Strong Light of Day by Jon Land Page B

taken the stage. His own expression stared back at him, Dane amazed by how little different he looked from year to year. His coarse black hair showed barely a touch of gray, and his skin tone held just enough color and leathery stitching to capture his rough-hewn spirit and experience as a mere boy working farm fields and offshore oil rigs before he owned a damn thing.
    Now he owned lots of things, though not this ballroom, where he’d taken the stage to give the keynote address to his company’s shareholders and was greeted with hoots, hollers, and boos. Dane had just managed to get the audience to simmer down, just a few catcalls about the lawsuits and controversies in which Dane Corp was embroiled stubbornly shouted his way, when the kid holding his leg hopped up the center aisle, much to the angry crowd’s delight.
    â€œI’m glad to see we’ve got a packed house today, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the cluster of faces and frames squeezed into the hotel ballroom’s tightly packed chairs, the shareholders he’d made rich who’d booed his entry. “And I appreciate the opportunity to address you, although I wish I could do it one stockholder at a time to better explain how Dane Corp is affecting, sometimes dramatically, your everyday lives.”
    He paused long enough to meet as many stares as he could, doing his best to ignore the smattering of fresh boos that resounded, and to ignore the one-legged young man at the same time.
    â€œYou sleep on mattresses treated with a Dane Chemical solvent to repel bedbugs,” Dane continued, his long legs aching from standing for practically two days straight doing damage control. “You drive cars made safer by the new air bags Dane Technology invented. You talk on phones and communicate on the Internet more clearly and safely because of Dane Advanced Electronics. The food you eat costs less because of the advances in farming made by possible by Dane Petrochemicals and Dane Pharmaceuticals. We are in the business of giving back—primarily to you, our shareholders.”
    â€œThen give me back my leg!” the kid yelled up at him, and the crowd roared with delight, cheering and applauding as he waved his prosthetic lower leg in the air at the foot of the stage.
    He was probably in his midtwenties but his long, shaggy hair and soft, buttery features made him look young enough to pass for high school. Almost immediately, dark-suited members of Calum Dane’s private security force stormed down both aisles. But Dane held them back with a simple gesture of his hand while he moved to the front of the stage to address the protester personally, seeing the headlines that would surely result if he let his security team have its way.
    â€œWhat’s your name, son?”
    â€œBrandon McCabe.”
    â€œHow’d you lose your leg, Brandon?”
    â€œYou took it from me. And I’m not your son.”
    Dane crouched in front of the protester so they were face-to-face. “By me taking your leg, I assume you’re referring to the unfounded claims that one of our pesticides caused cancer.”
    â€œIt’s not unfounded. This is living proof of that,” the young man added, addressing the crowd more than Calum Dane as he pumped the air with his leg. “My epithelioid sarcoma is living proof of that.”
    â€œNot according to a joint investigation conducted by the EPA and FDA.”
    â€œBullshit. And that’s what the investigation amounted to: bullshit.”
    â€œI’d ask you to watch you language, young man.”
    â€œYou didn’t ask me if I wanted to get cancer. There was no warning label on whatever it was that gave it to me, just all those reports I read later about people getting the same or similar disease, all linked to a pesticide your company produced.”
    â€œAnd that has now been removed from the market on a purely precautionary basis. We take our role and our