Bad Company (3 page)

“I got my fight from growing up in a one-room apartment in Brooklyn with a sick mother and somehow managing to get through school. We never had any help from Billy, only occasional interference because he could never leave things alone. At first Mom was too proud to make any demands on him, and then she was too sick, and then it was too late. I got my fight from standing up for myself when nobody else would. After Mom passed on, I got it from finding myself sixteen years old without a roof over my head and my only living relative in jail. I...”

She stopped, took a deep breath and then released it slowly. “Like I say, I’ve got so many bad luck stories I bore even me.”

It was true, she realized: she’d grown up full of fight and spirit. She’d never been one to take life’s ups and downs sitting down. It was only since Billy had tried to reconcile with her and she’d fled that all of that spirit had been knocked out of her. She’d stopped using her real surname in the three years since Billy had got out. She hadn’t even heard the surname spoken out loud for maybe a year until this morning when one of the gangsters had used it while he was pointing a gun in her face.

“He tried to get in touch,” she said. “When he was still inside. Said he wanted to apologize. The way he got in touch was to have two muscle-bound thugs bang on my door late one night and hand over a note he’d written. Nothing’s subtle in Billy Ray Dane’s world. Said he was going to be freed soon and he wanted to meet and get to know me.”

“Did you do that?”

She shook her head.

“I moved away from New York. Found a job cleaning cabins in a ski resort in Vermont, then headed up to New Hampshire. I’d come through it all. Working three jobs at a time so I could put myself through school, I found myself a place to live after Mom died. I was doing okay before Billy weighed into my life again.” But then it was as if all of that was knocked out of her. That was when the bad choices started; when all she could do was find ways to scrape by and keep a low profile.

She glanced across at Denny. He’d made her feel good. He’d flattered her, made her feel as if she actually had some value about her again. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that way. Couldn’t remember if she’d
ever
felt that way.

But when had she ever been with a guy who wasn’t some kind of trouble? Was she just repeating history with Denny McGowan? This enigmatic stranger with his beautiful eyes and easy charm and his frustrating habit of being hunted down by gunmen?

Just then, he swung off the highway, and into a Walmart parking lot.

“Now this may not be the finest outfitters you’ve ever tried,” he said, “but I bet they have an impressive line in t-shirts and bad-fitting sweat-pants.”

§

She stood a little distance from the checkout, watching while Denny took care of their purchases. It probably wasn’t an everyday sight here: guy in a tuxedo, bow-tie hanging loose around his neck, bagging up and paying for a mountain of jeans, sweaters, two puffer jackets, sneakers and hiking boots. When he pulled that roll of hundreds out of his tux pocket Cassie thought the cashier’s eyes were going to pop right out of her head.

Outside, loading up the Lexus, Cassie still felt detached, as if she’d taken a step back from it all and was watching someone else.

“So where from here?” asked Denny, oblivious to her mood.

“Indeed.”

He paused at that and gave her a quizzical look.

She’d been pushed around for too long now, always forced into responding to the events in her life. She’d dodged, she’d run, she’d evaded confrontation. In every relationship she’d had, she’d looked for protection above all else, and far too often she’d misinterpreted stupid male bravado as strength.

Denny McGowan.

Just another mistake, or was he somehow different? Was she really so desperate or shallow that she had to keep latching on to whatever was on offer like this? What did she even
know
about him? Pretty eyes and a perfectly proportioned dick were hardly the best basis for a relationship.

“I don’t know you,” she said. “You excite me and turn me on, and make me feel more alive than I have in years, but I don’t
know
you.”

“Isn’t that enough for now?”

“It’s a start.”

“What more do you need?”

“I want to have a good reason for why I’m risking my life by sticking with you.”

“Seems reasonable, for sure.” That spark in his eye again. That God-damned spark! She tried to blank it out.

“I need to know who you are,” she said. “I need to know why a guy walks into a bar in the middle of Nowhere, Maine, in a tux, in a storm, with a roll of hundreds in his back pocket. I need to know why he’s got two gunmen on his tail. I need to know all about you, Denny McGowan. I need to know if you’re worthy of me.”

...which sounded arrogant and demanding of her, but it was true: she deserved better. Better than she’d had; better than the life all those bad choices had led her to; just...
better
.

“You need to convince me, Denny. You need to
win
me.”

“You mean, like, you want me to take you on a
date
? Is that what you’re saying? I’ll do that. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

As ever, his answer was quick and facile, but there was something else in his eyes now. Perhaps it was some kind of realization that she’d taken a big step, that she meant this.

“There’s a place I know,” she said. “Place I used to work before I came out to Maine. Over in the White Mountains, near Bretton Woods. Maybe three hours west of here. Probably less, the way you drive. I know somewhere we can hole up, gather ourselves. Make plans. But I mean it: I need to know you, Denny McGowan. You need to convince me I’m doing the right thing here.”

“M
y turn,” she said, as they resumed their drive.

After loading up the Lexus, they’d found restrooms and changed into new clothes. Fresh underwear felt so damned good! After what seemed like the longest time, she was starting to feel human again. Jeans, a tee and another over-sized sweater, nothing to draw attention.

Denny looked different in sneakers, jeans and a check shirt. He’d worn that black tie and tux well, but now he looked more relaxed, as if he’d finally peeled away the layers of who he was trying to be.

This time they headed back the way they’d came and took the I-95 west. “First: are we safe in this car? The cops must have got to Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee back there, by now. What if they reported it stolen?”

Denny grinned at that. “It’s not stolen,” he said. “It’s mine.”

“
Yours
?”

“Al and Luis – the gentlemen you met back at your lobster bar – they took it from me last night. They were, shall we say, escorting me back to Boston in it when I took them by surprise and gave them the slip. I hid out in the trees until I saw them heading slowly south, looking for me, and so I headed north. I must have walked for miles in that storm, jumping into the trees every time I saw headlights just in case it was them coming back to search in the other direction.”

Outside, Bangor was mostly hidden from view by embankments and trees. They could have been almost anywhere. Cassie closed her eyes and took a long breath. So much had happened! Her quiet life at Pappy’s seemed so far away, all of a sudden.

“So why were they ‘escorting’ you back to Boston? A gambling debt, you said last night?”

He was doing that thing again: the slight delay while his brain worked, always calculating, planning what to say. She hated that she felt so suspicious of him, hated that her instinct always started off on a negative track.

“Tell me the truth, okay?”

He nodded, glanced at her with those steel-gray eyes, then said, “A bad business deal. A string of them... Business, gambling... it’s all just different forms of gambling at the end of the day. I didn’t really do all that. Looking after the money was Brady’s side of things.”

“‘Brady’?”

“Brady Lowe. Old buddy of mine. The oldest. We went through MIT together. He was an economics major; I was software engineering. Did you have me down as a geek? No? I’ll take that as a compliment. We roomed together through college, me and Brady. We set up a software company while we were still at Harvard Business School. We shared everything.”

“Including a girl...”

She remembered what Denny had said the previous evening:
She was beautiful, she was fun, she had an IQ of 160 and she was screwing my best friend. I’ll give you a hint: one of those was a lie.

“Yeah, that was kind of a breaking point, you know?”

“And your buddy... Brady Lowe: he cheated you out of everything?”

“Did I say that?”

She nodded.

Silence, for a time, then: “Maybe I was a bit harsh. Brady made some bad decisions. There were repercussions. You know what we did? We wrote dating software. Or at least, that’s what I did, while Brady was out making connections to turn my doodling into money. All I did was a wee bit of data-mining and pattern-matching. That and working out the algorithms that hooked people in so they just had to keep coming back for more.”

Again, Denny made her think of a salmon fisherman playing his fish, cutting it some slack and then drawing it back in. She could believe that Denny had spent a large part of his life working out just how to keep people hooked.

“Phone apps, add-ons that integrated with Facebook and Tumblr and just about anything else you’ve ever used online. You never saw our name, but I guarantee you’ve seen our work. We were part of the infrastructure just as the whole social media thing was taking off. But we were riding a wave. The business was full of ups and downs and when we hit a big down this year Brady decided to protect our interests by getting a little creative with the company finances. Moving money around through ghost accounts, and God knows what else. I had no idea what he was doing and how bad things were until it was too late. I had no idea the money Brady was moving around to keep us afloat had come from the kind of investors you’re never going to find profiled in
Forbes
.”

“And the girl?”

Denny shrugged, as if it was nothing. “I found the two of them one night, when I went back to the office. She was naked on her back on my desk, a long white line of coke between her tits and down the center of her belly, and Brady was bent over her snorting it all up through a rolled one hundred dollar bill. I wasn’t impressed and I expressed my dissatisfaction with him. Well, when his face stopped bleeding and he was still blubbing I figured it was more than just the drugs and the whiskey and the shame talking and that was when he confessed that he’d lost it all and he was scared, really
scared
.”

He paused, reached up, adjusted the rear-view mirror. When he turned briefly to look at her she could see the hurt in his eyes.

“I’d been blind,” he said. “I’d let my old buddy keep digging himself deeper and I’d been so lost in my own world I hadn’t even noticed. It wasn’t just Brady who’d blown it all: it was
me
.”

“So what did you do?”

Another shrug. Eyes back on the road ahead, the interstate still anonymous. “I made him tell me everything. I worked out who was the kingpin, the one guy who, if we could convince him to give us time and space, would protect us from all the other hyenas at the door. And I went to talk with him, to plead our case. I tell you, that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I did it because it was the only sensible thing to do.”

A flash of that grin, and then he went on: “And then when that failed I took Brady gambling and in no time at all we turned a five million debt into ten and it was pretty much downhill from then on in.”

§

They traveled in silence for a time. Cassie flipped down the sun visor and studied herself in the vanity mirror. She looked pale and tired. Why did she have a face that showed up the day’s wear and tear like that? Why couldn’t she be one of those women who always looked flawless?

She rummaged through her new bag for the bits and pieces she’d picked up at Walmart. A little foundation did wonders, even if she did get some of the powder on her jeans. Lips a soft pink, then some blusher to give her a bit of color.

“It’s okay for you guys,” she said. She’d seen him glancing across at her as she worked. “Run a hand through your hair and you’re fine.” He laughed. He seemed to be relaxing again, now that he’d told her his story. When he’d been telling her, he’d tried to play it cool, but it was clear that saying those things aloud, reliving them... it was all still very intense for him.

Doing her eyes was a little more tricky. Just as well Denny had such refined taste in cars: far easier doing her face in the Lexus than in Lou’s battered old SUV – and she’d done that more than once, on supply runs into Bangor. Shadow, eye liner, a little mascara... and all the time, Denny kept glancing across, as if he’d never seen a woman doing her face before.

Next time he looked, she gave a brief smile and he seemed awkward. She wondered what kind of women he was used to, if he’d ever shared domestic moments like this with a woman. There was so much she didn’t know. And so odd to be feeling this way: so domestic and intimate, when they were on the run from armed gangsters!

She mulled over what Denny had told her. His business partner Brady Lowe, the girl, the staggering scale of the money he had blown. She didn’t know how much of it was true, of course, or how much of it he’d spun so that he didn’t come off so badly, but the pattern rang true.

Way back, she’d tried to piece together her father’s story. She’d tried to make sense of the man who had only ever been in the shadows of her life. She’d only ever met him a handful of times, usually when he’d been arguing with her mom. Later, when her mom’s MS had become so much worse and then her pop was arrested for the first time, Cassie had educated herself about Billy Ray Dane from the newspapers and websites and, when his trial hit the headlines, the TV. The timing couldn’t have been much worse, with all that attention just as her mother was in decline, and then her mom was gone and Cassie’s only remaining relative was behind bars.