Chapter 20: The Vote

Beck held on to the microphone for as long as it took him to see four hundred phones pointed at his face.

Then he put it in the inspector's hand.

The inspector did not climb the stage.

He stood at the foot of it with the microphone in his fist.

His voice was the same dry one he had used on me over the phone.

"I'm the state's contracts inspector. Some of you know me from the fire seasons."

Nobody moved.

"I came tonight to decide whether Hollenbeck Air Rescue should hold the Sierra foothills contract for another four years."

He looked at the screen, where the drone footage of the dog had frozen on a smiling woman.

"I've heard enough to decide," he said. "The contract stays with this company, on one condition."

Beck's head came up.

"Mr. Hollenbeck has no part in how it is run. Not as an officer, not as a director, and not as a name on the door."

A murmur rolled across the hall.

"I can't make that happen from a table in a grange hall," the inspector said. "I'll need someone who can."

Everyone looked at me.

I walked up the three steps to the stage.

My legs were steadier than my pulse.

"I'm Victoria Riordan," I said, "and the Riordan Trust holds sixty percent of this company."

The woman director from the board had risen from table four.

She did not wait to be asked.

"I move that Beck Hollenbeck be removed as chief executive and as a director of Hollenbeck Air Rescue," she said. "With cause."

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