Read Cash Burn Online

Authors: Michael Berrier

Tags: #FICTION / Christian / Suspense, #FICTION / Suspense

Cash Burn (2 page)

BOOK: Cash Burn
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“That and Hollywood. I figured I’d get discovered.”

“Actress?” He pictured her onstage or mugging for a camera. It was easy.

“Not anymore. I was ready to grow up.”

“Well, who knows? Those talents might come in handy around here.”

Her eyes wouldn’t leave his. Jason began to think she would return his stare as long as he could hold it. She had nerve. “You know why this position has opened up?”

Her shoulders dipped, and she smoothed her skirt. “I know. It’s awful. The funeral’s this weekend, huh?”

“Two o’clock. Are you going?”

She nodded. “Sure. Kathy’s my friend. I feel terrible about what happened.”

Kathy was Jason’s longtime assistant, now out on an indefinite leave of absence. A vision of Kathy’s son, Greg, came to Jason’s mind. Whiskers barely poking out of cheeks that still held some of the softness of baby fat. Way too young to be as hard-hearted as he was the last time Jason tried to talk sense into him. And now, dead. Murdered. Piled next to a Dumpster like a sack of trash. Just a day shy of his seventeenth birthday.

“Kathy always says great things about you. She says Jason Dunn’s the best boss she’s ever had. And the most compassionate.” She nodded to the wall filled with plaques awarding Jason for his work with charities. “I don’t know how you find time to support all those causes.”

Jason blinked, trying to force away the image of Greg. “Well, it’s easy to be a good boss when you have people like I do.” He brought his elbows onto the desk. “We have the best lending teams in LA. And the best admins. The best ops people. I need an assistant who’s really on top of things. Our clients are demanding, and we cannot lose a single one of them. If somebody on this staff can’t hold up their end, I have to let them go.”

“I get it.”

“You sure? Because there’s nothing wrong with HR, Brenda. There’s plenty of good people down there.”

“I’m sure.” The tone was level. She smiled, exposing the underside of her upper lip against her teeth. “I’m up to it, Jason. I promise.”

Again she held his gaze. It gave him a sense that this girl was tough, ready for a challenge.

“Okay. I need to have a conversation with Margaret. She’ll say good things, right?”

“She should. My reviews have gone well. But there’s that policy against transferring before you’ve been at the bank six months. Will that be a problem?”

“August is close enough to October. We’ll get around the HR rule.”

He rose and looked down at her uplifted face, the heart shape of it.

She uncrossed her legs and rose, held out a hand. “Don’t be late for your meeting at Capital Construction. You only have a few minutes.”

He took her hand and shook it. She’d done some homework on his schedule. “I’ll give you a call when I have the transition worked out with Margaret.”

She brought her chin around and went for the door. He looked away. The picture of his wife leaned next to his telephone, and he kept his eyes trained on it.

A knock at the door made Jason look up.

Billy Reynolds was framed in the doorway. His hair was the color of dried weeds, tousled even this early from wresting analysis out of his head. “Wow, boss.”

“What?” Jason put on his jacket and stepped outside the office.

“Nothing.”

“No, what?”

Dan Martell strode up. His eyes followed Brenda toward the elevator. He drew back a flap of his jacket to tuck a hand in a pocket, striking one of his mannequin poses. “I heard it, but I don’t believe it.”

“Not you, too.”

Billy snickered. Jason glared at him, and the kid ran a finger underneath his nose as if he were sniffing.

“We’re going to be late.” Jason turned his back to them.

Brenda was gone when they reached the elevator. Dan started in as soon as they were inside. “You’re a better man than I am.”

Jason shook his head. “Aw, get over it, will you?”

“I don’t know, boss.” Billy’s smile was dying to break free. “How are you going to concentrate on work with her around?”

The elevator doors opened onto the parking garage. “I’m a happily married man.” The words hitched in Jason’s throat. He led the way to Dan’s car, hoping they hadn’t noticed.

3

At the end of another fourteen-hour day, the week careered to its conclusion. Jason’s grip on the steering wheel was an effort. Even his fingers were tired. Each arm had the tensile strength of a single thread. He swung the car into his driveway.

The panels of the garage door yawned up, the automatic light revealing the emptiness of a clean, swept concrete floor. Serena’s car was still gone.

He pulled in on the right out of habit, leaving room for her Mercedes. He clicked his remote to get the garage door closing before twisting the key to silence the engine. Its purr was replaced by the whirring of the garage-door closer, the chunk and rattle of the door hitting the concrete, and then silence.

The baked air in the garage was a stifling presence. He moved through it ponderously, each step an effort, and came to the door to the house.

No one greeted him.

He went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Maybe some stranger had wandered in to stock the place with food. The bare glass shelves reflected light from the single bulb, the glare warped by stains from spilled leftover containers long since removed. On the shelves in the door a bottle of mustard stood like a yellow sentry guarding a jar of olives. Soy sauce. A half-empty carton of organic milk. He swung the door, and it closed with a thud.

Jason couldn’t remember why Serena had fired their last housekeeper. Something about the dusting, or the bathrooms. But at least the refrigerator used to be full.

In the cupboard, the only possibilities were a box of Corn Flakes, some powdered pancake mix, and an ancient carton of cookies.

He took down the Corn Flakes and shook what was left of them into a bowl and went back for the milk. The edges of the carton cracked open, and white crumbs drifted down into the liquid. It reeked.

He put the carton back in the refrigerator and stared at the dry bowl.

Fatigue knitted through his joints like a disease.

He took the bowl to the sink and eased the tap open. Drops of water splashed off the Corn Flakes onto his hand. He carried his cereal to the table and was seated before realizing he’d forgotten a spoon. It took a moment to gather his energy to rise again. By the time he got back to the table, the cereal was a mass of slop.

He ate it anyway.

The curtains were closed, a panel against the dead day. The darkness of the summer night outside was still new.

The taps of his spoon on the dish sounded lonely and harsh in the silence.

He stared into the bowl, as if by doing so he could refill it. Finally he shoved himself out of the chair. He looked down at the encrusted bowl with the spoon angled out and considered leaving it there. But he took it to the sink. As he rinsed it, the dissatisfaction in his stomach argued against his fatigue. He went to the cupboard and found two stale chocolate-chip cookies left in the carton, and he downed them on his way up the stairs, craving milk.

In the master bathroom, he put his mouth under the faucet to wash down the cookies, wiped his chin with the back of his hand, and got his tie nearly off on the way to the closet. His fingers worked each shirt button loose with deliberation. The shirt went into the hamper together with his socks, the suit into the bag for the dry cleaner. Still in his underwear, he threw back the bedspread and crashed onto the sheets.

The cotton, taut and firm, pressed cool against his body. He settled into it like fluid seeking a lowest point. Thoughts about work flitted in his mind but couldn’t find purchase, and they surrendered to the vacancy of oncoming sleep.

Sometime later, he heard Serena’s voice. Groggy, he mumbled, “What?”

“I said, hi, handsome.”

That voice, like silky jazz. It brought a smile. Eyes closed, he heard her move through the room shedding jewelry, jacket, kicking her heels off into the closet, where he knew her shoes lay in heaps, their heel marks like scattered dark moons on the wall. When she emerged from the closet, she would be clothed in her short satin robe. The sink faucet going now. She would be leaned over the sink, legs bent at the knee, her back tipped forward.

When the water closed off, she would rise to press a towel to her face and dab the water off, coming away with a few strands of auburn-colored hair pasted to her cheek and forehead. A pinch by fingertips to remove the hair, and she would blink away the droplets clinging to her lashes.

Fear and sorrow tugged at his groggy mind. His eyes were still closed. He wanted to move to her.

She rubbed lotion into her hands, their backs, between the fingers, on the supple knuckles as she came to the edge of the bed. Her hands together, passing over one another, lotion soaking into her tight skin the color of creamed caramel.

He struggled against his own body, trying to move toward her but too tired. He sensed her unsmiling lips, but he knew her brown eyes held a glint of amusement.

Sorrow swelled deep inside him, burned. Longing for her was like a cord threaded through his chest. But he felt pinned to the bed.

Red fingernails pulled apart the edges of the robe. She slid out of it and draped it over the covers. She wore thin garments to bed this time of year. She leaned over the bed and peeled the covers back. One knee came onto the sheets first, and then she was in with him, moving toward him. And just before the warmth of her body reached him, he woke.

Alone.

The emptiness of the house was a vacuum, sucking the breath out of him.

She was not there.

She had not been there for weeks.

He rolled onto his back, his teeth grinding.

In the glow of a night light Serena had plugged in long ago, the shapes in the ceiling texture took on forms. He used to lie in the dimness with her, and they would point the shapes out to one another like kids on a hilltop imagining forms in passing clouds.

He pressed his eyelids closed. Now what he saw was the look on her face when he’d confronted her. After resisting his suspicions so long, trying to excuse her a thousand times, he had no choice when the final proof made its way to him.

Another man. Her lips on his. Her hands in his. Her arms, the ones he longed for now, encircling another.

She was gone.

4

Senior Probation Officer Tom Cole lowered himself out of his Explorer gingerly to avoid straining his knees. The pressure of the bones rubbing together felt like needles digging deep in the joints.

He slammed the door and hitched his pants, making sure the tail of his shirt hid the Glock 23 holstered at his kidney.

Traffic whizzed past him on Melrose, so he held tight to the side of the vehicle. The sun warmed his shaved scalp like a heat lamp. Stepping up to the sidewalk, he ran his palm over the smoothness from his shave an hour ago, back toward his clean crown, and then forward over the ridge above his forehead. The Fu Manchu mustache that framed his mouth was the only hair left on his head other than his eyebrows, and in this heat he thought of shaving that off too.

This unannounced visit to Flip’s place was overdue. He had it on his schedule every week, but with all his high-control parolees, he always seemed to be playing catch-up.

Tom moved off the sidewalk into the alley behind Flip’s apartment building. He scowled at the graffiti scrawled everywhere—black, red, blue. The name
Trixter
in yellow block letters was outlined in red to make it look three-dimensional. Above, way out of reach, someone must have leaned out from the roof to paint the huge initials
RF
. Lower on the wall, less artistic initials were drawn in white over others partially crossed out with black paint.

He walked past blue cubic trash bins reeking of baked garbage, a door meshed by iron grating, the entrance to an underground parking lot with a black-barred gate closed against intruders.

Here was the back door to Flip’s building. A keyhole and a handle only, no knob. He gripped the handle and yanked it. Solid.

Above the doorway, burglar bars covered the second-floor windows. A smile crept across his face. Bars on the windows with Flip inside. It was like a zoo with predator and prey locked in together.

On the sidewalk at the end of the alley, Tom sidestepped a pair of Goths in long black coats despite the heat. Their faces were pale behind black hair. Transylvanians. Next came three women side by side, sunglass styles branding them as tourists, purses dangling from their fingers. Ready to shop. He passed a tattoo parlor and glanced inside. The artist—spiked hair, arms inked up—sat with his feet propped on the counter in front of images of tat options pasted on the wall. The man reached forward to flick his cigarette against the edge of an ashtray, and their eyes met before the wall passed between them.

Tom rounded another corner and found handbills pasted the length of a wall like wallpaper insanely repeating the same announcements over and over until you couldn’t help but understand and remember that Kayse Evans was going to be playing at the Gig on August 28 and 29.

Five doors down, he came to the front of Flip’s building. In contrast to all the security in back, the door here swung open like the place was a drugstore during business hours. He stepped inside.

No elevator. The climb was going to murder his knees. Calling Flip down would save the wear on his joints, but that would be cutting corners. Tom needed to take a look at this new apartment.

He leaned on the banister, trying to take as much weight off his knees as he could, but every step grated. Soon he’d have to have the surgeries done. He couldn’t delay it much longer.

Down the hallway, he passed six doors and came to 312 and raised his knuckles and rapped. The door opened.

Flip held on to the edge of the door as if he wanted to slam it closed. Recognition of Tom Cole crept onto his face, and a sideways kind of grin replaced the glower.

Flip was wide enough that Tom couldn’t see past him. The man was shaped like a nose tackle; if you wanted to move him, you’d have a big job. He stood with his feet spaced, letting his black eyes bore under black brows, buzz-cut black hair, the nose a prizefighter’s, squashed onto his face like putty. A scar from an old cut creased his right eyebrow and continued diagonally upward to the corner of his forehead, lifting that brow just enough to give him the look of a perpetually interested observer.

BOOK: Cash Burn
6.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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