night." Stacy dropped the subject and took a seat in front of Dar's desk instead. "But I really think you need to hear what we heard. How about the lounge in the Hyatt...give me a half hour, huh?"

Dar considered the question while her peripheral vision tracked Rhonda examining the collection of photos on her wall credenza shelves. "All right," she decided. "Go on. I'll meet you there in ten minutes."

"Cool." Stacy got up. "Ten minutes, in the bar. Good deal, Dar. I think once we finish up, you'll agree it wasn't a waste of either your time or ours."

Dar continued to stuff papers into her briefcase as the two left, only stopping when the door closed. She rested her knuckles on her desk and leaned her weight on them. Finally she grunted and straightened up, slapping one of the speed dial buttons on her phone almost without looking.

The phone only rang once before it was answered. "Hey, sweetie."

Dar's lips twitched. "You know, it could have been someone other than me calling from here," she commented wryly.

"Not on our home number." Kerry replied, a smile evident in her voice. "They'd have called on the cell."

Our home number. The words sent a little tickle down Dar's back even after all this time. "You're right. Shows how long a day it's been." Dar reached up and rubbed her left temple. "I'm done with the sales crap."

"How'd it go?"

"All right, I guess," her partner replied. "But two of the directors caught me afterward. Apparently they've got some BS they overheard from our friends. Want to spill it to me offsite."

Silence. Dar could almost imagine the look of skeptical surprise on Kerry's face. "Yeah, seemed pretty stupid to me, but I've known the two of them for ten years. They're not idiots."

"Sounds pretty bizarre."

"Anyway, I told them I'd meet them over at the Hyatt," Dar said. "Shouldn't take long. I'm sure we already heard most of it last week from the jackasses' mouths." She was aware of a pensive quiet from the phone. "You interested in joining us?"

Kerry chuckled, after a moment's hesitation. "I think you know me too well."

Dar smiled. "Hey, me and two straight women. What a party. Of course I'd invite you." She finished packing up her case. "Especially if you're in those cute overalls you were wearing the other day...that'd shock all the Cubans at the Hyatt happy hour."

Kerry chuckled again, but this time the sound was entirely different. "Oh, the scandals you weave, Madame Roberts. No, you go meet your undercover friends and get the dirt. I'll be here hanging out doing the domestic thing."

Dar's eyebrows lifted. "Domestic thing?"

"Baking cookies."

"Cookies?" Dar's ears perked up. "You're making fresh cookies?"

"The Food Network is dangerous," Kerry asserted. "But if you time it right, you might get some hot from the oven," she teased. "So don't get too dirty."

"They'll be lucky if I sit down," Dar said. "See you in a little bit, Ker."

"Okay--hey, listen. Remember that story from the news last night?" Kerry said. "The car at the drug store?"

"Yeah?" Dar's hand hovered over the button.

"We were there when they were. I saw the guy they're looking for. He was a creep."

It was the last thing she'd expected to hear. "Really?"