Free Sleep No More by Greg Iles Page B

isn’t the word that comes to mind when I think of you.” Waters let a little emotion enter his voice. “You could stroke out, man. You could go blind. That happened to Pat Davis, and he was only thirty-seven. Diabetes is serious business.”
    “Christ, you sound like Jenny. If I want a lecture, I’ll go home, okay?”
    Waters was about to reply when Sybil Sonnier, their receptionist, walked in with something for Cole to sign. She did not smile at either of them; she walked primly to the desk and handed Cole the papers. This pricked up Waters’s antennae. Sybil was twenty-eight years old, a divorcee from South Louisiana, and much too pretty to be working in an office with Cole Smith. Cole had “dabbled” with their receptionists before, as he called it, and one of his escapades had cost them over fifty thousand dollars in a legal settlement. At that point, Waters had vowed to do all the hiring himself. But when their last receptionist’s husband lost his job and left town, Waters had been on vacation. When he got back, he found Sybil installed at the front desk: one hundred and twenty pounds of curves, dark hair, and smiles. Cole swore he had never touched her, but Waters no longer trusted him about women. When Sybil exited, Waters gave his partner a hard look.
    “Sybil’s been pretty cold for the past week. You got any idea why that might be?”
    Cole shrugged. “PMS?”
    “Cole, goddamn it. Did you sleep with her?”
    “Hell no. I learned my lesson about employees when I had to pay reparations.”
    “When we had to pay them, you mean. Next time you pay solo, Romeo.”
    Cole chuckled. “No problem.”
    “Back to your health. You don’t get off that easy.”
    Cole frowned and shook his head. “Why don’t you use all this energy you’re expending on paranoia and lectures to generate a new prospect, Rock?”
    This was an old bone of contention between them. Their partnership was like a union of the grasshopper and the ant. Whenever they scored big, Waters put forty percent of his money into an account reserved for income taxes. The rest he invested conservatively in the stock market. Each time they drilled a new well, he maintained a large share of it by giving up “override,” or cash profit up front. That way, if they struck oil, he was ensured a large profit over time. Cole preferred to take the lion’s share of cash up front; thus his “completion costs” on the wells were smaller, but so were his eventual profits. Even when Cole kept a large piece of a well, he almost always sold his interest for cash—usually the equivalent of two years’ worth of production—the day after the well hit. And Cole simply could not hang on to cash. He and his wife spent lavishly on houses, cars, antiques, clothing, jewelry, parties, and vacations. He invested in ventures outside the oil business, whatever sounded like big money fast. He had hit some big licks, but he always lost his profits by sinking them into ever-bigger schemes. And most damaging, Cole gambled heavily on sports. This addiction had begun at Ole Miss, where he and Waters had roomed together for three semesters. When Cole moved into the Kappa Alpha house and continued his partying and gambling, Waters stayed in the dorm. Only two things had allowed Cole to remain solvent through the years: a knack for buying existing oil wells and improving their efficiency by managing operations himself; and a partner who continued to find new oil, even in the worst of times. Thus, he was always after Waters to generate new prospective wells. As the attorney of the two, Cole handled the land work—leasing up the acreage where their wells would be drilled—but he saw his real job as sales. And a natural salesman without something to sell is a frustrated man.
    In the absence of a prospective oil well, Cole set about selling what he had on hand—himself—usually to the prettier and more adventurous wives in town. He promoted himself to his chosen paramour with