Free Fidelity by Thomas Perry Page B

couldn’t see Interstate 10 or the buildings that had been built beside it. They walked with the scorching stones under their feet, the sun blasting over their heads and the wind moving out of the east across the desert keeping them dry. The wind was constant out here, so there were big wind farms just down the interstate with huge white windmills with propellers that looked like airplane parts, spinning together, pivoting a little when the wind shifted.
    The silence was part of the etiquette of walking together in the desert. They walked and thought about basic things. It wasn’t a time to chatter about how the washing machine needed to get fixed or the damned government was getting worse or the car sounded funny. When they were together up here, they thought about each other and about themselves, and maybe a little about the other times up here over the years, and how it felt to be back.
    Hobart’s phone gave its irritating musical tone, and he looked at Valerie and frowned. She was watching him as she walked, waiting to see what he was going to do. He turned the phone off and put it back into his shirt pocket without looking at the number.
    They walked on, but the feeling was not the same after that. He knew she was thinking that he had violated the rules by carrying a cell phone out there. She was thinking he had turned it off, not to preserve the open connection between them, but to hide a call from somebody he couldn’t talk to in front of her. She was thinking it was a woman.
    Hobart could see her shock hardening into resentment. This was deeper than the anger she felt when she tightened her jaw. When she was like this, the muscles around her mouth went slack again, so her face flattened. Turning off the phone had not restored the sanctity of their walk in the desert. Now all she was thinking about was that Hobart had a secret from her. He had another life away from hereaway from her. Once the telephone had dragged her attention away from being with him, she could only think about the fact that he was away most of the time, and that when he was, there certainly were things he did that he never told her. He had to get rid of the telephone issue. He said, “Hold up a minute.”
    She stopped about ten feet away from him, halfturned and pretended to look toward something miles away, but held him in the corner of her eye.
    He made sure she saw he wasn’t punching in a new number, or using the navigation button to find a stored number. He just pushed the button for a missed call, so the phone would return it.
    She didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t listening, and couldn’t have, anyway. There were no other sounds she could pretend to be listening to. Even the wind was mild and steady.
    “Hello,” he said. “You called me.” He listened for a few seconds, looking at the ground and moving small pieces of gravel around with his boot. “All right. Same price as last time.” He listened again. “I don’t bargain or give discounts. If you don’t want to make that deal, it’s up to you.” He listened again. “Okay. Then I’ll take care of it. Good-bye.” He turned off the phone and put it away, and then began to walk toward Valerie.
    He thought she looked less annoyed, a little softer. It made him remember a time when they were in high school and had come out on a walk like this. They had already had sex a few times, at night among the big rocks in the hills on a blanket laid out on the stillwarm ground. On this afternoon they had been walking for two hours, so far into the desert that there was no chance that anyone would see them, even though they were in the open. They stopped in full sunlight on the flats and began to kiss. Neither of them ended the kiss, and things went further, and soon all of their clothes except their boots lay on the hot, sandy ground. At first they tried to lie together on their spread-out clothes. Nothing was thick enough except Hobart’s jeans, but the sun found the tiny copper